Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

I walked quietly along the trail practicing my opening speech. It was going to be difficult enough to get a foot in the door and I wanted to make the most of those first few seconds- Listen, Bill, we need to sit down and talk things over man to man…

When I reached the cabin, though, it was immediately apparent I wasn’t going to get a chance to talk to him man to man or any other way. Parked carelessly in front of Bill’s SUV at the side of the cabin, Jeremy Tripp’s E-type Jaguar glimmered grayly in the moonlight. I could hear it’s engine ticking as it cooled.

Jeremy Tripp and Bill Prentice. Click, click, click . A series of incidents from the recent past stepped brightly forward from the dark background of memory. Things which, at the time, had seemed uncertain or inexplicable now gathered meaning to themselves. The way Jeremy Tripp had looked at the garden center on his first visit to it, as though measuring it against some plan in his head. His crack about how the place would make a good site for a hotel. His bleached plants, dumped so publicly. And Bill’s weak attempt to move us out.

Bill Prentice and Jeremy Tripp. What could it equal but one man wanting to sell and the other wanting to buy. And the buyer not wanting the inconvenience of tenants. That had to be what Jeremy Tripp’s dead plants were about-a first step toward wrecking our ability to afford the business and, by so doing, remove our need for the warehouse. Bill’s visit, with his absurdly unenforceable demand that we give up our tenancy, must have been the push from his side.

And at the end of this freight train of conclusions there followed one other, the possibility that even Jeremy Tripp’s attacks on Marla-evicting her from her house, buying her as a prostitute-might be part of this same offensive. Was she perhaps just another way to strike at me, part of a war of attrition designed to force me to terminate Plantasaurus?

The threat that Stan and I might lose our business seemed suddenly very real. Our lease couldn’t legally be terminated unless we failed to pay rent, but if two rich men wanted us out things could get very difficult indeed for our already fragile enterprise. And, the terrible thought occurred to me, they might not even have to get us out for Plantasaurus to suffer. If Tripp bought the place with us as sitting tenants, having a man who fucked Marla on his deck and shot rabbits with a longbow as our landlord would make running our business a living nightmare. What series of obstructions might he not place in our path?

Though speaking with Bill was out of the question, I couldn’t leave without at least trying to learn something that might help me against these two men.

The cabin didn’t reflect Bill’s wealth. It was similar to many scattered throughout the mountains-made of logs with a stone chimney at one end, one or two bedrooms and a living area, a rainwater tank, electricity from a generator twenty yards back in the woods. The front windows were heavily curtained but on the side of the cabin where Bill’s SUV was parked there was another window. It was small and uncovered and set at about shoulder height. I squeezed into the space between the cabin and the car and moved carefully along the wall until I reached the edge of the window. I crouched down, then slowly raised myself until I was able to see through the bottom corner of the glass.

My line of sight was at an angle to the interior of the room but I could see enough. I was looking into the living area of the cabin. The room was spartan, the walls undecorated and the floor without covering. There was a wooden kitchen table and some chairs and, in front of them, a couch and a coffee table. Bill Prentice and Jeremy Tripp sat at opposite ends of the couch and it was plain they were not whiling away the minutes in idle conversation.

A large sheet of paper was spread across the coffee table. It was a mottled white and had thin lines and rectangular shapes on it. I couldn’t see it clearly, but it looked like a set of architectural plans. If the two men had been examining it earlier, though, they weren’t now. Tripp had just said something and was waiting for a response, his face stony with anger. Bill was staring at the floor, immobile. After a moment, Tripp spoke again and when Bill still didn’t respond he made an abrupt, irritated movement and snatched a remote from the coffee table. He pointed it into a corner of the room I couldn’t see and a thin wash of light spread back over the bare floorboards. Tripp’s jaw muscles bunched as he watched whatever had just appeared on the screen. Bill slumped forward and covered his face with his hands.

I stayed there for several seconds but the scene didn’t change and soon the fear of getting caught forced me away from the window and back along the trail to my truck.

Aweek later, as Stan and I were finishing breakfast, a guy with a beard and sunglasses rang our doorbell. He held out an envelope and a paper on a clipboard for me to sign. He wore a windbreaker that was frayed around the cuffs and the car I could see behind him out on the road was an old sedan with a bad paint job. I figured he must be a local guy UPS outsourced to.

When I signed for the envelope he nodded and said, “Served.”

It dawned on me as he drove away that UPS probably didn’t outsource.

I knew what the envelope held, I’d been expecting it. Plantasaurus hadn’t magically unleashed an avalanche of money in the last few weeks and the mortgage on the house remained unpaid. I held the result of that failure in my hand now-a notice of eviction and a statement about the right of the bank to undertake a mortgagee sale. We had two weeks to vacate.

When things had started to look like they might reach this point I’d talked it over with Stan. He’d been more than horrified. In a way he was like a blind man, someone who could only survive the chaos of the world by sectioning off a small piece of it and progressively limiting its variables until it was ordered and repeatable enough to exist within. Losing the house would rob him of an environment that had not only been a safe and familiar refuge since childhood, but which was also a touchstone to that time before he changed, before the lack of oxygen took away part of him.

I stayed on the doorstep after the courier had gone. Around me the sounds of morning-birdsong, a car starting, a child shouting somewhere further up the street-made the small front garden seem suddenly precious, a place whose true importance had only just been revealed. I stood and listened for a while, then I went inside and told Stan.

He was very quiet for a long time afterwards and just looked around at the walls of the kitchen. Then he wrapped his arms around himself and folded forward a little.

“I won’t be able to remember it all, Johnny. How can I store everything up inside me so it won’t get lost? There’s too much.”

“You won’t forget anything.”

“But some of the things I don’t even know I know. I can’t think of them right now but sometimes I look at something and then suddenly I remember what happened or what someone said or who was there. Like a flash. How can I do that for everything before we go?”

It was technically possible for me to spare Stan this heartache, of course, all I had to do was pick up the phone and list Empty Mile with a realtor. If the land had had no mystery about it, if I could have been certain that it was a plot of grass and trees and nothing more, Stan’s distress was such that I would have done so despite the promise I had made to my father. But I couldn’t believe Empty Mile was only what it appeared to be. My father simply wouldn’t have bought it if it was.

It was in an attempt, then, to find some justification for subjecting Stan to the loss of the house, for my decision not to sell the land, that I went upstairs.