Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

March 21, 1849

Cursed river! Yesterday I reached the repository of my greatest hopes-the middle of the bend-and that day and this I have worked until it was too dark to see. I am burned by the sun, the flesh of my hands is raw from shovel and pick and constant immersion in water, but I have not found my storehouse of wealth. The middle of the bend is as barren of gold as the stretch I have so far prospected. There are some hundreds of yards yet before Cooper’s Bend becomes again the Swallow River, but I do not think now that they will make my fortune. How can they be any different from the yards I have already scrabbled over? There is a chance, it is true, and I must hold that hope close to me, but even if the river changes its nature ahead things will not be as I wished them. Men from the diggings downriver have begun to arrive this evening and are staking claims as the light fades. The dream of having a new strike to myself is gone. I am once again one among many and if any wealth is ever revealed here it cannot but be diminished by such division.

March 29, 1849

I must let it go. If Cooper’s Bend had carried the amount of gold any sane man had a right to expect I would have succeeded in my goal, I would have returned to civilization a man to be remarked upon. But it is not to be. Cooper’s Bend holds nothing. More than two hundred of us, for the influx from the diggings downriver has been swift, have worked the river here for a week and know this as a truth. Though the riverbed has been thoroughly turned, not a single man has panned more than an ounce and there is movement away from here, onwards up the river or back to the diggings downstream. Those who have not already left, though all will do so soon, have re-christened this wretched stretch of water. The name they call it by now is “Empty Mile.” It seems fitting. I will move upriver with the others. I may yet find paying dirt, and though I am unlikely now to become a gold dust tycoon I may still pan myself a house, or perhaps, if I am lucky, a small ranch. If I am lucky…

April 2, 1849

The river is rich again! We are beyond “Empty Mile.” Men, from where the bend finishes to as far upriver as it is possible to see, and more arriving by the hour. Each of us throwing himself at the small square of bank or bed we have claimed as our own. We are like some mad race of boring insects, our humanity temporarily suspended as we dash to secure a future for ourselves. How many of us will succeed? Will I be among them? Already I have four ounces safely stored and the river’s golden heart beats steadily with each pan I lift. Let it beat this way tomorrow and all the days after. Let the gold never end.

There was nothing more. Nathaniel Bletcher had run out of paper and the end of his story was not recorded. I wondered what the Gold Rush had left him with. Millicent had said she thought he had become well off, so I guessed that at least he had not been one of the hordes of broken men who went home poorer than they had been when they started.

Whatever had eventually become of him, though, what he’d written was not what I needed. It did not clear up the mystery of Empty Mile. If anything, after reading the final pages of the journal, my father’s purchase of the land seemed stranger than ever. If there had once been gold in that part of the river I might have suspected that he’d had some sort of plan to find an overlooked pocket of dust. But the journal pages showed plainly that this could not have been the case, that there had never been any gold there to overlook in the first place.

I gathered the pages, the land document, and the aerial photo together and put them back in the trunk. As I was about to close the lid I noticed a photo that had slipped from a stack of Kodak packets which filled one corner of the box. I picked it up and looked at it. It was a shot of my father in front of the entrance gate to a large wooden roller coaster. He was standing overly upright and grinning broadly, as though he was clowning for whoever had taken the shot. There was a sign beside him on which I could read the words San Diego but nothing else. I put the picture back in its packet and closed the trunk.

In an effort to cheer Stan up I talked him into driving to town with me to have lunch in a diner. With money so tight we didn’t eat out and it was something of a treat. Even so, he was reluctant and stayed silent for most of the journey. But that changed rather dramatically when we hit the edge of Old Town.

We were driving along a street of stores when a guy in his early twenties came out of a bookshop lugging a weeping fig in a cylindrical planter. Stan saw him first and yelped for me to look.

“Hey, Johnny, he’s stealing our plants.”

At first I thought Stan was right and I pulled quickly to the curb. Then I realized that the store the guy had come out of wasn’t one of our customers.

“We don’t do that place.”

“What?”

“It’s not our plant.”

“But it’s a rental. Look at the planter.”

We watched the guy carry the plant a few yards along the sidewalk to a shiny new van that had the business name Plantagion and a phone number painted on each side under an orange sun and palm tree silhouette.

Stan let out a wail and started shaking his hands in front of him like he was trying to ward off some dreadful attack. “It’s not fair! It’s not fair! It was my idea.”

“Stan, calm down. A lot of other people do it in a lot of other towns and cities. The idea’s not ours.”

“But I thought of it for Oakridge. So I could be a businessman.” He dug frantically in his jeans pocket and pulled out the matchbox he kept his moths in. He pushed it open and held it to his mouth and started breathing rapidly in and out.

“What are you doing?”

“Moth essence. I gotta charge up.”

“Stop it.”

“I have to, Johnny. The connection’s getting weak. The power isn’t coming through. That’s why this is happening.”

“Jesus Christ, Stan!”

I pulled his hands away from his face. He looked suddenly frightened.

“Johnny… Am I going crazy?”

I took a breath and forced myself to calm down. “You’re not going crazy. But I don’t think any power or anything not coming back from some other place has anything to do with that guy and his van.”

“Why is he here, then? We checked and no one else did plants in Oakridge.”

Stan was right. Before we’d kicked off Plantasaurus we’d done a search of the local business directory to make sure no one else in town was already leasing plants. We hadn’t found anyone. Which meant Plantagion had only recently started operating.

“I don’t know.”

What I did know, though, was that we were in trouble-our business simply would not survive competition. And looking at Stan I could see he knew this just as well as I did.

As we sat in the pickup and watched the Plantagion guy move plants and sacks of potting mix around in the back of his van I wondered about the timing of this new company.

I used my cell and dialed the number on the side of the van. The call was answered by a female voice that sounded vaguely familiar. I told the woman I was interested in leasing plants and asked where the Plantagion office was. She gave me an address in the Oakridge commercial precinct. Stan and I put lunch on hold.

The Oakridge commercial precinct was an area of warehouses and workshops set in a couple of acres of tarmac five minutes drive from the eastern edge of Back Town. There’d been an outcry by environmentalists when it was built in the ’80s, but it had given the town a solid base for its small manufacturing and service industries.

Plantagion occupied a pressed metal warehouse on the edge of a maze of similar buildings. A sliding glass door in the front wall opened directly onto a reception/office area and as soon as Stan and I stepped inside I understood why the voice on the phone had sounded familiar. Vivian, the woman Gareth was supposedly in love with, the woman I’d bumped into in Jeremy Tripp’s bedroom, sat behind a desk with an Oakridge business directory open in front of her. I saw that a number of entries had been crossed through. It looked like she was working her way down the page. She was in the middle of dialing a number but she put down the phone when she saw us and waved us to a couple of chairs in front of the desk.