Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

They lived together in a small apartment over his father’s garage. When he and I were alone together he spoke about her constantly. It was a pairing which might have led to marriage, growing old together, children… except that I was in love with Marla too. And eventually she fell in love with me.

When it happened, when I took her away from him, it killed our friendship. He broke all contact with me, refused even to look in my direction when we passed one another on the street. This anger, this heartbroken enmity, had not lessened one degree by the time I left Oakridge a year later, so to find him now, waiting for me in the parking lot of the garden center, made me immediately wary.

He pushed himself off the Jeep and stuck his hand out.

“Johnboy. Been a long time, dude.”

“Gareth.”

We shook hands and pretended to be old friends glad to see each other again. Gareth must have sensed my uncertainty, though, because when the reunion was done he cleared his throat and stuck his hands in his pockets.

“This is an amazing coincidence, Johnny. When I heard you were coming back to town I hoped like hell we’d meet up, and now we have. I’ve been waiting for this a long time, man.”

“Really?”

“What happened was fucked up. Losing Marla was a blow, I can’t say it wasn’t, but after you left and she and I didn’t get magically back together I realized it was just one of those things. I felt like such a prick, you know? We were buddies. What happened with her shouldn’t have changed that.”

“Well, it was a long time ago.”

“Yeah, but I promised myself if I ever got the chance I was going to make it right.”

Gareth took his hands out of his pockets and raised his shoulders.

“I’d sure like to be friends again.”

I had enough to deal with in Oakridge without subjecting myself to Gareth’s particular brand of friendship, but with him there in front of me, holding out an olive branch, I didn’t feel I had much of an option. And, of course, there was the fact that he’d saved my life hovering in the background.

“Okay.”

“Awesome, man. Awesome! This is like such a huge fucking weight off my mind.”

We made nice for a bit longer, then I got my keys out and turned toward my pickup. Gareth was suddenly aghast.

“Dude, what are you doing?”

“Going home.”

“I thought… Look, you don’t know anything about my life now. Why don’t you come out to my place? We don’t have the garage anymore. You’ll get a kick out of it, I promise.”

“I don’t know…”

“Johnboy, come on! Follow me in your truck. An hour out of your day. Jesus, man, this is an event!”

We left the garden center and turned right on the Loop, following the wide curve of the Oakridge basin northeast. The country along our route was mostly light forest, but occasionally there were driveways leading into the gardens of large homestead-style houses. I had the windows down and warm air that smelled of pine needles and hot tarmac blew across me. For a little way we ran parallel to a stretch of the Swallow River and the trees that lined the road broke its metal glint into a pattern of backlit leaves and smashed silver water.

It was only when the scattered houses disappeared and the forest became denser that I began to suspect where we were going. I could have turned back, of course, I could have U-turned and raced for the safety of town. But I knew that sooner or later my time in Oakridge had to involve a return to this place, that it would be impossible for me to reconcile my past without doing so.

And so I followed Gareth when he turned into an unpaved, deeply rutted series of cutbacks that had originally been gouged into the hillside by Conservation Corps workers back in the Depression. It took us five minutes of scrabbling up the steep grade before the track leveled out and gave on to a place every Oakridge local knew well enough, but which for me was burned like a brand across the soft tissue of memory. A place I had not been since I was eighteen.

Tunney Lake was oval in shape, about four hundred yards by a hundred and fifty. It was fronted on its long side by a beach of coarse sand that was bordered to the right of where the trail came out by solid forest, and on the left by cleared land. There was no shoreline on the far side of the lake. Instead, a cliff of pockmarked rock rose fifty feet, straight from the water. Above this the trees continued, giving the lake the appearance of a giant soap dish chiseled into the side of the hill.

On the beach a scatter of people sunbathed on towels or played in the dark water. For the most part, though, the place was deserted. Late morning on a weekday the locals were at work and the tourists, not having the incentive of knowing how beautiful the place was, were almost always turned back by the difficulty of the road.

The track we were on ran almost the whole length of the beach and ended in a dirt parking lot which had a small set of public toilets in one corner. Beyond this there was a bungalow with a barn out back, and a collection of rundown weatherboard huts in a row along the last of the land by the beach. A wooden jetty cut into the water here. At the end of it a small rowboat lay upturned, the white paint of its hull flaking in the sun.

Gareth and I parked in the lot and got out of our cars. He walked a few yards toward the bungalow then turned back to me with his arms spread.

“Here it is, Johnny, the brave new venture.”

Like the trail, the bungalow and its row of huts had been built by the Conservation Corps in the 1930s. They’d used them as their barracks while they cut hiking trails through much of the hill country around the Oakridge basin. When they were banged together their projected lifespan had probably been two or three years, but their frames and foundations had been well made and they’d ended up standing for more than seventy. Much of their cladding, though, was now not original and the roofs were patchworks of replaced tin.

As long as I could remember the place had been run as a low-rent motel serving the few tourists who hung tough on the road or the occasional party of locals who got too drunk at their barbecues to make it back down the hill. It had had a string of different owners, but when I was last at the lake it had been one of Bill Prentice’s satellite concerns, a poor relation to his successful garden center.

The front of the bungalow had a red and white neon Reception sign in the window and had been made over into an office that faced the lake. I couldn’t see clearly through the grimy net curtains but it didn’t look like anyone was in there waiting for business to show up.

Gareth led me through the front door. In the office there was an unmanned white Formica desk littered with scraps of paper and empty coffee cups. Behind the desk a doorway gave access to the rest of the house. We went through it and along a corridor. The rooms we passed were shadowed and dim and there was a smell of old cooked grease and stale urine in the air.

The hallway ended in a large combination kitchen/living room. Set into the rear wall of this was a wide door and a window which showed a short view of the barn and the forest beyond it. In the living area of the room the floor was covered with dusty, worn-through carpet on which a ragged lounge set had been untidily arranged. There was a brick fireplace that had old ashes in the grate and, beside it, a scarred card table with bits of some mechanism strewn across it.

“As you can see, we’ve moved up in the world.”

“You run the cabins?”

As we were speaking a man in a wheelchair pushed open the back door and rolled into the room. He caught what we were saying and grunted, “When anyone can get up that fucking road.”