Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

“You can’t be here to lease plants.”

“We wanted to check out the competition. You do know you’re the competition?”

“Of course, but I don’t like to think in terms of competition. Do you know Schumacher?”

“The car racing guy?”

“Economist. Buddhist economics. Came up with a model for a limited-growth economy. Very popular among us greenies.”

“Er, anyway… This is your business?”

“No. I was bored up there on the hill. Jeremy Tripp is the owner. You’ve met him I think.” She looked archly at me as she said this. “He asked me to manage it. I’m very good at getting things started.”

“When did you open?”

“A week ago.”

“Got many customers?”

“Quite a few. But with the prices Jeremy’s charging it’s not surprising; they are far too low.”

“Can I see a price list?”

“Of course.”

She handed me a printed sheet that gave fees for various combinations of plants and the charges for maintaining them. What we offered customers was simpler, but wherever I could make a comparison, Plantagion was at least twenty-five percent cheaper than we were.

“We saw your van.”

“We have two. Jeremy had them painted specially. He said he wanted them to be visible. To stand out.”

“You’ve got two vans?”

“Two vans, two men working them, a warehouse man, and me.”

I glanced at Stan. His face was pale and set. He looked as though he’d just been robbed.

“I am not trying to intimidate you. But Jeremy said that you would visit us and he wanted me to be quite open about how robust the business is.”

“It’s an odd business for someone like him to be involved in. I mean, there’s not a whole lot of money in it.”

“He’s planning to grow it. Jeremy was quite the big shot out in the world, you know.”

After that there was a moment of awkward silence. Stan broke it by clearing his throat and nodding toward a dracaena in the corner behind her. “Your plant is too wet. The ends of its leaves are dead.”

Vivian glanced at it, then her phone rang and when she answered it I nudged Stan and we got up and headed out of the office.

Outside the warehouse the day seemed too hot and too bright. The right kind of climate for forests and rivers and mountains but wrong for this area of tarmac and bolted-together metal. The heat came off the steel walls of the buildings like it was trying to push us away.

As we passed the end corner of one of the adjacent warehouses someone called out to me. I turned and saw Gareth pressed close to the metal wall. He was partly covered by the shadow the building made and it looked like he had chosen the spot for the small measure of concealment it offered. He waved quickly for us to come over, then pulled us around the corner so that we were out of sight of the Plantagion warehouse.

“Is he in there?”

“Who?”

“Tripp.”

“I don’t think so. What are you doing?”

“I told you something was going on. She’s fucking him.”

“How do you know?”

“I can tell.”

“So you’re, what? Trying to get evidence?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“And then what?”

“Well, I’m not a hundred percent sure about that, Johnboy. Maybe I’ll just walk away. Maybe I’ll cut his balls off. That’d help you out, wouldn’t it? Neutralize the competition, so to speak.”

“We have to go.”

“We should catch up sometime, it’s been awhile.”

Stan and I began to walk away. But before we’d gone more than a couple of steps I felt Gareth’s hand on my arm.

“Did you think about the Empty Mile land? I’m still interested, you know.”

“I’m not selling it.”

“But you guys have got to need the money.”

“Maybe so, but it’s not for sale.”

Gareth frowned at me for a moment, then turned away without saying anything else and went back to the corner of the warehouse.

Stan didn’t want to go to lunch anymore and asked me to take him home. When we got there I sat with him out in the back garden, watching the trees in the shimmering afternoon stillness while he slumped in his chair like the bones had been pulled from his body. When I stirred, about to get up and go into the cooler house, he roused himself and said, “Jeremy Tripp is trying to get us.”

It was true. Any businessman would know that Oakridge couldn’t support two plant companies. Even if they charged similar prices, one would eventually have to go. The fact that Plantagion was charging twenty-five percent less than us, a level of pricing that simply couldn’t earn them a worthwhile return, said to me that Tripp had set the business up purely to compete us out of existence. And he’d wanted us to know it. He’d wanted us to see the vans, he’d wanted us to go to the office.

Stan stood up and headed into the house. “I’ve got to get some more moths.”

Toward the end of the afternoon I made Stan an early dinner. He didn’t eat much of it and when I left to go visit Marla he was sitting in front of the TV in his Batman suit. He’d found some moths and added them to the ones he already had. The matchbox was stuck in his utility belt.

When I got to Marla’s place she was just getting out of her car with an armful of the empty cardboard boxes she’d been scavenging in preparation for her forced move. We went inside and she dropped them on top of some others in a corner of the living room. I asked her if she’d started looking for a place. She shook her head.

“I haven’t been able to face it.”

“I’ve been thinking about something.”

“Something about you and me?”

“Yeah.”

“About us living together?”

“Makes sense to me… if you want to.”

Marla buried her head in my chest and held me. “Thank you, Johnny. Thank you…”

“There’s a problem, though. We got the eviction notice on the house today.”

“So sell the land. It’s in your name. Sell it, pay off the house, we can live there together.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? What does it matter what Ray wanted?”

“He must have had a reason for buying the place. Until I know what it was I can’t sell it.”

“Look, I had to research local Gold Rush history when I first started my job. Empty Mile’s on the Swallow River and the Swallow River used to be a big gold river. Maybe Ray thought there was still something to be found.”

“It’s called Empty Mile for a reason.”

“I’m not saying there is gold there, I’m saying Ray might have thought there was. He was in the Elephant Society. They’re nice people, but all of them live for this idea that one day they’re going to dig up a million dollars. I went to a lot of meetings for that research and I saw Ray there all the time. He was into it as much as any of them. He’d go on and on about how the Forty-Niners couldn’t have found everything. If you feel like that, maybe you can make yourself believe something about a piece of land next to a river.”

Marla went into her bedroom to change. When she came out she was looking at her watch.

“If you want to ask about Empty Mile we’ve still got time.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Elephant Society. They meet tonight. They might be able to tell you something about it.”

“We’re not members.”

“Like they’d care. Plus they know me from when I used to go.”

The Elephant Society met in Back Town in a hall above a short row of stores that had been built in the ’20s. The place was a couple of blocks before the town hall, on the other side of the road, and was rented out as a resource to various groups in the community. We went up a flight of wooden stairs to a long room with a cathedral ceiling that ran the length of two storefronts. Lights in glass globes were suspended from the ceiling in a line down the middle. The glass was opaque and had aged to a murky cream. The floorboards were bare and unpolished and dust rose from them so that the air in the place seemed dry and moved against the skin with a papery feel.