Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

The road we took cut through virgin countryside in a long series of twists that eventually connected with the Oakridge Loop a few miles north of our own Plantasaurus warehouse. I turned south there and headed for home. It was about the longest way you could take to Empty Mile but it meant we’d miss the Oakridge volunteer fire brigade if they were responding. And the police too, if it was that kind of alarm.

We didn’t talk much in the car. Stan sat against Rosie, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, glasses off and the heels of his hands pressed against his eyes. He rocked back and forth as much as the space in the small car would allow. He kept his eyes covered until we got back to Empty Mile.

In the cabin we all sat around the table. I made hot chocolate but Stan wouldn’t touch his and Rosie said she didn’t like milk. I tried to talk to Stan, to somehow break the shell of guilt that was so obviously hardening about him. But he was too horrified at what he’d done.

“Those photos made me go crazy.”

“I don’t want you to freak out about this, Stan. No one got hurt. The sprinklers put it out. A few plants got burned, so what? The warehouse was fine-other than the smoke it wasn’t damaged at all.”

“What would you have done, Johnny?”

“If the photos were of Marla I would have gone crazy too.”

“I must be out of control.” Stan lifted his hands and slapped the sides of his head rapidly and groaned. “What’s going to happen to me?”

“No one saw us. No one’s going to know who lit the fire. They’ll just think something blew out in the building and started it.”

“But if you do something that terrible how can something not happen to you?”

“I told you, no one saw us.”

“I don’t mean that, Johnny. I mean the world. Something in it sees what we do. Maybe it doesn’t see normal stuff, but something as huge as this…”

Stan looked wide-eyed around the room. He was overtired and emotionally battered. Marla had some sleeping pills and I gave him one and put him to bed. Rosie got in with him, I was glad she was staying. Her warm body next to him would be a better comfort than any words or drug I could give him.

When they were settled I drove Millicent’s car across the meadow to her house. She was sitting in the front room wrapped in her shawl, a small kerosene stove burning across the floor from her. The stove’s wick needed trimming and the air in the room smelled of fumes.

I told her where Stan and Rosie had gone in the car and what had happened when they got there. And I told her as well about the photographs that had sparked it off.

“I suppose you haven’t called the police about the son of a bitch.”

“I can’t really do that now.”

“Might have been a better idea than letting Stanley run off.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference. I know this guy. He’d say Rosie agreed to do it. Even Rosie says he didn’t force her, she did it to protect Stan’s business. Stan and Rosie aren’t the type of people who can go up against someone like Jeremy Tripp. Believe me.”

Millicent shook her head to herself. “That poor girl.”

“She’s sleeping now. She’s going to be okay. She was more upset about Stan than she was about herself.”

“You’d think if you were like Rosie or Stan life would go a little easier on you. But it doesn’t. Mostly it seems to go the other way.”

I gave her back the keys to the Datsun and left her staring at the blue flame of the heater, her fingers playing restlessly across the material of her shawl.

Ispent the night listening for cars, expecting a cavalcade of them to come thundering across the meadow at any moment, carrying cops and a warrant for our arrest. But the night passed undisturbed and when I woke the next morning I lay for a while daring to hope that we might have escaped the warehouse fire undetected.

It was a Saturday. Marla at home and no Plantasaurus work-what little we had left of it. I thought I was the first one up but when I went out onto the stoop Stan was sitting in a patch of sunshine wearing his Batman costume. He had his eyes closed behind the mask and didn’t realize I was there. His face was turned to the sun and his right hand was closed in a loose fist on his knee. Slowly, as I watched, he brought his hand up and I saw that his fingers were wrapped around a large brown moth. He pushed it into his mouth and started chewing, scrunching his face as he forced himself to eat the insect.

“What are you doing!”

He swallowed and shuddered, then opened his eyes and blinked and looked emptily at me.

“I don’t know, Johnny.”

“Jesus, Stan… Look, dude, don’t worry about last night. Jeremy Tripp deserved it. It’s not something you have to feel bad about.”

“Why’s everything going wrong? I used to be happy, then all of this bad stuff happened. I don’t understand it, Johnny.”

I could have told him it was just the way life was, that the bad came along with the good, but that wouldn’t have been the truth. Everything bad that was happening to Stan could be traced back to one event-Marla and me fucking in the forest for Bill Prentice. I couldn’t have foreseen that it would have such disastrous consequences, I hadn’t done it with the thought of hurting anyone at all, but still…

“Everything is going to be okay, Stan, I promise. I don’t want you to be frightened or upset about anything.”

“But there’s nothing behind things anymore, not like there used to be.” He looked at me then as though he had suddenly realized something. “Is this how you feel, Johnny? Am I like you now?”

By the middle of the morning Stan had changed out of his costume but he still had about him the air of someone who had been profoundly stunned. Rosie joined him on the stoop and the two of them spent a long time staring vacantly at the meadow.

In an attempt to distract him from his misery I reminded him that we hadn’t investigated our secret river yet. He seemed to have lost all interest in it, but after I’d talked for a while about gold and how much money we could make and how the whole thing would be a huge adventure, he roused himself a little and agreed to accompany me on an expedition to find out what the buried riverbed held.

“And maybe, Johnny, if there’s a lot of gold, maybe I could pay Jeremy Tripp back for his warehouse.”

Over the years my father had accumulated all the basics necessary for amateur prospecting: shovels, wire-mesh graders for sieving out stones, even a modern aluminum sluice. We’d brought this gear with us from the old house and kept it now in the shed behind the cabin. Stan and I loaded ourselves with a couple of pans, a shovel, a mattock, and a grader and were just coming back around to the front of the cabin when I realized that my plans for the day would have to be radically rethought.

Marla and Rosie were standing close together on the stoop looking up the slope of the meadow in alarm. I followed their gaze and saw, at the top of the track that led down to our cabin, a red E-type Jaguar sitting motionless against a background of trees.

Stan made a small whimpering sound and dropped the pan he was carrying. “Johnny…”

“It’s okay. He’s probably just here to see if we can lend him some plants.”

“No, he isn’t.”

“Why don’t you take Rosie and show her how to pan for gold? We really need to find out what’s in that riverbed.”

I handed my pan to Rosie. Stan stayed staring worriedly at Jeremy Tripp’s car.

“Go on, Stan. It’ll be better if it’s just me who talks to him. I’ll come and get you when he’s gone. Don’t worry about anything, it’s going to be all right.”