Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

She turned down the corners of her mouth and shrugged. “Ach, it was an affair.” After a pause she said, “Gareth called me as soon as he heard. He thought it might mean we would get back together. The child.”

“You won’t?”

“Good God, no. We have a conflict of interest in the road. I am close to convincing the council not to go ahead with it, you know. I have a lot of signatures.”

I took several sacks of potting mix to justify my visit and left her emptying the drawers of her desk.

And that was it. The night in the forest, which I had been so sure would bring the world down around me, slid into the past without a ripple. It seemed impossible that the consequences of something as monstrous as killing a human being could be escaped, but that was just what happened, and Stan and Marla and I remained free to pursue our unhappy lives at Empty Mile.

Besides allaying my fear of arrest, my visit to the Plantagion warehouse prompted me to put Plantasaurus out of its misery. The business had failed beyond the point of recovery. We had lost too many customers, our savings were gone-eaten up covering living expenses and subsidizing the last throes of the business-and we still had not been able to afford to replenish our stock of plants. Now that I knew Plantagion was set to stay in business, at least for the foreseeable future, it would have been an idiocy to continue the struggle.

I sat Stan down and explained that we had to let it go. He’d known it was coming and just nodded and kept his eyes on the ground. Later that week we met Vivian at her warehouse and signed over our remaining customers to them. Plantagion had been our enemy, one of the reasons our business had failed, and it was galling to have them bail us out of responsibilities we could no longer meet. But this way at least we avoided letting down those customers who’d stayed with us.

Stan was quiet as we sat with the lawyer Vivian had arranged and signed our names to various papers. He was silent, too, in the pickup on the way home and all I could think of to try and make him feel better was talk up how the gold we were going to mine out of our riverbed would eclipse anything he’d dreamed of earning as a businessman.

It didn’t seem to help much. Just before he got out of the pickup at Empty Mile he turned to me and said, “I know that, Johnny, but I thought of Plantasaurus. It was my idea. It came out of my brain.”

Later that morning I called Bill Prentice and told him we would cancel our lease on the warehouse if he still wanted us to. With Jeremy Tripp gone he didn’t have an immediate buyer for the garden center property anymore, but I guess he figured he was going to sell it sooner or later and that it would be easier to do so without tenants because he sent a cancelation agreement over in a taxi that afternoon. I signed it and sent it back with the driver and the next day, Saturday, Stan and I went around to the warehouse and cleared out what little stuff we still had there. We left the keys inside the building and never went back.

With Plantasaurus closed down, Stan and I were free to concentrate on our buried river. On Sunday we took our pans and shovels and went down to the trees at the bottom of the meadow to see if we really were going to get rich.

We spent the first couple of hours digging dirt from the hole Stan had started previously and carting it to the edge of the river in buckets. The weather was cool but we were sweating by the time we’d accumulated a pile large enough to last the day and for a short time, before our shoulders and backs started to ache, it was a pleasant change to crouch with our pans at the edge of running water.

An experienced panner can get through a bit less than a cubic yard of dirt a day. By midday Stan and I together hadn’t done anywhere near that, but we’d still liberated half a peanut butter jar of concentrates. It seemed we were indeed on the kind of untouched land that could make fairytale changes in lives. Like stories of lottery wins, or tourists picking up alluvial diamonds on a beach in Africa, we had one of those crazy, unearned chances at wealth. All we had to do was put dirt in a pan and wash it in the river.

The excitement of watching our jar fill steadily with black sand and gold dust began to rub off on Stan despite the emotional battering he’d taken over the last week. Though work on the river would never match the satisfaction a successful Plantasaurus might have brought him, the possibilities gold held for providing some sort of standing in society became more real to him as he held the jar and felt its weight and saw the swirls of yellow dust.

We broke for a lunch of sandwiches and Coke, sitting on the bank of the river with the sun in bright cool patches on the rocky ground about us. I ate and watched the river pass. It was a beautiful place on a beautiful day and it looked like we had money for the taking. I should have been able to rejoice in such good fortune, but I could not.

Three days after Tripp’s crash I’d visited a lawyer in town and signed the papers that gave Gareth a one-third share of the Empty Mile land. This, the fact that the two-week no-contact period he’d imposed was going to expire the following day, and my feeling that he knew just as much about the gold at Empty Mile as I did, made it a safe bet that everything good which might have come from the buried river would soon be polluted by his presence.

Stan knew Jeremy Tripp was dead but he didn’t know Gareth or I had had anything to do with it. As far as he was concerned it had been a road accident, pure and simple. To prepare him for the fact that Gareth would soon be a dark constant in our lives, though, I’d had to explain his share of the land-so I’d told Stan that it was the only way we could get the capital we needed to fully exploit the gold. He hadn’t seemed too bothered and just shrugged and nodded as though what I said held little meaning for him.

We were panning again after lunch when the day’s grace I thought we had suddenly evaporated and Gareth appeared at the edge of the trees.

“Hey, Johnboy, I figured you might be down here. Marvelous day for a spot of panning, what? I saw the hole you guys dug back there. Is that what you’re working?” He moved down the bank to the water’s edge. “What are you getting?”

Stan looked at me questioningly. I nodded and he held up the jar. “This is just one day.”

Gareth took the jar and rolled it in his hands so that the concentrates separated and the grains of gold caught the light. “One day? Jesus!”

Gareth threw a couple of handfuls of dirt into a pan and spent the next few minutes washing it intently at the edge of the river. When he was done he stood up and rubbed the tip of his finger through what he’d collected. He looked at me and smiled.

“Looks like I made a smart investment for a change.”

I told Stan to keep panning and drew Gareth away from the river. We went into the trees, out of Stan’s hearing. Gareth looked like he was about to start congratulating himself again but I cut him off before he could start.

“Let me ask you something. When, exactly, did you find out about the gold here?”

Gareth’s happy face became deliberately dumb. “What, the stuff you guys are panning? Just then, when Stan showed it to me, of course.”

“Bullshit!”

Gareth frowned and put his hands on his hips. “We’re in bed together now, Johnny, so to speak. It’s not going to do either of us any good to be antagonistic.”

“What did you do with the pipe?”

“That dirty old thing all covered with blood? Not something you can just drop by the side of the road. I put it somewhere safe, don’t worry.”

“I want it.”

“I bet you do. But I’m going to hang on to it for a while. You know what they say, money and friendship travel different paths. And it looks like there’s going to be a whole shitload of money around here soon. We need something to make sure we stay together.”