Empty Mile

CHAPTER 31

For the next two weeks I bought every newspaper I could get my hands on-the Oakridge Banner, the local Burton paper, even the day-old San Francisco Chronicle one of the shops in Oakridge sold. The Banner carried a piece on Jeremy Tripp’s death in one edition, the Burton paper had two articles over the course of the first week outlining the crash and later identifying the victim, but nothing afterwards. Neither of the papers called it anything but an accident-just another fatality on a difficult country road. The San Francisco Chronicle, of course, didn’t mention it at all.

No police came to Empty Mile to question or arrest me. No rumors of foul play were raised on the local radio station, no one in town muttered that there was something odd about the crash. But I was so scared of being caught that I couldn’t stop myself from grasping after a more concrete reassurance.

I figured that if the police had made anyone aware there was something suspicious about his death it would be his lover, Vivian. So, on the Monday of the second week after the crash I drove into Oakridge and saw her at the Plantagion warehouse on the pretext of needing to borrow a few sacks of potting mix for Plantasaurus.

They’d cleaned up the warehouse after Stan’s fire but there was still a damp burnt smell in the air and here and there, high up on the walls, I could see smears of soot they’d missed. Vivian was sitting behind the desk in the reception area and she looked bored. We made conversation and she told me she was finishing as manager at the end of the week. One of the installation guys was going to take over and run the business until whoever inherited the estate decided otherwise.

“I was really only doing Jeremy a favor. Without him I have no reason to be here. I need my energy for other things.”

“I read about the accident. What happened?”

She shrugged. “The usual story. He was driving too fast and lost control. Smashed his head to smithereens on the windshield. It would have been quick, at least.”

“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.”

Stan and Gareth and I spent the next few hours panning. By the end of the afternoon our jar was full. Gareth said he had some mercury at his place and though we were tired from our work all of us wanted to find out how much gold we’d panned. We went up to the cabin and dumped our gear on the stoop. Marla was inside and must have heard us, but she didn’t come out. As we drove away, Gareth in his Jeep, Stan and I in my pickup, I saw her behind the front window, her face haunted and pale, watching Gareth leave.

The lake at that time of day was softly lit by the tiring sun, and the shadows of trees back from the beach had begun their first dark tappings at the edge of the water. The scent of pine was strong as we walked along the path from the parking lot, as though the air, in cooling, was squeezing from itself essences that earlier in the day had been diluted by warmth and sunshine and blue sky.

I could hear David singing before Gareth opened the door of the bungalow, an unhappy drunken yodel against a background of the Eagles blasting from a stereo. Gareth looked at me ruefully.

“The council told us on Friday that the road isn’t happening. Any further action on it has been ‘postponed indefinitely.’ Dad’s pretty fucked up about it.”

We went into the living room and found Gareth’s father sitting in his wheelchair, head thrown back, howling the words to “Hotel California.” He was unshaven and there was an open bottle on the floor beside him. His back was turned to us and Gareth had to grab the handles of his wheelchair and shake it before he realized we were there. The singing stopped abruptly and David reached out toward his son, his hands trembled and there was spilled liquor on the front of his shirt. Gareth bent and hugged him and turned off the stereo. David reached for the bottle but Gareth beat him to it and held it out of reach.

“Party’s over.”

“You’re right about that!”

Stan stepped nervously closer to me. The movement caught David’s eye.

“I’ll tell you something, young fella, life’ll fuck you in the ass as soon as look at you. You remember that. In fact it likes to fuck you in the ass.”

Gareth put his hand on his father’s shoulder. “Dad, I told you it’s going to be okay. We’ve got this other thing now, this land at Empty Mile, and you, me, Johnny, and Stan here, we’re all going to be rich. You want to watch us mercury what we got today?”

David closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. “No.”

“Okay. I won’t be long. Just try and relax, okay?”

Gareth headed out of the room for the barn. Stan followed him, glad to get away from the frightening drunk man. I was the last out. As I passed David he caught hold of my arm.

“It’s good you and Gareth are friends. He’s always been a good son, a good boy… But people don’t seem to take to him too well. It’s good that you like each other. Especially after your father and all.”

“My father?”

“When he cut him out of that land of yours. Boy, that deal was all Gareth could talk about for weeks. The land and how if they could somehow get it they were going to be rich, rich, rich. And then, boom, your father decides to up and go it alone. I’ve never seen Gareth so upset. Maybe things are turning out okay now, I don’t know, but he almost went crazy back then.”

I wanted to question David more about the relationship between my father and his son, but Gareth stuck his head through the doorway and asked if I was coming or what and I was forced to bite down on the explosion of understanding David’s words had ignited within me and instead put on the face of a man whose only thoughts were of gold and the money it could bring.

Placer gold, gold you can just dig out of a river, comes in particles of various size-sometimes flakes, sometimes grains, sometimes so fine the gold is known as flour gold. The smaller the particles of gold, the more difficult it is, using a pan alone, to fully separate them from the dirt in which they are found. The gold we’d dug out of Empty Mile was what would generally be called fine gold-grains a little smaller than grains of beach sand.

Panning works on the principle of specific gravity-the weight of something compared with the weight of water. Gold has a very high specific gravity and so in a pan of water it sinks to the bottom, allowing lighter material like soil and silica to be washed away. Black sand, though, which is made up of metallic minerals, also has a high specific gravity and tends to collect with the gold, making it difficult to separate the two with water alone. One of the easiest ways to get down to pure gold from concentrates is mercury amalgamation. The chemicals needed can be bought from most prospector stores and the process is simple enough that it was used by miners during the Gold Rush.

When I entered the barn behind the bungalow Gareth had already dumped the contents of our jar into a steel pan and was drying them out over a portable electric hot plate. Stan was standing beside him watching intently, absently stroking the moth bag around his neck. He looked up as I walked in.

“Showtime, Johnny.”

When the concentrates were dry Gareth spread them out on a large sheet of paper. From a drawer in the bench he took a cylinder-shaped magnet, covered it in Saran Wrap, and began dragging one end of it back and forth through the dark powder. Grains of black sand collected against it. Twice Gareth removed the plastic film and replaced it with a new piece.

Using a magnet to remove the magnetic elements of the black sand is a quick and easy first step, but black sand also contains nonmagnetic elements which a magnet can’t pick up.

Gareth tipped the remaining concentrates into a wide glass beaker. He put on clear plastic safety goggles and a pair of heavy rubber gloves, then he reached under the bench and brought up a half gallon ceramic flagon. He motioned Stan to move back.

“You don’t want to get any of this on you.”

Gareth unstoppered the flagon and slowly poured a clear liquid into the glass beaker until the concentrates were covered to a depth of about half an inch. Stan, made a little nervous by the intensity of the situation, looked over at me wide-eyed.

“We’re in a mad scientist movie, Johnny.”

Gareth chuckled as he carefully agitated the beaker. “Nitric acid, dude. Spill it on the floor, it’ll eat a hole to China.”

“Yikes!” Stan moved another step away.

“The grains of gold in here are covered with all sorts of shit-pine oil from the trees, magnesium, iron sulfide… I’m just cleaning them up before we use the mercury.”

Gareth rocked the beaker gently a little while longer then drained the acid into an empty glass bottle and rinsed the concentrates several times with water from a sink in the corner of the barn. He filled a plastic milk jug with water and brought it back with the beaker to the bench.

“Stage two. Mercury, please, nurse.”

He nodded at a stoppered glass container under the bench. Stan handed it to him like it was a bomb. Gareth opened it and poured the shiny liquid metal onto the concentrates in the beaker. Then he poured in water from the milk jug and began swirling the beaker around, using the motion of the water to mix the mercury and the concentrates together.

I’d seen my father go through this process several times and I knew that one of the properties of mercury is that it will absorb gold. The blob of mercury/gold compound that results is called amalgam and can be easily lifted from the remaining non-gold concentrates.

When he was done, Gareth used an old spoon to remove the amalgam from the beaker. Without thinking, Stan and I both moved a little closer. This was magic. This was alchemy. We were now looking at a firm, dull gray lump that would soon release a pure metal we could sell for money.

The next step had to be conducted outside because of the toxic fumes it would generate. We used a long extension cord and set the hot plate up on a stool several yards beyond the barn’s entrance. Gareth placed a Pyrex dish about two-thirds full of nitric acid on the hot plate and into this lowered the lump of amalgam. Almost immediately fumes began to rise from the surface of the acid and I had to shoo Stan back so that he didn’t inhale them. Gareth turned the hot plate on and all three of us retreated to the entrance of the barn to let the solution boil away the mercury.

After five minutes Gareth pulled the extension cord out of its wall socket and once the acid had cooled a little we went back out and watched as he used a pair of tongs to lift out our gold.

It would have fit the occasion, our first reduction of dirt to precious metal, if the gold Gareth held before us had been bright and solid and shiny, but mercury amalgamation yields what is known as sponge gold, gold that is the color of rust and honeycombed with holes where the mercury has been dissolved by the acid. It would take heat from a blowtorch or gas burner to bring out its true color and luster.

Inside the barn again, we rinsed the gold and weighed it. When the needle of the scales came to rest there was a sudden silence around us. It took almost a minute for Gareth to break it by uttering a bemused “Jesus.” The needle of the scales had stopped a little past the six-ounce mark. At the current price of over nine hundred dollars an ounce we’d made more than five thousand dollars for one day’s work.

We spent a little while passing the lump between ourselves, feeling its weight, holding it up to the light. But now that it had been refined and there was nothing more to distract us, the day’s labor began to take its toll. I was shattered and Stan looked dead on his feet. We went out to the pickup, leaving Gareth in the barn with the gold. He’d wanted to keep it to show his father and I couldn’t be bothered arguing. We had the whole river to dig up, after all.

Stan dozed most of the way back to Empty Mile and when we got there I had to shake him to get him out of the pickup. He muttered something about going over to see Rosie, but instead plodded into the cabin still only half awake.

It was after nine o’clock but Marla had waited to eat with us. I told her about our day, about the five thousand dollars we’d panned, how it looked like the buried river was going to make us rich. Her responses didn’t rise above the noncommittal and try as I might to infect her with some enthusiasm for a gold-dusted future she did little more than nod occasionally. Stan shoveled in his food, head down, too tired to speak. He got up after he’d finished, gave each of us a kiss, and stumbled off to his bedroom.

When he’d gone Marla put her fork down and said tiredly, “This is the start, isn’t it?”

“Of Gareth? Yeah.”

“I don’t know how long I can take it, Johnny.”

“Can’t you just focus on the money?”

“I don’t give a shit about the money. There isn’t enough of it on the planet to make Gareth bearable. Don’t you understand what hell this is going to be for me?”

“What do you want me to do? He owns a third of the land now, I can’t stop him from coming here. And he’s got that fucking pipe.”

“We could move away.”

“Marla, we need that money. I have nothing left. Stan has nothing left. I’m not saying we have to dig up every last ounce, but we need something at least.”

Marla was quiet for a long time. Her hands were together in front of her on the table and her fingers twined anxiously around themselves. She watched them as though they were something she had no control over. Eventually she spoke.

“You know what I dream about, Johnny? I dream about going somewhere far away. To the East Coast, maybe. Somewhere we can just live and be together and start again and nothing can come in and spoil it. Sometimes I think that’s the only way we’ll ever have a chance.”

Later we moved to sit on the couch, and as we watched the fire burn I told her what I’d learned from David that evening-that Gareth and my father had planned to buy Empty Mile together, that for some reason they’d fallen out, and that my father had then bought the land by himself.

Marla shrugged, unimpressed. “Small town intrigue-gotta love it.”

“It’s more than that. Way more. Think how Gareth would have reacted. He’d done all this investigating, he was expecting a big payoff, then my father snatches it away from him. He would have freaked. He would have wanted revenge. What if he decided to get that revenge by making Pat kill herself? What if that was his reason for making the video? It makes sense. After you, me, Patricia, and Bill, the only other person who could possibly be hurt by it was my father.”

“Pretty horrific revenge.”

“Gareth’s a pretty horrific person.”

“But he already told you he made it to blackmail Bill. To force him to do something about the road to the lake.”

“That was just smoke. He wanted me to sell him Empty Mile, for Christ’s sake. He’s not going to tell me he made it to attack my father.”

“This is about Ray’s crash again, isn’t it? The whole brakes thing. They were fucked up on Ray’s car, they were fucked up on Tripp’s car. Now you’ve got an argument between Ray and Gareth over land.”

“Well, fuck, if we accept that Gareth made a video designed to get Pat to kill herself, it’s not much of a stretch to figure he could have tampered with my father’s brakes. And if he did that, then maybe he tried again some other way and actually ended up killing him.”

Marla rolled her eyes. “This is getting a bit much, Johnny.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe the cars are connected, maybe they’re not, I don’t know. But I can’t see why Gareth would kill Ray. You said he made the video to punish Ray for cutting him out of the land. Okay. Pat killed herself, Ray’s punished big time-Gareth’s successful. He’s successful, he’s achieved his goal. Why would he then go on and kill him? There’s no reason for it. And whatever else he is, Gareth’s a guy who usually has a reason for what he does.”

Marla’s logic was sound and I had nothing to contradict it with. Why would Gareth kill my father? If he’d had his revenge with Pat, why would he bother? I had no answer.

That night, however, the question of who was right and who was wrong didn’t bother me nearly as much as the quality of Marla’s dismissal. She had been so immediate, so adamant in her rejection of my theory, that although we sat pressed against each other on a comfortable couch in front of a fire, I felt suddenly very alone. Given her feelings toward Gareth I’d expected her to be more than receptive to the idea that he had been the cause of my father’s disappearance. Hating him so much, any halfway logical explanation should have provoked a knee-jerk reaction of support and I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something less than genuine about her refusal to agree with me.