Empty Mile

CHAPTER 32

Our gold mining operation moved ahead swiftly. Gareth raised a loan against his cabins at the lake and we hired a contractor in Burton to bring in bulldozers and a gang of men. When they were done we were left with a strip of torn earth twenty yards wide and two hundred yards long. On each side of this the stronger, older trees that bordered the course of our hidden river had been left untouched and their dark trunks formed walls which made the space feel like a vast natural cathedral. The debris from the ground-clearing was stacked in house-sized piles along the bottom of the meadow. Looking down from the cabin these mounds seemed ominous and ragged, as though they were the result of preparations for some primitive battle soon to be commenced.

We had a backhoe delivered and Gareth, who had used one before to dig drainage ditches around his cabins, trundled it through a space in the trees and parked it in the center of the cleared ground. It seemed as good a place as any to begin the process of making ourselves rich.

Throughout these preparations Gareth left Marla alone, coming to Empty Mile only to check on the progress of the contractors, entering our cabin only when she was out at work. The first day we started mining, though, this hands-off approach changed.

He arrived shortly after the sun had cleared the surrounding hills and the dew in the meadow was beginning to turn to a thin low-clinging mist. Marla had not yet left for the day so when I heard Gareth’s Jeep pull up I went outside with Stan and our equipment in the hope that we’d be able to head him off and go straight down to the river.

But Gareth had other ideas. He wanted to have breakfast with us. When I told him it was out of the question he smiled at me and mimed swinging a piece of pipe. There was nothing I could do. We went back into the cabin and sat around the table. Stan ate a second bowl of cereal. Gareth drank coffee and ate toast with exaggerated relish.

As Marla moved from one part of the cabin to another in her preparations for work he followed her closely with his eyes, trying to engage her in conversation whenever he could. She refused to answer him and did her best to pretend he wasn’t there, but I could tell by the tight lines of her face and the high color in her cheeks that it was a struggle for her. She left without eating anything or saying goodbye. As she went through the front door I saw something in Gareth’s eyes. It was only there a moment, but I caught it nevertheless-a wounded tenderness, a longing for something that had been lost forever.

A little while later Stan, Gareth, and I walked down the meadow and through the screen of trees to where the backhoe waited, cold and dewy from its night outdoors. Gareth slapped the engine cowling then put his hands on his hips and turned to us like we were all part of a gang.

“This is it, guys. Let’s make it happen.”

Our plan was to use the backhoe to clear the three or four feet of soil that had built up over the old riverbed and then to excavate the material beneath it. We had two sluices, one from my father’s cache of equipment, one supplied by Gareth, and these were to be our primary means of processing the gold-bearing sand and gravel.

A sluice is basically a long rectangular box open at both ends. On its floor, running horizontally across it, are a series of inch-high bars called riffles. The sluice is placed deep enough at the edge of a river so that the base of it is submerged but its walls rise a couple of inches above the water. Dirt is fed into the upstream end and the current of the water washes it along the length of the sluice. As it passes from one end to the other, the heavier material settles to the bottom of the box where it is caught by the riffles, while the mud and sand are washed out of the other end and into the river. Every so often the sluice is taken out of the water and whatever has collected against the riffles is knocked off into a bucket. This material is then further refined by panning. The result is concentrates-the same mixture of black sand and grains of gold we had refined by mercury amalgamation in Gareth’s barn.

Running a sluice requires a certain amount of skill and a lot of attention. Dirt has to be fed in at just the right rate or the sluice becomes overloaded and stones and other larger pieces of debris have to be constantly picked out by hand. But the amount of dirt that can be processed is exponentially higher than by using a pan alone, and if there is more than one person operating the sluice-one to feed it and one to pick out debris-the process goes even faster.

Because of his experience, Gareth was going to run the backhoe and build up a stock of riverbed material while Stan and I concentrated on the sluicing. That first morning, though, Gareth was too anxious to see what results we’d get to pile up more than a couple of hundred pounds of gravel and sand on the riverbank before stopping and joining us at the sluices.

We worked without speaking much. Carrying dirt in large plastic buckets, using shovels to sift it into the sluices, watching carefully as the water turned muddy, letting it clear again so we could see the black sand building against the riffles, moving the sluice a little side to side to let the light catch flecks of gold, reaching beneath the water to touch them with a fingertip…

Toward the end of the afternoon, while it was still fully light, we put the concentrates we’d collected in a plastic container. For a while the three of us just stood around and looked at it, ticking off in our minds all the future purchases this grubby metallic sand represented. Then we carried it up the meadow and put it in the shed at the back of the cabin. Our first day was over.

Stan went off to see Rosie. Gareth climbed into his Jeep and spoke to me through the window before he drove away.

“Some things can make everything else all right, just wipe the slate clean, don’t you think? All my shit with the road to the lake, all your shit with Tripp-doesn’t mean much now, huh?”

“Maybe we should split what we get each day. I don’t want you whining about how we’ve stolen some.”

“I trust you, Johnboy. Why wouldn’t I?” He winked and started his car. “See you tomorrow. I’m looking forward to breakfast. Maybe Marla will join us this time.”

Life quickly fell into a routine for Stan and Gareth and me-digging dirt and sluicing it, panning it down and then, every few days, amalgamating it with mercury. It was boring, tiring, backbreaking work that raised blisters on our hands and waterlogged our feet, but the richness of the dirt we were mining overrode our fatigue so that we worked in an avaricious trance where the filling of our bucket each day with black sand did not calm us with its promise of certain wealth but drove us on to want more and more and more. It was as though we became lost each morning and only regained ourselves when we threw down our tools at the end of the afternoon and walked away from the earth we had torn up and the river we had muddied.

Being wet every day forced Stan to change his approach to his moths. Instead of keeping them in a pouch around his neck, he put them, while he was working, in a large glass jar with a screw top which he stood on a nearby rock. The moths were always dying but Stan didn’t seem to care and called the jar his power generator and often during the day would touch it and hold it up and breathe in deeply with the glass pressed against his forehead.

All three of us stopped shaving, and as any clothes became soaked and filthy after five minutes of work, we tended, at the river, to wear the same things day after day without washing them. Sometimes Stan would bring his cassette player with him and run it on batteries and we would work to the sound of his mellow dance music, but mostly there was just the sound of water splashing, shovels going into dirt, and at intervals through the day the grind of the backhoe’s diesel engine.

Most days we took at least five ounces of gold from our hidden river. There were times when the content of the dirt dropped, when we found ourselves with nothing in our sluices after several hours work, but then all that was needed was for Gareth to direct his backhoe more to the left or the right and the gold always returned. Gradually, in this way, we were able to define the banks of the old river and get some idea of the distribution of gold along its length. And the better our picture of the river became, the more consistent our returns were.

We worked the first ten days straight through. After that we were exhausted and we took a day off to melt down the gold we had so far acquired in a crucible at Gareth’s place and take it to the assayer in Burton. We walked out of the Minco office with a check for a little more than forty thousand dollars. We’d sold them around fifty five ounces, but there was a commission fee plus our gold contained a small percentage of silver. This brought the per-ounce price down a little and also incurred a charge for the further refining that would be necessary to turn it into gold that fell into the standard purity range of between.995 and.999.

None of this was unexpected and we rode back to Oakridge with Gareth smugly proclaiming that at this rate each of us would earn a quarter of a million dollars in a year. While he was on this high I got him to agree to confining our workdays to Monday to Friday with the weekends off. This was necessary anyhow if we were going to last the distance, but it also meant Marla would at least be spared him two days a week.

But two days a week for Marla was, by then, nowhere near enough. Since we’d started mining she’d descended rapidly into a state of outright distress. When Gareth was anywhere on the property she withdrew completely, sequestering herself in our bedroom, coming out only for brief dashes to the kitchen or bathroom or to run for her car.

In fact, during the same period, the stresses at play on all elements of life at Empty Mile had grown greater and more destructive and it seemed now only a matter of time before everything must surely fall to pieces-before Marla went berserk, or Stan became lost to a world of moths and power, or I could no longer hold myself back from confronting Gareth over my father’s disappearance.

The first cracks began to show on a Sunday in November when Marla and I were sitting on the couch in front of the fire drinking coffee and Bill Prentice picked up his phone and called me.

I hadn’t heard from him since I’d canceled the lease on the Plantasaurus warehouse and the time during which we’d had no contact seemed to have drained some of the burning anger he had previously directed toward me. Perhaps he now believed Gareth was to blame for the video. I had no way of knowing. But his voice over the phone was measured and tiredly business-like, as though he had become resigned to a life he knew could never be set back on course. He began without small talk.

“The lawyers who administered my wife’s investments have recently supplied me with her financial records.”

“Okay.”

“They show a payment to her from your father. Do you know anything about it?”

“No.”

“That’s hard to believe. He wasn’t a rich man and this is a lot of money. A quarter-million.”

“Must be a mistake, he didn’t have anywhere near that much.”

As I spoke, however, it dawned on me that he had indeed had that much money. The remortgaging of our house had given him exactly that amount. And I knew what he’d spent that money on. When I spoke again I had to work to stop my voice from shaking.

“Can I ask you a question? Does the name Simba Inc. mean anything to you?”

“Patricia had family wealth, she administered her assets through a business entity of that name. What about it?”

“Do you know what assets she had, exactly?”

“Some of them, not all. Her money was always very much her own. She didn’t discuss it with me. Her will left whatever she had under that company to her brother. I had no visibility of it. I have no idea where it’s gone now that he’s dead too. How do you know about Simba?”

“You know that I live outside Oakridge now?”

“I don’t know anything about you.”

“I have some land at a place called Empty Mile. My father bought it just before he disappeared. Before Pat died. The seller is listed on the papers as Simba Inc. It’s the only thing the payment could be for.”

“Oh…” There was a long pause and a heavy, slowly let out breath, and then, quietly, “Lovers and business partners.”

“As far as I know there was just that one deal.”

Bill made a small choking noise.

“Bill, I’m sorry, but there’s something else I have to ask you.”

He didn’t say anything, but he stayed on the line.

“The video, the one Patricia was watching. Was that sent to you? Did Pat somehow… stumble across it?”

Bill spoke with a furious exactness. “That disk was sent straight to Patricia. The first time I saw it she was dead in our bedroom.”

He hung up and in the dark, empty silence of the phone against my ear I heard another piece of Bill Prentice’s soul scream and die. For me, though, there was a sunburst of sudden understanding.

Marla saw my expression and looked questioningly at me.

“I know what the fucking video’s about.”

Marla sighed. “Oh Christ…”

“It wasn’t just to hurt my father. There’s more to it than that. Gareth made it to try and stop him from getting this land.”

I told Marla what I had just learned, that Patricia Prentice had been Empty Mile’s previous owner and that the video had been sent straight to her, not to Bill.

“You told me that Pat hated Gareth because he ran her dog over, right? That means after my father severed his relationship with him, Gareth didn’t have a hope in hell of buying Empty Mile and getting his hands on the gold, even if he had the money. Pat wouldn’t have given him the time of day, let alone sold him anything. So what would he do? His first thought would be that if he couldn’t have it, then he was going to make damn sure my father couldn’t either. So he makes a video which he knows has a good chance of pushing an already suicidal woman over the edge. If she’s dead she can’t sell the land.”

“But Ray still bought it.”

“Yeah, but only because he closed the deal before Gareth could get the video together.”

“Jesus, I’m so tired of this.”

“What are you talking about? This isn’t something you can be tired of. It’s not just Pat and the video and the fact that we got sucked into some failed plan of Gareth’s. This gives Gareth a reason for killing my father.”

“Johnny, please-”

“Listen to me. If Pat was just a way to hurt my father for cutting Gareth out of the land deal, some kind of revenge after the fact, then, like you said, when she died Gareth had achieved his objective and he had no reason to do anything else. But if the aim was to stop my father getting the land in the first place, to fuck up the deal before it happened, then Gareth had failed. And if that was the case, then the only way to make things right, to stop my father from benefiting from the gold even though he now had the land, would have been to kill him. And you know what? I think my father knew. He’d spent enough time with Gareth to know what he was capable of and after we had that crash I think he saw the writing on the wall. That’s why he put the land in my name, not because of any bogus accountant. He knew Gareth was after him.”

Marla leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees, and ran her fingers through her hair. She let out a long breath. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t go through this endless rehashing of why Gareth did this, or why Gareth did that. We either accept that he’s an animal and try to live with what he did to Pat and what he maybe did to Ray, or…” She lifted her head and fixed her eyes on me. “Or we talk about killing him.”

We were both silent for a long time. Eventually she spoke again.

“Well, are we going to?”

“Going to what?”

“Talk about killing him.”

“Jesus, Marla, please…”

“It would be for the best, Johnny. It really would.”