I had seen one of them before, or at least a version of it-an eight-by-ten aerial photograph, a smaller print of the image my father had so excitedly hung on the wall of the living room. It looked like this smaller photo was the original. It was sharper and the paper had a heavy professional feel to it. I turned the print over. There was writing in a corner, done in my father’s hand with a fountain pen-a short note: The trees are different.
I flipped the picture several times, looking first at the image and then reading again what my father had written. There were trees on either side of the Empty Mile curve of river, but there was nothing special in that. There were trees everywhere in this part of the country. What had my father seen in these particularly? I looked at the picture a little longer but I couldn’t find an answer, so I put it aside and picked up the second of my finds-the papers for the original sale of the Empty Mile land to my father.
The date of the sale was recorded-just two weeks after my return to Oakridge. There was information that the owner possessed, along with freehold to the land, both mineral and water rights. There were references to the cabin and to boundaries and numbers of acres. And there were, of course, the details of the parties involved-my father as the new owner, and a company called Simba Inc. as the seller. The address for Simba Inc. was given as care of a law firm in Sacramento.
I called information on my cell phone, got the firm’s number, and called them. After bouncing from a receptionist, to an assistant, to a lawyer, I was finally told that the reason the law firm’s contact details were used for Simba Inc. was because Simba Inc. was a small investment concern whose principal valued privacy. The firm regretted, therefore, that it could provide no details whatsoever as to the identity of the previous owner of the Empty Mile land without a court order.
I hung up disappointed, but I figured that if there was some secret to Empty Mile the last owners wouldn’t have known about it anyhow, otherwise they wouldn’t have sold it to my father.
The final thing I’d found relating to Empty Mile was over a hundred and fifty years old and its presence in the trunk was as puzzling as the information it contained. Three sheets of discolored paper. Six pages of precise handwriting in ink. The missing pages from the gold-hunter’s journal I’d read at Millicent Jeffries’s place.
I could think of no explanation for them being there other than that my father had stolen them. But in all my life I had never known him to do anything remotely like that.
The room was gloomy. I turned on the lamp that stood beside my father’s bed and started to read, hoping that in these final pages of the journal I would discover some reason for his purchase of Empty Mile.
March 17, 1849
I rose at dawn and broke camp, determined to reach the stretch of river spoken of by the trapper before the sun was risen above the trees. The going was not difficult. The banks of the river, before I had gone very much more than half a mile, thinned of vegetation and I was able to proceed with relative ease. I was alert for indications of my longed for El Dorado and feared lest I passed by without recognizing it. The description the man had made possessed me-a broad curve of sandy bank, the water slow moving and shallow. From the panning at my last camp I knew that this part of the river was rich and I was conscious of the deposits that almost certainly lay within feet of me. But I want the best of the river and did not stop. At midmorning I found the place I was looking for. I need not have feared missing it. Cooper’s Bend. It is well named. A sweep of river curving roundly about a swell of land on its right bank. It is a pretty place but I did not stand long admiring it. Whether or not the trapper has told the men at the diggings downstream about this place they will, by their natural progression through the country, arrive here soon. I might have a week or two. I might have but days. I have to make my advantage count.
A river that makes a pronounced curve will generally deposit its gold toward the outside bank at the apex of the curve. My desire was to rush for this point and begin panning but I have learned that with gold nothing is properly predictable and it seemed prudent that I sample the length of this curve, this Cooper’s Bend, in order that I might be assured of the richest claim before the arrival of my competitors. And so I began where I was, at the downriver start of the bend on the left-hand bank. Today, though, I have had little luck. I have panned along one hundred yards of the bank, and I have panned in the body of the river for it runs shallow and affords no great difficulty. But I have found nothing. The faintest traces of color only, far less than in any other part of this river I have so far prospected. It is a disappointment and I worry, for even though I am only at the beginning of the bend I had high hopes. Still, there is much riverbed ahead of me.
March 19, 1849
For two days I have worked methodically up the river, crossing from one bank to the other and working the bed carefully in between so that I should not miss any but the smallest accumulation of gold dust in the river’s gravel no matter where it might lie. But does it lie anywhere? I have found nothing. Nothing! Some traces of dust, a sad thimbleful by the end of the day. I have not seen a stretch of river so poor. It is beyond my understanding. I could stop at random along the miles of Swallow River that wind behind me and, if there were space for a claim, pan a day’s wages at least. But here it seems a man would starve before he could dig enough to buy a week’s provisions. What unhappy luck it was that my path crossed that of the trapper’s! The river is broad, the water is slow, dust should fall from it and settle, and there is sand and gravel aplenty to catch it, but it seems some giant hand has already scooped it up. Men have not mined here before, this stretch of the river bears none of their scars. It must be nature then, alone, who plays this cruel joke. I have another day ahead of me before I reach the middle of the bend. I dare not speculate what awaits me.
March 21, 1849
Cursed river! Yesterday I reached the repository of my greatest hopes-the middle of the bend-and that day and this I have worked until it was too dark to see. I am burned by the sun, the flesh of my hands is raw from shovel and pick and constant immersion in water, but I have not found my storehouse of wealth. The middle of the bend is as barren of gold as the stretch I have so far prospected. There are some hundreds of yards yet before Cooper’s Bend becomes again the Swallow River, but I do not think now that they will make my fortune. How can they be any different from the yards I have already scrabbled over? There is a chance, it is true, and I must hold that hope close to me, but even if the river changes its nature ahead things will not be as I wished them. Men from the diggings downriver have begun to arrive this evening and are staking claims as the light fades. The dream of having a new strike to myself is gone. I am once again one among many and if any wealth is ever revealed here it cannot but be diminished by such division.
March 29, 1849
I must let it go. If Cooper’s Bend had carried the amount of gold any sane man had a right to expect I would have succeeded in my goal, I would have returned to civilization a man to be remarked upon. But it is not to be. Cooper’s Bend holds nothing. More than two hundred of us, for the influx from the diggings downriver has been swift, have worked the river here for a week and know this as a truth. Though the riverbed has been thoroughly turned, not a single man has panned more than an ounce and there is movement away from here, onwards up the river or back to the diggings downstream. Those who have not already left, though all will do so soon, have re-christened this wretched stretch of water. The name they call it by now is “Empty Mile.” It seems fitting. I will move upriver with the others. I may yet find paying dirt, and though I am unlikely now to become a gold dust tycoon I may still pan myself a house, or perhaps, if I am lucky, a small ranch. If I am lucky…
April 2, 1849
The river is rich again! We are beyond “Empty Mile.” Men, from where the bend finishes to as far upriver as it is possible to see, and more arriving by the hour. Each of us throwing himself at the small square of bank or bed we have claimed as our own. We are lik
e some mad race of boring insects, our humanity temporarily suspended as we dash to secure a future for ourselves. How many of us will succeed? Will I be among them? Already I have four ounces safely stored and the river’s golden heart beats steadily with each pan I lift. Let it beat this way tomorrow and all the days after. Let the gold never end.
There was nothing more. Nathaniel Bletcher had run out of paper and the end of his story was not recorded. I wondered what the Gold Rush had left him with. Millicent had said she thought he had become well off, so I guessed that at least he had not been one of the hordes of broken men who went home poorer than they had been when they started.
Whatever had eventually become of him, though, what he’d written was not what I needed. It did not clear up the mystery of Empty Mile. If anything, after reading the final pages of the journal, my father’s purchase of the land seemed stranger than ever. If there had once been gold in that part of the river I might have suspected that he’d had some sort of plan to find an overlooked pocket of dust. But the journal pages showed plainly that this could not have been the case, that there had never been any gold there to overlook in the first place.
I gathered the pages, the land document, and the aerial photo together and put them back in the trunk. As I was about to close the lid I noticed a photo that had slipped from a stack of Kodak packets which filled one corner of the box. I picked it up and looked at it. It was a shot of my father in front of the entrance gate to a large wooden roller coaster. He was standing overly upright and grinning broadly, as though he was clowning for whoever had taken the shot. There was a sign beside him on which I could read the words San Diego but nothing else. I put the picture back in its packet and closed the trunk.
In an effort to cheer Stan up I talked him into driving to town with me to have lunch in a diner. With money so tight we didn’t eat out and it was something of a treat. Even so, he was reluctant and stayed silent for most of the journey. But that changed rather dramatically when we hit the edge of Old Town.
We were driving along a street of stores when a guy in his early twenties came out of a bookshop lugging a weeping fig in a cylindrical planter. Stan saw him first and yelped for me to look.
“Hey, Johnny, he’s stealing our plants.”
At first I thought Stan was right and I pulled quickly to the curb. Then I realized that the store the guy had come out of wasn’t one of our customers.
“We don’t do that place.”
“What?”
“It’s not our plant.”
“But it’s a rental. Look at the planter.”
We watched the guy carry the plant a few yards along the sidewalk to a shiny new van that had the business name Plantagion and a phone number painted on each side under an orange sun and palm tree silhouette.
Stan let out a wail and started shaking his hands in front of him like he was trying to ward off some dreadful attack. “It’s not fair! It’s not fair! It was my idea.”
“Stan, calm down. A lot of other people do it in a lot of other towns and cities. The idea’s not ours.”
“But I thought of it for Oakridge. So I could be a businessman.” He dug frantically in his jeans pocket and pulled out the matchbox he kept his moths in. He pushed it open and held it to his mouth and started breathing rapidly in and out.
“What are you doing?”
“Moth essence. I gotta charge up.”
“Stop it.”
“I have to, Johnny. The connection’s getting weak. The power isn’t coming through. That’s why this is happening.”
“Jesus Christ, Stan!”
I pulled his hands away from his face. He looked suddenly frightened.
“Johnny… Am I going crazy?”
I took a breath and forced myself to calm down. “You’re not going crazy. But I don’t think any power or anything not coming back from some other place has anything to do with that guy and his van.”
“Why is he here, then? We checked and no one else did plants in Oakridge.”
Stan was right. Before we’d kicked off Plantasaurus we’d done a search of the local business directory to make sure no one else in town was already leasing plants. We hadn’t found anyone. Which meant Plantagion had only recently started operating.
“I don’t know.”
What I did know, though, was that we were in trouble-our business simply would not survive competition. And looking at Stan I could see he knew this just as well as I did.
As we sat in the pickup and watched the Plantagion guy move plants and sacks of potting mix around in the back of his van I wondered about the timing of this new company.
I used my cell and dialed the number on the side of the van. The call was answered by a female voice that sounded vaguely familiar. I told the woman I was interested in leasing plants and asked where the Plantagion office was. She gave me an address in the Oakridge commercial precinct. Stan and I put lunch on hold.
The Oakridge commercial precinct was an area of warehouses and workshops set in a couple of acres of tarmac five minutes drive from the eastern edge of Back Town. There’d been an outcry by environmentalists when it was built in the ’80s, but it had given the town a solid base for its small manufacturing and service industries.
Plantagion occupied a pressed metal warehouse on the edge of a maze of similar buildings. A sliding glass door in the front wall opened directly onto a reception/office area and as soon as Stan and I stepped inside I understood why the voice on the phone had sounded familiar. Vivian, the woman Gareth was supposedly in love with, the woman I’d bumped into in Jeremy Tripp’s bedroom, sat behind a desk with an Oakridge business directory open in front of her. I saw that a number of entries had been crossed through. It looked like she was working her way down the page. She was in the middle of dialing a number but she put down the phone when she saw us and waved us to a couple of chairs in front of the desk.
“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.
Empty Mile Page 17
