Empty Mile

Toward the end of the afternoon I made Stan an early dinner. He didn’t eat much of it and when I left to go visit Marla he was sitting in front of the TV in his Batman suit. He’d found some moths and added them to the ones he already had. The matchbox was stuck in his utility belt.

CHAPTER 20

When I got to Marla’s place she was just getting out of her car with an armful of the empty cardboard boxes she’d been scavenging in preparation for her forced move. We went inside and she dropped them on top of some others in a corner of the living room. I asked her if she’d started looking for a place. She shook her head.

“I haven’t been able to face it.”

“I’ve been thinking about something.”

“Something about you and me?”

“Yeah.”

“About us living together?”

“Makes sense to me… if you want to.”

Marla buried her head in my chest and held me. “Thank you, Johnny. Thank you…”

“There’s a problem, though. We got the eviction notice on the house today.”

“So sell the land. It’s in your name. Sell it, pay off the house, we can live there together.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? What does it matter what Ray wanted?”

“He must have had a reason for buying the place. Until I know what it was I can’t sell it.”

“Look, I had to research local Gold Rush history when I first started my job. Empty Mile’s on the Swallow River and the Swallow River used to be a big gold river. Maybe Ray thought there was still something to be found.”

“It’s called Empty Mile for a reason.”

“I’m not saying there is gold there, I’m saying Ray might have thought there was. He was in the Elephant Society. They’re nice people, but all of them live for this idea that one day they’re going to dig up a million dollars. I went to a lot of meetings for that research and I saw Ray there all the time. He was into it as much as any of them. He’d go on and on about how the Forty- Niners couldn’t have found everything. If you feel like that, maybe you can make yourself believe something about a piece of land next to a river.”

Marla went into her bedroom to change. When she came out she was looking at her watch.

“If you want to ask about Empty Mile we’ve still got time.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Elephant Society. They meet tonight. They might be able to tell you something about it.”

“We’re not members.”

“Like they’d care. Plus they know me from when I used to go.”

The Elephant Society met in Back Town in a hall above a short row of stores that had been built in the ’20s. The place was a couple of blocks before the town hall, on the other side of the road, and was rented out as a resource to various groups in the community. We went up a flight of wooden stairs to a long room with a cathedral ceiling that ran the length of two storefronts. Lights in glass globes were suspended from the ceiling in a line down the middle. The glass was opaque and had aged to a murky cream. The floorboards were bare and unpolished and dust rose from them so that the air in the place seemed dry and moved against the skin with a papery feel.

At the entrance a woman sitting behind a card table asked us to sign our names in an attendance register. The page she turned toward us bore what I assumed were the signatures and names of the members who had already arrived. The day’s date was stamped at the top of the page and beside it the words Magnetometers and their Role in Placer Gold Deposit Location were printed in red ink. The woman saw me reading and said helpfully, “Tonight’s lecture.”

Metal folding chairs had been set in five rows at the opposite end of the hall. A few were occupied, but we were early for the meeting and most of the ten or so people in the hall stood around in twos and threes chatting. I recognized a couple of them from the Society picnic.

As Marla led me toward an office door behind the chairs she whispered, “Chris Reynolds is the chairman. He knows as much as anybody. It’s good we’re early, we can talk to him and then get out before the meeting starts.”

“And miss the lecture?”

“Most of them don’t exactly live up to that description. Someone stands up and drones on about his or her pet subject for half an hour. Different one each meeting. This diggings, that diggings, the journey across the country to the gold fields, where’s the best place to look for gold now…”

“Not good?”

“Some of them are okay, but you come often enough and you start hearing the same thing again and again.”

The upper half of the office door was frosted glass set in dark oak. Marla tapped on it and a voice told her to come in.

We entered a small room that was paneled to waist height in more oak. An old wooden desk that had lost its varnish filled most of the space. Chris Reynolds sat behind it poring over some sort of financial ledger. He had a tired, weathered face and the skin around his eyes looked bruised. I hadn’t recognized the name, but I remembered the face. He owned a prospector supply store in town called the Nugget Shooter and we’d recently installed a couple of standing plants for him. Like anyone else who read the Oakridge paper he knew about my father’s disappearance.

We all said hi. Marla and I sat on chairs in front of his desk and she told him I was interested in the history of

Empty Mile. He looked happy to have the chance to hold forth on his area of expertise.

“Empty Mile. What do you want to know?”

“Anything you can tell me. My father bought some land there on the Swallow River and I’m trying to figure out why.”

“You’re here, so you must be thinking gold, one way or another.”

“It’s the only thing that stands out about the place.”

He laughed. “You could say that about almost anywhere around here. Look, the Swallow was thoroughly prospected during the Rush. There’s no gold left in that river, believe me. Not the sort you can take out with a pan. A lot of miners came this way. And a lot of miners means that all the gold got found. Even the name of the place bears it out. Empty Mile. Empty, nothing left. They came, they saw, they dug it all up. Did such a good job everyone who came later remarked on it. Started calling it…?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Empty Mile.”

“Exactly. And your father would have known that the same as any other member of the Society. It’s a nice thought, but I can’t see him thinking he’d bought himself an undiscovered strike. He must have had another reason.”

“That’s the origin of the name? That it was mined so thoroughly it became… notorious? It couldn’t have been that there just wasn’t any gold there to start with?”

“The Swallow was rich pretty much all the way up to where Oakridge is today. It doesn’t make sense that Empty Mile was barren. I know that stretch of river. The banks, the riverbed, slow water. There couldn’t not have been gold there. And there’s actually an account by a miner who passed through there complaining about the way it had been cleaned out. It’s a pretty strong indication that there had to be something there in the first place.”

He twisted in his chair and pulled open a drawer in a dented filing cabinet behind him. After a minute spent struggling with densely packed hanging folders he turned back to us and handed me a sheet of paper. It was a photocopy of a handwritten page. The creases where the original had been folded into eighths were visible in dark