Empty Mile

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.”