Empty Mile Read Free Page B

pretended to be old friends glad to see each other again. Gareth must have sensed my uncertainty, though, because when the reunion was done he cleared his throat and stuck his hands in his pockets.
    “This is an amazing coincidence, Johnny. When I heard you were coming back to town I hoped like hell we’d meet up, and now we have. I’ve been waiting for this a long time, man.”
    “Really?”
    “What happened was fucked up. Losing Marla was a blow, I can’t say it wasn’t, but after you left and she and I didn’t get magically back together I realized it was just one of those things. I felt like such a prick, you know? We were buddies. What happened with her shouldn’t have changed that.”
    “Well, it was a long time ago.”
    “Yeah, but I promised myself if I ever got the chance I was going to make it right.”
    Gareth took his hands out of his pockets and raised his shoulders.
    “I’d sure like to be friends again.”
    I had enough to deal with in Oakridge without subjecting myself to Gareth’s particular brand of friendship, but with him there in front of me, holding out an olive branch, I didn’t feel I had much of an option. And, of course, there was the fact that he’d saved my life hovering in the background.
    “Okay.”
    “Awesome, man. Awesome! This is like such a huge fucking weight off my mind.”
    We made nice for a bit longer, then I got my keys out and turned toward my pickup. Gareth was suddenly aghast.
    “Dude, what are you doing?”
    “Going home.”
    “I thought … Look, you don’t know anything about my life now. Why don’t you come out to my place? We don’t have the garage anymore. You’ll get a kick out of it, I promise.”
    “I don’t know …”
    “Johnboy, come on! Follow me in your truck. An hour out of your day. Jesus, man, this is an event!”
    We left the garden center and turned right on the Loop, following the wide curve of the Oakridge basin northeast. The country along our route was mostly light forest, but occasionally there were driveways leading into the gardens of large homestead-style houses. I had the windows down and warm air that smelled of pine needles and hot tarmac blew across me. For a little way we ran parallel to a stretch of the Swallow River and the trees that lined the road broke its metal glint into a pattern of backlit leaves and smashed silver water.
    It was only when the scattered houses disappeared and the forest became denser that I began to suspect where we were going. I could have turned back, of course, I could have U-turned and raced for the safety of town. But I knew that sooner or later my time in Oakridge had to involve a return to this place, that it would be impossible for me to reconcile my past without doing so.
    And so I followed Gareth when he turned into an unpaved, deeply rutted series of cutbacks that had originally been gouged into the hillside by Conservation Corps workers back in the Depression. It took us five minutes of scrabbling up the steep grade before the track leveled out and gave on to a place every Oakridge local knew well enough, but which for me was burned like a brand across the soft tissue of memory. A place I had not been since I was eighteen.
    Tunney Lake was oval in shape, about four hundred yards by a hundred and fifty. It was fronted on its long side by a beach of coarse sand that was bordered to the right of where the trail came out by solid forest, and on the left by cleared land. There was no shoreline on the far side of the lake. Instead, a cliff of pockmarked rock rose fifty feet, straight from the water. Above this the trees continued, giving the lake the appearance of a giant soap dish chiseled into the side of the hill.
    On the beach a scatter of people sunbathed on towels or played in the dark water. For the most part, though, the place was deserted. Late morning on a weekday the locals were at work and the tourists, not having the incentive of knowing how beautiful the place was, were almost