Empty Mile by Matthew Stokoe Page A

work?”
    “’Cause Dad wants to take us somewhere. He said it was a big surprise. I called Bill, it’s okay.”
    “What sort of surprise?”
    “I don’t know, Johnny, that’s why it’s a surprise.” Stan pushed the cereal box toward me. “Have some breakfast. Nutrition’s important. And guess what? Bill’s leaving the key to the warehouse with the girls at the counter. Can we go check it out after?”
    “Sure, you bet.”
    “Awesome!”
    Stan got up and stared shunting around the room like a train, chanting, “Business-man, business-man, businessman …”
    Half an hour later my father came home. He was carrying a flat package wrapped in brown paper. We followed him into the living room and watched as he tore open the wrapping and lifted out a framed black-and-white photograph about two feet long. He set it on the back of the couch so that it leaned against the wall.
    Stan bent forward and examined it. “Is it around here?”
    “Yes, not far.”
    It was an aerial photo of forested land. The dark line of a river curved in from the right of the frame and made a pronounced bulge around what looked to be some sort of rock spur. Trees lined both sides of it. In the upper half of the photo they were unbroken, but below the river there was a patch of cleared land. On the bottom right-hand corner of the picture a serial number was imprinted and the image itself looked slightly grainy, as though it had been blown up from a smaller print.
    “Did you go up in a plane and take it, Dad?”
    My father laughed. “Not me, Stan.”
    “Are you going to put it on the wall?” Stan sounded dubious.
    “I was planning to.”
    “You should have gotten something with colors.”
    “This is a special picture. What do you notice about it?”
    Stan squinted hard at it, then stepped back and blinked his eyes rapidly. “Whew, that made me dizzy. It’s just a river, Dad. Is it the Swallow River?”
    “Well done. See anything else?”
    “Yikes, you’re going to make my head spin round. I can’t see anything. Ask Johnny.”
    “It’s just trees and a river to me too.”
    My father smiled and looked at the photo and shook his head as though he couldn’t believe his luck.
    “Come on. We’re going for a drive.”
    We left the house and got into my father’s car. As we rolled out of the driveway Stan put on a pair of mirrored aviator shades and tied a patterned silk handkerchief around his neck.
    The place my father took us to was called Empty Mile. Once we were out of Oakridge it was about a twenty-minute drive, the last few miles of it along a single winding lane of blacktop known only as Rural Route 12. Along the sides of this road dusty wooden poles supported an old electricity feed that served isolated dwellings erected over the years by a handful of families who preferred a more reclusive lifestyle. Neither tourists nor townsfolk had any reason to come out this way—there was nothing to see here that couldn’t be seen closer to town or in more scenic surroundings. The only sign that the area was inhabited came from occasional boards, hand-painted with family names, that marked the entrances to unpaved trails.
    At one of these my father turned off the road and onto a track that was just two tire furrows worn in the earth. We drove along this through sparse forest until we emerged at the top of a wide meadow of deep grass that sloped downhill for several hundred yards. My father stopped the car and we got out.
    The trees we’d passed through were behind us and to the left and ahead of us also the meadow was bordered by forest. On our right the land rose in a steep rock wall about seventy feet high.
    In the top left corner of the meadow there was an old wooden house that needed paint. It was set off the ground and had a short flight of steps leading up to a roofed veranda. A beaten-up orange Datsun was parked beside it and in an unfenced garden washing hung on a line.
    On the opposite side of the meadow from this house,