Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

More Critical Praise for Matthew Stokoe

for High Life

High Life is perhaps the greatest neglected masterpiece of true noir. Ive never read anything like it before or since.

Ken Bruen, author of The Guards

One of the most unstinting, imaginative, brutal, and original contemporary novels ever written about the punishments that come with the prioritization of fame The fact that High Life isnt regularly mentioned in the same breath with classic, transgressive social satires like American Psycho and Fight Club is a mystery and an injustice

Dennis Cooper, author of Ugly Man

Stokoes in-your-face prose and raw, unnerving scenes give way to a skillfully plotted tale that will keep readers glued to the page.

Publishers Weekly

Soaked in such graphic detail that the pages smell, Matthew Stokoes High Life is the sickest revision of the California crime novel, ever.

Paper Magazine

forCows
(Akashic Books reissue forthcoming in 2011)

The word is out that Cows is every bit as dark and deranged as Iain Banks classic The Wasp Factory. Its not: its even more so. Possibly the most visceral novel ever written.

Kerrang!

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by Akashic Books
2010 by Matthew Stokoe

ePUB ISBN-13: 978-1-936-07083-1

ISBN-13: ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-12-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009939082

Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
info@akashicbooks.com
www.akashicbooks.com

CONTENTS

For my son, Zane.
You were in my thoughts through
all the long writing of this book.

E ight years. And now I was back. Back on my street. Back in my town. The house was still two hundred yards away, but I pulled over and killed the engine. From London to San Francisco, from San Francisco to this basin-shaped valley in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, the anxiety of my return had grown like some ravening tumor until now, with so little left between me and my past, I could no longer stand the tightening cage of the pickups cabin.

I got out and started walking. Fast along the sidewalk. Past houses I had seen a thousand times before. But it wasnt enough. This last distance, this final minute between me and my homecoming was a pain that threatened to blow apart my soul. So I ran. I ran with my arms pumping and my head thrown back. If I had had the breath I would have screamed.

Finally, in front of the house. Finally. Panting, pushing through the low gate, running the short path to the front door, and the front door opening, opening as I approached, swinging back into the house and Stan standing there, shaking his hands and running on the spot in his excitement. My brother Stan, eight years older and bigger, but still everything I remembered.

Johnny!

My name leaping from him like it was alive.

Johnny!

In that one word, in that snapshot frame of him shaking and running in the doorway, there was everything I needed to tell me that what I had done in leaving Oakridge was irredeemably, indisputably, wrong.

He danced backwards in front of me all the way along the hall, lunging in to hug me over and over, hanging on so tight we almost fell, yelling questions a million miles an hour, faster and faster, gulping for breath until the things he wanted to say outstripped his mouth and all he could manage was Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny clapping his hands and smiling so hard I thought his lips would tear.

And then he stepped close and held me, hung on with his arms and pressed his forehead against the side of my neck and in doing so tore open the memory by which I was most hauntedStan in my room on the night I left Oakridge all those years ago, his face pressed against my chest as I hugged him goodbye, the silence drawing out around us, around my awful inability to make my leaving even slightly less catastrophic an event for him, hating the pain I was causing and hating myself because of it.

And the sound that had echoed through all my days afterwards, the only sound he had made against mea single dreadful sob, bitten down on as soon as it was out. And as we stepped back from each other, seeing that he had forced himself not to cry so that I might not feel any worse than I already did. So that I could go and do what I had to do without the weight of his unhappiness holding me back.

Now, Stan pulled away and he was smiling.

Hey, I want to see whos tallest.

We stood back-to-back and he ran the flat of his hand across his head to feel where it hit mine. He was much taller than he had been and his body, which had begun to soften in the years after his accident, had grown bulky and curved. I wanted him to be small again, to be the boy I towered over and my arms fit around, but he outweighed me now by forty pounds.

Youre still bigger than me, Johnny, but Im almost there.

It seemed to me that morning that so much needed to be explained to him, to be made right, to be excused. But all I could do was say lamely, Im sorry I stayed away so long. Stan laughed.

But youre back now! Dadll be here tonight.

He couldnt take time off?

Stan shrugged. Do you have a car?

A pickup.

Im not allowed to drive. Look, Im wearing your jacket.

In my early twenties Id lived in a black leather biker jacket. Id given it to him as a going-away present. At twenty-three it fit him now, though tightly. Under it he wore a pale blue bowling shirt with his name embroidered on the left breast. With his dark hair slicked back and his square black-framed glasses he looked like some chubby 50s garage attendant.

I like the look, Stan.

Yeah, its sharp.

We went out into the back garden. It was long and narrow and from our position on the northern slope of the Oakridge basin it gave a view back across the town. Beds of flowers and small shrubs had been newly planted against the enclosing wooden fence. They were tidy and well cared for. Stan saw me looking at them and puffed up.

I do the garden.

Really?

Ive got green fingers.

He fluttered his fingers in front of my face and began to point out his work.

These are blue pearl. They flower in spring and summer and they like the sun. This one here is a peace lily, you have to give it a lot of water.

How do you know all this stuff?

Stan tried to hold it in but couldnt. Its my job.

You got a job?

At the garden center. I catch the bus. Ive been working all year.

Why didnt you tell me?

So it was a surprise.

Below us on the floor of the valley, Old TownOakridges original Gold Rush heart of 1800s wooden buildingsglowed whitely at the center of town. In the distance, further south, a thin curve of the Swallow River glittered.

Stan, do you ever see Marla around?

Sure.

How does she look?

She looks good.

Does she ever say anything about me?

Of course she does, Johnny. She always asks how you are.

Later, I walked up the street and showed Stan my pickup and moved it closer to the house. I carried my things inside and went upstairs. Id been traveling solidly for a day and a half and I was tired.

Despite the sunlight that fell dustily through the windows, my bedroom was cold. When I was twenty-one Id moved out of the house to live with Marla and my father had stripped it bare. It had been empty ever since and on the day of my return all I could find of the time I had spent there was a set of grubby outlines on the cream walls where my posters had been. A single bed had been placed under one of the windows and there was a small table beside it. There was nothing else.