The Far Empty

by J. Todd Scott

  He stepped back. “Mel, I . . .”

  She cut him off. “Think very fucking hard on what you’re about to say right now, Deputy Cherry, because you’ve said very fucking little for weeks.” She paused, breathed, searched his face. “Please make this count, Chris.”

  She hadn’t planned on any of this—not here, not now—but here it was all the same. He’d seen her angry plenty of times before. They both knew it could get a lot worse before it got better.

  He settled against the counter. “Okay, I know, I know. I haven’t been easy. Coming back here, all of this”—he took in the house, her, with a tired glance—“it’s just different than I thought it would be. Harder. You’re not happy here.”

  She inhaled, buying a moment, before nodding. “I’m not comfortable here, Chris. All of this stuff is yours. This house, everything in it. This fucking town. It’s all your old history. I don’t belong.”

  “How do we fix that?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s more than that. You’re different, too. Nothing about this place has been good for you.” She wanted to say Nothing has been good since Lonnie Ray Holliday, but stopped short. “Maybe you don’t belong here either, anymore.” Adding, “And if that’s the case, maybe there’s nothing either of us can do to fix it. Not here.”

  He looked around the kitchen, past her, down the hall where boxes still stood stacked.

  “You’re right, babe, I know you are.”

  In their other fights, he’d step forward now and put his arms around her, wrap her up for a heartbeat or two, and she’d be fine with that. Instead, he stood, arms crossed.

  “Look, give me another couple of weeks. Let me hear back from the DPS lab and make a stab at closing this thing . . . do some good here.”

  She hesitated. “Okay, then what?”

  “Then we’ll leave, if that’s what you want. We’ll leave.”

  If that’s what you want.

  But that wasn’t what she wanted, not exactly. She wanted him to say it, to admit that he was done here and needed to get the hell out of Murfee for both of their sakes. They didn’t have to go back to Waco, just somewhere, anywhere, else. Instead, he was putting it off on her, as if his stake in it—his own unhappiness—carried no goddamn weight at all.

  It was bullshit, unfair, but for now that was all he was willing to give, watching her through the smoke.

  There were other things she could say, a hundred things she knew would hurt him bad—as bad as putting bullets in him. Killing, really, whatever they still had. But she’d given herself to him and wasn’t ready to take it back.

  “Okay, Chris. If that’s what you want. If that’s the way it has to be.” She flipped her cigarette into the sink where he’d been washing dishes, not waiting to see where it landed.

  9

  CALEB

  Nothing much interesting happens in Murfee.

  Nothing much anyone knows about, anyway. Time here is like a bug trapped in amber, fossilization—we learned all about that in biology. Come back a year from now, ten years from now, and Murfee would seem exactly the same. You would be wrong. Our town does a pretty good job of holding her secrets close.

  • • •

  Two interesting things have happened in the past couple of weeks.

  First, our new teacher, Anne Hart, has come here from Austin to replace to Ms. Garner, who died in her kitchen. I have her for English, and she’s picking right up where Ms. Garner left off, with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

  I’ve already read the book several times and know most of the passages by heart.

  Ms. Hart is a small woman, delicate, much younger than Ms. Garner—who’d long ago fossilized. She keeps her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, kind of like Mom; a look I also like on Amé, although she doesn’t wear it often—or simply won’t—because she knows I like it. Ms. Hart doesn’t use nail polish and her glasses seem a little too large for her face, unnecessary, when she could as easily wear contacts, but there’s a point to them. Sitting at the edge of her desk, talking, trying not to smile or make much eye contact, she doesn’t seem much older than us, but she could be prettier—much prettier, I think—than she’s willing to show.

  Her clothes and glasses and the carefully maintained distance from us are props—all part of a charade, a mask she wears. I recognize it because I wear a mask every morning I wake up here in Murfee. I guess Ms. Hart has her secrets, too.

  Amé already doesn’t like her, but I think it’s a girl thing. Where Ms. Hart is light, Amé is dark—dark hair and eyes and skin—and she’s a hundred percent Murfee. At least one end of Murfee, out past the stadium and beyond Mancha’s, where all the little houses and trailers begin. She speaks Spanish there but never at school and won’t practice it with me, even though I’ve been taking it since the fourth grade.

  My mom tried hard to pick it up as well, always listening to her Rosetta Stone in her little Ford Ranger—the one I drive now, since my father kept it, just like that Kohler tub. We used to have days when we were allowed to talk to each other only in Spanish, at least outside my father’s earshot. If I wanted something, I had to start each sentence with quiero and go from there, and I used to write down all sorts of phrases and questions that Amé would sometimes translate for me. I memorized the lines and stumped my mom all day with them, making her look up the words in the small Berlitz she carried for the occasion. She would laugh, flipping madly through her dictionary, trying to repeat and remember what I said.

  Te quiero y te extraño y nunca te olvidaré.

  I love you and I miss you and I’ll never forget you.

  • • •

  I’ve known Amé for over three years now. We’re more than friends but a lot less than something else. She’s forever keeping me at arm’s length, but never quite letting me go. She’s got problems with her family and there’s that mess with her brother. We both carry holes in our lives, and maybe that’s all that draws us to each other, even if I want to believe it’s more than that.

  I think I love her, despite all the parts of her I never really see, but I’m no different. There’s so much we don’t show or tell each other, so much I guess we don’t dare say out loud.

  Amé, Ms. Hart, me—just like this goddamn town, we all do a pretty good job of holding our secrets close.

  • • •

  After Ms. Hart’s first day, Amé and I were sharing one of her cigarettes and I mentioned our new teacher, thinking out loud. I suspect my father knows Ms. Hart a little, met her once, but I’m not sure. As I talked, Amé turned her head sideways, her big silver hoops defying gravity, and blew smoke in my face. That was the end of the conversation. But then there’s the second thing that happened—the most important thing. The body Deputy Cherry discovered at Indian Bluffs.

  • • •

  My father came home the night after Deputy Cherry found the body, and didn’t say anything to me. I was in my room doing homework and he walked past my open door without a word. I am never allowed to close my door. He walked down the hall to his room but didn’t turn on any lights or wash his face or brush his teeth. There was no movement at all. It was like he walked in there and disappeared. I waited an hour, let the house grow dark, and then I did what I’ve long practiced: I crept down the hallway to spy on him.

  In my house it’s important at all times to know exactly where my father is and what he’s doing. As always, his door was cracked open as well. Not because he follows his own rules or cares less about his own privacy, but because he wants to hear clearly what I’m up to. Besides, he has nothing to hide. Not in his own home and not from his own flesh and blood.

  There’s a spot I stand in, as silent and still as him, where the hallway forms a T. From that point I can see right through the door to the headboard and the top third of his bed; clearly visible is the cherrywood nightstand my mom bought in El Paso, with a cream-c
olored lamp on it. The same King James Bible is always there and the same empty quartz glass, dry and dusty as the desert around Murfee. The books and glass are props—things a real, living, breathing person might have if they slept in that room.

  I can also see the old Rowan Cheval antique bronze mirror in the corner. It’s a full-size standing mirror, one of the few things my mom brought with her to Murfee, and I still remember her in front of it, brushing the desert dust out of her long hair or just pulling it up, all while seeing me over her shoulder, trapped in the glass.

  Sometimes when I’m spying and the moon is right, when the entire room is pale and pearl, I see my father twice, one real and another, darker one, both reflected in the mirror my mother loved. It’s like he’s not alone, like there’s another person in there with him, and when I’ve thought I’ve caught him whispering to himself in there, he must have been talking to that other man in the mirror. But when the moon isn’t quite up or it’s hidden by clouds, I can see nothing in the glass. It remains empty, black like pond water, as if he casts no reflection at all.

  That’s how it was the other night, after the body was found at Indian Bluffs. He was alone on the bed, the mirror empty, his arms rigid along his sides. He was staring straight up at the ceiling, and I looked close to see whether his chest was rising and falling, praying as always that it wasn’t. Praying, hoping, that he’d been struck down by a mysterious illness or that his heart had just given out.

  That he was done.

  Instead, the index finger of his left hand was tapping against his creased pants leg. Tapping, tapping . . . just above the knee. Like a clock ticking, like when he used to read my homework. Slow and practiced and deliberate—the way the big garden orb weavers out by the creek pluck at the strands of their webs. Spiders eat their own webs at the end of the day. It helps them regather the energy they’ve lost by spinning them.

  I always thought that finger tap just meant he was thinking or pretending to, but it might mean something else as well. Worry—real worry, that Murfee might have finally given up one of her secrets.

  At dawn, when the sun’s up over the mountains and it hits the far edges of town at the right angle, the pink caliche on the bluffs burns crimson and everything runs red. Murfee always wakes up bloody. The dead are her secrets . . . The missing are her ghosts.

  I know who Deputy Cherry found out at Indian Bluffs, and so does my father.

  My mother . . . his missing wife.

  10

  CHRIS

  Later no one would be able to explain exactly how it started. For every person who would talk, and there weren’t many, there was a different story. It involved a girl or a ranch job or a fútbol score; whatever, it didn’t matter. One thing everyone agreed upon was how it started to end.

  With Delgado and the knife.

  Aguilar was already near dead by the time Chris got to Mancha’s, with Delgado standing in a circle of people, his shirt torn off, revealing tattoos curling over his wasted stomach, like cursive writing, all the way to his throat. He was dark, darker than normal because of the blood all over him already going black; some of it was his own, but most of it was from Aguilar, who was on his back in the gravel. Aguilar kept kicking, struggling like he was trying to stand but had simply forgotten how, the memory of it lost, along with his blood, all over the ground.

  Everyone around Delgado was yelling, spitting Spanish, waving at the man who kept them at bay with the knife. The lot was littered with crushed beer bottles, discarded balls of tinfoil, old condoms; jackets and cowboy hats and John Deere caps all forgotten on the hard wooden benches beneath the tin pavilions. Chris caught sight of Eddie Corazon standing in the concrete doorway of Mancha’s, smoking a cigarette, calm, picking at his teeth with dirty fingers and eyeing the mess in his parking lot. Corazon knew that when it ended, however it ended, the men shadowing the bloody gravel would want more beers, more cigarettes. They’d sit around a few more hours until the naked bulbs strung up around the parking lot turned yellow, talking over and over again about what had happened, making up stories about it. Eddie probably hadn’t made the 911 call. The fight wouldn’t hurt business.

  Mancha’s was Murfee’s only bodega—part store, part restaurant—a gathering place for Mexican families and the ranch hands and laborers. It had gotten bigger, seedier if that was possible, since Chris’s teammates used to come to this side of town for cheap beer or condoms or weed. This tiny part of Murfee had a dozen unflattering names—Beantown, Beanville, Little Mexico—just like all the people who lived in it, their nearby homes wrapped by chain-link fences and patrolled by dogs.

  Everyone talked about the place, everyone knew about it. Everyone always denied they came here. Fights and trouble had been common at Mancha’s even when Chris was in high school, and like so much else about Murfee, that hadn’t changed.

  Chris parked hard, throwing gravel and painting the crowd with his lights. He got out and approached with his Taser at high-ready. Not his Colt, not yet; he hoped there wasn’t a need for the gun he had never pulled in the line of duty. He just wanted everyone calmed down, and a clear line of sight to Delgado. Now, though, half the circle was watching Delgado, and the other half was yelling at him, pointing back and forth between the man with the knife and the man they thought had a gun.

  As Chris got closer, Delgado took up howling, jabbing the knife at the air, standing over the man he’d stabbed. Stabbed didn’t quite do it justice—Delgado had all but scalped Aguilar, had worked the knife hard at the edges of the other man’s face. In fact, Aguilar’s hands were the only thing holding it in place, his entire visage lopsided, uneven, like a cheap Halloween mask.

  Chris had never seen anything like it. Delgado didn’t look much better. He was clearly on something—skin taut, eyes weird, sunken and blinking up/down, up/down, like a windup toy. There was blood in his mouth, in his teeth.

  Chris tried to steady his hand, tightening his grip on the Taser, waving everyone back. If anything, the circle only tightened, protective; everyone now concerned about what Chris might do to their compadre Delgado. Sensing this, Delgado stood taller, shouted louder, curling his knife in graceful figure eights in Chris’s direction. He hopped from one foot to the other as Aguilar’s face slipped sideways in his hands. The crowd cheered and Chris had no idea who or what they were cheering for.

  Chris was bigger than almost any other man there and still felt helpless, suddenly unsure of what to do next. Wishing his Colt was in his hand, even though he couldn’t imagine how that would make the situation any better. He couldn’t shoot everyone; desperately didn’t want to shoot anyone.

  Fortunately, that was when Duane Dupree came to his rescue. Chris had been so intent on the crowd, on Delgado, he never heard Dupree pull up. Didn’t even realize the chief deputy was there until he saw it on all the other men’s faces. They fell silent, the circle widening a bit like it was alive—taking a deep, deep breath—as Chris turned just enough to see Dupree move up next to him.

  Dupree leveled his Remington 11-87 shotgun roughly in Delgado’s direction, gently sweeping the crowd with it as he did so, making his point. The Remington shined as if Dupree had been cleaning it with moleskin at his desk before appearing out of thin air here at Mancha’s. The shotgun had a fourteen-inch barrel and rifle sights and Dupree’s initials etched in pearl along the stock, a gift from the sheriff for his years of service, and it was weightless in Dupree’s hands. He moved it as easily as Delgado had waved his knife; Delgado had now gone silent as well.

  “Got a problem here, Chris?” Dupree spit a long cut into the gravel.

  “Yeah, a bit of one.”

  “You want me to get on down the road, let you handle it?”

  Chris shook his head. “No, don’t think so. I think I could use the help.”

  Dupree grinned, ugly, looking no better than Delgado. He winked. “Well, okay then.”

  Chris
waited as Dupree moved forward. He zeroed his sights on Delgado, taking one slow, steady step after another, calling over his shoulder.

  “Eddie, you tell them beaner friends of yours to move back. You tell ’em now, or I’ll blow a hole through ’em.” Duane said it casually, as if he knew Eddie well or was just ordering a beer. Eddie Corazon wobbled his head back and forth, considering, maybe loosening up a knot in his neck. His throat looked swollen, like a snake that had swallowed a dog. He eyed Dupree long and hard before finally saying something in Spanish.

  It took a minute, but the circled crowd backed away slowly as Dupree got within ten or fifteen feet of Delgado. Dupree looked down at Aguilar. “Jesus Mother of Mary, you put a hurt on that ole boy.” Dupree sidestepped Aguilar’s slowly thrashing legs and cooling blood. “What a fuckin’ mess.”

  Duane eyed Delgado. “Now, Eddie, you tell this piece of shit right here to drop that pigsticker. Tell him rápido. Tell him I’m about to get fucking bored, and that I’m fixin’ to open up a fucking sunroof in that thick beaner skull of his.”

  Corazon made a face, said something to Delgado low and fast. Chris, still behind Dupree, couldn’t hear what it was.

  Dupree raised the Remington so it was pointed directly between Delgado’s wild eyes. “Give me a reason, beaner. Any reason.” Dupree chuckled, shrugged. “Come to think on it, I don’t need a fuckin’ reason. Not a goddamn one atall.” He winked at Delgado, spoke just to him. “You wouldn’t be missed, you hear me? Not missed atall. None of you ever are.”

  Eddie Corazon must have suddenly come to the same conclusion as Chris—that Duane Dupree really was going to blow Delgado’s head off right there in the parking lot—because he started speaking faster, gesturing at Delgado, begging him to put down the knife.

  Maybe it was the rock-steady muzzle of the shotgun or Dupree’s eyes or the cool, detached way he had said it, but Chris had no doubt that Dupree would kill Delgado. That he was looking forward to it. But while Dupree had been giving Corazon orders, threatening him, he’d also kept moving forward, steady and stealthy as a man could with a hundred eyes on him, closing the distance between them before anyone realized it. Just as Delgado loosened his grip on the knife, started to let it fall from his fingers, Dupree lashed out with the Remington—swung it like a bat and caught the other man in the face, rocking his head back and driving him to his knees. While he was down, Dupree gave him another blow to the head, then another. Wound a leg up high to kick him.