The Far Empty

by J. Todd Scott

  He got one of the nurses to wheel him down the hall to her. He wasn’t supposed be up and about, but she understood without him really having to explain, and so did the big Texas Ranger sitting outside his door, flipping through a magazine.

  He could see her only through thick glass, in her own magic bubble, floating, suspended, in the middle of the burn unit in a medically induced coma. It was still unknown if she would ever come out of it on her own. Or if she’d want to, knowing what had happened. Maybe she did know. Remembered it, dreamed it, reliving it . . . over and over again. She looked so goddamn small, held in the hands of the huge machines keeping her alive. Chris sat for a half hour watching Morgan Emerson lost in her own twilight.

  8

  AMERICA

  She didn’t know what to expect, so she tried not to expect anything at all.

  She had her mama’s fat friend, Pilar, drive her to Mancha’s even though she could have walked—gave her fifty dollars of Rodolfo’s money for her to wait in the car and keep her mouth shut—only to discover he was already there, leaning against the wall outside the bodega, drinking a horchata. She walked past him, just to be sure. She went inside and bought a pack of gum and cigarettes and counted her steps in the tiny aisles, and came back out to find him in the exact same position, watching her. She knew it was him because of the red boots. The voice on the phone had told her all about the boots . . . rojo.

  • • •

  He was young, close to her age, wearing a silly movie T-shirt, thin and frayed, with a thinner jacket, like a fútbol zip-up, tied at his waist even though it was chilly enough to raise bumps on her skin. He had tight jeans she always associated with Ojinaga, and those nice boots peeking out from underneath them. The boots were easily worth fifty times his clothes and the money she’d given Pilar. His hair was dark and pushed back high on his head, a thick black wave, and he was razor thin, like he barely ate. He had a small backpack sitting on the ground, right at the bright red toe of one of his boots, and wore a small braided rope—a bracelet—far too large for the wrist it circled.

  He smiled at her, said hola, and tossed his empty cup into the trash can, hitching up the backpack, which she thought seemed awfully light.

  Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t this.

  She gave Pilar another fifty, bought her a TV Notas magazine and a Coke, and told her to sit in the car and wait some more. Pilar kept staring around her shoulder, asking who the boy was, since she didn’t recognize him, but Amé told her that it was okay, all okay. Todo está bien.

  • • •

  They sat together on one of the benches lining the lot, where she knew her papa came and drank and sometimes fell asleep with his shirt unbuttoned and empty bottles sprawled around him in the gravel. The same lot where she’d met Deputy Cherry, what felt like years and years before. She pulled out the phone Rodolfo had given her and put it on the table. He pulled out his own, too, and side by side, they were nearly the same. He whisked them both away with one sure move of his hand, reminding her of a cat, slipped them into his backpack, and sat back to look at her. He turned his head this way and that, and said she looked like Mayrín Villanueva, a Mexican actress, and asked if Amé knew who she was. She said she wasn’t sure, but guessed it was a compliment.

  He laughed, said sí, very much so. She asked him about the ranch, but he didn’t want to talk about that, even when she pushed. She wanted to know if it was just like Rodolfo described. She asked about the peacocks, and when he finally broke down and said sí, it was all true—they were like blue and green metal—she let herself believe that her magia that night had worked. Deputy Cherry hadn’t died out in the desert then, and she was glad for that. But he was far away, might never return, and none of that mattered anymore anyway. It was too late. Her magia—Rodolfo’s phone—had summoned this thin, dark-eyed boy. He was sharp, like a knife. Even standing still he was in motion. He watched her closely, but then again, he watched everything.

  He told her he had come to deliver un mensaje, one that could only be delivered a mano. He held out his hands to her then as if they weren’t empty, as if there was something there only she might be able to see. They were slimmer, more delicate than her own.

  She asked if he had a place to stay and he shook his head, but said it would be no problemo, he’d take care of it. But she glanced at Pilar, watching them both through her windshield, and had an idea. It would take the last of Rodolfo’s money, but that didn’t matter anymore, either. There was so much she needed to know, everything—how he’d gotten to Murfee, how long would he stay? Why were the men from the ranch willing to help her? What did he really plan to do, and most important of all, when could she return across the river with him? Some things she guessed he couldn’t answer; others he might not want to. So instead she asked him his name. He was surprised, suddenly shy, as if it might never have occurred to him that she would want to know that. He scuffed his expensive boots in the gravel, like a kid pretending to be an adult and suddenly caught at it, but smiled anyway when he finally answered.

  “Máximo. Me llamo Máximo.”

  9

  THE JUDGE

  He drove through a storm. It was all cold wind around Van Horn—the air static like wool and metal shavings, a sky colored dust and bone. It was impossible to see where the highway ended and heaven began—as if a huge eraser had dragged across the edge of the world. But he’d never believed in God or heaven, not like his father and Hollis, or his grandfather, who’d said prayers while whipping him as a boy. God’s words were on his lips when the flames had flicked up the side of his canopy bed. Praying hadn’t done him any damn good.

  He did, however, believe in judgment. In his office was an original gold scale in a mahogany and glass case. It was a heavy thing, serious—scratched from use and still slick from the sweat of other men’s hands. There was a brief gold rush in Texas in 1853, in the hills around Austin, but nothing much had come of it. There was also the old folklore about gold that centered on Murfee itself—the Lost Nigger Gold Mine. In 1887, the four Reagan brothers picked up an illiterate Seminole, William Kelly, as a ranch hand. Kelly was known as “Nigger Bill”—what you called any mixed-blood in the Big Bend in those days. Kelly, only fourteen at the time, claimed to have discovered a gold mine, showing off a lump of ore as proof, and although no one believed him, Kelly abandoned his work and went on to San Antonio, still talking up his stake. He got an assayer to verify it—seventy-five thousand dollars to the ton—and then came back to the Big Bend.

  Some said he returned to the Reagans’ ranch, where the brothers killed him and dumped his body in the Rio Grande, having finally come around about the boy’s claim. Others said he fled over the border on a stolen Reagan horse, never to be seen again. Either way, the Reagan brothers spent the rest of their lives poking around for that damn mine—the last of them searching the dirt as late as 1930. In a copy of the Victoria Advocate from 1935, the Judge had read an interview with Lee Reagan, who dismissed the stories of Nigger Bill’s death, claiming he last saw him riding off on a stolen pony, and downplayed his family’s efforts to find the mine. But other treasure hunters also set out looking for it, and although there were whispers through the years that the mine had been rediscovered, something bad always befell the whisperer before they could pass on their secrets.

  He had a first edition of J. Frank Dobie’s Coronado’s Children, taken from his grandfather’s library before it burned, which recounted all about the mine and other stories of gold. It was possible Kelly’s gold wasn’t actually gold ore. Another writer, Haldeen Braddy, thought it was just a worked piece left by the Spanish. Or it had been dropped by a group of Mexican banditos fleeing the rurales—the Mexican Guardia Rural—abandoning their prize because it was slowing them down. He’d named his hunting lands El Dorado as a secret nod to those old stories, because one edge of his property encompassed the Reagan brothers’ original 1887 ranch. He’d
never seen treasure, though—nothing sparkling in the wallows, not even the gleam of fool’s gold flecking a granite rock face, but it was a helluva story anyway. You can’t find what isn’t there, and never was.

  In his days traveling back and forth, Murfee had come to look different to him now, as if he had been away for decades rather than days: the shape of it unfamiliar, the shadows longer, its people unknown to him. Duane Dupree and Chris Cherry hailed as heroes, and strangers walking the streets. Questions would get harder.

  William Kelly lost his mine—his life—when stronger men, more violent and determined and ruthless men, took it from him. It was blood and judgment. It was the old way of the West he knew and understood and accepted. It was Murfee now.

  There was a cell message waiting for him when he cleared Valentine, after he got through the dead spot in coverage after Van Horn. There were spots like that all over the Big Bend, all the way up to Sierra Escalera and his own El Dorado. Dead areas like graves. But he recognized the number, and of all the people he’d expected to hear from, she was the last. They hadn’t spoken since Thanksgiving morning, nearly a month ago, but he hadn’t forgotten her, far from it.

  It was Anne Hart.

  10

  MELISSA

  Chris was as thin as she’d ever remembered.

  He joked about it when she helped him to the bathroom, how he was on one helluva weight-loss plan. It wasn’t for everyone, but it damn well worked. As tall as he was, he weighed nearly nothing leaning against her, and that scared her more than anything. If he lost a few more pounds, he might disappear altogether. He saw the look on her face and told her it was okay. He was going to be okay. She searched his eyes and wanted to believe him. He asked her to open one of the windows, but they were sealed shut. Instead she pulled the shades back and the blinds up and let the late-afternoon sunshine fill the room. It glowed on his bed, turning everything white, revealing just how pale he was.

  He drifted in the sunlight, held up his own hands, even the damaged one, and looked at them, turning them back and forth, as if amazed by them. He fell asleep in mid-sentence, right at the point when he said he had something important he wanted to tell her.

  It was dusk when he came to, startled awake, as if he’d been dreaming about things that had scared him. Moving and flinching, dodging imaginary bullets. He reached out a hand to steady himself and she grabbed it, squeezed it, and he squeezed back. He’d called out a name too, just before he woke up, but she couldn’t tell who it was.

  He sipped some water, asked her how everyone had been treating her, how the hotel was. She told him everyone was nice, the hotel not so much. She asked how everyone had been treating him, how he liked the hospital. And he laughed; she’d made her point. She told him the sheriff had returned to Murfee with the rest of the department; they were still trying to find the other men who had done this to Chris. He hadn’t killed them all, and a few might not have escaped on the plane. They might still be out there hiding in the desert, waiting for another chance.

  Chris said it didn’t matter, they could look all they wanted. They were all gone now, all phantoms to begin with. In the end, they had never really existed anyway. Then he told her about Joe Garrison’s visit.

  “That man thinks you had something to do with those agents being attacked?”

  Chris shook his head. “No, but he thinks I might know why they were.”

  She didn’t want to ask, didn’t feel the need to. He’d tell her if he wanted to. And he did. Everything.

  Then it was her turn.

  She’d already told him about the video, but wanted to tell it all again. Just like him, everything, all of it. She’d learned sometimes you have to say something twice for it to matter. She told him how she’d been following him around, searching through his things, but he didn’t ask her what she was looking for or why she’d mentioned it to Duane Dupree at all. He didn’t need to. He knew her. The only one who ever had, ever would.

  “They hurt you because of what I said, right?”

  Chris shook his head, slow. “It doesn’t matter, babe. It has nothing to do with you. I did this. There are a lot of things I could have done different.”

  She looked out the window, not wanting to see his face when he answered, not wanting him to hide what she would see there. “Is this going to keep happening, Chris?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t. I mean, Duane could have left me out there and we wouldn’t even be talking right now. Not sure why he didn’t. It doesn’t make sense. Do you know they tell me my bum knee giving out is what saved me? I fucking fell down so I didn’t get shot in the back of the head as I ran. And then Duane got me out of there, kept me alive.”

  She made a face. “Fuck Duane Dupree. Seems to me he owes you, too. What about this Garrison, what’s he going to do?”

  A welcome smile at her old anger, then a shrug. “He thinks our department is corrupt. He’ll keep digging. His people were hurt, one’s dead. He doesn’t have a choice.” Chris reached out, took her hand. His was cold. “I saw her, that woman, again. That woman I met on 67. Her real name is Morgan Emerson. She told me it was Sara. She’s in a room a few doors down.”

  Mel knew that, had heard it from the other Murfee deputies. She walked by the room every day, but never looked in. “You didn’t hurt her, Chris, that’s not on you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Chris looked at her, looked close. “No, babe, but I didn’t do a helluva lot right, either.”

  He slept again, and she brushed his hair out of his eyes. Talking to her had exhausted him, exhausted her, too. He’d been carrying all this around with him, these sharp, silent burdens, and they almost cost him his life. She’d been telling herself she hated Murfee because she didn’t understand it, but the truth was she understood it far too well. There was a side of it no different from the city across the river, from the motels she and her daddy had bounced around—dangerous and desperate. Places where most people didn’t matter all that goddamn much, and where someone like Duane Dupree could do anything he pleased, hiding in the dark and neon. She was not going to allow him or anyone else to hurt Chris again.

  Chris sighed, rolled away from her. She adjusted his sheets and his skin was hot, burning. He’d been so cold earlier. He flinched from her touch, clawed out with his wounded, pale hand, and she knew he was once more dodging dream bullets.

  11

  MÁXIMO

  Pilar’s apartment was small, and she talked far too much. She had two little dogs he hated, who got hair all over everything, and she reminded him of his abuela. She talked about her hijo in San Elizario who never visited her anymore, and watched Máximo with her small eyes—always wanting to know what he liked on TV or what he wanted to eat. She burned the tortillas and her rice was no good, but if he asked, she always drove down to the market and got him cold Tecates.

  More than once he caught her staring at him as he tried to sleep on her couch, as large and pale as the moon and blocking the kitchen light behind her, breathing heavily. He knew he was going to have to fuck her. The money America had given her would not keep her quiet, not for long. Her hijo was far away and she was lonely and her little apartment felt empty, even with both of them in it. She worked with America’s mama at the dry cleaners, and she would talk if he didn’t do something about it, something for her.

  So he had her buy him beer—he wouldn’t drive on his own, careful because he’d never really driven a car and didn’t have a license—and sat on her bed and drank as many as his stomach could take and told his jokes and she laughed too loud and too long. He even sang “Cielito Lindo” to her.

  He thought the beers would make it easier, but it didn’t. Her eyes were pesos and she talked so fast, so nervous, he thought tiny birds would fly from her mouth. Finally he unzipped and grabbed her fat hand and put it down the front of his jeans, heard her gasp as she fumbled with him while he fin
ished off a Tecate and tried to watch fútbol on the TV over her shoulder.

  She may have even started crying as he pushed inside her. She said a name that wasn’t his—her hijo, that rotten boy, in San Elizario. But he was thinking about America all the time.

  • • •

  All America wanted to know about was the rancho.

  He told her other things he thought she might want to hear—some true, some lies. She wanted him to take her there, but she didn’t know what she asked. They wanted him to bring her there, too. But it was no place for her . . . no good would come of it. If he took her there, he would never see her again.

  He’d beaten men to death with wooden planks, helped shoot crossers in an abandoned house down by the water. He’d stacked heads in a bloody pyramid and pointed a rifle at two dozen niños and niñas no older than him and walked them ten miles to the border, one carrying two bundles of heroína taped to her legs. He’d tossed a grenade from a ten-speed bike into the open door of a disco.

  He’d seen worse things at the rancho.

  Instead, he asked her about Hollywood, where they made movies, and Houston and New York and Miami—cities he’d heard of. She’d never been to those places, but she said she had pictures of them all, taped to her walls. Then she showed him a picture that the ayudante del sheriff had sent to her phone, this gringo she knew as Dupree, who the others at the rancho had named Perrito. He read the words with the picture and deleted it for her.

  Staring hard into his eyes, she finally demanded to know if he’d come for her at all, or just for Perrito, and this other gringo she called El Juez. Did she matter? Did her hermano, Rodolfo? He asked her what she wanted, and after she told him—after she told him all the things Perrito had done to her and all the bad things he’d promised—he said with a smile, Te prometo que nunca te hará daño de nuevo, and they never talked anymore about the things he’d come to do.