This Side of Night

by J. Todd Scott

  RE-ELECT SHERIFF CHRISCHERRY

  How many of these signs did he have? Forty, maybe fifty more, all cluttering the back of his Big Bend County truck. Bethel Turner’s signs had started springing up all over the county weeks ago. The former Texas Ranger had hundreds of them, as bright and white and numerous as the flowering yucca you could see from the highway. Bethel had pulled them out of some very deep pockets, and they were everywhere now. For Chris to make his right, he’d have to throw them out and start all over again.

  Or throw them out and say the hell with it. To make a real run at this election, he should have started weeks ago, too.

  He yanked at the sign, pulling it out of the earth that didn’t want it.

  “Well, Marco, if the folks around here don’t know my name by now, I guess I’m not winning this election anyway . . .”

  * * *

  —

  MARCO SILENTLY HELPED HIM get the sign into his truck, unwilling to look Chris in the eye, probably wondering how much longer he’d be his boss. It was the same thing Chris wondered, now more than ever. Marco had been attending college at UTEP until a year ago, when his parents’ house had been burned down on the orders of a violent member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas named John Wesley Earl. Eight houses went up in flames that night, and many more would have, if the Murfee Fire Department hadn’t gotten a helping hand from a summer thunderstorm that had rolled through the area. The fires had only been a diversion, though, nothing more, for other crimes Earl and his sons Jesse and Bass were committing that night. But it was a costly one for Adalia and Jesús Lucero and their younger son, Emiliano—Marco’s brother—who was a freshman at Big Bend Central.

  The Lucero house was the second to burn.

  Adalia worked long hours at the Dollar General, but made it home in time to cook a real meal every night, and Jesús picked up hours at the Comanche cattle auction and the Monument Ranch. They, along with Emiliano, were asleep when the blaze started, and were slow to react. Emiliano’s tiny room was next to the kitchen, right where the flames first came through the wall, and he was up and running to the other side of the house to warn his parents when the combined explosions of a big sack of baking flour and two cans of Crisco cooking spray went off in front of him and knocked him off his feet.

  His face and hair caught fire, so did his eyes, and although he survived, every doctor said he was never going to see the same again, making it hard—painful, in fact—for him to read. It was like there was a small sun constantly rising and setting in front of his face, the flames that had burned him forever trapped in his ruined eyes.

  The fact that Chris later captured Earl, who was ultimately stabbed to death in his bed in the hospital unit of a federal penitentiary, was cold comfort for Emiliano’s parents. Even less for Marco, who abandoned school and came back to Murfee to help them rebuild and care for his younger brother.

  Marco had left Murfee wanting to be a doctor, but returned that morning after the fire, when the ashes were still black and wet and cooling and everyone could still smell the smoke hanging over the town. Something even the miraculous storm couldn’t wash away fast enough.

  Later that same day he walked into the department and asked what he needed to do to be a sheriff’s deputy.

  Chris had liked Marco from the start. He was bright, articulate, with a good head on his shoulders. Had a natural disposition for dealing with people, for disarming them. He’d be a good deputy if he kept at it, but would have made an even better doctor. He should have been a doctor. Chris hoped he could talk him into going back to school, where he truly belonged and where he could make a difference.

  If any good could come out of him losing this reelection, it might be that.

  After wrangling with the sign, Chris caught Marco staring back down the road again at the high school they’d both attended. Big Bend Central sprawled under the blue sky, with Archer-Ross stadium hulking behind it. Chris had played football in that stadium when it was still brand-new, remembering the smell of the freshly painted Raiders logo in the locker room and standing on the artificial turf in his bare feet right after it had been put down. He threw the first touchdown in that stadium, a thirty-yarder to Nat Bulger that Chris had lost in the brand-new Musco lights right after he let it go, never seeing it come down. He only knew what had happened after he heard the crowd yell, chanting his name.

  His dad had been there, and Nat Bulger’s dad, Matty, cheering as loud as anyone. And Sheriff Stanford Ross.

  The last time Chris had actually been inside the stadium was the night of his high school graduation, a decade ago. Although he’d been able to return to Murfee, he couldn’t bring himself to go back into that place.

  It wasn’t long after he came home that he’d discovered skeletal remains out on Matty Bulger’s cow pastures, changing his whole life. It could be argued that the lives of everyone around him, everything he touched after, changed that day as well, including Murfee itself. Constantly preying on Chris’s mind was the idea that the course of the years since had been forever fixed by that one forsaken moment when he’d knelt down to the exposed skull of DEA informant Rudy Reynosa.

  * * *

  —

  “SHERIFF?” Marco asked, gently. His voice was caught in the wind, nearly taken away by it. Down here below the mountains, unprotected, the wind took a lot of things.

  “Sorry,” Chris said, closing the tailgate. “I was looking back there at our old school, like you were a moment ago, and at that damn stadium. It’s hard to believe, but it seems even bigger to me now.”

  “Yes, sir. You know, I might start helping out with the boys’ basketball team. I played varsity my last three years.”

  “Is the team any good?”

  Marco smiled. “Nah, not so much. They can’t be if they asked me to help coach.” He leaned against Chris’s truck for a moment, wandering his own memories. “You were a pretty good football player, though, right? I used to see all your pictures up in the hall by the front offices, all those awards in that glass case. A big-time quarterback.” The deputy looked at Chris closely, like he was trying hard to imagine it. Chris had been much bigger then, weighed maybe fifty pounds more than he did now, but the Big Bend had weathered so much of him away. “They still say the team’s never been as good since you graduated.”

  Chris laughed, shaking his head. “Well, that was a long time ago.”

  Marco shrugged. “I used to go to all the Friday night games. Trust me, the team did suck, for a long time.” He pushed away from the truck with a grin, turning his back to his old school, taking another good long look at the signs stacked in the flatbed. “Are you worried about this?”

  “You mean the signs? No, I can get those fixed. Probably get them turned around in a few days.”

  Marco hesitated. “No, I mean the whole election. I hear people talk . . .”

  Chris stopped him, so his deputy wouldn’t have to say things he didn’t want to. “I do, too. Trust me, I’m fine. Bethel Turner’s popular, and he’s a good man. He’s got lots of experience. Decades of it.”

  Chris didn’t have to add: Not like me.

  “But he’s not you, Sheriff,” Marco said. “He’s not from Murfee, he didn’t grow up here.”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing. Does it matter?”

  Marco thought on it. “To me it does, to other folks, too, I think. I guess we’ll see.” He kicked at the ground with a scuffed boot. He didn’t look Chris in the eye. “You think you’re going to lose, don’t you?”

  Chris tossed his hammer into the back with the signs and clapped his deputy on the shoulder, shaking him out of it. “Well, I think it’s going to be damn close, and let’s leave it at that.”

  Chris didn’t want to tell him that losing might not be a bad thing at all.

  * * *

  —

  THEY WERE ABOUT TO GET INTO CHRIS’S TRUCK when
Marco asked him about the baby.

  “How’s the little one? Keeping you up at night?”

  Chris laughed, thinking about his son: John Thomas, nicknamed Jack. The baby had been the center of his world for the past three months. Chris was just about to answer when he saw something over Marco’s shoulder: a truck, approaching fast, using up both sides of the highway. Its blue and red wigwags flickering furiously, brighter than the morning sun.

  Its emergency sirens would catch up soon.

  “Well, he’s keeping someone up at night, but it’s not me . . .” He let the sentence go, as Marco turned to see what had stolen his attention. The deputy leaned forward, squinting, and asked, “Who is that? Dale, Till?”

  At this angle, head-on, Chris couldn’t tell which of his deputies it was, either. He realized that all this time standing outside his truck messing with the sign, he and Marco had been ignoring the truck radio, and both his handheld and his cell phone were still in the center console where he’d left them. Someone must have been trying to raise him, and when they couldn’t, Miss Maisie had sent out a posse to track him down. She knew he was out here on Route 72 by the school.

  It was supposed to have taken only a few minutes.

  “What’s going on?” Marco asked.

  Please not the baby . . . not Mel.

  The first wave of the sirens finally reached them, a long echoing wail that Chris hated. He’d hated it for as long as he’d been deputy and then sheriff, and it was one of many things he wouldn’t miss when Bethel Turner won the election.

  He wouldn’t miss it at all.

  “Trouble, I guess,” Chris said, taking a long breath and opening his door to get his phone, to check his messages. “Looks like trouble.”

  Because that’s what that wail meant.

  And it always was.

  FOUR

  The whole house smelled like dog and baby.

  Melissa Bristow could remember when she’d first come to Murfee and how she thought the whole place smelled like cows and shit. She’d hated that smell, hated the town, but that was then—a lifetime ago—and this was now.

  A lifetime. That had never been truer since John Thomas “Jack” Cherry had been born.

  “John” because she and Chris both liked the name.

  “Thomas” for Chris’s dad.

  And “Jack” just because it fit the baby perfectly.

  Everything about him was perfect. The way his gentle skin and wispy hair smelled, and most of all, his pure breath on her face. Like nothing else in the world.

  Out here at the Far Six in the wilds of the Big Bend, there were no cows—not anymore—though Ben Harper had once encouraged her and Chris to get some, since a ranch wasn’t much of a ranch without them. But with the windows wide open to the morning, there was still the receding sounds of night: the wind-whisper of mesquite and creosote (which had a unique smell all its own after a good hard rain) and breeze-blown ocotillo. The creak of the old rocking chair out on the porch they’d brought from Chris’s childhood house, and the breathing of the baby held tight in her arms.

  There was Rocky the dog panting and staring up at her, trying to get a good look at Jack as he slept.

  Rocky had come in from chasing shadows around the caliche, and smelled of heat and the desert. He always did after a few minutes outside, reminding her of the leather seats in her daddy’s old Pontiac after they heated up in the sun—feral, raw, and real. That car, a green or gray Bonneville if she remembered it right, had also often smelled of oil and whiskey: oil beneath her daddy’s fingernails from the Permian Basin rigs he worked outside Midland, and whiskey that he liked to drink one fist after another on Friday nights (and pretty much the rest of the weekend, too).

  She wondered what he’d think about her and her baby, if he were around to see them both.

  Rocky nosed against her knee, his almond-shaped eyes dark, curious. When Jack shifted in her arms, those eyes followed his every tiny movement. Each night, the dog slept as close to them all as he could, relentlessly patrolling the house at any sound. His thick fur was a pure, startling white—the color bred so Hungarian shepherds could distinguish the dog from wolves—and he was Mel’s constant shadow. Ben had been worried about her being this far out here alone, so he’d given her the dog for protection, and Rocky had grown big in the months since the older man’s passing. The dog would get much bigger before he was done. She missed Ben more than she ever wanted Chris to know, but moments like this, with Rocky watching over her and Jack, it was like the former chief deputy had never left them.

  What would he think if he could see them all now, still making a go of it at the Far Six? In the Big Bend?

  She bent close to Jack, listening to his heart, breathing him in. She could never do this enough and he amazed her. The idea that she and Chris had somehow created this tiny life, this infinite spark, now the brightest thing in the whole world. She loved Chris in a way that she never knew was possible to love another, but in so many ways it paled compared to what she felt for the baby in her arms; to the great light he gave off that she felt burning on her face when he breathed, and in the heat in her hands every time she held him.

  She’d heard stories about the lengths mothers would go to in order to protect their children, and she understood them all now. She’d once held a gun in her hands for Chris—aimed it steady at a man who’d wanted to kill him—and would have pulled the trigger if she’d had to. She would have done that for him, for them both, without a second thought or regret.

  She’d pull a thousand triggers for Jack.

  No . . . there was nothing Mel wouldn’t do to keep safe the baby they’d created together.

  * * *

  —

  SHE LAID JACK DOWN in the bassinet next to their bed, still messy and unmade from the morning, and searched for her phone. She wanted to call Chris and find out how the signs had turned out. He was supposed to pick them up and start putting them around town, and she’d written down for him a list of places she thought would be good. Places where they’d be easily seen, but then again, pretty much everything was easily seen out in the Big Bend and around Murfee itself. Sometimes you could go miles in any direction with only the farthest horizon bounded by mountains. Bethel Turner had been at it for a couple of weeks—his signs were everywhere—and he’d bought out not one but two billboards on I-67 and I-90. Vianey Ruiz had called Mel and said she saw one out on Texas 118 as well. But Chris had been slow to follow suit. In fact, he’d dragged his feet throughout this whole reelection. He’d always blown hot and cold about being the Big Bend County sheriff—a position that had been thrust on him at a time when he didn’t feel he had a choice—and that was even truer now that he did have one. Ben Harper’s and Buck Emmett’s deaths at the hands of the Earls still haunted him, but Jack’s birth had affected him just as powerfully. Chris had never been easy to read, had a natural tendency to melancholy and brooding that could overwhelm him, and they’d both dealt with some of the worst of it in the weeks running up to this reelection. So much so that he’d left most of the planning and what fund-raising he’d agreed to do in her hands, and he hadn’t even started thinking about the debate that was scheduled at Big Bend Central—a debate that was now a week away. He wouldn’t say it exactly, but it was as if he wanted to lose. She’d lived through a mood like this with him once before, after he was injured at Baylor and the broken promise of a football career had brought him limping back home to Murfee, bringing her along with him. Although they’d both resented being here at first, that was then, and this was now.

  And now was a whole hell of a lot different. For Chris, for her, and for their new baby.

  She didn’t know what Chris thought he’d do or where they’d go if they left Murfee . . . if he wasn’t the sheriff anymore. Focus on his writing, maybe, although she never knew if he was writing a bunch of short stories or one longer one—something like a w
hole book. He never talked about it much, other than to say that one day he hoped he might publish something. Writing was his dream though, a dream that had stayed with him through high school and college and his return to the Big Bend.

  At least the burden of being the sheriff hadn’t killed that.

  But without much apology, the only life he’d offered her was the one that she’d gone on to make with him here: working at Earlys, that crappy old bar in town, and Rocky the dog at her feet and Jack the baby in her arms and all of them together in this rickety house at the edge of the Big Bend. At the end of the whole damn world.

  It was all she had. It was their life, and she now damn sure didn’t want another.

  And if this was their life, that meant accepting all its ghosts, too. It meant Chris understanding he was never going to completely escape the dark, heavy presence of the man he’d replaced—Sheriff Stanford Ross—or the specters of Ben’s and Buck’s deaths, which had occurred long after Ross was gone. It was like her daddy’s old gray or green Bonneville again—growing up, that damn car had been as much her home as anywhere. Her daddy had driven them all over Texas in it, from Odessa to Galveston, chasing work and fleeing his own demons and ghosts, and yet he was never able to outrace any of them. He couldn’t. You couldn’t. They were already there waiting for you wherever you ended up, because you carried them with you. They were part of you. The best you could do was make your peace with them, with yourself, and get on with your life.

  Find a place you could call home, protect it, and let them share it with you.

  The Far Six Ranch was her home now. It was the only home Jack had ever known, and she was going to watch her boy grow up here, if she had any say in it.

  Maybe that was part of being a mother, too. Not only a fierce protectiveness for your child, but a desire . . . a need . . . to have a true place to call home.