The Far Empty

by J. Todd Scott

  What did it take for a mother to up and leave her son, disappear? She’d heard of this happening, of course, but it was still hard to wrap her head around. What could be so bad to make a mother flee, run off into the night, leaving everything behind?

  Maybe there was something about this wild and distant place that made such an idea acceptable, even possible, at the outer edge of so much emptiness.

  October wind brushed her hair, stung her eyes. She stared down mountains both faraway and close at the same time. She didn’t know their names, didn’t even know if they were in Texas or Mexico. Marc had called her geographically challenged, laughing at the broken compass she carried in her head—her inability to remember directions or state capitals and the trouble she had reading maps, even following MapQuest printouts. He bought her a GPS once, expensive and idiot proof, but—not surprisingly—she didn’t know where it was anymore.

  Like other bits and pieces of her life, it had been left behind somewhere.

  Although she really couldn’t comprehend abandoning a child, your own flesh and blood, the rest of running made so much sense that it hurt.

  Like a sharp pain, cutting your finger on paper. Just like now, whenever she thought about Marc. She knew that desperate need to disappear; to leave broken, unfixable things behind; to run into the wild dark and get lost in it until the storm passed, if it ever did.

  That she understood far too well. She’d make the best of it here while she could. Even if she couldn’t lose herself in Murfee, she’d lose herself in the work; try to, anyway. It was all she could do, and with all she’d left behind, it was all she had. She turned away from the window and back to the classroom, continuing to put the dead woman’s things away.

  3

  DUANE

  Hurting someone was easy, too easy.

  But showing restraint? Not raising your hand? Now, that was goddamn hard . . . a cross made of razors and nails, too heavy and sharp to bear. She didn’t understand that. Not yet. But she would, even though in this moment—right fucking now—he couldn’t remember her name. It was somewhere out of reach, circling. Soon he was going to have to let his hands do all the talking, anyway.

  • • •

  It had started first with messages, little texts. His first words were sweet before turning ugly. Next were the pictures: the wind in the trees behind his daddy’s house, the sun glowing red like hell over the Chisos; his gun in shadows on the kitchen counter. Even a dead jackrabbit rotting by the road, all tore up, dead eye marbled and staring right into the phone camera. He couldn’t explain why he sent these things to her, what they were supposed to mean. Couldn’t even remember sending most of ’em.

  He’d watched the little Mex girl grow up, but really first saw her sipping a Dr Pepper outside Mancha’s. Maybe it wasn’t even a Dr Pepper, and it was possible she hadn’t winked at him either, but there she was: dark hair, dark skin . . . dark mouth kissing a straw. He hadn’t even realized how much she caught his eye until he started having all those dark dreams about her. He’d been having them for a long, long time since.

  Now, finally, he was in her room—a first—one hand holding steady his duty trousers and the other his goddamn prick—embarrassed—limp and not working, although he’d wanted her to see it for so long. He might have already sent her a picture, but didn’t remember whether he’d done that, either. He wouldn’t touch her, not yet, not now, because once he started he knew he wouldn’t stop, so better not to start at all; all that restraint he possessed that she didn’t yet understand. Worse, there was no way she was going to touch him, not willingly, so he was left with his pants down around his legs, and none of it working out the way he’d wanted or dreamed about. He was too distracted, too busy cutting his eyes away from her to his portable on her nightstand, standing tall next to a pile of books and her cellphone. Taller than his prick, for damn sure.

  That damn phone distracted him. Oh, how he wanted to have a little look-see beneath its bright pink case, to find out if she’d been saving his texts and his pictures and who else she was talking to—peek at her dirty secrets and make sure there was nothin’ in there about him. She wasn’t to talk about him to anyone. He didn’t exist. He was smoke and dust and the wind in the picture he’d sent her—he was empty spaces. He’d told her what would happen if she ever snitched about the things he shared with her, and was pretty goddamn sure she’d gotten the message, ’cause he’d also put something sharp up near her eye or left a stray bullet in her book bag or sent her a picture of someone else’s blood, although he couldn’t quite recall which of those he’d done, maybe all of them.

  No . . . taking a gander at her phone wasn’t so much about her as it was about him—it might help him remember some things, that was all. It had been getting bad lately, all the little things he was forgetting. It was cigarette holes in a newspaper, black scorch marks where words should be. His daddy, Jamison Dupree, had known a thing or two about cigarettes and scorches. Duane still had the marks on his arms and back to show for it. The forgetting had gotten worse with the foco he’d been snorting, and if the Judge knew about that—well, he’d beat the dog piss out of Duane, so Duane had been keeping this dirty little secret to himself.

  He did like that foco, oh yes sir, he did . . . yes sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir. Duane loved its strange magic—the way it sped everything up and slowed it down at the same time. The way it made him sharp, like he was all shiny knife edge and cut the goddamn air when he walked, drawing blood, and the way it let him see things that weren’t there . . . see right through things.

  He’d once spied a mangy Mexican gray wolf out on his property and swore the foco gave him wolf eyes, just the same—afraid now people might even see them glowing, reflecting in his own dashboard light or the high beams of passing cars on Route 67.

  It wasn’t even a matter of liking the foco anymore as much as fucking needing it. It made him desperate, longing for his sharp skin and wolf eyes to protect him when he was awake, which was getting to be all the goddamn time, since he wasn’t sleeping so much anymore; or maybe he was and just was forgetting that, too. His daddy always said they had Comanche or Mescalero in them, which by birthright gave the Duprees a weakness for drink . . . burned as it was into their very blood, so they couldn’t help but lust for it. It had been for Duane’s own good that his daddy had touched those Lucky Strikes to his skin, the sweet stink of Four Roses on his breath . . . whisper-screaming never to pick up the bottle the way he’d done, ’cause he might never put it down.

  And Duane had listened to Jamison Dupree. Still did, because even before the foco took hold of him with its skeletal hands, before it had scorched him in its own way like his daddy’s cigarettes, he’d been dreaming of his daddy’s long-gone voice at his ear. Sometimes, worse—not just his voice, but all of him, rotted near away, standing right next to Duane, smiling lightning and blackness. If nothing else, he came by his needs honestly. They were in his blood.

  Then he was done, spent, barely realizing it . . . having forgotten she was even there. She stared at him, waiting for him to leave or whatever he was going to do next. He struggled with his pants, tried to focus on her walls, the posters and pictures there . . . magazine cutouts of places she would never go because he’d never let her. School was out for the day, a holiday, but her daddy was off to work or out at Mancha’s drinking a cold one. Maybe Duane had threatened to kill her daddy or her mama, or both of them. That’s what he’d done, or something like it. Then it came, slow, like a catfish surfacing in muddy water—why it had been so hard to concentrate on the task at hand. In his hand. It wasn’t about her phone, but his portable radio, black and sleek, and knowing in a way he couldn’t explain that it was about to crackle to life and summon him.

  He’d been forgetting things, true, no two ways about that, but that was because he now knew other things, too. Weird things, things he had zero reason to know. He tested himself all the time
. Like guessing the color of the next car that would pass him or the next stupid words someone might say to him. Knowing when his dead daddy would be waiting for him in the porch shadows . . . staring with eyes like hard white stones, the air around the soapberry and the shin oaks ripe with Four Roses and dead skin.

  So he knew all sorts of things, some useful, some not; secrets and mysteries and little peeks around the corner. Gifts—a fair trade, he figured, for all the things he was forgetting. Like he knew right now his radio was going to call him. Maybe it was his blood talking or the wolf eyes or just the foco. Maybe it was all his imagination. Or most likely, he was just going goddamn crazy.

  • • •

  She stayed across the room, wary, like a kicked dog. She was in a T-shirt and BBC sweatpants, and it was still kind of early, so she had no makeup, with her hair all a mess. But he loved her dark skin, like that bruised time of day when the desert sky was shot through by the setting sun and the ground was long with shadow, right before he was most likely to see his daddy standing beneath the leaves of the shin oaks.

  He could make her come and sit next to him, make her hold his hand and say things she didn’t mean, but he wasn’t in the mood for it. Not anymore. Messing with her was like messing with a kicked dog, and sometimes even a whupped dog might bite. Or at least bark. Duane smiled, chuckled. He finished with his pants.

  “Vete a la mierda,” she said through her teeth. Tough words, even if he didn’t know the exact meaning. She might have learned to talk like that from her brother, but her brother had never been tough at all. She hugged her arms. No need to waste a breath telling her to keep that fucking pretty mouth shut. That threat was already deep down in her eyes . . . all the things he’d swore to do, the horrible world he’d shown her in his pictures, not her magazine cutouts.

  • • •

  They both jumped when the radio came alive, with Miss Maisie from dispatch calling his name. He couldn’t hide a smile as he reached for it. Happened just like he knew it would. The girl inched around her room to give Chief Deputy Duane Dupree a wide berth. He skinned back his lips, flashed a bigger grin, let his wolf eyes really shine. Revealing them, wondering if his teeth looked sharp, too.

  Before he got out the door they both heard Miss Maisie on the radio going on and on about something, a trouble or mess, out at Indian Bluffs. A body? That’s what she’d said.

  The Bluffs was Matty Bulger’s place, farthest out near Chapel Mesa and damn near north Mexico, part of the Cut. The only property beyond that was the Far Six, and that hadn’t been worked in years, at least not for cattle, although Duane knew it well. It seemed Bulger had found a body rusting out on the caliche. Chris Cherry had caught the call and was out there now, probably fuckin’ it up.

  A body.

  Duane thought that should mean something to him, but like so much else, he’d forgotten what that could be.

  4

  MELISSA

  She hated nearly everything about the place, but mostly the smell. That constant wet, heavy stink of cows—the high, ripe tang of cow shit. It was everywhere and it hung in the air and crept into her food; she even dreamed of it. It reminded her too much of the oil fields, of the stench of burning gas and rusted metal. Chris kept telling her it was all in her head, and maybe he was right. This place was all up in her head, holding her hostage.

  • • •

  Mel took another drag on her cigarette, tried to inhale all the smoke, but even that did little to make the cow shit go away. The cigarettes were her secret, stowed away like pirates’ treasure around the house, even though Chris must have known about them and just wasn’t saying anything. He must have smelled them on her too; ignoring it like he did the cow shit stink, figuring the fight wasn’t worth it. Since they’d come here, back to his home in Murfee, a lot of things hadn’t been worth a fight.

  Except now . . . except for the body. Chris was all wound up about that in a way he hadn’t been wound up about anything in a long time. He was excited to play detective, wanted to convince her that this wasn’t just any dead body, not just one more wetback hauling ass across the caliche and scrub and dying on the way. Evidently, finding dead Mexicans was kind of a common occurrence around here. Is that what happened to people who tried to escape this place? And was that what she really smelled all the time—the dead who’d never made it? No, for Chris this wasn’t just another death, but possibly a murder, and somehow that made all the difference in the world.

  • • •

  Mel fished out another cigarette, eyeing her chipped nails and rocking the back porch swing with her pale bare foot. Chris’s dad had put up the swing with his own hands a year or so before Chris’s mom died of cancer. It was held together by carpentry nails; the cushions were faded and thin, and the floral pattern on them now looked more like bloodstains. She could pick out the uneven scratch marks where over the years Chris had worked at the wood with a penknife. It was easy to imagine him out here sitting, thinking, whittling. And his mom before that, wasting away, wrapped in blankets they now kept on their own bed. By the time they’d come to Murfee, his dad was dead as well, and Chris had the house free and clear.

  It was a small, sunburned affair, peeling paint, with a backyard much bigger than the house itself. It was filled with boxes of his dad’s old books, dusty and dank and smelling only slightly less bad than the cow shit. The whole place needed so much work, and Chris had been at it for a few months now, tinkering here and there, with little purpose or progress. He’d promised her a pool, and there was zero to show for that. The backyard remained a stubborn flat expanse of grass boxed in by warped fencing and surprisingly tall, modern lights: stadium lights, rising high above the grass that Chris actually did tend, some. He cut it short, but it was still smooth and a deep emerald green. It looked cold, polished, unreal—reminding her even more of the actual pool she didn’t have. At least this she understood. Chris had let it slip once, how he and his dad had thrown footballs out here all the time. They’d needed all the space because Chris had a hell of an arm, every toss a moonshot, and his dad had put the lights up so they could throw at night—back and forth, back and forth—over all that green grass.

  His mom watching them both from the porch, this very swing. Melissa had come to accept the swing and spent more time on it than inside the house. The porch, the swing, was her place now, where she could sneak her cigarettes and watch the smoke disappear—watch it rise and twist in the wind, escape past the trees and over the mountains.

  Anywhere away from here.

  • • •

  Chris arrived at Baylor big, heavy; got a scholarship on that cannon arm, but no one expected him to play, least of all him, and he hadn’t really cared one way or the other.

  She was a couple of years older, still taking a class here and there, since it gave her a reason to stay in Waco; working also a few hours in the Athletic Department and fucking some of the assistant coaches, one of whom was married. That last had turned into a scandal, a real mess that finally ended after she got a late-night call from his wife. The woman hadn’t yelled, hadn’t called her names or threatened her. She’d just cried, asking through tears and gasps why Mel had to fight and hold on to something that wasn’t hers, break something that didn’t belong to her and never had.

  And Mel had wanted to explain how school was supposed to have been hers, how being in Waco was damn near the only thing she had to hold on to—a way out of Spindletop and Goose Creek and the Spraberry Trend, all those stinking oil fields she and her daddy had moved through, even as she still hadn’t been able to quite leave them or him behind. How her piece-of-shit daddy had a thousand reasons for his drinking: stress and back pain, slights and old wounds that no one could ever see and that never healed. And how she’d spent far too many nights tending all those hurts, real and imagined, watching over him long after he’d passed out or been beaten senseless, eyeing the ragged rise and fall of hi
s chest, praying his breathing would never stop so she wouldn’t be left on her own; but sometimes praying that it would.

  She’d wanted to say all those things and more—explain every detail of her shitty life to the sad voice on the phone who’d dared question it. But instead, she just let that voice cry itself out, holding the phone tight to her ear for more than an hour, making herself listen, knowing that she had to hear it all, knowing that she owed the voice—that other woman—at least that much . . . until the woman finally hung up on her.

  Mel had then sat for another hour in the dark, phone still in her hand. Before dawn, she deleted the assistant coach’s number, and when that wasn’t quite enough, she tossed the phone itself into the small fountain in front of her apartment.

  Her daddy had always said: It ain’t stealin’ if they won’t miss it. But no matter what, it always was . . . always.

  After that came Chris Cherry. Even during his first year on campus—long past the time she should have graduated and left—she couldn’t help but notice him walking as often with a stack of books in his hand as a football. For the longest time they said hi every now and then but little more than that, as she watched him go from big and heavy to tall and strong. The time on campus carved him, cut away the excess, but he never saw it himself. He towered on the sidelines, a clipboard in his hand that she later found out had class notes on it rather than play sheets. The plays were easy for him and the classes he truly enjoyed.

  He was smart and came across as a gentleman through and through, moving slowly and carefully whenever they ran into each other, as if he was afraid his size would break her. He could also be shy for a guy so big, so much so that even as they started to speak to each other more and more, she felt like the one carrying both ends of the conversation. But he had an easy way of saying a lot without saying much at all, and a habit of listening serious and close, almost too intently. He could lose himself in a book that same way for hours on end, and even though they saw each other most often around the practice field and the Athletic Department, he never really talked about football or the team with her.