The Far Empty

by J. Todd Scott

  Like he did for Nancy Coombs, Brenda Holt, Vickie Schori, Nellie Banner.

  For so many others. For my mother.

  But I’ve seen the man without the mirror. I know his real face. Everyone says Ms. Hart will be here only through the end of the school year, and if I got to know her, I’d probably like her. Right now, though, I want her to get the hell out of here as fast as she can.

  Ms. Hart will never really be safe in Murfee. It might be that if I don’t do something, no one will. As long as my father is alive, I don’t think anyone is. He’s fooled all of them except me.

  Once upon a time he told all those stories to my mom.

  17

  CHRIS

  It was late when he wrapped up at the carnival, but he wasn’t quite ready to go home. He figured Mel was already asleep, so there was no need to text her anymore, to lie that he needed to stay out and work the road. She wouldn’t have believed it anyway. She knew as well as he did that the sheriff didn’t care about his deputies patrolling U.S. Route 67, writing tickets. Route 67, along with 90 and Texas 118, were all part of one long black ribbon that curled tight around Murfee like a zip tie. Desolate, rarely used, going nowhere. There might have been a time when he would have caught joyriders or drug smugglers racing in the dark between the border and El Paso and Dallas, but that hadn’t happened in forever, since long before Chris had joined the department.

  The sheriff had made it all safe.

  • • •

  He was out near the Union Pacific rail line, up on Mitchell Flat, far west of town. He’d already watched a train move past him in the dark, counting cars, its three front lights like huge glowing eyes, leading the way. As a kid, he’d wondered about all the places a train like that might have come from, all the places it might go.

  He was parked up on the grass at the Murfee Lights, the Ghost Lights, famous enough that the town had put up a small roadside viewing stand. They’d been seen and talked about since the fifties, tracing their origins back farther than that. The Lights were said to be glowing orbs about the size of basketballs, all ice-cream colors, floating and merging in pairs out across the flat. They appeared about a dozen times a year, explanations ranging from distant car lights off the state highway to small fires to temperature changes. None of these possibilities diminished their mystery, though, and Murfee kids had been coming out here forever, waiting for them, drinking and fooling around in their darkened cars. There was even a movie about the legend, a B horror picture with killer phantoms terrorizing a lost couple trapped in their car. He’d caught it a couple of times on late-night cable, more times than he’d ever seen the Lights themselves.

  But it was black on the flat now—cold, dark. No ghosts floating there. He had his window down, listening to the night wind try to move the mountains. His good-time radio was turned down low to a repeat of that call-in show Mel liked, Dark Stars or Dark Sun . . . Dark something, and the host was talking about the power of letting go. Chris couldn’t agree more, even if he had no fucking idea how to do it. His department radio was turned all the way up, but it stayed grave quiet, not even static. This time of night, unless she’d been asked to stay, Miss Maisie had long since gone home. After the train turned to echoes, he had the road—the whole world—to himself.

  • • •

  He’d known Mel was unhappy and had been for a while, never realizing how much, not until that moment in their kitchen. He wasn’t willing to face how unhappy he was, either. Chris had always had a touch of claustrophobia, no surprise for someone as big as him—it used to come on in basements every now and then, or in a small car; the occasional football tunnel when he’d been crammed together with the team. But he’d always coped, never talked much about it, knowing it had little to do with the true size of the physical space and more with the threat of being closed in, trapped, unable to escape. Unsure of what to do, as he’d felt at Mancha’s, as it had always been, growing up in Murfee, even beneath its endless skies, stretching forever. Empty, untouched, indifferent. Back then, books, as small as they were, particularly in his hands, had been his infinite worlds. They’d taken him to places far away from here; they were boundless. All of the books at the house had been escapes. He’d lost himself in them again and again to make Murfee bearable; this was why he still couldn’t let them go. But Mel, who had spent most her life always leaving places, didn’t quite understand that. Maybe she never would.

  But still he’d come back. Had come limping home to Murfee on his broken knee because it was home, because he’d been too afraid to face anywhere else—the old devil that you know. Afraid also to face Murfee alone, so he’d brought Mel with him, only to turn right around and leave her in that gray, lifeless house full of the air of his dead parents and the decay and dust of all their old things, all of those old books. At least his job got him out, offered a hint of light and air, even as she stayed behind, buried. Her only escape—his best offer—was taking orders at the Hamilton or pouring drinks at Earlys.

  Mel hates it and pretty soon is going to hate me, too. That was the heart of it. He couldn’t hide how much he resented returning; he saw it reflected in her eyes every day. He was small here, folded, crushed, and diminished. Claustrophobic. Mancha’s had reminded him of that. He couldn’t blame Mel for not liking Murfee or him when he himself didn’t like either very much. He’d been lost since the injury, getting Mel lost right along with him. They were like the couple in that horrible movie, trapped in their car, haunted by their ghosts. Had he been telling her the truth about leaving? Could he? He didn’t know himself, not anymore.

  Let go.

  But Chris couldn’t, didn’t know how to. Not now. Not the body at Indian Bluffs, not what he’d seen in Dupree’s truck. Not the sight of Aguilar’s face in his hands or the ruin Delgado had become after Dupree was done with him. Not these last few cold, brittle weeks with Mel, and God knows, not all the warm times they’d shared before that. Because he still could remember Melissa before . . . before Murfee, before their kitchen. Before she’d tossed a cigarette into the sink that was really aimed at him, them. An act far louder than anything she’d actually said.

  Before.

  • • •

  He’d heard things about her: how she fell in and out of the football program’s orbit, how she was all kinds of trouble. How she had a thing for men and they all had a thing for her too, at least for a little while—but he never cared about those whispers and in-jokes. She was pure light, magnetic, drawing him to her. He was closed off and quiet and lived on empty movie sets in his head, and she was a star—a north star, and he followed her.

  She took him into her bed before they had their first real date, tasting of cigarettes and Jack Daniel’s, both she and her sheets smelling like her perfume, and when they were done, she got up and walked naked into the kitchen for beers, her body lit by passing headlights so that she glowed pearl and blue. She came back and opened his beer and ran the cold bottle over his chest, running her own hands up and down his arms in a way that had made his skin ache, fingers tracing veins and muscles as if she could touch, maybe steal, the tiniest bit of the current thrumming there.

  She asked him then how he could throw the ball so goddamn far, and when he started to tell her he didn’t really know—that his dad had always just told him to let ’er rip, so that’s all he’d ever done and ever knew how to do—she’d put his warming beer on her nightstand next to a clock that was always off by an hour or so and rose up suddenly, arching in a way that made him hold his breath so she could straddle him first with her hands on her ass, then on his chest. Her hair falling forward in his face—mouth to open mouth—breathing all she was into him. Breathing, whispering.

  Let ’er rip, Chris. And he did.

  • • •

  He might have slept, drifted, remembering or dreaming of Mel from that time before, when she’d been naked and electric and his—afraid to let it go, afraid he a
lready had, even if she hadn’t. Wondering where she’d gone, or if he was the one who’d left her behind.

  But he was awake now, the radio playing music . . . opening his eyes to see, after all of the years, the Lights. Ghosts on the flat. He held his breath, mesmerized. They bounced along, a mated pair, locked together like dancers, shimmering the exact same cool pearl and blue of Mel’s car-lit body from his dream, their first night together. They were eyes staring at him from the dark. Then he understood. Headlights.

  Just headlights, turning off Old Ranch Road onto 67. His dash clock read 2:34 a.m., and he tried to guess who would be out that way at this time of the morning, where they might be going. He was still wondering when he caught the first sound of the car’s revving engine coming toward him. They probably never saw him, not when he pulled out behind them, not until he hit his lights and sirens.

  The car, a big dark SUV, went by him so fast—leaving a horse’s tail of dust and rocks in its wake—that his response was pure instinct, without thought. He gunned his truck to life and flipped on the wigwags, the road beneath him blue and red drumbeats. He knuckled the wheel, coming up to speed, closing the distance until he was right on its tail. The SUV, a Tahoe or similar, bigger than his F-150, flicked its brake lights once, twice—like it was thinking, debating. Then the brake light finally held steady as the big car slowed, stopping. Decision made. The SUV pulled smoothly off to the shoulder, waiting for Chris to angle to a stop, where he had his truck’s nose for cover. He rolled the wigwags over so they flashed behind him, not that he expected any other cars to come up Route 67, but he hadn’t expected this one, either. He’d been asleep, for chrissake.

  Nice work, Deputy.

  He popped his spotlight, sweeping it twice over the back of the vehicle. It was a late-model Tahoe with Texas plates, and in the harsh glare of his headlights and the mounted spot, he could read the digits. There was dirt and mud caked on the Tahoe’s ass, though, sprayed as high as the back glass. Even through that mess, he saw two heads moving in the front seats, talking, but not turning back to look at him.

  He fumbled on the Datalux, still off because when he parked out here, he’d never planned on seeing a car, much less stopping one. It took a long moment for the terminal to come to life so he could run the Tahoe’s plates, check if it was stolen. It was not unusual for cars boosted out of El Paso or Midland or even San Angelo to make their way over the border to be sold or stripped in Juárez or Ojinaga. Sometimes those same cars showed up again months later, painted different colors, all the backseats torn out to make room for burlap bundles of weed or coke or meth, but this car was going the wrong way for all that.

  The Datalux told him the car was registered to something called the Allegra Corporation in El Paso, and although a name like that could mean it was a rental, it could also mean anything or nothing at all. He wasn’t sure who or what he’d stopped, but wished now he’d just let it go. It was past 2:30 a.m. and there was nothing out here anywhere, anyway—not for a hundred miles.

  Let it go. But since returning to Murfee, letting go had become the hardest damn thing of all. In the tiny screen of his dashcam, the Tahoe sat ghostly and washed out, unreal. The camera had engaged the moment he hit his emergency lights. Sheriff Ross had been ambivalent about them, but they’d been purchased with a federal grant and installed in all of the department’s trucks before Chris arrived. Duane and the other deputies routinely turned them off or cut the cable, but Chris always left his alone. The driver and passenger remained still, patient. There was no mad scrambling from inside, no one jumped out shooting; no muzzle flare lighting the dark as his windshield spiderwebbed from stray rounds. His window was still down and the wind tugged over the idling of both engines. It would have been peaceful if he hadn’t been so damn nervous.

  • • •

  It wouldn’t get better sitting here, though. Each passing moment gave the strangers in the Tahoe time to think a little more about what they might want to do . . . all their options. If they hadn’t yet found the courage to fuck with him when he first lit them up, he was giving them plenty of time to find it now.

  Fuck me.

  Chris remembered Mancha’s and flipped the thumb break on his gun holster before he opened his door. He stood for two heartbeats behind the nose of his truck, approaching along the passenger side of the Tahoe and staying off the road just beyond the sightline of the side mirror.

  His right hand angled near his Colt, and his left swept the vehicle with his Surefire, checking the cargo area and the backseats. The windows were tinted, almost too dark, but not so bad that he couldn’t confirm there was no one else crouched down in the Tahoe. It was only the driver and the passenger, but that was enough. The passenger window was already down when he walked toward it.

  He saw her blond hair first, pulled back in a small, tight ponytail, but couldn’t quite guess the woman’s age. She wore dark clothes, a dark jacket with a high collar—high tech and expensive, rugged and outdoorsy. It looked new, hardly used. She had both hands on the dash, and he noted—weird—that she wasn’t wearing any rings of any kind. She was pretty in a stern, athletic way; kept her eyes forward, not looking into his light. She was still, quiet, and being very, very careful. That made Chris twice as worried.

  • • •

  “Ma’am,” he said, keeping the Surefire on her face, brushing it past to take in the driver—a man in a similar jacket with a thick goatee, peppered gray, hands on the wheel and fingers splayed and visible. These two knew the drill too well.

  But the man spoke first. “Deputy, sorry if we woke you.” He said it with a hint of a smile, a hint of East Coast accent, guessing correctly that they’d startled Chris. “We were zipping along back there. I know, I know, too damn fast . . . at this time of night I thought we had clear sailing through Van Horn.”

  “Well, ‘zipping’ is definitely one way to put it. I didn’t expect to see anyone out here tonight, either. Guess by now we can both just call it ‘morning.’ How about a license and some registration? Where you coming from?”

  The driver had his license between his fingers, quick, extending it. He used it to motion at his passenger—talking the whole time, keeping Chris’s attention. “Is it okay if Sara grabs the registration? It’s in the glove box.”

  Chris nodded and the young woman, younger than her companion, opened the glove box with one hand, leaving the other on the dash, pulling out a folded paper. Chris got a glimpse inside and saw nothing. No tissue boxes, no old receipts or folded takeout menus. Other than the Tahoe’s driver’s manual, still shrink-wrapped, the glove compartment was barren.

  In the floorboard between the woman’s sneakered feet, though, he caught a look at several empty water bottles and crumpled-up papers, an expensive black folio, and a package of half-eaten nuts. Chris took the registration and license. The man was Darin Braddock from El Paso.

  “Sara and I were at Lajitas for a couple of days, heading home. You ever spend any time out there?”

  “Not so much, no,” Chris said. Lajitas was a popular golf resort tucked between the Big Bend Ranch State Park and the even larger national park, visited by presidents and actors.

  “We were just looking for a little getaway.”

  “Sure, it’s nice.” Chris flipped open the registration, confirming the name Allegra Corporation. The rest of it appeared in order. Darin Braddock from El Paso was forty-seven, according to his license.

  Chris knew he should walk back to his truck and run Braddock for wants and warrants, but hesitated. He hadn’t been on the radar gun when the Tahoe blew past—in fact, it was still in its locked case—so writing a ticket was pure guesswork, an outright lie. And Darin Braddock, in a way he couldn’t put a finger on, did not seem like the sort of man that was easy to lie to. Chris’s curiosity was piqued by this pair and their vehicle—oddly empty and sterile and lived in at the same time—but was embarrassed for having been caug
ht asleep at the wheel. Braddock seemed to know it, and that made Chris want even more to just get this over with and get home.

  The woman remained silent. She hadn’t really glanced at him or Braddock. All Chris had seen of her was the side of her face, unsmiling. She didn’t look scared, only a little nervous. There was another thing too, a suspicion Chris couldn’t shake: that running “Darin Braddock” in the Datalux would only give him answers as opaque as the vehicle’s registration, as empty and clean as the Tahoe’s glove compartment. More questions and suspicions, not less.

  “Mr. Braddock, it’s late, or early, depending on how you want to look at it, and I don’t want to write you a ticket and I know you don’t want one. If I walk back to my car and run your license, am I going to find any other outstanding tickets? Warrants? Anyone want you for any reason?”

  Braddock laughed, now sharing a joke. “No, Deputy, you won’t. My only trouble is a significant other in El Paso who isn’t named Sara and who thinks I’m in Midland at a conference, if you know what I mean.” Braddock reached out and grabbed Sara’s hand, squeezed. She squeezed back, awkward, and turned to look up at Chris.

  Smiling, embarrassed. She was pretty, prettier than his first take, and the story made sense. Older Darin and younger Sara—possibly his secretary or his student—sneaking away for a couple of days and racing back home before someone caught on. Chris handed back the license and registration, lit up the seat over Sara’s shoulder with his Surefire to check for suitcases in the backseat and saw only small black cases, nothing big, and no golf clubs.

  He smiled and made as if to step back, but stopped.

  Let it go.

  “I do know what you mean, Mr. Braddock, so no trouble here. I’ll let you two get on home. One last thing, if you don’t mind.” Chris looked down at the young woman, giving her a chance to make eye contact if she needed it. “Ma’am, if I could just see your license too, you’ll be on your way.” Darin Braddock’s smile flickered, reset.