The Far Empty

by J. Todd Scott

  Sara hesitated, as if waiting for Braddock to say something for both of them, but when he didn’t—nodding a silent Go ahead instead—she said, “Sure. I’ll get it.” She reached toward the dark floorboard between her legs, between the empty water bottles, into the folio. Not a purse, not a makeup bag. Not even the back pocket of her jeans. She fumbled for a second at her feet, found the license, handed it over.

  “It’s a bad picture,” she said.

  Chris glanced down, read it, got ready to hand it back. He held it out a bit to make her reach for it, to give her one more chance to say something, anything, to him, but if she needed help, an escape, she wasn’t going to take it. Her hands took back the license without shaking.

  “No, no, it’s fine, ma’am. My girl says the same thing all the time.” Chris stood back, hand still hanging by his Colt. He and Braddock watched each other from their shadows.

  “Be safe, Deputy, it’s dark and empty out here. I don’t envy you.”

  “Thanks, I will. And you drive safe. Let’s keep your speed down a bit, at least until you’re out of my sight. That way I don’t feel too bad about not writing a ticket. If you come this way again, spend time looking for our Murfee Ghost Lights. They’re kind of famous in their own way.”

  Chris walked away and got back in his truck. He was sweating and it had soaked his shirt all the way through, so bad he could smell himself inside the cold cab.

  The Tahoe’s lights flickered, faded, gone.

  Until Mancha’s, until now, Chris had never imagined himself prone to getting rattled. But he also still had no idea if he was a good cop, either, even though he could cite his criminal code and write a fair report, better than Dupree or any of the others. Because being the law in a place like Murfee was most often about breaking up fights and serving child support warrants, or pulling over knuckleheads like Carter Dale after he’d pounded down a few too many at Earlys and then drove around in his Dodge with his fucking pants down. It was firefighting, putting out the little flames that sparked around a small town all the time, which was one reason why he’d been so taken by the body at Indian Bluffs—it held the promise of being an actual crime, a real mystery.

  And just like his mind had worked on that without even knowing it, standing there in Matty Bulger’s field until the skeleton and the damage done to it had revealed itself, he’d been working over the mystery of the Tahoe from almost the moment he’d lit it up. It had been turning off Old Ranch Road, not the usual way to come from Lajitas—you couldn’t even get there from here. There was nothing down that dirt strip at all—it angled south toward the old Far Six ranch, way past Indian Bluffs. It circled around Dupree’s place, then along the Monument’s fence lines. If you followed it long enough, you ran right into the Rio Grande. And there was the way Darin Braddock had very specifically addressed him as “deputy” right from the start, something that almost never happened when Chris pulled over a car. Nine times out of ten he was “officer,” as in Yes, Officer, I know I was going too fast, or Sir, yessir. You had city police officers and sheriff’s deputies and Texas Rangers all working West Texas, not to mention constables and Border Patrol and armed militia and God only knew what else, and few people could tell one from another and most didn’t care anyway. But Braddock had, and he’d been very direct about it—almost like he knew Chris, not just the badge he wore.

  There were the bags in the back of the Tahoe that weren’t luggage. Instead, black hard-sided Pelican cases like those used to store expensive and breakable equipment—cameras and recorders. Guns, too. There were the matching high-tech jackets they wore, identical, like the kind that might be official issue or duty wear.

  Then there was Darin Braddock himself, talking and smiling and spinning his off-the-cuff story of an affair to distract Chris so he wouldn’t search the Tahoe or ask too many questions. Treating Chris like a rube, betting he was just a good-ole-boy county deputy. And Braddock had been good, very good, even after he had to have realized he’d been calling his companion by the wrong name the whole time; still betting or hoping this good-ole-boy county deputy wouldn’t notice that, either.

  But Chris had noticed just how startled and awkward Braddock’s companion got after he grabbed her hand, not expecting it any more than Chris. And that was the moment he’d become afraid that the quiet passenger—Sara, but not really—with all her empty water bottles and no luggage and no purse, might be in serious trouble. So he’d played that little game with her license to give her a chance to say something, anything—to run or ask for help—only to end up with that stupid card in his hand, staring at a picture he couldn’t even be sure was the same woman. They were similar, hints of each other, but the woman in the picture had much longer, darker hair. He would’ve had to get the blond girl out of the car, into what little light he had, to be sure.

  Because whoever she’d been, she definitely wasn’t Sara, and even if she wasn’t a prisoner or a hostage or any of the other things Chris had feared, she absolutely wasn’t on a romantic getaway with a man named Darin Braddock, either. Her license had been from Delaware, and said her name was Morgan Emerson.

  18

  ANNE

  It was late when she came to, just as she’d planned. Dry-swallowing a couple of sleeping pills and three capfuls of vodka and falling down with her clothes on the night before had done the trick. Now sunlight washed her bedroom, bleached it. The room held so much light it hurt her eyes. She remembered . . . a game, her brain still foggy from the pills . . .

  Sheriff Ross, smiling, going on about Marc and that one time they all met before; laughing at his own jokes and stories. Deputy Chris Cherry, dressed liked a cowboy, lacking only a lasso; talking about a thousand books . . . walking together for what had felt like forever, under a million stars wheeling and burning, before they all turned into cheap carnival lights.

  She also thought she remembered, just before passing out, glancing out her window to catch a figure standing there in the street, staring back.

  No face, just shadows. Her dead husband, come to watch over her as she slept.

  Later she found the Houston Texans hat Marc had bought her when he went to a game with other guys from the department. He’d gotten one for each of them, had worn his almost all the time. She found it in the trash while throwing out the cheap vodka bottle and the silly soda cup from the carnival, and couldn’t for the life of her recall how it got there.

  19

  CALEB

  MY MOTHER

  These are things I remember about my mom. Watching TV in our living room in the dark. She liked crappy horror movies: Halloween, Friday the 13th, the original Twilight Zone series. When my father was out late or out of town, we’d set up camp and watch one. She popped popcorn or we ordered a pizza and hung out together. She talked to me about school, about Murfee, about whatever. She sat with her legs curled up underneath her, hair pulled back, wearing a BBC booster sweatshirt. I might ask about what high school was like for her or if she’d enjoyed college, but she didn’t like answering all my questions, and just laughed many of them off or turned them back on me.

  She came in from the rain, a few months before she disappeared. She ran into the house, soaking wet. I didn’t know where she’d been, but her jeans were heavy with mud, her shirt streaked with long river clay that looked like she’d been holding an armload of snakes. She didn’t know I was there, stripping off her outer clothes and putting them in a trash bag afterward, getting down on her hands to wipe up the floor where she’d been standing, trying to clean up any trace of her muddy footprints. She ran the shower in the bedroom for about thirty minutes. Maybe she was scrubbing away all that mud at first, then standing under the water after that, letting it run, letting it go hot then cold as the storm passed over our house with thunderous footsteps.

  CHRISTMAS

  My mom loved Christmas. Decorating the tree, buying presents, baking cookies. She loved it when it
snowed, always wanted to stand outside, arms stretched wide and turning in circles, trying to catch the meager flakes that sometimes escaped the Chisos. When I still believed in Santa, or for as long as my mom begged me to pretend to believe, “Santa” left all of my presents unwrapped under the tree, assembled, ready to go. I’d come down the stairs to see my haul all laid out, gleaming, new, spotted by the colored lights of the tree. In the center was always the thing I wanted most—a computer or a PlayStation; one year a guitar, upright in a stand with its strings bright and silver like razors.

  Later I learned that every Christmas Eve my mom hand-wrote a small paper sign with the year and placed it in front of “Santa’s presents” to snap a picture, memorializing the moment and my presents hours before I got up to see them. I saw those pictures pasted in a book, all of them, year after year. There was an unchanging quality about them—the tree always in the same place, decorated nearly the same way. The light and chasing shadows even looked the same, forever trapped by the camera that had caught them. If you held all those pictures together, riffled through them with your thumb as with one of those silly flip books, the only thing that would have changed were the dates on the paper signs themselves, scrawled with a black Sharpie in my mom’s handwriting.

  SMOKING BY THE TREE

  We have a large tree in the backyard, a pecan we’ve always watered like crazy just to keep it alive. When my father was out, my mom would stand underneath it and smoke a cigarette, make a cell call as well, or stare up through the high branches. I’ve stood out there myself, right in her spot, looking up through those same branches to see whatever mysterious place she peered into, and I’ve never seen much. Just the dark branches, skeletal arms, and brief breaks in the foliage where the sky might shine through, blue and white and harsh. I still go out there and sit underneath the tree, to read or think or to get out of the house, and I still smell her cigarette smoke, trapped in the leaves and the bark.

  THE KITCHEN

  My mom’s sanctuary in the house was our kitchen, where she spent most of her time. The yellow paint, the black-and-white pictures on the wall, the dried desert flowers in the brightly colored glass bottles and jars and the way she never kept the blinds down or closed in there, always letting raw sunshine in—it was all her. Most days she even left the windows open so the wind could find its way in too, bringing with it a fine dust that coated everything. If she wasn’t cooking, she was seated at the kitchen island, flipping through a magazine, writing a letter, drinking sun tea. Near the end, maybe four or five months before she was gone, she was there and my father walked in. He stood and looked down at her, arms crossed, and then picked up an oven mitt that she’d left on the counter. It was a silly thing, ugly, shaped like a rooster—bright green and red. I’d bought it for her one Christmas when I was nine or ten years old. My mom always used it, even though she had much nicer ones. My father slipped that oven mitt on his hand and walked over to where she was sitting. She saw him coming and didn’t make a move. He smacked her out of her chair, hitting her flush across the face with his gloved hand, and she went to the floor without a sound. Her skin was red from her right eye down to her jawline, but it wouldn’t bruise. The mitt had taken care of that. He pulled it off and put it back where he’d gotten it, straightening it out with the palm of his hand, and walked out of the kitchen past me, where I stood drinking a glass of milk, and didn’t look back. My mom didn’t use the kitchen much after that, but when she did cook, she still used that damn rooster mitt.

  LOADING THE GUN

  A couple of years ago my father was away, in Austin, and one rainy afternoon my mom caught me in our garage, loading and unloading his Ruger Mini-14 with a few of the rounds I’d stolen. I thought it was safe to touch because he didn’t carry that gun anymore for work, kept it stored and empty in the gun locker at the house with several others he’d collected, including those he planned to display at his office but hadn’t mounted or repaired yet. It sat there ignored, and I’d had the combination for some time, so whenever I thought I could get away with it, I’d sneak into that locker and stare at all those guns—dark and heavy, foreboding.

  The Ruger most of all, the one that had killed Dillon Holt. I wondered how many of the others had a story, too. That afternoon I got up the nerve to get that rifle out, put my naked hands on it—spent an hour or more working the action, testing the sights, loading and reloading. I’d shot skeet once or twice, but until that moment I had never held a real gun as long as I held that Ruger, examining every inch of it, the metal and wood against my fingertips—feeling its weight, and how it settled soft against my shoulder as I aimed it through a wall, into the house beyond. When my mom saw me, I fully expected her to scream, to yell or come grab me. Something. Instead, she just stood for long minutes in the garage door from the kitchen, unreadable. Before reminding me that when I was done, I needed to put it back exactly as I’d found it.

  Exactly. Then she turned away, shutting the door behind her.

  WATCHING ME

  My mom always used to watch me out of the corner of her eye, through her dark sunglasses—in the reflections of mirrors and door glass, thinking I never saw her. It was like OCD, a kind of mental handwashing: constantly checking up on me, to make sure that I was there or was okay. A little bit of it was wariness too, fear she didn’t want to admit, couldn’t admit—a need to know if that terrible dark thing inside my father had taken root inside me as well. What would she have done if she had decided I was like my father? If she knew for certain that awful and dangerous things hid behind my eyes and lurked in my hands? I don’t know; maybe she didn’t, either. Maybe there was even another fear, much worse. Not that I might be like my father, but what would happen to her if I wasn’t.

  She watched me all the time, like when I got pneumonia one September. I was sicker than hell, a sweating mess trapped in my bed, out of school for more than a week. My mom sat with me the entire time. I drifted in and out, waking up to see her at my bedside, reading a book, talking on her phone, but always watching me. She talked to me while I dozed just so I could hear her voice and know that she was there, finally revealing stories about herself. About college and someone named Jim she still dreamed about once in a while. About finding her mother dead on the bathroom floor from a heart attack, and the first time she kissed a boy, his hand fumbling underneath her shirt and how she’d been too afraid to tell him to stop, but not sure she wanted him to anyway.

  All about how her favorite color was purple, but she was pretty partial to yellow as well; that she didn’t like the taste of beer but could stomach it; was afraid she could find a taste for wine, so she didn’t keep it in the house. How she hated Murfee but loved Texas, how she needed me always to be a gentleman and what that really meant, and how she liked to stand out in our yard in the dark and look straight up at the stars, count them until the blood drained from her head, leaving her dizzy, like she’d done when she was a little girl.

  She knew I heard most of what she said, hanging on each of those tiny secrets, but she didn’t care. She wanted me to know all of those things and more. She was gone a few months later and she might have seen that in the stars as well, a glimpse of things to come. Even now I can still feel the weight of her hand on my forehead, my burning cheek. The touch of her fingers pushing my damp hair back from my face. Her breath against my eyes, bending down to kiss me good night.

  Goodbye.

  20

  DARIN

  His name really was Darin; that part was true and always had been. Just not Darin Braddock. He was born Darin Braccio in Howard Beach, New York, where his ex-wife Sara and their two girls now lived. She divorced him and returned there after she couldn’t take Texas or him or both anymore.

  “I never knew Texas could be this cold,” Morgan said, shifting in the Tahoe’s seat.

  “Yep, my mother used to say ‘cold as a witch’s tit.’ Ever fucking heard that?”

  “Um, no.”
She laughed, peering through her dark window. Chief Deputy Duane Allen Dupree’s house was a couple of miles distant, the security lights visible, windows aglow, everything around it black and empty and endless. Darin knew that’s the way she wrote his name in the notes she was keeping—the whole thing, every letter of it.

  “He doesn’t really, you know, do much, does he?” she asked.

  Darin glanced up from the issued iPad in his lap. He was playing solitaire. If Dupree had lived, you know, like anywhere near civilization, they could have put a camera up on his house, piped the feed to the iPad or even back to the office. But the redneck deputy lived so far out, even for Murfee, that a video feed was tough, and the tech request would have tipped his hand anyway to Garrison about his real interest out here, forcing them instead to do it the old-fashioned way—actually following Dupree around, the other deputies too, even Sheriff Stanford Ross, whom Darin had heard speak at a Texas Narcotics Officers Association conference. Lifestyle surveillance was damn hard work anywhere, and damn near impossible in the middle of nowhere. He and Morgan had been in and out of Murfee for two weeks, staying at a hotel in Valentine, and hadn’t seen a goddamn thing.

  Not counting the night Dupree had cranked off a handful of rounds into the dark. Now, that had been exciting. Darin was almost to the point of conceding that he was barking up the wrong tree, even as his instincts, honed over all of the years, whispered otherwise. He might be a lousy husband and a marginal father, but Darin Braccio was a damn good agent.

  • • •

  For the life of him he couldn’t figure out why he used that name, her name, when Deputy Cherry pulled them over. They were coming back from this exact spot, on the heels of a full night of watching Dupree’s house after that silly carnival, when he’d been caught by complete surprise by the blue and red lights ablaze in his rearview. He even thought about making a run for it, but Morgan insisted they pull over and bullshit their way through the late-night traffic stop. Basically lie, because she didn’t want some local deputy to flip his prowler, crashing trying to catch them. She had a weirdly honed sense of honesty.