The Far Empty

by J. Todd Scott

  Rodolfo told her once about visiting the ranch across the river, that secret place where the gun had been given to him. All about the zoo they kept there, with real lions and tigers and peacocks; where he’d met a brujo who cast a spell on him to always protect him from harm. He brought her a peacock feather, or what he’d said was one, anyway, long and green and purple and shining like metal. There were other things he saw at that place he wouldn’t tell her about, things that had made his lips quiver and his eyes go distant when he thought about them. He told her there was so much potencia at the ranch, so much power in those people, they glowed like the sun. They burned everything.

  • • •

  America loved her brother but had long ago accepted there was a weakness in him, a softness that drove her papa more than once to try and beat it out, to toughen him up and harden his skin. Her papa had wanted him callused, the way his own hands were cracked and bruised from hard work and the sun. But Rodolfo was pretty, like a girl, with a good singing voice. He liked his fancy food and cologne and both American and Tejano music and never roughhoused. To Rodolfo, it was better to make friends than fight. Better still to run away.

  If their papa thought the Border Patrol would toughen him up, he’d been wrong about that, too. Rodolfo had looked good in his green uniform, shined shoes, and ironed shirt, but he worked just hard enough to stay cool in his truck, napping in the cab to music, with the dirty river rolling by, baking in the sun. For a few dollars here, a few more there, he let families slip across the border to look for work. Their stories, their troubles, moved him. America had loved her brother for that, but understood his flaws—flaws that had left her holding his money, a phone, and a gun. Left her worrying about where he’d gone and when he’d come home. Better still to run away.

  • • •

  Caleb had some of that same softness. He loved her, or thought he did, but she knew it was as much to hurt his own papa as anything else, even if Caleb didn’t yet know it himself. They both lived in Murfee, but the river always lay between them. She was a Mex, a beaner, a wetback, and he was the son of El Juez. Caleb was too afraid to throw her straight into his father’s face, but the time they spent together made its way back all the same. It was a foolish game, juego peligroso.

  Foolish as allowing it to continue, but she was selfish in her own ways, because where there was softness, there was sweetness as well. Caleb had never tried to put his hands beneath her shirt or push against her, pene throbbing, asking her to touch it a little, just look at it.

  He took her to Las Luces where they searched for fantasmas together, and he talked about the books he read and the journals he kept, and always, always, about leaving Murfee and taking her with him. Rodolfo used to say the same thing, so part of her knew those thoughts were all foolish too, but let him keep them anyway. Because she also had silly dreams of her own, things she’d never shared with Rodolfo, could never share with Caleb. Like how everything might have been different if she, rather than Rodolfo, had been wearing a green uniform and watching the river. Or how things might be after she finished school—moving away and changing her name, her hair; becoming someone and something else altogether. A doctor, a lawyer, maybe even a deputy herself in some other town. Carrying a badge and gun all her own.

  So she liked hearing about all the places she guessed she’d never go while they lay on their backs in the bed of his truck at Las Luces, sharing cigarettes. As he talked and talked, she could see those places in the smoke above their heads: cities with tall glass buildings; beaches on a blue ocean with waves crashing and boats with colored sails. Caleb made those places more real than TV; he was a brujo and didn’t know it. Casting spells she liked with his words.

  • • •

  According to Pilar, her mama’s friend, her mama used to know magia—could weave small hechizos from hair and nails and drops of sangre and certain flowers. That is how she got America’s papa to love her, and though America questioned the choice, she couldn’t question the result. Her papa, old and battered and rough and quick to raise his hand to both her and Rodolfo, had never once done so to his rosa. He still sang songs to her, old ones that America did not know, and every Sunday he brought her dusty flowers he’d picked from someone else’s yard. Her mama always kept them in the same green jar until their petals dropped. America had asked her mama to teach her these things, but she’d waved America away, said Pilar was loca. It was all so much nonsense now. She’d lost her magia and all of her belief in it after crossing the river. Left it all behind in el mundo viejo, the small village in which she was raised. Perdemos mucho.

  That’s what had happened to Rodolfo. The spells cast on him in Ojinaga had lost their power here, leaving him no longer protected, no longer safe. Still, America longed for that kind of magia. For revenge, and Dupree’s eyes bleeding and his pene turning black, exploding in his hands. For lobos sitting at his door to tear out his throat when he tried to run, fantasmas haunting him as he’d haunted her.

  Dupree finally burning and that horrible smile catching fire.

  Because even if there was no real magia in the world anymore, that didn’t mean those things still couldn’t come true; so much more real and possible than any of Caleb’s stories or her own silly dreams of a different life. Her magia was Rodolfo’s phone—the one he’d left behind and that she kept so close. He’d said they glowed like the sun . . . they burned everything. She didn’t know who they were, had no idea what sorts of things might hold the other end of that phone or if they would even help her—¿Dónde está Rana?—but she knew where they were. At the ranch, with the peacocks and their metal feathers. Just across the river.

  2

  MÁXIMO

  He drank horchata through a straw, standing by the gate. The machete in his waistband scratched him, rubbed sharp against his ribs, while he waited to kill the man. He wanted a gun but was told to use the machete. He was to make it messy. They wanted to send un mensaje.

  He understood their messages. He’d been sending them since he was eleven years old, when he first killed for them, shot a man in the face with an old gun wrapped in tape while high on good weed. He’d laughed at the mess, the gun blasting sparks and powder, and hadn’t looked back as the man fell, blood everywhere. He was chewing gum, American gum—Big League Chew—and almost choked on it because he’d been laughing so much. Happy or afraid? He did not know. There had been so many more since. He was seventeen years old.

  He smiled at a pretty girl walking past his driver, Lugo, whose face was only a pair of dark sunglasses. Lugo didn’t notice the girl, but he did. He finished the horchata but kept the empty cup, sucking on the dry straw, a kid waiting for a bus. It was one of a thousand little lessons Chava had taught him before Chava himself got taught a lesson, burning alive in a barrel full of diesel gas, a real guiso. He helped light his old friend on fire and had watched him boil, the stink of it gagging. He’d liked Chava.

  • • •

  They gave him two hundred American dollars a week and lots of weed and places to stay. He had a nice phone and girls whenever he wanted and rojo Lucchese boots with the shadows of naked niñas picked out in silver. He dressed nice and looked older than his age. He stayed out all night in bars wearing the jewelry of dead men and watched fútbol games and talked to real women, not just girls. If anyone ever said anything to him, even the policía, all he did was make his eyes flat and black like river stones and say Nemesio and they walked away, rápido. It was a good life. He’d run with a pandilla until Chava found him and called him his hermano menor. Chava taught him how to hold a gun and use a knife, took him to the rancho and showed him other secrets. Chava’s jefes had liked him right off because he was young, smart, fast. They would not let him get tattoos of any kind and they talked about how he was an americano and how that was a good thing. Una cosa muy buena. Someday he would no longer have to make his way by killing. They told him he might become a jefe himself, a
t least a jefe poco, un teniente, like Chava. They smiled when they said it, a smile that died below their eyes, and then always put a gun in his hand anyway. He was in no hurry for someday. He liked killing, and he was very good at it.

  Besides, he saw what had happened to Chava.

  • • •

  The man breaks from the door of the small street-level apartment; he’s on a cellphone. He’s been hiding in that spot a week, not showering because the water was off. He stinks, smells himself, his own fear. He’s been collecting money but not fast enough. Not enough, because there is never enough time or money in the world.

  He sees a thin kid in an Avengers T-shirt leaning against the light pole, pulling on a straw in a Styrofoam cup, a book bag resting against the tip of his red boots. Waiting for the bus. Tapping his foot to music only he can hear. His boot edge shimmers with silver, grinning like a skull. Once clear of the door, the man finally catches sight of the car parked sideways down the street, the driver thick and bug-faced behind huge black sunglasses. He hears the engine, the car running, waiting for him, and he knows what that means. He turns to bolt the other way, past the boy, who drops the empty cup on the ground and smiles.

  The boy is the lookout. But he is wrong about that, too.

  • • •

  Máximo hit the man in the throat with the machete. Not the face. . . . They’d been very, very clear about that. They needed the man’s face. The first strike drove the man to his knees, sent his cellphone flying and blood high against the door he’d come out of and all over both of their faces. The man pissed and shit himself, and Máximo hit him again and again, chopping him to the ground. The dead man fell beside the empty horchata cup, his blood filling it. It wasn’t just about the face. They wanted the man’s cabeza. The whole head. Todo.

  • • •

  Later he took a cold shower to get the blood from underneath his fingernails and out of his eyelashes and hair. Then he smoked the weed Lugo had brought for him and drank a cold beer, so cold that ice still hung on it, so cold it numbed the hand that had held the machete. He pulled on his Luccheses and his new green shirt and combed his hair back and sat on Matador’s porch near the paper lanterns, trying to look for stars high above them and lonely girls beneath them at the bar. He was going to stay up way past dawn, until both the lanterns and the stars were pale and dead, anything not to sleep.

  Anything not to dream of todos los ojos. He couldn’t remember the faces of his brothers or his parents. His abuela was a haze of gray hair and curled hands and yellowed fingernails. He dreamed only of los muertos. They all stared at him the exact same way, with their dead ojos, asking the same thing; anything not to answer their question.

  ¿Qué eres tú?

  3

  THE JUDGE

  Most people didn’t know there had been an older brother, Hollis. They rode horses together on the family ranch in Pecos, land that had been his brother’s birthright. Even after Hollis died—an accident—the Judge knew he would never have that land, the soil his father and grandfather had worked and owned and drilled and sweated and bled upon. He shot the horse that had thrown Hollis—drove up and dumped it on the close-cut grass for his father to see, while his mother cried. That’s why he told everyone he was a self-made man.

  The Judge listened to Phil Tanner, hearing nothing, even though his lips were moving. Mouth opening and closing like a big pale fish, standing in front of the computer running his PowerPoint presentation, aiming a laser pointer at the screen. Tanner continued talking to Murfee’s town council, but the Judge kept him turned down, like the volume on a TV.

  It was a talent he had, to make people silent, mute, even when they were right in front of him. To smile and talk from behind a perfect mask so he could simply focus on other, more important things. Like now . . . and killing Duane Dupree.

  The bodies had been discovered far past Valentine, in the badlands of the Ojinaga Cut. The man had been DOA, but the other, a young woman, had survived both the bullets and the burning—their car found on fire down at the water’s edge by a handful of wetbacks making the crossing. Somehow, unimaginably, the woman had crawled free and put out her own flames in the river. Now she was in a coma in El Paso. The wetbacks had come forward because they were just smart enough not to want to take the fall for two federal agents. They probably saved her life, and their reward was a round of beatings and one-way tickets back to Mexico City. They’d each paid as much as $5,000 to get as far as they had, money it would take them years to earn again.

  The story made the national press, a three-day splash. But other than the Dallas memorial for the dead agent, the story had started to fade. Muted, like Phil Tanner now. And that made no sense. The feds should still have been turning Valentine and the other nearby border towns upside down looking for blood, but they weren’t, not publicly. He’d made a few calls, but no one was saying much, not even to him. There were whispers, suggestions: maybe the two had been off the reservation or were secret lovers. A Texas Ranger told him booze was involved. Whatever it was, everyone was treading lightly, and if that was a worry—and it was—the bigger one was that two federal agents were poking around to begin with, and he’d never caught wind of it.

  Even after telling Duane to keep an eye out for just such a thing. The very same Duane Dupree already halfway to crazy like his dead daddy Jamison; leaving behind a trail of blood and fire. Of that he had no doubt, and that’s what he should have seen coming. After all, he’d contemplated killing Duane Dupree before, but there was never a good time . . . a necessary reason. Now was pretty damn close, though.

  Tanner finished his presentation, turned it over to Terry Macrae, the council chair, who brought the meeting to a close. Terry was a decent man, as good as there was in Murfee, not like Phil Tanner, who liked his kiddie porn, the younger the better. He kept it on his school computer, probably spent time with his pants down behind his office door, staring at his pictures and the kids out in the school hallways, even if they were a bit old for his taste. Murfee was full of long shadows, and the Judge knew all the secrets others tried to hide in them. He saved them, held on to them, knowing they all had value. More precious than gold, most became damn near priceless, eventually.

  Tanner liked his kiddie porn and Matty Bulger got a nigger girl pregnant in Odessa. Johnny Mulgrew once beat a hooker to death in Hastings and thought every now and then about picking up another. He’d even dug a plot out at his place, a cellar but more like a cell, where he might keep her for a while.

  His own deputy, Dawes, liked his kiddie porn too, and Carter Lawson’s wife wanted you to punch her when you fucked her. Dana Lawson also liked to step out on her husband whenever he was on the road, which was a lot, and wasn’t above snorting a little coke or meth she’d bought from Eddie Corazon, bought with her mouth around his cock, and inviting a couple of the high school football players over for a good time. Martin Thorn finally broke down and put a pillow on his daddy’s head so he’d just fucking die because he needed that little bit of insurance money for his big gambling problem and a little beaner girl he kept on the side.

  • • •

  He drove around his town in the dark, watching it. Windows down, no matter how cold it might be outside. He was long past the point of questioning why. It could keep nothing from him, hide nothing. He cruised past Anne Hart’s house.

  She looked different now from when he’d first met her, and then later when he saw the news stories and pictures in the paper. He liked her hair color better before, the cut of it too, but there was plenty of time for all that. Tanner and his old friend Dial Montgomery had pulled her teaching and personnel records for him, and the Austin and Killeen police departments had generously shared their investigative files. He had a pretty good all-around picture of Anne Hart, had peeked a bit under her skin and knew what made her tick. It was another gift, like his ability to focus with the weight of the sun. But he still made a poin
t of driving up to her place like this a couple of times a week to see what cars were parked outside. Just keeping an eye on what she was up to.

  In the coming days he’d make a few phone calls, edge around the investigation of the burned agents, although he truthfully didn’t expect anyone to say for certain they’d been spying on his town . . . on him. He’d find no proof or suggestion, no confirmation they’d been here at all, but knew better—and when someone else looked hard enough, they’d know it too, leading them inevitably to Duane, who’d been obedient, loyal, steady until recently. Duane—now gone rabid, a threat to everything and everyone that had to be put down. If he’d made any mistake, it was not dealing with Duane sooner. You always lived with the threat of a wellhead fire in a man like Duane, something finally blowing loose inside his skull once and for all. He’d watched many of those in his family’s fields in Pecos, powerful coils of blood-black fire, visible for miles. Or Dupree was a sulfur flare: burning so damn bright, just to burn out twice as quick, with nothing left to show for it but a handful of bitter smoke and ash. Just like Duane had left that girl on the riverbank.

  A very long time ago the Judge had spent days alone out in the Pecos hills, the badlands. Summer mornings he was gone before sunup, losing himself in the dark before the sun burned it all away. Once he stumbled on an abandoned mining camp, a few shacks choked with weeds and grass; so removed and out of place that he wasn’t sure where or if there was even a shaft. He’d dreamed of all the things he could do with a deep hole like that all his own, a hole in the heart of the world. There had also been his grandfather’s old wooden hunting blind, where he sat when the sun came over the mountains. Where he once took Celia Martin’s cat and drove nails into it after it had bit him. There had been other animals, frogs and fish he took from the creek—so many that the stand itself went sour with the blood of things he had killed there. It stank, a smell so rank it kept the deer away and his father and Hollis were unable use it anymore, unsure of why the wood was always so dark and damp with fresh blood. He took no pleasure in the killing. It wasn’t about that, it never was. He just wanted a peek under the skin, peel it back a bit to see what made other living things tick.