The Far Empty

by J. Todd Scott

  • • •

  When he was a little older and had an old cast-off mare of his own, he rode along the dry creeks and out on the desert trails, searching for Spanish gold and bones and ghost towns. Riding as far as he could go. Until later, when he stole for the first time, but not the last—taking every thin nickel of Agnes Colfield’s under-the-mattress money and adding it to what he’d already got from selling his old nag for dog food so he could buy a dented Pontiac from Buchman’s and really wander afield. As far as he could go. Truth be told, he’d done more than just pinch Agnes Colfield’s money; he hadn’t left it at that. And her eyes, even thick with glaucoma, had been open and staring right at him the whole time, knowing who it was doing those things to her.

  He wasn’t worried she’d ever tell; knew she’d never breathe a word of it, or nothing anyone would believe. His father had once said she had softening of the brain, what they then called old-timer’s disease, and how it made her tremble and forget things. Sometimes she saw things too, people who weren’t there and never were. She also had a pretty daughter living in Monahans, not that far away really, not after he got that car of his own to drive up there and visit if he ever had a mind to. So he reminded Agnes of that as her brain slipped a gear and she started repeating the girl’s name over and over again, crying out softly for the daughter who wasn’t there, just as he got started.

  Later, they saw each other at the Dairy Freeze, Sunday after church, and he bought her a cone with her own money. She took it from him without a word, her frail liver-spotted hand shaking hard, but only he could see, so everyone watching him that day—watching him buy old Agnes a cone, chatting her up—knew that he was a fine young gentleman, destined to go places. He had been ever since, as far as he could go. So far he could never come back. He drove back and forth across his town, as empty and distant as the heavens above it, with a gun in his lap—a habit he’d picked up so long ago he couldn’t remember when it began.

  4

  CALEB

  I didn’t believe it at first. I didn’t want to believe it.

  I didn’t learn it from my father, of course. I saw it in the Daily like everyone else, with Amé reading over my shoulder. I wanted to find Cherry and scream that he was wrong and somehow messed it all up. I wanted to believe my father or Duane changed the results or fixed the tests in Austin or paid someone to do it. The body at the ranch wasn’t my mother, just another lost soul. It felt like I lost her all over again.

  I’ve always lived with the fear that my dad might hurt me. It was only a few years ago that I finally understood why. Hunting is a big deal around here, and you might think with all the land and the desert that you could pretty much walk out anywhere and shoot just about anything, but that’s far from the truth. Hunting has its own calendar, its own killing seasons, and since most of Texas is state park or private ranchland, you have to pay for the right to kill—like my father, who bought distant acreage from the Sierra Escalera for his deer and elk hunting. It’s remote and untended and he could charge a fortune for other hunters to use it, but he won’t, never has. It’s all his. He built blinds overlooking the feeding areas and creek crossings so he can spot and stalk whatever is in season. That way he can kill without ever being seen or heard. He calls it El Dorado. He told my mom he was taking me with him to check the blinds and fencing and that we would be gone a few days. My mom stood in the driveway when we left at first light, chewing her lip raw, hovering too near the truck even as he backed out. She never said a word, just watched us all the way down the street. It was a long drive and my father made calls until he was out of cell coverage. Then he stared out the window while I read a book.

  It’s hard to say when the road gave way to canyons, when rural became wild. I dozed, already fighting some sort of cold or infection even before we left; woke up to gray skies, dozed again. When my father hunted alone he often used horses from the Sierra Escalera ranch, but we drove straight into the hills, following paths or roads or signs only he knew, high enough that the desert gave way to pine and ridge. We were at the blackened edge of the earth, at the end of everything with night rising fast, when he finally stopped. He sat with his hands on the wheel, watching the trees sway, before he turned to me.

  “I thought I told you to handle that Carver boy,” he said, and I shook my head, at first not even knowing what he was talking about. “I thought I told you to handle that nigger, the one that’s been all over you. The. Basketball. Team. Caleb.” He said it very slow, hitting each word as if I was near deaf, but by then I understood. I was playing JV basketball at the time, not well or for many game minutes, but I was on the team. One of the other players who played my position, Antonio Carver, had been giving me a hard time, pushing me around, calling me names—fag, stuff like that. It was dumb, it was high school, but it had gotten back to my father, like everything.

  He’d already told me a month earlier to take care of Carver, but I hadn’t. My father came to the games because he had to, because it was expected, but he didn’t like sitting there watching me sit at the end of the bench. A Ross in Murfee didn’t sit at the end of the bench ever. My father brought me all the way out to the middle of nowhere to remind me of that, to have that one conversation. The trip was never about hunting; it was always about me.

  The windows were down and the truck was cold, getting colder, and I was scared. The night was rusted, broken and dangerous, and I sat there with my own father, terrified of what he was going to say or do next.

  “Did you know, Caleb, there was a time when I didn’t think you were mine?” I didn’t answer or dare move. “You may not believe me, but that’s not an easy thing to say. I know it’s not an easy thing to hear. That means I’ve had to live with the notion that another man crawled up between your mother’s legs and put you there . . . put you on me. Can you know how that makes a man feel? The only saving grace is that I would feel no responsibility for you, either. I could abandon you, leave you in a place like this, and never look back. Who would blame me?” He sighed, looked beyond me to someplace else. “But I’ve had to accept that you are mine, blood and bone, and therefore every inch my goddamn responsibility. You’re mine to raise and teach and by God, if nothing else, turn into a man.” His eyes were the darkest thing in the truck. “And although before we’re done you might wish it to be different, that’s the way of it now. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded.

  “I told you to handle that business with that nigger and you didn’t. Now you have that little nigger boy feeling comfortable pushing you around, and if you don’t handle your business with him, he’ll push you around forever and so will everyone else. I won’t allow it, so you can’t, either.” He got out of the truck and walked around to my side, opened my door, a gentleman, holding it wide. I clung to the seat until he grabbed my shoulder and tumbled me onto the grass and dirt.

  “It’s okay to be scared, Caleb, I don’t blame you. There are things you should be scared of. A smart man recognizes them, quick.”

  I understood it all, then: One of those things is me.

  “I’m going to get back in my truck and drive away and you’re going to stay here the night. This is your land, or it will be one day, and this is your first chance to get to know it. We’ve got a couple of big cats that prowl up here, old painters that have survived long past their time. I’ve seen their tracks. I could hunt them down, but I like knowing they’re here. They keep the other animals vigilant. Hell, they keep me on my toes, too.

  “You’re going to find a place to tuck in and you’re going to think about this talk. Indian tribes had ceremonies to make their boys into men. This is no different. If you come to understand me and you’re ready to do as you’re told, then in the morning when I come back for you, we’ll make the run the rest of the way up to Sierra Escalera and have a damn fine breakfast, best in Texas. If you don’t tell your mother, I’ll even let you have a dark beer and a shot of whiskey w
ith your biscuits and gravy, which is a pretty damn fine thing, too. But if you think you’re already man enough, then you walk your ass out of here tonight and keep on walking.”

  He shut my door over me and returned to his side of the truck, leaning on the hood. He seemed larger than the trees behind him, and I couldn’t find his face. “If you weren’t my son, I wouldn’t even come back for you. Never forget that.” He slapped his hand on the hood, a sudden noise that carried forever, like he was summoning all of the night’s terrors right to my spot, letting them know I was there. Then he drove away, whistling, with me still sitting on the grass.

  • • •

  I used to read about knights. About kings and castles and how a squire on the night before his knighting ceremony had to hold a vigil, staying awake and praying on his knees on a future life. Not so different from my father’s Indian rituals. Some claimed they had visions or were visited by angels or glimpsed the future as they waited through the night. At the ceremony itself, the knight-to-be dressed in white cloth for purity and wore a red robe over that to prove his willingness to be wounded. Then they put a blade in his hands, to show his willingness to kill. Maybe all I had that night were visions, fueled by fever and sickness as the temperature dropped and the whole sky froze in place.

  I know I curled against the rocks as the big cats screamed in the dark; got so close I saw their eyes on fire, felt their breath. I know I counted my own breaths and waited for shadows to move, and then they did, turning into snakes and other dangerous things that circled me in the night. I know at one point there was rain—quick, cold, like falling glass or broken stars—and I dreamed of a sword that became a gun in my hand. I know that the rain and cold worsened the ear infection I later learned I’d been suffering from, ravaging my left ear, so I’ve never been able to hear out of it quite the same way. I also know I saw my futures there, all of them, and understood then why my father hated me so much—not because I wasn’t his son, but because I was.

  And when dawn finally came, and with it a set of headlights creeping over the hills, I was still right where he’d left me, frozen and pale and shaking so hard I could barely stay upright, kneeling in the muddy tire tracks from the day before.

  • • •

  Three days later I caught Antonio Carver behind school with a sock filled with quarters. He never saw me, never heard me, but I whispered “I’m sorry” with each swing. I broke that kid’s jaw in two places, and after that there was some kind of trouble with his father, who also ended up bloody and battered by Duane Dupree and had to spend a day or two in my father’s lockup because of it. Then they all moved away. I quit the team the next season. It was a week after I attacked Antonio Carver that I stole the first handful of my father’s 5.56x45mm Ruger rifle cartridges.

  • • •

  I don’t think Amé truly believed it was my mom anyway, but she put her arms around me and told me it was okay when she saw how upset I was. She held me tight. She held me for real, and her heart beat against me as she whispered, Un día vamos a volar como los pájaros, muy lejos de aquí. It was something about birds and flying away, and she didn’t mean it. That’s because we’re both trapped here, held back by the hands of our ghosts. She can no more leave Murfee without knowing what happened to Rudy Ray than I can without proving what my father did to my mother.

  I’d been holding my own vigil since she disappeared, one longer and darker than when my father left me on the mountain, right until that very moment I had Amé’s face against my neck and neither of us was quite willing to let go—the moment I had another vision like those from that night, the very thing I’d missed all along. I’d been so focused on my mother, I had never even considered the other possibility, the only other one that made sense, right from the very beginning.

  When I told Amé, she laughed without really laughing.

  She called me dumb, lerdo, even as her eyes said something else. Her eyes hated me for even thinking it, let alone saying it out loud. She believes he is coming back. Just as much as I needed to believe it was my mom buried in the desert, she wouldn’t accept the truth that Rudy Ray never left for Houston or Mexico or a beach somewhere. He’s been here all along, still trapped, like the rest of us. And after I said it, gave it a voice, she pushed me away, hard, and then slapped me across the mouth before I could say it again.

  5

  CHRIS

  After the carnival they saw each other all the time—running into each other at the Hamilton, walking past each other on Main. They always stopped and talked for a moment, about books and the master’s degree he never finished. The places they both knew in Waco or whatever was going on at the school. She was polite and so was he—they both might’ve been sharing thoughts about the weather but knew they weren’t, and each time they stood a little longer, a little closer, and talked for a few minutes more. The last time was in the Hi n Lo parking lot. Dusk—standing together in stray light—as cars maneuvered around them. He’d dug up his old copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes from the boxes still sitting in the hall and had been carrying it around in his truck, waiting for a good time, the right time. She’d laughed when he handed the beat-up book to her, remembering their walk at the carnival. She promised to read it again and give it back when she was done, but he said not to worry about it, it was fine. They talked—she holding the few groceries she’d come for, he juggling the ones he’d bought but didn’t need. Neither feeling their weight.

  He didn’t know what he thought he was doing talking to Anne Hart, thinking about her so much, but if nothing else, she’d been keeping his mind off other things: his problems with Melissa, the body from Indian Bluffs. And that night out at the Lights.

  • • •

  He’d dumped the dashcam video on a thumb drive and never said a word about it, and couldn’t even think of a good reason why. At the time, it just made sense. A week later, when those two agents were discovered in Valentine, he still didn’t say anything, but brought the video home, hidden in his kit bag. He let a few more days tick by. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to look at it; he just didn’t know what was going to happen, what he’d have to do after he did.

  He and Mel had another silent dinner and she was already in bed and asleep when he finally pulled out the drive and downloaded the file to their laptop, pulling up the video. He moused back and forth again and again. Time, winding and rewinding. The two weren’t visible, less than shadows, and he was misshapen, monstrous, leaning over the vehicle, which was also unnaturally curved in the small-field view of the camera. None of that mattered. The make and model and license plate were clear.

  In the picture in the Daily, the Tahoe was a burned-out hulk, the fire’s horrible hands twisting it into even more impossible shapes than the dashboard camera. He couldn’t imagine how “Sara”—Special Agent Morgan Emerson—had crawled out of that thing . . . how she’d survived. Word was she still might not. Agents Braccio and Emerson had lied to him from the get-go. Maybe because they were just sneaking around together, hiding a relationship. He thought about all of his run-ins with Anne Hart, and although it wasn’t the same thing, not by a long shot—not yet, anyway—wasn’t that how it always started?

  “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.”

  But Braccio was divorced, his family in New York. His ex-wife and his two daughters had flown into Dallas for the memorial for his death. He’d seen a picture of them in their black dresses as someone in uniform out of frame, out of focus, handed the older daughter—but still so goddamn young—a folded flag. According to the paper, Braccio’s ex-wife’s name was Sara.

  There was confusion about where they were staying. Some reports put them in a hotel in Valentine, about thirty miles from where they were found on the river—word was they had separate rooms—but the DEA wouldn’t conf
irm it; not where they stayed or how long they’d been there. No one ever mentioned the pair visiting the Lajitas Resort, either, and Chris knew from a call he’d made out there—even before watching the video—that no one named Braccio or Braddock or Emerson had ever reserved a room.

  He’d placed the call from his truck, on his own cell, away from the other deputies. And like saving and then hiding the video, he couldn’t quite say why.

  Valentine . . . Lajitas. You could draw a long crooked line from one to the other, and there was only one place between them. Only one place on the whole goddamn map that mattered . . .

  Murfee.

  • • •

  He was still driving that stretch of road in his head when Mel suddenly spoke, sitting up in bed.

  “What are you doing?”

  He closed the video, hiding it. If she was watching him from across the darkened room, it looked secretive, and in a way, it was. “Not much. Couldn’t sleep.”

  She ran her hands through her hair. “I know. Why do you think that is, Chris? Something on your conscience? Something I need to know about?”

  “No, Mel, no . . . I . . .” She’d been at him like this for days, weeks, picking at his edges, suggesting and not suggesting all at the same time, in the same breath. He couldn’t tell whether she was screwing with him or if it was something else, something specific. He thought of Anne Hart, the last time he saw her, both of them standing close, effortless, rising in dusky light. “Why don’t you tell me?”