The Far Empty (10 page)

But hard as he’d tried, he’d never really been able to picture that other life, could never give it shape or color. It had remained unknowable, unsolvable—a cruel fucking riddle or joke, like Caroline Cherry’s cancer going into remission before firing back twice as hard. Her eyes had turned black and her veins had disappeared beneath paper skin and there had been a smell around her,
coming off her
, while she desperately held on to hair that had fallen loose into her curled hands.

No, it’d been much easier instead to imagine a life where he had never started a college game at all. Where he’d remained on the sidelines, studying for the classes he enjoyed, reading his books, anonymous even with his size. But of course, in that life, the one that had been so much easier to see—
the
clearer
one
—he never met Mel at all.

That was the price of
that
life, but in that one, he never came back to Murfee, either. He never saw the body at Indian Bluffs and never got called out to Mancha’s and never saw Duane Dupree nearly beat a man to death or saw another man piss on himself as he held the pieces of his face in his hand.

And in that life, he never looked in the locker in the back of Dupree’s truck.

•   •   •

Chris needed to wander a bit more, kill some time and let the sun finish going down around him; watch the sky change a hundred colors and then become no color at all, just black. Then he’d call Mel and try to tell her something about this day, and when he felt sure the department had cleared out he’d send another e-mail to Austin, maybe even make a call himself to check on the forensic ID. In the meantime, he’d compare the pictures he’d taken of the FlexiCuffs with the memory of those he’d seen in those few seconds in Duane’s truck locker . . .
oh fuck, so damn close
. He wanted, now more than ever in ways he couldn’t easily explain, to put a name and face and story to that mystery in the desert.

Skeletal hands held together tight by a thick zip tie, stretched out like a sunning snake in the upturned earth.

He knew he couldn’t escape what he’d seen in Dupree’s truck; not damning alone, maybe, but damning enough. He was bound tight to it now, with cuffs of his own.

CALEB

A
week had passed before Amé finally asked me about the body.

We were sitting high in the bleachers of BBC’s stadium, a concrete monster like a starship hovering at the edge of town. The field was all activity, an anthill, with the team preparing for the upcoming game against Presidio. Balls flew back and forth in long arcs over the green turf and distant voices and shouts carried up to us, words lost to the wind. She sat close, stealing some warmth, wanting to know what I thought about what they’d found out at Indian Bluffs.

I know what she really wanted to ask, though.
¿Es tu madre?

I’ve never said to her that I suspect my father had a hand in my mom’s disappearance.

Hinted at it, like I hint at so many things in our talks, but we both do that—all these secrets and questions within questions, nothing real. If anyone understands loss, though—understands losing someone without closure, without answers—it’s Amé.

His name was Rodolfo, Rudy. Everyone around here called him Rudy Ray. She last saw her older brother after my mom disappeared. He was a Border Patrol agent, a
green shirt
, driving his little white green-striped truck on the hunt for illegals crossing the Rio Grande, particularly in the Ojinaga Cut. The Cut was once part of a border dispute settled back in the seventies when the river changed course, Mexico taking one piece and Texas another, accomplishing nothing but swapping desolate Indian land back and forth. Unlike Amé, Rudy had spent a lot more time over the border, whole summers down south, and even felt easy about visiting family and friends in Ojinaga, Cuauhtémoc, and Delicias. He was fluent in both languages and knew the area and the people, so he was a natural fit for the Border Patrol. His parents had been proud of him, Amé twice as proud.

•   •   •

Amé’s dad works at the Walmart over in Fort Stockton and her mom works at the Supreme Clean right on Main. I see Amé’s mom, Margarita, all the time when I drop off my father’s uniforms at the cleaners. She’s a tired, round woman with gray shot through her hair like stray dust. I once heard Duane Dupree say in passing she used to be a stripper in Ojinaga, but that’s hard to imagine, and I’ve never asked Amé about it.

Rudy Ray was short like his mom, good-looking, with thick hair and a wisp of a mustache and goatee that Amé said he thought made him look older, but that she was always trying to get him to shave. He was about Dillon Holt’s age, so I knew
about
him more than I actually knew him; he moved out of Murfee and got an apartment in Nathan not long after high school. He spent some weekends in Midland and others across the border in the bars along Libre Comercio, wearing pointed fake-ostrich-skin boots, wide-open imitation Versace shirts,
and big enamel belt buckles painted gold and silver and shaped like a bull’s head or crossed revolvers. Amé showed me the pictures on her phone, including one of him standing by his black and chrome Dodge Charger with the custom paint job—a bright green snake coiled along the rear quarter panel. I thought both he and the car looked ridiculous, and it was that damn ugly Charger that started the trouble for him.

•   •   •

Rudy Ray had made good. He got a decent job that didn’t involve serving food or cleaning shirts or working on another man’s property. Still, it was a government job—he was never going to get rich doing it—but Rudy Ray
played
rich, acted rich, more so with each passing day. Whenever he drove that Charger through Murfee, people said he had to be involved with the narcos across the river—that he’d gotten tight with them through family or a girl in Ojinaga, a dancer whose job it was to find easy men like him. And maybe it had started small at first, just a few words about checkpoints or the names of agents and inspectors. Then later, looking the other way as loads came across the border, before the Ojinaga girl or the people who owned her (and by then, Rudy) convinced or forced him to carry the loads himself—tape-wrapped bundles hidden beneath a blanket in the backseat of his BP truck. People whispered these things all the time, people who’d gone to school with Rudy Ray and remembered him from town and saw him driving that chromed-out Charger or flashing a thick roll while buying a round of Montejima Reposado shots. Amé knew her brother had also heard the whispers, ignored them, even as she was afraid that the Border Patrol might start hearing them, too.

He swore to her it was nothing,
nada
, even as he gave her a couple of thousand dollars to keep in a box under her bed for parties and
school dances and dresses—things that Amé never does, clothes she’s never going to buy. I think Rudy Ray had imagined a much different life for Amé from what she had ever imagined for herself.

•   •   •

He called her late one night, admitting there might be a bit of real trouble, but that he would handle it. He’d found a way out, so no need to worry.

No need to worry at all.

She could still be proud of him, and he promised to move her to Houston with him when it was all over. But until then he made her promise not to talk about the money under the bed or show it to anyone. He sold the Charger right after that, but couldn’t shake his problems or the suspicions.

In his last call to Amé, he said he might be away for a while. He wasn’t sure, might slip south for a bit and see the sights, spend time on the beach watching the blue ocean, but he wouldn’t say what beach, what ocean. He made it sound like a vacation, even as she begged him not to go. He told her to be careful, do well in school, marry a nice gringo and have lots of gringo babies. He told her never to go to Ojinaga or Cuauhtémoc or Delicias; to stay on this side of the border,
always on this side of the border
.

Then he was gone.

•   •   •

That’s what I know, what I suspect. It’s everything I’ve pieced together from the things she’s said and the silences in between. And she really believes he is coming back, talks about it more than anything else. She thinks he’s going to come for her and drive her away to
Houston, in a car far classier than that damn Charger, which was cursed anyway. Amé once said her mom was a witch—a
bruja
—who won’t teach her any magic. I think she believes in that stuff, spells and spooks and curses, just like she believes Rudy Ray’s coming home.

And because I wanted to believe right along with her—so badly wanted to help her—I once risked raising it to my father. I asked if he or Duane Dupree or anyone in the department knew anything about Rudy Reynosa.

We were eating dinner and I broke the silence with the question. My father had looked at the ceiling, claimed he didn’t remember Rudy
specifically
, so couldn’t really say one way or another anything about him, but thought Duane may have ticketed him once or twice in that Charger, ugly as sin and running way too fast out by the stadium. Then he wanted to know why I cared so much about a damn beaner, staring me down with a beer parked halfway to his lips. I let it drop.

I didn’t believe him. Dupree knows Amé’s family, and my father has always known everything and everyone in Murfee, but still, that was the extent of my bravery—one fucking question.

I wonder if Rudy Ray ever saw the ocean?

She believes he is coming back.

I never talk about my mom coming back, ever.

•   •   •

When Amé finally asked about the body at Indian Bluffs, she was really asking about
me
. Asking but not asking. Watching without watching—her eyes dark as spring wells, bottomless behind the smoke of another one of her ever-present cigarettes. I know from Miss Maisie that Deputy Chris Cherry sent the body to Austin, so I’ve been waiting along with him, just like everyone else.

Miss Maisie tells me stuff because she’s old and likes me and doesn’t know any better. She’s worked radio dispatch as long as I’ve been alive, and is the only reason I know a damn thing at all about what goes on inside the sheriff’s department, my own father’s kingdom. Miss Maisie, and the local newspaper.

The
Murfee Daily
’s done one story and will do another. That first featured a black-and-white photo of Matty Bulger standing over a slash in the ground and a loose piece of yellow evidence tape trapped beneath his boot, his hands raised and captured right at that moment in a “Why me?” gesture. It was accompanied by a photo of Deputy Cherry next to his Big Bend County truck, awkward and uncomfortable in his uniform, looking away at something or someone in the distance. I don’t think the picture was even taken out at Bulger’s place, probably staged later, like a lot of things in Murfee—they feel staged, close to real, but not quite. Deputy Cherry comes off as decent, different from the other deputies and definitely no Duane Dupree, but he hasn’t been back in Murfee for long and I don’t know how close he is to my father. I’ve been nervous to talk to him, much less ask him anything about Indian Bluffs.

But when Chris Cherry gets his answer back from Austin, all of Murfee will finally know what I’ve believed from the beginning—it was my mom he found buried out there.

So that’s what I told Amé when she asked me about the body as I took the cigarette from her and finished it off. My mom has lain there for the past year, lost, waiting; waiting for someone . . .
for me
 . . . to finally find her.

And Amé didn’t ask anything else, just went back to watching the wind pull and tug at streamers on the goalposts.

ANNE

B
ig Bend Central was losing badly. She came to the game because it was expected, and honestly, she didn’t mind getting out of the little house for a bit. Win or lose, this game and the carnival afterward were a big deal.

She’d seen all the stuff set up in the field outside the stadium, the games and the vendors and the rides. Most of her students would be at the homecoming dance after the game tonight, but tomorrow they’d be out on the midway, trying to win those huge garish stuffed animals—purple bears and pink dogs and green monkeys—sneaking in flasks to spike the silly-shaped soda cups they were selling for five dollars a pop.

As for the game itself, Anne knew how serious Texas was about its football, and Murfee was no exception. The stadium seated over eight thousand—a huge concrete bowl open at both ends to knots of sweet acacia trees. It had a full press box and reserved seating and the
latest artificial turf and a scoreboard with video replay. What it did not have, not at the moment, was a winning team. BBC was down early just as they’d been in nearly every game of the season. But the stands were full, and under the huge lights, with everything polished and painted and perfect, the entire stadium
glowed
. She could only imagine what this all looked like from high above, the surrounding darkness of the desert anchored by all this heavy light—a great bonfire, burning and bright, trying to escape skyward.

Marc would have loved this crazy stadium in the middle of nowhere, the circus atmosphere. Electricity—excitement—ran through the bleachers, through the entire town, even as Presidio scored another touchdown and BBC’s coach screamed on the sidelines and tossed what Anne imagined must be a very expensive headset into the stands.

She was sitting with Lori McKutcheon and her small, silent husband, as well as two other teachers. They’d been nice to wave her over, passing small talk back and forth and including her in their chatter about the school, the carnival, the team. Lori’s husband said one thing and one thing only—BBC sure missed Chris Cherry—drawing nods and agreement from everyone around them. Anne pieced together that this Chris had been a great quarterback in Murfee and had even played some in college, but was back home as a deputy sheriff. The same deputy she’d read about in the
Murfee Daily
, something about a body discovered on a ranch. No one cared about that now. Instead, the town just wished he could trade his deputy’s uniform for a football one again.

•   •   •

She burrowed into her jacket, her cold breath adrift. Lori talked, and she nodded in all the right places and said more or less the right
things, a well-honed ability since Austin. She was here but not here, a ghost, turning in a lifelike performance; maybe a mime, forever pulling at invisible strings and failing to escape from invisible boxes.

At one point she thought she saw Caleb Ross sitting with Amé Reynosa, but when she looked again, they were gone. She lost herself in the game, the rise and fall of small voices around her. There was another reason she was glad to get out of the house, not face the thought of being alone. She knew that on this night more than any other, she needed to drop into this ocean of unknown people, let the tide of their lives and conversations take her away. Tonight she needed to hide. There was another cheer, a roar like pounding waves. Lori said something to her and Anne smiled, not knowing or caring what she smiled to.

She’d already deleted the inevitable cellphone messages from her parents, unheard, because she knew what they would say, and she’d spent the whole day keeping busy, trying to ignore the calendar and the time. After the game she was going to walk the midway a bit, buy one of those stupid soda cups or an elephant ear, let herself get cold and numb until she couldn’t feel her fingers . . . until she was so frozen by the night’s cold, hard edges that the tears she’d been afraid of all day would be little more than stray frost on her cheeks—invisible, unable to flow. She’d stay away from the house until late, well past the witching hour, and then race her fears inside and take a couple of Ambien or something even stronger, pray she slept until tomorrow afternoon; so by the time she finally struggled awake, this particular day—this awful date—would already be behind her again for one more year, locked away in a box with all the others, and all the others to come.

But it was never that easy, no matter what games she played with herself, no matter what silly tricks she tried. The date
always
fucking
won; impossible to outrun, to hide from. No amount of deleted messages or pretending ever made it truly go away. Because there was always that one moment,
like right now
, even as she tried so damn hard to pay attention to Lori’s stories about her sister’s lying, cheating husband, that she instead suffered an all-too-brutal flash of Marc, her once husband, all bloody and broken, with his hands reaching for her from their open front door.

Reaching to protect her, to shield her, as she tried to help him stand because he just couldn’t do it anymore . . . knees buckling and his face pale as he lay dying against her. Feeling the last breath he ever took against her face, eyes blinking as his soul passed by her . . . through her and beyond. Blinking away tears.

So now here she was again, against her will blinking away the goddamn tears she’d held back all day. Now turning her face from Lori and the others, facing upward, to blind herself in the stadium lights.

At 8:45 p.m. a lifetime ago, Anne Hart, then Anne Devane, had felt her husband Marc Devane die in her arms trying to protect her, never understanding she’d never really been the one in danger at all.