The Far Empty (12 page)

•   •   •

Cars left and the rides slowed to a stop, all the lights winking out one after another, at least those not already burned out or busted. Chris texted Mel, but there was no answer. He hoped she was asleep. He still had several more hours to go, anyway.

He’d enjoyed talking to the new teacher more than he cared to admit. She came across as smart and funny, sharing his love for words. Meeting her felt like holding a new book, the story within still a mystery, its ending unknown. He could catch up with Miss Maisie or Duane on Monday and find out what all they knew about her, but wouldn’t. That felt like prying or spying, and he didn’t want to do that.

Whatever drove her to Murfee was hers alone, her secret to keep.

MELISSA

O
f course she saw his text. She was sitting in her car, smoking and thinking, just choosing to ignore it. Earlier she’d been in the lot, walking toward the carnival, when Chris and the other woman had come toward her. They’d been easy to spot—even without his hat, Chris towered over most everyone—and they weren’t moving fast, just enough to sidestep the crowds. They paused to watch a young girl throw darts at tired balloons taped to a board, then walked on a bit more toward the carnival’s edge, slowing with each step, stopping in the last circle of light.

And Mel had seen it all from the darkened lot, one hand steadying her on the warm and ticking hood of the car. She’d come out as a surprise. Even did up her hair, spent extra time on her makeup—made a real effort. She felt she owed it to him, to herself; felt she had to hold on to something good because there had been for a time something really good between them. Wanted to believe there still could be.

Only to find him walking, talking, laughing, with a stranger. Mel had no idea who the woman was, had never seen her around. There was a time not that long ago when Mel would have roared right up to both of them, glowing white hot, gotten some goddamn answers, but tonight she’d just stood in the dark and watched.

Watching Chris.

Saw him smile easy and natural, laugh, like whatever that woman was saying might be damn funny. Talk with his hands the way he did when he was nervous or excited. Then the sheriff had come up and Chris had left, but not before sneaking a look back at the woman in the ball cap. The glance had been quick, but it had been enough. More than enough. Mel had already retreated to the car when the sheriff walked the woman out to hers. They stood by it while the sheriff talked, where they were darker shadows. And when the woman finally got in her car to drive away, the sheriff had been left behind in the wash of her moving headlights, weird tattoos of light coiling up and down his arms, across his face like live snakes. Mel had imagined then he’d looked right at her, eyes holding the last of that light, but if he’d seen her, he gave no sign, making his way alone back to the midway—walking with both hands in his pockets, a man without a goddamn care in the world. Afterward, Mel had stayed in the car with the radio off, getting colder by the minute, until the rides died one by one and the carnival lights went dark.

And that’s where she was when Chris’s last text came in. Still sitting in the car, smoking and thinking.

DUANE

T
here was blood everywhere. He blinked, once, twice, before it was gone.

The little house smelled like cat piss, but Duane didn’t own cats. Hated ’em. It was that fucking Mexican
foco
; smoking it left a burned matchstick stink in the air, like the devil himself had popped in for a quick visit. Tough to say . . . maybe he had.

Duane checked for ghosts whenever he got home now, looking in the corners where his daddy usually stood, but he wasn’t there tonight—away on whatever ghost business he had. It was a bad joke, since Jamison Dupree for damn sure never had any real business to attend to while alive. Still, Duane couldn’t shake the sense that something, someone, was watching him. He’d already been up to look more times than he could count, stark naked because his skin itched bad, leaving both the front door and the front windows wide open,
inviting the night in, daring whatever else was out there to join it. Even the devil.

•   •   •

He’d been out to the carnival for a bit, but all the bright lights hurt his eyes, drove him away, all the bells and whistles too loud like gunfire and people screaming.

Not before catching sight of the new English teacher with Chris Cherry, and making sure the Judge knew it, too. The Judge had listened with eyes flat and hard like coins and then walked right off in mid-sentence to find them. Pussy was the Judge’s weakness; always had been, always would be. He made too big a deal about it and let it get all into his head. Not like Duane, at least not until the little Mex girl had invaded his dreams. But before the Judge went off to hunt down Cherry, he’d made a point of his own—told Duane to be smart, keep his damn eyes open,
just in case
. He didn’t say any more than that, but he didn’t have to. That other thing troubling him was more than just pussy.

Chava . . . Rudy Ray . . . the Far Six. Of course Duane would keep a lookout, he always did. And with his new wolf eyes, the Judge had no idea all the things he could see. Duane was not a worrier. Before the
foco
, it had never been in his nature, not even while dealing with the Judge’s crazy beaners at their makeshift airstrip past the Far Six—a long patch of flattened gravel lit only by the dirty light of pie pans filled with coal oil.

Rudy Ray had been responsible for the pans and never got it quite right, not fucking once. All he had to do was make a goddamn straight line, and that had escaped him. The other beaners never complained, though, only laughed a bit about it and cuffed Rudy Ray
around, all in good fun. Rudy Ray had known ’em first, even got one of their special phones like the Judge; he’d been one of them in a way that Duane would never be. So much so, it sometimes seemed they’d all worked for Rudy Ray, rather than the other way around.

He hadn’t liked any of them, but got to know one passing well: Chava, bowlegged and short, with a machete always in his rope-tie waistband and a bright gold tooth, too big for his mouth, right in front. He’d spoken a little English. Chava’s head had been shaved, revealing scars on his skull, deep claw marks. He wore a dozen necklaces, little beads and bones, and when Duane had asked about them one night, Chava said they were gifts from their witch doctor. This witch doctor was half Mex but had spent time in Haiti, and they kept him around to cast curses and poison their enemies: other narcos, the
policía
and the
federales
and the
putos
. This witch doctor lived in a special ranch across the water, where they stored loads before the plane trips and where he fucked all the young girls they gave him on a big round water bed and where he also did his rituals and sacrifices, killing goats and zebras and snakes; once, even a fucking lion cub. He had a huge cauldron, an
nganga
, filled with bones that Chava claimed to have dug out of a graveyard. They’d had so much success and luck that the witch doctor’s cauldron had gotten even hungrier and needed “fresh meat”—live human sacrifice. Chava had helped with that, too.

He’d touched a finger to his machete and rattled the little bones on his necklace, what Duane had thought all along were bird bones or rat teeth but suddenly wasn’t so sure, before Chava had smiled and laughed and said something in Spanish and all the other beaners had joined in, even Rudy fucking Ray. Then a stupid grinning Mex had handed him another burlap bundle and told him in bad English to hurry the fuck up. They’d been fucking with him, probably.

Duane saw Chava two, three times after that, then never again. There’d been someone else, though, a beaner thinner and tall like a fucking skeleton, but wearing Chava’s same necklaces and carrying the same machete like he’d had it his whole life. Even that hadn’t worried Duane, not then anyway.

•   •   •

So the Judge didn’t have to say it, but things hadn’t been square in a long while. He hadn’t sent Duane out to meet a plane at the Far Six in months, near a year—all over lost money and Rudy fucking Ray’s mouth, which should’ve ended up in a fucking cauldron to begin with. After that, the line truly had gone silent on the Judge’s special little phone; dead, like a dropped fucking call, and the longer the silence had stretched, the sharper it had become—a goddamn knife edge. Some days the Judge pretended things were fine, nothing to worry about; others, like tonight at the carnival, he acted spooked, telling Duane keep his eyes peeled, like maybe he was seeing ghosts of his own. Duane reckoned
his
ghosts, at least half of what he saw, weren’t real—just the
foco
working overtime or his own brain casting shadows. The problem was, he couldn’t tell which half was which anymore, and maybe the Judge couldn’t, either.

•   •   •

A coyote made noise, a mama barking at her pups, forcing Duane to the window again, duty gun held low, scanning the cold dark. Starlight collected on his bare skin, made it glow, where he dreamed thick hair might soon grow to join his wolf eyes and his wolf teeth. When that happened he was going to show up at the door of his little Mex girl, huff and puff and really blow her house down. As a boy
he’d once seen a wolf at the far edge of this very property, way past the pecan groves. It had laughed at him before slipping into the endless dark. His granddaddy had built this place far from Murfee’s lights, passed it down father to son; but it wasn’t a true ranch, just seventy-five mean acres of snakebit land worth even less than the house that sat on it.

After Old Dupree had passed, Duane’s daddy bought, cheated, or straight-up stole a few head of Angus, deciding to try his hand at ranching. But they never thrived, because even a young Duane knew you had to do more than turn them all loose and hope for the best.

You had to
care
for them, get your hands dirty. Fill up stock tanks with good water and buy enough feed or plant hay for forage and repair fences, or at least build a few. You had to work the land and tend all the things on it, and those were two things Jamison Dupree was definitely never too keen on. Not his cows; not his family, either.

Duane had wanted to care for those damn cows, desperately, willing to do all the work himself—dreamed of taking a 4-H ribbon with the one he’d named Big Boss. But he was too young, too goddamn small, to do it all on his own. Most wandered off, lost, or got stole back by whomever his daddy had thieved them from. All of eight years old, and Duane had walked the fields alone before sunup, lugging buckets of feed and tap water almost as big as him, looking for those damn cows, calling out the names he’d given them.

The few that remained got bad sick, and with no money for a vet or medicine, they’d dropped where they stood. Breathing hard, laboring, blowing snot, their ribs raised like skinned knuckles on a fighter’s hand. So Duane got his granddaddy’s Smith & Wesson, the very same gun, ten years later, he would put against his daddy’s teeth while he slept off a drunk, and walked around the back field, shooting
them all. He had to hold that big fucking gun with both hands, kneeling next to their steaming heads and breathing in their last breaths; pulling that trigger steady, with their hot blood going cold in spray and streaks on his face. He kissed Big Boss once on the feathery star between his eyes and then blew his brains into the grass.

•   •   •

Maybe there
were
eyes watching him from beyond the very fields where he’d done that killing.

Or it was just a bit of shine off Chava’s gold tooth, come back from the grave like his own daddy. He pointed his gun into the night, figured it was worth cranking off a few rounds and letting whoever or whatever was out there know that he’d seen them. His three sudden blasts echoed and rolled over the caliche and back, stirring up thunder and lightning in his head. Right after that his cellphone rang once, making him jump, so he almost put a bullet through that, too.

He chewed sulfur, tasted it at the back of his throat. He’d snorted up the last of his
foco
two hours ago, right after leaving the carnival, and he was gonna need more soon.

A lot fucking more.