The Far Empty (19 page)

ANNE

S
he saw him everywhere now: smiling from behind mirrored sunglasses, passing her on the sidewalk. At school, standing with Principal Tanner. She once thought he was parked outside her house in the dark, but couldn’t be sure. Not Deputy Cherry, whom she was enjoying running into more than she wanted to admit, and would have been happy to see anyway.

Sheriff Ross.

•   •   •

Philip Tanner finally raised it, in a roundabout away. He fell in step with her in the hall as she was heading home, the sound of basketballs echoing from the nearby gym—the pop and pause of leather balls in flight. He was tall, edging closer as they walked through bands of late-afternoon light fading through the windows.

“Sheriff Ross mentioned seeing you back at the carnival, wanted to know how you were getting along here.”

“Well, I hope okay,” she said.

“Of course you’ve been fine, Anne. We’re glad to have you. I’ve known Sheriff Ross since he first moved to town. He grew up in Pecos, came here not long after high school. Murfee’s his true home, at least that’s what he always says. We go back a ways.”

“Neither of you look old enough to have known each other all that long.”

The principal blushed, his thin hair barely concealing the red splotches on his skull. “Thank you. Unnecessary to say and definitely not true, but appreciated nonetheless.” Tanner stopped, lightly touching her elbow and forcing her to stop with him. “Any man would age far too much after going through what he has, what with Evelyn leaving the way she did. He’s held up well. Very well, considering.”

She shrugged, wanting to sidestep talk of Sheriff Ross’s vanished wife. “I’m sure he has. But how do you think Caleb has held up, considering?”

Tanner blinked once, in slow motion, as if the thought had never occurred to him. Maybe it hadn’t. “Why, Caleb’s done fine. It can’t be easy raising a boy alone, but the sheriff’s been there for him.”

“I’d hope so. Caleb’s quiet, but a very bright young man, absolutely no trouble in class.”

“Oh, there’ll be no problems with him. The sheriff wouldn’t have it.”

“I see.” She waited while Tanner smoothed down his tie, over and over again. It was broad, striped brown and blue, and he’d tied it far too short, so it curved with his stomach. She wanted to tell him no amount of fussing was going to make it lie flat.

Tanner wasn’t quite ready to let her go. “I believe you and the Judge have a lot in common. You’ve both experienced your share of tragedy and you’re both moving on.”

Moving on.
That was a popular way to put it, but that wasn’t how it worked. All the bad things that happened to you weren’t just places that you packed up and drove away from, no matter how many times you tried. They weren’t haunted houses you left behind. Wherever you went, you still brought all those memories—all those ghosts—with you.

Beads of sweat popped on Tanner’s forehead, glistening, heavy; threatening to drip down his face. He’d called Sheriff Ross “the Judge” and though it wasn’t the first time she’d heard it, she still found it off-putting. She couldn’t resist tweaking the uncomfortable principal a little, standing in a school hallway trying to set her up with his good ole buddy the sheriff. She half expected him to pass her a paper note.

“Why do you think Evelyn Ross ran off?”

Tanner made a vague noise, as if the why of her disappearance had no more crossed his mind than her son’s coping with it. “I’m not sure I could say.” Then, vague: “She was troubled, I suspect.”

Anne had talked to Lori McKutcheon. Sheriff Ross had experienced “trouble” with more than one wife. “Does he miss her? Sheriff Ross, I mean. Does he miss Evelyn? Now, still?”

Tanner looked lost, like he’d walked into a conversation he’d forgotten he started. “Well, I don’t know that I . . . I’m really not the best one to say. He’s got a son, has to think about Caleb, their future.” Tanner kept messing with his ugly tie. “I imagine he’s come to terms with Evelyn leaving. After all, she’s gone. Not likely to come back, never to come back. When you lose someone like that, at some point you have to accept it, right?”

She couldn’t stop herself. She reached out, pulled his tie straight. “No, Philip, you don’t, really, not at all. You never have to accept it.” She left him standing in the hallway, searching for something other than his suit sleeve to wipe his head. Later, it struck her that he didn’t say he didn’t know or didn’t have any ideas about Evelyn Ross’s disappearance. He just couldn’t say.

•   •   •

In Austin it hadn’t started with a paper note, but a text. She was never one of those people who did a lot of texting. Her parents were too old for it, and for her friends in Virginia it was just as easy to catch up with a phone call. She’d had one or two school colleagues who exchanged texts now and then on a place to meet for drinks or a sale or something about one of their classes, but that was about it.

Most of her texting was done with Marc, and because he’d refused to tap out anything but complete sentences—grammar perfect and punctuation proper—it was more of a nuisance for him than a shortcut. Once he discovered emojis, though, he wasn’t beyond sending the occasional smiley face or tongue sticking out, those goofy symbols somehow more legal to him in a way that LOL and OMG were not, but it was never like they ever burned up thousands of texts between them. Still, it was only natural that when her phone buzzed that day, her first thought was
Marc
. She was at her desk, staying late after class, as she often did.

At over three thousand students, James Bowie High School was the largest school in the Austin Independent School District. Anne almost always stayed until five p.m. or later, working with the debate team or the thespian troupe, preparing the latter for the state one-act competition. With Marc working in Killeen and her in Austin, they
split the difference and lived in Georgetown, halfway in between. They both had to fight a commute, although hers was a bit worse. Staying at school allowed her to get work done, support her extracurricular activities, and avoid the worst of the traffic.

But she didn’t really need to conjure a reason to stay late. She loved Bowie, loved the staff and the students. It was her home away from home, and she spent more hours on campus than anywhere else. She had a small fridge in her classroom where she kept bottled waters and snacks, since things had a habit of disappearing in the teachers’ lounge, and Marc had bought her an XM radio that she put on when she had the room to herself. It wasn’t unusual for a few members of the thespian troupe, seniors mostly, to finish up their homework with her after the last bell before going to rehearsal on the stage at the CPA, the Center for Performing Arts. She learned a lot about them during those sessions—as they joked back and forth, made cell calls, talked about colleges they hoped to get into. They shared their arguments and secrets with her and she felt part of them in a way the other teachers probably envied. They called her Ms. Devane, using her surname as they did with every other teacher, but she was more to them than that.

It was a Thursday and raining hard, water running in blurry sheets down her classroom windows, and about eight of the thespian troupe were in the room. When her phone buzzed, the little LED winking at her, she’d ignored it at first, finished grading an essay on
Darkness at Noon
before finally picking it up, expecting one of Marc’s funny digital faces or a needlessly long question about what they were having for dinner. It was neither, and it stopped her.

U r beautiful.

She had smiled.
She remembered doing that
. And if any of the students had been watching her right at that moment, they would have
seen that silly smile on her face too, right until she realized the text hadn’t come from Marc at all. Curious, she looked at the number, tried to decipher it. It was an Austin area code but otherwise meant nothing to her. The phone was still in her hand when the second message came through:
U r beautiful. I think about u all the time.

She smiled again, held the phone facedown as if hiding it from unseen watchers. The kids in her room had become background noise, static. When she flipped the phone back over, the words were still there. She typed back:
Who is this?

She waited for a response, watching the rain, her students. One of them was sitting away from the others, hunched forward, his dark hair hiding his face, typing slowly, deliberately, on his phone. His intensity held her attention. His name was Lucas, one of her seniors. He wasn’t with the thespian group. As he finished typing his text, he looked up, caught her staring, and smiled.

Her phone buzzed.

•   •   •

First of all it was October, a rare month for boys . . .
Anne flipped the book around, felt its weight, smelled dust. It was a Bantam first edition, second printing, 1963, with a cover of weird pink shapes and monstrous faces and the title marred by a streak of lightning. Trapped in front of it all was a young boy with the cuffs of his jeans rolled up, arms half raised—
Something Wicked This Way Comes
.

Chris said the book had been his father’s, but Anne thought the highlighting and underlining between the covers were probably his, marking the deputy’s favorite lines. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d read the book. Chris had been thoughtful enough to remember their conversation at the carnival and dig it up for her. She’d
give it a go; whether she got through it or not, she’d give it back in a few days, despite his protests, and thank him. She wanted to trade him a book, but all of hers—Marc’s—were donated and gone. After her unpleasant conversation with Tanner and the memories it had conjured of her time at Bowie, she welcomed the distraction. She settled into the couch, thumbed a few pages, careful, since they were brittle.

The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm . . .

Twenty pages later her cellphone rang and she thought about letting it go, figuring it was her parents, when she found herself hoping it might be Chris. They’d traded phone numbers,
just in case
, and although she couldn’t imagine why he’d call, she did want him to know she’d started the book. But it wasn’t Chris or her parents or even Lori. It was Sheriff Ross.

“Anne, so glad I caught you at home . . .” Then he was off and running before she could catch her breath, telling her he how enjoyed seeing her at the carnival and around town, reiterating that if she needed anything—anything at all—she just had to let him know. It made her wonder if Phil Tanner had called him right after their talk in the hallway. Had he told the sheriff how she’d asked about Caleb . . . about Evelyn?

He told her how much Caleb said he enjoyed her class, but she couldn’t imagine the two of them, father and son, ever having that talk. Then he slipped into a story from Murfee’s past, about bandits and horses and Indians. From her debate and drama lessons she guessed he’d told this story a hundred times, a thousand. He had the easy, practiced speech of someone who seems not to have practiced at all; a powerful voice, deep, filling the phone and her room. She felt small listening to him, and wondered what it would be like to be this man’s son—
his wife
—hearing that voice all the time.

At the end, he mentioned getting together for dinner, nothing fancy, just a little thank-you for coming to Murfee and helping out. She held a finger on the page of Chris’s book as headlights passed her window before moving on.
She once thought he was even parked outside her house in the dark, but couldn’t be sure.
He’d called her only phone, her cell.
How did he know I was home?
And then another thought, more insistent: she couldn’t remember ever giving the sheriff her number.

DUANE

’
N
other, Miss Cherry, if you don’t mind.” He pointed at his now empty Dr Pepper, little more than slush. The heat in his hands had melted the ice, clear flames beneath the skin of his fingers making his nails glow. All because of the
foco
, leaving his heart and skin and skull full of copper nails and sparks. When Melissa, Chris’s girl, took his glass to get another, he wondered if it felt hot to the touch.

She’d started at Earlys a week ago, picking up hours for May Doyle, who needed the time to go to Abilene to deal with someone sick. May had worked at Earlys for ten years and knew her way around a bar back. Melissa? Not so much. Still, she was a fine sight better than May. Her body was tight, looked real fine in jeans, with her hair half pulled up over bare shoulders. Whenever she bent down to get something he tried to spy if she was wearing panties, but even with his wolf eyes—and they were sharp and bright tonight—he didn’t quite have the angle. He pegged her as the no-panty type,
wondering what the hell she saw in Chris Cherry. She seemed twice the woman that someone like Cherry could handle or satisfy. She brought him a new Dr Pepper, too much damn ice just like the last time, but he let it slide.

“Just Melissa or Mel, Duane. Chris and I aren’t married, and I don’t want to think I’m old enough for all that Ms. stuff.”

He raised his glass. “Why, no you ain’t. Not atall.” He took a sip, slow-eyed her over the glass, imagined her naked. Imagined a lot of other things, the sorts of things he dreamed about his little Mex girl. His eyes and teeth ached, one so loose he could work it with his tongue, sucking acid, sugar, blood—all that damn
foco
unraveling him and the too-sweet Dr Pepper making his gums sing. “You like it here?”

“Here, as in Murfee? Or here, as in
here
?” She took in Earlys—the old black-and-white pictures, the shot-up stop signs; the antler racks on the walls and the dusty permanent Christmas lights, hanging low.

He tipped his glass to her. “Both.”

She rubbed a rag on the bar top, scrubbing at scratches that would never go away. “How does that thing go? That thing they always say on cop shows? I plead the fifth.”

He yucked a little too loud, snorted in his ice. “It grows on you, you just gotta give it a chance.”

She tossed the rag aside, folded her arms. “Really? And how’s that?”

He tipped his pop, started searching his pocket for his Lucky Strikes. “Darlin’, you just have to see it with new eyes.”

•   •   •

He and Melissa had talked a couple of times in passing—the weather, that sort of thing. But tonight they had the bar almost to themselves, except for Paul Diamond and Mitchel Gary at a corner table deep in
their own talk, so he got her going on a bit about her life before Murfee. She talked just a little about her daddy, a wildcatter, who reminded him of his own and in none of the good ways, if there were any. He lit her up a couple of Lucky Strikes, kept her going.

It was easy too, because she was killing a few drinks of her own when she thought he wasn’t looking. She had a glass hidden beneath the bar, acted like it was pop, like his Dr Pepper, but he could smell the whiskey in it, all over her. No matter how many times she reached down to take a sip, it was always near full. She just kept adding more, talking, smoking his pack away. She didn’t ask anything about him and he was more than fine with that.

•   •   •

He’d seen tire tracks. Heavy, big tread. Deep cuts in the sand and rocks, a scattering of broken cacti—a secret trail only his wolf eyes had been able to pick out, marking the passage of his watchers. He’d followed it down to the very spot on his daddy’s land where they’d set up for a good view of the house, near a small spread of anacahuitas. Sitting there, watching
him
, all those nights. Real, not ghosts. After that, he figured it was time for some watching of his own, waiting for them to return. Ghosts didn’t drive big trucks.

So it had been easy enough, goddamn easy, when the time came, with the
foco
boiling and burning inside him. He saw the man first, thought it was Chava with his gold tooth and machete, before something flickered on/off in his head, a faulty pilot light, remembering then that Chava was gone and had been for a while. And he never saw the girl, not until it was over and he looked into her open and staring eyes and didn’t see his reflection; put his ear to her open mouth and didn’t hear a thing, not a ragged breath or an echoing
heartbeat. So he’d slipped a hand in her shirt just to double-check, not to feel her tits, although he did that too, and she never so much as twitched.

She was stone dead. Had to be, right until the car burned and the first oily flames had touched her cooling body. Until somehow, someway, the fire brought that girl back to life.

He’d thought about visiting the burned girl in the hospital, to stare at her and try to puzzle out how she’d died and come back. Not
back
like his daddy, who was little more than a shit-eating grin and whispers and shadows and old songs in his head—“Tall Men Riding” had been Jamison’s favorite, so Duane heard that all the time now. But back for real,
alive
, or damn near so. He just didn’t understand how it was possible. He for damn sure didn’t see that coming. It was a long drive out to the Cut, way down by the water, and he would’ve sworn she was dead the whole time.

What he wanted to do—needed to do—was talk to the Judge: admit that he fucked up and share some of their secrets again, just like ole times. But the Judge was wary; not too close, not too far away, either. He was keeping his own eye on Duane but not wanting to be seen with him. Duane really thought they’d been through far too much together to behave like that now. Those things he could remember anyway, since so much was burned away like the fire itself from that night; embers through his fingers. That girl hadn’t been just another Chava or Rudy Ray or Delgado, another beaner no one gave two shits about. She wasn’t some nameless wetback in Nikes running through the desert—she’d been a goddamn federal agent. Two of them, in fact, right here in Murfee. Where their blood still remained, staining everything. Blood
he’d
spilled, and dragging them to the river hadn’t changed that.

He hadn’t been in his right mind when he’d done it, but that wasn’t going to make a difference to the Judge. Hell, after all, Duane hadn’t been
right
in a long time, didn’t even know what that was anymore, since he’d been going wrong for so long. And now he’d left behind a real bloody mess, one the Judge would need to clean up, since he couldn’t risk the stink of it leading right to his goddamn door. That meant starting with Duane Dupree, and that’s why the Judge was keeping his distance—he’d already looked into Duane’s eyes and saw their newfound glow. The Judge was afraid if he stood close enough, Duane would see inside
his
head, all his goddamn killing thoughts.

•   •   •

Melissa asked a lot about Chris, about his job. Did he like it? Duane had no fucking idea.

“I reckon so . . . never heard him complain, not to me anyway. He keeps to himself mostly.”

“Yeah, I know. Always has. It’s his way. Too many books. He’s always reading inside his head. Just more . . . lately.” Her back was to him, straightening glassware, but he knew her attention was on him all the same. She was fishing, he just didn’t know for what. Maybe she didn’t, either.

“Sumthin’ troublin’ him?” He flicked ash on the floor. “He’s still not all twisted about that little dustup at Mancha’s, is he?”

A shrug. “No, it’s not that. I don’t think so, anyway. He talked about it a little. He’s just distracted. Coming back here, seeing all these people he used to know. Hell, I don’t know. Thought it might have to do with work. He was going on for a bit about that body he found outside of town, but not so much anymore.”

Duane raised his eyebrows, chuckled. “That thing? At Matty’s
place? Hell, darlin’, ain’t nobody distracted over that.” He waved the thought away. “Not the first dead wetback we’ve found around here. Not the last.” He was about to tell her about a picked-over mess he found last year near the Triple R, still wearing brand-new Nikes, but thought better of it. It was a helluva story, funny, but she wasn’t looking for a laugh.

“Nothing else he’s working on then?”

Duane pretended to think, looking for faces in their cigarette smoke; working his tooth, mouth full of blood. He could have spit it all out into his glass; probably fill it up, too. He was going to dig it out, probably leave a big damn hole in his head, but at least some of the pain would go with it. Maybe that hole would finally release other things too, all the horrible ghosts and shadows and his daddy’s songs. “Not that I can say, not so much.” He slid over another Lucky Strike, edged forward, like they were sharing secrets.

“You want that I keep an eye on him?”

Mel shook her head, dismissing his offer fast. “Thanks, no . . .” But he knew she wanted to say more, so he went back to waiting, swirling the last of the ice in his glass. Still too goddamn much of it.

“Anybody ever come around asking for him at work?” She finally looked at him, sideways. Her own eyes glowed, just too much to drink, but he wondered if she could see into his, which flamed for different reasons. He saw it all then, clear, as if written above her in the Christmas lights—her fears of Chris stepping out on her. That’s what this whole talk was about, what the whole night had been about. Duane didn’t really peg Cherry for the type, even with him talking up the new teacher, but he played along.

“Anybody particular?”

“No, just anyone. At all.”

He pushed his glass forward, spread his fingers on the table. He let her misery drag, let her chew her lip. She was embarrassed for asking and worried, afraid, of what he might say.

“Well now, not so that I’ve seen, not down at work, anyway. But he does keep to himself. You said that yourself. Not sure what he’s up to when he’s not there, and he ain’t there all the time. I can’t imagine what might be keepin’ him from home, though. If you was waitin’ for me, darlin’, I sure wouldn’t be dilly-dallyin’ around anywhere or with anyone.” He winked, letting her know he was being funny, or not.

“That’s sweet, Duane. It’s not exactly like that . . .”

He shrugged his shoulders, like he’d said his piece and there was nothing more to add. “No, darlin’, I’m sure it ain’t.”

She stared, silent, a long time, before going back to her glasses, back to her own thoughts. She’d wiped the glasses down so much they shined like diamonds, gleaming against the dark wood, but Duane knew she still hadn’t wiped away everything that was bothering her.

“There is one other thing . . .” Melissa was still talking.

“And what might that be . . . darlin’?”

She stuck her hands in her jeans, steadying herself. Her eyes were bright, new diamonds like the glasses had been, still lit by the booze.

“I’m sure it’s nothing, just weird. Chris was watching a video the other night, at the house. It looked like something from work . . .”