The Far Empty (27 page)

ANNE

H
e called and asked if they could meet outside Murfee, away from town. When she asked where, she heard him thinking on the line before he mentioned a place called the Lights. Wondering if she knew where that was. She said she did.

She came late after school and he was there before her, sitting in his truck, heater running. The little gravel lot was empty except for a few crushed beer cans, loose paper blowing across the ground. Also, two beer bottles standing upright like lonely sentries on the table under the pavilion, catching and then throwing a last bit of winter sunlight. If they talked for any length of time, night would find them, and maybe she’d see these mysterious lights after all.

As she got out of her car there was a train coming toward them, slow and lumbering, but it was too far away for any sound.

“Hey,” Chris said, surprised when she got in and handed him
back his book. He turned it over in his hands, back and forth, like he’d never seen it before, and then placed it up on the dashboard.

“How did your hunting trip go?” she asked.

“Bloody.”

“Oh.” She glanced around the tight interior of the truck, at all the police gear, as if there might really be blood there.

“Thanks for coming all the way out here. I know it’s weird. I didn’t feel comfortable in town.”

She smiled. “Yeah, I know that feeling.”

He shifted, facing her, and sitting this close to him in the car, she got a sense of how big he really was. He hadn’t shaved, not recently, and a fine line of hair ran along his jawline, pale, almost blond.

“I’m going to tell you some things and ask you a couple as well,” he said. “I hope you’ll hear me out first. And look, you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. I’m just trying to understand exactly what I’ve gotten myself into.”

“That sounds serious. Are you in trouble?” she asked.

He shook his head, but she didn’t quite believe him. “It’s not so much that I’m
in
trouble as that I’ve stumbled on some, if you get my distinction . . . if there really is one.” He paused, the train lumbering toward them. “And I think it involves you too, Anne.”

Anne held her breath. “God, I don’t need trouble, Chris. I came here to get away from it.”

“I know,” he said. “Or I guess I know now. Sheriff Ross told me all about it, his version anyway. How he met you before. And well, that other thing, with your husband and that student. I’m so sorry.”

Breath escaped her; she felt herself get small. There was no avoiding it. “I wish
he
hadn’t told you, not like that.”

“It’s okay. You can tell me here now, any way you want.”

Now she heard the train, felt it, as it went by. After the last car had passed—the last of the sun gleaming on its metal skin—she finally turned to him again. “His name was Lucas Neill.”

•   •   •

She told him about that day in her classroom, with the rain pounding outside and his very first texts. She didn’t leave anything out, right up to the day she’d gotten so worried and finally broke down and returned his messages. How they met outside a Big Lots and he’d tried to kiss her, and how she said no. How she hit him across the face and left him angry, frustrated. That was what she really wanted Chris to understand—that no matter what people thought, no matter what the news hoped to report (and went on ahead and suggested anyway, because it made a better story), she never had any sexual relationship with Lucas Neill.

She’d made mistakes—God knows that, a hundred of them—let Lucas get too close, listened too damn much, but she had never crossed that line. She told Chris how much she’d loved her husband, and how she sometimes wondered if she’d just gone ahead and slept with Lucas Neill, if he might still be alive. It was a silly thing to believe—to beat herself up over—but it haunted her anyway.

“A couple of days later the doorbell rang,” she said. “He rang the damn doorbell, like he’d been invited over.” She could still hear the cheap sound of that doorbell. She heard it all the time.

“It was this time of year, right around Murfee’s Fall Carnival, when you and I first met.” But that felt like forever ago. “Marc and I were talking about dinner, of all things, a simple conversation, like everyone does every day. It was late, but I wanted to go out and get
something and he wanted to heat up hot dogs, scrounge around the kitchen for leftovers. There was a game on TV he wanted to watch. I can’t even remember what it was, who was playing.” She wondered for a moment if it was possible that Chris had been on TV that night.

“Anyway, I was irritated, because he knew I didn’t like fucking hot dogs and I just wanted to go out, someplace stupid like Olive Garden or Red Lobster, and we were bickering. And then I got even more irritated when the doorbell rang and he stopped in mid-sentence to go answer it and . . .”

It’s Lucas, she knows that, even though his face is dark inside the hood of his sweatshirt. He says something, but it doesn’t really matter because the gun is louder, oh so much louder, and she is screaming both
Why?
and
No!
at the same time and Lucas is both laughing and crying and all Marc
is doing is reaching for her to protect her, to shield her, and then she’s trying to help him stand up because he just can’t do it anymore, as Lucas fires again into the back of Marc’s head and his knees buckle and his face turns pale while he dies in front of her. She feels the last breath he is going ever to take against her face and it makes her eyes blink as he passes through her and Lucas is still standing there aiming the gun at her and then finally thank God he puts it in his own mouth . . .

“He said later the plan was to shoot Marc and then himself. He had a moment’s thought about shooting me, but it didn’t matter anyway, because he didn’t shoot either of us. Only Marc, only my husband.”

She told him the rest, all about the trial and how it broke the remaining pieces of her life. Lucas Neill was convicted and sent to Austin State Hospital, a psychiatric facility. She admitted she read an article recently about a spike in patient-on-patient violence at Austin State, and how she hoped someone there was hurting Lucas Neill. She had dreams about that, hated herself for them. She tried a joke,
how it often felt like Lucas wasn’t the only one sentenced to that place, but she was crying when she said it.

•   •   •

“I guess Sheriff Ross remembered me from that stupid awards ceremony and the dinner after, then all the news following Marc’s death. When there was an opening at Big Bend he helped make it happen. I don’t know how many strings he pulled, but enough. And I needed it, because I needed to get out of Austin. I needed to get away.” She wiped at her face. “You know, once I got here, a part of me suspected that he was waiting for me, just waiting for the right time to . . .”

Chris stopped her. “Anne, I understand. I do. Look, this thing with you and the sheriff? That’s all . . .” He was struggling, searching for the right words, if there were any. “Well, it’s fake, like the carnival . . . the Pandemonium Shadow Show from the book. With the sheriff, with everything he says and does, there’s always this smoke, right? It hides everything, and you have to feel your way through it slowly, to see the real thing at its heart.”

Chris shook his head, still not sure he’d said it right. “But my dad used to say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

•   •   •

It was his turn. He told her about the body at Indian Bluffs. He told her that Caleb Ross and his friend, America Reynosa, believed that body was America’s brother, Rodolfo—a former Border Patrol agent—and how he believed that now, too. He thought he might even be able to prove it, all because of an old sports injury. Not his, Rudy’s, and if nothing else, it was a start. Pointing him in the right direction, so he could keep feeling his way ahead, searching for the real thing.

He told her it was also very possible that Chief Deputy Dupree was Rudy’s killer, and that it was done with the sheriff’s knowledge or on his orders.

“Caleb wouldn’t go quite that far, but he said America believed it, the part about Duane, anyway. And he’s convinced his dad is at the center of it all.”

“God, Chris, why?”

“Not sure, but it might also have something to do with those two federal agents that were attacked, their car set on fire.”

Anne remembered that.

Chris said, “You know, more smoke, this time for real.” Then he pointed out to her where he was parked the night he pulled over Darin Braccio and Morgan Emerson.

•   •   •

“Caleb is worried about you . . . for you. He didn’t quite come out and say it that way . . . but, you know the sheriff was married before, right?”

“Of course, his wife, Evelyn. Caleb’s mother.”

“Well, before Evelyn, there were others. Nellie died in the bathtub in their home, the house he and Caleb still live in. There was another one, early on, ran off to El Paso, I think.”

“I heard those things.” Her expression must have been clear even in the truck’s dark, as Chris smiled, cold.

“Yeah, the sheriff hasn’t been too lucky with love. All just coincidences, right? But between his wives and now Rudy Reynosa, we have a lot of people running away from Murfee. . . . You know, disappearing.”

“More smoke,” she said.

“Yeah, a lot more.”

They both sat for a long time, silent. She understood now why Caleb had been trying to talk with her, following her around. He was keeping an eye out for her, trying to protect her. Her boy knight in shining armor.

She wasn’t sure whether she grabbed Chris’s hand or he grabbed hers.

•   •   •

“Okay, so what does it all mean? What now?” she asked.

Chris touched the badge on his shirt, a gold star. “I’m not sure. Not yet. It could be a whole lot of nothing.”

But she knew he didn’t believe that, not even close. “Are you upset I didn’t tell you about Sheriff Ross before . . . that I knew him? How I ended up here . . . about my husband?”

“No more than you’re upset that I haven’t told you about my girlfriend. Her name is Melissa.” He released her hand, pointed at the book on the dash. “But it’s about the books, right? We both just love talking about books.”

She laughed, and in that moment, he could have fallen forward to kiss her, his big hands finding hers again and pulling her to him, where he’d feel twice as warm as the car, his own gravity holding her close. Safe. She would have let him, wanted him to. But Deputy Cherry, with his girlfriend Melissa at home waiting for him, didn’t do that, and it meant twice as much to her.

He finally said, “Be careful, okay? Just do that. And I’ll let you know how things go.”

“I will. But you’re the one who needs to watch out.”

“Fair enough. Oh, and he invited you over for Thanksgiving, right?”

“Yes, he did.” She was hopeful. “Are you going too? I wasn’t sure how to get out of it. The sheriff isn’t an easy man to turn down.”

He pulled the book down from the dash, thumbed the pages, and then carefully slid it between the seats for the drive home, or wherever he was going. “No, I’m not. But you’ll be having elk for supper.”

THE JUDGE

T
here was a clock ticking all the time in his head.

If he questioned it, which he really didn’t, he might think it was just the memories of that old West Country Longcase clock his grandfather had been so proud of, dominating the foyer of the big ranch house outside Pecos. It had been mahogany, shined so bright each and every day by the nigger house help he could see his face trapped in the thick wood. He’d been switched in front of it, knelt down by both his father and his grandfather at one time or another—Hollis sometimes looking on—with their rough hands on his neck, leaning hard into the birch rod and bloodying his shoulders, his back, his ass.

If he thought much about that, which again, he didn’t, he might wonder why he remembered the beatings in front of that damn clock, but never the reasons that had him kneeling there to begin with.

He sipped coffee while Caleb finished breakfast and got ready for school. He timed the boy’s movement to the ticking in his head, found him always moving too goddamn slow. He knew Caleb had let someone in while he hunted at El Dorado, guessing it was that wetback girl he’d been sneaking around with. She’d changed the very air trapped in the house; if he stood close enough to the boy, he’d probably smell her on him. He both cared and didn’t. Not so much the boy would try such things, but that he imagined himself safe enough to get away with them.

Like his truck, or his phone. The phone had been in his mother’s name, her account and Caleb’s held jointly down at Murfee’s only cellular store. The boy paid the bill in cash from his allowance and always in person, no records ever showing up at the house. He
thought
he could keep a handful of secrets that way, but the boy was wrong. Caleb’s life was like one of Evelyn’s snow globes, the ones she used to collect and set out at Christmas. All that occurred under the boy’s clear heavens were the movements of his hand, tilting it one way or another. They were his acts of God, granting an illusion of freedom. Caleb might look up and see sky, but he’d never touch it—never know it wasn’t real.

He dealt with his son no different from how he might a horse, giving just enough rein to keep the animal content . . .

Once Caleb was out the door, still silent, he checked his watch. In an hour he’d visit his old friend Mimi Farmer down at the Verizon store. She’d been the manager for more than a decade, and worried about Caleb, and knew how much
he
worried about and loved his only son. She’d been kind enough several times in the past to pull up Caleb’s phone records so he could keep an eye on what his boy might
be up to. She knew it was a father’s duty. No reason she wouldn’t do it again.

•   •   •

Later, he sat in the truck. It was cold, Thanksgiving the next day. The sun was distant, retreating, a hint of itself. The desert was always cold at night this time of year and the days warmer, but not now. He couldn’t remember a spell of weather like this—this soon for this long. Cold all the time. Where the sun was farther away, the Chisos and the Santiagos felt closer, clearer. They were all bright and dark, capped with white snow.

Men who wore guns, like his grandfather and his grandfather before him, once rode at the feet of those mountains, carving a place for themselves out of the very rock. They fought and died and killed in the shadows of the peaks, down along the Rio Grande’s muddy banks—lives worth no more than whatever they had in their pockets. The strong rode on, the weak did not. It made sense. It was the natural, violent order of things. They’d had plenty of blood on their hands, but the blood washed off eventually.

He’d always longed for that clarity of action and purpose, that awful, brutal simplicity. He’d practiced it when possible, but it was not always easy.

He neatly folded the papers Mimi had given him, a crease as sharp as an axe blade, sharp enough to draw blood if he held it wrong. He put them in the glove compartment. There were things he needed to do, calls he needed to make—a final dealing with Duane and more; clarity of action and purpose, brutal simplicity. Blood washes off.

He sat in the car with that ticking still in his head, even though
the clock and the house that held it were long gone. They’d both burned, along with his grandfather in his bed—blind in one eye and too weak to rise as the flames found him. Flames so hot he’d melted to the bed’s frame, so you couldn’t tell bone from iron, blood from ash. No one had ever figured out how the fire started.