The Far Empty (30 page)

CHRIS

H
e was covered in blood.

The dream goes like this. He walks in darkness, toward flame. Small fires burn the ground, casting monstrous shadows of men. A constellation he uses to navigate, tacking toward them—left, right, left. He breathes hard and he’s as scared as he’s ever been and his knee starts to throb and then all the stars flare, so bright they nearly blind him—do blind him—and the night turns metallic and something parts the air by his face, fingertips drawn across his skin, startling him so much he leaps back, like he’s been touched by a ghost. Another puts a fist through his chest and his heart nearly stops. Then his father is there, at his ear, telling him to just let ’er rip, Chris, just let ’er rip . . . and he does.

•   •   •

He was covered in blood.

But he had returned fire . . .
let ’er rip
 . . . remembering that now,
not just dreaming it; blasting holes through the gathered darkness and running, calling for Dupree but leaving Duane to take care of himself. When he started shooting back at the plane, his Colt had come alive in his hand, glowing like a fiery star of its own.

He took rounds, more than one—his own blood hitting his face. He’d felt it on his hands, leaking out of his heart with every breath. Still he kept firing, trying to run backward toward the cover of Dupree’s truck right up until he hit a snake hole, his already damaged knee protesting—buckling—and then tossing him over the ground.

He rolled over, searching for his gun, trying to reload, scrabbling at the caliche. His hands hurt from nettles and thorns and rocks but still he crawled, not even sure where he was crawling to anymore. He was covered in blood and going to die. So he stopped—the truck too damn far away—accepting that between his knee and his wounds he was never going to make it. He waited for someone to come put a bullet behind his ear and blow all he’d ever been and might be right into the desert, leaving his pieces for a different, distant deputy to find, the way he’d found Rudy Reynosa.

He’d refused to die facedown, though.

Rolling over, stretching out his hands, one last chance to protect himself; reaching out. There had been stars all above him.
God, so many stars
, right at his fingertips.

There had been other things, after that. But it was a movie forever missing a few frames, from all those moments he’d been unconscious or dead . . .

Duane Dupree staring into his open eyes, putting a gun muzzle against one, the way the sheriff had done with that elk, checking to see if he was dead. Lights, maybe a million of them, from a city, or just more stars. His face reflected and distorted in chrome—a fun-house mirror, and the sheriff
watching him with those same mirrors for eyes. Mel crying and her hair brushing his face . . .

All of those moments and so many others, lost, leading up to this one—
now
—and a man he didn’t know, sitting at the end of an unfamiliar bed. No more dreams: a stranger pulling photographs from a manila envelope, shuffling them like cards, waiting for Chris to wake up. He held them up and asked Chris names he didn’t know, so Chris was left only with
Who are you?
Who are those people?

The man smiled and said they were all dead men.

MELISSA

T
he hotel was nice, a lot nicer than most, but still reminded her of all the shitty roadside motels she’d spent so much of her life falling into and out of. She and her daddy had moved a lot, bounced around by work, his mistakes, the ever-present anger. She got to know peeling paint and swimming pools of rusty water and dead crickets—that weird color of neon particular to those places: harsh and hot, yellow and red. Colors promising carnivals.

Outside Odessa they lined the freeway like a string of fake pearls, downwind from the oil platforms and the fires, flickering in the distance. In Galveston they sweated in their own heat, near the sound and smells of the ocean—the hard rock of waves against concrete, salt and rust. She remembered once her daddy sleeping off a one-night drunk that stretched into three days, so she’d walked out on her own with two fingers’ worth of his whiskey in a paper cup to watch the huge cruise and container ships turn out to sea by Pelican Island.
They’d been as big as cities, lit from within, drifting in their own yellow haze, always heading somewhere better. All those different motels in different places, and they were always the end of the same line.

•   •   •

They’d airlifted Chris to the medical center in El Paso. The sheriff himself put her up in the hotel, so she could see Chris most every day, but each day was also a reminder of exactly what she was
not
. She wasn’t
family
. She and Chris weren’t married. She couldn’t make decisions or sign things or agree to things or speak for him—all she could do was wait her turn. She had to ask the sheriff for the information the doctors were unwilling to share, even though he’d told them more than once that it was okay. The only thing that was okay was that moment she had each day to hold Chris’s hand, marveling that he could hold hers back. It felt weak, faint, like holding the hand of a ghost. At least he was there.

•   •   •

He’d been shot three times, lost nearly three pints of blood. It had poured out of him nearly as fast as they could put it in, but when the doctors who didn’t want to talk to her had learned she shared his blood type, she’d offered them as much as they needed before they could even ask, and they took it.

She still didn’t understand all the damage, all the medical jargon, just enough to grasp that it was bad, real bad, though everyone promised it would heal with time and effort. She knew from the experience with Chris’s knee that even after skin and bone were whole again, some things might never quite heal. They’d worry about that later, though. Now Chris was a hero. He’d killed three of the fucking
men who’d tried to kill him—one for each pint of blood he’d lost. Everyone agreed it was a miracle that he was alive, and a credit to the other hero from that night. Chief Deputy Duane Dupree.

•   •   •

She had driven to El Paso escorted by the other Murfee deputies, and they had come up I-10 right along the border, on the razor line between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. In Murfee, she knew Mexico was
right down the way
, across the river, but she never saw it, except in the faces of people working in the mini-marts or driving in some shitty pickup after a long day tending another man’s lands. They didn’t even come into Earlys, staying instead out at that other place, Mancha’s, where on any given Saturday the gravel lot would be filled with cars with Chihuahua plates. But here Mexico sweated and breathed right beside her, piled in little buildings the color of wet cardboard all along the interstate. It stretched into a muddy haze, a huge city but mostly flat, as if it had been crushed by a hand, ringed by small ugly hills where someone had picked out Mexican phrases with colored rocks.

At night, heading back to the hotel, the lights of Ciudad Juárez stretched on forever and forever, almost beautiful, reminding her of Galveston’s huge cruise ships heading out to sea. These lights didn’t go anywhere better, however, just more of the crushing same. Endless and unchanging, everyone over there trying to get over here, and all it took was one look at those shantytowns lurking on the freeway, wasting under the weight of the sun, to understand why.

The men who’d tried to kill Chris—and Dupree too, although it was easy to forget that—had come from such a place. To her, it was a
city made out of nothing but the motels she and her daddy had lived in. Burning it all to the ground was too good for it.

Days passed. Every morning one of Murfee’s deputies—not Dupree, who was back in town—picked her up from the hotel and drove her to the hospital to see Chris for a couple of hours. Afterward, they brought her back or ran her by the store first, even though she had her own car; she’d insisted on bringing it from Murfee, just in case. She knew without knowing that Chris wouldn’t have wanted her completely at the mercy of Sheriff Ross and the Big Bend County Sheriff’s Department.

In between those rides she sat in the hotel, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey and Coke—but not too much—watching game shows and old movies but never the news, and waited to take Chris away.

CALEB

I
know he knows, and still we pretend.

We’ve both gotten so good at it. Maybe it’s the only thing we share, the only thing that ties us together as father and son—our ability and our need to lie to each other. We don’t know how to do anything else.

I didn’t pull the trigger on Chris Cherry, but I might as well have. All the times I’ve held a gun in my hand,
dreaming
. The things I said to him were no different from loading one and aiming it at his heart. Part of me knew the risk, but I did it anyway. I did it for me, for Amé—promising her it would all work out—but it was never my promise to keep. Chris did his best for both of us and nearly died because of it.

So I guess I did shoot my first man, just the wrong goddamn one.

•   •   •

I read in the paper that another millimeter or so and a bullet would have gone right through the left ventricle of his heart. He would have
bled out long before Duane Dupree ever got him back to Murfee, and still, he nearly died anyway. In the
Daily
there was a picture of Duane’s truck, full of bullet holes and empty windows. Chris’s blood was dried all down the side of the open door, and there was a bloody handprint too, against the windowpane. It could have been Duane’s or Chris’s, I don’t know. I saw that same picture on ABC News, CNN. I saw that picture behind my father in an interview he gave to Fox, and it’ll probably win an award.

They’re calling it the
Shootout at the Far Six
—Murfee’s own O.K. Corral.

Duane Dupree is now a hero. And my father is all over TV, saying all the right things, nodding in all the right places. He is smart, brave, concerned. Just like when Nellie Banner-Ross died in our upstairs bathtub. Just like when my mom disappeared. Always fucking pretending.

I found out about the shooting while my father and I were sitting down alone to Thanksgiving supper. I was across from the empty place still laid out for Anne Hart. The phone rang and I thought it was her calling to tell him she’d changed her mind, felt better after all. But when he looked at the incoming number for a long time, I knew it wasn’t her. He stared like he wasn’t sure what he was seeing . . . like he didn’t believe
what
he was seeing. He let it ring and ring.

The TV in the living room was turned down, muted, so everything was silent between us except his cellphone. Anyone looking into our house from the outside would have seen the appearance of normal—a Thanksgiving meal, football on TV, and a father and a son sitting at the table beneath warm lights. But that’s all it was—appearance.
Pretending.
Emptiness without depth. A postcard sent from someone else’s normal life, and nothing more.

He slowly cut the meat he’d hunted; chewed, took a sip of warm water, as his cell continued to ring.

I asked him if he was going to answer it—
because
it might be important
—and he stared back with eyes like a snowstorm, flat clouds blanking the horizon. He put his silverware down, arranged it near his plate while never taking his eyes off me, and finally picked up that goddamn phone. He knew who it was from the caller ID, but even he couldn’t hide his expression when he was forced to say Duane Dupree’s name out loud, acknowledging the other man’s voice on the line.

While he talked to Dupree, I could hear Dupree shouting over the line and saying Chris’s name, again and again, and I knew then my father had learned about our meeting at the stadium, maybe even our few texts, and that because of them—because of me—Chris was dead.

I also knew by the way he stared at his phone so long before answering, unbelieving, that Duane Dupree should have been dead as well.

•   •   •

Amé won’t talk to me now and I don’t blame her. I’m broken, I failed her. I understand, I really do, but it doesn’t hurt any less.

I took her out to the Murfee Lights a few times and we tried to find those phantom orbs. I didn’t take it seriously; for me it was another chance to be near her. But sometimes I think she really did believe in them—standing in the bed of my truck, staring out over the flat when I so much wanted to hold her hand, both of us searching the dark. Maybe we were always searching for different things.

My father is back and forth to El Paso, seeing to Chris, dealing with the media, dealing with the federal agents and Texas Rangers
who’ve swept into Murfee and back out again. He’s dealing with everyone and everything else at the moment but me. But eventually he will. He’ll have to handle his business. Me.

School is almost out for Christmas break, and he’ll be back in Murfee full time. We’ll be trapped together here, we both know it. For all of the hundreds of ways I’ve let him down, I finally let him down the only way he can’t overlook. I betrayed him. Worse than that,
I fucking failed.

I once wrote:
It might be that if I don’t do something, then no one will.
Maybe no one else was ever supposed to. So I waited after school yesterday until Ms. Hart left the building. She walked slow, as if carrying a heavy burden, but her arms were empty. She was wrapped in a long coat and it beat against her legs like the wings of a huge bird. I thought it might carry her away, lift her above the gray clouds and back to warmth and sunlight—to a better place far from here.

She looked like my mom, lost in thought, her hair pulled back. So much so that I stood there for long minutes, lost. I might have to finally accept that’s what my mom did—just flew away to warm sunlight, to a better place far from here.

I caught up to her near the bench that Amé and I often used, and this time she didn’t try to run away from me. I talked, frantic. I sounded crazy. But I had to pour it all out; otherwise I would have only broken down and cried. I told her everything.

She sat in Amé’s place and heard me out, holding back tears of her own. She didn’t even stop me when I told her I thought I was going to need her car.