The Far Empty (4 page)

MELISSA

S
he hated nearly everything about the place, but mostly the smell. That constant wet, heavy stink of cows—the high, ripe tang of cow shit. It was everywhere and it hung in the air and crept into her food; she even dreamed of it. It reminded her too much of the oil fields, of the stench of burning gas and rusted metal. Chris kept telling her it was all in her head, and maybe he was right. This place was all up in her head, holding her hostage.

•   •   •

Mel took another drag on her cigarette, tried to inhale all the smoke, but even that did little to make the cow shit go away. The cigarettes were her secret, stowed away like pirates’ treasure around the house, even though Chris must have known about them and just wasn’t saying anything. He must have smelled them on her too; ignoring it like he did the cow shit stink, figuring the fight wasn’t worth it. Since
they’d come here, back to his home in Murfee, a lot of things hadn’t been worth a fight.

Except now . . . except for
the body
. Chris was all wound up about that in a way he hadn’t been wound up about anything in a long time. He was excited to play detective, wanted to convince her that this wasn’t just any dead body, not just one more wetback hauling ass across the caliche and scrub and dying on the way. Evidently, finding dead Mexicans was kind of a common occurrence around here. Is that what happened to people who tried to escape this place? And was that what she really smelled all the time—the dead who’d never made it? No, for Chris this wasn’t just another death, but possibly a murder, and somehow that made all the difference in the world.

•   •   •

Mel fished out another cigarette, eyeing her chipped nails and rocking the back porch swing with her pale bare foot. Chris’s dad had put up the swing with his own hands a year or so before Chris’s mom died of cancer. It was held together by carpentry nails; the cushions were faded and thin, and the floral pattern on them now looked more like bloodstains. She could pick out the uneven scratch marks where over the years Chris had worked at the wood with a penknife. It was easy to imagine him out here sitting, thinking, whittling. And his mom before that, wasting away, wrapped in blankets they now kept on their own bed. By the time they’d come to Murfee, his dad was dead as well, and Chris had the house free and clear.

It was a small, sunburned affair, peeling paint, with a backyard much bigger than the house itself. It was filled with boxes of his dad’s old books, dusty and dank and smelling only slightly less bad than the cow shit. The whole place needed so much work, and Chris had been
at it for a few months now, tinkering here and there, with little purpose or progress. He’d promised her a pool, and there was zero to show for that. The backyard remained a stubborn flat expanse of grass boxed in by warped fencing and surprisingly tall, modern lights: stadium lights, rising high above the grass that Chris actually did tend, some. He cut it short, but it was still smooth and a deep emerald green. It looked cold, polished, unreal—reminding her even more of the actual pool she didn’t have. At least this she understood. Chris had let it slip once, how he and his dad had thrown footballs out here all the time. They’d needed all the space because Chris had a hell of an arm, every toss a moonshot, and his dad had put the lights up so they could throw at night—back and forth, back and forth—over all that green grass.

His mom watching them both from the porch, this very swing. Melissa had come to accept the swing and spent more time on it than inside the house. The porch, the swing, was her place now, where she could sneak her cigarettes and watch the smoke disappear—watch it rise and twist in the wind, escape past the trees and over the mountains.

Anywhere away from here.

•   •   •

Chris arrived at Baylor big, heavy; got a scholarship on that cannon arm, but no one expected him to play, least of all him, and he hadn’t really cared one way or the other.

She was a couple of years older, still taking a class here and there, since it gave her a reason to stay in Waco; working also a few hours in the Athletic Department and fucking some of the assistant coaches, one of whom was married. That last had turned into a scandal, a real
mess that finally ended after she got a late-night call from his wife. The woman hadn’t yelled, hadn’t called her names or threatened her. She’d just cried, asking through tears and gasps why Mel had to fight and hold on to something that wasn’t hers, break something that didn’t belong to her and never had.

And Mel had wanted to explain how school was supposed to have been
hers
, how being in Waco was damn near the only thing she had to hold on to—a way out of Spindletop and Goose Creek and the Spraberry Trend, all those stinking oil fields she and her daddy had moved through, even as she still hadn’t been able to quite leave them or him behind. How her piece-of-shit daddy had a thousand reasons for his drinking: stress and back pain, slights and old wounds that no one could ever see and that never healed. And how she’d spent far too many nights tending all those hurts, real and imagined, watching over him long after he’d passed out or been beaten senseless, eyeing the ragged rise and fall of his chest, praying his breathing would never stop so she wouldn’t be left on her own; but sometimes praying that it would.

She’d wanted to say all those things and more—explain every detail of her shitty life to the sad voice on the phone who’d dared question it. But instead, she just let that voice cry itself out, holding the phone tight to her ear for more than an hour,
making
herself listen, knowing that she had to hear it all, knowing that she owed the voice—that other woman—at least that much . . . until the woman finally hung up on her.

Mel had then sat for another hour in the dark, phone still in her hand. Before dawn, she deleted the assistant coach’s number, and when that wasn’t quite enough, she tossed the phone itself into the small fountain in front of her apartment.

Her daddy had always said:
It
ain’t stealin’ if they won’t miss it.
But no matter what, it always was . . .
always
.

After that came Chris Cherry. Even during his first year on campus—long past the time she should have graduated and left—she couldn’t help but notice him walking as often with a stack of books in his hand as a football. For the longest time they said hi every now and then but little more than that, as she watched him go from big and heavy to tall and strong. The time on campus carved him, cut away the excess, but he never saw it himself. He towered on the sidelines, a clipboard in his hand that she later found out had class notes on it rather than play sheets. The plays were easy for him and the classes he truly enjoyed.

He was smart and came across as a gentleman through and through, moving slowly and carefully whenever they ran into each other, as if he was afraid his size would break her. He could also be shy for a guy so big, so much so that even as they started to speak to each other more and more, she felt like the one carrying both ends of the conversation. But he had an easy way of saying a lot without saying much at all, and a habit of listening serious and close, almost too intently. He could lose himself in a book that same way for hours on end, and even though they saw each other most often around the practice field and the Athletic Department, he never really talked about football or the team with her.

She wondered then if the game was just his way out of some other place, too.

And he never would have gotten off the sidelines had Tyler McGee not spun a shot glass off his girlfriend’s head two days before their season opener against Wofford. Tyler wasn’t even the starter, he backed up Billy Pressey. But when Billy suddenly got sidelined with
appendicitis and Tyler got the call, he wanted to celebrate with a bar crawl, where he downed more than a few congratulatory Jäger shots and then got sideways with his girlfriend, Dominique.

He might have played anyway, the whole goddamn ugly episode buried, if not for the stitches. Not the fifteen it took to close up Dominique’s head; no, it was the six tiny stitches on Tyler’s hand, his throwing hand, cut by striking his knuckles on the bar.

That left Chris. Only Chris . . . suddenly walking into Floyd Casey Stadium in front of fifty thousand with “Old Fite” playing loud, over and over again, and his eyes hidden beneath his helmet.

Months later, when they were twined together in her bed, Chris admitted his hands had been shaking so badly he’d kept them clasped together in front of him like he was praying, and in a lot of ways, he was.

Still, it was only Wofford. The first game of the season, and the Bears would get back either Tyler or Billy before the real games. All Chris had to do was keep a cool head, not make any mistakes; let the defense and the running game hold the fort, and he’d have the win.But that game plan had only lasted through the first fumble, the first blocked punt, and a long run by a Wofford back who’d never gained more than eighty yards in any game. Chris once told her that when he walked onto the field for the second quarter, he didn’t really think much about his BBC games—all the games he’d played and won in high school—choosing instead to remember only what it was like to be
here
, in his backyard with his dad telling him to let ’er rip, just so they both could see how hard and high he could throw it.

And for the last half of the Wofford game, that’s all he did: let ’er rip. With fifty thousand fans watching to see how hard and high Chris Cherry could throw it.

He started the Louisiana-Monroe game the following week, and then again at Iowa State. Two days after that, Chris came up to her after practice and officially asked her out. He was so serious, so sweet and awkward about it, with his hair still wet from the showers and a bruise across his forehead from a hard hit turning blue to black, that she almost laughed.

Instead, she asked him why it took him so damn long.

They’d been together ever since.

•   •   •

Tyler McGee married Dominique and lost his scholarship, and Billy Pressey never took another snap as the starter. They talked about it a few times, how fast the pieces fell into place: Billy’s bad appendix and Tyler’s bad temper and a few stitches and some shitty team defense. All the little things adding up to Chris finally letting ’er rip all through the rest of his junior year, when packs of overweight, tired men with video cameras and cellphones and notepads sprouted in the stands like thick weeds, just to see him play.

And on through the long following summer, where they holed up in her apartment, sleeping but not really sleeping together in the bed that was too small for her, let alone Chris. Chris pushing himself harder and harder while she waited, supported. She didn’t really understand the secret language of the game, but she didn’t have to, because she understood the players . . . men . . . and all the things they needed. Although after they first heard his name together on
SportsCenter
she’d cried for an hour, while he sat there, quiet, twisting his callused hands.

Then his final year, and those first six wins and not one, but two, ESPN video profiles of Chris’s high school career in Murfee: all grainy, washed-out footage of Chris towering over fields far too
small. He was noticeably heavier, and that was the reason, according to everyone, he’d never been given a serious look . . . but there was still that goddamn arm, always that arm—lightning chained to that earthbound body.

And finally, that heartbeat moment of the Kansas State game beneath the lights, the ESPN2 Game of the Week, where K State’s Lonnie Ray Holliday showed that he knew how to let ’er rip pretty damn well too, catching Chris clean from the blind side right at the knees and Mel knowing—knowing for goddamn certain—that it was all over even before it really began.

There was an agent, briefly, who popped in like a magic trick, wearing suits a bit too shiny at the cuffs, who talked big about Chris having the opportunity to show off all of his
intangibles
. But then his phone went dead and he was gone as if he had never even existed. Vanished like a rabbit in a hat. Mel had called the agent over and over again even after Chris wouldn’t, standing over their sink, smoking cigarettes, trying not to cry.

•   •   •

When she was thinking straight she didn’t blame Chris for the injury itself, no more than she’d blame someone for getting hit by a car he never saw coming. It was more about what happened after, all the things that
didn’t
happen. Chris had started working on a master’s degree in literature, but let that go. He rehabbed some more, worked out, but not that hard, not that serious, and the weight he’d cut started to hang on him again. He’d sit in her apartment in the dark, flipping through TV channels or reading books by whatever sunlight he let in through the windows.

Never sports, though, never that, and none since. Finally, when it
was near unbearable, both of them washed out and colorless, he came in one afternoon and said he was going home, back to Murfee—a place to her that was only TV clips and high school game films. He’d made a call she knew nothing about to the sheriff’s department and they’d agreed to take him on. It was decent, honest work he could be proud of, and the old family house was still there and it was all set, easy. She knew without his saying it that he needed to get out of Waco, away once and for all. And standing there in the jeans he always wore so no one, most of all her, could see that white and coiled snake of a scar from the surgery, he’d almost been happy. Almost himself again.