The Far Empty (5 page)

Even still, the words were right there on the tip of her tongue, ready to spit it out:
Go fuck yourself, Chris.
He wasn’t going to make a decision like that on his own. He didn’t get to play house with her and then walk away, leaving her with nothing. He was supposed to be—
was going to be, goddammit
—different from and better than every other man she’d known from her daddy onward. She almost said all those things too—staring into his eyes, which were most often blue but other times appeared bottle green—when he finally smiled at her, wide, embarrassed.

Misunderstood. That’s when
she
understood he wasn’t talking about leaving Waco alone.

While he twisted his hands, hoping she got his meaning without making him put the words together out loud, she tossed water on that match-strike anger she’d struggled with forever—the same anger that had gotten her daddy in so much trouble for so much of their lives. An anger that had lit him from within, so that he was nearly glowing with it, his fists throwing sparks, always trying to set the world on fire. Burning them both.

Instead, she’d hugged Chris, face tilted down and hard, so he wouldn’t see her cry.

It took them a month to pack up what bits and pieces of a life they had in Waco, and then just like that they were here, in Murfee, unlocking the long-empty house he’d grown up in and where both of his parents had died. That first night there had been a rare West Texas rain, all noise and fury and white light against the dusty windows, and she’d given herself to him on a few blankets thrown down on the floor, with water dripping all round them.

She woke the next morning and stood on this still-wet porch and saw all the color that had sprung up overnight, the earth taking water like a dying man, with a pale mist falling skyward over hills that were the same sudden uncertain green of Chris’s eyes.

That had been truly nice, her best moment since coming here. Now the rain only reminded her that there were still a few holes in the roof Chris hadn’t gotten around to fixing yet.

•   •   •

Mel wasn’t sure what Chris thought coming back to Murfee might actually fix: his life, his knee, her. Them. If anything, coming home had made him more withdrawn, more sullen. Beyond the job, Mel couldn’t imagine what he was looking for here anymore. And that left
her
lost, alone, not knowing what she was fighting against or for.

But still they went on, rusting away minute by minute, until two days ago, when Chris had found the body out at a place called Indian Bluffs. It was all he thought about now—
his investigation
—and she hated herself for letting it get under her skin, letting it drive her fucking crazy. Chris was finally alive, awake, like those hills after the rain, and it had nothing to do with her at all.

•   •   •

Chris had snapped a few pictures on his phone and showed them to her that first night, sitting up in bed. She’d turned the phone this way and that, trying to make sense of the mess on the ground. That’s all she saw of the body.

After he got up to get them both a glass of water, she continued to thumb back and forth through the handful of other pictures on his phone. She saw none of her, none of their time in Waco, none of anything that might even make sense to her. It was all gone, deleted. Instead, there were images of cliff walls out in the desert where you could barely make out faded Indian paintings; a few more of ghost towns whose names no one remembered anymore; some of cracked earth circled over by big black birds in ugly skies.

And that damn body. All of Chris’s pictures were of dead places and things: memories and remains and ruins where people had once been and were no longer. By the time he came back with their glasses, she had put the phone on the bed and pretended to go to sleep.

•   •   •

She’d had a bad dream of her own last night, one where she was sitting on this very porch listening to a dying radio beneath a snapshot sky. She had tuned in to her favorite show,
Dark Stars
, hosted by a psychic who’d once been famous for solving murders and disappearances but now helped people connect with their dead relatives . . . with their ghosts. In her dream a voice had called in sounding just like her—in fact it was her—wanting to know what had become of Melissa Bristow. Rumor was, she’d gotten lost, disappeared in some oil field or ghost
town that no one could find anymore. But Melissa had been right there, with a mouthful of dust, screaming at the radio, at herself.

I’m right here.
But she wasn’t, not really.
She
was the ghost, haunting herself and Chris and the empty spaces between them.

She’d woken up cold and afraid and gasping, wanting and needing Chris and putting a hand out for him to feel his warmth and maybe his heartbeat, only to find his side of the bed empty. Instead, he’d been across the room, hunched in front of their laptop, his face hard angles in the screen’s glare . . .
investigating
.

Afterward, she’d struggled to find sleep, still angry. At him, at Murfee, at herself. The living she could compete with, fight against. She’d done it her whole life, so much like her daddy in more ways than she’d ever admit, who always fought for everything. But those things in his pictures? Ghosts and shadows and emptiness?

She didn’t even know where to begin. It was like her horrible dream and this house with its bad roof and its old books and this backyard with its lights and green grass—she was trapped inside one of Chris’s pictures, a picture of someone and something that didn’t exist anymore. But before she’d closed her eyes again, dropping into a sleep free of dead things, she’d imagined or dreamed, or just hoped, that Chris had climbed back in into bed with her and that she had reached out for him. Just to brush her fingers over him, to make sure he was real.

CALEB

T
here are so many stories about Phantly Roy Bean Jr., the infamous Hanging Judge Roy Bean—the self-proclaimed “Law West of the Pecos”—that it’s hard to sort the truth from the fiction. It’s hard to see the real man standing in the long shadow of one that may never have existed at all.

In eighth grade we had to write a paper about a famous Texan, and everyone thought I would write about Judge Bean. After all, my father is the new “Law West of the Pecos”—I read it all the time in the
Murfee Daily
, and that’s how the
NBC Nightly News
once referred to him. He’s a modern Roy Bean, always wearing either his custom Half-Breed hat or a Stetson; colorful and famous and outspoken, so much so that he’s been nicknamed the Judge. He’s even originally from Pecos. His family was once famous there.

In Murfee, he’s more than the sheriff. He’s larger than life. He is judge, jury, and executioner.

•   •   •

I almost wrote my paper on Gene Roddenberry, but at the last minute, chose Clyde Barrow instead. I thought it was funny that the sheriff’s son was writing about one of Texas’s most famous criminals. It was my raised middle finger to him. I was younger and dumber, and it was my awkward way of letting him know that
I knew
. That I knew all about him. My mom tried to talk me out of it before finally letting it go. She neatly corrected my punctuation and bought me a nice blue folder to put it in, even typing up the label for the cover. Back then, when my father was still pretending to be fatherly, or when he just wanted to push me or mess with me, he’d go over my homework. My mom had to lay it out for him next to his breakfast plate, to the left of the juice but not touching the fork, so he could scan through it with those gray eyes of his, searching for mistakes, tapping his long finger against the papers like a clock-tick. We both knew he wasn’t really reading. It was more about making me sit there watching him do it, waiting for him. But on that one morning, I saw that my Clyde Barrow report, that blue folder, wasn’t in his stack. My mom had already slipped it into my backpack next to the door. She never said anything and I never asked, even though we both knew he’d probably hear about it anyway. My father hears about everything that happens in Murfee, and if punishment was ever going to be given out over my disrespectful report, my mom would have gotten her measure of it, too. She sat there next to him while he read the rest of my work, calm, sipping her juice, never taking her eyes off me.

Walking to school and remembering my mom’s look—steady, warm, ready—I almost threw that fucking folder into the trash, willing to take the belt or the closet or whatever for the failing grade. But
I didn’t. I turned it in, my hands shaking, and that’s when I learned that Amé Reynosa, who I’d never spoken to even though she sat next to me in homeroom because our last names both began with R, had written her paper on Bonnie Parker.

I knew I wanted to be her friend that day, and have been, ever since. I suffered for that paper later; my mom did, too.

But whenever I get to sit close and talk to Amé, I’m ashamed to admit I’m still glad I chose Barrow.

•   •   •

There are all these stories about Judge Bean, legends. Who knows what’s true anymore? He left Kentucky when he was sixteen to work Louisiana flatboats, then opened a trading post for a time in Chihuahua, where he killed a Mexican, forcing him to move on to Sonora and later San Diego, where he shot a Scotsman in a duel over a lady. He was arrested, and while he was waiting in jail, women he’d courted brought all kinds of presents: flowers, wine, cigars, food, including an iron skillet full of tamales, hiding knives he then used to dig his way out of jail.

Allegedly a group of men tried to hang him in San Gabriel after another duel left their friend, a Mexican army officer, dead. The issue? A woman, of course. They put Bean up on a horse and strung a noose around his neck and slapped the horse’s ass, but when it stood rock-still, just staring at them, they left Bean to twist and hang. The woman who’d been the source of all the trouble later cut him down, but Bean was forever branded with a rope scorch around his throat. He moved on to Pinos Altos in New Mexico and managed a merchandise store and saloon. Once he even used an old cannon to blast back an Apache war party. I read that you can still see that rusted piece of artillery.

Then he was running the Confederate blockades down to Matamoros, opening a firewood business by cutting down a neighbor’s timber, operating a dairy farm and thinning down the milk with piss and river water. He even tried his hand as a butcher by cattle rustling. He married an eighteen-year-old girl, and after he was arrested for threatening her life, she still went on to have four children with him. He opened a saloon in his own tent city he named Vinegaroon, hard up on the banks of the Pecos River and deep in the Chihuahuan Desert, and got himself appointed justice of the peace. He heard cases in his saloon, drew the jurors from his best drinkers, and only ever used one lawbook—a dirty and water-stained 1879 edition of the
Revised Statutes of Texas
. Anything else he burned.

In a case where an Irishman shot a Chinese laborer, the Judge ruled that homicide was the killing of a human being, but he couldn’t find any law against killing a Chinaman.

Later, he moved his saloon and his courtroom to a railroad right-of-way, where he homesteaded for twenty years, illegally. He always made sure the school had free firewood in the winter. He ended every marriage service with “God have mercy on your souls.” They call Bean the Hanging Judge, but he really sentenced only two men to hang, and one of them escaped.

There are all these books and films, each one adding a little bit to the mystery and the legend, turning his violent exploits into jokes. He lied and cheated and stole at every turn; beat a teenage wife and killed men over other women. But he made sure a few cold kids got firewood, so all was forgiven or ignored.

He led a dark existence in a desperate time and place and became larger than life. He was life and death. But only in Texas, this godforsaken place where there’s more blood in the ground than water.

•   •   •

I know the stories everyone tells about my father, those that get repeated over and over again so that it’s hard to find the man—the real man—standing in the shadows behind the one people think they know or simply need to believe in.

How he saved Brenda Holt and baby Ellie.

How he arrested two Mexican drug runners up in Platas with an empty gun and a cold stare and two words of Spanish.

How he pulled out the tub that killed Nellie Banner-Ross with his bare hands. Everyone is positive they saw him do it—even though I know it’s still there, clean and smelling of bleach and my mom’s shampoo.

How he hands out Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas hams and donates half his salary to charity.

How much he loves his one and only son.

•   •   •

Two days after my dad saved Brenda Holt from Dillon, she was kneeling in front of him in our garage while he leaned back against the hood of his truck, his hard hands wrapped around her head. She was crying, and even through his smile he kept telling her to take it easy as he listened to the Rangers on the truck’s radio. The station popped in and out, static mixed with Brenda’s sobs.

•   •   •

Once I saw him calmly washing blood off his hands in our mudroom sink, turning them this way and that, looking down at them as
if they belonged to someone else, making sure there were no stains beneath his wedding ring.

•   •   •

There are times even now he stands in my doorway, watching me, unblinking, looking at
me
as if I belong to someone else, his gray eyes as unfathomable as the ocean, inescapable like the tide. Sometimes he lies fully dressed on his bed all night, those eyes unblinking, and I don’t know if he’s awake or what he sees or if he sees anything at all.

•   •   •

Every now and then, I feel again the hot touch of that old Ruger rifle. It’s like the skin on my knee still burns, a phantom brand, from when the gun brushed against me, that moment right after my father used it to kill Dillon Holt.

What does it take to shoot another man?

How long do you think about it before you pull the trigger?

How long after? I looked it up. That Ruger has a rate of fire of 750 RPM and a muzzle velocity of 3,240 feet per second. My father was probably less than a hundred feet from Dillon when he shot him.

Not even the blink of an eye or a whole heartbeat. At that distance or closer, I guess you don’t even think about it all.

•   •   •

I once had a dog, an Australian shepherd called, silly enough, Shep.

My mom got him for me in Braintree and named him while he was still in the cardboard box she used to bring him home. He was all paws and tail, high-strung and active, and I loved him so much it
made my heart hurt. He slept at the end of my bed, and when my father came in to stare at me, Shep stared right back with his own bright blue eyes, growling, like he could see something none of the rest of us could. My father didn’t like his bark, his look, or that growl, so while I was at school one day Shep mysteriously got off his chain and got lost in a thunderstorm, scared by all the crash and lightning, or so my father said.

I spent two days looking for him, calling his name until my throat hurt and I came home each night, muddy and cut. My mom sat on my bed and touched me up with Polysporin, drying my hair with one of her big towels. She never said anything, just held me tight without really seeming to do so.

I finally found Shep by Coates Creek way out behind our house. He’d been worked over with something small and heavy and left in the swollen water beneath the branches of an old, twisted desert willow. He was hidden, but not that well. I was meant to know, after all.

I buried Shep with my bare hands out by the creek and never said anything more about him. A month or so later my father offered to get me another dog, and I said thanks, but no.

I smiled when I said it, just like he expected me to.