The Far Empty Read Online Free PDF

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 beenat 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 realmess 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