The Far Empty by J. Todd Scott Page A

pearl, I see my father
twice
, one real and another, darker one, both reflected in the mirror my mother loved. It’s like he’s not alone, like there’s another person in there with him, and when I’ve thought I’ve caught him whispering to himself in there, he must have been talking to that other man in the mirror. But when the moon isn’t quite up or it’s hidden by clouds, I can see nothing in the glass. It remains empty, black like pond water, as if he casts no reflection at all.
    That’s how it was the other night, after the body was found at Indian Bluffs. He was alone on the bed, the mirror empty, his arms rigid along his sides. He was staring straight up at the ceiling, and I looked close to see whether his chest was rising and falling, praying as always that it wasn’t. Praying, hoping, that he’d been struck down by a mysterious illness or that his heart had just given out.
    That he was
done
.
    Instead, the index finger of his left hand was tapping against his creased pants leg. Tapping, tapping . . . just above the knee. Like a clock ticking, like when he used to read my homework. Slow and practiced and deliberate—the way the big garden orb weavers out by the creek pluck at the strands of their webs. Spiders eat their own webs at the end of the day. It helps them regather the energy they’ve lost by spinning them.
    I always thought that finger tap just meant he was thinking or pretending to, but it might mean something else as well. Worry—
real
worry, that Murfee might have finally given up one of her secrets.
    At dawn, when the sun’s up over the mountains and it hits the far edges of town at the right angle, the pink caliche on the bluffs burnscrimson and everything runs red. Murfee always wakes up bloody.
The dead are her secrets . . . The missing are her ghosts.
    I know who Deputy Cherry found out at Indian Bluffs, and so does my father.
    My mother . . . his missing wife.

10
    CHRIS

    L ater no one would be able to explain exactly how it started. For every person who would talk, and there weren’t many, there was a different story. It involved a girl or a ranch job or a
fútbol
score; whatever, it didn’t matter. One thing everyone agreed upon was how it started
to end
.
    With Delgado and the knife.
    Aguilar was already near dead by the time Chris got to Mancha’s, with Delgado standing in a circle of people, his shirt torn off, revealing tattoos curling over his wasted stomach, like cursive writing, all the way to his throat. He was dark, darker than normal because of the blood all over him already going black; some of it was his own, but most of it was from Aguilar, who was on his back in the gravel. Aguilar kept kicking, struggling like he was trying to stand but had simply forgotten how, the memory of it lost, along with his blood, all over the ground.
    Everyone around Delgado was yelling, spitting Spanish, waving at the man who kept them at bay with the knife. The lot was littered with crushed beer bottles, discarded balls of tinfoil, old condoms; jackets and cowboy hats and John Deere caps all forgotten on the hard wooden benches beneath the tin pavilions. Chris caught sight of Eddie Corazon standing in the concrete doorway of Mancha’s, smoking a cigarette, calm, picking at his teeth with dirty fingers and eyeing the mess in his parking lot. Corazon knew that when it ended, however it ended, the men shadowing the bloody gravel would want more beers, more cigarettes. They’d sit around a few more hours until the naked bulbs strung up around the parking lot turned yellow, talking over and over again about what had happened, making up stories about it. Eddie probably hadn’t made the 911 call. The fight wouldn’t hurt business.
    Mancha’s was Murfee’s only bodega—part store, part restaurant—a gathering place for Mexican families and the ranch hands and laborers. It had gotten bigger, seedier if that was possible, since Chris’s teammates used to come to this side of