The Far Empty Read Online Free Page B

left a stray bullet in her book bag or sent her a picture of someone else’s blood, although he couldn’t quite recall which of those he’d done, maybe all of them.
    No . . . taking a gander at her phone wasn’t so much about her as it was about
him
—it might help him remember some things, that was all. It had been getting bad lately, all the little things he was forgetting. It was cigarette holes in a newspaper, black scorch marks where words should be. His daddy, Jamison Dupree, had known a thing or two about cigarettes and scorches. Duane still had the marks on his arms and back to show for it. The forgetting had gotten worse with the
foco
he’d been snorting, and if the Judge knew about
that—
well, he’d beat the dog piss out of Duane, so Duane had been keeping this dirty little secret to himself.
    He did like that
foco
, oh yes sir, he did . . .
yes sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir
. Duane loved its strange magic—the way it sped everything up and slowed it down at the same time. The way it made him
sharp
, like he was all shiny knife edge and cut the goddamn air when he walked, drawing blood, and the way it let him see things that weren’t there . . . see
right through
things.
    He’d once spied a mangy Mexican gray wolf out on his property and swore the
foco
gave him wolf eyes, just the same—afraid now people might even see them glowing, reflecting in his own dashboard light or the high beams of passing cars on Route 67.
    It wasn’t even a matter of liking the
foco
anymore as much as fucking needing it. It made him desperate, longing for his sharp skin and wolf eyes to protect him when he was awake, which was getting to be all the goddamn time, since he wasn’t sleeping so muchanymore; or maybe he was and just was forgetting that, too. His daddy always said they had Comanche or Mescalero in them, which by birthright gave the Duprees a weakness for drink . . . burned as it was into their very blood, so they couldn’t help but lust for it. It had been for Duane’s own good that his daddy had touched those Lucky Strikes to his skin, the sweet stink of Four Roses on his breath . . . whisper-screaming never to pick up the bottle the way he’d done, ’cause he might never put it down.
    And Duane
had
listened to Jamison Dupree. Still did, because even before the
foco
took hold of him with its skeletal hands, before it had scorched him in its own way like his daddy’s cigarettes, he’d been dreaming of his daddy’s long-gone voice at his ear. Sometimes, worse—not just his voice, but
all of him
, rotted near away, standing right next to Duane, smiling lightning and blackness. If nothing else, he came by his needs honestly. They were in his blood.
    Then he was done, spent, barely realizing it . . . having forgotten she was even there. She stared at him, waiting for him to leave or whatever he was going to do next. He struggled with his pants, tried to focus on her walls, the posters and pictures there . . . magazine cutouts of places she would never go because he’d never let her. School was out for the day, a holiday, but her daddy was off to work or out at Mancha’s drinking a cold one. Maybe Duane had threatened to kill her daddy or her mama, or both of them. That’s what he’d done, or something like it. Then it came, slow, like a catfish surfacing in muddy water—
why
it had been so hard to concentrate on the task at hand.
In his hand
. It wasn’t about her phone, but his portable radio, black and sleek, and knowing in a way he couldn’t explain that it was about to crackle to life and summon him.
    He’d been forgetting things, true, no two ways about that, butthat was because he now knew other things, too. Weird things, things he had zero reason to know. He tested himself all the time. Like guessing the color of the next car that would pass him or the next stupid words someone might say to him. Knowing when his dead daddy would be waiting for him in the porch