The Far Empty by J. Todd Scott

knew the area and the people, so he was a natural fit for the Border Patrol. His parents had been proud of him, Amé twice as proud.
    •   •   •
    Amé’s dad works at the Walmart over in Fort Stockton and her mom works at the Supreme Clean right on Main. I see Amé’s mom, Margarita, all the time when I drop off my father’s uniforms at the cleaners. She’s a tired, round woman with gray shot through her hair like stray dust. I once heard Duane Dupree say in passing she used to be a stripper in Ojinaga, but that’s hard to imagine, and I’ve never asked Amé about it.
    Rudy Ray was short like his mom, good-looking, with thick hair and a wisp of a mustache and goatee that Amé said he thought made him look older, but that she was always trying to get him to shave. He was about Dillon Holt’s age, so I knew
about
him more than I actually knew him; he moved out of Murfee and got an apartment in Nathan not long after high school. He spent some weekends in Midland and others across the border in the bars along Libre Comercio, wearing pointed fake-ostrich-skin boots, wide-open imitation Versace shirts,and big enamel belt buckles painted gold and silver and shaped like a bull’s head or crossed revolvers. Amé showed me the pictures on her phone, including one of him standing by his black and chrome Dodge Charger with the custom paint job—a bright green snake coiled along the rear quarter panel. I thought both he and the car looked ridiculous, and it was that damn ugly Charger that started the trouble for him.
    •   •   •
    Rudy Ray had made good. He got a decent job that didn’t involve serving food or cleaning shirts or working on another man’s property. Still, it was a government job—he was never going to get rich doing it—but Rudy Ray
played
rich, acted rich, more so with each passing day. Whenever he drove that Charger through Murfee, people said he had to be involved with the narcos across the river—that he’d gotten tight with them through family or a girl in Ojinaga, a dancer whose job it was to find easy men like him. And maybe it had started small at first, just a few words about checkpoints or the names of agents and inspectors. Then later, looking the other way as loads came across the border, before the Ojinaga girl or the people who owned her (and by then, Rudy) convinced or forced him to carry the loads himself—tape-wrapped bundles hidden beneath a blanket in the backseat of his BP truck. People whispered these things all the time, people who’d gone to school with Rudy Ray and remembered him from town and saw him driving that chromed-out Charger or flashing a thick roll while buying a round of Montejima Reposado shots. Amé knew her brother had also heard the whispers, ignored them, even as she was afraid that the Border Patrol might start hearing them, too.
    He swore to her it was nothing,
nada
, even as he gave her a couple of thousand dollars to keep in a box under her bed for parties andschool dances and dresses—things that Amé never does, clothes she’s never going to buy. I think Rudy Ray had imagined a much different life for Amé from what she had ever imagined for herself.
    •   •   •
    He called her late one night, admitting there might be a bit of real trouble, but that he would handle it. He’d found a way out, so no need to worry.
    No need to worry at all.
    She could still be proud of him, and he promised to move her to Houston with him when it was all over. But until then he made her promise not to talk about the money under the bed or show it to anyone. He sold the Charger right after that, but couldn’t shake his problems or the suspicions.
    In his last call to Amé, he said he might be away for a while. He wasn’t sure, might slip south for a bit and see the sights, spend time on the beach watching the blue ocean, but he wouldn’t say what beach, what ocean. He made it sound like a vacation, even as she begged him not to go. He told her to