The Far Empty by J. Todd Scott Read Free Book Online

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. ButI 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