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J. Todd Scott's new novel is set in the unforgiving landscape of West Texas, near the Big Bend of the Rio Grande. Human hands have tried to make a living here; human feet have crossed its vastness; but the elemental space remains an essential mystery in reality and in Scott's novel. In a town reminiscent of the actual West Texas town of Marfa, Texas, strange lighted figures can be seen near the horizon at night. The land holds secrets and bones of which it is silent. The narrator of our work knows a little of each character's created inner landscape, but each character remains prisoner of his or her needs. Scott's novel refuses to disclose answers to the questions it raises.
Dramatis personae: Sheriff Stanford Ross, a law (if we may call it that) unto himself; his first wife Vicki Schori (left town); his second wife Nellie Banner (died in the bathtub); his third wife Evelyn Monroe (left town); Caleb Ross, Evelyn and Stanford's grieving, frightened, and abused son; América Reynosa, young woman of Mexican heritage, beloved of Caleb, sexually abused; Chris Cherry, new deputy, once the town football hero, now recovering from injuries; Melissa, Chris's girlfriend, who hates the way West Texas can erase one; Duane Dupree, Sheriff Ross's chief deputy, Meth addict, sexual predator, and hit man; Rudy Ray, missing border patrol officer, América's beloved brother; Mexican-American people of the fictional town of Murfee, despised, abused, and murdered by the law; Darin Braccio and Morgan Emerson, FBI agents, but not for long; shadowy members of two rival Mexican drug cartels; Máximo, a boy, hired killer for one of the cartels.
As THE FAR EMPTY unfolds, each chapter narrates a character's activities and thoughts, and we come to know what drives each. The discovery of a murdered person buried on a ranch brings Chris Cherry into contact with real evil. As he investigates the identity of the victim, he uncovers facts pointing toward the sheriff's office's involvement with the death. Since he has seen Duane Dupree beat some Mexican men nearly to death and heard Dupree's racist slurs, Chris realizes that the law's line drawn in the sand might be neither straight nor narrow.
Meanwhile a new schoolteacher (replacing one who died under strange circumstances) has taken over Caleb's class. If there is a heightening of tension in Scott's tale, it might be that generated when a young woman from out of town encounters the predatory sheriff and we wonder if she might become the fourth wife. Or perhaps when Caleb trusts this teacher with his fears for his life and the life of América, whose name, it must be said, cannot be an accident. Or perhaps when Chief Deputy Dupree, crazed by the drugs he takes, goes hunting for human prey. Because of the novel's limited omniscient narrative style, we know things that Deputy Cherry does not and cannot. In a genre—the police procedural—in which having all the facts is key, those who need the facts can never have enough, and those in possession of facts use them for heinous crimes. Just across the border, members of a drug cartel only strike when a terrible pot of entrails boils up its assent. Mexican people living under a reign of terror disappear, bones are left in shallow graves. The sheriff calls these deaths "river killings" to separate them into a category different from those committed on white bodies stateside.
Background: over a period of a year in 2011-2012, Jonathan Treviño, member of the real-life Hidalgo County sheriff's office in Mission, Texas, headed a drug sting operation composed of several local law enforcement officers. Treviño and his group kept the drugs and extorted hush money during busts. The county sheriff, Lupe Treviño, Jonathan's father, was also implicated in drug-related crimes. Scott's novel is based in certain realities which govern South Texas: the absolute rule of the county sheriff, family nepotism, crime's ability to ignore geographical and legal borders, a dog-eat-dog governing morality, and a simmering hatred between racial others. Scott himself brings years of work with the US DEA to his novel, and this matters so very much: he gets the characters, police procedure, and the rapacious nature of crime "right."
§ C. Downs, Ph.D., is professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and a fan of the well-turned whodunit.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, May 2016
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