Empty Arms: A Novel (6 page)

I press the bottle to my lips and close my eyes, willing the memories to stay away. But he’s all I can see, crouching in a thicket of wildflowers on the side of the road at Mr. Buckley’s farm as I came barreling down the road in Daddy’s Buick singing “All You Need Is Love” at the top of my lungs.

“All you need is focus,” Mom snapped from the passenger seat, turning off the radio.

“Oh please, there’s nothing out here but farmland and cornfields. How much damage could I possibly …”

“Watch out for that boy!” Mom grabbed the steering wheel and jerked us across the double yellow.

The sound of screeching tires caused his head to snap. A hammer was raised next to his face, which registered with surprise and then fear. He leaned into the fence as if that would’ve been any match for Daddy’s steel grill.

“Catharine Evelyn White, pull over,” Mom hollered.

My heart knocked in my chest as I steered the car to the shoulder. Mom stormed around the front of the car and tore open my door. “Out.”

“Come on, nothing even happened.”

“Now.”

Reluctantly, I climbed out of the car and walked around the back of it. The boy, who’d already continued hammering at the fence, glanced over his shoulder.

“You okay?” I called.

“Fine.”

“Sorry. I didn’t see you there.”

He stood up and brushed the dirt off his knees. He was tall with broad shoulders, and his skin was as tan as leather. “No worries. You just caught me off guard.” He shielded his eyes from the sun, revealing labor-strong arms.

“What are you doing out here anyway?”

“Fixing my uncle’s fence. We’re trying to keep the foxes out. And the Buicks.”

I bit my grin. “I didn’t know Mr. Buckley had any relatives.” The Buckleys never had any children, and Mrs. Buckley had died two summers earlier. No one knew exactly how she died. Mom said it was breast cancer, but there were rumors that he butchered her like one of his pigs. It was the summer before I started high school, the same summer Jim Morrison turned up dead in his bathtub, so our imaginations ran wild with conspiracy theories. There was never a funeral for Mrs. Buckley, which only made the rumors worse. As if the whole thing wasn’t creepy enough, Mom dragged me over to his house every week and made me help sweep his floors, scrub the hard water stains out of his toilet, and wash his overalls while she cooked him a week’s worth of dinners. From the windows, I could see him trudging around the farm, carrying buckets and rakes and talking to himself. “It’s the Christian thing to do,” she’d say whenever I complained about it. But I’d come home and tell Angela about the gaping space in his bedroom closet where his wife’s clothes used to be and the way all his picture frames hung empty. It was fun fueling the gossip until the day I looked out his bathroom window and saw him kneeling in a row of corn sprouts talking to the sky.

“He’s my mother’s brother,” he said. “My family runs a ranch in Texas, so we don’t get up here to see him much.”

I nodded and chewed my lip, wondering what brought him here now.

“He needs an extra set of hands around here,” he added, as if he’d heard the question in my mind.

Mom beeped the horn, startling me. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around.”

“Wait.” He stepped toward me. “What’s your name?”

“Cate. What’s yours?”

“James.”

“Nice to meet you, James. Sorry for almost killing you.”

A crooked smile broke across his face and he shrugged. “It wouldn’t have been such a bad way to go.”

Mom beeped again. I waved to him and climbed back in the car. “Geez, Mom. I was just apologizing.”

Her lips were pursed and her eyes were furious. “You’re never going to get your driver’s license if you don’t pay attention to where you’re going,” she said, and the tires kicked up gravel as she steered back onto the road. I pretended to listen as she scolded me, but my eyes were glued on the boy in the side mirror.

I didn’t see him again until the day of the eclipse, a week later, but I replayed our encounter in my mind a hundred times. Angela and I went to a party at Angel Falls, and that’s when I saw him, standing at the top of the waterfall, assessing the distance to the gorge below.

“Who’s that?” Angela asked in awe of his strong body. We watched in stunned silence as he did a back flip into the cold water and swam ashore. Before I could answer her, she bounced over to his side with a towel, and I knew that I didn’t stand a chance. With big boobs and a small waist, Angela was always the girlfriend and I was just the friend. Even though I was used to it, I couldn’t ignore the sliver of jealousy poking at my ribs.

I grabbed a beer and found a patch of moss on the riverbank where I could watch my friends dive into the water and ignore Angela making a play for the guy who had dominated my thoughts for the past week.

A couple of minutes later, a shadow fell across my lap. “Cate?”

James was standing over me, a black T-shirt hiding the strong upper body that had made Angela swoon. “Oh, hi. James, right?”

“Yeah.” He sat down next to me and dangled his legs in the water. His amber eyes caught the sunlight reflected off the surface. His damp hair was drying to a shade of brown so dark it was nearly black, although in the sunlight I could see subtle red highlights. His tan skin was smooth and untouched by the wrath of acne that most guys our age were battling.

I sipped my beer, trying to act casual, but my heart was skittering in my chest. “What are you doing here?”

“Creighton invited me.” He nodded in the direction of our high school’s star quarterback, who was carrying a kicking and screaming Angela toward the water’s edge. “He got a flat tire by the farm. I helped him change it.”

“You’re a regular Mr. Fix-It, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. “I’ve always been good with my hands.”

My cheeks flushed and I buried my smile in my beer. “So, what part of Texas are you from?”

“Eagle Pass.”

I nodded though I couldn’t imagine it. I’d never been anywhere but the seashore. “What’s it like?”

“Hotter than a deuce,” he laughed. “Let’s just say I’m glad to be spending the summer this far north.”

My ears perked up. He was going to be in Angel Falls all summer. I brought my cup to my lips, trying to contain the smile that was on the verge of dancing across my face.

“So what do you do for fun?” he asked.

I glanced over at my friends jumping off the falls and drinking around the bonfire. “You’re looking at it.”

“No, what do
you
do for fun?”

I shrugged. No guy had ever asked me that before. “I play the piano and dance. Ballet.”

I felt ridiculous as I said it. Those were things Mom made me do. “I like going to movies and concerts,” I added, hoping I didn’t sound completely pathetic. “What do you do for fun in Eagle Pass?”

“Lots of things. I ride horses.”

I’d begged my parents for lessons for years, but Mom thought horseback riding, along with most of the things I wanted to do, wasn’t fit for a respectable young lady.

“I fish. We live near the Rio Grande. The catfish are huge.”

“Creighton and the guys like to fish.”

He glanced over at Creighton, who was standing at the river’s edge flexing his biceps for Angela. He turned back to me unfazed. “One of my favorite things to do is go to bull fights. Have you ever been to one?”

I shook my head. “I always thought it seemed kind of senseless.”

“That’s because you’re looking at it wrong. Most sports are all about points; touchdowns, runs, baskets, goals. In bullfighting, there aren’t any points, no scores to keep.”

“Then what’s the point? Where’s the satisfaction?”

“The satisfaction comes from the triumph of a fragile, breakable human artfully outmaneuvering 1,200 pounds of brute force.”

I shrugged, unconvinced.

“Think of it this way. Bullfighting is very much like what you do when you play the piano or dance ballet. The matador must control his movements and maintain his rhythm. There’s an artistic flow that can move you in a way that can’t be described. The satisfaction doesn’t come from a high score but from an intuitive appreciation for what you just experienced.”

I was fascinated by the way he spoke and moved. It made me want to know everything about him. “What else do you like to do?”

“We play splits.”

“Splits?”

“It’s a knife-throwing game.”

“I like throwing knives.”

He chuckled. “
You’ve
thrown knives?”

“I have.”

“I don’t believe you.”

I shrugged.

He drained his beer. “Fine. Then I challenge you.”

“You challenge me? To what?”

“A duel.”

“You’re challenging me to a duel?”

He pulled his legs out of the water, jumped up, and extended his hand.

I put my hand in his and let him pull me up. “I accept your challenge.”

He pulled me toward him. “Follow me.”

“Where are we going?”

“To get my knives.”

I followed him to a shiny black Camaro with a Texas license plate. “You have them with you?”

“Of course,” he said, sliding into the driver’s seat and reaching across the passenger seat. He opened the glove box and retrieved a black leather case. I couldn’t help but think how much Daddy would despise my new friend and his concealed weapons.

“Come on,” he said, taking my hand and leading me into the woods. Once we were surrounded by towering oaks, he stopped and told me to pick a tree.

I spun around, eyeing the thickness of the trunks surrounding us. “That one.” I pointed to a tall oak with a trunk that was thicker than the two of us standing side by side.

“Nice choice.” He opened his knife case and extended a row of woven leather handles to me. “You want to go first?”

I pulled a knife from his case and centered myself in front of the tree.

“Do you need me to show you how to hold it?”

I shot him a smug smile. “I think I can figure it out.”

His smirk told me he still didn’t believe that someone like me could possibly know how to throw a knife. “When you miss, make sure to watch where it goes. I don’t want to lose any.”

“I’ll be sure to do that.” I positioned the metal blade between my thumb and forefinger, gripping it the way Daddy had showed me years ago when Mom was at work. “Never tell your mother about this,” he’d warned as we aimed at the trees in our backyard. I drew my arm back and flung it forward, sending the knife spiraling through the air. It stuck in the center of the trunk with the precision of an arrow. I turned to James whose mouth was hanging open.

“You just …” he pointed at the knife with a bewildered expression. “You know how to …”

“My dad taught me when I was eight,” I said with a satisfied grin. “Your turn.”

He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. He stepped in front of the tree and positioned the knife between his fingers, taking aim. He whipped his arm faster than even Daddy and his knife stuck in the centerline too, just below mine. “Tie,” he called and passed me another knife.

I steadied it in my hand and hurled it at the tree trunk, sticking the centerline again. James’s smile widened as he watched me set the pace, round after round.

“You ready to forfeit yet?” I called after I hit the centerline a dozen times in a row.

He aimed and fired the knife into the tree directly above mine. “Dream on.” He nudged me with his elbow as we walked toward the tree to retrieve the protruding knives.

“All right, but we might be here all day.”

“Fine by me,” he said.

Fine by me too, I thought as we pulled the knives from the thick bark. “Hey, why don’t you teach me that game you were telling me about? Splits.”

He shook his head. “That’s a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“I’m serious, Cate. It’s a dangerous game.”

“Well, then I definitely want to play.”

He rubbed his chin and looked at the oak that had been our target for the past hour. He grabbed my hand and led me over a fallen tree to a clearing about twenty yards away. He put his hands on my shoulders and positioned me on a patch of soft earth and kicked away a few stray rocks. “You stand here.” He paced ten feet and turned to face me.

I looked around, wondering which tree we were going to aim at from our new positions, but they all seemed too far away.

“Not a tree,” he said. “Each other’s feet.”

My face must’ve given away my fear because he doubled over in laughter.

“Do you trust me?” he asked positioning the knife between his fingers and eyeing my flip flops and perfectly painted toenails.

“No,” I cried, jumping away from him.

He chuckled and lowered his knife-bearing hand. “See, I told you it’s too dangerous.”

“You and your friends really play this?”

He shrugged. “Back in elementary school.”

“What kind of school lets children throw knives at each other’s feet?”

“Well, you don’t actually throw them
at
your opponents’ feet, you throw them twelve inches away from their feet.”

Twelve inches wasn’t a lot of space when it came to razor sharp blades and little piggies, but we’d both just stuck the centerline of the oak tree a dozen times. “All right,” I nodded. “Let’s play.”

“Really?”

I let out a deep breath and returned to the spot where he told me to stand, praying that we wouldn’t end up in the emergency room.

“We’ll do a practice round so you can see how it works. I’ll go first.”

My heart pounded in my ears as he aimed the knife at the ground by my feet. I closed my eyes and a second later I heard a thud as it speared the earth beside me. I looked down and the leather handle protruded from the ground about seven inches from my left foot. I looked at him and we giggled anxiously.

“Now you have to move your left foot until it’s touching the edge of the blade.”

I widened my stance until my foot was flush with the knife in the ground.

“Now, pull the knife out of the ground and throw it at me. Just remember, it has to stick up in the ground within twelve inches of either foot.”