The Outlaw Album (9 page)

Yes, I thought, gray heads had suffered while young ones went unnoosed. Alf Bowden was yielded to life while nine of his comrades were forfeited, but this did not make a friend of him.

“Shot him in the neck,” Jefferson said. “In front of your mother, he not even having English enough to know why he was killed. Small blessing.” Jefferson kicked about in the wood curls. “What a mess you have made.” I said nothing. “Your scarlet oaf of a comrade, Younger, ruined you for me, Jacob. He should never have visited.”

It was true; I lost something when Coleman Younger happened by. It was the year of the World’s Fair in St. Louis, and he was not long out of prison. I had not seen him since I returned from Old Mex in sixty-eight, but I had read about him often. He came to the door and knocked. When I answered it he said, “Jake Roedel, it is your old comrade, Coleman Younger.” I saw that he told the truth and said so, then welcomed him in. Prison had paled him, and he had become a pinkish man, a color I had never thought him capable of. I remembered him red. I offered him wine, but he was prepared with a flask of his own. We gathered at the table. Jefferson, a young man meeting history, sat at Coleman Younger’s elbow. We drank. The freeness of my own remembrances encouraged my guest to candor, and he spoke truly of our shared activities. Jefferson questioned him, and he answered directly, not noticing that my son was of the generation that cared less for America than they did the land that earlier generations had fled. There was now pride about the awkward consonants of foreign names, and narcissism in noodles called spaetzle, and in porkpie hats called homburgs. In Coleman Younger’s answers were accounts of the days of the Dutch boy, Alf Bowden, Creve Coeur Gap, and numberless others, for the war went on unblunted by my famous deed. Jefferson’s eyes fixed on me when the talk shifted to baseball and the World’s Fair, then he quietly left the house, easing the door closed behind himself. I knew then that he was lost to me.

“I could not turn him away,” I said. “You gained from him—a great bitterness to drive you.”

“My boys will not inherit such from me,” Jefferson said. “They will not find that I killed my own people in the service of traitors, or that I scalped possible cousins for sport.”

They littered Creve Coeur Gap. Their uniforms were valuable plunder, and their sourdough bodies began to rise with the sun. Little Arch Clements started it. They all watched me, and I knew it. They came off with a steady pull, a sound like that of a toothless grandma sucking on a cob of corn accompanying them. I saved mine for some time before flinging it to the river.

“I took no pleasure in that,” I said.

“I take no pleasure in you,” my son said.

He left me to myself.

I went back to work. The voice in my blade called out chop! chop! And my hand obeyed. Slash! Stab! The wood flew until only nubbins survived, and these I ground beneath my boots.

My hand had carved I knew not what, I had not restrained it, and what it wrought was bark chips and wood curls, sawdust and splinters.

Could this be? Could my passport be such?

The chips and curls would not mend. No other design would grow from them. I gathered a handful of the fragrant flakes and raised them to my face. My nostrils rested on the little pile, my tongue touched their salt. Nothing but wood chips—the large rendered small, and confusing.

I blew on them and they began to spray about, then I tossed them to the corners.

Oh, that voice in my blade had divined me well. I would seek no other monument.

I
t’s always a mess when they want to trumpet their love, say the words that make it all clear and everlasting, announce that a hard bond has formed between them that will never break, snap, melt, never, then want Dalrymple to come up with some retort that proves it back. He had to guess. He never did quite feel it, but gave a try at thinking his way into love, love with her, the one sitting close, imagining himself deep inside her spirit, toward the very bottom, where it’s fearful and wet and her secret hopes splash about. But the light goes out on that picture before he can find any feelings of his own down in all that black wet, and he’s got to say something.

Just tell me what you want to hear.

Well, that sure ain’t it.

How about trout?

I get carsick on that road—you know that.

I like how they let you catch them there first. Plus it’s a pretty spot.

You can’t say you love me, can you?

I think it all the time.

You just can’t say it.

Aw, Janet, I love, love, love you! Love, love, love.

That’s it, add insult, mockery. It’s a weak man can’t say love.

She’s put her finger right on the button about him, which is embarrassing. It’s so general, his problem, so everywhere among men, that he wants to add a wrinkle to it, some invented misery that makes it seem like he at least had a special sort of problem with love that was all his own. But what on earth would that be? That he was raised by foreigners who spoke a different language that had lots and lots of words but none of them were love? Or he can’t reach his emotions good since his tragic baby went down with the ship or was lost in the fire or whatever? But he doesn’t have any such excuse to give as an answer and instead opens another beer, looks out the window at the foggy hollows and damp dark bark, the vast forest of trees stripping down for the winter snooze.

The road is skinny and curvy, with no shoulder and deep gullies alongside, and plenty of people die alone in those severe gullies, impaled, twisted awry in their bones, bleeding out in slow drips, wondering why none of the kids in back is making a sound. Miss a curve, fly downward, see you in a day or two, my friend, maybe not so quick. Janet is snug against her window, eyes closed to slow the carsick welling in her chest. She’s itty-bitty and wears glasses of the type ancient ladies favor, with little swan wings on the frame, stems hooked to a silver chain. Her hair is penny colored and lies down in a wide flat noodle that sticks to her forehead, a style she found while watching a sinister late movie in black-and-white that kept Dalrymple guessing just which sharpie actually had the bag of money to the very end. Her look makes her seem like a lady he should’ve met in some other life, one when there was more horn music, not so much this one. She’s searched out clothes that go with her look, and this dress is crinkled black stuff with veil material across the high part of her chest and partway down the arms. Her shoulder blades are pale, the bone sharp and pressing on her skin, and she keeps a filterless cigarette burning between her fingers, raises each one and slowly adds bright red lipstick circles to the paper, red circles smooched at the same place every time. She does not inhale, but waves the butt about near the window like she’s erasing the visible world with smoke as they motor along the blacktop.

There’s suddenly a person ahead, hunkered at the edge of the road with a knapsack laid down, wearing a long green army coat and a knit cap pulled over the ears. The situation is so obvious the hitcher doesn’t bother to throw a thumb out, just stares at the car, the stare suggesting the occupants should do the right thing by their fellow man, their fellow bum, their fellow teenage runaway.

Stop, Janet said. Stop—that’s a woman. A woman in green, adrift and alone, way out here in the woods and mist.

Dalrymple always enjoyed the way Janet said things when she was off her meds. Her words then put special color to events, events he usually witnessed but hadn’t noted any special color or significance to until she retold the event a minute after it happened. She’d built him a bunch of favorite memories that way. He’d hate to lose her.

What kind of woman is that?

She’s lookin’ like a man out here, so men passin’ won’t snatch her up and keep her chained in the basement.

You sure got a bad thing about men.

I got a bad thing about everybody if you pay attention.

Thirty yards past the woman Dalrymple stopped the car. He and Janet turned to look backwards over their seats, out the rear window. They watched the hitchhiker, who watched them in return. The hitcher bent to sit the knapsack upright, expecting to heft it to her back soon, run toward the car, say how ya doin’, ask where they were heading. Janet stared hard, waving smoke from her view.

She craves you.

She what?

Craves you.

That’s a great word. I guess I always have done that myself, crave stuff.

The hitcher walked in tight circles around the knapsack. She undid her long coat and held it parted with her hands on her waist. She wore an old sweater that must’ve been looser on her once, and green pants with lots of places to keep small things handy.

Janet threw a butt from the window, lit another. Her eyes were tightening behind those eyeglasses.

You are why she’s here, my love. You. She’s been looking for you all along without knowing it. She knew she was looking, just not that she was looking for you, and you alone.

Can she even see me from there?

She’ll realize she has found you without knowing she’d wanted to after you back up for her and stop and she sees your face—where will that leave me?

Did you bring any pills at all?

She’s a hundred percent gal under that coat, and you like new ones best of any.

(The funk of their lives sometimes wilted Dalrymple, made his vision shrink, this funk mostly the result of having punted earthly ambition, trimmed the wants from life, accepting a kind of decay, a rotted reduction of who they’d been capable of becoming at the start. He and Janet didn’t mesh that well, always having petty dramas spring to life around them, but they couldn’t decide to part, either, or make most simple decisions at all. Where to live, what to eat today, tonight, tomorrow, when to get out of bed, when to get out of bed again, which toothbrush, which channel, which bills to pay—all decisions they couldn’t seem to make. Things just happened without selection or consensus. Even when they tried to pick dream vacations, a present to themselves, an exercise that ought to be purely sweet and silky smooth, they ended up frustrated with each other, devastated, really, by their inability as a couple to clearly prefer one dream spot over another—the Rockies?

My nose gets dry up there, bleeds on my pillow at night.

Texas?

I hate their costumes.

Los Angeles?

Sure, I’ll hold the gun while you do the driving.

Ireland?

We can drink at home.)

Christ, Janet, it’s been almost five years. I have been with you almost five years.

Almost five years coming to an end, judging by her eyes, such power in them, black, I think, with the future in there already up and walking around holding hands. She’s just about got the details for you and her all worked out. I expect you’ll live in Taos or one of those other places full of the holy heebie-jeebies, where crystals and chanting and such shit hold sway.

I’m not moving to Taos. I’m not learning a bunch of fucking chants. I don’t get dazzled by shiny fucking rocks.

She does. She does. You don’t have to like something if she does.

That sounds familiar.

The hitcher has bent and lifted the knapsack. She is watching the car from an angle, her face turned to the side, and there is a force about her, something sort of rumbling from her expression. She starts walking toward the car, sure of herself.

I can see it in her eyes!

She looks kind of cold, that’s all.

Ready already to betray me. Didn’t take long. She’s got her hooks in you good.

There’s no hooks.

Just exactly what you’d say if there were hooks in you good and deep.

Dalrymple shifted to reverse, removed his foot from the brake and floored the car toward the hitcher. She stood still, expecting him to stop, and as he neared she still expected him to stop, then she quit expecting him to stop and dove off the road and he swerved to hit her and missed. The car slid down the slope of the gully upright at first, arms inside raising to brace against the dash, the car slipping sideways, then picked up speed and rolled over, crushing saplings and shrubs, scrub oak and brambles, rolled twice more before slamming into a hickory tree. The wheels were in the air, spinning, all glass shattered, and the roof had lowered. Bone cracked in the meat of Dalrymple’s arm and made a reddening hump in his shirtsleeve. Both knees hurt and he couldn’t see well through the warm ooze, but he did see an arm wearing an overcoat come through the passenger window, move Janet’s head aside, and reach beneath it for her purse. The hitcher came around to his side, then, and pushed on him and poked among his many pains until she could reach his wallet. She smelled of woodsmoke and spilled soup but didn’t say anything, only grunted, then scrambled back uphill suddenly talking very happily in rhyme to somebody not present.

Janet was crumpled, mumbling, mushed badly inside her middle area. The skin was split on her forehead; her nose gurgled. Dalrymple and Janet hung upside down, hidden from the road and doomed together. Her face was topsy-turvy, lips torn and bleeding, moving weakly in the mess, slowly taking a shape that might’ve been a smile.

T
he stories from my sleep bled into my morning chores and I kept trying to reclaim different ones, go back inside them, but they were slippery, hard to hold or even locate again. I had appeared in three or four movies over the night, and in daylight I hoped the better flicks might meld into one united story I could follow easy, live among for the day, but they couldn’t quite do it. All morning I felt uncertain as to where I was in this flesh, at this time, and just how is it I got here, or got over the ocean if that’s where I actually am. There was a shiny boy with yellow hair pedaling a bicycle, wearing wooden little shoes and britches that stopped under his knees, riding on fat tires in a foreign land of waving grain, but not one where bombs were dropping. Seems like he was in the one at the beach, too, when the nuns cleaning fish with pocket combs sang to Sleepy and me and Momma with her neck opened sideways while we floated toward the sun to burn away our faces. I had a paintbrush in hand, laying red over the walls already splashed that way in the movie that so often breaks into the middle of the others, takes over any of them, a movie of red, red, red I’d had explained to me so many times in group without getting it all the way ever. But then there he is still pedaling with a goose in the handlebar basket, his yellow hair boiling hard and making bubbles as he passes, and he knows me from someplace secret I don’t remember ever being and smiles lopsided and mysterious my way.

Wait!

In the dull dutiful movie that had morning chores in it I walked the pasture bringing feed to the cows, kicking dewdrops into flash splinters, but feeling like large parts of me were yet inside those other shows, chasing that bicycle toward mountains I couldn’t name and avoiding walls of redness and that smell. My thoughts chased after scenes occurring all over the world, scenes that fled faster than I could chase, and I sat on the grass feeling bereft, abandoned by my good dreams, surrounded by the others.

I reached about all over my memory for those better stories but couldn’t get a grip.

The cows had chewed their fill and started to scatter when Sleepy came driving south, down the meadow from the hay barn to the north, straight through the pasture, over humped ground and old fallen branches. Tools and various metal bits bucked in the truck bed and clanged until he halted beside me. Sleepy terrified everybody around for certain reasons but me, who knew him in a different way: the day in the kitchen with that shape spreading red on the floor he said kind of soft to me, “Drop a hammer or somethin’ in all that mess beside her, darlin’, and maybe they’ll think…” On this regular, slower day he hung his head from the window, a smoke pinched in his fingers, and said, “Run up and fix your hair, Rebecca. Run up and drag a brush through there, and put on a new polka-dot dress, why not? Somethin’ that looks decent to people.”

“Decent?”

“Now you’re well again I kind of want you standin’ behind me today. I want you with me.”

“New polka-dots?”

“There’s a dress in your closet now I left there for you.”

“I have to recognize my choices plainly and be honest and know that I always have choices before...”

“There’s only one dotted one.”

Sleepy’s eyes look like he’s napping all the time. It’s easy to think he’s drowsing even when he looks straight at you, as his eyelids have been lame and droopy since he was born missing a needed muscle or something, so they don’t ever open wide or shut tight. When he blinks there’s a tiny rounded twitch over the eyeballs, but no real flapping of the lids. He’s got various rough habits and rattler eyes, and his air of menace is sincere and fetching to certain sorts. There have been plenty of roadhouse gals who swooned for him, surrendered to his complete scariness, but none he kept long. Some gals went away of a sudden at night and left behind everything they owned that wasn’t on them. Abandoned undies might flap from our clothesline for weeks.

The polka-dots belonged around me and had forever, it seemed, once I’d gone among them. I had too many shoes from all ages on the floor, shoes and boots for school and church or chores, and almost failed to maintain my composure properly from the buzzing confusion and doubt of choice they raised in my head, those dusty toes, stiff laces, childish sizes that didn’t belong to me anymore—too much footwear and no clarity! clarity!—but finally I selected the white sneakers I already had on that they give out while you’re in there and I’m used to feeling on my feet. The skirt flounced real twisty and shook those dots fizzy when I walked to the truck. Sleepy sped out the driveway and onto the blacktop, tromping the gas toward China Church, or maybe Dorta. His booze bottle slid underfoot on the turns until I dropped a sneaker on the neck. Out the window there’s a blur of trees and fence posts, crows on wires and ponds scummed green, two kids racing three-wheelers over a puckered dirt mound.

“You got trouble?”

“Not for long.”

I could hear inside his mind better now, too, since my return, the roundelay of sounds amok in the head—swift ripping sounds, human whimpers behind the door, that distant banjo striking notes curved so sharp only one ear can hear them and the other gets suspicious. I hoped not to ever again submit to the demands of such sounds, but I don’t make that kind of promise to myself anymore.

Sleepy says, “You know any Wallaces?”

“From where?”

“From over toward West Table, on the Dorta road. Those ones.”

“In school there were some, from by Bawbee, that dairy.”

“These ain’t related to those.”

“Their cheese hardly melts.”

“That’s not the ones I mean.”

“I don’t, then.”

“Good. That’ll make it easy on you if they act up silly and start a fight.”

Staff at the gate told me my life is all day-by-day from here on out.

At a certain spot he backed the truck a few feet onto a gravel road running to the head of a thin trail that led into the public forest, around Sulphur Ridge, then dropped to the Twin Forks River. On private land across the blacktop and down in a swale there was a nice red barn, well-kept and big, beside a huge pen of hogs dusting their skin in the sunshine. Up the slope beyond sat a white house of beaming windows, with fancy railings edging the porch, gray double doors to the root cellar slanted against the near wall, a swing chair on hair ropes hanging from a stooped tree in the yard. Past the house there stretched a long field of bright, gangly corn, then there was a scant line of trees, and behind them another field of a different crop that hadn’t done much sprouting yet.

Sleepy said, “Ol’ boy’s got him some fat acres, don’t he?”

“Good dirt.”

“That means plenty.”

Sleepy slouched in his seat and watched the house across the road, smoking cigarettes and punching the radio dial all over the place, seeking tunes he liked but finally giving up. In the quiet you could hear car tires sing low notes on the hard road while nearby birds tried to thwart the song with quick little trills. A burly beer truck passed, grunting slow toward Mountain View, the side painted with a tall picture of beer in a glass, beaded and beckoning, and Sleepy chuckled, then said, “Whatta you think?”

“I must abstain from alcohol and other stimulants.”

“They haul ’em warm, anyhow.”

We sat there until the sun was announcing the lunch hour in the sky, and from behind us there came a sound on the gravel, a sweet crunching, two boys on bicycles, both in blue jeans and T-shirts of several colors wrung together, sweating brightly. Wide hats hid their hair, big shades hid their eyes. They rolled to the pavement, looked up and down the blacktop like they were waiting on someone coming to get them, then turned their bikes about and pedaled back to the trailhead. Their feet were clamped to the pedals, and the bikes were the kind meant for mountainsides and rock creek beds. Both boys nodded at the truck, and one wore a nice necklace featuring a circled silver thing that sent the sun rays back at me spinning.

Sleepy said, “Oh, my—look at them wheels. That kind costs plenty. ”

“Is that one’s hair yellow?”

“Them boys look like they’d be easy—but there’s the man now, going up to the house for his eats.”

“Those hats hid the colors.”

“I won’t show my gun ’til they show theirs.”

The lane in is narrow, with separated wheel ruts coated by white chat and a taller mohawk of grass between. Every passing tire spreads the chat a bit more and deepens the ruts likewise. The farmer steps onto the porch as Sleepy drives near. Through the screen door I can see a woman of wife age, and a grown son in shadow behind the screen. Sleepy and the farmer lock eyes a minute with the engine running, then Sleepy turns the key. He says, “Stand in the yard, there, and look decent unless I call you over.”

“I have been instructed and will comply.”

I take my stand by the tailgate and wait. Chickens range about the yard, flapping and pecking, murmuring to each other, the kind with red leggings and sharp clucks. Sleepy and the farmer meet on the porch, and the wife steps out while the son lingers on the other side of the door to be nearer the shotgun rack, I imagine. That swing chair on hair ropes is just for show, it seems, and couldn’t hold much weight, the hair being loose and rotted, ready to snap. The wife is a pretty lady but doesn’t look too good just now—pale, hands at her sides, like she’s expecting to see her world flipped wrong way up and dropped on its head at any instant now. Her lipstick is perfect even on lips shaking that way. The farmer is trying to speak back, but pretty soon he stops and Sleepy leans close to him and keeps talking. Young corn smell is coming strong across the yard, with the smell of turned dirt, and chickens. That son opens the door and stands in the way of it closing.

He’s the shiny boy my sleep sent to me. Yellow hair is quite clearly boiling bubbles on his head.

Sleepy laughs alone, the only laugher on the porch. I can hear him say in slowed words, plain and loud, like talking to a kid, “Now, Edward, you’ve known me most all my life—you know damn well that wasn’t me you seen.”

You have to believe your dreams keep your best interests in mind and wouldn’t send anybody wrong to you. I went without thinking or making the choice over the grass to the steps, the way my sleep would want, and swung my dots, sliding past the wife and the farmer. The boy looks at me like he doesn’t remember bicycling through fields of waving grain all night so clear as I do.

“I’m here about your yellow hair.”

“I’m listenin’ to what they say.”

“Don’t you have wooden shoes you wear sometimes?”

“I know who you are.”

I start to reach for his hand, to hold it and feel the warm fingers, and splash the other hand up to his head of boiling yellow and pop those hot bubbles with my fingertips, gather the bubbles and pop, pop, pop but you can startle dreams with sudden changes and they lose their shape and drain through the cracks to somewhere you can’t find, so I don’t. “Maybe you only wear them for going out bicycling?”

“You need to get off this porch.”

Sleepy clomps down the steps and into the yard, suddenly stops, goes on high alert, raises his nose, and takes several big sniffs of the air. “Is that your barn burnin’?”

The farmer, the wife, the son, all rush down the steps, into the yard for a view of the barn. They cluster together. The farmer says, “I don’t see any smoke.”

I follow the family down and stand still behind the boy, drinking his shadow, and it has all the things inside I hunt. I don’t make a move to touch him on his arm fat with muscle, the skin browned from field work, or poke a finger through the hole torn in his shirt by the armpit and tickle. Patience is the quality most lacking in people of my group, and impulses must be recognized and arrested and considered before taking action, or else the flicker of a bad idea unchallenged can instantly make you swing a sharp instrument of hurt into the area of someone you had ought to love but can’t for a second. I have learned exactly how patience looks when standing in public view and I strike that look in the farmer’s yard.

Sleepy stares at the barn, tilting his head side to side as if confused by what he sees and wanting different angles, then says, “Oh, maybe you’re right—it
ain’t burnin’,
is it.” He climbs into the truck, waves a small wave, fires the motor. I make those dots jump apart and back together fast the way I walk swinging to the truck and hop into the seat. Sleepy eases us away on the lane real slow. I don’t even need to look at the boy to know everything in his chest and how I’ll collect him when the right movie shows. After we hit the paved road and go faster, Sleepy starts to whistle, not that well, a song I recognize before long, though, one of the ancient tunes we’ve all felt, but I couldn’t put any name to it.