Daniel Woodrell - The Outlaw Album - Stories

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.