Daniel Woodrell - The Outlaw Album - Stories

The 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.