Daniel Woodrell - The Outlaw Album - Stories

Her mother ran west when the girl was five. I was too steady for her taste, too regular, too much the same one day to another. She wanted fizzy drinks and jukeboxes, different arms to hold her every week or two. She remembered her daughter’s birthday for a few years, sent a gift at Christmas, then she just didn’t anymore. She’d turned that page, lit a fresh cigarette, poured a cold one, found new lips to kiss.

I went to all the trouble and tracked her to Reno once our girl was gone, and she said, “Everything with you is a downer, Henry. I just can’t stand your blah-blah-blah negative attitude. You’re so selfish that way. She’ll turn up.”

“She didn’t leave—she was taken.”

“What’s your proof? You got any?”

“You don’t even know her.”

The phone went click, and that was it. She has yet to call with another question.

I always wondered if her mom’s leaving was why the girl ran to fat for so long, had a roly-poly figure until the year before she went gone. She took up swimming, jogging, some flowery-sounding yoga class at the Civic Center, ate salads and more salads and rice cakes. She made herself into a size she hadn’t believed she could ever be. That meant so much to her, to finally have a figure clothes looked good on, to feel a little admired when lolling around the pool in town, wear shorts to the ballpark on summer nights.

I’ve often thought about that: If she’d stayed chunky would she be here now?

Such questions popping up keep the hurt fresh.

And sometimes I think, Were there two of them? Three?

How much of our world is in on this?

The cow trembled in the sideways tree, the broken left foreleg canted in a separate direction from the other legs, snapped sharply to the right and dangling. There’d been moans since the storm in the night pushed on and away and the wind calmed. The cow heard my feet rustle pebbles on the cliff, and its tired neck raised the head to look up at me. The cow had wide screaming eyes that were saying things that living things say to me in that language better than words. That language that travels. I’ve seen it everywhere.

The sideways tree was a lonely old sycamore halfway down the cliff that grew straight out from the face for about ten feet, then curled upward for another thirty. Far below, the river flowed clean and dense in the morning shadow cast by the bluff, the rocks in its bed singing of centuries spent singing in the rushing, the things that wash by, bump going past, leave marks or bones. And the cow repeated everything again with those shrill eyes pointed my way, pleading as it had since the forest started rattling and lightning shanks stomped down yellow from the sky and the wind huffed ’til bad instincts took charge and the cow plunged through the barbed wire, seeking a way out of the suddenly terrifying pasture but found only a way down, and the sideways tree snagged it so it had a long hurt night held aloft to hear the rocks far, far below, and know horror.

I felt responsible for the cows.

I turned and walked across the broad sopping pasture toward Ma’s house, tall supple grass flicking droplets to my knees. The sky had been washed baby blue and blank, and the other cows were munching away at the greenery, rubbing their hides on small trees. Ma’s house is a square two-story built plain long ago and still sturdy. It’s painted an invented shade of white about halfway around the house to where the paint ran out, just past the south corner and beyond sight from the road, some certain mix of various whites you have to fetch from town. The rest of the house has been colored with the paler paints left over in the shed, so it’s one color house seen driving by, several others standing in the yard, colors that don’t rhyme in the eye, but the old wood is well coated. A ladder yet leans there, and a couple of brushes on the bottom rung have stiffened atop a paint can lid.

She’s asleep, Ma, snoring in her room, letting the creep of cancer slip her mind a spell, and I go tiptoe through the kitchen to the gun cupboard in the hall. The rifle I want is standing in the back now, behind a cracked oil lantern and a pile of yesteryear phone books, not handy like I kept it. It’s an old bruiser, a bolt-action aught-six that has been whipped on by wintry thickets slapping and raw sporting weather since two grandpas ago, yet it still has a glow to it, a veteran allure. I trust this one most.

The cow screams at me again with those eyes. Screams what you think it would. The sideways tree is too far down the cliff for me to clamber there, even if I was willing. In the valley and downriver a short ways there’s a twist of smoke coming from a new house I keep forgetting is there now. A strange but handsome riverside house made of fresh shining wood, with a steep roof of bluish tile, where outsiders have come to live. I stand on the cliff so a stray round won’t pop into a tile.

This target seemed so close, so easy, so harmless, not like those when I’d been elsewhere.

I said, “Should’ve stopped at the checkpoint, hajji.”

The dead cow slumped more loosely over the sideways tree. The eyes finally hushed. One leg strode hard for a few seconds, trying to climb the cliff now it was shot, climb the cliff in death, then abruptly stilled.

A man came out of the house below and stared at me, a silver-haired man in a black T-shirt, until I flapped a hand his way that meant never mind, it’s okay, and he nodded. He went about his business, stacking firewood in the yard, a dog trailing him, a cat trailing the dog, a woman standing on the porch. Together it all makes one of those pictures of perfect life that might splay across your mind when you are far off and think of home, somebody else’s home, the kind that looks like that and raises your spirits.

In Ward 53, where they fretted about me so, they told me maybe I should paint, take up painting landscapes or portraits, something soothing, but whenever I try the picture explodes on me, the light of day shatters, the humans don’t look too human, and strange patterns span the sky. Sometimes the sky is all cherry blossoms, one big blush of pink and white, and there’s bones sticking up from the mud below, with little volunteer vines growing around them, linking them together, like the scattered bones don’t truly belong to death but might hop up reunited by vines and dance a loose clattering jig once more. Hopeful, I guess, deep down, which is why they wanted me to paint.

I have a dozen dead items painted that way.

I know the departed cow in the sideways tree will be next.

Before I went into the desert I’d had a decent job at Spangler Feeds, hefting sacks, stacking salt blocks, sweeping grain dust and such, and they would’ve held it for me, but the whole feed mill burned down to a knee-high mess of ash and nails while I was away, and the Spanglers decided not to rebuild, just not worth it, so they moved to Florida instead and fish for big ones at sea a lot. They sent a postcard. Where Ma worked didn’t help with insurance, so now I watch her cows for her while I can and we’ll contribute the dough to cancer treatment.

Ma’s a Boshell. I’m a Girard, because Ma got to feeling guilty after Dad was gone and had my papers fixed so I was legally his, even if they’d never married. Dad Dad, my sorrowful Dad, was a man given to long blue spells pierced by moments of excited yearning—a handsome doomed man I like more and more as the days roll past and I imagine him with dark curls and thin whiskers and how we resemble.

I carried the rifle with me and marched across the field counting cows. I had got to know them by their color schemes and shapes, and two or three were the kind of cows that had personalities, too, goofy traits or bad tempers that made them stand out among the herd. Only the one had bolted. I walked under the shade trees and around the wallow of red mud and dull water counting twice, then I went to the house to fetch my painting stuff, which they’d been very glad to give me back at Ward 53.