The Outlaw Album: Stories

            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.

            I set the easel above the cow, considered colors I might use, colors that’d catch the feeling of this killed cow, the tragedy of last night that was already nearly forgot, while the cliff and tree and bullet hole’d tell the facts of the story. The color of the actual cow meant nothing now, so I’d fit some to it—colors that suited would come about somehow as my brush moved, and the tree would get rendered the same. I sensed blue for the cow and bronze for the tree and blue again for the killing ground that waited below the tense yellow cliff. The sky grew plum and gray and rippled like a window curtain. As I made the picture, the scene in my head took over and the cliff turned up flat on me, so the plum-gray sky was standing sentry over to the right, and the cow in the sideways tree hung above level ground but below the branch, disobeying gravity now that it’d died.

            The bullet hole was a pink question mark.

            Ma had walked the pasture counting heads while I was lost deep inside that scene with the cow, and crept along behind me. I was adding chrome boulders to the stream, and when I caught a creeping sound behind I fast as a flinch reached for the rifle, but the rifle wasn’t there, and I sprang for the dirt with one hand shielding my face while the other aimed the paintbrush. The brush swept back and forth, wanting to spray a wide field of fire, a death blossom, get ’em all, and I felt wiggly in my head as a few drops dove loose to dribble down me.

            Ma said, “That cow’s money lost now.”