The Outlaw Album: Stories

            I was waiting on him ever since, the slide-in move under my quilt as I slept, the whiskery rub on my cheek, the fingers riding roughshod over my skin like cowboys hunting an Indian to blame. Ma always was scared to chase him off, or even let on she noticed the things he done.

            The day I come across the mattocks in the shadows and swung down on his head and rendered him into my own big quiet baby, there was a girl. The girl was yelling high-pitched the way they did, out there in the old barn where Uncle took them. The barn sets near where the house was once, long ago, a good ways down the cow pasture from where the house is now, and the wood hangs at a tilt on the sides of the barn, all dried up and flaky from sun and rain and freeze since Ma’s ma was younger than me, and the roof has fallen open in a bunch of spots, but there’s some hay put by inside, pitched around loose, and a shock of old garden tools leaned in the corner, and small birds black as pepper come and go from the slanted rafters. This one screamed louder than most, and screamed loudest in between sentences she said, such as, There’s no need for this! Get off of me! Stop! Stop! Please, stop!

            Uncle culled these girls from down on the river, which they come here for, and flows just yonder over our ridge and down a steep hill. They come here from where there are crowds of people bunched in tight to loll along our crystal water in college shirts and bikinis, smoking weed and drinking too much, laughing all the way while their canoes spin on the river like bugs twirling in a spider’s web. Mostly they don’t know what they’re doing, but the river is not too raging or anything. Everybody thinks they can do that river when they stand looking at it up at Heaney Cross, where they rent the canoes and the water is smooth. Uncle dicks them when he catches them, on the smelly damp hay in the old barn with the open spots above leaking light on his big behind bouncing white and glary on some girl whose eyes won’t blink anymore. But this yelling girl was giving him a tussle, clawing at him and such as that, scratching him under his eyes so blood laid a narrow path down his face and dropped from his chin onto her chest and bare boobies, and Uncle dicked her even harder in his own blood. She had brown hair that was bright blond on top in perfect streaks, which looked pretty and special, something I might ought to try, and stopped yelling because he had his hands on her throat.

            Uncle stood once his own breaths slowed, stood and hooked his bibs up and left her lay there, and then is when I slunk into the barn and knelt.

            Let’s get you out of here, lady. Sometimes he comes back.

            I hauled her up and made her move, trying to get her to the spring pooled under our ridge where her canoe would likely be waiting. Uncle looked for loners, mostly, and understood that the law here ain’t eager to come into our woods after him, so he was bold as an idiot sometimes, when he smoked powder or drunk a bunch. I held hands with her down the trail, which switches back and forth and is steep, with little rocks slippery underfoot, and she didn’t say a word. Get in the spring, I said, and when she didn’t, I pushed her. The cold water shocked her face into a different cast, brought color to her skin. The water in the pool shimmered like glass, and you could see the polish on your toenails standing in there. I made a shallow cup of my hands and sloshed what water I could onto her skin, which had tanned, and she wore earrings I liked, the kind that hung low from the ears but didn’t flop around all spaz every time your head moved, with purple glass in the low part, my favorite color. Her body had got to be one big goose bump, plump and trembling, her lips pressed together and mumbly.

            There was a bird book in her canoe that put a name to all of them it looked like, with inked pictures. I said, Come on, lady, get the hell away from here. And, listen, if you run to the law, well, he’ll know, and pretty quick he’ll know where you live, too. You won’t want that. Nobody wants that. She got into the canoe, and I gave it a strong shove out to the main current and waved good-bye. She didn’t raise a paddle, even, until she was near gone from sight.

            Back in the pasture, he said to me, She leave anything good?

            Didn’t she have on a necklace? I said. Seems like there was a skinny golden one around her neck before she laid down on the hay. Must be it flew off or broke loose.

            You might be right, he said, and headed for the barn. I think maybe you are. He started staring at the messed straw and dirt and bird puddles on the ground. Golden, was it?

            I said, Just there, I think. She laid just there. Then I eased to the dark nearby corner and let my hand drop to the mattocks handle. Maybe you could find it best with your fingers, feel for it. He got on his knees to feel the dirt for gold, and I hoisted that mattocks overhead and slammed down like I was busting the cow pond ice open in winter, so the whole herd could drink.