The Outlaw Album: Stories

            Sleepy laughs alone, the only laugher on the porch. I can hear him say in slowed words, plain and loud, like talking to a kid, “Now, Edward, you’ve known me most all my life—you know damn well that wasn’t me you seen.”

            You have to believe your dreams keep your best interests in mind and wouldn’t send anybody wrong to you. I went without thinking or making the choice over the grass to the steps, the way my sleep would want, and swung my dots, sliding past the wife and the farmer. The boy looks at me like he doesn’t remember bicycling through fields of waving grain all night so clear as I do.

            “I’m here about your yellow hair.”

            “I’m listenin’ to what they say.”

            “Don’t you have wooden shoes you wear sometimes?”

            “I know who you are.”

            I start to reach for his hand, to hold it and feel the warm fingers, and splash the other hand up to his head of boiling yellow and pop those hot bubbles with my fingertips, gather the bubbles and pop, pop, pop but you can startle dreams with sudden changes and they lose their shape and drain through the cracks to somewhere you can’t find, so I don’t. “Maybe you only wear them for going out bicycling?”

            “You need to get off this porch.”

            Sleepy clomps down the steps and into the yard, suddenly stops, goes on high alert, raises his nose, and takes several big sniffs of the air. “Is that your barn burnin’?”

            The farmer, the wife, the son, all rush down the steps, into the yard for a view of the barn. They cluster together. The farmer says, “I don’t see any smoke.”

            I follow the family down and stand still behind the boy, drinking his shadow, and it has all the things inside I hunt. I don’t make a move to touch him on his arm fat with muscle, the skin browned from field work, or poke a finger through the hole torn in his shirt by the armpit and tickle. Patience is the quality most lacking in people of my group, and impulses must be recognized and arrested and considered before taking action, or else the flicker of a bad idea unchallenged can instantly make you swing a sharp instrument of hurt into the area of someone you had ought to love but can’t for a second. I have learned exactly how patience looks when standing in public view and I strike that look in the farmer’s yard.

            Sleepy stares at the barn, tilting his head side to side as if confused by what he sees and wanting different angles, then says, “Oh, maybe you’re right—it ain’t burnin’, is it.” He climbs into the truck, waves a small wave, fires the motor. I make those dots jump apart and back together fast the way I walk swinging to the truck and hop into the seat. Sleepy eases us away on the lane real slow. I don’t even need to look at the boy to know everything in his chest and how I’ll collect him when the right movie shows. After we hit the paved road and go faster, Sleepy starts to whistle, not that well, a song I recognize before long, though, one of the ancient tunes we’ve all felt, but I couldn’t put any name to it.

Returning the River

            My brother left no footprints as he fled. There’d been three nights of freeze, and the mud had stiffened until the sloped field lay as hard as any slant road. Morning light met rime on the furrows and laid a shine between rows of cornstalks cut to winter spikes, and my brother, Harky, a mutinous man with a fog patch of gray hair drifting to the small of his back and black-booted feet, crushed the faded stalks aside as he came to them, and only these broken spikes marked his passing. His strides were long but curiosity curled his path, spun it about in small pondering circles as he glanced behind, followed by abrupt, total shifts in forward direction. The mud was unblemished but for the debris of cornstalks, and some of the pale dried shucks were spotted by kerosene drippings. Harky still carried the fuming torch he’d made of a baseball bat and a wadded sheet, the torch he’d used to set the neighbor’s house afire, to make amends, to show his love, and flammable droplets fell beside him partway across the field.

            Our father chased my brother. He chased him down the road from the burning house, into the field, wearing a white bathrobe and loose slippers. With each step he fell farther behind as his old sick feet skittered over uneven furrows and tripped. The nosepiece from his oxygen tube was yet pinched to his face, and a length of tube waved about while the robe flapped open. He fell repeatedly and stalks stabbed his skin broken at the ankles and hips. He stood up from the field six times, or only five, then again tripped over a furrow, collapsed to the frost, and lay there, face to the mud, withered fingers clenching at stalks, robe flung wide.

            Smoke and shouts drifted from the neighbor’s house.