The Outlaw Album: Stories

            There was a good deal of blood, and his arms and legs and fingers and all shook pretty jittery for a spell. His face was to the hay and the blood built a creek down his backbone. He messed himself so I could smell it strong standing back from him a distance.

            I had sat down and started poking him with a stick by the time Ma got home from work. He wasn’t shaking that much anymore. She screamed, yanked on her hair, called for an ambulance, and asked me, Who did this? I said, The last girl he was after done it. Ma said, Oh, my, if he don’t die what’ll we do?

            Ma works, so he became my baby to take care of once they turned him out of the hospital. He was there almost all summer, s’posed to pass away any ol’ day but he never. Doctor said, He’ll need constant care, like a newborn. Ma said, I got a job already—he’s yours, hon.

            You finally get an ogre under your thumb and you can’t hardly keep from torturing him some at first. That’s how it started with my baby, torturing him a little bit now and then, but his face hardly twitched and his eyes just stayed focused on something over yon behind the clouds that he couldn’t look away from, so it wasn’t as much fun as you figure torturing an ogre should be. I wheeled him out to the yard in thunderstorms and left him set there in his metal chair. Rain beat on him and blown leaves stuck to his face, but he never caught pneumonia or a lightning bolt. I poured bird feed into a bread pan and set him along the tree line with the pan on his lap. One day I put him in a frilly pink dress Ma had and did his hair up in a French bun and used the whole bucket of Ma’s makeup on him—eyeliner, rouge, lipstick—and wheeled him out front to the road and left him sit all day beside the mailbox, for every passing neighbor and stranger to see, until Ma found him and wheeled him back to the house. Then she and me spent the evening curling his hair like Shirley Temple and laughing, hooking bras on him, drawing movie star moles on his cheeks, searching for just the right spot until he looked like a disease had got him, trying all the shades of lipstick on his sagged mouth, and cherry red worked best, we figured, with his complexion.

            I had to feed him pabulum with a cereal spoon and squirt water into his throat so his pills would go down. He could chew, which must be the last reflex to shut off in a body, or something. Once I rolled him all the way around on the paved road to the river, and shoved him into the water up to his neck. He made a picture, with only his head poked up for turtles to rest on, while tiny white waves lapped at his jowls, and the chair scooted slightly in the current. I left him there for fate to find him easy, and floated away to the bridge, where I dove and dove for tourist treasure that might’ve washed down from all the canoes that take spills upstream, and let the sun dry me after, then dawdled back to where he waited. He wasn’t exactly where I left him, but was fine, cold but fine, and I had a terrible awful time wheeling such a big fat wet baby uphill to home.

            Twice a day I slid the thunder pan under him and wiped his butt, and every three days I shaved his face with an old straight razor in case my hands shook and he got cut to ribbons by accident. I wiped the drool from his chin when he slobbered, which was always, spent most of my time with him, and in about a month I caught myself singing at him, “You are my sunshine…” and such—baby music, the kind you coo more than sing. I puked out the front door, catching myself that way, the first time. It was awful, awful, singing happy words to a baby that had done so much bad in this world, but soon it started to happen again, about every day, and I got used to catching myself singing to him, accepted it as a human thing of mystery.

            He was helpless, and I took to wondering if Uncle was still evil now that he’d become a helpless baby. Do babies learn evil in the run of their days, or bring it with them from the other side of all that you can see? He drooled and I held a rag to his lips, and wheeled him outside into the fresh air and bright light, shoved him along the driveway, to and fro, singing.