The Outlaw Album: Stories

            Morrow made a lowball offer before supper that day, an offer that could seem insulting to both Nan and the seller, but a few weeks later the offer was accepted. He arrived at the Twin Forks Store and Campground in early March, driving a pickup truck with everything he expected to need stacked neatly in the bed. He intended to change his habits in new surroundings, give his system a shake, so he arrived without many of his once-favorite things: the antique liquor cabinet with the copper top his father had left to him, a box stacked with discs of music that had once made his feet move in ecstasy but that he didn’t expect to listen to again. He’d taken all of his golfing trophies down from shelves in the den and tossed them into a trash can at the curb, then returned to drop four pair of handmade shoes and his wristwatch on top of the trophies. That same night he drove to downtown Omaha and placed a set of customized golf clubs on a sidewalk near the bus station and drove away with a raised hand blocking the rearview mirror so he couldn’t look back. He did keep a stuffed buffalo head he’d bought on impulse at a garage sale in Lincoln, because the eyes seemed to know him, his pump shotgun for hunting game birds, one box of favorite books. Several pictures of his daughters were saved and brought along, but none of their mother.

            By late May he had acquired a routine suited to this new version of himself: wake above the store before dawn, walk to the river, hang his robe on a low limb, plunge in and swim upstream until his arms balked, then float back to his robe as first light began to raise the sky. There would be coffee boiling over freshened campfires, bacon sizzling, trout split and dropped into the grease, and as he passed the earliest to rise he’d wave and they’d wave back. He’d open the store early, skin numbed by the river and feeling tightened ten years younger, the smell of the outdoors drying into his hair.

            He hired two relatives of Nan’s to wrangle canoes and help out in general, a blood uncle named Royce, and Sky, who he took to be a ceremonial uncle of some sort, while he tended to the store. The locals who came in were often people of a kind he hadn’t truly believed still existed but found rewarding to meet: pioneer-lean old men who poached deer whenever hungry and wouldn’t pay taxes, their wives wearing gray braids and cowboy hats, clasp knives sheathed at their belts; men with the beards of prophets who read the Bible at a certain slant and could build anything, their women smelling of lavender, in gingham and work boots; folks living hidden in the hills and only reluctantly coming into contact with the conventional world for want of baby formula or headache powders. A few of these customers lingered to chat, but most said all they had to say with a slow nod hello and a jerk of the chin on the way out. There were some he didn’t want to linger, squint-faced men with cursive tattoos garbled in shades of blue, who cleaned his shelves of Sudafed and red matchsticks, then returned in a few days hoping to buy more of the same. Royce, who seemed slow in offering helpful advice to an outsider, finally said, “Mr. Morrow, them fellas is buyin’ all that so they can drive over the hill there and hide somewhere to cook up drugs. The red part from the matches and grains from them pills both help make the recipe.”

            “There’s so much I don’t know.”

            “That’s lesson one.”