The Outsider (10 page)

“Yeah?” Mose cocked a grin at the boy. “No more than you are, I reckon.”

Benjo jutted out his chin. “I’m not scuh—scared of him.”

It was on the tip of Mose’s tongue to ask the boy if he intended to take on the desperado’s six-shooters with his puny sling, but this time he held back. He didn’t want to hurt the boy. Because he was built small and stuttered, a lot of people, especially outsiders, thought Benjo Yoder was weak and maybe a little stupid, and they picked on him because
of it. Mose himself was sometimes mean to the kid, though he was always sorry for it afterward. He supposed he’d always been a little jealous of Benjo because he had Rachel Yoder for a mother.

With the mean words he’d been about to say drying up in his mouth, Mose found himself out of conversation. He bent over the chopping block again, rubbed his hands across the seat of his trousers and wrapped them around the ax helve.

“Muh—Mose?”

Mose glanced up, waiting while the muscles in Benjo’s throat strained and his lips pulled back from his teeth.

“Duh—duh—duh—duh . . .”

Mose huffed an impatient sigh. “
Ja, vell?
Spit it out or swallow it.”

Benjo pursed his lips and bulged his cheeks, and the stubborn word indeed shot out on a spray of spittle. “D-did you really go into the G-gilded Cage last suh—suh—Saturday and buy yourself a g-glass of the Devil’s b-brew?”

Mose straightened with a snap, bringing the ax with him. He flushed, glancing around guiltily as if he expected his father to come popping up out of the buffalo grass and give him what-for again. “So what if I did?” he said.

“So d-did you drink it . . . the Devil’s brew?”

“I said I drank it, didn’t I?”

Mose wedged the ax back into the chopping block and wiped his mouth with his sleeve to hide his smile as Benjo launched into the first round of his many whats, whys, and how comes, barely slowed by his stutter. The truth was Mose relished the opportunity to tell someone about his adventure in Miawa City’s grandest honky-tonk. The good Lord knew his father and his aunt Fannie sure hadn’t wanted to hear a word of it.

Just talking about it brought back to Mose all the flavors of that day. There’d been the first panicky excitement that had dried his mouth as he pushed open the door of the Gilded Cage, his eyes blinking against the sting of thick cigar smoke. The place had been rank with the smell of tobacco slop, spilled beer, and woolen union suits that hadn’t been washed in weeks, maybe never.

The floor had been sprinkled with sawdust, and in the sudden quiet that marked his entrance, it ground under the heels of Mose’s new boots as he walked up to the bar. Shyness kept his eyes on his boots, and he became sort of mesmerized by the way their pointy toes could cut such a dashing swath. When he glanced up, he was startled to see himself reflected in a huge gold-framed mirror. He thought he looked flashy in his new mail-order suit and derby, and not at all like a Plain boy. Until he heard somebody snicker.

Besides himself, the mirror had shown Mose a half dozen watermarked wooden tables that were ringed by spindly chairs. The walls were decorated with deer antlers and one moth-eaten moose head. A man plucked halfheartedly at the yellow keys of a piano. A brassy-haired woman leaned over the piano player’s shoulder, and Mose barely kept his mouth from falling open at the sight of all that naked skin she was displaying. Four other men lounged on their tailbones on chairs drawn up to a potbellied stove, cradling tin pails of beer in their laps. They were gawking at Mose as if he’d suddenly started sprouting a set of horns to rival the moose head’s.

Mose looked away from the reflection in the mirror, his gaze moving over the shelves of decanters, cigar vases, and jars of brandied fruit, finally settling on a man polishing the bar with a wet rag.

The man gave him a slit-eyed once-over, then let loose a long splatter of tobacco juice out the corner of his mouth. It
hit the side of a brass cuspidor with a loud
ping.
“How there, Plain boy,” he said. He had thick purple lips, hanging jowls, and wispy white hair that sat on his head like a dandelion puff. “Who let you outta the zoo?”

“I’d like a glass of your finest whiskey, please.”

The barkeep hawked a deep laugh, along with another glob of tobacco juice. “ ‘A glass of your finest whiskey, puleeze,’ ” he mocked. But then he stretched his thick lips into a long flat line that curved up on one end like a fishhook. Mose hoped it was meant to be a smile. “You got two bits?”

Mose braced his foot on the bar’s brass rail while he dug the coin out of the fob pocket of his flashy new vest.

The barkeep sat a bottle and a glass in front of Mose and gave him another one of those fishhook grins. “This here is the best damn tarantula juice this side of hell. One slug is guaranteed to cure whatever ails ya,” he said, and filled the glass to the brim with what to Mose’s eyes looked like swamp water. Mose carefully lifted the glass, drew a deep breath, and prepared to join hands with the Devil.

He coughed and sputtered and shuddered with the first fiery swallow, but the next one went down a little easier. The barkeep watched Mose for a moment longer and then went back to his polishing.

The men around the stove also went back to what they were doing, which appeared to consist of smoking, chewing, spitting, and blaspheming. Mose had been just starting to think that sinning wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, when the woman with all that naked skin sidled up to him and asked him if he wanted to buy a dance.

“The way it works,” Mose told Benjo, unable even now to keep the wonder of it out of his voice, “is you pay another two bits to the barkeep for a piece of red tin called a token. Then you give the token to the lady and she tucks it in her,
uh . . . she puts it away, and then you dance.” Actually what Mose had mostly done was stumble and trip across that sawdusted floor. But, oh my, she’d felt as soft and fluffy in his arms as a goose-down pillow.

“Those dancing ladies, they fly fast as silk flags in a high wind,” he said with a wink and a grin. He doubted, though, that Benjo knew what the word “fast” meant when applied to a lady. Mose wasn’t quite sure himself about all the nuances of the word.

Benjo was looking up at him in wide-eyed wonder, and Mose felt a bright glow. “So, how’d you know about me paying a visit to the Gilded Cage anyway?”

“I . . . I h-heard your da talking to Mem about it. He said you’re buh—buh—breaking his heart.”

All the brightness left Mose, like clouds swallowing up the sun.
Breaking his heart.
Put like that, it suddenly didn’t seem enough that he’d paid for his grand adventure with the lick of the old man’s razor strop across his back.

“Aw, old Deacon Noah’s just afraid I’m going to stroll into some honky-tonk one day and come out an
Englischer.
” He snorted as if such a thing was beyond belief, but this niggling doubt tickled at him, like an ant crawling up his ankle. Just that one little jaunt into the Gilded Cage had shown him that seeing certain things made you want other things that maybe you shouldn’t want.

“Wh-what does it t-taste like?”

“Huh? What? The whiskey?” Mose cuffed his mouth, his lips pulling back from his teeth as if he were just now taking his first big swallow of what the barkeep had told him was the best damn tarantula juice this side of hell. “It’s like swallowing fire. And it makes your belly buzz and tingle, when it hits bottom.”

“Wh-what does it smell like?”

“Huh? I don’t know. It smells like whiskey.”

Benjo nodded seriously, as if this bit of knowledge only confirmed his own vast experience, and Mose hid a smile.

“What about that f-fast lady you duh—duh—danced with? Wh-what did she smell like?”

“Criminy!” Mose swiveled his head around as if looking for eavesdroppers. He leaned on the ax helve, bringing him eye to eye with the younger boy, and he lowered his voice to a harsh whisper. “There’s a question you shouldn’t be asking.”

“Wh-why not?”

Because she’d smelled of sweat and old talcum powder, and he didn’t like tarnishing his adventure by exposing it to the light of too much truth. “Because you’re a pesky, wet-behind-the-ears, snot-nose kid, that’s why not.”

“Yeah? W-well, your da told Mem that you had
your
nose buried in her b-bosom and it was nuh—naked.”

“Criminy!” Mose snatched up his ax with such force the boy jumped. “I don’t know why I bother with you anyway, Benjo Yoder. And if you don’t quit pestering me, it’ll be the Fourth of July before I’m done chopping this wood.”

“I w-w-was only wuh—wuh—wondering whuh—whuh—what she smelled like,” Benjo said, stuttering so badly Mose barely understood him. He had decided to ignore the pesky kid anyway.

Benjo took out his sling and dug a stone out of the ground with the toe of his brogan. He cast Mose a look, but Mose was still ignoring him. He fitted the stone into the sling’s leather socket, held the two ends of the rawhide cords in his left hand, and whirled it above his head. He let go of one cord sharply and the stone whizzed through the air, hitting the pine burl bull’s-eye. But Mose ignored that as well.

Benjo released a tiny sigh, turned, and shuffled away.
Mose waited until the boy was almost at the house before he looked up. He thought maybe Benjo would glance back to see if he was watching, but he didn’t.

Mose snatched off his hat and slapped himself on the thigh with it hard enough to sting. “Gol-blimey, Mose Weaver. You’ve got straw for brains!”

He’d been so busy answering Benjo’s questions that he’d let slip by the opportunity to ask a few of his own. Benjo probably knew all sorts of interesting things about the outsider, like what he was wanted for and how much lead he was packing and how many people he’d killed. Above all, Mose wanted to know exactly what sort of flashy duds the desperado had been wearing when he was shot.

T
HAT NIGHT THE OUTSIDER’S
fever settled into his chest, and Rachel knew he wouldn’t live to see the sun rise.

He breathed as if he were drowning inside his own body. It was horrible to hear him, the way the air gurgled in his lungs and rasped wetly out his throat. And she found herself waiting, with her own breath suspended, to see if each strangled gasp would be followed by another, or if it would be his last.

She refused to let him go easily. In the early hours, while he could still swallow, she dosed him with onion syrup. She
stripped the sweat-soaked nightshirt off him and bathed his naked body. And while the vinegar water rose off his burning flesh in a steam that enveloped the bed, she prayed for him. She prayed not that God would save his life, for his life already rested in God’s loving hands. She prayed only that He would have mercy on the outsider’s soul. For she had learned long ago that not all the bum lambs could be saved.

Once, deep in the night, she thought he came awake. He struggled to sit up, and she leaned close in to him and laid her arm across his chest to calm him, while taking care not to jostle his gunshot wound or his broken arm. His breathing was coming in such hard shocks now that she wondered how his ribs didn’t crack from the strain. Long ago he’d ruptured his sutures again; the bandage shone wet-black with blood in the flickering lantern light. And she supposed it was a testament to how close to death he was that he’d finally let go of his gun.

Suddenly his hand lashed out, his fingers spanning her neck as if he would strangle her, pushing her chin up.

He held her suspended with his strong and violent hand. She stared down into his face and she was lost for an instant in the compelling facets of his eyes—eyes that turned black and wild as his grip on her throat tightened.

“Bastard,” he said, the words torn raw from his throat. “I’ll fucking kill you, you goddamned bastard.”

His fingers clenched, hurting her. She clawed at his wrist. She brought her knee up against the side of the bed to use as leverage to pull against him. His grip tightened and tightened, choking off her air now. Rachel’s chest burned, her ears roared with surging blood. The lantern-lit room began to blacken at the edges.

Then he let her go, so abruptly that she collapsed in a
sprawl on top of his chest. Air flooded into her starved lungs on a rush of pain. A small, startled cry escaped her bruised throat. Frantic still with fear, she pushed herself off him and staggered away from the bed.

He had fallen back into a deep faint, although his chest still strained for every breath. She stared at him, her hand to her throbbing throat, her own chest heaving. The agony of pity and horror that she felt was nearly as paralyzing as his fingers had been. It wasn’t the foul words he’d spoken; she’d heard such words before, although never from the mouth of a Plain man. But that look in his eyes. She couldn’t imagine the rupture of spirit it would take to so fill a man with such black and bottomless hate.

She wasn’t sure how long she’d stood there before she realized that his fevered body was now racked with chills. She covered him up with the sheet and her star-patterned quilt, and then another quilt, and still he shuddered and shook so hard the iron bedstead rattled. Finally she took off her half boots and crawled into the bed with him, fully clothed from her shawl to her prayer cap, to warm him with her own body’s heat.