The Outsider (39 page)

Folk said a drought was in the making and everyone, even those with only a nodding acquaintance with the Lord, prayed for rain. But no rain came. Not even enough dew collected overnight on the tall grass to wet the ewes’ udders. And on the morning the outsider paid his first visit to town, the sun came up smoking and the wind died early, so that by midday the whole valley lay sweltering, beneath a blanket of gummy, heavy air.

“Isn’t this a fine summer’s day we’re having in spring?” Rachel said to the outsider as he was loading the wagon with crocks of her clotted cheese. “The grasshoppers started singing even before the sun came up.”

Cain swiped at the drop of sweat that clung to the end of his nose and growled something about how now they wouldn’t shut up. She laughed back at him, not caring that the heat made him grumpy. It was hot, true, but there was a canopy of deep and endless blue sky overhead, and the smell of sun-ripe grass and sage spiced the air. A patch of fireweed in front of the barn had exploded overnight into bright pink blossoms, so pretty that Rachel smiled every time it caught her eye.

The wagon made a song as it creaked and clattered and rumbled its way to town over the washboard ruts in the road. The harness chains jingled and jangled, and the old mare’s plodding hooves beat a sleepy tattoo on the baked dirt. Rachel had often dreaded going into town before, the outsiders all stared so and could be so mean. But today a feeling of excitement gripped her, as if they were off on some grand adventure.

She knew a part of her happiness came from him, because he was here with her, sitting in her spring wagon with Benjo between them. He almost looked as if he belonged with her now. His flashy clothes, all but the black duster, had been ruined in the cattle stampede, so Ben’s broadfalls, sack coat, and felt hat had been added to the Plain shirt. Except it was too hot for the sack coat today, and he couldn’t seem to put on the big floppy broad-brimmed hat without tilting it at a rakish angle. He still wore his own fancy stitched boots and black suspenders. And, always, his gun.

Like the road they traveled on, the Miawa Valley itself had the undulating shape of ripples on a washboard, with
Miawa City tucked into the lowest dip of the rolling buttes and hills. The first thing a body saw when topping the rise before town was a meandering creek lined with diamond willows and aspens, whose silver leaves always quivered even in the stillest air. Surely the creek was the only pretty thing about the town, which otherwise was a sparse collection of ramshackle buildings roofed with rusty tin and made of logs weathered to the color of old buffalo bones.

Only one road led in and out, but a fingerboard had been planted at the top of the hill pointing the way for those who’d perhaps harbored a faint hope of avoiding the place. Cain pulled the wagon up, looked from the fingerboard to what awaited them down the road, and said, “If you asked me, to call itself a city is to give itself airs. Fact is, if you was to ask me further, I’d say it’s got to stretch itself a bit even to be a burp in the road.”

Rachel squinted against the sunstruck piles of tin cans and bottles that had been dumped along the creek. “It does have a church,” she said, “although the circuit preacher only comes through twice a year. And it’s got a schoolhouse, with a flagpole. Except a man got drunk one afternoon and shot at it, at the flag I mean, so now it’s got a couple extra stars on its field of blue.”

Benjo bounced up and down on the seat, sputtering. “Tuh—tuh—tell him how the Miawa g-got its name, Mem.”

She glanced at Cain. He was watching her in that intense, heavy-lidded way of his that made her feel as if he measured the depth and length of her every breath.

“Once, a long time ago,” she said, trying to copy his drawling way of telling a tale, “before the white man came to this valley, there was a Blackfoot warrior name of Mia-Wa, who was afflicted with the worst case of hard luck of any Indian ever born. One night he went to light a campfire
and wound up setting the whole prairie ablaze. One day he rode off to kill a buffalo and instead caused a stampede that trampled all his tribe’s tipis flat as flapjacks. Another time he took his bow and arrow and went hunting for supper. He saw a plump willow grouse and he took aim, but he missed the bird and shot his chief in the foot instead—”

“Th-that’s not the way Da used to tuh . . . tell it,” Benjo interrupted. “He suh—said ol’ Mia-Wa’s arrow got his ch-chief smack in the ass.”

Rachel gave her son a look. “Anyway, the other Indians eventually got so tired of the walking disaster that was poor Mia-Wa, they banished him from the valley forever. So don’t ask me why they then decided to go and name the whole place after him.”

“Might be,” the outsider said, “that they were so glad to see the back of him, they decided to commemorate the event.”

Rachel laughed. Their gazes met and lingered, and parted. He gathered up the reins and started them on their way again.

Alongside the creek some tame Blackfeet lived in tipis made of antelope hides. As they drove by, Rachel saw smoke puffing from one of the tipis, and her smile faded. She thought of that Indian, poor Mia-Wa, who’d failed at everything he’d tried to do. To be banished from your home and family, to be ripped up by the roots from the very earth of your life, was a fate too horrible to be borne.

They passed the cemetery next, where a pair of boots dangled from a freshly hewn cross. Then came a two-story gray clapboard house that was encircled by a double gallery, and had a red locomotive lantern hanging from a hook next to the front door. Three women in silk wrappers and hair papers sat perched on the upper balcony rail like a flock of bright-colored finches.

“Th-that’s the house where all the Jezebels live,” Benjo declared, loud enough for the Jezebels to hear, and to laugh.

Rachel hauled her son’s pointing finger back into the wagon. “If you’re going to flap at something, make it those flies that are feasting on my cheese.”

Benjo twisted around to pick up the bundle of willow branches that lay in the wagon bed. He waved the makeshift fan over the crocks of clotted cheese that Rachel hoped to trade to defray the cost of their monthly supplies.

As for Rachel, she kept her eyes carefully on the road ahead and off that house of sin. Keeping her mind from wandering inside was more difficult. In that house were beds. She could imagine those beds, with goose-down comforters deep and white and soft as fresh snowbanks. There’d be lace edging on the pillow slips and sheets so silky they’d whisper under a woman’s bare skin. There’d be a piano playing in the parlor below. A mahogany piano. A piano below, and above a man and woman lying on a bed in a hot and shadowy room, clasped together, moving together, and the music from below pulsing over them and through them. . . .

“You going to roost up there all day?”

Rachel looked from the outsider’s raised hand to his upturned face. He stood in the road, in the middle of Miawa City, waiting to help her climb out the wagon, and he didn’t look at all like he’d been thinking of bare legs entwined on feather beds in houses of sin. He only looked hot.

Her fingers were curled around the edge of the seat beside her thighs, and she couldn’t seem to loosen them. Her face burned like a stoked fire. She hadn’t known it was in her to conjure up such wicked imaginings.

He took a step closer and clasped her around the waist, swinging her out of the wagon and all the way onto the
warped boardwalk. She gasped aloud and clung to his shoulders like a child.

“You don’t want to be getting your feet wet,” he said.

It had been a polite thing to do, nothing more. Yet she had been so aware of the hard strength of his hand and arm pressing into her back, of the way her skirts had whispered as they brushed against his leg. Of how, just for an instant, their faces had been close enough for his lips to have touched hers.

“Wet?” she said. And then she realized that Mr. Beaker had just stepped out of his barber shop to empty a bathtub. Gray sudsy water flowed through the shallow trough that passed for a gutter in the road.

She didn’t notice how the barber had stopped to stare, how the few people who were about on such a hot morning had all stopped to stare, not so much at her and Benjo this time as at the infamous shootist Johnny Cain. She looked around her, feeling disoriented, as if she’d never seen Tulle’s Mercantile, Wang’s Chop House, the Slick As a Whistle Barber and Bath, the town’s four honky-tonks and dance halls. A covered jerky clipped past them, throwing up a cloud of dust and dung flies. She let the dust settle over her without even blinking.

“We better get those crocks out of the hot sun,” Cain said to her son. “How about you handing them down to me?”

Tulle’s Mercantile sported a ratty green-and-white-striped awning over its bay window. Cain set a couple of the cheese crocks beneath the awning’s dubious shade, and as he straightened up she saw him grimace and press a hand to his side. The day after the cattle stampede she’d come upon him shirtless, scrubbing himself at the yard pump trough. His whole torso was a purpled mass of weals and welts and bruises.

“Since Doc Henry’s going to be cutting that surgeon’s plaster off your arm this morning,” she said, “you ought to go ahead and have him take a look at those ribs.”

“Aw, they ain’t busted, Rachel. I should know.”

She looked away so he couldn’t see her face. He’d called her Rachel. He did it sometimes now, when he forgot about keeping his distance.

She wondered why he would know how busted ribs felt. The life he’d had before he’d come staggering across her wild hay meadow, the paths he’d followed before his had intersected with hers—it was all a source of constant, gnawing curiosity to her.

Yet when she stole another glance at him, she had to laugh at the face he was pulling. “What is it about you men and physicking? Wave a bottle of cod liver oil under your nose and you run like a prairie chicken. Then come winter let that same nose catch a rheum and to hear you moan, one’d think you were dying. And what are you snickering over, Benjo Yoder? You’re the worst of the lot.”

Cain and her son rolled their eyes at each other, as if to say, “Women!”

“After I’m done being tortured by the doc,” Cain said to the boy, “I’m going to go buy me a horse. Want to help me pick it out?”

Benjo looked like he’d just been given the moon.

“A horse?” Rachel said.

He grunted as Benjo slapped another crock of clotted cheese into his hands. “Lady, if I ever do got to make a quick getaway, it sure ain’t gonna be on that slug mare of yours.”

“Oh.” Of course he would need a horse. After all, he wasn’t going to stay forever. When he left he would certainly need a horse.

“Horses are expensive.”

His face took on a look of pure astonishment. “You don’t think I can afford one on my dollar a day? Well, shucks. Guess I’ll have to hold up the stage, then. Or use some of this.”

Rachel didn’t see where it came from. It was suddenly flying at Benjo and he snagged it out of the air. A man’s leather boodle book.

The boy popped the boodle book’s button lock and spread open the flaps, his eyes going wide. It was stuffed fat with treasury notes and greenbacks. “
Barmlich!
Wuh . . . wuh . . . where did all this money come from?”

“It was in my coat pocket all along. Back in the days when I had any pockets worth mentioning.” She could hear the mischief in Cain’s voice. But all she could think of was that he was buying a horse.

“All those hours you kept me flat on my back and as good as naked,” he said, his eyes on her now, “and I guess you never thought to look and see if I had a purse you could lift.”

“I would never!” she cried.

His eyes laughed at her.

She pulled her gaze away from him and resisted the urge to fan her face with her hand. “We were only wondering, Benjo and I, how you managed to come by so much?”

“Monte winnings.”

A democrat wagon rolled by, its axle squealing loudly. Benjo clambered out of their wagon, the boodle book still clutched in his hand. At least, she thought, the man hadn’t admitted to robbing a bank.

“I assured my father that you didn’t partake of the Devil’s pastimes,” she said stiffly.

“Well, now, that depends on what the Devil does to pass his time.” The laughter in his eyes was both teasing and knowing. “Shouting fire and making hell howl?”

“Games of chance,” she said. “For one thing. There are others.”

“Uh huh.” He took off his hat to cuff the sweat off his forehead. He raked his hair back out of his eyes with his fingers. It was getting long, as long as any Plain man’s.

He dropped the hat back on his head and gave its brim that rakish slant. “I’ll try not to do any misbehaving today, but I ain’t promising.” His arm settled over Benjo’s thin shoulders. “Come along, partner.”

Rachel watched them walk off down the boardwalk, feeling strangely left out. He was taking her son along with him to buy a horse that he would then use to leave them. Benjo got invited along, and all she’d gotten was a little nudge to his hat.

“Do you really think you’ll be needing a quick getaway, Mr. Cain?” she called after him.

He cocked his head around and flashed his rascal’s smile, the one she didn’t trust. The one that belonged to Johnny Cain.

“Don’t you know, Mrs. Yoder? The guilty man runs even when no one’s chasing him.”