The Outsider (42 page)

It was a simple matter, anyway, to remove the surgeon’s plaster and splints. Lucas cut through the hardened gypsum with a surgeon’s saw. When he was done Cain stretched out the healed arm, flexing his fingers.

“Your killing hand, is it?” Lucas said.

“Killing and other deeds, both wondrous and wicked.”

Lucas laughed, although his gaze was held by that hand, the long fingers and fine-boned wrist. He wondered if God, when He created a man’s hand, had thought beyond all the good the instrument could perform to the evil it would do.

He nodded at the desperado’s killing hand. “That one might not serve you so well for deeds of any sort in the future.
It was a bad break. Your arm may seem much as before, but the bone’s been weakened. Like a rope that’s been frayed once and then mended. I wouldn’t, for instance, trust it with my life.”

“I never figured on dying in bed anyway.” Johnny Cain looked up at him smiling, but Lucas saw that his eyes were empty.

“How about a drink?” Lucas said. He opened the glass-fronted door of a cabinet, shoved aside a box of lancet blades, and extracted a fresh bottle of Rose Bud. He brought out a silver caddy of tobacco and cigarette papers as well. “Or a smoke?”

“No, thank you. I’ll take some water, though.”

“The kitchen’s in there, back through the parlor.”

He followed behind Cain, bringing the whiskey with him. He longed for a cigarette himself, but his hands had the booze tremors too badly to build one. “So you only indulge in the larger vices, do you? Murder and mayhem and such. But then I suppose a young man in your profession must always keep a clear head. No whiskey to dull your brain, or smoke to cloud your eyes.”

He leaned against the doorjamb, watching as Cain worked the pump and cupped his hand under the running water. “Are you sufficiently impressed with our great metropolis? You have certainly impressed
us.
You’ve been the sole topic of conversation for weeks now. Everybody’s been busy speculating over whom you’re going to shoot dead next.”

Cain bent over the sink to drink, the well-scrubbed hickory of his Plain shirt pulling taut across his back.

“There’s a
Harper’s Monthly
been making the rounds,” Lucas went on, “with a story in it that has you killing your first man when you were but a tender fourteen. Or was it
twelve? In any event, twenty-seven more are said to have followed that first poor unfortunate into the grave in the intervening years, dispatched there by your lightning-quick draw. Have I got the tale right?”

Cain splashed water over his face and straightened up, combing back his wet hair with his fingers. “I haven’t stopped to do a tally recently. Are they counting those three I was supposed to’ve killed up on Tobacco Reef?”

“Hell, I don’t know.” Laughing, Lucas waved the hand that held the whiskey bottle. “You probably noticed, by the proliferation of stray dogs scavenging in what passes for a street around here, that our fair and charming town doesn’t have an excess of law enforcement. Hence, you may slaughter the citizenry with reckless abandon and relative impunity. Although, as I’m both physician and undertaker for these parts, you might want to spare a thought for the trouble you’d be putting me to.”

The kitchen was small, barely large enough for an old sawbuck table and a potbellied stove. Cain stood at his ease in front of the big stone sink, his quick and dangerous hands hanging loosely at his sides.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll be a friend to you, sir. I’ll shoot them stone dead so’s you don’t have to do any doctoring, and I’ll do it where it don’t show so’s you’ll have little work in making them pretty for the burying.”

Lucas laughed again. And then the laughter faded as he stared into Johnny Cain’s eyes and realized that, if the man had ever had a soul, the Devil had long ago claimed it. To Lucas, looking into those eyes was like that first shuddering razor-edged rush that came from a whiskey bottle, but now the horror and excitement of seeing his own dark potential was reflected in someone else.

Only two other people in his life had ever been able to
do that to him, to force him to see through the amber fog of booze in his brain to the unbearable truth about himself and the human condition. One was his brother, who had been killed in the war. The other was a woman, and he had married her.

“Why do you do it?” he said to Cain.

“Do what?”

Lucas shrugged. He took another pull of whiskey, for he had lost his thought. But then he found another. “Live the way you do. Hasn’t it occurred to you that it’s a flamboyant, self-indulgent, and rather prolonged form of suicide?”

“So’s drowning yourself in a bottle.”

Lucas smiled painfully. He thought of all the whiskey bottles laid out like dead soldiers, stretching in a long line through all the years of his life, and in that moment he both relished and regretted every one of them.

He rubbed the bottle back and forth over his mouth. “Ah, but I have found a way to go to hell without dying. This is my solace, my lover, and my joy. What is yours?”

He said nothing, but Lucas knew the answer. Killing was this young man’s whiskey, to be embraced, celebrated, drunk deep. It was his obsession and his addiction. Johnny Cain was intoxicated with death.

Lucas tried to swallow through the tightness in his throat. “And what of our dear Plain Rachel?” he said. “Have you spared a thought for what you’re doing to her? She who is not plain at all, with her fine red hair and those big solemn gray eyes that can see through to the dark side of a man’s soul. She who is so damned innocent, so pathetically innocent. You could destroy her utterly.”

Cain’s voice and face expressed only mild inquiry. “Why do you care? Unless you want her for yourself?”

Lucas shook his head. “I do like her, though. And when
I’m not wallowing too deep in my drunkenness, I admire her, bound as she is by her faith that is gentle and yet so severe. In this world, but not of it. If I thought there was even the remotest shred of hope for the salvation she believes in—”

He cut himself off. He wasn’t going to bare all of his soul to this man, at least not yet.

“Thanks for the water,” Cain said.

As he started to pass through the door he stopped and turned. His stare was an insult, filled as it was with that cold indifference. “You’re right, Doc, I do have it in my mind to seduce Rachel Yoder. But not for all the obvious reasons.”

DOCTOR LUCAS HENRY FOUND
himself back in the brown leather wing chair, not sure how he’d gotten there. The whiskey bottle in his hand was still mostly full. A fine sheen of sweat coated his skin, sticky and cold, in spite of the stifling heat in the room.

He stared with longing down the bottle’s slender neck into brown liquid oblivion. He wanted to crawl into the bottom of that oblivion and stay forever. He’d been there before and he knew it for a gentle, numbing place where no one could touch him, no one could hurt him, where he couldn’t feel and he didn’t care anymore about the horrors that he still managed to drag down into the bottom of the bottle with him.

His brother had told him once that he dwelled too much on the dark side, that he wallowed in thoughts of sinning and evil and death, especially death. He had become a doctor to fight death, and a cavalry officer to wage it, and he drank to escape both his fear of death and his fascination with it. Or so his brother had once said.

But after many years and many bottles of Rose Bud, years of killing himself a swig at a time, Lucas had arrived at the hardly original conclusion that it wasn’t death he feared so much as living.

He looked at the wall, where hung his officer’s sword and the valentine his flamboyant and beautiful wife had given him the first and only year they were together. But he seemed to see them through a watery film, like rain on a windowpane. These mementos of his disgrace and his damnation.

He toasted them with his bottle of Rose Bud. His mouth twisted, starting out as a smile and becoming something much more painful.

“Here’s to conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.”

The words echoed in the hot, empty room. And Doctor Lucas Henry thought of how some of the hardest blows life dealt fell not on the body, nor even on the heart, but on the soul.

T
HE WANTED POSTERS HUNG
limply in the hot, still air, papering the side wall of the town’s sprawling livery stable. They shared the space with “for sale” notices, old stage schedules, and an advertisement for a McGrady’s Big Top Circus and Extravaganza which, as much as anyone
could remember, had only made it as far west as Fort Benton.

Waiting in the gray twilight shade cast by the livery, Benjo Yoder had already read the whole wall at least once. Some of the wanted posters had sketches of the outlaws. None of them looked like anyone he knew. But there was this one poster that drew his attention. It didn’t have a picture, only a description. It was rain-spotted and curling at the corners, but it wasn’t as old as most of the others, which were so shredded they looked like mice had been at them. The poster described how a man had stolen one hundred and fifty-seven dollars in greenbacks and treasury notes last winter from a bank in a place called Shoshone, in the Wyoming Territory. The bank teller had been shot dead through the heart “by a tall and slender man, well dressed, in the third decade of his life and with a Southern way of speaking. He has dark brown hair, a handsome visage, and the cold blue eyes of a man-killer.”

Benjo stared at the poster and wondered how big a wad one hundred and fifty-seven dollars would make. If it would be enough to make a black leather boodle book bulge at the seams.

“Were you thinking to run me in to the law?”

Benjo jerked around. Guilt more than fright had his heart thudding in his chest.

Johnny Cain’s gaze lifted from Benjo’s upturned face to the poster-papered livery wall. The floppy felt brim of the Plain hat cast a shadow over his cold, blue, man-killer eyes. “Might be you could collect a reward, huh? And then later, you could issue invitations to my necktie party and sell off pieces of the rope they hang me with, as souvenirs.”

Hot words of denial knotted up in Benjo’s throat and
tangled his tongue. He could feel his chin jerk as he tried to force them out.

“Uh—uh—uh . . . I w-would never do that. Whuh—what you said. Not for nuh—nuh—nuh—”
Nothing.

He thought suddenly of his father, and his belly made a sickening lurch. He wondered what had happened to the rope the cattlemen had used to hang Ben Yoder.

The outsider had hooked a thumb in his gunbelt and half turned, so that he was looking at the creek now. In the tangle of wild plum thickets that choked the bank, two jays were having an argument. “What do you want most in this world, Benjo, above all other things? Want bad enough to make your teeth ache.”

What Benjo Yoder wanted he couldn’t even formulate as a thought, let alone put into words. Certainly not words he could ever say to this hard-eyed man, who gave him the same shaky-excited feelings he got listening to the wind gust through the big cottonwoods at night, or watching a herd of wild mustangs gallop across the prairie.

He searched his mind desperately for a wish that Cain would believe. Something flashy, worldly, something an outsider boy would want badly. Then he remembered the marvel he and Mem had seen last time they were in town, displayed behind the sheet-glass bay window of Tulle’s Mercantile.

“I wuh—want a s-safety bicycle,” he said, and it was only half a lie. For that shiny black machine, with its nickel-spoked wheels and genuine lizard-skin saddle, had sure been something grand.

The answer seemed to satisfy the outsider, for he nodded. His gaze left the creek and came back to the wall of posters, paused there, and then settled on Benjo’s face.

“Would you turn me in to the law for a bicycle?” Cain said.

Benjo could see the words in his head, white on black, like chalk on a slate board. He could see the words and he could feel them form in his throat and curl around his tongue. He could see them and feel them, but he couldn’t get them out. Frustrated to the point of tears, he could only shake his head hard.