The Outsider (49 page)

He hooked his thumbs in his gunbelt and cocked one hip. His mouth pulled into a wry grimace. “So, you want me to go cut you a willow switch now,” he said, “or wait till you’re done scolding me?”

“Don’t make a joke of it. Not this.”

“You got to allow—”

“No, I will not allow it, Mr. Cain. I will not allow you to teach my son how to push his fist through another’s face.”

“One thing I was trying to do was save wear and tear on his own nose.”

“While putting his soul in jeopardy.”

“Look, right now your boy’s having himself a little tussle
with life. He already knows and understands your way. So he’s asked me to show him my way—”

“The ways of violence!”

“Ways he’s
seen
, Rachel. And been on the hurting end of, to judge by the look of him. Ways he can’t help seeing, no matter how much you and your people try to shelter him. Maybe you ought to let him make his own choices as to what sort of man he wants to grow into?”

She looked at his revolver, hanging heavy at his hip and snug along his thigh, looking as if it belonged there the way his hand belonged at the end of his wrist. “Like you’ve made your choices.”

His eyes held hers for a moment. Then he slid the gleaming Colt from its holster, snapped open the gate, and began feeding cartridges into the chambers, one by one.

She averted her gaze from the sight of that hand loading a gun, and for the first time she noticed the shattered green bottle glass littering the ground beneath the fence. He’d been teaching her son how to fight with his fists. He could have been showing Benjo how to shoot, as well. To shoot and to kill.

He snapped the gate closed. “What did you come down here for anyway?” he said.

“Benjo. He was—”

He shook his head slowly. “Uh uh, Rachel. You didn’t know about your son getting beat up on by those other boys until you got down here. You’ve been listening to me practice my shooting for weeks now, and you’ve been wanting to come and not wanting to come.” His finger moved gently, lovingly over the trigger guard, but his eyes were locked with hers. “Because it excites you, doesn’t it?”

Her breath left her in a gasp. “No!”

Casually he stretched out his arm, pointing the gun barrel slightly downward.

She didn’t see the battered tin plate lying in the grass until he struck it with the first shot. It leaped into the air, ringing like a dinner triangle, only to be struck by the next bullet, and the next and the next and the next, ringing, ringing, ringing. He made that plate dance, and she couldn’t imagine how he did it, how his eyes could follow that flash of tin so fast, to strike it again and again, five times in all, before it at last clattered to the ground.

He stood there with his arm outstretched, the gun wedded to his hand and his eyes on fire with an unholy delight. She stared at him repelled—and enthralled. Caught up in his wild and ringing power.

She breathed, ran her tongue over her dry lips. “You’re right-handed,” she finally said, surprised her words sounded so everyday, as if she were discussing the sheep or what she was going to fix for supper. “You managed so fine with your left hand while you were injured, I thought—”

“I’ve taught myself to manage fine with either hand.”

“To kill with either hand.”

“That most especially.”

His smile was cold, but something terrible flared in the depths of his eyes, as though the shutters there had cracked open an instant to reveal the passion that lived inside him—a passion stark and black, and infused with the most frightening pain.

She leaned forward, her voice softening. “It’s possible to change, Johnny. With prayer and effort and the help of God’s holy grace. Oh, I’m not saying it won’t be hard—”

He grabbed her arm, his fingers biting deep, hauling her roughly up against him. With his other hand, he brought
his revolver up to her face and pressed the barrel against her cheek.

“Rachel, darlin’,” he said. “Who are you fooling?” He pressed the barrel harder into the soft flesh of her cheek, forcing her mouth to pucker. He wet her lips with his tongue. “You want to change me, Rachel, to reform me and make me God-fearing . . . but only so’s your conscience won’t put up a howl when you finally take me into your bed.”

He took her mouth, then, in a kiss that was both sweet and brutal, and she let him. When he was done he released her. He dropped the hand with the gun to his waist and fired the sixth bullet, making the tin plate dance one last time.

RACHEL LAID HER FOREHEAD
against the cow’s warm broad belly. Her throat felt so raw and hot her sigh hurt coming out. But it hurt even more to hold it in.

She hiked up her skirts, pulled the tin milking pail between her legs, and leaned forward, balancing easily on the one-legged milking stool. The cow’s hairy udder bag, heavy with milk, swayed as she washed it. The milking actually was Benjo’s chore, but he hadn’t come home since he’d run off. When he did, she would bathe his cuts with witch hazel and rub a raw potato on his bruises, but she knew she would get precious few confidences in return. He’d confided his trouble to the outsider, though, and it hurt to think of that.

She pulled and squeezed on the cow’s pink teats, and the milk hit the bucket with a sweet ringing. Cain had said her boy was trying hard to grow and learn how to fight his own battles and she had shamed him with her fussing. She wondered if Ben, confronted with the sight of their son’s bruised and bloody face, would have done the same as the outsider
and taught Benjo how to fight back. How to fight his own battles.

It wasn’t the Plain way, though.

And it wasn’t the Plain way to kiss as she and the outsider had kissed. Two people not married, kissing with their open mouths and tongues.

She’d always known he was tainted—what he’d seen, done, how he’d lived and sinned. But she could only think of that with her head, not with her heart. Not down deep where it really mattered. She couldn’t think of him in terms of right and wrong anymore, or of good and evil. At some time during the long hot spring, her soul had come unstrung.

“Rachel.”

She looked up, twisting half around on the milking stool. He stood within the door frame of the stall, his feet spread slightly, his hands hanging loose at his sides, the way he did just before he fired his six-shooter. Rafter shadows fell in bars across his face.

“I’m sorry what I did to you out there,” he said.

“Don’t you dare tell me you’re leaving.”

“I’m hurting you, goddammit.”

“Don’t blaspheme; it’s wicked. And you’re not hurting me. Leastways, no more than I deserve to be hurt.”

His throat clenched around a harsh laugh. “All right, maybe I’m not being too kind to myself either. But no woman deserves me, especially not a woman like you.”

The cow chose that moment to slap her in the side of the head with a manure-caked tail, and Rachel went back to her milking. Hunh. A woman like her, with stinky green cow poop likely smeared now on her prayer cap and cheek. It made her want to laugh, probably because she was so close to crying.

“You’re sounding like Benjo again, feeling sorry for yourself for having to bear the fruit of your sinning when you’ve only yourself to blame. And whether I deserve you or not bears no relation to whether you are leaving or staying. You said you’d stay and work my farm until the mating season, so I’m holding you to your word.”

“Jesus God Almighty, save me. Rachel, you know what I want from you. I don’t know how to make it any plainer.”

Oh, she knew what he wanted all right, and she wanted it as well. But she also knew how to wage that particular battle. “We are two very strong people, Mr. Cain, who can and shall resist temptation. Salvation has always required suffering and sacrifice. God doesn’t expect us to let Him do it all.”

He stared at her hard awhile longer, and then he laughed, a soft, easy laugh of genuine amusement. “That boy of yours,” he said, “he sure did ask the wrong person to teach him how to fight.”

LATER THAT EVENING
Moses Weaver stood among the wooden markers and decaying boots of the Miawa City cemetery, trying to screw up the courage to go screw his first woman.

The cemetery was as close as he’d been able to bring himself yet to the Red House. Mose figured he might as well get used to the cemetery anyway, since this was likely where he would be ending up real soon. His father would kill him for what he was about to do, and then, since he would have died unsaved, he would be planted for eternity among outsiders, here in this Godforsaken place.

And it would all be worth it, he thought, if he could have but a few moments of heaven on earth between the soft white thighs of Miss Marilee.

But before he got himself inside of Miss Marilee, first he had to get himself through the front door. He’d ridden to town on an old knock-kneed plow mule. But he hadn’t wanted to arrive looking any more the bumpkin Plain boy than he could help, so he’d stopped at the cemetery. He’d looped the mule’s halter reins around the trunk of a quaking aspen, intending to walk on over to the house of sin. The ground had saved up most of the day’s blistering heat and was now releasing it back into the night air. He was sweating rivers beneath his flashy mail-order clothes.

He was sweating oceans by the time he climbed the steps of the Red House’s broad verandah. The famous locomotive lantern was lit, casting a red glow onto the warped floorboards. The lantern swayed in the wind and its red light flickered in the half-moon window above the door, making Mose think of the flames of hell.

He gave the door a timid rap and was surprised when it opened almost immediately. He found himself staring down into the slit-eyed face of a man as shriveled as a seed husk. Mose had never seen an Oriental before, but he’d heard they had one working at the Red House. He wondered if it was true what they said about Orientals having yellow skin. In the puddle of red light cast by the locomotive lantern he couldn’t tell.

He realized he was staring and he flushed, jerking his gaze away. He slapped the hat off his head. “I’m here to see Miss Marilee.”

The front top of the man’s head was bald, but a long black braid swung over his shoulder as he bowed. He said something in a scratchy voice that Mose couldn’t understand. He hoped it was the Chinese for “come right on in,” because that was what he did.

He felt awkward and stumble-footed standing on the
worn carpet of the hallway. The Oriental waved at a curtain of blue glass beads and squawked more Chinese. A string of brass bells suddenly appeared in the little man’s clawlike hands. He rang them with vigor, then shuffled off on silk slippers into the shadows.

Mose passed through the beads, clicking and clacking, and entered a room stuffed from floor to fanlight with things: plaster busts and glass vases, brass spittoons and lacquered boxes, and other things he couldn’t have put a name to. Even the furniture was all doodadded up, with tidies on the chairs and sofas and Arab scarves draping every conceivable flat surface.

His gaze drifted from a hurdy-gurdy with yellow stars and a moon painted on it, to the china pug on the hearth, to a pair of dragon candlesticks, and stopped dead at the huge gilt-framed painting that filled one wall, of a man apparently being ravished by three naked nymphs. He stared at it, his mouth agape. He supposed this was what the Bible meant when it said: “He goeth after her straightway, as an ox to the slaughter.”

Beneath the painting, a small sign in black letters read:

SATISFACTION GUARANTEED,

OR SECOND TOKEN GIVEN FREE.

He thought at first the room was empty—of human habitation, that is. But then something stirred over by the nickel-plated parlor stove. The something was a cowpuncher, to judge by the pointed-toed boots and dusty Stetson, a cowpuncher sitting stiffly on a ladder-back chair. The stove wasn’t lit on such a hot night, but Mose thought it sure probably drew a crowd come winter.

He settled himself on a plush purple sofa and saw right away why the cowpuncher had chosen the chair. The sofa’s
feather cushions closed around him until he felt in danger of being smothered. He rested his hat on his knee and tried not to fidget.