The Outsider (51 page)

In the seconds that followed, he discovered two things: what the butter was for, and what the inside of a woman felt like. All hot and wet and grasping, and the closest thing there was to heaven on this earth.

HE COLLAPSED ON TOP
of her, his skin wet and slippery beneath his clothes, all his muscles feeling heavy and battered.

She pushed against his chest with the butts of her hands. “That was wonderful, honey. But you’re a big, heavy boy and you’re crushin’ me.”

He flung himself off her onto his back, his chest pumping
hard. He gasped, blinked his sweat-stung eyes, and gasped again. After a long while, the ceiling came into view.

“Those are bullet holes up there,” he said.

She had rolled away from him to sit up. “Huh?” She tilted her head back to see what he was looking at. “Oh, some fool one night, he kept thinkin’ he was hearin’ a fly, and so he tried to kill it.”

A great roll of laughter pushed up from Mose’s chest. He opened his mouth and let the laughter shoot up to the bullet-pocked ceiling. He heard her snort and that made him laugh all the harder.

When their whoops had dwindled into giggles and their giggles into silence, he turned his head to stare at her. She looked surprised, as if she’d just caught herself out doing something she didn’t usually do.

A sweet smile softened her face. “You’re real nice, Moses.” She leaned over and stroked his cheek. Then she shook her head. “A poor innocent babe who’s so lost in the woods even the trees don’t know what to do with him. But nice.”

She got up and took the blue enameled pitcher out into the hall, where there was hot water in a covered tin container waiting on a trivet. She brought the filled pitcher back into the room and, turning her back on him, began to wash between her legs.

Mose lay on the bed and watched her, feeling a stirring again in that part of him he wasn’t supposed to think about, but which seemed lately to have been occupying all his waking moments and most of his dreams. He had released his soul to a dark desire, sure enough. He had lain with a woman who was not his wife. The terror of the sin and its certain wages of hellfire haunted him already, but he knew he would be doing it again.

“Your time’s about all used up,” she said to him over her shoulder, “and I got Mr. Hunter a-waitin’ downstairs for me to make nice to.”

Mose sat up. He tucked his limp cock back inside his trousers and drawers, fumbling with the unfamiliar, worldly buttons. “Why can’t he go with one of the other girls?”

“ ’Cause it’s me he always asks for in particular.”

From out in the hall came the tinny clang of someone else replacing the cover on the water canister. He cleared a lump that felt the size of a crabapple from his throat. “I don’t want you to be with him.”

She whirled and bent over to thrust a stiff finger under his nose. “Now, you listen to me, boy. Don’t you go gettin’ your head all twisted around backwards. I’m a workin’ girl, see. I open my legs for any man who’s got the price of admission.”

Mose stood up, his gaze falling to the pointed toes of his worldly boots. It occurred to him suddenly that he had forgotten to take them off. He hadn’t taken anything off, except for his hat. “Will you . . .” He cleared his throat again. “I would sure consider it an honor, Miss Marilee, if you would go on a picnic with me sometime.”

She slapped her hands on her hips, blowing out a big sigh. “Oh, God. Now he wants to go on a goddamned picnic—”

“Tomorrow?”

She sighed again. “Oh, God. Surely I got to wonder what’s comin’ over me. It must be the baby what’s made me go all soft in the head.” She sucked in her lower lip, and Mose thought that sin or not he was going to have to kiss her soon.

“Not tomorrow,” she said, and for a moment Mose, who was still staring at her mouth, thought she was talking about kissing. “We’ll go on that picnic real soon, though.”

She pushed him toward the door. “Now you gotta git, ’cause like I been tellin’ you over and over, I’m a workin’ girl.”

S
HE RUBBED HER FINGERTIPS
along the bare skin of his forearm, right below his rolled-up shirtsleeve. “You ain’t exactly no flannel mouth, are you?”

Mose stared at her, enjoying the pink and pretty picture she made. She was dressed in some fluffy thing the color of primroses. Pinpricks of sunlight pierced her flat-brimmed straw bonnet, freckling her ear and jaw. The ringlets of hair that fell over her bare shoulders were the exact yellow of spring wheat.

“I don’t know,” he said. “What’s a flannel mouth?”

She grinned at him. “Someone whose gums’re always flappin’.”

He could have explained that it was the Plain way to keep your thoughts and feelings to yourself. Words between friends were gifts to be shared and cherished, not spent profligately, or blurted in haste or anger. But she wouldn’t have understood. Their ways were too different.

Marilee whipped a palmetto fan through the air with such exuberance the brim of her hat lifted a little. “Land, it’s hot. I wonder if it’s ever gonna rain again.”

Mose squinted against the brassy sun as he looked out over the rolling miles of prairie. The hot dry days that had followed one after the other with no respite had already burned the grass a golden brown, although it was only June. The sky was the gray-yellow color of an old bruise.

His first thought had been to have their picnic at Blackie’s Pond, where they’d met. But there wasn’t enough shade cast by the stunted willows and wild plum trees there, so they’d moved up the hill a ways to this stand of cottonwoods and box elders. Although the leaves on the latticework of branches above their heads looked green, they rattled like bits of dry paper in the constant Montana wind.

They sat as deep into the shade as they could get, on one of his aunt Fannie’s quilts, which he’d spread over ground that he’d cleared of stones and branches. When she’d promised to go on this picnic with him, he hadn’t known whether to believe her. But here she was, and there was a delighted, almost childlike glow about her.

When he had driven up to the Red House earlier, in a flashy black shay he’d borrowed on credit from Trueblue’s livery, she had come tripping out the door looking as fresh and promising as a sunrise, carrying a cloth-covered basket. “I ain’t never been on a picnic with a man yet,” she told him, “who didn’t forget to bring along the victuals. So I decided to provide them for myself.” She had laughed then, a bright quick laugh that made his belly tingle and his chest feel all soft and warm, and Mose had thought he must surely love her. All the way out here, driving the little black shay, he beamed like a full moon.

Now she lifted the cloth off the top of the basket, smiling sweetly at him. “It’s only common doin’s, I’m afraid. Pone and fried chicken and candied yam pie.”

He leaned closer, pretending to admire the food, but admiring the softly rising swell of her breasts instead. “Did you cook this all up yourself?”

Her eyes widened slightly in surprise, then she gave him a coy look. “Well, I did want this day to be somethin’ special.”

He watched as she spread the food out on the quilt, and she kept casting quick little glances up at him from beneath her bonnet brim. The food smelled delicious. She smelled delicious.

He took a big deep swig of air and blew it out. “I liked what we did the other night, Marilee. I liked it a lot, and I want to come pay you another call soon. Soon as I can scrape up another three dollars.”

She patted his arm with her little white palm. “I liked it, too, Mose. You make a girl feel special.”

Mose breathed again, his chest swelling. A part of him knew she probably said such things to all her three-dollar gentleman callers, to get them to come back with another three dollars. But he liked hearing the words anyway.

She held out a chicken leg to him, wrapped up in a white cloth napkin. He was about to take it from her when he heard the sound of hooves drumming the ground. He rolled to his knees, shading his eyes against the sun glare. Three men were riding toward them on horses bearing the Circle H brand. Hunter men.

“Run,” she said.

His head whipped around to her. “I’m not leaving you—”

She pushed him hard in the back. “Go on, you fool. Git!”

He stood up. Not to run, but because he wanted to meet whatever was coming on his feet. Fear clawed at his belly, though, and a knot of burning nausea rose in his throat. He fought it down. He couldn’t bear to disgrace himself by being sick in front of her.

The man on the lead horse, a stranger to him, began uncoiling a rawhide lariat. The roiling fear in Mose’s belly exploded with such force his knees buckled. They were going to do to him what they’d done to Ben Yoder. They would hang him here, from a limb of one of these cottonwoods.

He ran then, sprinting out across the prairie. He could hear hooves pounding the sun-baked ground behind him. He ran harder, the breath sobbing and catching in his throat.

He cast a look over his shoulder. The Hunter hired hand was thundering down on him, swinging the lariat in a wide floating loop over his head. Mose stretched out his legs, straining every muscle and sinew in one desperate forward lunge.

The lariat twirled and sailed and settled over him, roping him like a calf for the branding.

The rawhide sang taut, jerking Mose off his feet. He hit the ground hard, grunting as the air was slammed from his lungs. Through the ringing in his ears he heard laughter, and then the rope jerked again and he was suddenly being dragged over the ground, over rocks and brush and sticks that ripped at his clothes and flesh. He was hauled brutally back to the cottonwoods and Marilee and the ruins of their picnic.

The rope went slack and he slid to a stop in a shower of dirt and ripped bunchgrass. He lay there, gasping for breath, trying not to show his fear, while the three Hunter men dismounted and stood around him.

“Get up onto your knees,” said the one who’d roped him.

Swaying and lurching, fighting down dizziness and nausea, Mose got all the way onto his feet. If he was going to be on his knees, it would be before his Lord. Not that he expected a whole lot of mercy from that quarter. He had sinned mightily, seeking the pleasures of the world to satisfy his own desires, and the wages of sin were hellfire. But he’d
forgotten that before you passed through the gates of hell, you first had to die.

Mose tossed the dusty hair out of his eyes and looked up into the face of his murderer.

The man was short and slender, with a heavy upper lip, side-whiskers, and a small gray beard elegantly trimmed to a point. He was dressed fine, with a whiskey-colored velvet vest, a tall black hat, and a white silk tie. He looked like a cultured man, but he had a hog’s eyes, small and dark and darting. He was smiling, gathering up his rope into a smooth, tight coil.

Mose’s gaze shifted to the other two. One was Fergus Hunter’s son, and he looked almost as ill as Mose felt. The other seemed to be just an ordinary cowboy, straw-haired, tall and rangy, dressed in chaps and a gray Stetson. He had Marilee in front of him, her arms gripped fast in his big hands. Mose thought she must have tried to run away while he was being roped, for her skirt was ripped and dusty, and she had a scratch on her cheek.

“What are you going to do to him?” she asked in a trembling voice.

“You should be worrying about what we’re going to do with
you,
Miss Marilee of the Red House,” said the man with the rope, who wasn’t a hired hand at all, Mose decided. He was another stock inspector—a hired gun.

He met Mose’s eyes, smiling still. “I said onto your knees, woolly puncher.” And he backhanded Mose hard across the face, driving him down where he wanted him.

Mose’s head swam. Blood from his lips dripped into the dirt. The hired gun loomed over him, but Mose didn’t look up into the man’s face this time. He looked at the man’s polished fancy-stitched boots.

“I don’t reckon you’ve ever been on a cattle drive, have
you, boy?” the man said. “Not with you being a woolly puncher and all. Well, there’s a lesson we give out on the trail to wet-behind-the-ears youngsters like you, who don’t know how to behave.” He shot a look over at Marilee. “Horny-tailed boys who don’t understand their place in the order of things. It’s called a legging. What we do is we bend that boy over a wagon tongue or a downed log, and we whup his bare ass with a pair of chaps until he’s too sore and raw to fork a horse . . . or a woman.”