The Outlaw Album: Stories

BLACK STEP

The cow trembled in the sideways tree, the broken left foreleg canted in a separate direction from the other legs, snapped sharply to the right and dangling. There’d been moans since the storm in the night pushed on and away and the wind calmed. The cow heard my feet rustle pebbles on the cliff, and its tired neck raised the head to look up at me. The cow had wide screaming eyes that were saying things that living things say to me in that language better than words. That language that travels. I’ve seen it everywhere.

The sideways tree was a lonely old sycamore halfway down the cliff that grew straight out from the face for about ten feet, then curled upward for another thirty. Far below, the river flowed clean and dense in the morning shadow cast by the bluff, the rocks in its bed singing of centuries spent singing in the rushing, the things that wash by, bump going past, leave marks or bones. And the cow repeated everything again with those shrill eyes pointed my way, pleading as it had since the forest started rattling and lightning shanks stomped down yellow from the sky and the wind huffed ’til bad instincts took charge and the cow plunged through the barbed wire, seeking a way out of the suddenly terrifying pasture but found only a way down, and the sideways tree snagged it so it had a long hurt night held aloft to hear the rocks far, far below, and know horror.

I felt responsible for the cows.

I turned and walked across the broad sopping pasture toward Ma’s house, tall supple grass flicking droplets to my knees. The sky had been washed baby blue and blank, and the other cows were munching away at the greenery, rubbing their hides on small trees. Ma’s house is a square two-story built plain long ago and still sturdy. It’s painted an invented shade of white about halfway around the house to where the paint ran out, just past the south corner and beyond sight from the road, some certain mix of various whites you have to fetch from town. The rest of the house has been colored with the paler paints left over in the shed, so it’s one color house seen driving by, several others standing in the yard, colors that don’t rhyme in the eye, but the old wood is well coated. A ladder yet leans there, and a couple of brushes on the bottom rung have stiffened atop a paint can lid.

She’s asleep, Ma, snoring in her room, letting the creep of cancer slip her mind a spell, and I go tiptoe through the kitchen to the gun cupboard in the hall. The rifle I want is standing in the back now, behind a cracked oil lantern and a pile of yesteryear phone books, not handy like I kept it. It’s an old bruiser, a bolt-action aught-six that has been whipped on by wintry thickets slapping and raw sporting weather since two grandpas ago, yet it still has a glow to it, a veteran allure. I trust this one most.

The cow screams at me again with those eyes. Screams what you think it would. The sideways tree is too far down the cliff for me to clamber there, even if I was willing. In the valley and downriver a short ways there’s a twist of smoke coming from a new house I keep forgetting is there now. A strange but handsome riverside house made of fresh shining wood, with a steep roof of bluish tile, where outsiders have come to live. I stand on the cliff so a stray round won’t pop into a tile.

This target seemed so close, so easy, so harmless, not like those when I’d been elsewhere.

I said, “Should’ve stopped at the checkpoint, hajji.”

The dead cow slumped more loosely over the sideways tree. The eyes finally hushed. One leg strode hard for a few seconds, trying to climb the cliff now it was shot, climb the cliff in death, then abruptly stilled.

A man came out of the house below and stared at me, a silver-haired man in a black T-shirt, until I flapped a hand his way that meant never mind, it’s okay, and he nodded. He went about his business, stacking firewood in the yard, a dog trailing him, a cat trailing the dog, a woman standing on the porch. Together it all makes one of those pictures of perfect life that might splay across your mind when you are far off and think of home, somebody else’s home, the kind that looks like that and raises your spirits.

In Ward 53, where they fretted about me so, they told me maybe I should paint, take up painting landscapes or portraits, something soothing, but whenever I try the picture explodes on me, the light of day shatters, the humans don’t look too human, and strange patterns span the sky. Sometimes the sky is all cherry blossoms, one big blush of pink and white, and there’s bones sticking up from the mud below, with little volunteer vines growing around them, linking them together, like the scattered bones don’t truly belong to death but might hop up reunited by vines and dance a loose clattering jig once more. Hopeful, I guess, deep down, which is why they wanted me to paint.

I have a dozen dead items painted that way.

I know the departed cow in the sideways tree will be next.

Before I went into the desert I’d had a decent job at Spangler Feeds, hefting sacks, stacking salt blocks, sweeping grain dust and such, and they would’ve held it for me, but the whole feed mill burned down to a knee-high mess of ash and nails while I was away, and the Spanglers decided not to rebuild, just not worth it, so they moved to Florida instead and fish for big ones at sea a lot. They sent a postcard. Where Ma worked didn’t help with insurance, so now I watch her cows for her while I can and we’ll contribute the dough to cancer treatment.

Ma’s a Boshell. I’m a Girard, because Ma got to feeling guilty after Dad was gone and had my papers fixed so I was legally his, even if they’d never married. Dad Dad, my sorrowful Dad, was a man given to long blue spells pierced by moments of excited yearning—a handsome doomed man I like more and more as the days roll past and I imagine him with dark curls and thin whiskers and how we resemble.

I carried the rifle with me and marched across the field counting cows. I had got to know them by their color schemes and shapes, and two or three were the kind of cows that had personalities, too, goofy traits or bad tempers that made them stand out among the herd. Only the one had bolted. I walked under the shade trees and around the wallow of red mud and dull water counting twice, then I went to the house to fetch my painting stuff, which they’d been very glad to give me back at Ward 53.

I set the easel above the cow, considered colors I might use, colors that’d catch the feeling of this killed cow, the tragedy of last night that was already nearly forgot, while the cliff and tree and bullet hole’d tell the facts of the story. The color of the actual cow meant nothing now, so I’d fit some to it—colors that suited would come about somehow as my brush moved, and the tree would get rendered the same. I sensed blue for the cow and bronze for the tree and blue again for the killing ground that waited below the tense yellow cliff. The sky grew plum and gray and rippled like a window curtain. As I made the picture, the scene in my head took over and the cliff turned up flat on me, so the plum-gray sky was standing sentry over to the right, and the cow in the sideways tree hung above level ground but below the branch, disobeying gravity now that it’d died.

The bullet hole was a pink question mark.

Ma had walked the pasture counting heads while I was lost deep inside that scene with the cow, and crept along behind me. I was adding chrome boulders to the stream, and when I caught a creeping sound behind I fast as a flinch reached for the rifle, but the rifle wasn’t there, and I sprang for the dirt with one hand shielding my face while the other aimed the paintbrush. The brush swept back and forth, wanting to spray a wide field of fire, a death blossom, get ’em all, and I felt wiggly in my head as a few drops dove loose to dribble down me.

Ma said, “That cow’s money lost now.”

They tell me Dad committed suicide for reasons he dreamed up. His mind was too active. He had a round mind and it roamed. He could imagine any kind of hurt. He could imagine the many miseries of this world flying over from everywhere to roost between his ears, but he couldn’t imagine how to get away. Ma loved him past his end and has never kissed another man. She loved his mind, his round, roaming mind that made her feel a glowing inside her skin between those spells of blight. He waited all of a calm spring night for some fresh serious pain to come into his heart and kill him. Twelve coiled hours hunched at the kitchen table, frozen peas dumped on the tabletop, a shotgun leaning against the back of his chair. He arranged rank after rank of cold green peas, took aim, and flicked each toward the kitchen sink and kept a secret score. Then he gathered the peas from the sink and floor, rearranged them across the tabletop, and flicked them all again. Once the peas were ruined, he switched to flicking corn kernels, raisins, whatever, until the score was lost in his head and the floor slippery. He drank enough coffee his brain shook in its bowl, then drank whiskey to get that shaky brain calm. At some point inside that addled calmness the heavy curtains parted and he thought he spied a good way out, an answer to it all—stepped to the back stoop and sat and erased his problems in this world, maybe not the next. He died gushing blood on the second step of the back stoop, the step we keep painted black.

I don’t truly remember, but Ma has told me about it, made it meaningful to me, saying I followed him onto the stoop, my rusty diaper drooping, and the ejected shell bounced off my belly, and Dad tried to say one last word to me but it drowned in blood that jumped up in his throat, never got said. So now I do sort of recall an ejected shell bouncing from my baby-belly, blood flying, that one last word drowning in red.

He’s buried out back, Buddy Girard, and Ma prays at his grave.

Ma? Ma? She’s not all there; parts have fallen away and dashed, dashed against her days, parts that fell the day she was pulled from school at sixteen and sent to work at the shoe factory, parts that fell the day the shoe factory closed, the day Marcella died in her crib, the day she was told she had cancer, the day Dad died on that one black step. She has always carried on, though, Ma, hefting the parts of herself that remained, dragging them onward, and remaining more decent than she had to be, which makes me try to stay alive for her.

Ma wants to be buried on the farm. She’d been happy here when she was too young to know better and during the first year with Dad. Her grave will be near the rest, but not quite with them, several paces to the west of the others, under the dirt with Buddy. I’ve squared the plot with railroad ties, and we’ve planted perennials along the border, purple phlox and daisies and such that wave spirited colors when a breeze passes. The graves overlook the river and are well shaded in summer until about noon, then the good light reaches and grows things there. A spot has been picked for me, also, to the sundown side, and I’ve found my marker, a reddish river stone with battered edges and a kind of cracked, silent dignity. It’s too big to throw or kick away. The stone will remain unchanged, no name or date, and someday vines and flowers will cover the stone in tangled green and sweetness. Ma wants a regular wooden cross about three feet tall, painted white, same as Dad had before a high wind flung his away.

You have to know where to stand to stand over his grave.

I like graves that disappear.

Mary is the woman who has chosen me to be the man she needs. She has rooted inside my life and claimed me, claimed me to be her man of tomorrow and the days after, claimed me for loving, too, I guess. She lives with her momma four miles away, near where Chime Creek joins the Twin Forks, in a trailer with her kids, two of them, Joe and Nora, neither old enough for school but both already hunkered down into a fretful shyness, a reluctance to be noticed or speak up. Mary likes to visit me after dark, once the bars have got boring, raise dust driving her heavy rattling car into Ma’s yard, and park under the spreading oak, radio music kicking holes through the night quiet.

She grunts getting out of the car, slams the door. Most times she’ll have a movie in her hand, whatever beer is left tucked under her arm. Her moccasins are silent crossing the dirt.

This time, same as always, I greet her with “Mary.”

“Yup. Once again.” She’s taller than she wants to be and rolls her shoulders forward to shorten her neck, drops her chin, sags her upper self like a flower that’s got a blooming too heavy atop for its stem to carry. She holds the movie toward me, shakes the box. “How ’bout a picture show, Darden?”

“Funny?”

“Could be to you.”

Mary wants to kiss, so I do, and she wants some sort of familiar caress, one that suggests we know each other’s bodies like favorite getaway places we’ve come to own, so I put both hands to her butt and pull the cheeks spread a little bit, lift her. Mary has a small beer pooch underslung from her lower belly, but is elsewhere lean, skinny, even, and I can about feel the bone under her butt with my fingertips. She’s got pale hair and a few freckles that seem to be forever fading from her face but never go away.

In the living room she right away wants me to get naked. Ma’s bed is downstairs so she can be near the john, and she lays snoring in the dining room, just around the corner. The TV is muted but on, throwing a headache light across the room, throbbing between near dark to suddenly glaring, with many skittish flickers between. I know I’m supposed to want this, what she offers, so I try to recall how it goes when this is something you want, crave, gotta have, can’t do without, might kill for, die over, mourn when it’s gone.

Somehow my clothes come off, drop to the floor, first frost stripping a tree of its last clinging leaves.

“Such a tight, smooth boy,” she says. Mary is pushing nine years older, and unlike most women would do she apparently enjoys reminding me I’m way younger. It somehow stokes her needs and juices her good to say it aloud. Whenever she says it she sighs soft and looks like a crouched cat studying songbirds in a low bush. “Lucky ol’ me. Lucky, lucky.”

All Mary does is scoot from her moccasins and jeans and blue undies. She keeps her shirt on and buttoned, the tails hanging over that pooch. Her lips get around on me some, visiting here and there, then I bend her over the couch, knees to the carpet, and slam her the doggy-way she wants it most times. Slap her ass as she has taught me while I slam, slam and slap, and she snickers, snickers, moans into the cushions. Fresh rug burns get added to the old on my knees and I collapse backwards after, stare at the ceiling, count the cobwebs and get the same tally as the visit before.

She says now I’m home for a while we should get married, and soon, before they send me back, but has only ever one time asked me about over there, how it was, what details I needed to get off my chest, what memories I might want to share with her, and I said, It’s all real sandy. Sand blows into everything. Makes soup even turn crunchy.

That’s it?

I think I miss the crunching.

“Put this in,” she says before my breathing is even righted, and tosses the movie my way. She raises herself to sit on the couch, then uses her blue undies to mop herself dry, catch my come seeping, and stuffs them dampened into her purse. “It’s got that guy in it I like.”

Somewhere in the flick I fell out of interest. It wasn’t funny, and the guy she liked so dodged bullets slower than pigeons and cracked wise at death, which never happened to him or his, and I yawned and went away. On the porch I stared up at the big oak in the yard. Tree frogs honked their raspy honks in unison, and fat brown bugs battered the porch light behind me. Mary’s car was under the spread limbs, and I saw that the windows had fogged. I crossed the dirt yard, opened the back door, and there slept Joe and Nora, undressed for bed but without a blanket to cover them. I pointed a finger and wrote Mary’s name in the fog above them, then rubbed their used wet breaths onto my face. They’d been there since she left the trailer and hit the first bar, and were probably asleep by the second roadhouse or the third. I picked both up at once, an arm under each, and neither child woke as I carried them inside. Mary looked over from her movie as I laid the kids on the empty end of the couch. She was smiling with her chin down and her eyes wide, and said, “See? I told you you loved them kids.”

In the story that happens to me so often, asleep or wide awake, I had got down on my hands and knees to collect red and white parts of Lt. Voorhees, from when his brain-housing unit came apart in his quarters, skull chunks denting the ceiling, teeth and ears splatted to the walls, brains a clotting spray—a story that happens to me whenever it wants to, and I can’t shunt it aside or stuff it in a box, but can only accept the sunken feelings it deals me time and again. A few times Dad showed up to help me collect the cracked bone and stringy glop, clumped hair, kneeling beside me in a foreign place, calling me “son” while we raised a wet pile. Some days I start hearing the final words Lt. Voorhees said before closing his door that night spoken over and over, at different volumes in my head, all day long, low to loud, Hope I dream about daylight again.

Hope I DREAM about daylight AGAIN.

HOPE I dream about DAYLIGHT again.

McArdle and Fuller fell by toward the next sundown, or the one after, drawn by boredom and word of my return, wanting to remember high school, with a box of beer and bowls of smoke to make it seem those years-ago days might happen again tomorrow if only we got wasted enough. I left the house with them in McArdle’s truck and we drove to the river, built a jolly campfire on a gravel beach. Their memories are cleaner than mine, the silly details yet shine for them, are easily found and spoken as jokes or boasts. My head cramps trying to only call up the faces from the hallways. I should be glad for this visit, I know, so I hunt dry wood up the slope, stack it on the fire to grow the flames, and say I am, I am glad to see you two, your faces make me feel home.

So-and-so got married, so-and-so moved away, so-and-so fell in the lake or was pushed, drunk as a skunk whichever. It takes only five minutes together before they lean close and ask the standard ghoul questions I expect from civilians, and I answer, Oh, you damned straight I did.

Then, Maybe more’n used to ride our school bus.

Then, Like tomatoes being busted open with hammers.

Then, Sometimes all you can do is shovel red sand into a body bag and send that home with a name on it.

The empties clatter into the fire, smokes mingle, dusk settles, there is laughter. I recall times together like this, drinking the day away in canoes on the river, chucking dry-ice bombs into blue holes and cheering the boom and spray, and as dark fell driving into town with more cold beer to circle the Sonic, round and round at half a mile an hour, biceps on display out the windows, hoping some town girls would of a sudden realize we were cute, kind of sexy, even, and want to go for a ride in the country, then switching to whiskey when none did.

I guess I joined to become more interesting than that.

Fuller had been our alpha, our main instigator, with showboat muscles and a habit of bruising you good in horseplay, then saying it was only a joke, bro, don’t be mad. In the firelight I can see he’d like to mess with me some again, as he did back when, give a demeaning Dutch rub, or clamp on a headlock ’til I croak “Uncle,” but he’s just not sure anymore, not sure I won’t go Kill! Kill! Kill! in my head, yank something deadly from my watch pocket, zip-cuff him to a sapling, and feed his ass to the fire a pound at a time. I can see the itch is in him, and the doubt, so I help him clear the confusion, saying, “After the desert, bro, the list of things you’re totally certain you’d never ever do gets a lot shorter.”

Ma’s breaths scrape together traveling her throat and have short hisses at their tail, plus something come undone in her chest clatters. Her sleep is a busy place and she speaks mushed words into the sheets, her legs walk to yesterday and back across the mattress, her eyelids totter as the eyeballs rush about in darkness, wanting to see everything they’ve ever seen again. The bed she chose for the dining room is small with no headboard, low to ground, a short fall if she rolled loose in her rambling and tumbled.

Another rough day before noon there was this cemetery in the sand, with row after row of markers for the dead, mud-colored or white, each big enough to hide behind, and a high dun wall around the whole place. We cleared one row then crept toward the next, each small distance electric with the idea that this gravestone ahead could be the one Ali Baba is hid behind and waiting, finger on the trigger or arm cocked to throw something that explodes. The air smelled of shit roasting in oil and carried that shrill music that made your skin tighten. One row at a time, crawling inch by inch, from marker to marker, the pressure building with each scoot forward, sweat dripping, hands turned white squeezing, and after several rows you heard some guys go empty, moan themselves into the dust, become still where they were, not about to move on. They make it ten, twenty, thirty rows, but can no longer imagine making it through all the rows. Each marker, each row, who knows what’s there, anything could be, you might soon become a chunky breeze exploded sideways or get shot through-and-through, and those possibilities nourished dread. Your own mind can gut you good so easy. With sprung nerves soldiers lay faces to the sand to avoid seeing ahead and had to be booted by sergeants.

Mary wanted to be a bride again and announced she soon would be while we all splashed in the river. Joe and Nora hopped on stick legs in the shallows above the one-lane bridge, and Ma sat in a folding chair with her feet under water and a scarf over her fuzz of hair. I had my goggles to hunt treasure spilled from tourist canoes upstream and had found a wristwatch with a rotted band. Mary wore a white T-shirt over her suit and said, “It’s official, y’all—me’n Darden are gettin’ hitched.”

I dove again. People riding inner tubes went by overhead, casting squat shadows that roamed over the bottom rocks and stretched with distance. Legs looked so white and puffed from underneath, with bubbles attaching to the flesh like blisters, and voices arrived as deep blurry barks.

Ma said, “When does this happen?”

“While he waits to hear about goin’ back,” Mary said. The sun was halfway west and shined at a slant that broke around her. Her face was shaded faint but the skin on her neck glowed at the sides. “I’ll get it right this time. I’ve learned some things I couldn’t’ve guessed at before.”

Joe and Nora stood still in a trickle of river, bare feet sinking into the gravel bed, staring at me, faces empty, holding themselves in tight. Mary saw and kicked water at them so they’d know it was okay to seem happy just now. They tried.

Mary unloaded a picnic onto a blanket in the shade, beer chilling in the river.

Ma said to me, “You sure this is good news?” Her eyes were mournful and ringed, like those of a hunted thing that has decided to stop running. I would paint her soon. Her chest had been cut away from her first, both sides, but she fell sick in other parts, too, and the sick didn’t rest; it prowled her body, salting her with ruin you couldn’t see in her face for a good long while. Now the ruin just stares out at me, all the time, from those eyes that know about hope and that body that can’t offer any. She leaned my way and whispered, “It’s your life, son.”

“I just don’t care to make big decisions anymore.”

“That is one.”

“Let’s act happy.”

“That’s another.”

I fell on the river and went inside. The water ran chest deep, and I spread over the rocky bottom and found a big one to cling to. There were all these tiny tatters of different debris rushing past near the bottom and the rushing was all I heard. I clung to the bottom, my feet rising behind and touching air while my hands held steady on the slickened old stone and kept me from spinning downstream. I held and held to the rock and forgot about breathing, sunk into that choice spot between breathing and not ever breathing, between raising up to walk on the bank and picnic or staying under to join that debris already lost to the rushing.

Stink from the cow took over the air. The cow was screaming again, screaming stink, a brown dirge of stink like the dead scream always. Ma and me stood on the cliff with our noses pinched against the loud stink and squinted our eyes, too. Ma’s trying to act spry so she can help. She’s wearing rubber mud boots and a long dress with no waistline and no pattern in the cloth. A big yellow sun hat shades her face.

Neither of us wants the cow kicked to the river below, to dump such ruin into the clean water, so we decide to haul it up the cliff with three ropes. I’ve backed the truck near the edge, and Ma swears she can work a clutch and drive just fine, no problem. I tied my ropes to the truck, cinched one around me snug, and led the other two down to the sideways tree. There were shrubs to grab at on the cliff face, untrustworthy roots and clumps of stranded weeds, and I tossed my feet at them to slow my falling. The sideways tree was sturdy and the cow oozed. Flying things had got the eyes, the lips and ears, the soft easy meat anything left dead in the open serves up first. I had to sit astride the cow to get the ropes looped around, the first under the front legs, the next under the back, and thickened death-juices leaked from the cow onto my jeans and shirt. I gave Ma a wave and me and the cow scraped the dusty cliff and flew up together, meat and meat under the sky, hooves whirling, boots whirling, one head down, one head raised, one spinning smell.

Ma helps me unlash and says, “You’re nuts to go back.”

“They cleared me for goin’, Ma.”

Ma drove and the cow slid across the pasture to the grassless place, and I untied it. My clothes stunk past cleaning, and I flung them off, shirt first, then jeans, and went about in my skivvies and started tossing stuff from the trash heap into the burn circle. The pile grew, and grew tall enough for a ten-foot flame to rise from household trash, old plywood, a tangle of blowdown, hedge trimmings, a busted headboard and stained mattress I couldn’t recall. I was near naked in the world and sweating, bending to drop matches, encourage the flames, scorch that stink away. Ma watched me, looking at my tats some, not too impressed by the pictures, I knew, but mostly studying the long ragged divot torn top to bottom on my back and wondering what invention made that wound.

“She found out how much you’re worth dead.”

“Where?”

“She’s been askin’ folks all around.”

We stood close together fireside, watching the cow burn in the circle as the sun sank. The cow only slightly thinned, but the brain-housing unit was soon laid bare and white atop deep glowing coals. Hooves cracked in the heat. Full dark made fire seem the center of all things. A breeze raised little flames that wiggled in the eye sockets and stuck a long tongue of fire lapping from the mouth. Ma’n me stared silently ’til the tree frogs went quiet and owls came out to fly. We left the cow at peace finally in the embers, started toward the house, walking slowly through the spreading weeds of our garden plot where nothing got planted this year.