Outlawed

by Anna North

  “How dare you?” The Kid’s voice was a hiss. “You owe me everything. You’d be dangling from a gallows right now if not for me. And you presume to question my sanity?”

  “I’m not questioning—”

  The Kid drew a gun. It gleamed in the moonlight with an oily sheen like snakeskin.

  “Get away from me,” the Kid said.

  I held up my hands and began backing away.

  “I’m just saying you need some rest.” I tried again.

  The Kid fired the gun into the air. Night creatures fluttered and scurried away from the blast.

  “Go!” the Kid shouted.

  As best as I could on my injured leg, I ran.

  Agnes Rose was sitting on the bunkhouse steps when I got back.

  “Thank baby Jesus,” she said when she saw me. “I thought I heard a shot.”

  “You did,” I said. “It’s all right. Well, it’s not. The Kid is sick.”

  “Can you cure it?”

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “We made a plan before I left. If this happened, the Kid wanted to go to the cowboy shack to recuperate in private. But now the Kid won’t listen to me.”

  In the direction of the orchard I could still hear birds chattering and settling—the guttural complaints of ravens, the low ghost-call of an owl.

  “Well, there’s only one thing to do,” she said. “We wait until the Kid finally sleeps, and we take the gun. Then we take the Kid out to the cowboy shack—by force if we have to—and we trade off standing guard until it passes.”

  I imagined it—holding the Kid at gunpoint, tying the Kid’s wrists, hoisting the Kid up onto a horse. I knew we could do it. But every time I thought of binding the Kid’s arms behind the Kid’s back, I remembered the way the sheriff and his deputy had looked at me on the road out of Casper, like I was less than human, like I was rotten food. I would not treat the Kid the way they had treated me.

  “No,” I said. “It should be the Kid’s choice.”

  Agnes Rose sighed. “All right,” she said, “but how do we convince the Kid to choose wisely?”

  “Who does the Kid listen to?” I asked.

  “Before tonight,” Agnes Rose said, “I would’ve said the Kid listens to you.”

  “Obviously not,” I said. “Who else?”

  Agnes Rose thought for a moment. The stars were going out, the sky over the mountains very slightly bluing.

  “The Kid trusts Cassie,” she said.

  “But they’re always fighting,” I said.

  “They don’t agree on much,” she said. “But Cassie’s known the Kid longer than anyone. Maybe she’ll know what to say.”

  I stood still for a long time in the dark next to Cassie’s cot in the great room. I remembered the Kid’s insinuation that something terrible would happen if Cassie and the others found out. It struck me that the Kid had not given Cassie enough credit. She must have known something was not right with the Kid; she had known the Kid too long and too well to miss it. I did not know why she had not confronted the Kid in front of the others, why she had not refused, flat-out, to continue with the Kid’s plan. Probably if we successfully got the Kid to the cowboy shack, Cassie would scuttle it once and for all. Surely the Kid would never forgive me for that. And yet I could not think of another way.

  Cassie woke with a jerk and a look of fear in her eyes so abject and primal that I, too, felt afraid. Quickly, though, it was replaced with annoyance.

  “What time is it?” she demanded.

  “It’s the Kid,” I said. “The Kid needs help.”

  It could not have been more than an hour that we waited outside the bunkhouse while Cassie went up to the orchard after the Kid. In that time the sky went from blue-black to royal blue to aquamarine and then, in the sudden manner of the mountain regions, bright with streaks of gold and pink like the tails of gleaming horses. The meadowlarks awoke, with songs that, on another day, would have made me smile. Coyotes chuckled in the predawn and then went silent, shamed out of their scavenging by the light of day.

  Agnes Rose and I sat on the steps, or she sat on the steps and I paced, or she paced and I sat on the steps, or both of us paced in circles that grew in size until they intersected only every few minutes, the two of us nodding at each other, making faces of mingled encouragement and worry. We didn’t speak. I didn’t know what Agnes Rose was hoping for as the morning waxed and warmed around us, as we drew closer to the inevitable time when the rest of the gang would wake and find the Kid gone.

  I knew only what I was selfishly afraid of: that Cassie would fail, the gang would split, and the Fiddleback plan would wither and die; or that Cassie would succeed, she would take charge, and the Fiddleback plan would wither and die. Either way I would lose my chance to go to Pagosa Springs. Hole in the Wall might feel like home to me now, but I did not belong at home yet. I had work to do, and as I saw the possibility of doing it recede into the brightening distance, I grew ever more afraid that I would lose myself—not in the way the Kid had, but slowly, every day blanking out a piece of my heart and mind, until I faced some sheriff’s gun or executioner’s gallows with no fear or sorrow, because that which was worth protecting had already ebbed away.

  When, finally, just as the sun crested the mountains and cast its lemony light across the bunkhouse steps, Cassie came down from the orchard with the Kid by her side, Agnes Rose and I rushed to greet them with questions and offers on our lips.

  “Are you all right?” Agnes Rose asked. “Kid, you scared us.”

  “I’ll get a horse ready,” I said. “Kid, which one do you want to ride?”

  “I’m all right, Agnes,” the Kid said in a clear but quiet voice. “Doc, Cassie will get my horse ready. You have your own work to do.”

  “Tell the others the Kid and I went on a trail ride,” Cassie said. “If they ask where, say you don’t know. I’ll explain everything when I get back.”

  If Cassie expected that this would satisfy the rest of the gang, she was mistaken. As soon as the others woke—first Texas, to look after the horses, then Elzy, startled to find Cassie’s bunk empty, then Lo, and finally News—each wanted to know where the Kid was, and once they found no answers forthcoming, a general confusion bordering on panic settled over the bunkhouse, which Agnes Rose and I were powerless to defuse.

  “I knew it,” Texas said. “Is the Kid sick, Doc? Is it serious?”

  “What about the job?” Lo asked. “We’ve been rushing it too much. If the Kid’s not right, we should wait until the fall at least, maybe longer.”

  “We can’t delay the job,” News said. “Doc can help the Kid, right Doc?”

  By the time Cassie returned at high noon, hollow-eyed with worry and lack of sleep, both Agnes Rose and I had invented tasks outdoors to avoid the increasingly insistent questioning of our compatriots. I was gathering mint when she rode up, and so when she called us all to the bunkhouse moments later, I still carried a basket full of fragrant, dew-flecked leaves.

  “First,” Cassie said to the assembled company, “the Kid is going to be all right. There’s no immediate danger.”

  “What happened?” Lo interrupted. “Where is the Kid now?”

  Cassie held her hand up.

  “Let me finish,” she said. “The Kid is going to be all right, but the Kid is very ill right now. It’s an ailment that, frankly, I don’t pretend to understand, but it’s something that the Kid anticipated and made a plan for, out of concern for all of us.”

  “What’s the plan?” News asked.

  “The only treatments for this illness are rest and time,” Cassie said. “So the Kid will be resting somewhere safe until it passes.”

  “Where?” Elzy asked. “When can we visit?”

  “The Kid has asked for complete solitude for the time being,” Cassie said, “and so I’ve been instructed not to reveal the place. Rest assured that the Kid will have everything necessary for a swift recovery.”

  For a moment everyone talked at once. Only Lark w
as quiet, looking at me with confusion. I squeezed his hand, a promise of a future explanation.

  It was Lo who finally broke through the din: “We should call off the job,” she said. “Who knows how long until the Kid will be well again?”

  Cassie nodded and took a slow breath.

  “The Kid knew that some of you would be worried about the job, and asked me to pass along a message to everyone: the Kid has complete confidence in all of us, and knows that even without one of our number, we will succeed.”

  Again the bunkhouse grew loud with competing voices. Again Lo spoke over everyone.

  Elzy had been looking out the window, avoiding Cassie’s eyes, and when she spoke, her voice was quiet but hard. “Cass,” she said, “your loyalty to the Kid isn’t a good reason to put us all in danger. Why don’t we just wait until the Kid recovers?”

  “You know I’d like to,” Cassie said, “but our time is running out. Remember, the bank president comes back in June, and then the vault will be guarded again.”

  Lo opened her mouth, shut it, then opened it again. “Cass,” she said, “you know as well as I do this job never made any sense for us. We’re not bankers, we’re not landlords. We came here to get away from those kinds of people. Mother of God, running a town? I can’t imagine anything worse. And now’s our chance to reconsider. If we let the moment pass while the Kid recovers, the Kid could never blame us.”

  “We don’t need to argue,” News said. “Let’s have a vote. The Kid would respect that, no matter what we decide.”

  “You’re right,” Cassie said. “All those in favor of sticking with the plan, raise a hand.”

  Cassie lifted her own hand, and News and Agnes Rose and I followed. Texas raised a hand too.

  Lo shook her head.

  “Good luck to you,” she said. “I hope you don’t get shot in the street in Fiddleback, or strung up in the town square. And if by some miracle you succeed, I hope you make Fiddleback into a paradise, I really do.”

  She pulled her rucksack from under her cot.

  “Where are you going?” Texas asked.

  Lo shrugged.

  “I was on my own before I came here. I’ll be on my own again. I’ll be all right. Don’t forget, I taught every single one of you how to hide.”

  Elzy followed Lo to the door.

  “Lo, wait,” she said. “You can’t just leave.”

  “I can, El,” said Lo, shouldering her rucksack. “And you can too. Maybe you should think about it.”

  And Lo shut the door behind her, leaving a stunned silence in the room. News and Agnes Rose looked at each other with worried eyes. Texas put her head in her hands. Only Lark, sitting cross-legged on his bunk, his long feet bare, looked unafraid.

  “We can’t do anything now,” Elzy said to Cassie. “We’re two down, and I’m not even half the shot I used to be. We have to start a fire, break into a vault, hold up who knows how many bank clerks—”

  “Two,” said News.

  “Fine, two,” Elzy went on. “Plus loading up a wagon with gold bars and driving it back up here. How are we going to do that with just six people? We’ll be slaughtered.”

  Lark lifted his eyes to Elzy’s face.

  “Seven,” he said.

  That night I went to the kitchen cabin as Cassie was preparing dinner. Now that it was spring we had rabbits in our snares, fat with new grass. Cassie had laid out two pearly pink carcasses on a butcher block. A broth boiled on the stove, its smell green and spicy.

  “If the Kid needs help with sleeping,” I said, handing over the near-empty bottle of laudanum, “two drops in tea or water, no more. And don’t leave it in the cowboy shack. The Kid shouldn’t be alone with it just now.”

  “Thanks,” Cassie said.

  She slid a small sharp knife under the front legs of the first rabbit and sliced them away from the body. I lingered.

  “You could’ve called the plan off,” I said. “Why didn’t you?”

  Cassie carefully trimmed the fat from the inside of each front leg and set it aside in a yellowish-white pile. Then she sliced upward from the loin to rib cage and cut the meat away from the ribs. She worked for so long, and so silently, that I thought she might not have heard me. Then she said, “The day I met the Kid, my husband cut off all my hair. He said I wasn’t a real woman, and I didn’t deserve to look like one.”

  “That’s awful,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  She cut along the rabbit’s pelvis, looking for the back-leg joint.

  “I believed him,” she said. “I believed everything he said about me. It was the Kid who didn’t believe.”

  “So you owe the Kid?” I asked. “Is that it?”

  Cassie shook her head. She reached inside the rabbit’s leg flesh and popped the leg-joint open.

  “The Kid was a ranch hand for my husband,” she said. “We used to meet in the barn and plan our escape. At first I thought it was just for me. I thought the Kid was so selfless, a hero. Then my husband went on a cattle drive and I let the Kid stay the night in my bed. The Kid never slept.”

  She popped the second joint and cut each leg free.

  “After that I started to notice things. The red threads in the Kid’s eyes. The way the Kid always talked about the future whenever the past came up. I saw the Kid had some terrible pain to carry, and helping me was a way to carry it.”

  “The sickness,” I said. “The one the Kid’s father had.”

  “That was part of it, I think,” Cassie said. “But I always thought there might be more. The Kid has always stood a little bit apart, even from me.”

  Cassie brought the flat of her knife down on the rabbit’s spine with a force that made me jump.

  “So when you ask, do I owe the Kid, the answer is yes, of course, the Kid gave me a life. But also the Kid needs to be a hero. The Kid needs to be the Kid. If I take that away—”

  She bent the rabbit’s pelvis backward away from the spine, then sliced it off and tossed it in the boiling water. “If I take that away, then I don’t know what,” she said.

  She turned away from me and began to trim silvery skin from the outside of the loin.

  I took a breath.

  “What happened to the two of you?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “After you left your husband. Texas said something happened, and then you had to come here to be far away from everything. What happened?”

  Cassie put down her knife.

  “We moved to an integrated town near Arapaho land and called ourselves the McCartys: the Kid was the husband and I was the wife. Nearly a year we lived that way, perfectly happy. The Kid worked for a rancher and I took in sewing. We lived in rooms at first, and then when we had a little money we built a house on the edge of town. With our own hands we built it; I’d never seen the Kid sleep so well as when we’d spent all day sanding the doors to fit.”

  “And then?”

  “There was an accident at the ranch. A horse kicked the Kid in the head. The Kid wasn’t moving; everyone feared the worst. Before anyone could send for me, the doctor was there undressing the Kid to check for a heartbeat.

  “The rancher was kind. He could have had the Kid thrown in jail, but instead he gave us the night to pack. ‘If I see your face in town tomorrow, I’ll have no choice but to call the sheriff,’ he said.

  “We were gathering what little we had when the men came. I don’t think the rancher sent them. I think he was honest. But in the end it doesn’t matter. First they shot our horses. Then they put a torch to our little house. We only escaped because the men were drunk, and because months of running had made us fast. For miles, the Kid kept looking back at the house we’d built, going up in flames.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Cassie shrugged.

  “Now you know,” she said. “Go get me some purslanes. And not the ones the snails have been eating.”

  CHAPTER 10

  On the thirtieth of May in the year of our
Lord 1895, the Hole in the Wall gang rode for Fiddleback—minus its leader, plus one itinerant thief, cowboy, and veterinarian’s assistant. The journey took a day, and we camped by the same lake where Agnes Rose and News and I had stopped a few weeks before. There we fed and watered the horses, and passed around a bottle of gin that Agnes Rose produced from Prudence’s saddlebag. News had brought along her fiddle, and she began to play “Sweet Marie,” first slowly and then faster, her eyes closing, a smile forming on her face. After a time Texas got up to dance. Cassie and Elzy quietly joined hands.

  The night reminded me of my very first at Hole in the Wall, but missing from our circle now were Lo with her beautiful jacket covered in bells, and the Kid presiding over all of us, binding us together.

  “You’re quiet,” Agnes Rose said to me, passing the bottle.

  The herbs cooled my tongue; the alcohol warmed my throat.

  “Do you think Lo will be okay on her own?”

  I handed the bottle back and Agnes Rose took a long drink.

  “She should be worrying about us,” she said.

  I looked around the circle in the falling light. Where that first night I had seen only wildness and joy in the gang’s celebration, now I could sense a desperation in the way Texas jumped and somersaulted, the way we all swigged from the bottle. Cassie whispered something and Elzy gave a high, fevered laugh.

  All this time I had been following Texas’s lead, assuming that sticking to the Kid’s plan was the best way for me to assure my passage to Pagosa Springs. But now I was afraid. In the last few days it had occurred to me that perhaps the Kid would not recover, and that when I returned from Fiddleback, the Kid might be unable to hold up the other end of the bargain—if I returned from Fiddleback at all.

  “Why are you going through with this?” I asked Agnes Rose.

  She was quiet a moment. She slid out the pins that held her hair in place, and the heavy auburn braids fell down past her shoulders.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I mean, I know why Cassie’s doing it, and Texas. I have an idea, I think, about Elzy and News. But you clearly know how to fend for yourself. Why don’t you leave? Why risk your life for the Kid’s plan?”