Williamson, Penelope

by The Outsider

  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.

  CHAPTER 16

  The 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.

  And then he remembered that he'd lied about the bicycle anyway, and the things he wanted most.

  Cain reached up and ripped the wanted poster off the wall. He crumpled it up in his fist, but he didn't throw it away. He gave it to Benjo.

  "Let's go see about that horse," he said.

  The livery was the only building in town to wear any paint, and the paint it sported was the bright red of a spit-polished apple. Even on hot days, passing through those sliding double doors was like dipping your toe into a pool of spring water. Dark cool moist air enveloped them, redolent of hay and manure. Today the livery's back doors were open, and from the yard there came the tang of burning charcoal and the pang-ping-pang of hammer on steel.

  They found Trueblue Stone, the hostler, at the smithy out back, fastening a new handle onto a battered black-bottomed boiling pot. Trueblue wore only a pair of tattered trousers and a big leather apron that fell all the way to the domed toes of his hobnailed boots. The bare skin of his arms and back was shiny and black. He had the biggest muscles Benjo had ever seen on a man, thick and knotty as cottonwood logs, and he spoke to his horses with words no one else understood. He'd once told Benjo the words came from a place called Africa.

  While the men fell into a conversation about horses, Benjo rummaged through the pile of horseshoes that stood nearly as tall and wide as a haystack in the middle of the yard. Trueblue liked to tell a story that he'd once fashioned a horseshoe out of a piece of falling star and then accidentally went and tossed it onto the pile. Benjo didn't believe the tale, but he always looked for the lucky horseshoe anyway, whenever he came to the livery.

  Except for this time. This time he dug a hole deep into the pile, stuffed the wadded-up wanted poster in there, and covered it with dozens and dozens of bent and rusted horseshoes.

  When Trueblue was finished with the pot, they went to the corral to look at the horses. There were five of them for sale, four geldings and a young mare.

  "Which one do you fancy?" Cain asked.

  It took Benjo a moment to realize the question had been directed at him, and his chest stretched with surprise and pleasure. But with Trueblue standing there—a man who could speak to horses with words from Africa—Benjo knew he had no hope of getting any of his own ordinary words out from around his twisted-up tongue, so he pointed to the mare, a chestnut with a blaze on her face and white stockings.

  "She is the prime one of the lot, all right: nice fat sleek coat, bright eyes, a long arch to her neck, thick cannons, and a clear-footed gait. You've a good eye, partner," Cain said, making the boy's chest swell even more. "Trueblue allows as how she can be a bit of a bangtail when the mood takes her, though. I'm looking for a real sugar-eater of a horse. One that's been gentled, not broke."

  Benjo watched, fascinated, as he checked all the horses over carefully, peering in their mouths and up their nostrils, running his hands over their legs. He even squatted down in the dirt of the corral and studied their droppings. He narrowed the horses down to two candidates, the mare and a big gray gelding, riding them both bareback with only a hackamore bit. To Benjo's proud delight, he settled on the mare, even though Trueblue had said she could be a bit of a bangtail when the mood took her.

  He dickered with Trueblue for a long time over the price—what the hostler wanted for the mare was an ocean apart from what the outsider appeared willing to spend— and then they dickered some more over a saddle and bridle. And not for a minute during it all was Benjo bored. He loved watching Johnny Cain, and he loved listening to him talk. He even pretended to be him sometimes, tilting his hat low over one eye and moving in that easy, loose-jointed way Cain had. But even when Benjo was alone, with no one but himself to hear, he couldn't talk in that cool, slow way of Cain's.

  Afterward, out again on the hot and dusty street, Cain wiped the sweat off the back of his neck and said, "You know, Benjo, I sure have got me a touch of dry throat, what with all the argufying I had to do with Trueblue Stone over the cost of that mare you talked me into. How about if I was to buy us a couple of sarsaparillas?"

  Grinning, Benjo nodded. Then, remembering his manners, he said, "Puh—pun—puh..." Please.

  They walked side by side down the boardwalk, and although Benjo felt the stares, he didn't care. In truth, he relished the looks and the whispers they were attracting. It was a sinful thing, he knew, a worldly thing, this thinking you were somebody. But walking alongside of Johnny Cain, he felt like somebody.

  And when they stopped in front of the Gilded Cage saloon, he thought he would explode from nervous excitement, although the moment lost some of its shine when Cain said, "Maybe you better wait out here, else your ma'll have both our hides."

  Benjo waited until the saloon's summer doors had stopped swinging behind the outsider's back before he stood on tiptoe to peer inside. But he couldn't see much beyond an old moose head hanging on the far wall and a coal oil lamp with a red paper shade.

  He dropped down on his knees and peered beneath the batwing doors. He saw a tobacco-stained puncheon floor sprinkled with sawdust. He craned his head, looking up. A whiskified man sat slumped over a table, snoring. A long string of flypaper coiled down from the ceiling above the man's head, but it didn't seem to be doing much good, for half a dozen flies buzzed around his oiled hair. Two more men stood at a brown felt-covered table, knocking ivory balls around with long skinny sticks.

  He didn't see any dancing ladies with naked bosoms.

  He saw the big gold-framed mirror that Mose Weaver had talked about, though, and the barkeep with the purple lips and the jowly cheeks. "Soon as I serve Gramps here," the barkeep said to the outsider, who must have just put in his request for the sarsaparillas.

  The barkeep jerked on a big silver handle and a dark stream purled out of the tap and into a glass. He set the foaming glass in front of the only other man standing at the counter, an old-time prospector, to judge by his sourdough coat and slouch hat.

  The prospector slapped a coin on the slick wood, making it ring. He said, "Here's how," and drained most of the Devil's brew in one swallow.

  Benjo heard the ring of jingle-bobs and the scrape of spurs on the boardwalk behi
nd him. He backed up on his hands and knees, out of the way of the saloon's door. His gaze went up winged, silver-studded black leather chaps to a fringed and greasy white buckskin shirt and a cowhide vest, settling finally on a face with a billy-goat beard and a bulging cheek, and pale wet eyes.

  A strange light appeared in those eyes when they fell on Benjo.

  "You sure do keep turning up where you don't belong, don't you, boy?" Woodrow Wharton said.

  Benjo's head jerked as the words began to pile up in his throat. His left hand went to the sling at his waist.

  But Wharton was already turning away. "I don't mean to wound your feelings any, but your daddy should've thought about using a French letter."

  His lips peeled back from his pointed teeth, and he sent a stream of tobacco juice whizzing so close to Benjo's face he felt the spray. Laughing, Woodrow Wharton slammed the flat of his hand on the swinging door and disappeared into the murky shadows of the Gilded Cage saloon.

  Miawa City was a dangerous place. Most especially, thought Rachel Yoder, it was a dangerous place for a Plain woman who sometimes forgot to keep to the straight and narrow way.

  First there had been that girl crying in the privy alley, sobbing as if her heart had shattered. Rachel knew she shouldn't have gone to her. The church's teachings were clear on that: outsiders, with all their corrupting ways, were better left to their own hurts and worries. And such a girl as that one, who lived in the house with the red locomotive lantern, ought to be doubly shunned for the wickedness she had fallen into.

  The girl had been coarse, with her harlot's paint running in streaks down her face and her Jezebel dress that showed all of her bosom. And she had been lewd, brazenly admitting to being with child after lying in sin with a man. Yet Rachel had felt a disturbing empathy for her, as if her tears could have been the tears of any woman, of all women. And she'd felt an even more disturbing curiosity to know of the forbidden things that this girl could tell her of: feather beds and silk sheets and mahogany pianos. And all the ways in which a woman's body could please a man.