The Outsider (20 page)

His joy is in killing.
This was the piece of the outsider she’d known about all along and hadn’t wanted to see, couldn’t bear to see. It wouldn’t fit into the pattern she wanted to make of him.

“Have you come to take him back to prison?”

“Did he tell you he’s done a stretch in prison?” He rolled his big shoulders in a shrug. “Nope, that’s a new one on me. He ain’t wanted anywheres at the moment. I checked. I do need to have a li’l chat with him, though.”

He pushed himself off the gate and started across the yard toward the house, his boots squelching in the mud.
Rachel stood rooted a moment, so that she had to hurry to catch up with him.

A slice of fading sunlight fell across her well-scrubbed pine floor as the sheriff opened the door. The back of the kitchen remained cloaked in shadows, and the outsider sat within those shadows, his back to the wall. His Colt lay on the table in front of him, his left hand resting lightly on the grip.

“You promised to put away your gun,” Rachel said.

“Now, I doubt Johnny Cain ever made such a promise. He’s only bein’ cautious, ain’t you, boy? He knows a tin badge ain’t no guarantee I don’t have it in my mind to build up my own rep by takin’ on his.”

The sheriff had kept the bulk of his body shielded by the door. He stepped fully inside now, though he held his hands spread out at his sides. “Now, what I’m fixin’ to do,” he said, “is hang up my gunbelt on that there wall hook, along with my hat, and then I’m gonna pull a chair up to Mrs. Yoder’s table here and have myself a cup of coffee. That coffee do sure smell good, ma’am.”

The kitchen didn’t smell of coffee; if anything it smelled of pickled beets. The blue-speckled coffee pot sat cold on the fender of the stove. The hoecakes she’d dropped lay broken and scattered over the floor.

As Rachel knelt to clean up the mess, she glanced up at the outsider. His eyes rested solely on Sheriff Getts, and his face wore a slightly puzzled look, as if an innocent such as himself couldn’t imagine what a lawman could possibly have to say to him.

The sheriff scraped a chair up to the table and collapsed into it with a heavy sigh. “There’s three dead bodies I need to account for up on Tobacco Reef. I figure you can help me do that.”

“I’m always willing to oblige the law,” said Johnny Cain with a smile that held no warmth.

The sheriff grinned in kind. “That’s fine, real fine.” With slow, deliberate movements, he fetched a briarwood pipe and a buckskin bag of loose tobacco out of the pocket of his muddy duster. He said nothing more until he had the pipe smoking.

He settled his thick shoulders into the chair, puffed, and blew a cloud of smoke into the rafters. “My pappy was a mountain man,” he said. He acknowledged the cup of cold, oily coffee that Rachel set before him with a nod of his head and a mumbled “ma’am.”

“Even lived with the Chippewa for a spell, my pappy did. He taught me how to read sign to the point where I reckon I’m pret’ near as good as most Injuns, if you’ll excuse my own horn tootin’.”

He took the pipe out of his mouth and rubbed the fringe of his mustache. He studied the man across the table from him, staring intently as though assessing the broken arm and the careful way he sat to accommodate the bullet hole in his side. Then the sheriff pushed the pipe back in his mouth and spoke around the bit.

“Now, this is what I figure happened up on that butte. It has its genesis, so to speak, with these three brothers name of Calder who ranched with their pappy up east of here. Them boys was down in Rainbow Springs a week or so back, where they spotted you in that high-stakes monte game what was happenin’ then, and they got took with the sudden, stupid notion that braggin’ rights to the name of Calder would sure be enhanced considerable if that name could be the death of Johnny Cain.”

Rachel shot a startled look at the outsider, but he only watched the lawman with his flat eyes.

She had taken herself as far away from the two men as she could and still be in the same room. She perched on the woodbox next to the cookstove, cradling a bowl of beans in her lap to be picked over before soaking. But though her fingers sifted through the beans, her whole awareness was held by what was being spoken of at the table. This would be a tale of violence and death, she knew, and she didn’t want to hear it. But at the same time she couldn’t make herself cover her ears.

The sheriff inflated his cheeks and blew the air out in a gusty sigh. “Now, I ain’t gonna speculate on how they knew just where you was headed and when you’d be passin’ on through, though I suspect your kind can’t step out to take a leak without hearin’ hammers cockin’ behind every bush. Suffice it to say them three boys waited for you up in the rocks of Tobacco Reef, figurin’ to bushwhack you as you rode on by. Maybe you saw the sun flashin’ off of a rifle barrel, or maybe you just
knew
they was there, like your kind always knows.”

He paused for dramatic effect, and Rachel drew her feet up, pressing them hard against the slats of the woodbox as if to give herself support. Johnny Cain sat silent and motionless except for his hand, which stroked the smooth wooden grip of his gun once and then went still.

“However it was,” the lawman went on, “you’d already turned and was firin’ by the time they got off their shots. Which accounts for Rafe Calder windin’ up dead in the rocks.”

To Rachel’s shock the lawman actually laughed then. “Yup, deader’n a can of corned beef, Rafe was—and still is, less’n he somehow managed to resurrect hisself. Shot plumb bull’s-eye in the mouth.” He chuckled again, shaking his head. “But then Rafe always did have a big mouth.”

The air in the room had turned thick, until it had become an effort to breathe it in. Rachel couldn’t take her eyes off the outsider’s face, but it was as smooth as a weathered tombstone and just as difficult to read.

The sheriff suddenly leaned forward and stabbed the stem of his pipe toward the outsider’s hooded eyes. Johnny Cain didn’t so much as flicker an eyelash.

“Now, you might not know this,” the sheriff said, “but them Calder boys had a rep in this neck of the woods for being crack shots. Hell, I once seen Rafe drive a nail into a fence post with the six slugs in his Colt. So if they had long enough to take aim at you, they was bound to hit you. Which they did, huh?” He looked the outsider over again slowly. “Which they sure enough did. One got you and another got your horse. Your horse went down, prob’ly rolled on you, which is prob’ly how your arm got busted.”

He leaned back, and his fingers began to toy with his tarnished watch fob. But Rachel noticed that during all the lawman’s fiddling, the outsider never once looked at the man’s hands or anywhere other than into his washed-out eyes.

The lawman’s spiky gray eyebrows drew together, as if tugged by complicated thoughts. “This is where it starts to get tricky, but this is how I’m picturin’ it. You lose your six-shooter when your horse rolls and your arm gets broke, you can’t reach your rifle what’s still in the saddle scabbard, and them two livin’ Calder boys is coming out of the rocks, their guns trained on you. So you make like an Injun and play dead.”

The sheriff smiled slowly and nodded his head at the outsider as if acknowledging him a score in a game they were playing. “Yup, them Calder boys might not’ve known shit from wild honey, but they never was flat-out empty-headed.
They come up on you slow, keepin’ you covered the whole while. Maybe one of ’em kicks you a bit to see if you groan. Might be he even takes a lick at your busted arm, in which case you’re one tough son of a bitch. Because you don’t let out a peep, you don’t so much as flinch. You just lay there playin’ possum, waitin’ for them to get closer. And you know they’ll be gettin’ closer if they’re gonna take your scalp, or maybe your nose or an ear—”

Rachel lurched off the woodbox, dumping the bowl from her lap onto the floor. In the sudden silence she could hear the beans scattering over the bare pine boards.

“Yes, ma’am,” Sheriff Getts said, not taking his eyes off the outsider, “them boys was gonna need a trophy, don’t you know? To prove they kilt Johnny Cain.” Shrugging, he rubbed the bit of his pipe over his lips as if in thought. “Otherwise there woulda been no point to any of it.”

Rachel looked at Cain, wondering how he’d endured it, how heart and mind could bear such fear. She thought of the utter terror she had seen in his eyes that day in the hay meadow, when she’d first touched him.

“So you wait,” the sheriff was saying, his voice a gruff whisper now. “You wait, because your kind are good at waitin’. You wait until Jed Calder puts up his gun and takes out his toad sticker and bends over you, and then you shoot him with that boob gun you carry in a holster under your armpit. And all the whilst you’re killin’ Jed, you’re grabbin’ the knife out of his hand and you’re cuttin’ the guts out of his baby brother Stu, and I reckon by then you musta been either real sore or real scared, because that boy looked like he’d been stabbed with a shovel.”

Rachel trapped a moan behind her pressed lips. She shut her eyes and saw blood, smelled it. All that blood soaked and splattered on his clothes—it hadn’t all been his.

“Mind you,” the lawman was saying, “I ain’t sure exactly how you managed to do that final bit, to take them both unawares like that. I only know you did manage it, because I seen the evidence with my own eyes.” He wagged his head again and frowned. “Them boys shoulda known better than to go pokin’ at a sleepin’ rattler.”

For the first time Johnny Cain stirred, but only enough to lift his head. He flashed one of his charming, easy smiles. “You sure do tell a fine story, Sheriff.”

“Uh huh. And I suppose you’re gonna tell me you shot yourself whilst cleaning your gun, and then broke your arm fallin’ outta the chair.”

“There ain’t no law against being clumsy that I know of.”

Sheriff Getts slapped his hand down on the table so hard the dishes rattled. Rachel jumped; the outsider smiled.

“There ought to be a law, though,” the lawman growled, “against treatin’ a man like a fool when he ain’t one. There’s some as say that to pit a man against one of your kind even in a fair draw is still murder, but I’m not so judgmental, myself. I’ve known them Calder boys to be dumb as fence posts and mean as polecats their whole lives, and so their deaths sure ain’t no loss to civilization such as we know it. They came after you, and you only gave ’em what they asked for.”

He leaned forward and tapped his finger on the silver star he wore. “But when I put myself on the pin side of this badge, I swore to uphold the law and protect the citizens of this territory. So I also figure I’d be derelict in my duty if I didn’t suggest that you mosey on along, soon as you’re able. And before this nice little valley is overrun with more bad hombres and fool boys who want to be known as the quick son of a bitch who shot Johnny Cain.”

The sheriff stared hard at Johnny Cain, the pipe jutting upward as he clenched his teeth on the bit.

Johnny Cain said nothing.

“You are truly a tough bastard,” the lawman said. “But then I figured you would be.” He pushed the chair back from the table. Lumbering to his feet, he pulled the watch from his vest, then glanced at the window, glazed gold now by the setting sun.

“Thank you for the coffee, ma’am,” he said to Rachel as he turned to leave.

And still Johnny Cain said nothing. Not even good-bye.

Rachel went with the sheriff out into the yard. The salmon pink light had seeped out of the clouds, leaving them a smoky gray. It would be full dark soon and a cold wind had sprung up. She was worried that Benjo wasn’t back yet. She hoped he was only lurking in the barn, waiting for Sheriff Getts to leave.

The sheriff knocked the bowl of his pipe against the fence, the wind catching the sparks and embers and sending them winking like fireflies into the falling dusk. Leather squeaked as he put his weight in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle. He leaned over and patted the neck of his horse. Though Rachel knew his eyes were on her, she couldn’t look at him.

“That Johnny Cain . . .” he began.

He had a strange way of saying the man’s name, she thought. Johnny Cain—as if it was all of a piece, all run together.

But then she couldn’t imagine anyone calling him just plain Johnny, the outsider who sat at her table with his hand always within easy reach of death. And Mr. Cain, the charming rascal with the lazy smiles and teasing ways—he was a made-up man. Made up by him to put her at her ease while he recovered from his injuries in her house. There was no Mr. Cain.

There was only Johnny Cain. The man who had offered to kill for her.

“Don’t start to feelin’ tender for him,” the sheriff was saying. “A man like him is trouble, and trouble don’t like bein’ lonesome. Time and luck’ll run out on him someday, they always do, and he’ll wind up dyin’ how he lives.”

She crossed her arms beneath her breasts and flung her head back to stare up at him. “But what is a man to do if there are people always out there waiting to shoot him in the back, to cut off his ears?”

He gave a little nudge to the battered brim of his hat. “Which is my point exactly, ma’am. You and your boy have already had your share of woes. When his destiny finds Johnny Cain, you don’t want to be standing anywheres near him.”