The Outsider (57 page)

She lifted her head and drew her shoulders up proud. She unwrapped the reins from the brake handle and spanked them against the horse’s rump. The shay lurched into motion, bouncing over the bunchgrass and back out onto the sun-basted road.

“Maybe I’ll do just that, Lucas Henry. And maybe you’ll be sorry someday.”

He tilted back his head, upending the whiskey flask over his mouth and drinking until it was empty. “Maybe I already am,” he said.

IT WAS STILL BLISTERING HOT
a week later when Quinten Hunter and his father, and his father’s wife, went to the stockyards at Deer Lodge to buy more beeves for their overstocked and overgrazed range.

“Overstocked” and “overgrazed” were the words that figured most prominently in Quinten’s conversation throughout the long ride there, until the Baron told him to shut his yap and save his breath for breathing. Whereupon Quinten accused his father of being the kind of stubborn fool who wouldn’t move camp to get out of the way of a prairie fire, and Ailsa almost smiled.

At least Quinten imagined that she almost smiled. She was wearing a black straw shade hat with a gauzy scarf that fell over her face. The prairie wind molded the scarf against her nose and mouth and cheekbones. She looked more distant
than ever, a woman wrapped in a shroud. She drove her small purple shay in silence along the ribbons of wheel tracks that wound through the sere and wind-flattened grass. Quinten and his father rode alongside her, but she might as well have been alone in the wild and empty land beneath the brassy sky.

That night in Deer Lodge they ate antelope steak in the dining room of the new three-story brick hotel. The Baron, his face flushed with whiskey and desperation, talked about the old days when cattle could be fattened on the open range at no expense save for a few cowboys, some corrals, and a branding iron. The good old days, when a five-dollar steer could be run for a season or two and then sold for sixty dollars.

The good old days, Quinten thought, were like yesterday’s dollars, used up and spent long ago. But try telling that to his father.

While they ate, Quinten watched the reflection of their table in the glass panes of the hotel’s lantern-glazed window: a man and wife and their son, sharing a meal, the man talking and smiling, his wife seeming to hang on his every word. And beside them their son, raised in their image, the heir to their past and the hope of their future.

He smiled wryly to himself, his eyes slitting, and the reflection in the windowpanes wavered and fell away. Some truths were only illusions, he thought, and other truths were turned into lies, whether you thought you could bear it or not, and the accepting of that bit of life’s knowledge was hard, hard.

And then there were those truths you shouldn’t be thinking about at all. Like what had been done to that Plain boy and his poor chippy out by Blackie’s Pond, what he had watched and
allowed
to be done to them. When he remembered
what had happened on that day, he couldn’t bear to look at his father’s face.

You heard your pa say how she had to be taught a lesson. . . .

God, she had screamed.

Quinten looked away from the window and caught the gaze of his father’s wife. She stared back at him, and the deep emptiness, the utter indifference, of her violet eyes made something sink inside him.

“Christ and all his saints,” his father suddenly said. “I’ve known a livelier time at a funeral.” He yanked the napkin out of his collar, tossed it onto the table, then pushed heavily to his feet. “I’m going to see if I can find me a place where the company’s more perky and congenial.”

Quinten and his father’s wife had not spoken before the Baron left, and they did not speak afterward. They finished their coffee and walked side by side in silence up the hotel’s narrow Turkey-carpeted stairs. They had taken two rooms on the top floor: he and his father would batch it together in one, and Ailsa would have the other. In all the years Quinten had been with them, he’d never known them to share a bed.

He paused at her door and said, “Good night, Mrs. Hunter.”

“Good night, Quinten,” she answered. She glided inside and the door shut behind her with a soft click.

His own room was stuffy with the heat, and stank of the last occupant’s chewing tobacco. Quinten threw open the window, hooked his gunbelt over the bedpost, took off his coat and shirt and boots, and lay down on top of the bed’s nappy chenille spread. He stacked his hands behind his head and closed his eyes, but he felt too edgy to sleep.

A wagon with a squeaky axle rumbled by in the street below. Across the way a woman laughed and a piano struck
up a tinny tune. A man came out of the saloon next door and pissed in the alley beneath Quinten’s window.

He wondered what she was doing now—if she slept already, or if she lay there in the dusk like he was doing, counting the knotholes in the ceiling. He wondered if she cared at all that her husband had once again left her alone while he began the evening in some saloon and ended it in some whore’s bed.

He must have drifted off, for he was suddenly jerked awake by the sound of crashing glass and gunfire. He snatched up his own gun and went to the window, but all the fuss was coming from a lone whiskified cowhand who was having a shootout with the street lamps.

Quinten put away his gun and stood a moment in the dark, in indecision. Then before he quite knew how he got there, he was standing outside her door and his curled knuckles were rapping softly on the wood. Too late he realized he was wearing only his trousers.

He had started to creep back across the hall when the door opened. She was still dressed in the dark purple silk dress she’d worn to dinner, except that three of the tiny jet buttons at her neck had been undone. She held a glass of whiskey in her hand. A faint blush stained her cheeks, like the first promise of sunrise in a pale dawn sky.

Her eyes registered on him and something happened deep inside them. It was as if a lamp that had been burning in a soft violet night was suddenly extinguished. He wondered if she had been hoping, expecting, to open her door and find his father on the other side of it.

“That gunplay,” he said, his voice breaking a little over the words, “it wasn’t anything for you to worry about. Only some cowboy with a bellyful trying to blow a week’s worth of prairie dust out of his Colt.”

She said nothing.

He swallowed, breathed. “Well, I just thought I’d see if you were all right.”

She put her small white palm against the door and pushed it shut in his face.

THE SUN WAS COMING UP
hot again on a new day when Quinten met his father at the stockyards. The Baron hadn’t come back to the hotel the night before and he looked the worse for it. His eyes were bloodshot and his face raspy with beard stubble. He held his head as if it hurt even to breathe.

“Serves you right,” Quinten said.

His father gave him a weary, bleary-eyed look. “Aw, bloody hell. Let’s go buy us some cows.”

It wasn’t the best time of year to be buying stock. But the work of rounding up and branding and driving the herds to their home ranges could sometimes carry well into July, and a rancher looking to unload a bunch of mature cattle didn’t always want to wait until the fall drives. So a man with the money to spend could often find beeves for sale in the summer months.

This morning, though, the pens and corrals that usually teemed with livestock were mostly empty. The wind blew dust devils down the open cattle chutes. Pole fences cast harsh shadow over barren lots. Only the middle pens held a couple of hundred ragged cows, which stood listlessly around the feeding and watering troughs, their heads hanging low in the heat.

“Jesus,” the Baron said. “This place is as deserted as a church on Saturday night. Where is everybody?”

“Busted.”

A tall man walked over to them from beneath the shade
of a water tank. He was so thin he looked put together out of sticks, and he was coated in red prairie dust from the crown of his black Stetson to the fringe on his worn chaps.

“Busted,” he said again, smiling to show off teeth that were yellow as corn. “Nobody’s selling, because nobody’s buying.” He pointed his long muzzle-shaped chin at the cows in the middle pens. “You’re looking at all I got left of a ranch over in east Oregon. I been trying to hang on, but with the market glut and beef prices falling again this year, there ain’t no way. I don’t want to sell out—hell, not for the little I’m going to be getting. But I’m busted.”

The Baron surveyed the quiet herd, his eyes squinting against the sun and wind-whipped dust. “They’re a pretty ragged bunch,” he said. “All horn and tail.”

“They’re trail weary, is all. Otherwise they’re prime stock. All they need is a season or two of fattening up.”

Quinten swallowed down a sigh and looked away. The sick feeling of the night before was back in full force, churning in his belly. He went over to a corral fence and leaned his arms on the top rail.

“I met up with a fellow last night who’s willing to buy ’em for the hides,” he heard the cowman say. “But I ain’t said yes to his offer yet.”

The sun, white as a flash of lightning, was searing the morning sky. Quinten closed his eyes.

In the Miawa country, not too far from the ranch, was a hogback ridge that shot straight up nearly three hundred feet into the sky and ended in a rocky, weed-choked coulee. In the years before the white man came, when his mother’s people had been free to hunt the land of their birth, they had stampeded whole herds of buffalo over that cliff. As a boy, he had gone often to that place to walk among the piles of sun-bleached bones.

He had always wondered what those great dark hunchbacked creatures had felt when they took that last wild and frightening plunge off the edge of the world into oblivion.

He heard his father say, “I don’t like taking advantage of a man when he’s down.”

And the cattleman answered, “I don’t see myself as doing you a particular good turn, sir. In this market any man buying instead of selling is only chasing his own tail while he tries to catch up with himself.”

The transaction was completed on a word and a handshake. His father had gotten a good deal, but Quinten didn’t know where the money was going to come from. He didn’t want to know. He told himself he ought to be concentrating instead on the logistics of how they would trail their newly acquired cows up to the Miawa, but it was too hot to think.

The cattleman said he had to go look up the hide buyer, to whom he’d promised an answer by this morning. He started to walk off, but then he turned around, pointing down the road, to a pair of wagons filled with huge jute sacks stuffed with wool and piled high as haystacks.

“Now there, sir, is the business you and I should be in. Sheep. Why, I bet them mutton punchers could buy us out twice over for what they’re gonna get for just one of them wagons of wool clips.” The cattleman hawked a short laugh and spat in the dirt, then walked off.

Quinten came up to stand alongside his father as they watched the heavily loaded wagons trundle toward them.

The man at the reins of the lead wagon had a thick ginger-colored beard that came to the middle of his chest. The wide brim of his hat flapped in the wind; his broad shoulders strained the seams of his old-fashioned sack coat. The driver of the second wagon was a beardless youth and he wasn’t dressed Plain, but Quinten knew him. Remembering
how he knew him stirred a shame that Quinten felt as a queasiness deep in his belly and a vile taste in his mouth.

The shame made Quinten angry with his father, who was the cause of it. “Looks like those Plain folk had themselves a good wool crop this year,” he said. “I don’t suppose they’ll be wanting to sell out to us now or anytime soon.”

The Baron said nothing, but Quinten could see the muscle working along the bone of his rigid jaw.

“And I don’t expect a plague’s going to come along and wipe them out for us either,” Quinten pushed on. “Not with them being so godly and on the side of the righteous like they are. Pity that new stock inspector you hired isn’t with us now. A man who can rape a woman with a gun barrel wouldn’t have any trouble shooting down innocents in the street without provocation.”