The Outsider (71 page)

QUINTEN HUNTER STOOD ON
the gallery of the big house. You could see a long way from anywhere in Montana, he thought, the sky was so big, the horizon so far. And what he saw on this day hurt. The prairie grass was so brown, the sage foothills gray with dust. Tag ends of clouds clung to the mountains, but they were empty of rain.

The dour slapping push of the hot afternoon wind made him feel a bit crazy. On the renegade side, as they said up on the reservation. His mouth tightened into a bitter smile. Maybe he should go take some paleface scalps, or chase down a herd of stampeding buffalo, if he could find any, or get wild-assed drunk on firewater. Get the Indian out of his system.

He went on into the house instead, in search of his father. As he walked down the hall toward the Baron’s study,
he could hear that tobacco-fed voice growling to someone about “this Christly drought.”

The door was open only a crack. Quinten had raised his hand to knock when he heard his father’s wife say something about having to find another way, and he paused, his fist suspended in the air.

“There is no other way!” the Baron bellowed. “Everything’s already been mortgaged twice over, including the bloody air we’re breathing.”

“That money’s mine,” Ailsa said, steel beneath the soft snow of her voice. “I’ll not be giving you any more of my family’s paltry legacy to pour down the dried-up waterholes of a dying ranch. There’s precious little of it left, as it is. I shall need it for myself, for when I leave here.”

The Baron made a howling noise, as if he were in pain. “You’re never leaving here, you’re never leaving me, more’s the bloody pity of it. You enjoy tormenting me too much, you perverse bitch.”

Quinten knocked and went through the door in one motion, without waiting to be invited.

The Baron was sitting in his maroon leather swivel chair behind his massive black walnut desk. He had put his dusty boots, with cowshit caked on the soles, on the green leather top of that desk because he knew how it would irritate his pure-bred wife.

Ailsa, elegant in brown silk, was sitting in a Boston rocker stenciled in gilt that caught the sunlight pouring through the lace panels on the windows. She didn’t look irritated, only beautiful. And untouchable.

“Ah, there you are, Quin, m’boy,” his father said, waving his cigar in an expansive gesture of welcome. “I was just telling your mother that we’ve been having buzzard’s luck lately, eh? Can’t kill anything and won’t nothing die.”

Their fighting had gotten savage, if the Baron was referring to his wife as his bastard’s mother. Quinten thought she probably hated that above all things, although you would never know it to look at that cool, remote face. But then his father’s snarling courage had never been any match for her cunning cruelty.

“If cattle prices don’t start coming back up, it won’t pay us to ship them to market this year,” his father was saying. “It’ll be a fine skinning season come fall. And yet did you hear what those damned holy-howler mutton punchers got for their bloody wool? The range is getting sheeped out, and they’re getting rich off of it, the cocksucking bastards.”

Ailsa Hunter’s lips might have thinned a little at her husband’s crude language, but her violet eyes remained deep and unassailable.

“The sheep men aren’t having things totally their way this year,” Quinten said, weary already of the argument that they had been playing out all summer. “I heard they’ve been forced to throw their herds back onto the slopes of buttes they’d already eaten across once. This drought is affecting us all.”

The Baron gave him the snake-killing look Quinten always got whenever he tried to calm the troubled waters his father was always stirring up between himself and the mutton punchers. “If things don’t turn around here soon, we’ll be so broke we’ll have to sell our saddles,” the Baron said, naming the worst fate that could befall a cattleman.

“What does it matter?”

The words, spoken in Ailsa’s snowbank voice, silenced the room. Quinten could hear the wind blowing through the cottonwoods outside, and the tick of the brass pendulum in the polished oak hanging clock.

“Matter? Bloody Christ on His cross, it matters!” The Baron swung his boots off the desk, pushing to his feet with a
creak and groan of leather. “Do you think I’ve sweated blood only to watch this place die before me? I want Hunters to be ranching this valley a hundred years from now. The boy—”

“The boy!” To Quinten’s shock, she actually laughed. “None of it has ever been for the boy, and the only fool who believes that is him.”

Slowly she turned her head on its long thin neck to look at him, and Quinten felt the breath back up in his throat. He knew he was about to find out, at last, how the Baron’s half-breed bastard had come to be brought to this house fourteen years ago. He would discover the Devil’s bargain his father had made with this woman.

“You’ve always thought you were something special to him,” she said in that cold, cold voice, “because you think your mother was special. Well, he had himself a new squaw every winter. A new squaw and a new buffalo robe to keep a man warm during the long, cold Montana winters, isn’t that what you used to say, Fergus?”

The skin around the Baron’s mouth had grown taut. “She’s lying,” he said.

Something caught at Quinten’s chest, hurting. He had this strange liquid feeling, as if his heart had been ripped open and was bleeding inside his chest. “He brought me here,” he said. “My . . . the Baron brought me here to the ranch.”

“I made him do that. You were my price for staying.”

“Goddamn it, she’s lying!” his father roared, as if shouting her down could make his own words truer.

“Why?” Quinten said, looking only at her. A little malicious smile flickered on her mouth, and a trace of color had risen under her skin.

“He promised me he would give up his red-skinned tarts once we were married, and he did for a time. Until that winter I grew heavy with his child, then he took your mother
back to his bed. He’d already experienced her charms during an earlier winter, which is how you came to be.” She lifted her slender shoulders in an elegant shrug. “I don’t know why he chose to have a second go at her. Perhaps he’d been through them all at least once, and he was starting over at the bottom again.”

She had her face turned up to him, and she was looking at him, really looking at him, and he felt as always that bittersweet yearning, the raw longing, even while he was listening to her speak words that hurt worse than the thousand slights, worse than all those years of benign indifference that she had ever given to him.

“But I had my revenge on your father,” she was saying. “I willed our baby to be born dead. I
willed
it. And I never let him touch me after that. Instead I made him bring you here, to his precious ranch where he was going to build his dynasty—you, his get by an Indian squaw. I made certain he would never have a legitimate son, a white son, and every time he looked at you he was going to remember why and what it had cost him.”

She stood up, sleek and cold and deadly as a sword. She came to him where he was, rigid in the middle of the plush floral carpet of his father’s study. She dug long painful fingers into his arm. It was now the second time she had touched him. The second time in a lifetime.

“Why don’t you ask him who will get all this worthless and beloved land of his after he dies?”

Quinten watched her glide from the room. She left behind her an arctic silence. The sun burned through the windows, making the gold paper and tin wainscoting on the walls glow and glitter. But it might have been winter outside.

“Don’t you go putting any stock in what she said, Quin. She’s crazy. She’s been crazy for years.”

He turned to look at his father. The Baron had taken a fresh cigar out of the cedar humidor on his desk and he was peeling off the silk band. “Who gets this ranch after you die?” Quinten said.

His father pointed the unlit cigar at his face. “What a bloody thing to ask your old man. Do I look ready for the bone orchard yet?” His eyes were haggard, his color high. But his jaw was set strong, and his brogue thick. “Ye’re my son, damn yer bloody hide. Ye’re my son.”

Quinten looked at his father. He wanted to believe. He
yearned
to believe, and the emotion was so powerful it left him feeling weak. But he was a breed. In the eyes of the white world, that made him inferior. And in some hard and bitter corner of his heart, he’d always known his Indian blood had made him inferior in his father’s eyes as well.

His father turned away with a snarl. “Bugger it all, then. What did you blow in here for if it was only to glower at me?”

Quinten had to swallow twice before he could speak. “I was out riding line and I came across a dead steer. But I don’t think this one died of thirst. It had swollen legs.”

“Are you telling me you think we got blackleg now on top of everything else? Shit, boy. Sometimes I think you wish the bad luck on us.”

“The dead beef was one of those you bought off that Oregon man in Deer Lodge a couple months back. Beeves we didn’t have any range for in the first place.”

The Baron’s jaw bunched, then he pushed out a hard sigh. “When it comes to this subject, conversing with you is like discussing the meaning of life with a stump. We had the range once, and we would have it still if those bedamned, holy-howling, Bible-banging mutton punchers hadn’t settled the north end of the valley. And if our cows have got the blackleg, then it probably came from their damned bloody sheep.”

“You don’t know that—”

“I’ll tell you what I know, and for once in your life you’re going to shut your yap and listen. We had the range once and we’ll have it again.” He held a match to the end of his cigar, sucking and puffing to get it going. Then he pointed with the smoking end of it at a pile of gunnysacks on one corner of his desk. It was the first Quinten had noticed of them.

“Tonight,” his father said, picking up one of the sacks, handling it almost lovingly, “we’re going to booger those mutton punchers so bad they’ll be run out of this valley for good, every last woolly one of them.”

Quinten looked at the gunnysack in his father’s hand, feeling weary and sick and scared. This was wrong, what his father was planning to do, wrong and ultimately pointless, because all the grass in all the valleys in all the world wasn’t going to make their troubles go away. But the Baron in this mood could make himself believe that fire wasn’t hot.

“Getting rid of the Plain folk isn’t going to drive cattle prices back up or put rain in the clouds,” he said, knowing it would do little good.

His father gripped the brown burlap in his fist, shaking it before Quinten’s face. “Life isn’t owed to you, boy. You got to earn it. You are my son—I’ve said as much to the whole valley, to the whole bloody world, and I mean it. But if you want this ranch, then it’s time you learned how to fight for it.”

“Johnny Cain married that Plain widow he was working for. That sheep farm of hers now belongs to him, and there’s a man who’s always lived by the gun. He won’t run.”

“Johnny Cain might be more feared in these parts than the Almighty, but he’s only one man.”

Quinten closed his eyes for a moment, afraid suddenly
that he was going to weep. “You used to tell me a story when I was a little tacker, when we’d go out on hunting trips up to the res. About some fellow back in Scotland, years ago, who single-handedly rallied his people to drive the English off their lands. No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on coming, you used to say that to me, remember, Pa? One man who won’t run can stop an army.”

“Hell, those were only stories, boy. In real life, your one man just gets himself killed. He gets trampled in the dust, until there’s nothing left of him or his bloody gun.”

“I want no part of this,” Quinten said to his father’s weather-toughened face. But the words came out of his mouth mangled, as if he were chewing leather.

“You’ll have a part of it,” the Baron said, his voice hard now, as hard as his eyes. “Or you’ll have none of it.”

Quinten nodded, hearing his father’s threat, accepting it. A moment ago he’d been fighting back tears. Now his eyes were so dry they burned. And he felt empty inside. As if one of those spirit thieves his mother’s people believed in had come and whisked away his soul up into the sky, and he was looking down on this room now, down on this moment, from far away, lost in the blueness of the vast Montana sky. There stood his father stiff-backed with pride and stubbornness. And there stood himself, hearing the echo of his father’s words in his heart:
You are my son.
Tasting the certainty, bitter like alkali dust, not only that what they were about to do was wrong, but that the consequences were going to be bad. Maybe deadly.

He said nothing, though. There was no reason to say what could be more plainly shown. He picked up a gunnysack from his father’s desk. He left the study with it in his hands, left the house with it.

Outside, the hot wind was blowing so hard that he had to put the strings of his hat through the toggle and pull them tight to his chin. The wind was blowing up the dust in a fine spray that stung his eyes and dried his throat. He could feel the heat and the wind toughening his skin, leathering it, seasoning Quinten Hunter into what he would be for the rest of his life.