The Outsider (74 page)

She couldn’t breathe. She could smell the bitter stench of gunpowder, but she couldn’t hear or see anything. And she still couldn’t breathe. She opened her mouth and then the breath was there, filling her lungs, as sweet and biting as spring water, and just as cold.

In some calm part of her mind there came not a thought but a certainty:
I am dying.

She fought to open her eyes. And suddenly they were open, and she saw the face of her
Englische
husband. His sweaty face was streaked with dust, his eyes were glittering brightly, and she tried to smile at him, to say his name.

But there was a terrible pain now inside her chest, and she thought her eyes must be filling up with blood, because the world was turning red.

Johnny.

J
OHNNY CAIN SAT IN
the dust with his wife’s head in his lap, and he watched her die.

The bullet hole in her chest bubbled blood. Her
eyes widened, focusing on his, then slowly drifted closed. Her lips formed his name.

“No, please,” he tried to say. He curled his body over her and pressed his face hard into her chest. He opened and closed his mouth as if drowning, and tasted her blood.

He felt hands pulling him off her, he heard Doc Henry saying they ought to get her inside. The boy was there, too.

He couldn’t look at the boy.

He stood up and backed out of the way, letting them have her, because she was dead now and it didn’t matter, nothing mattered.

He kept hearing in his head, over and over again, the crack of a gun firing. He kept feeling the recoil of the Colt against his hand. He kept killing her, over and over again, he saw himself killing her.

He looked down at his hand. It was red and wet with her blood, and his gun was still there. In his hand. He’d held her and watched her die, and all the while his gun had still been in his hand.

SHE WAS BREATHING STILL,
but barely, and it was a sucking chest wound. He had never seen anyone live with a sucking chest wound.

Lucas Henry had laid her on the couch in the examining room. There was nothing he could do but stand here and drink, and watch her die.

Her boy sat on the floor in the corner, his knees drawn up beneath his chin. Every so often his head would jerk and his mouth would open, but no words would come out. Lucas thought Rachel’s son was probably trying to beg him to save her, and so he was glad the words were stuck in the boy’s craw.

He brought the bottle of Rose Bud up to his mouth and drank deep. He heard footsteps crossing the parlor. He turned, unsteady on his feet. “Cain?” he said.

But it wasn’t Johnny Cain, come to weep over the body of the wife he had slain. It was Miss Marilee of the Red House. She had herself all decked out in black taffeta, her idea of the respectable, respectful matron out to do a good deed, he supposed.

“I’ve come to help you lay her out,” she said, her mouth solemn. She even had tears in her eyes, although Lucas couldn’t imagine what they were for. As far as he was aware, she didn’t know the woman.

“She isn’t dead yet,” he said.

She stared at him, her eyes wide, her forehead wrinkling a little. “Then why aren’t you doing something to help her?” she asked.

He sighed. “Because she has a forty-four-caliber bullet lodged next to her left pulmonary artery, the bullet having first ruptured the lung, which has brought about pneumothorax, or air in the pleural cavity, complicated by valvular emphysema. Does that answer your question, Miss Marilee?”

He brought the bottle of Rose Bud up to his mouth with one hand, while the other lowered the sheet, exposing the wound. It pulsed blood and air with her weakening heartbeat, and Doctor Lucas Henry went on, deliberately cruel, wanting to punish her since he couldn’t punish himself enough, “Or maybe you’ll understand this better: she’s dying, and I haven’t the skill or the knowledge to prevent it from happening.”

Marilee leaned over for a look, her black taffeta skirts rustling. “Can’t you get the bullet out?”

“No.” He pushed out a breath thick with the reek of
whiskey. “It would take a miracle. And she’d likely die in the end anyway.”

Her eyes met his, and a hard, calculating look came over her face. “I think you’re scared to try, Lucas Henry. You’re scared because you know you’d have to put down that bottle to do it.”

“Ah, Miss Marilee, sweet Marilee.” He curled his lip and tried to put a cutting edge on his tongue, but he could hear the quaver in his voice. “I’m beginning to think your sweetness is more like spun sugar—all air.”

Her chin went up a notch. “I can be real nice when I want to be, and mean when I have to be. But one thing I ain’t ever been is a coward.”

He stared at her. He started to bring the bottle back up to his mouth, then let it fall. His hand, his whole arm, trembled badly. He could feel each separate breath as a shock to his chest.

He knew he couldn’t do it. He thought maybe if he hadn’t pickled his brain and palsied his hands with the booze for so many years, he might have done it. But now, it was too late—years too late.

And, besides, a man couldn’t really be redeemed for all that he had done by a single act, could he?

“All right, damn you,” he said. He looked around the room, terrified to begin. He had never set out to perform a miracle before. Miracles were for fools who believed.

His gaze fell on Rachel’s son, who sat huddled in the corner, a look of hope on his face. “Get the boy out of here,” Lucas snapped.

He tilted back his head and drank from the bottle of Rose Bud, drank long and deep, searching for that whiskey-induced edge between belief in his own worth, his own capabilities, and the knowledge, deep in his guts, that there was nothing there to believe in.

Marilee coaxed the boy to his feet and gently led him to the door. Lucas stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Take this with you, too,” he said, and held out what was left of the Rose Bud. But then he couldn’t let it go.

The sweat was running cold on his trembling flesh. He could smell himself and the whiskey. He gripped the bottle so tightly his whole body shook with the effort. “Maybe we should pray for that miracle,” he said, his voice breaking over the last word. “Well, Miss Marilee of the Red House, do you think God’ll listen to the prayers of a drunk and a chippy?”

She gave him the sweetest smile he’d ever seen. “I always figured God listens to the prayers of sinners first, Luc. We’re the ones who need His help the most.”

She pried the bottle out of his rigid fingers, and he let her have it.

GREAT COLUMNS OF BLACK SMOKE
rolled over the burning prairie grass. Flames leapt along the buttes and ridges, flinging sheets of lurid red light, flinging cinders, sparks, and ashes up against the bruised sky. The wind was blowing from the north. It had driven the fire down the mountain and across the cattle rangelands of the Circle H.

The big house was a pile of black, smoldering ruins when Quinten Hunter rode up to it. Even the bullet-riddled signboard had burned to the ground. Strangely, the long line of stately cottonwoods still stood.

It was beneath the cottonwoods that he found his father’s wife.

She must have saved the horses, at least she had saved one for herself. Quinten got off his own horse and went to stand beside her. She didn’t look at him. She looked at the
ruins of the house where she had lived with her cattleman husband for sixteen years, and she said nothing.

Quinten’s eye, where his eye used to be, throbbed with a fierce pain, as if he were being stabbed there over and over with an awl. He seemed to be unbalanced by it, by only seeing half, so that he couldn’t walk very straight, and as he came up to her, he stumbled, bumping into her. For the length of a heartbeat he caught his arm around her waist to steady himself. She smelled of smoke, and soot dusted her pale face.

She pulled away from him and took a step back.

“He’s dead,” Quinten said to her, to his father’s wife. “Johnny Cain killed him.”

She stood still, facing him, for a very long time, and then he saw tears well in her eyes and spill over onto her cheeks, leaving streaks in the soot.

“Why?” Quinten said.

Her mouth curled just a little. “Oh, you foolish, foolish boy. I loved him. Do you think I would have done it, done any of it, if I hadn’t loved him?”

She turned abruptly away from him and mounted her horse. Her skirt rode up around her knees, revealing black lisle stockings and button shoes. She didn’t look at all like herself, straddling that horse like a boy. He thought how he had never really known the first thing about her, and now he was never going to.

He looked up into her face, so beautiful, so cold, and shining wet with an incomprehensible grief. “Where are you going?” he said.

He didn’t think she would answer, but she did. “I don’t know.”

“Are you ever coming back?”

“Perhaps.”

Quinten watched her ride away. He watched until she disappeared from his sight, and a body could see for a long time in Montana, even a one-eyed body. He knew she would never return, but he thought that it would be many years before he stopped waiting.

RACHEL’S SON WALKED THROUGH
Miawa City, searching for Johnny Cain.

A sooty black cloud had swallowed up the sun. It made Benjo think of the story his grandfather often told during the preaching, about a time of earthquakes and famines and fearful sights and great signs from heaven, and then Jesus with His fiery angels would come again, and no one would ever die after that.

A part of him knew the black cloud came from the fire on the sheep mountain, but another part of him, the part that was a heavy ache in his chest where his heart was, wanted to believe the darkness was one of those great signs from heaven, that Jesus was coming to help Doc Henry make the miracle.

Benjo’s brogans stirred up puffs of dust as he walked toward the livery. The road was deserted and it made him feel scared, scared of being alone forever. He found Johnny Cain beside the barn, sitting in the dirt with his back pressed up hard against the wall that was papered with wanted posters.

Benjo wanted to shout, but he couldn’t. His tongue was tangled up so bad, he didn’t think it was ever coming loose again. Words, a torrent of words blocked his throat, choking him.