The Outsider (75 page)

He made a lot of noise, walking, because Cain had his Colt in his hand and he was jumpy. But Cain didn’t seem to hear or see him.

As Benjo watched, he brought the gun up to his mouth,
he rubbed the barrel back and forth, back and forth, over his mouth. He put the muzzle in his mouth and closed his teeth around it.

And he smiled.

Benjo opened his own mouth, but nothing would come out. He couldn’t even scream. He thought he would strangle over his own breath.

He took the last few stumbling steps at a hard run and threw himself at Cain’s arm, his fingers wrapping tight around the wrist of the man’s gun hand. The blow jarred the gun out of Cain’s mouth, but he still held the barrel pointed at his face.

The man’s eyes stared back at Benjo, and the strong muscles of his wrist flexed and tightened beneath Benjo’s fingers, as he brought the gun barrel slowly, slowly back into his mouth.

“I killed her, partner,” Cain said, and his voice was gentle, almost sweet. “I killed her.”

Benjo shook his head hard, and tears splattered from his eyes. The words were piling and swelling in his chest, pushing against his skin and rib bones, crushing his heart.

“Fuuuuhhh!” he shouted. “Fuh—fuh—fuh . . . father!”

He let go of Cain’s wrist and grabbed for the gun, knocking the barrel up into the sky. The gun fired, and the crack of the shot echoed in the hot, thick air.

Benjo wrenched the gun free from Cain’s hand, and he flung it away from them with the same hard, violent motion he used to hurl his sling. They watched together as the gun flew, end over end, far, impossibly far, in a wide, high arc across the dark, ash-filled sky, over the willow brakes and chokecherry trees, to land with a splash and a silver spray of water in Miawa Creek.

And Johnny Cain screamed.

He stopped the ragged noise of it with his hands, pressing his hands hard against the bones of his face, his breath coming in tearing sobs. Benjo wrapped his arms around the man’s shuddering back, and he held him. He closed his eyes and imagined opening his mouth, he imagined the words pouring out of his mouth, slowly, easily, like water from the spout of a pitcher.

“D-Doc Henry . . . He’s g-going to muh—muh—make a muh—muh—muh . . .”

Miracle.

DOCTOR LUCAS HENRY WALKED
into his parlor, wiping his hands on a huck towel, and looked up to find Johnny Cain standing at his open door with Rachel’s son at his side.

The man’s and the boy’s hands were gripped together in a single fist. It was hard to tell who was holding on to whom. The boy’s face was pale, his eyes wide and dark. But the man looked as though he’d passed through to the other side of hell, to a place where the sun had burned to ash, and he had been left screaming in the darkness.

Cain said, “The boy told me she’s not dead yet. That you were trying to save her.”

Lucas shrugged. “I’ve managed to remove the bullet, and to repair some of the damage. But I can’t lay claim to saving her yet. She has to survive the surgery. And the risk of pneumonia later is considerable.”

Lucas knew his words were callous, but he was too tired to care. When he lifted the bullet out of Rachel’s lung and saw the faint tremor of a pulse in her neck, he had felt more powerful than God. Now, though, all he wanted was another slug of whiskey.

And here was Johnny Cain, man-killer, wife-killer, standing
in the doorway, holding himself still, as though he feared if he so much as breathed he would shatter.

“I’ve put her in my own bed for now,” Lucas said. “You can go on in to her . . . and if you have it in you somewhere, you might try praying.”

“I don’t know how.”

“You could always begin by getting down on your knees.”

It was the boy, though, who moved, pulling the man after him.

They walked hand in hand up to the bed. Cain stood, looking down on her. “Rachel,” he said, her name a torn whisper.

He dropped abruptly onto his knees beside the bed. He wrapped one arm around the waist of Rachel’s son. The other hand stretched out and gripped the sheet that lay across her breast. His back bowed and his head came down, pressing into her dark red hair that lay like a spill of wine over the pillow.

LUCAS LEANED AGAINST THE
jamb of his open front door, a half-empty bottle of Rose Bud dangling from his hand, and looked down the deserted road. An acrid haze smeared the horizon and the sky above was murky. Toward the south, where the Circle H spread lay, a big boil of a black cloud was rising and spreading.

He heard the rustle of black taffeta, smelled honeysuckle toilet water. Miss Marilee of the Red House.

She came up to stand beside him. “That Johnny Cain, he sure does love his woman. It’s gonna go real hard on him if she dies, after what he done.”

“ ‘Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,’ ” Lucas
drawled. He slanted a look at her, lifting his eyebrows in deliberate mockery. “That’s Shakespeare, Miss Marilee.”

She lifted her shoulders in a pretty little shrug that set her crop of short curls to bouncing. He saw that she had Rachel’s blood on her cuffs, and a streak of it on her neck, like the mark of a kiss.

“I don’t know about that, Luc. But I know there’s all sorts of love. Deep and shallow, pure and naughty. Blessed and cursed. But the best love, I reckon, is the kind that comes back at you from the person you give it to, bright and blindin’ like the sun bouncin’ off a mirror.”

“I had a love like that once, and I wound up killing her for it.” The words shocked him coming out as they did, without thought or premeditation. They burned his throat as if they were fire, and they hurt him in the guts, tearing at all the old wounds that had been suppurating and putrefying for years.

He turned full around to face her, so that she could look into his eyes and know him for what he was. “And I do mean that literally, my dear. I am as much a wife-killer as Johnny Cain in there.”

He watched her eyes go wide with hurt and shock, and he almost smiled, for he had at last gotten what he wanted. Or thought he wanted. But then, the years of drinking had taught him not to trust himself or his motives. He was always his own worst enemy.

He turned away from her and settled back against the door frame. His eyes focused on the flame-glazed clouds of smoke billowing on the horizon. “Now, I don’t want you to get things all backwards in that pretty and empty little head of yours, Miss Marilee. I didn’t become a drunk because I killed my wife, you understand. I killed my wife because I’m a drunk.”

He lifted the bottle of Rose Bud and looked at the world through green glass and amber liquid, and then he drank from it, proving to her and to himself that he was as he claimed.

“She begged me to quit,” he said, “and I told her I would, but I never really meant it, because a drunk can think of no worse fate than being deprived of his whiskey bottle. One night I came home—inebriated, of course—and found her packing her clothes in a trunk, leaving me just like she promised. We argued and I hit her and she fell down a flight of stairs and broke her neck. She wanted to save me and I knew it, and so I destroyed her before she could. Don’t you think that must have been the way of it, sweet Marilee?”

She backed up a step and crossed her arms over her chest. A bright, painful light glittered in her eyes.

“I was cashiered from the cavalry and spent seven years in Leavenworth for what I’d done, and you would probably say that wasn’t punishment enough, but you would be wrong.” He smiled and he could feel the horror of that smile as it twisted over his face. He held the whiskey bottle up to her, tilting it so that it caught and refracted the sunlight in prisms of amber flame. “Because I have found a way to go to hell without dying.”

She shook her head, hard enough to send a single teardrop splashing onto her cheek. “It don’t change things, me knowin’ what you did. Probably it ought to, but it don’t. I love you, Luc Henry, and it won’t ever change things either if you can never find it in you to love me back.”

Lucas closed his eyes, swallowing back a sigh. He didn’t know how he could make her understand that his craving for whiskey was stronger than his need for someone’s love. “You think you know what you’re saying, but you don’t. You think you’ll be able to change me, but you can’t. I might never break your lovely neck, but I will still end up hurting you.”

She struck her breast with her fist, so hard he heard it. “Oh, don’t you understand, Luc?
Life
is going to end up hurtin’ me, so why not you?”

He stared at her. Her bosom lifted and swelled with her panting breaths, and a blush bloomed like hothouse roses in her cheeks. Her eyes, wet and wide, could shame the blue right out of heaven. She was sweet and pretty, and he thought she probably really did love him, in her way.

She opened her hand and let it fall, looking away from him. “I thought I’d go on up to the Red House and have myself a bath,” she said, after the silence had stretched out too long. “But I’ll come back later, if you want a little company.”

“It’s not Saturday.”

She gave him a punch on the arm. “Oh, you! I never said nothin’ about engagin’ in any bed sport. There’s always conversation. You ever done that with a woman, Doctor Henry—engage in a little conversation?”

He laughed, and felt his heart warm. But whiskey sometimes had the same effect on him, and he was past telling the difference.

She gave the place on his arm where she had just hit him a little rub. “I’ll come back. I ain’t nothin’ if not persistent.”

He watched her walk away, those modest skirts swaying with the chippy’s swivel of her hips. Today, for the first time, he had noticed that beneath her dirt-poor ignorance and voluptuous body was an admirable amount of grit. It frightened him that she just went on loving him in spite of everything.

Lucas watched her until she turned down the road toward the Red House, then his attention was caught by the churning dust of a Plain man’s wagon. The man pulled the wagon up on the edge of town and climbed out. He walked slowly toward Lucas, but he didn’t come all the way up to the house.

He stood in the middle of the road, his long black beard lifting and falling with the hot, gusting wind. He just stood there, silent, and waiting. Lucas had the feeling the man had within him the resources to wait forever.

Lucas didn’t have such resources himself. He set his bottle down on the boardwalk and went out to talk to the man. He dispensed with any polite greeting, because a Plain man wouldn’t expect it and wouldn’t want it.

“If you’re here for Rachel, I can tell you she lives for the moment, although I can’t promise anything more, and you’re not taking her anywhere without first going over my own dead body. But you can come in and see her if you want.”

He didn’t think he would get a response from the man. There was no expression on that bearded face, or in the pale gray eyes.

But then the man said, “No,” and the word came out on a gust of hard breath. “My daughter is dead to me, but you come tell me if she dies,
ja
?”

“Yes. I’ll tell you,” Lucas said, not understanding. And yet he had the feeling that just by being here this big, gruff Plain man had been forced to surrender some of his rare and precious innocence.