The Outlaw Album Read Online Free PDF Page A

me, then choked the light from her pretty eyes and put her…Should I grab him now while he’s handy and beat on him till he tells me where I can rake her bones together?
    At some point every old friend sensed my suspicion aim their way and several couldn’t get over that moment of recognition, even after my suspicion rotated to the next ol’ buddy, or slightly creepy cousin, that mailman with the pencil mustache. There was no blood, no hair strands snatched loose in a fight or torn bits of her blouse, and she was a strong girl, so he had a gun to her head or she trusted him enough to go sit in his truck a minute, hang out, sip a soda. That brings everybody I know into the picture.
    Her mother ran west when the girl was five. I was too steady for her taste, too regular, too much the same one day to another. She wanted fizzy drinks and jukeboxes, different arms to hold her every week or two. She remembered her daughter’s birthday for a few years, sent a gift at Christmas, then she just didn’t anymore. She’d turned that page, lit a fresh cigarette, poured a cold one, found new lips to kiss.
    I went to all the trouble and tracked her to Reno once our girl was gone, and she said, “Everything with you is a downer, Henry. I just can’t stand your blah-blah-blah negative attitude. You’re so selfish that way. She’ll turn up.”
    “She didn’t leave—she was taken.”
    “What’s your proof? You got any?”
    “You don’t even know her.”
    The phone went click, and that was it. She has yet to call with another question.
    I always wondered if her mom’s leaving was why the girl ran to fat for so long, had a roly-poly figure until the year before she went gone. She took up swimming, jogging, some flowery-sounding yoga class at the Civic Center, ate salads and more salads and rice cakes. She made herself into a size she hadn’t believed she could ever be. That meant so much to her, to finally have a figure clothes looked good on, to feel a little admired when lolling around the pool in town, wear shorts to the ballpark on summer nights.
    I’ve often thought about that: If she’d stayed chunky would she be here now?
    Such questions popping up keep the hurt fresh.
    And sometimes I think, Were there two of them? Three?
    How much of our world is in on this?

Black Step
     
    T he cow trembled in the sideways tree, the broken left foreleg canted in a separate direction from the other legs, snapped sharply to the right and dangling. There’d been moans since the storm in the night pushed on and away and the wind calmed. The cow heard my feet rustle pebbles on the cliff, and its tired neck raised the head to look up at me. The cow had wide screaming eyes that were saying things that living things say to me in that language better than words. That language that travels. I’ve seen it everywhere.
    The sideways tree was a lonely old sycamore halfway down the cliff that grew straight out from the face for about ten feet, then curled upward for another thirty. Far below, the river flowed clean and dense in the morning shadow cast by the bluff, the rocks in its bed singing of centuries spent singing in the rushing, the things that wash by, bump going past, leave marks or bones. And the cow repeated everything again with those shrill eyes pointed my way, pleading as it had since the forest started rattling and lightning shanks stomped down yellow from the sky and the wind huffed ’til bad instincts took charge and the cow plunged through the barbed wire, seeking a way out of the suddenly terrifying pasture but found only a way down, and the sideways tree snagged it so it had a long hurt night held aloft to hear the rocks far, far below, and know horror.
    I felt responsible for the cows.
    I turned and walked across the broad sopping pasture toward Ma’s house, tall supple grass flicking droplets to my knees. The sky had been washed baby blue and blank, and the other cows were munching away at the greenery, rubbing their