The Outlaw Album Read Online Free PDF

hides on small trees. Ma’s house is a square two-story built plain long ago and still sturdy. It’s painted an invented shade of white about halfway around the house to where the paint ran out, just past the south corner and beyond sight from the road, some certain mix of various whites you have to fetch from town. The rest of the house has been colored with the paler paints left over in the shed, so it’s one color house seen driving by, several others standing in the yard, colors that don’t rhyme in the eye, but the old wood is well coated. A ladder yet leans there, and a couple of brushes on the bottom rung have stiffened atop a paint can lid.
    She’s asleep, Ma, snoring in her room, letting the creep of cancer slip her mind a spell, and I go tiptoe through the kitchen to the gun cupboard in the hall. The rifle I want is standing in the back now, behind a cracked oil lantern and a pile of yesteryear phone books, not handy like I kept it. It’s an old bruiser, a bolt-action aught-six that has been whipped on by wintry thickets slapping and raw sporting weather since two grandpas ago, yet it still has a glow to it, a veteran allure. I trust this one most.
    The cow screams at me again with those eyes. Screams what you think it would. The sideways tree is too far down the cliff for me to clamber there, even if I was willing. In the valley and downriver a short ways there’s a twist of smoke coming from a new house I keep forgetting is there now. A strange but handsome riverside house made of fresh shining wood, with a steep roof of bluish tile, where outsiders have come to live. I stand on the cliff so a stray round won’t pop into a tile.
    This target seemed so close, so easy, so harmless, not like those when I’d been elsewhere.
    I said, “Should’ve stopped at the checkpoint, hajji.”
    The dead cow slumped more loosely over the sideways tree. The eyes finally hushed. One leg strode hard for a few seconds, trying to climb the cliff now it was shot, climb the cliff in death, then abruptly stilled.
    A man came out of the house below and stared at me, a silver-haired man in a black T-shirt, until I flapped a hand his way that meant never mind, it’s okay, and he nodded. He went about his business, stacking firewood in the yard, a dog trailing him, a cat trailing the dog, a woman standing on the porch. Together it all makes one of those pictures of perfect life that might splay across your mind when you are far off and think of home, somebody else’s home, the kind that looks like that and raises your spirits.
    In Ward 53, where they fretted about me so, they told me maybe I should paint, take up painting landscapes or portraits, something soothing, but whenever I try the picture explodes on me, the light of day shatters, the humans don’t look too human, and strange patterns span the sky. Sometimes the sky is all cherry blossoms, one big blush of pink and white, and there’s bones sticking up from the mud below, with little volunteer vines growing around them, linking them together, like the scattered bones don’t truly belong to death but might hop up reunited by vines and dance a loose clattering jig once more. Hopeful, I guess, deep down, which is why they wanted me to paint.
    I have a dozen dead items painted that way.
    I know the departed cow in the sideways tree will be next.
    Before I went into the desert I’d had a decent job at Spangler Feeds, hefting sacks, stacking salt blocks, sweeping grain dust and such, and they would’ve held it for me, but the whole feed mill burned down to a knee-high mess of ash and nails while I was away, and the Spanglers decided not to rebuild, just not worth it, so they moved to Florida instead and fish for big ones at sea a lot. They sent a postcard. Where Ma worked didn’t help with insurance, so now I watch her cows for her while I can and we’ll contribute the dough to cancer treatment.
    Ma’s a Boshell. I’m a Girard, because Ma got to feeling guilty after Dad