The Outlaw Album by Daniel Woodrell Read Free Book Online

dripping, hands turned white squeezing, and after several rows you heard some guys go empty, moan themselves into the dust, become still where they were, not about to move on. They make it ten, twenty, thirty rows, but can no longer imagine making it through all the rows. Each marker, each row, who knows what’s there, anything could be, you might soon become a chunky breeze exploded sideways or get shot through-and-through, and those possibilities nourished dread. Your own mind can gut you good so easy. With sprung nerves soldiers lay faces to the sand to avoid seeing ahead and had to be booted by sergeants.
     
    Mary wanted to be a bride again and announced she soon would be while we all splashed in the river. Joe and Nora hopped on stick legs in the shallows above the one-lane bridge, and Ma sat in a folding chair with her feet under water and a scarf over her fuzz of hair. I had my goggles to hunt treasure spilled from tourist canoes upstream and had found a wristwatch with a rotted band. Mary wore a white T-shirt over her suit and said, “It’s official, y’all—me’n Darden are gettin’ hitched.”
    I dove again. People riding inner tubes went by overhead, casting squat shadows that roamed over the bottom rocks and stretched with distance. Legs looked so white and puffed from underneath, with bubbles attaching to the flesh like blisters, and voices arrived as deep blurry barks.
    Ma said, “When does this happen?”
    “While he waits to hear about goin’ back,” Mary said. The sun was halfway west and shined at a slant that broke around her. Her face was shaded faint but the skin on her neck glowed at the sides. “I’ll get it right this time. I’ve learned some things I couldn’t’ve guessed at before.”
    Joe and Nora stood still in a trickle of river, bare feet sinking into the gravel bed, staring at me, faces empty, holding themselves in tight. Mary saw and kicked water at them so they’d know it was okay to seem happy just now. They tried.
    Mary unloaded a picnic onto a blanket in the shade, beer chilling in the river.
    Ma said to me, “You sure this is good news?” Her eyes were mournful and ringed, like those of a hunted thing that has decided to stop running. I would paint her soon. Her chest had been cut away from her first, both sides, but she fell sick in other parts, too, and the sick didn’t rest; it prowled her body, salting her with ruin you couldn’t see in her face for a good long while. Now the ruin just stares out at me, all the time, from those eyes that know about hope and that body that can’t offer any. She leaned my way and whispered, “It’s your life, son.”
    “I just don’t care to make big decisions anymore.”
    “That is one.”
    “Let’s act happy.”
    “That’s another.”
    I fell on the river and went inside. The water ran chest deep, and I spread over the rocky bottom and found a big one to cling to. There were all these tiny tatters of different debris rushing past near the bottom and the rushing was all I heard. I clung to the bottom, my feet rising behind and touching air while my hands held steady on the slickened old stone and kept me from spinning downstream. I held and held to the rock and forgot about breathing, sunk into that choice spot between breathing and not ever breathing, between raising up to walk on the bank and picnic or staying under to join that debris already lost to the rushing.
     
    Stink from the cow took over the air. The cow was screaming again, screaming stink, a brown dirge of stink like the dead scream always. Ma and me stood on the cliff with our noses pinched against the loud stink and squinted our eyes, too. Ma’s trying to act spry so she can help. She’s wearing rubber mud boots and a long dress with no waistline and no pattern in the cloth. A big yellow sun hat shades her face.
    Neither of us wants the cow kicked to the river below, to dump such ruin into the clean water, so we decide to haul it up the cliff with three