Outlawed(19)

For the next week, Texas took me on a trail ride every morning, and Amity drew a map of the valley in my mind. At the northern end, where the valley floor sloped up to meet the pass, were the horse pastures and the bunkhouse and the other buildings where the gang kept their gear. Two creeks flowed through the valley, one along its western edge and the other to the east, bending at the valley’s halfway point and running westward about a mile before ending in a heart-shaped pond. Near the bend was a small cabin where Texas kept some shoeing equipment and an extra bridle and saddle; she called it the cowboy shack. Beyond the shack was a small rise overlooking a wide salt flat where we sometimes spotted a badger or coyote, and once, a family of grouse, moving fussily with their heads held high like fancy, overdressed ladies. And always, rising above it all, was something that still shows up in my dreams: a wall of bright red rock many stories high, stretching from one edge of the valley to the other.

The wall kept its own time, its own matins, lauds, and vespers. The rock rose in jagged layers, each casting shade across the one below, so that even when the valley floor was bright with morning, the wall was striped and splotched with shadow. The shadows stretched and slid as the day wore on; with each quarter hour a new section of rock blazed flame red, and another plunged into ochre darkness. In the evening, the setting sun made the stone glow a living pink as though blood coursed through it, even as the warmth and light drained away from the valley floor.

I had been studying the wall and its transformations for a few days when I asked Texas, “Where’s the hole?”

Texas looked at me like the question surprised her. Then she pointed.

“See that notch?” she asked.

Wind and water had carved chutes and furrows down the height of the wall, and I could see five or ten things that might qualify as a notch.

“No,” I said.

“Yes you do,” said Texas. “About three o’clock, the place where the shadow is.”

We were watering the horses at the bend in the creek. To the southwest, I thought I could make out a spot where two rock faces, bending backward, met each other in darkness.

“It doesn’t look like much,” I said. “Not to name a gang after.”

Texas shook her head.

“Cassie and the Kid didn’t pick this place for looks,” she said. “You climb up to that notch, you can see everything and everyone for ten miles in any direction. It’s the best place in all of Powder River country to defend against an attack.”

“Why did they come here?” I asked.

Texas looked annoyed.

“I just told you,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I mean why did they start the gang? Why did they become outlaws?”

Texas took a breath.

“I don’t know the whole story,” she said. “What I do know is they traveled for a while as husband and wife. Then something happened, and they decided they needed somewhere safe, far away from any towns or people. So they came here. They hunted and fished for a while, but the Kid always had big plans. And big plans mean money. So they started stealing from people, and people turned into stagecoaches, and stagecoaches turned into banks. Now we spend every spring and summer robbing up and down the Powder, and then we come back here and hope nobody follows us.”

The wind was picking up. I could see the shadows of clouds racing across the valley floor.

“Have you ever been attacked?” I asked.

“Not yet,” said Texas.

She looked up at the sky.

“We should get going,” she said. “It’s going to storm.”

Once I had become a passable rider, it was time for me to learn to shoot. Elzy, whose tall form I remembered embracing Cassie against the tree the night I arrived, was the gang’s best sharpshooter, so the Kid assigned her to be my teacher. At first she was kind, if unconventional.

“Look, this is easy,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

We practiced in the tiny orchard behind the bunkhouse, planted by some optimistic farmer in the days before the Flu. On a stump in the middle of the orchard she placed two rock-hard pears from a tree nearby. She stepped back about thirty paces, then lifted her revolver—so sleek and handsome compared to Mama’s old shotgun—cocked it, and fired. The pear on the left exploded. It did look easy. It looked so easy anyone could do it.

Elzy showed me how to cock the gun. She showed me how to hold it and how to use the sights.

“Whenever you’re ready, just pull the trigger,” she said.

I had never longed to hold a revolver, never argued about Colts and Eagletons like the boys in school, or made my fingers into a gun to shoot noises at my friends. But now, the gun smooth and heavy in my grip, I felt like Justice herself, the blindfolded woman who stood cast in bronze outside the courthouse in Fairchild. I would not sentence barren women to die like Judge Hammond, whose mind was addled by drink and age and who did whatever the mayor and the sheriff told him to do. My gun would protect the innocent. I would be dangerous only to the wicked.

At first I thought I might have fired from an empty chamber. I pressed the trigger and a sound came out and then nothing, the pear and the stump unscathed, a few birds complaining in the summer air.

“Okay,” Elzy said, “let’s try a little closer.”

I couldn’t hit the pear at twenty paces, or at fifteen, and at ten Elzy began rolling her eyes and looking up at the bright blue sky like she was praying to baby Jesus to make me less useless. When I finally hit it—the bullet blowing the stem and neck off the pear, leaving an apple shape behind—I turned grinning to Elzy to receive her approval.