Outlawed(64)

The Kid’s face was indignant and defensive, but also weary and anxious. I could tell we were both worried about what I would say next.

“Do you remember what you told me before I left?” I asked. “About your father?”

The Kid stood up.

“Don’t patronize me. Of course I remember. But you don’t have to worry about that anymore. I thought I might be going that way, but it turns out I’m not. I’ll be all right in the morning.”

“Kid,” I said slowly, “you said that if you began to speak as though you were not a mortal human, and no man or beast could harm you, I should take you to the cowboy shack and let you stay out there until you recovered your senses.”

“How dare you?” The Kid’s voice was a hiss. “You owe me everything. You’d be dangling from a gallows right now if not for me. And you presume to question my sanity?”

“I’m not questioning—”

The Kid drew a gun. It gleamed in the moonlight with an oily sheen like snakeskin.

“Get away from me,” the Kid said.

I held up my hands and began backing away.

“I’m just saying you need some rest.” I tried again.

The Kid fired the gun into the air. Night creatures fluttered and scurried away from the blast.

“Go!” the Kid shouted.

As best as I could on my injured leg, I ran.

Agnes Rose was sitting on the bunkhouse steps when I got back.

“Thank baby Jesus,” she said when she saw me. “I thought I heard a shot.”

“You did,” I said. “It’s all right. Well, it’s not. The Kid is sick.”

“Can you cure it?”

“It’s not like that,” I said. “We made a plan before I left. If this happened, the Kid wanted to go to the cowboy shack to recuperate in private. But now the Kid won’t listen to me.”

In the direction of the orchard I could still hear birds chattering and settling—the guttural complaints of ravens, the low ghost-call of an owl.

“Well, there’s only one thing to do,” she said. “We wait until the Kid finally sleeps, and we take the gun. Then we take the Kid out to the cowboy shack—by force if we have to—and we trade off standing guard until it passes.”

I imagined it—holding the Kid at gunpoint, tying the Kid’s wrists, hoisting the Kid up onto a horse. I knew we could do it. But every time I thought of binding the Kid’s arms behind the Kid’s back, I remembered the way the sheriff and his deputy had looked at me on the road out of Casper, like I was less than human, like I was rotten food. I would not treat the Kid the way they had treated me.

“No,” I said. “It should be the Kid’s choice.”

Agnes Rose sighed. “All right,” she said, “but how do we convince the Kid to choose wisely?”

“Who does the Kid listen to?” I asked.

“Before tonight,” Agnes Rose said, “I would’ve said the Kid listens to you.”

“Obviously not,” I said. “Who else?”

Agnes Rose thought for a moment. The stars were going out, the sky over the mountains very slightly bluing.

“The Kid trusts Cassie,” she said.

“But they’re always fighting,” I said.

“They don’t agree on much,” she said. “But Cassie’s known the Kid longer than anyone. Maybe she’ll know what to say.”

I stood still for a long time in the dark next to Cassie’s cot in the great room. I remembered the Kid’s insinuation that something terrible would happen if Cassie and the others found out. It struck me that the Kid had not given Cassie enough credit. She must have known something was not right with the Kid; she had known the Kid too long and too well to miss it. I did not know why she had not confronted the Kid in front of the others, why she had not refused, flat-out, to continue with the Kid’s plan. Probably if we successfully got the Kid to the cowboy shack, Cassie would scuttle it once and for all. Surely the Kid would never forgive me for that. And yet I could not think of another way.

Cassie woke with a jerk and a look of fear in her eyes so abject and primal that I, too, felt afraid. Quickly, though, it was replaced with annoyance.

“What time is it?” she demanded.

“It’s the Kid,” I said. “The Kid needs help.”

It could not have been more than an hour that we waited outside the bunkhouse while Cassie went up to the orchard after the Kid. In that time the sky went from blue-black to royal blue to aquamarine and then, in the sudden manner of the mountain regions, bright with streaks of gold and pink like the tails of gleaming horses. The meadowlarks awoke, with songs that, on another day, would have made me smile. Coyotes chuckled in the predawn and then went silent, shamed out of their scavenging by the light of day.

Agnes Rose and I sat on the steps, or she sat on the steps and I paced, or she paced and I sat on the steps, or both of us paced in circles that grew in size until they intersected only every few minutes, the two of us nodding at each other, making faces of mingled encouragement and worry. We didn’t speak. I didn’t know what Agnes Rose was hoping for as the morning waxed and warmed around us, as we drew closer to the inevitable time when the rest of the gang would wake and find the Kid gone.

I knew only what I was selfishly afraid of: that Cassie would fail, the gang would split, and the Fiddleback plan would wither and die; or that Cassie would succeed, she would take charge, and the Fiddleback plan would wither and die. Either way I would lose my chance to go to Pagosa Springs. Hole in the Wall might feel like home to me now, but I did not belong at home yet. I had work to do, and as I saw the possibility of doing it recede into the brightening distance, I grew ever more afraid that I would lose myself—not in the way the Kid had, but slowly, every day blanking out a piece of my heart and mind, until I faced some sheriff’s gun or executioner’s gallows with no fear or sorrow, because that which was worth protecting had already ebbed away.