The Outlander (13 page)

He pressed himself, hard now, against the give of her thigh, shifted, then
pressed again. The widow's blood racketed in her ears. She closed her eyes and
held her breath. He lay her on her back and his knee crept between hers. She was a tiny
floating thing, coming to the cataract's edge, gentle before the thundering
drop.

“No!” she said suddenly, and struggled to get up.

Thinking he had been rebuffed, the Ridgerunner slid quickly away. She rose
violently from the blankets and began pawing at her skirts, only to remember that she
had sewn them into pants. She began unbuttoning her bodice. Finally, he understood and
began to help with trembling fingers, the two of them in a war with the multitude of
tiny buttons. She pulled the clothing down, standing bent in the cramped enclosure, and
wriggled from the legs of it, then fell on him with kisses, only to discover he was now
pantless too.

The widow's head was swimming. How long had it taken them to get to
this? Had she wanted this at the beginning? She didn't care, never would care, and
so she touched him, his hardness leaping in answer, and began angling herself down onto
him.

“Wait,” he whispered and removed her hands from him.
“This way. If it doesn't go in, you can't get knocked up.” He
did not enter her, but positioned her over him and pressed her down in her own wetness,
slid her slowly back and forth,
back and forth, along the length of
him, his hands on her hips, guiding. She acquiesced, watching his eyes watching her. The
flap of the tent's canvas, the strange kissing sound between them. And something
in his face, some beautiful fury transpiring there. Her husband had never looked at her,
never opened his eyes, but had buried his face in her hair and, to her view, he became
only an advancing and retreating shoulder. Now, she could see this man's face, his
pupils huge in the dark, see his joy, and it was contagious. All at once, she felt
something.

“Slower,” he whispered, but she would not slow. She moved back
and forth, braced above him, amazed by the tug of pleasure.

“Wait,” he said, “wait!” Still she rocked faster,
pursuing a filament of something new, a voice on the wind, following as one does in a
dream, hunting blindly, knowing somehow which way to turn, chasing a firefly into the
dark.

He groaned and seized her knees as he jetted over his own belly, jetted
and subsided. He subsided and lay still — but she was still floating helpless,
disastrously unfinished. She rocked again, insistent, like a thwarted child, but it was
gone. Silence hung in the tent's dim little universe. The warm liquid between them
grew cool. She felt goosebumps spread along his thighs. Crouched darkly over him, steam
rising from her shoulders, her hair hung over her breasts, the widow glowered down at
William Moreland.

“Mary,” he pleaded to her ghostly silhouette. “Now, Mary
. . . I did ask you to slow down.”

ALL THAT EARLY
morning they wrangled among the blankets,
the widow kissing his face, and when the light came, they
emerged
sleepless and famished. They washed, and she set to cooking while he shaved. It was
silent in the little camp, and the widow wore an easy smile on her face. She stole a
look at him, watching his beautiful hands move, her metal spoon hanging above the pot,
forgotten.

Later, in the manner of old duffers sitting before a fire, the two hermits
fell to comparing storms they had seen. The Ridgerunner's stories were the more
epic for his having been roofless during them. He remembered a blowy, restless summer
evening when lightning had struck unexpectedly from a variegated sky, and there had been
a single titanic roar, deafeningly close, that left him jabbering in surprise. Minutes
later, he'd spotted a flickering glow in the trees to the north of his camp where
a stricken tree, then several trees, had ignited. This clever escape artist had been at
pains to decamp fast enough to outrun the advancing flames, scrambling to pack his bags
with the glow behind him, then running like a mad Berber with chattels rattling on his
back. There were nights when the aurora borealis seemed to seek him out, linger over him
like a lover, a moaning rumble along its shores. He told her about deep summer on Idaho
lakes when there came clouds of silverfish, mosquitoes, plagues of blackflies, waves of
them, humming the air like eruptions from some infernal fissure. For him, the seasons
passed like people on a road, each with its own character, its own thoughts and
messages. There was the cold spell, he estimated it to be around Christmas, when wearing
every stitch of his clothing was not enough, and so he carried his canvas tent round his
shoulders and over his head like a massive monk's cloak. He had drifted south, but
the cold weather followed him. Any animals he could shoot had
to be
skinned and cleaned where they fell or their bodies froze hard as hammers by the time he
got back to camp. A snared rabbit, utterly stiff. The Ridgerunner dancing to stay warm,
knocking the dull head against his knee, parrying the thrusts of an imagined fencing
partner, the dead rabbit as his foil. He dreamed of killing something big so he could
cut it open and put his numb hands inside and warm them, just once, but the deer and elk
had drifted south off the mountain ranges. Finally, the cold abated and snow fell
softly, day and night, snow to his chest, twenty feet deep in the draws and gullies,
windblown drifts that stood higher than his head and that he scaled in his snowshoes
like an ant struggling up the toe of a boot. Snow in his lungs, on his blue lips, driven
on furious night winds through the very fabric of his tent, and in the morning, crystals
carried sparkling on the air. In this extreme cold he saw peril and beauty in measured
balance, like a promise to him alone, silent confirmation of the divine.

The widow sat riveted as he talked. His tales were honed by the
storyteller's art, and selective, but this girl was the perfect audience and her
eyes shone darkly in the firelight. She wore an aspect of devotion.

“I think you're brave,” she told him solemnly. “I
wish I was like you.”

“Oh hell,” he said, delighted, “brave's got
nothing to do with it.”

In her turn, she told him a tale of green hailstones as big as a
man's fist tearing through the trees and drumming on the cabin's roof. In a
hissing melt they came down the chimney and expired in the fire, dousing it, so a river
of sooty water ran the length of the building and the widow was frantic to
sop it up. With a dirt floor, and nothing but an old wagon cover
spread across the bedroom floor, she lived in fear of mud. Finally she and John had laid
a bucket in the hearth and sat watching as it rang out, spittoon-like in the night.
After the storm came an unearthly quiet, the yard littered with glistening debris, while
far away, injured cattle bellowed. The cabin's only window had been staved in that
night and had never been repaired. John had simply blacked it out with hand-hewn boards
hammered into place, and with that, all light, but for what peeped in through the front
door, was excluded from the cabin's damp interior. Eventually John admitted he
lacked the money to buy more glass. She gave him back her engagement ring so he could
sell it, but no window came; the ring simply dropped into the well of his debts. She
wondered whether she should ask for help from his brothers, Jude and Julian, for they
owned the next parcel of land, but she saw them so rarely, and they had never been warm
or helpful . . . Here the widow's tale ceased and she fell into tense silence.

“One thing about living up here,” murmured the Ridgerunner,
“there's no goddamn debt.” The widow snorted, then sighed.

IT WAS A MYSTERY
to her why he should need time between
bouts of sex, for she needed no such interval. He could not make the coffee in the
morning for her kissing him, and she would not let him leave the camp to check his
snares but dragged him back to the tent. She fretted over his ratty socks, and told him
she would sew him some new clothes, perhaps a coat made of hide. She asked him where
they
would go next, what kinds of places they would see, as if they
were a genteel couple on holiday, they didn't mind where they went, and they would
never part. The shadow of something fretful passed over his face and then was gone.

One warm afternoon they lay together, almost sleeping, arms and legs
entwined, her thighs slaked with his semen, while the shadows of leaves trembled on the
tent's screen. Outside, the shaving mirror rocked where it hung, victim to a
gentle wind, and cast an oval of light swaying idly about the camp. A bright spot
leaping, and a band of brightness within which motes and insects danced. His breath in
her hair, his pulse visible along the inside of his elbows. She rolled and pushed him on
his back and placed her head against his chest, so she could hear the thundering source.
Untold months of sleeplessness evaporated in a sigh, a slack mouth, and this
heartbeat.

Later, he sat naked at the foot of the tent and held her feet in his lap.
He stroked the hair on her leg, running his palm along the nap. He cupped her calf in
his hand, weighing the muscle against his palm.

“You could eat this,” he said.

She poked his belly with her foot. “Have you done this
before?” she asked.

“Do what?” he said. “Threaten to eat a girl?”

Her eyes were unreadable. “Who was she?” she said.

“Well, now, she had big, beautiful brown eyes and long lashes. And
she was taller than me.” His face had taken on a sly cast, so she knew he was not
serious. “Not a big talker, of course. But a good listener.”

“All right, who was she?”

“My old Jersey cow,” he grinned.

She did not laugh at his joke but dismissed it with a sigh and sat up
suddenly, her hands behind her, bracing. Her face was gloomy and she regarded him
intently. His smile faded as her eyes bored into him, depthless and strange.

“John had others,” she said. “Two that I know of. And I
was his wife. It doesn't seem likely I'd know everything, does
it?”

“John,” he said, weighing the name.

“He could have had many of them. I'd never know.”

“Some men do.”

“Why? Why do they need to?”

“What do you mean,
why
?”

“I never denied him anything,” her voice was harsh, for the
giving had been at some cost and was regretted. “I worked hard for him. But
nothing I did was right. Everything I put my hand to displeased him. Sometimes, I would
imagine I was one of those girls. In my imagination they looked nothing like me, and I
gave them names. I wondered whether he was different with them than he was with
me.”

“Men do it,” he said thoughtfully, “because women let
them.”

“Maybe.”

“Would he be angry about us?” he asked.

“No. Because he's dead.”

The Ridgerunner's face registered surprise, but not at the news
— she knew it was her flat tone that took him aback, the want of regret. They sat
in silence, a strange unspoken conversation between them. His face questioning, and hers
slowly answering. And then, in tiny increments, they both began to grin again. A
dappling of light across the widow's gloom.

“All those women,” she sighed, lying back down, “it
never did him any good. He didn't have the slightest idea what to do.”

THE WIDOW WOKE
at dawn. She stretched and yawned and
pulled her hair from her face. Above her was the soft canvas of the tent, through which
a golden light flooded. The shapes of trees waving in streaks of sunlight . . . she
smelled pipe tobacco. At this, she bolted upright, scrambled from the tent naked, and
went striding across the clearing to where the Ridgerunner sat on a stump smoking her
pipe. She swiped it from his mouth.

“
Bloody
. . .” she muttered, rubbing spit from the
stem, “bloody
man
!”

“Now,” he wheedled, “I thought we discussed this issue
of ownership and the tyranny of . . .”

“No.”

“Darling . . .”

“I said no, I meant no.” She poked solicitously at the bowl,
checking the way he'd packed it, then bit down on the stem, saying through gritted
teeth, “This pipe is mine.” She turned and paced back to the tent, her ass
pink with cold, her feet storming the frosted mud.

“You know,” he said, “if I was ever to disappear,
I'd be sure to take that pipe with me.” She stopped and turned around, a
stricken look on her face.

“Would you ever leave?” she asked.

“Never,” he said.

Two days later, the Ridgerunner was gone.

THEY CAME DIAGONALLY
across the dusty street, shoulder
by shoulder, and stepped up onto the boardwalk, their long legs swinging. A second
later, the brothers entered the telegraph office. One or two of the girls gaped at them
while the others tapped. The elderly manager got up laboriously from his seat, shaky,
his eyes shifty, as if these customers were about to rob the place.

“Order forms are over there, gentlemen.”

The brothers turned to the counter against the wall.

Gradually the office fell silent, the remaining telegraphists pausing over
their keys, while a soft electric hum came from the generator in the middle of the room.
A muted pattern of motion echoed between the men. One head inclined, the other followed.
Making out the transfer form, turning in unison, approaching the front desk. The manager
smiled dryly, presenting a false, mercantile goodwill. The brothers ignored him and
assessed the price list.

Finally, one of them put down a large finger on the price list.
“This one,” he said, and his brother lay a single coin on the counter with a
snap.