The Outlander (30 page)

Out of nowhere Ronnie said, “We got blown over.”

With that, Jim stopped moving; he seemed to sag in his ripe and
sweat-lacquered clothes. There was silence for a moment, the fire crackling in the
stove.

“Blown over?” McEchern looked from one to the other of them.
“By what?”

“Blast of air,” Jim said, his voice like that of a mourner in
a chapel, afraid the dead might hear. “Blew me halfway down
the drift, took Ronnie off his feet.” The widow and the dwarf looked at
Ronnie, took in the size of the man, and tried to imagine a wind strong enough to make
even him stagger.

“Knocked me over,” Ronnie repeated.

But now that Jim had started talking, he seemed unable to stop. “It
come up the sump hole with a bang, Mac, the most awful sound you ever heard. Suddenly
I'm on my ass, two yards away from my helmet. Shit raining down around us like
someone set a charge right over our heads. Some moron down the drift was just laughing
away. Probably the seam he'd been working on just fell out right at his feet. But
it ain't funny. There's some as don't care. Say you're a ninny
and the like. Some think they're immortal, just cause they haven't died
yet.
Well, I know when bad's coming, and it's by God coming. We
been smelling fresh water for weeks. Smelled it but never saw any. Sure enough,
yesterday here it comes, filling up the sump hole, and bringing . . .
things
with it.”

“Things,” said Ronnie stupidly.

“Like what?” said the dwarf.

Jim just shook his head in answer. “Tell you one thing, Mac. I
ain't about to leave this boy here,” he indicated Ronnie, the world's
most enormous boy, “ just on account of some jackasses think God gilded their
balls.” He didn't even apologize to the widow. “Nope, we're out
of here.” He gathered up his goods and, seizing Ronnie's sleeve, dragged him
from the tent.

The widow stood swaying, the alcohol still boiling her brain. Diabolical
it was, and, she could see now, habit-forming. She eyed what was left in the bottle that
hung in the little man's hand.

McEchern chuckled and shook his head. “Poor old Jim,” he said.
“He's always been a bit soft. Thinks witches exist. Can you believe that?
Thinks you can cure warts by burying your hair. And he scolds poor Ronnie like a wife.
Some boys are just not cut out for mining work. Myself, for example. I wonder what
‘things' he was talking about.”

“Flynn,” Mary said simply.

“Oh.” McEchern tipped his hat back with a little thumb.
“I wondered where he'd got to. Nobody tells me anything.”

The dwarf pondered her face for an unguarded moment, and she let him. It
gave her a chance to scrutinize him. Despite the disorder of his misshaped parts, the
abbreviated legs, the infantile hands, the knobbed shoulders, a strange handsomeness had
assembled in McEchern. His face was untouched by the disaster, the blue watching eyes
more human for where they were set.

“Jim might be right,” he said, “about bad coming. Maybe
if you look for something long enough, it comes to look for you. Maybe you call the joke
on yourself. I'm afraid of bears, for instance. Have nightmares about them. Go out
of my way to avoid the bastards. And you wouldn't believe how many I've run
smack into. One old boy, in the pitch black, he was right by the path, just outside
there, he woofed directly in my face. Ruffled my shirt collars he was that close. And
then he turns and runs into the trees, making the biggest racket you ever heard. I would
have pissed my pants, but I was too scared. They say you can smell 'em coming, but
I never did. I guess I only run into clean bears. Hey, you seem like a clever girl. Want
to see my new venture?”

“Whisky?” she said.

“Nope. Baths.”

He took her outside to the back of his store, where he had erected
another, smaller tent — a tall, simple rectangle in which maybe eight cots could
be arranged. It was crisp and as yet unweathered, the canvas almost white. McEchern had
strung it up tautly with guy ropes and drawn the door flaps back cutely like the
curtains in a lady's window. Inside, there was a stove for boiling water, four
deep tin baths, various small tables and benches set about so bathers could undress, and
at the foot of each bath stood a rough clothes tree so a bather could keep an eye on his
pockets. Considering the condition of the two recently departed miners, the widow saw
the point in a venture like this.

“The way I figure it,” said McEchern, “a man will pay
for a good bath if you don't charge too much. I'll keep to two days a week
so I know when to get the stove on.” The widow, towering next to him, had
contracted the hiccups. He waited patiently for her to get them under control, for it
seemed she wished to ask him something.

“How are you going to get the water from there”— she
pointed into the trees where there ran a thin mountain rill — “to
here?” She pointed into the tent. “What if you get three customers at a
time? You'll be run off your feet.”

“All right. Yes. A few kinks to work out.” The dwarf 's
face went lemony. “Now, what I'm going to do is . . . I'll, uh . .
.”

“Well, do you know how to barber?”

“What?”

“Give a man a shave, trim his moustache?”

“Can't say as I do. I trim my own. What do you think of
it?”

“It's a very fine moustache.”

“It is, isn't it?” McEchern stroked it proudly with his
child's hand. He had lost the train of the discussion, derailed perhaps by
whisky.

“Well, I only ask because . . . because I
do
know
how.”

“To what?”

“To barber! I used to do it for my father, and my . . . for another
man.”

“Did you now?” His face was suddenly serious, almost comically
so, the hand poised at dragging down the long whiskers, the brow furrowed with
thought.

“In fact,” she said, “I'm quite good at
it.”

McEchern glanced around the little marshalling area, assessing the
logistics. A bath. Then a shave. Who couldn't find a few coins for that? And the
fact that the shaving would be done by a girl — not some seasoned old dame with
her face done up like a mortuary photograph, but a pretty young girl. Her hand on your
cheek, her face bending close to yours in concentration. . . .

“You know,” the widow said finally, “men might haul
their own water to the stove if you give them a free drink.”

McEchern's mouth fell open in surprise at such a good idea. And then
he gazed at her with such depthless affection that the widow couldn't help
smiling.

A FEW DAYS LATER
, the Americans arrived. They came in
from the west, having taken the long route overland, through Indian country, the better
to avoid cities and police. They came up the footpath toward town driving four stolen
horses before them, a slow rooster tail of dust rising in their wake. There were eight
men, all brothers from a family of horse
thieves, sun-blistered,
nearly asleep in their saddles, their hats hard with age. They looked like they were
fashioned out of mud, all eight washed to the same matte shade of nothing, the same
colour as the ground they passed over. Even their eyes seemed to have faded away. The
saddle horses on which they sat were slat-ribbed and surly, their rumps badly wasted,
nervous as cats among the tents and buildings. They crowded together as they walked,
clannish, and the men who rode them seemed to draw up too, to hide within their coats.
In stark contrast were the four quarter horses that preceded them, captives run
together, tied halter to tail, led by one man who rode in front. These animals were
robust: sleek despite the dust, and they stepped high.

The widow saw them coming, and she ran back into the house calling,
“Bonny!” He hurried out the door, still chewing his supper, wiping his hands
on his pants, and showering them with greetings.

The oldest brother came closer and calmed his uneasy horse. Late summer
butterflies about his hat. He opened his mouth to speak and nothing came out. He cleared
his throat.

“Bonny,” he croaked to the Reverend. “Been a
while.”

“It's been a year, Gerry. How are you?”

The man was swallowing hard now.

“Gerry? Are you not well?”

“Just been a while . . . since I talked to anyone.”

The Reverend glanced at the seven brothers behind the man, seven mud men
on mud horses. “You talk to them, don't you?”

“Not much point.” Gerry grinned. He noticed the widow where
she hid in the doorway, and his eyes grew wide. “Pardon me, ma'am,” he
said and removed his hat. Under it
seemed to be another hat, this
one white. And then all the brothers did the same, seven hats coming off to show various
white brows on which sat bouquets of stiff and matted hair. A murmuring of
ma'ams.

Mary delighted at the preposterous sight of them — like creatures
risen from the grave, doffing their rotten hats. Gerry turned and pointed at the four
quarter horses, now nipping at one another like colts. “We got these for you to
look at. A kind of sample, I guess. They're no better or worse than the others. We
got twenty-three more penned up out of town a ways. We'll need some feed soon, and
salt. We've run out of salt.”

“Are you serious?”

“What?”

“You drove twenty-seven horses?”

“We had over thirty. Lost a few on the way. A couple got away, and
we just couldn't run 'em down. One got taken off in a river, thanks to
Jamie.” A boy in the back glowered and set his jaw. Clearly he did not agree it
had been his fault.

“Excellent!” said the Reverend, beaming. “You boys
really did it this time. Now, can we offer you anything to drink? Mrs. Boulton, do we
have food?”

“Well,” Mary thought for a moment. “I made bread. We
have plenty of coffee. And I have all that stew . . .” She smiled politely and
pointedly at the Reverend. His face fell, for she referred to porcupine stew — not
the first batch but, incredibly, the second. The widow, it seemed, was totally incapable
of snaring a rabbit, or killing a bird, or shooting a deer, but had easily bagged her
second porcupine. A large mass of pungent stew sat congealing in a pot on the cold
stove. Neither of them had had the courage to eat it yet. The two hosts
assessed the bedraggled men before them, the hollow cheeks, the stave-chested
horses they sat on. These men would eat grass if they had to.

“Heat it up,” the Reverend said, forcing a grin. “Nice
and hot.”

THE NEXT MORNING
, the widow was outside McEchern's
store, bent over one of the American boys, carefully shaving the difficult terrain of
his Adam's apple. He was nervous and kept swallowing, so the object would leap and
sink without warning. She halted and huffed with annoyance. Of all the parts of a
man's body, the widow found this the most bizarre, the most unnecessary. The tiny
knob in its centre, with a hollow divot just above. Impossible to shave! She seized the
boy's jaw and pressed his head against her shoulder, which caused him to freeze in
terrified pleasure. She looked like she was about to slit his throat. On the other hand,
he was reclining on her breast. He didn't know whether to fight or faint.

McEchern strutted in and out of the bathing tent, where several other
brothers lounged in tin bathtubs with their heads laid back against the sides. They all
had bleeding knuckles and some were smoking cigars. Most of them were still drunk. A
light rain fell, cold as snow.

The widow called for McEchern, and the dwarf hurried out and handed her a
lavishly steaming rag that had been sitting in water on the stove. This she wrapped
quickly about her customer's face. A muffled cry came from under the rag and the
boy's arms and legs flailed. Then he sat still, clutching the chair seat, mouth in
a pained O, a diaphragm of cloth blowing in and out with his breath.

“There you go, Jamie,” the widow said. “You just sit
there for a minute. That is your name, isn't it?” The boy moaned something
and jawed his cloth like a puppet. It was not a bad haircut, now that she looked at it.
The boy had wanted his sideburns cut like mutton chops, an outrageous fashion seen
mostly on the covers of lurid books, and he preferred his hair to touch his collar. She
ran a hand over the crown and pulled down on the nape hairs to check they were all the
same length, and slowly the boy went all woozy and relaxed, and his legs went wide.
McEchern stood watching her, a sly smile on his face. His pockets newly full of coins.
Her apron jingling too.

The brothers' name was Cregan and they all hailed from Bozeman,
Montana, though they hadn't returned to that town in so long a time the youngest
ones couldn't claim to remember it at all. They came from a family of fifteen
boys, an incredible assault on the laws of probability. The mother dead of exhaustion
when the youngest was two — lucky for her, the family wisdom went, otherwise she
would have just gone on having boys. How many could she bear? As with any family of more
than four children, the older ones looked after the younger ones. Most of the boys knew
how to sew and change a diaper, and they all knew how to cook, though badly.

A few of the fifteen had made the mistake of staying in Bozeman and
becoming respectable. They'd fought their way into law schools or opened
legitimate businesses. But their name, at least in Bozeman, was forever in shadow thanks
to the remaining eight. The Cregans were invoked wherever the discussion turned to the
puzzling nature of the criminal mind, or the eternal ineptitude of the law. And the
Cregans were indeed felons, cattle rustlers, horse thieves,
arsonists, though they had never been caught at, let alone convicted of, anything
halfway serious. Just drunkenness and brawling, which they seemed to enjoy the way some
men enjoy sports. They came into any room as a group and went out the same way, often
backward, holding broken chair legs aloft. In jail, having been nicked for one or
another minor infraction requiring a short stay, they ate together, were bunked in
groups to keep fights down, mumbled to one another in a queer familial shorthand, and
acknowledged no one else. The oldest walked like a general with his own private army.
When they were released, now properly fed and rested — refreshed, even —
they went straight back to work. They, too, considered themselves businessmen, purveyors
of a valuable product at a reasonable price — it was just that, most often, the
product belonged legally to someone else.