Read Online The Outlaw Album by Daniel Woodrell - Free Book Online

“Shit.” Pelham fetched a bucket of water and cleaning rags, the stiff brush that worked best, and they cleared the books from the shelf, stacked them on the floor. They scrubbed and scrubbed until the paint flaked and that streaking of blood was gone from sight. Pelham dropped the brush into the bucket and said, “I’ll be going to the river with his dad.”
    They stood on big gray rocks and cast into the current. Shallows began just below the men, and the river murmured passing over the small stones and limestone gravel. Shadows covered the riverbed and halfway up the slope beyond. The current tugged the fishing line like there was a bite and made the rods bend, but the only things on the line were the river and the bait. Randall spoke with his back to Pelham. “What’d Randy say to you?”
    “Not a word. He never spoke.”
    “How is it you had a knife ready when he showed?”
    “He only growled.”
    “I can’t feature that part. I don’t get that. I guess I just don’t know what kind of shit really goes on over there.”
    “It’s the same shit as always, Randall.”
    Pelham broke from the stream and stepped to the riverbank. He reached into his knapsack and retrieved a bottle of bourbon, then hopped back onto the gray rocks. He held the bottle toward Randall. “You ever start drinkin’ whiskey?”
    “Only had to start once.”
    They sat on the rocks, listening to the river, drinking bourbon from the bottle, letting trout swim past. They sat in silence for ten minutes, twenty, slowly sharing the whiskey. Two kids in yellow kayaks whipped down the channel, racing each other and laughing, easily skirting boulders and skimming the shallows. Their young laughter could yet be heard when they’d floated from sight, far downriver.
    “He got different. He was always kind of lonely, you know, not so sure how he stood in the world, always lookin’ for somehow to measure himself, prove somethin’, figure what size of man he was. Could be he found out and it broke him.”
    “Randall—why me?”
    “You know, he was plenty spooky sometimes—that stare, the hours’n hours when he wouldn’t talk. I could see he was hurtin’ in some way I never had to know, and he drank vodka in bed of a mornin’ with his boots on and took other stuff, too, right there in the house. So, anyhow, one time I went in there while he stared at the ceiling with his boots on the sheets, and asked him, ‘Son, you want to talk about it?’ And he looks at me like he ain’t certain sure we’ve met before, but he says, ‘Will do, bro. Here’s all your main answers: Yes. I lost count. Like tossin’ a bucket of chili into a fan. Pick up all you can, shovel the rest.’”
    “There it is.” That very phrase took Pelham back to a time of rain. He screwed the cap onto the bottle and stood. He stretched his legs and turned upstream. He didn’t want to tremble facing Randall. He jumped from the rocks and crouched at the water’s edge, dunked his head and the cold sluiced through him and soaked his neck, drained down his spine. “Whiskey came a little early for me today.”
    “Me, too.”
    “Let’s go.”
    That night Pelham taped his own boot camp photo onto the refrigerator, side by side with Junior’s. Jill looked into the teenage face of her husband and asked, “Is that even you? You looked like that?”
    His head was shaved, skin lightly reddened, hat set too squarely, a slight bruise puffed beneath his left eye, expression flat and unblinking.
    “For a while, there, I looked exactly that way.”
    “Huh. I thought everybody was against Vietnam back then. That’s all you ever hear about, anyhow. ‘Hell no, we won’t go,’ that sort of stuff.”
    “That wasn’t our neighborhood.”
    He studied the two faces and drank a beer, then another. Jill was mostly at the counter, chopping chicken parts to marinate for guests coming by tomorrow. Citrus and garlic smells were strong. He could see something happening to both faces,