Free The Outlaw Album by Daniel Woodrell

guilty but I am leery of him. You listen to this lady. This porch right here. I was standing on this porch right here when it was less sunk and Cecil was out there in the street with a mess of boys. They were little but practicing to be dangerous someday. One of them picks up a stone and tosses it at the high-up streetlight there. He misses it by a house or two. He ain’t close. I stood there on the porch out of curiosity and watched. They all flung stones at the light but none was close to shattering it. Then Cecil pick up a slice of brick and hardly aims but he smash that light to bits. As soon as it left his hand I seen that his aim for being bad was awful accurate.
    Well she says. He seems sensitive to her.
    Oh he can do that lady. He could do that years ago.
    You are a hard nut she tells me. He is lost without you. His parole could be denied.
    Tell me why do you care? I ask her this but my suspicion is she would like to give Cecil lessons in gaiety.
    Because I admire his talent Mister McCoy. Cecil is a poet who is pissed off at the big things in this world and that give him a heat that happy poets got to stand back from.
    You want us to take him home because he pissed off? That ain’t no change.
    Artistically she say wheezing that put-down breath again.
    Lady that ain’t enough I tell her. Let me show you the door.
    When we are on the porch she wants to shake hands again but I don’t chew my cabbage twice. I have been there so I lead her across the yard. Her cheeks get red. I look up and down the neighborhood and all the homes are like mine and Wilma’s. The kind that if they were people they would cough a lot and spit up tangled stuff. Spit shit into the sink.
    At her car she hands me the booklet. It is yours she says. Cecil insisted.
    I take it in my hands. I say thank you.
    She slips into the rattly old thing and starts the motor. A puff of oil smoke come out the back and there is a knocking sound.
    I lean down to her window.
    Look lady I say. Wish Cecil well but it is like this. He ain’t getting no more poems off of us.
    Her head nods and she flips her hand at me. The monster band-aid on the hood has caught my eye again. What kind of craziness is that about I wonder. I want to ask her but she shifts the car and pulls away. So I am left standing there alone to guess just what it is she believe that band-aid fix.

The Horse in Our History
     
    T he body fell within a shout of a house that still stands. A house shown up rudely in morning brightness, a dull small box gone shabby along the roof edge, with tar shingles hanging frayed over a gutter that has parted from the eaves and rolled under like a slackened lip. The yard between the house and the railroad tracks has become an undistinguished green, the old oaks have grown fatter with the decades, and new neighbors have built closer. At the bottom of the yard near the tracks there are burnished little stumps where elms that likely witnessed everything had been culled in the 1960s, probably, after the Dutch blight moved into our town and caught them all.
    The body fell within a shout, and surely those in the house must have heard something. Shouts, pleas, cries, or brute laughter carrying loudly on that summer night before the war, here in the town this was then, of lulled hearts and wincing spirits, a democratic mess of abashed citizenry hard to rouse toward anything but winked eyes and tut-tuts on “negro matters.” A Saturday in summer, the town square bunched with folks in for trading from the hills and hollers, hauling okra, tomatoes, chickens, goats, and alfalfa honey. Saturday crowds closed the streets around the square to traffic, and it became a huge veranda of massed amblers. Long hellos and nodded good-byes. Farmers in bib overalls with dirty seats, sporting dusted and crestfallen hats, raising pocket hankies already made stiff and angular with salt dried from sweat wiped during the hot wagon ride to town. In the shops and shade there were others,