the outlaw

“If I’d known she could be so antagonistic, I would have kicked her down the stairs,” slurred the outlaw to the man at his left. He spoke in a tone which was apparently his version of a whisper, although the throaty, bellowing tenor made his boast audible to everyone at the table, and perhaps the rest of the old tavern. And that was clearly his intention.

The outlaw, they all knew, had escaped weeks earlier from jail in Wiki-up, the small dust blown town to the immediate South. They knew this because it’s the first thing he told them when he sat down. They had clearly been uneasy about a stranger, with an ominous presence such as his, standing a short distance away, watching them moving their chips and calling bets. So, apparently it was his idea of breaking the thickening ice telling them what he should have done to his ex-wife when she told him she didn't like his line of work. 

Now he sat, leaning forward on the front two legs of his chair with his thick barrel of a chest crouched over the edge of table, partly to conceal his cards, and partly, it seemed, to appear an aggressive card player another player might expect to play fast and loose and somewhat recklessly. The outlaw was drunk  and amicable toward the man at his left, but the way the corners of his mouths drew up into a mean smile when he was called and raised, along with the momentarily fixed gaze of those yellow eyes and pupils so black you forget their substance, no one at the table doubted he would kick a woman down a set of stairs. Even his own mother, to whom, as it happened, he had done much worse.

-bryce