The Man and The Outlaw

Chapter One

Birds whistled in the trees around them as the early morning breeze cooled the air, sliding over the surface of the pond and creating thousands of ripples. Something moved in the water to their right, a small splash cutting the relative stillness, and Clara's fingers moved faster to tie on her plastic fishing lure.
"Told you to rig up last night," a teasing voice said in her ear.
Her father, Rick Thompson, was already casting towards the disturbance, flicking his wrist with each turn of the reel handle, twitching the retrieval of his own lure to entice whatever fish lurked in the area. As Clara watched, his line grew suddenly taut, and he jerked the tip of his rod swiftly and sharply to set the hook. A largemouth jumped at the end of his line and flipped tail over head in the air as her father reeled it in, playing it every so often and expertly leading it towards the bank where he stood. He bent and pulled it from the water as Clara hastily made her first cast of the day.
The fish was big-bellied and dark green, its oversized mouth gaping and flinching as her father gripped its bottom lip between his thumb and curled index finger to pry the hook out of it. He held it up to her, his bearded face splitting in a wide, devilish grin.
"One to nothing," he announced playfully.
Clara jerked her ballcap down more securely on her head and made another wild cast, rolling her eyes at her dad as she did so, but feeling the desperate desire to tie up the competition rising steadily in her belly as she worked the reel in her hand.
"We're just getting started old man," she replied with a determined grin of her own.
They were both of a competitive disposition, never to do anything that had no promise of winning and losing. Every activity they did together was filled with smarmy trash talk and good-natured jabs and completed with a gloating ceremony of the day's champion over the day's fool. Though times did arise when one wore the loss more heavily on their shoulders than usual (the obvious result of well fought competition), most of their battles ended in smiles and laughter, a day never wasted between the two of them.
"Name calling so early, Clara-belle," he said, flipping the fish back into the water and wiping his hand on the leg of his jeans, "you must be nervous."
"You wish," Clara laughed as she felt a bite on her own line and knew the day's competition would be a fierce one.

It was past midday by the time they began to pack up their rods and tackle gear. The temperature had jumped, and the bite had disappeared. The score had ended in a tie, six to six, but Clara's last catch had been a monster and she argued her case vigorously that biggest fish should qualify as the tiebreaker.
"Those weren't the rules we set out with," her father reminded her stubbornly. "Most fish wins, wasn't it?"
Clara groaned loudly and threw her tackle bag roughly over her shoulder.
"We can't end in a tie! That's like kissing your sister!" she exclaimed.
"You don't have a sister," he pointed out to her with a chuckle.
Clara wrinkled her nose. "Well, if I did, I wouldn't want to kiss her."
They picked up their fishing rods and began the short trek back to the farmhouse where Clara had lived all her life. Walking side by side, her father began to whistle, a pleasant and calm look on his face. It was the soundtrack of her childhood, a noise in which she drew great comfort and peace from. He whistled when he cooked, he whistled when he worked, he even whistled while he sat reading in his armchair in the back room of the house late at night, which Clara always thought would've made it impossible to concentrate on the words he was trying to understand.
"I don't need a sister," she said suddenly, grabbing his hand in hers tightly and smiling up at him.
"You don't, huh?" He rubbed his thumb against the back of her hand, and she could feel the roughened skin that the day's catches had left with their tiny, sandpaper teeth each time he'd lipped them and displayed them for her to see.
She shook her head.
"Loren's basically like my brother," she said, "and you're my best friend, Daddy."
He looked down at her and smiled, his eyes shinier than they had been seconds ago.
"Just don't got no room for a sister," she decided with a shrug, and he sniffed and chuckled at her.
They continued to walk hand in hand and after a beat of silence, a thought occurred to her, and she looked up at him once again.
"Am I your best friend?" she asked him, the question seeming altogether more important than any one she'd ever asked before.
"'Course you are," he replied immediately, easily.
"Nobody else even close?"
"Not even close."
She looked up towards the farmhouse that was nearing ahead of them and smiled hugely, feeling as though nothing could ruin this moment and that it might just go on and on for as long as she could hold it here. This line of thinking brought another question to her mind.
"Will we be best friends forever?"
"Forever," he assured her with happy finality...

Clara sat thinking on that memory from several years ago, a moment so clear and bright in her head that she could've been watching it play out on a screen before her. There were tears drying on her face and a pistol sat heavily in her lap.
They'd buried her father today, put him in the Earth near his beloved pear tree in the back forty. It's what he'd always said he wanted, and she'd seen to it that it happened just that way.
She couldn't believe he was gone. He'd been the single most important part of her life and now he was nothing more than reminiscing, nothing outside a memory like the one she'd just been looking back on. She felt lost and numb and terribly alone.
Loren Winchester, a close family friend who'd worked for her father throughout both their adolescent years, had come back to be with her for the burial and to say his own goodbyes. Her dad had taken care of Loren like he was his own son when Loren's alcoholic father failed to be the stable presence he needed. She and Loren had grown up together like siblings, until about a year ago when he'd followed his longstanding girlfriend to a town further west, taking with him Clara and her father's well wishes. She reckoned he would marry her one of these days.
After they'd finished putting her dad to rest and shared a quiet dinner together, she'd sent him back to his new home with a grateful hug.
"Call me if you need anything, alright? I mean it," he'd told her, and she had promised she would, not realizing then how soon indeed she would be calling on him.
With Loren gone, Clara had wandered the house and then the farm, finding she couldn't get comfortable in any of her usual places. Her father's armchair haunted her in the backroom, she found herself straining to hear his familiar whistling wherever she happened to be in the house. Their fishing pond was quiet but had almost an eerie atmosphere to it now and the thought of wetting a line made her nauseous. She couldn't sit in the truck, it had belonged to him, and anyway he hadn't trusted it at the end. The controlling parties of the country had taken to tracking folks with the little computers that rested inside the hearts of their vehicles. Most people around their area, wanting more to be left alone than they wanted to get places quickly, had reverted to riding horseback and keeping their whereabouts to themselves.
She had circled the house for a third time when she heard the phone ringing inside. She stood on the porch listening to it, contemplating whether she really needed to answer it, and then flung the door open and yanked it from the table in the dining room where she'd left it. Putting it to her ear, she snarled "What?" harshly into the receiver.
When she hung up the phone, her insides were twisted and gnarled. She'd broken out into a cold sweat and tears were threatening in her eyes again. It had been the sheriff calling. He was the one who had come out and brought the news that her father had died just three days ago. Could it really only have been three days since her life had changed forever? It seemed much longer than that.
Her father had been shot down outside the First Bank of Richmond, a single bullet in the back that tore through one of his lungs and ended his life. It was this information that she had been given three days ago and nothing more. They were still questioning witnesses and didn't want to give her anything that they weren't sure of, but even then, she could tell they were holding back. The Sheriff had promised to call her the minute they had more definitive answers.
The more definite facts as he, and now Clara, knew them were this: there'd been a holdup at the First Bank; people had been screaming and running, panicking; her father had just exited the bank before the holdup began, mere minutes shy of escaping with his life and returning home where Clara waited for him; shots rang out from inside the bank, perhaps just to intimidate the remaining people inside into quiet submission, but one bullet flew perfectly through the swinging front doors and hit a mark it probably never intended to.
"And who robbed the bank?" Clara had asked, knowing the answer already, but determined to hear it for herself regardless. There was a long pause on the other end before the sheriff cleared his throat.
"It was The Outlaw Valdez, Clara," he'd told her plainly.

Sitting now on her front porch as the last lights of the day began to die, Clara picked the gun up off her lap and felt the weight of it in her hand. Her father had taught her to shoot, among other things, to protect herself and she had taken to it naturally, had enjoyed it even.
Hector Valdez, known as The Outlaw, was the most notorious criminal this side of the Montgomery Trail. Tales of his crimes flew far and wide, some complete fiction but others as true as the day is long. He was a bank robber who had no qualms about killing folks that got in his way. He rode a blonde stallion and wore a low brimmed hat and a bandana over half his face in every Wanted poster Clara had ever seen of him. Sheriffs, posses, and bounty hunters had been chasing him for over a year, but none of them had even gotten close to catching him. Some people thought he was a ghost, he had such a knack for vanishing without a trace, but others said he was just lucky and eventually all that luck would run out.
Clara had never known what to believe about him, you never could tell how much information was true or not these days, and to be honest she hadn't thought much about The Outlaw Valdez at all. She'd never considered that his life and hers would collide, leaving in its wake such a huge pile of destruction and heartbreak.
If she hadn't considered him much before, she hated him now and this feeling came on and was accepted by her easily. There was a fire in her belly, as she stared at the gun in her hands, to use it for more than the protection her father had instructed her about. There was a desire in her for the darkest, most treacherous of all uses the weapon could provide. Her father was dead, taken from the world too soon before his time, sentenced to a cruel fate that he did not deserve, and there was but one man responsible for it.
She set the gun down on her lap once again and tugged the scarf from around her neck, allowing it to fall open and relishing the cool evening air on her skin. She considered, not for the first time, that there were other weapons at her disposal, other ways to hurt a man and make him pay for his wrongdoings. Her father would not have approved, but still the gray markings on her neck, highlighting her vocal cords, began to itch.