There were two photos of Pac being circulated on bounty posters. In both, he held a pistol close to his face and a bandana tied around his head, just beneath his hat. Pac smoked freshly rolled tobacco and counted a fistful of money. He was little more than an imaginary friend, something that filled in Wynn’s empty spaces just like he filled in everyone else’s. Nellie missed seeing posters where his eyes were at their largest, swollen with curiosity and full of wisdom, of life. And the ones where he smiled like he was meeting The Mother herself had long faded into obscurity. The only remaining copies hung above Wynn’s bed. The same one she’d died in.

“I won’t deny it, I’m a straight ridah, you don’t wanna fuck with me.” Nellie could hear Wynn’s voice all around her. There were other lyrics to that old song, but those were Wynn’s favorite. Especially the “you don’t wanna fuck with me.” Wynn chewed that one up and spit it out like dip. Nellie imagined it was Wynn’s war cry when she and her gang went out and fucked shit up, though she just saw it as handling business. The words lingered in the air around them like dust.

By the time Wynn birthed Nellie, those days were in the past. Nellie had only heard stories about that side of her mother, whispered from the mouths of strangers in their tiny settlement. Stories of Wynn’s hands soaked in blood: how she’d sent a single bullet through the throats of three men, how she’d rode at the front of a gang of women, twenty-five deep, brave enough to ride through any town with their faces uncovered since they’d likely just rob it blind.

Nellie only knew Wynn as the woman who sat her down and brushed her hair smooth once a week; who worked on a small ranch swathing oats and separating them from the stem; who pulled blue oaks from the ground with her bare hands, chopped them into lumber and firewood, and carried any extra to the elderly couple a mile up the road. Wynn taught Nellie to shoot, often in the dead of night—made her pay attention to what she heard more than what she saw. Wynn was the person who cradled Nellie in arms toned by labor, made her feel both strong and delicate. The woman who hosted monthly card games where Nellie watched her mother’s friend group dwindle from the crack in her bedroom door jamb. One by one, Wynn’s friends stopped dropping by for spiced apples and Spades. Started turning up floating face down in rivers, or with their limbs tangled high in trees. Shot. Drowned. 

They came for Wynn just after Nellie’s twentieth birthday. While Nellie was out, they dragged Wynn to the basement of an abandoned saloon, beat her purple and left her to die. When Nellie found her, her voice was a whisper, her breath merely a breeze. Nellie loaded her into a shallow wagon and took her home. Laid her in the bed, Pac’s eyes wide and watching from her favorite poster—one Wynn found being distributed in a town with nothing else to offer..

Wynn had prepared Nellie for this moment. She grabbed the locket from her mother’s bedside table and gently pulled Wynn’s spirit from her lips like fingertips coaxing out a splinter. Her spirit—strong, black, with tinges of red and blue—fit perfectly into the space in the locket. Nellie wondered what it would have looked like if she’d seen it before Wynn turned things around. If there would have been more red, more blue. Less black.

Nellie paused as she shut the door to her mother’s bedroom and listened carefully, eyes scanning the darkness. Her ears twitched as she heard a slow, high-pitched whistle from within the house: a tune she remembered from her mother’s sleepless nights, when she paced the front room mumbling,  “Saw me in the drop, three and a quarter. Slaughter, electrical tape around your daughter.”

Nellie moved quickly, pulled the pistol from her holster, and fired five quick shots, leaving a single bullet in the cylinder, just in case she’d missed. The intruder collapsed to the ground, his pistol sliding across the floor. She wrestled a set of matches from her pocket and lit the lantern hanging on the sitting room wall.

The man writhed on the floor, his hands shook as they pressed against the gunshot wound on his side. Nellie figured she had until sunrise before the rest of his crew rose from the dirt, pistols in hand and rained down on the house like a storm. She kept the gun on him until his chest stopped rising and his hands were flat against his stomach, his screaming ceased. Until he had given her a life for the one he’d stolen.

When morning came, Nellie climbed onto her horse, gathering the reigns into her hands. Tucked between the skin of her hips and the waist of her jeans, Pac’s smile sat, folded into the seam of a bounty poster. A photo of her mother sat comfortably behind it. In it, Wynn’s—hair was in a single braid dangled over her shoulder, a bundle of firewood hugged against her chest like her only daughter. And she smiled. Nellie wondered if this was the photo they had used on her bounty posters, or if they dug up one that Nellie had never seen, one where Wynn carried a shotgun on her shoulders and bared her teeth. Where she beat someone’s head with a brick or smoked a rolled cigarette over a fresh corpse.

“I won’t deny it, I’m a straight ridah,” Nellie mumbled, her eyes settling on where the horizon spat out the sun. Her voice wasn’t as rich as Wynn’s had been, it didn’t hold that same power. Still, Nellie held onto the locket around her neck and sat up higher on her horse. Said, “You don’t wanna fuck with me.”

A. Brown is an Indianapolis-based writer from coastal Virginia. She was a TED Residency Finalist in 2018 and a recipient of the MVICW Author Fellowship. She is finishing up her MFA from Butler University and her work has been published in RueScribe, and Entropy Magazine and is forthcoming in Honey Literary.