Outlaw Inn

The Outlaw Inn is a roadside roadhouse encountered by Jenny and Pauline on their journey over the Rockies. Its significance comes from the collision of two realities: it is a sparse, almost townless stopping place where a failing car leaves the women stranded, and a bar whose wall of wanted posters includes Pauline’s recognizable portrait. Their private flight thus meets its public record in an unlikely gathering point.

Setting and Arrival

As Jenny and Pauline try to cross the Rockies, their car overheats again. An orange warning light holds their attention until Pauline consults their atlas and spots a small town a few miles away. They limp onward at twenty miles an hour, trailing steam, but the car gives out beside a gas-station pump at dusk. Across the road stands a low, sagging, tar-papered roadhouse, almost indistinguishable from the dark foothills and sky behind it. Neon signs for Budweiser and Coors lend its otherwise bleak outline the appearance of something bright and welcoming.

The apparent town proves not to be a town at all. Jenny recognizes the place as a named meeting point between isolated habitations: the gas station and roadhouse offer a shared stop without a settled community around them. Five trucks and a car are parked there. With their engine off and the dashboard lights extinguished, Jenny and Pauline look across the road at the bar’s signs and hear faint music. The broken car has turned the stop from a point on their route into a place where they must decide what to do next.

The Bar and Its Posters

The roadhouse is identified as the Outlaw Inn during the women’s conversation with a man in the bar. When he remarks that they have found the place, Pauline asks whether he has named it; only then do the women notice the posters covering the walls. The display forms a stripe above the bar and spreads across the room, layered over itself and marked by time and use: some posters have torn corners, moustaches, or added dialogue bubbles. Novelty reproductions of historical outlaws sit alongside what appear to be real wanted posters, giving the walls the feel of an uneven archive of fugitives.

The collection’s mixture of staged, sepia-toned outlaw imagery and actual notices makes the Inn’s name more than decoration. The posters turn the bar into a place where outlawry is both popular spectacle and an active form of identification. The women have arrived seeking shelter from a mechanical failure; inside, the wall makes the danger attached to being recognized materially present.

Pauline’s Portrait

Among the posters Pauline recognizes herself. Her portrait hangs above the bar and the bartender’s head, fixed with four tacks over another notice. Unlike the surrounding papers, it is crisp at the edges, unfaded, and untouched by graffiti. Its three-quarter view shows the familiar brunette hair and pearls. Jenny compares this image with Pauline beside her and finds that the poster’s more sharply drawn eyes and cheekbones, combined with her bleached pale-yellow hair, make Pauline appear harder and cheaper than Jenny sees her in person.

The portrait does not merely announce that Pauline is wanted; it reframes her through an image that is both familiar and distorting. Pauline takes Jenny’s hand with her free hand and finishes her drink. In the midst of a public display of other people’s pursuit and capture, that small gesture brings the scene back to the two women’s immediate companionship. The Outlaw Inn holds the contradiction in one room: Pauline is exposed as a recognizable fugitive, yet she remains beside Jenny, sharing the precarious stop their broken car has forced upon them.