Lonesome Animals

by Bruce Holbert

  “Asking straight out isn’t natural,” Strawl said.

  “Neither is pretending I’m not looking for someone I am.”

  Strawl sighed. “You married to the truth?”

  “Truth is natural,” Elijah said.

  Strawl shook his head. “Getting what you want is natural.”

  They were quiet awhile. The wind was cooling. Summer was losing its traction.

  Elijah pointed toward the Columbia. “Its fish suit me when I am hungry and its water if I have a thirst, but if it’s between me and those places I want to go, then I find a ferry or a bridge. And those are the lies.”

  “Could be they’re just truth told in a different way.”

  “What kind of way?”

  “Way that will get you across the river.”

  Elijah was quiet awhile.

  “What’s a dam, then?” he said finally.

  Strawl considered for a minute, but he saw no way the metaphor could go further.

  “It’s a big piece of concrete that stops up rivers, you goofy bastard,” Strawl said.

  Elijah laughed. Strawl felt a little defeated and was sullen as they rode out the north portion of the town up a dirt road that led to another one, which finally ended at the foot of a shale escarpment beneath the ridges the river had cut. Strawl heard a spring. He and Elijah stopped to let the horses slake their thirst.

  A home lay in an elm copse; it was not board and nail but granite rounded by a thousand years of river current pressing against it. The stones were stacked edge-wise and mortared with concrete troweled with a care unusual for these parts. The roof was shingled in green shakes to repel fire. Genuine glass windows fit into the careful gaps left for them, which held no caul k to square their sills or frames. There was no reason for the structure not to stand into the next millennium. A smattering of lawn surrounded the place, and a gate with no fence attached stood poor sentry against thieves or visitors. No dog sounded. The place had no outbuildings or corral. Smoke rose from the stovepipe. Those inside were afoot.

  Elijah tied Baal near the concrete porch steps and opened the door. A lantern’s light drifted through the doorway. A few minutes later, Elijah’s arm beckoned. Strawl snubbed Stick to one of the elms near a patch of wild oats.

  Inside, the lantern lit a low table next to a bench sofa, which held Chin’s sister. Her beauty had instigated a multitude of broken noses and twice that many arrests. Though its height was some years behind her, she remained as exotic and beautiful and was now handsome, as well, with high cheekbones and skin the color of well-finished wood. Her nose was tiny and her eyes large and full of something that Strawl could see even now might turn a wise man idiot. She’d stayed thin in the places it suited a woman and broad in the places that it suited one, too. The cards before her on the table lay in rows, and each flip was accompanied by a toss of her plaited black hair, the snap and whoosh the only noises in the room aside from the lantern burning its kerosene reservoir. An older man, not quite Marvin’s vintage but at least Strawl’s, smoked and drank tea. Once, he corrected the woman’s play, and she exchanged the cards as he advised without a word. No one spoke until she had sorted through her discards twice for a play she might have overlooked. Strawl watched her gather the cards and shuffle them, her fingers not blunt, meaty male digits, intent on bending the deck from shape, but the flutter of bird wings, mixing the cards in a synchronized rhythm—feathers in air.

  Instead of dealing out another hand, she squared the deck and set it aside.

  “Please,” she nodded toward a chair in the kitchen. “Sit. Excuse my manners.”

  “Obliged,” Strawl said. Elijah, too, fetched a chair and nodded his thanks.

  “Are you hungry?” the woman asked. Then she waved away the question. “You are hungry,” she said. “Who is not hungry this time of evening?”

  In the kitchen, she cut some tortillas from a roll of flat bread and stoked the stove, then began to warm the hard beans she had soaked. When they were near soft enough to refry, she lifted a door in the kitchen floor and disappeared into the cellar to return with a venison back strap that she shredded with a hand-grinder. She set the meat to simmer and added a half dozen spices.

  Strawl examined the room for any indication Jacob might be on the premises or that he’d been a recent visitor. He found nothing. His sister kept an immaculate house, though it appeared to be her nature, rather than a ploy. He watched her carefully for nerves while she continued to circle from pot to skillet to the cutting board, and, when she thought he and Elijah and the silent man on the sofa had hit the dregs of their drinks, she widened her orbit to refill each cup.

  She fed them on porcelain plates, and the fork and spoon were genuine silver, though the knives were stainless steel for practical reasons. She filled five cordial glasses with brandy and set one next to each plate. The silent man unscrewed a quart jar of green chilies and peppers. Strawl sniffed the lid, then spooned the concoction onto his plate. He dipped a forkful of beans into it and, pleased with the result, tipped the jar and shoveled more over his meal. Elijah opted for no garnish, but ate as if he had a bet on it, and the woman rose to refill his plate before she had taken a bite from her own meal. Strawl crossed his eyes at him and the boy looked hangdogged until the woman returned with his food and bent and kissed his forehead. He glanced up and she remained a moment to let his blinking eyes look into hers. She smiled and, in that moment, Strawl felt a thread of envy for the boy.

  They drank their brandy and tea and finished their meal in silence aside from the silver’s clack against the porcelain. As the woman cleared the plates, the old man filled a hooked pipe with tobacco. He nodded and Elijah and Strawl built two cigarettes and followed the man to the porch.

  Each lit a match and pulled in smoke until there were two embers lighting the evening and another shadowy, sinister glow. The man was grey at the temples, though for the most part, his hair remained black. He’d cut it like a helmet around his face. His slanted eyes looked less so because of the weather his face had seen. One might have mistaken him for just another farmer.

  The woman joined them, gathering her skirt and upon a step below, gazing as the trees stirred in what was left of the river’s breeze and glancing at the men only occasionally through smoke.

  “You are hunting Jacob Chin,” said the man.

  Strawl nodded.

  “My brother-in-law. My woman’s brother. You come here to this home.”

  “Yep,” Strawl said.

  The man sighed and considered his situation. “Do you think,” the man said, “that it is wrong to call your sister a whore?”

  Strawl remained quiet; the man tipped his face toward Elijah.

  “Seems a little hard,” Elijah answered.

  The woman ducked her face into her brandy and drank.

  “What if she was? I mean if she was a prostitute by definition. She accepted money or gratuity for the favors of her sex.”

  Elijah remained silent.

  “Would it be unlike stating she was brown-haired or tall or short?”

  “It would be mean,” Elijah decided.

  “Would it?” the man asked. “If you spoke it lovingly, like a mother who told people my son is a congressman or a doctor. He helps people. Does not a prostitute heal us?”

  Elijah looked stumped. Strawl turned toward the door to avoid staring at the back of the woman’s head.

  “It’s her brother saying it,” he said finally.

  “Jacob?”

  The man nodded. “Who is her brother to lie?” He shifted in the chair he had brought from the kitchen so he could see Elijah and the woman. She stared into the yard, leaving a man’s workshirt she was wearing and her plaited hair to answer for her.

  He turned his attention to Elijah. “If he said she had a pleasant ass, well, that would be wrong. But it might be as true as saying she was a whore. If he liked skinny buttocks, with only a little curve where the hamstring thinned and the flesh turned meaty and then a smooth,
graceful rise like the arc of the horizon, then a steep drop like a teamster with no brakes barreling off the hills to a spine flat as Nebraska. And if instead of packing around a caboose as broad as Mae West’s half moons, two muscled crescents as small as a boy’s pressed her legs forward, and those paired muscles were just about as beautiful to him as the sound of dogs on the scent or a blue sky in the morning, well, wouldn’t that be as worthy a truth as there is?”

  Elijah drank from his brandy and then his tea. He looked disappointed. Both had cooled. The woman’s fingers threaded a strand of grass. She put it to her lips and whistled through it.

  “Would this man not be lying if he claimed she did not possess a backside of the same proportions that he found most pleasing? What path is there for such a person?”

  “Ignorance,” Strawl said.

  The old man smiled. “For you and I, yes. We have enough winters behind us to think practically. We know spring is always coming.”

  “And then another winter,” Strawl said.

  The man rapped his pipe against the porch railing. “Hope and despair, they chase one another like children, and time is only the gods at play. We know plenty.”

  “Like any backside is only as good as the front side.”

  “Well said,” the old man replied. “But our friend. He doesn’t have enough seasons to be certain. He thinks spring might someday remain, despite the winters he has seen.”

  “A romantic,” Strawl said.

  “Would this observation be such a sin in, as you say, a romantic?” He relit his pipe and pulled from it, then unloosed a cloud of pungent smoke. “Would not such a man be tortured? Would not he have to be crazy to be sane?”

  “I don’t know,” Strawl said.

  “And remember, this sister, with this anatomical wonder, was selling it, or renting it—that is a much more accurate manner to think of this thing—so she and he would have food enough. Would it not be impossible for him to separate her ass from the sister who possessed it, just as it would be impossible to separate the voice that moaned and gasped under those tenants from the one that called him to meals or that had cooed to him through childhood fevers and injuries?”

  Elijah rolled a second cigarette.

  “It would be a relief to blame the girl, but then she would blame her parents, who abandoned the two of them to St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Bellingham, and then they would cite their own starvation, and who can find a rationale to condemn a person for existing and wanting to continue? Who is responsible for so many unfortunate pregnancies gestating to fruition? Lust, you may argue, was their weakness, but they acted upon it in the only manner the good book prescribes. That is a ridiculous argument, I think you would agree. A god who claims our heat for one another is sinful and then requires it to make families. Well, he makes more difficulty than is reasonable. God cannot be so unfeeling or impractical.”

  “Unless he has a sense of humor,” Strawl said. He looked at Elijah. “You going to let him talk down the almighty?”

  Elijah said, “It’s not my God that he’s talking about. It’s the Catholics’.”

  “Hairsplitting,” Strawl said.

  The man stared into his open hands, then at Strawl. “Do you believe such cruelty comes from above?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

  “But it does. You are an orphan.”

  “That’s no secret.”

  “So you have no sympathy?”

  “Like I told you, doesn’t matter what I think.”

  “Do you have a sister?”

  Strawl shook his head.

  “Ah. Perhaps if you did. And if she were beautiful.”

  The evening was cooling. Elijah put his jacket over the woman’s bare legs. Strawl listened for the horses until he was certain both were where they had been left.

  “So that is the end of blame,” the man said.

  “All right,” Strawl said. “I absolve our friend of any indiscretions with his sister. He has earned a reprieve.”

  The man nodded. “And you would agree, then, that he must be forgiven for resenting his sister’s patrons. Because he now has twice the reason to be offended: that of a brother and that of a lover. So it is natural he would hate them.”

  Strawl nodded.

  “And not unnatural that those whose spite includes a discourteous comment directed toward him or his sister would leave him especially angry. It would be no shock, then, that he would decapitate three or four in those years and tie them by their hair or their beards to streetlights, where they would be discovered the next morning by the priests and nuns engaging in their constitutionals following morning prayers. In fact, you might admire his restraint. And forgive him, even, for murdering the grocer and his wife, who had neither touched his sister nor spoken to him, but was nevertheless engaged in a great conspiracy to kill them, by eating when he and his sister had no food and sleeping when they were tired and having a house when it rained. Who can say, without any consideration, that he, himself, would not have done the same?”

  Strawl smiled. “Not me,” he said.

  “Would you arrest such a man?” the old fellow asked.

  Strawl shook his head. “I’d kill him.”

  “You would feel no pity?”

  “What worse punishment is there for that man than breathing another breath?”

  “But he is guilty of nothing.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Well, then he’s no more guilty than the rest of us.”

  Strawl nodded. “Rabid dog, he isn’t sick on purpose, and prophets, they never set out to hear God in their heads, yet that doesn’t stop us from putting a bullet into their brain buckets or nailing them to a pair of perpendicular beams. And it doesn’t make me or the Romans anything but right for doing it. According to your theory, Judas was as innocent as the virgin. Nobody’s guilty, but people still need killing, for their own sake or others’. It doesn’t matter to me except when the pay comes through.”

  Suddenly the woman began to laugh and she continued for a long enough time to hush them. She looked at the old man through the smoke. “Maybe now you can put that story away for good, Howard. I’m damned tired of us all being saints.”

  She rose and stepped past them, dropping Elijah’s jacket in his lap before disappearing into the house, where she lit a lantern and carried it to her room, then drew the curtain. The light floated beneath as she discarded one garment and donned another, and that was enough to hold their attention even after she turned the lamp down and the room was nothing but dark.

  “You know why I’m here,” Strawl said.

  The old man nodded.

  “She does, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “This Jacob, what is he to you?”

  “It’s what he is to her.”

  “I just heard a story about all that. What is he to you?”

  “It’s what she is to me.”

  “Your wife, then. Seems you’d both be glad to see the back of him.”

  “That may be true,” the man said.

  “But it can’t be your idea?”

  The man nodded.

  “Just tell me where to find him. I’ll think the rest myself.”

  “How do you know he is the killer you seek?”

  “I know he’s murdered and that he’s twisted as a top. That moves him to the front of the class.”

  “He will not go to prison.”

  “You’d be surprised what people will do once their alternatives dwindle. I expect he’ll hang, anyway.”

  “He won’t allow it.”

  “Then I’ll kill him. I get paid and you get shed of his shadow betwixt you and her.”

  “No,” he said. “That is not something you can kill.”

  Strawl snuffed the last of his cigarette against his boot heel. “We’ll sleep on it,” he said. He walked behind the house and loosed his bedroll from Stick, and Elijah did the same with Baal. It was cold and they built a fire to keep the mor
ning frost from them. The man invited them inside, but Strawl preferred a cold sky to a warm bed, especially in a house with so many different versions of the same people residing in it. Elijah said nothing. His quiet was not sad, but measured like he was waiting for the scales to quit rocking and level. They both slept easily until after midnight, when they were awakened by the woman’s howls and the old man trying to settle her. It took a half hour and Strawl listened to her quiet, then catch herself on a sob and cry some more. Elijah rose and entered the house and then her bedroom.

  “I am an incestuous whore,” she said.

  “You are not either,” Elijah told her.

  “I am,” she said.

  “There is no glass in nature,” Elijah said. “Did you know that? The alchemists hunted the philosopher’s stone to conjure two things: gold and glass. One for obvious reasons, the other for miracles, because what would be more of a miracle than a stone one couldn’t see, but could see anything through? Your beauty is glass, and it reflects the beauty of others like a mirror. You are a miracle. But you do not know it. You possess a soul that lights the glass. And if you recognized your own light, you could expect love, and return it.

  “But then a man tells you a hard truth, one you don’t want to hear, one he doesn’t want to speak: there is no God, or the poor don’t inherit the earth, or your beauty is not timeless. And you shout at him, ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  “It is only later, you realize he does not see through you like glass and does not want to. He instead longed to open his skin with the shard that is you, to bleed upon you and make you visible.”

  “Who is this man?” she asked.

  “He is any one of us. The man isn’t the point.”

  “Did you burn the church?”

  Elijah laughed. “Lots of things burned that summer,” he said.

  “ Is my brother the killer?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I don’t want him to be.”

  When she was silent half an hour, Elijah returned to his sleeping bag. He and Strawl lay and listened to the crickets a long while.

  “Miss that pinky finger?” Strawl asked.