Lonesome Animals

by Bruce Holbert

  “Just counting ten,” Elijah said.

  They were quiet awhile.

  “I never saw anyone as pretty,” Elijah said.

  “Me neither,” Strawl said. “Though she’d have had better luck plain as a sack of barley.”

  Elijah didn’t reply.

  “You might have lied to her,” Strawl said. “The brother looks good for it.”

  “But you’re not sure, so it’s the truth until another truth takes its place.”

  Strawl said nothing, but he considered the circle of damage Jacob Chin and his sister had wrought until he dropped off.

  When they woke, she fed them a breakfast of venison sausage and biscuits and gravy, and they ate past their fill. Neither offered a word toward Jacob’s whereabouts, though Strawl discovered a cash receipt drawn on a Wilbur bank and, reflected in a bedroom mirror, a buffalohide cape of the type the Montana Crow constructed, too large for the man or the sister, separate or together, but the kind of garment a man like Jacob, Taker of Sisters, would hang on to out of vanity. If it was here, he was south, where the towns and murders were and where the autumn had not yet reached.

  thirteen

  When the horses returned them over the ridge lining the San Poil, Strawl directed Elijah to inquire at the houses and line shacks in the valley. Strawl took the ridgeline and looked for smoke. Late afternoon, he saw Elijah ascending once more. Jacob, Taker of Sisters, had a woman in the Swahila Basin. She took in his laundry and cooked for him several times a month. He’d been there two mornings before, then boarded the Wilbur Ferry. Apparently he had some history with the Cloud boys. One of them had insulted him.

  “He might’ve went to old Canada.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “No reason.”

  “Exactly,” said Strawl.

  Jacob would be carousing in the towns across the big river, where the wheat had been cut and the farmhands were flush and whiskey-inclined following a month of seven-day weeks and fourteen-hour days. Cards and dice made them easy marks.

  “It’s supposed to be harder,” Elijah said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Finding them.”

  “What makes you say so?”

  “Books.”

  “Books don’t know,” Strawl said.

  At the Keller store, Strawl purchased flour and dried beef enough for a week of camps and Elijah a whole cake in a box, which he tied carefully to his saddleback, employing three ropes to anchor it against the horse’s bouncing back quarters. The old Keller Road wound them through the north and eastern portions of the Swahila Basin, the best farming country on the entire reservation. Yellow wheat bent, then relaxed under the evening wind, the bearded stalks bouncing like froth upon a flaxen sea.

  Across the river, the only true palisades north of the Big Bend bordered the water for three miles, leaving no beach or bank. The granite glittered silver and green and red, depending on the light. The two-hundred-foot cliff threw a shadow over the hastening river and the opposite bank, where Strawl and Elijah rested and watered the horses. The two of them collected wheat stalks and rubbed the kernels from the hairy seed heads and fed them to the horses. They continued until dark, meandering toward the ferry until the horses were well fed. Twilight, they shared the flat ferry’s deck with three Fords and a Chrysler. Their drivers sat sullenly at their steering wheels or fooled with their radios, though no station transmitted past a hum in this low country. The ferryman pitched his bow into the wind to bisect the river’s waves. The spray spattered the cars’ window glass and wet Strawl’s face. He lifted his hat and let the top of his head cool, then wiped his hand across his damp hair and his hooded brow and the orbs of his eyeballs and his abrupt triangle of a nose and then the thin lips and worn teeth beneath them. They felt like corpses might to the mortician who prepared them.

  The horses tipped their faces into the air and enjoyed the wet breeze. Elijah chewed a jerky strip in silence. The pilot swung the bow opposite the lined pilings, then gunned the throttle a moment and cut the engine. He scrambled to the bow, gaffing the first hoop in the concrete dock; he pushed off once to brake, at the same time threading a rusty chain with links as large as fists through the hoop, then snubbing it with a heavy lock, then he was on to the next hoop, stopping the ferry entirely with such precision the boat didn’t rock, nor did the bow chain grow taut. He unhinged a metal ramp, spat a stream of tobacco into the water, lynched the bolt securing the plates to the landing, and waved at the first car, which turned on its lights and exited, as did the others, stitching a yellow and red lit chain on the switchbacked grade rising from the river.

  The weather was mild. Strawl and Elijah allowed the horses a leisurely pace. In the fields above the breaks, threshing machines hummed in the darkness along with the voices of the men who sewed the grain sacks shut and others who threw them into long horse-drawn wagons. Implements crawled, stirring the dust and chaff, while the scarlet moon poured light onto the skyline. The cool, settling air smelled rich as a baking oven.

  They both lit cigarettes when they climbed past the canyon rim, then glanced at one another.

  Elijah gazed into the night, now fully dark aside from the starlight and the red moon.

  “He isn’t any more likely to murder tonight than last night,” Strawl said.

  Elijah said, “No less, either.”

  “He might kill some gossip or blowhard, though.”

  Elijah smoked a minute, then spit on his thumb and forefinger and snuffed out the ash. “He done the world little good as it is. Sinful to halt him if he’s balancing the ledger.”

  Strawl nudged Stick and he made for a dirt road off the gravel, then another that had dwindled to a set of weedy tire tracks. A mile following it put them at an ancient line shack. The walls were not going to keep much out, but the weather was calm, and inside were a metal stove and enough wood to cook a decent breakfast. They hobbled the horses in a grassy eyebrow to let them feed and doze. Both put out their bedrolls and lay atop them. Elijah drank water from a canteen and then rinsed his face over a tin. He dropped his eyes and doused the rest of his head. Satisfied he was clean, he bent over the tin and raked his scalp as dry as he could, then let the remaining water tick from his hair into the tin. Finally, when it had quit, he combed it back and pillowed his head with his saddle and dropped to the quick and ghostless sleep of the young.

  Strawl, himself, could not. He lay and listened through the glassless windows at the wind move, then quit, then begin again, until his ears climbed under that sound and found the horses, Stick alternating his weight from one side to the other and Baal tugging shoots from the ground and turning them to paste with her mouth. A truck pulled the hill, motor whining until the driver clutched and shifted down.

  He would like to have been able to say he lay until dawn recounting his sins, or pondering the physics of a planet that spun so plumb it held all the creatures upon it upright, yet kept such poor time the calendar required an extra day one year in four to make sense. He was the kind to ponder in such terms, but a manhunt pressed those high thoughts into hibernation. He slept through their inevitable questions intent to awaken with the sense of the puzzle maker rather than another witless piece. Knowledge was just the jug a man drank from, anyway. Arithmetic might fill one and words another, and a man could swap bottles and drink his fill of both yet understand nothing because most men’s minds are sieves, not cisterns.

  In the predawn blue, Strawl watched a paint labor on a game trail. Its rider, an immense man, was hunched over the saddlehorn, asleep. Jacob, the Taker of Sisters, was nearly too much weight for his mount. He required a quarter horse or maybe an Arabian cross if he were to cover any ground at all, not the skinny paint he was aboard.

  The Lord had constructed Jacob for the Iliad: loose-jointed as a cat and thick in the chest and the ass; he had thin legs and arms thick as tree roots and greased hair pulled back that shone purple in the low light—power you could not write away for in a magazine or
curry with dumbbells. God’s intent resides in such men’s bodies, more so even than it inhabits a priest’s soul or a lover’s heat or a surgeon’s blade. Just breathing, such a man was prophet and prophecy, an act before thought, as quick as the almighty’s mind and as inculpable. Whatever made him was before sin or forgiveness or the guilt in between.

  Strawl watched man and horse descend the road into the river bottom, then choose a fence-line trail and negotiate it in the predawn gloaming. Cattle lowed as they passed, and the wheat stirred in the wind that pushed through this country every morning, whether it was ninety above or ten below. Jacob dismounted to open a barbwire gate, then shut it behind him. Strawl heard a truck engine turn and then catch. The horse and Jacob glanced in the sound’s direction. Sparrows cheeped. Bobwhites bobwhited. A great horned owl whooed and went silent, and the gulls over the river cawed and fussed and circled the ferry landing and the garbage containers. Killdeer scolded and the chukar in the shale falls clacked as horse and rider passed, just threads of shadow in the thin, coming light, blessed horse and sacred man, just tracks and light diverted a moment, then not.

  A year before Strawl retired, a Lincoln County deputy called Lucky—who was anything but; Jacob had put his eye out rather than be arrested—had told him about the dilapidated ranch building where Jacob was bound. The deputy had done some homework and discovered the place was neither abandoned nor inhabited. The Chin sister had purchased it and ten useless acres from a bachelor rancher for a paltry sum and services rendered, then signed the deed over to Jacob. The deputy had no interest in walking into a hornet’s nest, but he told anyone who would listen in hopes another might be game for the risk.

  Strawl had at first figured Jacob’s direction to be north—Loomis and Palmer Lake, where he might drink and fish and lie low. It’s what a guilty man would do. Instead, Jacob parked himself in the wheat ranches and farm towns where the locals would not likely miss his coming or going. He could hold out against a single man there, but a group could take him without much trouble. The move troubled Strawl.

  Elijah’s joining the hunt troubled him, too. Strawl could see no reason for it and wasn’t inclined toward company, though Elijah would be handy if they crossed swords with a man as formidable as Jacob. Still, it remained another thing he didn’t understand in a business where blind spots had killed better men than himself.

  fourteen

  Strawl rose and lit a fire in the stove. He set coffee to perk and then fell into a silent, dreamless sleep and awakened only when he heard a cured bacon side popping in a pan. A circle of hard biscuits rose in another and Elijah, bent, guarded them from burning.

  Strawl ate his breakfast and glanced at Elijah, who was mopping up bacon grease with a biscuit.

  “He’s down Spiegel Canyon,” Strawl said.

  Elijah sipped at his coffee and watched the black surface rock in the cup. He lifted his eyes and blinked.

  “Dropped in the west break and an hour later out the east.”

  “Then he isn’t in the Spiegel Canyon.”

  “The road,” Strawl said. “They call it Spiegel Canyon Road all the way to the river.”

  “Well, you should have said it was the road you meant.”

  “I never said it wasn’t.” Strawl lay against his bedroll and closed his eyes.

  “You aren’t in any hurry, are you?” Elijah said.

  “Neither is he. Careful man never is.”

  “He doesn’t know we’re trailing him?”

  “He’s been chased his whole life,” Strawl said. He sipped at the coffee, but it had cooled.

  “The river is at his back and cliffs on both sides. One road in and out.”

  “He knows what he’s doing.”

  Elijah remained quiet awhile. He refilled Strawl’s coffee.

  “You ask a lot of damned questions,” Strawl said.

  “I haven’t asked a one.”

  “No, but there you sit, waiting to be answered all the same.”

  Elijah looped and cinched the strap securing his bedroll.

  “You don’t sound smart enough to make a study, anyway.”

  “Smart person keeps it to himself.”

  “Well, don’t let me make you a moron. Silence appeals to me as much as the next person.”

  Strawl waved a hand to dismiss him. “You’d talk the bark off a tree.”

  “But I don’t require the tree to say much.”

  Strawl drifted back toward sleep; his hat, smelling like hair and sweat and living, shaded the light. Twilight offered their best odds. The light turned tricky at the end of the day, and the birds’ chirping would provide cover. They might even catch Chin drunk. Strawl tried to sleep, but the rheumatism in his hip and knees moved him to shift positions, and his rest was fitful at best. He finally quit on it altogether and propped himself against his saddle. He drank a cup of lukewarm coffee, his face blank of emotion.

  Elijah struck a match head against the floorboards. An acrid sulfur smell reached Strawl as it caught, and then the tobacco burning.

  “You never liked ranching much.”

  Strawl shook his head. “Can’t all be as fortunate as you. Selling a place you never owned and buying rounds at the inn.”

  “I’ve been blessed, I admit,” Elijah said. He drew on his cigarette, then exhaled. “But you enjoy this. You got the bit between your teeth and are near a gallop.”

  “Trouble you keeping up?”

  “My horse is complaining,” Elijah told him.

  “Might need you a bicycle.”

  “What I can’t figure is why you quit. I’d say maybe you were slipping, if three counties weren’t paying you for the same job because they can’t manage.”

  “I was getting old.”

  Elijah pawed that answer away. “Ranch was making you old. That’s why you wanted rid of it.”

  A cigarette batted Strawl’s hat followed by a book of matches. Strawl set the hat on his chest. “I killed a man.” He lit the cigarette.

  “You killed more than one.”

  “Guess I finally limited,” Strawl said.

  “That’s no answer.”

  “One time, not long after I started copping, I ended up chasing a big cat. He’d killed a child and scarred another. We used to get called out on those cases, like the bears and wildcats were criminals. Well, I treed the thing, and it crouched on a high elm branch, one hundred and seventy pounds of muscle and claws and teeth. Its ears pinned against its skull. It batted the air and roared, spooking The Governor. I put my eye into the peep site and waited for it to leap to another branch or uncoil for the ground. When I pulled the trigger, I still thought that cat would fly or turn smoke or just disappear. Do some kind of miracle. It didn’t seem possible he would die, but the cat just shook when the bullet hit him, then lost his footing and fell on the ground. He breathed a minute, then died. That was that.”

  “That must’ve been a lot of years before you quit.”

  “Thirty, maybe.”

  “Damned old reason.”

  “I’m a slow learner,” Strawl said.

  They dozed the rest of the day. Evening, Strawl collected his traps and saddled and Elijah did likewise. The ride into the canyon, Strawl said nothing. Elijah did not press him. You could creep up on a man like Jacob Chin, but it was impossible to surprise him because he expected nothing but what happened next and was only unnerved by waiting for it.

  Spiegel’s Canyon doglegged. The Spiegel Ranch peered over the lip, a two-story plantation building with a columned porch and a swing creaking in the evening wind. The barn and shop lay a hundred yards behind it, a corral between, but the ranch had outgrown horses and cattle. A stand of barley awaited cutting and a DC crawler waited to turn the earth and start again.

  They followed a seasonal creek bed. The sandy inclines remained inhospitable for vegetation. They proceeded cautiously, Strawl on the draw’s edge, Elijah navigating beneath him at the bottom.

  Where the canyon bent to gather the runoff fro
m a neighboring draw, Elijah raised his hand and Strawl drew Stick’s rein. An engine coughed and fired, but it was west and only audible because the wind had switched direction. The canyon ended abruptly where the prehistoric floods had slashed a mile-wide chasm of scattered basalt and silty loam, remaking its path into a dozen dry channels.

  The bottom country beneath had little worth. The bottom country turned too steep and strewn with rocks for cash crops. The wider tracks were green with alfalfa or orderly canopies of scraggly peach or apple orchards. A few listless heifers and their calves gazed up at the men, then continued browsing the hillside. Strawl could see no fence keeping them, just a coursing river and a steep climb and a bovine lack of ambition.

  Across from Strawl, Elijah let Baal sort her descent through a shale slide and later a birch copse where the ground held water. Coyote willow and rabbitbrush grew in the shadows, complicating Baal’s work. Beyond, Strawl heard a horse whinny and a goat bleat and, after a moment of working through the country with his eyes, located a small house, a patched corral and a sagging barn. The seasons had worn the sideboards paintless and the winds had separated a third of the shingles from the roof. The most recent remnants were scattered upon an uneven stand of green grass between the house and corral.

  The wind was up, but he heard the horse step hard, then crow-hop and land. The goat bleated again. Strawl untied a saddlebag and lifted a glass to his eye. The horse was rolling in the grey dirt and the goat looped circles around it until the horse stopped and the goat butted its neck, which prompted the horse to return to all fours and make its own loops, with the goat at the center this time spinning like a top. Then the horse tired and walked to the high point in the corral and gazed regally at the barn and corral and the house, and the goat slept in the shade the horse made.

  Men were killed in such pacific environs as often as in barroom riots, Strawl knew, but he wasn’t clear if Elijah did. Strawl swung his leg from the right stirrup and dismounted. He walked Stick partway down a gravel slide until they encountered a tiny hollow and dipped a neckerchief in his canteen, squeezed the excess water into a puddle from which Stick could drink, then tied it to his forehead and returned his hat to shade himself from the sun. Elijah climbed the grade. Crickets buzzed and ticked. A cat investigated the brush adjacent to the house until a rooster pheasant exploded in flight, throwing it backward in surprise.