Lonesome Animals

by Bruce Holbert

  “They say Christ, he died of suffocation, actually. The diaphragm, it just wears out under the weight and can’t pull in any breath,” Hollingsworth said. He and his cohorts collected their tools and left the same way they’d come. Strawl watched the dust rise all along their path out until it settled again in the darkness.

  Strawl could not keep from making water and stayed wet through the night. His weight tore at his shoulders and bent his back. He slept in fits and woke dew-covered. The first full day he fought any way he could, shaking the tree until the branches chattered and leaves and aphids drifted from above on the warm air. The weather turned hot and he burned in blotches where the sun slanted through the tree’s thinned canopy. He twisted himself to relieve the pains one place but the effort ended with just another burned spot and he surrendered. Ants worked near his ankles and when his bowels pressed loose late in the day, they fell upon his excrement and began to pack it away. A few ventured farther into his ass to finish the job.

  A bit of wind at sundown eased him into night, which he spent sleepless. His urine quit. He could smell the pain, a tang like metal, but unsharp, and smoky. By the end of the following day, he was not sure what might be beneath or above him. Both directions glimmered like the sky or water or sun-baked fields. He listened to his own breathing, the sound of his pulse. He knew a person didn’t have to attend to his body’s workings, that the mind could keep the parts together without thoughts, but he feared losing his grip on the gears altogether.

  All his life, he’d clung to solitude. Now, like the pain, it shook him with a trembling that neared joy but was not. Aloneness was impossible and inescapable, and evading it was what directed him toward it, and he recognized his mind circling madly like a calf with the turning sickness, remembering what it knew, then just remembering the remembering.

  When he awoke the third morning, Dice was stirring a fire and boiling coffee. Once he’d had a cup, he sawed the branches and unlooped the chains and Strawl unfolded against the tree. Dice poured fresh water from a canteen into his coffee cup and held it while Strawl bent his head to drink. His face was a shadow in the sun, but it quaked and shuddered with his breaths. Strawl’s dried lips bent and bled, and he drank until his thirst was slaked.

  “You’re a kitten now, aren’t you?” Dice said.

  Strawl was silent.

  “I’m looking for a killer,” Dice said. “Are you?”

  Strawl remained too weak to respond.

  “I didn’t think so. Maybe because you found one in the mirror.”

  Dice arrested him, and he slept for two days. When he awakened, the nurse was changing his feed bag. She hurried out, then returned with Dice, who sat himself in a chair across the room, smoothing his thin mustache.

  Strawl rattled the handcuffs.

  Dice nodded. “You recall you are under arrest.”

  Strawl reached his free hand for a cup filled with lukewarm water. He drank.

  “Hollingsworth make a hefty campaign donation?” Strawl asked.

  “His father did, actually.”

  “You’ve done their bidding so I guess you’ve earned it. Am I going to be arraigned here or at the courthouse?”

  “Courthouse, when you’re able.”

  “I’m able now,” Strawl said.

  Dice stood and lifted the chart from the foot of Strawl’s bed. “You have three cracked ribs and a concussion and a bruised lung along with a fractured finger, a dislocated shoulder, and various contusions and abrasions. You’re a beat-up old man.”

  “I suppose you’ve put those BIA boys that jumped me behind bars, as well.”

  “You didn’t have to set that bull loose on them.”

  Strawl’s head hurt him and he closed his eyes for a long moment. “I didn’t figure you’d approve of me shooting them. It seemed the more measured response.”

  The room was quiet awhile, Strawl’s labored breathing the only sound.

  “Can’t solve a murder without a case file, Dice.”

  “But you didn’t solve a murder. Instead two more followed. All with you in the vicinity.”

  “I might’ve done better if you weren’t playing both sides against the middle. You sic everyone on everyone else and figure you’d arrest the last of one standing?” Strawl drank from the cup once more. He sighed and rubbed his bad side. “It won’t make an indictment.”

  Dice shook his head. “Don’t need one. Banged up as you are, you can’t appear for arraignment for a good month. That’s September, and Judge Higgenbothem will be out of the county for a wedding back east, then October his honor’s absent again two weeks for hunting season. And then it’s November and elections.”

  “You send them breeds up the butte?”

  “I didn’t discourage them.”

  “After you lulled me with the silverspoon.” Strawl tried to laugh, but wound up hacking. “Guess I overestimated your ethics and undershot your guile,” he said, when he could speak. “You might make it in politics, after all.”

  “I intend to,” Dice said.

  “In that business, it’s always November,” Strawl said. “You’d do good to remember that.” Strawl considered throwing something at him, but nothing was within reach that would leave a proper dent.

  “I’m not quitting.”

  “I hired you. I’m firing you. This case is over. You are all I need.”

  Strawl shook his head. “You’re a damned fool. I got your money and I got a gun and a saddlebag full of bullets. I’ll look until I’m satisfied and I am not as of yet. And you will be damaged, my friend. I will go out of my way.”

  Dice chuckled. “The handcuffs and guard at your door say different.”

  The guard at Strawl’s door delivered the weekly papers to him and a magazine or two. Strawl saw an archived photograph of himself captioned “The Accused.” The article read as if Dice had written it, offering just enough detail to ease people, though not any claims he couldn’t back away from later.

  A week into Strawl’s detention, he ordered cookies that Elijah bribed the hospital kitchen to pepper with laxative. Strawl offered them to the deputy minding his door. Three hours later, the guard grew uncomfortable and excused himself. Strawl blinked a flashlight through his room glass and Elijah climbed the fire escape and broke the glass and applied a pair of metal-cutting crimps to the handcuffs. Strawl, still looped with opiates, took a good while negotiating the swinging steps to the parking lot below.

  Elijah delivered him to the ranch in the flatbed. Dot met them on the porch and helped Arlen and Elijah pack Strawl to the sofa.

  “You’re being charged with murder,” Dot told him.

  “Yep.”

  “Do the police think you did it?”

  “No.”

  “Why did they arrest you, then?”

  “Because I could have done it,” Strawl said.

  Dot blinked her eyes. “Do you have an alibi?”

  Strawl shook his head. “ I’m not even sure which days I need one.”

  Strawl’s legs shuddered and he held on to a chair.

  Dot stepped toward him. “You can say, ‘I would never do something like that. I would have no reason. I am not that kind of person.’”

  “Is that true?” Strawl asked.

  “No,” Dot said. “But I’d like to hear it.”

  Elijah rolled Strawl a smoke and drew it lit. “You have no alibi, then.”

  Strawl inhaled a lungful of smoke.

  “They don’t care about my alibi. What did you do with my ranch money?” Strawl said.

  Elijah didn’t reply.

  Strawl set his cigarette on the edge of a saucer Arlen had fetched for the ashes. “I need to sleep now,” he said.

  He slept a thick, dreamless sleep and woke with the light, missing the pain medicine from the hospital. Once upright, he hobbled to the kitchen and put on some coffee and ate three brownies from a covered plate. The caffeine and sugar steadied him. Walking was easier, though his ribs ached like a bad tooth.
r />   Arlen lay under the crawler chassis, greasing the U-joints, his wiry arms wrestling a clutch casing. He scooted from underneath the rig. Strawl nodded at him. Arlen took his glasses from his nose and wiped them on his shirttail. His newsboy cap hooded his narrow face, which looked as if the bulk of it had pulled toward his nose like a gopher Strawl recalled from the funnies. The result left him appearing tipped forward and eager sometimes and at others as if he were fighting a headwind. Arlen stared a moment, watery-eyed through his glasses, then knocked his hands together and returned to his chore.

  Strawl changed the oil in the trap wagon, his injuries turning a half-hour job into one that required triple the time. Dot brought them their breakfast. After his first wife’s demise and before Ida arrived, Strawl had returned from manhunts to visit Dot and she would take his hand and walk him to the river, and there they would toss stones and branches into the current. He would smoke and she would chew Jujubes from the Omak five-and-dime. She had quit speaking in school, as well as to the Cunninghams, who boarded her. He never asked her why.

  He and Arlen pulled themselves from under the machines. They washed their hands and forearms with an oily goop that cut grease, then rinsed under a well spigot outside. Dot set their plates on cinderblocks and put a bottle in the boy’s mouth.

  Dot waved her hand at them. “Eat,” she said.

  They made short work of their eggs and ham and fried potatoes. Arlen was soon under the tractor again, the girls offering him tools he didn’t need but accepted all the same. Inside the barn were the plow, the cultivator, and rod weeder and seed drills, all scrubbed clean and folded upon themselves like grasshoppers. Strawl had been content to keep them in the weed patch by the creek year-round, but Arlen had even filed the rust that ate at the drill wheels. Strawl spied six or seven one-gallon paint cans stored under the bench, all International Harvester red.

  “You went hunting bad men when Mother died, too,” Dot said.

  “You remember anything of your mother?” Strawl asked.

  “No,” she said. “She’s just gone.”

  “You know how?”

  “She cracked her head on something.”

  Strawl nodded.

  “You think I’d kill and dress out Indians. I kill her, too, you figure?”

  “God no,” Dot told him. “Her death broke you worse than me.”

  “I was broken already,” Strawl said. “And Ida?”

  “The river,” Dot said. “Not even you can whip a river.”

  Strawl tipped his coffee cup to his mouth, then set it down. “You know, there’s no predicting what the worst criminals will do because they don’t know, themselves. The ones who make a career of it, they’ll weigh the odds and do their time when they’re caught. But these others, they’re another matter. They’ve probably been committing little crimes all along and not even calling them such and then the moon changes and they’re holding a gun on someone and wondering why the rest of us are so wound up.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it takes much wit to be a detective.”

  “They might be no trouble to find, but they’ll kill you quicker than Wyatt Earp. They’ve been desperados from the crib. They don’t need motive to murder,just inclination.”

  “You pity them?”

  Strawl looked at Dot. “You’re smart, but you don’t know it all,” he told her. “Goose flies south in fall, but it ain’t conscience directing him. It’s just he knows that’s where all the other geese are headed.”

  He looked over the girls and the baby. He had nothing to say to them, he realized, and that was as significant a sin as his others. He returned to the trap wagon, cranking at the filter with a tool Arlen had constructed to make it easier. He watched their feet from beneath, until they opened the squeaky door and were out of sight.

  The evening following, Strawl sent Elijah to Keller Ferry to put his ear to the ground concerning Pete and the silverspoon. Jacob would be no trouble to apprehend if evidence made him a more likely suspect, but Elijah was better suited to keep the reapers cutting than to sort the chaff from the grain. A murderer was about, and employed or not, Strawl had determined to take the man himself. First, though, he had decided to clear a few debts from his ledger.

  seventeen

  After he had heard Baal’s footfalls disappear into the distance and watched Elijah’s lantern come on, then go out again in the darkness, Strawl limped to the trap wagon and turned the ignition key. He drove the highway to Coulee Dam. His hands on the steering wheel glowed in the green dash light. The speedometer floated near fifty miles an hour and the truck wandered like a gin mill drunk. Any higher and it would spill him off the pavement.

  Past Buffalo Lake, the light ahead nearly blinded him. Bureau contractors had gone to double shifts and the electricians had strung chains of high-powered electric lamps over the worksite. Others lit the tent city, more the cofferdam. The longest were looped to the lower bank on the other side of the river, abutting the west end of the project. There, a portion of the construction had settled and labor had commenced on the powerhouse structure. Generators larger than houses lay on their sides, the metal glinting. The turbine wheels that would fit within them were finned with twisted iron plates two tons each. The riprap upon the banks glittered as if a thousand fallen stars were holding the water in place, and the galaxy itself fueled the work.

  In a metal box welded to the cab of the trap wagon were Strawl’s tools. He cut his lights a block before the police station and left the rig to idle, then filled his pocket with three wrenches and a flathead and a Phillips screwdriver along with wire snippers. In the parking lot, he found a cruiser with a broken axle and withdrew the call box. He wired the leads into the trap wagon’s cigarette lighter, then drove to Dice’s home address. The lights in the house were out, but an unfamiliar sedan had parked across the street. From the microphone, Strawl reported a prowler to the dispatcher and stammered the address as if he were reading it from a piece of paper. Then he parked himself at a high spot, which allowed him a view of the house.

  Strawl rolled a cigarette, then lit it and watched the smoke break in the cool dark air. He recalled learning to hunt on his own after he’d squandered the few dollars his father offered as severance. He remembered being alone and starving and standing over the first rabbit he’d ever snared. He enjoyed its dying like a job well done. It puzzled him and he killed three more that same way. He listened to them squeal in the traps and later studied their peeled carcasses on a makeshift spit over his fire, each fitting against the other like tongues into grooves.

  Strawl sipped a cup of coffee from a thermos he had thought to bring. He could not see the dam or even the black river from his vista, but the light boiled out of the work below like bitter bile from the world’s pierced entrails. Strawl had heard Arlen say that all we had once thought sturdy ground was not. Country floated like pieces of eggshell on an ocean over a yolk so elemental and hot that it melted rock into an angry, smoldering glue. Strawl knew nothing of the world that inclined him to argue.

  Blue and red lights flashed in the distance against the cloud cover. Dice had been farther to the west than he ought to. Probably in Coulee City. A rodeo cowboy had opened a tavern there a few years ago. He had built a stage for bands. People traveled miles to eat and dance and drink and fight.

  The car was covering the miles. Strawl bent and stared into the black coffee, letting the heat bathe his face. Dice had married his wife too young. He treated her to dinner out once a week, and last year had bought her a bracelet with diamonds, but money didn’t matter to most women. It was love they wanted, same as men, it turned out.

  The squad car made the turn to Dice’s house, tires spitting gravel against the metal fender. He did not cut the blues or the siren, likely hoping the commotion would hurry the principals from their adulterous joining so he could continue to convince himself his suspicions were just a cop’s natural inclination.

  Strawl sipped his coffee. It was bitter and hot and hurt his t
hroat going down, then lit in his stomach like a stone. He heard the car door slam, then the house open under Dice’s key. He dumped the coffee dregs on the gravel outside the window and tipped his seat back and fell asleep.

  Morning, Strawl entered the police station from the back door.

  “Dice beat up his wife,” Barnes said, upon seeing him. Barnes was from the South and he always sounded mid-song, and thought as slow as he talked. Strawl had kept him on because his simple mind allowed him to carry out any order without questioning it and that was the closest thing to loyalty he’d encountered.

  “She’s in the hospital.” Barnes nodded at the pistol in Strawl’s belt. “You don’t need that. None of us took it too serious, you being arrested.”

  Strawl nodded. “Never can be too careful, it seems. You seen her?”

  “No. Just him.”

  “Dice?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s in the jail cell. He just locked himself in and tossed the keys to me. I don’t know what in hell for. She had it coming.”

  Barnes was leading up to something, but he was too much a lackey to offer an opinion until he was asked. Strawl let him stew a full minute.

  “What is it?” Strawl said finally.

  “What should I do with him? He hasn’t done anything,” Barnes said. “Not really.”

  “He’s surrendered his gun?”

  Barnes nodded.

  “I’ll take care of him,” Strawl said.

  He found Dice’s hat and his tobacco and pipe on the desk, then delivered them to Dice, who was huddled in his cell. It was mid-shift and he was the only captive the jail held. Strawl sorted Barnes’s keys until he found the right one and let himself in. Dice wouldn’t meet his eye until Strawl ordered him to.