Lonesome Animals

by Bruce Holbert

  Strawl took the pipe from his pocket, filled and lit it. Dice looked up through his messed hair, then accepted the pipe. Strawl opened the cell door. “Come on if you want to fix it.”

  Dice rose. Strawl led Dice to the squad car. Strawl stopped at the flower shop and bought a bouquet and handed the flowers to Dice. Dice stared at them. “You’re a rotten man. Not any better than the rest of us. It’s time to show you, you hypocritical bastard,” Strawl whispered.

  Strawl parked at the hospital and they crossed the gravel lot.

  “His wife,” Strawl said.

  The receptionist was a God-fearing woman and had never thought much of Strawl until it had come time to vote. She gave him the room number. Strawl passed the nurses’ station on the second floor. Two of them were nodding in their chairs at a radio show. A monitor blipped. He found the room himself.

  “Look at the havoc you have wreaked, Sheriff. How will you live with yourself now?” Strawl said. “You can’t.”

  Karen Dice lay on a hospital bed, a tube sputtering in her throat. Strawl looked at her chart but could make nothing of the doctor’s squiggles. Her cheek looked like it held half an apple. On her brow, a line of sutures oozed with the swelling. Her ear was blue and dotted with blood.

  Dice sat in the chair next to the bed. He scooted himself forward and put her hand in his. She squeezed back, though she was still unconscious with the morphine. When the doctor made his rounds, he looked at Dice over his wire-rimmed glasses. Dice released his wife’s hand as if he’d lost a husband’s privileges. Her hand dangled over the metal bed rail, her fingers spread like she was reaching out or just trying to mount enough strength to return it to the warm place next to her.

  The doctor bent and opened one of her eyes with his thumb and flashed a penlight in it. The whites were shot with blood and the pupil dilated with narcotic. Dice returned her hand to her side. He patted it and the muscles in her forearms fluttered. Strawl realized the man was responding in a manner he never could, one beyond guilt and shame. The demon for which she had yearned had been aroused. Strawl shook his head. Dice had been too impatient. Revenge, they said, was best served cold.

  He glanced into a mirror on the door. He was unshaven and tired-looking and his own eyes were purpled from his own beating. He listened to the machines working. The doctor set the stethoscope on her breast and listened. Strawl thought it strange, all those men wanting just to touch that same spot, their hands trembling, and her trembling, too. The doctor, though, let the disc lie and counted to himself, like touching there was the same as anyplace else. He wrote another number on the chart, then hooked it to the bed foot.

  Dice found an empty water pitcher. He ran the faucet, then set the flowers in it. He put the arrangement on the nightstand. Outside the room, the doctor met Strawl. He was an old man who had come through the Great War.

  “Sheriff,” he said. “Did you put him up to this?”

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Strawl said.

  “There’s nothing mysterious about you,” the doctor said.

  eighteen

  Four days later, Dot opened Strawl’s front door to find Elijah on the step. She and Arlen had brought the children and a plate of supper each evening since Strawl’s return, and while her family ate, Dot changed Strawl’s various dressings and applied his ointments, then rubbed liniment into his lower legs to stave off atrophy.

  “Look what the cat dragged in,” Dot said. She opened the door and allowed Elijah to enter the room.

  “You want a bite to eat?” Strawl asked.

  “Loaves and fishes?” Elijah asked.

  Strawl shook his head. “Beef and taters.”

  Dot placed the child in Arlen’s arms and prepared Elijah’s meal.

  Elijah winked at the boy. “Against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue,” he declared.

  “Don’t preach to him,” Dot said from the kitchen.

  “You want heathen children?”

  “No, I want them to consider the source.”

  “Bible’s words, not mine.”

  “You’re the one saying them.” Dot set his plate in front of him, but Elijah didn’t eat. He sat silent, chastised.

  “For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister. Are we not brother and sister?” he asked.

  Dot sighed. “Brothers and sisters trust one another. They don’t shirk.”

  “Quit squabbling and tell me what’s the news,” Strawl said.

  “Well, Hollingsworth is in high spirits,” Elijah said. “Carrying around the newspaper with your mug shot and reading the article out loud.”

  “Them BIA boys gloating, too?” Strawl asked.

  “They figure they’re in charge again.”

  Strawl mopped a spot of gravy with his buttered bread. “Chickens will cluck,” he said, “but it takes a rooster to crow.”

  “And an ass to bray,” Dot said.

  Strawl clacked his fork on his plate. “You are ruining my digestion.”

  “Maybe you could digest better in jail,” Dot said.

  “Jail wouldn’t have him,” Elijah told her.

  Arlen leaned forward. “Come to think of it, why haven’t the police visited? This is the most likely spot for you to land.”

  Strawl shrugged. “I left them the address to forward my belongings. They confiscated my buck knife and I owe a debt or two to that blade.”

  Dot said, “That’s no answer.”

  “Bringing men out here to arrest me would require Dice to admit I escaped. He’d rather avoid that.”

  “That’s not the reason,” Elijah said. “You hear about the Dice woman? She’s been in the hospital ten days and will likely see that much more.”

  “You wouldn’t beat a woman?” Dot asked Strawl.

  “He didn’t need to. Dice did it.”

  “He beat up his wife?”

  “Nearly killed her.”

  “That doesn’t sound like him,” Dot said.

  “No it doesn’t,” Elijah replied. “Kind of makes you wonder what would light that kind of fire in a man.” He looked up from his meal at Strawl, then scooped a bit of potatoes. Dot stared at him, too.

  “Man puts a key into the ignition, doesn’t mean he built the motor, doesn’t mean he owns the car. Just means he knows where the key goes.”

  “Did you make the sheriff harm that woman?” Dot asked.

  “I was asleep,” Strawl said. “And it’s God in charge of creation, ask the prophet.”

  Elijah smiled. “It’s quite an alibi. Even Dice wouldn’t argue. And I know he won’t pick up the wrong end of a rattlesnake again.”

  “As it should be,” Strawl said.

  Dot put her head in her hands. “You coaxed him into assaulting his wife. My God, wouldn’t you think my mother would have finished you for hurting women?”

  The room grew quiet.

  “What do you think you know?”

  “I was four years old, not four months.”

  Strawl nodded.

  “You were my favorite,” Dot said. “I used to sit on the window ledge for hours, loyal as a dog, watching for you to come up the walk.” She glanced up at Arlen. “I see the girls behave the same with him. I envy that. She did, too. I could tell, even then.” She pulled Esther, the serious one, next to her by a loose dress tie. The child stood dutifully while Dot stroked her hair. “You were my favorite,” she said again.

  “Lord knows why,” Strawl said.

  “She knew why. She encouraged it. For you, not for me. And surely not for her.”

  “You can’t remember that kind of thing.”

  “I do,” Dot said. “Because I catch myself doing the same.”

  “Why’s that?” Strawl asked.

  Dot shrugged. “Love,” she said. “And a normal life. There’s some comfort in the routine and something pleasant about having a minor celebration every evening when your husband comes up the walk.”

/>   Strawl was quiet. He could hear his own ragged breaths. “I ever tell you about your grandparents?”

  Dot shook her head.

  “There’s a reason for that,” Strawl said.

  “You didn’t mean it,” Dot told him. “I remember you didn’t mean it.”

  “Well, I wish my memory was as generous as yours,” Strawl said. “Too many things I meant to do get in the way of believing you.”

  “It was a long time ago,” Dot said.

  “It was,” Strawl agreed. He rose and lumbered into the kitchen for more of his meal.

  “What was that all about?” Elijah whispered.

  “It’s none of your affair,” Dot snapped.

  “I sold the property,” Elijah whispered. “Is that why you’re so wound up at me? He bought it back. You’ll get it all. I did you a favor.”

  “Property doesn’t have anything to do with it, though good manners might have led you to inform us. We had a bargain. I took care of my end. You were supposed to watch him. Instead, you sold your inheritance and squandered it on who knows what.”

  “He doesn’t seem looked after?”

  “No, he looks beat-up. And there were two other killings.”

  “I don’t know he did them or the others,” Elijah said.

  “Do you know he didn’t?” Dot whispered.

  Strawl hobbled back into the room with his second helping. Elijah turned his attention to the baby. “He called his servant that ministered unto him, and said, put now this woman out from me.”

  Dot stared at him. “And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcasses be wasted in the wilderness,” she said.

  Elijah ignored her. “You girls sass your mom often as you can?” He poked Violet’s ribs and she giggled.

  “They’re intolerable as always,” Dot said.

  “And this baby’s well?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked to Arlen. “You in good health?”

  “We’re all fine,” Dot told him.

  “Good,” Elijah said. “Now, I have presents, if anybody is inclined.”

  The girls squealed and trailed him through the door to Baal and the saddlebags. Dot waited a moment, then scooped up the baby and followed.

  Strawl gazed out the window. The maple remained filled out with summer, the leaves green and slick in the slanting light. Elijah treated the girls to rock candy and ribbon and offered a ball to the baby, who immediately put it in his mouth.

  “I see the big hill’s been disked. You thinking about planting winter crop there?”

  Arlen nodded.

  “Makes sense,” Strawl told him. “That dirt holds water better than the rest, though it shouldn’t, being on an incline.”

  “Ground there is soft,” Arlen said. “Snowpack can sink instead of run off.”

  “I knew there was a likely reason. Just didn’t know what it was.” Strawl pointed his chin toward the door. “Tell her it’s all right,” he said. “Tell her I told you so and you believe me.”

  “Except I don’t.”

  “You can swear it off in a prayer if you can’t bear the lie.”

  Strawl stood. He ached everywhere but was as mended as time would allow. He made his way to the door.

  “I’ll start morning,” he said to Elijah. “You’d be better served to stay. There will be a shit storm and you don’t appear to own the clothes for that kind of weather.” He looked at Dot. “Don’t say a word. You know I’m not listening.”

  “I got two boxes of bullets, yet,” Elijah said.

  “You’ll need them.”

  “You figure I squandered your money,” Elijah said.

  “Nope,” Strawl told him. “You got more imagination than that.”

  “Then why do you think I took it?”

  “I have no idea,” Strawl said.

  “What if I told you?”

  “Then I’d still have no idea,” Strawl said.

  First, Strawl felt compelled to square the rest of his more recent disputes. He and Elijah cornered the remaining Bureau of Indian Affairs policemen at their office as they arrived for their morning shift. Most limped and two still wrapped their skulls in gauze, following their encounter with the bull. Strawl handcuffed the six of them to one another, then herded the group to the truck bed and latched the odd cuffs to the low end of the stack muffler pipes to keep them there. Strawl directed Elijah north and east toward a copse of hardwoods and huckleberries above Owhi Lake rife with bear droppings and matted hair. He ordered the deputies to strip, then organized them in a ring around the tallest tree and cuffed the ends to close the circle. Ten pounds of pork from the grocery were stowed in the cab along with a few jars of honey. Strawl poured honey over their heads and torsos and legs, then strung a pork chop or ham around each’s neck, then scattered scraps in the surrounding brush.

  Each breath was a difficulty, but he ordered Elijah next to drive to Hollingsworth’s ranch, where Strawl splintered the door with an axe and took both the silverspoon and his father from a fine lunch served by their wives and attended by the children. Strawl cuffed them together as well. When the old man, whose face was red with spidery blood vessels, began to bluster about law and due process and friends in advantageous positions, Strawl broke his nose with his pistol butt.

  Elijah drove silently and said nothing when the silverspoon attempted to negotiate with him, though it was clear from his expression that such grisly work had not gone easily on him. Strawl considered how to dispatch the two. Killing them crossed his mind, but even he would have difficulty arguing his innocence when he had taken them in front of a houseful of witnesses.

  Elijah persuaded him to dump them in the middle of nowhere and gamble on how they’d manage their return. Strawl chose the west end of Omak Lake where there was no road, and the few Indians who inhabited the area were far enough into the past to think a pair of white men were devils. To add to their difficulties, he sliced off the soles of their feet, poured gasoline on the wounds, and lit them afire.

  That evening Strawl reclined on a saddlebag while Elijah made camp and cooked three trout from Friedlander Creek.

  “Who is this killer, if not Jacob Chin?” Elijah asked.

  “Someone with enough sense and patience and money to keep clear of witnesses,” Strawl said. He pointed his finger and banged it against the palm of the other hand. “Most crimes, one person and another disagree on what belongs to who, and they don’t have the smarts to connive it from the other nor the patience or faith to wait for it to fall to them. So they rob or kill.”

  “Or both.”

  Strawl nodded. “Then the one who committed the crime runs. If he’s really mean at heart, he might leave clues that lead the people to think some other poor lout did the thing, though that happens so rarely and usually is planned so sloppily it’s not worth mention. Mostly it’s the first. A person behaves without courtesy or decency and only later grasps he’s perpetrated a crime to boot.”

  The fish had finished cooking and Elijah slipped one onto a bed of leaves for Strawl. Strawl opened his pocketknife and sliced a piece loose. The golden skin tasted of salt and the one eye looked up at him. Elijah remained quiet. He separated the fine bones from the flesh and carefully drew the skin back.

  “You didn’t like cutting those boys’ feet, did you?” Strawl said. “Or making the BIA boys bear food.”

  “I didn’t do any of it.”

  Smoke curled from the fire. Strawl added a stick and watched the flame take it, flipping images as if they were moving pictures without the screen, raw light and perfect black and the shadows alternating between.

  “You permitted it,” Strawl said.

  Elijah nodded. “Do not allow what you consider good to be spoken of as evil.”

  “Or the other way around.”

  “Yep.” Elijah sheathed his knife and set the fish beside him on its leaves. “What if I didn’t allow it?”

  “Read some more. You�
�d be dead. Or I’d be. Or one of us would have converted the other, which is what happened.”

  Elijah’s eyes gazed into the fire. He blinked once, then again. Otherwise his face was calm as a lake. “I can’t see it that way,” he said.

  The flames burned and smoked. It was a good fire, bedded now with a floor of coals that would keep through morning and banked by rocks and a bough green enough not to spark with a delinquent ember. Strawl prepared his bedroll and pillowed his head with his saddle. He closed his eyes.

  “Maybe he can’t help himself,” Elijah said. “He enjoys murder and intends to keep at it, wrong be damned. Plenty of enjoying what you’re not supposed to in that good book, too. Look at David with Bathsheba.”

  “Or Samson and Delilah.”

  “Solomon.”

  “Solomon and who?”

  “Song of Songs. Whoever.”

  “Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  “They’re towns, old man, like Nespelem and Keller, not people.”

  “Lot and his salt shaker, then,” Strawl said.

  Elijah chuckled. “Adam and Eve.”

  Strawl waved his hand. “Cain and Abel.”

  “Changing subjects.”

  “Subject is murder.”

  “Well, you can hardly turn a page without a killing in the Old Testament.”

  “Moses killed his share with all those plagues, didn’t he?” Strawl said.

  “God sent those. Moses never shed blood once he started as God’s prophet.”

  “Well he’s just a damned politician, then,” Strawl said.

  Elijah stepped out of the firelight and pulled a blanket from his horse’s saddlebags, then bedded down across from Strawl. He padded his head with his saddle and made certain his rifle scabbard remained within his reach.

  Strawl tried to sleep as well, though the talk troubled him. He rolled his blanket away from Elijah. “Old days, I had a name and a description and a gun, and the criminals were scared and I wasn’t. Deer or pheasant will lie in a thicket until you practically stomp on them, yet a man bolts first he hears you no matter how good he’s covered.”

  “This one’s wiping his tracks.”

  Strawl shook his head. “This one doesn’t leave tracks.”