Lonesome Animals

by Bruce Holbert

  Elijah smoked awhile. Strawl waited for sleep.

  “Then what is it we’re doing looking for him?” Elijah asked.

  “Pretending,” Strawl told him.

  “Pretending what?”

  “We know.”

  “And the BIA and the Hollingsworths?”

  “They were pretending, too.”

  “Pretending what?”

  Strawl shrugged. “Whatever lets them sleep eight hours. We’re no different than them.”

  “Then how did they come to their hard roads and we didn’t?”

  Strawl turned and faced Elijah. He patted the firm earth with his hand, flattening a spot. He drew a stick man with his forefinger. “They can invent themselves any way they want. I have no qualms with that. Their pretending got in the way of mine, though. So I pretended something past what they could.”

  Strawl was quiet. He closed his eyes and studied the bloody red of their lids in the light from the fire. His blood beat through him. His heart opened and clamped shut, pressed his lungs like a bellows ; his breathing was as constant as the starlight falling over him and still it moved; moving was its constancy. The earth spun and circled on its tether of gravity, making day and night and spring and fall, but for the sun it was always day and for the moon night, without letup or meaning or hope. They were as gods, and Strawl realized this was peace.

  The boy read from his good book in the waning light. His lips muttered and his body rocked with the language in his head. Strawl wondered at the boy’s love of such stories, then did not. His own time had produced nothing to rival such epics,just dime novels invented to sell. Stories of Billy the Kid and Bat Masterson had little truth and less art. Like Jacob preached, they weren’t story, just things that someone said happened, sense and moral applied to them after the fact. What was unsaid and undone would chronicle Strawl and his ilk.

  Yet a sweet-voiced cowhand with a guitar singing “Utah Carol” could move him to tears when his own offspring could not, and “The Strawberry Roan” drew laughter from him that ought to belong to his grandchildren.

  He recognized the rituals people built from their lives and knew others expected he possessed his own code and they treated his actions as if they belonged to a larger whole, and he’d responded as fittingly as he could manage, and turned story himself for a time, and violence only multiplied the community’s admiration of him. But self-annihilation is the end of every myth. Men don’t worship a god; they grieve at his murder and their complicity in the crime. Gods are less entities than faulty compass points the world uses to guide itself, anyway—at least until it becomes lost enough to seek out another tale promising true north.

  Strawl realized he had done his work too well and, in keeping alive, had managed to outlive any story that put him on the side of right, and he realized, too, he had no inclination to change it.

  nineteen

  they rode to Swahila Basin, idling through the morning until they reached the Cloud ranch once more, where they were fed and then informed that a bored fisherman with a weakness for berries had freed the BIA cops. They were beset by fire ants but had made enough noise to encourage anything larger to keep its distance. The silverspoon and his old man crawled upon a logging path and, finally, a skidder who clothed them with gunnysacks and drove them in a wagon to the Omak hospital, where they were bandaged and released.

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

  “Still protecting fools.”

  “Then why’d you get beat up?”

  Strawl ignored him.

  “You think God is in this, James?” Elijah asked.

  Cloud nodded and said it might be so, but his eyes were tired and it was clear to Strawl he humored the boy like he might have his own a month before.

  “Jacob Chin rustled a calf but wasn’t cited,” Cloud said.

  “Cops that side of the river in league with Dice?” Elijah asked.

  Cloud said, “Farmer never swore out a complaint. He just mentioned it at coffee.”

  “Maybe we ought to go see about him.”

  “You have a hankering for veal?” Strawl said.

  “Thought you wanted to find this killer.”

  “I’ve ruled Chin out,” Strawl said.

  “Who have you ruled in?” Elijah asked him.

  Strawl plucked some tobacco from his saddle’s satchel and turned a cigarette.

  “Thought you were a cop,” Elijah told him. “You spent a lot of time on squaring yourself with other cops, lately, with no killer in sight.”

  “ I’m a man staying level with any who want to tip the scales otherwise before I’m a cop or a citizen or any other damned thing.”

  “Level means even.”

  “No, level means upright,” Strawl said.

  He smoked and Stick pawed the earth and switched his tail at a fly.

  “He is like you,” Cloud said.

  Strawl pointed his chin at Elijah. “Him?”

  “Yes. Him. And Jacob Chin,” Cloud said.

  “I’ll agree on the latter.” Strawl nodded. “That’s why he needs a visit, I suppose.”

  It took them most of the day to cover the ground and catch the ferry once more, and they didn’t sight Chin’s cabin until dusk. No smoke rose from the stove and the corral was ungated and empty of the goat and the horse. Strawl fired a shot, but no rifle replied, though birds cackled and flew. Strawl and Elijah dismounted and called but received no answer, so they opened the knobless door, hinged with leather boot heels and secured with a strap threaded through holes on both sides of the jamb. The single room was surprisingly well kept. Plates and tins were stacked on a shelf next to a skillet and two pots, one inside the other. A lantern rested next to a pallet and a couple of books, one about history, the other without a cover. On a makeshift scrap two-by-four table lay a bar of soap and a washing bucket still half full and, in one corner, a straw broom.

  Elijah glanced at Strawl, who only shrugged.

  Outside, he roused Stick and Elijah Baal. They rode a hundred yards toward the river until Stick wheeled the direction they’d arrived. Strawl sawed his rein. Stick fought, then relented and, with his head aimed at the ground, began again toward the river.

  “What’s the matter?” Elijah asked.

  “Blood,” Strawl said. “He smells blood. Goddamnit.”

  They rode the game trail toward the big river. Two of the kittens skittered in the long grass, paralleling them. Strawl ducked for a low branch, then so did Elijah. Yellow pollen clung to their clothes and hair.

  The last of the light draped the river ocher and shadow, along with the coulee’s basalt, the turned earth and post-harvest stubble, the dark pine and birch silhouettes picketed against the corduroy sky. The light dwindled further and its long threads seemed to stretch across the horizon like waning amber echoes distorting whatever voice color possessed.

  Soon they heard the insects’ hum, then the squabble of magpies ; then they caught the sweet reek of meat in decay. Jacob’s armless body hung upside down from a pine bough ten feet in the air. A breeze following the river rocked it. The body was held fast with a metal rod driven through the ankles at the Achilles’ heel, then snubbed tight to the branch with a chain. Beneath the body, a fire had been reduced to coals and their pink light pulsed eerily, flashing upon Jacob’s head. A dollop of melted fat slipped from his flesh, then hissed and smoked upon the coals.

  Strawl approached and bent to examine the dangling head. The scleral orb had shriveled to half its original circumference. The heat had oranged the eyewhite without opening the vessels. Each pupil had expanded to eclipse all but a narrow rim of iris, which had itself darkened sufficiently to be barely discernible. The eyes resembled a child’s marbles more than anything else, each loosely secured in their too-large sockets by a string of optic nerve.

  Above, his lips had thinned and the taut muscles maintained their awful grimace, as if he were still partly present to witness his predicament. The skin of his cheeks, pulle
d by gravity, bloated his face, the flesh not blackened or scorched but cooked—smoked meat as sure as an elk’s hindquarter.

  The flames had baked his hair to a fine dust that floated from his scalp whenever the air around him was disturbed.

  The odor swung with the breeze but there was no respite from it, no matter where a person stood. The kittens mewed and sniffed and then began tussling over an errant sinew. The magpies ventured a return, and Strawl shot three in succession before the others retreated into the lengthening shadows.

  “The coyotes must have taken the arms,” Strawl said. But five minutes later Elijah discovered them drooped in a neighboring tree, chained at the wrists. Dangling, they looked like some ancient, brutal cuneiform.

  Strawl examined the head more closely. He found no sign of the weapon his man preferred, no sign of a weapon at all. He pulled the arms from the tree. The killer had hacked them from the shoulders with an axe, and the sockets were bruised with poorly delivered blows.

  “He was alive for this.” Strawl shook the pair of joined arms and their manacled hands waved. “Jacob, you put up a fight. I’ll give you that. The bastard had to have at you alive and you made work for him. And look.” He motioned to Elijah. “This fire’s built low and the bastard dug a ditch to put it in. You see this bark in the sand? He set the fresh wood against the burning just right so it would roll into the coal bed as the old burned out. This is a slow-cooking fire.”

  Strawl hunted until he found a stray branch. He poked the ash beneath the coals. “ It’s been baking him for days,” he said. “And he was alive for it. He’d have bled out eventually, but that would take hours.” Strawl shook his head. “How long did he cook and know he was cooking?”

  Elijah said nothing. He had dismounted and kept both Baal’s and Stick’s reins. The horses cropped the grass and Strawl listened to their jaws work. Elijah gazed at the coals as if hypnotized, the rosy light playing on his smooth face.

  “He suffered, then,” Elijah said.

  The emptied sockets would have ached brutally, though blindness would have enraged a man like Jacob more than any pain might. Dying would have bothered him less. But he was bound to endure both all the same, the second slowly, without illusion or hope or faith. Blood would first have left the branched veins and arteries piping the chest cavity, but femoral arteries would feed the heart and maintain its rhythm, and the brain, suddenly served by gravity rather than drawing against it, would become more aware than it had ever been. He would have heard his blood tick on the sand and hiss in the fire beneath him; he would have known the sickening loss of buoyancy as if he were in an emptying bathtub, and smelled his singed hair—an offensive odor even when it was not your own. He would have felt it disappearing into his scalp. Past the torn and chopped flesh and muscle and ligament he’d borne, his fat cells would’ve slowly liquefied and he would, finally, understand that his skin, as it shifted and peeled from its muscled mooring like wet cloth, was abandoning him.

  Strawl bent to one knee. His head seemed light, as if it had received a blow. It floated upon his neck and above his body like a child’s balloon batted to and fro with the wind. He shook it slowly, to remind himself a string still attached his consciousness to his physical self. He opened his mouth, made an oval with it, inhaled a breath; the air cooled his lips and made his teeth like wet rocks. He spoke a small sound, a vowel alone, the guts of a word without its consonant skeleton. His gaze shifted down into the sand beneath him, a grey stone almost too small to perceive yet a hundred million times repeated on this beach until it was all that remained on the band between the flora and the river, except what washed against it, which would eventually disintegrate into more of the same. His hands shuddered as he raked his fingers into the earthly shingle, which left jagged, digit-sized marks. He breathed to calm his hands, but they declined to obey. They floated, like his head, barely tethered to the rest of him.

  He tipped his head toward the night above and the darkness was like the sand, the constellations only worth mention because of the vast blackness between the flecks of light, a blackness that would devour them as the sand swallowed the driftwood and dying insect and the flesh of fish and men. His hands quivered. He slapped them together, thinking one’s quaking would equal the other’s and together they would be still. Instead the spasms multiplied and he appeared to his own floating consciousness a repenting sinner shivering in the face of his angry Lord. He broke them apart and drove each into the cool sand. Their vibrations climbed his arms into his shoulders and chest and he heaved as if he were sobbing though he was neither sad nor hurt nor tearful. Blood sounds beat in his ears and when he closed his eyes he could see the sound drumming through his lids, its rhythm grey, then black. The river itself coursed like a vein obeying a similar symmetry, one it knew nothing of, yet it knew nothing else. The black water was as dark as the sky, black as the blackening coulee around them, black as the trees’ forms, black as the rock, black as the birds flitting across their tiny portions of the sky. It was only the temporality of light that made them appear any other shade. But under, under remained the darkness and an order that required no policing, a government without need of law, a religion without dogma or theology—one that required no prayer or even faith, such was its undeniability, though it was absent of light and warmth and no longer even possessed a name because politeness and fear had erased the word but not the thing itself.

  To believe in craziness was once sacred: seeing the face of God, how could a man remain sane? Why would he desire to? Strawl breathed again, a short, wracked breath between the seizing of his trembling diaphragm. Most would find horror in this moment and the rest sadness or tragic order. Strawl felt none of these. The air in his head grew heavy and clouded; his chest heaved for another breath and he realized he was in danger of passing out. The muscles in his face opened and he felt the skin stretching in a manner he couldn’t recall. The other portions, reacting through habit, attempted to flatten his expression, but the inclination this time was too powerful. His face split open like a jack-o-lantern and smiled.

  Strawl laughed. It was the first instance he had done so in earnest in forty years. The sound echoed in the coulee.

  “I thought you had half a fond spot for the Taker of Sisters.”

  “I admired the man,” Strawl said.

  Elijah shook his head. “So why are you so amused by his demise?”

  “Demise?” Strawl asked. Jacob’s blood smelled to Strawl like welded iron, what was beneath the burning, the loosening metal bead crawling back toward rock. He recalled Jacob asserting his claim to his sin with his sister and the certainty and vehemence of a man standing on his own property with a notarized paper to prove it, and, in the doing, he seemed to draw up the one moment with which he refused to part no matter the damage, and in that instant resided all the pleasure and tragedy a life contained. And it was as if the event devoured his heart every day and each day he ate it right back into himself.

  Strawl had no such reminiscences. His memory was an animal’s, containing no room for sentiment. Any emotion he’d encountered was grounded in anger or fear—same as the great cats and bears, the same as their fodder, too—or duty, which was a poor guess built upon witnessing others he figured knew better and followed with an awkward imitation.

  “This man didn’t rot from the inside and fall in the forest like a dying pine. What kind of a man dies like this?” Strawl asked. He threw Jacob’s chained arms at Elijah. They skittered into the darkness. But Strawl could still smell them, still feel them in his hands. “They had to drill and shoot and dynamite him from this world like those breaking rock for the dam. The riprap is spread up and down the river for miles each way, the rock was so gigantic and stubborn. That’s what kind of man this is. Fondness. Hell, I love this man, now.” He paused. “What is the line? What a work man is? That’s Shakespeare, not your goddamned Bible with its prophets and messiah. What a work man is!” Strawl said.

  “And what of the man who did this?”
Elijah asked him.

  “Him, too. They bestride this narrow world like a colossus.”

  “More Shakespeare.”

  “Yep.”

  Elijah shook his head sadly. “Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passes away.” He nodded at Jacob Chin, Taker of Sisters. “Ask him.”

  Strawl backhanded Elijah into the sand.

  “I did,” Strawl said, standing over the boy. “And he answered.”

  twenty

  In Nespelem, Truax reported nothing from the surrounding counties of which Strawl wasn’t aware. Strawl ordered ten pounds of jerked beef, two peppered with cayenne. He paid with cash.

  “You don’t want me to just put it on your bill?” Truax asked him.

  “Nope,” Strawl said. “In fact, what is the balance?”

  Truax told him and Strawl peeled enough money from the expense roll to cover it. “We square?”

  Truax nodded and dug in a drawer for his pipe, then packed and lit it. “You all there, Strawl?”

  “I am not,” Strawl said.

  They were quiet a moment. Outside the window, Strawl noticed the sky turn grey while a cloud blocked the sun, then a moment later, return to its midday hue.

  “I was just thinking,” he said. “Wasn’t six weeks ago when you had the body back there that clanged the bell to start this race, and now here I am again ready to finish it. I guess I’m just an old paint circling a track.”

  “Seems shorter than that,” Truax said.

  “Or longer,” Strawl remarked. “Depends on which end of the scope you’re looking through.”

  “I never knew you to cavort with the bottle. You take a fall or get clobbered again?”

  Strawl shook his head. “You asked if I was all here. I’m about half here and half there, but I am fit as a fiddle and here to dance to any tune the fiddler plays.”

  “Well I hope you’re not letting those BIA boys and Dice make the music.”

  Strawl shook his head. “All they can make is noise, and I can hear noise twenty miles off. I’m talking about music, not clatter.”