Lonesome Animals

by Bruce Holbert

  “Well, watch your topknot,” Truax said.

  “Do the same,” Strawl told him.

  Strawl then took his leave. The doorbell clanked on the lock stile when it shut behind him. The day was warm but crisp with fall. The military contractors had sawed circles every six feet of the boardwalk, and centered in each hole was a spindly white oak, new enough the branches and leaves cast shadows thin as fishing nets over the streets, in an order that contradicted the scattering of pitched and flat-roofed buildings and their gutterless eaves.

  Strawl stopped to make a cigarette, then walked through that flickering of shadow and light, his boots thumping each step in a slow, rhythmic beat, more than the random rattle most men made. His legs moved with their own purpose, sure of what he was not but making him more certain every time they clacked the grey pine boards under him, half a foot across broken by a quarter inch of gap, then another, and his shadow floated between the order and chaos of the others. He smoked and stepped through the smoke, smelling its burning, different than the stink in his lungs and on his clothes. Fourteen horses were tied to the fence at Hurd’s Tavern along with a four-door Buick sedan and a rusted 1923 Ford grain truck with enough space in the bed to haul ten men. The weather had relented enough to keep the dust down, and the sun shone in the blue sky cleanly, and Strawl could see past the end of town to the varying greens of the pine and fir and birch scattering the nearest ridge and the grey and rusty rock where nothing grew, and the blue-grey sagebrush that pocked the grade below, all that took in the thin soil there.

  The boy he had seen six weeks ago, then a week after that, hurried the other direction upon recognizing Strawl. Strawl watched him disappear in an alley, his dog nodding and loping after him. A doorless Model A clanked past in the other direction, then a pair of bays with Indian riders followed. Strawl could smell the animals and the men damp with their own perspiration. A mile east, he heard a woman speak to a child, and closer, but south, a straw boss directing an Indian to take the tractor and turn the summer fallow. There was no entrance in the rear of the tavern, just the one on the street and another opening into an alley. He could sit at a table between the two and see both with no trouble. Elijah had tied Stick and Baal to the livery for feed and a good watering, where he’d also borrowed a single-wheeled cart and drove it to the trading post for their necessities.

  Strawl approached the tavern and with each step, he grew more assured and less dubious about his endeavor.

  He opened the tavern door and stepped inside.

  The place was owned by Garfield Hurd, an ex-army sergeant who had earned a fortune bootlegging to the Indians and now was slowly losing it serving them legally. The building, like every other in Nespelem, was thin-walled and shingled with shakes that in summers left it a tinderbox. Fires had already gutted the town twice, though it was less than thirty years old.

  Strawl stood in the doorway a moment and allowed his eyes to correct for the darkness. Inside were twelve men who ranged from seventeen to forty-eight. All had received a letter by post a week earlier. Hurd raised a hand, and Strawl returned the greeting. Hurd poured a schooner of beer. Strawl took it and drank. He looked to the three back tables seating the Bird clan. “I’ll need six buckets and the bourbon,” Strawl said.

  Hurd hunted the whiskey under the till, then, finding it, glanced up at Strawl to make certain of his intent. Strawl wagged his finger and Hurd set the bottle on the bar. He commenced to fill the wooden buckets with beer. Strawl took three, then returned for the rest and the bottle, eschewing a shot glass, knowing the Birds were not inclined to measure their whiskey.

  Strawl purchased two dozen cigars, as well. He lit one for each and offered the beer until the clan was all smoking and drinking. Strawl sipped his beer and dawdled over his own cigar for half an hour. The veins of the leaf wrapper burned hotter: they pinked and glowed before the ash like bloody rivers crossing a dark topography, the light not unlike the coals baking the Taker of Sisters.

  Strawl unbreeched his revolver and tumbled the cylinder, listening to each chamber click until the wheel slowed to a stop. He set five bullets into the chamber and spun the cylinder once more, then replaced the works and pressed the pin centering it and fired a shot into the wall above the clan. The report hushed the din. The Birds stared at Strawl.

  “Boys,” Strawl said. “Don’t let me interrupt your revelry. Please. It does my heart good to see men at ease.”

  The room remained quiet.

  “I said drink,” Strawl shouted. He put a round a little lower on the wall. One of the Birds lifted the whiskey from the table and took a tug, then handed it to the next who did the same, while the others lifted their beer glasses, still eyeing him.

  Strawl ordered six more buckets of beer. Smoke rose from their cigars to the ceiling, where it collected, then descended back upon them in silver fog. In it, Strawl could smell Jacob’s fat dripping on the fire. He recalled his mind floating in that scene and felt it again unloose and hover outside his head. He fired his pistol into the floor to direct his thoughts, but though the shot rang in his ears, and the powder’s stench crowded his nose, and the hole in the floorboards was enough to put his thumb through, his thoughts remained apart from him.

  “Yesterday, I saw a man. Someone cooked him. Slow. While he was still living.”

  The Birds quieted.

  “He was a criminal, I guess. There’s paper on him in two counties, though neither describes his crime. They just tell of some things he did. Stealing and fighting. Those aren’t crimes unless someone else decides they are. The damned bigwigs steal every day. It’s why we’re in the fix we are, isn’t it? And fighting? Taking every breath is a fight, isn’t it boys? Can you recall one moment that wasn’t a fight? Guns and fists are what the law doesn’t like, but for some, all they have is guns and fists, and some, they’re fighting things guns and fists can’t even crease.”

  He paused and looked at the silent group. Some cradled their beer glasses and others sat with their hands in their laps, gazing down.

  “That man, he took it. His arms were hacked from his shoulders, then he was strung up like a beef and cooked and he kept alive. He could’ve picked dying. I’ve seen plenty do it when they recognize their clock leaking time. But he didn’t do that; he kept alive. Knowing nothing was left but cooking and dying anyway.” Strawl fired into the ceiling and a bolt of light shot through. He squeezed the trigger and let off another round and another luminous cord bisected the room. Strawl stood and the two rays crossed his torso.

  The oldest Bird rose. He had greyed at the temples, though he was as smooth-skinned as a child and the only wrinkles he possessed, cornering each eye, made him appear wise and alert. They were a beautiful people, Strawl thought. His name was Raymond, and no one ever addressed him as Ray.

  “We have done nothing,” he said.

  “I’m not here to accuse.”

  “You’re not hunting a killer?”

  “Are you killing?” Strawl put the gun barrel next to the man’s temple.

  Raymond drank from the whiskey bottle and handed it to a cousin or nephew, someone not young enough to be his son.

  “Heard it was you,” he said to Strawl.

  “I heard that, too,” Strawl said.

  “That would mean you’re chasing your tail.”

  “And that isn’t like me,” Strawl said.

  “No,” Raymond said. “It’s not.”

  “Well, decorating bodies doesn’t sound like you, either,” he said. He raised the pistol and swung it around the room. “You others. I don’t know so well.”

  The Indian now holding the whiskey bottle took a pull.

  “Leave us,” he said.

  Strawl shot the bottle from his hand. The bullet creased a cousin behind him who hit the wooden floor and howled, then grabbed his bleeding arm. Strawl watched the blood soak his shirtsleeve, then tick on the floor as it had from Jacob, like time itself leaking away. Strawl bent and looked over the prone man. “Fuck pain,�
�� he said. “Fuck fear.” He laughed. “Fuck your sister.”

  It was quiet. The wound was clean. “In and out,” Strawl said finally. “You’ll lift a glass again with no trouble.”

  “Killing us will do no good,” the one still holding the bottleneck said.

  Strawl turned the gun on him.

  “It might,” Strawl said. “Can’t know for sure without going on and doing it.”

  “The law will take you.”

  “Law paid me for twenty years and all I did was kill and harass Indians. They’d be happy to have a few on the house.”

  He set his beer glass on the table and watched it wobble, then steady. Condensation ringed the wood under it. He inhaled a breath and studied his hands until their tremors slowed. Bullet holes pocked the back wall, and through them seeped a fainter light, like stars in early dusk. Casings clacked on the floor under his chair legs. The Indians stared at him, many wide-eyed, looking for openings to exit or furniture to duck under.

  “Goddamnit,” he said. This was nothing near what he’d intended.

  He leveled his gaze at Raymond.

  “We’ve been honest with one another, haven’t we?” Strawl asked. “About the big things, I mean. You might have lied to keep from getting caught and I might have lied to catch you, but we never lied about what we were, any of us.” Strawl tipped a beer bottle at the family. “I put Henry there in the guardhouse six months once. I’m just guessing, you likely pulled a couple over on me, as well.” He paused.

  “You have committed crimes, but most are justified by your ways. It’s why I have not visited you.”

  Raymond and the others waited for him to go on.

  “I have summoned devils within me all my days, and they have heeded my call. So much so, that they arrive now without prompt or cue and I have to beckon other devils to do them battle. I have spilled blood for no cause. I would like to be sorry for it, but for the most part I am not. It’s a failing, I know.” He paused. “It has made me strong and feared and it has ground me to a nub.” He rested his eyes a moment. “But the things I have seen recently.” He stopped and drank. “I hunt a man who is a man but something else, too. As brave as the Taker of Sisters died, this man I seek has more to him. He had the power to make such a man die, yes, but also the will to watch and appreciate such an end. There is something beautiful in blood, a thing past the beauty of the flesh, or a flying bird, or a painting or a song, even past a god’s grace,” Strawl said. “This man knows this thing. I will know what he knows. Then he can go ahead and take what he wants from me.”

  “What if it is your own face you see?” Raymond asked.

  “It will be,” Strawl said. “But it will be another’s as well.”

  “Maybe your monster is lonely.” The group laughed.

  “Monsters are always alone,” Strawl said. “But never lonely.” He set his gun on the table and reloaded the cylinders, then held it up and spun the housing so the group of men could see it filled with rounds. He turned his back to it and the Indian men. “Here is my pistol. If you have done these things, you will kill me now, and I will die and many will be happy for me to be dead, but I will meet who it is that does these things and know him and be satisfied. Kill me, but only if you have killed the others.” Strawl sighed. “And if you have done these things and do not kill me now, then you are not a man nor even a dog, but a snake slinking into his hole.”

  No one moved aside from Hurd, who ducked behind the bar for his scattergun.

  They would kill him now, Strawl knew—he had neither the law nor the fear of the guilty to discourage them—but he would have his answer, nonetheless. And then perhaps death would be a relief, just a late Sunday morning with no chores and no church and no light flooding the room, no conscience to pester you into rising when you rolled onto your side and make out daylight in the window glass and determine the time, and then, just as you prepare to swing your feet onto the cold floor, you remember it is Sunday and your muscles unloosen and your head returns to your feather pillow and your eyes close and your head darkens once more, and you feel lucky, blessed even, for ten minutes of sack. And it was better alone, with no one to share it with, no one to wake you and ask if you wanted her to begin the coffee, or to start the coffee without your asking and then begin breakfast for which you would be grateful thirty seconds after rising, but those minutes before, resent as much as if a day offence building stood before you.

  The Bird clan whispered and smoked and mulled his offer. Minutes passed until the beer was gone and the cigars burned to stubs. The room emptied, two or three at a time nodding to the new barmaid on their path to the door, and with their departure, Strawl’s fatigue returned. It was no relief being left alive and outside of it. Finally, only Raymond remained. He opened the cylinder and emptied Strawl’s pistol of bullets and speared the burning end of his cigar in a tin ashtray.

  “We have nothing to do with these killings,” he said.

  “I’m out of fight, Raymond,” Strawl told him. “You should have seen them. The first had wings made of rib bone. And the last. Well, I told you about him. Both in their youth, still.”

  “None of us are young,” Raymond replied. “Not even those just born.”

  Strawl handed Raymond a fresh cigar and sat in silence as the man left the tavern. He drank a little more from the bottle of beer in front of him, but it was lukewarm and bitter and didn’t slake his thirst. Raymond and his band had not killed anyone. Strawl did not hold with the notion that eyes revealed the soul. Faces were another matter. He trusted them not for what they revealed, but for what they could not hide. Living animated each in a manner neither beard nor rouge could mask, and each differed in how it told of such living. Though Raymond had managed to maintain a lively wit, every muscle that wrapped his skull was tired. His skin draped over his face as loose as a serape. The narrative in him had ceased, and what remained was history severed from memory, no more alive than if read in a book. Killing was not in them any longer. They were simply witnesses that rumor and hearsay occasionally multiplied into more.

  He’d failed.

  He had no more suspects and a herd of red-assed police in a race to see which could take the most of his flesh the soonest. He realized he was tired and in want of sleep. He hoped Elijah had not dallied collecting the horses. It was a short ride to Conant Springs and the soft meadow that encircled it.

  Strawl rose to square his bill. Hurd had left and the hired woman stood with her back to him, rinsing glasses. Her dark hair had been parted in the middle and tied with a beaded band. She stood in a familiar manner. The woman’s face rose in the mirror then she turned to accept his money and he recognized it was Ida, his late wife and Elijah’s mother. She counted his change, then let it sit on the blonde wooden slab.

  “Alive,” Strawl said.

  She nodded.

  “Did the current save you?”

  “No,” she said. “I was never in the river.”

  Strawl put his hands to his face and rubbed his brow. “Did Elijah give you the money?”

  “He has money?”

  “He sold half the ranch. I wanted to know what he squandered the proceeds on.”

  “He owns no ranch.”

  “I gave him half of mine,” Strawl said. “After you died.”

  “I have not seen him since I left you.”

  “But he knows you are well.”

  “He knows,” Ida said.

  “Was living with me so awful?” Strawl asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “For me.”

  “Then why did you stay?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You couldn’t have left without deceiving me, making me think you were dead?”

  “No,” she said.

  Strawl was quiet until she spoke again.

  “I did not want to cause a mess in your house.”

  “Generous of you,” Strawl said. He tapped the bar with his finger, rattling the coins and paper. “Though the funeral put me to some e
xpense.”

  Ida set down a dried glass, then lifted another and toweled the inside, her dark hand flattened against the glass.

  “I never chased skirts. I never struck you. I never left you hungry.”

  She ran some water and rinsed another glass under it.

  “Well good luck to you,” Strawl said.

  He collected his money and stepped from the bar into the bright light of day. It blinded him, and he squinted. Elijah sat on the bench in front of the tavern.

  “Same number went in came out. Still no killer.”

  “Nope,” Strawl said. “Ran into your mother, though.”

  Elijah nodded.

  “The money. Was it for her?”

  Elijah shook his head.

  “You knew she hadn’t drowned.”

  “I knew.”

  “It would be a good reason. The money and her,” Strawl said.

  “I know,” Elijah said. “But it wouldn’t be my reason.”

  “Maybe I could stand being deceived a little.”

  “You’ve been deceived plenty.”

  “That so?”

  “It was Dot that smuggled Ida off the place. That was her part of the bargain.”

  “Bargain?” Strawl asked.

  “My end was to keep you from killing more Indians.”

  “Seems to me you got the lighter duty.”

  “Dot didn’t know that.”

  “But you did.”

  “Yes.”

  “For certain.”

  “Yes.”

  Strawl noticed the grin on the boy’s face, a strange smile, one he recognized though its expression was now not familiar.

  “Jacob was about four days dead. That would put his death the night before you came back to the ranch, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would,” Elijah said.

  Strawl heard the meaty whack before he felt it. His knee bent in a manner it wasn’t built for and he tipped clumsily onto his side. The pain was by now familiar: there was no beauty or wonder in it, only hurt, and he was not worthy of a glorious death or even a simple one after which people mourned, and rather than provoke him, the blow and the knowledge left him resigned. Another blow from the rifle butt to his injured ribs took the wind from him, and he imagined he was drowning, as he’d imagined Ida drowned. Then came another blow that cracked against his ankle and though it did the least damage it caused him the most pain, and he yelped like a wounded animal, enraged, finally, and once more.