Lonesome Animals

by Bruce Holbert

  “How did this happen?” Strawl asked.

  The old woman flexed her forefinger as if it were pulling a trigger.

  “I didn’t shoot them,” Strawl said.

  The old woman shook her head. She pointed to the rocks above.

  “Goddamnit, that’s not what I intended!” Strawl shouted at her.

  The woman looked at him as if he were a tornado or a thunderbolt or a killing freeze.

  Strawl removed the stones covering the bodies. The father’s skull was a leaking gourd and his shirt spattered with his own grey brains. A boulder had blasted the boy’s chest with such force it parted his ribs and sternum and tore a strap of flesh a foot wide and twice that long. Under, his heart and part of a lung sucked for air and floundered until they ceased their toil.

  Suddenly, a girl cried out in Salish and scurried from the trees beneath them, half naked, dotted with welts. She raced through the stones and fell upon a pack, tearing at the rawhide straps.

  Strawl had prepared for her to rise with a gun. But she held in her hand, instead, only a skinning knife. Relieved, he cried out in her language to put it away. She blinked at him, understanding the words but not how they could be from him. Then she drew the blade across her throat. Blood arced from an artery and the scarlet spray pocked her skin and the rocks beneath her. She dropped to one knee. The blood poured from her like she’d opened a spigot. By the time he reached the girl it was thick as syrup.

  Strawl sat on a flat rock and watched her die. He was too weary to speak. He remained where he was through the day’s heat and into the cool evening. He possessed no compass to direct him from this place and no heart to beat blood into his muscles and press him forward if he had.

  He carried the bodies into a draw, where the dirt was softer. There he dug three graves. He let the old woman sing, then filled them. It was nightfall when he finished. He offered the woman passage back, making it clear she would ride his mount, but she was determined to stay and he could produce no convincing argument otherwise in her language or his own.

  Rumor and the Box Canyon newspaper reports cemented Strawl’s reputation with criminals and the general public alike, and, though those opinions originally diverged, time would eventually wind them into a braid.

  Ten days later, Strawl cooked breakfast, as he did each morning he wasn’t pursuing suspects. The skillet snapped with Polish sausage and he added three eggs. Emma puttered behind him, organizing canisters and setting the table. The child slept. Ordinarily it would have been a sweet moment for them, yet when he asked Emma for the peppermill and she dallied to finish lining the napkins with silverware in the proper order, Strawl clanked the pan with the metal spatula and said again, “The pepper.” Emma crossed her eyes at him testily, and he lifted the cast iron skillet, sausage and all, and drove it into the side of her head. Sausages scattered across the floor and grease, blood, and cerebral fluid clotted her hair and streaked her face.

  She staggered, blinked her eyes at him, then collapsed onto her side and seized. Strawl took her head in his hands and watched her pupils black the hazel from her eyes. The child, four years old, fussed in the other room, then found a toy and quieted, until a neighbor shielded her eyes and packed her away.

  Emma breathed for two more days, then did not.

  Strawl confessed to the commandant and insisted on a trial and prison. The commandant wrote Emma’s death up as an accidental fall and ordered her buried without an investigation. He promoted Strawl to captain, but Strawl resigned his commission the next day and remained AWOL throughout the remainder of his stint, taking contracts on men from the state and later the feds.

  He put Dot in his bed and she slept under his unfurled arm, but he did not rest. The third day, he farmed her out to the most pleasant neighbors and soon was absent entire seasons, just his bedroll and Isaac Stevens. He could tolerate only silence for weeks at a time, though it wasn’t the kind conferred upon so many men a generation younger than he, who drew their stoic qualities from dime-store novels and the picture shows. Strawl’s stillness was not a heroic choice; it contained nothing resembling assurance or calm; it was its opposite: a smoking, frozen bewilderment, or, when driven past tolerance, a mustering of powers so unhinged from will or belief, so purely sired in what was before him and his blindness to it, as to be monstrous.

  It seemed to him he’d gotten living backwards, that the years were stealing wisdom from him rather than delivering it. He recognized what anyone in police work must: in even the most virtuous life, anarchy lay, like a live round, bolted and chambered, and at any moment the firing pin could fall upon the casing and thrust the spinning lead in any direction.

  Those years, the only words he heard directed him toward his man or lied to steer him awry. Traveling aboard a breathing animal, he matched its breaths with his own, the only tastes in his mouth the remains of a meal from an army tin or something he’d killed an hour before, his mind emptied and filled with all of what surrounded him, and he sought from it nothing but its silence. Yet his ears denied him even this small favor, for no man is permitted that kind of quiet.

  one

  The Omak Stampede was only another rodeo in those t days and Omak just another lumber town. The year of the Crash back east, the mill owner’s wife, along with her women’s group, pressed her husband and the cattle barons and city fathers to adopt ordinances closing the taverns at 9 pm, and the sheriff was ordered to accost Indians and drovers for vagrancy if they had less than ten dollars on their person.

  In the late summer of 1932, two eateries shut their doors and all three taverns, including The Lucky Seven, which served as city hall. Ranch hands traded their callings for dam construction in the coulee and payday whorehouses. The alfalfa second cutting was left standing as no one remained to operate the swathers and balers, let alone buck and stack the bales. The city fathers concluded the winter following that, though the women were fine ladies and the five churches’ bells tolled a refined melody Sunday mornings, none were likely to turn their righteous efforts to peddling flour or fence wire or nails or hammers or supply the manpower to drive them.

  The mayor, who drew the black lot, traveled to Nespelem and promised the tribe a rodeo with longhouses and stick games and Wahlukes and a powwow if they would consider coming in for a community fair. An Indian woman named Pence mentioned moving the Keller downhill races to the Okanogan sand hill. Six months later the inaugural Omak Stampede Rodeo and Suicide Race crowded the town with enough broke drifters and cowhands to tend the ranches through spring.

  Strawl was a horseman of some repute and a lawman of more renown, though much of it had been fostered in infamy. Nearly sixty-three, he had been invited to join the melee. When he declined, the fair’s committee offered to name him parade marshal and, when he again begged off, the city council asked him to fire the starter’s pistol for the first night’s race. He agreed to attend on the condition that there be no public announcement. His reason was hardly modesty. His reputation was such he would be noted by any he encountered, whether he mounted a pulpit or rode in a convertible automobile. It was also such that half the crowd possessed reason to kill or maim him, some beyond even grudges, so he determined to make it as difficult as possible.

  Near sunset, half an hour before the race found him with a group of doddering septuagenarians, smoking beneath a tremendous oak at the race’s beginning point. Though ten years their junior, his pigeon toes and inward nature folded his shoulders and shrunk his stature, not unlike the others. In his law days, the posture made him appear earnest and simple, a guise he employed to combat the lies of suspects or those close to them.

  Old Belsbe coughed an awful hack. He had been ill for two months, though there was nothing other than the sniffles going about. It was likely the men around him had stood at his wedding and certain they would carry him to his rest, but without a son to take on his ground, his widow would be compelled to auction implements and all. Huddled in their snapped shirts and bolo ties, they calibrated
Belsbe’s days and their own assets and those of the others.

  Ground was truth past title and deed, past the addition or subtraction or algebra or calculus they learned in school or the god they learned in church or the trite history lesson a politician might use to lever a vote, a truth so inarguable it required no faith at all. Ground simply was. Strawl’s own five hundred acres he’d bequeathed early to his children—a mistake slowly bankrupting him, though dirt and its flora knew no difference.

  The participants in the race had begun to separate themselves from the crowd. They swapped whiskey bottles and laudanum in a tight group, while below the rodeo announcer delivered scores on the last few bull riders and chided the clowns draped on the stock chutes. Laughter and talk and periodic applause wafted up the embankment along with the smell of the frybread in the concession cooker grease.

  Strawl checked the blank rounds in the starter pistol, then examined the course, which opened with a leap onto a sixty-two-degree grade that hurtled a hundred yards into the Okanogan River. Once man and horse were across and up the bank, they labored a hundred-yard incline into the rodeo grounds.

  As the events in the rodeo round wound up, the announcer directed the audience above and behind the north bleachers. Lights mounted to the poles that lined the course suddenly blinded the onlookers. Horses, turned blanched as the moon, reared and wheeled. They grunted as the last of the riders cinched their saddles. One began to nicker and fight its bridle. The other animals responded until the whole field was astir. Riders yipped, armed themselves with quirts, and tied leather pouches filled with gravel meant not to stir their mounts but beat passing riders.

  The mayor nodded toward Strawl, who lifted his arm and squeezed off a shot. Animal and man leapt at the bluff and piled as one down a hill too steep to hold plant or seed. In a breath, half the riders covered the two hundred yards to the water. The rest remained in the fog of men and horseflesh tumbling toward the Okanogan River. Those still aboard their mounts floundered through water, swam a few yards, then lumbered into the rodeo grounds, which were once again filled with sound and light.

  The other riders littered the grade and nearest bank, hobbled with broken ankles, dislocated shoulders, cracked ribs, and cracked skulls. Their horses drank at the water’s edge as if suddenly and quietly pastured. Three tested broken legs, stunned that something as certain as a bone could be so quickly cast into doubt. Later, in the rendering yard, they’d be put down for pig feed.

  The crowd quieted. The temperature was stifling, and Strawl’s duties as honorary marshal were finished. He started a second cigarette and admired the orange ember cooking the paper. In the clear sky, he could discern the constellations. They were all that was left of his mother’s teachings, stars in the sky that someone once thought made pictures.

  Strawl searched for the Rotarians and his check. They were uneasy in his presence and wouldn’t keep him long. In his police days, when their tone bent toward haughty, Strawl would soon follow with a stop at their businesses, one of their children in tow. He’d confide evidence of their daughters letting lowlifes into their pants or their sons stealing skin books for self-abuse. Not crimes, he’d say. Just unbecoming. Not what a community man would want out.

  The old-timers drifted toward a stand that hawked cold drinks. One wiry man remained, slight of build. His hand smoothed his long mustache and his blue eyes blinked in the dusty air. He wore a grey county sheriff’s cap.

  “Well, I guess you know why I am here,” the man said.

  “You’re going to offer me some work, Officer Dice. Or arrest me.”

  “Both possibilities have been discussed.”

  “And?”

  “The former. We want to contract you.”

  “Why waste the time and the money? The reservation is across the river from you,” Strawl told him.

  Dice remained quiet.

  “And it’s not your jurisdiction.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Let the tribal police hunt him.”

  Dice looked into his hands. “It’s more complicated than that.”

  Strawl laughed. Dice was sheriff of the neighboring county but rarely absent from his office except to walk across the street to town hall and lunch with the mayor. At his insistence, his picture appeared in the weekly papers next to the crime blotter, though he had investigated nothing rougher than a trespassing since succeeding Strawl as sheriff. Even when Jasper Sampson was arrested by vigilantes for burning outbuildings, then lit his jail cell on fire and cooked himself; Dice let a federal man clean it up. It wasn’t that he had no stomach for the work; he saw no profit in it. Hiram Evans meant to give up the State House the following winter. A well-meaning neighbor had approached Strawl himself about an appointment to the position, but Dice wasn’t waiting for encouragement.

  Strawl hollered at a passing boy.

  “Bring me a cold drink,” Strawl told him. “Be quick.”

  The boy pointed at himself. Strawl nodded.

  “Yes sir.” The boy turned for the drink stand.

  “You didn’t give him any money,” Dice said.

  “He’ll be glad to treat.”

  Dice watched him go. The rodeo below was breaking up. Strawl listened to the audience’s steps clatter the bleacher planks.

  “You hunted George Taylor,” Dice said. Taylor was a bank robber after the Great War. He stuck up two Spokane Old Nationals in one day. A week after, Strawl discovered his abandoned sedan at Leahy Junction. He borrowed a mount and followed him north as far as the Columbia, then east through the reservation. Finally, he killed Taylor through a line shack window while the man fried bacon at the woodstove.

  Dice stuck his hands in his pocket.

  “Put the State boys on the bastard,” Strawl told him.

  “They been,” he said.

  “They got to have a lead or two then.”

  “Not a sniff.”

  Dice paused and lit a cigarette, then offered one to Strawl, who declined, as he was still working on his own.

  “Heard you got you some help,” Dice said. “Hired man?”

  Strawl shook his head. “Dot’s husband.”

  “I thought he was educated?”

  “Can’t eat a sheepskin.”

  “Them shysters back east wrung us good, haven’t they?”

  “My meals are still arriving regularly enough,” Strawl said.

  Dice drew from his cigarette. His pinched face pinked in the glow.

  “That dam coming along?” Strawl asked him.

  “Now that Roosevelt has shook Congress by the collar.”

  Roosevelt was a liar, but good at it. He’d requested money for a high dam in Grand Coulee, like Hoover’s, but Congress had only funded enough for a low structure. Roosevelt ordered the engineers to go ahead with the original proposition anyway, then told Congress to either finish the chore or explain five million dollars for a dam that stopped no water.

  “Workers thick as ants on an anthill is what I’ve heard.”

  Dice nodded.

  “Registered voters all, I presume.”

  “Soon as they cash their checks.”

  Strawl leaned into the oak. The striped bark pressed lines into the skin on his arm.

  “Would you consent to examine a body?” Dice asked him.

  “Where?”

  “Truax’s meat locker.”

  “Family don’t mind you keeping him in a cooler?”

  “Storing him isn’t nearly as cruel as killing him was.”

  Strawl had planned to cross the river to Nespelem in the next week to sharpen saw blades at Clara’s Mill anyway. Visiting the butcher wouldn’t put him out. “I’ll look at the body,” Strawl said.

  The boy returned. He handed Strawl the paper cup and Strawl took it and drank.

  Dice tossed the child a quarter and the boy looked at it. “You want some, too?” the boy inquired.

  Dice shook his head. The boy vanished.

  “You got a kind streak for ch
ildren?” Strawl asked him.

  “I’m happy to treat, too,” Dice said.

  Strawl blew a cloud of cigarette smoke his direction and watched him blink.

  “We’ve got three counties that meet within fifteen miles of one another,” Dice told him.

  “Well, you all put your heads together, then.”

  “There’s money in it is what I’m saying. Might be handy.”

  Strawl turned the cup in his hands.

  “How’s that wife of yours?” Strawl asked him.

  “She’s nothing to this affair.”

  “Affair,” Strawl said. “A word that fills both barrels, doesn’t it?” He turned the paper cup until he found its seam, then slid his thumbnail under the corner and began unraveling the coating. “How long have you been copping?” Strawl asked.

  “Including time as your deputy, ten or twelve years, I guess.”

  “ In all that time, you ever once know anyone to twist my tail?”

  “No,” Dice said.

  “Or herd me like a woman.”

  Dice shook his head.

  He spat on the ground and smiled hard. “You think when I left that badge in the drawer, I left what was behind it in there, too?”

  Dice extinguished his cigarette into the heel of his boot, looked at Strawl one more time. Dice had shoved too hard, coaxed too little, and Strawl waited to see if he possessed sense enough to retreat. And when he turned and walked back to his car without a word, Strawl gave him credit at least for that. He watched the patrol car pull away, a boxy Chevy magazine ads claimed delivered eighty miles an hour on a straightaway.

  two

  The following morning, Strawl arrived at Thacker Ferry just after dawn. He drove his trap wagon, a flatbed pickup. On the undercarriage, iron forks extended beyond the grill. They braced a hundred-pound bar on which Strawl had bolted a cable winch. He replaced it with a snow blade November to March.