Lonesome Animals

by Bruce Holbert

  Young Bill Thacker, Wild Goose Bill’s son, picked at his breakfast on board the boat. A late riser and a drinker all his waking hours, Young Bill was worthy of remark, but he was never a shade to Wild Goose Bill, who had established the ferry for the army, which drove the Salish tribes through the Big Bend country to the Okanogans and back again until the federals settled on the reservation boundaries. Bill turned a profit, but he gambled and drank with anyone so inclined, which kept him from gathering the riches he might have. He’d earned his nickname for a drunken Thanksgiving hunting expedition that ended in him poaching a farmer’s pet goose, then claiming he’d seen it walking toward Canada to migrate. He was killed finally in a gun battle over a woman he had determined to take as his wife, though the idea wasn’t fondly received by her or the boy she coaxed into being her champion. The woman was shot twice through the arm by Bill, and the boy and he swapped enough lead to put them both beyond a doctor’s care.

  Young Bill wiped his chin and rose from the table, then pulled on his oily duster and wide-brimmed hat, beaten from crossings under weather less fair than this morning’s. He unchained the gate and Strawl drove the truck carefully over the metal ramp onto the barge. Bill tugged at a come-along pulley and the heavy ramp rose, shifting the ferry forward in the water. He untethered the ropes from the poles driven into the river bottom on both sides and the current pushed them toward the downstream pilings, but Young Bill gunned the diesel engine and squared the ferry with the cable strung to the opposite bank. He tugged a rope starter and another, smaller motor caught, which turned a pulley. When he locked the crank into place, the spool took the cable slack with a lurch, then commenced to drag them across. Two seagulls rose at the sound, but a family of ducks simply separated and let the ferry pass.

  At the opposite landing Bill opened his ledger and added the trip to Strawl’s tab, then eased the ramp onto the sandy bank. The road rose out of the canyon, carrying Strawl again into the Okanogan country. Judged by beauty, it was far superior to Strawl’s own ground. The slopes to the water were grassed with bluebunch and broadleafs like balsamroot and wolfweed. Alder and cottonwood dotted the bluffs and draws. He could smell the pollen in the air, and the pine and fir pitch cutting it, reminding him of Indian medicine.

  Above, in the flat meadows, a few farmhouses appeared, some painted and others abandoned, their sideboards buckled against from weather and neglect. Falling boughs had punctured a roof or two. The Indians had surrendered the dwellings after a final year of not harvesting enough to make expenses, or simply deciding to labor upon a farm they never desired, so they could pay bills for which they felt no responsibility, wasn’t a bargain they were willing to enter into another year.

  Other homes were scattered across the clearings beyond: poorer shacks and lean-tos, often walled with rusting tin or the hoods and hacksawed roofs of cars. Spoiling elk and deer carcasses hung from a few cottonwoods and locusts shading them. Two men spooned in a garden like dozing lovers. Grease darkened their checked shirts. One’s head rose, and he shaded his eyes with his hand to watch Strawl pass. A barnstormer dipped a wing over the road, then climbed until his plane was a speck in the sky too distant for anyone but Strawl to hear.

  The town was four streets with passable houses surrounded by another scattering of shanties extended this way and that, as shapeless as spit on a flat rock. White men, like the butcher, Truax, owned the hardware and the livery and taverns and grocery. Most had appeared on the reservation with nothing but what they could borrow or pilfer. Eventually, they took women, but on the reservation the institution of marriage was unhinged. The merchants refused to acknowledge tribal ties and the churches wouldn’t wed heathens until they could read catechism. Ceremonies, licenses, preachers, and justices of the peace were tiresome formalities, shed for flesh and convenience. Courtship consisted of a man putting whiskey into his beloved until she either surrendered to or slept through his passions. Women changed hands like tractor parts, and often a pretty girl was more or less shanghaied into a man’s house if her family didn’t have the means or guns to argue. The Catholic priest scolded his parish weekly over such indiscretions, but Sunday morning generally presented its own difficulties to the local population, and the few in the pews already abided by the Church’s teachings.

  Strawl waited while eight mottled cattle passed, steered with a willow switch by an overalled Indian boy. A half-pint yellow dog followed, tongue lolling in his mouth.

  Inside the butcher shop, Truax cranked a pan full of hog scraps into sausage. He glanced at the ring of a bell attached to the knob and squinted, then blinked upon seeing Strawl. His hand moved into a drawer that held his pistol and a pry bar. Strawl had never had any legal truck with the man, but he’d left one of his brothers walleyed in a bar scrape. On the other hand, he’d once extricated Truax’s youngest son from a larceny charge when the boy fell in drunk with a gang of no-accounts who robbed a mule and wagon from the priest’s stable.

  “Still keep the equalizers in the same place, I see,” Strawl said.

  Truax smiled. “Didn’t recognize you, sheriff.”

  “Or maybe you did.” Strawl laughed. He nodded at the meat and the grinder. “Better pepper it up good.”

  “I could grind horse hooves and beaver teeth with a little pepper, they’d eat it.”

  Truax washed his hands at the sink, then dried them on an apron hanging from the pegs. Over six feet and barrel-chested as a bull, he cut an imposing figure, despite the spindly legs supporting it.

  “I was wondering how many before you’d show up.”

  “I’m not on the payroll,” Strawl said.

  Truax tapped the ashes from his corncob pipe and reloaded it. “I got some advice for who is.” He puffed. “Catch the bastard or put a lot of barbwire between here and that dam.”

  “If the barbwire was manageable, we’d see it,” Strawl said.

  Truax nodded. “We might as well be Canada, now. Less they hear the better.”

  “Except if you got a killer amongst you.”

  “Shit,” Truax said. “I don’t know a worthwhile man over fifty who hasn’t killed someone.”

  “You included,” Strawl said.

  Ten years ago, Truax’s niece had garnered the attention of an older man who’d turned up with a broken skull soon after. Strawl had caught the gossip that Truax had offered the suitor honor or life, and the poor fellow had thought it only poker and bet his chips. But Strawl was fond of Truax and not compelled either way about the victim. He’d relinquished the case to the tribe’s police, who, when no one squawked and Truax made good on a beer keg he’d offered as a donation, declared the death a suicide.

  Truax’s was not unlike most reservation crimes. Here, justice was less a blindfolded woman weighing a man’s virtues against his sin than a poor shot occasionally firing a round into a fistfight to remind those brawling she could, if inclined.

  “I told you I ain’t working,” Strawl said.

  Truax spit into his sink basin and ran some water into it. “If it was plain murder, Dice’d stick to shaming us Sundays with the Methodists and invest in cemetery plots. It’s not killings they got objections concerning. It’s killings with style.”

  “This fellow have a flair for it?”

  “Thinks they put corpses in museums, far as I can tell. See for yourself.”

  Truax opened the metal door to the locker. The room went white in degrees as he set a match to each hanging lantern. Blood from the slaughter room adjacent had worked under the wall. The cold room smelled like meat and metal. The light irritated dust motes into the air. A steer lowed in the corral across the street. Otherwise, it was silent aside from the ticking of the flames in each lamp.

  The body lay on three two-by-eights that rested across a pair of metal carts. It was facedown and blue, not the tinge a white person turns, but the darker hue of Indian flesh in rigor mortis. The sternum had been sawed, not broken with an axe. The killer had then painstakingly sliced tracks for the ribs wi
th what looked to be a razor and pulled them through the back flesh until they resembled nothing more than angels’ wings. The scapula blades added to the effect, though no angel or its carcass was likely to be found with skin strips and the attached fat dangling into its empty body cavity like guttered candlewax or strands of colored sinew dangling from its wounds like frayed denim.

  “Who found him?” Strawl asked.

  “Mills. Tied his horse to the hardware rail and there he was.”

  “He around?”

  Truax shook his head. “Skidding logs with the Canucks.”

  Strawl’s cigarette was out. He patted his shirt, then pulled a leather bag from the pocket and a paper loose from its package. He sprinkled tobacco into the folded papers and twisted the smoke, found his matches, then set both on the metal counter.

  “There a gut pile?”

  Truax shook his head.

  “Any blood at all?”

  “Just where the body laid.”

  “How come you know all this?”

  “Like everyone else, I came running when Mills hollered.”

  Strawl nodded.

  “Why at the hardware?”

  “I don’t know. Seems to me him laid out like a turkey on a platter’s more to the point.”

  Strawl examined the bottoms of the man’s feet and his ankles and wrists. He’d not been bound or beaten. An incision above each ankle had emptied his femoral arteries. Dried blood knotted each shut. Another slit had opened the jugular and drained the skull. Each cut was clean and stitched with needle and thread. The victim had been hit in the temple with something sharp enough to tear his cheek to the bone and blunt enough to drive a dime-sized skull fragment into the only organ the killer didn’t relieve him of. A spade point was Strawl’s best guess. It wasn’t an unusual weapon on the reservation; guns made noise and knives required close range and probably some acquaintance. A shovel would at least provide the advantage of surprise.

  The blow may not have killed the man. Skull fractures rarely took lives and those that did took time. The brain might have hemorrhaged, but bleeders generally took a number of blows. The man’s eyeballs were shot with blood as if he may have been strangled, but Strawl found no ligature marks.

  He examined the body for an hour, then stepped from the locker back into the store. Truax continued to grind meat, the wheel squeaking each turn. Strawl considered the delicate cuts on the body: no skips, no slashes demonstrating doubt, nor hacks from anger, just work done well. The rest was lunacy or a sense of humor. The incisions were where the genius was. His killer had shucked himself of emotion for practicality.

  “Hell of a mess,” Truax said, behind him again.

  Strawl nodded.

  “Not your problem, though.”

  “Nope.”

  “Who’ll take care of it, then?”

  “No one.”

  The skin between Truax’s eyebrows pressed together. He rubbed his forehead, folding his thumb and index finger over each temple. “Ain’t nothing you can do?”

  “Tribe’s got its police. Maybe they’ll get lucky. That’s what it’ll take.”

  “Redskins hunting a redskin,” Truax said.

  “What makes you so sure it’s an Indian committed this crime?” Strawl asked him.

  “They’re the only ones with time to do it up fancy,” Truax told him. “Rest of us got jobs.”

  Outside, the day’s light blinded him, then a clanking engine and the whir of wings and flaps split the air. Strawl lifted his face toward the plane and spread his arms, thinking he might himself take flight if he took a notion, but he remained anchored to the earth, looking crucified by the plane’s hurtling shadow.

  Strawl’s hearing was as constant as a hound on the scent and sounds to him were clear and separate as smells. He could recognize a footstep two miles off, and likely what made it, and he could do it in a rainstorm. Moreover, his head divided sounds until he had them situated as well as if he could see what was making them. But such a clatter melted his talent into a chaos of noise and undid his nerves.

  He reclined upon a shaded bleacher seat until the plane lopped over them, then suspended above the hard dirt like it required a moment to become simple and machine again, then rattled to the ground, stopping near the tiny horse track’s grandstand, which held twenty Indians and rounders, as well as Strawl, ready to replace one gawker with another.

  The girl finishing her ride reported she recognized nothing from above, not her house, not the town. The river turned a drizzle.

  “A wonder the birds don’t get lost,” Strawl said.

  Their faces turned toward him. The crowd parted as he approached the airplane and its pilot, whom he showed his badge.

  “Police business,” Strawl said. It was a big place with few people and lots of cover if you could manage on your own, and many could. He had decided a look from above might be of use.

  He labored over the wing and into the plane’s cockpit. The pilot handed Strawl a set of smeared goggles that Strawl declined. The plane’s pistons began to whir. The connecting rods ticked and the cam whined and the carburetor twisted air and gasoline to accept the plug’s spark. The tires bounced on the hard dirt while the wings bucked the wind and gravity until the plane shuddered and with a tug, began to rise. They climbed slowly over the rooftops, checkerboard spaces between the dusty streets like the tartan wool in the mackinaw the pilot wore. The trees were upended cones and then circles that contained differing degrees of green.

  The pilot banked over the town and the fairgrounds and the upturned faces. Strawl pointed him south and west. The pilot nodded and they traced the river’s channel. Cataracts boiled in its black current. Later, in a smooth pool near Washington Flats, a flock of mudhens rose as one. They could have been a school of fish misplaced, like Strawl himself flying, but he likened them more to a symphony climbing the opening notes of the overture, the instruments synchronized in a way both natural and not.

  The dam was before them, then, a scar marking the river’s course, but a minor wound from this high, an injury one survives, one that adds to one’s courage, or the myth of that courage.

  Strawl directed the pilot to the other side, and they floated over the farm country like no bird ever had, low enough for Strawl to make out the shadow of the plane as it passed over the country. Almota was where he had imagined it, and the spring and canyon that bore his own name, and the Big Hole and each road that ribboned the farms as delicate as lace stitching. Cattle gazed up, stupefied. A deer herd, with the same unison as the birds before, broke from feeding in the wheat, leaping rock and sagebrush and barbwire all with the same grace, until the plane passed and they halted, continuing to stare at the sound of the engine.

  They passed Osborne Corner and Pearl and the Troutman Ranch Road and Tag Ear Lake and Badger Spring and the Chalk Hills and then banked over old Fort Okanogan back toward the reservation, and Strawl could identify each tree and each bay in the river and each bend and ripple, and then Kartar Town and the lighter blue and green of Omak Lake’s south fingers and the silver granite cliffs lining its north edge, flashing in the light.

  Strawl motioned up with his thumb and the plane climbed until the whole of the country looked under a haze and he imagined he could see the earth’s curve at the horizon. Beyond Bonaparte Mountain, they wheeled like a circling hawk across the unpeopled north, broken with rock and choked with brush and trees of all varieties native to this country. The only sound was the engine and the wind passing, and it had ceased to be a sound at all. Strawl realized his own talent was useless in this sky. Listening married a mind to this moment, then the next, and a sky was too large for an audible second to tick away and another to replace it. If he had ears, silence was all a god heard. Prayers and hymns and oaths and curses turned as repetitive and indistinct as raindrops against the river’s surface. Salmon bucked two hundred miles of current, soundless as the dead, and trees rose a hundred feet without uttering a noise aside from what the wind pressed f
rom their needles. Even time thinned to nearly nothing in the face of plain country. A thousand years and Babylon was only a word.

  And Strawl possessed what was below like a god possessed his world; nothing in it occurred that he didn’t recognize, and that was why the killings troubled him. A dab of wood smoke smeared the horizon. Strawl could smell it, too insignificant to be a wildfire and too grey to be part of the haze. He motioned the pilot that direction and they traveled ten minutes, though the smoke got no closer. He spied a boy driving a pair of roped goats up a path. The boy’s face stared up, the rest of him just a dark, squat shape under it. He motioned for the pilot to press on, but he shook his head. Strawl showed him his badge once more, but the pilot pointed to the fuel gauge and Strawl nodded, disappointed to return to the prison of gravity and his spinning planet.

  three

  When Dice offered him the case files, Strawl under-W W stood his rationale for keeping the details out of the paper.

  The first victim a Nez Perce man, about thirty. He’d been struck in the temple, as well, and though the body exhibited no wounds Strawl could associate with struggle, even a dying man would likely fight being castrated. The killer had cut the scrotum, emptied its contents, and later cured and tanned the empty sack, stuffed it with tobacco, and tacked it to the postmaster’s house.

  The second and third men were about the same age as the first. One had been discovered dangling from a rope in an elm in what passed for a park in Nespelem. Gutted throat to anus, he’d been cleaned like a fish, thoroughly enough that in the photograph sunlight seeped through the skin covering his ribs and spine. The murderer had broken free a bottom rib and skewered the man’s liver upon it.

  The third had been skinned. The hide—scalp and all—appeared one Sunday morning draped over the wooden billboard welcoming travelers to the Colville Indian Reservation.