Lonesome Animals

by Bruce Holbert

  The fourth, like the first, had been gouged through the privates. The photograph was just a bloody blur. However, a week later, a hairy band constituted from the man’s pubic hair was discovered in the five-and-dime store in Mason City, ornamenting a ladies’ hat.

  Indians had a reputation for disrespecting bodies. Thirty years ago on the Plains, the Lakota and their like would take hair if they were too angry to think straight, and the bands in the Southwest were disagreeable in all kinds of matters regarding women and children. A thousand miles lay between them and this country, though, and, despite what Phil Sheridan and the missionaries thought, every Indian didn’t need killed or saved to get along with white people. The closest the locals had had to a burr was Chief Bird, who was more politician than warrior and only rankled the government because he neglected to remain in one place long enough for the government to build a fence around them. In conflict, the local tribes were more inclined toward embarrassing an enemy than killing him. When they were amongst themselves, they would heist another band’s horses and return them a week later painted blue or sneak into a sleeping camp and piss in the kettles outside a rival’s tent. The worst Strawl had heard them do was, in the very old wars, capture a man and lop off his pointer finger, leaving him awkward drawing a bow, but alive.

  Dice perched on the edge of his desk across from Strawl. Strawl tipped the folder at him. “How were they killed?”

  “All with something blunt,” Dice said.

  “Same thing?” he asked.

  Dice shrugged. “We weren’t careful enough early on, I admit. Tribe caught the first one. A case of beer and a basket of chicken is their idea of police work. They didn’t even know he’d been nutted until the sack showed up. Called us and Ferry County, but it was too late to figure much.”

  Strawl nodded.

  “We got started earlier on the others, but as you can see, it did little good.”

  Strawl closed his eyes. The town had electricity and the glow from the bare bulb above turned the papers a blinding white. He squinted at the photographs one more time and rubbed his temple. Dice’s office sat in one corner of the building and the jail cells in another. Strawl could hear a prisoner rise and take his breakfast, a bowl of mush that a passing deputy had delivered him. The man had been charged with assault, Dice had said, a crime generally ignored amongst laborers. Fighting was common between Okies and drifters and the Bureau didn’t want to lose laborers. This prisoner, however, had belted an engineer. Dice would hold the man for a fortnight, when the judge would return and rule time served.

  Dice put a plug from his tobacco into his pipe and lit it. Sweet-smelling smoke filled the room. “What’s your price?” he asked.

  Strawl tipped back in his chair. He’d heard talk that some men’s souls were built to hunt others, just like some were constructed for crime, each minute adding a brick until they were complete enough to rob or shoot their way to the state prison in Monroe. It wasn’t the blood Strawl missed or the idea he’d righted a person wronged. There was quiet on the ranch, but nothing approaching the serene. Between planting and cutting and tending the storage silos and the parts he either needed or was going to, his head was as full of noise as the radio. Most days he’d have liked to shoot a gun in the middle of it, just to enjoy the report in his ears.

  “What do you think is behind most murders?” Strawl asked Dice.

  “Bad tempers,” Dice answered.

  “Or bad cards,” Strawl said.

  “Or plain stupidity,” Dice said. “Remember that Trust in Coulee City?”

  “Yep.” A would-be Dillinger had managed to get off with a suitcase full of scratch, but shotgunned a man on a constitutional that he worried might witness against him. The poor fellow was blind. The murderer hanged just a few months ago.

  “What’s under this one?” Strawl asked.

  Dice studied him. “I haven’t encountered a crime akin to this one,” he said. He tapped on his pipe, then set it in the pie tin that served as an ashtray.

  “Children,” Strawl said. “Of all that might have undone me, who’d have thought it would be children.” He chuckled. “Half the ranch. That’s what they lost. That’s what I’ll take for salary.”

  Dice shook his head. “Too much.” He puffed again, then spoke through gritted teeth clamping the pipe stem.

  “I heard once that the best cop has to be half a criminal himself,” he said.

  “I hear the same of politicians,” Strawl replied.

  Dice laughed. A deputy walked past the office, returning with the prisoner’s empty bowl.

  Strawl rose.

  “I can get you half.”

  Strawl leveled his gaze at the man. “Half just gets me half broke.”

  “You don’t think much of the public, do you?”

  “Not any more than I have to.” Strawl took his bowler in his hand and rose. “Once more, good luck to you,” he said.

  “Should I arrest you and save a lot of trouble?” Dice asked him.

  Strawl stopped for a moment, as if considering an answer, then continued out the door.

  In town, he visited the grocery, filling Dot’s list, adding a sack of candy for each of the girls and a lollipop as big as his head for the infant, to preclude him choking on it.

  Like many of the ranchers, he concluded his visit at the lip of the coulee, gazing skeptically at the labor on the dam. It was the first Roosevelt president who had augured the future for them.

  Their barbarous, picturesque, and curiously fascinating surroundings mark a primitive stage of existence . . . and will pass away before the onward march of our people. The doctrine seems merciless, and so it is; but it is just and rational for all that . . . let [these men] share the fate of the . . . hunters and trappers who have lived on the game that the settlement of the country has exterminated, and let him . . . perish from the earth he cumbers.

  This didn’t keep T.R. from admiring the old-timers’ character; indeed, he often imitated it, without a hint of irony or cynicism. Hunting as ritual and battling the indigenous people replenished the stagnant and cooling Caucasian blood with the truth violence recalled in the human soul, he declared. But by then Wyatt Earp was refereeing boxing matches and advising Hollywood movie directors.

  If T.R. served as the West’s prophet, his nephew, Franklin, was the prophecy manifested. Deified by the papers and itinerants searching out work (his framed glossy hung with the family pictures on the wall of every store and eatery within a hundred miles), he promised a concrete wonder to curtail the downriver floods and irrigate the state’s desert center. The result, the papers trumpeted, would be a structure with enough concrete to build a sidewalk to the moon.

  The river below marked the county line, and Mason City in the coulee’s bottom straddled it. On the Grant County side was an army of tents that housed bevy after bevy of destitute Midwesterners ecstatic for their spot under the canvas and three squares. The project compensated them little past meals, but it seemed a fortune next to nothing. What they did hang on to they squandered in Grand Coulee’s B-Street, which kept only one grocery store but three cafés-cum-cathouses Fridays and Saturdays.

  Strawl rubbed his closed eyes. The town of Grand Coulee teetered on top of a flat bluff above the rock high enough to keep clear of the Columbia when it leaped its banks with the spring Chinooks. Churches pocked the town, and Sunday mornings, while the unfortunates camped below mustered breakfast over open fires and finished what whiskey remained and, after, concocted Heat cocktails of gasoline and milk and honey, the blessed and the faithful lined pews and lifted hymnals and sang—the women in earsplitting pitches and the good men in their bolo ties vocalizing little recognizable as music beyond the lyrics. They killed with alcohol and church bells, emptying a man’s pockets Fridays and Saturdays and declaring it his own doing on the Sabbath. But that, Strawl knew, was only half of the truth. The other half was that drinking wasn’t what made most men drunks; they were just pouring liquor into a hole in themselve
s, and it drained nearly as quick as it filled, which made it necessary to drink steadily or stay empty, which they refused to do.

  The project had succeeded in shearing one portion of the coulee by dangling men in ropes and harnesses a hundred feet below the cliff’s edge, where they set dynamite charges. After detonation, another crew with jackhammers would drop to beat the rock smooth. Below, others cleared the debris, raising the five-ton pieces of granite and limestone with long-necked cranes that deposited them into belly dumpers with wheels on both sides of their carrying compartments. The rigs bore the slag to banks to riprap the riverbank. It was silver and glinted like tin in the sunlight.

  In the river itself, the contractors had fashioned a simple cofferdam with enormous timbers that resembled giant railroad ties. The contraption diverted a third of the current from the far bank. Inside the deep box, the men had scooped the river bottom until they encountered bedrock, then hammered it flat and drove steel rods into the stone to anchor the concrete pours. Lead pipes filled with river water crosshatched the space to cool the cement, a process that would otherwise take ninety years.

  Strawl smoked and studied the laborers who scurried across the site like locusts from the Bible. Nothing below looked as it once did. Not even cities changed the country they occupied so. The killer had sprung from this hurried rush toward who knows what, and Strawl had killed or arrested anyone who might have been a brake on the wheel. He was liable as Roosevelt for what went on below.

  He leaned back in the car’s seat until the sun neared the west wall of the coulee and the whistle ended the shift below him. He heard the gravel turn and Dice’s squad car ease to a stop. “Your place wasn’t worth as much as I imagined,” Dice said.

  A mandible muscle under Strawl’s jaw fluttered and cramped. He rubbed at it. “Took you all day to find an assessment on the place?”

  “My clerk is a slacker.”

  “Good help is hard to find,” Strawl said.

  “Grant County agreed to split your fee, so I guess you’re going to get paid, if you’re still game.”

  To those county commissioners and city fathers who’d conjured this concrete idol, Strawl was as aboriginal as the natives he had penned up and more savage—a mean dog with nothing to guard, until, of course, another mean dog showed up.

  Dice handed him a contract to sign. “You’ll want to make it legal,” he said.

  When Strawl didn’t move, Dice looked at him. “Second thoughts?”

  Strawl shrugged. He could smell the sickening aroma of Dice’s tobacco and wondered at what ugliness it hid.

  “I don’t have a pen,” he said finally.

  four

  The dawn sky was slipping to purple, and the cumulus clouds that floated over the horizon had tinged with the rose color Homer favored no matter what occurred beneath it.

  When he had surrendered the road and copping for the ranch, Dot was eleven years old and a budding intellect, thanks to her school and foster parents. She had insisted on educating Strawl, reading aloud the Iliad and Odyssey. Afterwards, she explained the results of a battle or one god lining up against another. The characters made speeches and argued in their own camps more often than they swung a blade against their enemies, and as soon as Strawl took a rooting interest in one, he’d prove himself a fool. He did, however, favor the portion when Hektor returned to the walled city from the wars. His wife was holding their son, and when he reached for the boy—Strawl didn’t recall his name—the child cried out and shrank into his mother’s blouse. For the moment, it appeared there was nothing left for Hektor but to finish breaking their hearts and die. Then he realized the child’s wide eyes were on the metal helmet and the horsehair plume rising from it. He removed the headpiece and the boy leaped to him, and for a moment they were happy.

  Strawl heard the rap on his door. He twisted the knob of the kitchen table lamp and watched the flame climb the flue. At the stove, he lifted the black pot and poured a second cup of coffee, then set it across from his own. Mornings, the fluid greasing his joints congealed to something feeling like paste and the grit in it often halted an elbow or a knee altogether. He missed moving smoothly. Aside from his hearing, the only other physical skill he’d owned was foot-speed and he bemoaned the loss. An exaggerated instep left him somewhat pigeon-toed, fodder for mockery in country still negotiated primarily by horses and their bowlegged riders, until he reached twelve-and-a-half and the same muscles that set his knees akimbo suddenly turned him as fast as a colt. At local fairs, he whipped boys and men in both the straight sprints and on the horse track’s mile oval, then bested them again in the stick relays, running alone. The sole contest he lost pitted him against a bicycle, and only after a mile and a half of wagers and shouting did he collapse and lose consciousness, waking to the barker passing horse dope under his nose.

  Even the preacher had cited his mettle in a sermon, though the man had turned on him when he refused to race any longer, citing him as an example of misplaced vanity or pure pigheadedness. Strawl had no idea where one began and the other left off, and, though confused at the new huffiness directed toward him, possessed neither the feelings to suss it out nor the words to pose his bewilderment into a question, and even if he had managed one, he wouldn’t have known where to submit it.

  It wasn’t much later that his father, with two in the cradle and three others younger than Strawl, had walked him to the end of the block. “Old Abraham had to sacrifice his firstborn, and I guess I do, as well,” he said.

  “God kept Abraham from it,” Strawl corrected him. “He sent an angel.”

  His father had stared into the white sky and nodded. “Yes, but Abraham was blessed by God and founder of a nation. I don’t see one coming for you and me.”

  He stopped walking and put twelve silver dollars into Strawl’s hand and closed his stubby fingers over it. “Good luck, son,” he said.

  The house’s door rattled again.

  “Come on in,” Strawl said.

  The draft from the open door snuffled the lantern’s flame. Strawl watched his shadow and Dot’s on the wall behind the table. She was a square, squat woman, plain as Strawl himself and heir to few of her mother’s charms, except astride a horse. There, she transformed into something out of Mallory. Her tiny blue eyes shone like a fury’s, and her aquiline nose looked Roman and noble. She sat a horse as if just another one of its graceful parts and rode like an Indian on fire. No man could get more from an animal, Strawl included.

  She crossed the room and sat. Her two girls followed, jabbering. They towed the boy, only eight months, in a wagon behind them. They delivered him eggs and sausage on a plate, still warm. Dot removed her scarf and set it in her lap and smoothed a strand of hair that had freed itself during the walk to his house. He watched her lift a bread loaf from her satchel and slice off the end with a kitchen knife. She buttered it and put a piece in the boy’s mouth.

  “See anyone interesting at your rodeo?”

  Strawl chewed a piece of sausage and swallowed. He sipped his coffee.

  “Sons of bitches and bastards and a few liars,” he said. “I fit in nicely.”

  “Well, I hope you told them some whoppers.”

  “Said I was rich.” He lifted his plate and shoveled half an egg into his mouth. She stared at him until he swallowed. Strawl mopped the yolk with his bread.

  “Esther killed a rabbit,” she said.

  “Violet jealous?”

  “No, though she wanted to shoot at a barn cat to keep square.”

  “Arlen let her?”

  “He told her they were pets.”

  “Didn’t stop her, did it?”

  Dot shook her head. “She informed him Sara Rinker had pet rabbits. ‘This was a wild rabbit,’ Arlen told her, and Violet said, ‘All animals are wild till they get tamed.’ Then Esther argued the wild rabbits weren’t even the same breed as the pet ones, and Violet answered talking about breeding is naughty, and then I put on the potatoes to boil and left it for Arlen to
sort out.”

  “Lawyers, those two,” Strawl told her. He finished his coffee. “Officer Dice spent a minute with me.”

  “Did he mention Elijah?”

  “Subject was never broached,” Strawl told her. “Them Cache Creek slayings are making noise. He wants some help on it.”

  “Did he ask you to cease and desist?”

  “What?”

  “Did he think you were behind them?”

  “Do you?”

  Dot glanced up from the boy, who was polishing off his bread and butter. Her eyes blinked and the time it took for her to answer offended him as much as the answer. “I’ve worried over it,” Dot said. “You have a reputation, and I don’t know you well enough to convince myself otherwise.”

  “I haven’t killed any of them.”

  “In your experience, isn’t that what anyone would say, guilty or not?”

  Strawl laughed. “I admire your skepticism.”

  “I don’t,” Dot said.

  “Well, the powers that be have decided I am on the side of right. At least for now.”

  “Do they think Elijah is responsible?”

  “I told you. They didn’t mention your brother.”

  “You didn’t tell me what you think.”

  “Your brother is a mystery. But I doubt he’s a murderer, especially to this degree. Just a thief.”

  Dot shook her head. “He didn’t steal what you gave him.”

  “I didn’t give him half my place to squander.”

  “I guess you should have put that in the mortgage agreement.”

  “Maybe so,” Strawl said.

  “What made Dice think you were back in business?” she asked.

  “Heard I was broke.”

  Dot refilled their cups. “There’s no shame in that,” she said. Her voice was deep as whiskey and filled with gravel. She sounded like a scold, even when it wasn’t her intent. Strawl had always admired her more than enjoyed her. She told the truth no matter the price. It made her noble as a knight, but stern company.

  “Wasn’t me that split the place,” she told him.