Lonesome Animals

by Bruce Holbert

  And now they were, for the most part, silent once again, even Elijah who employed conversation much like Strawl himself, to extract intelligence from others, though Elijah’s methods were far more generous than Strawl’s. No one fussed over others’ worries like he, especially if he saw himself the cause. Yet like a drunk on a bender, he’d plunge suddenly into silence as if it were his own country and disappear from his family without warning or apology or explanation.

  The sun had mounted the horizon before he heard Elijah clamber up the bank below. He crested the hill with two sage hens he’d captured with a snare and a saddlebag loaded with camas. It had been three months, before the killings filled the papers, since Strawl had seen the boy. He was disappointed he couldn’t remain angry with the boy and wondered if he still had enough pluck for hunting killers.

  While the coffee perked, Strawl helped Elijah clean the birds, then cut a green oak switch stout enough to bear their weight and turned the portions above the coals. Their grease fell into the fire and spat. Elijah sliced and arranged the onions on the skillet’s bottom and set the pan to simmer on a rock. Then he hunted a flat piece of shale and cleaned it, then, with the flat of his knife, pressed the camas root into paste on the flat surface. When finished, he laid several willow switches over the coals and added half the onions, covered it with more of the branches, then moved the fire to one side with a long stick and buried the camas on the other, then returned the fire over it. Uncooked, camas made a person sick as green whiskey, but baked all day, it was a fine squash.

  With the birds nearly finished, Strawl slid them from the stick into the skillet and Elijah divided them, thighs and breast, and stirred in a pocketful of huckleberries with the onions and meat, then added water and flour until the gravy thickened. He returned the pan to simmer while Strawl found an aluminum pie plate in his traps to cover it.

  The bird basted to their satisfaction, Strawl withdrew it from the fire and forked the meatier back quarters onto Elijah’s tin plate, it being his kill, though Elijah split the thighs and legs and returned an even share to Strawl. Their hands and faces shone with grease as they ate. Elijah alternated each bite of meat with one of onion in the careful manner he had always eaten. Strawl rolled them each a cigarette. High clouds ribboned the sky, but the sun was hot and the air dry, and they would burn off before noon. The breeze that rose around dawn had faded to just a breath.

  “What were you doing in a card game?” Elijah asked.

  Strawl lay back in the yellow grass and watched a raven cross the sky. He let some smoke go and it disappeared above him. “County was in the card game. Seems they got a killer they want shed of. I was just listening like every good citizen should.”

  “Cain slew Abel.”

  Strawl let another lungful loose. “The victims aren’t kin to one another, and he couldn’t be kin to all of them, so I think you got the wrong scripture.”

  “All men are brothers,” Elijah said.

  “And every rainbow ends with a pot of gold and a leprechaun.”

  Elijah lay back and set his coffee cup on his chest. “Did you find anything worth the trip?”

  “Just that the youth of today don’t know how to gamble or knife-fight.”

  Elijah finished his coffee, then found his King James in his saddle poke and lay in the grass, tipped on one elbow to study it. Ten minutes later, he closed the cover like he was slamming a door. “I guess I’m the prodigal.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “And Dot, she’s the working one. She’s got to be mad,” Elijah said. “But it’s her in the wrong.”

  “Except she’s not.”

  “Mad or wrong?”

  “Neither. Your sister and her husband are tending the ranch that’s financing our follies,” Strawl said. “I’d speak kindly of her if I were you.”

  Elijah chewed a piece of grass into threads. “I don’t mean any slight. She’s keeping to her part of the scripture. I just forgot I was doing the same. It’s a relief, I’ll tell you.”

  “Don’t get too happy with yourself,” Strawl told him. “You keep behaving like a character in that book and you’ll find yourself living a story you can’t get loose from.”

  Elijah tapped his good book. “I don’t want loose from these stories.”

  Strawl laughed. “Makes you one up on Christ.”

  “That’s blasphemy.”

  Strawl shook his head. “Gethsemane. Let this cup pass from me, Lord.”

  “He wasn’t sure yet.”

  “No wonder the damned Jews never took him serious. He shows up with no gold and no notion of what God thinks, but says he’s him. That’s a man too broke to drink with and too crazy to pour liquor into even if you had a charitable streak.”

  Elijah stared at him.

  “Seems to me God the father ought to have done a better job informing God the son of his plans.”

  Strawl watched as Elijah stirred the dirt with a stick, his temper rising. He looked up at Strawl. “Is that what giving away a ranch did? It turn you God?”

  “I’m a long way from divine,” Strawl told him. “And I had no plan.”

  Elijah said nothing. His long black hair swooped over his eyes like a bird wing, leaving him looking as delicate as a girl.

  “Meek shall inherit the earth,” Elijah told him. He walked toward the butte and Strawl closed his eyes and napped. Elijah’s shouts stirred him. The boy was on the bluff’s edge, pointing. Strawl hiked the hundred yards between them. A gun fired and tin pots clanked below.

  “It’s Woo banging pans,” Elijah said.

  Strawl nodded. He heard two more shots.

  “Someone’s shooting at him,” Elijah said.

  Strawl put a ryegrass stem between his teeth and chewed it flat. “Someone shooting to be heard.”

  Strawl turned to mount Stick. Elijah followed. They galloped the four miles to town. Woo stood in the middle of the hard dirt street, whacking a skillet against a soup pot. Pete stood beside him, wielding a 10-gauge. Red casings gathered beneath his boots along with scattered shingles. He’d shot the roof eave. Strawl took the weapon under the barrel with one hand and shoved backwards, bloodying Pete’s nose. Unarmed, he quieted.

  Woo continued with his hardware. Strawl drew his pistol and put a hole in the pot.

  Woo gazed at him, eyes wide. “You kill my pan.”

  “I’ll get you another,” Strawl told him. “Now what in hell are you going on over?”

  Woo led them behind the tavern to the kitchen door. Hooked on a makeshift clothesline between two poles were the Cloud boys in the same garb from last night’s poker game. Their weight sagged the cord and their booted toes tapped the ground when the breeze rose. The piece of ground beneath them Woo kept clean for parked cars. A few drops of blood clotted in the dust. Strawl smelled their body odor; they were not yet spoiling, though they would be soon in the heat. Their heads had been cut off and barbwired into their open palms. His man had taken the time to use a cord and staples to secure them. The lids drooped over their sightless eyes; they appeared embarrassed by their deaths.

  “You bunk here,” Strawl asked Woo, “or you still with Coretta?”

  “Coretta,” Woo said. Coretta was a fat Indian woman who told fortunes with a deck of fifty-one cards.

  “They this way when you arrived?”

  Woo shrugged. “I come in front.”

  “Well, how’d you discover them, then?”

  Woo pointed at Pete. “He drink coffee then go to pisshouse then I hear hollering.”

  Strawl turned to Pete. “You do this?”

  Pete’s eyes blinked. “I don’t have nothing against those boys.”

  “Neither did their killer. He just likes to argue using corpses. I kill you now and the town police will cash me out.”

  “Why’d you want to do that?”

  “I like money,” Strawl told him.

  “And shooting people,” Elijah said.

  “They were there when I come back,” Pete said. “That’s all I k
now about it.”

  “I shot many with better stories,” Strawl told him.

  “Holten boys,” Woo said. “He kill all three. They rob me.”

  Pete looked like a steer waiting to be leveled with a sledge. “That so?”

  “That’s just for openers.” Strawl leveled the empty shotgun at him, then lowered it. “You ain’t got it in you. How about your partner? He seems to think enough of himself to kill a man.”

  “He’s at the horse doctor,” Pete said. “With a cut lung.”

  “How about them others?” Strawl asked Pete.

  “Powell don’t have a mean bone in him.”

  “The Irish?”

  “Well, he don’t like anybody,” Pete said. “If he decided to murder, he could wear himself out, I’ll grant that. But he’d still’ve had to think it.”

  Strawl set Pete’s shotgun against the building, then again examined his man’s talents. Flies hovered over blood and bone. Again there was no savagery, just care, and, when he lifted the greasy heads, he saw the same temple wounds. He heard a chick’s piping. He thought it might be a killdeer attempting to distract them from its nest, but there was none in sight, and being in sight was the point.

  The sound grew louder. The corpses’ mouths had been wired shut. Strawl unwound the first, and a sparrow fluttered between the Cloud boy’s teeth. It set its wings and flew. Inside the other was a tiny starling. It sat on the dead tongue and cried its birthday cry, then shat.

  nine

  Strawl cut the cords attaching the heads to the corpses and attempted to undo the staples without tearing the skin. He lifted the bodies from the clothesline. They walloped the ground like sacks of grain. The killer had driven a grappling hook between each boy’s ribs to attach them to the line. Elijah and Strawl stood studying the bodies and the heads next to them.

  “Jesus Christ,” Strawl said. “I can’t decide if this man thinks he’s doing something ugly or beautiful.”

  Elijah looked like he would cry. “Maybe both,” he said.

  Strawl argued to bury them straightaway. Any flat spot where the ground wasn’t rocky would do, and they had Woo and Pete to help with the digging.

  Elijah shook his head. Petey and Woo kept out of it.

  “You’re just too lazy to dig.”

  “Maybe the family has some preparations to make.”

  Flies hummed over each body’s wounds.

  “A funeral doesn’t require a casket. They hold them for people lost at sea all the time.”

  “These aren’t lost.”

  Strawl nodded to the boys below him and their heads loose on the hard ground. “Might be better if we told them they were.”

  Elijah nodded. “We’ll need to prepare their parents.”

  Strawl rolled one of the heads with the toe of his boot. Sand pocked the cheek. A few grains dried in a watery eye. He glared up at Elijah. “How exactly do you prepare a mother for this?”

  “The bodies,” Elijah said. “Prepare the bodies.”

  “Suit yourself,” Strawl told him.

  Pete bent and heaved, but only a line of bile dropped to the floor.

  “Put you off your breakfast?” Strawl asked.

  Pete said nothing. He opened the back door and joined Woo inside. Through the plastic window covering, Strawl saw the Chinaman’s shaky hand pour him some coffee, but Pete made no move toward his eggs and sausage.

  Outside, Elijah placed each head atop what he decided was its proper neck. Next, he bored a hole with his pocketknife through the skin under one boy’s clavicles. He threaded a cord from Woo’s shed through it, then repeated the process on the other side. He disappeared into the shed behind the tavern and returned with a hammer and a handful of galvanized nails. He attempted to pound one into the neck, but the flesh turned greasy and the head rolled away.

  Strawl smoked.

  “You got any ideas?” Elijah asked.

  “You heard my idea.”

  “Do you want Dot buried someplace without the proper words being said, someplace you don’t even know where it is?”

  “I don’t want her buried at all.”

  “That is only choosing what isn’t,” Elijah told him.

  Elijah had a point. The boy set his jaw and lifted his hammer and a nail.

  “You aren’t going to be able to wire their heads to their shoulders,” Strawl said.

  “Are you going to cite a law that goes against it?”

  “Just physics. Skin tears like paper and bone splits, otherwise carpenters would do surgery. Woo got any boards in his shed?”

  “Scrap timber,” Elijah said.

  “If you can find a couple of one-bys long enough and some wood screws, you might be able to bolster their spine and shoulders enough to keep a head to it.”

  “Like a cross?”

  Strawl nodded. He left him to the job. Woo put on some sausage and hotcakes and, at the bar, Strawl washed his hands in a bucket, then watched his second breakfast spit on the griddle. Pete’s remained abandoned, though he glugged coffee as fast as Woo could pour it.

  Woo soon put Strawl’s plate in front of him, then slid the tabasco across the counter. Strawl opened the bottle, turned it over, and hit the bottom until his eggs were spackled orange. He broke a yolk, then dipped a link in the yellow puddle on his plate.

  Elijah had managed the boards and the screws and was attempting to find a way to snub the Cloud brothers’ foreheads to the top of the board without them slipping through the loops. The heat beaded the perspiration left in their glands and shined the boys’ faces and dulled their hair. The cleaved heads were expressionless, as if they found their predicament of little surprise.

  A bevy of impatient magpies prattled on Woo’s broken eave and Strawl had seen a grey and white dog make the circle around the building twice and then another yellow hound join him. Elijah finally cinched the skulls to their crosses with the boys’ pants belts. This left their heads tipped back and exposed the severed necks. He cut and drove wood wedges between the boards and the back of each skull. Then he drove three wood screws through the boards and into the backs of their heads for insurance. He gazed, satisfied with the results.

  Strawl filled a pitcher with water and delivered it to the boy. No one passed, let alone stopped, aside from Woo’s few patrons and the boys moving the bodies from the town cemetery to the other above the new waterline.

  Woo owned a wagon for supplies, and Strawl yoked Stick and Elijah’s mare, Baal, to the T-bar. He and Elijah and Woo lifted the Cloud boys onto the flatbed, then covered them with blankets from Woo’s closet.

  Elijah drove. The bodies rocked on the planks of the wagon bed. It was midday and hot. Starlings dove at the wagon as it passed a clay bank pocked with their nests. A few larks trilled. Strawl heard the hush of a hawk’s wings as it left its perch in a tamarack and weaved across the blue sky. Flies hummed over the wounds, but Woo kept a sack of lime, and they had scattered some across the wounds to subdue the odor.

  Strawl’s saddle lay behind him in the wagon and he unscabbarded the rifle, opened the bolt, and began to clean the chamber with a fresh handkerchief. He listened to the flowing and the little breeze jangle the drying cheat and foxtail. The road ascended the east side of the crease the San Poil had cut into the country. A trickle next to the Columbia, especially at the close of summer, it still had managed to shape this portion of the county, dividing the rock and pine forests of the Okanogans all the way to Canada. A few of the original San Poil River clans like the Cloud family raised enough cattle to turn a profit. It was as close to the old times as they were likely to find, and Strawl imagined they had counted themselves fortunate.

  The prairie in the Swahila Basin was broken with cottonwood and pines and they passed through bladed light and shadows cooling and warming them like they were feverish. In the grass, rodents stirred and chukar clucked among a rock spill and Strawl heard the crickets that Dot’s girls worried were rattlesnakes.

  “All killings have reasons?�
�� Elijah asked.

  Strawl nodded. “Lots and none. Maybe your good book has something to say about it.”

  Elijah finished his cigarette and licked the end to put out the last of the ember. He clucked at Stick, who was steering for a low limb to clobber them. Elijah tightened the rein until the horse recognized man was ahead of beast on the matter.

  He whacked a horsefly, then brushed the remains off his pant leg. “You don’t care where we inter those souls behind you,” he said. “You just want to avoid dealing with the living over it.”

  The Cloud ranch buildings at the field’s edge had grown long in the shadows. A few ancient elms shaded the house, though they’d lost one recently to disease. Split, quartered, and stacked against the north wall, it would season a year then be priced to warm a winter. The field was irrigated with long pipes extended from a raised water tank fed by a well. At each end rested a giant insect-looking sprinkler. The pastured cattle dotted a sloping hill in the locusts’ and bull pines’ shade. There was enough grass there to keep them another month, as long as they avoided poisoning themselves with the flowering larkspur and hawksbeard, the only noxious weeds this side of the river.

  The road in had been plowed loose, then filled and graded. A black lab yapped and trailed their wagon. The Cloud clan sat in kitchen chairs on the porch, neighbors and shirttail relatives among them. They quieted as the wagon neared. The rate bad news covered country never failed to astonish Strawl. It relieved him, as well. Most of the wailing would be finished.

  Elijah drew rein and disembarked from the wagon. Strawl followed. They slapped the dust from their pants, then climbed the porch steps. The men wore denim pants and the bright checked shirts the Indians seemed to find handsome, and the ladies dressed in flowered prints stitched by their own hands.

  Strawl lifted his hat. He let Elijah speak.