Lonesome Animals

by Bruce Holbert

  “You think Elijah’s done?” Strawl asked Raymond.

  “I do,” Raymond said.

  “Convince me.”

  “Killing is work. They have to pay you to do it and put the weight of the law behind you, and it still wears you out.”

  Strawl nodded.

  “Well, Elijah’s got sense but he is like Dog in one way,” Raymond said. “He is lazy.”

  Strawl laughed and pushed his cap back on his head. “A lawyer couldn’t have made a case more convincing,” he said.

  Strawl circled the firelight to Stick. The horse nickered at his smell. Strawl led him to a grassy spot beneath the rock promontory. Raymond and Marvin had offered Strawl a place among their blankets and tents, but Strawl had declined, preferring to bed near Stick in the case that Dice or the BIA turned ambitious enough to work nights.

  Strawl collected twigs and pine needles into a depression and coaxed a small fire to burn, fueling it with branches from a bull pine halved with a lightning strike. The trunk had braided its new growth around what had been killed and in the darkness looked like a long neck twisted awfully, and above, half feathered with needles, half blackened by a blow of current and light and smoke; it trembled in the sky like a monstrous, dying head.

  His tobacco pouch was empty. He undid the straps of his saddlebag and found a piece of jerky not completely ruined by Truax’s pepper. He chewed and spat and sipped at the canteen, then poured water in his cupped hand and let Stick lap it dry. He repeated this until Stick’s thirst had waned and then batted his nose lightly to announce an end to it.

  The fire burned fast but low, fueled with the deadwood. Strawl withdrew a larger stick that had begun to catch and let it smolder on a stone, afraid the fire might be visible from above. He covered himself with his blanket. The sky was clear and had no bottom to it, just miles of light and darkness piled upon one another.

  Elijah had managed to turn murder into art and philosophy and religion all at once. He’d not encountered anyone who’d equaled it, but he’d not encountered anyone interested in equaling it, either. It was as if the boy were attempting to take the cruelty out of crime and the selfishness, too, leaving only the blood and absence, making the pain that coincided temporary but the relief permanent, like pulling an abscessed tooth.

  Ridiculous, Strawl knew, but an ingenious, thoroughly heroic, absurd epic joke, one so committed to itself that it had surrendered being funny and so had he. And Marvin thought them father and son. Strawl never possessed much humor, but the little he owned he’d never bargain for an idea. It was not that he valued laughter; he knew no ideas so worthy he’d drop a nickel into the offering plate. They were kin by means, not ends, because Strawl had none of the latter. What they had in common was blood. Strawl’s talent lay there, and he’d bequeathed it to Elijah the same as the ranch, though he could not sell this inheritance to the neighbors. It was his.

  Strawl lay back on the saddle and blew a breath into the sky that clouded in the cold, then disappeared. Still, he thought, the boy had promised an end to it and two good men believed him. Though he had committed his share of misdemeanors and the arson certainly had been a felony, he’d never hurt man nor beast before and he had had reason, no matter how unreasonable.

  Below, one of the men banked the coals of the cooking fire. It smoked a moment at being disturbed, then did not. He fell asleep looking at the piece of sky over him, wondering if it was over Canada as well, and, if he were to lie in that land, if other things would be the same for him when he looked up at night.

  twenty - three

  Strawl rose and warmed the last of his water and put one of Elijah’s tea bags in a cup, as he was out of coffee. He watched the steam rise from the steeping liquid, letting his face dampen in its wet heat. Stick nickered and Strawl rolled an apple he’d held back in the horse’s direction. It popped in the horse’s jaws as he snuffled and chewed. Strawl bridled him and brushed the blanket then set it across his back. He followed with the saddle. The horse puffed his belly to battle the cinch as he had since Strawl had purchased him as a green colt. Strawl tossed a rock into the brush, and when Stick turned toward it, distracted, Strawl tugged the strap and snubbed it tight. The horse wheezed at being bested once more. He shuffled and threw his head against the reins. Strawl scolded him and mounted. He circled the sleeping camp once more and splashed across the stream to the trail that brought him in. A half mile later, he came upon Raymond on foot. Strawl slowed his horse.

  “Lighting out?” Raymond asked.

  Strawl nodded.

  Raymond shook his head. “These people. Us. We won’t make it long.”

  “Think not?”

  Raymond said, “We cook in pots and pans from the fort, sleep under dime-store blankets. It’s not cold yet. Not like it’s going to be. There’s no seasoned wood to burn aside from deadfalls, and the snow will cover them. Even if we remember enough to get into winter, we’re living so close together, typhoid or cholera or whooping cough or the flu will end us.”

  “There’s some reasons others haven’t put down here, I guess.”

  Raymond nodded. “And we’re about to learn them. I’d invite you to stay, but that doesn’t seem as friendly as allowing you your leave.”

  Strawl said nothing.

  “We could use someone lethal to keep back those law folks. Whether they’re pushing for you or him, they’re pushing for someone, and they’ll settle for who they find first and that will likely be fifty people who can’t move like one. Maybe they will arrest us, and rescue us from languishing with disease.”

  “They may be due some ill fortune,” Strawl said. “You never know.”

  “You think that might be so?”

  “I believe if you’re hunting a bear you better not neglect the likelihood the bear’s hunting, too.”

  Raymond leaned upon a stick he’d trimmed to walk with. “You know, I was in those groups they shipped to the fort for schooling. I recall I enjoyed it. I could already read and they had history books that were nearly as entertaining as the old grandfather’s stories. In those books, there were tribes of people, too. I remember the Huns were bad ones. They wiped out Rome. I never met one so I asked the Fathers, and they said there were no more Huns. They were rubbed out, I thought. But the Father said no, they just stopped being Huns and now were other things. Germans or Bavarians or Cossacks, maybe.” He looked up at Strawl. “You didn’t take anything from anyone they had not already lost. Neither did Elijah.”

  Stick tossed his head and snorted. Strawl patted him.

  “He’s up on the ridge,” Raymond said. “Listening for those that are coming.”

  “No, he’s waiting on me.”

  Raymond nodded. “Not unlikely that’s so.”

  “You’re staying on, I suppose,” Strawl said.

  Raymond shrugged. “If I don’t get killed, the tale will be worth a bucket of beer every time I tell it. Never know when things will be that hard.”

  “One thing I’m wondering, what did he kill them with?” Strawl asked.

  “He bronzed a donkey’s jaw and teeth. He sharpened one end to a blunt punch and filed the rest sharp as a shaver blade. It appeared a lot of trouble to me.”

  Strawl shook his head. “He’s had that around forever. I thought it was just decoration. Well, the boy took the long view with the few things he committed to.”

  “I guess this counts as one.” Raymond did not look sad, but like someone who comprehended sadness existed in each moment of each day.

  “Well good luck to you,” Strawl said.

  He sawed Stick’s reins and pressed him forward. The trail wound through a bulge of ferns and yellowing serviceberry bushes. At the top, he gazed over the forest and rock below. He could hear children speaking and mothers correcting them and then laughter from two men. Three hundred yards away in the shadow of a sheer slab of broken granite was Elijah aboard Baal.

  Elijah had been waiting for Strawl since before light. His patience pleased him. He h
ad risen above time. Like a storm, it passed, but it did not leave him wet. An hour in the freshening light was only an hour if he agreed that’s what it added up to. If he decided it to be a year or a second, it was. He wanted nothing, not to live nor to die. He could not explain this even to himself and knew better than to attempt it. He built a cigarette and smoked it. Strawl remained on the skyline, Stick mincing steps, anxious to have his head and pick his way through the canyons below.

  He had dressed this morning in fine canvas pants and a clean checked shirt. Over it, he wore an elk-skin vest that had come to him through his grandfather, worn thin and dark under the arms from sweat and hard rides and the raising of a rifle or bow and pocked with three tears, two fairly earned in skirmishes with the Entiats and one the result of being hooked by a shorthorn steer during cutting season.

  Strawl remained silhouetted, frozen and black like a tree or a rock on the skyline. In Elijah’s scabbard was his 30.30. He lifted the rifle over his head and yipped. Strawl returned neither the call nor the gesture. Elijah raised the rifle, pressed it to his shoulder, and fired a round. Dust rose ten yards in front of Strawl and the report echoed. Baal reared. Elijah fought him down. Stick spun Strawl in a full circle, and as Strawl regained his bearings, Elijah fired another round, this one splattering against a tree trunk ten feet above the rider and horse. Bark and pollen flew then floated then settled with the dirt. Once more Elijah beckoned. Strawl raised his hand, a gesture neither to halt nor encourage Elijah, just acknowledging he was there.

  “Old man,” Elijah shouted. “I heard them say you wanted to meet the one who had done this killing. You wanted to know him.”

  Strawl had dismounted to settle the horse.

  “It will be fair,” Elijah said.

  “Like belting me with a board?” Strawl asked.

  Strawl could hear Elijah laugh and he was glad for it. “Didn’t like that much did you?” Elijah said.

  “Not a very courteous way to treat an old man, especially one that financed your town here.”

  “Well, this is not the same.”

  “It’s different because I know you’re a killer.”

  “I’ve known you were a killer since we met,” Elijah said.

  “That make us even now?”

  “Makes a square fight. One murderer against another.”

  Strawl spat onto the ground.

  “You going to debate you’re a murderer?” Elijah asked.

  “No. I am inclined to argue your few scalps equal my many.”

  “Then I will probably lose,” Elijah said. “But it will be square.”

  Strawl figured him true to his word. He wasn’t sure if the boy hoped to be killed or to kill him or whether he didn’t care how the matter ended as long as it was closed. But he would want it justly settled.

  “There’s others out there that won’t be so fair to either of us.”

  “They will come when they come. You are here now.”

  “And I am leaving.”

  “You will not meet me, then?”

  “I have met you,” Strawl said. “Our business is settled.”

  He mounted and Stick wheeled, and he took one more look at Elijah. He was scabbarding his rifle and patting Baal’s withers. He sat in his saddle straight-backed and carefully. One hand crossed his face, absent wrinkle or pock. It raked his hair, purpled in the dawning. He looked as young as he was and Strawl found himself feeling strangely relieved by this, as if killing had not stuck to the boy but slid off him like a tired skin and he was fresh with another.

  He watched Elijah study the trail that would return him to the camp. Baal paused before descending and Strawl could see Elijah’s face lose its animation for a moment. His skin and mouth slackened. His eyes, Strawl imagined, gazed sightlessly into the silt of the trail. It was as if he’d left himself and his flesh and bones were simply husk. He realized it would have been how Elijah’s victims appeared to him and why he had decided upon them. Strawl studied the boy as he descended and nudged Stick forward to peer over the ledge. Strawl watched him pass through shadows and shafts of light, wearing the same countenance until a rabbit broke from the brush and hurried ahead on the path. Baal gave chase for a few yards and Elijah blinked and smiled and his face turned his own.

  Strawl turned Stick south and townward, tired once more, though not yet ready for sleep.

  twenty - four

  The BIA cops who had followed Strawl and Elijah into the mountains had foolishly left their weapons in their squad cars a quarter mile from their camp, as if automobiles weren’t folly enough for such an endeavor. They huddled around the fire, arguing about who had made the coffee last. Strawl counted five.

  He drilled a round in three as Stick galloped through the place they had cleared for their bedrolls. He shot to wound, but one named Elvin stood when he should have stayed seated and it was the last time he would without someone straightening his braced legs. The other two made for the woods. Strawl listened and when they broke brush he fired twice, hearing the thump of flesh and a groan with each report. He turned Stick and stood over those who remained, while they gasped and sputtered in the dawn firelight. “Seek and you shall find, boys,” he said. “Trouble is what you wanted, I am obliging you. Otherwise retire from the field.”

  He fired into one of their legs and listened to the fellow holler. Another stammered a pathetic plea and Strawl chose to leave them alive. “You heal and still feel inclined for more, come to my side of the river and we’ll finish this hoedown.”

  Three hours later, tracking by sound, Strawl switchbacked up a canyon ahead of Dice and the silverspoon. He lay with a downed birch as a rest and sighted Dice’s horse. It did not even rear, just stopped and fell, driving Dice into the ground like a fence piling. He did the same for the silverspoon’s animal though it was a thoroughbred and he hated to waste good horseflesh.

  Strawl scrambled down the hill for position while the silverspoon’s head swiveled stunned by his sudden predicament. Dice remained under his horse—his ankle was broken as it turned out—allowing Strawl the luxury of patience. The silverspoon hopped on bandaged feet toward his rifle until Strawl shot out his left knee. The man fell in sections like a dynamited building, then propped himself to kneel. A second bullet destroyed his right elbow. He fell again.

  Strawl reloaded and stepped into the clearing. Dice gasped and pressed at the horse, but the weight pinned him in place as if the hand of God. The silverspoon flopped like a fish on a stringer until his left hand gained some purchase in the dirt beneath him. He spat and swore. Strawl admired the man’s spunk and shot out his shoulder and other elbow out of respect. It left him torn up as a kite in a windstorm.

  “Please. Stop,” he said.

  “OK,” Strawl said.

  He took three steps—he counted them—and stood over Dice.

  “You won’t kill me,” Dice said.

  Strawl nodded. “I won’t even shoot you.” He stopped and rolled himself a cigarette and lit it, then put it between Dice’s lips until Dice drew then exhaled. Strawl took the smoke from Dice’s mouth with his fingers.

  He nodded at Dice’s saddle. “Your rifle’s in the scabbard there,” he said. “Might’ve made sense to reach for it.”

  Dice said nothing. The silverspoon could not move except to moan. Strawl turned to where he could see them both. “Your sheriff could’ve kept me off you,” Strawl said. “You both have to live with that.” He nodded toward Hollingsworth. “He may not die but he won’t ever be himself, either. And he’s got you to thank.”

  “It wasn’t me that shot him to pieces.”

  “No, you just allowed it with a weapon twelve inches from your hand.”

  “You’re just trying to keep yourself from being guilty.”

  “I have never been anything else,” he said.

  Dice’s horse gasped and the bullet hole beneath his heart hissed red foam as his lungs fought to keep their prime. Its eyes were wide and adding and subtracting the way any dying thi
ng does, hoping for a new kind of math. Strawl patted the animal’s head and called it a good, steady fellow whose work was done well. The horse met his eye and blinked and Strawl saw his own reflection appear in the pupil. Strawl pressed his hands to his lips and then on its forehead and spoke to it one more time soothingly, before he stepped back and put it out of its misery.

  twenty - five

  Most see hope as the opposite of fear, but Russell Strawl knew better: fear’s opposite was certainty. Fear ends where knowledge begins, even knowledge of the worst kind. Strawl had no recollection of being afraid. The world had long ago lost its capacity to surprise him.

  Several months later—it was nearing spring—Strawl arrived at the ranch house in the late afternoon. The air was brisk, winter’s creeping frost still held the trees from budding. He put Stick up and loaded his manger with fodder, then poured what was left from a bag of oats into his feed pail. The horse nickered and ate.

  Evening, he rocked on a porch swing and listened to its chain squawk and his grandchildren at play in the yard a quarter mile below. The girls shouted and chased each other with willow whips and the baby laughed once with so much delight that Strawl couldn’t help feeling lighter.

  That night, he slept a deep dreamless sleep and woke feeling the wounds with which he had marked the years and the past months. He dressed slowly and put on more coffee and drank it, then fried some bacon and basted two eggs and devoured them. They pleased him so that he cooked another half dozen and the last of the bacon slab and enjoyed them more than any meal he could recall.

  Then he walked outside and climbed a bank behind the house too steep to plow, where he lay on the grassy grade. It was the first moment in his life he could recall having nothing pressing enough to need his attention.

  Past Bird Mountain, light continued to break. An hour later, he searched his jacket pocket until he found a cigarette, which he lit and drew from until the ash caught. The burning tobacco popped in the wind. He laid his head back into the land that was, before his, no one’s. He wanted to circle this place like weather, like the mists of each spring, to be only a shadow across the great rock walls, the yellow prairies, the few bear and cougar still prowling the woods, the pine, tamarack, elm, and white-barked birch that marked the canyon breaks, and the wiry creeks that unraveled into the thick gash of a river that had cut a thousand feet of basalt and granite to secure its place.