Lonesome Animals
Page 24
Arlen had hitched the plow to the tractor and turned the piece below the barn. Grey dust billowed on a light breeze and veiled man and machine. The earth parted before the implement, but it remained unchanged. Put your hands through it and it crumbles and returns to itself, as water will. Cross it with a blade and it welcomes the blow patiently, as if knowing the futility of any act to nurture or wound it. Its gravity towed the moon, but any farmer needing Newton to instruct him on its pull had acquired his vocation through accident or inheritance. Physics and fulcrums and formulas in a book possessed no wisdom next to an ordinary handful of dirt. In it was the only certainty and calm that existed. Nothing was more common than dirt, or more fair.
The emerging leaves appeared slick in the rays of the light. Rusty basalt and shale spills formed three of the four horizons, a few spindly locusts scattered among the sharp, volcanic rock. The steep canyons deposited earth and rock from the glacial floods along the canyon ridges and bottoms.
By noon, Arlen had finished turning the piece and moved on to another behind a basalt bluff that held an enormous bull pine the years and gravity had tipped dangerously over its steep bank. Dust lifted beyond the outcropping, smearing the sky, while the diesel motor’s clatter receded to a tick. Arlen would cut those same waves and whorls through the same unknowing ground until he expired and the little boy replaced him on the seat.
In the past months alone, Strawl had read of a furniture delivery truck driver who’d chased his wife from her flowerbeds bordering their home with his rig, then, once she’d broken into the open lawn, gunned the throttle and put her under his wheels. When the police arrived seeking a motive, he simply said he loved her.
In the same newspaper was a brief account of two unemployed gypboard hangers, who after a day panhandling and a night drinking, backed their pickup into the water, then fell to an eventless sleep until, before dawn, the worn clutch holding the truck in gear slipped, and they coasted with the pickup under the current; a brief smell in their nostrils followed like dirty socks, then the exchange of air for water that in the reverse marked their birth, and then just quiet, until the sheriff’s wrecker retrieved the bodies the next morning.
They were facts, he told himself, and a man or a woman absent from the world, well that was simply the absence of a fact, and life only a product of brain neurons spitting chemicals back and forth, making the time appear more. Hamlet misspoke, Strawl decided. It is consciousness that makes cowards of us all, not conscience. Right and wrong are venomless when compared to the simple awareness of being alive. The knowledge that existence can equal something past the sum of our circulation and digestion, that those corporeal purposes serve a galaxy of space between a man’s ears, whose suns and planets obey his own peculiar science, but one in which he alone recognizes the order, and only in glimpses, epiphanies that melt before he can speak or even think them—and the knowledge even this distant self is not his possession but belongs to others weighing and judging the dim and distant light he emits. When a man who knows all this steps toward his doom despite it or because of it, he might be called heroic. And Strawl knew himself to be nothing of the kind.
For him, as for the vast, vast hordes, fate or accident ends their illusions with severed medullas and spilled spinal fluid, or impacts that separate their aortas from their hearts and empty their blood into their body cavities, or with clotted veins or arteries, halting some significant process, and life withdraws from them with the sensation one feels in a draining bathtub, all that warmth and time ended.
Time is too brief for philosophical musings to link absurd collisions of time and space and matter to justify a life that requires death. Finally only fear, useless fear remains. That is all there is to know. That is wisdom.
Arlen ended his work before dusk, leaving the discs in the field to collect again in the morning when he would finish the summer fallow. He parked the tractor on the hard-packed dirt outside the barn. He checked the fluids and tightened a nut holding the seat that continually vibrated loose. The girls clung to his legs as he walked toward the house. Dot and the baby met him on the foot of the porch where the girls worked the hand-pump so he could rinse his face and hands before coming inside. Strawl could smell a roast cooking—some kind of meat, at least, beef rather than pork, he decided. He had lit no lantern nor opened the curtains, so he was uncertain if they knew he had returned. He guessed not. Dot would find herself compelled to gather his news, no matter how ugly.
But then in an hour he saw her shadow moving up the hill, past the ranch house and corral, bearing his direction. He lay back in the grass and listened as her footsteps stirred the brush.
“I see you’ve done better than the others hunting me,” Strawl said, his eyes closed. “I’d expect no less from you.”
“You’ve been absent a long while.”
Strawl nodded. “Dice been here?”
“And others. Daily for a month, then once a week. Now we see them stop at your place, but they don’t bother to inquire with us.”
“Sorry it was a bother.”
“It wasn’t,” she said. “Not nearly as much as having you here might have been.”
Strawl smiled at that.
“You been far and wide? They thought Canada.”
“No,” Strawl said. “I just been off the main road.”
“Why not Canada? Seems the only safe haven.”
“I don’t seem to be safe anywhere.”
“Well, you’re unsafe company. That’s easy to see.”
“Enough said. I go to Canada, nothing changes but Canada.”
“Are you arrogant enough to think you can corrupt a whole’nother country?”
“You think I can’t. I’d be happy to hear the argument.”
“I don’t have one aside from hope,” Dot said.
“That’s a prayer, not rhetoric.”
Dot remained quiet; Strawl could hear her breaths from walking the hill.
“Seen Ida in my travels.”
Dot said nothing.
“Seems the funeral was premature.”
“ How is she?”
“Healthy and happy and gainfully employed.”
Dot was quiet.
“I guess you all made me the butt of that joke.”
Dot’s voice turned bitter. “It was no joke. Out was what she wanted and you aren’t inclined to allowing people their own way.” She sighed. “I thought it would be simpler than arguing.”
“Simpler for her. Simpler for you.”
“Yes,” Dot said. “Because nothing is simple for you.”
Strawl was quiet.
“Heard from your brother?” he asked finally.
“Not a thing.”
“That’s good.”
“The police after him, as well?”
“I don’t guess so.”
Those that thought his ears were his only asset knew little about listening. Living alone had left him intuition like a woman’s, which inclined him to listen and not just hear. At times the talent served him well. Others it hardly mattered.
“You let the law know I’m back in the vicinity, yet?” Strawl asked.
“Give me a reason not to,” Dot said.
“What would be the use? You have or you haven’t. I’m here either way.”
Strawl listened to her walk away.
The following morning, he opened the door and in the hard-packed dirt yard was Dice—on a crutch, his ankle still cast in plaster—and five National Guard troops. Dot and the girls stood off a ways with Arlen, who stared into the dirt and dug a hole with his boot. A damned waste of time, Strawl thought.
“I’m unarmed,” he said.
The guardsmen held rifles at ready, while the last approached and frisked him. Satisfied, he stepped back.
“I’d like to feed old Stick before I go,” Strawl said. “He’s my horse.”
Dice shook his head, but the sergeant of the guardsmen said all right and they parted for him to pass. Inside, the barn was cool. S
tick’s head rose when Strawl slid the door. The light made geometry of the floor and walls, squares, octagons, rectangles with sides out of parallel. Rhombuses, Strawl thought, a strange word, one that ought to mean more. He hunted until he found another sack of grain and opened it with the pocketknife the guardsman had not seen necessary to confiscate. He added two bails to the feed box and cranked the hand-pump until water filled a halved barrel he’d fashioned into a trough for the horses left inside. Stick ate and Strawl pressed his ear below the horse’s withers and listened to his stomach churn and the great bellows of his lungs pull in air and the steady hum of his passing blood, and the muscled heart drumming it. The Bible had no monopoly on miracles, Strawl thought.
At the other end of the barn were the double doors that led to the corral. Strawl opened them so the horse could exercise a little. Next to the outside wall, under a canvas spread, was the county’s first threshing machine, used, but in working condition, certainly. Returning, Strawl passed the tack bench and his saddle upon it. He’d left the rifle in its scabbard and now withdrew it and opened the breach and filled the chamber.
Outside, it was bright and he blinked his eyes at the figures in his yard, just shadows until his vision adjusted. The guardsmen talked and Dice smoked by himself. The little girls stood under Dot, her hand on their shoulders, tethering them, and the boy rode in a wagon beneath. Arlen was the first to see Strawl return and he took two or three steps across the dirt yard toward him. In his eyes, Strawl saw the reassurances his son-in-law would offer, the devotion he would promise to his daughter and grandchildren, the good sense with which he would tend his work. Strawl knew, too, that Arlen’s intents were not a false comfort; he was determined to follow through with them, right up to the moment he saw the rifle barrel, which Strawl had swung with each step to disguise it, rise and cough and then smoke, and Arlen felt the bullet split his chest and his eyes blinked and he thought no more of his responsibilities.
The guardsmen and Dice had their guns at their shoulders. Strawl tossed his in the dirt and continued walking toward Dice’s squad car with his hands over his head. The shot’s ringing silenced the grandchildren, even the baby. Strawl’s ears were deaf with the bullet’s report. Dot stared at him, mouth open as if she could not breathe.
Strawl opened the squad car door and Dice finally hobbled to him and cuffed his wrists, which he extended palm up to make the chore no more work than necessary.
EPILOGUE
Strawl died seven months later when a stroke paralyzed his left side and pneumonia congested his heart and lungs, a weight he finally decided he was too tired to lift. In that time he had no visitors and spoke to no one other than the guards for their counts. His body lies in the old prison cemetery, according to their records, though weather and age have worn all the stones from that time to blank, mossed slabs.
No one was charged with the reservation killings. They stopped, and that had been the intent of the investigation. They have passed from memory to tale to rumor to oblivion with remarkable alacrity, but that is the fate of stories in the time in which we live. Few are built to last.
The Bird clan is still a strong presence on the reservation, and many of that name are now Canadian citizens working ranches and pulp mills in Kelowna and Osoyoos. Marvin was sighted in Nespelem a year following Strawl’s arrest, but then disappeared and was heard from no more. Rutherford B. Hayes became so devoted to Canada that once Britain entered the war and Canada mustered troops, he volunteered for duty and won the British Cross and the Queens Medal for Gallantry for his service at Juno Beach, where he rescued a squad of infantry from a machine gun nest, clearing its gunners by hurling stones and shell casings upon them until they retreated. He then took the gun and turned it upon the retreating Germans and killed a dozen. After the war, he lit in Cranbrook, where he bred dogs and doctored horses until he was elected mayor by write-in vote, which incensed him to such an extent that he left the town for the mountains.
Dice, however, accepted the people’s mandate and was elected State Senator seven times, until he retired to Spokane where he lost most of his pension on grain speculation, then recovered it and a fortune to boot when the Bureau of Reclamation, to add a third powerhouse, purchased a hundred acres he’d bought for near nothing thirty years before. He remained married to Karen, his only wife, until his death at seventy-nine.
Elijah disappeared. It was as simple as that. No one heard more from or about him. A month following Strawl’s arrest, however, despite a wet April, fire consumed the woods of his encampment. The canyon walls, too severe for the smoke eaters to find purchase, became as embers in a smith’s furnace, one heating the other and both the earth below. Trees exploded before the flames reached them and the basalt shone like the glass it had once been. Heat rose in surges and, when the wind pulled the smoke clear, even the blue of the sky shuddered against it. Nights, it bent the starlight and each morning, deer and elk and bear stumbled from the edges of the woods onto highways and into neighborhoods and the merchants’ shop-lined streets of the outlying towns, blasting breath from their baked lungs and, in the adrenaline-fueled euphoria that is known to accompany the severest of burns, leaped and spun on their hind legs, dancing as if smoten spirits, while the moon, still hanging in the growing dawn, remained the color of blood.
Copyright 2012 Bruce Holbert
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
eISBN : 978-1-619-02077-1
COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West