Lonesome Animals (10 page)

Of all the towns in this county, Keller was Strawl's favorite. Its tiny houses had followed the riverbank, each with a dock and racks to dry fish and barrels constantly burning, filling the valley with fragrant pine smoke. Small tugs had navigated the channel between the two rivers, towing chained log booms that encircled the raw timber the jacks and skidders had run into the narrower upper river. A small lumber plant cut the pine into planks, and a gristmill turned the spring wheat ranchers harvested atop the canyon. A ferry alternated west and north to transport goods and travelers into the upper half of the Colville Reservation or deliver them to the farms on the far side of the Columbia. The town's major boast was a semi-pro baseball team full of young Jim Thorpes hurling a ball and swinging a bat like they had been at it a thousand years. The town contained only one tavern, but it held a hardware store, which also sold moonshine, and a livery and a dry goods shop where women could purchase gabardine and gingham, as well as two churches, one Catholic and another Methodist, but both took all comers.

Strawl squandered the balance of the day in the only grocery and hardware still operating. He began by perching on the porch chairs where the regulars stopped acquaintances and swapped stories. The patrons, however, gave him a wide berth; as the word
passed, the customers simply put off their shopping until finally the store proprietor pleaded with Strawl to leave the premises. Strawl then visited the church, where the new minister, who did not know him, was too flustered by the concerns of his uprooted flock and a church sanctuary that would soon be underwater to offer assistance. When Strawl told him babies were dying, the man looked like he might cry, but he still had no answers.

Next, he considered simply arresting people to frighten them and then peppering his quarry with questions and charges, but if he wanted them frightened of him he'd already managed that, and if they were more frightened of his man, they had more reason to remain silent, not less. Each person Strawl encountered, whether he knew them or not, recognized him and likely had kith or kin who'd suffered a beating or a bullet or a jail sentence at his hand. One farmer, Lori Carlin, sat and talked for a while, though his only news on the murders was that it wasn't Stick Indians, ghosts that both whites and natives attributed to mischief, such as flat tires and fallen women.

“Them ghosts aren't mean,” the man said. “Just ornery.”

By mid-afternoon, he had determined to plan anew. He lunched under a copse of oaks and napped in their shade until twilight, when he mounted again and rode toward the old town site to the one place there might be enough rounders to contribute something beyond gossip.

The first Strawl saw of his son that evening was his feet snubbed to a rope extending from a cottonwood. The town's one remaining streetlight illuminated the rooftop of the tavern but left the tree and Elijah shadows until he'd almost passed them.

Strawl's eyes followed the feet down to pant cuffs and pockets turned out. Elijah's bare arms, bound behind him and fastened to his belt, had goose-pimpled, but his face split with a grin.

“Looks like you're in a spot,” Strawl told him.

“I've been worse off.” Upside down, his t-shirt had rolled past what little chest he had, his ribs there to count. Otherwise, he appeared unperturbed, his brown skin as smooth as the lacquered walnut of their kitchen table and his eyes darker yet. Pupil and iris seemed one. They reflected what they saw like bottle glass and concealed their contents just the same. His high cheekbones narrowed for his jaw and chin and triangled his wolfish face. He'd cropped his hair short not long after Ida died and now doctored it with oils and combed the part so carefully, Dot claimed he counted the follicles on each side. He was half drunk, and half crazy, but all of himself.

“Been here long?” Strawl asked.

“Long enough to take all the comfort there might be from it,” Elijah said. “You wouldn't want to cut me loose I don't guess?”

“Those who put you there went to some trouble.”

Elijah laughed. The sound was neither a scream nor chuckle, but it was genuine. Strawl rolled a cigarette, and, after he lit it, bent and pinched it into Elijah's lips and began another. Elijah smacked and puffed until he drew smoke.

Strawl's cigarette ash flickered and greyed. He tugged his pocketknife blade free.

“Won't do to have the poor working against one another, I imagine,” he said. He sawed a few strokes on the rawhide and unbound Elijah's hands. His knife hadn't crossed a whetstone in some time, however, and the heavy hemp rope that secured him to the branch was tougher. Strawl halted and contemplated the worn blade's luster. Smoke ascended from Elijah beneath him, his wet breath with it. He grinned and continued hanging. His lollygagging rankled Strawl; he at least could press himself up and slacken the rope.

“You squander my money?” Strawl asked him.

“ It's a heap of wampum. I can't spend it that fast. At least on the normal amenities. Maybe I bought stocks and bonds.”

“You don't know a stock from a bond.”

“Doesn't matter.”

“That place is all I had. I halved it for you.”

“It's all I had, too, so I sold it. You hadn't ought to be willing things if you're going to keep living. No hard feelings, of course.”

“I been talked about dead before,” Strawl said.

“How's Hemmer taking care of the place?”

“He's not. I bought it back six weeks ago. Cost me my last dime and a promissory note, to boot.”

“That's unfortunate. It'd have been a good joke, you sitting on the porch watching him run things.”

“I'm sorry to disappoint you.”

Elijah shrugged. “Maybe you'll fall off your horse and get crippled.”

“Mornings it feels like I already have,” Strawl said.

Elijah spat his cigarette onto the ground. Strawl watched it smolder and die.

“If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?”

“You've had plenty to eat.”

“And they shall say unto the elders of the city, this our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard and all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.”

“Apparently you're deaf, then,” Strawl told him.

“Or this isn't Israel.”

“ It's surely not that,” Strawl said. “You going to tell me what you did with the money?”

Elijah, still dangling, shook his head. Strawl folded the blade to sheath it, then built himself another cigarette and one more for Elijah. He struck a match for himself and left the box.

“Suit yourself,” Strawl said.

Rusting automobiles lined the road into the skeleton of the old town. Since the Crash, few could afford gas or oil to move them. Most had resigned themselves to horses once more; they went slower, but on grass, which the bigwigs hadn't devised a way to ration or commandeer.

The town's major lumber mill, now closed in the face of the flood, but a tavern run by a Chinese, which served the best food within a hundred miles, remained. Its owner, Woo, had never considered straying so far north when he was imported to drive rail and later took his chances on mining claims, an endeavor in which success was as dangerous as failure. Those without a strike starved; the few happening onto one fared worse. One winter, a rounder from Lewiston and his partners murdered thirty-six. An early runoff stirred the Snake River bottom enough to loosen the rope anchoring the bodies which passed through the sawmill town of Lewiston, one or two a day. Schoolboys abandoned books and chores altogether for casting lures in the current and the chance of hooking a Chinaman. The murderer was squandering his plunder on gin and whores when word reached him. A day later, he was apprehended lounging in a bubble bath, assuming no one would undertake the nuisance over a gaggle of Buddhists.

Eventually Woo migrated onto the reservation over a period of a year, chefing local spoons and catering hotels, collected enough savings to go halves with a drunken Canadian, who one day went north and didn't return. Strawl had heard Woo was too stubborn to drag up stakes despite the deluge. It was the closest to a useful
fact he had acquired all day. Strawl had not put a chair before portions more exotic than chicken pie in years. It was a luxury he'd decided to allow himself.

The tavern had no shingle, but it was not difficult to find, as fewer than twenty people remained where more than a thousand had resided before. A humid odor, more greens than meat, spread itself from the building.

Lanterns provided the only light, one for each table. The nearest still flickered from the breeze he'd let in. Cooking behind a counter were three small Chinese, speaking their bell-like tongue in a kitchen lantern-lit, too, though he'd seen power poles just up the block.

The tavern was one long rectangle, and a smaller one behind it that held the kitchen. A bar reclaimed from one of the Nespelem fires stood in front of the kitchen, with a half dozen rickety stools. The rest of the place held tables with checked linen cloths and, in the back under an overhead lamp, a large card table and a game made up of four white men in clean cotton button-ups, one in store-bought trousers and a shirt too clean for labor, and two Indians wearing checked flannels and canvas trousers.

The room's raw studs held no gypboard, and a warm evening draft fluttered the tablecloths, but the food was highly regarded; people went out of their way for Woo's meals. Three girls tended the dining tables, packing steaming teapots and plates loaded with rice and vegetables. He saw chicken glazed in apricot sauce and thin beef strips cooked with peas and peppers. One plate held an entire duck seared near black with sugar. A woman sipped soup as clear as water; a fried egg was taking up the bottom of the bowl. Girls in dresses and men and women wearing their Sunday clothes dotted the tables.

Strawl tipped his cap to Woo and nodded, though he saw no sign the man recalled him. Strawl was disappointed, as he had
frequented his bar more than others and thought their relationship amicable.

“What you like?” Woo asked. He wore a mustache, though not one you'd associate with a Chinese. He'd shaved its edges to barely span the bottom of his nostrils. He shuffled when he walked and his hand palsied, holding his spatula.

“I'll have green tea,” Strawl said, and took a stool at the bar. “And that sugared duck you cook. And make it peppery. With sweet and sour gravy and those vegetables.”

Woo smiled. “You want soup, too?”

Strawl nodded.

“May be long time,” Woo said. “I forgot how to cook real Chinese, I think.” He laughed a high-pitched laugh. “I thought you cop no more.”

“I just had a hankering for foreign company,” Strawl said.

Woo shook his head. “You just like Woo's duck.”

“That's a fact,” Strawl said.

The meal arrived family-style. Woo offered a pair of sticks as a joke.

Strawl piled the food in mounds that he tried to keep separate, but finally swirled into a tasty mess.

“You chase the bad man?”

“One,” Strawl said.

Woo nodded vigorously. “He scare everyone.”

“What do you know of Chin's doings?”

“I let you eat free if you kill him.”

“I might take you up on that. What do you have against him?”

“He steal my good horse and damned near shoot the bar mirror.” Woo motioned to the bullet holes on the wall.

“He do these other murders?”

Woo wiped a dish and set it on a stack of others. “He might do them. He is mean.”

Strawl sipped the last of his tea. “I'll be looking him up,” he said. “How about the Bird tribe?”

“They eat here when they pass. They pay and don't break things. Many of them. I don't know all names.”

“Me neither,” Strawl said. “They all look alike, too.”

Woo nodded. “Big.” He thumped his chest.

“Yep. Every one of them could lift a steer and pack it across a creek, women included. You think they're up to killing?”

Woo shrugged. “I ask nothing. I just listen.”

Strawl nodded. “What do you hear, then?”

“Same as you. Men killed then torn to be funny. No one knows before. No fighting. Very careful, maybe.”

Strawl shook his head. “Too many bodies too fast. Psychopath might kill more, but, you're right, he'd be careful as a cabinetmaker or he'd be caught. This kind of thing takes time and patience and a plan beyond what your common criminal can muster.” He sat a minute and sipped his tea, then tapped his finger on the cup's rim. “Killer knew these men, Woo; they trusted him. That's why there's no struggle; they went willing.”