Lonesome Animals (19 page)

The Lord had constructed Jacob for the Iliad: loose-jointed as a cat and thick in the chest and the ass; he had thin legs and arms thick as tree roots and greased hair pulled back that shone purple in the low light—power you could not write away for in a magazine or curry with dumbbells. God's intent resides in such men's bodies, more so even than it inhabits a priest's soul or a lover's heat or a surgeon's blade. Just breathing, such a man was prophet and prophecy, an act before thought, as quick as the almighty's mind and as inculpable. Whatever made him was before sin or forgiveness or the guilt in between.

Strawl watched man and horse descend the road into the river bottom, then choose a fence-line trail and negotiate it in the predawn gloaming. Cattle lowed as they passed, and the wheat stirred in the wind that pushed through this country every morning, whether it was ninety above or ten below. Jacob dismounted to open a barbwire gate, then shut it behind him. Strawl heard a truck engine turn and then catch. The horse and Jacob glanced in the sound's direction. Sparrows cheeped. Bobwhites bobwhited. A great horned owl whooed and went silent, and the gulls over the river cawed and fussed and circled the ferry landing and the garbage containers. Killdeer scolded and the chukar in the shale falls clacked as horse and rider passed, just threads of shadow in the
thin, coming light, blessed horse and sacred man, just tracks and light diverted a moment, then not.

A year before Strawl retired, a Lincoln County deputy called Lucky—who was anything but; Jacob had put his eye out rather than be arrested—had told him about the dilapidated ranch building where Jacob was bound. The deputy had done some homework and discovered the place was neither abandoned nor inhabited. The Chin sister had purchased it and ten useless acres from a bachelor rancher for a paltry sum and services rendered, then signed the deed over to Jacob. The deputy had no interest in walking into a hornet's nest, but he told anyone who would listen in hopes another might be game for the risk.

Strawl had at first figured Jacob's direction to be north—Loomis and Palmer Lake, where he might drink and fish and lie low. It's what a guilty man would do. Instead, Jacob parked himself in the wheat ranches and farm towns where the locals would not likely miss his coming or going. He could hold out against a single man there, but a group could take him without much trouble. The move troubled Strawl.

Elijah's joining the hunt troubled him, too. Strawl could see no reason for it and wasn't inclined toward company, though Elijah would be handy if they crossed swords with a man as formidable as Jacob. Still, it remained another thing he didn't understand in a business where blind spots had killed better men than himself.

S
trawl rose and lit a fire in the stove. He set coffee to perk and then fell into a silent, dreamless sleep and awakened only when he heard a cured bacon side popping in a pan. A circle of hard biscuits rose in another and Elijah, bent, guarded them from burning.

Strawl ate his breakfast and glanced at Elijah, who was mopping up bacon grease with a biscuit.

“He's down Spiegel Canyon,” Strawl said.

Elijah sipped at his coffee and watched the black surface rock in the cup. He lifted his eyes and blinked.

“Dropped in the west break and an hour later out the east.”

“Then he isn't in the Spiegel Canyon.”

“The road,” Strawl said. “They call it Spiegel Canyon Road all the way to the river.”

“Well, you should have said it was the road you meant.”

“I never said it wasn't.” Strawl lay against his bedroll and closed his eyes.

“You aren't in any hurry, are you?” Elijah said.

“Neither is he. Careful man never is.”

“He doesn't know we're trailing him?”

“He's been chased his whole life,” Strawl said. He sipped at the coffee, but it had cooled.

“The river is at his back and cliffs on both sides. One road in and out.”

“He knows what he's doing.”

Elijah remained quiet awhile. He refilled Strawl's coffee.

“You ask a lot of damned questions,” Strawl said.

“I haven't asked a one.”

“No, but there you sit, waiting to be answered all the same.”

Elijah looped and cinched the strap securing his bedroll.

“You don't sound smart enough to make a study, anyway.”

“Smart person keeps it to himself.”

“Well, don't let me make you a moron. Silence appeals to me as much as the next person.”

Strawl waved a hand to dismiss him. “You'd talk the bark off a tree.”

“But I don't require the tree to say much.”

Strawl drifted back toward sleep; his hat, smelling like hair and sweat and living, shaded the light. Twilight offered their best odds. The light turned tricky at the end of the day, and the birds' chirping would provide cover. They might even catch Chin drunk. Strawl tried to sleep, but the rheumatism in his hip and knees moved him to shift positions, and his rest was fitful at best. He finally quit on it
altogether and propped himself against his saddle. He drank a cup of lukewarm coffee, his face blank of emotion.

Elijah struck a match head against the floorboards. An acrid sulfur smell reached Strawl as it caught, and then the tobacco burning.

“You never liked ranching much.”

Strawl shook his head. “Can't all be as fortunate as you. Selling a place you never owned and buying rounds at the inn.”

“I've been blessed, I admit,” Elijah said. He drew on his cigarette, then exhaled. “But you enjoy this. You got the bit between your teeth and are near a gallop.”

“Trouble you keeping up?”

“My horse is complaining,” Elijah told him.

“Might need you a bicycle.”

“What I can't figure is why you quit. I'd say maybe you were slipping, if three counties weren't paying you for the same job because they can't manage.”

“I was getting old.”

Elijah pawed that answer away. “Ranch was making you old. That's why you wanted rid of it.”

A cigarette batted Strawl's hat followed by a book of matches. Strawl set the hat on his chest. “I killed a man.” He lit the cigarette.

“You killed more than one.”

“Guess I finally limited,” Strawl said.

“That's no answer.”

“One time, not long after I started copping, I ended up chasing a big cat. He'd killed a child and scarred another. We used to get called out on those cases, like the bears and wildcats were criminals. Well, I treed the thing, and it crouched on a high elm branch, one hundred and seventy pounds of muscle and claws and teeth. Its ears pinned against its skull. It batted the air and roared, spooking The Governor. I put my eye into the peep site and waited for it to
leap to another branch or uncoil for the ground. When I pulled the trigger, I still thought that cat would fly or turn smoke or just disappear. Do some kind of miracle. It didn't seem possible he would die, but the cat just shook when the bullet hit him, then lost his footing and fell on the ground. He breathed a minute, then died. That was that.”

“That must've been a lot of years before you quit.”

“Thirty, maybe.”

“Damned old reason.”

“I'm a slow learner,” Strawl said.

They dozed the rest of the day. Evening, Strawl collected his traps and saddled and Elijah did likewise. The ride into the canyon, Strawl said nothing. Elijah did not press him. You could creep up on a man like Jacob Chin, but it was impossible to surprise him because he expected nothing but what happened next and was only unnerved by waiting for it.

Spiegel's Canyon doglegged. The Spiegel Ranch peered over the lip, a two-story plantation building with a columned porch and a swing creaking in the evening wind. The barn and shop lay a hundred yards behind it, a corral between, but the ranch had outgrown horses and cattle. A stand of barley awaited cutting and a DC crawler waited to turn the earth and start again.

They followed a seasonal creek bed. The sandy inclines remained inhospitable for vegetation. They proceeded cautiously, Strawl on the draw's edge, Elijah navigating beneath him at the bottom.

Where the canyon bent to gather the runoff from a neighboring draw, Elijah raised his hand and Strawl drew Stick's rein. An engine coughed and fired, but it was west and only audible because the wind had switched direction. The canyon ended abruptly where the prehistoric floods had slashed a mile-wide chasm of scattered basalt and silty loam, remaking its path into a dozen dry channels.

The bottom country beneath had little worth. The bottom country turned too steep and strewn with rocks for cash crops. The wider tracks were green with alfalfa or orderly canopies of scraggly peach or apple orchards. A few listless heifers and their calves gazed up at the men, then continued browsing the hillside. Strawl could see no fence keeping them, just a coursing river and a steep climb and a bovine lack of ambition.

Across from Strawl, Elijah let Baal sort her descent through a shale slide and later a birch copse where the ground held water. Coyote willow and rabbitbrush grew in the shadows, complicating Baal's work. Beyond, Strawl heard a horse whinny and a goat bleat and, after a moment of working through the country with his eyes, located a small house, a patched corral and a sagging barn. The seasons had worn the sideboards paintless and the winds had separated a third of the shingles from the roof. The most recent remnants were scattered upon an uneven stand of green grass between the house and corral.

The wind was up, but he heard the horse step hard, then crow-hop and land. The goat bleated again. Strawl untied a saddlebag and lifted a glass to his eye. The horse was rolling in the grey dirt and the goat looped circles around it until the horse stopped and the goat butted its neck, which prompted the horse to return to all fours and make its own loops, with the goat at the center this time spinning like a top. Then the horse tired and walked to the high point in the corral and gazed regally at the barn and corral and the house, and the goat slept in the shade the horse made.

Men were killed in such pacific environs as often as in barroom riots, Strawl knew, but he wasn't clear if Elijah did. Strawl swung his leg from the right stirrup and dismounted. He walked Stick partway down a gravel slide until they encountered a tiny hollow and dipped a neckerchief in his canteen, squeezed the excess water into a puddle from which Stick could drink, then tied it to his
forehead and returned his hat to shade himself from the sun. Elijah climbed the grade. Crickets buzzed and ticked. A cat investigated the brush adjacent to the house until a rooster pheasant exploded in flight, throwing it backward in surprise.

A quarter hour later, Elijah led Baal to his position. Strawl offered him the field glasses, and Elijah examined the cabin, then returned them to Strawl and drank from his own canteen.

The sun descended the sky and they sat swapping the glasses. The horses grew bored and slept upright. Strawl and Elijah dozed as well, until Strawl heard the door's creak below them. Jacob, Taker of Sisters, filled the opening, then circled the house and stared into the pinking west. Clouds feathered in the heat, blue and violet, too thin to bear anything other than dew. Jacob leaned upon a rifle and studied the horizon until dusk purpled the night. He turned toward the canyon and waved his rifle at them.

They watched him feed the horse and goat and speak to them as if they were human. Another cat trailed him silently, sniffing the horseshit next to the halved oil drum, which was his manger, when suddenly Strawl heard wings beat the air and saw an owl rise with a third mewing kitten in its talons. It climbed toward the moonlight until a rifle sounded and the bird pinwheeled and released the kitten. Beneath, Jacob, Taker of Sisters, leaped the corral rail, parallel to the ground, then hit the hard-packed dirt and rose, kitten in hand.

“Could you do that?” Elijah asked.

Strawl shook his head. “Not even in my prime.”

They were both silent awhile, then Strawl fired a shot into the night. Jacob answered it, like a knight from Malory crossing sabers.

“We'll arrest him another time,” Strawl said.

“I thought we were going to kill him.”

“Then we'll kill him another time,” Strawl said. “He'll be just as dead.”

Strawl stood and clucked. Stick, still bridled, approached, and Strawl took his reins and began to weave down the hill for the house at the bottom. He glanced at Elijah. “Not like you to avoid an interesting conversation.”

Strawl halted a hundred yards from the house with Elijah behind and still far up the hill. He whistled and it was returned twice. Strawl walked Stick toward the goat and the horse. Both lifted their heads and stared as he passed. The kitten scrambled to the brush and made a frantic circle that ended behind a crude kitchen chair where Jacob reclined, his back against the house. A pipe between his teeth glowed. He looked like a photograph of Roosevelt pinching his cigarette holder and selling the NRA. The kitten climbed into Jacob's lap, and he worked his hands behind its ears.