Lonesome Animals (2 page)

Strawl shot out Reynolds's knees in the chair where he sat. The ranch hands scurried under a pool table. Strawl approached Reynolds, stepped on his wrist and put another bullet through his palm, then did the same to the other, leaving the ring finger dangling. Finally he hauled Reynolds by the ankles outside where he tied him to his horse and fired a round into the air. The horse bolted over the steep, paved road, Reynolds's head whacking the asphalt each step. When the horse tired, Strawl shot into the sky again and the horse barreled onto the highway where he was fortunate to dodge a freight truck. No luck saved Reynolds, whose head smashed like a melon under the Studebaker's wheels.

For two months following, nearly every morning, Strawl and Emma woke to cut flowers on their doorsteps or fruit breads or a string of cleaned trout or a calf's liver. Emma cooked or sliced each gift from the porch and invited neighbors to meals, serving them grand dinners that she allowed Strawl to enjoy by carrying
the conversation, occasionally hauling him by callused hand into the kitchen where she shut the door and hooked the lock into the hoop and tongue-kissed him and banged her hips into his until both their faces flushed with ardor.

Seven weeks later, he encountered a pervert suspect on a Nespelem street. The man drew his weapon like he was Jesse James himself and Strawl twisted out of the bullet's path behind an elm. The pervert let off another round. Strawl saw it leave the barrel and the smoke following it. He dropped to one knee and heard the bullet thump into the withers of an Appaloosa brood mare tied to the livery post. The horse reared and dragged the shop's porch into the street. Strawl rested his right wrist on his left and squeezed his pistol's trigger. The bullet took the man's testicles from his lingam. His pants leaked blood like he'd pissed himself red and both hands covered his plumbing like he might still mend. Strawl belted the man's pistol and removed a knife and razor from his pockets, then walked to the stockade, where he ate a late lunch and afterwards sent a pair of corporals to collect the man, who lived to stand trial and serve twenty-three years in Walla Walla breaking granite to gravel to pave farm roads.

One of the girls the man had victimized stopped by a week later with ajar of apricot jelly. “I slept three nights in a row now,” she told him. He said nothing, but Emma cried, and that night she pulled him to her like a hungry she-wolf and didn't turn loose until the moon crossed half the sky. Strawl felt close to heroic.

Emma informed him she was pregnant six weeks later, and he felt he had arrived in a strange country that he'd set out for but never expected to reach. Someone invited him to join a church. Emma was included in a fashionable quilting circle and the commandant suggested Strawl spend more time at his desk. He put his savings into a plot of land across the river and Emma began sketching house plans.

His daughter arrived healthy and they named her Dorothy, though she soon became Dot. Emma clucked and hummed to the baby all hours, but to Strawl the child turned frustration. He found no edge to an infant he could grasp, and she became as foreign to him as the moon.

Narrative could not reside in such routines, though, despite the fact most of living did. Strawl's wife knew his twisting his hands and worrying the windows for what they were: foreshadows of an escape from her and his daughter for his work. They were no more interesting than a field to him. A description of a man and a litany of his crimes, though, made for a story that he, in those days of righteousness and ignorance, could end and rely upon as argument that the world contained patterns and logic and, if not justice, then at least retribution.

The habit, however, required being alone, and the isolation drove his mind into his skull like a mussel into a shell. In his isolation he concluded each person ground the gristle and meat of his days and events and emotions into a meal he could feed himself and not feel empty. A person's worth came down to his talents as a butcher; some cut and boned their hours and years without reckoning and wondered why they encountered blood at all, while others acknowledged themselves as the source of both the killing and the sausage.

He was mistaken of course.

When he was assigned what would eventually be called the Box Canyon Massacre, he had not yet surrendered his ignorance or his bliss.

Box Canyon was north, and north was a direction like Hell was a place. Property lines and boundaries between counties or countries remained rumors. No one knew where Up North started and
where it left off, but they were certain that it held all that white people feared and the little left they didn't understand. Any disturbance that remained a mystery beyond a month the army relegated to that particular compass point, and when county and state police took up the army's duties, they found it just as handy. Strawl had apprehended men in the north country, which was filled with mountains and trees and rock you found any other direction; the only difference was a later spring and earlier fall and a few wolves and panthers. The Indians knew this, but the BIA cops still attributed crimes that they themselves were accessories to or those that they were too indolent to investigate to that bearing.

The Box Canyon Massacre took place neither in a Box Canyon, nor was it a massacre. A family of Methow with no reputation for trouble left the reservation to pick huckleberries in the Okanogan foothills. A cattle rancher named Doering accosted the spindly group as they crossed his rangeland. The Indians quickly agreed to divert along a county road. The rancher, though, being German, possessed a bit of the Hun, and he shot the old grandfather who spoke for them in the shoulder. Horses reared and riders fell and, in the melee, the rancher broke his neck against a tree stump, and his straw boss's thigh took a bullet—likely from Doering's rifle, facts would later determine. The Doering widow, however, insisted it was murder, and the superintendent of police summoned Strawl to clear it up.

The Methows knew enough of military justice to recognize their best chance lay in the high timber. They bolted for the deepest country in that portion of the state, north of Aeneas and beyond the Kettle River toward Curlew and the Canadian border. Severe as a steeple, all except the frost line remained canopied with pine and birch and aspen and tamarack, making tracking dark and humid, even midday. Add that to the carpet of ferns and brush that grew in such habitat and it was slow travel. It took Strawl six days to
close on the group enough to hear them and another two days for a sighting. They labored across a trail that led around Chesaw Mountain, bearing their belongings on packboards and a travois. Above and below, sheer granite cliffs sparkled like fresh water.

Strawl worked himself ahead of them at the foot of a talus slide. When they were within his sight once more, he fired a warning shot into the rocks above as was his habit when he wanted to stop a suspect he knew was already afraid. The gun belched sulfur and a smoke wisp and the report echoed against the rock. A second of silence passed, one that, looking back, should have made him uneasy, as the women should have at least shouted in surprise. A rush of stones followed. One tumbled through the trees a hundred feet below, scalping saplings and bushes in its path. An old woman wailed. The family had bolted in their fear and collapsed a soft part in the trail, Strawl surmised. As he approached the little band, he saw checked shirts and wool blankets scattered among the rocks along with stockings and unmatched shoes. Ten feet beneath the trail, he discovered the father and his son, half buried with stones.

“How did this happen?” Strawl asked.

The old woman flexed her forefinger as if it were pulling a trigger.

“I didn't shoot them,” Strawl said.

The old woman shook her head. She pointed to the rocks above.

“Goddamnit, that's not what I intended!” Strawl shouted at her.

The woman looked at him as if he were a tornado or a thunderbolt or a killing freeze.

Strawl removed the stones covering the bodies. The father's skull was a leaking gourd and his shirt spattered with his own grey brains. A boulder had blasted the boy's chest with such force it parted his ribs and sternum and tore a strap of flesh a foot wide and twice that long. Under, his heart and part of a lung sucked for air and floundered until they ceased their toil.

Suddenly, a girl cried out in Salish and scurried from the trees beneath them, half naked, dotted with welts. She raced through the stones and fell upon a pack, tearing at the rawhide straps.

Strawl had prepared for her to rise with a gun. But she held in her hand, instead, only a skinning knife. Relieved, he cried out in her language to put it away. She blinked at him, understanding the words but not how they could be from him. Then she drew the blade across her throat. Blood arced from an artery and the scarlet spray pocked her skin and the rocks beneath her. She dropped to one knee. The blood poured from her like she'd opened a spigot. By the time he reached the girl it was thick as syrup.

Strawl sat on a flat rock and watched her die. He was too weary to speak. He remained where he was through the day's heat and into the cool evening. He possessed no compass to direct him from this place and no heart to beat blood into his muscles and press him forward if he had.

He carried the bodies into a draw, where the dirt was softer. There he dug three graves. He let the old woman sing, then filled them. It was nightfall when he finished. He offered the woman passage back, making it clear she would ride his mount, but she was determined to stay and he could produce no convincing argument otherwise in her language or his own.

Rumor and the Box Canyon newspaper reports cemented Strawl's reputation with criminals and the general public alike, and, though those opinions originally diverged, time would eventually wind them into a braid.

Ten days later, Strawl cooked breakfast, as he did each morning he wasn't pursuing suspects. The skillet snapped with Polish sausage and he added three eggs. Emma puttered behind him, organizing canisters and setting the table. The child slept. Ordinarily it would have been a sweet moment for them, yet when he asked Emma for the peppermill and she dallied to finish lining the
napkins with silverware in the proper order, Strawl clanked the pan with the metal spatula and said again, “The pepper.” Emma crossed her eyes at him testily, and he lifted the cast iron skillet, sausage and all, and drove it into the side of her head. Sausages scattered across the floor and grease, blood, and cerebral fluid clotted her hair and streaked her face.

She staggered, blinked her eyes at him, then collapsed onto her side and seized. Strawl took her head in his hands and watched her pupils black the hazel from her eyes. The child, four years old, fussed in the other room, then found a toy and quieted, until a neighbor shielded her eyes and packed her away.

Emma breathed for two more days, then did not.

Strawl confessed to the commandant and insisted on a trial and prison. The commandant wrote Emma's death up as an accidental fall and ordered her buried without an investigation. He promoted Strawl to captain, but Strawl resigned his commission the next day and remained AWOL throughout the remainder of his stint, taking contracts on men from the state and later the feds.

He put Dot in his bed and she slept under his unfurled arm, but he did not rest. The third day, he farmed her out to the most pleasant neighbors and soon was absent entire seasons, just his bedroll and Isaac Stevens. He could tolerate only silence for weeks at a time, though it wasn't the kind conferred upon so many men a generation younger than he, who drew their stoic qualities from dime-store novels and the picture shows. Strawl's stillness was not a heroic choice; it contained nothing resembling assurance or calm; it was its opposite: a smoking, frozen bewilderment, or, when driven past tolerance, a mustering of powers so unhinged from will or belief, so purely sired in what was before him and his blindness to it, as to be monstrous.

It seemed to him he'd gotten living backwards, that the years were stealing wisdom from him rather than delivering it. He
recognized what anyone in police work must: in even the most virtuous life, anarchy lay, like a live round, bolted and chambered, and at any moment the firing pin could fall upon the casing and thrust the spinning lead in any direction.

Those years, the only words he heard directed him toward his man or lied to steer him awry. Traveling aboard a breathing animal, he matched its breaths with his own, the only tastes in his mouth the remains of a meal from an army tin or something he'd killed an hour before, his mind emptied and filled with all of what surrounded him, and he sought from it nothing but its silence. Yet his ears denied him even this small favor, for no man is permitted that kind of quiet.

T
he Omak Stampede was only another rodeo in those t days and Omak just another lumber town. The year of the Crash back east, the mill owner's wife, along with her women's group, pressed her husband and the cattle barons and city fathers to adopt ordinances closing the taverns at 9 pm, and the sheriff was ordered to accost Indians and drovers for vagrancy if they had less than ten dollars on their person.