Lonesome Animals (23 page)

Elijah delivered him to the ranch in the flatbed. Dot met them on the porch and helped Arlen and Elijah pack Strawl to the sofa.

“You're being charged with murder,” Dot told him.

“Yep.”

“Do the police think you did it?”

“No.”

“Why did they arrest you, then?”

“Because I could have done it,” Strawl said.

Dot blinked her eyes. “Do you have an alibi?”

Strawl shook his head. “ I'm not even sure which days I need one.”

Strawl's legs shuddered and he held on to a chair.

Dot stepped toward him. “You can say, ‘I would never do something like that. I would have no reason. I am not that kind of person.'”

“Is that true?” Strawl asked.

“No,” Dot said. “But I'd like to hear it.”

Elijah rolled Strawl a smoke and drew it lit. “You have no alibi, then.”

Strawl inhaled a lungful of smoke.

“They don't care about my alibi. What did you do with my ranch money?” Strawl said.

Elijah didn't reply.

Strawl set his cigarette on the edge of a saucer Arlen had fetched for the ashes. “I need to sleep now,” he said.

He slept a thick, dreamless sleep and woke with the light, missing the pain medicine from the hospital. Once upright, he hobbled to the kitchen and put on some coffee and ate three brownies from a covered plate. The caffeine and sugar steadied him. Walking was easier, though his ribs ached like a bad tooth.

Arlen lay under the crawler chassis, greasing the U-joints, his wiry arms wrestling a clutch casing. He scooted from underneath the rig. Strawl nodded at him. Arlen took his glasses from his nose and wiped them on his shirttail. His newsboy cap hooded his narrow face, which looked as if the bulk of it had pulled toward his nose like a gopher Strawl recalled from the funnies. The result left him appearing tipped forward and eager sometimes and at others as if he were fighting a headwind. Arlen stared a moment, watery-eyed through his glasses, then knocked his hands together and returned to his chore.

Strawl changed the oil in the trap wagon, his injuries turning a half-hour job into one that required triple the time. Dot brought them their breakfast. After his first wife's demise and before Ida arrived, Strawl had returned from manhunts to visit Dot and she would take his hand and walk him to the river, and there they would toss stones and branches into the current. He would smoke and she would chew Jujubes from the Omak five-and-dime. She had quit speaking in school, as well as to the Cunninghams, who boarded her. He never asked her why.

He and Arlen pulled themselves from under the machines. They washed their hands and forearms with an oily goop that cut grease, then rinsed under a well spigot outside. Dot set their plates on cinderblocks and put a bottle in the boy's mouth.

Dot waved her hand at them. “Eat,” she said.

They made short work of their eggs and ham and fried potatoes. Arlen was soon under the tractor again, the girls offering him tools he didn't need but accepted all the same. Inside the barn were the plow, the cultivator, and rod weeder and seed drills, all scrubbed clean and folded upon themselves like grasshoppers. Strawl had been content to keep them in the weed patch by the creek year-round, but Arlen had even filed the rust that ate at the drill wheels. Strawl spied six or seven one-gallon paint cans stored under the bench, all International Harvester red.

“You went hunting bad men when Mother died, too,” Dot said.

“You remember anything of your mother?” Strawl asked.

“No,” she said. “She's just gone.”

“You know how?”

“She cracked her head on something.”

Strawl nodded.

“You think I'd kill and dress out Indians. I kill her, too, you figure?”

“God no,” Dot told him. “Her death broke you worse than me.”

“I was broken already,” Strawl said. “And Ida?”

“The river,” Dot said. “Not even you can whip a river.”

Strawl tipped his coffee cup to his mouth, then set it down. “You know, there's no predicting what the worst criminals will do because they don't know, themselves. The ones who make a career of it, they'll weigh the odds and do their time when they're caught. But these others, they're another matter. They've probably been committing little crimes all along and not even calling them such and then the moon changes and they're holding a gun on someone and wondering why the rest of us are so wound up.”

“Doesn't sound like it takes much wit to be a detective.”

“They might be no trouble to find, but they'll kill you quicker than Wyatt Earp. They've been desperados from the crib. They don't need motive to murder,just inclination.”

“You pity them?”

Strawl looked at Dot. “You're smart, but you don't know it all,” he told her. “Goose flies south in fall, but it ain't conscience directing him. It's just he knows that's where all the other geese are headed.”

He looked over the girls and the baby. He had nothing to say to them, he realized, and that was as significant a sin as his others. He returned to the trap wagon, cranking at the filter with a tool Arlen had constructed to make it easier. He watched their feet from beneath, until they opened the squeaky door and were out of sight.

The evening following, Strawl sent Elijah to Keller Ferry to put his ear to the ground concerning Pete and the silverspoon. Jacob would be no trouble to apprehend if evidence made him a more likely suspect, but Elijah was better suited to keep the reapers cutting than to sort the chaff from the grain. A murderer was about, and employed or not, Strawl had determined to take the man himself. First, though, he had decided to clear a few debts from his ledger.

A
fter he had heard Baal's footfalls disappear into the distance and watched Elijah's lantern come on, then go out again in the darkness, Strawl limped to the trap wagon and turned the ignition key. He drove the highway to Coulee Dam. His hands on the steering wheel glowed in the green dash light. The speedometer floated near fifty miles an hour and the truck wandered like a gin mill drunk. Any higher and it would spill him off the pavement.

Past Buffalo Lake, the light ahead nearly blinded him. Bureau contractors had gone to double shifts and the electricians had strung chains of high-powered electric lamps over the worksite. Others lit the tent city, more the cofferdam. The longest were looped to the lower bank on the other side of the river, abutting the west end of the project. There, a portion of the construction had settled and
labor had commenced on the powerhouse structure. Generators larger than houses lay on their sides, the metal glinting. The turbine wheels that would fit within them were finned with twisted iron plates two tons each. The riprap upon the banks glittered as if a thousand fallen stars were holding the water in place, and the galaxy itself fueled the work.

In a metal box welded to the cab of the trap wagon were Strawl's tools. He cut his lights a block before the police station and left the rig to idle, then filled his pocket with three wrenches and a flathead and a Phillips screwdriver along with wire snippers. In the parking lot, he found a cruiser with a broken axle and withdrew the call box. He wired the leads into the trap wagon's cigarette lighter, then drove to Dice's home address. The lights in the house were out, but an unfamiliar sedan had parked across the street. From the microphone, Strawl reported a prowler to the dispatcher and stammered the address as if he were reading it from a piece of paper. Then he parked himself at a high spot, which allowed him a view of the house.

Strawl rolled a cigarette, then lit it and watched the smoke break in the cool dark air. He recalled learning to hunt on his own after he'd squandered the few dollars his father offered as severance. He remembered being alone and starving and standing over the first rabbit he'd ever snared. He enjoyed its dying like a job well done. It puzzled him and he killed three more that same way. He listened to them squeal in the traps and later studied their peeled carcasses on a makeshift spit over his fire, each fitting against the other like tongues into grooves.

Strawl sipped a cup of coffee from a thermos he had thought to bring. He could not see the dam or even the black river from his vista, but the light boiled out of the work below like bitter bile from the world's pierced entrails. Strawl had heard Arlen say that all we had once thought sturdy ground was not. Country floated
like pieces of eggshell on an ocean over a yolk so elemental and hot that it melted rock into an angry, smoldering glue. Strawl knew nothing of the world that inclined him to argue.

Blue and red lights flashed in the distance against the cloud cover. Dice had been farther to the west than he ought to. Probably in Coulee City. A rodeo cowboy had opened a tavern there a few years ago. He had built a stage for bands. People traveled miles to eat and dance and drink and fight.

The car was covering the miles. Strawl bent and stared into the black coffee, letting the heat bathe his face. Dice had married his wife too young. He treated her to dinner out once a week, and last year had bought her a bracelet with diamonds, but money didn't matter to most women. It was love they wanted, same as men, it turned out.

The squad car made the turn to Dice's house, tires spitting gravel against the metal fender. He did not cut the blues or the siren, likely hoping the commotion would hurry the principals from their adulterous joining so he could continue to convince himself his suspicions were just a cop's natural inclination.

Strawl sipped his coffee. It was bitter and hot and hurt his throat going down, then lit in his stomach like a stone. He heard the car door slam, then the house open under Dice's key. He dumped the coffee dregs on the gravel outside the window and tipped his seat back and fell asleep.

Morning, Strawl entered the police station from the back door.

“Dice beat up his wife,” Barnes said, upon seeing him. Barnes was from the South and he always sounded mid-song, and thought as slow as he talked. Strawl had kept him on because his simple mind allowed him to carry out any order without questioning it and that was the closest thing to loyalty he'd encountered.

“She's in the hospital.” Barnes nodded at the pistol in Strawl's belt. “You don't need that. None of us took it too serious, you being arrested.”

Strawl nodded. “Never can be too careful, it seems. You seen her?”

“No. Just him.”

“Dice?”

“Yes, sir. He's in the jail cell. He just locked himself in and tossed the keys to me. I don't know what in hell for. She had it coming.”

Barnes was leading up to something, but he was too much a lackey to offer an opinion until he was asked. Strawl let him stew a full minute.

“What is it?” Strawl said finally.

“What should I do with him? He hasn't done anything,” Barnes said. “Not really.”

“He's surrendered his gun?”

Barnes nodded.

“I'll take care of him,” Strawl said.

He found Dice's hat and his tobacco and pipe on the desk, then delivered them to Dice, who was huddled in his cell. It was mid-shift and he was the only captive the jail held. Strawl sorted Barnes's keys until he found the right one and let himself in. Dice wouldn't meet his eye until Strawl ordered him to.

Strawl took the pipe from his pocket, filled and lit it. Dice looked up through his messed hair, then accepted the pipe. Strawl opened the cell door. “Come on if you want to fix it.”

Dice rose. Strawl led Dice to the squad car. Strawl stopped at the flower shop and bought a bouquet and handed the flowers to Dice. Dice stared at them. “You're a rotten man. Not any better than the rest of us. It's time to show you, you hypocritical bastard,” Strawl whispered.

Strawl parked at the hospital and they crossed the gravel lot.

“His wife,” Strawl said.

The receptionist was a God-fearing woman and had never thought much of Strawl until it had come time to vote. She gave him the room number. Strawl passed the nurses' station on the second floor. Two of them were nodding in their chairs at a radio show. A monitor blipped. He found the room himself.

“Look at the havoc you have wreaked, Sheriff. How will you live with yourself now?” Strawl said. “You can't.”

Karen Dice lay on a hospital bed, a tube sputtering in her throat. Strawl looked at her chart but could make nothing of the doctor's squiggles. Her cheek looked like it held half an apple. On her brow, a line of sutures oozed with the swelling. Her ear was blue and dotted with blood.

Dice sat in the chair next to the bed. He scooted himself forward and put her hand in his. She squeezed back, though she was still unconscious with the morphine. When the doctor made his rounds, he looked at Dice over his wire-rimmed glasses. Dice released his wife's hand as if he'd lost a husband's privileges. Her hand dangled over the metal bed rail, her fingers spread like she was reaching out or just trying to mount enough strength to return it to the warm place next to her.