Lonesome Animals (25 page)

That evening Strawl reclined on a saddlebag while Elijah made camp and cooked three trout from Friedlander Creek.

“Who is this killer, if not Jacob Chin?” Elijah asked.

“Someone with enough sense and patience and money to keep clear of witnesses,” Strawl said. He pointed his finger and banged it against the palm of the other hand. “Most crimes, one person and another disagree on what belongs to who, and they don't have the smarts to connive it from the other nor the patience or faith to wait for it to fall to them. So they rob or kill.”

“Or both.”

Strawl nodded. “Then the one who committed the crime runs. If he's really mean at heart, he might leave clues that lead the people to think some other poor lout did the thing, though that happens so rarely and usually is planned so sloppily it's not worth mention. Mostly it's the first. A person behaves without courtesy or decency and only later grasps he's perpetrated a crime to boot.”

The fish had finished cooking and Elijah slipped one onto a bed of leaves for Strawl. Strawl opened his pocketknife and sliced a piece loose. The golden skin tasted of salt and the one eye looked up at him. Elijah remained quiet. He separated the fine bones from the flesh and carefully drew the skin back.

“You didn't like cutting those boys' feet, did you?” Strawl said. “Or making the BIA boys bear food.”

“I didn't do any of it.”

Smoke curled from the fire. Strawl added a stick and watched the flame take it, flipping images as if they were moving pictures without the screen, raw light and perfect black and the shadows alternating between.

“You permitted it,” Strawl said.

Elijah nodded. “Do not allow what you consider good to be spoken of as evil.”

“Or the other way around.”

“Yep.” Elijah sheathed his knife and set the fish beside him on its leaves. “What if I didn't allow it?”

“Read some more. You'd be dead. Or I'd be. Or one of us would have converted the other, which is what happened.”

Elijah's eyes gazed into the fire. He blinked once, then again. Otherwise his face was calm as a lake. “I can't see it that way,” he said.

The flames burned and smoked. It was a good fire, bedded now with a floor of coals that would keep through morning and banked by rocks and a bough green enough not to spark with a delinquent ember. Strawl prepared his bedroll and pillowed his head with his saddle. He closed his eyes.

“Maybe he can't help himself,” Elijah said. “He enjoys murder and intends to keep at it, wrong be damned. Plenty of enjoying what you're not supposed to in that good book, too. Look at David with Bathsheba.”

“Or Samson and Delilah.”

“Solomon.”

“Solomon and who?”

“Song of Songs. Whoever.”

“Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“They're towns, old man, like Nespelem and Keller, not people.”

“Lot and his salt shaker, then,” Strawl said.

Elijah chuckled. “Adam and Eve.”

Strawl waved his hand. “Cain and Abel.”

“Changing subjects.”

“Subject is murder.”

“Well, you can hardly turn a page without a killing in the Old Testament.”

“Moses killed his share with all those plagues, didn't he?” Strawl said.

“God sent those. Moses never shed blood once he started as God's prophet.”

“Well he's just a damned politician, then,” Strawl said.

Elijah stepped out of the firelight and pulled a blanket from his horse's saddlebags, then bedded down across from Strawl. He padded his head with his saddle and made certain his rifle scabbard remained within his reach.

Strawl tried to sleep as well, though the talk troubled him. He rolled his blanket away from Elijah. “Old days, I had a name and a description and a gun, and the criminals were scared and I wasn't. Deer or pheasant will lie in a thicket until you practically stomp on them, yet a man bolts first he hears you no matter how good he's covered.”

“This one's wiping his tracks.”

Strawl shook his head. “This one doesn't leave tracks.”

Elijah smoked awhile. Strawl waited for sleep.

“Then what is it we're doing looking for him?” Elijah asked.

“Pretending,” Strawl told him.

“Pretending what?”

“We know.”

“And the BIA and the Hollingsworths?”

“They were pretending, too.”

“Pretending what?”

Strawl shrugged. “Whatever lets them sleep eight hours. We're no different than them.”

“Then how did they come to their hard roads and we didn't?”

Strawl turned and faced Elijah. He patted the firm earth with his hand, flattening a spot. He drew a stick man with his forefinger. “They can invent themselves any way they want. I have no qualms with that. Their pretending got in the way of mine, though. So I pretended something past what they could.”

Strawl was quiet. He closed his eyes and studied the bloody red of their lids in the light from the fire. His blood beat through him. His heart opened and clamped shut, pressed his lungs like a bellows ; his breathing was as constant as the starlight falling over him and still it moved; moving was its constancy. The earth spun and circled on its tether of gravity, making day and night and spring and fall, but for the sun it was always day and for the moon night, without letup or meaning or hope. They were as gods, and Strawl realized this was peace.

The boy read from his good book in the waning light. His lips muttered and his body rocked with the language in his head. Strawl wondered at the boy's love of such stories, then did not. His own time had produced nothing to rival such epics,just dime novels invented to sell. Stories of Billy the Kid and Bat Masterson had little truth and less art. Like Jacob preached, they weren't story, just things that someone said happened, sense and moral applied to them after the fact. What was unsaid and undone would chronicle Strawl and his ilk.

Yet a sweet-voiced cowhand with a guitar singing “Utah Carol” could move him to tears when his own offspring could not, and “The Strawberry Roan” drew laughter from him that ought to belong to his grandchildren.

He recognized the rituals people built from their lives and knew others expected he possessed his own code and they treated his actions as if they belonged to a larger whole, and he'd responded as fittingly as he could manage, and turned story himself for a time, and violence only multiplied the community's admiration of him. But self-annihilation is the end of every myth. Men don't worship a god; they grieve at his murder and their complicity in the crime. Gods are less entities than faulty compass points the world uses to guide itself, anyway—at least until it becomes lost enough to seek out another tale promising true north.

Strawl realized he had done his work too well and, in keeping alive, had managed to outlive any story that put him on the side of right, and he realized, too, he had no inclination to change it.

t
hey rode to Swahila Basin, idling through the morning until they reached the Cloud ranch once more, where they were fed and then informed that a bored fisherman with a weakness for berries had freed the BIA cops. They were beset by fire ants but had made enough noise to encourage anything larger to keep its distance. The silverspoon and his old man crawled upon a logging path and, finally, a skidder who clothed them with gunnysacks and drove them in a wagon to the Omak hospital, where they were bandaged and released.

“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Elijah said.

“Still protecting fools.”

“Then why'd you get beat up?”

Strawl ignored him.

“You think God is in this, James?” Elijah asked.

Cloud nodded and said it might be so, but his eyes were tired and it was clear to Strawl he humored the boy like he might have his own a month before.

“Jacob Chin rustled a calf but wasn't cited,” Cloud said.

“Cops that side of the river in league with Dice?” Elijah asked.

Cloud said, “Farmer never swore out a complaint. He just mentioned it at coffee.”

“Maybe we ought to go see about him.”

“You have a hankering for veal?” Strawl said.

“Thought you wanted to find this killer.”

“I've ruled Chin out,” Strawl said.

“Who have you ruled in?” Elijah asked him.

Strawl plucked some tobacco from his saddle's satchel and turned a cigarette.

“Thought you were a cop,” Elijah told him. “You spent a lot of time on squaring yourself with other cops, lately, with no killer in sight.”

“ I'm a man staying level with any who want to tip the scales otherwise before I'm a cop or a citizen or any other damned thing.”

“Level means even.”

“No, level means upright,” Strawl said.

He smoked and Stick pawed the earth and switched his tail at a fly.

“He is like you,” Cloud said.

Strawl pointed his chin at Elijah. “Him?”

“Yes. Him. And Jacob Chin,” Cloud said.

“I'll agree on the latter.” Strawl nodded. “That's why he needs a visit, I suppose.”

It took them most of the day to cover the ground and catch the ferry once more, and they didn't sight Chin's cabin until dusk. No smoke rose from the stove and the corral was ungated and empty of the goat and the horse. Strawl fired a shot, but no rifle replied,
though birds cackled and flew. Strawl and Elijah dismounted and called but received no answer, so they opened the knobless door, hinged with leather boot heels and secured with a strap threaded through holes on both sides of the jamb. The single room was surprisingly well kept. Plates and tins were stacked on a shelf next to a skillet and two pots, one inside the other. A lantern rested next to a pallet and a couple of books, one about history, the other without a cover. On a makeshift scrap two-by-four table lay a bar of soap and a washing bucket still half full and, in one corner, a straw broom.

Elijah glanced at Strawl, who only shrugged.

Outside, he roused Stick and Elijah Baal. They rode a hundred yards toward the river until Stick wheeled the direction they'd arrived. Strawl sawed his rein. Stick fought, then relented and, with his head aimed at the ground, began again toward the river.

“What's the matter?” Elijah asked.

“Blood,” Strawl said. “He smells blood. Goddamnit.”

They rode the game trail toward the big river. Two of the kittens skittered in the long grass, paralleling them. Strawl ducked for a low branch, then so did Elijah. Yellow pollen clung to their clothes and hair.

The last of the light draped the river ocher and shadow, along with the coulee's basalt, the turned earth and post-harvest stubble, the dark pine and birch silhouettes picketed against the corduroy sky. The light dwindled further and its long threads seemed to stretch across the horizon like waning amber echoes distorting whatever voice color possessed.

Soon they heard the insects' hum, then the squabble of magpies ; then they caught the sweet reek of meat in decay. Jacob's armless body hung upside down from a pine bough ten feet in the air. A breeze following the river rocked it. The body was held fast with a metal rod driven through the ankles at the Achilles' heel, then snubbed tight to the branch with a chain. Beneath the body,
a fire had been reduced to coals and their pink light pulsed eerily, flashing upon Jacob's head. A dollop of melted fat slipped from his flesh, then hissed and smoked upon the coals.

Strawl approached and bent to examine the dangling head. The scleral orb had shriveled to half its original circumference. The heat had oranged the eyewhite without opening the vessels. Each pupil had expanded to eclipse all but a narrow rim of iris, which had itself darkened sufficiently to be barely discernible. The eyes resembled a child's marbles more than anything else, each loosely secured in their too-large sockets by a string of optic nerve.

Above, his lips had thinned and the taut muscles maintained their awful grimace, as if he were still partly present to witness his predicament. The skin of his cheeks, pulled by gravity, bloated his face, the flesh not blackened or scorched but cooked—smoked meat as sure as an elk's hindquarter.

The flames had baked his hair to a fine dust that floated from his scalp whenever the air around him was disturbed.

The odor swung with the breeze but there was no respite from it, no matter where a person stood. The kittens mewed and sniffed and then began tussling over an errant sinew. The magpies ventured a return, and Strawl shot three in succession before the others retreated into the lengthening shadows.

“The coyotes must have taken the arms,” Strawl said. But five minutes later Elijah discovered them drooped in a neighboring tree, chained at the wrists. Dangling, they looked like some ancient, brutal cuneiform.

Strawl examined the head more closely. He found no sign of the weapon his man preferred, no sign of a weapon at all. He pulled the arms from the tree. The killer had hacked them from the shoulders with an axe, and the sockets were bruised with poorly delivered blows.

“He was alive for this.” Strawl shook the pair of joined arms and
their manacled hands waved. “Jacob, you put up a fight. I'll give you that. The bastard had to have at you alive and you made work for him. And look.” He motioned to Elijah. “This fire's built low and the bastard dug a ditch to put it in. You see this bark in the sand? He set the fresh wood against the burning just right so it would roll into the coal bed as the old burned out. This is a slow-cooking fire.”

Strawl hunted until he found a stray branch. He poked the ash beneath the coals. “ It's been baking him for days,” he said. “And he was alive for it. He'd have bled out eventually, but that would take hours.” Strawl shook his head. “How long did he cook and know he was cooking?”