Lonesome Animals (26 page)

Elijah said nothing. He had dismounted and kept both Baal's and Stick's reins. The horses cropped the grass and Strawl listened to their jaws work. Elijah gazed at the coals as if hypnotized, the rosy light playing on his smooth face.

“He suffered, then,” Elijah said.

The emptied sockets would have ached brutally, though blindness would have enraged a man like Jacob more than any pain might. Dying would have bothered him less. But he was bound to endure both all the same, the second slowly, without illusion or hope or faith. Blood would first have left the branched veins and arteries piping the chest cavity, but femoral arteries would feed the heart and maintain its rhythm, and the brain, suddenly served by gravity rather than drawing against it, would become more aware than it had ever been. He would have heard his blood tick on the sand and hiss in the fire beneath him; he would have known the sickening loss of buoyancy as if he were in an emptying bathtub, and smelled his singed hair—an offensive odor even when it was not your own. He would have felt it disappearing into his scalp. Past the torn and chopped flesh and muscle and ligament he'd borne, his fat cells would've slowly liquefied and he would, finally,
understand that his skin, as it shifted and peeled from its muscled mooring like wet cloth, was abandoning him.

Strawl bent to one knee. His head seemed light, as if it had received a blow. It floated upon his neck and above his body like a child's balloon batted to and fro with the wind. He shook it slowly, to remind himself a string still attached his consciousness to his physical self. He opened his mouth, made an oval with it, inhaled a breath; the air cooled his lips and made his teeth like wet rocks. He spoke a small sound, a vowel alone, the guts of a word without its consonant skeleton. His gaze shifted down into the sand beneath him, a grey stone almost too small to perceive yet a hundred million times repeated on this beach until it was all that remained on the band between the flora and the river, except what washed against it, which would eventually disintegrate into more of the same. His hands shuddered as he raked his fingers into the earthly shingle, which left jagged, digit-sized marks. He breathed to calm his hands, but they declined to obey. They floated, like his head, barely tethered to the rest of him.

He tipped his head toward the night above and the darkness was like the sand, the constellations only worth mention because of the vast blackness between the flecks of light, a blackness that would devour them as the sand swallowed the driftwood and dying insect and the flesh of fish and men. His hands quivered. He slapped them together, thinking one's quaking would equal the other's and together they would be still. Instead the spasms multiplied and he appeared to his own floating consciousness a repenting sinner shivering in the face of his angry Lord. He broke them apart and drove each into the cool sand. Their vibrations climbed his arms into his shoulders and chest and he heaved as if he were sobbing though he was neither sad nor hurt nor tearful. Blood sounds beat in his ears and when he closed his eyes he could see the sound drumming
through his lids, its rhythm grey, then black. The river itself coursed like a vein obeying a similar symmetry, one it knew nothing of, yet it knew nothing else. The black water was as dark as the sky, black as the blackening coulee around them, black as the trees' forms, black as the rock, black as the birds flitting across their tiny portions of the sky. It was only the temporality of light that made them appear any other shade. But under, under remained the darkness and an order that required no policing, a government without need of law, a religion without dogma or theology—one that required no prayer or even faith, such was its undeniability, though it was absent of light and warmth and no longer even possessed a name because politeness and fear had erased the word but not the thing itself.

To believe in craziness was once sacred: seeing the face of God, how could a man remain sane? Why would he desire to? Strawl breathed again, a short, wracked breath between the seizing of his trembling diaphragm. Most would find horror in this moment and the rest sadness or tragic order. Strawl felt none of these. The air in his head grew heavy and clouded; his chest heaved for another breath and he realized he was in danger of passing out. The muscles in his face opened and he felt the skin stretching in a manner he couldn't recall. The other portions, reacting through habit, attempted to flatten his expression, but the inclination this time was too powerful. His face split open like a jack-o-lantern and smiled.

Strawl laughed. It was the first instance he had done so in earnest in forty years. The sound echoed in the coulee.

“I thought you had half a fond spot for the Taker of Sisters.”

“I admired the man,” Strawl said.

Elijah shook his head. “So why are you so amused by his demise?”

“Demise?” Strawl asked. Jacob's blood smelled to Strawl like welded iron, what was beneath the burning, the loosening metal bead crawling back toward rock. He recalled Jacob asserting his claim to his sin with his sister and the certainty and vehemence of a
man standing on his own property with a notarized paper to prove it, and, in the doing, he seemed to draw up the one moment with which he refused to part no matter the damage, and in that instant resided all the pleasure and tragedy a life contained. And it was as if the event devoured his heart every day and each day he ate it right back into himself.

Strawl had no such reminiscences. His memory was an animal's, containing no room for sentiment. Any emotion he'd encountered was grounded in anger or fear—same as the great cats and bears, the same as their fodder, too—or duty, which was a poor guess built upon witnessing others he figured knew better and followed with an awkward imitation.

“This man didn't rot from the inside and fall in the forest like a dying pine. What kind of a man dies like this?” Strawl asked. He threw Jacob's chained arms at Elijah. They skittered into the darkness. But Strawl could still smell them, still feel them in his hands. “They had to drill and shoot and dynamite him from this world like those breaking rock for the dam. The riprap is spread up and down the river for miles each way, the rock was so gigantic and stubborn. That's what kind of man this is. Fondness. Hell, I love this man, now.” He paused. “What is the line? What a work man is? That's Shakespeare, not your goddamned Bible with its prophets and messiah. What a work
man
is!” Strawl said.

“And what of the man who did this?” Elijah asked him.

“Him, too. They bestride this narrow world like a colossus.”

“More Shakespeare.”

“Yep.”

Elijah shook his head sadly. “Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passes away.” He nodded at Jacob Chin, Taker of Sisters. “Ask him.”

Strawl backhanded Elijah into the sand.

“I did,” Strawl said, standing over the boy. “And he answered.”

I
n Nespelem, Truax reported nothing from the surrounding counties of which Strawl wasn't aware. Strawl ordered ten pounds of jerked beef, two peppered with cayenne. He paid with cash.

“You don't want me to just put it on your bill?” Truax asked him.

“Nope,” Strawl said. “In fact, what is the balance?”

Truax told him and Strawl peeled enough money from the expense roll to cover it. “We square?”

Truax nodded and dug in a drawer for his pipe, then packed and lit it. “You all there, Strawl?”

“I am not,” Strawl said.

They were quiet a moment. Outside the window, Strawl noticed
the sky turn grey while a cloud blocked the sun, then a moment later, return to its midday hue.

“I was just thinking,” he said. “Wasn't six weeks ago when you had the body back there that clanged the bell to start this race, and now here I am again ready to finish it. I guess I'm just an old paint circling a track.”

“Seems shorter than that,” Truax said.

“Or longer,” Strawl remarked. “Depends on which end of the scope you're looking through.”

“I never knew you to cavort with the bottle. You take a fall or get clobbered again?”

Strawl shook his head. “You asked if I was all here. I'm about half here and half there, but I am fit as a fiddle and here to dance to any tune the fiddler plays.”

“Well I hope you're not letting those BIA boys and Dice make the music.”

Strawl shook his head. “All they can make is noise, and I can hear noise twenty miles off. I'm talking about music, not clatter.”

“Well, watch your topknot,” Truax said.

“Do the same,” Strawl told him.

Strawl then took his leave. The doorbell clanked on the lock stile when it shut behind him. The day was warm but crisp with fall. The military contractors had sawed circles every six feet of the boardwalk, and centered in each hole was a spindly white oak, new enough the branches and leaves cast shadows thin as fishing nets over the streets, in an order that contradicted the scattering of pitched and flat-roofed buildings and their gutterless eaves.

Strawl stopped to make a cigarette, then walked through that flickering of shadow and light, his boots thumping each step in a slow, rhythmic beat, more than the random rattle most men made. His legs moved with their own purpose, sure of what he was not
but making him more certain every time they clacked the grey pine boards under him, half a foot across broken by a quarter inch of gap, then another, and his shadow floated between the order and chaos of the others. He smoked and stepped through the smoke, smelling its burning, different than the stink in his lungs and on his clothes. Fourteen horses were tied to the fence at Hurd's Tavern along with a four-door Buick sedan and a rusted 1923 Ford grain truck with enough space in the bed to haul ten men. The weather had relented enough to keep the dust down, and the sun shone in the blue sky cleanly, and Strawl could see past the end of town to the varying greens of the pine and fir and birch scattering the nearest ridge and the grey and rusty rock where nothing grew, and the blue-grey sagebrush that pocked the grade below, all that took in the thin soil there.

The boy he had seen six weeks ago, then a week after that, hurried the other direction upon recognizing Strawl. Strawl watched him disappear in an alley, his dog nodding and loping after him. A doorless Model A clanked past in the other direction, then a pair of bays with Indian riders followed. Strawl could smell the animals and the men damp with their own perspiration. A mile east, he heard a woman speak to a child, and closer, but south, a straw boss directing an Indian to take the tractor and turn the summer fallow. There was no entrance in the rear of the tavern, just the one on the street and another opening into an alley. He could sit at a table between the two and see both with no trouble. Elijah had tied Stick and Baal to the livery for feed and a good watering, where he'd also borrowed a single-wheeled cart and drove it to the trading post for their necessities.

Strawl approached the tavern and with each step, he grew more assured and less dubious about his endeavor.

He opened the tavern door and stepped inside.

The place was owned by Garfield Hurd, an ex-army sergeant
who had earned a fortune bootlegging to the Indians and now was slowly losing it serving them legally. The building, like every other in Nespelem, was thin-walled and shingled with shakes that in summers left it a tinderbox. Fires had already gutted the town twice, though it was less than thirty years old.

Strawl stood in the doorway a moment and allowed his eyes to correct for the darkness. Inside were twelve men who ranged from seventeen to forty-eight. All had received a letter by post a week earlier. Hurd raised a hand, and Strawl returned the greeting. Hurd poured a schooner of beer. Strawl took it and drank. He looked to the three back tables seating the Bird clan. “I'll need six buckets and the bourbon,” Strawl said.

Hurd hunted the whiskey under the till, then, finding it, glanced up at Strawl to make certain of his intent. Strawl wagged his finger and Hurd set the bottle on the bar. He commenced to fill the wooden buckets with beer. Strawl took three, then returned for the rest and the bottle, eschewing a shot glass, knowing the Birds were not inclined to measure their whiskey.

Strawl purchased two dozen cigars, as well. He lit one for each and offered the beer until the clan was all smoking and drinking. Strawl sipped his beer and dawdled over his own cigar for half an hour. The veins of the leaf wrapper burned hotter: they pinked and glowed before the ash like bloody rivers crossing a dark topography, the light not unlike the coals baking the Taker of Sisters.

Strawl unbreeched his revolver and tumbled the cylinder, listening to each chamber click until the wheel slowed to a stop. He set five bullets into the chamber and spun the cylinder once more, then replaced the works and pressed the pin centering it and fired a shot into the wall above the clan. The report hushed the din. The Birds stared at Strawl.

“Boys,” Strawl said. “Don't let me interrupt your revelry. Please. It does my heart good to see men at ease.”

The room remained quiet.

“I said drink,” Strawl shouted. He put a round a little lower on the wall. One of the Birds lifted the whiskey from the table and took a tug, then handed it to the next who did the same, while the others lifted their beer glasses, still eyeing him.

Strawl ordered six more buckets of beer. Smoke rose from their cigars to the ceiling, where it collected, then descended back upon them in silver fog. In it, Strawl could smell Jacob's fat dripping on the fire. He recalled his mind floating in that scene and felt it again unloose and hover outside his head. He fired his pistol into the floor to direct his thoughts, but though the shot rang in his ears, and the powder's stench crowded his nose, and the hole in the floorboards was enough to put his thumb through, his thoughts remained apart from him.