Lonesome Animals (32 page)

M
ost see hope as the opposite of fear, but Russell Strawl knew better: fear's opposite was certainty. Fear ends where knowledge begins, even knowledge of the worst kind. Strawl had no recollection of being afraid. The world had long ago lost its capacity to surprise him.

Several months later—it was nearing spring—Strawl arrived at the ranch house in the late afternoon. The air was brisk, winter's creeping frost still held the trees from budding. He put Stick up and loaded his manger with fodder, then poured what was left from a bag of oats into his feed pail. The horse nickered and ate.

Evening, he rocked on a porch swing and listened to its chain squawk and his grandchildren at play in the yard a quarter mile below. The girls shouted and chased each other with willow whips
and the baby laughed once with so much delight that Strawl couldn't help feeling lighter.

That night, he slept a deep dreamless sleep and woke feeling the wounds with which he had marked the years and the past months. He dressed slowly and put on more coffee and drank it, then fried some bacon and basted two eggs and devoured them. They pleased him so that he cooked another half dozen and the last of the bacon slab and enjoyed them more than any meal he could recall.

Then he walked outside and climbed a bank behind the house too steep to plow, where he lay on the grassy grade. It was the first moment in his life he could recall having nothing pressing enough to need his attention.

Past Bird Mountain, light continued to break. An hour later, he searched his jacket pocket until he found a cigarette, which he lit and drew from until the ash caught. The burning tobacco popped in the wind. He laid his head back into the land that was, before his, no one's. He wanted to circle this place like weather, like the mists of each spring, to be only a shadow across the great rock walls, the yellow prairies, the few bear and cougar still prowling the woods, the pine, tamarack, elm, and white-barked birch that marked the canyon breaks, and the wiry creeks that unraveled into the thick gash of a river that had cut a thousand feet of basalt and granite to secure its place.

Arlen had hitched the plow to the tractor and turned the piece below the barn. Grey dust billowed on a light breeze and veiled man and machine. The earth parted before the implement, but it remained unchanged. Put your hands through it and it crumbles and returns to itself, as water will. Cross it with a blade and it welcomes the blow patiently, as if knowing the futility of any act to nurture or wound it. Its gravity towed the moon, but any farmer needing Newton to instruct him on its pull had acquired his vocation through accident or inheritance. Physics and fulcrums
and formulas in a book possessed no wisdom next to an ordinary handful of dirt. In it was the only certainty and calm that existed. Nothing was more common than dirt, or more fair.

The emerging leaves appeared slick in the rays of the light. Rusty basalt and shale spills formed three of the four horizons, a few spindly locusts scattered among the sharp, volcanic rock. The steep canyons deposited earth and rock from the glacial floods along the canyon ridges and bottoms.

By noon, Arlen had finished turning the piece and moved on to another behind a basalt bluff that held an enormous bull pine the years and gravity had tipped dangerously over its steep bank. Dust lifted beyond the outcropping, smearing the sky, while the diesel motor's clatter receded to a tick. Arlen would cut those same waves and whorls through the same unknowing ground until he expired and the little boy replaced him on the seat.

In the past months alone, Strawl had read of a furniture delivery truck driver who'd chased his wife from her flowerbeds bordering their home with his rig, then, once she'd broken into the open lawn, gunned the throttle and put her under his wheels. When the police arrived seeking a motive, he simply said he loved her.

In the same newspaper was a brief account of two unemployed gypboard hangers, who after a day panhandling and a night drinking, backed their pickup into the water, then fell to an eventless sleep until, before dawn, the worn clutch holding the truck in gear slipped, and they coasted with the pickup under the current; a brief smell in their nostrils followed like dirty socks, then the exchange of air for water that in the reverse marked their birth, and then just quiet, until the sheriff's wrecker retrieved the bodies the next morning.

They were facts, he told himself, and a man or a woman absent from the world, well that was simply the absence of a fact, and life only a product of brain neurons spitting chemicals back and forth,
making the time appear more. Hamlet misspoke, Strawl decided. It is consciousness that makes cowards of us all, not conscience. Right and wrong are venomless when compared to the simple awareness of being alive. The knowledge that existence can equal something past the sum of our circulation and digestion, that those corporeal purposes serve a galaxy of space between a man's ears, whose suns and planets obey his own peculiar science, but one in which he alone recognizes the order, and only in glimpses, epiphanies that melt before he can speak or even think them—and the knowledge even this distant self is not his possession but belongs to others weighing and judging the dim and distant light he emits. When a man who knows all this steps toward his doom despite it or because of it, he might be called heroic. And Strawl knew himself to be nothing of the kind.

For him, as for the vast, vast hordes, fate or accident ends their illusions with severed medullas and spilled spinal fluid, or impacts that separate their aortas from their hearts and empty their blood into their body cavities, or with clotted veins or arteries, halting some significant process, and life withdraws from them with the sensation one feels in a draining bathtub, all that warmth and time ended.

Time is too brief for philosophical musings to link absurd collisions of time and space and matter to justify a life that requires death. Finally only fear, useless fear remains. That is all there is to know. That is wisdom.

Arlen ended his work before dusk, leaving the discs in the field to collect again in the morning when he would finish the summer fallow. He parked the tractor on the hard-packed dirt outside the barn. He checked the fluids and tightened a nut holding the seat that continually vibrated loose. The girls clung to his legs
as he walked toward the house. Dot and the baby met him on the foot of the porch where the girls worked the hand-pump so he could rinse his face and hands before coming inside. Strawl could smell a roast cooking—some kind of meat, at least, beef rather than pork, he decided. He had lit no lantern nor opened the curtains, so he was uncertain if they knew he had returned. He guessed not. Dot would find herself compelled to gather his news, no matter how ugly.

But then in an hour he saw her shadow moving up the hill, past the ranch house and corral, bearing his direction. He lay back in the grass and listened as her footsteps stirred the brush.

“I see you've done better than the others hunting me,” Strawl said, his eyes closed. “I'd expect no less from you.”

“You've been absent a long while.”

Strawl nodded. “Dice been here?”

“And others. Daily for a month, then once a week. Now we see them stop at your place, but they don't bother to inquire with us.”

“Sorry it was a bother.”

“It wasn't,” she said. “Not nearly as much as having you here might have been.”

Strawl smiled at that.

“You been far and wide? They thought Canada.”

“No,” Strawl said. “I just been off the main road.”

“Why not Canada? Seems the only safe haven.”

“I don't seem to be safe anywhere.”

“Well, you're unsafe company. That's easy to see.”

“Enough said. I go to Canada, nothing changes but Canada.”

“Are you arrogant enough to think you can corrupt a whole'nother country?”

“You think I can't. I'd be happy to hear the argument.”

“I don't have one aside from hope,” Dot said.

“That's a prayer, not rhetoric.”

Dot remained quiet; Strawl could hear her breaths from walking the hill.

“Seen Ida in my travels.”

Dot said nothing.

“Seems the funeral was premature.”

“ How is she?”

“Healthy and happy and gainfully employed.”

Dot was quiet.

“I guess you all made me the butt of that joke.”

Dot's voice turned bitter. “It was no joke. Out was what she wanted and you aren't inclined to allowing people their own way.” She sighed. “I thought it would be simpler than arguing.”

“Simpler for her. Simpler for you.”

“Yes,” Dot said. “Because nothing is simple for you.”

Strawl was quiet.

“Heard from your brother?” he asked finally.

“Not a thing.”

“That's good.”

“The police after him, as well?”

“I don't guess so.”

Those that thought his ears were his only asset knew little about listening. Living alone had left him intuition like a woman's, which inclined him to listen and not just hear. At times the talent served him well. Others it hardly mattered.

“You let the law know I'm back in the vicinity, yet?” Strawl asked.

“Give me a reason not to,” Dot said.

“What would be the use? You have or you haven't. I'm here either way.”

Strawl listened to her walk away.

The following morning, he opened the door and in the hard-packed dirt yard was Dice—on a crutch, his ankle still cast in plaster—and five National Guard troops. Dot and the girls stood off a ways with Arlen, who stared into the dirt and dug a hole with his boot. A damned waste of time, Strawl thought.

“I'm unarmed,” he said.

The guardsmen held rifles at ready, while the last approached and frisked him. Satisfied, he stepped back.

“I'd like to feed old Stick before I go,” Strawl said. “He's my horse.”

Dice shook his head, but the sergeant of the guardsmen said all right and they parted for him to pass. Inside, the barn was cool. Stick's head rose when Strawl slid the door. The light made geometry of the floor and walls, squares, octagons, rectangles with sides out of parallel. Rhombuses, Strawl thought, a strange word, one that ought to mean more. He hunted until he found another sack of grain and opened it with the pocketknife the guardsman had not seen necessary to confiscate. He added two bails to the feed box and cranked the hand-pump until water filled a halved barrel he'd fashioned into a trough for the horses left inside. Stick ate and Strawl pressed his ear below the horse's withers and listened to his stomach churn and the great bellows of his lungs pull in air and the steady hum of his passing blood, and the muscled heart drumming it. The Bible had no monopoly on miracles, Strawl thought.

At the other end of the barn were the double doors that led to the corral. Strawl opened them so the horse could exercise a little. Next to the outside wall, under a canvas spread, was the county's first threshing machine, used, but in working condition, certainly. Returning, Strawl passed the tack bench and his saddle upon it. He'd left the rifle in its scabbard and now withdrew it and opened the breach and filled the chamber.

Outside, it was bright and he blinked his eyes at the figures in
his yard, just shadows until his vision adjusted. The guardsmen talked and Dice smoked by himself. The little girls stood under Dot, her hand on their shoulders, tethering them, and the boy rode in a wagon beneath. Arlen was the first to see Strawl return and he took two or three steps across the dirt yard toward him. In his eyes, Strawl saw the reassurances his son-in-law would offer, the devotion he would promise to his daughter and grandchildren, the good sense with which he would tend his work. Strawl knew, too, that Arlen's intents were not a false comfort; he was determined to follow through with them, right up to the moment he saw the rifle barrel, which Strawl had swung with each step to disguise it, rise and cough and then smoke, and Arlen felt the bullet split his chest and his eyes blinked and he thought no more of his responsibilities.