Lonesome Animals (33 page)

The guardsmen and Dice had their guns at their shoulders. Strawl tossed his in the dirt and continued walking toward Dice's squad car with his hands over his head. The shot's ringing silenced the grandchildren, even the baby. Strawl's ears were deaf with the bullet's report. Dot stared at him, mouth open as if she could not breathe.

Strawl opened the squad car door and Dice finally hobbled to him and cuffed his wrists, which he extended palm up to make the chore no more work than necessary.

Strawl died seven months later when a stroke paralyzed his left side and pneumonia congested his heart and lungs, a weight he finally decided he was too tired to lift. In that time he had no visitors and spoke to no one other than the guards for their counts. His body lies in the old prison cemetery, according to their records, though weather and age have worn all the stones from that time to blank, mossed slabs.

No one was charged with the reservation killings. They stopped, and that had been the intent of the investigation. They have passed from memory to tale to rumor to oblivion with remarkable alacrity, but that is the fate of stories in the time in which we live. Few are built to last.

The Bird clan is still a strong presence on the reservation, and many of that name are now Canadian citizens working ranches and pulp mills in Kelowna and Osoyoos. Marvin was sighted in Nespelem a year following Strawl's arrest, but then disappeared and was heard from no more. Rutherford B. Hayes became so devoted to Canada that once Britain entered the war and Canada mustered troops, he volunteered for duty and won the British Cross and the Queens Medal for Gallantry for his service at Juno
Beach, where he rescued a squad of infantry from a machine gun nest, clearing its gunners by hurling stones and shell casings upon them until they retreated. He then took the gun and turned it upon the retreating Germans and killed a dozen. After the war, he lit in Cranbrook, where he bred dogs and doctored horses until he was elected mayor by write-in vote, which incensed him to such an extent that he left the town for the mountains.

Dice, however, accepted the people's mandate and was elected State Senator seven times, until he retired to Spokane where he lost most of his pension on grain speculation, then recovered it and a fortune to boot when the Bureau of Reclamation, to add a third powerhouse, purchased a hundred acres he'd bought for near nothing thirty years before. He remained married to Karen, his only wife, until his death at seventy-nine.

Elijah disappeared. It was as simple as that. No one heard more from or about him. A month following Strawl's arrest, however, despite a wet April, fire consumed the woods of his encampment. The canyon walls, too severe for the smoke eaters to find purchase, became as embers in a smith's furnace, one heating the other and both the earth below. Trees exploded before the flames reached them and the basalt shone like the glass it had once been. Heat rose in surges and, when the wind pulled the smoke clear, even the blue of the sky shuddered against it. Nights, it bent the starlight and each morning, deer and elk and bear stumbled from the edges of the woods onto highways and into neighborhoods and the merchants' shop-lined streets of the outlying towns, blasting breath from their baked lungs and, in the adrenaline-fueled euphoria that is known to accompany the severest of burns, leaped and spun on their hind legs, dancing as if smoten spirits, while the moon, still hanging in the growing dawn, remained the color of blood.

Copyright 2012 Bruce Holbert

 

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions.

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

eISBN : 978-1-619-02077-1

 

 

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