Lonesome Animals (7 page)

Strawl grinned at her. “You don't need comforting. I'm just crossing the river, like I have a hundred times before.”

She hugged him anyway, and the rigid awkwardness of their arms and chests turned obvious to both of them.

“Manage to stay miserable, will you?” Dot said. “A person gets your age doesn't want to enjoy anything much. You're old, and pleasure makes the time go too fast.”

“True enough,” Strawl said. He watched Dot and her family cross the hard dirt path to the barn, then bend through the corral railings.

“You tell your husband he buys that combine he's eyeing, he better just keep going down the road. I won't have it on my place.”

Dot turned. “It's not your place, it's mine. Legal as the courthouse.”

Strawl pawed a hand her direction. “Doesn't matter. Long as I'm living, it's Strawl Canyon and Strawl Road, and even after. It's my place.”

S
tick remained in passable shape herding the fifty head of cattle pastured behind the house, but the horse's temperament was the primary reason Strawl favored him. Bullheaded enough to bust a rider's head with a low branch if bored, Stick had some personality, which made him decent company. Moreover, any animal keen enough to catch his rider napping was, in fresh country, all ears, nose, and eyes. As far as covering ground, Stick was not built for eight furlongs but for twenty miles. He could pick his way through a trail like a burglar crossing a squeaky roof, and lope uphill or down from morning till black night if you didn't draw rein.

Strawl scabbarded his .06 and scattergun and holstered a pistol onto his belt. Venison jerky and a tin box of flour, a sackful of coffee and the pot, plus his worn mess kit filled one saddlebag,
along with an oilskin satchel full of stick matches, string, a thread and needle, and a burlap sack holding a load of apples to keep Stick through any grassless stretch. Shells for the weapons rattled in the other, and he had a wallet full of expense money the three counties had delivered him in separate envelopes.

Strawl climbed aboard and screwed his black felt Anthony Eden, a piece of haberdashery he'd purchased on pure whim, onto his head. The horse soon broke into a trot and Strawl's eyes teared in the wind. He pulled his hat lower and felt guilty, experiencing such satisfaction leaving his family and heading toward as black a man as he'd encountered.

He boarded the ferry once more, Young Bill puzzled by the horse. On the other side, the sun on the prairie warmed him. A line of mallards sliced the sky, and Strawl watched a red hawk atop a fencepost study a mouse in the grass below. The wind eased as he traveled the road paralleling the river, and he unbuttoned his canvas jacket.

He turned Stick north and east following a game path that paralleled the river opposite Thacker's Ferry, then headed west past the Hopkins Ferry Road, then the mouth of Hopkins Canyon, then the ferry that served it. He passed Clara's gristmill once more, where he had sharpened his saws. The building and machinery had been moved lock, stock, and barrel on a flatboat from the Okanogan country; it was the talk of the county ten years ago.

The road joined the main highway toward town. Cars passed, their horns pressing Stick into the shoulder ditch. Strawl worried he'd spook, but the horse's mind was on his work. In Nespelem, he stopped at the grocery and bought a handful of day-old radishes and fed them to the horse for his troubles.

Strawl took Wack-Wack Road east until he met Joe Bird Creek, which he followed atop the Nespelem Divide until it dwindled to its source. On the other side, he crossed into Ferry County and
the San Poil country. He picked through another trail at Peter Dan Creek and meandered with it until the channel and path veered north into a thicket he wasn't inclined to navigate. Instead, he directed Stick to circle through a meadow, where he let the horse eat his fill of bunchgrass and wild oats. Midday, they met Manila Creek. The tribe or county had graded the highway and laid new gravel. Under Johnson Ridge, Strawl rested Stick for half an hour in the shade, then steered north. There was no track, but the country was open. Desert scrub and sagebrush, it was an oven in August, but the dirt was soft and good for horseback travel.

He found a thin path and veered with it west for a flat a smaller stream drained. The morning had become hot and close, like it was preparing for a summer squall. Wildflowers smelled thick and almost sickening in their sweetness. Strawl wove through a thicket of fir and tamarack, then halted at the edge of a rectangular clearing framed by higher, basalt-strewn ground thick with pine and fir and birch that thinned the light and enough low brush to make approach a noisy proposition.

The center was a depression still lush with groundwater. The grassy meadow feathered in the wind, somewhere between green and the yellow it would remain through late summer and autumn. Grasshoppers clicked and floated in the air, good bait for fishing the nearby streams.

Strawl kept in the trees and circled the clearing. On the other side was a well-constructed tongue-and-groove log structure with a tin chimney, and a cord of seasoned wood was stacked against the north wall for insulation. A hundred feet to the south was a wind-driven pump over a well. Beyond that was the peak of the outhouse, built in another hollow to keep the sewage from draining toward the well.

The primary resident was the last living San Poil medicine man. His Salish name meant Raven Flying, but the closest English translation was Marvin.

Strawl avoided the plastic window and banged on the door with his pistol butt.

The door cracked and a watery eye took him in. “No bad men here,” the voice said.

“Marvin, I'm not put off that easy.”

No one answered.

“I just want to ask you about something.”

“Marvin does not know,” Marvin said.

“What colored feather is on a starling?”

“Marvin does not know.”

“Now you're lying, Marvin. Lying to the law is a serious matter.”

“What is a starling?”

“It's a bird, Marvin. That explains the feathers.”

“Brown.”

“Brown?”

“Brown feathers.”

“Jesus.” Strawl sighed.

Marvin was quiet behind the door.

“What about these killings?” Strawl asked.

“I do not know of any killings.”

“You don't have any idea what I'm speaking of?”

“I do not know about none. No killings. No whiskey for Marvin.”

“Marvin, I'm not accusing you.” Strawl waited for a minute. He heard whispering. Marvin had a wife, but Strawl couldn't make out if it was her voice or another's. He had seen Marvin's buckskin tied behind the house but no other, and there was no way for a car to get in or out, though that didn't rule out walking.

“That Inez, Marvin?”

“Inez is not here,” Marvin answered.

“Then who in hell is it?”

“Marvin.”

“That's another lie, Marvin. You lie about Inez, I can put her in the jail.”

“ Inez is not here,” Marvin repeated.

“I'm trying to be civil, Marvin. I know you haven't done nothing wrong; quit behaving like you have. I come here to chew the fat a little is all.”

“You are not the law now. They told me.”

“Who's they? Those there behind the door with you?”

“Indians. Indians told me.”

“Indians behind the door.”

“Me behind the door.”

Strawl leaned against the wall. He heard stirring inside and looked up at the blue sky. Nostalgia had pressed Strawl to begin here. Back when concerns over an uprising still existed, Strawl had arrested Marvin several times for practicing his medicine. Each time the man was respectful and compliant, but as soon as the judge set him free, he would be back to his powders and singing. Once Strawl hauled him in naked to embarrass him into obedience, but the man simply served his sentence, then left the jail in his prison clothes. Strawl blackened both his eyes and broke his nose before Marvin left the shadow of the jailhouse and then broke two of his ribs, but Marvin did nothing but cover up, then, after the beating, hobble to his home and sing a prayer. Strawl refused to pursue him afterward.

Now Marvin was harmless and too remote to hear anything beyond gossip. At best, Strawl might have been able to rule out the San Poil country, no more. He wanted to see how the years had treated the man, truth be told.

“I can't let you put me off, Marvin. Word would get out I turned soft. Open the door so I can say we talked, then I'll let you alone.”

Marvin said nothing. Strawl gave him two minutes by the watch, then drove his shoulder into the worn wood. The chain gave and Strawl pushed into the house. Two doe-eyed grandchildren gazed up at him, then bolted under the table.

“Now, I haven't done a thing to you to imply I'd hurt babies,” Strawl said.

Marvin remained quiet. His long hair was tied behind his neck with a scrap of rein and his face was wrinkled but not bloated and gone to seed like so many in town. Inez, his tiny, grey-haired wife, huddled behind him.

“What do you know about these killings?”

Marvin looked down at his shoes. In his early police days, Strawl had equated such gestures with guilt, but he had come to realize that eyeing another man was an insult to the Salish tribes.

“They're bad,” he said.

“They are that. An Indian doing them?”

Marvin said nothing.

“I'm not asking for fact. What's your opinion on the matter?” Strawl paused, hunting a word. “Gamble. Would you gamble the killer's Indian?”

“A crazy Indian, maybe.”

“A white man. Could he do this? A crazy white man?”

Marvin shook his head.

“Why not, Marvin?”

“No money for him.”

Strawl nodded.

“Thank you, Marvin,” he said. He looked at the children under the table, all eyes and shaggy black hair, then Inez, cowering behind Marvin. “I apologize for interrupting your day.”

Outside was a wooden cable wheel from the dam that locals had scrounged for picnic tables. Strawl untied Stick's saddlebags and left half a sack of flour for Inez upon the wheel and his deck of
cards for the grandchildren, along with a handful of sugar cubes meant to treat Stick.

It took him through the heat of the afternoon to retrace his path to the Nespelem road, then ride the six miles to the Indian Agency. Tenement flats that once barracked soldiers lined a grassy field on which they had drilled. Half the place had filled with orphans or widowed or abandoned mothers with their litters. Attached at the far end was a medical center, where a nurse distributed tablets of all sorts to those she could convince to swallow them.

The police department was next to the pole plant, an effort to turn the tribe into capitalists. The best they had managed was to hire white lumbermen to deliver raw logs and employ an Indian crew to pluck them from the rigs with the loader and another to operate the saws. It wasn't that the Indians were lazy so much as they were mystified by the project. The young men would work for a day or a week, then wander off, not seeing how their lives differed at the end of the day from the start.

Their cops, though, were a different matter. They hired the members who had assimilated enough to appreciate a weekly check, and, more significantly, those who saw the job as permission to behave in any manner they saw fit or profitable as long as they kept the Nespelem merchants and the citizens up- and downriver content. As on most reservations, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had undercut the chiefs and medicine men by recruiting the shiftless and mixed breeds to police the reservation. Uniforms turned them into whores and their sidearms into whores with knives.

Strawl tied Stick to the porch rail and opened the station door. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke. Two cops looked up from desks and paperwork and three more from a cribbage board, all in sweat-stained grey uniforms.

The stockiest one, Otis, was in charge, and he recognized Strawl
immediately. He set down a deck of cards and stood. “You got no jurisdiction here.”

“That's a big word, jurisdiction,” Strawl told him.

Otis's oily skin shone in the light of the bare bulb. He'd greased his hair and pulled it to one side. The part was well tended. Strawl unfolded the order granting him police powers over three counties. “Says here different.”

Otis walked to him, then looked at the paper. “You got a badge?”

Strawl drew it from his pocket.

“This paper don't say we have to help you,” Otis told him.

“Then I can't count on your generosity in this matter?”

“No,” Otis said.

Strawl nodded. They'd begun to laugh before he closed the door.

Outside, Strawl searched until he discovered a nightstick in one of the squad cars. He lifted it from the seat and put it in his belt. The keys were in the ignition. The same was true for two others.

A mile back, he'd seen a bull pastured and fenced, separated to keep him from brawling with the steers headed to slaughter. When Strawl looped a rope over his big head, the bull was tame enough to be led. Strawl tethered him to Stick and towed him back to the agency. On his way, he found a nettles bush. He gloved his hands and uprooted it, then lay it across the saddle horn, careful to keep the leaves from Stick's hide and his own.

At the police building, he halted the bull, then quietly started two squad cars and backed them against the two side doors leading out. He wound the nettles around the nightstick handle, then secured them with a strap from his saddlebag and led the bull to the only door he'd left unblocked. Strawl worried the bull would collapse the floor, but it held him. He opened the door then led the bull inside, then lifted the animal's tail and thrust the stick and nettles up his ass, then kicked his testicles. The animal screamed and tried to turn, but Strawl fired two pistol shots into the ceiling,
which was enough to dissuade him. He splintered two desks in front of him, instead, then bellowed and started toward a pair of the card players, who hurried for the door. Opening it, they discovered their predicament and turned back. The bull broke one's knee and hooked another in the thigh and dragged him into a desk before he could get loose.