Lonesome Animals (8 page)

Otis stood in the center of the room. The animal stormed toward him, then dropped his head and swept Otis's legs from under him. For a moment he was aboard the bull crosswise. His hands and boots reached for the floor and his head bounced against the bull's thick chest. Then the bull spun and Otis flew from his back into a cabinet. The bull rushed and Otis grunted as he fell under its hooves. Cartilage popped and smacked like chicken gristle. The bull raked Otis's belly with a horn and a bloody line spattered his police shirt. The bull snorted and slobbered over him, then glanced at the two remaining cops, who, upon seeing it do so, hammered a screened window with a chair and leapt out through the glass and wire.

Strawl tried to herd the bull toward the open door, but when he proved too agitated, he shot him twice through the skull. He found the case file in the first cabinet he checked and slipped the contents into a valise left on the desk. He made his way past the men groaning and the bull, careful to avoid the warm blood that pooled on the floor.

There had been some cause to call down hell upon the BIA, but the bull had certainly been a response past reason. He'd supposed the animal would simply chase the cops into a corner so he could collect what he desired, but, once loose, the animal had proven too much like Strawl himself, a bullet from a barrel, hurtling where someone else had aimed it, no more conscious of the damage than lead itself.

His anger renewed, however, when he perused the first page of the file. Stewing, he retraced his morning ride. Arriving at
Marvin's cabin, he did not circle the meadow and outbuildings. One shoulder thrust and the door splintered. The old couple ate bread and sausages at their table. The cards lay near the children's dishes. Strawl lifted Inez by her hair. She yipped and he hauled her over the table, ruining the meal. He shook her until she was upright and showed Marvin his pistol. He nodded toward the kitchen counter. “I see your glasses full of his powders,” Strawl shouted. “He practicing medicine again?”

“I am only showing the children,” Marvin said.

“That all you showed, Marvin?”

Marvin was silent.

Strawl twisted the old woman by her hair. “I came with questions this morning hoping to be friends. Since, I've been educated. In fact, I'm about as smart as a goddamn lawyer now, and lawyers never ask a question they don't already know the answer to. Now, did someone come for medicine or not?”

“My medicine is old like me.”

“Age is not my concern, yours or your powders'.” The children had clambered under the table. Strawl released his grasp on the old woman's hair.

“How about it?”

“A man was here.”

“For medicine?”

Marvin nodded.

“What did he look like?”

“It did not work.”

“The medicine?”

“He wanted ghost medicine. To hide and come back. It did not work.”

“He didn't go away.”

“No, he remained.”

“He local, then?”

Marvin stood, frozen as his Moon of Breaking Trees. His eyes were round like the children's.

“Goddamnit, you'll tell me what he looks like.” Strawl dragged Inez out the door. This was not what he had intended, but he was unable to figure a way back from it.

“You seen him,” Strawl shouted. Marvin shook his head. Inez said nothing, just breathed and quivered under his hand. Marvin began to hum, then Strawl made out words. “Hell Mary, bless the fruit in the mother. Bless the fruit.”

“No Mary hereto pray to, Marvin,” Strawl said. “Just me. And I'm an angry kind of god.”

“He stole from the powder while we went to fish at the river,” Marvin said.

“When?”

“Months,” Marvin said. “Not a year. Not half. Months.”

Strawl twisted Inez's hair.

“He likes the old ways,” Marvin said. “But he does not know them.”

“What makes you say so?”

“He took from the cornstarch and flour, too.”

“You know him, don't you?”

Marvin shrugged.

“You and him are plotting an uprising, are you?”

“No,” Marvin said. “No uprising.”

“Convince me.”

“There is no one to fight that we can whip.”

“Except each other.”

Marvin nodded.

“That what he's up to? A war? Which tribe is he?”

Marvin shrugged. “His own,” he said.

“He's a killer, Marvin. He'll kill these babies and you and Inez because you talked to me. He'll know and he'll cook your
grandchildren like Christmas hams. Your only chance to take care of them is to give me what you know, damnit.”

“I know nothing more.”

“You'd let these babies be cooked?”

“I know nothing. I can lie but you will return like this time, so I am telling the truth.”

Strawl cursed Marvin, then set the pistol against the old woman's ear, barrel up, and fired. She cried out. Blood from her eardrum spattered his wrist. Marvin knelt to receive his wife as she collapsed to the ground. Strawl looked at the two of them beneath him.

“You tell me if you hear of him or I'll do her other ear.”

S
trawl rode for Keller Butte to pitch his first camp. The promontory rose out of the long hump that had divided the Nespelem and San Poil tribes for a thousand years, and the rivers bearing the same names even longer. He settled on a ridge that allowed him a view of Marvin's meadow and shack and any avenue leading to it. Behind him was an enormous granite slab that promised to keep him in the shadows in all but the morning hours and kept the lights of the town of Keller a glow beyond another, lower bluff. Underneath a bull pine he found needles in a hollow softened by the deer that had bedded upon it and hatcheted the lowest pine boughs to construct a pallet and laid out his roll and waited for darkness.

A hundred feet below and two hundred yards away, Marvin's grandchildren chased each other, then beat a pan with sticks. The clanks climbed the cliff to him. Marvin's wife lay fetal on a blanket beneath the makeshift table, catching the last of the failing sun. Marvin joined her with a water bucket. He soaked a cloth and bathed her face carefully, then shushed the children in Salish. They quit their noise and curled like pups around her. Strawl could no more imagine their lives together than he could if studying a pile of ants.

Strawl swept clear a hollow, then gathered pine straw into a mound. He added sticks from a downed birch and lit them and nursed the fire until it burned warm, but low enough to escape notice. He poured water from his canteen into the frying pan and made bread to go with his jerked beef.

His adult life, he had watched people turning the same day over and living it again for years at a time, and he thought himself happy it was not his lot. Isolation, Strawl once liked to think, was his penchant, but recently he realized choice had little to do with it. Elijah had made his opinion clear on both farming and Strawl as soon his mother passed and he had a check to cash. Ida, herself, had enjoyed her time alone to his company. And Dot would prefer a book. The grandchildren were hesitant to accept the treats he delivered from town. When he wrestled them, and left an opening to squeeze his nose or box his ears, they used it instead to escape to their mother or father. He was past poor company, it was clear, and the day's events would go far in maintaining that. Twenty years ago, he mistook such a reputation for respect, but as he tracked or camped alone, he discovered even if it played that way in town, it was something else within his own mind. He bent and scooped a handful of earth from the ground. Nothing was more just than dirt. Returning to it squared them all. Two wives, two flower
bouquets, two preachers, at least in Ida's case a two-day drunk, all for dirt becoming dirt once more.

Dawn, Strawl woke bent and aching and remained bleary-eyed through his pot of coffee. In the morning light, he sifted through the papers in the valise once more. He sorted interview notes typed on yellow legal paper from the third murder on, likely because Dice and Higgenbothem in Wenatchee had begun to press the tribe's investigation. No person had witnessed a single crime, nor did they recall the victims beyond brief description or any argument of any kind preceding the murders.

The crimes were marked by intricate patterns and the victims by the lack of one, except no struggle. If rancor were at the root, in his man's chest was a heart that beat pure winter and a mind as patient as a buzzard's. Most crimes were born in simple want argued into need. To criminals, the law was an argument, stealing persuasion, and killing misplaced zealotry. It made them self-righteous; a part of them desired capture, saw it as a reckoning. Strawl understood them, even agreed occasionally—most acts a man could perpetrate had been unlawful at one time and legal others. A criminal's birth might be just catastrophic scheduling, the same as a victim's.

The BIA hadn't been completely derelict. Aside from interviewing Marvin, they had spoken with the leaders they could muster from the confederated tribes that resided on the reservation, but many had ceased being Methow, Lakes, Nespelem or Chelan or Palus or Wenatchi. The Nez Perce bore enough physical features that they could be discerned from the other bands and the Bird people kept to themselves, but the others had jumbled into as mixed a soup as the whites disposing them. None knew anything of the crimes, or if so, weren't inclined to share it with the Bureau's police.

Under the crime report was a list of suspects. Rutherford B. Hayes, a six-foot-six Hoosier, had cut a wide enough swath in
his thirties to acquire the moniker Pale Horse. Strawl had arrested him three times, the last ending in an eighteen-month stint in Monroe. The time didn't tame him as much as it put him off people. He constructed a commendable house from logs and sod, stealing the shake shingles from the mill yard, only because he didn't have tools to fashion his own. Strawl refused to investigate the matter, citing deficient evidence, though the cedar on Hayes's roof was inarguable.

A thornier issue was the land upon which he built it. The house clung to the lee side of Granite Mountain. At issue was whether Hayes owned the land or not. Actually, there was not much dispute : he had neither deed nor bill of sale. The land was claimed by both the tribe and the forest service, however, and Strawl refused to serve notice without a plaintiff with legal standing. The house stayed. Hayes raised a brood of mastiffs that he managed to keep as owly as himself. Their bays carried miles, and it was rumored they had killed the last brown bear in the country.

Hayes had the capacity to murder, Strawl thought, but the kind of attention these murders drew contradicted the man's last twenty years. Still, without contradictions, no crime would go unsolved.

Next on the list, Jacob Chin, Taker of Sisters, was still in his prime, however. A Chinese Indian, Chin had first earned what money he came by honestly, as a cowhand. But he broke horses in such a brutal manner that they often ended up crippled or so skittish they bolted at the wind shifting. He was better suited for felony. He ran what passed for a black market on the reservation, peddling opium to the coolies and dried coca leaves a cousin mailed to him from Venezuela. He owned two clapboard houses in Inchelium and turned out a spindly Indian woman from each at three bucks a throw. He hadn't built up a head of steam until well after Strawl retired, so all he knew of the man was word of mouth. His crimes intrigued Strawl less than his predisposition toward
Indians. At fourteen, he'd beaten his San Poil uncle to death with a shovel. His record showed eight assaults, all on Indians, and in country where fisticuffs rarely were reported, that was a bevy.

The notes listed one of the Bird boys, as well ; they ran in herds and Strawl could not sort this one's name from the others he knew.

The Bird boys, an assortment of uncles, nephews, cousins, and brothers, stuck together and weren't inclined toward town. They raised their share of hell when they visited, and gossip linked them to the death of a Tar Evans, a trapper who didn't know when to stop drinking or talking, but Evans had been running headfirst and downhill toward his grave for twenty years. His death was less a crime than the product of his nature and he'd been felled by a blow to the head with a two-by-four, which made intent unlikely; the man for whom Strawl was searching had more intent than a porcupine had quills.

Strawl himself was part of their list. They'd attributed no opportunity, no weapon, and no motive, other than history and meanness. He was not surprised. It was the reason they'd refused to share the files. If the accusation were true, he'd be tipped off, and if it were false, they would have to contend with his spite. Anyone hunting grizzly faced the fact that the bear was hunting him, too, and was better suited for the endeavor, and so it was with Strawl and their police, and he was armed to boot. The BIA wanted to keep downwind.

There were no interview notes, and Strawl surmised the Indian boys had been disinclined to put their theories to the principals and risk blows or worse, their recent encounter with Strawl proved their caution not unreasonable.

Strawl turned the morning fire's dying coals, then dumped the coffee over them. The day was still cool, but yesterday's closeness had given way to a high pressure and the blue above. He closed his eyes, resting them from the smoke. He recalled with envy the
vision his first Indian scouts possessed. They perceived brown and green hues no one other than Indians parsed out, as well as shapes likely to move and the shapes they would move through.

Strawl had enlisted with the army at sixteen. There, he drank whiskey and fought and habituated the Denver guardhouse. What enraged Strawl was everything: all a little and no thing more than another. His belly was constantly filling. The result was one day he'd take what a man shouldn't and an hour past not endure people acting human, then the fisticuffs would commence and cease, and another man would lie in a bleeding heap, and suddenly his living was up to Strawl. Some looked pleading, some looked trustful, and others just waited for him to make up his mind.