Lonesome Animals (18 page)

Strawl nodded.

“And not unnatural that those whose spite includes a discourteous comment directed toward him or his sister would leave him especially angry. It would be no shock, then, that he would decapitate three or four in those years and tie them by their hair or their beards to streetlights, where they would be discovered the next morning by the priests and nuns engaging in their constitutionals following morning prayers. In fact, you might admire his restraint. And forgive him, even, for murdering the grocer and his wife, who had neither touched his sister nor spoken to him, but was nevertheless engaged in a great conspiracy to kill them, by eating when he and his sister had no food and sleeping when they were tired and having a house when it rained. Who can say, without any consideration, that he, himself, would not have done the same?”

Strawl smiled. “Not me,” he said.

“Would you arrest such a man?” the old fellow asked.

Strawl shook his head. “I'd kill him.”

“You would feel no pity?”

“What worse punishment is there for that man than breathing another breath?”

“But he is guilty of nothing.”

“That's not true.”

“Well, then he's no more guilty than the rest of us.”

Strawl nodded. “Rabid dog, he isn't sick on purpose, and prophets, they never set out to hear God in their heads, yet that doesn't stop us from putting a bullet into their brain buckets or nailing them to a pair of perpendicular beams. And it doesn't make me or the Romans anything but right for doing it. According to your theory, Judas was as innocent as the virgin. Nobody's guilty, but people still need killing, for their own sake or others'. It doesn't matter to me except when the pay comes through.”

Suddenly the woman began to laugh and she continued for
a long enough time to hush them. She looked at the old man through the smoke. “Maybe now you can put that story away for good, Howard. I'm damned tired of us all being saints.”

She rose and stepped past them, dropping Elijah's jacket in his lap before disappearing into the house, where she lit a lantern and carried it to her room, then drew the curtain. The light floated beneath as she discarded one garment and donned another, and that was enough to hold their attention even after she turned the lamp down and the room was nothing but dark.

“You know why I'm here,” Strawl said.

The old man nodded.

“She does, too?”

“Yes.”

“This Jacob, what is he to you?”

“It's what he is to her.”

“I just heard a story about all that. What is he to you?”

“It's what she is to me.”

“Your wife, then. Seems you'd both be glad to see the back of him.”

“That may be true,” the man said.

“But it can't be your idea?”

The man nodded.

“Just tell me where to find him. I'll think the rest myself.”

“How do you know he is the killer you seek?”

“I know he's murdered and that he's twisted as a top. That moves him to the front of the class.”

“He will not go to prison.”

“You'd be surprised what people will do once their alternatives dwindle. I expect he'll hang, anyway.”

“He won't allow it.”

“Then I'll kill him. I get paid and you get shed of his shadow betwixt you and her.”

“No,” he said. “That is not something you can kill.”

Strawl snuffed the last of his cigarette against his boot heel. “We'll sleep on it,” he said. He walked behind the house and loosed his bedroll from Stick, and Elijah did the same with Baal. It was cold and they built a fire to keep the morning frost from them. The man invited them inside, but Strawl preferred a cold sky to a warm bed, especially in a house with so many different versions of the same people residing in it. Elijah said nothing. His quiet was not sad, but measured like he was waiting for the scales to quit rocking and level. They both slept easily until after midnight, when they were awakened by the woman's howls and the old man trying to settle her. It took a half hour and Strawl listened to her quiet, then catch herself on a sob and cry some more. Elijah rose and entered the house and then her bedroom.

“I am an incestuous whore,” she said.

“You are not either,” Elijah told her.

“I am,” she said.

“There is no glass in nature,” Elijah said. “Did you know that? The alchemists hunted the philosopher's stone to conjure two things: gold and glass. One for obvious reasons, the other for miracles, because what would be more of a miracle than a stone one couldn't see, but could see anything through? Your beauty is glass, and it reflects the beauty of others like a mirror. You are a miracle. But you do not know it. You possess a soul that lights the glass. And if you recognized your own light, you could expect love, and return it.

“But then a man tells you a hard truth, one you don't want to hear, one he doesn't want to speak: there is no God, or the poor don't inherit the earth, or your beauty is not timeless. And you shout at him, ‘Why are you telling me this?'

“It is only later, you realize he does not see through you like glass and does not want to. He instead longed to open his skin with the shard that is you, to bleed upon you and make you visible.”

“Who is this man?” she asked.

“He is any one of us. The man isn't the point.”

“Did you burn the church?”

Elijah laughed. “Lots of things burned that summer,” he said.

“ Is my brother the killer?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I don't want him to be.”

When she was silent half an hour, Elijah returned to his sleeping bag. He and Strawl lay and listened to the crickets a long while.

“Miss that pinky finger?” Strawl asked.

“Just counting ten,” Elijah said.

They were quiet awhile.

“I never saw anyone as pretty,” Elijah said.

“Me neither,” Strawl said. “Though she'd have had better luck plain as a sack of barley.”

Elijah didn't reply.

“You might have lied to her,” Strawl said. “The brother looks good for it.”

“But you're not sure, so it's the truth until another truth takes its place.”

Strawl said nothing, but he considered the circle of damage Jacob Chin and his sister had wrought until he dropped off.

When they woke, she fed them a breakfast of venison sausage and biscuits and gravy, and they ate past their fill. Neither offered a word toward Jacob's whereabouts, though Strawl discovered a cash receipt drawn on a Wilbur bank and, reflected in a bedroom mirror, a buffalohide cape of the type the Montana Crow constructed, too large for the man or the sister, separate or together, but the kind of garment a man like Jacob, Taker of Sisters, would hang on to out of vanity. If it was here, he was south, where the towns and murders were and where the autumn had not yet reached.

W
hen the horses returned them over the ridge lining the San Poil, Strawl directed Elijah to inquire at the houses and line shacks in the valley. Strawl took the ridgeline and looked for smoke. Late afternoon, he saw Elijah ascending once more. Jacob, Taker of Sisters, had a woman in the Swahila Basin. She took in his laundry and cooked for him several times a month. He'd been there two mornings before, then boarded the Wilbur Ferry. Apparently he had some history with the Cloud boys. One of them had insulted him.

“He might've went to old Canada.”

“What makes you think so?”

“No reason.”

“Exactly,” said Strawl.

Jacob would be carousing in the towns across the big river, where the wheat had been cut and the farmhands were flush and whiskey-inclined following a month of seven-day weeks and fourteen-hour days. Cards and dice made them easy marks.

“It's supposed to be harder,” Elijah said.

“What's that?”

“Finding them.”

“What makes you say so?”

“Books.”

“Books don't know,” Strawl said.

At the Keller store, Strawl purchased flour and dried beef enough for a week of camps and Elijah a whole cake in a box, which he tied carefully to his saddleback, employing three ropes to anchor it against the horse's bouncing back quarters. The old Keller Road wound them through the north and eastern portions of the Swahila Basin, the best farming country on the entire reservation. Yellow wheat bent, then relaxed under the evening wind, the bearded stalks bouncing like froth upon a flaxen sea.

Across the river, the only true palisades north of the Big Bend bordered the water for three miles, leaving no beach or bank. The granite glittered silver and green and red, depending on the light. The two-hundred-foot cliff threw a shadow over the hastening river and the opposite bank, where Strawl and Elijah rested and watered the horses. The two of them collected wheat stalks and rubbed the kernels from the hairy seed heads and fed them to the horses. They continued until dark, meandering toward the ferry until the horses were well fed. Twilight, they shared the flat ferry's deck with three Fords and a Chrysler. Their drivers sat sullenly at their steering wheels or fooled with their radios, though no station transmitted past a hum in this low country. The ferryman pitched his bow into the wind to bisect the river's waves. The spray spattered the cars' window glass and wet Strawl's face. He lifted his
hat and let the top of his head cool, then wiped his hand across his damp hair and his hooded brow and the orbs of his eyeballs and his abrupt triangle of a nose and then the thin lips and worn teeth beneath them. They felt like corpses might to the mortician who prepared them.

The horses tipped their faces into the air and enjoyed the wet breeze. Elijah chewed a jerky strip in silence. The pilot swung the bow opposite the lined pilings, then gunned the throttle a moment and cut the engine. He scrambled to the bow, gaffing the first hoop in the concrete dock; he pushed off once to brake, at the same time threading a rusty chain with links as large as fists through the hoop, then snubbing it with a heavy lock, then he was on to the next hoop, stopping the ferry entirely with such precision the boat didn't rock, nor did the bow chain grow taut. He unhinged a metal ramp, spat a stream of tobacco into the water, lynched the bolt securing the plates to the landing, and waved at the first car, which turned on its lights and exited, as did the others, stitching a yellow and red lit chain on the switchbacked grade rising from the river.

The weather was mild. Strawl and Elijah allowed the horses a leisurely pace. In the fields above the breaks, threshing machines hummed in the darkness along with the voices of the men who sewed the grain sacks shut and others who threw them into long horse-drawn wagons. Implements crawled, stirring the dust and chaff, while the scarlet moon poured light onto the skyline. The cool, settling air smelled rich as a baking oven.

They both lit cigarettes when they climbed past the canyon rim, then glanced at one another.

Elijah gazed into the night, now fully dark aside from the starlight and the red moon.

“He isn't any more likely to murder tonight than last night,” Strawl said.

Elijah said, “No less, either.”

“He might kill some gossip or blowhard, though.”

Elijah smoked a minute, then spit on his thumb and forefinger and snuffed out the ash. “He done the world little good as it is. Sinful to halt him if he's balancing the ledger.”

Strawl nudged Stick and he made for a dirt road off the gravel, then another that had dwindled to a set of weedy tire tracks. A mile following it put them at an ancient line shack. The walls were not going to keep much out, but the weather was calm, and inside were a metal stove and enough wood to cook a decent breakfast. They hobbled the horses in a grassy eyebrow to let them feed and doze. Both put out their bedrolls and lay atop them. Elijah drank water from a canteen and then rinsed his face over a tin. He dropped his eyes and doused the rest of his head. Satisfied he was clean, he bent over the tin and raked his scalp as dry as he could, then let the remaining water tick from his hair into the tin. Finally, when it had quit, he combed it back and pillowed his head with his saddle and dropped to the quick and ghostless sleep of the young.

Strawl, himself, could not. He lay and listened through the glassless windows at the wind move, then quit, then begin again, until his ears climbed under that sound and found the horses, Stick alternating his weight from one side to the other and Baal tugging shoots from the ground and turning them to paste with her mouth. A truck pulled the hill, motor whining until the driver clutched and shifted down.

He would like to have been able to say he lay until dawn recounting his sins, or pondering the physics of a planet that spun so plumb it held all the creatures upon it upright, yet kept such poor time the calendar required an extra day one year in four to make sense. He was the kind to ponder in such terms, but a manhunt pressed those high thoughts into hibernation. He slept through their inevitable questions intent to awaken with the sense of the puzzle maker rather than another witless piece. Knowledge was
just the jug a man drank from, anyway. Arithmetic might fill one and words another, and a man could swap bottles and drink his fill of both yet understand nothing because most men's minds are sieves, not cisterns.

In the predawn blue, Strawl watched a paint labor on a game trail. Its rider, an immense man, was hunched over the saddlehorn, asleep. Jacob, the Taker of Sisters, was nearly too much weight for his mount. He required a quarter horse or maybe an Arabian cross if he were to cover any ground at all, not the skinny paint he was aboard.