Lonesome Animals (6 page)

Strawl heard the rap on his door. He twisted the knob of the kitchen table lamp and watched the flame climb the flue. At the stove, he lifted the black pot and poured a second cup of coffee, then set it across from his own. Mornings, the fluid greasing his joints congealed to something feeling like paste and the grit in it often halted an elbow or a knee altogether. He missed moving smoothly. Aside from his hearing, the only other physical skill he'd owned was foot-speed and he bemoaned the loss. An exaggerated instep left him somewhat pigeon-toed, fodder for mockery in country still negotiated primarily by horses and their bowlegged riders, until he reached twelve-and-a-half and the same muscles that set his knees akimbo suddenly turned him as fast as a colt. At local fairs, he whipped boys and men in both the straight sprints and on the horse track's mile oval, then bested them again in the stick relays, running alone. The sole contest he lost pitted him against a bicycle, and only after a mile and a half of wagers and shouting did he collapse and lose consciousness, waking to the barker passing horse dope under his nose.

Even the preacher had cited his mettle in a sermon, though the man had turned on him when he refused to race any longer, citing him as an example of misplaced vanity or pure pigheadedness. Strawl had no idea where one began and the other left off, and, though confused at the new huffiness directed toward him, possessed neither the feelings to suss it out nor the words to pose his bewilderment into a question, and even if he had managed one, he wouldn't have known where to submit it.

It wasn't much later that his father, with two in the cradle and three others younger than Strawl, had walked him to the end of the block. “Old Abraham had to sacrifice his firstborn, and I guess I do, as well,” he said.

“God kept Abraham from it,” Strawl corrected him. “He sent an angel.”

His father had stared into the white sky and nodded. “Yes, but Abraham was blessed by God and founder of a nation. I don't see one coming for you and me.”

He stopped walking and put twelve silver dollars into Strawl's hand and closed his stubby fingers over it. “Good luck, son,” he said.

The house's door rattled again.

“Come on in,” Strawl said.

The draft from the open door snuffled the lantern's flame. Strawl watched his shadow and Dot's on the wall behind the table. She was a square, squat woman, plain as Strawl himself and heir to few of her mother's charms, except astride a horse. There, she transformed into something out of Mallory. Her tiny blue eyes shone like a fury's, and her aquiline nose looked Roman and noble. She sat a horse as if just another one of its graceful parts and rode like an Indian on fire. No man could get more from an animal, Strawl included.

She crossed the room and sat. Her two girls followed, jabbering. They towed the boy, only eight months, in a wagon behind them. They delivered him eggs and sausage on a plate, still warm. Dot removed her scarf and set it in her lap and smoothed a strand of hair that had freed itself during the walk to his house. He watched her lift a bread loaf from her satchel and slice off the end with a kitchen knife. She buttered it and put a piece in the boy's mouth.

“See anyone interesting at your rodeo?”

Strawl chewed a piece of sausage and swallowed. He sipped his coffee.

“Sons of bitches and bastards and a few liars,” he said. “I fit in nicely.”

“Well, I hope you told them some whoppers.”

“Said I was rich.” He lifted his plate and shoveled half an egg into his mouth. She stared at him until he swallowed. Strawl mopped the yolk with his bread.

“Esther killed a rabbit,” she said.

“Violet jealous?”

“No, though she wanted to shoot at a barn cat to keep square.”

“Arlen let her?”

“He told her they were pets.”

“Didn't stop her, did it?”

Dot shook her head. “She informed him Sara Rinker had pet rabbits. ‘This was a wild rabbit,' Arlen told her, and Violet said, ‘All animals are wild till they get tamed.' Then Esther argued the wild rabbits weren't even the same breed as the pet ones, and Violet answered talking about breeding is naughty, and then I put on the potatoes to boil and left it for Arlen to sort out.”

“Lawyers, those two,” Strawl told her. He finished his coffee. “Officer Dice spent a minute with me.”

“Did he mention Elijah?”

“Subject was never broached,” Strawl told her. “Them Cache Creek slayings are making noise. He wants some help on it.”

“Did he ask you to cease and desist?”

“What?”

“Did he think you were behind them?”

“Do you?”

Dot glanced up from the boy, who was polishing off his bread and butter. Her eyes blinked and the time it took for her to answer offended him as much as the answer. “I've worried over it,” Dot said. “You have a reputation, and I don't know you well enough to convince myself otherwise.”

“I haven't killed any of them.”

“In your experience, isn't that what anyone would say, guilty or not?”

Strawl laughed. “I admire your skepticism.”

“I don't,” Dot said.

“Well, the powers that be have decided I am on the side of right. At least for now.”

“Do they think Elijah is responsible?”

“I told you. They didn't mention your brother.”

“You didn't tell me what you think.”

“Your brother is a mystery. But I doubt he's a murderer, especially to this degree. Just a thief.”

Dot shook her head. “He didn't steal what you gave him.”

“I didn't give him half my place to squander.”

“I guess you should have put that in the mortgage agreement.”

“Maybe so,” Strawl said.

“What made Dice think you were back in business?” she asked.

“Heard I was broke.”

Dot refilled their cups. “There's no shame in that,” she said. Her voice was deep as whiskey and filled with gravel. She sounded like a scold, even when it wasn't her intent. Strawl had always admired her more than enjoyed her. She told the truth no matter the price. It made her noble as a knight, but stern company.

“Wasn't me that split the place,” she told him.

When Dot married, she and Arlen took up a house in Chelan where the county employed Arlen to engineer and construct a small dam above the falls. Strawl and Dot wrote only occasional letters to one another, until he was put ass over teakettle by a misbehaving sorrel. The doctor set and cast both his legs and took the horse as payment. Arlen and Dot and the girls returned to tend the animals and plant the fall crop. Arlen left equipment magazines on the kitchen table Sundays when Dot fixed a weekly family dinner
large enough for him to cobble the rest into a week of suppers. The literature announced new fertilizers, experiments in weed control, and rod weeders with rotating tines. Arlen had talked Strawl into a fresno to level the uneven knobs Strawl left fallow and spoke longingly of a gas-powered combine that would harvest the place in a few days. He underlined the most compelling points in pen. Strawl had no argument against them except money, which was the only one he required.

Dot's family stayed on, and two years after, Ida—Strawl's second wife and Elijah's mother—drowned alone fishing the river during runoff, as was her wont. Her body never surfaced and it was likely a hundred miles away, twisting in the current toward the ocean. Her passing, of course, stunned the children, and Strawl tried to close the wound by splitting the ranch between them.

He had expected to work Elijah into accountability with his piece and to anchor Dot and Arlen with the other. Neither turned out as he had predicted.

Arlen was smarter than Strawl, but he had little faith in himself. Like a poker player short-stacked, he took outrageous gambles on poor odds and failed to play even money. He had tried to outsmart dirt and moody weather with the wheat hybrid seed fostered in the Palouse, but that country received a half inch of rain Junes and had dirt black enough to grow any seed. The rocky coulee was less generous and by the time Arlen had discovered so, he'd augured his half into a hole so deep, Strawl took it back until he could return it to profit.

After six months of lukewarm effort, Elijah peddled his portion of the ranch to Hemmer, a disagreeable neighbor, which was half of Strawl's worth. The boy lacked the will to finish, and not just his chores. Checkers, he saw moves others missed, but often grew bored and lost or just stopped playing entirely. Strawl had seen him build rolls in a poker game just to drop them betting hands
he had no business playing. The boy was not even his blood, but Strawl, too, in his youth, had been hoppy as bacon on the griddle and possessed the attention of a horsefly. He had spoiled the boy. When he and his mother had agreed to live with him, Dot was starting at the high school in town, so, after his chores, the boy was permitted to fish and hunt and wander on his own.

He wondered if Dot knew Elijah's whereabouts. It was unlike her not to share an opinion, but she felt he was her brother, and confidences between siblings were the hardest to pierce. They felt an owing past even husband and wife, whom the joining of loins could undo as easily as it intertwined them. Even parents surrendered their children out of guilt over raising criminals. Childhood was a lonely business, however, and navigating that solitude together seemed to fix siblings fast. Though Dot had been miffed that Elijah received an equal share, when Elijah sold his portion she had been satisfied at Strawl's comeuppance. For her, it was a wash between the two in a strange way. If Dot had apprehended Elijah's whereabouts, she hadn't surrendered them, and likely would not now that he had dealt away his inheritance, and turning her would require Strawl to stoke a wrath in her he doubted he could smother when the issue concluded.

“I was just wanting a little rest,” Strawl said.

Dot looked down at her coffee. “I guess he did, too.”

“Maybe I should have beat him,” Strawl said.

“What he did with his inheritance is your folly and his. You never asked my advice.”

“You still mad?” he asked her.

“You were fair.” She paused and blinked her eyes. “I was only mad a little and I haven't been for a long while. We've got my wages yet and our half of the ranch. We'll look after you.”

“I don't intend to spend my dotage on your porch, useless as a stick, thank you.”

“I wouldn't be surprised if you planned it to come to this.”

“Wish I was that smart,” Strawl said.

Dot sighed and began to collect the children. “A piece of ground is no substitute for love, Father,” she said.

“It was never meant to be.” Strawl shook his head. “It's got a deed and a price and you can measure it. It's all I had to give. Land.”

“I'd swap for more of you and less of it,” Dot said.

“No, you would swap for more of someone else standing in my shoes and less of me in them,” Strawl told her.

Dot said nothing.

“I don't blame you,” Strawl said. “I'd likely trade myself if I thought I'd get a taker. Might be we could swap me for an old brood mare.”

Dot chuckled. “Maybe if it only had three legs.”

“We'd still be a leg ahead, wouldn't we?” Strawl replied. He walked across the room and examined a worn bookcase Elijah had commandeered as his own many years before.

“I see he got rid of the donkey skull, at least.” Elijah had ridden thirty miles to pay a horse doctor for it.

“Except the jaw. He bronzed it with the teeth.”

Strawl shook his head.

“Samson,” Dot said. “That's how he fought the Philistines.”

“Guns are too simple for a true believer, I guess.”

“Apparently,” Dot said.

“What did he think he needed the money for? Whenever he asked didn't we come up with it?”

“Maybe he needed something he couldn't ask for.”

“What would that be?”

“Heaven on Earth. The second coming. Who knows?”

Strawl stood and walked them to the door. Across the pasture and beyond the barn, Arlen had constructed their house. He'd put it at the bottom of Squaw Creek, despite Strawl cautioning him
against it, because that's where the elms Dot favored for shade grew. The bottom flooded every thaw, as Strawl had foreseen, and the house might've been ruined if Arlen hadn't carted in river gravel and laid it under the foundation and then run metal culverts both ways. Springs, the floor trembled with the water passing, and the front yard was often a swamp navigable only by a row of two-by-eights he'd cut for the purpose, but not a plank of the house got damp.

“I see Stick is at the ready,” Dot observed. The horse was reined to the porch post.

“He's not as hardy as The Governor,” Strawl said. “But he'll suffice.”

“You could take the truck,” she told him.

“Horses don't break down and they don't need gas.”

“He's crazy, I hear, your killer,” Dot said. “He might want to cut you to pieces and serve you on a bun at the café.”

“If the man wanted me, I'd be shepherd's pie or on the coat rack at the livery,” Strawl said.

“You agree he's insane.”

“It's crazy people that make the most sense.”

Dot put her hands on her hips and stared at him.

“Cutting others hither and yon. That's reasonable?”

“Man's got an ordered mind. It's just a sideways order.”

“If you're trying to comfort me, you're making a mighty wide circle,” Dot said.