Lonesome Animals (9 page)

Finally, the commandant ordered he either discharge or transfer. He chose the latter and rode mail patrols in Astoria, Oregon, for nine months, fishing and digging clams on the Pacific beach with each pass he earned.

He found the ocean a comfort. The hushing of the constant surf and the wind teeming with the unperfumed odors of all that was alive or dying underneath the swells steadied his heart and quelled his mind like knowledge of the everlasting for believers. From the ocean he drew the only spiritual guidance he could lay claim to, though he could not name it. A stomach ulcer converted him to teetotaler, and, in truth, he was happy for the excuse. Drinking he did not do partway, and drunkenness smothered his memory and conscious self like a blanket over a fire. But his body continued, fanned by winds he did not comprehend though the wreckage and black eyes following were evidence enough of their strength.

Twice during his stint he was accosted by bandits and neither time surrendered his bundle. In the second instance, he pistol-whipped a gold panner and turned him over to the authorities bent in half across his saddle. When the Tonasket colonel needed a policeman, he was promoted sergeant and reassigned.

Strawl watched the dew burn off in the warming morning. He lit a cigarette. The stovepipe over Marvin's cabin issued smoke as either he or his wife kindled the stove for breakfast.

Stick was fresh and Strawl mounted and pointed him north. He rode game trails, letting the horse sort out a direction when they gave way to meadows or bald hills where the deer and elk didn't require paths. Morning's cool graduated into a warmth approaching pleasant, then a heat that put Stick into a lather until Strawl drew rein. The sun disappeared more hastily than it had risen; sunset stretched over the country for a rusty and luminous breath, then darkness stretched back, and with it the sweat ringing his hat and spattering his shirt chilled him. Strawl camped on a ridge beyond Granite Mountain's sightlines and, he hoped, past the scent capacity of mastiff hounds.

The next morning, he rose and circled the mountain until he found an opposite ridge that permitted him a view of Rutherford Hayes's cabin door while keeping him upwind of the dogs. He tied Stick to a tamarack trunk and rested in the tree's thin shade until Hayes opened the door. Strawl put two bullets in the porch's lowest step. The man broke for the house. He emerged with a rifle as thick as a fencepost.

“Put the dogs away, Root,” Strawl shouted.

The man's head turned, hunting Strawl's direction.

“If I wanted you shot, you'd be bleeding already. No harm will come to you.”

“Who are you?” the man shouted.

“Russell Strawl.”

“Sheriff Strawl?”

“I got no paper on you and no inclination to take you past the front porch. I want a word is all.”

“Come on, then,” Hayes shouted. The man whistled and five dogs each weighing nearly as much as Strawl himself broke the
brush from four separate directions. Strawl allowed five minutes more for any stragglers, then hiked from his ridge to the knob that held Hayes's cabin.

Hayes sat on the porch with a broken pocketknife, digging Strawl's bullets from the step. The first lay next to him, a spattering of lead.

Strawl was surprised to see his face shaved clean as if a barber had serviced him and his now grey hair cut in a style that, if not fashionable, was at least a manageable length. His face held the furrows anyone's would after twenty years' passing. Only in his eyes were things amiss; the blue irises were too light, emptied of one thing and filled with another. He squinted at Strawl as if Strawl were a long way off.

“How are you, Rutherford?” Strawl asked.

“I am,” Hayes told him. “I am that name.”

“Rutherford,” Strawl said. “I know you from a long time back. You don't need to introduce yourself.”

“You let me keep here,” Hayes said. “They wanted to run me off.” The man's voice started soft then turned loud, then quieted again, like he was trying to come to the right volume to speak to another.

Strawl said, “I put you in the penitentiary, too, you recall.”

Hayes looked at him for a long time, too long, though Strawl garnered nothing rude about his stare.

“I needed jailing,” he said.

The dogs scratched and whimpered at the door.

“You care if I let them go?”

“I got no quarrel if they don't try and tree me.”

Hayes laughed. “They'll just figure you're one of them or one of me. They don't know much difference.” He gave Strawl a handful of jerked deer. When they boiled out the door, Strawl offered each the treat; they did not scrap or fuss or wolf their food like town
dogs; in fact, they waited turns until each had a stick of meat. Strawl patted one and the others whimpered so he gave them each their share of affection.

“Seems like good company,” Strawl said.

“Safe,” Hayes said.

“Safer than people, you mean,” Strawl asked him.

It took him ten minutes to collect his thoughts, but Strawl figured he had no need for haste in this place and plenty of time for philosophy.

“Other way around,” Hayes said. “They ain't people. It makes them safe from me.”

“People can be trying,” Strawl agreed.

Hayes shook his head. “I need things plain. It makes me dangerous company.” He scratched at a mole under his chin. “Dogs. They're easier to figure, and don't squawk if you guess wrong.” Hayes nodded at Stick, who nosed the pine needles under the tree where he was tied. “I miss horses,” he said. “I had a ken for them as a boy.”

“Come in handy up here,” Strawl said. “I'm surprised you didn't add one to your menagerie.”

Hayes lifted the spent bullet with his fingers. Strawl watched them shift it in the palm opposite. It balanced there a moment until he shut his fingers over it. “Too easy to travel down there. I might get to liking it,” he said. “Or not liking it. Neither one I'm suited to.”

Strawl sat and tugged his makings from his trouser pocket. He turned a cigarette and offered it to Hayes, then built another for himself. Hayes drew softly, he coughed, then drew again and let the smoke out, then after considering a full minute, threw the remains of it into the dirt and let it smolder.

Strawl pulled from his own smoke and exhaled. “It's a tedious vice,” Strawl said. “You're better off.”

Hayes said nothing for an hour. The silence was at first clumsy, then plain, then pleasant. Strawl gazed over the hard-packed yard, watching the dogs wrestle, then hunt the afternoon shade. They dozed happily and he envied them. A few early geese creased the blue sky. Their clatter sounded like laughter, and Strawl watched them for twenty minutes trying to predict in which pothole they might light. He rose and crossed the dirt to Stick, pumped water into a bucket and let the horse drink, then withdrew some coffee and chicory from one saddlebag and his coffeepot from the other. Hayes smiled and took the collection inside his house and lit a Franklin stove and perked the coffee, then returned with two cups filled, a sprig of mint that grew naturally behind the house in each.

“You kill anyone recently?” Strawl asked him.

Hayes took another quarter of an hour to answer. Strawl would have expected some grand prevarication from another man, but Hayes's only intent seemed thoroughness.

“It would have been recent,” Strawl told him. “And with a lot of folderol. And more than one.”

Hayes looked into his hands. “My mind doesn't work like it used to,” he said. “It ain't worn-out like old folks'. It just quit working in words somewhere back. What I recall seems inclined toward more weather and smells and what I remember of them I can't say because the words quit me when the weather does.” He looked like a child. He was crying. Not sobbing, just tears welling below his eyes and sliding down his cheeks. “I don't remember people for a long time,” he said. “I admit I have had killing in me. Maybe it sneaked back without me knowing.”

Strawl finished his cigarette.

“I suppose you'll need me for a trial.”

Strawl shook his head. “You didn't do it.”

“I don't understand.”

“These dead men. Someone would have to thought about it,” Strawl told him. “It's more meanness than a man could muster on accident.”

Strawl smacked his lips and two of the dogs approached. Strawl patted their heads and listened to them pant in the heat. Another brought him a stick and left it at Strawl's feet. He tossed it and watched all three dogs climb over one another like rough children. One returned the stick and Strawl threw it again, and they all went forth once more, though this time they became so occupied with wrestling one another, the stick slipped their minds.

“That's it, then?” Hayes asked.

“That's it,” Strawl said. “Sorry to have intruded. I know people have to be an inconvenience to you.” He pumped some water into a cupped hand and washed his face. “Rutherford, you seen anything unusual, at all, come this way?”

Hayes said, “Fire north.”

“Forests burning all over this summer.”

Hayes said, “Wood smoke, tamarack likely. Nothing pitchy as planks or studs and stringers or hardy as fruit trees. Stove likely or camp.”

“How far north?”

Hayes sniffed. “Not to Canada,” he said. “But not much short of it.”

“Can you catch a whiff now?”

Hayes nodded.

“How come you didn't locate me by scent?”

“You weren't on fire.”

Strawl smoked again. Alone, a man's senses honed upon open country like a blade across a whetstone, Strawl knew; his own were sharpened in a similar fashion. He had known those who claimed to navigate by scent, but none whose talents went beyond what seeing and hearing could deliver to an ordinary man paying attention.
Hayes had no reason to lie or gloat, though. Strawl did not doubt his sincerity. But cross a blade against a stone long enough, even the best steel passed its edge and you possessed nothing but a bone handle and filings.

“You seen anything else worth mention?” Strawl asked.

“Well, I did encounter a new trail with a lot of blood in a spot and a dead baby.”

“That might qualify, Root.”

“The trail I wouldn't think much about. Game track just getting used by people now.”

“Blood and the baby on the trail or you find them separate?”

“Half mile or so following it. Not something bleeding out. One big splat and the baby in the middle. Tiny as a new pup. Coyotes hadn't got to the afterbirth, but the magpies scrapped over it until I shooed them off.”

“Probably stillborn,” Strawl said.

“I figured so.”

Strawl extended his hand. “Well I admire your nose,” he said. “And I thank you for your trouble.”

Hayes said nothing, but, when Strawl rose to go, he commented on the waning day and asked if Strawl would like a bunk on his porch and Strawl agreed. Hayes fed him the remnants of an elk stew, bland without salt or pepper and so thick with gravy and wild vegetables that they consumed it with forks and knives. He had no bread, but Strawl fried his flour and a dappling of starch into a fine flat bread that they used to sop up the remnants of the meal. They fed the rest to the dogs, who waited their turns once more.

T
he next morning, Strawl rose, surprised Hayes remained asleep in his handmade bed. Strawl guessed even their abbreviated conversation had been, to a man like Hayes, as much effort as 140 miles to the Greek at Marathon. He left some coffee as well as salt and a candle and a matchbook and some tobacco in case Hayes changed his mind on such matters, then bid goodbye to the dogs with another jerky stick.

He rode until early evening, enjoying its cool, when he encountered a boy driving a string of donkeys with a stick. The donkeys packed flannel and wool and other dry goods along with double-sacked flour and grains of all kinds. The boy's hair had been cut with a bowl a long while ago and his bangs hung in his face, which was round and seemed to Strawl angelic. Pudgy, he
had yet to gain that wiry length of adolescence, and he waddled when he walked.

Strawl drew Stick to a halt.

“Where you headed?” he asked.

The boy pointed in the direction Strawl had come.

“You bringing those to Hayes?”

The boy shook his head. The donkeys browsed on the wild rye surrounding them. The boy steered one from a thistle. Strawl offered him some jerky and leftover bread. He watched the boy eat them, careful as a coon.

“You know anything about a dead baby?”

The boy shook his head.

“You speak?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You done anything wrong?”

“No.”

“Quit acting like you have, then,” Strawl told him. He dropped another piece of meat at the boy's feet. The dog sniffed it and then looked to the boy, who nodded. The dog's jaws clamped the jerky and he trotted to the shade beneath a pine to take his supper.

“That's a good dog,” Strawl said, then nudged Stick onward.

He rode ten miles, considering his choices. Jacob Chin would require a change of direction and more time and energy than he felt compelled to commit to a BIA lead. Instead he determined to take a good meal in Keller and, there, put his ear to the ground. He diverted from the trail leading to Marvin's, instead heading toward the river and town. Keller was situated on the edge of the Swahila Basin, a lowland steppe holding the mouth of the San Poil River. The town had been a quarter mile lower, where the river met the Columbia, but the Bureau of Reclamation had bought it outright, land, buildings, and roads, and burned it in order to clear the reservoir's new banks. West, Strawl could see
a few abandoned houses near the river's edge and below, in what had once been a meadow, a cemetery pocked with open graves. A team of three Indians stabbed the ground with shovels. Another transported the bodies higher where a second crew interred them. The Catholic priest mumbled ashes to ashes over those who never knew they were condemned otherwise and added to the pots and beads and headdresses a pewter crucifix. Carpenters beat together planks for caskets, which the church insisted replace the disintegrating blankets and robes wrapping each skeleton. Nobody bothered to seal the emptied sepulchers, and the rising river would rub the graves out.