Lonesome Animals

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For Holly, Natalie, Luke and Jackson

The author would like to acknowledge Dan Smetanka, Janet Rosen, and Sheree Bykofsky for shepherding this work to publication, and Max Phillips, Chris Offutt, Elizabeth Mc-Cracken, Charles McIntyre, John Whalen, Melissa Van Beck, Desi Koehler, David Hamilton and Bob Ganahl for their support of his work these past years.

We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story.

—John Steinbeck

Strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

—Joseph Conrad

There was, even in Russell Strawl's time, the myth of the strong silent man of the West. The reverse was closer to the mark. Geography and miles keep people few and far between, even in settled times. Their minds combat the silence and isolation inherent in such spaces by supplying their own narrative. The sound fills the waking hours and intrudes upon any dream they might recall. The remoteness in their gaze, the hesitance in responding to any word put to them, is neither contemplation nor the weight of seriousness nor peace nor solitude nor even alienation upon their souls; it is the jar of another's words piling into the torrent of their own.

For ten years preceding his marriage, Strawl policed the upper Okanogan country. In that time, he arrested 138 Indians, ninety-seven white men, and one woman, who nearly shot his hat from his head as he tried to talk her out of a pistol. He killed eleven men in flight because the circumstances made returning them alive too much trouble. Three others he killed returning fire, and one he beat into a moron with a blacksmith's hammer.

He deposited his checks directly into the army bank, and that kept him from drinking them up in the early days, though after a year, the work occupied him more than any tavern might. The
Lord above filled the holes in the Sunday morning believers; the law began to do the same for Strawl.

Strawl could smell a guilty man—perhaps because the odor was familiar. He could predict which rise he might pursue for his stand, because he himself would have chosen the same. In a person's face, he recognized the seed of acts before he who owned it might. Among the stories told about him are those in which he announced to a suspect hoping to disappear in the hollow of a thicket: “You are considering the distance between yourself and the brush and whether I can get a round in you before you reach it. It is a good bet for you, nearly fifty/fifty. And once you are in the trees, well, your luck may hold for who knows how long. But then I will kill you instead of arrest you, which is simpler for me and requires no paperwork or trial. It's up to you. If you've a weapon, you might even get a round into me, though no one has managed yet, and if you have a brain in your head, you know who I am.”

And the pursued would consider his chances while Strawl opened his revolver and spun the cylinder to make certain each round remained in its place. He would likely fire one into the terrain above, raining dirt upon his man. Then he would linger silently, ignoring the conversation his suspect might employ to buy time or stave off boredom. Most instances, less than five minutes and his man would surrender his weapon from the brush. Strawl would treat him kindly with the cuffs and rope and help him to his mount if he possessed one.

Some took hours, however. Strawl ate his supper and smoked cigarettes, then let The Governor drink from the coffeepot. If it was cold, he'd build a fire with as pitchy a fuel as he could find. A few patient enough to manage twilight threw insults at him as the light thinned upon the horizon. In the early years, he prepared for such contingencies by keeping the wind at his back, then lighting anything between himself and his quarry that took a match. Or if
the ground was steep and the country right, he would lever boulders free with a bar and roll them onto the suspect's position. Later in his career, waiting lost its capacity to entertain him, and, after an hour, he grew annoyed and threw army surplus hand grenades or smoke ordnance to move the conversation forward.

His facility to stash heart and soul in a saddlebag and his man's inability to do the same separated him from his prey; there was little human in it. Yet Strawl believed the state of every mind was thus and saw it as the central truth around which each man orbited, not considering the possibility that the star that held him in its gravity may not be a star at all, but a black planet and he a trivial moon, circling it.

The moments when Strawl crashed against a door and spilled into a room, or knelt under a pine's shadow outside a fire's fitful light, every second belonged to itself and what occurred within it either informed the next or did not. Some appeared to blend like a painting's oils, a pleasant serendipity, while others existed apart, as those on the pallete, the same colors a useless collision of time and reason.

Justice was just a coincidence within the bedlam, a moment that when separated from the whirlwind turns simple enough to take on fairness's guise. Prosecutors argue the malice in a thunderbolt ; defense attorneys the inevitable forces of the jet streams and barometric pressure and condensation and topography. Given the proper atmosphere, a tornado resided in each of us; only our circumstances differed.

Sympathetic as the latter's pain and damage might be in an acquaintance, a judge and gavel encouraged an ordinary person toward clarity. Jurors will avail themselves of any opportunity to hunt meaning in the dying winds and withdrawing rain inside a courtroom. Strawl had witnessed them rule more than one innocent man guilty just for a reprieve from the moral ambiguity outside the courthouse walls.

Strawl, however, remained in the comfort of the storm, and he thought himself content.

When a woman, the only one Strawl ever desired beyond the natural stirrings flesh is slave to, pierced that narrative for a time, it seemed evidence that nature, judgment, and good fortune had finally taken Strawl's side. Women were not foremost in his thoughts. Church girls tended soldiers' barracks, and on occasion the grocer's daughter—Emma Everett was her name—visited Strawl's billet to open the windows and trade out the bedding. She had a fine, straight nose and long, dark hair and possessed little of the formality that set him off of most women.

She approached him in September. The air was heavy with dust and harvest chaff holding the light. She wore a long dress, thin enough to reveal the shadow of her legs in the lowering sun.

“Would you enjoy a hale and hearty walk?” she asked him.

“I traipse around all day long,” he said.

She cocked her head and blinked her eyes at him, then puffed up her lower lip like a child.

She extended her hand. He stood, but didn't take hers, so she slipped it under his elbow. Dusk cloaked half her face and, in the shadows, he enjoyed her nose and thin lips and teeth slightly bent inward in a manner that the old women used to say came from keeping on the tit too long.

On a bluff that overlooked China Bend, he sat in the damp grass and listened to the crickets rake their bellies. Emma bent to one knee with him. Her shoes were within his reach. He wanted to bend and clean them with his handkerchief.

“I'm working at the grocery,” Emma said. “I see nearly everyone in the county except you. Would it slay you to stop once in a while?”

“Commandant does the shopping,” Strawl said.

Her brow creased and she frowned.

“I'm not much for conversation.”

“Is it because people lie to you in your job?” Emma asked.

“I have heard some whoppers,” Strawl chuckled. “Words turn just noise after a while. I suppose if a house was burning, ‘fire' might be handy, but not nearly as much as a bucket of water.”

“So those books on your bed stand, they must raise quite a din when you open them.” Strawl loved books. They were closed loops. He wondered if she was poking fun at him.

“Why'd you haul me up here?” Strawl asked.

“Because I didn't think you would.”

She bent and kissed him and her face erased the sky. She closed her eyes and her face turned blank as a piece of paper waiting for his writing.

He held her head in his hand, pleased with the weight, then put his face to hers and their lips clobbered awkwardly. A drop of blood stained one of her front teeth. She kissed him again, and he tasted her blood in his mouth. Afterwards, he gazed down at the clear part in her hair and the white skin and her forehead and nose underneath. She turned her head up to his and he set his lips to hers. She parted her mouth like she was drinking from a stream and he felt his do the same.

Emma took one of his hands and laced both hers over it. He clamped her wrists and pulled her toward him until she was stretched enough to kiss. Sweat stung his scalp. Her nose flared and her lungs filled. He found her dress buttons with his fingers. Hers fluttered on the backs of his hands like tiny birds. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

He stared at her breasts loose under her camisole. “I don't know what to do,” he said.

She took his hand. “Please don't think I do. Know what to do, I mean.”

“I will think whatever you want me to,” Strawl said.

She laughed a little. “Not knowing. That's better than flowers or ribbon or perfume, really.”

The second year of his marriage, Strawl tracked a bad half-breed for a month. The man's path included a girl not more than fourteen raped with a tree branch and another, only a little older, beaten nearly to death then violated with a broken pool cue. His third woman, he took a breast as a trophy.

The first woman had been conscious enough to offer a fair description : brown hair, cut with bangs in the front, a mustache, wiry strong. The second added he blinked too much. Even the third, in death, contributed the bloody red handkerchief that a man named Reynolds—who fit the rest of the descriptions—was known to favor. Strawl found him at the Red Garter in Coulee Dam sharing a pitcher of beer with two ranch hands between alfalfa cuttings.