Lonesome Animals (14 page)

Elijah had a point. The boy set his jaw and lifted his hammer and a nail.

“You aren't going to be able to wire their heads to their shoulders,” Strawl said.

“Are you going to cite a law that goes against it?”

“Just physics. Skin tears like paper and bone splits, otherwise carpenters would do surgery. Woo got any boards in his shed?”

“Scrap timber,” Elijah said.

“If you can find a couple of one-bys long enough and some wood screws, you might be able to bolster their spine and shoulders enough to keep a head to it.”

“Like a cross?”

Strawl nodded. He left him to the job. Woo put on some sausage and hotcakes and, at the bar, Strawl washed his hands in a bucket, then watched his second breakfast spit on the griddle. Pete's remained abandoned, though he glugged coffee as fast as Woo could pour it.

Woo soon put Strawl's plate in front of him, then slid the tabasco across the counter. Strawl opened the bottle, turned it over, and hit the bottom until his eggs were spackled orange. He broke a yolk, then dipped a link in the yellow puddle on his plate.

Elijah had managed the boards and the screws and was attempting to find a way to snub the Cloud brothers' foreheads to the top of the board without them slipping through the loops. The heat beaded the perspiration left in their glands and shined the boys' faces and dulled their hair. The cleaved heads were expressionless, as if they found their predicament of little surprise.

A bevy of impatient magpies prattled on Woo's broken eave and Strawl had seen a grey and white dog make the circle around the building twice and then another yellow hound join him. Elijah finally cinched the skulls to their crosses with the boys' pants belts.
This left their heads tipped back and exposed the severed necks. He cut and drove wood wedges between the boards and the back of each skull. Then he drove three wood screws through the boards and into the backs of their heads for insurance. He gazed, satisfied with the results.

Strawl filled a pitcher with water and delivered it to the boy. No one passed, let alone stopped, aside from Woo's few patrons and the boys moving the bodies from the town cemetery to the other above the new waterline.

Woo owned a wagon for supplies, and Strawl yoked Stick and Elijah's mare, Baal, to the T-bar. He and Elijah and Woo lifted the Cloud boys onto the flatbed, then covered them with blankets from Woo's closet.

Elijah drove. The bodies rocked on the planks of the wagon bed. It was midday and hot. Starlings dove at the wagon as it passed a clay bank pocked with their nests. A few larks trilled. Strawl heard the hush of a hawk's wings as it left its perch in a tamarack and weaved across the blue sky. Flies hummed over the wounds, but Woo kept a sack of lime, and they had scattered some across the wounds to subdue the odor.

Strawl's saddle lay behind him in the wagon and he unscabbarded the rifle, opened the bolt, and began to clean the chamber with a fresh handkerchief. He listened to the flowing and the little breeze jangle the drying cheat and foxtail. The road ascended the east side of the crease the San Poil had cut into the country. A trickle next to the Columbia, especially at the close of summer, it still had managed to shape this portion of the county, dividing the rock and pine forests of the Okanogans all the way to Canada. A few of the original San Poil River clans like the Cloud family raised enough cattle to turn a profit. It was as close to the old times as they were likely to find, and Strawl imagined they had counted themselves fortunate.

The prairie in the Swahila Basin was broken with cottonwood and pines and they passed through bladed light and shadows cooling and warming them like they were feverish. In the grass, rodents stirred and chukar clucked among a rock spill and Strawl heard the crickets that Dot's girls worried were rattlesnakes.

“All killings have reasons?” Elijah asked.

Strawl nodded. “Lots and none. Maybe your good book has something to say about it.”

Elijah finished his cigarette and licked the end to put out the last of the ember. He clucked at Stick, who was steering for a low limb to clobber them. Elijah tightened the rein until the horse recognized man was ahead of beast on the matter.

He whacked a horsefly, then brushed the remains off his pant leg. “You don't care where we inter those souls behind you,” he said. “You just want to avoid dealing with the living over it.”

The Cloud ranch buildings at the field's edge had grown long in the shadows. A few ancient elms shaded the house, though they'd lost one recently to disease. Split, quartered, and stacked against the north wall, it would season a year then be priced to warm a winter. The field was irrigated with long pipes extended from a raised water tank fed by a well. At each end rested a giant insect-looking sprinkler. The pastured cattle dotted a sloping hill in the locusts' and bull pines' shade. There was enough grass there to keep them another month, as long as they avoided poisoning themselves with the flowering larkspur and hawksbeard, the only noxious weeds this side of the river.

The road in had been plowed loose, then filled and graded. A black lab yapped and trailed their wagon. The Cloud clan sat in kitchen chairs on the porch, neighbors and shirttail relatives among them. They quieted as the wagon neared. The rate bad news covered country never failed to astonish Strawl. It relieved him, as well. Most of the wailing would be finished.

Elijah drew rein and disembarked from the wagon. Strawl followed. They slapped the dust from their pants, then climbed the porch steps. The men wore denim pants and the bright checked shirts the Indians seemed to find handsome, and the ladies dressed in flowered prints stitched by their own hands.

Strawl lifted his hat. He let Elijah speak.

“I'm sorry,” he said. The Cloud boys' mother nodded. Beneath her chair's painted wooden legs lay her leather parfleche, an envelope-shaped satchel the size of an army pack. To stripe it, she'd used vermillion and red ochre and a purple dye concocted from sage buds. A yellow and orange orb painted with birch bark drops and mountain ash looked like an unhinged head over the bright bands. In her hands, she turned a ball of string, knotted and looped to mark the years and good hunts and hard snows and the births and deaths in her family. The string had wrapped around her wrists, but she continued to make loop after loop.

“I have them,” Elijah told her.

She looked up at him, and her face twisted.

Strawl spoke up. “The bodies.”

“You can see them if you like,” Elijah said.

“Here? You brought them?” the Clouds' father asked. He wore a bolo tie stone at his throat and his eyes looked as if he'd just awakened.

“Yes,” Elijah said. “Me and him.”

“The old sheriff?” he asked. “He is helping you?”

Elijah nodded.

“He didn't do this?”

“No,” Elijah said.

The old Indian lifted a pistol from under the blanket in his lap, then opened the cylinder and backed out the shells. He glanced at Strawl. “You hear things,” he said.

Strawl nodded.

“You have killed others,” he said. The gun was not for evening the score. The San Poil did not believe in revenge very much. For them, time only ran in one direction.

“I understand,” Strawl told him.

The man looked at Elijah a moment, blinking his rheumy eyes, then rose and, with his wife, walked to the wagon. Strawl let Elijah take them to the bodies. They stood, gazing upon their boys. The mother rearranged a strand of hair on one. From her dress pocket she withdrew a pair of rosaries and set one on each of their chests. The old man opened one hand of each and deposited a feather, and then they returned to their chairs and misery.

Strawl checked the harnesses on the horses while Elijah spoke to them. He joined Strawl at the wagon finally. “They asked us to take care of them. They don't want the priest finding out and requiring a mass.”

Strawl drove the horses. The bodies were close to putrid.

“They bury them in the old days?”

Elijah shrugged. “I've never seen anything but Christian funerals.”

“Must be something to it for folks besides exercise digging, I guess, or they wouldn't go to the trouble.”

“Ashes to ashes,” Elijah said.

“Weren't you arguing for ritual a few hours ago?”

“I was wrong,” Elijah said.

They rode awhile in the quiet. The horses' clops ticked at the shortening day. Strawl was thirsty, but the nearest creek was a mile yet and a hundred feet down a steep bank. He didn't know if a drink merited the effort.

He tired suddenly. His legs ached and the place behind his eyes hurt. He handed the reins to Elijah and put his elbows on his knees and set his head into his knobby hands and dug at his temples with
his fingers. He could hear himself breathing and his heart rocking in his chest. After a mile, he asked, “Them boys have their guts still?”

Elijah said nothing.

“You wrestled them and that wire. They weigh what a man weighs?”

“More or less,” Elijah said.

“Head is ten, twelve pounds tops. Guts twice or more. That'd be near fifty pounds, a third of their body. You'd notice.”

“Neck cut would have drained them lickety split,” Elijah said. “Just raise their legs and smoke a cigarette and they'd be dry as dust.”

“But blood weighs nothing next to flesh,” Strawl said. He climbed over the buckboard seat and pulled the covering from the boys. He tugged one shirt open, splitting the buttons, then the others. Finding them unmarked, he examined the neck wounds. Their heads were broken loose with an axe, the flesh hacked and peeled back. Strawl touched their skin. It was toughening, but gave to his fingers. He sifted their greasy hair for the wounds that killed them. They were blunt and deep, likely from the same axe head that had decapitated them.

“He was in a hurry,” Strawl said. “He prettied it up, but he didn't gut or drain them and he cut with something other than a razor.”

Elijah nodded. “Makes sense. Had to do it between the poker game and breakfast.”

“Didn't have to do it at all. He wanted to do it enough to chance it.”

By the time they reached the old town site, the day had cooled. Elijah steered them toward the abandoned cemetery.

“You are a lazy son of a bitch,” Strawl said.

Elijah grinned. He clucked Stick to an open grave. He took the
boy nearest the tailgate by the feet and tumbled him in. The head unloosened and Elijah lifted it in his hands and looked into its face a moment.

“So long partner.” He tossed it into the grave, then stood, staring. “I only guessed which head went with which body. Only way to be sure is to bury them together.”

Strawl took the ankles of the second boy and Elijah the arms, and they swung his body into the grave. The head, his or not, lolled and the slit throat opened like a meaty, toothless mouth. Strawl and Elijah gazed upon the boys lying back-to-back like two halves finally rejoined.

“Family asked us to stop, coming out,” Elijah said.

Strawl didn't reply.

“We'll have to eat.”

“Suppose.”

“And get drunk, likely.”

“Do our manners know no bounds?” Strawl asked.

Elijah climbed aboard the wagon. “I remember when drinking was for pleasure,” he said. “Now it's j ust another goddamned chore.”

A
dozen cars lined the road into the Cloud house. Elijah lifted a metal loop and dragged a barbwire gate open. They drove through a pasture, then opened a wooden fence to let themselves into the corral and set loose their horses. The animals rolled in the dirt while Elijah deposited an alfalfa bale taken from those that lined the far wall in a manger. Next to it, he added two buckets of oats. Strawl pumped the spigot outside, filling the trough. He and Elijah listened appreciatively to the horses feed and water.

From the house, talk hummed and laughter roughened by liquor. A few stone-faced girls in bright dresses traded a group of boys turns dangling from a rope on an elm branch. Strawl rolled a cigarette and smoked it.

“I'll fetch you a plate of food,” Elijah said.

“You hiding me?” Strawl asked. “I've done nothing today but carry home their dead.”

“Not many whose memory ends at today,” Elijah said.

“I never harmed that family in all my years of work.”

“You exist. That's damage enough.”

“The Great White Devil.”

“Devil doesn't have a color,” Elijah said. “How do they know you aren't behind all this murdering, their boys included?”

Strawl pawed the air.

Elijah stayed quiet awhile. “I just thought I'd save you the trouble of a crowd,” he said. “You've never been partial to them. No one wants to settle with you.”

“That so?”

“You are an IOU nobody can redeem.”

“You cashed me out pretty good,” Strawl said.

Elijah sat on his haunches and chewed a grass stalk flat. Strawl finished his cigarette. “ I'd have a plate,” he said finally.

Elijah nodded and Strawl watched him go. In the barn's loft, Strawl constructed a pallet from loose straw and put out his heavy blanket. He brought the saddle from the wagon up the ladder to pillow his head. He wished he'd thought to add a book to his poke, but his bags held only the agency files and he had neither the patience nor light left for that kind of study.

In the late afternoon heat, the crowd milled at the house's near end on a wraparound porch. On a mound in the yard, Cloud stood like a doleful mustang examining his brood. He doffed a genuine Stetson. He'd combed his straight black hair to one side with his hand, though it retained the shape of the hat. His starched canvas slacks would have held their crease in a tornado, and his turquoise shirt buttons matched the stone cinching his bolo tie.