Lonesome Animals (21 page)

Strawl tapped his cup with his forefinger. “Hard to speak for a fish.”

“You think I killed them others?” Jacob asked.

“I believe you have concerns beyond the ordinary,” Strawl told him, “and they were killed beyond the ordinary.”

Jacob nodded and drank. “I get carried away. You going to arrest me?”

“Not with that posse of cats watching over you.”

“They are small but mighty.”

Strawl nodded.

“So why'd I kill them?”

“You tell me.”

“Because I'm not Indian, maybe.”

“You're half. We're all half of something. Or quarters or worse.”

“I'd kill over that. Being half of something. It's awful.”

Strawl's cup was empty of shine and coffee. He reached for the pot but it was empty too. He found his canteen and drank. Jacob offered him the moonshine.

“Still on duty,” Strawl replied.

Jacob tipped his cup. “Here's to idle hands,” he said. By the sky it was nearly first light. Strawl stirred the fire, but Jacob stood and walked toward the river. Strawl watched him disappear.

“You better follow me,” Jacob said. “No telling what I'll do.”

Strawl rose despite the ache in his knees and lumbar and followed Jacob's drunken path by sound. Soon he could hear the river passing. They both stopped and threw a few rocks and listened to them plop into the water.

“Here,” Jacob said. Strawl followed his voice to a towering pine a hundred and fifty feet high and half a thousand years old. Jacob was already ten feet above him in the tree. Strawl pulled himself up by a sturdy bough, then, balancing his weight, found a branch a few feet higher. Above it was a step hacked into the trunk, then a trimmed limb for a foothold. Jacob led him. Through the pine aroma, Strawl navigated the snubbed branches Jacob had cut for steps. In other places he had nailed scrap lumber for rungs, and a hemp rope dangled from above if they should slip. Strawl's hands stung. Pitch and sap clung to them. Above, he could hear Jacob ascend, and to the east sunlight swelled on the coulee lip. Half an hour later, the country went grey, then brown, then golden with light. He was near the top of the tree. Beneath him, the river winked and sparkled like a handful of quarters on a sidewalk. The water's sound never ended. Even from a hundred and fifty feet above, it beat like a pulse pressed by a heart made of something he could not conceive.

Jacob waved at him, a kidney-shaped shadow with an arm. He sat perched on a bench he'd constructed. He slid to accommodate Strawl. The seat was long and the branches above it pruned to the trunk.

Somehow Jacob had managed to bring the shine jar, as well. He drank and sighed, then offered the jar to Strawl, who still demurred.

“You are fatherless?” Jacob asked.

“I guess that is no secret.”

“Fathers are just stories.” Jacob spat. “I hate stories, and I'm not fooling. You should arrest anyone telling a story.”

“Then you'd need arresting.”

Jacob shook his head and drank the last of his cup. He let it go and they watched it tumble from limb to limb until it clacked on the ground. “I'm fighting words with words. It's why people think I'm crazy.”

“Here I thought it was because you ran whores and killed those that vexed you.”

“And slept with my sister.”

“And had a yen for postmortem art.”

“Buffaloed them all, ain't I?” Jacob drank again.

He set the jar next to him. “A thousand years ago, a smell or a taste did not need a word to be. Days without hours—no six o'clock, causing seven o'clock.”

“They'd still be days,” Strawl said.

Jacob shook his head. “Dawn don't follow hours and neither does dusk. I'm sitting next to you; last time it was sunup, I was miles away, but that doesn't make it a day.”

“You got a good point,” Strawl said. “Time had better lay low.”

Jacob shook his head. “Stories are a prison,” he said.

Strawl nodded. He'd read light could travel 186,000 miles per second, but darkness was even faster, because it never left. Narrative was such a constant. You could not recall its taste or its scent or its syrupy weight in your consciousness, but then you didn't recall the smell of rain until it was upon you. If knowledge was the apple the serpent proffered Eve, then story was the next fruit she plucked, memory and story, and in the Tree of Life, the angels guard forever the sweet fruit of amnesia.

“You're just old enough to be senile,” Jacob told him. “But God hates you.”

“If he's anything like the preachers say, that's likely,” Strawl told him.

Yet with the sky so deep and blue in the dawning, he felt anchored securely for the first time in many years. He sensed the earth moving beneath, inventing time and memory and the stories Jacob so despised. A stillness enveloped the houses and the barns on the skyline, the thirst-strained fields. It enveloped even the river, and Strawl felt as if he were in huge, comforting hands. Together
he and Jacob watched the sun climb the horizon and the blue sky. The birds sang and then sang louder, then quieted. A hawk circled beneath them, hunting. Magpies chattered and flitted from branch to branch. Larks trilled and a raven answered with a caw. A breeze whisked the needles, then stilled as the temperature rose.

Strawl thought about a life spent tracking those like Jacob, wise fools who still preferred their crimes illegal and unencumbered. They asked no redemption, simply witnesses.

“I could have done it,” Jacob said. “It's not unlikely.”

Strawl nodded. “A man who builds a chair this high in a tree, you can't put anything past him.”

Jacob smiled. He seemed pleased to know he had the murders in him and that they might have originated from the same place in him that climbed a tree. They both fired their pistols in the air to celebrate the new day.

They dozed in the warm sunshine and the first blow from the axe did not rouse them. The shudders felt akin to sleep, and Jacob dreamed a frozen lake and a doe bounding a few graceful leaps, then falling, its feet kicking the air. Strawl dreamed too—of white smoke so thick he couldn't see, yet could breathe like air—until the clang of metal tearing wood woke him.

Elijah looked up. “I told you not to bother my sleep.”

“Man takes his rest earnestly,” Jacob said.

“Rest is about the limit what he's earnest concerning.”

With each blow, the tree shimmied. Strawl glanced at Jacob, who blinked his eyes in the light.

“You want me to shoot him?” Strawl asked.

Jacob shook his head. “Axes are made for trees and trees are made for axes.”

It took a half hour of hard blows to topple the pine. Elijah possessed a rudimentary understanding of physics and more than a few years' experience felling timber. As a result, the tree quaked
upon the point of pulp holding it upright, then, after a final blow, tipped toward the water like a falling arm, turning at the last moment to spill Strawl and Jacob to the downriver side of it, where they would not be trapped or swept under.

Both slapped against the water, then, stunned and cold, kicked a few yards until they found grips on a stone rising some ten feet beyond the bank, where Elijah offered them a rope and fished them out.

T
o Jacob, stories were the accidental or arbitrary collision of events with whatever fortunate or unfortunate soul happened to be in their paths, but people starved for meaning knitted luck and gossip into matters of myth.

Perhaps, Elijah pondered, memory will fall from men's minds like primordial tails from their asses when they were monkeys no more. The next thing you know we'll emerge into a paradise once more, pure and storyless. But until then, stories, tired as they are, would have to suffice, and prophets will be pewter jugs that pour themselves out in water and blood as the new story, as rivers remain both ancient and new when they pass.

Elijah drifted as they rode, thinking these things as if he were in a far-off galaxy, observing the elliptical orbits of the planets and
implosion of stars and collision of asteroids into moons that would carry their wounds a hundred thousand years, and in such a state he was not afraid of the moments in the lives of any one man, himself included, though, like gravity, he felt compelled to yield to such forces.

Strawl halted them at a Keller grocery and replenished their food stock. Outside he saw Elijah speaking to a cousin of the Clouds, who was wearing a backward cap.

“What did he want?” Strawl asked.

“Peace of mind.”

“He ask for that, did he?”

“No, he asked if we'd found the bad man.”

Strawl continued loading their grub.

“What did you tell him?” Strawl asked.

“Judge not lest ye be judged, seven times over.”

“Criminal must have said that.”

“We found one?” Elijah asked.

“Not likely,” Strawl said. “Not unlikely either.”

“Why not arrest him, then?”

“You watched us scrap. Tough to arrest someone whipping you.”

“You might have just shot him, then.”

“If I shoot him and another Indian gets carved up like Thanksgiving, then where would I be? Unlike you may have heard, I shoot people for a reason.”

“Mad a reason?”

“The only reason, sometimes, but I am not mad enough to kill the man and am not certain enough he needs killing. He should have went north if he was on the run. Or east. Even west, he could hide in the foothills. But he headed the only direction he shouldn't have gone. How come you're so interested, anyway? This is more work than you do in a year.”

“I'm not getting paid, so I count it as pleasure.”

Strawl said nothing.

“If I whet my glittering sword and my hand takes hold on judgment, I will render vengeance to my enemies and will reward them that hate me with arrows drunk with blood.”

“Doesn't sound like the fisher of men,” Strawl said.

“Nope, but sounds like you and me.”

“Speak for yourself,” Strawl said.

“Let tongues not wag against me.”

“If you're going to keep spouting scripture, I wish you would do it out of my earshot.”

“I believe I'll oblige you. Marvin has a kind ear. And he has made Ida's medicine bag.”

“What will you do with it?”

Elijah shrugged. “Throw it in the river. It's as close to a grave as I've got.”

Strawl nodded and watched Elijah lope Baal among the houses along the San Poil, pausing to visit anywhere a lantern remained lit.

Strawl took the ridgeline looking for camp smoke. He made his bed once more above the shaman's cabin. He dug the camas from beneath the firepit's dead coals and cut it into thin slices and put them in the skillet. He started a low fire and let the camas soften with a slice of jerky while he plucked and dressed two quail and a grouse he groundslew that afternoon. He added them in portions to the skillet along with a fennel and wild oregano, then opened a bottle of beer and poured half into the stew, then stirred in enough flour to thicken the concoction and finally garnished it with chives plucked from Jacob's garden. He kept the fire low and finished the warm beer and let the pan and its contents simmer until Orion sparkled above him in the clear night.

Even this far off, Strawl clearly heard Marvin and his grandchildren and Elijah at the makeshift table in front of the house while they ate frybread and a stew Inez had prepared. The children prattled for stories and Elijah encouraged them until Marvin took a
seat on an apple crate and pitched his voice at the sky. He spoke in English because it was the only language his grandchildren understood past the smattering of Salish they spoke for secrets.

“In this country, you complain the sun is too hot, but it is summer, Coyote, heat is necessary. But you don't like it.

“So a cloud passes and makes some shade for you, yet you are not satisfied.

“More clouds come, enough to darken the sky. But even this does not please you. The clouds begin to drop rain.

“‘More rain,' you demand. The rain is a downpour. Beaver's pond fills and he stirs from his dam to play. Deer bed in a serviceberry thicket to hide. A creek appears beside your path, and you step in, but it is not enough for you to bathe, and you are on a gambler's roll. ‘It should be deeper,' you say.

“The creek swells until it is a big river. The water boils across rock. Coyote, are you not afraid? You are a fool. You are swept over by the current. You roll like a stone down a grade. It is a storm without air. You are drowning in your wishes. You gasp and vomit on the river's bank. The buzzards circle over you. You convince the buzzards to hunt farther for their meal, or is it your shadow that argues because it wants to remain? This is the reason Big River washes against its banks and the salmon swim in its current, because you will not find shade to get out of the sun.”

Marvin stopped and drank from a tin cup.

“Later, you teach the salmon to follow the river. When you encounter the human beings, you command a salmon to leap from the water into your arms and invite the people to feast. You offer the biggest portions to the villages that give you the most beautiful maidens. An Okanogan maiden refuses you and you stop the river with a rocky falls the salmon cannot climb. You make more rock falls at the Kettle and Spokane Rivers because in these places, too, the maidens refuse you. You are selfish. That is your way.”

The fire burned and the children shifted places around it. Elijah remained quiet. The light drained from the sky before he began once more. “Coyote taught the people that Caluk cured horses and Oregon grape leaves made a tea that did the same for children. Vanilla mended blindness and mosses eased arthritis.”