Lonesome Animals (22 page)

“Cusick's Sunflower wakes an ailing organ,” Elijah added.

“Yes,” said Marvin. “These are all good things, but Coyote also made jimsonweed and nightshade and belladonna. And they are not unlike their edible cousins. This was to rub out those who refused to hear the Animal People or to relieve the villages of those who had leaky minds and could not recall one flower's color over another—so the children must listen to their elders. This, too, is because of Coyote. It is also his way.”

Marvin finished with something that could have come from Elijah's Old Testament. “When the Animal People return, Sinkalip will bring all the spirits of the dead with him. There will be no more other-side camp. All the people will live together. There will be no difference between the living and the dead. Then things will be once again right,” Marvin said. “And now we wait.”

Finally, Marvin turned the porch lamps down and Strawl heard them retire, including Elijah, who was likely sleeping in a nest of blankets somewhere in the kitchen.

Strawl realized he was hungry. He rolled two cigarettes and set them aside for later, then he hunted a flat rock and washed it with his canteen, and, when it suited him, drew the grouse from the skillet and spread its breast and wing upon the stone along with the sauce. He divided the meat with his buck knife and ladled the gravy into his mouth with a flat stick. His teeth tore the gristle and blood dripped onto his chin. He was glad for it, as he had not taken a meal by himself in a long while, and it was alone that eating turned pure philosophy, stripped of nuance. What was flitting and thinking a bird's thoughts now fed him.

An hour later, the dry wolfweed rattled, then a rock shifted, and Strawl heard a man's breath as he regained his footing. Crickets halted, then after a minute passed, renewed their hum. A rabbit or badger broke its cover. A pair of owls stopped calling and Strawl heard the branch beneath them when they shifted their weight and set themselves for flight. There were two men, single file, at least ten yards between them. The insect sounds and pauses scattered before and behind them. Marvin's house was unlit, but Strawl had ruled out any of those below when he heard the awkward noises. A serious man would be harder to detect, or if not, would simply wait him out. No one of consequence moved with so little grace.

Strawl lit a cigarette and cupped the end to hide the ember, though he doubted those passing had enough sense to discern it as separate from the fire. They halted to rest near the crest of the butte, their lungs panting enough to hush the insects and alarm a scolding chipmunk.

The interlopers approached his camp from upwind, and Stick nickered. Strawl kneeled outside of the firelight, opposite them, behind a bull pine and a thicket of gumweed. The silverspoon's arm was in a sling and he leaned upon a crutch. Strawl watched him in the fire's glow as he kicked the blankets covering his saddle.

“He's been here,” he said.

“But he's not here at present,” Dice said.

“We've got him penned up.”

Dice examined the fire and Strawl's trappings. “Or he us,” he said.

The silverspoon's breath faltered under his damaged ribs. “You said it yourself. He's a criminal.”

“It's him you need to convince, not me.” Dice turned a stick in the fire. “The old man who built this fire taught me a rattlesnake doesn't think he's wrong and fangs don't require your agreement to put their poison in you.” He looked up at the silverspoon. “Do you
really want to traipse into the darkness after someone whose mind works that way after your recent encounter?”

The fire ignited a pitchy branch and snapped, and the two of them deliberated for a while.

“You took a beating and you want to square it, I know,” Dice told him. “But maybe now's the time to go home and heal a little.”

The silverspoon nodded, and Dice led him away the direction that they had come, just as noisy but less foolish.

Strawl dismissed the silverspoon out of hand—he was attempting to save his face, if not to others' opinions then for his own vanity. Strawl considered more carefully Dice's part in the exercise, however. He wondered if he knew the situation straight off and purposefully clattered up the butte like a billy goat banging a tin can to keep Strawl clear of them. Dice had proved hard to predict. He'd crossed Strawl twice, though with enough subtlety that the true number was likely higher. Still, his motive remained clear, and Hollingsworth, silverspoon or not, was not likely to serve the purpose. Assault was difficult to prove, especially when the accused was working on the dime of three county police departments. The silverspoon may have money, but he had the same witnesses Strawl did, and Strawl was certain they feared him enough to report honestly, and that would be the end of it.

Marvin's house below was still, aside from the small plume of smoke rising from the stovepipe, the fire ebbing to coal but keeping the house warm against the coolness of even August's early mornings. The horses below neighed and Stick answered them, though his interest was clearly flagging. Strawl added one more branch to the fire, then transferred his saddle from the light's reach, mostly out of habit. A killer remained at large. Yet Strawl feared nothing in this country and was certain that those threats his skills could not fend off, his reputation would, even while he slept.

A
day and a night later, Strawl woke handcuffed to a Grand Coulee hospital bed. An intravenous tube dripped saline from a bottle above him. One eye wouldn't open. He blinked with the other until he could make out walls and a window. His chest ached. He raised his hands until the chains stopped him. His knuckles were skinned and bloody. The ring finger on his left hand looked broken.

After they had beaten him nearly senseless, the BIA lackeys still ambulatory, with Hollingsworth and Pete leading them, dragged Strawl into a birch copse fed by the creek. Hollingsworth shackled his wrists, then his ankles. The others had three longer chains. They bound Strawl to a tree that they had pruned carefully to the height of his head, then undid his shackled wrists and chained
each to opposite branches. Hollingsworth stood him on a rock and cinched the chains and clasped the lock securing them. He employed another chain to hold his ankles, then another his waist. The others leveled guns at Strawl. Hollingsworth, with the help of two tribal cops, knocked the rock free using another as a hammer, and Strawl was draped upon the tree.

“They say Christ, he died of suffocation, actually. The diaphragm, it just wears out under the weight and can't pull in any breath,” Hollingsworth said. He and his cohorts collected their tools and left the same way they'd come. Strawl watched the dust rise all along their path out until it settled again in the darkness.

Strawl could not keep from making water and stayed wet through the night. His weight tore at his shoulders and bent his back. He slept in fits and woke dew-covered. The first full day he fought any way he could, shaking the tree until the branches chattered and leaves and aphids drifted from above on the warm air. The weather turned hot and he burned in blotches where the sun slanted through the tree's thinned canopy. He twisted himself to relieve the pains one place but the effort ended with just another burned spot and he surrendered. Ants worked near his ankles and when his bowels pressed loose late in the day, they fell upon his excrement and began to pack it away. A few ventured farther into his ass to finish the job.

A bit of wind at sundown eased him into night, which he spent sleepless. His urine quit. He could smell the pain, a tang like metal, but unsharp, and smoky. By the end of the following day, he was not sure what might be beneath or above him. Both directions glimmered like the sky or water or sun-baked fields. He listened to his own breathing, the sound of his pulse. He knew a person didn't have to attend to his body's workings, that the mind could keep the parts together without thoughts, but he feared losing his grip on the gears altogether.

All his life, he'd clung to solitude. Now, like the pain, it shook him with a trembling that neared joy but was not. Aloneness was impossible and inescapable, and evading it was what directed him toward it, and he recognized his mind circling madly like a calf with the turning sickness, remembering what it knew, then just remembering the remembering.

When he awoke the third morning, Dice was stirring a fire and boiling coffee. Once he'd had a cup, he sawed the branches and unlooped the chains and Strawl unfolded against the tree. Dice poured fresh water from a canteen into his coffee cup and held it while Strawl bent his head to drink. His face was a shadow in the sun, but it quaked and shuddered with his breaths. Strawl's dried lips bent and bled, and he drank until his thirst was slaked.

“You're a kitten now, aren't you?” Dice said.

Strawl was silent.

“I'm looking for a killer,” Dice said. “Are you?”

Strawl remained too weak to respond.

“I didn't think so. Maybe because you found one in the mirror.”

Dice arrested him, and he slept for two days. When he awakened, the nurse was changing his feed bag. She hurried out, then returned with Dice, who sat himself in a chair across the room, smoothing his thin mustache.

Strawl rattled the handcuffs.

Dice nodded. “You recall you are under arrest.”

Strawl reached his free hand for a cup filled with lukewarm water. He drank.

“Hollingsworth make a hefty campaign donation?” Strawl asked.

“His father did, actually.”

“You've done their bidding so I guess you've earned it. Am I going to be arraigned here or at the courthouse?”

“Courthouse, when you're able.”

“I'm able now,” Strawl said.

Dice stood and lifted the chart from the foot of Strawl's bed. “You have three cracked ribs and a concussion and a bruised lung along with a fractured finger, a dislocated shoulder, and various contusions and abrasions. You're a beat-up old man.”

“I suppose you've put those BIA boys that jumped me behind bars, as well.”

“You didn't have to set that bull loose on them.”

Strawl's head hurt him and he closed his eyes for a long moment. “I didn't figure you'd approve of me shooting them. It seemed the more measured response.”

The room was quiet awhile, Strawl's labored breathing the only sound.

“Can't solve a murder without a case file, Dice.”

“But you didn't solve a murder. Instead two more followed. All with you in the vicinity.”

“I might've done better if you weren't playing both sides against the middle. You sic everyone on everyone else and figure you'd arrest the last of one standing?” Strawl drank from the cup once more. He sighed and rubbed his bad side. “It won't make an indictment.”

Dice shook his head. “Don't need one. Banged up as you are, you can't appear for arraignment for a good month. That's September, and Judge Higgenbothem will be out of the county for a wedding back east, then October his honor's absent again two weeks for hunting season. And then it's November and elections.”

“You send them breeds up the butte?”

“I didn't discourage them.”

“After you lulled me with the silverspoon.” Strawl tried to laugh, but wound up hacking. “Guess I overestimated your ethics and undershot your guile,” he said, when he could speak. “You might make it in politics, after all.”

“I intend to,” Dice said.

“In that business, it's always November,” Strawl said. “You'd do good to remember that.” Strawl considered throwing something at him, but nothing was within reach that would leave a proper dent.

“I'm not quitting.”

“I hired you. I'm firing you. This case is over. You are all I need.”

Strawl shook his head. “You're a damned fool. I got your money and I got a gun and a saddlebag full of bullets. I'll look until I'm satisfied and I am not as of yet. And you will be damaged, my friend. I will go out of my way.”

Dice chuckled. “The handcuffs and guard at your door say different.”

The guard at Strawl's door delivered the weekly papers to him and a magazine or two. Strawl saw an archived photograph of himself captioned “The Accused.” The article read as if Dice had written it, offering just enough detail to ease people, though not any claims he couldn't back away from later.

A week into Strawl's detention, he ordered cookies that Elijah bribed the hospital kitchen to pepper with laxative. Strawl offered them to the deputy minding his door. Three hours later, the guard grew uncomfortable and excused himself. Strawl blinked a flashlight through his room glass and Elijah climbed the fire escape and broke the glass and applied a pair of metal-cutting crimps to the handcuffs. Strawl, still looped with opiates, took a good while negotiating the swinging steps to the parking lot below.