Lonesome Animals (30 page)

“Yes,” Marvin said.

“I can't promise you anything on that.”

“ Is that why you're here? To shoot your son?”

“He's not blood to me.”

Marvin said, “He is like you. He has no blood father. He is your
son. You are his father. His deeds are yours. Blood is not necessary. He is why you are here.”

Strawl shook his head. “I am not sure what's put me here, but unless someone throws lead my direction, I don't plan on shooting.”

“Will you arrest us, then?”

“Who here would allow it without guns? And I already told you I'm not inclined to do that. Elijah, however, is excluded on both counts.”

Marvin nodded. He steered Strawl up a trail to a rock outcropping that overlooked the camp. They sat and smoked a long time.

“One of those women wife to a Cloud boy?” Strawl asked.

“Two,” Marvin answered. “One to each.”

Beneath them, Inez organized the women into something resembling an apple-packing line at two split logs, which served as tables. There, some chopped roots and vegetables raised in a garden they'd passed climbing to where they now sat. Others gutted a stringer of trout, and two more plucked sage hens. They were preparing tomorrow's meals.

“Couldn't help but notice she was with child. A good deal of others seem in the same state. I'm guessing you're not building a home for wayward women out this far.”

“No,” Marvin said.

“No felony,” Strawl said. “Impolite and a sin, but law doesn't reach that far.”

“They are all pregnant with Elijah's children.” Marvin tapped the pipe then struck a match and handed it to Strawl, who smoked then tried not to cough at the harsh mixture.

“But those Cloud girls, their husbands are barely cold.”

“He had made them pregnant before.”

“That why he killed them?”

Marvin shook his head. “He decided they would die before he made their wives pregnant, even.”

Strawl handed the pipe back to him. The women below were separating the contents of their meal into pots to stew through the night. Inez ground some grain with a homemade pestle. Marvin studied their work. His hair was long and he wore it in a braid that he'd tied with a yellow handkerchief.

“You didn't stop him?”

Marvin puffed on the pipe and watched the smoke break in the cold air. “He asked permission.”

“Permission to kill someone? Who from, his good book?”

“Me,” Marvin said. “Though the book he listened to, as well.”

“You told him it was all right to kill those Cloud boys.”

Marvin nodded. “After he asked, I told him to copulate with their women and then to kill the men.”

“Those other boys, too?”

Marvin nodded. “Except Jacob Chin. That was his own killing, though I am sure he thought it necessary.”

“Marvin.”

The old man raised his hand. “He did not kill without discrimination nor did we permit him to do so without caution and thought. When he asked about some, we told him no, and he did not go further. They are still living. They are sick, but they have life in them.”

“All the years I have known you, you were a peaceful man. Why in hell would you grant him such a request?”

“The men were dead already,” Marvin said. “Replacing them. It was the only way. If they lived longer, it would soon be as if they had not lived.”

As Marvin told it, those boys were present a little less every day, senile in their thirties, but with no distant childhood to retreat into, their bodies and voices husks roused only by alcohol or blood for an hour or so, before sentience withdrew and they returned ghosts. Elijah couldn't tolerate witnessing their disappearance. They were
bent on being forgotten, even by themselves, and Elijah had resolved to deny them that.

Strawl recalled Dot reading him from Shakespeare's play about the murder of Caesar. Let us not be butchers, Brutus said, but instead carve him up like a dish for the gods. And so Caesar was remembered, and Anthony lived and Brutus was killed. If Caesar had managed twice the years, until his back bent and his eyes clouded and his mouth drooled, he would not be remembered a tenth as well.

And Elijah had left them children, Marvin reminded him. Boys who would be fathered not by ghostmen, but by stories. And Elijah would be their great-uncle, breathing their fathers' stories into them like a man puffs an ebbing coal to renew a fire, until each child became a conflagration of his father's match-strike.

These children would hear of their fathers' strange deaths and consider them and retell them until they contained reason and God, and this would be the beginning of tales that would outlive all that was. They would be as resurrected as Lazarus recalled from the tomb.

“It's a generous idea,” Strawl said.

“It is his.”

“Do you believe it?”

“I want to believe it. I have nothing else to believe.”

“Where is he now?”

“Sleeping. He is done with killing. Seven pregnant women,” he said. “He's got all the story he can tell.”

“Blood gets in a man's nature,” Strawl said.

“It was not blood that killed them,” Marvin said. “It was not anger. It was mercy.”

Strawl was quiet. The crickets sawed at the night.

“You are not going to take him?”

“You think he is done.”

“I am certain,” Marvin said. “He is tired.”

“The tired sleep and rise feeling froggy,” Strawl said.

“Not those tired in this way. Sleep is not medicine for them.”

Strawl nodded. “What would it change if I took him or didn't?”

Marvin didn't reply and Strawl didn't expect him to. They smoked a little longer in silence. Below, the mastiff announced herself to another yearling that belonged to the Birds. Five minutes later, the branches parted and Raymond Bird appeared. Strawl offered him the pipe and he smoked and smiled. They made room for him to sit. The bulk of the clan arrived half an hour later. They marched in four pairs, each packing a quartered elk strung to a pine pole. Strawl could smell the animal and the men and the blood and simple human residue from a day occupied with tasks enough to make a man feel useful.

“Rutherford Hayes left to Canada,” Raymond said.

Strawl nodded.

“We asked him to stay with us,” Marvin said.

“He's done with people.” Raymond coughed and spat. “I put a deer's hindquarters on his porch once and he tethered that dog to my house a year later. Or paid someone to. Shame he's going.”

Raymond unscrewed an army canteen and offered it to Marvin and Strawl, who drank deeply, then returned it to him.

The aroma of the ovens rose to them. Marvin stood. Strawl and Raymond watched him negotiate the trail into the camp. At its foot, he took two pie plates and extended them as if a penitent waiting for a blessing. The women loaded the tins with food, then he hunted spoons and returned.

Strawl thanked him for the plate. He and Raymond ate in silence and finished by cleaning the gravy and grease with a piece of flatbread. Marvin reloaded his pipe with kinnikinnick, but Raymond rolled cigarettes for himself and Strawl.

“There's law coming for him,” Raymond said.

“A ways off yet,” Strawl said. “And they're more likely hunting me. They don't know what for on this issue, and I've put the red ass on the lot of them recently.”

Raymond watched his cigarette glow.

“How do you know how far they are?”

“Can't hear them,” Strawl said.

“Hearing distance, they're already too close.”

Strawl shook his head. “My ears are sharper than most.”

“How good?”

“How far are we from that wolf?”

“What wolf?” Raymond asked.

“The one I hear howling,” Strawl told him. He smoked his cigarette down.

Raymond looked to Marvin. “That bragging?”

Marvin shook his head. “They say it is so.”

Raymond let that settle.

“I thought dogs could only hear like that.”

“Maybe I am a dogman,” Strawl said.

Marvin and Raymond chuckled at that. The dogs beneath hurried back and forth past the fire like the shadows of bats swooping, hoping for scraps or a chipmunk to chase. The owls hooted at them and the dogs yapped back until someone from the tents hit one with a stone. He yelped and the rest quieted.

“Someone is angry with your brothers,” Raymond said. He set his plate on the dirt and leaned back so he could see the stars filling the sky.

“If you are dogman you should know the stories of Dog,” Raymond said.

“There are a bookful of stories of Dog,” Strawl replied.

“ Know about the one where Dog sniffs his brother's ass because someone stole his salmon?” Raymond asked.

Strawl shook his head.

“He doesn't know the difference between food ready to eat and food shit out. Dog is stupid. Did you know Dog once went to the people to ask for fire for his people?”

“How did it turn out?”

“They fed him.”

It was quiet a moment. “That it?” Strawl asked.

“If you know Dog, you know it is so,” Raymond said. “Dog has no purpose. That's why he's ruled by people. I just wonder if what rules men has the same opinion of us.”

“You think Elijah's done?” Strawl asked Raymond.

“I do,” Raymond said.

“Convince me.”

“Killing is work. They have to pay you to do it and put the weight of the law behind you, and it still wears you out.”

Strawl nodded.

“Well, Elijah's got sense but he is like Dog in one way,” Raymond said. “He is lazy.”

Strawl laughed and pushed his cap back on his head. “A lawyer couldn't have made a case more convincing,” he said.

Strawl circled the firelight to Stick. The horse nickered at his smell. Strawl led him to a grassy spot beneath the rock promontory. Raymond and Marvin had offered Strawl a place among their blankets and tents, but Strawl had declined, preferring to bed near Stick in the case that Dice or the BIA turned ambitious enough to work nights.

Strawl collected twigs and pine needles into a depression and coaxed a small fire to burn, fueling it with branches from a bull pine halved with a lightning strike. The trunk had braided its new growth around what had been killed and in the darkness looked like a long neck twisted awfully, and above, half feathered with
needles, half blackened by a blow of current and light and smoke; it trembled in the sky like a monstrous, dying head.

His tobacco pouch was empty. He undid the straps of his saddlebag and found a piece of jerky not completely ruined by Truax's pepper. He chewed and spat and sipped at the canteen, then poured water in his cupped hand and let Stick lap it dry. He repeated this until Stick's thirst had waned and then batted his nose lightly to announce an end to it.

The fire burned fast but low, fueled with the deadwood. Strawl withdrew a larger stick that had begun to catch and let it smolder on a stone, afraid the fire might be visible from above. He covered himself with his blanket. The sky was clear and had no bottom to it, just miles of light and darkness piled upon one another.

Elijah had managed to turn murder into art and philosophy and religion all at once. He'd not encountered anyone who'd equaled it, but he'd not encountered anyone interested in equaling it, either. It was as if the boy were attempting to take the cruelty out of crime and the selfishness, too, leaving only the blood and absence, making the pain that coincided temporary but the relief permanent, like pulling an abscessed tooth.

Ridiculous, Strawl knew, but an ingenious, thoroughly heroic, absurd epic joke, one so committed to itself that it had surrendered being funny and so had he. And Marvin thought them father and son. Strawl never possessed much humor, but the little he owned he'd never bargain for an idea. It was not that he valued laughter; he knew no ideas so worthy he'd drop a nickel into the offering plate. They were kin by means, not ends, because Strawl had none of the latter. What they had in common was blood. Strawl's talent lay there, and he'd bequeathed it to Elijah the same as the ranch, though he could not sell this inheritance to the neighbors. It was his.

Strawl lay back on the saddle and blew a breath into the sky that clouded in the cold, then disappeared. Still, he thought, the boy had
promised an end to it and two good men believed him. Though he had committed his share of misdemeanors and the arson certainly had been a felony, he'd never hurt man nor beast before and he had had reason, no matter how unreasonable.