Lonesome Animals (5 page)

And Strawl possessed what was below like a god possessed his world; nothing in it occurred that he didn't recognize, and that was why the killings troubled him. A dab of wood smoke smeared the horizon. Strawl could smell it, too insignificant to be a wildfire and too grey to be part of the haze. He motioned the pilot that direction and they traveled ten minutes, though the smoke got no
closer. He spied a boy driving a pair of roped goats up a path. The boy's face stared up, the rest of him just a dark, squat shape under it. He motioned for the pilot to press on, but he shook his head. Strawl showed him his badge once more, but the pilot pointed to the fuel gauge and Strawl nodded, disappointed to return to the prison of gravity and his spinning planet.

W
hen Dice offered him the case files, Strawl under-W W stood his rationale for keeping the details out of the paper.

The first victim a Nez Perce man, about thirty. He'd been struck in the temple, as well, and though the body exhibited no wounds Strawl could associate with struggle, even a dying man would likely fight being castrated. The killer had cut the scrotum, emptied its contents, and later cured and tanned the empty sack, stuffed it with tobacco, and tacked it to the postmaster's house.

The second and third men were about the same age as the first. One had been discovered dangling from a rope in an elm in what passed for a park in Nespelem. Gutted throat to anus, he'd been cleaned like a fish, thoroughly enough that in the photograph
sunlight seeped through the skin covering his ribs and spine. The murderer had broken free a bottom rib and skewered the man's liver upon it.

The third had been skinned. The hide—scalp and all—appeared one Sunday morning draped over the wooden billboard welcoming travelers to the Colville Indian Reservation.

The fourth, like the first, had been gouged through the privates. The photograph was just a bloody blur. However, a week later, a hairy band constituted from the man's pubic hair was discovered in the five-and-dime store in Mason City, ornamenting a ladies' hat.

Indians had a reputation for disrespecting bodies. Thirty years ago on the Plains, the Lakota and their like would take hair if they were too angry to think straight, and the bands in the Southwest were disagreeable in all kinds of matters regarding women and children. A thousand miles lay between them and this country, though, and, despite what Phil Sheridan and the missionaries thought, every Indian didn't need killed or saved to get along with white people. The closest the locals had had to a burr was Chief Bird, who was more politician than warrior and only rankled the government because he neglected to remain in one place long enough for the government to build a fence around them. In conflict, the local tribes were more inclined toward embarrassing an enemy than killing him. When they were amongst themselves, they would heist another band's horses and return them a week later painted blue or sneak into a sleeping camp and piss in the kettles outside a rival's tent. The worst Strawl had heard them do was, in the very old wars, capture a man and lop off his pointer finger, leaving him awkward drawing a bow, but alive.

Dice perched on the edge of his desk across from Strawl. Strawl tipped the folder at him. “How were they killed?”

“All with something blunt,” Dice said.

“Same thing?” he asked.

Dice shrugged. “We weren't careful enough early on, I admit. Tribe caught the first one. A case of beer and a basket of chicken is their idea of police work. They didn't even know he'd been nutted until the sack showed up. Called us and Ferry County, but it was too late to figure much.”

Strawl nodded.

“We got started earlier on the others, but as you can see, it did little good.”

Strawl closed his eyes. The town had electricity and the glow from the bare bulb above turned the papers a blinding white. He squinted at the photographs one more time and rubbed his temple. Dice's office sat in one corner of the building and the jail cells in another. Strawl could hear a prisoner rise and take his breakfast, a bowl of mush that a passing deputy had delivered him. The man had been charged with assault, Dice had said, a crime generally ignored amongst laborers. Fighting was common between Okies and drifters and the Bureau didn't want to lose laborers. This prisoner, however, had belted an engineer. Dice would hold the man for a fortnight, when the judge would return and rule time served.

Dice put a plug from his tobacco into his pipe and lit it. Sweet-smelling smoke filled the room. “What's your price?” he asked.

Strawl tipped back in his chair. He'd heard talk that some men's souls were built to hunt others, just like some were constructed for crime, each minute adding a brick until they were complete enough to rob or shoot their way to the state prison in Monroe. It wasn't the blood Strawl missed or the idea he'd righted a person wronged. There was quiet on the ranch, but nothing approaching the serene. Between planting and cutting and tending the storage silos and the parts he either needed or was going to, his head was as full of noise as the radio. Most days he'd have liked to shoot a gun in the middle of it, just to enjoy the report in his ears.

“What do you think is behind most murders?” Strawl asked Dice.

“Bad tempers,” Dice answered.

“Or bad cards,” Strawl said.

“Or plain stupidity,” Dice said. “Remember that Trust in Coulee City?”

“Yep.” A would-be Dillinger had managed to get off with a suitcase full of scratch, but shotgunned a man on a constitutional that he worried might witness against him. The poor fellow was blind. The murderer hanged just a few months ago.

“What's under this one?” Strawl asked.

Dice studied him. “I haven't encountered a crime akin to this one,” he said. He tapped on his pipe, then set it in the pie tin that served as an ashtray.

“Children,” Strawl said. “Of all that might have undone me, who'd have thought it would be children.” He chuckled. “Half the ranch. That's what they lost. That's what I'll take for salary.”

Dice shook his head. “Too much.” He puffed again, then spoke through gritted teeth clamping the pipe stem.

“I heard once that the best cop has to be half a criminal himself,” he said.

“I hear the same of politicians,” Strawl replied.

Dice laughed. A deputy walked past the office, returning with the prisoner's empty bowl.

Strawl rose.

“I can get you half.”

Strawl leveled his gaze at the man. “Half just gets me half broke.”

“You don't think much of the public, do you?”

“Not any more than I have to.” Strawl took his bowler in his hand and rose. “Once more, good luck to you,” he said.

“Should I arrest you and save a lot of trouble?” Dice asked him.

Strawl stopped for a moment, as if considering an answer, then continued out the door.

In town, he visited the grocery, filling Dot's list, adding a sack of candy for each of the girls and a lollipop as big as his head for the infant, to preclude him choking on it.

Like many of the ranchers, he concluded his visit at the lip of the coulee, gazing skeptically at the labor on the dam. It was the first Roosevelt president who had augured the future for them.

This didn't keep T.R. from admiring the old-timers' character; indeed, he often imitated it, without a hint of irony or cynicism. Hunting as ritual and battling the indigenous people replenished the stagnant and cooling Caucasian blood with the truth violence recalled in the human soul, he declared. But by then Wyatt Earp was refereeing boxing matches and advising Hollywood movie directors.

If T.R. served as the West's prophet, his nephew, Franklin, was the prophecy manifested. Deified by the papers and itinerants searching out work (his framed glossy hung with the family pictures on the wall of every store and eatery within a hundred miles), he promised a concrete wonder to curtail the downriver floods and irrigate the state's desert center. The result, the papers trumpeted, would be a structure with enough concrete to build a sidewalk to the moon.

The river below marked the county line, and Mason City in the coulee's bottom straddled it. On the Grant County side was an army of tents that housed bevy after bevy of destitute Midwesterners ecstatic for their spot under the canvas and three squares. The project compensated them little past meals, but it seemed a fortune next to nothing. What they did hang on to they squandered in Grand Coulee's B-Street, which kept only one grocery store but three cafés-cum-cathouses Fridays and Saturdays.

Strawl rubbed his closed eyes. The town of Grand Coulee teetered on top of a flat bluff above the rock high enough to keep clear of the Columbia when it leaped its banks with the spring Chinooks. Churches pocked the town, and Sunday mornings, while the unfortunates camped below mustered breakfast over open fires and finished what whiskey remained and, after, concocted Heat cocktails of gasoline and milk and honey, the blessed and the faithful lined pews and lifted hymnals and sang—the women in earsplitting pitches and the good men in their bolo ties vocalizing little recognizable as music beyond the lyrics. They killed with alcohol and church bells, emptying a man's pockets Fridays and Saturdays and declaring it his own doing on the Sabbath. But that, Strawl knew, was only half of the truth. The other half was that drinking wasn't what made most men drunks; they were just pouring liquor into a hole in themselves, and it drained nearly as quick as it filled, which made it necessary to drink steadily or stay empty, which they refused to do.

The project had succeeded in shearing one portion of the coulee by dangling men in ropes and harnesses a hundred feet below the cliff's edge, where they set dynamite charges. After detonation, another crew with jackhammers would drop to beat the rock smooth. Below, others cleared the debris, raising the five-ton pieces of granite and limestone with long-necked cranes that deposited them into belly dumpers with wheels on both sides of their
carrying compartments. The rigs bore the slag to banks to riprap the riverbank. It was silver and glinted like tin in the sunlight.

In the river itself, the contractors had fashioned a simple cofferdam with enormous timbers that resembled giant railroad ties. The contraption diverted a third of the current from the far bank. Inside the deep box, the men had scooped the river bottom until they encountered bedrock, then hammered it flat and drove steel rods into the stone to anchor the concrete pours. Lead pipes filled with river water crosshatched the space to cool the cement, a process that would otherwise take ninety years.

Strawl smoked and studied the laborers who scurried across the site like locusts from the Bible. Nothing below looked as it once did. Not even cities changed the country they occupied so. The killer had sprung from this hurried rush toward who knows what, and Strawl had killed or arrested anyone who might have been a brake on the wheel. He was liable as Roosevelt for what went on below.

He leaned back in the car's seat until the sun neared the west wall of the coulee and the whistle ended the shift below him. He heard the gravel turn and Dice's squad car ease to a stop. “Your place wasn't worth as much as I imagined,” Dice said.

A mandible muscle under Strawl's jaw fluttered and cramped. He rubbed at it. “Took you all day to find an assessment on the place?”

“My clerk is a slacker.”

“Good help is hard to find,” Strawl said.

“Grant County agreed to split your fee, so I guess you're going to get paid, if you're still game.”

To those county commissioners and city fathers who'd conjured this concrete idol, Strawl was as aboriginal as the natives he had penned up and more savage—a mean dog with nothing to guard, until, of course, another mean dog showed up.

Dice handed him a contract to sign. “You'll want to make it legal,” he said.

When Strawl didn't move, Dice looked at him. “Second thoughts?”

Strawl shrugged. He could smell the sickening aroma of Dice's tobacco and wondered at what ugliness it hid.

“I don't have a pen,” he said finally.

T
he dawn sky was slipping to purple, and the cumulus clouds that floated over the horizon had tinged with the rose color Homer favored no matter what occurred beneath it.

When he had surrendered the road and copping for the ranch, Dot was eleven years old and a budding intellect, thanks to her school and foster parents. She had insisted on educating Strawl, reading aloud the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
. Afterwards, she explained the results of a battle or one god lining up against another. The characters made speeches and argued in their own camps more often than they swung a blade against their enemies, and as soon as Strawl took a rooting interest in one, he'd prove himself a fool. He did, however, favor the portion when Hektor returned to the walled city from the wars. His wife was holding their son, and when he reached for the
boy—Strawl didn't recall his name—the child cried out and shrank into his mother's blouse. For the moment, it appeared there was nothing left for Hektor but to finish breaking their hearts and die. Then he realized the child's wide eyes were on the metal helmet and the horsehair plume rising from it. He removed the headpiece and the boy leaped to him, and for a moment they were happy.