Lonesome Animals Read Online Free PDF Page A

them. Two men spooned in a garden like dozing lovers. Grease darkened their checked shirts. One’s head rose, and he shaded his eyes with his hand to watch Strawl pass. A barnstormer dipped a wing over the road, then climbed until his plane was a speck in the sky too distant for anyone but Strawl to hear.
    The town was four streets with passable houses surrounded by another scattering of shanties extended this way and that, as shapeless as spit on a flat rock. White men, like the butcher, Truax, owned the hardware and the livery and taverns and grocery. Most had appeared on the reservation with nothing but what they could borrow or pilfer. Eventually, they took women, but on the reservation the institution of marriage was unhinged. The merchants refused to acknowledge tribal ties and the churches wouldn’t wed heathens until they could read catechism. Ceremonies, licenses, preachers, and justices of the peace were tiresome formalities, shed for flesh and convenience. Courtship consisted of a man putting whiskey into his beloved until she either surrendered to or slept through his passions. Women changed hands like tractor parts, and often a pretty girl was more or less shanghaied into a man’s house if her family didn’t have the means or guns to argue. The
Catholic priest scolded his parish weekly over such indiscretions, but Sunday morning generally presented its own difficulties to the local population, and the few in the pews already abided by the Church’s teachings.
    Strawl waited while eight mottled cattle passed, steered with a willow switch by an overalled Indian boy. A half-pint yellow dog followed, tongue lolling in his mouth.
    Inside the butcher shop, Truax cranked a pan full of hog scraps into sausage. He glanced at the ring of a bell attached to the knob and squinted, then blinked upon seeing Strawl. His hand moved into a drawer that held his pistol and a pry bar. Strawl had never had any legal truck with the man, but he’d left one of his brothers walleyed in a bar scrape. On the other hand, he’d once extricated Truax’s youngest son from a larceny charge when the boy fell in drunk with a gang of no-accounts who robbed a mule and wagon from the priest’s stable.
    â€œStill keep the equalizers in the same place, I see,” Strawl said.
    Truax smiled. “Didn’t recognize you, sheriff.”
    â€œOr maybe you did.” Strawl laughed. He nodded at the meat and the grinder. “Better pepper it up good.”
    â€œI could grind horse hooves and beaver teeth with a little pepper, they’d eat it.”
    Truax washed his hands at the sink, then dried them on an apron hanging from the pegs. Over six feet and barrel-chested as a bull, he cut an imposing figure, despite the spindly legs supporting it.
    â€œI was wondering how many before you’d show up.”
    â€œI’m not on the payroll,” Strawl said.
    Truax tapped the ashes from his corncob pipe and reloaded it. “I got some advice for who is.” He puffed. “Catch the bastard or put a lot of barbwire between here and that dam.”
    â€œIf the barbwire was manageable, we’d see it,” Strawl said.
    Truax nodded. “We might as well be Canada, now. Less they hear the better.”

    â€œExcept if you got a killer amongst you.”
    â€œShit,” Truax said. “I don’t know a worthwhile man over fifty who hasn’t killed someone.”
    â€œYou included,” Strawl said.
    Ten years ago, Truax’s niece had garnered the attention of an older man who’d turned up with a broken skull soon after. Strawl had caught the gossip that Truax had offered the suitor honor or life, and the poor fellow had thought it only poker and bet his chips. But Strawl was fond of Truax and not compelled either way about the victim. He’d relinquished the case to the tribe’s police, who, when no one squawked and Truax made good on a beer keg he’d offered