Free Lonesome Animals by Bruce Holbert

over the table, ruining the meal. He shook her until she was upright and showed Marvin his pistol. He nodded toward the kitchen counter. “I see your glasses full of his powders,” Strawl shouted. “He practicing medicine again?”
    â€œI am only showing the children,” Marvin said.
    â€œThat all you showed, Marvin?”
    Marvin was silent.
    Strawl twisted the old woman by her hair. “I came with questions this morning hoping to be friends. Since, I’ve been educated. In fact, I’m about as smart as a goddamn lawyer now, and lawyers never ask a question they don’t already know the answer to. Now, did someone come for medicine or not?”
    â€œMy medicine is old like me.”
    â€œAge is not my concern, yours or your powders’.” The children had clambered under the table. Strawl released his grasp on the old woman’s hair.
    â€œHow about it?”
    â€œA man was here.”
    â€œFor medicine?”
    Marvin nodded.
    â€œWhat did he look like?”
    â€œIt did not work.”
    â€œThe medicine?”
    â€œHe wanted ghost medicine. To hide and come back. It did not work.”
    â€œHe didn’t go away.”
    â€œNo, he remained.”
    â€œHe local, then?”

    Marvin stood, frozen as his Moon of Breaking Trees. His eyes were round like the children’s.
    â€œGoddamnit, you’ll tell me what he looks like.” Strawl dragged Inez out the door. This was not what he had intended, but he was unable to figure a way back from it.
    â€œYou seen him,” Strawl shouted. Marvin shook his head. Inez said nothing, just breathed and quivered under his hand. Marvin began to hum, then Strawl made out words. “Hell Mary, bless the fruit in the mother. Bless the fruit.”
    â€œNo Mary hereto pray to, Marvin,” Strawl said. “Just me. And I’m an angry kind of god.”
    â€œHe stole from the powder while we went to fish at the river,” Marvin said.
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œMonths,” Marvin said. “Not a year. Not half. Months.”
    Strawl twisted Inez’s hair.
    â€œHe likes the old ways,” Marvin said. “But he does not know them.”
    â€œWhat makes you say so?”
    â€œHe took from the cornstarch and flour, too.”
    â€œYou know him, don’t you?”
    Marvin shrugged.
    â€œYou and him are plotting an uprising, are you?”
    â€œNo,” Marvin said. “No uprising.”
    â€œConvince me.”
    â€œThere is no one to fight that we can whip.”
    â€œExcept each other.”
    Marvin nodded.
    â€œThat what he’s up to? A war? Which tribe is he?”
    Marvin shrugged. “His own,” he said.
    â€œHe’s a killer, Marvin. He’ll kill these babies and you and Inez because you talked to me. He’ll know and he’ll cook your
grandchildren like Christmas hams. Your only chance to take care of them is to give me what you know, damnit.”
    â€œI know nothing more.”
    â€œYou’d let these babies be cooked?”
    â€œI know nothing. I can lie but you will return like this time, so I am telling the truth.”
    Strawl cursed Marvin, then set the pistol against the old woman’s ear, barrel up, and fired. She cried out. Blood from her eardrum spattered his wrist. Marvin knelt to receive his wife as she collapsed to the ground. Strawl looked at the two of them beneath him.
    â€œYou tell me if you hear of him or I’ll do her other ear.”

six
    S trawl rode for Keller Butte to pitch his first camp. The promontory rose out of the long hump that had divided the Nespelem and San Poil tribes for a thousand years, and the rivers bearing the same names even longer. He settled on a ridge that allowed him a view of Marvin’s meadow and shack and any avenue leading to it. Behind him was an enormous granite slab that promised to keep him in the shadows in all but the morning hours and kept the lights of the town of