Skin Medicine (16 page)

Cabe cleared his throat. “Your husband…he is a good man?”

“
Yes, I think so,” Janice said. “He always tries his best, always tries to do right by people…sometimes he fails as we all do, but he never stops trying. In his job, well, let’s just say he is unappreciated when things go smoothly and vilified if they do not.”

Cabe listened and heard, but was not sure if any of it registered. His thought processes were garbled and he wasn’t sure what day it was. He kept seeing the hacked prostitute, Virgil Clay, the old Indian at the jail, Henry Freeman, Jackson Dirker…a parade of faces and incidents that flowed together and lost solidity.

Sipping his coffee, but not tasting it, he thought: Everyone but me seems to think Dirker is a good man…maybe I’m wrong and maybe they don’t know him and maybe he’s changed and I have, too.

“
Do you know my husband?” Janice asked of him.

“
The sheriff,” Cabe said, nodding. “I’ve met him.”

“
Do you know him well?”

Cabe swallowed. “No, ma’am, I guess I don’t know him well at all.”

18

The next morning, Henry Wilcox released Charles Graybrow from his cell, told him to keep away from the booze and he’d keep out of trouble. Graybrow told him that he had a powerful taste for the whiteman’s devil-brew and that him keeping away from it was like a cloud trying to stay away from the sky.

Wilcox just shook his head. “On your way, Charlie.”

At the door, Graybrow stopped. “What did I do, anyway?”

Wilcox sighed. “You don’t remember? You honestly don’t remember? Or are you playing me again? No, I guess you don’t recall. Well, Charlie, you gotta take a shit, we’d appreciate it you don’t do it on someone’s porch. People are touchy about things like that.”

Graybrow scratched his head. “I’m just an ignorant savage, what do I know of your ways?”

“
Oh, get the hell out of here.”

Although outwardly somber, inside Graybrow was grinning like a kid that had written dirty words on the blackboard. Maybe whites didn’t find him amusing, but he enjoyed himself immensely at their expense.

He stepped out and although the sun was shining and drying up the mud, there was a chill in the air.

Another deputy, Pete Slade, tied his horse to the hitch post and nodded to Graybrow. “She’s a cold one today, eh, Charlie?”

Graybrow shrugged. “I’m an injun…we don’t feel the cold.”

Slade just shook his head and went inside.

Graybrow pulled his blanket coat tighter to him, shivering. He was about to start down the street when another man came out behind him. He nearly stumbled off the plank sidewalk, then gathered himself. He was thin, lanky, face bruised-up, his dirty sheepskin jacket smelling like he’d just pulled it off the sheep itself. He scratched at his shaggy, knotted beard.

“
They got m’gun in there,” he said, not seeming to address Graybrow, but someone standing behind him. “1851 Colt Navy. Big .44, that’s what. Killed them bluebelly sumbitches with it in the war, didn’t I? They got it, say I can’t have it back. Not until, until…what did they say? Y’all remember?”

Graybrow told him that he had forgotten.

He knew who the man was: Orville DuChien. Some mixed-up white-eye thought he was still in the war. He talked crazy and people crossed the street when they saw him coming. He was not only disturbed, but dangerous if pushed. A couple miners had decided to have fun once by knocking him around and DuChien had sliced them up pretty with a deer knife.

Like a rabid dog, it was wise to keep your distance from the man.

Graybrow had only seen DuChien from a distance, had never been this close to him before. And now that he was…he was struck by something. He could not put a name to it. Not the smell or the uneasiness he inspired, but something deeper, something
peculiar.

Orv started to shake and his eyes seemed to lose focus. “Yessum, Daddy, I remember all about that, yessum. Grandpappy say I got to go down into the holler tonight, yessum tonight. Them roots and what…only show by moonlight, he say. Yes sir. I dig ‘em and Grandpappy brew ‘em up, make them warts just fade right away. Like that time…remember, daddy? Old Wiley, he had that tumor. Grandpappy…he calls them names from the hilltop, them ones Preacher Evrin say is bad, bad, bad, make the stars shake and the dead a-tremble in their graves. Them ones? Yessum. Then he…Grandpappy, yes sir…he say them words and push his hands into the innards of that slaughtered hog…lays ‘em on Wiley’s tumor. That old tumor, Mister Tumor, he pack his bags and be gone. Yessum. Grandpappy say I got the gift, too…but daddy, I don’t like it. Scairt me bad…”

Graybrow knew and did not know. He stepped back from Orv, something in him finding revelation in that crazy, moonstruck hillbilly.

Orv said, “Yessum, ain’t nothin’ good gonna come of this here town. Not what with them…them other ones all touched by
his
hand.”

“
Whose hand?”

That made Orv laugh. “The old hand…the old hand from the mountain…”

Graybrow told him to relax, that everything would be fine, fine, but he knew and knew damn well that whatever had Orville DuChien was not something that would ever let go. It was bone deep. It was special.

Orv broke into a coughing fit, then seemed to find himself. “I…I was talkin’ to that what ain’t there, weren’t I? I keep doin’ that, don’t I?” One filthy paw was clasped on Graybrow’s shoulder, squeezing, squeezing. “I talk to them no one else sees and hear them voices. They tell me…tell me what’s gonna happen and to who. Tell me things, secret things, about other folks. Things I shouldn’t know.”

“
How long you had it?” Graybrow inquired.

“
Always. Told Jesse and Roy they was gonna die, gonna die, gonna die! Didn’t believe me, but they died! Yankees killed ‘em like I say! Hear? Like I say…”

Graybrow knew what it was. Sure, he was crazy. Crazy because of what was inside of him. Whites would have said he was just plain touched or maybe bewitched and they would be right on both counts…but there was more to it than that. Much more. For Orville DuChien had the talent, he was “sighted”. He had the gift. Just like that grandfather he spoke of. It ran in families sometimes. The tribal shaman had it…ability to see sprits and know what would happen before it did. Yes, this hillbilly was a prophet. Undirected, but a prophet no less.

Orv pointed at something, something Graybrow could not see, started jabbering, then shook his head. “You tell yer daddy, you tell him it ain’t right takin’ the strop to you. Weren’t yer fault that pony ran off…weren’t yer fault…”

Graybrow was shaking himself now. That pony. He remembered. He had forgotten, but now he remembered. The pony that ran off into the hills and how very angry his father was. The hillbilly had plucked it from his mind.

Orv walked out into the street, stopped, nearly got run down by a lumber wagon. He stumbled back, fell against the hitching post. “Injun…you hear me…you…you tell him the bad man, the bad man is real close…the bad man will kill a fine lady what ain’t no whore!”

“
Yes, I’ll tell him, I—”

But Orv was already gone, running away down the street, clutching his head in both hands, as if trying not to hear something. And people fell out of his way like dominoes, because everyone in Whisper Lake knew Orville DuChien was just plain touched.

Everyone except an old Ute Indian.

19

And each in his or her own way, greeted the new day.

At the Union Hotel, Sir Tom Ian strapped on a customized leather cartridge belt and slid a British .44 Bisley pistol into the holster. As he did so, he thought of what he had witnessed at the Cider House Saloon the night before. He was impressed that Tyler Cabe, though well into his cups, had managed to survive an encounter with Virgil Clay. It was sheer luck that Clay had missed his target at such close range…but there was no luck involved with a man who could dive out of the way and shoot with such accuracy as he fell. Impressive. Sir Tom had no love for Virgil Clay. He had put up with the man following him around like a stray, amused by his lack of social graces. That he was dead now, meant little to Sir Tom. He had a job waiting for him down in Sedona, Arizona Territory…a wild town in need of a crack pistolman with a reputation. But he was in no hurry. And particularly now that Tyler Cabe would have to deal with the likes of Elijah Clay…

And high above Whisper Lake in a sheltered arroyo surrounded by stands of juniper and pinon, Elijah Clay was loading his pistols and sharpening up his knives. Word had reached him about Virgil’s murder…and, to Elijah, it
was
murder. Chewing a strip of jerky, he ran the blade of a bowie knife over a wetstone, thinking hard and thinking long about a Arkansas bounty hunter named Tyler Cabe. For Elijah was from hill people. He was part of a hill country clan back in West Virginia. And there were certain codes that were invariably followed. Wrongs were always righted. When kin was killed, blood called that you settled matters. Flesh for flesh. That Cabe was a Southerner meant very little to Elijah. He had taken up no side in the War Between the States, knowing that one government was equally as corrupt as the next. He was a free-liver and a free-thinker as all hill people were. And when it came to vengeance, hill people meted it out accordingly. Thinking these things and knowing them to be true, Elijah found himself thinking of that fancy pistol fighter from Texas that had gunned-down his brother Arvin. It had taken that cowardly sumbitch near eight hours to die when Elijah had worked him with the knife…

At the Callister Brother’s Mortuary, Caleb Callister found himself looking at a horror. His new embalmer, Leo Moss, though every bit the ardent professional, was equally as morbid as Caleb’s deceased brother Hiram. As Caleb had been going through the books after a heady night of sex and gambling, Moss had called him into the undertaking parlor at the back of the building. You’ve got to see this, Moss told him. On the slab was some transient found dead in an alley. Thin, wasted, he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Moss had been sorting through his innards since before first light and now proudly revealed his prize. A tapeworm. He had it in a five-gallon glass jar of alcohol. It floated in the brine, coiled like some obscene snake. A parasitic flatworm, cut free in sections. Thirty-two feet, Moss told Caleb. Now ain’t that just something? Caleb had to agree it certainly was. Life was just full of odd surprises.

In his rooms at the St. James Hostelry, Jackson Dirker bolted awake from a nightmare which he could not remember. But as he lay there…the war was on his mind and he could just guess what he’d been dreaming of. Dirker had been with the 59
^th
Illinois Infantry under Post. His first real taste of war had been at Pea Ridge. He could remember riding up on Tyler Cabe and his ragtag crew of Johnny Rebs. Remember them looting through the heaps of mutilated Union boys. Jesus…those, boys, they’d been scalped. Disemboweled. Faces carved from the bone so that their own mothers wouldn’t have recognized them. Dirker’s soldiers wanted to kill the graybellies there and then…but Dirker meted out a different punishment. He could remember the feel of that bullwhip in his fist, snapping, snapping, eating into flesh. Looking down on those dead boys, he’d lost control. Lost all sense of propriety. What he’d done was wrong. He knew that now…just as he knew now—and maybe had that day—that Cabe and his men had not desecrated those bodies. But knowing it and admitting it were two different things. For pride was a harsh mistress.

Like Dirker, Tyler Cabe also dreamed of the war. Faces of fallen comrades floated through the mists. He saw all the blood and death, wandered from one battlefield to the next, clawing through heaped Confederate and Union dead, trying to escape, escape. Dirker passed by, shaking his head, asking him how he could allow his men to mutilate those bodies. Cabe told him, no, no, no, we didn’t, I would never allow that,
never.
And Cabe came awake, eyes fixed and glassy…he could smell the powder, the filth, the blood. And then it faded and he closed his eyes again.

In a seedy hotel rooming house, the man who called himself Henry Freeman and claimed to be a Texas Ranger sat on his bed, naked and cross-legged. On the bed before him was a Green River knife with a six-inch blade sharper than a straight razor. At one time, the Green River was pretty much the official knife of fur trappers and mountain men. A practical weapon for fighting, hunting, and butchering. It was also favored by buffalo skinners, who could skin off a hide in record time with the versatile tool. And, as Henry Freeman knew and knew well, it had other uses…such as eviscerating women and cutting out their hearts. He had one such trophy before him, carefully wrapped in deerhide. Freeman rocked back and forth, listening to the voices in head. Whores were fine, they told him. They needed to be purged. But there was other game…like maybe the gentile Southern lady who ran the St. James Hostelry…

Over in Redemption, the Mormons rushed about like busy ants, throwing the old mining town into shape. All you could hear were the sounds of saws and hammers, of lumber being stacked and wagons plying the dirt roads. Old shacks and houses were stripped to the frames and sometimes pulled down altogether, rebuilt from the ground up. The air was chill, but there was no lack of spirit or ambition as the abandoned town was rediscovered. Everywhere then, hammering and pounding, cutting and gutting. Sweat and hard labor and aching muscles. For Redemption had to be resurrected, body and soul…it was God’s will. And it had to be fortified, for one of these nights, the vigilantes would ride again.