Skin Medicine (32 page)

Janice was breathing hard and Cabe was, too.

What was it all about? Lust? Passion? Yes, surely those things were evident, but something more too. Something that went deeper. Something that he could feel burning deep inside of him like hot coals and blue ice. There was a word for it, but he didn’t dare think it.

“Please, Mr. Cabe. You are, without a doubt, a man who can handle his own affairs, but…”

“But what?”

She averted her eyes. Cabe reached out and pressed his hand over hers. It was like an electric shock passed through him. She started as well. She made to pull her hand away as color touched her cheeks, but didn’t. And under his rough, callused paw, her hand was petal-soft and fine-boned. It felt so very good.

She licked her lips. “I don’t…oh what in God’s name am I doing?”

“Say it,” he told her.

She sighed. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“If that’s what you want, then I’ll make sure nothing will.”

They stared into each other’s eyes for a time and then Janice pulled away, rushing from the dining room as fast as she could. And Cabe just sat there a time, feeling like a man flattened by some tremendous wave.

It was some time before he could so much as stand.

15

“Well, I see you’re still alive,” Charles Graybrow greeted Cabe later that morning. “I was planning on buying a nice whiteman’s sort of suit for your funeral. Maybe I was rushing things.”

Cabe dragged off his cigarette. “Maybe just a bit.”

After his talk with Janice Dirker, he finally found his guts again, tucked ‘em back in, and took to the streets. Started walking. Checking Whisper Lake out saloon by saloon. And not for drinks, but for Elijah Clay. At the far end, near the Union Pacific railroad depot, he spotted Charles Graybrow having a taste at a lumber yard, chatting it up with another Indian who was cutting barrel staves.

Graybrow stood there, studying the sky which was leaden and turbulent. A chill breeze ruffled his long iron-gray hair which was tucked under a campaign hat. One eye was squinting, the other open in that solemn brown face.

“Hey, Tyler Cabe,” he suddenly said. “You figure I wear a fancy whiteman’s suit and hang around the depot, folks might think I’m some rich banker from back east?”

“Doubt it.”

“Because I’m an injun?”

Cabe shrugged. “That might tip ‘em off.”

“Damn, it’s hell to be an injun some days. Maybe I’ll get the suit, though. Way I hear it, Elijah Clay’s in town. They say he’s looking for you.” Graybrow just shook his head. “So I might get some use out of the suit after all.”

Cabe just chuckled. He crushed his cigarette in the dirt and pulled off his hat. Not looking up, he fumbled with the rattlesnake band above the brim. “Already got me dead and buried, have you?”

Graybrow nodded. “Me and a bunch of my red brothers are taking bets. I’m saying your dead before tomorrow morning. But maybe I’m just a pessimist. Folks say that about me. Go figure.”

Cabe put his hat back on. “You’re gonna lose some money, I think.”

“Maybe.” Graybrow looked over to his Indian friend. “Hey, Raymond? You think you can fix up my amigo here?” Then he turned to Cabe. “I call him Raymond because his name is Raymond Proud.”

“No shit?”

Raymond Proud stood up and he was a big man dressed in wool pants, suspenders, and a lumberjack shirt. “Is this the Arkansas bounty hunter?”

“Yes. Calls himself Tyler Cabe.”

Proud nodded, scratched at his chin. “Yeah, I’m thinking I could fit him. I got some spare scrap lumber out back.”

“Yeah, that would work. He don’t want no fancy nameplate. Just the box.”

“Well, I’d need a little money up front.”

“That could be arranged.”

Cabe just stood there, not getting it at all. “What the hell are you two talking about?”

Graybrow patted him on the shoulder. “Just stay out of this, okay?” he said in a whisper. “I’m getting you a good deal.”

“On what?”

“A casket. You’ll need one soon enough.”

Cabe felt his mouth drop open. “Well, you two just got all sorts of faith in me, don’t you?”

“Nothing personal, is it, Raymond? We just know Elijah Clay is all.”

Cabe let out a sigh and walked away, deciding to take a look around the depot. Somewhere, that hellbilly was hiding out and he planned on getting the draw on the sonofabitch come hell or high water. Because, honestly, for the first time in a long while he felt that he had a damn good reason to go on living.

“Hey, Tyler Cabe,” Graybrow said. “Slow down, I need to talk to you.”

But Cabe didn’t slow down. “If you found me a nice plot of earth, I ain’t interested.”

Graybrow caught up with him, put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “No, nothing like that. Just stop now.” He was panting. “It’s not that I’m old, but I don’t want to show off and run you down.”

“Course not. Wouldn’t be your way.”

Graybrow smiled thinly. “You didn’t like my little joke back there?”

“Not much.”

“It’s my injun sense of humor, it’s kind of strange, I reckon. White folks never seem to get it.” He followed Cabe to a bench by the telegraph office. “All us injuns got it. Take Custer at the Big Horn, for instance. He would’ve just waited for the punchline, things would have turned out different.”

“You’re crazy, that’s what.”

Graybrow offered him a drink. “It’ll settle your nerves.”

“My nerves are fine. Besides, it’s a little early.”

“You white folks…boy, I’ll never understand you. You bring the whiskey out here, get my people hooked, then you act like it’s not good enough for you.”

Cabe smiled. “That’s our little joke.”

Graybrow took a good pull off his bottle. “Since you already know about Clay being in town, I won’t warn you about that. But I hear them miners hired you to sort out all these killings. That true?”

“Word travels fast, don’t it?” Cabe said. “But, sure, it’s true enough.”

“Good. Because you’re gonna need my help. I know lots about those killings. If you wanna stop them, then you’re gonna have to stop James Lee Cobb.”

“Who in Christ is that?”

“You don’t know?” Graybrow said. “Well, sit back, because I have a story to tell you. And before you ask, yes, it does have to do with coffins and graves and the like. Just not in the way you think…”

16

The day turned progressively colder as Cabe and Graybrow rode out to Deliverance. They followed the dirt road up out of Whisper Lake and past the Southview Mine, taking the road where it forked at the blasted oak.

Cabe found himself studying that oak.

It was tall and craggy and black, looked something like a huge trapdoor spider climbing from the ditch alongside the road. Cabe could not put a finger on it, but that tree bothered him immensely. He was not one given to omens and portents…but somehow, somehow that tree was a signpost warning him off.

He found himself studying the landscape as it swept past him—the exposed vermilion rock bursting from the heavy bracken and scrub, the clumps of saltbush and horsebrush giving away to grassy meadow and dense stands of aspen. Streams flanked by drooping dogwood trees and leafless willows.

He took it all in, making a mental note of the barren cliffs and thick forests, as if he might never see them again.

But as he rode his sleek-muscled strawberry roan up that narrow, winding road that was carpeted in autumn leaves and pine needles, he knew it was just the wild stories getting to him. Superstitious bullshit that had no place in his line of work. All that business about James Lee Cobb. His life and his culinary habits. Then that bit about him being shipped to Whisper Lake in a casket…except maybe he wasn’t dead. Seemed likely what with that Callister fellow being killed (for no one really bought the suicide theory) and the body vanishing. But there was more to it than that. Because Goode—the old saddletramp Graybrow said had brought the casket in—was pretty firmly convinced that what was in that box was not exactly human. You added that to the fact that Deliverance had gone bad shortly afterwards, had sold its soul to the Devil (as the locals claimed) and, well, even the sanest of men started thinking things.

Beside him on his calico gelding, Graybrow said, “Ever tell you, Tyler Cabe, about the two fools that rode into the town of devils?”

“Nope. What happened?”

“They got killed. Way I heard it, anyway.”

Cabe licked his lips, felt the cool wind at his mouth. “You scared, Charles? Scared of what we might find?”

Graybrow said, “Hell no. I’m an injun, we don’t know fear.” He rode in silence a moment, navigated a dip. “Still…I was thinking there might be something I’m supposed to be doing right now, somewhere I have to be. I told the Widow Lucas that I’d stop by and fix that barn of hers. It leaks. Maybe I should be doing that.”

“When does she need it done?”

“Oh, about two years past,” Graybrow admitted. “But still I think of it. Wonder at times like these if I should get over there. Think so?”

“Nope. Not unless you need my help.”

“Figured on doing it alone.”

They rode higher and the air was fresher, frigid, so crisp it seemed it might snap. A few snow flurries danced in the air. You could hear the crunching of the horses’ hooves through the leaves and loam, the jingling of equipment and creak of saddles, but nothing else. The aspen forests gave way to juniper and pinyon pine as the road climbed and snaked. Above were slopes blanketed in Douglas-fir and spruce, ancient bristlecone pines dotting the ragged peaks just below the snowline.

Cabe had ridden through many mountains. Had spent countless days and nights prowling their wastes…but never was he so struck by their absolute silence as he was here. Tree limbs brushed together and wind hissed through the high boughs, but other than that it was silent. Oddly silent. Deathly silent. The sort of heavy, brooding silence one acquainted with burial grounds and crypts.

And Cabe did not like it one bit.

“Should be just around that bend,” Graybrow said, sounding like something was lodged in his throat.

Cabe felt himself tensing. There was no real, palpable threat here. No men waiting for them with guns. Yet, his muscles had drawn up tight and his heart was beating fast. Something was crawling up his spine and he had a mad desire to have a pistol in each hand.

The road squeezed between high timbered banks where the wind rattled stands of dead pines and then they saw Deliverance. But, as Cabe learned, you didn’t just see the place these days, you
felt
it. And feel it he did. If something had been crawling up his spine before, it was running up it now. The air was much colder, like a blast of wind from an icehouse. Something in him trembled and curled-up. His balls went hard and his chest was wrapped in iron bands.

“Hell and damnation,” Graybrow muttered.

The village sat before them in a little hollow, forest pressing in from one side and rolling fields to the other. Tall stones like monuments rose from those fields, leaning and gray. All the trees were stripped and dead. Nothing moved, nothing stirred. Only the wind howled and whistled and from its timbre, Cabe was certain there was nothing alive in Deliverance.

The town gave him an immediate, unpleasant sense of claustrophobia. The buildings and houses were pressed together too tightly, rising up over the streets and overhanging each other. Wherever there was an open courtyard or lot, rows of shacks and tent-roofed log structures were inserted. The roads were impossibly narrow and congested. There was not a vertical line to be found anywhere, everything was a crazy sprawl of leaning walls, sloping roofs, angled doorways, and clustered shanties. Even the streets and alleyways were zigzagging and haphazard. Most towns were built to accentuate sunlight and space, Deliverance was built to accentuate shadow and repression. It looked, if anything, like some decaying slum back east.

There was a wooden sign set at the town’s perimeter.

DELIVERANCE, it read in faded block letters.

Someone had etched a pair of simple crosses to either side of the name. They stood out like hex signs. Cabe felt his throat go tight, he could barely pull a breath down into his rasping lungs.

As they rode down and into the sinister heart of the village, it seemed the entire place was decaying, rotting like the carcass of some cursed animal. There were great gaping rents in the walls and the roofs were falling into themselves. Windows were shuttered, planks flapping in the wind. Everything was weathered a uniform gray like graveyard marble. Huge, macabre shadows spilled from warped doorways and collapsing stairwells, laying in the muddy streets in black pools.

Cabe and Graybrow tethered their horses to a hitching post and just stood there, feeling the aura of Deliverance fill them like a seeping poison. Weeds grew up in the streets and sprouted from boardwalks which were contorted and frost-heaved, if not completely rotted right out.

Carefully, then, Cabe slid his Evans .44-40 repeating rifle from the saddle boot, sucked in a blast of frosty air, and said, “Well, Charles, what you say we have a look around?”