Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

“My medicine” he spoke softly as the breeze nuzzled the leaves overhead.

  Making a fist of that right hand, Titus slapped it against his chest, right over his heart, then brought the fist down to almost waist level with a bold, confident gesture.

  “It is strong. My medicine’s strong.”

  Now Scratch opened his hand and placed it near the right side of his forehead, fingers open, separated, and slightly curved into a cup as he twirled the hand back and forth, back and forth in a tight spin to resemble mental instability.

  “That’s right: I’m crazy,” he explained, the volume of his voice rising. “A damn fool, crazy. You go tell your people they best not mess with me. I’m a crazy nigger!”

  The eyes glared back at him, unflinching.

  “Now I’m gonna prove to you just how crazy I am, you son of a bitch,” Titus growled. “When you get back to your people—you be sure to tell ’em all what you see’d here today.”

  Leaning to the side, Bass quickly laid the belt bag and the dead man’s knife where they would be safe, more than an arm’s length away, then took out his own skinning knife. It made a faint crackling noise as he drove the narrow blade deep into the base of the dead man’s throat, blood seeping out as he dragged the blade along the flesh and muscle stretched over the breastbone. At the bottom of the sternum he plunged the knife into the abdomen, all the way to the handle. Sawing through the thick rawhide belt that held up the leggings, Titus flung aside the front of the leather breechclout and continued down, down in a ragged line, drawing the full length of the blade through the gush of blood and spill of purple intestines until the knife struck hard bone just above the warrior’s penis.

  After wiping the blood from the blade on the dead Indian’s legging, Scratch drove the weapon into the ground beside the body. He rocked forward, rising onto his knees over the warrior. Giving the wounded Arapaho one last, long look of devilish insanity—the trapper stuffed both hands into that wide, grisly incision.

  Again and again he ripped apart the gaping slash, pulling out long lengths of that purplish-white intestinal coil, heaving it to the far side of the body until no more remained. Then he retrieved the knife from the ground and went to work on the rest. Bladder and both kidneys he hacked loose, flinging them onto the growing gut-pile. The stomach, and liver, then the gallbladder—chopping it all free with savage slashes of the knife, splattering himself with the Indian’s blood, painting himself in crimson, reveling in the warmth of his victim’s body like some wild, feral beast gorging itself up to the snout in its prey.

  He growled, grunted, whooped, and shrieked in shrill exultation every time he pulled some new organ free and hurled it onto the expanding gut-pile there in the grass near the body. Chopping and jabbing, hacking and sawing with the knife, Scratch repeatedly stuffed his arms past the elbows into the chest cavity, tearing free the lobes of lung from the connective tissue on the interior of the chest wall, ripping them from their last grip on the windpipe’s branching forks.

  With all those warm, quivering organs lying beside the sundered carcass, empty from downstream anus to upstream voice box, there remained but one last organ for him to cut free from that bloody hollow.

  Seizing the soft, sticky, warm globe in his left hand, Scratch slipped his knife under the rib cage and hacked it free. Bringing it out from beneath those last, lower ribs, he gazed at the heart, turned it over and over, thick blood continuing to ooze from those butchered vessels. So small and weak and defenseless, he thought as he studied it.

  Then for the first time during his mad, crazed orgy over the body, Bass turned to look at the wounded man. And when he saw how transfixed the warrior’s eyes had been on him throughout it all, Bass knew what he must now do.

  Cradling the quivering heart in his left hand, he scrambled over to where he could squat right beside the wounded Arapaho. Rolling the organ over in his hands, Bass suddenly shoved it forward, until he held it suspended no more than two inches from the warrior’s face, blood still dripping onto the brown skin stretched taut across the Indian’s frozen, grim countenance.

  “You tell your people what you see’d here today,” Bass grunted, realizing his anger fired his every vein with hot surges of adrenaline, his voice little more than the sound an animal would make after making its kill.

  His eyes never leaving the wounded man’s, Scratch slowly turned the heart over and over in his hands, slowly bringing the slimy organ closer and closer to his opening mouth. Then he shoved the heart between his teeth, clamped down, and savagely tore off a symbolic hunk of his enemy’s power.

  How warm the soft, elastic tissue felt between his teeth, against his tongue—yet no different from the elk liver or buffalo heart he had been eating for years. So strong was the muscle, he knew as soon as he began to grind it between his back teeth that he wasn’t about to chew it up fine enough. Instead, he swallowed hard, gagging at first, then tried again—this time sensing the hunk of raw flesh glide past the back of his tongue. He swallowed once more to make sure it would stay down.

  And stood, grinning madly, staring wild-eyed at the wounded man—then suddenly cocked back his arm and flung the heart across the creek. It landed with a bounce on the open and grassy bank the horsemen had come down to make their crossing.

  Quickly pointing at the dead Indian, Bass made the sign for “medicine” in front of his forehead: bloody, slimy fingers rising slowly in that symbolic spiral of smoke. He concluded by slapping his own chest with that crimson hand—painting himself with that red handprint.

  “His medicine,” he uttered the words now as he repeated the signs. “It’s now my medicine!”

  Swiping the back of his red hand over his mouth, Bass made the signs one last time, not taking his eyes off the enemy who lay there in pain, breathing in short gusts, watching the crazed trapper.

  “You’re gonna live to tell ’em,” Titus growled as he turned back toward the mutilated carcass.

  Dropping to one knee near the dead man’s hip, Bass swiftly made two slashing arcs with the skinning blade, freeing both penis and scrotum together in one ragged trophy.

  “Here’s all this bastard’s got left for power now,” he said, shaking the warrior’s manhood.

  Then he violently stuffed it into what was left of the dead man’s face. He adjusted it there, ceremonially, not having the lower jaw to clamp it in place. Bass stood to admire his handiwork: how he had carefully laid his enemy’s manhood across what was left of the bloody face, how he had gutted the warrior. All of it would speak a powerful message to any man who happened across this scene … that is, before the predators came and finished what he had begun.

  After wiping off the knife and stuffing it back into its sheath, Scratch retrieved the buckskin bag from the ground and stuffed it under his own belt. Then he stopped and studied the dead warrior one more time. Those leggings weren’t all that bloodied. And the moccasins might be serviceable.

  He knelt and dragged the cut ends of the rawhide belt thong from the knotted loops at the top of the leggings, then scooted himself down to the dead man’s feet, where he grabbed the heel of the moccasins and yanked them off the dirty brown feet. One at a time he urged the soft buckskin sheaths down the legs until they were both free and slung over his shoulder. He got back to his feet, stuffing the decorated moccasins inside his shirt.

  “Go. Go on back to your people now.”

  Holding his arm out toward the distance, pointing across the creek in the direction the riders had come, Bass sensed the hot fire in his veins beginning to subside. Moving over to stand above the wounded man, he watched those black eyes a moment longer, then looked down at the blood smearing the warrior’s legging where he had crushed the lower leg.

  “Gonna have to drag yourself from here on out,” he said quietly, a strange calm come over him now. “G’back and tell your people what happened here. Show ’em that busted leg of your’n. Tell ’em I got the bastard what took my hair. You tell ’em his medicine’s mine now.”

>   “Damn—but would you look at Scratch!” Elbridge Gray said as he slowly rose from their circle of downed timber where they had spread their sleeping robes.

  Titus slowly came into the fire’s light and reined his saddle horse to a halt.

  Hatcher scrambled to his feet too, his eyes narrowing in concern. “Ye awright, nigger?”

  “He looks hurt, Jack,” Caleb declared, stepping closer. “Lookit the blood all over ’im.”

  “Ain’t mine,” Scratch explained. “Ain’t none of it mine.”

  Isaac craned his neck to look back at the pack mule. “Hannah ain’t carrying no game. How you come to have so much blood on you?”

  “I had me a scrap,” Bass answered as he leaned back and peeled the moist scalp off the saddle horn where he had placed it for his ride back to their camp. Placing his fist inside it, he raised the long, glossy hair into the firelight.

  “What the hell is that?” Solomon asked, the farthest away at the other side of the fire.

  “Whose the hell is it?” Hatcher corrected.

  Kicking his left leg to the right to clear the saddle horn, Bass dropped to the ground. “The bastard what scalped me.”

  He watched the sets of eyes flick to the blue bandanna, then come back to rest on his face.

  “Ye made some mess of yerself,” Jack advised as he stepped closer, reaching out to brush the hair with his fingers.

  Wood was next, moving up just before the rest crowded in. “How you so dad-blamed sure this was the one what got your scalp?”

  “Yeah?” Rufus agreed. “That’s coming on two year ago.”

  “I know,” Titus reassured them as he pushed through the group and settled onto a downed log at the fire’s edge. “A man just knows.”

  “I be damned: Scratch got him back the warrior what got him,” Caleb declared as he came up to sit beside Bass.

  “I knowed one day I’d kill the bastard what took my hair.”

  “Awright, Scratch,” Hatcher said sympathetically. “We’re yer friends: we’ll believe you when ye say you know it was the one—”

  “It was the one,” he snapped. Yanking the leggings from his shoulder, Bass flung them to the ground at his feet. “There, see for your own damn selves.”

  Graham asked, “You … you took the red nigger’s leggings?”

  “There,” and Titus pointed at the quillwork illuminated by the flickering firelight as the last of twilight seeped to black of night. “That’s just the way I been remembering them colors every night since the son of a bitch cut my hair off my head. Every last blessed night I see that strip of quills in my sleep. See them colors sewed up just like that.”

  “Warrior wears his colors,” Hatcher agreed thoughtfully, nodding. “Every red nigger has his own design too.”

  Solomon looked askance at the legging. “That really come off the one what took your topknot?”

  “Many a time I told you boys since you found me in that buffler valley—I was knocked out to the world, but I come to while the son of a bitch was scraping off my scalp. I saw with my own damned eyes the colors on them leggings. He was hunkered right by my head.” Titus reached inside his shirt, tore out the moccasins, and hurled them onto the leggings by his feet. “I saw the nigger’s mockersons too!”

  “I ’member ye telling us,” Hatcher assented.

  “Every damn night since … I seen that nigger’s leggings, seen his mockersons in my head, and nary of it would go away and leave me be.”

  “Now we know why,” Fish replied. “You was bound to get your chance at the nigger.”

  “Solomon is right,” Jack agreed. “Ever’ man should have him his chance at those that done him wrong. Just one chance to even the score.”

  Caleb snorted, “Looks to me like Titus done better’n just even up the score! I’d say Titus gone and got the better of it all!”

  “Where’d you leave ’im?” Rufus asked.

  “Right where he and ’Nother jumped me.”

  “’Nother’n?” Hatcher asked. “How many red niggers did ye lay into?”

  And as Elbridge brought him a scalding cup of coffee, Bass told them of the horsemen’s approach, how they attempted to outflank him and run him down about the time he noticed the warrior’s leggings and moccasins. He told it all—everything from breaking the second man’s leg, to gutting and butchering the scalp taker.

  “Then ye just up and left that other’n to crawl off?”

  Bass nodded. “He ain’t going anywhere very fast. I don’t figger that brownskin’s gonna drag hisself outta the Bayou afore we set off ourselves for the Popo Agie.”

  “Rendezvous ain’t long now!” Rufus cried.

  “Wha’cha gonna do with that scalp?” Caleb asked. “Make you some hangy-downs, some scalp locks to sew to your shirt, maybe ’long your shoulder and down the arms?”

  “Dunno,” he said. “Ain’t thought that far.”

  Hatcher handed the scalp back to Bass as Scratch tugged nervously at the blue bandanna. Wagging his head, Titus said, “Lost my patch o’ beaver fur, boys. Can’t for the life of me … I took off the bandanny to show the one nigger where his companyero skelped me. Must’ve lost it then.”

  “You want me to see to cutting you ’Nother from a poor plew, Scratch?” asked Solomon.

  “No,” Hatcher responded instead as the others turned to regard him with curiosity. “Bass won’t be needing no more beaver fur to wear over that little skull spot on his noodle no more.”

  He studied Jack cautiously. “I won’t?”

  “That’s right,” Jack replied, kneeling at Bass’s knee, using one finger to describe a circle around the Arapaho’s scalp. “Ye won’t need that plew no more because ye got ’sactly what ye need to make a new skelp lock for yerself.”

  Scratch gazed down at the glossy hair and the drying flesh he held in his lap. “For myself?”

  Hatcher reached out and seized the trophy. “Take off that goddamned bandanny for me.”

  “Why you want me to—”

  “Take it off so I can have me a good look at that head bone of yer’n. G’won, do it.”

  Quickly glancing at a few of the others, Bass’s eyes eventually landed on John Rowland, who sat alone at the side of the fire, staring morosely into the flames—totally without interest in what the others were doing. John looked up at Scratch for a long moment, then went back to gazing at the fire.

  “Awright,” Titus agreed quietly, standing as he started to drag off the dirty bandanna.

  “Sit back down right where ye are,” Hatcher commanded, stepping right to Bass’s side, where he could peer down at the bare bone. With one hand he gently turned the back of Scratch’s head toward the fire’s light.

  Bass started to look up a moment. But Jack locked Scratch’s head in his hands and turned it back to the side so he could examine the patch of bone while holding the Arapaho’s scalp beside it.

  “Eegod! There it is, boys,” Hatcher declared eventually. “Bass can wear this nigger’s hair for his own!”

  “How he gonna do that when we know the bastard’s skelp gonna dry up?” Rufus asked.

  “This here scalp ain’t gonna dry up,” Hatcher said. “Not if Bass takes care of it.”

  “Just how’m I gonna take care of it?” Bass inquired.

  “First whack, ye’re gonna salt it,” Jack explained.

  Titus wagged his head. “Awright, then what?”

  “Ye’re gonna tan it just like the squaws do all their hides.”

  Scratch had to grin, what with the way the others were beginning to smile as if Jack had lost a few of his pebbles. “I … I’m gonna tan this nigger’s scalp.”

  “Injuns do it alla time,” Hatcher declared. “Take ye some brains and water … get that worked down into the skelp. In no time at all it’s gonna be ever’ bit as soft as them skins a squaw used for yer leggings last winter.”

  He stared at his leggings for a long moment, rubbing the brain-tanned, fire-smoked hide between a thumb and forefinge
r. “You really s’pose it’d work?”

  “Mad Jack Hatcher says it’ll work?” Caleb Wood cheered, “It’s gonna work!”

  Jack himself boasted, “Less’n a week from now, ye’ll be wearing this nigger’s hair for yer’n.”

  “The hull thing?” Solomon asked.

  “Hell, no,” Hatcher growled. “We gonna cut that skelp down so after it’s cured, it’ll be just a li’l bigger’n that bone on the back of Bass’s head.”

  “Fit right over it?” Scratch inquired.

  “Like it was made to be there,” Jack said enthusiastically.

  “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” Bass roared, slapping his knee as he stood. “I’ll wear the nigger’s hair what got mine, boys!”

  “Gonna look a li’l strange to me,” Isaac said.

  Bass whirled on him. “What the hell’s gonna look so strange ’bout it?”

  “Ain’t same color as your’n.”

  He peered down at the scalp, a disappointment sucking the wind right out of him. “Damn, if you ain’t right. It don’t look like—”

  “It don’t have to,” Jack interrupted, shouldering Simms aside. “The nigger’s hair is yer’n, no matter that it don’t look like yers. It’s the medicine what counts!”

  With Hatcher’s contagious enthusiasm, he felt cheered anew. “Damn right, Jack! It’s the medicine what counts.”

  “But Scratch’s hair is brown,” Solomon grumped, “and that there’s black as night.”

  “Scratch’s ain’t gonna be brown much longer anyways,” Caleb declared.

  Bass cocked his head, asking, “What you mean by that?”

  “You ever look at your hair since we moseyed down to Taos last winter?” Wood tried to explain. “Ever give that beard of your’n a good look too?”

  “This child sure is getting gray awready, ain’t he?” Rufus said.

  Grabbing a hank of hair at the side of his head, Titus held it out before his eyes in the firelight. “This here ain’t gray!”

  “That ain’t where ye’re going gray right now, Scratch!” Hatcher bellowed. “Up there on top of yer head. Down there on yer beard. Here,” and he grabbed some of the silver-flecked hair hanging right there at the temple. “Lookee there.”