Skin Medicine

by Curran, Tim

  Clay stood there, visibly shaking.

  Somebody told them to take it outside.

  Miners and drifters fell out of the way.

  Freeman looked smug; Sir Tom grinned.

  Cabe felt a tenseness at his groin, felt his guts tighten into coils tight as bedsprings. He was tight and hard and ready to pounce.

  Clay said, “Ah, fuck you…” He turned away, made it maybe two, three feet, then came around fast and lethal, the Navy .36 filling his hand. He got off a shot as Cabe brought out his Starr double-action .44 in a smooth, practiced motion. The round just missed Cabe, ripping into the bar. Cabe threw himself to the side as Clay fired again and, falling to the floor, he got off a single shot. The bullet punched a hole in Clay’s chest, deflected off a rib, and bounced through his torso, macerating organ and tissue before erupting from a hole just beneath his left armpit.

  Clay made a weird gagging/wheezing sound and hit the floor, vomiting out a tangle of blood. He shuddered and went still. The blood that bubbled from his mouth was very dark.

  “Dead,” someone said. “That sonofabitch is dead.”

  Hands pulled Cabe to his feet and he shook them off, surprised as he always was at moments like this that he had survived yet again. Some were patting him on the back and saying what a crack shot he was and what a set of balls to get into it with someone like Virgil Clay. Others were calling him a killer and still others were saying something about Clay’s father, how he was the real nasty one.

  Cabe found he could barely stand. It always got like that. Going into a fight he was all balls and hot blood, coming out of it…just shaky and disoriented. Felt like his legs had no bones, were packed with wet straw.

  Sir Tom nudged Clay’s body with the tip of his boot. His right thumb hooked into his gunbelt, just above the .44 Bisley hanging there.

  Cabe was thinking, Oh, boy, here it comes…me and Sir Tom…I hope they bury me under a nice tree so I get some shade…

  Sir Tom just smiled. His face was pleasant and easy. “That’s one fine piece of shooting, Mr. Cabe. My hat’s off to you.”

  Crazy thing was, he seemed to mean it. Like maybe Clay had been no friend, but just some stray dog that had been following him around and sometimes dogs get run down by horses. Life goes on.

  Cabe was going to say something, but then Henry Wilcox—Dirker’s massive deputy sheriff—was plowing his way through, men falling out of his way like cut trees.

  Everyone seemed to be talking at once and Wilcox listened, understanding perfectly that Virgil Clay wasn’t nothing but trash and that this was bound to happen. He told Cabe as much, told him it would go down as self-defense…but, there was such a thing as due process. And until a coroner’s inquest, he’d have to be held.

  “So, give me your gun,” he said, “and we’ll take a walk.”

  Cabe took a step backwards…but knew he really had no choice. So, sighing, handed his weapon to Wilcox. “I want that back,” he said. “I carried it since the war, had it converted to cartridge at no little expense—”

  “You’ll get it back,” Wilcox promised him. “Let’s go.”

  “To the jail?”

  Wilcox nodded.

  As he led him away, Cabe said, “Tell me one thing…does Dirker still have that whip?”

  14

  So, two cells down from Orville DuChien, Cabe was deposited like so much refuse. He was given an army blanket, a piss pot, a jug of water, and told not to dirty the straw if he could help it. He said he’d do his best.

  Wilcox told him he was honestly sorry about having to lock him up, but the sheriff had set down specific rules concerning such things. A man was gunned down or knifed, his assailant had to be locked up until the facts were sorted out. No exceptions.

  So Cabe was a prisoner.

  He was not truly angry about it, knew and knew damn well it was his own fault, dancing with that inbred shithound Clay…least he was the one locked-up and not toes-up in the mortuary. That was something. His cell was big enough for a cot and a little slip of floor upon which to pace. To either side were the bars separating his from the other holding cells. He tried pacing for a bit, but his head was pounding from the cheap whiskey and excitement. He sat down then, massaging his temples.

  He remembered then the farm back in Yell County, up in the foothills of the Ouachitas. It wasn’t much of a place—just a plot of land with some hogs and chicken, corn and barley. Cabe’s old man rented it from some rich bastard name of Connelly from Little Rock who owned just about everything and everyone in the county. It was but one miserable step up from being a sharecropper. Connelly’s monthly rent was so high, that even when things went good—which was seldom—the elder Cabe barely had enough to feed his family.

  Tyler lost two sisters to a diphtheria outbreak. His old man had a fatal heart attack in the fields one afternoon. And his mother had a stroke and died while Tyler was off fighting the War Between the States. The land and Connelly’s greed had wiped out his kin. The Yankees had burned and looted Connelly into the poorhouse during the war. And that was the only time Tyler Cabe ever cheered for the North.

  But thinking of the farm…he could see his old man sitting on a willow stump one morning, dirty and sweaty and beaten from trying to wring a living from the thin soil. “Tyler,” he said. “Yer my only boy. Ye ain’t the smartest I’ve ever done seen, but damn if ye ain’t the most determined. I figure ye’ll do okay. At least, I shore hope so. But whatever ye do…don’t ever let another man own ye…”

  And Tyler Cabe never had and never would.

  He figured if he had nothing else, he always had his self-respect.

  Wilcox let him keep his Bull Durham, papers, and matches, so he rolled himself a cigarette and felt sorry for himself.

  Damn, he thought, old Crazy Jack was going to love this one.

  Locked-up, eh, Cabe? Killed a man, did you? Still the same hotheaded old Southern boy you was back when, ain’t you? Figured it would come to this, boy. You ain’t got the brains God gave a piss-drunk rooster.

  Damn.

  Water was dripping down on him, just a few droplets, but he figured he’d be soaked by morning. Soaked and freezing and didn’t he just have that coming?

  “Cot’s not bolted down,” a voice from the next cell said. “Slide it over to the other wall or your blanket’ll be frozen stiff come morning.”

  Cabe struck another match, held it up to the bars off to his left. He saw an old Indian sitting cross-legged on his own cot. He was dressed in a blanket coat and campaign hat, his hair long and steel-gray. His eyes were black dots set in a worn face with more wrinkles in it than an unmade bed.

  “Just a suggestion,” the Indian said. “I’m good with suggestions, but not much with following them.”

  Cabe smiled despite the pounding in his head. “Name’s Tyler Cabe…you?”

  In the gray darkness, Cabe saw that the old man just stared dead forward like he was seeing something no one else could. “You want my injun name or my white name?”

  “Injun name would be fine.”

  The old man adjusted his hat. “No, you couldn’t pronounce it and I can’t remember it. In white tongue it meant “One Who Waits”. Something like that, I recall.”

  “And what is it you’re waiting for?”

  “Don’t know rightly. Figure I’ll stay around until it comes to me.”

  “Just keep waiting, eh?” Cabe said.

  The Indian shrugged. “Surely. I’m always waiting for something. When I was a free-running injun, I suppose I was waiting for the U.S. Government to take my land away. When they did that I used to wait on the reservation for my beef ration, my flour and corn. Never came too much, but I always waited for it. Now I wait here in Whisper Lake. But if I wait in any one place too long…some white-eye feels the need to kick me around. But that’s life as an injun: You wait long enough, something always happens.”

  Cabe didn’t know what to make of all that. The old man seemed to be joking and to be dead seriou
s at the same time. But Cabe knew from the Cherokees back home that they were not like white men and you could not read them as such.

  “What’s your white name?”

  “Charles Graybrow,” he said. “Graybrow…that’s injun, too. Means man with gray brow.”

  “Really? I’d have never figured it.”

  “Learn something every day, Tyler Cabe.”

  Cabe rubbed his temples again. Christ, it was a doozy, that headache. Older he got, harder the liquor was on him. And Graybrow wasn’t helping none…Cabe got the impression that he was being insulted and befriended at the same time.

  “Here,” Graybrow said. “This’ll help your head.”

  Cabe lifted his hand and a small leather pouch was passed to him. The Indian’s fingers felt very rough like untreated hide.

  “What is it?”

  “Injun head-magic,” Graybrow said. “Though some whites just call it headache powder.”

  Cabe washed it down with water, splashed some more water in his face. He passed the pouch back through the bars.

  “Why were you locked-up, Tyler Cabe?”

  Cabe grunted. “For being a damn fool, I suppose. I stopped by the Cider House for a drink. Next thing I know, I killed a man. Shot him. Virgil Clay was his name, they tell me. Hell, one less speck of trash in the world.”

  “Virgil Clay?” Graybrow clucked his tongue. “That’s bad medicine there, I tell you. Oh…when an injun says ‘bad medicine’ it means the shit’s about to fly and you’re gonna catch some.”

  “Don’t say?”

  “Yep.”

  Graybrow told him that the Clay’s were an ornery mountain clan from back east in West Virginia. Something happened to them during the Civil War and they pretty much had to leave their beloved hill country or face prosecution. Graybrow couldn’t be sure, but he thought he’d heard something to the effect that the clan had been doing more than a little murdering and horse-thieving and most of the county had hounded them out. They’d ended up in Utah Territory, attracted maybe by the mountains. Most of the clan was gone now. As far as Graybrow knew, only a few of ‘em lived up in the high country and they didn’t cotton to strangers poking about…as more than one miner or trapper had learned the hard way.

  Cabe asked about Virgil.

  Trash, Graybrow told him, just like you said. A speck of trash in a big smelly heap called Whisper Lake. He thought of himself as the fastest gun since Wild Bill, but to call him a shootist would be giving him far too much credit. Shit, Graybrow said, calling him a man was giving that animal too much credit. Virgil was strictly a bottom-feeder, a product of a demented backwoods clan that bottle-fed their young on violence, hate, and intolerance. You wanted to call Virgil Clay something, “murderer” was always a good tag. Maybe sidewinder or weasel was applicable. Bottom line here, Graybrow pointed out, was that Virgil Clay was an ornery, dirt-mean life-taker with all the morals and sense of fair play as a leg-chomping river gator.

  “Man like that? I tell you what, Tyler Cabe, you don’t hang him; you hang his mother for pumping out that filth and his father for grooming him into the reptile he became.”

  Cabe listened and listened, finally couldn’t help himself. He asked Graybrow if maybe, just maybe now, he had an ax to grind against old Virgil. That made the old man sigh. “Ax to grind?” he said. “I’m an injun, Tyler Cabe. We grind stone knives and tomahawks, didn’t you know that?” Graybrow told him one day, well over a year before, he and his brother-in-law Robert Sun-Bird—finest, kindest injun that ever lived, had to feel sorry for him marrying my foul-mouthed, snake-mean sister—were on the road outside Frisco. They were bringing a wagon of lumber back to the reservation to throw up a couple lean-tos. They’d paid real money for it, too. He said the ore wagons came and went and no one paid the Indians much attention until a lone rider showed.

  Virgil Clay.

  He seemed pleasant enough when he stopped Graybrow’s wagon, inquired about the weather, saying only injuns could truly predict the weather. Sun-Bird told him this was true, looked to the sky and forecasted a dry spell for the next week. Clay thanked him, asked for a match to light his cheroot with and was promptly given one. And, yep, he was a pleasant sort, Graybrow said, but his eyes were just plain crazy, beady and close-set. A scorpion wearing a man’s flesh. After Clay got his light, he pulled a pistol and shot Sun-Bird dead. Before Graybrow could do much more than wipe the blood from his eyes, Clay yanked him from the wagon and pistol-whipped him there on the road until his eyes were swelled-up and he couldn’t see.

  “So, maybe you’re right, Tyler Cabe…maybe my ax needed some grinding. Maybe in my heart I still sharpen it from time to time.”

  Graybrow told him that that was Virgil Clay, what he knew of him. Though it was rumored he’d run roughshod over Indian Territory, running whiskey in the Nations and robbing and looting redskins and whites alike up and down the Arkansas and Canadian Rivers. Was put on trial once at Fort Smith…but was acquitted of something involving rustled cattle and changing brands with a running iron. In Whisper Lake, he hung tight to Sir Tom Ian ever since Ian showed in town a month back.

  Cabe said, “I suppose the rest of that brood is just as bad?”

  “Worse,” Graybrow said. “Damn worse.”

  Only person Graybrow ever knew that rode up to the Clay family spread and rode back down again was Jackson Dirker. Dirker made himself pretty clear on the subject of the Clay’s: Long as they obeyed the law, he couldn’t run ‘em out of town, but they so much as spit on the sidewalk, he would ride a posse up into the hills and burn the lot of ‘em out.

  No, there wasn’t many of them left…but one of them happened to be Virgil Clay’s old man, Elijah, and he was plenty. Graybrow told him to imagine Virgil, but bigger, meaner, just as crude and coarse as a rutting hog…a hog that ate raw meat and shit razor blades, thought that roasting babies on a spit was how you whiled away a slow Sunday afternoon.

  “That bad, eh?”

  “Bad Medicine,” Graybrow told him. “When an injun says that—“

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Cabe figured none of this was good news. If he got out of this mess, the Clay clan might come gunning for him. He’d better watch his back. Course, Dirker might find it amusing—one crazy Southerner hunting down another.

  “But, you know, Tyler Cabe, I’m an injun and sometimes we do go on. I got a good imagination,” he said. “I can read, you know that? I like reading them dime novels and I know everything they say is true. All those stories of redskins attacking wagon trains and kidnapping white women and children…just a shame. I know whites would never kill and burn like that. It’s a good thing the white man came out here and sorted out all us heathen red devils. I’m truly thankful for it.”

  Cabe ignored that, lighting another cigarette. “Well, tomorrow, the next day,” he said, “you see that sumbitch Elijah Clay riding in after me, you let me know.”

  “I will…if I’m sober.”

  Cabe asked him what he was locked up for.

  Graybrow took his time in answering. “Not sure. I was drunk at the time. But I figure I musta done something. Maybe I scalped some innocent, God-fearing whites or peed on ‘em. Something like that. I been known to do both and sometimes at the same time.” He was silent for a time. Finally, he clucked his tongue, sighed. “Whatever I did, must’ve been bad, you think? To be thrown in here? You don’t suppose I got locked-up just because I’m an injun, do you?”

  “No, white folk wouldn’t do that. We got too much respect for you people.”

  Graybrow slapped his knee. “You’re right. But for a minute there…boy, I was scared.”

  Cabe told him he didn’t strike him as a man who scared easy and Graybrow launched into a tirade about how he was just a simple savage and the white world was so fast and complicated…it frightened him. All he wanted from life was a tipi and a fire to dance naked around. And maybe a buffalo robe and a chew of tobacco. Maybe a woman…or two of them. And some horses and cattle. Ma
ybe his own bank and livery, now that you mention it…

  “All right already,” Cabe said.

  “Sure, I go on. I know that. It’s because I got a taste for the firewater, makes my head funny. Can’t think right.”

  The talk drifted to what Cabe was doing in Whisper Lake and he told the old man all there was to tell. The old man agreed with Dirker that the Sin City Strangler had finally found a place he could call home. He recounted much of what Carny the bartender had told him earlier that night at the Oasis—vigilantes, animal attacks, tensions brewing.

  “There are two Mormon villages heresabouts, Tyler Cabe,” Graybrow said, now dead serious. “One of ‘em is called Redemption and was once a mining town. The Mormons have taken it over and are fixing it to right. People around here, they blame them from Redemption. But they’re wrong. Redemption is just an ordinary town.”

  “What about Deliverance?”

  “That,” Graybrow said, “is another matter. I’m tired now. Maybe another day I’ll tell you about that place, but not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. That is, if I’m—”

  “Sober?”

  “Yep.”

  15

  Cabe figured he slept maybe two, three hours and then came awake to the sound of keys jingling at his cell lock. The door swung open and there was a figure standing there. His head still throbbing from the booze, his eyes glued to slits, and his mouth carpeted in fuzz, he wasn’t sure if he was awake or not.

  Regardless, he knew the dim figure was Jackson Dirker.

  “Sorry to disturb your beauty rest, Cabe,” he said. “God knows you need it, but you don’t belong in here. C’mon, we need to talk.”

  Cabe, after some effort, got his boots down on the floor and managed to sit up. His head pounded and his guts tried to climb up the back of his throat. “Shit,” he said. “I feel pretty much like shit.”

  In the cell next to him, Graybrow was snoring away louder than a crosscut saw biting into hardwood. Cabe once heard that Indians were real quiet, that they didn’t even snore. So much for that one.