I know then we’ve lost her. I know she’s bewitched.
* * *
A few nights later, Lina went wandering again, and this time she didn’t return. I was in Gallup getting wasted with Orlando. Mami thought Lina was with me and didn’t report her missing until the next day. The tribal police got involved, posters went up, and people searched the arroyos and acequias, but then the deaths of four joyriding teenagers in a head-on with a semi out by Church Rock stole everybody’s attention. As for me, the only searching I did for my sister was in a heroin haze in the desert after she was long gone.
“So what happened, Drunk Girl? You get arrested again?” Mami snorted when I dragged myself into the kitchen, exhausted after my visit to Blileytown the night before.
I collapsed on the couch, staring up at the whirling ceiling. I tried to find words to explain where I’d been, what I’d seen. Hair and bones poking up out of the sand and something half-human that flew me through an eternal night, impaled and enthralled.
“Well?” Mami demanded when I’d been quiet too long.
She brought her plate into the living room and slammed it down on the table. Crossed her meaty arms. Glowered. “So, Drunk Girl, you know what I do last night when Arthur Yazzie won’t let me sleep?”
It took me a second to remember Arthur Yazzie wasn’t some hot boyfriend, but how the old people referred to arthritis. She went on, “First I call Leo, because he’s wise in the ways of the shaman, and he tells me Lina is probably fine, that she must have ran off to L.A. or Vegas to start a new life. So I say, ’Bullshit, old coot! What do you know?’ and hang up. Then I go out in the desert and call to the skinwalker Alfonso Nez saw years ago. I call to the Minotaur to come sit with me.”
I had an image of Mami, ponderous on swollen ankles and arthritic joints, armed with her rosary and fetishes, braving the darkness to conjure up monsters.
Any other time I would have laughed, but today I wasn’t so sure the skinwalkers weren’t real. Still, I tried to dismiss her. “That’s a sick fucking joke.”
“No joke.” She chomped down on frybread folded over a heap of Navajo round steak and gnawed pugnaciously with stump teeth. Bits of bologna spewed from her mouth. I put my arm over my eyes. “I got something to tell him,” she said.
“There’s no skinwalkers,” I mumbled, gummy tongue adhering to furred teeth. “Alfonso Nez was probably doing peyote and ran into a cow.”
Mami shook a sausage-thick finger. “You think skinwalkers just a Navajo superstition, but what do you know, Drunk Girl?”
More than I wanted to, I thought, but what I said was, “I know that even if there’s some psycho out there hunting women, he’s not coming for you. You’re too old and too fat.”
“Old and fat’s better than stupid and squaybe!” She pulled a face like there was a stink to the bologna. “What I want to say to the Minotaur is, ‘Listen, asshole, you fucked up when you took my Lina. She had a good life ahead of her. She was a hard worker, a good student. Didn’t hang out with trash and slut around and drink herself blind. Didn’t bring shame on the family.’ She was nothing like you.”
“Lina is nothing like me!” In my outrage, I lunged up off the sofa too fast. The walls lurched and turquoise paint oozed down the robes of the Virgin in her niche by the kiva. I steadied myself. “Don’t talk like she’s dead!”
My anger must have frightened Mami—either that or she was scared I was about to projectile vomit again—because she got up and lumbered to the window, squinting out at the shimmering heat waves like she expected Lina to come strolling through them.
“She must’ve went off to meet somebody she knew, and the Minotaur saw her,” Mami said and turned her bitter black gaze onto me. I felt the bone tremble in my pocket like a warning. I knew I should speak, but the words wouldn’t come, and I felt a surge of something cold and disloyal.
“You think Lina was so perfect? You should’ve seen her, humping the mattress and tearing out her own hair!”
Mami stared at me like I was roadkill served up on a platter. When she spoke again, the words unspooled from her tongue like a curse.
“So you know why I called to the Minotaur?”
I felt too broken to ask.
“Cause I want to tell the son of a bitch that I’ll make him a trade. I got a girl here who won’t get a job or do chores or act decent. Girl who runs wild like a jackrabbit. I tell the Minotaur to come take Drunk Girl away and bring back my good daughter Lina.”
* * *
Mami’s voice was so full of loathing and scorn that I didn’t dare tell her what happened in Blileytown, or show her the bone that I’d found. Worse, I later discovered she’d ransacked my room and thrown out all of my booze so I had nothing to bolster my courage for what I had decided to do. Finally, I grabbed a bottle of Listerine from the medicine cabinet, stuffed it in my back pocket and took the bus to the outskirts of Gallup.
Uncle Leo lived north of the city, in a split-level modular tucked away on a rural road without much else besides cactuses, but his courtyard was tree-shaded and restful, an escape from the punishing heat of midday. Birdhouses hung from the juniper branches and scarlet ristras swung from the portal.
Leo was outside tending his garden of succulents. A sweat-stained t-shirt clung to his back and his grey-streaked black hair was tied back with a bandanna. When I called to him, he smiled and straightened up, wincing with a hand to the small of his back.
We sat in the porch chairs and chatted a while before I asked him if he really believed what he told Mami, that Lina had left town to make a new start.
He spread his big hands, which were calloused and scarred from years of carpentry work. “What do you expect me to say to her, Franki? That I think Lina’s in the ground rotting somewhere? That would be too cruel, and besides, we don’t know for sure.”
I pounced on that. “What if she’s alive, but she needs help getting home because a demon’s possessed her? You could do an Enemy Way ceremony to protect her from evil.”
Leo hefted himself out of the chair and shuffled out into the garden. “Not many young people believe in demons these days. I’m surprised that you do.”
So I told him about the fits Lina had suffered, and about the thing lurking out by the gate, but I didn’t tell him about my dream of flying through the night with a monster. I was too ashamed to talk about that.
Leo spoke gravely. “That was the moth frenzy that afflicted your sister. She must’ve caught the eye of a skinwalker and he sent his wild energy into her. He drove her mad.”
When he said that, I thought about Blileytown and suddenly remembered finding tarantula hair in my teeth. I clenched my jaw so I wouldn’t throw up.
“Do the ceremony for her,” I snapped, annoyed with his puttering among the clusters of barrel cactuses and coachwhips with their shiny, spiked leaves.
Leo bent to pluck a dead leaf from a fleshy, blue-green agave. When he straightened again, his knees popped like gunshots. “You know how a skinwalker gets his power? By killing a family member. That’s the price for their shape changing, their ability to entice and cast spells. The corpse dust they use, they make that from the bones of the people they kill. You can’t fight a skinwalker, Franki. If you’d talked to me earlier, when the moth frenzy first started, maybe I could’ve done something, but now…”
I’d thought something similar myself. Maybe if I didn’t stay drunk and high all the time, I could’ve done more to help Lina and Mami wouldn’t be wishing it was me gone instead. The guilt stung, and I lashed out. “You could still do the Enemy Way ceremony. You loved Lina! Mami always said she was your favorite.”
“Your Mami doesn’t know everything, Franki.”
I didn’t know what he meant, so I blurted, “Then I need something else. I need you to get me a gun.”
He looked like I’d asked him to help me hold up the Stop N Save. “Forget that. Way you live, too many things can go wrong. Only person ending up dead will probably be you. Now, if you want
money to go to that rehab in Tuba City, I might be able to spare a few bucks.”
“I’m gonna get sober,” I muttered for maybe the five-hundredth time in my life.
Leo sighed and ran his fingers over the leathery leaf of a coachwhip, caressing the plant like you’d touch a pet dog. Although he was standing a good ten feet away, his nostrils twitched and deep furrows ridged his high forehead. “Listerine, Franki? You’ve sunk to drinking mouthwash these days?”
* * *
I figured Orlando would show me more respect, so I cruised Coal Street until I found him asleep in an oval of shade behind the Fu King Smoke Shop. He came awake growling when I kicked the soles of his boots.
“Shit you want, Franki?” When I told him why I needed a gun, he said I was batshit crazy and besides, guns weren’t cheap, but when I flashed the wad of cash I’d conned out of Leo, letting him think I might actually go into rehab, he exclaimed “Howah!” and changed his tune fast.
We went to his Dad’s house and I waited while he rummaged through the garage and came back with a .44 Magnum, matte black in a leather holster. It was sexy and lethal-looking and would probably kick me all the way to Las Cruces if I fired it, but I clipped it onto my belt and yanked out my shirttail to cover the bulge. The Listerine buzz was a faint afterburn now, replaced with a shivery nausea. I asked Orlando to get me something to drink. While he was doing that, I spotted a sweet little folding knife inside a table drawer and slipped it in my back pocket.
He came back with a rectangle of black tar, and we shot up and attempted to fuck. When he got sentimental and said going into the desert alone was too dangerous, I told him I’d be okay, and besides, he was going to go with me.
* * *
Near twilight we rode his broke-ass dirt bike out to the crossroads, banged another quarter mile through the scrub, then ditched the bike in an arroyo and set off for Blileytown. I was the bait, walking up ahead to try and lure out the Minotaur, while he followed behind out of sight.
I’d made this trek so many times I knew it by heart, but tonight the landscape looked surreal and distorted. Even the burnt-orange horizon seemed saturated in gloom. Night didn’t just fall here, it dropped like a club to the back of the head. One minute I was squinting into the glare of a fever-red sunset, the next I was stumbling into gullies and slashing my arms on the cholla spines while a paper-thin moon teased hazy light from behind a funnel of clouds. A gritty wind lashed my hair, and coyotes keened a hysterical dirge to whatever poor thing they were rending. When I sensed something coming inhumanly fast at my back, I pulled out the Magnum and almost fired on a rabbit that went bounding past.
Orlando was being a dick, playing some kind of game. He was supposed to keep pace, pausing when I paused, flashing a penlight to let me know he was there. Instead he was either lagging too far behind or following too closely, bumbling into bushes and sending rocks clattering.
Overhead, the sky swarmed with corkscrews of cloud and the stars bled cold, distant light. An owl carved the air with a baleful whoosh and soared past with a mouse struggling in its talons. I hadn’t heard Orlando make any noise for some time now. I was starting to think he’d turned back and abandoned me, but I resisted the urge to call out.
I made it another quarter mile, my nerves increasingly fraught, before the jagged silhouette of San Felipe came into view, and I stopped short with shock. Swastikas covered every inch of the decaying walls. It pissed me off that vandals had done this until I realized the black and red geometric designs weren’t spray-painted on, but were seething out of cracks in the ancient adobe and scurrying away on nimble, reddish-haired legs. I realized that this was where the tarantulas in my dream came from. Blileytown was their nest. Too numerous to crowd onto the walls, they began scaling the black enamel bowl of the night, scuttling across constellations while comets shot past them like tracers. Sometimes a comet would hit its target and burn one of the spiders to ash, but most missed. The tarantulas, manic and vengeful, laid siege to the sky.
I stared at this lurid sight, mesmerized, until I heard Orlando murmur, “Howah,” close by, and that jarred me out of the trance. The word, uttered calmly enough but with a distinct undercurrent of awe, seemed to come from inside the churchyard. I forced myself to climb onto the wall that was now bare of spiders and felt the finger bone shift in my pocket and dig into my hip. It felt alive, like the woman it had belonged to was urging me along. Go find him. Go kill my killer.
From my vantage point atop the wall, I searched for Orlando, but the courtyard was black upon blacker. Some celestial joker had unplugged the stars and thumbed out the moon. Jumping down from the wall was an act of pure faith. When my feet hit the ground I thanked a god I had never believed in, then realized my gratitude might be misplaced because what I saw made my blood freeze.
The skycrawlers had scuttled back into their cosmic rabbit holes, but the chollas were ornamented with bizarre and hideous vines, the limbs of dead women draping their branches in pale, fungal-like strands. Caught on the cactus spines, their tattered skin fluttered like the putrid remains of a pageant of crucifixions. Where the flesh had been eaten away gleamed mottled patches of bone.
Orlando had been positioned with a certain crude jest so that his stupefied stare seemed directed between the thighs of a dead woman dangling above him. When I touched his face, an eyelid peeled off like cellophane and fluttered away in the wind, leaving a damp stain on my fingers.
Something veered through the scrub and I whirled, the gun gripped in both hands, firing at a shadow with a gobbet of meat in its mouth. I didn’t hit the coyote, but the recoil of the Magnum damn near dislocated my shoulder. I went deaf from the explosion and blind from the flash, and one of my fingers broke when I fought to hold on as the gun was pried from my hand. A suffocating weight mashed me into the dirt, and the Minotaur’s huge head, with its matted hair and wide-spaced, bloody horns, lowered itself toward my face.
I found the folding knife in my pocket, but in my desperation to click out the blade I slashed my palm, ring finger to wrist.
The Minotaur opened my legs like a book he was going to rip cover to cover. Beyond his horns I could see the phantom faces of his victims, their eyes bright with a terrible elation that might have been mistaken for lust.
“The dead women,” I whispered. “They’re here.”
Words rumbled from vocal chords not intended for speech. “It’s good you can see them. You’ll join them soon. They love me so they stay close.”
Blood pumped from the gash in my hand, and my fingers were numb, but I felt the curve of the knife hilt and I grabbed it.
The monster’s huge nostrils flared. He looked down at the knife. I knew he would take it away from me and probably drive it into my heart, but he instead snatched up the fragment of bone that had fallen out of my pocket.
He held it up, sniffed it. Dog sounds came from his throat. He tilted his massive head back, the better to inhale the scent. “Your sister’s. I remember her smell. She was eager. She wanted me all the time.”
I stabbed the blade into the base of his neck where the coarse animal hair thinned and a man’s blue vein bulged. The shock jolted him upright and his muscles went rigid. He slapped at his throat, a motion which only drove the blade deeper as blood streamed down his chest. I thought he would topple over and crush me, but he lurched to his feet and shambled away, gouts of blood jetting when he yanked the blade out of his neck. I was on my feet, too, and I glanced back as I ran. He had dropped to his knees and was drinking his own blood from his cupped hands, the dead women mournful, coiled around him like ribbons of thin, patchy fog.
* * *
When I finally made it back to the road and was picked up by a passing motorist, I was raving about dead women hung from the chollas and claiming I’d been raped by a skinwalker.
The tribal police found Orlando’s gored body stuffed into an abandoned coyote den. His face, apparently, was intact, but the pathologist was baffled by the puncture wounds to his belly
, which clearly weren’t made by coyotes or by the gun with my fingerprints on it. Around San Felipe, a forensics team dug up the bodies of five women who’d gone missing over the years. None of the remains belonged to my sister, and although I tried to take detectives to the place where I’d found the skeleton, I wasn’t able to locate it.
I spent a month at a shelter in Albuquerque for addicted and traumatized women. I felt safe there, even put on some weight, but the day before I went home, someone hung a scarlet ristra on the door to my room. I screamed when I saw it and tore it apart with my hands.
I should have realized this wasn’t the end of it.
* * *
My first night at home, I wake up lathered in sweat, my body rippling with energy that arches my spine until I think it will snap and violently jitters my legs. I stuff the sheet in my mouth so I don’t scream when my skin starts to crawl off. It slides from my arms like a pair of long gloves, leaving behind only the barest shadows of tattoos and moles, then the rest of it creeps off my body. My face, neck and scalp peel off last with a death-rattle snap, which is when I first see the Minotaur outside by the gap where the gate used to be. Naked and wanton, he snares my skin in his fist and loops it around his groin like a trophy.
After a few nights of this, I stop eating and won’t leave the house. Mami thinks that I’m using and starts calling me Drunk Girl again, but how can I think of liquor or smack when I’m wrecked all the time now, my mind reeling, undone, and the phrase ‘fuck your brains out’ is no longer crass slang, but a dismal, unhinging reality.
One night, in desperation, I drive my head into the wall, but that only makes the assault worse because as my consciousness flickers and dims, his power expands, and I come to convulsing with his violent energy running amok in my veins.
Peel Back the Skin Page 5