McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  in her kiss. But the nightmarish Seventh Cavalry came in

  waking life—with a taste for human flesh.

  Two cops, one big and the other little, traveled through the dark. The big cop hated Indians. Born and raised in a Montana that was home to eleven different reservations and over 47,000 Indians, the big cop’s hatred had grown vast. Over a twenty-two-year law enforcement career he’d spent in service to one faded Montana town or another, the big cop had arrested 1,217 Indians for offenses ranging from shoplifting to assault, from bank robbery to homicide, all of the crimes committed while under the influence of one chemical or another.

  “Damn redskins would drink each other’s piss if they thought there was enough booze left in it,” the big cop said to the little cop, a nervous little snake-boy just a few years out of Anaconda High School.

  “Sure,” said the little cop. He was a rookie and wasn’t supposed to say much at all.

  It was June 25th, three in the morning, and still over 100 degrees. Sweating through his polyester uniform, the big cop drove the patrol car east along Interstate 90, heading for the Custer Memorial Battlefield on the banks of the Little Big Horn River.

  “But you want to know the worst thing I ever saw?” asked the big cop. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other in his crotch. He felt safer that way.

  “Sure,” said the little cop.

  “Out on the Crow rez, I caught these Indian boys,” the big cop said. “There were five or six of them scalp-hunters, all of them pulling a train on this pretty little squaw-bitch.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “Shoot, that ain’t the bad part. Gang rape is, like, a sacred tradition on some of these rez ghettoes. Hell, the bad part ain’t the rape. The bad part is the boys were feeding this girl some Lysol sandwiches.”

  “What’s a Lysol sandwich?”

  “You just take two slices of bread, spray them hard with Lysol, slam them together, and eat it all up.”

  “That’ll kill you, won’t it?”

  “Sure, it will kill you, but slow. Make you a retard first, make you run around in a diaper for about a year, and then it will kill you.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “About the worst thing there is,” said the big cop.

  The little cop stared out the window and marveled again at the number of visible stars in the Montana sky. The little cop knew he lived in the most beautiful place in the world.

  The big cop took the Little Big Horn exit off I-90, drove the short distance to the visitors’ center, and then down a bumpy road to the surprisingly simple gates of the Custer Memorial Cemetery.

  “This is it,” said the big cop. “This is the place where it all went to shit.”

  “Sure,” said the little cop.

  “Two hundred and fifty-six good soldiers, good men, were murdered here on that horrible June day in 1876,” said the big cop. He’d said the same thing many times before. It was part of a speech he was always rehearsing.

  “I know it,” said the little cop. He wondered if he should say a prayer.

  “If it wasn’t for these damn Indians,” said the big cop, “Custer would’ve been the president of these United States.”

  “Right.”

  “We’d be living in a better country right now, let me tell you what.”

  “Yes, we would.”

  The big cop shook his head at all of the injustice of the world. He knew he was a man with wisdom and felt burdened by the weight of that powerful intelligence.

  “Well,” said the big cop. “We’ve got some work to do.”

  “Sure,” said the little cop.

  The cops stepped outside, both cursing the ridiculous heat, and walked to the back of the car. The big cop opened the trunk and stared down at the two Indian men lying there awake, silent, bloodied, and terrified. The cops had picked them up hitchhiking on the Flathead Reservation and driven them for hours through the limitless dark.

  “Come on out of there, boys,” said the big cop with a smile.

  The Indians, one a young man with braids and the other an older man with a crew cut, crawled out of the trunk and stood on unsteady legs. Even with already-closing eyes and broken noses, with shit and piss running down their legs, and with nightstick bruises covering their stomachs and backs, the Indians tried to stand tall.

  “You know where you are?” the big cop asked the Indians.

  “Yes,” said the older one.

  “Tell me.”

  “Little Big Horn.”

  “You know what happened here?”

  The older Indian remained silent.

  “You better talk to me, boy,” said the big cop. “Or I’m going to hurt you piece by piece.”

  The older Indian knew he was supposed to be pleading and begging for mercy, for his life, as he’d had to beg for his life from other uniformed white men. But the older Indian was suddenly tired of being afraid. He felt brave and stupid. The younger Indian knew how defiant his older friend could be. He wanted to run.

  “Hey, chief,” said the big cop. “I asked you a question. Do you know what happened here?”

  The older Indian refused to talk. He lifted his chin and glared at the big cop.

  “Fuck it,” said the big cop as he pulled his revolver and shot the older Indian in the face, then shot him twice more in the chest after he crashed to the ground. Though the big cop had lived and worked violently, this was his first murder, and he was surprised by how easy it was.

  After a moment of stunned silence, the younger Indian ran, clumsily zigzagging between gravestones, and made it thirty feet before the big cop shot him in the spine, and dropped him into the dirt.

  “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” said the younger cop, terrified. He knew he had to make a decision: Be a good man and die there in the cemetery with the Indians or be an evil man and help disappear two dead bodies.

  “What do you think of that?” the big cop asked the little cop.

  “I think it was good shooting.”

  Decision made, the little cop jogged over to the younger Indian lying there alive and half-paralyzed. His spine was shattered, and he’d die soon, but the Indian reached out with bloodied hands, grabbed handfuls of dirt, rock, and grass, tearing his nails off in the process, and pulled himself away in one last stupid and primal effort to survive. With his useless legs dragging behind him, the Indian looked like a squashed bug. Like a cockroach in blue jeans, thought the little cop and laughed a little, then retched his truck stop dinner all over the back of the dying Indian.

  There and here, everywhere, Indian blood spilled onto the ground, and seeped down into the cemetery dirt.

  The big cop kneeled beside the body of the old Indian and pushed his right index finger into the facial entrance wound and wondered why he was doing such a terrible thing. With his damn finger in this dead man’s brain, the big cop felt himself split in two and become twins, one brother a killer and the other an eyewitness to murder.

  Away, the little cop was down on all fours, dry heaving and moaning like a lonely coyote.

  “What’s going on over there?” asked the big cop.

  “This one is still alive,” said the little cop.

  “Well, then, finish him off.”

  The little cop struggled to his feet, pulled his revolver, and pressed it against the back of the Indian’s head. Maybe he would have found enough cowardice and courage to pull the trigger, but he never got the chance. All around him, awakened and enraptured by Indian blood, the white soldiers in tattered uniforms exploded from their graves and came for the little cop. As he spun in circles, surrounded, he saw how many of these soldiers were little more than skeletons with pieces of dried meat clinging to their bones. Some of the soldiers still had stomachs and lungs leaking blood through jagged wounds, and other soldiers picked at their own brains through arrow holes punched into their skulls, and a few dumb, clumsy ones tripped over their intestines and ropy veins spilling onto the ground. Dead for over a century and now
alive and dead at the same time, these soldiers rushed the little cop. Backpedaling, stepping side to side, the little cop dodged arms and tongueless mouths as he fired his revolver fifteen times. Even while panicked and shooting at moving targets, he was still a good marksman. He blasted the skull off one soldier, shot the arms off two others and the leg off a third, had six bullets pass through the ribs of a few officers and one zip through the empty eye socket of a sergeant. But even without arms, legs, and heads, the soldiers came for him and knocked him to the ground, where they pulled off his skin in long strips, exposed his sweet meats, and feasted on him. Just before two privates pulled out his heart and tore it into halves, the little cop watched a lieutenant, with a half-decayed face framing one blue eye, feed the big cop’s cock and balls to a horse whose throat, esophagus, and stomach were clearly visible through its ribs.

  That night, as the Seventh Cavalry rose from their graves in Montana, Edgar Smith slept in his bed in Washington, D.C., and dreamed for the first time about the death of George Armstrong Custer.

  Inside the dream, it was June 1876 all over again, and Custer was the last survivor of his own foolish ambitions. On a grassy hill overlooking the Little Big Horn River, Custer crawled over the bodies of many dead soldiers and a few dead Indians. Seriously wounded, but strong enough to stand and stagger, then walk on broken legs, Custer was followed by a dozen quiet warriors, any one of them prestigious enough to be given the honor of killing this famous Indian Killer, this Long Hair, this Son of the Morning Star. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull walked behind Custer, as did Gall, Crow King, Red Horse, Low Dog, Foolish Elk, and others close and far. But it was a quiet Cheyenne woman, a warrior whose name has never been spoken aloud since that day, who stepped forward with an arrow in her hand and stabbed it through Custer’s heart. After Custer fell and died, the Cheyenne woman stood over his body and sang for two hours. She sang while her baby son slept in the cradleboard on her back. She sang an honor song for the brave Custer, for the great white warrior, and when she ended her song, she kneeled and kissed the general. But Custer was no longer Custer. The quiet Cheyenne woman kissed Edgar Smith lying dead in the greasy grass of his dream.

  A ringing telephone pulled Edgar from sleep. Reflexively and professionally, he answered, heard the details of his mission, grabbed a bag that was always packed, and hurried for the airport. Brown-eyed, brown-haired, pale of skin, and just over six feet tall, he was completely unremarkable in appearance, a blank Caucasian slate. Measured by his surface, Edgar could have been a shortstop for the New York Yankees, a dentist from Sacramento, or the night shift manager at a supermarket. This mutability made him the ideal FBI agent.

  Two hours after the phone call, after his Custer dream, Edgar sat in a window seat of the FBI jet flying toward the massacre site in Montana. All around him, other anonymous field agents busied themselves with police reports and history texts, with biographies and data on Native American radicals, white separatists, domestic terrorists, religious cultists, and the other assorted crazies who lived within a five-hundred-mile radius of the Custer Memorial Battlefield.

  “Can you imagine the number of men it took to pull this off?” asked one agent. “Over two hundred graves looted and sacked. How big a truck do you need to haul off two hundred bodies? You’d need a well-trained army. I’m thinking militia.”

  “But it’s two hundred dead bodies buried for a hundred years, so that’s about two million pieces of dead bodies,” said another agent. “Hell, you’d be hauling loose teeth, ribs, some hair, a fingernail or two, and just plain dust. You’d need a vacuum for all this. It’s not the size of the job; it’s the ritual nature of it. You have to be crazy to do this, and you have to be even crazier to convince a bunch of other people to do it with you. We’re looking for the King of the Crazy People.”

  “You want my opinion?” asked the third agent. “I’m thinking these two dead Indians, along with a bunch of other radical Indians, were desecrating these graves. I mean, it is the anniversary of Custer’s Last Stand, right? They were trying to get back at Custer.”

  “But Custer isn’t even buried there,” said a fourth agent. “He’s buried at West Point.”

  “So maybe these were stupid Indians,” said yet another agent. “These Indians were pissing and shitting on the graves, digging them up, and piling the bones and shit into some old pickup. And along come our local boys, Mr. Fat Cop and Mr. Skinny Cop, who shoot a couple of renegades before the rest of the tribe rises up and massacres them.”

  “That’s well and good,” said the last agent, “but damn, the local coroner says our cops were chewed on. Human bite marks all over their bones and what’s left of their bodies. Are you saying a cannibalistic army of Indian radicals ate the cops?”

  All of the agents, hard-core veterans of domestic wars, laughed long and hard. They’d all seen the evil that men do, and it was usually simple and concise, and always the result of the twisted desire for more power, money, or sex. Perhaps the killers in this case were new and unusual. The FBI agents thrilled at the possibility of discovering an original kind of sin and capturing an original group of sinners. The local cops had described the massacre scene as the worst thing they’d ever seen, but each FBI agent was quite confident he’d already seen the worst death he would ever see. One more death, no matter how ugly, was just one more death.

  In his seat apart from the other agents, Edgar wondered why he had dreamed about Custer on the same night, at the very same moment, these horrible murders were happening on the battlefield that bore Custer’s name. He didn’t believe in ESP or psychics, in haunted houses or afterlife experiences, or in any of that paranormal bullshit. Edgar believed in science, in cause and effect, in the here and now, in facts. But no matter how rational he pretended to be, he knew the world had always contained more possibilities than he could imagine, and now, here he was, confronted by the very fact of a dream killing so closely tied with real killings. Edgar Smith was scared.

  He was even more scared after he and the other agents walked over a rise and stood before the Little Big Horn massacre site. Three of the agents immediately vomited and could only work the perimeter of the scene. Another agent, who was the first rescuer at the bombing of the U.S. military barracks in Beirut and had searched the rubble for bodies and pieces of body, turned back at the cemetery gate and retired on half-pension. Everybody else ran back to their cars and donned thick yellow haz-mat suits with oxygen tanks. Trembling with terror and nausea, the agents worked hard. They had a job to do, and they performed it with their customary grace and skill, but all along, the agents doubted they had enough strength to face an enemy capable of such destruction.

  Edgar counted two hundred and fifty-six open graves, all of them filled with blood, pieces of skin, and unidentifiable body parts. Witches’ cauldrons, thought Edgar as he stared down into the worst of them. The dirt and grass were so soaked with blood and viscera that it felt like walking through mud. And then there was the dead. One of the state cops, or what was left of him, was smeared all over his cruiser. He was now a pulp-filled uniform and one thumb dark with fingerprint powder. The other cop was spread over a twenty-foot circle, his blood and bones mixing with the blood and bones of one Indian. The other Indian, older, maybe fifty years old, was largely untouched, except for twenty or thirty tentative bite marks, as if his attackers had tasted him and found him too sour. One tooth, a human molar, was broken off at the root and imbedded in the old Indian’s chin. This was all madness, madness, madness, and Edgar knew that a weaker person could have easily fallen apart here and run screaming into the distance. A weaker person might have looked for escape, but Edgar knew he would never truly leave this nightmare.

  And yet, Edgar could only know the true extent of this nightmare after he followed the blood trails. There were two hundred and fifty-six blood trails, one for each grave, and they led away from the cemetery in all directions. Occasionally, five or ten or fifteen blood trails would merge into one, until there were only
forty or fifty blood trails in total, all of them leading away in different directions. Eventually all of these trails faded into the grass and dirt, and became only a stray drop of blood, a strip of shed skin, or small chip of bone, then a series of footprints or single hoofprint before they disappeared altogether. Edgar had no idea what humans, animals, or things had left these blood trails, but they were gone now, traveling in a pattern that suggested they were either randomly fleeing from the murder scene or beginning a carefully planned hunt.

  Early the next morning, in Billings, Montana, Junior Estes sat on the front counter of the Town Pump convenience store, where he’d worked graveyard shift for two years. He worked alone that night because his usual partner, Harry Quakenbrush, had called in sick at the last moment.

  “Jesus,” Junior had cursed. “You know I can’t get nobody to work graveyard at the last sec. Come on, Harry, if you ain’t got cancer of the balls, then you better get your ass in here.”

  “It is cancer of the nuts, and you should feel sorry for bringing it up,” Harry had said as he’d hung up the phone and crawled back into bed with his new girlfriend.

  So Junior was all by himself in the middle of the night, and knew he couldn’t cashier, stock the coolers, and disinfect the place all at the same time, so he decided to do nothing. He might get fired when the boss man showed up at 6 A.M., but he knew Harry would get fired, too, and that would be all right enough. Most nights, twenty or thirty insomniacs, other night shift workers, and the just plain crazy would wander into the store, but only two hookers had been in that night and had pointedly ignored Junior. Poor Junior wasn’t ugly, but he was lonely, and that made him stink.

  At 3:17 A.M., according to the time stamped on the surveillance tape, Junior noticed a man staggering in slow circles around the gas pump. Junior grabbed a baseball bat from beneath the counter and dashed outside. The external cameras were too blurry and dark to pick up much detail as he confronted the drunken man. A few years earlier, up north in Poplar, a drunk Indian had set a gas pump on fire and burned down half a city block, so Junior must have remembered that as he pushed the man away from the store. Then, at the very edge of the video frame, the drunken man grabbed Junior by the head and bit out his throat. As the video rolled, the drunken man fell on Junior and ate him. Later examination of the videotape revealed that the drunken man was horribly scarred and that he was wearing a Seventh Cavalry uniform, circa 1876.