by Tim Curran
Skin Medicine
Tim Curran
Tim Curran
Skin Medicine
Part One: The Oblong Box
1
Utah Territory, 1882
The moon came up.
It slid from a satiny, wind-blown grave.
It came up over the mountains like some huge, luminous eye staring down from the misty sky above. Its pallid light sought and touched serrated horns of exposed rock, winked off drifts of snow, and imbued spruce and pine with a ghostly ambience. The wind blew and the trees bent, shadows dripping from them in writhing loops, finding craggy ground and slithering across the landscape like greasy black worms, filling hollows and glens and dark, secret places with night.
And high above, that bloated moon kept watch.
Not daring to blink.
If this was an omen, then it was a bad one.
2
The wagon came pounding down the hard-packed, frozen road that cut through the silver mining camps of the San Francisco Mountains. Like a jagged knife blade, it slit open the underbelly of night, probing, slicing. It bounced over deep-cut ruts laid down by ore wagons and was drawn by a team of black geldings blowing steam from their nostrils. Their iron-shod hoofs rang out like gunshots. A whip cracked and the team vaulted forward and the wagon thumped and bumped and careened.
“ Christ almighty,” Tom Hyden said, clutching the plank seat for dear life. “You’re gonna get us killed, old man. You’re gonna pitch us straight down into one of them ravines. See if you don’t.”
Jack Goode grinned, a cigar stub protruding from his weathered lips. “Man pays me to do a job, sonny, and that job I do,” he said, cracking the whip again, his long white beard blowing up over his face like a loose neckerchief. “I do what he asks and I do it quick as I can on account I got better ways to spend my time.”
Hyden felt the wagon thrashing beneath him, wood groaning and iron creaking. His ass bones were getting jarred right up into his throat. He clung to the seat with one hand and his shotgun with the other. The box in the back rattled in its berth like dice in a cup.
“ Dammit,” he cried, “all we got in the back is a body. A dead one at that. It don’t care if we’re early or late.”
Goode just laughed.
The road dipped, climbed, then cut through a shadowy cedar brake and leveled out as it meandered across a rocky plain. The moon washed everything down with ethereal, uneven light.
“ There,” Goode said. “Whisper Lake ain’t but a cunt-hair down through that gorge. We can slow up some. Here, kid. Take these ribbons.” He passed the reins to Hyden and struck a stick match off his boot, cupping it in his hands, firing up his cigar again. He blew smoke and coughed. “We’re making good time. Luck holds, I’ll be in town just in time for a swallow and a tickle.”
Hyden could see sweat glistening on the horses’ flanks like dew. And maybe some of it was blood. Way the old bastard was working that bullwhip, he’d probably laid their flanks clear open. Hyden sighed, kept his eye on the countryside, kept imagining he saw dark shapes flitting about-shapes like little men. But he was tired, his eyes caked with sleep. If he didn’t put his head down and pretty goddamn soon, he was going to fall right out of the wagon. Squinting his eyes, he thought he saw something running across the twisting road ahead…something that ran upright.
“ You see that?” he said to Goode.
Smoke barreled from Goode’s nostrils like fumes from a foundry stack. “Nope. Didn’t see a thing,” he said. “And I didn’t, because I ain’t looking. If there something out there, mayhap I don’t wanna see it.”
“ It looked like…” Hyden sighed. “Nothing, I guess.”
“ Sure, it was nothing. These goddamn mountains are full of nothing. That’s why I rode us so hard back there-if there was something back there, I didn’t want to see it. Particularly if it looked like little men that weren’t men.”
“ You seen ‘em, then?”
“ Nope. Ain’t seen nothing I wasn’t supposed to see.” Goode stretched, his back popping. “Listen to me, boy. Just keep yer eyes on Whisper Lake. We’ll be there in an hour or so. Just think of the women and the strong drink and the sins of the father.”
Hyden just shook his head. Sometimes he just couldn’t figure Goode out. Sumbitch had a way of talking about something while he was talking about something else entirely. Hyden watched and saw no more shapes. Imagination, that’s what. Fatigue. He didn’t believe in the tales of little men. It was some kind of Shoshone legend. Hyden’s grandpappy Joe, when he wasn’t pulling off a bottle of rye and reminiscing about all the gold strikes he’d been on, talked about ‘em. Said they were real. Said he’d seen ‘em in the mountains. Said he knew a trapper up in the Needle Range had shot one and stuffed it, sold the mummy to some sideshow fellow from Illinois for a case of Kentucky bourbon and a Sharps rifle.
But grandpappy Joe, he did go on.
Hyden had a packet of home-rolled cigarettes and lit one up. They’d been on the trail since the afternoon before. Were bringing a pine box and its occupant from the Goshute tribal lands of Skull Valley down to Whisper Lake in Beaver County. Fifty a piece some injun was paying ‘em. Just to bring a body home.
Shit, but it was a living.
“ Hey, boy, how old you now?” Goode asked.
“ Twenty-three come spring.”
“ Twenty-three.” Goode laughed. “When I was twenty-goddamn-three I had me a Sioux wife and three young-uns up in Dakota Territory. Had me a strike of the yellow stuff worth near hundred thousand.”
“ Then what the hell you doing hauling stiffs for a hundred bucks in this godforsaken land?”
“ I spent it.” Goode went silent, thought about it. “Twenty-three, twenty-three. You ever get yer lily pressed, boy? By a white woman, I’m saying. Why, I know this one down Flagstaff way-runs herself a crib of meat-eating felines with more curves than a loose rope. This one, though, Madame Lorraine, she dunks you in a hot bath, rubs you down with oil and Louisiana perfume, then sucks yer Uncle Henry so goddamn hard, yer eyes get pulled back into yer head-“
“ Quiet,” Hyden said. “I heard something.”
“ Just my bowels blowing off steam, son.”
“ No, damn you, not that.”
Goode listened. Couldn’t hear a thing but the wind skirting the trees and whipping through empty spaces. The sound of the horses hoofs. Not a damn thing else.
“ Boy,” he said, “you quit worrying about them little folk. Got yerself spooked. You might be better looking than a bluetick, but you ain’t much smarter.”
“ It ain’t that. It’s something else.” Hyden looked back in the hold, at that narrow pine box. Could see moonlight reflecting off the brass bands and square nail heads. “Something moved in there.”
“ Stop with that. Dead ‘uns don’t move, take my word for it.”
Hyden just sat there, the countryside too dark and shadow-riven for his liking. He tried to think about Whisper Lake. A soft bed. Some hot food. But then he heard it again…a thumping sound. He was sure it came from inside that casket.
Goode would not look back there. He took the reins back and piloted them through the frosty night. A few snowflakes lit in the air like flies. With any luck, it wouldn’t build into anything before they reached Whisper Lake.
“ What’s worrying you, son?” he finally said.
“ What’s in that box, I guess.”
“ It’s just a dead body.”
“ I know it’s a dead body,” he said. “But I thought…”
“ You better quit thinking, then,” Goode said. “We’re a long way from nowhere to be thinking such things. Dead ‘uns are dead ‘uns. They can’t hurt you no more than a rocking chair can. Keep that in mind.”
Hyden chewed his lip, clutched his shotgun tightly. “I guess I’m wondering what’s in there, what’s in that box. I don’t like it.”
“ Dammit, boy, I don’t like what’s in yer head, but you don’t hear me complaining.”
They rode on and the moon slid behind a cloud and the night grew darker, went black to its roots, seemed to gather around them in clutching, sinister shadows.
“ Boy, light that lantern.”
Hyden reached over the seat…froze-up tight when he thought he heard a shifting sound from inside the box…then quickly grabbed the oil lamp and lit it up with a cupped match. The shadows retreated, but the night seemed bunched around them like a fist anxious to grasp something. It hung to either side of the wagon in sheets and blankets of murk. The hold was creeping with stygian forms.
Goode said, “Yer hearing things back there and that ain’t so strange. Not really. This road is bad and that body is knocking around same as us. Don’t pay it no attention, son.”
But Hyden kept hearing those sounds and something was stirring his guts with a willow twig. “I just been thinking is all,” he said, his breath frosting from his lips. “Been thinking on Skull Valley where we got the box from. Kind of creepy up there. Kind of lonesome and desolate…it puts your mind to things.”
“ What sort of things?”
“ Skull Valley…that’s Spirit Moon’s grounds.”
The old man licked his lips slowly, deliberately. “I hear tell Spirit Moon’s dead.”
“ Some say he don’t die same as others.”
Goode laughed. “Bullshit. Besides, Spirit Moon is from the Snake Nation, boy. Skull Valley is Goshute land. What would Spirit Moon be doing there?”
“ The Snake is just Shoshone, anyhow. Goshutes are tight with ‘em. I heard his tribe is up there in the hills, doing what they do.”
“ Maybe, son, but what you heard about Spirit Moon…those is just witch-tales, is all. Injuns think he’s some big bad medicine doctor, but a white man should know better. Just some Snake witch doctor. A damn injun and he don’t scare me none.”
But Hyden didn’t believe that. Goode even pronounced Spirit Moon’s name kind of low in a whisper…like he was afraid the old injun would hear him from his grave. And maybe he would at that.
“ You ever hear of Walking Mist, boy?”
Hyden said he had. Another Snake medicine man, but from years back.
“ Well, let me tell you about him. Walking Mist was a Snake hoodoo man, too, like Spirit Moon. In fact, he was his ancestral granddaddy. Well, back in the ‘30’s, so I was told, up in the Wasatch, Walking Mist got on the wrong side of a couple beaver trappers from Fort Crockett. The three of ‘em were boozed-up and looking for a fight and happened upon Walking Mist who, it was claimed, refused their offers of marriage to his sisters. They shot Walking Mist down, chopped off his head and buried it in a box. They buried his body somewheres else.” Goode’s face was set and stern in the lamplight. “Well, now old Walking Mist he had himself a high yeller girl for a wife, some nigger out of a Baton Rouge plantation. She was said to be one of them conjure-folk. Said she used to make up love potions and cures for the sick. Made little dolls out of clay and burlap, sprinkled the hair and fingernails from someone she didn’t like in ‘em and put the hex on ‘em. Folks used to pay her to do so…horses, skins, rifles, what not.
“ Well, this high yeller girl goes into one of her voo-doo trances and, sure enough, she locates old Walking Mist’s head with a rod cut from an ash tree. She opens that box and old Walking Mist’s head, powerful crazy medicine man that he was, is still alive. Eyes open. He tells her where his body is buried. Not long after, Walking Mist is seen ambling around, head stitched back on, a funny light in his eyes.”
“ And what about them trappers?”
Goode grinned like a bear skull. “They found ‘em one day. They had twenty-foot stakes shoved right up their asses. Up their asses and right into their throats. Just bobbing in the wind up atop them stakes that were driven into the ground. Thing was, nobody never did find their heads.” Goode spit his cigar butt into the night. “I heard that from an old Ute I used to do some drinking with.”
“ I thought you didn’t like Indians?”
“ This ‘un was different.”
Hyden was nodding his head up and down. “That story, I believe it. My grandpappy Joe said that Spirit Moon was part demon and part human, could do anything he set his mind to. Grandpappy said a copper miner lost his hand in a cave-in and Spirit Moon rubbed something on it and called names into the sky and a month later, that hand grew back. Grandpappy Joe said it was true. Said Spirit Moon had eyes like coals. When them eyes looked at you, you were never the same again.”
“ Country’s ripe with bullshit, son.”
“ Some of it’s true.”
“ Maybe.”
“ There was a Paiute from the Cedar Band that had two heads,” Hyden said. “I saw him once. It was true enough.”
Goode laughed. “Next you’ll be telling me you can rope a bronco with yer pecker and still have enough left to make a dance hall gal whistle Dixie in the dark.”
Hyden felt his ears burn like they’d been branded. “If you don’t believe in nothing, then why you tell me that story of Walking Mist?”
“ To pass the time, boy, strictly to pass the time and to see how gullible you are. And dammit, yer gullible. That Ute believed what he told me, but I expected better from you being a white man. If I’d known you were afraid of spooks, I woulda got me another boy to ride shotgun.”
“ My grandpappy Joe-“
“ Yer grandpappy Joe was full of more shit that a privy pit,” Goode said. “And don’t take that the wrong way, son. But he liked to talk is all. Now, enough with this fool yarning, I say.”
And it was enough.
Hyden was thinking about Skull Valley. The day before, they’d pulled into a little Goshute camp situated at the base of a rise punched through with caves. Some young buck in an army shirt and bowler hat was waiting for them with the pine box at the side of the dirt trail. A couple old men in trade blankets were standing in a loose circle muttering some nonsense. The buck-didn’t look like no medicine man-paid Goode without so much as a word, seemed relieved almost. The body was that of some white man who had kin in Whisper Lake. They never learned what the Goshute were doing with it and they didn’t ask. But now, thinking on it, Hyden was wondering what those old men were up to and if that young buck was some kind of shirt-tail relation to Spirit Moon.
Hard to say.
Hyden didn’t know if they were Goshute or Snake. He’d only seen Spirit Moon once. Over at the store in Ophir, Toole County. Spirit Moon had been there with his sons, who were loading his wagon. The old man was wrapped up in a buffalo robe and there were beads and feathers braided into his hair. His face was a maze of tiny scars that seemed to move like writhing maggots. Hyden had turned away then, before the old man looked upon him. Before-
There was a shifting in the box and both of them heard it this time.
They looked at each other in the eerie, flickering lantern light, something like fear cut into their faces. They quickly looked away. Hyden licked his lips, but he didn’t have any saliva left.
Something was happening.
He could pretend otherwise, but something was building around them like heat lightning and they could both feel it. But they were men. Grown men with a job to do and it had to be done.
From the box there was a thump, then a rustling.
“ Boy,” Goode said, his breath not coming real easy, “take a look back there for the love of Christ…what the hell am I hearing?”
Hyden felt a white-hot terror in his belly, felt it feeding up into his chest. He leaned over the seat, shotgun in one hand, lantern in the other. His skin was crawling in undulating waves. He was cold to the bone…but it was not from the clammy April night. He looked at the box, the lantern casting tongues of light over its lid. The brass hasps were still fitted into place. All them t
hose-Jesus, had to be a hundred of them-still pounded into the lid. Only…only, didn’t it almost look like five or six of them were sticking up now? Like maybe something inside was pushing them through? Hyden felt a grim weight settle over him, crushing him down like a granite graveyard slab. He felt weak, paralyzed even. The atmosphere around him was blanched, soured, thick with something that just ripped the heart straight out of his chest.
As he watched, two of the nails slid out of the lid with a groaning sound. They popped free and clattered into the hold.
“ What in the Christ?” Goode said, his voice sounding choked and dry. The moon came back out and his face was discolored and sickly. “Mind me, boy! What was that?”
“ Nails…” Hyden tried to say, but there was no air in his lungs. Just something blowing and drifting like desert sand. “Them nails…they’re starting to pop free…”
“ Yer imagining shit!” Goode said. “Or…or maybe that body’s bloating. Known ‘em to burst a box right open…happens sometimes.”
But Hyden just shook his head. Things like that didn’t happen in cold weather.
Then they both heard it. A noise from inside that box-a scraping, scratching sound like fingernails on wood. There was horror in both men’s eyes. A huge, relentless horror that spilled out like tears and into the night, surrounding them, enclosing them, wrapping them tight in a shroud. The darkness slithered and whispered.
Then: thump, thump, thump. Pounding fists.
Goode drew in a sharp breath: “Get up! Get up!” he cried to the horses, his whip cracking like thunder. “Get-up you sonsofbitches! Get-up!”
Hyden just kept watching the box, wondering maybe if his scattergun would be of any use against what tried to climb out of it. Whatever was happening in there, it wasn’t good. Wasn’t natural. There were arcane mysteries fermenting in there, dark alchemies brewing, spectral truths rattling their teeth. In the black, noisome darkness, something was breathing and aware. And that something was worse than anything Hyden could imagine.