Skin Medicine

by Tim Curran

  Some things had to be kept secret.

  Like the history of the Callister brothers, for instance.

  Nobody in town knew much about them. Like everyone else they had just drifted in like leaves before a harsh Autumn wind. They blew in and set up a cabinetry shop and then the local undertaker had died, so Hiram decided they should get into that end of things, too, since most cabinetmakers were undertakers as well.

  So they did and in a town with a very high mortality rate like Whisper Lake, it proved very lucrative. Extremely so. Eventually (and with the population boom) the Callisters gave up making cabinets and concentrated on coffins and undertaking. And this is all people really knew about the Callister brothers, aside from whispers and gossip.

  They didn’t know that they were from Logansport in western Louisiana or that their father had been a cabinetmaker and his father before him. They didn’t know what it was like growing up with a man who was hardened by life and physically powerful from uncounted years of harsh manual labor. A man that liked to drink and use his fists on his family. Caleb himself had tasted the fury of those fists on numerous occasions as had Hiram. And that time the old man had caught Hiram out in the barn with that other boy doing those disgusting things, he’d nearly beaten him to death.

  Only Caleb’s intervention had saved his life.

  And sometimes Caleb wondered why he’d bothered because as the old man said, Hiram was “touched and not by the hand of the Lord.” Hiram was a strange boy, plump and bookish. He didn’t run and play with the other children. He collected beetles and toads and anything dead he happened upon. Liked to sun-dry dead things and sit around and look at them. Caleb thought it was sick, but Hiram was blood and what could he do but protect him? Except, the older they got, the more peculiar Hiram became. And it was Caleb himself, just shy of his twentieth birthday, that had to pay that boy off after what Hiram had done to him. And it wasn’t the first time. For Hiram was a pervert and he had fondness for children, especially boys. But Caleb protected him and kept his secret, though sometimes he’d wake in the middle of the night, his skin crawling at the memory of things he’d seen.

  But that was a secret.

  The Callisters had been good at secrets. The old man had a few of his own. By the time he was fifteen, Caleb had been to the local brothel more than once, striking up friendships with some of the girls. Most, barely older than himself. They had confided in him that his father would come in drunk, throw money around, then want to take one of the girls upstairs. That he liked to use his belt on them. That was one of his secrets. Another was what happened to their mother. The old man didn’t think the boys knew, but they knew, all right. They didn’t believe she had up and run off. They knew the old man had come home one night in a drunken rage, stinking of whorehouse perfume and their mother had mentioned the fact. And the old man had savagely beat her. Kept beating her long after she was unconscious, pounding her skull with those massive fists until her brain had hemorrhaged and she had died. And that the old man had thrown her body in an abandoned well…where her bones still lay. Yes, the boys knew this, but they kept it secret.

  Secrets, secrets.

  Like how the old man had taken to regularly beating Hiram because he was so sick ashamed of “that queer little bastard.” Yet, Hiram remained at home even after Caleb had long since moved out. But trouble was going to come in spades and it finally did. Caleb had gone home to visit after three solid days of debauchery and found Hiram, naked and bloody, standing over the old man’s corpse with a hatchet in his hand. Hiram had nearly cut his head off. So another secret was born. They bagged up the old man in sack cloth weighed down with rocks and sank him in the depths of the Sabine River where he could spend eternity with his own kind-alligators and water moccasins and all the other slimy, slinking nightmares that called those dark bottoms home. Shortly afterwards, once the old man was declared dead? on account he just vanished and nobody in town liked him anyway? they sold off the properties and business and came west.

  People in Whisper Lake did not know these things.

  Nor did they know what Hiram did with the corpses of dead prostitutes that came into the mortuary. Or how Caleb had happened in one night and found him having sex with one of them. And by that point, Caleb was just damn sick of covering up for that goddamn deviant even if he was his older brother. And that when Caleb found him dead-suicide, coroner said, even thought they both knew it was far from the truth-it was really a blessing because sooner or later, Hiram was going to get caught doing something unpleasant and it would destroy everything Caleb had worked for. And when Hiram was buried, a lot of secrets were buried with him.

  But there were secrets even Caleb did not know.

  Like maybe how it was for Hiram that night when black, malevolent voices got into his head and made him see things and feel things and hear things that were just plain awful. Or how he opened James Lee Cobb’s casket and Cobb was awake in there, staring, staring with a single eye like a coal glowing in a furnace, taking the blood sacrifice offered him. Or how Hiram went mad when Cobb took him by the throat and tried to scream but had no voice and his heart finally gave out, knowing, knowing that nothing could look like Cobb and live.

  Caleb did not know about that, but he sometimes guessed awful truths.

  People in town could not know these things. Nor would they honestly want to. Just like they didn’t know that Caleb Callister hated Mormons and was part of a vigilante gang that had murdered no less than twelve of their members or how omnipotent he felt when he pulled on that white hood and got down to business. And they didn’t know about those two Mormon girls the vigilantes had happened upon picking berries and how they had raped them continually until they’d bled and then slit their soft white throats and buried them in shallow graves no one would ever find. Or how the vigilantes laughed when renegade Indians were blamed for the disappearance of the girls. Nobody knew about that. Nor did they know that of all the Mormon camps and villages scattered in the hills and valleys, the vigilantes did not raid in the one called Deliverance. Because even the Mormons shunned that place and whatever had happened there, it was Devil’s work.

  And above all, nobody guessed that the disappearance of James Lee Cobb’s body and the hideous degeneration of Deliverance from a God-fearing Mormon hamlet to a place of dark, nameless rites was not coincidental, but very much connected.

  Like the Callisters, these secrets were tended in the lonely tracts of the town’s sordid soul.

  7

  Despite being warm from his bath and just as relaxed and easy as a kitty curled up in a drawer, Tyler Cabe threw on a deerskin jacket and a pair of gray woolen pants and went back out into the elements. The rain had stopped and the wind had died down, but it was still cold and his boots sank four inches into the mud sea of the road.

  At the Oasis, Frank Carny was still on duty. A swamper was mopping bloody sawdust from the plank floor. There had been a knife fight, Cabe learned. No one had died, but it had been a messy affair as such things often were. A few men were playing poker and a few others were huddled at tables, telling stories of strikes in the Montana goldfields.

  Cabe drank beer and told Carny why he was there and the two got down to some serious talking.

  “ Well, I’m sorry to hear that you and the sheriff don’t get on so well. All I can say is that he’s a good man, far as I can tell,” Carny said. “Like him or not, you gotta admit that boy’s got a real set on him. Shit, I’ll wade in on anybody with my bare fists…but they got a gun? Forget it. I become a coward then. Dirker? Hell, he goes right after anybody, he figures they’re causing trouble in his county.”

  Cabe sipped off his beer. “I ain’t saying he’s a bad sort, Frank. Ain’t saying that at all. We just have a history is what. So much water under that fucking bridge, it’d drown a bull elephant.”

  He hadn’t told Frank Carny everything. Just enough so he’d understand the lay of the land, so to speak. Understand who and what Tyler Cabe was and who an
d what Jackson Dirker was to him. Cabe figured that was important, because he needed a friend in this town, someone he could trust and was plugged into the local grapevine. Sometimes a little confession softened a person. Sometimes you had to expose your flanks to win the battle.

  Carny put his elbows on the bar, looked Cabe dead in the eye. “Listen, Tyler. You seem like a right sort to me, so I’ll tell you something. Dirker’s got a lot friends in this town…and he’s got a lot of enemies. I tell you this, just so as you don’t speak out of school to the wrong person. I like Dirker…but I’ve been around, I understand how it must be for you. I’ve got enough lumps and bumps and scars…but, we’ll say they were self-inflicted. Your scars are of a different stripe, aren’t they?”

  Cabe swallowed his beer. “I would say so.”

  Carny drew himself a beer from a wooden keg. “Can I be bold here, Tyler?”

  “ I wish you would be.”

  Carny poured half the mug down his throat in a single swallow, wiped foam from his wiry mustache. “Wars are bad business. Never been in one, but you don’t have to be to figure that. You and Dirker…you were twenty years younger back then. Full of piss and vinegar. Both fighting your asses off for a cause you firmly believed in. But you were kids, neither of you had the common sense and tolerance that comes with age and experience. Keep that in mind.”

  Cabe licked his lips. “Young and randy?”

  Carny laughed. “Exactly. Hot-headed, pissed and pumped with the sort of craziness only youth knows and which wars-and the bastards who start ‘em-like to exploit. Just keep that in mind, friend. I’m of a mind that neither of you are the same men you were.”

  Part of Cabe didn’t like Carny telling him his business and how he should feel about the shit he’d waded through…but, damn if he hadn’t asked for it. It was food for thought. So Cabe took a bite, swallowed, found it didn’t lay so bad in his belly after all. He didn’t hate Yankees like some. Maybe the rich easterners pulling the strings, but not your common man or soldier. Just cogs was what they were, he figured. Hell, up in Dakota Territory he’d struck up a friendship with a Union vet who’d lost a leg at Gettysburg. And the bottom line there was that, old enemies or not, sometimes only vets could understand other vets and what they’d been through.

  “ I’ll keep that in mind,” Cabe told the bartender in all sincerity.

  Carny served a few beers, poured a few shots, came back. He clipped the end off a cigar and fired it up, lighting Cabe’s cigarette for him. Watching each other, maybe understanding each other, they did not speak for a time.

  “ Tell me about Whisper Lake,” Cabe finally said.

  “ It’s a mining town, Tyler. Not a company town per se, more of a three-company town-the Southview, the Arcadian, Horn Silver. They don’t own everything here, but most of it. They’re always trying to buy one another out and steal away each other’s workers and the like. The strings they pull are big ones. Caught in-between are the miners and prospectors and some of ‘em are pretty tough types. They come from back east or across the sea, just about everywhere. Then you got the usual assortment of prostitutes, gamblers, shootists, outlaws, petty criminals, you name it. Stuck in the mess are the business owners. Just one big human soup simmering away and, as you might figure, the worst possible things can and do happen here.”

  “ Sounds like every mining town I’ve ever known.”

  “ Sure. World’s full of places like Whisper Lake, Tyler. Once they strike ore, it’s all over but the dying and the scheming. Once the paint’s dry, the people show and the garbage starts piling up and said garbage collects flies.”

  Cabe listened and didn’t hear anything he hadn’t heard before…yet, he had the oddest feeling that Carny was trying to say something without saying it. He finished his beer. “And?” he said.

  “ And what?”

  Cabe studied him long and hard, his green eyes refusing to blink. “There’s something else. I can hear it in your voice.”

  Carny set his cigar in the ashtray, put his elbows on the bar again. “This place is a cauldron like I was saying. Only it’s about to boil over. See, there’s trouble here. We’ve got hardrock miners vanishing out in the hills and people saying it’s Mormon militias that are responsible.”

  “ You believe that?”

  Carny shook his head. “No, I don’t. I mean, hell Utah Territory is mostly Mormons. But mining towns like this one or Frisco are mostly gentile. Mormons don’t care for places like this-bastions of sin, they call ‘em-but I can’t see them murdering folks on account of it. They have some blood on their hands after that Mountain Meadow Massacre and the rest, but I found them to be generally peaceful folk. Clannish, but always willing to help a stranger in need. You can understand how they might not like places like this, places that might corrupt their sons and daughters.”

  Cabe understood that. Mormons were no different from ordinary Christians in that respect. Places like Whisper Lake had a way of expanding their boundaries, drawing in the worst sort of people and practices. He said, “But you don’t think they had anything to do with these disappearances?”

  “ No, sir, I do not.” Carny re-lit his cigar. “But get folks around here to believe it. Shit. I’ve heard there’s vigilantes that have formed, are planning revenge against the Mormon camps.”

  “ Sounds like Dirker’s got his hands full.”

  “ In more ways than you can guess, friend.” Carny’s voice dropped down to a whisper and he continued. “See…there’s been not just disappearances, but murders. And I’m not talking shootings or knifings because people here don’t pay them any more mind than the brothels or gamblers. These murders I’m talking about…goddamn, folks have been slaughtered, Tyler. Mutilated in the worse ways. Heads torn off, bellies opened up, limbs ripped free. I’ve heard rumors that these bodies, they were eaten.”

  A long gray ash fell from Cabe’s cigarette. “Eaten? Well, shit, sounds more like wolves or a wild dog pack. I’ve heard stories about Mormons, but never that they ate folks.”

  “ I agree. But, again, get people here to believe that. They’ve formed vigilance committees and are shooting at shadows. Things are getting crazy.”

  But Cabe could understand it. The Mormons. They were different, they made good targets. Good ones to vent your frustrations on. Because when people got scared, they formed into gangs and these gangs needed a common enemy. If they couldn’t find one, they created one.

  “ I guess all I’m saying to you,” Carny began, “is that this Sin City Strangler of yours, he couldn’t have found a better place to squat. He’ll fit into this madhouse like a needle into a button hole.”

  Cabe didn’t doubt that at all.

  8

  Later, in his room, Cabe did some thinking.

  A mining town. Dance houses, gambling halls, saloons, brothels. There was nothing money could not buy in such a place. The riches coming out of the ground would attract killers and thieves and scoundrels of every conceivable stripe. Immigrants would flood in, bringing trash from every corner of the country with them. The mining companies would pay men three-dollars a day for ten and twelve-hours workdays, six days a week if not seven. Drillers and muckers and jackers. Powermen would gouge out drifts and slopes, gut the mountains to extract ore. And the mines would hum around the clock and timber would be stripped from hillsides for bunkhouses and shacks and offices. Run-off from the smelters would kill the vegetation and foul the creeks and rivers and the lake with waste. The fish would all die and those that remained would be fouled with toxins. The town itself would be just as filthy and stinking as a boring cob. The company-or three of them, in this case-would own just about everything and everyone. It would have stores that sold everything from beef to Bibles to bed sheets and the miners would pay in company script, keeping the workers nicely in debt. There would be company doctors and company housing and company stables. And, if all else failed, a company coffin in six-feet of rank company earth.

  Men would come by the hundreds
to sell their souls to the malefic company god. Lots of men would die in the shafts-from cave-ins, from gas, from explosions, from dangerous equipment-but that wouldn’t bother the company none because they had ten men lined-up and ready to take the company oath…soon as they pushed your corpse out of the way.

  Yeah, that was Whisper Lake.

  Like some huge human hive where flesh and blood were as cheap as desert dirt and the rich owners and their lily-white board of directors sat up in the high offices, pressed and starched and spotless. Never caring how much blood was on their hands because it always washed off and if there was enough green, it canceled out oceans of red.

  Whisper Lake. A human cesspool where humanity was a commodity like hides or whores.

  Then you add to that heady mix these murders and the Mormons and the vigilantes and too many hot-hands and not enough cool heads and you had real trouble.

  And that, Cabe knew, was Whisper Lake laid bare. The town stripped of skin-raw quilts of muscle, yellow fat, and greasy rank blood that stank of mordant corruption.

  The perfect stalking ground for the Sin City Strangler.

  Looking out his window at the muddy streets below, Cabe waited. Maybe for the Strangler. Maybe for something else. Because whatever it was, it was coming. And it was going to be bad.

  9

  The prostitute’s name was Katherine Modine, but folks in Whisper Lake just knew her as Mizzy Modine, Dirty Mizzy, or “Old-Squirm-and-Kick”. Behind her back she was called “The Crab Queen of Beaver County”…and more than one scratching miner could attest to that one. But to her face she was never called anything but Mizzy. And mainly because she had a vile temper and packed a Smith amp; Wesson pocket. 38 and was not afraid to use it. She had killed one man and shot up three others.

  Mizzy was freelance, operated out of a crib over on Piney Hill, which sat in the brooding, gray shadow of the Arcadian mine…or one of them, at any rate. Her crib was a glorified shack that stunk of cheap whiskey and cheaper perfume, body odor and twenty-dollar sex. When the wind blew, the shack rattled and swayed and quite often it rattled and swayed when no wind blew. While townspeople might have said old Dirty Mizzy was “horizontally employed”, Mizzy didn’t look upon herself as a whore. She’d been selling what God gave her since she was fifteen and had worked dozens of mining camps, cow towns, and military depots from West Texas to the Wyoming Territory and had missed very little real estate in-between.