Skin Medicine

by Tim Curran

  Mizzy considered herself something of an entrepreneur.

  And maybe she was. In Whisper Lake, she serviced a steady stream of customers who weren’t real particular as to where they stuck their business…just grateful there was such a place. For those with more respect for what dangled between their legs, there were always the painted ladies who operated out of the sporting houses or high-dollar brothels where ten minutes with an imported French or Portuguese delight could cost you $400 or more.

  Mizzy was an equal opportunity nightworker and was willing to spread her legs for any who could pay the price, regardless of race or cultural affiliation. And at twenty bucks a pop, what she offered was a bargain. And particularly in a mining town where prices tended to get inflated. And if you didn’t have twenty dollars, Mizzy was always willing to take what you did have in trade. Be that horses or cattle, buffalo furs or customized Winchester rifles, injun ceremonial daggers or a fancy pair of lizard boots. Because when she wasn’t whoring, she was selling goods out of her little shop…and she always had an eye on the inventory.

  Some nights were busy, some nights were slow.

  And tonight was just plain dead. So when there was a knock at the door of her crib, Mizzy grinned and the cash register in her mind rang up a sale. She quick lighted up the red tapers and turned down the oil lamp and prepared to receive a gentleman caller.

  He came in out of the wind, his face just as pallid as spilled milk, offset by a sharp black mustache and eyes just as dark as chipped coal. He was tall and thin, dressed in a ankle-length frock coat and matching bowler hat.

  “ Well, come in, kind sir,” Mizzy told him, “and just make yourself comfortable. Name’s Mizzy. Can I get you a drink Mister-”

  “ No thank you, madam. That’s not why I’m here.”

  Music to Mizzy’s ears. She sat back on the bed, a large fleshy woman with breasts the size of bunk pillows and a face painted-up brighter than carnival glass. Her visitor dropped a twenty-dollar gold piece in Mizzy’s glass compote tray and set his hat on the chiffonier, laid his coat across it. Mizzy loved the sound of that money ringing out against the glass. Maybe she didn’t like this fellow with those dark eyes and that graveyard marble skin and that hard slash of pink mouth…but she liked his money just fine, thank you very much.

  He was not the romantic type.

  He ordered her to strip and she did and he pushed himself into her almost immediately, an odd passionless look on his face as if he found the very act tedious and banal.

  “ Oh yes, baby, oh yes,” Mizzy said, going through her spiel, pretending to be beside herself with his masculine talents, moaning and groaning and making the sharp little squeaking sounds that always got them going.

  But it wasn’t getting this one going.

  His thrusts had not become more frantic; they were even and slow, impartial really, possibly disinterested. His face betrayed no emotion…it was white and smooth set with those opaque, unblinking eyes and was for all the world like the face of a manikin or a bust cut from granite.

  Mizzy was a businesswoman. She liked to bring things to a close quick as could be. Hated to keep other customers waiting in line…even though there probably weren’t any more on a stormy, bleak night like this.

  She laid it on thick, just totally beside herself at the sight of his greased member sliding into her, cooing and muttering filthy words and throwing down the whore-talk spicy and hot like Mexican peppers.

  “ Close your eyes,” the man suddenly said, his voice just as dead and flat as a crushed possum.

  Mizzy did so, hoping he was getting close now. He was squeezing her breasts roughly, but if that’s what he liked, that’s what he liked…so be it. Her eyes pressed shut and her pelvis meeting his every thrust, Mizzy heard a swish of something satiny and before she could do more than gasp, he’d looped a silken scarf around her throat, pulling it tight and tighter like a jungle python trying to squeeze her life away.

  She fought and thrashed and tried all the tricks she knew to throw off an unwelcome rider…but he persisted, slamming into her now as black dots danced before her eyes. Her lungs began to ache and she felt that scarf shutting down the flow of blood to her head until her face was hot and felt like it would explode from the pressure.

  And he was panting.

  He was drooling.

  His eyes were huge and black and glistening.

  “ You love me…don’t you?” his voice was saying. “You love me…you love me…don’t you…don’t you… don’t you…”

  Mizzy’s fingers kept trying to find that little. 38, but it was gone, just gone.

  And then the scarf was so tight that she sank into a darkness that just kept getting darker and more complete and from some far-off place she could feel him slamming into her and she was dying, but didn’t seem to mind so much because what was it all worth? All the struggling and swindling and whoring? Who needed that when you could slip down into ocean depths and fields of black velvet…

  “… don’t you…don’t you…don’t you…”

  Some five minutes after Mizzy was clinically dead, the tall man stopped thrusting, spending his seed in the cooling lower regions of Mizzy Modine, shooting life where there was now only death. When he was finished and had calmed, he took a skinning knife and slit Mizzy from navel to throat, pulling out the dripping jewels and loops of meat he found within, scattering them happily about the room. Then he slit her breasts off, cut her eyes out and replaced them with silver coins.

  Then he sat and smoked a cigar and marveled at his handiwork.

  Before he left, he violated Mizzy’s corpse one last time. Then he donned his coat and bowler hat and slipped out into the blowing, frigid night, became a shadow that was swallowed by others and then did not exist.

  And it was a strange, ominous night in Whisper Lake. The wind blew and dogs barked and a raw malicious evil twisted thickly in the air.

  10

  Tyler Cabe did not like to think of the war, but sometimes it reared up in his head, big and hungry and dark, chewing right through him like a cancer. And often in the dead of night when he was alone and all the little worries and fragments of guilt a man has hidden away in his soul started coming back to him, nipping at the edge of reason and resolve. The war, then, would return as he tried to sleep…or it would jerk him awake at four a.m. with cold sweats and shakes. It would not be a memory, but a physical, palpable thing that he could feel and see, taste and smell as it oozed from his pores like diseased blood, drowning him in horror.

  Cabe had been a member of the 2 ^ nd Arkansas Mounted Rifles.

  His first engagement was at the battle of Wilson’s Creek where all his wide-eyed naivete had been purged from him in the worst possible way. He often thought that it was here that he truly lost his virginity. And if that was true, it was no sweet lovemaking in the dark, but a brutal violation. A rape of all he had known and believed in up to that point. Twelve miles southwest of Springfield, Missouri, on Wilson’s Creek, General Nathaniel Lyon’s Union forces struck at the Confederate lines at five in the morning. The fighting that ensued was savage and horrible. Cabe saw men-men he’d known and trained with-blown to ground meat all around him. He was splattered with their blood and entrails. A grisly baptismal. He crawled through their remains, ducked under their anatomies that dangled from tree limbs like garland, tasted their hot, salty blood on his lips.

  In the billowing smoke and confusion, half out of his mind, all he could hear was the thundering cannonade and the screams of the dying. The 2 ^ nd pulled back from what was known as Bloody Hill, but then through sheer zeal and fortitude, were able to stabilize their positions. The Confederate forces attacked Union positions no less than three times, inflicting and taking horrendous casualties. After the third charge, the Yankee columns fell back to Springfield, but the 2 ^ nd Arkansas and others were just too beaten-up and threadbare to pursue them. The Confederate victory-if you wanted to call it that with some 1200 dead-bolstered Southern sympathy in Missour
i, but the cost was staggering.

  Cabe came out of that shocked, distraught, burned and bruised and damaged.

  That was his first taste, his induction into man’s oldest preoccupation.

  After that, the 2 ^ nd was sent to Indian Territory to quell an uprising by the Creeks and Seminoles. By then, Cabe was desensitized by combat and, instead of wanting to run and hide as he had at Wilson’s Creek, he dove into battle viciously. The Indian fighting was often close-in and barbaric and he found that he liked it that way. There was something far too impersonal about putting a ball through a man from a distance or shelling him indiscriminately…when you came at him with pistol and knife, were splashed with his blood and saw his agony, it woke up some primal beast that lusted for more.

  And there was always more.

  Pea Ridge came next.

  The 2 ^ nd Arkansas, mustered into the CS Army of the West and, thrown together under the command of Generals Price and McCulloch, began the bloody affair on the southern tip of the Ozark Mountains. The combined force stood at over 20,000 including 5,000 Indians from the Five Civilized Tribes. With a near-two-to-one superiority in numbers, the Confederates, sensing a sure victory, split their army into two columns and attacked from front and rear. But Curtis, the wily Union general, flanked both Confederate armies and mercilessly pounded them with artillery fire until the Southerners were forced to retreat.

  For Cabe and the 2 ^ nd, it was a living hell.

  There’d been a blizzard a few days before and the weather was bitterly cold. Everyone was tired and hungry and near-frozen when Confederate General Van Dorn forced them into the fight. They deployed just east of Leetown in Morgan’s Woods. Confederate generals McCulloch and McIntosh were killed just two hours into the fighting and the 2 ^ nd was left leaderless, pounded and harassed by the 36 ^ th and 44 ^ th Illinois relentlessly. The Confederate army was now in full retreat, pursed by the 1 ^ st and 2 ^ nd Union Divisions. Cabe’s company, cut off now, took shelter in an abandoned farmhouse.

  Shoes worn to threads, uniforms hanging in ragged strips, Cabe and the others shivered in the cold. Starving, scratched, torn and bleeding, they waited for relief that never came. There was no food to forage and scarcely any blankets or overcoats to keep warm with. Ammunition was long used-up. Many of the men were wounded, some severely. Just a tattered band strung together with bloody bandages and pride that was quickly eroding.

  Within an hour, the shelling began.

  The walls collapsed, the roof caved-in. The wounded and weak were buried alive in the rubble. Johnny Miller, Cabe’s best friend in the world, was decapitated by shrapnel. The survivors tried in haste to dig the others out-their screams and pathetic whimpers echoing through the frosty air-but it was hopeless. As the Yankees pressed in, shrieking and blood-hungry, Cabe slipped off into the woods with three others-Sammy Morrow, Pete Oland, and little Willy Gibson. They trudged through swamps and crawled through bramble thickets until they were caked with cold mud, their faces scratched to the bone and uniforms cut to ribbons.

  Little Willy was out of his mind, alternately giggling and sobbing and Sammy Morrow kept yelling at him, calling him a mama’s boy and telling him it was time to get weaned off that fucking tit already. But Little Willy ignored him, carrying on conversations with men long dead.

  “ He’s crazy, Tyler,” Sammy told Cabe. “We can’t make a run with this bastard at our heels. He’ll give us away.”

  “ We can’t leave him.”

  “ Why the hell not?” Sammy wanted to know.

  But Cabe figured if he didn’t know the answer to that one, what was the point of explaining it to him?

  Just around sunset, fatigued and shivering, having had no food in well over twenty-four hours, they were ready to lay down and die. Pete Oland, reconnoitering ahead, discovered a tangle of dead Yankees in a little clearing flanked by a dark, denuded thicket. Cabe counted ten men. Ten men in blue rags that had been obscenely mutilated. They had been scalped and dismembered. Faces had been gouged from the skulls beneath. Their bellies had been opened, internals yanked out and strewn in every which direction like bailing wire.

  “ Goddamn,” Pete said. “Ye ever seen anything like it?”

  “ Injuns,” Sammy told them. “All them Injuns under Pike.”

  And maybe he was right, Cabe had thought. The Cherokee and Creek, Chocktaw and Chickasaw. Wouldn’t have been the first time that Indian troops had gotten a little excited in the carnage and reverted to their old ways.

  “ I don’t like them Yankee bastards,” Sammy said and kept saying. “But this…Christ in Heaven, there ain’t no reason for this! Ye hear me? Ain’t no reason! Goddamn injuns! Civilized tribes, my ass!”

  Cabe told them to get control of themselves. The men were dead and they had died horribly and savagely, but they were dead. There was nothing to be done for them. He had his boys dig through the corpses and viscera, stripping off greatcoats, blankets, knapsacks, and cap boxes. Any food they could find and especially weapons. Whoever had slaughtered these men had left their Enfield rifles. Cabe figured that well-supplied and well-armed, his group could make it back to the retreating Confederate lines.

  It was a plan…only it didn’t happen.

  As they looted through the dead, disgusted to a man, a platoon of Yankee cavalry came bounding out of the thickets, ringing in the Confederate soldiers like a noose. There was no escape. No quarter. No nothing. Cabe had been through a lot up to that point…but robbing the enemy dead and then being caught at it like a bunch of ghouls…well, that was pretty much the end of the sad, old road.

  The bluebellies dismounted.

  Although a lot of them looked a little worse for wear with their dirty, ripped uniforms and gaunt faces drawn hard by war and atrocity, they were looking pretty good compared to Cabe and his men.

  The Yankee soldiers got real excited when they saw the condition of their fallen comrades. They had to be physically restrained by their sergeants. As it was, they were like a bunch of slavering mad dogs surrounding the Southerners.

  Then an officer walked through their ranks.

  A tall, wiry lieutenant in a flapping blue frock coat and a Hardy hat, campaign sword at his side catching the dying sunlight. His face was set hard as marble, those blue eyes just as electric as ball lightening. He walked around the litter pile of the dead Yankees. Flipped one over with his shiny black boot. He showed no emotion, but his eyebrows kept arching, the corners of his lips pulled into a skullish frown.

  Cabe knew he had to defuse an ugly situation. “Corporal Tyler Cabe, Second Arkansas Mounted Rifles, sir.”

  The lieutenant announced he was Jackson Dirker of the 59 ^ th Illinois.

  Something about his bearing and steely silence made Cabe’s blood run cold. Here was a man who obviously garnered instant respect from his troops and was no doubt a good soldier…but here also was a man who, despite his reserve and indifferent manner, seemed to have an almost violent, savage aura about him that bubbled just beneath those crystal blue eyes like acid waiting to devour flesh and bone.

  “ Sir…we, we came upon these bodies in this condition. Our unit was chopped up at Pea Ridge, we’ve been on the dodge since yesterday. My men haven’t had a decent meal in days,” Cabe explained, his voice shrill and cracking, because, God, he knew how bad it looked. “We were only going to gather some weapons and food off these…these dead…just enough to survive with.”

  The Union soldiers were all shaking and filled with a blank, mindless rage. Little Willy started babbling nonsense that no one could understand and a burly sergeant told him in an Irish brogue to shut his peckerwood Johnny Reb mouth and shut it right fucking now. But Little Willy was crazy and lost in some dream world and he kept right on, choosing the worst possible moment to begin bragging about how many Yankees the 2 ^ nd had killed. The sergeant made a pained, choking sound and pulled an Army Colt and shot him in the head. Little Willy’s skull came apart like a shattered glass vase and his brains vomited into the grass a
nd he fell straight over like a dead tree.

  Cabe and the others started shouting and yelling and the Yankees quickly overpowered them. Cabe was knocked to the ground with a rifle butt to the temple and Sammy and Pete were roped to ash trees, then stripped to the waist.

  Dirker came walking back from his mount with a bullwhip, something about him just as dark and venomous as rattlesnakes coiled in a ditch. “Graverobbers, ghouls,” he said in a weird, whispering voice. “Killing a man is one thing…but to mutilate him, to do…something…like…this…”

  The whip began to snap in the air, its braided length curling and unfurling, waking and stretching…and then Dirker began venting himself. The whip lashed against the bare flesh of Pete and Sammy’s backs, laying them both open in bloody gashes. Dirker kept snapping that whip until both men quit screaming and went limp, their backs like bleeding meat. Cabe came to his senses about then and threw two Yankees out of the way, making for Dirker and then that whip licked him across the face with an explosion of biting agony that dropped him to his knees. It lashed out again and ripped into his cheeks, opened his nose in a ragged laceration. Then he was down and near senseless and that whip clawed at his face again and again and again.

  The next thing Cabe knew, he was in a field with maybe a hundred other Confederate soldiers. They were force-marched to the Mississippi River where they were loaded onto the rotting hulks of old steamboats. They were packed into the lower decks and the next week or so was spent down there in the filthy, cold blackness, eating and sleeping and living on stone coal that was two-feet deep. The boat took them up the Mississippi via St. Louis to Alton, Illinois where they were loaded into cattle cars for the trip to Chicago. By the time they reached port, there were dozens of staring corpses packed down there with them…men who had succumbed to the cold, starvation, disease.