Skin Medicine (3 page)

Pumping water into the basin, Hiram pulled off his rubber gloves and washed his hands thoroughly.

The wind picked-up outside and a tree limb scratched at the roof. For a reason Hiram could not understand, a chill swept up his spine. That sense of dread again. It had been gnawing at him for hours now…but why? He found himself thinking of the two men that had brought the casket.

They’d been scared white.

But why? Why? Fatigue, maybe. They’d been on the trail for two days from Toole County to Whisper Lake. And cold, inhospitable days they had been. Such deprivation and exposure could do strange things to men. Hiram cleaned up his instruments, decided against working on Cobb tonight. The oil stove in the corner was chugging away, yet he felt cold. Worse, his skin actually seemed to be crawling in turgid waves. He wanted out of the mortuary in a bad way and was not sure why.

He paused, a droplet of sweat coursing down the hill of his cheek.

There was something, something.

He could not hear anything, but…he turned around, staring at the casket. He stood there, watching it, his brain filled with cryptic thoughts. It was ridiculous…but he had the unnerving sensation that he was being watched, studied, stared at.

Children peeking in?

No, it was too late and the shades were drawn. Carefully, slowly, he went to the windows, peered around the shades. The dirt street outside was empty. He could see the town stretching out in the distance

clustered roofs climbing the hills and dipping into hollows. He could hear the wind skirting the lonesome spaces. Hear a wagon somewhere in the distance. The sound of voices over towards saloon-row. The ever-present rumble of mine machinery.

But no one looking in, watching him.

The shadows seemed to be growing longer in the mortuary, spilling out from crevices and cracks and crannies, tangling like mating snakes across the floor. The lanterns still burned bright, yet everything seemed oddly murky.

Eyes watching me.

Imagination?

Hiram had no use for superstition. He would have no truck with it. Yet, something in him was alive and electric and concerned, afraid maybe. He walked across the room to the casket. Licking his lips, he ran his hands over the roughhewn cedar, fingering nail holes and splintered knots.

Eyes staring at me.

That body in there…James Lee Cobb…Hiram began to wonder about it as something inexplicable began to take hold of him, but so gently he was not even aware of it. All he could think about was the body in the box, body in the box. Cobb had died up in Skull Valley, they said. His injun friends had bought him a casket, paid for him to be shipped back to Whisper Lake.

Now why would injuns do that for a white man?

Hiram wiped sweat from his brow. He knew there was a reason, but he couldn’t seem to remember what it was. Cobb had come home to the only kin he had. Sure. Had a half-brother over in Deliverance, the Mormon settlement just west of Whisper Lake. That’s why Cobb was sent. The half-brother was going to pick up the box day after next, he said.

Hiram’s hands were trembling now.

He mopped more sweat from his brow, thought:
What the hell is wrong with me?

He couldn’t seem to think straight. His brain was filled with wild, leaping thoughts that could not be strung to together into anything reasonable. There was a tenseness behind his eyes. Perspiration was beading his face, pooling under his eyes, streaming down his jowls. A few droplets struck the surface of the box.
Plop, plop.

For one irrational moment, Hiram thought it was blood.

Yes, like a sacrifice. A blood sacrifice offered up to some malefic pagan god. Blood. Burnt offerings. A tribute of blood and flesh and burned entrails. Atonement. Expiation. Some gods demanded these things, they—

Hiram began to whimper, tears mixing with sweat.

Eyes that won’t shut, won’t die, won’t stop staring.

He stumbled over to the tool bench, found a small crowbar.

Standing over the casket, he looked upwards, seeing only the stained tiles of the ceiling, but maybe hoping for some divine intervention from God. From the Lord Jesus Christ even though Hiram did not believe in him or anything else. Regardless, something had hold of Hiram now and his thoughts were a jumble and his brain a buzzing hive of wasps. His eyes were wide and unblinking, tears bled away, taking his sanity with them. His lips moved, but no sounds came out.

Blood offering.

Watching me.

Frantically, he began pulling the nails from the box, ripping them from the cheap plank coffin. One after the other until he was panting and wheezing and his heart was pounding and his temples throbbing. He broke the remaining brass band and it clattered to the floor along with the crowbar.

The eyes are watching me.

He tore the lid from the box and let it drop away. Then he was looking inside the box and seeing he did not know what. A body in a black burial suit, yes, but wrong, all wrong. Too many shadows crawling and slinking and shifting and maybe not shadows but the body itself.

Hiram’s heart thudded dully, his breath was locked in his lungs.

Something in him shattered like white ice and he saw the eye. A single green eye, wide open and staring. Like a silver coin, it shined and glimmered, reflecting a burning light that got inside Hiram’s head.

Then there was a scalpel in his hand and he held his left wrist out.

Blood offering. Expiation.

He slit his wrist, dark arterial blood streaming into the box in loops and spirals. Something in there moved and rustled.

“
God help me…” Hiram’s voice echoed from another room.

And a single rawboned, fleshless hand snaked from that pit of conspiring shadows and took him by throat.

It was like the hand of God.

5

Early the next morning, Caleb Callister found his brother’s body.

It had been stuffed in the casket, white and bloodless and shrunken. Caleb did not cry out or go into theatrics. He summoned the coroner quite calmly for he was a man used to death in all its unpleasant forms.

The coroner came and gave his verdict of suicide.

An odd suicide at that. Hiram, for reasons unknown, had slit first his left wrist, then his right. Then he had climbed into the box. The scalpel was still locked in his fist. The box had contained the body of James Lee Cobb. But as to where that body had gotten to, no one could guess.

Suicide, then.

The only thing that concerned the coroner were the bruises at the throat, the crushed windpipe. But he was willing to overlook this on account he had no viable explanation and Caleb was not interested in pursuing it.

Let the dead rest, Caleb told him.

Forever Amen.

Part Two: Gone to Hell

1

Seven Months Later…

The black sky unbuttoned itself like a corset, spilling cold, freezing rain by buckets that found the wind, joined with it, becoming a raging, angry thing that pounded the landscape, lashing and whipping and driving anything with blood in its veins to cover. Dusty, sun-cracked soil became mud. Mud became swamp. Swamp became rivers and creeks that overflowed their banks and sank the world.

Two hours after sunset, the water began to freeze and the rain became snow and the San Francisco Mountains were sculpted in ice. Through the maelstrom came a lone rider trotting through muck and snow and freezing rain.

His name was Tyler Cabe and he was a bounty hunter.

A yellow slicker wrapped around him like a wet, flapping skin, Cabe rode into Whisper Lake. He couldn’t see much of the town through the snow that became pelting rain and then snow again, but was simply glad to be anywhere. Anywhere he could find warmth and hot food.

He brought his strawberry roan to a gallop and stabled it at the first livery he found. Stowed his saddlebags and guns. Then he crossed the muddy, sucking streets and fell through the door of a tent-roofed saloon called the Oasis. Inside, the floor was covered in sawdust. There was a bar and tables with pine benches pulled up to them. A woodstove in the corner belched greasy fumes that mixed with tobacco smoke, cheap cologne, and body odor. A dozen worn, beaten-looking men slouched over beers and whiskey. A lone gambler played solitaire in the corner.

Whisper Lake was a company town, Cabe knew. These men and everything around them would either belong to the company or exist through its permission.

Cabe shook the rain off his flat-brimmed Stetson with the rattlesnake skin band, pulled off his slicker and hung them both from a hook near the woodstove. Dressed in striped pants, high-shafted boots, and a black frock coat, he found himself a stool at the bar, studying the oil painting above the bar which showed some fleshy jezebel displaying her charms. He saw himself in the mirror—the scars across his bony face, the sharp green eyes peering from narrow draws.

“
Thirsty, friend?”

Cabe looked over at the bartender, a heavy-set man with a neck thick as an old cottonwood stump. His nose was flattened, eyes peering out from puffy pads of flesh. He had the look of a barefisted fighter about him.

“
Yeah,” Cabe said. “Damn if I ain’t.”

“
Beer? Whiskey? Got some rye if it’s to your taste.”

Cabe shook his head. “No, nothing like that. Need something that’ll warm me up. I’m not sure if that’s a dick between my legs or an icicle.”

The bartender laughed. “Frank Carny,” he said.

Cabe introduced himself. “You fight?” he asked.

“
Once,” Carny said. “Years back.”

“
Do any good?”

“
Held my own. Can’t see outta my left eye no more, too many hits. A wise man does something other with his head than use it for a punching bag.”

Cabe nodded at that, made good sense.

One of the miners at the bar laughed. “Where you from?”

“
Been riding all day,” Cabe said. “From Nevada. Was starting to think I just wouldn’t make it.”

“
Helluva day for a ride,” the miner said. He turned to the bartender. “Make him something special, Frank.”

Carny grinned. “Ever had a Brigham Young?”

Cabe just looked at him. “A what?”

“
Brigham Young,” the miner said. “After one of those, you’ll become a confirmed polygamist.”

Cabe smiled.

“
Or maybe a Wild Bill Hickok? Two swallows and you’re a crack shot gunman. You’ll pull iron on anyone.”

Cabe allowed himself a laugh.

The bartender shook his head. “Nope. I think our friend here needs a Crazy Horse. You put one back and you’re ready to take on the U.S. Seventh Cavalry.”

Carny started pouring and mixing and the smell of alcohol in the air was enough to curl the hairs at the back of Cabe’s neck. A glass was set before him. He didn’t even ask what was in it. As he brought it to his lips, he felt the fumes burn up through his nostrils and right into his brain. He put it to his lips and threw it back in one swallow.

Jesus.

It landed in his belly like liquid metal, melting ice and setting dry tinder ablaze in the mother of all firestorms. Cabe started coughing and gagging and sputtering and for one divine moment, he saw the face of Jesus…and then fingers of warmth were threading through him, igniting him in places he didn’t know could burn.

“
Damn,” he said. “Goddamn.”

A couple miners were laughing. Carny was smiling.

Cabe found his seat again, ordered another. He rolled himself a cigarette and lit it up. Everything in him was blazing away nicely now and he honestly didn’t have a care in the world. He’d been following a man for near six weeks now, a killer, but right then he would’ve traded shots of whiskey with him. The Crazy Horse was one damn fine drink.

He sipped carefully on the second. “I don’t think my ass has been burned so thoroughly since the war, gentlemen.”

Carny nodded, wiped out some glasses. “What side you fight on?”

“
Confederate,” Cabe said, offering no more. The war was in his mind every day, but he did not speak of it. Not unless he was with another veteran. Some things were better left in the past. “You?”

Carney shook his head. “Not me. Had me a brother died at Shiloh fighting for the Union, Eighth Illinois.”

“
Sorry to hear that,” Cabe said and meant it. “I truly am. Lot of good boys died on both sides and the older I get, the more I start to wonder what the hell it was all about.”

“
Amen,” said the miner.

Someone coughed, then gagged, then began to mumble something. Down at the end of the bar, a man in a filthy sheepskin coat raised his head. He pulled off what was left of his whiskey, gagged and spit most of it on the floor. He had a shaggy black beard that reached to his chest and eyes like setting suns.