Tim Curran - Skin Medicine

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.

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.

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.

“ War, you say?” he managed, a tangle of drool hanging from his lips like a dirty ribbon. He wiped it away with one grubby fist. “War betwixt the States. No… War of Northern Aggression. Yes sir. I fought. I sure did. Goddamn blue bellies, goddamned Yankees. Sonsofbitches.”