Tim Curran - Skin Medicine

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.

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.”