Cannibal Corpse, M/C

“Of course it is.”

They ate in silence and the meat was so very tasty that the idea of talking during the eating of it would have been close to sacrilege. At first, Slaughter wolfed it…then he slowed down, savoring the rich juices, the smoky flavor, the hickory/brown sugar sweetness and the bite of mesquite. Three slabs later, he was breathless and almost dizzy with the wonder of it, full and satisfied and glowing warm. It was the feeling one got after making love to a very beautiful woman…only, somehow, it was taken up a few notches.

“You like?”

Slaughter just smiled. “There’s like and there’s love and then there’s pure infatuation, man.”

Feathers nodded. He understood. He knew his craft and he knew it well. “How about you lend me one of those cigarettes, son, and let me tell you a story now that you’re full and sleepy and feeling no pain?”

Slaughter gave him one.

The old guy snapped off the filter, lit it with a burning stick. “The man in black,” he said. “I seen him more than once. Long before the worms started falling and the cemeteries vomited up their dead, I saw him when I was a child. I saw him as an adult. I spoke to him and I watched him make with his black magic…”

Chapter Nineteen

“What I tell you happened when I was a boy,” the old man said, “and in those days the Spirit Lake Reservation was a place of the most awful poverty and desperation. There were several villages on the reservation—Crow Hill, Wood Lake, Fort Totten, a few others—but the one we lived in was called Crabeater Creek. It’s not there anymore. It burned to the ground one night and was never rebuilt. I suppose that’s what I want to tell you about…”

Crabeater Creek was nothing but a collection of houses that were so very ramshackle they weren’t even houses, they were more like shacks. This was long before the days of the casinos and the easy money they pumped into the rez. There was little to no medical care, and what there was of it was doled out by a white doctor in Fort Totten named Dr. Beak who sampled liberally from his own pharmacy and was only working the reservation because he cut a deal with the feds that kept him out of federal prison on charges of narcotics trafficking. Something which, obviously, would have cost him his license to practice anywhere but Mexico or Calcutta. How men like Beak get their licenses in the first place is one of the eternal mysteries of this life, like why God made little green apples or why fat women wear tight pants.

We had no running water, precious little food, rampant disease outbreaks, and a sort of communal curse that was the drink. My father was a kind man and a good man, but when he drank—which was whenever he could—he became a violent drunk that beat other men, beat my mother, and beat my brothers and I. In the end, the booze beat him. It beat him hard and beat him silly and when it was done there was nothing left. Not that any of this should come as a surprise to you or anyone else. The reservation was an awful place in those days. In the summers we subsisted on handouts and whatever we could hunt up in the woods and hills and in the winter, well, we crowded around woodstoves and prayed for spring while we watched each other get thinner as the snow fell and babies died of the croup and the flu each morning. The men drank. The woman mourned. We kids just stayed out of the way.

Anyway, you ask of this fellow in black. Well, first I ever heard of him was when Skip Darling lost his mind one long dead white winter. He took up an axe and chopped up his wife and three children. It was in the middle of a blizzard. When the tribal police got there, he had their remains stacked up tidy as cordwood and he was sitting in his rocker by the stove with the bloody axe in his hand. Jim Fastwind, who was my best friend, had an uncle who was with the tribal police. And he told us all about it by the fire one night. He said Skip’s eyes were like black holes leading down into a darkness you did not want to know about. When they questioned him, he said a man in a black hat had told him to do it. Was he an Indian? they asked. No sir, he was white. His face was bleached white and his eyes were like pink quartz. He carried a book with him. He showed it to Skip. In it were written the names of Skip’s wife and children. That’s why they had to die. Skip said his name was in the book, too. Two days later, Skip hung himself in jail.