Skin Medicine

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.”

Hyden chewed his lip, clutched his shotgun tightly. “I guess I’m wondering what’s in there, what’s in that box. I don’t like it.”

“ Dammit, boy, I don’t like what’s in yer head, but you don’t hear me complaining.”

They rode on and the moon slid behind a cloud and the night grew darker, went black to its roots, seemed to gather around them in clutching, sinister shadows.

“ Boy, light that lantern.”

Hyden reached over the seat…froze-up tight when he thought he heard a shifting sound from inside the box…then quickly grabbed the oil lamp and lit it up with a cupped match. The shadows retreated, but the night seemed bunched around them like a fist anxious to grasp something. It hung to either side of the wagon in sheets and blankets of murk. The hold was creeping with stygian forms.

Goode said, “Yer hearing things back there and that ain’t so strange. Not really. This road is bad and that body is knocking around same as us. Don’t pay it no attention, son.”

But Hyden kept hearing those sounds and something was stirring his guts with a willow twig. “I just been thinking is all,” he said, his breath frosting from his lips. “Been thinking on Skull Valley where we got the box from. Kind of creepy up there. Kind of lonesome and desolate…it puts your mind to things.”

“ What sort of things?”

“ Skull Valley…that’s Spirit Moon’s grounds.”

The old man licked his lips slowly, deliberately. “I hear tell Spirit Moon’s dead.”

“ Some say he don’t die same as others.”

Goode laughed. “Bullshit. Besides, Spirit Moon is from the Snake Nation, boy. Skull Valley is Goshute land. What would Spirit Moon be doing there?”

“ The Snake is just Shoshone, anyhow. Goshutes are tight with ‘em. I heard his tribe is up there in the hills, doing what they do.”

“ Maybe, son, but what you heard about Spirit Moon…those is just witch-tales, is all. Injuns think he’s some big bad medicine doctor, but a white man should know better. Just some Snake witch doctor. A damn injun and he don’t scare me none.”

But Hyden didn’t believe that. Goode even pronounced Spirit Moon’s name kind of low in a whisper…like he was afraid the old injun would hear him from his grave. And maybe he would at that.

“ You ever hear of Walking Mist, boy?”

Hyden said he had. Another Snake medicine man, but from years back.