Skin Medicine

While most of the men in the room were a slat-thin, desperate-looking bunch whose worldly possessions consisted of a pick, a sluice box, and the ratty, stained clothes on their backs, Hiley was ruddy-cheeked with a belly just as round and full as a medicine ball. That gut was a source of endless barbs, but Hiley took them all, smiled, and proudly said it was merely a trapping of success. As he was often wont to point out: “When you got a tool like mine, boys, you gotta build a shed over it.”

There was a plank bar down one side and maybe a dozen grubby men pushed up to it. There were a few tables where the whores were working their prospects, trying to part the ragged, leather-faced men from the gold dust they’d collected in their buckskin pokes. Under the glare of hurricane lamps a half dozen others were playing a hand of poker with greasy cards and well-thumbed chips.

The whores were laughing, the men were drinking, the gamblers were losing…and all and all it was an average night in Sunrise and by dawn the only one richer would be Hiley.

The double-doors opened and two men in gray dusters stepped in. They wore wide-brimmed hats that thrust their faces into pools of shadow. Their eyes seemed to glisten like wet copper.

Everyone stopped what they were doing, watched the strangers.

The two of them stood there a moment, looking around, drinking it all in. Behind them, out in the darkness, a horse snorted…or something did. The strangers closed the doors. They looked on all and everyone with flat, dead eyes, hungry eyes. The eyes of wolves taking in a tasty herd of steer, wondering which one they would take down first.

The men looked at each other, nodded, then came into that crowded room just as smooth and oily as serpents sliding up out of a crevice. Their spurs rang out on the plank flooring, their dusters swished. They took their time, admiring the racks of picks and shovels, the barrels of salt pork and beans, the soiled doves working the miners. They seemed to like what they saw, grinning with smiles of narrow yellow teeth. One was bearded, the other clean-shaven with pitted scars along his jawline.

Together, they leaned against the bar, set identical sawed-off Remington pumps on its surface.

They did not speak and all eyes were on them.

Maybe everyone was smelling something bad coming off these two, some inexplicable, savage odor that turned their insides to sauce. Because it was definitely there. A strange and heady odor of slaughterhouses and bone pits. The smell, say, wild dogs might carry with them from hunting and scavenging, chewing on dead things.

Hiley managed to clear his throat of whatever was lodged in it. “You gents thirsty?” he asked.

The bearded one laughed and it was a hollow, barking sound. “You hear that, Hood? Man wants to know if we’re thirsty.” He laughed again. “You thirsty, son?”

Hood stroked that scarred jaw. “Reckon I am. But I don’t see my favorite drink distilled anywheres. Figure I’ll have to tap my own keg in my own way. You understand my meaning, Cook?”

“ Suspect I do.”

A miner at the bar with a Remington model 1858. 44 hanging at his hip, said, “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“ Here that, Hood? This one wants to know what that means.”

That made Hood laugh. A staccato, metallic laugh like a hammer banging at a forge. It was not a human sound. “I heard him. Figure this feller just don’t understand what we’re about is all.”

“ Maybe you should show him,” Cook said.

“ Maybe I’ll have to.”

Hiley, behind the bar, his hand resting on the stock of an Army carbine just out of view, licked his lips carefully. “We don’t want no trouble here, gents. All of us are just drinking and playing cards and minding our own. I suggest you do the same.”

Hood was grinning again and it was the sort of grin a corpse might have…two months in the ground. “That some sort of threat?”

The miner with the. 44 nodded. “Damn straight it is, boy. You can either be sociable and peaceful…or things can happen the hard way. There’s only two of you and there’s about two dozen of us, give or take. You might want to weigh that out.”

“ I suspect I will,” Hood said, “being outgunned and all.”

Cook wiped the back of his hand over his beard, said, “You’ll have to excuse us. Hungry is what we are. Bellies are just plain empty, growling something fierce.”

It was Hiley’s turn to laugh now, only it was more of a nervous tittering. “Shit, boys, all you had to do was say so.”

“ Believe we just did,” Cook reminded him.

Hiley didn’t seem to catch that or want to. He could feel every set of eyes in the place watching him now, seeing how he was going to handle these hardcases. He knew the situation had not been pacified yet, that just about everyone in the room was armed and lead could begin flying at any moment. He did not want this. This was his place and bullets caused damage. That cost money. Bodies he could sweep out with the trash…but stock, now that wasn’t easily replaceable up here on the far left side of the Devil’s asshole.