Skin Medicine

Clay said, “Ah, fuck you…” He turned away, made it maybe two, three feet, then came around fast and lethal, the Navy. 36 filling his hand. He got off a shot as Cabe brought out his Starr double-action. 44 in a smooth, practiced motion. The round just missed Cabe, ripping into the bar. Cabe threw himself to the side as Clay fired again and, falling to the floor, he got off a single shot. The bullet punched a hole in Clay’s chest, deflected off a rib, and bounced through his torso, macerating organ and tissue before erupting from a hole just beneath his left armpit.

Clay made a weird gagging/wheezing sound and hit the floor, vomiting out a tangle of blood. He shuddered and went still. The blood that bubbled from his mouth was very dark.

“ Dead,” someone said. “That sonofabitch is dead.”

Hands pulled Cabe to his feet and he shook them off, surprised as he always was at moments like this that he had survived yet again. Some were patting him on the back and saying what a crack shot he was and what a set of balls to get into it with someone like Virgil Clay. Others were calling him a killer and still others were saying something about Clay’s father, how he was the real nasty one.

Cabe found he could barely stand. It always got like that. Going into a fight he was all balls and hot blood, coming out of it…just shaky and disoriented. Felt like his legs had no bones, were packed with wet straw.

Sir Tom nudged Clay’s body with the tip of his boot. His right thumb hooked into his gunbelt, just above the. 44 Bisley hanging there.

Cabe was thinking, Oh, boy, here it comes…me and Sir Tom…I hope they bury me under a nice tree so I get some shade…

Sir Tom just smiled. His face was pleasant and easy. “That’s one fine piece of shooting, Mr. Cabe. My hat’s off to you.”

Crazy thing was, he seemed to mean it. Like maybe Clay had been no friend, but just some stray dog that had been following him around and sometimes dogs get run down by horses. Life goes on.

Cabe was going to say something, but then Henry Wilcox-Dirker’s massive deputy sheriff-was plowing his way through, men falling out of his way like cut trees.

Everyone seemed to be talking at once and Wilcox listened, understanding perfectly that Virgil Clay wasn’t nothing but trash and that this was bound to happen. He told Cabe as much, told him it would go down as self-defense…but, there was such a thing as due process. And until a coroner’s inquest, he’d have to be held.

“ So, give me your gun,” he said, “and we’ll take a walk.”

Cabe took a step backwards…but knew he really had no choice. So, sighing, handed his weapon to Wilcox. “I want that back,” he said. “I carried it since the war, had it converted to cartridge at no little expense-”

“ You’ll get it back,” Wilcox promised him. “Let’s go.”

“ To the jail?”

Wilcox nodded.

As he led him away, Cabe said, “Tell me one thing…does Dirker still have that whip?”

14

So, two cells down from Orville DuChien, Cabe was deposited like so much refuse. He was given an army blanket, a piss pot, a jug of water, and told not to dirty the straw if he could help it. He said he’d do his best.

Wilcox told him he was honestly sorry about having to lock him up, but the sheriff had set down specific rules concerning such things. A man was gunned down or knifed, his assailant had to be locked up until the facts were sorted out. No exceptions.

So Cabe was a prisoner.

He was not truly angry about it, knew and knew damn well it was his own fault, dancing with that inbred shithound Clay…least he was the one locked-up and not toes-up in the mortuary. That was something. His cell was big enough for a cot and a little slip of floor upon which to pace. To either side were the bars separating his from the other holding cells. He tried pacing for a bit, but his head was pounding from the cheap whiskey and excitement. He sat down then, massaging his temples.

He remembered then the farm back in Yell County, up in the foothills of the Ouachitas. It wasn’t much of a place-just a plot of land with some hogs and chicken, corn and barley. Cabe’s old man rented it from some rich bastard name of Connelly from Little Rock who owned just about everything and everyone in the county. It was but one miserable step up from being a sharecropper. Connelly’s monthly rent was so high, that even when things went good-which was seldom-the elder Cabe barely had enough to feed his family.

Tyler lost two sisters to a diphtheria outbreak. His old man had a fatal heart attack in the fields one afternoon. And his mother had a stroke and died while Tyler was off fighting the War Between the States. The land and Connelly’s greed had wiped out his kin. The Yankees had burned and looted Connelly into the poorhouse during the war. And that was the only time Tyler Cabe ever cheered for the North.