Skin Medicine

Trash, Graybrow told him, just like you said. A speck of trash in a big smelly heap called Whisper Lake. He thought of himself as the fastest gun since Wild Bill, but to call him a shootist would be giving him far too much credit. Shit, Graybrow said, calling him a man was giving that animal too much credit. Virgil was strictly a bottom-feeder, a product of a demented backwoods clan that bottle-fed their young on violence, hate, and intolerance. You wanted to call Virgil Clay something, “murderer” was always a good tag. Maybe sidewinder or weasel was applicable. Bottom line here, Graybrow pointed out, was that Virgil Clay was an ornery, dirt-mean life-taker with all the morals and sense of fair play as a leg-chomping river gator.

“ Man like that? I tell you what, Tyler Cabe, you don’t hang him; you hang his mother for pumping out that filth and his father for grooming him into the reptile he became.”

Cabe listened and listened, finally couldn’t help himself. He asked Graybrow if maybe, just maybe now, he had an ax to grind against old Virgil. That made the old man sigh. “Ax to grind?” he said. “I’m an injun, Tyler Cabe. We grind stone knives and tomahawks, didn’t you know that?” Graybrow told him one day, well over a year before, he and his brother-in-law Robert Sun-Bird-finest, kindest injun that ever lived, had to feel sorry for him marrying my foul-mouthed, snake-mean sister-were on the road outside Frisco. They were bringing a wagon of lumber back to the reservation to throw up a couple lean-tos. They’d paid real money for it, too. He said the ore wagons came and went and no one paid the Indians much attention until a lone rider showed.

Virgil Clay.

He seemed pleasant enough when he stopped Graybrow’s wagon, inquired about the weather, saying only injuns could truly predict the weather. Sun-Bird told him this was true, looked to the sky and forecasted a dry spell for the next week. Clay thanked him, asked for a match to light his cheroot with and was promptly given one. And, yep, he was a pleasant sort, Graybrow said, but his eyes were just plain crazy, beady and close-set. A scorpion wearing a man’s flesh. After Clay got his light, he pulled a pistol and shot Sun-Bird dead. Before Graybrow could do much more than wipe the blood from his eyes, Clay yanked him from the wagon and pistol-whipped him there on the road until his eyes were swelled-up and he couldn’t see.

“ So, maybe you’re right, Tyler Cabe…maybe my ax needed some grinding. Maybe in my heart I still sharpen it from time to time.”

Graybrow told him that that was Virgil Clay, what he knew of him. Though it was rumored he’d run roughshod over Indian Territory, running whiskey in the Nations and robbing and looting redskins and whites alike up and down the Arkansas and Canadian Rivers. Was put on trial once at Fort Smith…but was acquitted of something involving rustled cattle and changing brands with a running iron. In Whisper Lake, he hung tight to Sir Tom Ian ever since Ian showed in town a month back.

Cabe said, “I suppose the rest of that brood is just as bad?”

“ Worse,” Graybrow said. “Damn worse.”

Only person Graybrow ever knew that rode up to the Clay family spread and rode back down again was Jackson Dirker. Dirker made himself pretty clear on the subject of the Clay’s: Long as they obeyed the law, he couldn’t run ‘em out of town, but they so much as spit on the sidewalk, he would ride a posse up into the hills and burn the lot of ‘em out.

No, there wasn’t many of them left…but one of them happened to be Virgil Clay’s old man, Elijah, and he was plenty. Graybrow told him to imagine Virgil, but bigger, meaner, just as crude and coarse as a rutting hog…a hog that ate raw meat and shit razor blades, thought that roasting babies on a spit was how you whiled away a slow Sunday afternoon.

“ That bad, eh?”

“ Bad Medicine,” Graybrow told him. “When an injun says that-“

“ Yeah, I know.”

Cabe figured none of this was good news. If he got out of this mess, the Clay clan might come gunning for him. He’d better watch his back. Course, Dirker might find it amusing-one crazy Southerner hunting down another.

“ But, you know, Tyler Cabe, I’m an injun and sometimes we do go on. I got a good imagination,” he said. “I can read, you know that? I like reading them dime novels and I know everything they say is true. All those stories of redskins attacking wagon trains and kidnapping white women and children…just a shame. I know whites would never kill and burn like that. It’s a good thing the white man came out here and sorted out all us heathen red devils. I’m truly thankful for it.”

Cabe ignored that, lighting another cigarette. “Well, tomorrow, the next day,” he said, “you see that sumbitch Elijah Clay riding in after me, you let me know.”

“ I will…if I’m sober.”

Cabe asked him what he was locked up for.