Skin Medicine

Graybrow took his time in answering. “Not sure. I was drunk at the time. But I figure I musta done something. Maybe I scalped some innocent, God-fearing whites or peed on ‘em. Something like that. I been known to do both and sometimes at the same time.” He was silent for a time. Finally, he clucked his tongue, sighed. “Whatever I did, must’ve been bad, you think? To be thrown in here? You don’t suppose I got locked-up just because I’m an injun, do you?”

“ No, white folk wouldn’t do that. We got too much respect for you people.”

Graybrow slapped his knee. “You’re right. But for a minute there…boy, I was scared.”

Cabe told him he didn’t strike him as a man who scared easy and Graybrow launched into a tirade about how he was just a simple savage and the white world was so fast and complicated…it frightened him. All he wanted from life was a tipi and a fire to dance naked around. And maybe a buffalo robe and a chew of tobacco. Maybe a woman…or two of them. And some horses and cattle. Maybe his own bank and livery, now that you mention it…

“ All right already,” Cabe said.

“ Sure, I go on. I know that. It’s because I got a taste for the firewater, makes my head funny. Can’t think right.”

The talk drifted to what Cabe was doing in Whisper Lake and he told the old man all there was to tell. The old man agreed with Dirker that the Sin City Strangler had finally found a place he could call home. He recounted much of what Carny the bartender had told him earlier that night at the Oasis-vigilantes, animal attacks, tensions brewing.

“ There are two Mormon villages heresabouts, Tyler Cabe,” Graybrow said, now dead serious. “One of ‘em is called Redemption and was once a mining town. The Mormons have taken it over and are fixing it to right. People around here, they blame them from Redemption. But they’re wrong. Redemption is just an ordinary town.”

“ What about Deliverance?”

“ That,” Graybrow said, “is another matter. I’m tired now. Maybe another day I’ll tell you about that place, but not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. That is, if I’m-”

“ Sober?”

“ Yep.”

15

Cabe figured he slept maybe two, three hours and then came awake to the sound of keys jingling at his cell lock. The door swung open and there was a figure standing there. His head still throbbing from the booze, his eyes glued to slits, and his mouth carpeted in fuzz, he wasn’t sure if he was awake or not.

Regardless, he knew the dim figure was Jackson Dirker.

“ Sorry to disturb your beauty rest, Cabe,” he said. “God knows you need it, but you don’t belong in here. C’mon, we need to talk.”

Cabe, after some effort, got his boots down on the floor and managed to sit up. His head pounded and his guts tried to climb up the back of his throat. “Shit,” he said. “I feel pretty much like shit.”

In the cell next to him, Graybrow was snoring away louder than a crosscut saw biting into hardwood. Cabe once heard that Indians were real quiet, that they didn’t even snore. So much for that one.

He splashed water in his face, gulped some down, and pissed into the pot, getting some on his boot. Making moaning sounds, he followed Dirker out into the front office. Dirker shoved a cup of hot coffee into his hand.

“ Drink it,” he said. “I need you fresh…or as fresh as you can be.”

Cabe drank the coffee and it tasted like maybe they had made it with water dredged from a privy, but it went down, all right. Dirker poured him another cup, leaning up against the wall, looking very dire. Cabe had to wonder when the hell it was that Jackson Dirker slept.

He set his cup down. “Now, listen to me, Crazy Jack or Sheriff or whatever the fuck they call you here…it was self-defense. Before you go off on some wild tangent on how I’m shooting up the town…that boy there…goddamn Virgil Clay…he pulled on me, got off the first shot. I put one in him because I didn’t have much of a choice.”

Dirker just nodded. “I know that. I heard all about it.”

“ Then you ain’t charging me with nothing?”

“ No, not this time around, anyhow,” he said. “But hear me on this and hear me good. I won’t have you going around shooting people whenever the need strikes you. After awhile folks are going to start tripping over the bodies and they’re not going to like it.”

Cabe told him it couldn’t be helped. And Dirker said maybe and maybe not. He had no love for Virgil Clay or the clan that hatched him. They were trash and everyone knew it. If it hadn’t have been Cabe, it would have been someone else. But…and he emphasized this pretty sternly…the witnesses, a lot of ‘em anyway, were saying that Cabe had been drunk and running his mouth. That he could have walked away from it at anytime, no harm done.

“ Oh, but there would have been harm done, Dirker,” Cabe said. “I would have lost all credibility with them people there. They would have thought I was some sort of coward.”