Skull Moon

He stopped the wagon a reasonable distance from them and dismounted.

Indians. He saw that much.

But this was the Oklahoma panhandle. These were not his people, not his mother's people. She had often told him that the Crow were not the same as other tribes. That the Sioux and Ute and Flathead and Bannock were all separate peoples. That they had only the stars and moon and sun in common, but nothing else. But Longtree's white teachings had told him that all Indians were the same-they were all heathen savages, no more, no less.

And in those dark days after his tenure as an Indian scout for the army and time spent beating men in the ring, he had little use for anything but money. Men, white or red, were all savages to him. He thought of himself as truly belonging in neither world so he hated equally.

He watched the Indians and they watched him.

A beaten, lean lot they were, all bundled up in rags and moth-eaten blankets and cloaks of dusty despair. Zuni, he figured. They studied him with hateful, mocking eyes sunk in burnished skins. And who were they to look on him like that? These pathetic, hopeless sonsofbitches who begged for crumbs in a white town and warmed themselves around a buffalo shit fire?

Longtree despised them.

He tethered up his horses so the thieving redskins wouldn't make off with them and, gathering up his shotgun and saddlebags, went inside.

There was a fire burning in the hearth and a few depressed and drunken men slouched over shots of whiskey or forgotten card games. The place smelled of piss, sickness, and misery.

There was a Mex behind the bar, a greasy little thing missing an eye.

Longtree set his shotgun on the bar. "Gimme a shot of something," he told the Mex.

The Mex poured him whiskey.

Longtree looked around surreptitiously. "You know a guy named Benner?"

Someone walked up behind him and Longtree turned around real fast, hand on the butt of his Navy Colt.

"I'm Benner," a man said. He was so ravaged by the climate he could've passed for an Arapaho. "You here for the body?"

"Yeah," Longtree said absently. He was listening to the commotion out on the street. The injuns were chanting and pounding gourds and rattling beads. Commingled with the moan of the wind, it all took on a very eerie, haunted sound.

"Heathen Halloween," Benner croaked.

Longtree eyed him up to see if it was a joke. Benner's face was forbidding. "Since when do redskins celebrate that?" Longtree asked. "Halloween's a whiteman's-"

"It don't belong to any Christians," Benner said in a low, guarded voice. "Halloween's a pagan ceremony, my friend."

"Halloween…out here? That's crazy. Out east, maybe, but not here."

Benner shrugged. "That's what we call it. Heathen Halloween. They celebrate it this night every year." He seemed disturbed at the idea. "Now, we'd best get you what you came for."

Longtree downed his shot and followed Benner into a claustrophobic back room. A match was struck and a lantern ignited. There was a wooden box sitting atop a heavy table. It was about six feet in length and looked much like what it was: a coffin. Benner pried open the lid and held the lantern close so Longtree could see.

"Christ," Longtree muttered.

It was some sort of Indian chieftain done up in skins and beads and necklaces of animal teeth. The face had the texture and color of tanned animal hide, the skin just barely covering the ridges of the leering skull beneath. The eyes were empty, grizzled pits, the teeth broken and pitted like deadwood. A beetle crawled out of one eye socket and Benner brushed it aside.

"Almost two-thousand years old," he told Longtree. "Been baking in the sun and drying in the wind since before white men ever set foot here…"

Longtree shrugged and thought of the money they promised him in San Fran for it. A smile brushed his lips. "Some people'll pay good money for anything, I reckon."

But an Indian chief, is what he was thinking. I'm taking money to deliver an Indian chief. That's what it has come down to.

"Those Indians out there," Benner said in a whisper, "usually they have their October heathen service out in the hills where we can't see. But they brought it to town now that he's here. They're mighty ornery about me having stolen him. They want him back. Some sort of god to them, I guess."

"Don't look like a god to me," Longtree said.

Benner was staring at him. "You're kinda dark yourself friend…you ain't got no injun blood in you, do you?"

"No," Longtree lied.

"That's good. I can trust you then, I guess."

Longtree grunted and looked down at the chief and couldn't help shuddering: the old boy looked angry. His leathery, crumbled face was hitched in a sneer, it seemed. There was something else that bothered Longtree, too. Now that he studied the old ghoul's face, there seemed to be something slightly off-kilter about it, almost as if his bones weren't laying quite right. His face had a narrow, inhuman cast to it, the eyes too large, the jaws exaggerated. It was reptilian somehow, suggestive of the skull of a rattlesnake.