Ghost Medicine

by Andrew Smith

  “That’s a good one,” Gabe said.

  “You should’ve gotten one of a forty caliber, too,” I said.

  “I would’ve, but the guy couldn’t draw it.”

  Tom was lying, grinning. We knew he had drawn it himself. He could draw anything.

  “Oh shut up,” Gabriel said.

  “When did you do it?” I asked.

  “Last night. I went to Holmes.”

  I leaned in to Tommy and looked closely at the inked figure on his skin. It was so black where the ink had gone in, it almost looked like velvet, but the flesh around the clean edge of the snake was pink and swollen. I held my finger just above the tattoo, and I could feel the heat from Tommy’s side, and then I touched him.

  “Ow!” Tommy yelped suddenly, and I nearly jumped out of my shoes.

  Then Tom and Gabe started to laugh wildly, and I swatted Tom’s hat from his head, feeling foolish for being startled so badly.

  “Why’d you do that, anyway?”

  “What? Scare you?” Tommy asked.

  “No.” I pointed at his hip. “Why’d you get that?”

  “I don’t know,” Tommy said. “I guess it’s kind of a warning to me. Maybe it’s a warning to the other snakes out there. So it’ll keep ‘em away.”

  “Or maybe it will attract ‘em,” I said. Then I looked right at Tommy, could see him watching me, the small pulses of our fire reflecting in his eyes. “I was scared about the whole thing, Tom. You know?”

  “I know,” Tommy said. “And thanks, Stotts.”

  Tommy just smiled that bent-up confident grin he always wore, looking down in admiration at the black snake crawling across his belly and then he let his shirt fall back down to cover it.

  SEVEN

  You sure are one scrawny little cowboy, Tennis Shoes.”

  “Everyone says that. I can’t help it.”

  “I guess as long as you’re sitting in a saddle your pants’ll stay up anyways.”

  I went back to Rose’s by myself a few days later. I brought her some tobacco and a little brown kitten I’d picked up in front of the market in Holmes. I told her it was named Tobacco. I had gotten Carl Buller to buy me a jug of that wine I saw outside her place. He thought it was for me. I didn’t say anything. I watched Rose open it. We were sitting outside her front door on two folding chairs I had dragged out from inside the place. Reno was standing, drinking at the trough.

  “Those bottles out there. It’s not ‘cause I liked the stuff, particularly. Winery people gave it to me. Ha! Winery people. Looking at my land. Wanting to put grapevines on it. So I told ‘em not to come up here if they didn’t bring some wine next time. So you know what they did? They delivered twenty cases.

  And I never had any idea to sell to ‘em anyway. I told ‘em if you planted grapes here in this ground, they’d come out tastin’ like cows and horses. Ha! You want some, boy?”

  “I’m too young.”

  “There’s no laws on my land.”

  “My name’s Troy. Troy Stotts.”

  “That’s a strong name for a boy. And the other one, your brother—the one with black hair that wears them boots?”

  “Tom. He’s not my brother. He’s still not walking right from that snake bite.”

  “Snake? Ha! He got bit? Did he swell up?”

  “Well, he turned colors. That’s for sure.”

  “Did I ever tell you about that twenty-four-pound cat I had?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, every time I go into town, they never have no cats, so thank you, Troy Stotts, ‘cause this one’ll be a good one.”

  “Did you walk all the way to town?”

  “I got a station wagon out there. But it’s no good, really. I got a lawyer who takes care of my money and pays my land taxes for me, that’s why I went. You got a girl?”

  “Yes.” I thought about Luz. I had never said such a thing out loud, and wondered if the saying made it true.

  “She pretty?”

  “Yes. She’s smart, too.”

  “Then you better be careful. What’s her name?”

  “Luz.”

  Rose smiled. She patted my knee softly with a wrinkled hand. “Don’t mind the things you give up. We all do it.”

  “What?”

  “What you have to give up to go and make her yours. Don’t mind it. But don’t forget it, neither.”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about, so I just pretended like I did, kept my mouth closed, and nodded.

  Rose patted my knee again and said, “You’ll be okay, Tennis Shoes. I can tell that.”

  “You said me and Tom could come back and get some horses.”

  “I knew you liked ‘em. I could see it right away. Of course you can get yourselves horses. I said it, didn’t I? I don’t ride ‘em. I hardly even get ‘em any feed but once in a while.”

  “We’ll bring some hay next time.”

  “Will you move some more wood in then?”

  “I’ll do it right now.”

  “Thanks for the cat, boy. I don’t think this one’ll get that big, though.”

  “You got a big black mare out there that looks pregnant. She’s real pretty. And she looks mean, but I like that sometimes in a horse. As long as she’s not crazy mean, you know? ‘Cause if she’s not crazy mean then she’ll be mine, and no one else’s. You know that about horses?”

  “Sounds like you want more than a couple horses for you boys.”

  “I would.”

  “Will you bring more tobacco?”

  I never liked the sheriff ‘s son, Chase Rutledge. He was eighteen and had just graduated from school, so Tom, Gabe, and I had spent enough years dealing with his torments, name-calling, and otherwise just unlikable attitude. More than anything else, I think it was just a natural resentment Chase felt toward us and our friendship, something that he never had with the selfish and shallow punks who called themselves his friends. Growing up, he mostly left Tommy alone, though; most likely because Tom Buller had a reputation for being a real fighter, and Chase knew well enough about that.

  So I kind of cringed when I rode Reno to Papa’s store one night after work to buy some tobacco for Rose and saw Chase’s best friend, Jack Crutchfield, standing alone on the deck outside the front door. And Jack, fat and mean, knew I was there but he didn’t even look at me when I walked past him.

  Inside I saw Chase, tall and dirty, the boy who rarely seemed to shower or put on anything clean. He was standing at the counter, arguing with George Hess, who refused to sell him whiskey.

  Chase just stared at me, and I looked away, pulling my hat down straighter.

  And when George handed me the tins of tobacco I’d asked for, I could almost feel the heat coming from Chase as he got madder.

  “You’ll sell that kid tobacco, but you won’t sell me a bottle?” Chase whined, scratching the greasy hair under his baseball cap.

  I cleared my throat, looked down, and waited for George to make my change.

  “Tobacco’s one thing,” George said, “but whiskey’s out of the question, Chase. What would your dad say? And besides, I know this isn’t for Troy. He doesn’t chew. It’s gotta be for Tommy or someone else. Isn’t that right, Troy?”

  I stuttered, “Uh, yeah.”

  George handed me my change and, turning away from Chase, I wadded it up and stuffed it with the tobacco into my back pocket. As I opened the door, I could hear Chase pleading, “Come on, George.”

  And George Hess said, “I told you no, Chase. Now just get on home.”

  Chase Rutledge slammed his hand down on the counter and followed me out.

  I could tell Chase was wanting to make some kind of a scene, so I quickly began untying Reno’s lead from the post in front of the store.

  “Stotts.”

  “What, Chase?”

  Jack stood, breathing hard through his nose, right behind the sheriff ‘s son.

  Chase looked both ways across the dark street. There was nobody else around. I knew he wa
s looking to see if Tommy was with me.

  “Go in there and ask George to sell you a bottle of whiskey.”

  I took a deep breath.

  Jack grunted. “Ask him, Troy.”

  “He won’t sell it to me, Chase,” I said.

  “I bet he will. He thinks you’re a good boy.”

  Chase moved closer. I could smell him. I held Reno’s lead in my hand, feeling trapped.

  “Do it, Stotts,” Chase said, close enough that I could feel the heat of his breath.

  “Forget it, Chase.”

  “Think you can stand up to me without Tommy Buller around?”

  I looked right at him. “Yeah. I do.”

  Then Chase Rutledge said, “You’re a pussy, Troy.” And before I could do anything about it, he balled up a fist and punched me in the gut. I doubled over and fell onto my hands and knees, still holding Reno’s lead and jerking my horse forward. I must have stayed down there for more than a minute, trying to get my breath back, because when I cleared my head and straightened up, Chase and Jack were gone.

  I heard them laughing somewhere out in the dark.

  I never said anything to Tom or Gabriel about that night. I wanted to forget about it. But I was nagged by the feeling that I had to get even.

  Every morning always began the same way at my house: feeding Reno, cleaning his stall while keeping an eye out for the turkey, feeding the goats, throwing scratch to the hens and cleaning their nest boxes, gathering any eggs laid during the night, although they tended to lay most in the afternoons. I liked the routine well enough, and I always loved mornings at my home most of all, the color of the sky, and the smell of the air. My dad told me that he always resented having to do the chores when he was a boy, but when we moved back after my brother died, I just naturally started doing them even though at first I was too small. At first, I think my dad wanted to forget everything about boyhood in general, and my mom hurt so bad that she just needed to try to find some cure, somehow, for the ghost of her older boy, so even at four years old I knew enough to leave them alone, especially in the morning, and I’d wake and find myself outside, breathing that air, seeing the colors of the stretched and slanted sun, trying to find something to do that would become my routine. But the morning after I brought Rose the kitten was when things began to take a turn away from those routine days that just happen and then are forgotten.

  I could smell the coffee waiting for me in the kitchen. I had grown to appreciate coffee in the mornings, ever since the day Luz came up to that cabin and we had shared some. I’d drink some coffee, do my morning chores, and, while I was out, Dad would get some breakfast for me.

  I slipped my feet into my loose shoes, put on a clean T-shirt and my hat, and went outside.

  I swear Reno could hear me getting dressed because every morning as I put on shoes he began his usual chorus of feed-me calls from out in the barn. That morning, on top of his bellowing, I could tell he was running around inside his enclosure.

  I stepped down the three wooden steps, the middle one a bit wobbly, onto the cool ground. In the hay room, I flaked off some alfalfa for Reno and the goats. I grabbed two small orange buckets and scooped some scratch into one and some sweetened four-way grain into the other.

  You know how sometimes you can be so caught up in the hypnosis of a routine that the whole world could be on fire in the corner of your eye and you wouldn’t really notice it until a burning tree fell on your head? Well, that’s kind of how things worked out that summer morning, because something was terribly wrong, right in front of me, but I might just as well have been blind.

  So it wasn’t until after I had dropped some hay onto the ground for the goats, put Reno’s in his feeder and fended off his usual barrage of nose pushes and nudging until I gave up the grain, and tossed some scratch out onto the dusty ground in front of the hen house, while looking out for that mean tom turkey of mine, that I noticed the large trail of blood like some gruesome treasure path leading out to the edge of the enclosure to a thick little stand of pines where a narrow creek flowed most of the year. I remember thinking, Oh. Blood. And it looked ridiculous, too, like spilled paint or clown’s makeup, but I knew it was blood, it couldn’t have possibly been anything else.

  I first looked at Reno, at his legs and belly; but he looked fine. I walked toward the blood, got about halfway across the pen, and then my eyes followed the trail out toward the trees. Right on the other side of the pipe fencing, still and motionless, was a mountain lion. She was staring at me, her mouth open, panting noiselessly. Her muzzle and face were wet with blood, but it looked black, not like the candy-colored red streaming across the ground in front of me. Just below the bottom rail of the pipe corral, half-in, half-out of our enclosure, was the carcass of one of our small black goats.

  The lion just watched me, as if to say: “Well, what are you going to do about it?” I looked down, but there was nothing to throw at her. I took my hat off, but I wasn’t about to throw that. It wouldn’t have gone far enough, anyway. So I flailed my hat around and began yelling, “Get out of here!”

  Reno startled a little and trotted over to my side as I continued waving and yelling.

  The lion took up the little goat in her jaws, pulled it backwards a few feet out of the enclosure, then disappeared into the darkness of the trees. I could hear her dragging the carcass, stepping heavily, snapping small twigs. Then she was just gone.

  I heard the whack!-whack-whack of the screen door back at the house, then the sound of my father tramping across my worn path, following my footprints to where I stood, Reno beside me, staring down at the crazy redness in the corral. I wasn’t scared, but my heart was thumping heavily, and I could feel the surge of caffeine and adrenaline pushing small pindrops of sweat out of my temples.

  My dad came up to the enclosure, undid the catch on the gate. “Were you screaming?”

  “A huge mountain lion got one of the goats. That little black stupid one.”

  Calling a goat stupid is like calling water wet.

  But you didn’t mean that about those wild horses, too, did you, Tommy?

  Well, they’re not so dumb, I guess.

  You wanna come back here with me and get us a couple of ‘em?

  She said we could.

  Bring her some more tobacco. And Tommy? I’d take ‘em all if she’d let us.

  I showed my dad where I had seen the cat carrying off its kill. We climbed between the rails and followed the blood trail back into the trees. There was no mark on the ground here, so following the lion was difficult, and both of us realized we didn’t want to get too close to her anyway.

  “I guess we should call Fish and Game.”

  “Dad, by the time that guy gets out here it’ll be April. I’m calling Carl Buller and see what he says we should do. They’ve probly had lions before on the Benavidez.”

  “You could call him. But I don’t think it’ll come back here anyway. Look how long we’ve lived here and never even seen one.”

  We went back inside and had more coffee. I was nervous about leaving Reno out there, but I couldn’t believe a cat would think of bothering him. We penned up the other two goats inside the barn and sealed shut the hen house. My dad got on the phone to the Fish and Game Department, and had to call the opposite end of the state just to get the number of our local agent, and then he had to leave a recorded message for him anyway. I went back to my room and got my .22 from the closet and propped it, along with a box of loose ammo, beside the kitchen door.

  “I wouldn’t shoot a lion with a .22, Troy, unless you’re sure you can outrun her.”

  “Let me use that thirty-ought-six then.”

  “I say we just wait a while. She’s not coming back for anything else here.”

  But my dad was wrong.

  It rained the next afternoon. The stain of blood disappeared.

  She rode out to see me. I was working alone that day. I had driven the F-150 out into the pasture to drop off some dry bales of alfalfa to the
horses after the rain. I saw her riding out on Doats, wondering how she could get away, unnoticed, from her parents’ watching.

  We sat on the open tailgate of the truck, swinging our feet in the air over the edge, leaning back against the hay, hooks hanging like floppy ears from the bale’s upturned corners. I put my arm around her shoulder and we hooked our ankles together and swung those legs, like one, up and down off the gate. And we sat there like that as the horses gathered around the feeder, sticking their noses through the metal poles that supported the hay as they ate, occasionally looking up, ears perked, and sniffing at us. I can’t imagine there was anywhere better either of us could be.

  And she kissed my cheek, so softly. We sat there, watching the horses, looking at the sky, smelling the smell of the land.

  “Isn’t this about the most beautiful place in the world, Troy?”

  I took my hat off and put it on her head.

  “I wouldn’t pick anywhere else over it.”

  She picked up a piece of straw and tickled the bottom of my chin with it, and we sat there for the longest time, not saying anything, just watching.

  “What do you want, Troy?”

  “You mean more than this?” I asked. And I know I should have been choking on nervous ness, but I felt so relaxed beside her.

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing could be better than this, Luz.”

  She brushed the straw through the hair over my ear.

  “How about you?” I said.

  Luz cleared her throat and put her hand on my knee.

  “My dad says that one day this whole ranch is going to be mine,” she said. “He says that I’d be the only woman who could ever keep it running.”

  “I bet that’s true.”

  I lay my head back farther in the hay and stretched my leg out straight and held it there, so I could see the shape of her ankle where it rested over my foot.

  “Is that what you would want?” I asked.

  “I love it here,” she said. And she said it slowly, so my heart nearly jumped out of my mouth because I thought she was about to say something else. Something about me, that I wanted to hear, but it scared me just the same.