Ghost Medicine

by Andrew Smith

  “I know. I’m an idiot.” And I caught myself because I felt like I was about to start crying. “I put all my bloody clothes in the wash.”

  “I swear that horse is going to kill you one of these days.”

  Stottsy, that look means he’s not tired of trying to kill you is all.

  “Or die trying.” And then I kind of laughed, which, I’m sure, tipped my dad that something was not right.

  “You sure you’re okay, Troy? There anything wrong?”

  “Really, Dad. I’m okay. And Dad, Tom Buller’s coming to get me so I can spend the night there. We got a lot of early work to do tomorrow, if that’s okay.”

  “You’re working too much, I think.” And he went to the freezer and opened it. “Let’s get some ice on that nose. It’s probably broken.”

  “Dad. I’m not working too much. I love it there.”

  And he came back from the sink with a towel bundled around some ice cubes. I sat down on the couch with that ice pack on my face and waited for the sound of the Ford pickup signaling Tommy’s arrival. It came in a few minutes and I said good night to my father and left.

  “He took the money,” Tom said as soon as I opened the door.

  “I know it.” Then the dome light’s shine fell on my face.

  “Jeez, Stotts, what the hell happened to you?”

  “Clayton Rutledge punched me for smarting off.” I took a deep, quavering breath to calm down.

  “Troy Stotts smarting off? No way, man. Who’d believe it?”

  I smiled and it hurt.

  “What did your dad say?” he asked.

  “I didn’t tell him. I told him Reno treed me. What did your dad say about the money?”

  “He went to Benavidez and told him he’d quit if he wanted him to, but Benavidez wouldn’t have it. He said Rutledge explained it to Benavidez and it was all cleared up. So CB got pretty messed up. He’s out cold now.”

  “Take me to the main house, Tommy. I’ll walk back to your place after I see the man.”

  We drove away from my house in silence, the headlights cutting narrowed triangles of light into the blackness of the night, the graveled road skimming below them, dull and gray like the surface of the moon.

  “What’re we going to do, Tommy?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything we can do,” he said.

  “He said he was going to arrest me,” I said.

  “That would be too much work,” Tom explained. “I think Clayton Rutledge’s worked more in the last twelve hours than he has all year.”

  It was after 8 when Tommy dropped me off outside the main house. I knocked, quietly, because of the hour. I waited and then knocked again. Luz opened the door. She gasped when she saw me, then came outside and closed the door behind her.

  “Oh Troy! What happened?”

  “Clayton Rutledge.”

  “Oh no!” And she grabbed my head and lightly touched around my nose and eyes with her cool fingers, so soft. I would have taken twice the beating to have her touch me like that again. I closed my eyes because I felt like I was going to cry. “I’m so sorry, Troy. We can’t let him get away with it. You need to see my father.”

  “That’s why I’m here. But I can’t go in yet, give me a minute.”

  So we sat down on the steps, looking out at the night. We didn’t talk; she had her arm around me and my head was down between my knees the way I was sitting after Clayton hit me; and we just stayed like that for the longest time, me feeling miserable and wonderful at the same time, feeling the warmth of Luz Benavidez next to me.

  “Okay. I can go in now.”

  We stood up and kissed once before she opened the door.

  And then I whispered, “But Luz, I don’t want everyone looking at me and asking questions. I’m really tired and worn out. I just want to see him alone.”

  “Go upstairs and wait in his office. I’ll get him.”

  I was scared sitting in that office, just waiting. And then I heard his footsteps coming up the stairs and I wished I hadn’t come at all. I stood up when the door opened, holding my hat in front of me with both my hands, like a shield. Mr. Benavidez stopped and stared when he saw me. I stuck out my hand.

  “Hello, sir,” I said.

  He took my hand. Not so hard this time.

  “Troy. What happened?”

  And then I told him the whole story. He stood there, in front of the door as if to block my escape, listening and nodding his head occasionally.

  “This is outrageous, son,” he said. “In the morning I’m going to call the county sheriff and see if there’s something that can be done about Deputy Rutledge’s behavior. Has your father seen this?”

  “I was scared. I told him I had an accident,” I said. “That I fell off Reno.”

  “Pretty soon everyone is going to think I gave you a bad horse,” Mr. Benavidez said and smiled a little. “But I want you to know that Clayton did come by here to explain what happened with the truck. And I have to tell you that his son’s story and yours do not agree. So it is your word against his, and in this town that means you will lose.”

  “But what about the money?”

  “That’s another matter. Carl has made mistakes before, although none quite so expensive. Clayton explained that anyone could have taken the money. Even Carl, although I know this is not true. So I don’t know what I’ll do about that, other than forget about it and try to make it up by selling two horses tomorrow. You see, this is how ranchers think. And Clayton said that there is little that can be done officially. Now as for your injury…”

  “And you’re just going to take it like that?” I said. I wasn’t so scared of Mr. Benavidez as I was mad at his putting up with Clayton Rutledge and his son, but I tried my hardest to not sound disrespectful after what he’d just said about Tom Buller’s dad.

  “The sheriff says there is really nothing that can be done. He said if charges were pressed, they would also be pressed against you. So it’s better left alone. Things will work out, I’m sure.”

  “I’m sure.” I felt myself almost choking. I wanted to cuss so bad, and that’s something I never did.

  “I’ll make that call in the morning.”

  “Thank you.” And I moved past him toward the door. “Good night.”

  Luz was waiting in the hall. I know she could see the disappointment in my swollen eyes as I walked past her to the staircase.

  “Good night, Luz,” I said, and left that big house.

  Tommy was waiting for me on the walkway to the main house, by the side of the dirt road. He had a heavy brown jacket on, collar turned up so it almost touched the brim of his hat.

  “Been waiting long?”

  “Just got here, Stotts,” he said. “Here.” And he pulled a tall can of beer from each of his pockets. “Thought you might like one.”

  “I might.”

  We popped open those beers and they sprayed us a little, after being jostled in Tommy’s pockets. I took a long swig. It tasted bad, but felt cool and tingly and calming as it went down. A wind was blowing steady from the northwest, so we walked with our heads down and hats pulled low, sometimes tipping back to drink.

  “You don’t have to tell me that Benavidez doesn’t really care about the money and stuff, ‘cause I figured it would be like that.”

  “He said he was going to call the sheriff in the morning,” I said.

  “Yeah, but he won’t really try to do anything,” Tom said. “Because they’re like kings, Benavidez and Rutledge. And they’re totally in control of their own share of just about everything you see around here. Neither one of them wants to go to war with the other ‘cause there’s too much to lose. So I could’ve told you that.”

  “I’m quitting.”

  “No you’re not, Stottsy. I won’t let you do that.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s get in and have some more beer. I don’t think CB’ll be awake till Wednesday, anyway.”

&nbs
p; We took our dusty shoes off on the porch and went into the Foreman’s house. I could hear Carl snoring from a back bedroom. We threw our coats and hats on the long wooden bench inside the front door, like we always do. I followed Tommy into the kitchen.

  “You hungry?” Tom asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I hope you know how to fix food, ‘cause so am I.”

  “Let’s see if there’s anything that just needs opening,” I said.

  We sat on the couch in the living room and ate pretzels and bologna sandwiches, talking while we drank beer. I fell right to sleep on that couch before I finished my second beer. Tommy threw a blanket over me and left me there.

  The angel is sleeping in the woods.

  No. I don’t really know about you, Stottsy. You’re scary smart.

  We were sitting around the fire: me, Gabey, Tommy, and my dad was there, too. I remember Gabey was dressed all in white. Dad was smoking a cigarette. I looked into the flames and there were flames on the hills, streaking up to the mountains, circling the bottom of those two granite fingers, gray-white against the starlit sky. I was holding my Dawson folder, but I knew somehow I had broken it; the blade wouldn’t open. I felt blood in my hand.

  And my father waved his arm through the tongues of the lapping fire at Tommy. Snakes crawled out of the tops of Tommy’s boots and he just kept brushing them off his legs, laughing, as more and more came out.

  And then my father picked up Gabey, all small and bundled up like a sack of ice cubes, and he dropped him into the fire. Tommy and I got up and looked down into the fire, which was sucking down into the earth as though it had been turned upside down. I reached in after Gabey, bent forward at the waist, plunging my arms down into the fire, but it had become foaming icy water and all I could see was the swirling foam in front of my eyes and I know I stopped breathing, too, and I knew I was dreaming, but I screamed anyway.

  Gabe. Gabe!

  It was light. I heard Tommy running down the hallway from his bedroom. I was soaked in sweat.

  “Stottsy, you okay? I heard you screaming for Gabe or something.”

  “Oh man,” I said and touched my eyes, then jerked my hand back at the shock of pain from the bridge of my nose.

  “I had a really bad dream. I must’ve got hit pretty hard yesterday.”

  “Naw. I think that baloney was rotten.”

  I sat up on the couch and yawned. “I can make some coffee if you got it.”

  I tossed the blanket aside and went with Tom into the kitchen. They had one of those coffee pots that cooks on a stove, like you’d use for camping. It took us a while to find the coffee can, but we finally did, and I managed to put it all together.

  “So?” Tommy said. “What was that scary dream about?”

  “I don’t know. It was too weird. I was trying to pull Gabe out of a fire but it was sucking me in.”

  “I’m not going to say it, Stotts. You know. What you think I’ll say.”

  “Yeah. I’m crazy.”

  The coffee was starting to boil. Tommy stretched and rubbed his eyes.

  “So are we going to work today even if CB doesn’t get out of bed?”

  I took a breath. I wanted desperately to forget about the day and night before, the dream that woke me.

  “I want to,” I said.

  THIRTEEN

  The fires came early that year, the summer my mom died.

  The winter before had carried so much rain and snow on its gray shoulders, then the summer of the mountain lion, the ghost medicine that promised to make us vanish, to cure our ghosts, brought so much growth in the underbrush; and that growth, in turn, withered and dried under the heat of a particularly fierce July.

  Tommy and I were out by the fence line, at the temporary corrals we had built for those horses we’d finally gotten from Rose. They were tame and calm now, and we were happy for that. The big roan had gotten to the point where he would smell Tommy, and Tom was touching him just about every day, so he was close to being ready for the halter. He looked to be about three years old, so we figured he hadn’t been wild for so long that there was nothing we could do with him, and he wasn’t too old to geld, either.

  “It just hurts to think about,” Tommy said.

  “You wouldn’t want to keep him if you didn’t geld him,” I said.

  “It’s the thought of it, I guess.”

  “He’s had his way enough, though. I’m sure it’s his foal mine’s carrying,” I said. “It kind of makes you wonder, huh, when you see a horse like him, though. I mean, look at his legs, how fine they are. And look at how big he is. He could easily kill you, he practically did that time we finally got a rope on him. But now he lets you get in there with him and he smells up against you and he even lets you touch him.”

  “I want to get on him.”

  “He’s going to let you do that, too. And he doesn’t have to, you know that, ‘cause you know he could just as easy kill you. But he’s going to let you do all this to him, and it’s no humiliation to him. It’s a bargain.”

  “Man, you’re weird about horses. I think that Reno’s messed up your head.”

  “By landing me on it too many times, I bet.”

  That mare of mine was doing well, too. I had her on the halter and could take her out on walks, ponying with Reno. But like horses can be sometimes, he was jealous of her, and I saw that. Sometimes she followed us off the halter. And she was getting real big and wide, like she was getting ready to foal. I named her Ghost Medicine, for the lion we took that day. Tommy named that stallion Duke.

  Duke could be pretty mean, so we separated the corral with pipe down the middle, running right over the big trough we kept filled by hauling water out of one of Benavidez’ water trucks. The horses were standing along the rail, head to tail, flicking each others’ faces with their tails, in the shade of one of those big umbrella-shaped oaks, when I noticed a column of pale smoke off in the woods, a few miles to the south of us.

  “There’s a fire over there,” I said, pointing.

  Tommy squinted his black eyes at the smoke. “It looks like it’s probly down by the highway, maybe three or four miles.”

  “Think we should go back in and tell ‘em at the ranch?”

  “Let’s watch it a while. Could just be the Forest Service burning something on purpose.”

  So we watched the smoke, sitting there with our legs inside the corral and our arms draped over the top rail. When I first saw it, the smoke was translucent and sand-colored. A few minutes later, it thickened up to a solid white; and then finally it began mushrooming up in big round pillows of dark gray and black; thick and ominous. It wasn’t good. And it was heading north, towards the Benavidez ranch, and us.

  “It’s gonna be a bad one,” I said.

  “What do you say we do, Stotts?”

  We fixed our stares at the distant smoke, over the tops of the trees.

  “We gotta go tell Rose ‘cause she might have to get out. If it gets bad we might try to run some of her horses this way.”

  “Okay. What about these two, then?”

  “Well, if it gets bad then we’ll have to let ‘em out. If they’re smart enough they’ll head for the lake. It’s not that far.”

  “I could go get the trailer.”

  “Yours isn’t going in no trailer today,” I said.

  “Okay. Let’s get over to Rose’s.”

  I jumped Reno over the fence and opened the chute gate for Tom and Arrow. The smoke was nearly filling all the southern sky now and our shadows fell dim on the ground; the daylight had gone orange. I heard the rumble of the propellers of the first water-dropping plane overhead.

  I saw Rose’s windmill over the rise of the hill before her house. It was turning, facing south. The wind, hot and dry, was picking up. Rose was standing out in front of her house, hands on her hips, wearing that dirty flowered dress of hers, staring up at the smoke like she was mad at it. The sky was nearly gone now, and smoke was low to the ground. The air stun
k of burning brush and tree.

  “Ha! My two young cowboys are back to see the fire,” she said. “Well, I been here for the last fire, more than twenty years ago. But a steel house don’t burn!”

  “I bet it makes a good oven, though,” Tom said.

  She had an old Ford Falcon station wagon with fake wood paneling on the sides, all faded and flaking away. She drove it a few times each year to pick up supplies and visit her lawyer, so I knew it could run if she needed it.

  “Do you need us to help you get anything loaded into your car?” I asked. The problem, I knew, was that the easement through Benavidez land that gave her access to the highway was south, toward the fire.

  “I’m not going anywhere just yet,” she said. “But I guess I’d take that cat.”

  “It looks pretty bad,” I said. Ashes were falling from the sky, soft like snowflakes. Some were black and curled. Some were smoking. Our shadows were gone, but it was still afternoon.

  Tom got down from Arrow and handed his reins to me.

  “I’m going to get some stuff out of the house for her in case she decides to go.”

  I tied both of the horses up at the post by the goat trough. Tommy was already coming out the front door carrying two jugs of wine.

  “I got her tobacco in my pockets. This is all she’d want anyway.”

  “Ha! You got some tobacco? See, you boys is good ones,” Rose said.

  “Did you see that cat in there?” I asked.

  Tom kept walking around the side of the house to the station wagon. “If I did, I wouldn’t say.”

  I went into her house and turned toward the back wall. I walked right into a thick, sticky spider’s web. I felt my stomach rise up and I took my hat off and shook it, certain there would be a big black widow on it somewhere. I gave a quick look toward Rose’s “living room”—the seats around her stove. No cat. That was good enough for me.

  “I can’t find him in there,” I said as I came out the door.

  But Tom was holding Rose’s little brown cat, its paws straight up on the front of his shoulder like he was aiming to use Tommy’s face as a scratching post. I grimaced, still feeling spiderwebs on me.