Skull Moon

by Tim Curran

  One step at a time.

  "If I didn't know better," Longtree said to her, "I'd say you were suggesting these killings were done as revenge."

  She shrugged. "You'll have to find that out yourself."

  He let it rest. He'd suspected a connection between the murdered men and now one was offered him-they had to be the rustlers, the same ones who'd lynched Red Elk and of which one was a murderer.

  Take it easy, he cautioned himself. Be Careful. She could be lying about all this.

  But he'd made no decisions yet. He would investigate it all and then draw his conclusions.

  He found himself staring in her eyes and she into his. He arched his head toward her and she took him in her arms, kissing him passionately. She pulled away, slipping free of her calico dress. Longtree followed suit. Her taut body was bathed in orange light. He kissed her breasts, her belly, everything. She drew him on top of her and guided him in. And even as he pounded into her with powerful thrusts and stared into her savage, hungry eyes, he saw the face of Lauters.

  But not for long.

  Some time later, they lay together before the fire, covered in Longtree's blankets. The night was cold, but they were sweating and filled with that pleasant warmth that only comes after sex. They didn't speak, not for the longest time. There didn't seem to be a need to. The breeze was crisp, yet gentle in the arroyo beneath its wall of pines. The stars overhead were brilliant.

  Sitting up on one elbow, Moonwind said, "You were raised in a mission school?"

  "Partly." He told her of the Sioux raiders that had destroyed his village, his family. "You could say, I was equally schooled by the Crow and by whites."

  "The whites often place things in categories. Have you noticed this?"

  "Yes."

  "Everything must be labeled and organized and separated into appropriate boxes. A strange thing."

  Longtree laughed. "They find life easier that way."

  Moonwind said, "My father, Herbert Crazytail, is a very wise man. When I was young he was friends with many whites. When they built the mission school in Virginia City, he sent me there so that I could learn the ways of the whites. That I would speak their tongue and know their god. He said that the whites were possessed of a strong medicine."

  "He was right," Longtree admitted. "It's something I've learned and sometimes the hard way."

  "Yes, my people as well. Crazytail wanted me to know the ways of whites and to understand that, although their medicine was strong, they misused it. I learned this. He wanted me to know that their god and his teachings were wise, but that the white man did not follow them. This also, I learned. The white man is wasteful, Joseph Longtree. He destroys what he does not understand and laughs at that which he cannot fathom. He has a god, but he profanes him, ignores his teachings."

  Longtree couldn't argue with any of that. White religion, unlike red, was generally a matter of convenience. It was practiced only when it did not interfere with other aspirations or needs.

  "The white man separates the natural and the supernatural. But my people-and yours-do not. We have no words to divide them. They are one and the same," Moonwind said, her eyes sparkling and filled with fire. "If the whites believed this, they would accept us and we, them."

  "You might have a point there," Longtree said. "What you have in this land is a collision between cultures."

  "Answer me this," she said to him, holding his face in her long, slender fingers. "Since you are half-white, do you believe in the supernatural or only that which you can touch, can feel, can hold in your hand?"

  It was not an easy question to answer.

  And the only way he could was to tell her about Diabolus. "It was in the Oklahoma Territory along the New Mexico border. Many years ago. I was a bounty hunter at the time. A man paid me to bring him a body…"

  14

  Joe Longtree rode almost 200 miles to collect the body, and all the way the demon wind was blowing. It came out of the north, screaming over the dead, dry land with the wail of widows.

  When he finally made it to Diabolus, he knew there would be trouble. The town was a desolate place, a typical failed Oklahoma/NewMexico border town with skeletons lining the street: closed-up, boarded-down buildings weathered colorless by the winds and heat. He saw no one and he didn't like it at all. In another year, this place would be another ghost town, blown away by the desert dust, sucked dry of humanity and hope. And after Longtree got what he'd come for, it could do just that.

  "Shit and damnation," he cussed under his breath and steered the wagon down the black, lonesome street. The thud of the horse's hoofs was like thunder on the hardpacked clay, echoing through abandoned buildings and thoroughfares.

  A few tumbleweeds chased each other down the road.

  Longtree had two lanterns hung on long hooked poles to either side of him and they did little to light up the ebon byways. It was like creeping through the dark innards of a hog.

  Up ahead, there was light and people. Horses were hitched up before a sagging single-story saloon and there were fires lit in the street, groups mulling around them.

  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 down
ed 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.

  "We'll have to take him out the back way," Benner told him, "those injuns'll be angrier than a fistful of snakes if they know he's gone and you're taking him."

  Longtree nodded.

  Benner suddenly took a step backward, one trembling hand grasping his temples, his lips pale as fresh cream. He was whiter than flour in a sack. His eyes were lunatic, rolling balls shifting in their swollen sockets.

  "What the hell is it?" Longtree asked.

  Benner shook his head, mouthed a few unintelligible words and then seemed to calm down. For one awful moment he looked as if he'd seen something Longtree hadn't. "I'm okay," he said.

  "You accustom to spells?"

  "No, I'm fine," Benner assured him. "Just this place, I guess. Gets to a man after a time. Nothing here but injuns and sand and the wind. Goddamn snakes everywhere." He mopped his forehead with a discolored bandanna. "I wish them redskins would take that damn heathen ceremony somewheres else."

  Benner put the lid back on the crate and opened the rear door. The wind slammed it violently against the outer wall and both men started. Longtree brought the wagon around. The box didn't weigh much and it was a simple matter to load it.

  "Where did you find this, anyway?" Longtree asked him in the whispering darkness.

  "Out in the hills," Benner said hesitantly. "Out in some burying ground the injuns call Old God Hollow. Lot of curious things out there. I'm probably the only white man who has ever been to that awful place. It's an ancient place and an evil one, friend, only in your nightmares will you ever see such a thing. Must be ten or fifteen other scaffolds there with injun corpses drying out on them, injuns with devil-faces like his. There's faces carved into the rocks and bones everywhere, piles of 'em. And scalps…Christ. Must be thousands, strung up on poles and not recent ones either, but old things tanned by the wind into leather." He paused, lowering his voice. "This old chief and the others I saw, there's something not right about 'em. I've heard stories about an older race…shit, I don't know. But somebody had to teach them injuns how to scalp folks."

  "A fellah down in Tucson told me white folk started that," Longtree said.

  Benner grinned. "You believe that, do you?"

  "Nope. Just mentioning the fact."

  "If you coulda seen them scalps in the Hollow, you'd think different."

  "Where is this place?" Longtree asked.

  "About ten mile, due east." That crazy look was in Benner's eyes again. "I heard about it from an old Kiowa name of Hunting Lizard or Hopping Lizard, can't remember which. He wasn't much then, just some old rummy who'd sell his soul for a bottle, but I guess in the old days he was some big shot medicine man. He called it the Snake Grounds. Told me there was gold up there, more than a man could carry away in a week. I fell for it. He got a bottle out of the deal and sent some white fool to his death, that being me. No gold there, of course, just them mummies and scalps and other things meant to drive a sane man crazy."

  Longtree nodded with disinterest. "Gold, you say? Maybe you didn't look too good."

  "Maybe not. I just wanted out. Goddamn place."

  "So, you took one of these dead ones instead?"

  Benner was brushing the palms of his hands against his pants as if he were trying to rub off some old stink. "Yeah. I was hoping I could sell it to a carnival or something. Damn. The wind was howling like nothing I'd ever heard before and there were snakes everywhere, biguns, coiled around them scalp poles and hiding in the rocks. Rattlers bigger than anything you'd want to see. Must've killed a dozen, barely got out of that devil-yard alive."

  Longtree said, "Country's full of snakes."

  "Not like these, friend, not like these." Benner was grinning like a desert-stripped skull. "If you coulda seen 'em, seen what was in their demon eyes…"

  "I'd best be on my way," Longtree told him, wanting nothing more than to get out of that damn town.

  "I hope God rides with you, son."

  Longtree paid him and unhitched his horses.

  "Good luck," Benner said and was gone.

  A few of the injuns were eyeing up Longtree and what he had under the tarp in the back of the wagon. He set out his shotgun and Navy sixes on the seat next to him.

  If it's killing you want, it's killing you'll get, Longtree thought at them. This old boy's going to a museum, Heathen Halloween or not.

  The Indian's chanting took on a raw, expectant tone, the lot of them dancing in crazy circles, shaking bone and feather talismans and waving skulls about.

  Longtree urged the horses around facing the way he'd come and started to make his run. He'd barely gotten them up to a trot before the Indians made their move. They came on foot, brandishing knives and ceremonial spears. They were a howling pack of crazy men, their eyes bulging, blood boiling like hot tar. If Longtree had ever seen true religious fervor reach its ugly, insane climax before, he would've known what this was, but he never had. He only knew they stood between him and freedom, him and a lot of cash.

  He left them behind in a cloud of dust, laughing to himself.

  It was a long, hard ride through the desert at night. Somehow, somewhere, he'd gotten turned around. There was heavy cloud cover so he couldn't see the stars, had no true way of navigating. It was just Longtree and that wagon and the body in the box. The horses started acting funny right away. They moved with starts and jerks, pulled the wagon in circles. Even the bite of the whip could not convince them to do his bidding.

  After a time, Longtree just stopped them completely.

  The desert had gone cold and lonely and silent as the crypt.

  There was something in the air and he felt it then: heavy, ominous, enclosing. It seemed that the very air around him had gone strange. It was thick, suffocating, hard to pull into his lungs. It had the consistency of coagulated grease. He could actually feel it laying over his skin like a motheaten tarp. It smelled fu
nny-like spices and age and things shut up for too long.

  He stepped down off the wagon and could not get his bearings.

  Longtree had been a scout. And it had once been said of him that he could track a pea through a blizzard…but now he was blind, his senses-always so preternaturally sharp-were completely shut down. Had he been dumped on the desolate plain of some alien world he could have been no more helpless.

  He thought: What gives here? What is this about?

  It was so black suddenly it was like being sewn-up tight in a bag of black velvet. The horses were snorting and neighing and pawing at the earth. A breeze had picked up, but it carried a horrible stagnant odor on it. Not natural in the least. Longtree had never smelled anything like it before, but it made his skin go cold, wrapped icy fingers around his heart.

  He wanted to run.

  Something in him was demanding it, screaming it in the blackness of his brain: Run! Run, goddamn you! Take flight while you still can! Before, before-

  The wind kept picking up, adding to his disorientation.

  His own breathing seemed loud, almost deafening.

  The wind was beginning to make a low, moaning noise that dragged fingernails up his spine. Distant, was that sound, but getting closer by the second and sounding like voices mourning in unison and coming from every direction.

  Longtree uttered a strangled cry and pulled his Navy six.

  The mesa and towers of black rock seemed to rise up higher and higher, reaching into the sky and…and then leaning out, pressing together, drawing over him like fingers trying to clutch and hold him.

  The wind became gale force and picked up sand and bits of rock and grit that peppered his teeth and forced his eyes shut. And echoing everywhere, those voices moaning and screeching and whispering what seemed his name. And it became a real, full-blown sandstorm that whipped and howled and blasted everything in its path. It carried an odd half-light about it that created shadows and shapes and forms in a murky, surreal illumination. It forced Longtree to his knees next to the wagon and he pulled his neckerchief over his eyes and that was okay, that was just fine.