Skin Medicine

by Curran, Tim

  James Lee just said: “It’s him, ain’t it? The Witch-Man.”

  “Ain’t no such thing, damn ye! Ain’t no such thing!”

  But James Lee couldn’t stop. “They say…they say how he can do things. Things no one else can. Maybe, maybe if we brought the…the crazy woman to him, he could cure her—”

  James Lee caught the back of Uncle Arlen’s fist in the mouth for that. And when he got home, he got a better taste of it. When Uncle Arlen was done, James Lee was folded up on the ground bleeding.

  “Ye never, ever, never mention that one ‘round me again, hear?” Uncle Arlen told him. “That heathen devil witch-man is nothin’ but pain and trouble! He cain’t cure nothin’ and no one, all he’ll bring ye is seven yards of hell!”

  After that, James Lee didn’t mention Heller the Witch-Man again.

  Even Auntie Maretta looked on him differently. She wasn’t exactly cold, but gone was the warmth and love he’d once known. Sometimes he got the feeling she was scared of him. And one night he heard Uncle Arlen say:

  “What’d I tell ye, woman? Like calls to like.”

  Although he didn’t mention the strange old man, James Lee never stopped thinking about him or what lived in the shack up yonder. Days became weeks that wrapped themselves around months and years. And it was from an old moonshiner named Crazy Martin that James Lee got the answers he wanted. Crazy Martin knew the old man, lived way up in a hollow known as Hell’s Half-Acre and with good reason.

  So one summer afternoon, James Lee made the pilgrimage.

  It took him hours to navigate the mud roads and pig trails that snaked through the deep forest. But finally, in a hollow where no birds sang and no insects buzzed and the vegetation had a gray, dead look about it, he located the Witch-Man’s shack.

  Heller was sitting before a fire. “Come sit yeself down, boy,” he said, without once looking in James Lee’s direction. “I knewed ye’d come, sooner or later, I knewed ye had to. So sit down. Folks say I bite people, but don’t ye believe it none.”

  James Lee sat before the fire, refusing to meet the old man’s eyes.

  Heller had a fiddle on his lap and he played a slow, melancholy tune while his mouth rambled on and on about his crops and how they were taking and it would be a good year, save fire and frost.

  “Ye said I was marked,” James Lee managed after he realized the old man was no flesh-eating booger like they said. He was just an old man who lived in a weird hollow who worried over his crops.

  “I recall, boy, I recall.” He set the fiddle on his lap. “Yer pa…no sir, yer uncle, I think, yes…yer uncle didn’t cotton ye talking to me, did he?”

  James Lee was astounded. Here, all these years later, the old man remembered a chance encounter like it was yesterday. And he seemed to know things without being told them. Maybe he wasn’t just some old dirt-farmer after all.

  “I think…I think he’s afraid of ye,” James Lee said honestly. “I think lots of folks are.”

  “Yessum, they is. They certainly is.” The old man thought about it. “Yer uncle…I figure he’s a wise sort. For commerce with me can come at a terrible price. Boy like you…he cain’t afford what I got. Less’n, he don’t value his soul. Ye value yer soul, boy?”

  “Yes…yes, I do.”

  “Good boy. Now state yer business, will ye? I cain’t pull everything outta yer head.”

  So James Lee told him. About his mother, the mysteries surrounding their coming to Missouri. He went on and on, telling him the same things and asking him the same questions for these were things he’d never spoken aloud to anyone before, but had always itched to.

  “First off, boy, yer mama…she’s beyond m’ help. M’ power does not extend far enough to fight what holds her. She was cursed, boy, cursed by…yes, by that evil old bitch. Yessum, I see her in my head, that hag. She packs a heap of power, boy…even dead, her medicine is strong.”

  “I was hoping…”

  “No, boy. But what has yer mama…yes, it’s weakened some. If’n ye wait…surely, there will be peace for yer mama.” The old man leaned forward, his eyes burning. “But hear me, boy, ye carry the mark…yer life’ll be a dark matter. Ain’t no sunshine comin’ yer way…jus’ darkness.”

  James Lee couldn’t fathom any of that business. Heller waxed on about the “Devil’s Mark” and how those who wore it were cursed. But finally, the shadows growing long, Heller let him leave, telling him to follow the trail straight up and out of the hollow. Not to stop, not even to pee. To keep walking, looking straight ahead. That if he saw someone on the trail, to not look upon them, not to listen to what they said. And if he heard voices from the woods…to just ignore them, no matter what they said or what they promised.

  “This holler, boy…it’s full of them what don’t rest easy.”

  James Lee ran out of there and up into the sunshine and greenery again. When he got back to the cabin, no one would speak to him as if he carried a stain upon him. A stink of crazy old men and witches. The next day, he packed what he had and left the hills, figuring he was seventeen and a man. That it was time to make his way in the world.

  West was where he was going.

  And on the way he fell in with the wrong type. He seemed to naturally gravitate to them. And as the weeks and months past, whatever had been waiting in him all these years began to sprout, to take root and bloom. But it was no flower, but a mordant and eating cancer that devoured him an inch at a time.

  By the time he fought in the Mexican-American War, James Lee had already killed six men…with his hands, his pistols, knife and hatchet.

  4

  The dry winds were born of blast furnaces and ovens. They scoured the desolate countryside, howling through dry ravines and whistling along the peaks of rocky precipices. Dense stands of chaparral and wiry brush trembled. Sand blew and snakes hid amongst the crags. Buzzards circled in the yellow hazy sky above. Flies lit on the faces of the living and the dead and the wind tasted of salt, heat, and misery.

  All in all, Northern Mexico was a parched, godless country just this side of hell.

  James Lee Cobb, a Missouri Volunteer, watched as two buckskin-clad irregulars dragged another Mexican corpse from the dirty scrub.

  “That’s six now, boss,” one of them named Jones said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the Spanish face of a corpse that had taken a load of grapeshot in the belly. He was just one big, wide opening between sternum and crotch now…you could’ve passed a medicine ball through him without brushing meat. “Six of them stinking, mother-raping sonsofbitches.”

  “Every time I see a dead greaser,” Cobb said, “I think this land is one inch closer to civilization.”

  Jones nodded, kicking at a spider in the dirt. “Yep, I would agree with that, James. I surely would.” He spit at the corpses again. “You know? Some of this country down here…it ain’t too bad. If it weren’t were for the Mesicans dirtying it up, might be fit for a white man. You think?”

  Cobb narrowed his eyes, watching for trouble, always watching for trouble. “Could be. Hotter than the Devil’s own asshole, but maybe.”

  “Worth thinking on.”

  Cobb listened to the wind talk and it spoke in the voices of demons, telling him there would be a lot more killing, a lot more ugly dying before this little party was wound up. Licking his leathery lips, this made Cobb smile.

  ***

  Whatever Cobb had been as a boy, he was not as a man. He could never honestly mark the point when he had gone from being wide-eyed and naïve…to what he was now, a blooded killer.

  Maybe it had been his first killing.

  That drifter he’d knifed in Kansas after his run from Missouri, the one that seemed eager to teach him the ways of sodomy. Maybe when he’d pulled that hunting knife and sank it clear into the stinking pervert’s belly and felt all that hot blood come bubbling out like lava through a sharp slit in the earth…maybe that had done it. For once he got that first killing over and done with, it all came real ea
sy and natural-like. A predestined thing.

  Just like Heller the Witch-Man told him, his life had become “a dark matter.”

  Cobb didn’t think much of Missouri or Heller or Uncle Arlen and Auntie Maretta much after he left. Not even the horror that was his mother. Staying alive, staying whole, keeping his belly full and his scalp intact—these things tended to occupy his thoughts. He stole horses and rustled cattle. Trapped beaver in the Rockies and Wyoming’s Green River country. He bootlegged whiskey to injuns and supplied them with U.S. issue carbines for their fights against squatters and the Army. All in all, there was a lot of murdering and violence involved and this on a daily basis. All the good things in him withered like green vines in a drought and something else, something shadowed and nameless rose up to fill the void.

  Something that had been there from the start…just waiting.

  Waiting its turn.

  When Texas decided to annex to the United States, he’d joined a group of hellraising Missouri volunteers to fight for its independence from Mexico.

  War, any war, was a hard business, but something in Cobb liked it.

  His first taste of it was at the steaming holding camps at Matamoros where everyone was anxious to fight and there was nothing to do but take it out on each other. The Missouri volunteers went at it tooth-and-nail with volunteers from Georgia and Indiana and particularly with the regular army, which looked down on all volunteers as trash. At best, they decided, they were mercenaries, at worst, just cut-throats and freebooters. So the volunteers gave them hell at every quarter. And when they weren’t using their fists, they were popping off their muskets at passing game, shadows, anything that moved and some things that didn’t.

  Matamoros was one unruly hive of confusion and insubordination. The regular army was incensed over these brigands, these hell-for-leather volunteers.

  And the volunteers themselves were amused to no earthly end.

  But then Cobb and the others were jammed aboard a riverboat and taken down the Rio Grande. The river had burst its banks, then burst them again. Maybe once after that, too. Point being, the pilots were having a hell of a time with it. They couldn’t be sure what was river and what was flood plain. The boats kept getting snagged in mud flats and bottoms. And in that sparse country, the troops had to dismount every so often to gather wood for the boilers…and such a thing required scavenging for miles sometimes.

  Finally, the boats arrived at Camargo…a lick of spit that was neither here nor there nor anywhere you truly wanted to be. Just a little Mexican town on the San Juan River maybe three miles from its junction with the Rio Grande. It had once been sizeable, but was now in ruins from the flooding. The troops unloaded, an irritable and ornery lot, into a camp that was plagued by swarms of insects, snakes, and blistering heat. Men washed their laundry and horses in the same water camp kettles were filled. It was a filthy, desolate place where yellow fever and dysentery raged unchecked. The hospital tents were crowded with the diseased and dying.

  Cobb and the other volunteers spent most of their time arguing, swatting flies, and burying the dead.

  It was that kind of place.

  Death everywhere…and the fighting hadn’t even begun.

  ***

  Cobb’s volunteers slowly threaded out of the rocks, dumping more cadavers on the stinking heap before them. Twelve of them now. Twelve Mexican guerrillas. The sort that preyed on small bands of U.S. soldiers. Cutting them off, gunning them down. Taking them alive if they could and torturing them. Whipping them until they lost consciousness or cutting off their flesh in small chunks until they bled to death, screaming all the while.

  Maybe the regular Army didn’t know how to deal with these pigs, but the volunteer forces surely did.

  When you took them alive, you made a game out of it. You buried them up to their necks in the sand and spread honey over their faces and let the fire ants do their thing. You dragged them behind horses over the rocks until they broke apart. You hung them by their feet and swung ‘em through bonfires. You dropped them into pits of diamondback rattlesnakes. You staked them out and let the wildlife have their way. And, if you felt real creative, you took a skinning knife to ‘em…it could last for hours and hours that way.

  But, best, when you found their villages, you burned them. You shot down their children and raped their women.

  One of the volunteers was pissing on the bodies and Cobb had to yell at him. “Is that how ye show respect for the dead, ye sumbitch?” he said, backing the man against a wall of stone. “Is that how ye treat these chilis? Shows that ye don’t know shit, my friend. Let me show ye how it’s done.”

  Cobb pulled out his bowie knife, pressed the blade against his thumb until it bled…just to make sure it was real sharp. Then, carefully and expertly, taking one of the dead ones by the hair, he ran the blade of his knife under the jaw line and around the cheekbone and just under the scalp and then traced it back down again until he had made a bloody circle. Then, sawing and pulling, he peeled the face from the bone beneath.

  He held up the dripping mask. “All set to scare the kiddies with.”

  The other volunteers were laughing and clapping each other on the backs. Why, it was the damn funniest thing they’d ever seen. Leave it to Cobb to come up with something like that. Just when you thought he’d exhausted his grisly creativity by using the scrotum of a Mex for a tobacco pouch or making a necklace of fingers…he came up with something new.

  Pulling their knives, the others began doing it, too.

  Cobb walked amongst them, motioning with his bloody knife like a schoolteacher instructing on the finer points of conjugating verbs. Except, Cobb’s classroom was a hot, wind-blown place and his subject was butchering. He made quite a figure standing there in his filthy, threadbare buckskins, forage cap tilted at a rakish angle atop his head. His beard was long and shaggy, his hair hanging to his shoulders in greasy knots. An assortment of Colt pistols, revolvers, knifes, and hatchets hung from his belts. Along with the newly-acquired Mexican death mask and the mummified hand of a priest he’d hacked off in Monterrey and sun-dried on a flat rock.

  There weren’t enough bodies to go around and there was some argument as to who was going to get what. Cobb settled that by telling the men it was strictly first come, first served. Those of you who got here first, why ye just carve yerself a face, that’s what ye want, he told them. Ye others, well ye have to make do with what ye can beg, borrow, or steal. Cobb told them—and they believed him—that there would be plenty of trophies to be had down the road a piece. Maybe tomorrow, maybe today.

  “One thing ye can count on, boys,” he said to them, “is that there’s always gonna be more. Mexico’s just full of ‘em.”

  He watched them going to work, hacking and sawing and cutting, singing little ditties they’d learned from the Mexican folk, but didn’t understand a word of.

  Yes, Cobb watched them, knowing they’d patterned themselves after him. He’d joined up as an enlisted man, but soon enough—maybe through ferocity in battle or sheer savagery—he’d become an officer and their leader. They looked up to him. They fancied all the badges and military decorations he’d taken off dead Mexican officers and pinned to his hide shirt. The necklaces of fingers and blackened ears, the skull of the that Mexican colonel he’d mounted from his saddlehorn.

  They wanted to be like him.

  They wanted to be a bloodthirsty hard-charger like James Lee Cobb. They wanted to leap into battle as he had at Buena Vista, shooting and stabbing and pounding his way through the Mexican ranks.

  It made them fight real hard in battle so they could collect up trophies as he had.

  And, yes, they could fight hard and die hard and loot and mutilate the dead all they wanted…but none of them would ever be like James Lee Cobb. They would never have his peculiar appetite for inflicting suffering and death. An appetite born in nameless places where human bones were piled in pyramids and human souls were boiled in cauldrons. They would never have that a
nd they surely would never have the birthmark he had.

  The one that looked like a red four-fingered handprint.

  A handprint that positively burned when death was near.

  ***

  What happened at the Battle of Buena Vista was this: Some 14,000 Mexican troops commanded by General Santa Anna charged Zachary Taylor’s U.S. forces which numbered less than 5,000. Through determination, audacity, and sheer luck, the American’s pushed the Mexican’s back.

  Easy enough to tell; not so easy to experience.

  On a dismal morning in February 1847, the troopers under Taylor received orders to strike their tents and march on Buena Vista. Sixteen miles later, they arrived…lacking provisions, wood for fires. Early the next morning picket guards arrived, saying that a large Mexican force was approaching and approaching fast. James Lee Cobb and the Missouri volunteers stationed themselves in a narrow ridge, just beyond an artillery battery and waited for their enemies.

  Along with them, were elements of the Kentucky and Arkansas cavalry. Each man waited amongst the rocks, eyes wide, flintlock muskets and carbines primed and at the ready, knives sharpened and hatchets in hand. There was a stink in the air—sour, high, heady.

  The smell of fear.

  For down below, the enemy were massing and everyone spread out on that ridge could see them, really see them for the first time. The sheer numbers. For once, intelligence had neither over-inflated or under-inflated enemy strength. The Mexicans moved and marched, formed-up into ranks and scattered out in skirmish lines. From where Cobb sat…they were mulling, busy things in perpetual motion.

  “Don’t look out there and see yer death, boys,” Cobb told his volunteers. “Look down there and know, know that if they take ye, yer gonna take ten of them motherfuckers with ye.”

  Cannonade exploded along the face of the mountain as the Mexican guns—eight-pounders and sixteen-pounders--sought them out. By nightfall, they picked up the pace, raining hell down upon two Indiana rifle companies. Bugles sounded and men died and gouts of smoke filled the air…but the real fighting had yet to begin.