Sitting atop packing crates in the alley behind the Red Top Saloon, Jack Goode was saying, “I’ll tell you something, Charlie Graybrow. Just between you and me and that heap of dogshit over there, this town has the curse all it over it. Yes sir, right from its bones to the roofs above, cursed, that’s what. Lookit me for instance. Just take a look at me and tell me what you see.” Goode paused, pulling from a bottle of whiskey, wiping a few drops from his white beard with the back of his hand. “No comment? That’s fair. Sure enough. Well, I’ll answer it for you. You’re looking at a man what won’t see sixty again. Hell, won’t see sixty-five, I reckon. A man that’s been here and there and everywhere. I fought in the army, I trapped in the mountains. I whipped a mail coach down the Overland trail and I was even a Pony Express rider until some Cheyenne bucks in Wyoming Territory filled me so full of arrows they could’ve used my ass to water flowerbeds. What I’m saying, my red brother, is that I ain’t afraid of shit. Never have been.”
Charles Graybrow took the bottle, had a taste. “But now?”
“ Now things is surely different, ain’t they?”
Charles Graybrow agreed with that silently. He knew bad things were happening and would continue to happen. All those disappearances and killings out in the hills. And now this latest massacre. Bad medicine. That’s what it was. Then the vigilantes out tormenting the Mormon squatters and now that prostitute getting slit from kitty to chin.
Not good, not good at all.
Even a fool (or a white man) had to sense the bad aura in and around Whisper Lake these days. It was so thick you could hold it in your hand. Almost as if that particular corner of Beaver County was a gathering point for noxious forces. Made a fellow think. Even made an injun think.
“ Things keep up,” Graybrow said, “well have the army in here.”
Goode pulled from the bottle. “Yes sir, you probably got a point there, my friend. Damned and dandy if you don’t. Because I’ll admit before God and the Democrats and gladly so that I’m shit-scared over this place and what’s happening here. You ask me, there’s a poison here and old Whisper Lake is just rotten to the roots. And it’s getting worse by the day. This town, my friend, is as surely fucked as a three-dollar whore.” He sighed, looked skyward as if he expected the hand of the Lord to smite him from above. “And you know the worse thing of all, Charlie?”
Graybrow shook his head.
“ I think I’m to blame,” Goode admitted. “Somehow, some way…I brought hell down upon this here burg.”
Graybrow took the bottle from him. “How do you figure that?”
Goode sighed. “It’s a long story, but I’ll make it quick for you, I reckon.”
“ Yeah, I’m an injun and all, so don’t go confusing me. I’m real simple.”
“ Now, don’t be like that, Charlie. That’s not what I meant. You know I got nothing but respect for your people.”
Graybrow nodded. “Surely. Amongst my tribe we consider you to be something of a holy figure. Many is the day we pray for your guidance.”
“ No shit? Goddammit…you’re tugging my cord again.”
“ I’m funny like that,” Graybrow said. “Maybe it’s because I’m an injun.”
Goode told him that might be the reason, yes sir. “Anyway, about seven months ago I landed me this job. I was hired by this injun, a Goshute, from the Skull Valley Band. He wanted me to transport this body from up there down here to Whisper Lake. A hundred U.S. Treasury greenbacks he promised me. I jumped on it. Figured I’d come down here, maybe do a little panning up in the hills. Now, this body we were talking about belonged to a fellow name of James Lee Cobb. You hear of him?”
Graybrow washed whiskey around in his mouth. “Some sort of killer, I think. Outlaw. Pistol fighter. Something like that.”
Goode clapped him on the shoulder. “And then some. A cold-blooded killer is what we’re talking, Charlie. Cobb came out of Missouri and his trail was red and hurting. Fought in the Mex war. Robbed. Killed. Raped. Got trapped up in the high Sierras with a few saddle tramps, ate the sumbitches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Well, you get the idea. Old Cobb…why he was just as low as the belly of a squashed rattlesnake in a wagon wheel rut.”
“ Why’d that Goshute have you bring him here?”
Goode shrugged, shook his head. “Hell if I know really. Said something about it being Cobb’s last wish. Had some sort of half-brother living in these parts. About all I could figure is that Cobb was wanted for just everything just about everywhere, so he was on the dodge in injun country.”
“ So you brought the body here?”
“ Yes, damn if I didn’t. Me and this little squirt of piss name of Hyden brought the box clear from Skull Valley and right across the San Fran mountains…”
Goode went on to tell him what that had been like. And as he told it, his eyes got wide and staring, his face rubbery and discolored. A tic jumped at the corner of his lips as he told his story, gazing fearfully into the distance as if he saw the Devil riding in on horseback. When he finished…he was shaking and breathing hard.
“ Sounds like what?” he finally said. “About thirty pounds of prime manure? Maybe. But I swear it’s true. That body in that box…it weren’t dead. Least not in the way we understand dead, you and me. It was crawling and scratching and nails were popping free…and Jesus, Charlie, I coulda pissed myself. Whatever was in that box, well, it weren’t right at all. Like its spirit had just gone sour like bad milk.”
Graybrow listened and kept his sarcasm to himself, because he knew Goode. And Goode was about as superstitious as most atheists. He wasn’t above telling a few tall ones, but Graybrow knew this was not one of them.
Goode pulled hard off the bottle. “I never told a living soul about this, Charlie. And I’m telling you only because I trust you and we killed a few bottles together and you’re an injun. You people know about shit like this. White folk? Hell, we’re black and white from toe to skull. Something don’t fit in our worldview, we pave it over with bullshit so’s we can sleep at night. But Indians…yeah, you people ain’t afraid to look the dark things in the face, ain’t afraid of admitting that there’s black, evil things that can drive a man mad to look upon.”
Graybrow appreciated that, even though he didn’t say so. “You think that Cobb wasn’t human as such any longer?”
“ I don’t know what to think,” he said, “but what was in that box…well, I’m not above admitting that if it had gotten out, I wouldn’t be here right now.”
“ And you think that Cobb brought hell to this place?”
Goode licked his lips, thought it over real carefully. “Well, I keep my ear to the ground and I hear things. We brought the body to Callister’s Mortuary. And that night, they say, Callister was found dead. And it weren’t suicide. Rumor has it Cobb’s body was nowhere to be found, but the other Callister-Caleb-he shushed it up. Now, I don’t think I have to tell you what’s happened over in Deliverance since then. Even the Mormons themselves won’t go within a mile of that place.”
“ And you think Cobb went there? That he’s the…focus of this?”
But Goode would only shrug. “Those are the facts way I know ‘em. First chance I get, Charlie, I’m gonna fill my poke and ride out of this graveyard Hell-for-Leather. The idea that old James Lee Cobb might come knocking at my door one night keeps me awake until the wee hours.”
Graybrow thought it over for a long time as they finished the bottle. Either Goode was crazy or maybe he had something. But even if he was right, there wasn’t a man in Whisper Lake that would ride out to Deliverance to check it out.
“ Well, dammit, enough confessing, Charlie. I ever tell you about the time I sold my wife for a dollar? Truth. She was a mean outfit from back east used to gargle with scrap iron and piss tacks. One time we was in this saloon at a mining camp up in the Big Horn range, Wyome Territory. This big dirt-mean sumbitch named Johnny Houle says to me, ‘How much fer ye wife, son?’ And, hoo! Me and Thedora, we had been going at it for hours. So I say, a dollar. He pays me, drags her off. She shows later, dress torn and face bruised, just a-ready to skin and scalp me. Next day, old Johnny finds me. He’s walking funny like there’s a boot and spur up his ass sideways. You know what? He wanted his dollar back…”
But Graybrow was not listening.
He was thinking of Deliverance and James Lee Cobb. Wondering just what it was he could do about it. And right then, he thought of Orville DuChien. His second sight. Orv would probably know if Cobb was up there. And if he did?
Graybrow started thinking about Tyler Cabe then.