Skin Medicine by Tim Curran Page A

know that of all the Mormon camps and villages scattered in the hills and valleys, the vigilantes did not raid in the one called Deliverance. Because even the Mormons shunned that place and whatever had happened there, it was Devil’s work.
    And above all, nobody guessed that the disappearance of James Lee Cobb’s body and the hideous degeneration of Deliverance from a God-fearing Mormon hamlet to a place of dark, nameless rites was not coincidental, but very much connected.
    Like the Callisters, these secrets were tended in the lonely tracts of the town’s sordid soul.
     
    7
    Despite being warm from his bath and just as relaxed and easy as a kitty curled up in a drawer, Tyler Cabe threw on a deerskin jacket and a pair of gray woolen pants and went back out into the elements. The rain had stopped and the wind had died down, but it was still cold and his boots sank four inches into the mud sea of the road.
    At the Oasis, Frank Carny was still on duty. A swamper was mopping bloody sawdust from the plank floor. There had been a knife fight, Cabe learned. No one had died, but it had been a messy affair as such things often were. A few men were playing poker and a few others were huddled at tables, telling stories of strikes in the Montana goldfields.
    Cabe drank beer and told Carny why he was there and the two got down to some serious talking.
    “ Well, I’m sorry to hear that you and the sheriff don’t get on so well. All I can say is that he’s a good man, far as I can tell,” Carny said. “Like him or not, you gotta admit that boy’s got a real set on him. Shit, I’ll wade in on anybody with my bare fists…but they got a gun? Forget it. I become a coward then. Dirker? Hell, he goes right after anybody, he figures they’re causing trouble in his county.”
    Cabe sipped off his beer. “I ain’t saying he’s a bad sort, Frank. Ain’t saying that at all. We just have a history is what. So much water under that fucking bridge, it’d drown a bull elephant.”
    He hadn’t told Frank Carny everything. Just enough so he’d understand the lay of the land, so to speak. Understand who and what Tyler Cabe was and who and what Jackson Dirker was to him. Cabe figured that was important, because he needed a friend in this town, someone he could trust and was plugged into the local grapevine. Sometimes a little confession softened a person. Sometimes you had to expose your flanks to win the battle.
    Carny put his elbows on the bar, looked Cabe dead in the eye. “Listen, Tyler. You seem like a right sort to me, so I’ll tell you something. Dirker’s got a lot friends in this town…and he’s got a lot of enemies. I tell you this, just so as you don’t speak out of school to the wrong person. I like Dirker…but I’ve been around, I understand how it must be for you. I’ve got enough lumps and bumps and scars…but, we’ll say they were self-inflicted. Your scars are of a different stripe, aren’t they?”
    Cabe swallowed his beer. “I would say so.”
    Carny drew himself a beer from a wooden keg. “Can I be bold here, Tyler?”
    “ I wish you would be.”
    Carny poured half the mug down his throat in a single swallow, wiped foam from his wiry mustache. “Wars are bad business. Never been in one, but you don’t have to be to figure that. You and Dirker…you were twenty years younger back then. Full of piss and vinegar. Both fighting your asses off for a cause you firmly believed in. But you were kids, neither of you had the common sense and tolerance that comes with age and experience. Keep that in mind.”
    Cabe licked his lips. “Young and randy?”
    Carny laughed. “Exactly. Hot-headed, pissed and pumped with the sort of craziness only youth knows and which wars—and the bastards who start ‘em—like to exploit. Just keep that in mind, friend. I’m of a mind that neither of you are the same men you were.”
    Part of Cabe didn’t like Carny telling him his business and how he should feel about the shit