Skull Moon (11 page)

"And what is this Skullhead?"

"A supernatural being. Nothing more. According to tradition, the Skullhead is a righter of wrongs."

Longtree stared at her, knowing she knew more than she was saying. She avoided his eyes. "Tell me what this is all about."

She continued staring in the fire for some time. Then, "It has been said that those of the Skull Society have the ability to change shape, to shift themselves into other forms." She let that lay with him. "It is a fairly common belief with my people. The Bear Society believes they can assume the shape of their spiritual guide, the great bear. The Wolf Society believes they can become wolves."

"Do you believe in
this?"

"I believe many things."

"But do you believe in this? The whites have a name for shapeshifters. Do you know what it is?"

"Werewolf," she said softly.

He nodded. "A legend."

She seemed unconcerned with his label. "It has been said the ancients were in league with many creatures. Some no longer walk this land. Some are distant memory. That they hunted with them,
as
them. That they could reverse their skins. Beneath their flesh were the pelts of wolf, bear. This was accomplished with the Blood-Medicine my father spoke of."

Longtree tossed his cigarette into the fire. "Okay. That's fine for the Wolf and Bear Societies. I don't ridicule their beliefs. But what of the Skull Society? What is it they claim to become with this Blood-Medicine?"

"With the Blood-Medicine, men of the Society could become the Skullhead."

"What else?"

She went silent again. Then she turned and looked at him, her eyes drinking him in, making him shiver. Shadow and light played over her face. "It was said my grandfather was a shapeshifter. That he often hunted in the form of an animal. That his father was one and his father's father."

"And Crazytail?"

"Yes, he, too."

Longtree licked his lips. "Are your telling me your father is killing these people in the form of an animal? Some primal beast? This Skullhead?"

She looked angry. "No. You wanted to know about the Skull Society. That's all I'm telling you."

But was it? Was she laying it all out for him? No, he decided, she was spinning tribal tales, nothing more. People didn't turn into animals. There were no werewolves. Or Were-bears. Or Skullheads. If he started believing garbage like that then it was time to turn in his badge. It was madness.

"One year ago," she said, "a local white girl was murdered in Wolf Creek. Her name was Carpenter. She was raped, then stabbed. My brother, Red Elk, was arrested for the crime."

"Did he do it?"

"No, he wouldn't do such a thing." She seemed to believe this. "He had too much honor. He was found stooping over the body, so, of course, being an Indian, the whites decided he was guilty." Her lips tightened down like a vise. "He was arrested and put in jail. Two nights later, vigilantes stormed the jail and hanged him." She laughed dryly, without emotion. "At least, this is the story Sheriff Lauters told."

"And you think he was lying?"

"Yes. I don't know why he would, but I think it was to protect someone." Moonwind had planted the seed of uncertainty, now she nourished it. "In recent years, the local ranchers have been plagued by a cattle rustling ring. Red Elk told me he thought he knew who the members of that ring were."

"So he was arrested and lynched to shut him up?" Longtree asked.

"Yes, I think so. But there's more to it than that. A rumor circulated after he was hanged, mainly among the whites, that Red Elk didn't kill that woman. That he came upon her as she was dying and she told him who her attacker was."

"One of the ring?"

"It would seem...
logical,
don't you think? Red Elk knew who her killer was and he knew who the rustlers were."

Longtree sighed. "You're just guessing."

"Am I? I visited Red Elk in the jail the day before he was lynched. He told me he knew who the killer was. That in the courtroom he planned on pointing the finger at not only the killer, but at the entire ring."

"But he didn't tell you who this person was?"

She shook her head. "He said it was too dangerous for me to know."

Longtree thought about it. It made a certain amount of sense. If Red Elk knew who the real killer was and who the rustlers were, then certain parties would have every reason in the world to have him jailed and lynched before he came to trial. But what of Lauters? What was his part in this? Logic dictated that he was one of the ring, that the killer was another. Lauters didn't want this killer going on the stand because, facing the noose, he'd have told everything. Red Elk was seen stooping over the body, a very convenient surrogate. Everything fell into place after that. The ring must've have known Red Elk knew about them. It made sense...it answered many questions...but was it
true?

Longtree rolled another cigarette and lit it with an ember from the fire. "Who," he said, "saw Red Elk bending over the body?"

"Sheriff Lauters."

Longtree winced. Damn. It was all too obvious now. Or was it? He couldn't jump to conclusions here. He would have to proceed slowly. Check out all this as quietly and covertly as possible. If Lauters was involved and he discovered Longtree nosing into the affair...it could get ugly. Still, none of this explained the series of killings.

"I'll look into it," he promised. "But my first consideration is still the murders."

"Maybe if you solve one crime, you'll solve the others."

Longtree looked at her. Moonwind knew much more than she was saying, but she was fiercely stubborn. She would tell no more than she wanted to. A woman like Moonwind couldn't be coerced into talking. He had to gain her confidence and the only way he could do that was by investigating her brother's lynching and what led to it.

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..."

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 downed 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.