Ghost Medicine

  Luz and Gabriel went home, and Tommy and I were inside his house. I had called my father and told him I’d be staying and that we had a lot of work to do in the morning with getting the truck and baling the field. Carl looked grim, said there was something he needed to talk to us about, so we all sat down out there in the great room where I’d be sleeping, while Carl drank a beer, which made my stomach sour a bit.

  “Me and Ramiro dropped some bales out for those horses yesterday,” he began. “We brung out some box community feeders, too, to keep it in better shape and spread them out so those horses should all be fine for a while now. And we found that woman, too, boys.” He took a long drink. “She was dead in her car out on the side of that easement road, just sitting there like she was asleep, but she’d been dead for a while.”

  I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach again. I looked over at Tom and I could tell he was shocked, too; and neither of us said anything, we just stared at Carl.

  “I guess it was her heart or something,” Carl said. “The fire wasn’t close at all to where we found her. The county coroner came out in the afternoon and took her away.”

  “She had a cat with her,” Tom said.

  “There wasn’t any cat there yesterday,” Carl said. “Just that woman.”

  “What’ll happen to those horses? And her place?” I said.

  “Well, I guess the coroner’s gonna look for her next of kin,” Carl said. “They usually do that.”

  “She had a lawyer in Holmes,” I said. “But I don’t know who he is. He handles her money and stuff.”

  I put my head down in my hands.

  “We could try to look him up tomorrow,” Carl said. “I’m sorry, boys, I didn’t realize you all had become such friends.”

  NINETEEN

  I couldn’t sleep. I just lay there on the couch under the blankets, sweating and staring out at the dark room. Then I got scared, thinking about what happened with Chase, thinking about that ghost story Tommy told. I got up and went into Tommy’s room. He was in his bed, with his face turned to the door. I couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or not. I heard him gasp when he saw me standing there.

  “You thought I was that ghost, huh?”

  Tommy sat up. “Maybe.”

  I sat on the small couch against the wall. “I’m sorry, ‘cause I can’t sleep anyway.”

  He threw a pillow at me. “Neither can I. You can camp out here if you want.”

  “I got scared just now, Tommy,” I said. “Sometimes I get so scared thinking that everyone around me is gonna die.”

  “Well, they are, Stotts.”

  “I know.”

  “I guess that is pretty scary,” Tommy said.

  I put my head on the pillow and lay down, staring up at the darkness of the ceiling, knees bent because the couch was so short.

  “I feel sorry for Rose,” I said. I wiped my hand across my eyes. “And sorry for those horses and her place.”

  And Tommy said, “Don’t cry about it anymore, Stotts.”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe there’s something we can do. But we’ll have to get out of here quick in the morning before that deputy comes looking for us.”

  “I don’t think he wakes up too early.”

  “Well, he will if his boy comes home bleeding all over the place and crying about how we shot him.”

  “He would’ve already been here, then.”

  Somehow I went to sleep, but woke when Tommy shook my shoulder. I could smell coffee cooking in the kitchen. The sun wasn’t all the way up yet. Tommy gave me a clean T-shirt and I got dressed and carried my hat out into the kitchen, where Carl was sitting at the table, smoking a cigarette, cup of coffee and phone directory in front of him. Tommy poured two cups and I sat down next to his dad.

  “Looks like there’s only one lawyer listed in Holmes,” Carl said. “So I don’t know if it’s the right one. I circled the name: Clifford Wickham. Sounds like a lawyer, don’t he?”

  I took a sip of coffee. It tasted good. “What time is it?”

  “Five-forty,” Tom said.

  “Probably not exactly lawyer hours, I guess,” I said.

  “Wake him up,” Carl said to me. Then, turning to his son, “We gotta get that truck.”

  While Carl and Tom walked to the stables to get another truck, I called Mr. Wickham and woke him up, like Carl said, and found out that he was the lawyer that Rose had hired. He already knew about Rose dying, but he was most interested in me for some reason, he seemed to have expected my call. And then he said that Rose had named me and Tommy Buller as beneficiaries to her holdings because she didn’t have any surviving family members and that the paperwork had been notarized weeks ago. Then he asked if he could come see us later that day and I gave him directions to the Foreman’s house. Before I hung up, I said, “But we might be in jail in Holmes later today, too, so I’ll write your number on my hand.”

  I was pouring another cup of coffee when they got back, and carried it out with me so we could get on our way. They had Gabe with them in that other truck, too, so I knew he didn’t sleep good, either; he never woke up early on his own, and he looked pale and sick. I got up into the bed of the truck, careful with that hot coffee, and I could hear Carl say, “Okay with me” from inside and then the door opened, wafting out a puff of cigarette smoke, and Tommy and Gabe got out and sat down in back with me. Tommy pulled out his can of tobacco and the truck started to roll away down that bumpy road toward the lake.

  I grabbed Gabe by his shoulder and pulled him toward me.

  “Did you see her this morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me if she’s not okay, Gabey.”

  “She’s okay, Troy. She told me to tell you that.”

  “She did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did she say anything else?”

  Gabriel looked over at Tommy once, and then back at me and said, “No. She just told me to tell you she’s okay.”

  But his look told me something more.

  The morning was still and cool. The sun was just coming up as we sat with our backs to the cab, watching as a curling tail of dust kicked up behind the truck. I gulped the last of my coffee, hit the grounds at the bottom, and poured the sludge out over the side.

  “That Wickham was her lawyer, Tom,” I said. “And you won’t believe this. He told me she willed it all to me and you.”

  “What?”

  “Her land, horses, everything she had. She didn’t have any family so she left it all to us. What do you think about that? He says he’s coming out to see us this afternoon over at your house.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “We might be in jail.”

  I held out my hand so he could see the black marker scrawl on it. “So I wrote down his number.”

  “Luz said she won’t tell Dad,” Gabe said. “Unless she has to. She said she wants to forget about it.”

  “Well, that won’t be easy for Chase Rutledge to do, I bet,” I said. “In some ways I’d like to see Luz tell everyone what happened. In some ways, I wish we would’ve killed him.”

  No one said anything to that. But I looked at Gabe and Tommy and could tell they were trying not to look back at me.

  Then Tommy shifted himself and asked Gabe, “What did your dad do to you? For missing church and everything?”

  “Nothing yet. I snuck out this morning. He doesn’t know I’m here.”

  “You see what happens when you get a couple beers into an altar boy?” I asked Tommy. Gabe kicked me and tried to smile, but he was scared. We all knew he was thinking about Chase’s promise to get even with him. I felt sick, like I was drunk and couldn’t shake it out of my head.

  Tommy was smiling, looking back at the road winding away behind us. “Damn! We got our own horse ranch, Stotts!”

  “It’s half-burned land and a burned-out steel house with about fifty horses that might starve this winter and a few goats we need to get rid of,” I said. “We got
a lot of work to do, Tom.”

  After we jump-started the truck and lamely tried to excuse and explain that keg of beer still sitting in its bed, Carl let the three of us go out to see those two horses we had left by the fence line, as long as Tom and I promised to meet him at the stables for our regular work before noon. Carl drove away, swearing, “If you boys get drunk and kill that battery this time, you might as well hitch yourselves to the bumper and tow it back yourselves ‘cause I’m not coming out here again.”

  We all piled into the cab and Tommy swung the pickup around and headed down the road toward Rose’s place. Tommy pulled out his tobacco and passed the can to me, so I took some, too.

  “If I’m going to jail, I might as well take some of that stuff, too,” Gabe said and Tom started to laugh.

  “Damn, Gabey. Shooting a sheriff ‘s kid really turned you into a hardened criminal,” Tom said, and I handed the can over to Gabriel.

  Even Tommy had to watch, despite attempting to drive, as Gabe fumbled with that can and its potent contents. Of course, Gabe spilled some on his lap when he opened it because he didn’t pack it down by whipping his wrist, and he spilled some more when he scooped up a clump between his thumb and index finger. He held it up in front of him, looking at it like it was some kind of insect.

  “You just put this in back of your lip?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “And then what?” he asked, still holding it up.

  “Just do the first part first and you’ll figure it out,” Tommy instructed.

  Gabe shut his eyes, pulled his lower lip out with his left hand, and packed the tobacco down, frowning and puckering.

  “It’s okay,” he said, but there was a tear almost breaking from his eye. Tommy and I laughed. Tom spit out the window, and then I spit in the cup.

  “Just spit, don’t swallow,” I said.

  “It’s hard not to swallow what’s in your mouth,” Gabe said, talking like there was a clothespin on his tongue. A trickle of brown drool leaked from his lower lip. He put his head out the window and spit.

  “Crud,” he said, “I spit all over the truck.”

  “Poor truck,” Tommy said. “Watch where you aim, Gabey. You wouldn’t want to wash any of the horse crap off it.”

  “I feel really weird,” Gabe said. He held his hands out, bracing himself on the dashboard.

  “Hell, if it wasn’t so early, I’d offer you a beer,” Tom said.

  “If it wasn’t warm as piss, I’d probly drink it, too,” I said.

  Gabe laughed, and some of the tobacco plopped out of his mouth, and then we all laughed. And then I looked out the windshield and realized that Tommy had just made that turn at the place we called the end of the road. Gabe and Tommy realized it, also, because it suddenly seemed real quiet inside that rattling truck. Tommy stopped the truck at the meadow where we found Luz’s horse.

  “You wanna see if he’s laying there dead?” Tommy said.

  “It was just a scrape, Tom. There’s no way he’s dead unless he had a heart attack or something,” I said. “But we could look and see if we can pick up all the spent casings.”

  “We already did that when you were playing kiss-the-hero with my sister,” Gabe slurred, trying to hold in his spit. Then he opened the door and spit down on the dirt.

  We all slid out of the truck and walked, like we were under some kind of spell. When we got to the spot where Gabe had shot Chase, it was almost as though we were expecting to be greeted by something more than just an open meadow with green grass and white flowers. We stood, looking down like we were at some graveside ceremony.

  “There’s a little blood there,” Gabe said, pointing down.

  “What kind of medicine is that, chief?” Tommy said.

  “It’s not. It’s poison.”

  I looked at the back of my hand, remembering I had smeared Chase’s blood on it yesterday. Less than a day ago. Gabe took the tobacco out of his mouth and threw it down there, and then spit.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  Farther south, we drove through more burned-out forest and fields before getting to the south pasture where Tommy and I were keeping his stallion and my mare. The stallion was trotting back and forth, agitated, head bobbing up and down. My mare had foaled, probably some time the day before, because she and the little one were both up and moving around. Tommy pulled the truck up alongside the corral and we all got out and went right to my horse’s pen.

  “It’s a little colt,” I said, “like Carl said it would be.”

  We just stood there, me with my foot up on the corral’s railing, staring at that little foal and Ghost, his mother. And he’d look at us, and then run and kick behind her. Tommy spit, turning away from the corral. I saw him looking out past the fence at all that land Rose had given to us.

  “It was your tobacco,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Why she gave it to us. You gave her that whole can of tobacco that first day, remember?”

  “And I wasn’t even nice to her,” he said.

  “Yes you were, eventually,” I said. “I know she liked you, and you liked her.”

  “But it was you,” he said. “You were the one she really liked. She wouldn’t’ve cared if I never came back again with you. As long as you’d carry the chew.” He looked back out at that land. “She got us drunk that time.”

  “We almost killed ourselves. That’s why.”

  Tom smiled.

  “What’re you gonna name him?” Gabe asked.

  “I’m naming him after you, Gabey,” I said. “I’m calling him Gunner.”

  “Shoot,” Gabe said, and swatted at me with his dirty hat.

  I climbed between the pipes of the corral. Ghost looked nervous, keeping her ears back and putting herself between me and her foal. Tom and Gabe stayed out and kept quiet as I walked slowly and silently toward the mare, holding my head low and my hand out to the horse. She was scared and tense, but after she ran around me twice she let me touch her, and as I stroked her nose I’d sneak a half a foot closer until my body was right up to her shoulder and I could see over her, right at that nursing colt’s silvery-rusty back.

  “Let’s bring ‘em home, Tom,” I said.

  “To your place?”

  “I’ve got four stalls off my barn. I need to take better care of ‘em now, I can’t just leave ‘em here.”

  “What about that big one?” Gabe asked.

  “I think we should try to get him, too,” I said.

  “Let’s let ‘em go,” Tommy said. “I’ll catch him again.”

  I looked over at Tommy in disbelief, and he repeated, “Let’s let ‘em go, Stotts. So he can run around on Rose’s land again.”

  I said, “You could catch him again. I know.”

  And Tom Buller looked sad and proud at the same time when we opened the gate on the stallion’s side of the pen and stood back as that horse took off, scattering the smoke of black ashes and dust away from his hooves. Tommy didn’t say anything else about it, he just quietly watched that horse galloping away. It seemed to me that Tom Buller was setting a piece of himself free, too. Tommy walked to the truck, looking away from me, and backed the trailer through the gate on the mare’s side of the pen while Gabe tied a little rope halter for the colt.

  “I don’t know if you can get it on him, but if you do this should work,” Gabe said, slinging the halter over the top rail of the corral. “You might just have to pick him up and carry him in and hope he doesn’t bang around too much.”

  Tom parked the truck and I opened the gate to the trailer as he came around into the corral. Gabe stood behind the big trailer gate so he could shut it, and I grabbed the mare’s halter and lead rope.

  “If I can’t lead her in, we’ll flag her in with our hats,” I said.

  “That’ll do,” Tom said.

  I worked that black mare on a long lead rope, so I could use it like a longe line. I had it attached to the bottom of her rope halter, with the lead coil
ed up beside it in my left hand. She saw the rope when I started moving toward her and she walked away, escorting her foal with her. I had to walk around, leaning this way and that for a good ten minutes before she would stand still and let me get up close enough to her. I got her to turn her head toward my chest and I stroked her neck and talked softly to her, telling her she was good. I got the rope over her neck and she moved a little, but she knew that rope meant stand still. And she saw the halter coming up below her face and started to move her head just a little, but I brought it up and then reached around her neck with my right arm to tie it off. Then she started to run away, but I just gave her some slack and followed her at her shoulder, keeping that lead loose in my left and waving at her hips with my right until she calmed down and turned her head back toward me. All the while, the colt trotted along with her, making a squeaking kind of whinny.

  “I’m gonna try and lead her on first, Tom,” I said.

  “Maybe the little one’ll follow,” he said.

  She hesitated and froze up right by the door of the trailer, but Tom got behind her and waved his hat at her and she went right in. The colt wanted to follow her, but Tommy stopped him up so I could halter him. The colt didn’t like that halter at all, and struggled against it. It was amazing how strong he was and how fast he could move those gawky legs, but I managed to tie it on so at least I could hitch him next to his mom at the front of the trailer. When they were both inside, the mare clattering her hooves back and forth, from side to side, and him just trying to hide his face in her belly, Gabe shut the door.

  Tommy punched fists with us.

  “Good job,” I said.

  “Thanks, Gabey,” Tom said. “Let’s get ‘em over to Stotts’ place so we can get back before noon.”

  Well, my dad was quite surprised about my new additions to our barnyard, but he didn’t mind because he knew I was the one who’d take care of them. We got the trailer backed up to the open breezeway door and I went in the barn and opened up a stall for the horses. Gabe manned the trailer door again. My dad stood by the gap in the breezeway.

  “I don’t think you should watch us get them off, Dad,” I said. “It’s pretty scary.”