Cannibal Corpse, M/C

“What makes you think I know?”

“You do.”

The old man almost smiled. “You white people always think Indians are wellsprings of darkest mystery. Some of us are. Most of us aren’t. A few of us just happen to be real good with barbecue.”

Slaughter did smile. “And a few of you are real evasive.”

“Not on an empty belly, son.”

Feathers took up his carving knife and cut a slab of meat for Slaughter, then another for himself. When Slaughter asked if he needed some dipping sauce Frank told him it would only mask the pure wonder of the meat itself. He was right. The pronghorn, made in the Barbecue King’s inimitable style with secret rubs and slow- smoking, was unbelievable. It was tender and sweet with a little zing of spices that made your tongue stand up and take notice as you chewed.

Slaughter could only say, “This is good. I mean, this is really good.”

“Of course it is.”

They ate in silence and the meat was so very tasty that the idea of talking during the eating of it would have been close to sacrilege. At first, Slaughter wolfed it…then he slowed down, savoring the rich juices, the smoky flavor, the hickory/brown sugar sweetness and the bite of mesquite. Three slabs later, he was breathless and almost dizzy with the wonder of it, full and satisfied and glowing warm. It was the feeling one got after making love to a very beautiful woman…only, somehow, it was taken up a few notches.

“You like?”

Slaughter just smiled. “There’s like and there’s love and then there’s pure infatuation, man.”

Feathers nodded. He understood. He knew his craft and he knew it well. “How about you lend me one of those cigarettes, son, and let me tell you a story now that you’re full and sleepy and feeling no pain?”

Slaughter gave him one.

The old guy snapped off the filter, lit it with a burning stick. “The man in black,” he said. “I seen him more than once. Long before the worms started falling and the cemeteries vomited up their dead, I saw him when I was a child. I saw him as an adult. I spoke to him and I watched him make with his black magic…”

Chapter Nineteen

“What I tell you happened when I was a boy,” the old man said, “and in those days the Spirit Lake Reservation was a place of the most awful poverty and desperation. There were several villages on the reservation—Crow Hill, Wood Lake, Fort Totten, a few others—but the one we lived in was called Crabeater Creek. It’s not there anymore. It burned to the ground one night and was never rebuilt. I suppose that’s what I want to tell you about…”

Crabeater Creek was nothing but a collection of houses that were so very ramshackle they weren’t even houses, they were more like shacks. This was long before the days of the casinos and the easy money they pumped into the rez. There was little to no medical care, and what there was of it was doled out by a white doctor in Fort Totten named Dr. Beak who sampled liberally from his own pharmacy and was only working the reservation because he cut a deal with the feds that kept him out of federal prison on charges of narcotics trafficking. Something which, obviously, would have cost him his license to practice anywhere but Mexico or Calcutta. How men like Beak get their licenses in the first place is one of the eternal mysteries of this life, like why God made little green apples or why fat women wear tight pants.

We had no running water, precious little food, rampant disease outbreaks, and a sort of communal curse that was the drink. My father was a kind man and a good man, but when he drank—which was whenever he could—he became a violent drunk that beat other men, beat my mother, and beat my brothers and I. In the end, the booze beat him. It beat him hard and beat him silly and when it was done there was nothing left. Not that any of this should come as a surprise to you or anyone else. The reservation was an awful place in those days. In the summers we subsisted on handouts and whatever we could hunt up in the woods and hills and in the winter, well, we crowded around woodstoves and prayed for spring while we watched each other get thinner as the snow fell and babies died of the croup and the flu each morning. The men drank. The woman mourned. We kids just stayed out of the way.

Anyway, you ask of this fellow in black. Well, first I ever heard of him was when Skip Darling lost his mind one long dead white winter. He took up an axe and chopped up his wife and three children. It was in the middle of a blizzard. When the tribal police got there, he had their remains stacked up tidy as cordwood and he was sitting in his rocker by the stove with the bloody axe in his hand. Jim Fastwind, who was my best friend, had an uncle who was with the tribal police. And he told us all about it by the fire one night. He said Skip’s eyes were like black holes leading down into a darkness you did not want to know about. When they questioned him, he said a man in a black hat had told him to do it. Was he an Indian? they asked. No sir, he was white. His face was bleached white and his eyes were like pink quartz. He carried a book with him. He showed it to Skip. In it were written the names of Skip’s wife and children. That’s why they had to die. Skip said his name was in the book, too. Two days later, Skip hung himself in jail.

That was one incident. Here’s another. My sister Darlene had a thing for cats and she begged and pleaded with my mother for one until she finally got her way. Darlene was a cute little shit with huge chocolate brown eyes that would melt you. No one could say no to her, least of all my mother. So Darlene got her kitten and she loved that thing to death. Then one night, winter again, my mother was tending to a neighbor’s sick child and my father was off drinking. Darlene began to scream and we charged into her room and it took us a long time to calm her down. But by then we already saw what had unnerved her: the kitten was dead on the floor, drowned in a pool of its own blood and innards. It looked like it had been stepped upon. Hard. But Darlene said a skeleton man in black came into her room and he was a white man with “funny eyes” and that he picked up her kitten and squeezed it until the guts came out of its mouth. Then he laughed and said that one night soon, he was coming back to do the same to her.

Now, let me tell you about Shayla Hawk, our teacher at the mission school. A full-blooded Sioux, she was beautiful beyond belief. Her skin was copper, her hair long and black, her eyes just this side of midnight. Absolutely breathtaking. That same winter, the winter of the worst blizzard in memory, she did not come into town from her little cabin on the Creek. The tribal police, again, went in there. Shayla was quite dead. She had been taken apart, anatomized I guess you might say. Her head had been tied by the hair to the beams above along with her legs and arms and entrails. Her torso was nailed to the wall. They found her heart, tongue, and stomach in a stewpot. There was blood everywhere, of course. A single setting had been placed out on the table with cooked portions of her anatomy upon a plate. It had been partially eaten and a mug filled with her blood had been drained. A very grisly discovery, you might say. But what seemed worse is that whoever slaughtered her, whoever dressed her out like a deer, calmly sat there, eating her as her organs boiled on the stove and her remains dripped from the rafters above.

That’s a horror story, isn’t it?

But it’s true. There was a rumor that the only evidence was a single handprint burned into the wall. Months later, Jim Fastwind and I snuck up there and had ourselves a look. Even then, the stink was still evident—sour, gamey, heavy in the air. But we saw the handprint burned into the log wall nearly an inch by our reckoning. Not the hand of a monster but a very human hand, except the fingers were easily ten or eleven inches in length.

Well, now you’re getting a taste of life on the reservation in those days, aren’t you? It wasn’t all bad, surely, but when the man in black started showing up—and when he did, people died or went mad—things became considerably worse. By then, of course, he was called the Skeleton Man when he was mentioned at all…because that’s how Darlene described him. Like a skeleton in a black suit. So thin he could slide under a door which, she claimed, was how he entered her room that night.

Regardless, the reasonable thinking people of the tribe decided that this boogeyman was nothing but a campfire story, a folktale, what have you. Something that years later might have been referred to as an urban legend. Yet, when things happened now and again there was always some skein of bullshit concerning the Skeleton Man. But the tribal police said it was nonsense and people concurred…at least publicly. Privately, they kept a close eye on their children. For maybe the light of reason will chase away the shadows, but sooner or later that light will go out and the shadows will come skittering back.