One dog-hot August night of the year as I lay in my bed, my father was sitting on a willow stump out in the yard doing his drinking. I heard him talking to someone. I looked out there and there was a man with him. A tall, thin almost emaciated man dressed in black. In the moonlight I could see his face and it was like white cheese. His eyes were like topaz. And his mouth—oh, how I remember that mouth—grinning huge like if it opened much more it would swallow the world.
My father said something and this man in black, the Skeleton Man, said, “We’ll walk together, hand in hand. To a place you’ve never seen and no man may yet know.”
I wanted to cry out to my father not to go with him, not to listen to what he said…but I was terrified. I was so afraid I was shaking. As they started walking side by side I noticed that the Skeleton Man cast no shadow in the moonlight. I opened my mouth to scream. That’s when the man in black put those pink jellyfish eyes on me and I swear to you it felt like a thousand spiders crept up my spine. I could not speak. I could not move. Maybe it was what they call a hysterical paralysis, but maybe it was a little something more. I lapsed into a fever that lasted over a week and I only vaguely remember Dr. Beak hovering over me smelling of disinfectants and five-dollar rye whiskey.
And my father? We never saw him again. But a few years later when a particularly dark tract of woods we kids called Lonesome Thicket got flattened by a rogue tornado, bones were found. A complete set of white shining bones in the very top branches of a thirty-foot oak. I won’t attempt to explain that, but I believe I knew who the bones belonged to.
But now I backtrack. For on the morning of the night I saw my father walk off with the Skeleton Man, something happened. A 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner rolled into Crabeater Creek. The Roadrunner had been cruising the Spirit Lake Reservation most of the morning and people had noticed it, of course it. It would pull up before someone’s house, the big meat-eating 426 Hemi under the hood purring like a big cat with an empty belly, then it would drive off. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason. Every time the tribal police showed to investigate, the car was gone and there was only some crazy story of a long, sleek machine painted flat black that looked like a shark out of a nightmare, something fast and lethal that swam the roads of the rez, its sparkling chrome grill like jaws waiting to open for a sacrifice of flesh and blood.
But the Roadrunner took no sacrifice.
It slowly cruised the high roads and dirt tracks, getting familiar with Crabeater Creek particularly for reasons only known to the man behind the wheel. Who was that man? You may well ask and I may well tell you. But for now, don’t ask me how it is I know these things. Just listen.
The man’s name was Chaney, though he had been known in other places as Royer and Smith and Bowers. He had been known by a lot of names in a lot of places. But that day, at the end of a hot dead August, he was Chaney. Had you seen him walking down the street, tall and proud and juiced to the gills on hard, acid-eating attitude, you would have crossed the street to get out of his way. For it was within him and without, that simmering evil, something physical yet impossibly…nebulous. Something savage and empty and raw-boned. I had a teacher at the mission school who said that iniquity in its purest form has a certain attraction, but there was nothing remotely attractive about Chaney. His eyes were soft and pink and juicy like the bowels of a hog. He was a skeleton wrapped in skin. His face was the color of a new moon, pocked with holes and drawn by scars.
So Chaney was indeed the Skeleton Man. He pulled up in front of a deserted house on Grassy Hill just across the creek and sat behind the wheel of that death-black Roadrunner. He did not move. He did not fidget and he did not blink his eyes, he only stared and hummed a morose tune under his breath. Just waiting, forever waiting. That house on Grassy Hill had once belonged to an Indian agent named Summers and had been sitting empty since Mathew Lake had hung himself from the chandelier three years earlier.
Several dozen people had seen the Roadrunner that morning and the strange thing was that, though they saw the actual physical incarnation of the car, their minds assured them that what they had seen was not a 1960’s muscle car with a flat and lusterless paintjob, but a black hearse. An old Cadillac hearse straight out of the 1950’s, glossy and dark and somehow ghostly, even in the early hours of that sunny, fine day. The sight of it disturbed them in ways they could not—or did not want to—understand. It made something turn bad inside them, made voices whisper in their heads and their bellies turn over in a slow unpleasant roll. They saw it pass and felt the spit dry up in their mouths, smelled impossible things like black graveyard dirt and rotting flowers. But what bothered them most was that, although the sunlight came down bright and sure, the car cast no shadow that they could see. This was something they would tell themselves later that they had imagined, but when the nightmares of that hearse haunted their bones at three in the morning, they would know better.
Only one man, far as I can tell, talked with Chaney that morning and that was Albert Smith. But Albert was a drunk and nobody paid much mind to anything he said. Albert claimed to have stepped out of an alley in Crabeater Creek and there was Chaney the Skeleton Man. Albert described him as looking like “a loose, slithering weave of shadows.”
Albert was terrified and particularly because there was not another soul around. Just him and the Skeleton Man. He claimed he went down to his knees and begged that his life be spared. But the Skeleton Man was disinterested. He stared down the street with his pink eyes and said, “
So, far as I can tell, Albert was the only one that day that spoke with Chaney the Skeleton Man and lived to tell the story.
Anyway, Chaney was at the house on Grassy Hill. He stepped out of the Roadrunner, lit a filterless cigarette with a finger that burned sulfur-hot like a matchhead and waited. As he told Albert, he liked Crabeater Creek. He had been there before and he liked its lines and curves, the smell and taste of it. Like a seductive and exotic woman, he was anxious to put his hands and mouth on it, to run his tongue over its hot, perfumed flesh.
But that would be later.
For now, Chaney was content just to be there. He pulled a briefcase from the backseat and, whistling like a man on his way to work, he moved through the gate and up the flagstone path to the vacant two-story frame house with an apple tree in full bloom out front. He plucked a FOR SALE sign out of the overgrown yard and went up the steps and in.
Inside, there was silence and echoes. A darkness that clung too readily beneath stairs and behind half-shut doors. His face pale and his eyes shining, Chaney looked around, seeing that there was no furniture to be had save a card table and a folding chair.
A car door slammed outside and Lona Whitebird, the local reservation real estate agent, came through the door smiling brightly even though she did not like this man called Chaney. For reasons she did not fully understand, he reminded her of the snake house at the Chicago Zoo. There was that same coiling vitality to him, that vague musky, reptilian odor that seemed to waft off him. But he had the proper paperwork, proving he was an enrolled member of the Spirit Lake Sioux, so she could not deny him even though she was certain he was no Indian. She was, in the back of her crowding little mind, not even sure he was a
“Well, Mr. Chaney,” she said. “I see you’ve taken down the sign. I think that means you’ve made a decision.”
“I have,” he said.
“And?”
“This will do nicely.” He nodded his head, but did not smile. “I will make a fine and secret work here.”
Lona did not know what he meant by that and was not sure she wanted to. Chaney was always saying things like that, she discovered in their earlier meeting when he inquired of the house, things loaded with innuendo that you did not dare question. There was a concrete ambiance to him, an appetite she did not like. He reminded her of something stark and cold like a slaughterhouse. When she looked at him she could only think of winds blown through October cemeteries. His eyes did not emote, they were dead things waiting to be filled with something. His face was the color of bone, a pallid canvas of scar-tissue set with draws and hollows that coveted shadow.
Nothing good could come of a man like Chaney, she thought.
And she was right. For he was just a gnawed shell, an empty drum of giggling darkness and scratching midnight. He was no more human than a bag of cobras.
“Well, then,” Lona said. “I guess we have some papers to sign.”
She sat at the card table and opened a folder of documents. Chaney stood behind her and she could feel his
