Ghost Medicine Read online

  He turned back to the house and waved at the door. They were all three looking at us through the glass. “Look, here they are with the coffee.”

  I must have looked like a ghost.

  I was so scared of that man I felt like throwing up. If it weren’t for the railing, my knees would have probably given out. I don’t know if I said three words for the rest of the night, but when the coffee was finished, Benavidez told Gabriel to call Tommy to take me home.

  “Can Gabe and I ride along?” Luz said.

  I wanted to tell her no, but Mrs. Benavidez said, “You both can go with Troy. That would be nice.” She looked real mad, too, like she always did, even if she wasn’t.

  I felt Benavidez’ eyes on me.

  “Stop the truck now, Tom,” I said once we had gotten out of sight of the house and through the west gate.

  Luz and Gabe were sitting in the bed.

  “What?”

  “Stop the truck. I’m gonna walk home. I want to.”

  Tom stopped the truck right in the middle of the dirt and gravel road.

  “You’re not walking home, Stotts,” he said grimly.

  I opened the door and got out. Tom got out of the driver’s door, saying “What’re you doing?”

  “Why’re we stopping?” Gabe asked, sitting with his back to the cab, arm slung over the side.

  I started walking down the road, disappearing out of the sideways cones of headlight into the darkness.

  “Troy!” Luz called out. “Tommy! You’re not going to let him walk home by himself!”

  I heard the truck start up, the grinding sound of its tires rolling slowly up behind me, could see the lights brightening my path, stretching a long black distortion of me out ahead, then shining white-hot on my back.

  “Come on! Get in, Stotts. What’s wrong with you?”

  I stopped walking and went back toward the truck. I stopped at the side of the bed. “Get up front, Gabey. I need to talk to your sister.”

  “Let’s all just ride back here,” Gabe said.

  “How nice,” Tom said, sarcastically.

  “Gabe. Please?”

  “Oh.”

  Gabe got in the cab and I jumped up next to Luz. I sat down right next to her.

  “We can go now,” I said, and patted the back window twice.

  Tommy pulled the truck forward into the night. Luz and I sat there, talking about her father, talking about our arrangement, and holding hands.

  “He’s just trying to scare you and at the same time let you know that he likes you,” she said. “It could be a lot worse. And he’s giving you a job, too.”

  “To keep an eye on me.”

  “He has a lot of faith in you, Troy. You’re like a part of our family.”

  I wanted to kiss her so bad just then, too. And that made me feel madder, so I just looked at my feet.

  It was about 10 when we got back to my house. I could see my dad inside, through that big window, moving from the kitchen into the living room. Tommy turned the truck off and I let go of Luz’s hand.

  “Hey, Troy,” Gabe said, getting out of the truck, “I want to take Tommy back there to Reno’s stall so he can take a look at that chip in his hoof.”

  “Thanks, Gabey.”

  Tom Buller was a pretty decent farrier. Gabriel Benavidez was a real slick liar. And even though he was playing a game with me about wanting to sit back there with us, he must have known that I was going to kiss his sister again before I’d go home.

  They all three sat up in the cab after Tommy’s ranting about Reno’s hooves being all square and fine when he and Gabe got back from the barn. They drove off down our dusty drive and I let myself into the house.

  After that night, Luz and I talked on the phone every day. Tommy and Gabriel teased me that I was always checking in with her, that I had to get her permission to spend time with my friends; but I took their teasing, because I knew they were wrong, that there was something much bigger pulling Luz and me together, and neither one of us could do anything about it, even if we’d wanted to.

  “How’d it go?”

  My dad was sitting on the couch, arms out along the back-rest, stretched to both sides. He was wearing a white T-shirt and had his reading glasses on.

  “Really good,” I said. “They asked about you. We had steaks. And Mr. Benavidez wants me to go to work for him starting Monday, if that’s okay with you.”

  I always called Luz’s father “mister.” And ever since he was a kid, my dad called him Arturo, even though most people around Three Points whitewashed the name to Art.

  “Wow. Really? That’d be great,” he said. “He’ll work you hard, though. I don’t think you even weigh as much as a bale of hay.”

  “I can lift ‘em. It’ll be okay. Good night, Dad.”

  And he just quietly watched as I disappeared into my room.

  FOUR

  Tom Buller didn’t need much of an excuse to get into a fight with Chase Rutledge the night after I started work at the ranch, and Chase seemed more than willing to give the little it would take. I’d brought Reno with me so Tom could trim his hooves, and as we were riding past the church we saw Chase, leaning there in the dark on a shovel. We knew he was doing something he shouldn’t.

  Tom said, “What’re you looking at?” to Chase.

  And Chase just smirked and said, “The teacher’s boy and the son of a drunk.” He was smoking a cigarette and he flicked it off the back of his middle fingernail, launching it like some small orange comet that sprayed off sparks when it bounced from Arrow’s neck, which made Tom’s horse recoil as though he had been whipped.

  Tommy inhaled and looked over at me, and then he just about flew off Arrow’s back down to the dirt road, tossing that shovel back out of Chase’s grasp to go scooting noisily along the ground and send our two horses nervously rearing into the dark, and me, slipping down from Reno’s saddle to land on my elbows and butt in the dust.

  And from my resting place there in the dirt, I first wondered if I had broken my arm, and then watched in awe as that gangly Tom took on the much-bigger kid. I never saw anyone who could fight like Tommy Buller, all knees and elbows inside the flailing reach of the taller boy, crushing into ribs and legs as Chase crumpled down to the road.

  Then Tommy flipped him over, had his legs bent back, crossed in a V as he straddled them like he was roping a runaway calf, and grabbed Chase’s greasy hair, pressing his bloodied face hard into the dirt.

  “This bastard’s got a gun in his pants!”

  I got up to my knees, then feet, and brushed the bits of gravel from my bleeding elbows as Tommy pulled a small wood-gripped black revolver from Chase’s back pocket.

  “Here, Stotts.” And he tossed the gun back to clatter down at my feet while I flinched an attempt to catch it. And I didn’t know what he expected me to do with it, either, so I just popped the wheel and spilled out the five .22 caliber rounds into the dirt and then threw the gun as far as I could into the trees across the street from the darkened church. Then I saw Jack Crutchfield running off, away from the church, down the street where I had thrown Chase’s gun. Even in the dark, I knew it was Jack because no one else around looked as overfed or ran as slow. Chase and Jack did just about everything together. They were punks who got away with whatever they felt like and we hated each other.

  “Okay. I’m done, Rutledge.” Tommy panted and pushed Chase’s face hard into the dirt. Chase just kind of moaned and gasped. “I’m gonna get off you now. I don’t think you want any more, but if you do I got plenty left.”

  Tommy got up and straightened out his shirt and jeans. There wasn’t a mark on him. Chase struggled up to his hands and knees, head hanging low, and spit a blob of blood as a rope of red snot wormed down from his nose.

  I gathered the horses’ reins and walked them over to pick up our hats where they’d fallen in the dust on the road.

  As I handed my friend his hat, keeping an eye on the still-kneeling and wheezing Chase Rutledge, Tommy sa
id, “Damn, Stotts! What happened to you?”

  “I fell off Reno.”

  “Damn!” Tommy laughed at me, his black eyes squinting and shining even in the dark, and he pulled his little round can of chewing tobacco from his back pocket.

  “Well, if you hadn’t’ve thrown that shovel…” I offered as an excuse for my horse manship.

  “That was fun,” he said, and then spit back in Chase’s direction.

  Chase had gotten to his feet, limping away from us as though he were headed back to his house, and was holding the wadded end of his shirt up over his mouth and nose, so he sounded a little muffled and weak when he said, “One of these days I’m gonna kill you, Buller.”

  And Tommy just grinned and spit and said, “Well, bring some friends and I guess it’ll be a fairer fight then.”

  I think I admired Tommy Buller more than anyone else in my life at times like that. I wanted to be like him, the way he always seemed so fearless and could smile at the worst times and barely get winded in a fistfight.

  The evening was summer-warm. I was only wearing a dirty T-shirt and my Levi’s. Tom’s shirttail hung out behind him, but other than that, he looked like he could have come straight from church. I brushed the dirt out of my hair and pulled my hat on tight and Tommy just laughed and spit, looking at me, and said, “Damn!”

  And I could only say, “Well, you shouldn’t’ve thrown that shovel!” as we got up on our horses and rode off toward my house on the north side of the lake.

  Eventually, we found out that the lock had been busted on the community donations box and that a statue of Saint Francis had been overturned, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch for us to blame it on Jack and Chase, even though we both kept quiet about it, knowing how far Deputy Rutledge tended to go to make sure his son and his friend never suffered the consequences to what his father called their “mischief.”

  Tommy wiped his hand over his face. “Did he hit me?” He looked at his palm.

  “He never even touched you once. If there’s blood on you, it’s his.”

  Tommy stopped Arrow there in the road.

  “Get down, Stotts.”

  “What?” I circled Reno back around to face him.

  “Get down.”

  He was standing there in the road, looking at me that way he did, squinty-eyed and grinning like he was playing a joke on me and I had no choice beyond cooperation.

  I knew better than to argue with Tommy Buller because he could get an idea—or a plan—in his head, and that would be it. There was no way of harnessing that energy once he got charged up. And he even said “get down” one more time to me as I was slinging my leg up and over the saddle.

  “Okay. What’s up, Tommy?”

  Tom Buller’s mouth stretched back in his tight-lipped coyote grin.

  “Punch me in the face, Stotts.”

  I sighed and my shoulders slumped and I started to turn back to get on my horse. “Hell, Tom.”

  “Come on, Stotts. Punch me.” Tom grabbed my shoulder to pull me back around. “No one’s gonna believe I beat the hell out of Chase Rutledge if I don’t at least have a black eye to prove it.”

  “No one’ll ever beat the hell out of that boy.”

  And Tommy put his chin right up to my face and smiled. “Come on, Stottsy. Just once.”

  I exhaled deeply and then propped his chin up between the thumb and index finger of my left hand. “Well, okay.”

  I made a fist with my right hand and cocked it back, low by my hip. Then Tommy snapped his chin back out of my hand and we both started laughing.

  “Damn, Stotts!” he yelled. “You’re crazy! You were really gonna hit me!”

  Then he spit and held out his fist and I punched it once and said, “Well, you shouldn’t’ve thrown that shovel.”

  “And when are you gonna learn to stay on that horse of yours?”

  We both laughed and I pulled up the waist of my jeans and we climbed back up onto our horses.

  “Where’d you learn to fight like that anyway?”

  “Losing at least a hundred times, I guess.”

  And I thought, That’s a lot of times to not give up and try something else.

  “Thanks for the trim on Reno, Tommy.”

  “No sweat, Stotts. Stop feeding him so much alfalfa.” Then he spit off into the darkness. “We’re still going to the fire pit tomorrow night, right?”

  “Yeah.” I looked over at him, but Tommy had those narrow eyes fixed on the road ahead, still smiling.

  I asked, “Do you think he would really do it? Chase, I mean?”

  Tommy spit again. “He’s too much of a coward.”

  “That’s what I mean, Tom.”

  Tom Buller didn’t say anything to that.

  “I saw Jack running off when you were beating on Chase,” I said.

  Tommy laughed, “You saw Crutchfield running?”

  “And what do you think he was doing with that shovel, anyway?”

  “Planting roses, probly. Or waiting for me to come along and throw it at your horse so I could laugh at you for falling off him.”

  I never believed I knew very much about horses; I still don’t now. There’s more to them than I can guess. But I do know that there are some horses you can just look at and tell they don’t like anything about you. Chase Rutledge was like that, at least toward me, even if I never really did know the reasons I gave him.

  “What kind of gun was that, anyway?”

  “Loaded,” I said. “A twenty-two. I threw it across the road. Probly shouldn’t’ve, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  The next afternoon I rode out to our fire pit on the other side of the lake just as the sun was stretching the shadows of those tall trees on that part of Benavidez land. I knew Tom and Gabriel would be there, stoking the fire high, already laughing, already telling their stories.

  I like the color of the sun at dusk, when it cuts down away in the west, turning the air a kind of amber like the whole world is seen through the smoke of Tom and Gabriel’s fire. I like the way the fading light sucks all the lingering heat from the day at that time of year. It was the time of day you’d see deer, which meant quickness. Everything meant something in the woods—I had read as much in a book on Indian medicine. Deer were quickness medicine. Coyotes meant someone was going to play a trick on you. Hawks were messengers. Snake medicine means change. I always knew Tommy Buller had strong snake medicine in him, even though he played the coyote most of the time, because he could always shrug things off so easily and be new again, just like a snake shedding its skin. It was all reasonable enough to me. Well, as reasonable as any other explanation I ever heard for why things happen or how things fit into this world. I told my friends about it, too, and the saying made it seem unarguable to me.

  I said it to Tom and Gabe, and they got serious enough to stop laughing and consider it.

  “And bears mean strength,” I added. “If you dream about ‘em. Or if you see ‘em at the right moment.”

  “Everything’s some kind of sign, I guess,” Gabe reasoned.

  Tommy leaned forward and spit a long brown splash of tobacco, sizzling, into the fire. We watched him as he threw a pine cone into it, making it flare like an illusion in a magic show.

  And then he got that joking, black-eyed coyote look in his eyes and kind of winked at Gabriel and said, “Yeah. And pine -cone is dumbass medicine.”

  And we all laughed at that.

  Gabriel played to Tommy’s teasing and fixed his serious eyes on me. “And my sister is …”

  Then they both looked at me, thinking I would finish it.

  “I don’t know.”

  We stared into the fire for a long time after that, each, I’m sure, thinking about what I really would have said if I were telling the truth.

  “What about horses?”

  And I said, “Horses. They’re all different. Some are smart, some are stupid. Some are good, some are bad. Some of ‘em you just can’t ever like. And some of ‘em
you like right away and you understand ‘em, and there’s no telling why.”

  Tommy yawned and stretched his long legs out against the rocks in front of us. “I like your Reno. He’s a good one.”

  “Everyone likes him.”

  “You never said why Benavidez gave him to you.”

  “ ‘Cause I don’t really know.”

  And then Gabe smiled, but you could never tell with that smile of his what he was meaning because he was usually so serious. Or maybe scared. “I do.”

  I could tell he was waiting for me or Tommy to just beg him to talk, but we just stared straight into the fire, my eyes getting heavy and watery from the smoke and light. And we sat like that, silently, for the longest time before Tommy put his head all the way back on that old saddle in the ground, like he was about to go to sleep. Then I gave out and took my hat off and just rested my head straight back in the dirt.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what I think,” Gabe said.

  We were flat on our backs, staring up at the sky, the stars, the rising smoke, feet toward the fire.

  “Get ready, Stottsy, he’s thinking now, too. This’ll be really good.”

  “He’s the kind of horse anyone would want. But the kind of person who’d pay for him would be the wrong person for the horse. So my father made a bargain with the horse. The horse chose you and in exchange, he made him promise that one day he’ll take you far away from Benavidez land.”

  And I guess I took Gabe’s bait. “All right. Why?”

  “Tom, I think you were right about the pine cone medicine.”

  “True, Gabey. True.”

  I thought I could feel myself getting smaller. It was an easy enough thing to feel, lying there on my back in the dirt, looking up at the endlessness of the night and listening to my friends pick away at me because they knew more about me than I thought I would ever show them.

  FIVE

  When I got to the Foreman’s house in the morning, Carl Buller was standing with his right foot up on the trailer hitch, resting an elbow on his knee and smoking a cigarette. Tommy was coming out the screen door, pulling a T-shirt over his head as he switched his hat from hand to hand.