P.O. Box 722

Claude, TX  79019

racox@officetex.com

Word Count:  10355

(originally published in NEW TRADITIONS IN TERROR, edited by Bill Purcell, December 2001)

    When did it all come crashing home you ask?  When did the bottom fall out, and my life go up in flames?  Well let me tell ya...

    "Ok," Jensen asked for the umpteenth million time, as he pushed his now damp stringy hair back on his head with one meaty hand. "Tell me one more time how Deck managed to get in the well."

    I ground my teeth together in frustration, as I tried to hold back my anger. You see I told myself that these guys were just doing their jobs. I told myself that my innocence would protect me. Hell I hadn’t even been read my rights at that time, though I knew I should have been.

    Detective Jensen looked at me from across the graffiti embossed table with tired blue eyes. Eyes pleading for the truth. They knew I was feeding them a load of bullshit. They had something on me. Something that was making my story look doubtful to them, but they would never know the real story of that night. I’ve never told the real story till this day, to you.

    I mean it’s not like they would have believed the truth anymore than they believed what I was telling them. I remember sitting there, silently telling myself again that I wasn’t crazy, that I had seen it with my own two eyes, but in the back of my mind I still wonder. I will always wonder.

    No, I couldn’t have told them the truth, all that would have succeeded in doing would have been ensure myself a long stay at the Mental Health Pavilion. No, I had told my story, I had made my bed.

    That was my story and was sticking to it.

    My eyes twitched away from Detective Jensen’s, and just that instant where my eyes flicked away from his told him everything he needed to know. Because before I even gave my repetitive recitation on the demise of Deck Carver, Jensen sat back and folded his arms across his broad chest, a frown creasing his stubbled face.

    "I told you," I mumbled into my hands. "Deck was drunk, he fell off into the well when I wasn’t looking. I never even heard him fall."

    Jensen just sat there, staring at me, like he had just caught me pissing in the punch bowl at the junior prom or something. I could almost see the wheels spinning in that massive head of his as he formulated his next move. The sweat on my forehead had begun to run freely.

    Jensen looked up at his partner, who was standing silently next to the door. No words passed between them, but Jensen’s partner nodded ever so slightly.

    Then Jensen turned his bull like head back towards me and smiled tightly.  His gleaming teeth looking like machinery from some old rock grinder.

    "How did Deck come by those slashes across his abdomen?" Jensen asked me with that same tight smile plastered on his normally passive face. "Preliminary Coroners report states that the abdomen wounds were likely inflicted by a knife, maybe a machete. Did you happen to see who gutted your friend before shoving him head first into a thirty six inch hole in the ground?"

    My head was spinning. How the Hell could I have forgotten that? I'll tell you how, I wanted to forget. I wanted to forget the whole damn thing. It had taken them three days to extract Deck’s body from the well. I had taken those three days to master my fear. To straighten out my mind. To forget, and I had forgotten alright.  I had pushed it out of my head like a bad dream. Now, I was up shit creek without a paddle.

    Jensen sat patiently, waiting for an answer to his question, but I was dumbfounded. I tried to think of a way out, anything that would account for the slashes across Deck’s abdomen.

    I opened my mouth to speak, but only a nervous squeak came out. I clamped my mouth shut, and Jensen’s smile grew a little, even as his eyes narrowed. I tried my level best to look calm, and made sure to clear my throat before attempting to speak again.

    "Like I said," I told them slowly. "I didn’t see him fall into the well, but I imagine the roots and debris cut him up pretty good as he bounced off of the sides of that thing. He fell what? One hundred feet or better?"

    "Oh he’s got plenty of root and debris cuts on him. In fact, he’s pretty near scalped from the debris, but those are mostly on his head and shoulders. No son, I’m talking about the wounds on his abdomen," Jensen came back quickly.

    All I could do was shrug.  God, I must have looked like an idiot.

    "I wouldn’t know nothing about any knife wounds on Decks stomach," I told him, and that time I concentrated, so I was able to look him straight in his sleepy blue eyes.

    But I knew the real story, and it must have been written all over my face.  I was telling them a half-truth in hopes of skating, those weren’t knife cuts on his abdomen. They were something else, something much worse.

    But if my looking Jensen eye to eye when I told him that I knew nothing about any knife cuts made any kind of impression on him, he didn’t show it. In fact, it appeared to infuriate him even worse.

    "You have the right to remain silent," Jensen growled at me as he stood up from the table and hulked over me. "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney."

    I clearly remember thinking, 'Holy shit, this guy is fixing to bust me for murder.'

    "I want to call my lawyer right now!" I yelled back at him as he finished my Miranda Rights.

    Jensen’s partner’s face had changed from one of apparent apathy to one of concern as he rushed over and grabbed his partner’s sizable upper arm. He could tell Jensen was about to lose his temper, so could I.

    "Do you understand these rights I have just read you?" Jensen growled while his partner was tugging at him.

    "I want my fuckin’ lawyer, and I want him now!" I said, trying to stand up, only to have Jensen shove me forcibly back into the hard wooden chair.

    "Do you understand these rights?" Jensen raged in my face.

    I remember his breath smelled like a home-style hamburger, what I wouldn’t give for a good home-style hamburger right now.

    "Yes!" I screamed back, almost in tears then. "I understand them you Fuck!"

    "Jen!" Jensen’s partner screamed in his ear, finally drawing his enraged partner’s attention. "Let’s step outside and talk."

    Jensen kept his angry eyes on me as they stepped out of the blank acoustic tiled room. My eyes were firmly fixed on the floor.

    You wanted to know when it all came crashing down.  Right there in that police station, that was when I knew...

    Life as I had known it was over right then, inexorably changed by circumstances beyond my control. I was about to be charged with murder. The murder of my best friend, Deck Carver. The truth was, I never murdered Deck Carver, but the real truth was always too bizarre to be told. Who on Earth would have believed me? Not Detective Jensen of the Amarillo Special Crimes Unit. Not my court appointed lawyer. Not a jury of my so-called peers.

    No one would have believed the truth, not even if they had seen it with their own eyes, though it probably would have made for a great insanity defense, and maybe I was insane then. After all, who knows? Do the insane know they are insane? It’s a question I ask myself all the time.

    God, I remember how the memory came flooding back after Jensen stomped out of the room. How my foot began to tap, and the muscles in my face began to twitch.

    Yeah, I killed that night, but know this, I never killed Deck Carver.

    It all began with a twelve pack of beer and a dare. Just a friendly bet. The wager; a twelve pack of beer that I could not spend the night on the Indian burial grounds at Kiowa Wells. An eight dollar twelve pack of beer that cost me and my best friend our lives.

    From that point on my memories are more like a dream than something real. I don’t know the cause of what happened, I guess it would take a team of NASA scientists to figure that one out. Maybe the planets were aligned just right. Maybe it was the Winter Solstice. Maybe it was the full moon. Maybe it was the way a damn bird flew across the sky. Whatever it was, it changed my future.

    How can you explain why your destiny changes? I don’t know what caused it, I still don’t really even know what it was, but I can tell you what it felt like. Or at least I can try.

    There are holes in the fabric of the universe, this much I know. The government physicists won’t tell you about them, maybe they don’t even know about them. But there are tears in the fabric of our existence, gaps in time. The Indians knew about this, maybe that’s why they picked Kiowa Wells for their graveyard. I know it all sounds like a Timothy Leary acid trip, but I was there, and it changed everything.

    Have you ever walked into a place that just felt wrong? A place that raised the hackles on the back of your neck. A porno bookstore, or a bar on the wrong side of the tracks? A reverse de'javue. That feeling that it’s no longer going according to plan, that it’s out of control. The feeling that your life’s track, your destiny, has just taken a detour, and gotten lost.

    That was how I felt the minute I stepped foot in Kiowa Wells, and that feeling is still with me to this day. My fear is, that it will be like this for the rest of my life. I mean, how do you put your destiny back on course if you don’t know where it went wrong in the first place? And if that is the case, if there is no going back, then I’m not sure I can live like this.

    We were just pumpers, Deck and I. A pumper is the guy that drives around checking oil rigs and tank batteries to make sure everything is working. Our main job was to open and close valves, start and stop rigs, and occasionally fix minor problems. Deck hired me on back in 1996, and gave me a percentage of his rigs on a sub-contract. It was grungy work, hard on both men and trucks. Our territory covered a large swath of country North of Borger, Texas; from the old ghost town of Plemons, down the Canadian River to the old town site of Adobe Walls, and there, right smack dab in the middle of that large block, was Kiowa Wells.

    We had seven rigs working around Kiowa Wells, just strippers with minimal production. Kiowa Wells was an odd place in more ways than one. It was a flat area with large clumps of Alkali Sacaton grass that extended well up into Kiowa draw from the Canadian River. This remote area was named for the natural artesian wells that dotted the flats here, and the Kiowa burial grounds that inhabited the same location. The wells were natural holes in the ground, almost perfectly circular, sometimes as big as four foot across. For most of the year these holes were dry as a bleached bone, but when the rains came just right, and the river crested, these holes could become gushing artesian wells that spewed water as high as ten feet into the air.

    I had always hated Kiowa Wells, Deck knew that. Just something about the place gave me the willies. The old Indian burial grounds were fenced off now. The Hutchinson County Historical Society had done that back in the eighties, but it wasn’t just the burial ground, the whole area spooked me. It was out of time and place somehow. With its large clumps of Sacaton grass waving sometimes eight or ten feet in the air, right out there in the middle of the short grass prairie. It just didn’t feel right, it felt empty, like a void. Even in the daytime, when you’re down on the Wells sound seems muted, the wind stops, the temperature is a few degrees cooler. It’s like walking into a whole different world then looking out a window on what you know as reality.

    Of course there were stories about Kiowa Wells. The people of the Panhandle seem to have a story for every natural landmark or ghost town. I guess that holds true everywhere, but the stories about Kiowa Wells were particularly gruesome.

    The stories I’d heard were related to me by Deck himself on the day he gave me the sub-contract for rigs on the West side of the Wells, the same day of our little bet. The first story went like this...

***

    Shortly after Marcy’s expedition through the Panhandle of Texas in search for a new route to the California goldfields, a wagon train led by a scout named Ledbedder came through, following Marcy’s route. Only Marcy had never gone to Kiowa Wells, he’d gone South of the River, but Ledbedder, seeing the large artesian wells, decided to make camp there for the night. That was some time in April of 1850.

    That winter, three men walked into Denver Colorado and identified themselves as the last remaining survivors of Ledbedders Train. People just naturally assumed they had been set upon by Indians, though it was well known Ledbedder was a Comanchero, and had made arrangements with the local tribes for safe passage.

    The men were half starved.  One man’s feet even had to be amputated because of frostbite. All three insisted that they had not seen an Indian the entire time they were in Kiowa Wells.

    "Well how long were you in Kiowa Wells?" They were asked.

    Not one of the men could say for sure how long it had been. All they knew was; they had gone into the wells with the train in April, and walked out in the dead of winter, though it had only seemed like a matter of days to them. Two of the men couldn’t even tell them what year it was. The doctor associated this with Hypothermia, but I know better now.

    "If it weren’t Injuns, what were it?" One old miner was reported to have asked.

    None of the three could give a definite answer, and one man refused to talk about it at all, but the man with the frostbitten feet, Johnson, related the story while drugged out of his mind on Laudnum.

    He said things were going well enough when they entered the Wells. The camp site was a good one, even though the game was scarce up Kiowa draw.

    They had just settled in good for the evening, when two members of the fifty or so in the party, became violently ill. Then, if that wasn’t bad enough, Mrs. Sucrach, who was seven months pregnant, went into labor. Suddenly, the once sleepy campsite was bustling with activity. Johnson then told of how the full moon appeared over rim of the Canadian River breaks, and how time seemed to stand still.

    A mist rolled up from the river, he told them. The kind of mist that stuck to you like cobwebs. All noise had ceased, except that of Mrs. Sucrach in her labor pains. Ledbedder went around the camp, encouraging people to stand firm, telling them that there was no danger, but Johnson said he could feel the fear creeping up on him like a thief. People began to panic, running helter-skelter, this way and that. Abandoning material possessions and kin just to escape.

    It seemed hard to breath, Johnson told the assembled. Like the mist filled your lungs and just settled there.

    The oddest part, he said, was that the people who ran off in one direction, seemed to come back from the other. If they ran screaming off to the West, they came back in screaming from the East. Johnson related to them the story of how he had been in a house of mirrors once back in Atlanta. He said it reminded him of how he felt out there that night at Kiowa Wells.

    You had to be right up next to a person to hear them scream, he told them. Then all at once the wells began to gush, and Mrs Sucrach was moved by Johnson and her husband to higher ground. The wagons were soon flooded, and Ledbedder, who had been encouraging stability and steadfastness, had now taken to braining anyone that came within reach with a spade shovel. The panic seemed to grow as Mrs Sucrach’s baby came closer to this world, even old Johnson said he sat down and began to cry like a idiot, though he had no idea why.

    Johnson told them it was a still birth and that Mrs. Sucrach wailed at the top of her lungs for her child, but the baby was dead, born cold and blue. It’s death shroud, the mists that clung to it. Out of fifty people screams and cries for help, Mrs. Sucrach was the only one they could hear out in the mist. Johnson said he finally couldn’t stand the wailing anymore, so he got up and began walking West. Or at least what he remembered to be West from the daylight.

    The moon never moved, it just hung there, he said, for days and weeks it seemed to him that it just hung there. He walked for hours, but Mrs. Sucrach’s screams of torment never left his ears. Ledbedder had found a Henry rifle, and was now shooting people at random. Johnson was reported to have said that he wished Ledbedder would have shot him too.

    For hours Johnson walked, until finally he ended up back at where Mrs. Sucrach lay, next to a clump of Sacaton grass. Her cold baby still cradled in her arms.  Her husband, dead with a gunshot wound to his side, laid out beside her.

    "Please, give ‘em that dead baby Mrs. Sucrach," Johnson pleaded with her. "You got to give it to ‘em or we’re all gonna be here forever."

    Johnson had no idea why he said that, but he remembered saying it just the same.

    Mrs. Sucrach just screamed, and hugged her baby tighter to her bosom. Once, Johnson admitted, trying to take the dead baby from her, but she shoved him off, and bit his hand. Leaving a ragged black scar that he carried all the way to Denver.

    It was Ledbedder that finally took the baby. In his own way Ledbedder rescued them. He popped around that clump of Sacaton and shot Mrs Sucrach in the head, point blank, with that Henry rifle, Johnson told them. She should have died instantly. But Johnson said, she went right on screaming, half of her head gone, and her brains splattered all over the tall grass.  Ledbedder jerked the cold child from her twitching hands and threw it down to the flooded wells.

    Johnson claimed that he remembered no more for a long time after that, he slept he said. And when he awoke, the wells were dry, the wagons were gone, and the air was cold. Four of them were alive in all, Johnson and three others, Ledbedder included.

    Ledbedder told them they should start for Denver. Winter was on them, and it was their only chance. But two days out of Kiowa Wells, Ledbedder stuck the barrel of his Henry Rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toe. The other three, numbed, and confused, merely followed the directions Ledbedder had laid out for them.

    They arrived in Denver almost a month later.

    The people that had assembled to hear Johnson’s story had no idea what to make of it, but it impressed them enough that they convened the county court and tried Ledbedder in posthumous absentia. He was found guilty of the murder of forty six people within just a few short hours.

***

    "And you can look that up, it's public record in Denver," Deck told me as we drove out to the Wells. "That there is some true shit."

    "So, what happened to the other three?" I asked him.

    Deck looked at me and grinned like the cat that just ate the canary. He had me roped in and he knew it.

    "Well, old Johnson died of blood poisnin’ about a week later, one of the others killed himself not long after that, and the other went on to become an outlaw named Savage George. He was hung within the year. They said Savage George thanked ‘em at his hangin’, that he was happy to go."

    "You’re so full of shit," I told Deck as I took a sip of my beer.

    It was Saturday, December twenty-first, we always rode together on Saturdays, and most of the time we drank way too much beer.

    "Yeah, well I dare you to spend the night out at Kiowa Wells," Deck said seriously. "I wouldn’t do it for a twelve pack of beer."

    "I’ll do it. What the Hell, It’s Saturday, and I got nowhere to be tomorrow," I boasted, taking another long swallow from my warm beer. "For a twelve pack of beer, I’ll spend the night out at Kiowa Wells."

    Deck just laughed.

    "Bullshit," he said. "You’ll never make it the night out there. No one has."

    "I will," I allowed as we topped the rim of the river valley and followed the two track dirt road down to one of our rigs in the valley floor.

    "There was this kid back in the twenties, I think it was," Deck told me, as if he knew the kid by first name basis. "It was right after Borger boomed up. Anyway, he was the night watchman on number seven out by the Wells..."

    "Oh fuck you, you’re just trying to scare me now!" I interrupted, as I fished another beer out of our Styrofoam cooler.

    "No," Deck said with all the earnestness he could muster. "This is no bullshit, I read about this in a newspaper story they did on the boom days of Borger. Anyway, this kid, Roy, had his girlfriend out on rig seven that night. And seven was a sure enough Mississippi back in those days, so the pressure on the casing kept that rig bucking all the time, must have scared the shit out of that farm girl. Anyway, Roy decides that would be a good way to get into the farm girl’s panties, see. She’s already nervous from the moaning and shifting of the drilling platform, now he’d take her out to Kiowa Wells and show her the Indian burial grounds."

    I just shook my head and sat back in the seat of the truck to let the heater run over my feet, it was getting cold outside, and a blue line was forming off to the North of the river. The way I figured it then, Kiowa Wells wouldn’t be as big a problem as the Blue Norther that was moving in off of the Caprock.

    "Anyway, he gets her out there, and sure enough they start banging away, right there on the Indian graves. Then, while he’s not looking, the moon is coming up over the Cap, and the mist starts rolling up from the river. He feels it, right as he’s about to unload. The mist rolls over them, and he looks down at this chick he’s boinking, only she’s changed right. She’s someone else now, and he freaks out. That’s when the panic hits him, and he runs like Hell, but there’s no way out. Kiowa Wells has him. At every turn he sees her, and she’s screaming at the top of her lungs, and she’s holding a baby in her arms. Roy, he’s just getting more and more scared out there. Finally, he can’t stand the screaming anymore. He can’t get away. So, he picks up a mesquite branch and brains her with it."

    "The next day the foreman finds Roy staggering around out by the rigs. Confused, and wandering around like he’s totally lost, even though he’s been there a hundred times. Roy keeps muttering about a baby, and the wells. The foreman gets kinda scared, and he goes down to the Wells. There they find the body of the girl stuffed a few feet down one of the Wells, dead as a doornail, with her feet still waving out in the wind," Deck finished in his best serious voice.

    I was having none of it, it was all just folklore and myth as far as I was concerned. We stopped the truck next to a tank battery. I checked a gauges on one of the rigs, and started another while Deck sat in the truck under the heater. Turning my back to the North wind, I took a piss and shivered in the cold air. This Norther was bound to be a doozy by the feel of the wind and the looks of the skies to the North. I was thinking about ducking out on my bet till another day.

    If only I would have.

    I zipped my pants and jumped back into the truck, slamming the door quickly.

    "Norther blowing in," Deck observed as he put the truck in gear and turned west up the oilfield road to Kiowa Wells. "You sure you don’t want out of this bet? You buy the twelve pack, I’ll even let you drink some of it."

    Deck was chiding me, egging me on. He knew there was no backing out now.

    "Screw that, when you buy me my twelve pack you won’t get a shittin’ one of them," I laughed. "I’ve got all the gear in the back, I’ll find a nice comfortable nook and be just fine. You’re gonna owe me come tomorrow morning."

    "You know that kid, Roy, I was telling you about, the night watchman out on seven. They tried him for murder right there in Borger. Hung his ass for it too. He claimed till his dying breath he didn’t kill her. He swore there was something else out there that night," Deck told me in a matter-of-fact manner.

    "There you go, trying to spook me again, it’s all horseshit Deck. I’m not backing down."

    Deck shrugged.

    "Fine," he said. "You’re a grown man over twenty one, guess you can do what you please."

    We drove on in silence until we rounded the bend and dropped off into Kiowa draw.

    "Last chance, Bubba," Deck said cryptically. "You can still get under a nice warm heater tonight."

    "Not on your life," I told him, little did I know then how prophetic those words would be.

    Our rigs were out on the West side of the Wells, so we checked them first, Deck giving me sidelong half smiling glances the whole time. I had just enough beer in me to be belligerent, so the more he prodded and chuckled, the deeper I dug in. He knew that of course, so he jabbed me pretty often.

    "Well," he said after flipping the switch to turn on one of the rigs and throwing his pipe wrench into the bed of the truck. "It’s time."

    I looked up at the gloomy sky and had second thoughts, but the sneer on Deck’s face dissolved them. I marched over to the truck and grabbed one of the emergency bedrolls, the pup tent, and our emergency food pack. When you went out as far afield as we did, it paid to be prepared. There were areas out here you couldn’t even get out on a cellular phone, and radios were just useless. Kiowa Wells was one of those places.

    I grabbed a six pack of beer out of our styrofoam cooler and began lugging it all over to a sheltered spot where Kiowa draw opened up onto the wells.

    "You come get me first thing in the morning!" I hollered back at Deck. "And bring my beer!"

    Deck just stood by the bed of our truck with a queer look on his face, then he waved and nodded. In a flash, we was back in his truck, bouncing out of Kiowa draw with the motor revving to all Hell. I watched him go, cursing myself for a stubborn fool. I was about to spend a miserable cold night out here in the boonies. For a twelve pack of beer. Who was the idiot here really? Hell, we bought beer for each other all the time. What was I thinking?

    I set up the tent, and rolled the bedroll out inside. After that, I looked around for material to make a fire, but it was useless. Flakes of snow were starting to blow in, and the sun was setting. I would never have gotten a fire started in that wind anyhow. I grabbed a beer, put my back against the warmer south face of a bluff that looked down on the wells, at the Indian burial grounds right smack dab in the center of it, and let my mind wander.

    That was a mistake.

***

    I don’t remember how long I sat there nursing that beer, or when the sun went down. My mind seemed to have just shut off like a switch. The world around became a daydream that I could not awaken from.

    When I finally came too, the full moon hung over the draw like the bloated red face of a demon. I took a mechanical sip of my beer and spat it out in surprise. It was flat. My body shook all over from the intense cold around me, and a couple of inches of snow covered the frozen ground. The thick gloom of clouds had disappeared from the sky, and the stars shone like lamps next to the red moon. A shiver shot through me like a charge of electricity. Something was terribly wrong, but my mind was numbed, frozen like the ground below me. I looked back up at the stars, and blinked owlishly.

    The big dipper was gone. In fact none of the stars were right that night. Familiar constellations were missing, or in the wrong area of the sky totally. All at once I felt disoriented, with no idea of North, South, East, or West. I was like a compass sitting atop a magnet, spinning round and round.

    Then I felt something like the touch of an insect on my ankle, a prickle on my skin. I looked back down, a thick lazy mist was moving up from the Wells, emanating from the Wells. It boiled up like lava, orange under the strange moon, inexorably coating the ground in an ever thickening blanket.

'Move!' my mind cried.

    But my body was frozen and sluggish. The fingers of terror clawed at my stomach, and my heart began to thud deep in my ears.

    Slowly, much too slowly, I scrambled to my feet. The clinging mist was already up to the middle of my thighs. All around me was a sea of fog. It was filling the draw now, and covering the river bed for as far as the eye could see.

    The bluff was my only chance. I turned and started clambering up it’s sheer caliche side. My heart racing faster in my chest.  The fog literally seemed to pull at me. Maybe my legs were just asleep from sitting out there in the cold, I don’t know, but it was like pulling myself out of a pool of glue.

    One yard... then two... then three; I was almost out, almost to the grassy top of the bluff. I grabbed for a skunk bush root that was hanging out of the side of the bluff. It looked sturdy, hell it was as big around as my wrist, but it was my undoing. When the root snapped, I lost it. Every hold I had was suddenly gone, and I was falling.

    Falling and screaming.

    If all this memory was like a dream, then what came next was like a nightmare. The memory is disjointed, without a sense of time or place. I was in the mist, trapped by Kiowa Wells. Reality had taken a powder. I screamed for help, but whether that was at the beginning or the end, I cannot tell you. It seemed like I screamed forever, but the screams were muted, swallowed up by the wells. It was hard to breathe in here, like sucking mineral water into your lungs. Panic began to fill me as my breathing became more and more labored. I bolted, running in panic, but I never made it out that way. The mist was always there, at every turn. I ran and screamed. Finally, after what seemed like hours or days of running, I plunged head long into the same bluff that I had tried to climb out on.

    It was a shock. A slap in the face. I needed that right then. At last the panic seemed to drain out of me as I rubbed my forehead where it had struck a large caliche rock on the side of the bluff. My breathing slowed, and my mind began to function again. There had to be a way out of here, and I had to find it. Then I heard the scream.

    It started like the far away howl of a police siren and grew. Soon it was deafening, making coherent thought almost impossible. It came from everywhere around me. A feeling of dread filled me, taking the place of the panic. I knew it was Mrs. Sucrach. I knew she was holding her dead child in her arms. I knew she was rocking her child back and forth, and I knew to make her stop I would have to kill her, then throw that dead baby down to the wells like a sacrifice.

    I didn’t want to do it, but it was the only way out, something told me that clear as daylight. I reached down and grabbed a thick mesquite branch. It was three foot long, heavy and solid as iron. This would end it. I walked downhill from where I was, with no idea of the direction I was going, but knowing I was going down to the edge of the wells. Then I felt him.

    Someone else was in here besides me and Mrs Sucrach, someone dusty and tired, old and evil. My face changed from a grimace of resolve to a wary look of hatred. I was to put Mrs. Sucrach out of her misery, that was my job, so what was he doing here?

    I turned on my heel, the mesquite branch held like a batter at the plate waiting for a Nolan Ryan fast ball. He appeared out of the mist like a ghost ship. One moment he wasn’t there, then he was, and all at once I was facing him, only it wasn’t who I expected. It was Deck.

    I let the branch fall to my side, and breathed a wet sigh of relief.

    "What are you doing here Deck?" I asked, my relief flooding from me like the mist from the wells.

    "I came back to check on you when the weather turned bad," Deck told me with a friendly smile on his face. "What’s going on here?"

    I looked around, I could barely hear Deck over the din of Mrs. Sucrach’s screaming even though he was right in front of me he sounded like he was speaking from miles away.

    "We gotta get out of here Deck," I screamed at the top of my lungs. "This isn’t right, none of it."

    Deck simply smiled and nodded. At first I thought he hadn’t heard me. Then he spoke.

    "Well go kill that bitch and let’s get out of here," Deck said quietly.

    He said it quietly, and I heard him this time, even over Mrs. Sucrach’s screaming.

    I turned to go back down into the wells and stopped at the first clump of Sacaton grass I came too. I simply couldn’t go on. I couldn’t kill Mrs. Sucrach, even if she was just a ghost. Even if she’d been killed more times, by more people than I could count. I just couldn’t do it. Deck was behind me, I could feel him back there, the same feeling I had when I felt him in the mist, but when I turned to face him, it was just Deck still smiling at me.

    "I can’t do it," I told him. "We got to find another way out."

    "There ain’t no other way out partner," Deck told me. "This is how it plays out every time."

    The hair stood up on the back of my neck. Then, as I stood there staring at Deck, he started wavering. Going in and out of focus like a bad picture. It was such a distortion of reality that I got nauseous for a moment. I took a step backwards and tripped over the clump of Sacaton grass. That clump of grass saved my life.

    As I fell, I saw the mists swirl. In slow motion I saw the gleaming red metal of the shovel as it whistled by my head. I hit the ground with a grunt, and sat there dumbfounded.

    Above me, cursing and spitting like a man in a fit of apoplexy, stood a huge man, with a bristly beard, and wide haunted eyes.

    "Ledbedder?" I mumbled.

    Beside him, staring out into the mists as if he were in a trance, stood Deck, oblivious to what was going on around him.

    Hearing his name seemed to bring Ledbedder out of his rage, at least partially. His haunted eyes focused on me, and he grimaced like a man in intense pain.

    "Kill that bitch, make her shut up!" Ledbedder cried. "It’s the only way."

    Ledbedder was waving his shovel around like a mad man, it’s spaded end gleaming red in the mist, catching odd rays of moonlight. It looked as if it had been sharpened.

    I scrambled back on the salt crusted silt that surrounded the clumps of Sacaton grass, and came face to face with Mrs. Sucrach. A look of unearthly anguish filled her flushed face. Tears like running water coated her red cheeks. She was the epitome of pain. I froze, watching her weep, unable to unlock my eyes from her as she rocked the still blue infant in her arms.

    "You got to kill her, and give the baby to the Wells!" another voice that carried above the din said from behind me.

    I turned to see a young man in old fashioned rough neck gear standing there with a look of hatred on his face.

    All at once, Mrs. Sucrach, oblivious to us all, stopped screaming, pausing to caress the dead baby in her arms. My eyes filled with tears, and I felt as though my heart would burst.

    The two men bore down on me, with Deck, walking like an incoherent zombie behind Ledbedder.

    "Look boy," Ledbedder explained, obviously relieved that Mrs. Sucrach had stopped screaming. "You got to kill her. That’s how it works. You know that. I know he told you."

    My head seemed to be on a swivel, trying to keep both Ledbedder and the roughneck in my line of sight as Mrs. Sucrach gently cooed at her dead child.

    "What are you talking about? Who would have told me?" I asked, my eyes always returning to the cold blue baby Mrs. Sucrach was nuzzling.

    "Settadoni," Ledbedder explained impatiently. "The Kiowa."

    "Who?" I asked, now mesmerized by the baby.

    Ledbedder dropped the shovel to his side, and knelt down as the roughneck came around behind the clump of grass where Mrs Sucrach sat.

    "It’s the curse boy, the curse of Kiowa Wells. Settadoni buried his whole tribe here, his whole family included, after an outbreak of small pox, and he forbid any white man from ever setting foot on this place. I was the first to, so now I serve him, but there have been plenty more since. Lots of bodies in these here wells. Now hurry before she starts blubbering again."

    "What curse," I asked with a trembling voice. "Deck never told me about no curse."

    Ledbedder let out a string of expletives that would have made a cowboy blush red as a rose.

    "Damnit boy, it ain’t important. You got to kill her, so you can leave here, and we can all go back..." Ledbedder said, trailing off.

    "Go back where?" I asked, to Ledbedder’s obvious irritation.

    "How the Hell should I know, I just know that I can’t stand that bitch’s screaming anymore, and my only relief will be when you kill her," Ledbedder said.

    I looked back to Mrs. Sucrach, her tears were flowing again, and her face twitched against the waves of pain hit her like the tides.

    "I ain’t gonna kill her Ledbedder. If you brought me here for that, your fucked," I told him swallowing hard as my own eyes once again grew misty with sympathy.

    The roughneck behind Mrs. Sucrach picked up a twisted mulberry limb and swung it hard at Mrs. Sucrach’s head. I screamed in dismay, but the branch passed harmlessly through her.

    "He told you," Ledbedder almost pleaded with me. "You got too, please."

    "Fuck you Ledbedder," I said angrily. "You had Deck bring me here so I could end some kind of perdition you and your fellow murderers are in. Fuck you!"

    I expected Ledbedder to grow angry, but he just smiled.

    "I didn’t have Deck bring you here boy," Ledbedder said as he picked up the shovel from the ground beside him.

    Again the spade blade gleamed red, and I swallowed hard. I told myself they were just ghosts, but they looked as real as anyone standing right in front of you, and the brain has an awful hard time ignoring the senses if you know what I mean.

    "I had you bring Deck here," Ledbedder laughed. "That’s how it works boy, Settadoni brings the one he wants, and someone close to them for good measure. Kind-of poetic justice for his family and all. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

    I was confused, but I could feel the truth of what he was saying. I had lead Deck here, by taking his stupid bet, even when the weather was turning bad, I had made it so he would be here when I triggered whatever it was I had triggered.

    "You see boy," Ledbedder continued. "It’s not just the death of Mrs. Sucrach and her baby that Settadoni requires, oh no. He already owns her soul, same as he owns mine, and Roy’s over there. You see boy, I made a bad bargain is what I did. I got trapped in this place back in 1849, just like you did tonight. Settadoni was ready to take me, and not all nice like the way it is now. No, he was gonna rip me up a little. Anyhow I made a bargain with him, if he would just let me go, I would bring a whole passel of white folks right to his little private Hell on Earth here, and ol’ Settadoni, being the savage bastard that he is, took me up on it. But he got some insurance, he kept part of me here, while the rest of me went out to put together the wagon train I led out here. I kept my end of the bargain, even bringing him Mrs. Sucrach and her baby there. Oh did Settadoni love that. I really thought he was gonna let me go, he let a few of the others go, or they got away anyhow. Ol’ Johnson was just too stupid to know what was happening. And he did let me go, after a matter of fashion. That is after I blew Mrs Sucrach’s head in two. That was what sealed it for me. I just couldn’t get it out of my head. The way she screamed for that baby, and the way her head flew apart. So, I killed myself, thinking that would be the end of it. I misjudged, I had become a part of Settadoni’s curse here, and the part of me that he kept just dragged me right back here. No, you see, Settadoni needs a little fresh blood every now and then, and as long as he gets things his way, I get a little peaceful sleep for awhile. All I did was get you to help me bring Deck out here, and you played your part like a good soldier, so finish it, and kill Mrs. Sucrach there. You’ll walk out of here free as a bird."

    I was having my doubts about walking out of there free as a bird.

    "What about Deck?" I asked, fingering the mesquite branch next to me.

    Ledbedder sighed and gave Mrs. Sucrach, who was blubbering a little louder now, a distrustful eye.

    "I’ll shoot it too you straight son, your buddy ain’t gonna walk out of here with you. He messed with the graves awhile back, Settadoni don’t take a lot of that. That’s why you brought him here," Ledbedder told me in his best sympathetic voice. "Like I said, you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

    It was Roy who spoke then.

    "Just think of it like this," Roy told me, stepping around the clump of Sacaton and standing over me, then nodding to Mrs Sucrach. "You’re putting her out of her misery too. Giving her a rest. How do you think she feels having to go through this over and over like this?"

    They looked solid as you do standing there jotting your notes, and I was about to find out how real they were. Sure, I could have whacked Mrs. Sucrach and ended up like these pathetic bastards. And for my trouble I probably would have had visions of bashing Mrs. Sucrach in the head over and over till I just snapped and killed myself like Ledbedder had. Then I would have surely ended up right back there, listening to Mrs. Sucrach wail for her dead child for an eternity. And there was Deck to think about, I had to at least try.

    Mrs. Sucrach began to wail then. It started low in her chest, like an animal in pain, then it roared out like a thunderclap, filling Kiowa Wells with her torment. Ledbedder and Roy covered their ears, and grimaced like they were shot. That’s when I took my chance.

    Sure they were already dead, but they were in Hell, or at least Settadoni’s perdition. Their souls were like whipping posts, built for torment. They would feel the blows.

    I brought my mesquite bat up fast and hard, connecting to the side of Roy’s head with a gravely crunch. Ledbedder stared at me like I had lost my mind, and maybe I had. But, Roy went down in a twitching heap nonetheless. He was dead, or dead again I should say. Ledbedder stared at him like it was the first time he had ever seen such a thing.

    "Well I’ll be," Ledbedder mumbled.

    I brought my bat up again. Again, aiming for the head, but Ledbedder flinched like a whipped dog, and the bat only caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder.

    The problems with my weapon were it’s lack of balance and it’s bad grip. Both screwed me right then. After over-swinging on the glancing blow to Ledbedder’s shoulder, my top heavy bat ripped out of my fingers, and flew away, into the mists.

    "You little sombitch," Ledbedder mumbled as he grabbed for the shovel that lay next to him.

    Rage filled Ledbedder’s face as he grabbed up his sharpened shovel, and started for me. I backpedaled, and my foot tangled in a clump of Sacaton. I went down in a heap, losing site of Ledbedder in the cloying mist.

    I lay there in the heavy mist, barely breathing. I couldn’t see Ledbedder, and I couldn’t hear him over Mrs. Sucrach’s screaming. Seconds went by, then minutes, or at least it seemed like minutes. 

    Ledbedder had lost me in the mist.

    I had just about convinced myself of that, when I saw the red glint on the blade of the shovel as it shot out of the mist like a missile from Heaven. It was that red glint that saved me, I flinched, and rolled quickly. The blade of the shovel just catching the collar of my shirt before digging half way up the spade in the alkali dirt next to my head.

    "Bear shit!" I heard Ledbedder mumble as he yanked at the shovel, trying to free it from the dirt.

    Then I was running, only not like before, I ran with control, keeping a firm eye on the ground beneath my feet. Noting when the salt crusted alkali soil disappeared, and the short buffalo grass started. Once I was out of the Wells I stopped. Shrouded in the mists I waited.  Shivering in the cold, my breath, adding to the mist around me.

    "Now where did you get to boy?" I heard Ledbedder yell over Mrs. Sucrach’s din somewhere to the left of me.

    For a moment I wondered why it was I could hear Ledbedder over Mrs. Sucrach’s wails when all other sounds seemed so muted and distant.

    It was because the dead could be heard here. In this place, they were the reality, and the living were the shades.

    I held my breath and waited. It was the waiting that was hard. Waiting brought thinking, and thinking brought panic. Soon my hands were sweating, and my heart was racing in my chest.

    "I still have your friend boy," Ledbedder yelled, closer to me now. "It ain’t done, not by a long shot."

    He still had Deck. My best friend who had come back out here to check on my well-being in the snow storm. The one I had led here, the one I had sucked into this mess.

    "Now, we might not be able to shut Mrs. Sucrach up," Ledbedder yelled, even closer, but still invisible in the mist. "But I can still give Deck here to Settadoni, and that might just be enough for him, for a little while. Oh yeah, Settadoni will enjoy your buddy here, you can count on it."

    I scanned the area around my feet. Nothing but snow and grass. Not a weapon, or anything I could fashion into a weapon, in site.

    "I’m gonna gut him, unless you come out," Ledbedder yelled, seemingly almost right on top of me. "Maybe we can strike some kind of deal here?"

    I crouched down like a runner in the starting blocks. My only shot was to charge Ledbedder as he appeared from the mist. Assuming he didn’t see me before I saw him. I heard his feet crunch in the snow directly in front of me.

    A shadow, just a dark smudge really, appeared in the mist, and I lunged headlong into it. I struck his solid form with a grunt and drove him back into the dirt, leaning in, my shoulder buried in his solar plexus, hoping to stun him.

    It was then I heard the laughter over Mrs. Sucrach’s screaming, and I looked up to find myself staring into Deck Carver’s blank eyes.

    "Woo-Hoo, that was a good one!" Ledbedder squealed, hoping from one foot to the other like some vaudevillian jester.

    I rolled off of Deck just as Ledbedder swung his shovel, I heard the hiss as it cut my shirt, I felt a tinge of pain, but no impact. I had again rolled just in time to save myself, but not in time to save Deck. Even as I rolled up on my knees, I heard Deck grunt, and Ledbedder swear under his breath.

    "Bear shit!" he said again.

    My eyes locked with Deck’s. Deck was trying to get up, his hands on his stomach, trying to hold his insides in place. His eyes were clear now. The trance that had held him, gone in time to meet his death.

    There are a lot of things about that night that haunt me, Deck’s eyes are one of them, the look of confusion, the plea for help that died on his lips as he coughed up a great gout of blood.

    Ledbedder considered the situation, shrugged, and drew back again, with a blow that I thought was aimed for me. Instead, swinging the shovel like a golf club, he again struck Deck across the abdomen. Deck, who was still holding his hands on his stomach, and trying to get up, lost about three fingers, and the handle on his insides as the shovel tore across his abdomen, crossing the original strike like an X. Decks bowels slithered out of him like a thousand snakes onto the damp buffalo grass. He tried to cry out, but again he choked on his own blood. At last his struggles ceased, and he laid back on the ground, still looking at me.

    Ledbedder had jammed the bloody shovel in the ground and was now leaning on it, wiping his forehead with a red bandana. He seemed unconcerned as I crawled over to Deck and cradled his head in my lap.

    "Oh shit man," I said, looking down at his torn abdomen. "Oh shit Deck, I’m so sorry."

    Deck was unable to speak, but he looked at me then, it’s his face that haunts me as much as anything about that night. It was an accusing look, a look of confusion, and pain. He had no idea where he was, or why he was here. It was as close to being innocent as one could get out at Kiowa Wells. I wanted to explain to him what had happened, but I couldn’t, his time was too short.

    I didn’t say "thanks," or "goodbye," all I could say was, "Oh shit man," over and over.

    Some kind of send off that is.

    The spark burned out in his eyes, and at last his twitching ceased. He died without ever knowing what had happened to him out here on the Wells.

    I looked up at Ledbedder with damp eyes, but Ledbedder seemed to fade, not totally out, but he gained a transparency that I had noticed in Mrs. Sucrach.

    "Why him?" I muttered, still rocking back and forth with Deck’s head in my lap. "You were after me, so why did you kill him?"

    Ledbedder nodded, "I was after you boy, it was a pure-dee accident that I hit him at all the first time, but it was bound to happen. He was never gonna leave this place, and you were never gonna leave as long as he was alive. So, it all works out."

    "Yeah, but I never killed Mrs. Sucrach," I said, noting Mrs Sucrach’s continued wailing.

    "No you didn’t," Ledbedder agreed, looking past me now, looking at something behind me. "But I got to thinking about that after that first swing where I accidentally hit your buddy there. You didn’t kill Mrs. Sucrach, but you sure caved in ol’ Roy’s head back there, and I reckon that will be enough for Settadoni, cause it looks like we’re about to go home."

    "You see son," Ledbedder said looking back down at me.

    In his eyes I could see the pain of one hundred years of damnation. His eyes were so haunted that I wanted to recoil, to run away, screaming, but Ledbedder’s will, his need, held me in place.

    "Here," he said, gesturing at the mist all around him. "This place we’re all trapped in.  Roy, me, Mrs. Sucrach, and the others, it’s just a test. It’s Settadoni proving to himself over and over that down deep, white folks ain’t no better than animals really."

    "I’m coming back, ain’t I?" I moaned, the tears once again running freely down my face.

    Ledbedder stood back up straight and shrugged.

    "You’re either coming back, or you’ve broke the curse by not braining Mrs. Sucrach. Which it is, I can’t say." Ledbedder said distantly. "All I know is, I’m never getting out of here."

    I hung my head and cried softly for a minute, my agony adding to that of Mrs. Sucrach’s.

    "You better move boy, Settadoni will be here in a minute," Ledbedder told me in a quiet voice as he shoved his bandana back into the pocket of his ducking britches.

    Ledbedder was no longer a threat to me, so I gently slid out from under Deck, my eyes fixed on the accusation of my blood soaked jeans, and stood up.

    With almost imperceptible slowness the sounds of Mrs. Sucrach’s wails of agony faded into the distance, instead they were replaced by the sound of drums.

    Kiowa drums. War drums.

    I moved over to stand next to Ledbedder, all the fight, drained out of me like so much hot air. The mists parted over head, and I could see the bloated red moon hanging almost directly over Kiowa draw. But now the stars were right, the big dipper was there, and the other constellations were back in their place as well. The feeling of disorientation slipped out of me, but the feeling of ill persisted.

    It still persists to this day.

    Out of the mist walked a short, squat man; with long dark hair, a beaklike nose, a merciless mouth, high cheek bones, and wide haunted eyes. Instinctively, I knew it was Settadoni, the owner of this little Hell we occupied.

    "Be quiet now," Ledbedder whispered in my ear. "He can’t see the living, but he can hear them sometimes."

    Settadoni walked right up to Deck’s body like he never saw Ledbedder and I. Over Deck’s body Settadoni sang a warbling chant that sounded both stricken, and fierce at the same time. He danced around Deck’s body, this squat little man who looked as real as anyone standing in the street. I wanted to turn away, not watch this little demon who so relished the death of my friend, but I could not, I was frozen. Something about Settadoni’s song, the warbling notes, the guttural chants, hypnotized me.

    At last Settadoni finished his chant and pulled a knife from his belt, I heard Ledbedder hiss beside me, and he grabbed my arm. With one fluid motion Settadoni laid the knife against Deck’s pale scalp and pulled back, while dragging the knife forward, peeling Decks scalp off in a rough, torn, jagged looking pattern.

    Settadoni looked up at the sky, and opened his arms to the moon, letting out a war-cry that I still hear in my dreams. Settadoni’s war cry, the look on Deck’s face, and Mrs. Sucrach’s wailing. Three things no amount of alcohol or drugs will ever erase from my mind.

    Then he picked Deck up, his strong squat frame levering Decks body over his shoulders in a fireman’s carriage. He marched past us, straight down to the Wells. The mists parted as he went, as they had parted when he came in.

    "Quick boy, follow that path he just gave you," Ledbedder told me, pointing to the hallway in the mists from which Settadoni had come. "and get the Hell out of here, before it’s gone."

    He shoved me up the path, his calloused hands pushing me along, but my feet were leaden, and my mind consumed with Settadoni’s death song.

    Even as I stumbled up the path out of the Wells my head swivelled back, watching Settadoni trotting down to the Wells. Ledbedder was now following him, with his head down, and his shovel swung carelessly up onto his shoulder. He was almost completely transparent now, just a dim memory, a story told to frighten tourists.

    It was Settadoni’s Hell they were in, and he was the master there, my escape meant nothing to Ledbedder, Roy, Mrs. Sucrach, or Deck, they were still trapped. Still trapped there till this day. I fear that part of me is as well. Makes me wonder if I’m going back there when they finally give me the shot. When they finally strap me down and punch that needle into my vein. You see it’s all been wrong since I spent the night on Kiowa Wells. I never murdered Deck Carver, but who else were they going to put that one off on; not Ledbedder, Roy, or Settadoni.

    No, I can feel it, part of me is still there on the Wells, and I wonder what’s worse, a lifetime on death row, or an eternity in Kiowa Wells. If only I knew, if I just knew I wouldn’t be going back, then I would end it. But I don’t know you see, and that’s why it feels all wrong, why my destiny is so out of kilter.

    You wanted to know if I'm guilty, hell yeah I'm guilty.

    You wanted to know where I went wrong?  What made me a murdering bastard?  You wanted to know the why's and how's...well there it is.

    To think, it all started with a twelve pack of beer and a dare.

The End

May 26, 2000

Panhandle, TX