Kelly kicked the cadaver with cocky cowboy confidence, and the brittle bones--held together as they were with rotten jerky--snapped and shuddered under the force. First a rib or two caved in, then the ladder of the spine shook a little,--a rattler in the grass--til the skull itself snapped free and rolled, almost joyously, down into the gully.
"Well you'll have to go down there and retrieve that," I said. And maybe there was scolding in my tone that opened his defiance.
"And why would I go dig a dead man's head out of that hole?" Kelly protested.
"Oh, I don't know, maybe because somebody might give a flying rat's ass who's head it was you kicked down the hill."
"You think?" He asked, an inscrutable curl on his lips.
"I think," I responded. And after a pause, "And the sun ain't gonna wait for you to man-up and go get that thing."
It was the combination in the appeal: a nod to civic responsibility and a nudge of masculine threat that finally got him to slide--with the ass of his wranglers bobbing up and down in the dirt--the length of the steep embankment. And while he bitched and cursed searching for the weathered shell of someone's intelligence among the brambles, I kicked the dirt around the decomposing buffet wondering which animal had eaten which part of whoever the fuck this once was.
"I got it," Kelly yelled up to me. "Catch," he hollered.
"Fuck, man. A little respect. Carry the thing."
He obeyed.
While he struggled up the incline, I mused about what to do next. Kelly fucking hated the cops. He had been arrested 10 years ago when the sheriff and his snaggle-toothed, inbred posse had discovered a half acre of weed growing in a distant corner of the winter pasture. Of course the land was his ally for a defense: it was summer and he never went to that part of the ranch; some kids must have planted it without his knowledge. It was bullshit of course, but an easy one for a city jury to buy, and he went free. So I would volunteer to take the skull in myself.
"I'll talk to the police so you don't have to get mixed up in it. Hell they don't even need to know you were with me when I discovered it." The idea appealed to Kelly. He handed me the head and, after pulling out a coat to make room, I loaded it into my backpack, picked my rifle up off the boulder I had laid it on, and we started back, following the barbed wire for a mile or so back to the two track road where we had left my rig.
I dropped Kelly off at his place. He was high now, happily babbling some shit about a buck we had seen earlier in the day. The skull in the backpack had left his mind. Kelly wasn't the only one with an empty head.
But I was grateful for his seemingly easy dismissal of the weathered corpse we had found. I wasn't going to the cops. I didn't want him to press me about it in the future.
The waning moon was bouncing light off the black asphalt of the two lane highway and making its way between the leaves and branches to find the surface of the river, a shimmering black mirror. I was smiling. "For all of that this was a good day of hunting," I said to myself. "Tonight I am going to boil off the gristle."
I like bones, and I must have a shiny cleaned-up skull of everything from a skunk to a bear back at the cabin, nearly every species that shits and dies on this side of the Crazies. Now I had an actual human skull to add to the collection. Ain't no way an investigation into John Doe's remains was gonna take that away from me. I laughed to myself, "I'm gonna put it like a prize on a high shelf in my grandma's china hutch. Take it out if I wanna impress some fuck buddy, or better yet if I want to give him bad dreams."
