FIC: SPN, Gen, PG-13, "Late Nite at the Sudzy Dudz"
For upsy_daisy's crossover prompt a while back.
It's not actually a fic. And I don't actually have icons of the crossover characters suggested - Scully and John Winchester.
EDIT - Now with actual Beta, by Hossgal! Thanks!
Late Nite at the Sudzy Dudz
August 1997
Scully wasn't certain it was the most disgusting laundromat in America, but from the layers of filth and soap scum in the battered linoleum corners to the smell of she wasn't certain what wafting to her with every breath, it was clearly in the running. Leave it to Mulder to bring them to Sturgis, South Dakota the week after the national biker rally, so they could be sure to catch the tire tracks in everybody's scraggly front lawns and the piles of garbage and empty beer cans on every open bit of public land. She was probably imagining it, but it was like the whole town smelled of stale Budweiser and motorcycle exhaust. And they'd been only planning to stay in it overnight, which had now dragged on to six days which absolutely necessitated doing wash because she and everything she owned were caked with grit.
The only other people in the laundromat at eleven o'clock at night were a couple of teenaged boys, which might usually have spelled trouble except for the several dufflebags of actual laundry they were processing in the remaining washing machine next to Scully's washes. Theirs was the only other machine that appeared to be operable in the whole place. There seemed to be only one working dryer, and she hoped her clothes got done before the huge assortment of t-shirts and jeans the boys had stuffed in the washer were finished washing because they were clearly going to take forever to dry.
Normally, a couple of teenaged boys out alone at night in a town like Sturgis would have immediately made her keep her eye out for problems, not like she thought she wouldn’t be able to handle them, but these boys just didn't give off that feeling. They were all business, all about the laundry and waiting for it to be done. The younger one was doing some kind of homework, despite it being summer, a battered chemistry textbook and a number two pencil were coming into play as he sat at the folding table while the washers sloshed and vibrated beside him. The older one sprawled in one of the cheap orange plastic chairs next to the only remaining wire laundry cart in the establishment, going line by line over a very well-thumbed copy of Auto Trader magazine. Out doing errands strangely late on a weeknight, but clearly no threat and, though clearly not affluent, very clean-cut and tidy looking. Scully had a creeping suspicion they were probably army brats. They had the organized precision she knew so well from her own childhood about them.
After looking them over and cataloging them, she turned back to her own forensics journal, the subscription she never got the chance to keep up with because Mulder insisted on nattering on during every single plane ride ever, but this time, because of their extended stay in Sturgis while Mulder hunted some insane Indian legend about cattle mutilations that was clearly leading nowhere, she was 3/4 of the way through the worthwhile articles in the issue.
"How you boys comin' with that laundry?" Scully looked up at the door at the sound of the gravelly voice along with both of the boys to see a tall, rugged man dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and holding a grocery-sized paper sack with the top rolled down in his left hand. It was clearly holding something heavy, Scully noted. The man had very dark hair and hadn't shaved in a day or so. He was very handsome if you liked movie cowboys or cops, Scully also noted.
She glanced over at the boys to see both of them sitting up, almost at attention, the older, blondish one, in particular, at the man's question.
"Gonna be a while yet," the boy said, the voice nearly an imitation of the man's as well as the expression he now wore. Though they didn't look much alike, they were so clearly father and son that it couldn't have been more obvious if it had been tattooed on their foreheads. The younger one's face had relaxed into a look that was almost sullen, and he glanced at Scully, almost as though he was trying to see if she'd be any help.
“Washers busted?” the father asked.
“You got it,” the boy replied, and then brandishing his Auto Trader at the broken washers with clear contempt, “Bikers.”
The father turned his attention to Scully, taking her measure in a few seconds, from the bottom of her slightly scuffed pumps to the top of her wilted head and then looked the washers over with the same measured eye.
“Well, that’s no good,” he said. “Not if we want to get on the road sometime before next Christmas.”
“Only one dryer working in the whole place, too,” the older boy said.
The next sentence out of the man’s mouth surprised Scully, and made her glad that she had her gun with her.
“Any surveillance cameras?”
“In this shit-hole?” the younger boy said. “You kidding?” The older boy nodded his head in agreement.
“If you’re sure, Dean, then go out to the car and get the toolbox,” the man said. “And watch your mouth in front of the lady, Sammy. Excuse my boy, ma’am, he’s not real used to polite company these days.”
The older boy unfolded himself out of his plastic chair and ambled out of the Laundromat to rummage in the trunk of a black 1970s American car out in the dirt parking lot. He was back shortly, moving slower and leaning over under the weight of the black tool box in his left hand.
Scully felt herself staring.
Setting the toolbox down on the washer, the boy stepped back to give the man room and his father opened the machine and had the coin-collecting mechanism off the nearest washer in under a minute.
Scully was shocked and appalled to think this man and his clean-cut sons were about to rip off the quarters from some crappy dilapidated Laundromat. And, of course, that she should really stop them, being a law-enforcement officer and all.
“Oh, that’s just disgusting,” the boy said, looking at the mechanism in his father’s hand. “Who does something like that?”
“Pigs,” the father said, setting it aside. He fiddled with some wires inside the washer and flipped dials to on. It rapidly began filling with water. “Thing’s in perfect condition. It’s just that some asshole, ‘scuse me, ma’am, jammed the coin collector up with all that crap so you can’t use it.”
He stepped back, screwdriver in hand, eyeing the other washing machines.
“Dean, see what you can do about the dryers, will ya?”
“Sure,” the kid said, selected a few tools and headed off to the bank of dryers on the wall.
Just then her washer stopped and Scully found herself the center of attention. All three, man and boys, were eyeballing her to see what she would do.
“I've got two washers, but I can get everything into the one dryer,” she said.
“You probably won’t need to, if you don’t mind jury-rig,” the man told her, as she put down her magazine and advanced on her wash.
“But how do we pay?”
“The office over there looks locked. I’m planning to shove an envelope under the door,” he said. “I think I got one in the car.”
Scully felt herself relax.
“If you don’t mind my askin’ ma’am,” the man said as she dug her clothes out of the washer and piled them on top of the non-working one to her left, “Why are you carrying a gun in here? I know it’s night, but without the bikers here Sturgis isn’t that bad a place.”
“Oh there, you are,” Mulder’s voice, holding the overly-pleasant tone that heralded bad news, rang from the doorway. “Doing wash?”
“I seem to recall that I told you I’d be doing wash when you got in the car to go out to the site,” she said tersely, not looking at him.
The younger boy at the drying table began to snicker.
Scully looked at him and then followed his gaze to the doorway to see what was so funny.
Apparently, it was Mulder. Covered from head to toe in what appeared to be some toxic combination of mud and who knew what else, it smelled like pure manure.
“If you think that I can be persuaded to wash any part of that,” Scully said. “Think again.”
“No, I was just wondering if you had extra soap,” Mulder sounded pained and then sighed ostentatiously.
“What happened to you, man?” the older boy could clearly not contain his curiosity, even though he didn’t stop working on the dryer, having gotten two more working in under five minutes.
“Occupational hazard,” Mulder said.
“Why, you with the FDA?” the father said, eyeing what remained of Mulder’s suit with perhaps more amusement than he should have been, judging from Mulder’s mood.
“We,” Mulder said somewhat prissily, “Are FBI agents.”
“Apparently didn’t learn anything out here during the ‘70s then,” the man said.
“We aren’t here to bother the Native Americans,” Mulder replied. “It was all the cattle mutilations.”
Mulder was too busy eye-rolling at the suggestion that they might be out there to hassle whatever AIM activists remained in South Dakota to catch the looks that passed among the man and his sons, but Scully saw them, even as she stuffed the last of her laundry into the first dryer the boy had worked on.
“Are you sure this will be ok?” she asked the boy. “I’d rather not light my underwear on fire.”
The, Scully hated to admit, extremely handsome kid gave her a look that clearly implied he could think of quite a few better ways to light her panties afire than by putting them into a defective dryer. She felt guilty because the look was appreciative and that she found it more than a little flattering despite the fact that she was much the worse for the humidity and more than old enough to be his mother. He gave her a grin that should have been illegal and said in a way that was downright dirty, “Yeah, it’ll be fine. If I fix something it stays fixed.”
“Isn’t it past your bedtime, sonny?” Mulder asked from the doorway, in a way that was too casual to not be pointed.
“Gee, Dad,” the kid said with an aw shucks hayseed shtick that could have got him into any acting school in the country. “Have I got your special permission to stay up late?”
“Don’t argue with the FBI man covered in bullshit, Dean,” the father growled from where he was loading in the last of their laundry. “That’s pretty much guaranteed to not end well for anybody.”
The younger boy snickered at Mulder again, but then asked, “You gonna tell us what happened to you? Because, you walked in here where there were people and that means you probably wanted to tell somebody about it.”
Mulder sighed dramatically, and Scully hid her smile in setting the dryer, because the kid was absolutely right.
“I wanted to tell her,” Mulder said, indicating Scully with a filthy thumb. “Because she was investigating the cattle mutilations, too. And I found that there was something mutilating cattle, but it wasn’t at all what we thought. And, someone had gotten there before I did and, well, did some pretty weird stuff that had Charlie going all mystical native shaman on me and insisting we leave right away in case whoever did it was still hanging around.”
“Why’s that?” the man asked, turning around from his washer and leaning up against it with the air of a man who was ready to hear a good story.
Mulder didn’t seem terribly inclined to oblige him, he kept it short.
“He said whoever had dispatched the thing that was killing the cattle was about a hundred times more dangerous than that thing was in the first place,” Mulder said, folding his arms across his filthy chest and dislodging a chunk of something that fell to the linoleum in a clump.
“And what kind of thing would that be?” the man asked, continuing to give Mulder his full attention. And Scully was suddenly reminded of Skinner, because this man had that same air of casual power and possible censure if you didn’t give him an answer he liked.
“This isn’t some continuation of Charlie’s endless stories about the ghost of Joshua Barton the buffalo skinner?” Scully asked, lifting an eyebrow in extreme skepticism.
“Now that sounds like a good story,” the older boy said, finishing his last dryer, slamming the door and turning around to lean against it looking like the picture that should appear next to the word “loiter” in the dictionary.
“Yeah, what’s that all about?” the other boy said, all innocent curiosity.
“The short version of the story is that Joshua Barton was a very nasty piece of work around here back in the 1870s. He’d come out with his Remington rifle and a couple of helpers and kill hundreds of buffalo at a time. Skin them. Leave the carcasses rotting in the sun. And any Native Americans he found, he’d do the same to them,” Mulder said.
“That sort of thing happened all over this part of the country,” the man said in his gruff voice. “What’s different about this guy?”
“What’s different is that one day when he and his boys were out on a hunt, they got found by the Cheyenne. And for what he’d done to their people, the Souix and the buffalo, they took him and his men and did for them exactly what they’d done for so many others. They skinned them alive and left them out there to rot on the plains. But the legend has it, that as they were skinning him, old Joshua cursed them and he did it with what the witnesses described as “powerful medicine,” Mulder said. “And, apparently, it worked, after a fashion.”
“So you’re saying this dude is responsible for all the Indians around here getting shoved on reservations?” the older boy smirked.
“No, what I’m saying is he’s supposedly responsible for a string of skinning murders and cattle mutilations going back in the records to the 1890s, and before that in Native stories,” Mulder said. “They always happen around this time of year, which is when he was taken out by the Cheyenne. And they only happen if somebody is unlucky enough to be near the spot he was killed on this date. Or rather, during this week. Because it took him a strangely long time to die.”
“Maybe they just skinned him a little at a time,” the younger boy said helpfully.
“Sammy,” the man said with a clear warning in his voice.
The kid frowned but then continued, “Well, Dad, it doesn’t make sense for some guy to be able to lie out on the prairie with no skin on and take a week to die.”
The man relaxed visibly. “Yeah, right. That’s right. Maybe they did just skin him a little at a time.”
“That’s not how the story goes,” Mulder said, skeptically.
“But that’s good thinking, Sam, is it?” Scully said. “It’s logical. It makes sense. There’s bound to be a sensible explanation for all of this.”
“Right,” said Mulder. “It’s bound to be some 120 year old serial killer with a thing for leather.”
The older boy snickered.
“So what happened out there today?” their father asked.
“So, we get out to the site, to see if more cattle had been killed, only to find, well, something you won’t like, Scully,” Mulder smiled. “Basically somebody had been out there with some shovels and they had, apparently, dug up old Joshua’s body, or whoever’s body was out there. And then, here’s the really weird part, they did a full scale Roman vacation in Carthage on it.”
“Does this involve burning and salting somehow?” Scully asked.
“Oh, not only that,” Mulder said finally warming to the topic. “That’s not even the highlight of the thing. They’d taken gas out there and burned a huge… some kind of magical symbol, with signs I’m unfamiliar with, all around it and then they burned the bodies in the middle of that. And then they salted the whole area. It must have taken pounds of the stuff.”
“How did you get covered in mud?” Scully asked, not touching the explanation, because that would just encourage him and she didn’t feel like having that insane "I want to believe in whatever" argument in front of strangers in a laundromat.
“Well, that’s the best part, I guess,” Mulder said with a grin. “Because just as Charlie was telling me about all the bad medicine from all the magical signs these people had left out there, and how dangerous whoever had done it actually was, the charges went off.”
“Charges?” Scully said.
“Whoever had burned the bodies had gathered up all the cow carcasses, dragged them into what Charlie called a wallow and filled them full of dynamite,” Mulder said. “Must have put a slow fuse on it and left. We showed up just at the wrong time.”
“So you’re saying that you went out to the site where some killer ghost was doing his killing in the middle of the night,” the man said looking at Mulder like there was nobody dumber on earth.
“While I have the greatest respect for Charlie and his people,” Mulder said. “There are other explanations for cattle mutilations than marauding ghosts. And if you’re going to catch somebody in the act, you’d better go out when the act is likely to occur.”
“Yeah, I bet it was just old man Green painting himself with phosphorescent paint and stumbling around the prairie and moaning the whole time,” the older boy said from his position by the dryers. “And I bet he would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you and Daphne, here.”
“Dean, you need to watch that mouth,” his father said sternly, but Scully could tell he was trying not to laugh.
“And, of course, Dad, everyone knows that aliens are responsible for cattle mutilations, not ghosts, anyway,” the younger boy said with a smile.
“Nobody believes in aliens, Sam,” the man said, smiling back.
“Don’t you want to take a shower, Mulder?” Scully asked before he started in.
“Oh, I don’t think I’ve felt this good since I was down the sewers in New Jersey,” Mulder said.
“Let me guess, ghost alligators?” the older boy asked.
“No, just a giant mutated flukeworm,” Mulder replied. “Better than liver-eating mutants. You gonna be long, Scully?”
“Just until the dryer’s done,” she replied.
“Do you want to book the plane tickets, or should I?” he asked.
“Why don’t you,” Scully said. “I’ll be a few minutes.”
“Right,” he said. “In a few minutes then.”
“So where were the liver-eating mutants?” the man asked, once Mulder had headed back to the motel.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it,” Scully said. “He’s dead.”
“Right on,” the older kid said, and returned to his orange chair.
"And you're not going after whoever nearly blew up your partner?" the man asked.
"I think he's satisfied that it was just a bunch of superstitious people behaving foolishly," Scully said. "And whoever was committed enough to do all of what he described is probably smart enough to be long gone by now."
"But you believe it was a ghost that did the killings around here the last week, then," the man said.
"No, I think it was whoever destroyed the evidence," Scully said. "And I'm sure they won't be hard to track from records back at the Hoover building if they’re burning things with gas and blowing up cow carcasses. And I imagine Mulder doesn't think so, either, or he wouldn't be talking plane tickets."
"Well, Ma'am," the man said, exchanging another glance with his sons. "I sure hope you find that murderer, then. Before he goes crazy on somebody else."
"Oh, I'm sure we will," Scully said with a smile, and sat back down with her journal and waited for her dryer to buzz.
It's not actually a fic. And I don't actually have icons of the crossover characters suggested - Scully and John Winchester.
EDIT - Now with actual Beta, by Hossgal! Thanks!
Late Nite at the Sudzy Dudz
August 1997
Scully wasn't certain it was the most disgusting laundromat in America, but from the layers of filth and soap scum in the battered linoleum corners to the smell of she wasn't certain what wafting to her with every breath, it was clearly in the running. Leave it to Mulder to bring them to Sturgis, South Dakota the week after the national biker rally, so they could be sure to catch the tire tracks in everybody's scraggly front lawns and the piles of garbage and empty beer cans on every open bit of public land. She was probably imagining it, but it was like the whole town smelled of stale Budweiser and motorcycle exhaust. And they'd been only planning to stay in it overnight, which had now dragged on to six days which absolutely necessitated doing wash because she and everything she owned were caked with grit.
The only other people in the laundromat at eleven o'clock at night were a couple of teenaged boys, which might usually have spelled trouble except for the several dufflebags of actual laundry they were processing in the remaining washing machine next to Scully's washes. Theirs was the only other machine that appeared to be operable in the whole place. There seemed to be only one working dryer, and she hoped her clothes got done before the huge assortment of t-shirts and jeans the boys had stuffed in the washer were finished washing because they were clearly going to take forever to dry.
Normally, a couple of teenaged boys out alone at night in a town like Sturgis would have immediately made her keep her eye out for problems, not like she thought she wouldn’t be able to handle them, but these boys just didn't give off that feeling. They were all business, all about the laundry and waiting for it to be done. The younger one was doing some kind of homework, despite it being summer, a battered chemistry textbook and a number two pencil were coming into play as he sat at the folding table while the washers sloshed and vibrated beside him. The older one sprawled in one of the cheap orange plastic chairs next to the only remaining wire laundry cart in the establishment, going line by line over a very well-thumbed copy of Auto Trader magazine. Out doing errands strangely late on a weeknight, but clearly no threat and, though clearly not affluent, very clean-cut and tidy looking. Scully had a creeping suspicion they were probably army brats. They had the organized precision she knew so well from her own childhood about them.
After looking them over and cataloging them, she turned back to her own forensics journal, the subscription she never got the chance to keep up with because Mulder insisted on nattering on during every single plane ride ever, but this time, because of their extended stay in Sturgis while Mulder hunted some insane Indian legend about cattle mutilations that was clearly leading nowhere, she was 3/4 of the way through the worthwhile articles in the issue.
"How you boys comin' with that laundry?" Scully looked up at the door at the sound of the gravelly voice along with both of the boys to see a tall, rugged man dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and holding a grocery-sized paper sack with the top rolled down in his left hand. It was clearly holding something heavy, Scully noted. The man had very dark hair and hadn't shaved in a day or so. He was very handsome if you liked movie cowboys or cops, Scully also noted.
She glanced over at the boys to see both of them sitting up, almost at attention, the older, blondish one, in particular, at the man's question.
"Gonna be a while yet," the boy said, the voice nearly an imitation of the man's as well as the expression he now wore. Though they didn't look much alike, they were so clearly father and son that it couldn't have been more obvious if it had been tattooed on their foreheads. The younger one's face had relaxed into a look that was almost sullen, and he glanced at Scully, almost as though he was trying to see if she'd be any help.
“Washers busted?” the father asked.
“You got it,” the boy replied, and then brandishing his Auto Trader at the broken washers with clear contempt, “Bikers.”
The father turned his attention to Scully, taking her measure in a few seconds, from the bottom of her slightly scuffed pumps to the top of her wilted head and then looked the washers over with the same measured eye.
“Well, that’s no good,” he said. “Not if we want to get on the road sometime before next Christmas.”
“Only one dryer working in the whole place, too,” the older boy said.
The next sentence out of the man’s mouth surprised Scully, and made her glad that she had her gun with her.
“Any surveillance cameras?”
“In this shit-hole?” the younger boy said. “You kidding?” The older boy nodded his head in agreement.
“If you’re sure, Dean, then go out to the car and get the toolbox,” the man said. “And watch your mouth in front of the lady, Sammy. Excuse my boy, ma’am, he’s not real used to polite company these days.”
The older boy unfolded himself out of his plastic chair and ambled out of the Laundromat to rummage in the trunk of a black 1970s American car out in the dirt parking lot. He was back shortly, moving slower and leaning over under the weight of the black tool box in his left hand.
Scully felt herself staring.
Setting the toolbox down on the washer, the boy stepped back to give the man room and his father opened the machine and had the coin-collecting mechanism off the nearest washer in under a minute.
Scully was shocked and appalled to think this man and his clean-cut sons were about to rip off the quarters from some crappy dilapidated Laundromat. And, of course, that she should really stop them, being a law-enforcement officer and all.
“Oh, that’s just disgusting,” the boy said, looking at the mechanism in his father’s hand. “Who does something like that?”
“Pigs,” the father said, setting it aside. He fiddled with some wires inside the washer and flipped dials to on. It rapidly began filling with water. “Thing’s in perfect condition. It’s just that some asshole, ‘scuse me, ma’am, jammed the coin collector up with all that crap so you can’t use it.”
He stepped back, screwdriver in hand, eyeing the other washing machines.
“Dean, see what you can do about the dryers, will ya?”
“Sure,” the kid said, selected a few tools and headed off to the bank of dryers on the wall.
Just then her washer stopped and Scully found herself the center of attention. All three, man and boys, were eyeballing her to see what she would do.
“I've got two washers, but I can get everything into the one dryer,” she said.
“You probably won’t need to, if you don’t mind jury-rig,” the man told her, as she put down her magazine and advanced on her wash.
“But how do we pay?”
“The office over there looks locked. I’m planning to shove an envelope under the door,” he said. “I think I got one in the car.”
Scully felt herself relax.
“If you don’t mind my askin’ ma’am,” the man said as she dug her clothes out of the washer and piled them on top of the non-working one to her left, “Why are you carrying a gun in here? I know it’s night, but without the bikers here Sturgis isn’t that bad a place.”
“Oh there, you are,” Mulder’s voice, holding the overly-pleasant tone that heralded bad news, rang from the doorway. “Doing wash?”
“I seem to recall that I told you I’d be doing wash when you got in the car to go out to the site,” she said tersely, not looking at him.
The younger boy at the drying table began to snicker.
Scully looked at him and then followed his gaze to the doorway to see what was so funny.
Apparently, it was Mulder. Covered from head to toe in what appeared to be some toxic combination of mud and who knew what else, it smelled like pure manure.
“If you think that I can be persuaded to wash any part of that,” Scully said. “Think again.”
“No, I was just wondering if you had extra soap,” Mulder sounded pained and then sighed ostentatiously.
“What happened to you, man?” the older boy could clearly not contain his curiosity, even though he didn’t stop working on the dryer, having gotten two more working in under five minutes.
“Occupational hazard,” Mulder said.
“Why, you with the FDA?” the father said, eyeing what remained of Mulder’s suit with perhaps more amusement than he should have been, judging from Mulder’s mood.
“We,” Mulder said somewhat prissily, “Are FBI agents.”
“Apparently didn’t learn anything out here during the ‘70s then,” the man said.
“We aren’t here to bother the Native Americans,” Mulder replied. “It was all the cattle mutilations.”
Mulder was too busy eye-rolling at the suggestion that they might be out there to hassle whatever AIM activists remained in South Dakota to catch the looks that passed among the man and his sons, but Scully saw them, even as she stuffed the last of her laundry into the first dryer the boy had worked on.
“Are you sure this will be ok?” she asked the boy. “I’d rather not light my underwear on fire.”
The, Scully hated to admit, extremely handsome kid gave her a look that clearly implied he could think of quite a few better ways to light her panties afire than by putting them into a defective dryer. She felt guilty because the look was appreciative and that she found it more than a little flattering despite the fact that she was much the worse for the humidity and more than old enough to be his mother. He gave her a grin that should have been illegal and said in a way that was downright dirty, “Yeah, it’ll be fine. If I fix something it stays fixed.”
“Isn’t it past your bedtime, sonny?” Mulder asked from the doorway, in a way that was too casual to not be pointed.
“Gee, Dad,” the kid said with an aw shucks hayseed shtick that could have got him into any acting school in the country. “Have I got your special permission to stay up late?”
“Don’t argue with the FBI man covered in bullshit, Dean,” the father growled from where he was loading in the last of their laundry. “That’s pretty much guaranteed to not end well for anybody.”
The younger boy snickered at Mulder again, but then asked, “You gonna tell us what happened to you? Because, you walked in here where there were people and that means you probably wanted to tell somebody about it.”
Mulder sighed dramatically, and Scully hid her smile in setting the dryer, because the kid was absolutely right.
“I wanted to tell her,” Mulder said, indicating Scully with a filthy thumb. “Because she was investigating the cattle mutilations, too. And I found that there was something mutilating cattle, but it wasn’t at all what we thought. And, someone had gotten there before I did and, well, did some pretty weird stuff that had Charlie going all mystical native shaman on me and insisting we leave right away in case whoever did it was still hanging around.”
“Why’s that?” the man asked, turning around from his washer and leaning up against it with the air of a man who was ready to hear a good story.
Mulder didn’t seem terribly inclined to oblige him, he kept it short.
“He said whoever had dispatched the thing that was killing the cattle was about a hundred times more dangerous than that thing was in the first place,” Mulder said, folding his arms across his filthy chest and dislodging a chunk of something that fell to the linoleum in a clump.
“And what kind of thing would that be?” the man asked, continuing to give Mulder his full attention. And Scully was suddenly reminded of Skinner, because this man had that same air of casual power and possible censure if you didn’t give him an answer he liked.
“This isn’t some continuation of Charlie’s endless stories about the ghost of Joshua Barton the buffalo skinner?” Scully asked, lifting an eyebrow in extreme skepticism.
“Now that sounds like a good story,” the older boy said, finishing his last dryer, slamming the door and turning around to lean against it looking like the picture that should appear next to the word “loiter” in the dictionary.
“Yeah, what’s that all about?” the other boy said, all innocent curiosity.
“The short version of the story is that Joshua Barton was a very nasty piece of work around here back in the 1870s. He’d come out with his Remington rifle and a couple of helpers and kill hundreds of buffalo at a time. Skin them. Leave the carcasses rotting in the sun. And any Native Americans he found, he’d do the same to them,” Mulder said.
“That sort of thing happened all over this part of the country,” the man said in his gruff voice. “What’s different about this guy?”
“What’s different is that one day when he and his boys were out on a hunt, they got found by the Cheyenne. And for what he’d done to their people, the Souix and the buffalo, they took him and his men and did for them exactly what they’d done for so many others. They skinned them alive and left them out there to rot on the plains. But the legend has it, that as they were skinning him, old Joshua cursed them and he did it with what the witnesses described as “powerful medicine,” Mulder said. “And, apparently, it worked, after a fashion.”
“So you’re saying this dude is responsible for all the Indians around here getting shoved on reservations?” the older boy smirked.
“No, what I’m saying is he’s supposedly responsible for a string of skinning murders and cattle mutilations going back in the records to the 1890s, and before that in Native stories,” Mulder said. “They always happen around this time of year, which is when he was taken out by the Cheyenne. And they only happen if somebody is unlucky enough to be near the spot he was killed on this date. Or rather, during this week. Because it took him a strangely long time to die.”
“Maybe they just skinned him a little at a time,” the younger boy said helpfully.
“Sammy,” the man said with a clear warning in his voice.
The kid frowned but then continued, “Well, Dad, it doesn’t make sense for some guy to be able to lie out on the prairie with no skin on and take a week to die.”
The man relaxed visibly. “Yeah, right. That’s right. Maybe they did just skin him a little at a time.”
“That’s not how the story goes,” Mulder said, skeptically.
“But that’s good thinking, Sam, is it?” Scully said. “It’s logical. It makes sense. There’s bound to be a sensible explanation for all of this.”
“Right,” said Mulder. “It’s bound to be some 120 year old serial killer with a thing for leather.”
The older boy snickered.
“So what happened out there today?” their father asked.
“So, we get out to the site, to see if more cattle had been killed, only to find, well, something you won’t like, Scully,” Mulder smiled. “Basically somebody had been out there with some shovels and they had, apparently, dug up old Joshua’s body, or whoever’s body was out there. And then, here’s the really weird part, they did a full scale Roman vacation in Carthage on it.”
“Does this involve burning and salting somehow?” Scully asked.
“Oh, not only that,” Mulder said finally warming to the topic. “That’s not even the highlight of the thing. They’d taken gas out there and burned a huge… some kind of magical symbol, with signs I’m unfamiliar with, all around it and then they burned the bodies in the middle of that. And then they salted the whole area. It must have taken pounds of the stuff.”
“How did you get covered in mud?” Scully asked, not touching the explanation, because that would just encourage him and she didn’t feel like having that insane "I want to believe in whatever" argument in front of strangers in a laundromat.
“Well, that’s the best part, I guess,” Mulder said with a grin. “Because just as Charlie was telling me about all the bad medicine from all the magical signs these people had left out there, and how dangerous whoever had done it actually was, the charges went off.”
“Charges?” Scully said.
“Whoever had burned the bodies had gathered up all the cow carcasses, dragged them into what Charlie called a wallow and filled them full of dynamite,” Mulder said. “Must have put a slow fuse on it and left. We showed up just at the wrong time.”
“So you’re saying that you went out to the site where some killer ghost was doing his killing in the middle of the night,” the man said looking at Mulder like there was nobody dumber on earth.
“While I have the greatest respect for Charlie and his people,” Mulder said. “There are other explanations for cattle mutilations than marauding ghosts. And if you’re going to catch somebody in the act, you’d better go out when the act is likely to occur.”
“Yeah, I bet it was just old man Green painting himself with phosphorescent paint and stumbling around the prairie and moaning the whole time,” the older boy said from his position by the dryers. “And I bet he would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you and Daphne, here.”
“Dean, you need to watch that mouth,” his father said sternly, but Scully could tell he was trying not to laugh.
“And, of course, Dad, everyone knows that aliens are responsible for cattle mutilations, not ghosts, anyway,” the younger boy said with a smile.
“Nobody believes in aliens, Sam,” the man said, smiling back.
“Don’t you want to take a shower, Mulder?” Scully asked before he started in.
“Oh, I don’t think I’ve felt this good since I was down the sewers in New Jersey,” Mulder said.
“Let me guess, ghost alligators?” the older boy asked.
“No, just a giant mutated flukeworm,” Mulder replied. “Better than liver-eating mutants. You gonna be long, Scully?”
“Just until the dryer’s done,” she replied.
“Do you want to book the plane tickets, or should I?” he asked.
“Why don’t you,” Scully said. “I’ll be a few minutes.”
“Right,” he said. “In a few minutes then.”
“So where were the liver-eating mutants?” the man asked, once Mulder had headed back to the motel.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it,” Scully said. “He’s dead.”
“Right on,” the older kid said, and returned to his orange chair.
"And you're not going after whoever nearly blew up your partner?" the man asked.
"I think he's satisfied that it was just a bunch of superstitious people behaving foolishly," Scully said. "And whoever was committed enough to do all of what he described is probably smart enough to be long gone by now."
"But you believe it was a ghost that did the killings around here the last week, then," the man said.
"No, I think it was whoever destroyed the evidence," Scully said. "And I'm sure they won't be hard to track from records back at the Hoover building if they’re burning things with gas and blowing up cow carcasses. And I imagine Mulder doesn't think so, either, or he wouldn't be talking plane tickets."
"Well, Ma'am," the man said, exchanging another glance with his sons. "I sure hope you find that murderer, then. Before he goes crazy on somebody else."
"Oh, I'm sure we will," Scully said with a smile, and sat back down with her journal and waited for her dryer to buzz.