Author’s Note: 6, 7, and 10 won the contest. Thanks to all who voted. It’s nice to know all of you are reading. And now… for my adventures with ancient native demons.
It’s 2am.
I’ve been at this for hours, ever since my shift ended. Yelling, kicking, cursing screaming. But it’s a no go. I’m freezing my fucking ass off and it’s a no goddamn go. I can’t even tell you how mad it makes me that I have to be on this stupid fucking oil rig until at least daybreak, and I’m doing it gratis. Not one thin red cent.
But you know what they say. You can’t argue someone’s religion.
Especially not when that religious tradition involves a shape-shifting demon roaming the desert, hungry and waiting to pounce. Even more so since everyone except me is convinced that the demon is circling THIS place at THIS very moment, waiting for any sign of weakness.
God damn it.
I’m wearing a black Carhartt jacket but the desert cold still seeps in. Now that I’m not working it’s impossible not to shiver so I have to pace back and forth. Out here on this fucking oil rig until daybreak, and not for one red cent. Not one. Unacceptable.
Meth-addled brains and superstition are a powerful combination.
It had started simply enough. I had gone into work that afternoon, ready for another week of working night tour, and just as I was undressing and getting ready for my relief crew to take over… Little Mike came wandering into the dog house. I’ve seen scared men before. Little Mike was beyond terrified.
Not that I cared much. I had been on shift for eight hours, and on an oil rig that means eight hours. No lunches, no breaks, no stops. Just eight straight hours of back-breaking labor. So the fact that Little Mike was terrified didn’t bother me so much, because there was a roast beef sandwich that needed to make its way into my belly before I got in the back of the truck. I hated eating in the wind.
I was the first to change out of my work clothes. The other guys on my crew are all stiff backed and slow, even the ones that are younger than I am. Eventually, maybe just out of curiosity, I ask what’s wrong.
“What’s wrong Mike?” I ask as I slide my pants on the rest of the way, still eating my sandwich. Technically I couldn’t leave until my Driller was dressed, so I might as well see what had spooked Little Mike so bad.
Mike said a word in Navajo that I didn’t understand, which is of course logical as I don’t speak Navajo and that language doesn’t sound like any other language on Earth. I shrugged it off. Wouldn’t be the first time someone came to work high as a kite. I kept walking to the dog-house door. It was time to go home and sleep. I turned back to call for my Driller but it seemed as though while I had been busy leaving everyone else had frozen still.
Six men were looking at Little Mike like he was a doctor who had told them they all had terminal cancer. It was like a time freeze effect in a movie. I could move, but no one else could. Curiosity got the best of me.
“What did you say Mike?” I asked, still trying to eat that goddamn sandwich.
“SHHHH!!!!!!!” Six men shouted at once.
And so it came to pass, that at 11 o’clock at night, when I should have been beginning my two hour commute back home, I learned about “Skin Walkers.”
As Little Mike indeed confirmed that “he thought” he had a seen a “Skin Walker” seven very paranoid, very superstitious Navajo began to go completely ape-shit. If you’ve seen a bus full of sugar-high school-children multiply that by ten and you can imagine the movements of these men.
My Derrick Man tore open the door of his locker, throwing all of his cover-alls to the floor.
“Where the fuck is it! Where the fuck is that amulet!”
He was looking for a magical amulet to protect him from the ancient demon. I think his grandmother made it for him. But that’s not the point. The point is that he was looking for a magical amulet. In America. In the United States of America. In the country that developed the atomic bomb and sent a man to the moon, a twenty-seven year old man, was digging through his locker to find a magical talisman. Unfortunately, he could not find it.
Later on, he remembered pawning it for drugs.
Meanwhile, my Driller decided to take a rational approach to the problem.
He was going to kill the demon.
Only one thing prevented this: he did not have the necessary equipment. As everyone yelled, and everyone panicked my driller got up on a chair and called for order by saying “Okay! Listen! DON’T PANIC!”
At the time, I was relieved. I even thought my Driller wasn’t such a bad guy. Sure he was an asshole most days, he liked to throw his hard hat at me an awful lot, but he was a lot smarter than most of the people I worked with. We were even friends in sort of a “I don’t hate you that much” kind of way. I smiled because I really thought this could have turned into a bad situation. Then he opened his mouth again, so of course, it did. Turn into a bad situation that is.
“Does anyone have a ceremonial blanket?”
I put my head against a locker with a thud. This was going to be bad. In fact, this was going to suck.
Little Mike, overcoming his fright said, “What the hell does that matter? Do you have an ash stick to kill it with?”
I slammed my head into the locker again. Nope. No luck. I didn’t wake up to a better world. I put my roast beef sandwich back into my lunch pail, slammed the lid, and sighed. If I hadn’t been eighty miles from the nearest working phone I would have walked away.
Here’s what I managed to learn about “Skin Walkers” in my attempt to reason someone into taking me home.
They begin life as other Navajo children do… until they turn bad. In a ritual sacrifice they kill a member of their family to gain command of dark spirits. Then, using some sort of magic they extract from animal pelts they can change form into terrifying beasts. Also, they have some kind of powder that can kill you instantly… or something. I kind of had to stop listening. I was going to kill someone otherwise.
“Hey guys… why can’t we drive home? No way a… Skin Walker” I hated those two words now, “can run as fast as a car.”
There was an eighteen year old kid I worked with. He was a father of two. And he also fancied himself as educated. “ARE YOU KIDDING!?!? Skin-walkers can run over eighty miles an hour! My cousin Charlie Yellow-horse was driving last year and was almost killed by two of them!” I don’t even know why I asked what I did next.
“Was he high, Danny?” I rubbed my palms against my eye-lids.
Danny’s eyes went wide in indignant shock. “Only a LITTLE bit!”
I argued with him for about five minutes, trying to get him to understand that his cousin had probably imagined the whole thing. No luck. He wasn’t going to budge. Ain’t faith wonderful?
I turned to my driller. “Come on, Carey. You can’t believe this shit. Let’s go home. We have to be back here in,” I looked at my watch “fourteen hours. It’s going to take two and a half to get home, eight to sleep, and I want to say hello to my little brother and sister before I have to come back.”
Unfortunately for me, Carey had a distant uncle in Utah who knew a guy whose third cousin had once walked past a Skin Walker, gotten cancer, lost all of his body weight and died. With sources like that how could I argue?
So now, returning to the present, after I finished my first round of yelling, I got in the bed of Carey’s truck, zipped up my jacket, looked up at a sky full of sparkling stars and then got pissed off. I had just remembered the night Carey told me that stars were from holes in a blanket that the spirits draped over the sky. He didn’t really believe it… completely… but just looking at it made me think of the Skin-Walkers.
I looked to my phone. No bars. No signal. No way out. I could try hitch-hiking but I wouldn’t get anywhere. If truckers suspect a rough-neck has just up and left his crew they would sooner spit at him then stop and give him a ride.
At moments like these you are forced to examine every moment of your life that has led to it. I had been lazy. I hadn’t been completely lazy, but I could have done more. I could have looked harder for a high paying summer internship somewhere else, but I hadn’t thought about it. I looked at Carey, Danny, Jack, and Glenn. In a strange way I realized I had needed this. I realized I hadn’t come to the oil fields for money, like I thought. I had come because I needed this kind of kick in the ass. I needed to see the bottom. All my life before this I had been able to turn away. Now I was stuck, and suddenly that became invigorating. I pulled myself together. I pushed myself up out of the truck bed, walked up to Carey and used the best kind of logic.
Faux logic. If there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I’m the kind of guy who does his best thinking when he’s backed into a corner.
There is more skill involved in creating a false argument than you could imagine. You have to understand the false premises that your audience will be willing to accept and then think of the pseudo-magical ways in which you can link them together to get what you need. You are called upon to display a great deal of skill when you deal with the sense of nonsense. That’s why people who make political ads get paid so much money.
Here’s how I started.
Premise: Skin Walkers don’t attack in the day, because they are evil, and evil is most comfortable at night.
It was classical and it was accepted… with conditions. Carey explained that he knew of at least two instances where Skin-Walkers had attacked in the day. I was in luck because they were both in houses, and not as severe as the others.
Revised Premise: Skin Walkers, having once been human, but now being mostly evil can live and function in the day but are not nearly as powerful as they are at night.
Everyone seemed to suddenly believe that they had known this all along. Which is not surprising, as I would later find out (through wikipedia and other sources) that their view of Skin-Walkers didn’t really match up with the traditional legends. Which was not surprising at all, as among other things, I had discovered that other than Carey the other guys on my crew could literally not count above fifty.*
Second Premise: What was brighter, an oil rig surrounded by darkness, or a car with headlights, cab-lights, and possibly flash-lights?
This was the hard sell. This was what caused the uproar. They refused to agree and accused me of just wanting to go home. I closed my eyes and thought.
What would Cotton Mather or Torquemada do?
Third Premise: Skin-Walkers HATE technology and can probably make lights go out.
This, because it was scary, and all of my co-workers were afraid it would happen was immediately accepted. In fact, they just happened to remember a few stories where this same phenomenon was observed. Thankfully none of them were bright enough to point out that the car was a machine.
Fourth Premise: Where would we be most safe? The oil rig, where we would be most stationary, or the truck, where we would be moving?
I had them. They were completely fucked. They were too scared to do anything but grab flash-lights and get in the truck.
Conclusion: Time to go
On the ride home, basking in the glow of my victory I received an added bonus. I got to see something I never thought I would see.
I got to see how legends are born.
Some people think legends are made when the gods themselves interfere in the affairs of mankind. Some people think the men themselves are the gods and using the sheer force of their own will overcome the otherwise inviolate forces of nature that hold the universe together. But I knew this was false for I had the good fortune to see how legends were born up close.
You see, what I mistook for rocks, broken pieces of steel pipe, and coyotes were in fact Skin-Walkers making a mad dash to devour me and my meth-junkie friends.
I smiled in the bed of the truck. Freezing my ass off, while listening to everyone in the cab fight with each other. Ain’t life grand, I thought, laying in the bed of the truck, staring at enormous balls of gas burning brightly lights years away.
*I don’t mean for this piece to sound racist, but when cultural beliefs meet stupid people (who are, not to mention, heavily drug impacted) who have nothing else to use as a world view the result can look like an ugly racial stereotype.
As for the not being able to count above fifty thing, when I said literally I meant it literally. We had to replace a drive chain once and while I counted the old chain to see how long it was one of my coworkers counted the other one. He counted it ten times and got ten different results which were wildly far apart. Every time he got passed twenty he had to squint his brows together and think really hard. Same for the other co-worker. My driller (who did end up becoming something like my friend albeit in a strange way) made me the designated counter after that. It’s not a lie when I say most of the people I met out there couldn’t add or subtract.
I imagine I’d have more compassion for them if they hadn’t made that summer the worst experience of my life… but goddamn those guys were dumb. And I’m a person that grew up around dumb people. But… just goddamn. You would have had to have been there.
