He saw the bones that belonged to him before he even found them. The drug that traveled time was with him, guiding him. And when he found the bones, centuries old, they lay in the grave that had waited patiently for him all of these years to return.
In the murky moonlight, Thurman James Skodas stared at the chalky pile. His tire-red eyes had not explored sleep for days. The Yaqui shaman told him he would find them here, and when he found them, he knew they were his. They belonged to no other.
They had given him the drug that could see tomorrow and into the past. And now he was here, looking at them, his bones, the bones that belonged to him and no other.
When he arrived from Chicago, the woman who read the cards in the La Boca del Diablo told him to follow his dream, his dream would take him to where he wanted to go.
So that's what he did. He followed his dream.
He followed the dream that had been with him since he was a boy. The dream that always took him to the place where he looked at his bones, the bones that belonged to him and no other.
"But why do you want to find your bones?" the Yaqui shaman wanted to know.
"Because I am following my dream," he told him, "to find my bones that belong to me and nobody else."
When he was a boy his mother would find him in his backyard and she would say, "Thurman James, what are you doing?"
"I'm digging for bones that belong to me and no other."
"Come away from there. You'll find no bones that belong to you; just the dog's and he don't share with you or anyone else. Come away, Thurman James, your supper's getting cold!"
When he was in school his teacher would say, "What are you drawing there, Thurman James?"
"I'm drawing pictures of my buried bones that belong to me and nobody else."
The old woman who read the cards in La Boca del Diablo said, "Follow your dream. It will take you to the bones that belong to you and no other."
As a young man, he would sometimes hire bony whores on the street and they would say to him, "What do you want?"
"I want to introduce you to my bone," he would tell them. "Bone you with my flesh bone."
"That will be fifty bones," they would say. "Bone me good for twenty minutes, Bone Man."
When he met Madeline Huesos, they courted for a year before they were married in the local boneyard.
"Why do we have to get married in a cemetery?" she wanted to know.
"Because there are bones here," he explained. "Lots of bones."
The same year he was married he began to collect animal skeletons; animals that were indigenous to the Southwestern deserts. He decorated his home with them. He had rabbits and coyotes and lizards and snakes and one large puma in his bedroom next to the TV set.
After they were married for six months, he bought a femur from a friend of his who worked at the County Morgue, and when he got home, he asked his wife if he could insert it into her vagina. She said, "No way, Thurman James Skodas. No way!"
He loved his wife dearly and did not press the issue. He went to find the same bony whores he used to meet when he was a young man and he presented them with the large femur and told them, "This is for you."
"Bone Man, that's going to cost you extra. Go deep, but be gentle. Bone me good for twenty minutes."
He would then take them into a nearby alley and he would bend them over and bone them good with the large femur before going home to his wife whom he loved dearly.
At work, his boss would say to him, "Why do you have pictures of bones on your wall?"
"Because," he would say, "those bones might belong to me and no one else."
One day, after he had been there for a month, the doctor at the psychiatric hospital said, "You are not insane. You simply have a bone fixation. Go home and bone your wife and try to be happy. Try not to think of bones anymore."
When he came home from the hospital that day, he found his wife and her lover boning in bed. Her lover had a bone that was almost as long as his femur.
He said, "What are you doing boning my wife in my bed?"
"I've been boning your wife for years, bonehead. Now get out of here before I get mad." And then his wife's lover flipped him the bone.
Thurman James Skodas reached for his bone-handled hunting knife and swiftly slit their throats—first his, then hers; after this, he sliced the flesh off their still warm bones and threw their carved meat in the bathtub. He then scoured their skeletons with Brillo soap pads and put them in the trunk of his car so he could take them with him. That night, he left the windy city to follow his dream to find his bones that belonged to him and no other.
Thurman James Skodas looked for his bones all of his life and finally found them in the Sonoran desert on that overcast night with bloated clouds hung in the heavens bruised with precipitation. He walked in the desert hearing the earth crunching under his boots, the drug that traveled time in his mind, seeing the glow of his bones in the distance, hiding in sand.
A swarm of bats flew across the gray blanket of sky as he uncovered his skull buried beneath a pile of ancient and forgotten rocks. In the murky moonlight, he saw that his head had been crushed with some sort of blunt object. There was a hole at the top of the skull the size of a silver dollar. The drug that traveled time whispered to him that his wife and her lover had murdered him in a violent rage eons ago. He then took their latter-day bones from the trunk of his car and threw them on top of the bones that belonged to him…and no other.