Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  “You did very well,” she told Omie.

  “He didn’t believe me.”

  “No one likes to believe things that sound sensible and everyday. They prefer to believe things that are silly and can’t happen.”

  “But it did happen,” Omie reminded her, and Zoe could only nod ruefully.

  Another night in the chair. In the early morning hours Zoe grew angry at her discomfort and took herself to bed, leaving Bryce on his own in the dim lamplight. She was sure he would still be there come morning, and her own increasingly nervous condition required a decent night’s sleep. The bed was wonderfully roomy and accommodating without her husband in it, and Zoe drifted off with ease. Her rest was deep and untroubled, and this caused her extra guilt when she discovered, on rising next day, that Bryce was gone.

  He was not in the house, not in the yard, not even at the cemetery, where Zoe fully expected to find him lying across Patrick’s grave. Word quickly spread, and a good number of Pueblo’s citizens began a search of the town. By evening it was generally accepted that the man in the chair had vanished completely, just walked away while no one, including his wife, was watching.

  The incident received much coverage in the newspaper, which had yet to print a word about Omie’s retraction. Zoe couldn’t decide if this was a good thing, or bad. At least this way her daughter was not branded a liar. That might have been preferable, though, to having been labeled a prophetess. For the next three days the Chieftain’s editorial asked, encouraged, and finally dared Omie to locate her father by means of her unique ability. Zoe considered making trouble for the paper by telling the dwindling crowds around her house that Omie had already admitted her story was untrue, but Omie begged her not to.

  “I don’t want to lie again. I hated telling that man a lie!”

  “Very well, we’ll cope with matters as they are.”

  In the following week interest in mother and daughter waned slightly, then was revived by the Chieftain’s revealing at last that Omie had confessed her second sight was nothing but a hoax perpetrated upon the gullible citizenry of the town. The article was cleverly worded, creating the impression that Omie had only now admitted her prank, and it was further hinted that the disappearance of Bryce Aspinall might very well have been similarly planned to excite public interest, with a view to winning sympathy for the family, and possibly monetary support.

  Zoe was outraged, but knew there was little she could do. When a rock came through the window she decided to sell the house and move on. The sale was quickly accomplished, bringing renewed attention to what the Chieftain called “a saga of deception not yet ended.” Zoe’s last act of interest in Pueblo was to install Bryce’s headstone in the cemetery. Even if Bryce was not known to be deceased, he might as well have been, so she wished his stone set up next to that of their son. The sexton objected to such an unusual request, maintaining that a gravestone should be raised only when there was a body to accompany it. He obliged her, though, when Zoe gave him ten dollars over the common fee. It was a bargain, since he didn’t even have to dig a hole.

  The two remaining Aspinalls (Zoe made up her mind to resume the Dugan name as soon as possible) bought tickets on the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad and journeyed north by west, into the mountains that supplied the ore for Pueblo’s smelters.

  Traveling through the magnificent cleft of the Royal Gorge, the sky a mere strip of blue far above, Zoe asked herself if she had mourned enough for her son. It seemed there had been no time for prolonged grieving. No sooner was Patrick dead than all attention had been turned to Bryce and his peculiarities. Patrick’s demise had been overtaken by events begun by Bryce, expanded by the newspaper, and finally ended by Zoe. Every hour since Bryce climbed down from his wagon had been unreal, an exaggeration of misfortune, without room inside its coils for true feeling. And now it was somehow too late. She had wept for Patrick, but not enough, and now could weep no more. Zoe felt numb inside, could barely recognize as her own the girl beside her with the blue birthmark swirling from her eye. Bryce had destroyed a part of her, she felt, and into the hollow place left behind, Zoe could pour nothing of herself that was not required elsewhere.

  Omie was attempting to see the top of the gorge, high above. The train was a toy winding through the narrow defile, buried deep in noonday shadows.

  “Will the cliffs tumble down on us, Mama?”

  Zoe shook her head.

  16

  When their son was born, Clay and Sophie named him Silan. He grew to be a sturdy boy, with his father’s powerful hands. Both parents were relieved to see that his face resembled Sophie’s, rather than Clay’s. He was a handsome boy, and they were proud of him. Silan was the center of their marriage, its cause, and the reason for its continuation, but the parents allowed no hint of that to pass their lips when the boy was within earshot.

  It had become clear even before Silan was born that Sophie and Clay had nothing in common but their shared sense of guilt for having betrayed Grover at the hour of his death. It was not enough to build love upon, barely sufficient for mutual respect. Sophie had another lawman in her life, and Clay made it clear he liked the work; he would not be persuaded to quit. He had been elected marshal without opposition, and took pride in not requiring a deputy to assist him in keeping things tamed in Keyhoe.

  He had killed another man shortly after assuming the office. That man had refused to set down a rifle he walked out of a store with, after declining to pay the proprietor. For all Clay knew, in all the shouting, the rifle was loaded, so when the thief refused to release his hold upon it, Clay counted down from three. Incredibly, this was accepted as some kind of dare by the thief, who died with a show-me smile on his lips. He was not a local, and no one laid any blame at Clay’s feet for his death. The rifle, it turned out, had not been loaded, and this reinforced Clay’s belief that stupidity, in conjunction with conscious lawbreaking, had resulted in the demise of an individual no decent person need shed tears over.

  He gave much of himself to the work of making Keyhoe safe, and was on first-name terms with most of the citizens. Clay could muster what it took to make small talk on the main street with storekeepers and passersby, but always felt more like his true self when silent, unaccosted by people he had no real interest in. He sometimes thought of them as cattle he had been hired to protect. His aloofness, a handicap in any other field, was Clay’s ally in law enforcement. News of the tall preacher-like figure, with a sawed-off shotgun he didn’t hesitate to use, spread throughout the county and beyond, and Clay learned that a reputation is as powerful a weapon as anything from a gunsmith’s forge.

  He was capable of appearing at any time of the day or night, in any part of town. Some people spoke of having entered Clay’s office and found him staring at them from his upholstered chair, but they formed the impression his eyes had been closed a fraction of a second before their hand rattled the doorknob. Though no one ever caught him with his eyes closed, it was said that the marshal catnapped frequently, conserving himself for the endless hours consumed by his duties.

  Sophie saw him with closed eyes often. Clay seemed to fall asleep whenever he came home, which was generally only a few hours in the early evening, for a meal and a pipe. After eating, he used the sofa to stretch out on while he digested and smoked, and when his bowl of tobacco ash was knocked out, he would sigh deeply and fall into a profound sleep not even Silan could penetrate with his squalling. For his wife, Clay had little time and less conversation. He occasionally mounted her, but never with sweet endearments to ease the ritual of penetration.

  Sophie often stood by the sofa and stared at him as if he were some embalmed object of ancient times, interesting enough in its features, but so remote from everyday life as to arouse no emotion whatsoever. This was her husband, this sleeping man, and she felt nothing for him that a wife should feel. The frustrations of their first year together had slowly yielded to an understanding, on Sophie’s part, that Clay saw the marriage as something he had be
en forced into by circumstances, a regrettable compromise in a life otherwise unblemished by concession. It baffled her still, his utter lovelessness.

  The cruelest aspect was his revelation of a tender side, reserved exclusively for short periods spent with Silan. Let Sophie so much as enter the same room, and Clay’s playfulness was stuffed back inside himself with alacrity. It was a miserable marriage, a miserable household, and Sophie dreaded the day Silan was old enough to comprehend the sterility around him.

  In March of 1880, when Clay was twenty-four but looked a decade older, the second-largest bank in Keyhoe was robbed of a sum in excess of seven thousand dollars in easily transportable folding money. While someone rode to fetch the sheriff from the county seat, a full hour’s gallop away, Clay decided to organize a posse of his own and set off in pursuit while the trail was still hot, hoping the sheriff and his own posse would join them before too long.

  Seven armed volunteers presented themselves and were hastily deputized. Witnesses told Clay he couldn’t possibly mistake the robbers when he caught up with them, because one of the men rode a horse unlike any other. This animal seemed to have as many descriptions as there were witnesses to its gallop through town, but was generally acknowledged to be swirled in colors not commonly associated with horsehide. The two riders were rendered in nondescript terms. Look for the horse, he was advised.

  The robbers had fled south, heading for the Indian Nations between Kansas and Texas, where lawlessness was the norm. This land, set aside for the use of native Americans, was within the far-flung jurisdiction of the Western District of Arkansas, and was known to be a haven for desperadoes, a land beyond the rule of law. The federal marshals of Judge Isaac Parker’s court in Fort Smith, Arkansas, were permitted entry to the thousand untamed bolt holes of outlawry inside the Nations, but Clay, as the members of his posse pointed out several times while they rode nearer to this ill-favored area, was no federal marshal. He held no official power outside the town of Keyhoe, and that had been left behind. Even the county sheriff, should he ever catch up with them, had no legal right to penetrate further south than the county line bordering the Nations. Word would have to be sent to Fort Smith, over two hundred miles away, for any further action against the robbers.

  Confronted with the dwindling enthusiasm of his posse, Clay ordered them home. When they turned their horses, Clay dismounted and began examining the front left fetlock of his gelding.

  “Trouble?” he was asked.

  “Getting lame. I’ll follow on.”

  There were offers to wait with him. Clay refused them all and soon was alone, a state he found preferable to the short-lived excitement of heading a posse. He filled his pipe and smoked awhile, considering his next step. Sooner or later, probably later, the sheriff would happen along with men of his own, and likely tell Clay to get back where he belonged, in the restricted bailiwick of Keyhoe. He would probably even escort Clay back there, eager to turn the whole affair over to Parker’s men from Arkansas, even if delaying pursuit meant losing the trail altogether.

  Clay didn’t want to do that. He wanted to catch and kill the men who had robbed a bank in his town. It didn’t matter that they had harmed no one in the course of the robbery; that was sheer good luck, in Clay’s opinion. They were robbers, and deserved to die for doing what they did. It was a personal insult, their choice of Keyhoe to ply their trade. It meant they didn’t fear him, or else had never heard of him, or, if they had, didn’t believe what they’d heard. Clay wanted to stretch their ears and shout death into them. Two dead men and a sack of loot, that’s what he wanted to take home, and to hell with the county sheriff and Judge Parker’s federal marshals.

  The tracks of his prey were clearly visible, even to a non-tracker like Clay; two swaths cut by galloping horses through the long prairie grass lying heavy from rains the day before. They wouldn’t be too difficult to follow if he kept hard on their trail and didn’t quit till he caught up. He mounted and rode on.

  The landscape he passed across was featureless for the most part, an extension of Kansan anonymity expressed in an abundance of flat sky and equally flat prairie. It was the lack of geographic diversity, perhaps, that caused Clay to begin ruminating on his lot. He asked himself if he was, if not actually happy, then fulfilled in his deepest part, and had to admit that he was not. His duties as marshal of Keyhoe had become routine, were tedious in their changelessness. This hunt for robbers was the most exciting event to have overtaken him in a long time, and the illegality of his continued pursuit beyond the bounds of his jurisdiction did not bother Clay one bit; rather, they enhanced his pleasure, his relief in at last finding a worthwhile task for himself.

  He decided, quite suddenly, that after apprehending and executing his quarry, he would contest the next election for county sheriff. Assuming he won, and used his enhanced powers to the fullest in ridding the locality of lawbreakers, he would then be in a position conducive to selection as a United States marshal, allowing him access to virtually every nook and cranny between the two oceans. These thoughts of a field large enough to prove himself upon lifted his spirits.

  Clay continued south as the sun completed its arc and sank at last below the long line of the horizon. In the dusk he could not follow the trail with any certainty, but stopping to wait for the night to pass seemed pointless; he had brought along no food, could not have risked a fire to cook it in any case, and had not tied a bedroll to his saddle before riding out of town. He’d behaved like an amateur, in fact, not a leader. Since rest was not possible, he decided to keep going in the same undeviating direction the trail had indicated all afternoon. The robbers just might be foolish or confident enough to announce their presence with a campfire somewhere ahead.

  It was so unlikely a scenario that Clay, less than an hour later, was startled to see ahead of him the unmistakable flickering of a small blaze. Filled with self-congratulation and a low opinion of his prey for their predictability, Clay rode slowly closer, and dismounted when he calculated he was a quarter mile from the fire; much closer and there was a chance the horses might smell one another and create a fuss. He took from his saddlebag a lead weight, attached it to the reins and set it on the ground, then took his shotgun and began making his way carefully forward, feeling for each step, wary of gopher holes and matted grass that might trip him.

  The night was near moonless, few stars visible behind the clouds gathering for another storm. Clay could scent rain on the light wind, and wood smoke. Where had they found anything to burn in that treeless place? As he came closer, he saw by the firelight what at first appeared to be low brush. A few steps more and he realized they were treetops. The fire had been built along the rim of a sunken creek bed. The men he wanted had built a fire of willow wood, in plain sight of any posse that cared to follow them this far. Why hadn’t they taken the obvious precaution of locating the blaze down on the creek bed, where it would not have been so glaring a signal across miles of open plain?

  It was an obvious trap. They were waiting for anyone stupid enough to rush the fire, probably had their rifles resting along the rim, just beyond the firelight’s reach. As he watched, Clay saw a chunk of wood come sailing from the darkness and land in the flames, followed by another. At least one man was on watch, feeding the fire from behind cover, waiting for any arrivals.

  Clay felt a quiet rage. They, the perpetrators of a crime, were laying for him. Did they know for sure he was tailing them, or were they just being cautious, if setting up such an unmistakable ambush could be termed caution? He would assume they were expecting him, and make his approach accordingly.

  It required a half hour to worm his way through the grass until he found the creek bed, several hundred yards east of the fire. Clay slid carefully down the eroding banks, wishing he had just a few minutes of moonlight to show him the way upstream. In the pitch darkness all around, he had to pause before every step. The stream bed was dry, but littered with branches and debris deposited when the water gave out during la
st summer’s heat; soon the spring thaw would fill it again. Before setting his boot down at every step, he had to be sure there was nothing underfoot to create the least noise. Progress along the creek, following its serpentine curves, was frustratingly slow.

  Eventually he could make out the fire along the rim, some twenty yards further on. Of the men, or man, who fed it there was no sign. Clay cocked his shotgun’s hammers and waited for the men to make a move that would reveal their place of hiding. The fire was burning low, in need of replenishment. Even at this distance Clay felt uneasy. He needed to know where they were, couldn’t do a thing until they revealed themselves.

  He heard a series of soft nickerings, brought to him on the wind from south of the dry wash. Their horses had been staked or hobbled away from the fire in case of gunplay. He bet the money was with them, ready for a fast getaway if something went wrong, the arrival of a sizable posse, for instance. But the setup before him had all the earmarks of having been arranged for just one man. It irritated him, this lack of knowledge about the situation he was stepping into. Each of his previous killings had involved a set of known parameters, the whole thing laid out before him, its various permutations evident in advance. Clay preferred it that way, not skulking in darkness. He was actually beginning to shake with the tension of waiting for developments, and had to make a conscious effort to stop. No more wood was flung onto the fire, and the extent of Clay’s field of vision was narrowed as the open flames degenerated to embers.

  He couldn’t wait any longer. Ten more steps along the dry wash failed to reveal anything he wished to know, but his eleventh step resulted in the cocking of a hammer close by on his left. Clay whirled and fired, once, twice, the brightness that flared from both barrels blinding him, but before darkness swamped his eyes he saw someone rammed backward by the blast, a fool too dumb to get behind cover before taking aim.