Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  “Holding a mirror to the lips is easier.”

  “Let me finish. Within minutes of that final breath, my balance registers yet another loss, in every case. The loss is barely perceptible, even to an instrument such as this, but there is no doubt such a lessening of weight does occur. Can you guess what causes it, Mr. Dugan?”

  “Well, now, I guess that would be the soul departing the body, if what they say is true.”

  “You’re perfectly correct. I have weighed, at the moment of release, a total of eighteen persons thus far, and in each case have noted the phenomenon. The human soul, Mr. Dugan, weighs between two and three hundredths of an ounce. I cannot explain the difference in weight for each soul, but differences there surely are, and they do not conform to advanced age, the cause of death, or the gender of the deceased. It may be that with further research into the mystery, and the compiling of more extended notations of soul weights, a pattern will emerge to indicate the exact nature of God’s presence in us all.”

  “Interesting work, Reverend.”

  “Indeed, but so frustrating. I am aware that what I say has a macabre ring to it, but the fact is, sir, I require more dying persons in order to establish a lengthier set of figures.”

  “You’d be better off in a big town.”

  Clay was enjoying the conversation. He had several times met persons of unsound mind, but never one so loquacious and articulate. Wixson’s crackbrained theory, in combination with the unusual machine, presented a picture of lunacy so piquant it made Clay a little sad.

  Wixson shook his head. “I have on a number of occasions attempted to do just that, but somehow townspeople see fit to move me on. They have no curiosity over this greatest of discoveries, no interest at all. That is the proof, if proof were needed, we live in the most godless times of all since the Flood. Which of God’s creatures, even the lowliest, would not wish to know such things, were he given the mind and tongue of man? Not one! But man himself laughs at the notion of a soul possessing actual weight and substance.”

  “There’s a considerable number of fools around, I’ll grant you.”

  “But here you are, a hunter of men, and you understand. Does this suggest a world made topsy-turvy, Mr. Dugan?”

  “It might. I’m not given to philosophy.”

  “Then give me your opinion on a further step I intend taking, when my financial condition improves. Are you familiar with the principles of modern photography?”

  “I’ve got a rough idea how it works.”

  “It is my intention to create, possibly with the help of an expert in the photographical science, a new kind of developing plate, one that will reveal, possibly in negative outline, the very shape of the soul as it departs its prison of flesh.”

  “You’d link the camera somehow to the scales.”

  “Yes! The fractional decrease in weight will trip the lens shutter at precisely the right moment. Your grasp of the concept is gratifying, Mr. Dugan. A man of alertness like yourself would make an admirable partner in the venture.”

  Clay shifted uncomfortably inside his boots. “Can’t help you there, Reverend. My time’s pretty much cut out for me, doing what I do. A professional photographer is the man for you.”

  “I suppose.” Wixson’s face registered deep disappointment.

  “Sourdough’s just about done, I’d say,” Clay told him, and led the madman back to the fire.

  While they ate, Wixson talked of having been granted his vision of measuring the soul’s weight while watching cotton bales being weighed in New Orleans. The whiteness of the boles peeping from splits in the burlap baling material had reminded him of clouds, then ghosts, and so his revelation was visited upon him, with such force it threw him to the ground. He had worked hard for a year to purchase a beam balance big enough to place a body on, then hired a skilled artisan to refine its accuracy to the impossible scale he had described. “My balance is my life now, Mr. Dugan, and in following the star I have been told to, I have found a peace of mind I never knew before. That, too, is why I prefer the open spaces of our great land. God is here in greater abundance than in the cities. Satan has created such places as repositories for the damned.”

  “Could be,” Clay murmured.

  “Are you … currently anticipating the capture of some outlaws, Mr. Dugan?”

  “There’s a bad bunch in Montezuma County. Could be I’ll get a couple or three.”

  “And are men such as you find inclined to … resist arrest?”

  “More often than not.”

  “And you perforce are obliged to shoot at them.”

  “I am.”

  “I wonder, Mr. Dugan, if it might not be possible that I accompany you to Montezuma County. These fellows could serve the cause of science and Christianity both before they expire, don’t you think? It would be compensation of a kind, for having lived a life of violence and criminality.”

  “Reverend, that just isn’t going to be possible. Your wagon there won’t go where I need to go. I’m sorry.”

  “Ah, yes, the beaten trail leads to no outlaw roost.”

  “But I wish you luck with your work.”

  “And I thank you for that.”

  They parted company early in the afternoon. Clay watched Wixson’s wagon lurch toward the east, and wondered how long such a man, burdened with such a hopeless task, could survive alone. It was none of Clay’s problem, but he worried a little as he continued west toward the mountains.

  He felt the chill of their peaks already. The higher regions were scattered with yellow and red, and Clay knew the avalanche of color would have spilled down into the lower valley floors by the time he crossed the ranges to Montezuma County. He supposed everything he saw around him was beautiful, whether it had been created by Wixson’s God or some great natural force blindly going about its endless business of growth and decay.

  Beauty was not a subject Clay dwelt upon often, and when he did, he assigned it almost exclusively to certain horses (Sunrise had been a prime example) or women. In particular, Clay considered ideal the model for a picture he had found on the inside of a cigar box lid in some hotel room in Wyoming. He had discarded the box, having no use for it, but saved the lid, and two or three times a week would take it from his saddlebags to stare with longing at the beautiful woman depicted there. Venus Revealed was the title of the picture, and Clay was in love with it. This creamy creature sprawled among inviting pillows was Clay’s notion of the perfect woman, from her redly painted toes to her voluminous hair. He loved her Cupid’s bow of a mouth; he wanted to run his hand along the sweep of her waist and hips, and cradle the fullness of her pink-nippled breasts; he loved her deeply indented navel and plump knees, and it made him sick to know that a woman like that would never so much as look at a homely man like himself. The cigar box lady was as remote from Clay’s world as the Venus of myth, and it irritated him that he hadn’t the strength of will to dispose of her before his occasional glancings at the lid became daily occurrences. He knew himself for a fool, but could do nothing about it.

  During the week he required to reach Durango, Clay moped with unaccustomed intensity. He had always considered himself something of a stoic, and now it seemed he was unable to put down the sense of pity he felt toward himself. It was a distressing time, and Clay yearned, atypically, for human company. Maybe it had been the demented preacher who opened this door to introspection, or the unfortunate interview with the Alamosa marshal. It was all well and good to declare himself an outcast if that was what society deemed him fit for, another thing again to be content in that role. Yet what else was there for him to do? If he could not avenge the holes in his cheeks and the memory of his soiled pants by hunting down the thousand and one siblings in crime of the Chaffey brothers, what could he do? There was no other occupation so perfectly suited to him, given his personal history, his gloomy temperament and his intolerance of wrongdoing. The very root of his character demanded that he keep on with the life he was living, whatever his deep
est reservations might be.

  Surrounded by towering beauty, a landscape so unspoiled he might have been journeying through some mountainous Eden, Clay could only look upon such magnificence as mockery of himself and his puny troubles. Even being aware that he had correctly proportioned himself among this landscape of gorgeous excess brought him no shred of pride, no wry acknowledgment of his own wisdom in so seeing the truth. He was who he was, and no other self could be inserted into the actuality he inhabited with such unwillingness.

  Halfway to his destination, Clay awoke one night and rolled from beneath his blankets to prowl about the campfire in nothing but his grimy union suit, while he attempted to recapture a dream so disturbing it had wakened him. A young girl had appeared before him while he traveled an unknown road, a girl with a blue mark on one side of her face, like the mask of a raccoon. The mark accentuated one of her eyes, made it appear to glow with unnatural light, and the brilliance of it had swept across him like the beam from a lighthouse. “Where are you? Who are you?” the girl had asked, without once moving her lips, and Clay had been afraid to answer, since it was clear even to a hardheaded man like himself that the girl was no girl, but an imp in cunning disguise, an innocent female sent to lure him down among the darkness she had sprung from. He lifted his dream hand to ward off the light from her masked eye, and the action had been imitated by his physical body, waking him with a hammering heart to stride about the glowing coals with his shotgun cocked and ready for any other demons that might spring from the darkness inside his head.

  “Well, all right!” he bellowed at shadows beyond the light. “All right, then! Here I am!”

  Clay’s horses stamped and snorted as he strode back and forth in a frenzy of uncoordinated movement, afraid of he knew not what. Eventually he was able to calm himself by becoming aware of the frost settling on his shoulders and the chilled earth beneath his socks. He wrapped himself in blankets again and tried to reenter the world of sleep, but the girl he had seen would not go away; she was there inside his eyelids, demanding answers to those same cryptic questions. It was not right that such a little demon visit him by night. If a succubus should come to torment him, it should come in the guise of the cigar box lady, and he would embrace it and surrender himself, but the imp had been proud of itself, testy and insistent. Clay was unable to stop his body from shaking, and could not decide if it was the cold that made him quake so, or fear of a simple dream. He wondered also if he was becoming mad, like the lost soul dragging his beam balance through the wilderness. That would be the ultimate humiliation, he decided: to be insane, yet unaware of it.

  It was his aloneness that caused such episodes, he was convinced. Not the aloneness of a man passing through uninhabited country, but rather the larger solitude of the untouchable, the pariah who has no caste but himself with which to belong. The bitterness he felt welling inside him grew from knowing he was not truly alone, merely separated from those other parts of himself, the sister and brother who shared his blood, those dim and distant portions that, if united with himself, would constitute the Dugans, a tripartite entity without fear of darkness.

  He wondered, for the first time in more than a year, where they could be. It was a futile exercise, he knew, but it would fill the hours that loomed like a series of walls between himself and the dawn, and so he leaned his scarred cheek against the leather pillow of his saddle and attempted to conjure from the dwindling resource of memory a portrait of the two missing Dugans. It was likely he could pass them both on the street and not recognize either one. That was the kind of irony Clay appreciated. It made him smile. His sister and brother were gone forever, hacked away from him like a gangrenous arm and leg, leaving him a kind of cripple, an awkward facsimile of a completed man. As ever, there was nothing he could do, and he surprised himself by permitting tears of unquenchable misery to slide from his eyes, across the bridge of a nose already displaying the permanent stigmata of the spectacle wearer, and down across the ragged wounds that made him heir to his fate.

  In the Durango Herald, Clay read of the newest slaughter committed in northern New Mexico by the red fiends Panther Stalking and Kills With a Smile; two entire families had been butchered in their sleep. Unlike ordinary Apaches, the murderous brothers had no qualms about perpetrating their crimes during the hours of darkness. The territorial governor had at last placed a reward on their heads of one thousand dollars apiece. Clay toyed with the notion of going there and hunting them, then admitted he probably couldn’t match the sneakiness of Indian ways, and would likely end up with his bowels in his lap, the fate, apparently, of an army officer named Dobson who had set out alone to capture the hellions south of the most recent outrages. Dobson and another man similarly treated had been buried with full military honors. Two other troopers were still missing, and believed to have met the same end. No, he would stay where he was, hunting his regular prey, since that was work he knew himself capable of executing with skill.

  In Montezuma County he came to the mountain town of Killdeer, a place so remote there was not one planed length of lumber on any one of its structures. Every dwelling wore a rough coat of unstripped bark and clay chinking to keep out the weather. The forest around Killdeer was already stripped of leaves, the pines darkening, the air crisp with approaching snow. Clay tied his horses to a rail outside a store-saloon and went within to absorb alcohol and information. Killdeer had been the town a dying man told him of, wherein Clay could find an outlaw named Archie Powell, wanted in three states for robbery and murder. Archie Powell was worth four hundred dollars. The dying man (Clay’s bullet had lodged in his lungs) had only fetched one hundred, but the name of Killdeer had made the effort of tracking him down worthwhile.

  Clay was the only customer. While the barkeep poured him a drink, he asked, “Arch been around?”

  “Say who?”

  “Arch Powell.”

  “Don’t know the feller.”

  “Arch and me, we rode together some while back.”

  “Don’t know him,” reiterated the barkeep, but Clay knew he was lying. While he drank, he watched the man closely, noting the casual way the barkeep did the same to him. By the time Clay ordered his third whiskey, the barkeep decided the tall man with the spectacles and scars was drunk enough to be pumped for the truth.

  “Where’d you say you rode with this feller?”

  “What feller?”

  “Feller you said.”

  “Arch? Oh, up around Montana way. Had some high old times, Arch and me. He most likely told you about that time with the pig.”

  Archie Powell had shot a pig that blundered beneath the legs of his horse on the main street of Shelby, and when upbraided for the deed by the pig’s owner, had shot the owner, then slit open the belly of the pig and thrust the carcass over the head of the deceased, in full view of several dozen witnesses.

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Ham Deidsheimer, short for Hamilton.”

  This was the name of Clay’s hundred-dollar man, one of Powell’s lesser sidekicks during his Montana days. The gang had specialized in robbing payroll shipments in the mining area around Butte, and had profited so handsomely they had not been heard from for more than a year. It was rumored that Powell was originally from Colorado, but that was not substantiated until Clay heard the name Killdeer from Ham Deidsheimer. Clay was hopeful the clue gave him an edge over the many federal officers and Pinkerton men also interested in running Powell to earth.

  “He’ll know,” said Clay to the barkeep.

  “Who’ll know?”

  “Arch, he’ll know the name.”

  “No Arch around here, mister.”

  “Well, sure, I know that.” Clay winked, and ordered another shot of liquor. He smiled conspiratorially at the man with the bottle, but was met with a face of stone.

  “You tell him,” suggested Clay, “you tell him I look even prettier than him nowadays, with these holes in my face. He won’t have seen them yet, since we split up
, all the boys. Feller in Denver run a stick through my face on account of not wanting to pay up some dollars he owed me. He come out of it worse, though. Run a bullet through his, front to back.” He laughed and tossed down the drink.

  Powell was a dandy and a womanizer, proud of his looks. Clay knew a description of himself and his scars, which Ham Deidsheimer had not had, would alert Powell to the deception, unless he explained them. Clay was also taller than Deidsheimer, but not by much.

  “I guess I’ll just take a bottle and wait,” Clay said.

  “Take as many as you want,” advised the barkeep, “and wait for snow in hell, far as I care.”

  “You’re a real friendly feller.”

  “Anyone pays for whiskey, I’m friendly.”

  When the bottle was set before him, Clay grabbed the barkeep’s shirtfront and pulled him close. “I drink slow,” he said, “but by the time my bottle’s gone, I want Arch here, see, because I come a long way to see him.”

  He released the man and went to a corner table to drink. The barkeep went to the back room, and Clay heard a woman’s voice. The woman came out and walked by his table, staring at him as she passed on her way to the door. He watched through one of the yellow-paned windows as she hurried along the street, arms hugging a shawl around herself against the cold. She returned within ten minutes, and ignored him as she passed through to the rear of the building. Clay guessed some intermediary had saddled up and was at that moment riding from Killdeer out into the mountains to alert Arch Powell.

  Clay began making plans. By the time the outlaw came through the door and saw a stranger where Ham Deidsheimer was supposed to be, Clay would have a story ready, something to do with Ham passing on the Killdeer connection before dying, maybe following an attempted bank robbery with Clay. Powell would be suspicious, but Clay would spin the yarn with conviction, and be drawn nearer to Powell if all went well. If all did not, he could always shoot the man there and then, assuming Powell arrived alone, or at least without more than one henchman. Clay sometimes wished Colt or Remington would invent a shotgun with more than two barrels, or one capable of storing shells in a tube, like a repeating rifle. To pass the time, he composed a mental letter to that effect.