Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  When the mate left them, Zoe said to Omie, “Why wasn’t it Doolin, the way you said?”

  “I don’t know how I got it mixed up, Mama.”

  “I suggest that in future you consider your words carefully before uttering any prognostications. You did the same thing once with regard to your father.”

  “Which father?”

  “Leo. You said a man with one blue eye and one brown eye—that could only mean him—was robbing us, but the money stolen from our room had nothing to do with him. Do you remember that, back in Leadville, before we came with him to Glory Hole?”

  “No. I’m sorry if I was wrong. I didn’t mean to be.”

  “Let us try to put all this behind us and enjoy ourselves. Look! A flying fish! Did you see it?”

  “I’ve seen lots. Mama, when we get to the place he said, will we turn around?”

  “Why should we do that? We’re only partway across the ocean to where we’re going. We just need to get on another ship. This time, if you don’t mind, we’ll take a steamer, with lots more people on board to lose ourselves among.”

  “I … I don’t want to.”

  “There is nothing wrong with steamships, Omie.”

  “No, I mean I don’t want to go over the ocean anymore.”

  “Oh, Omie, we mustn’t quit now, just because some ignorant sailors have been rude to us.”

  “I don’t want to, Mama.…”

  Omie suddenly vomited over herself.

  The two days inbound to Bermuda were spent with Omie tossing restlessly on her bunk, sometimes awake, sometimes not, and often somewhere in between. The passengers were quick to ascribe blame for Omie’s condition on the crewman who had shouted at her during the sea burial, but no one actually went to the Brannans’ cabin to express sympathy; there was something not altogether right about the girl, and her mother was equally alarming, with her rigid expression of contempt for everything and everyone, and her pinned-up right sleeve. They were a peculiar duo, and befriending them for the short time remaining till landfall at Bermuda might have prejudiced the crew against anyone attempting to do so. The longest part of the voyage lay ahead, and it would be better, everyone silently concluded, to let the Brannans keep their own company until the ship was rid of them.

  Isolated though Omie was, her influence continued to instill fear and ill will toward her among the crew. The dark man was seen again, his long coat hanging straight down even in the strongest breeze, and one seaman on the dog watch swore he witnessed a ghostly train pass by in the darkness, its cowcatcher plowing through the waves, smokestack spitting purple fire, and another swore a band of phantom horsemen had followed the ship for almost half a league before riding their glowing steeds beneath the waves.

  Zoe and Omie took meals in their cabin, and did not go on deck until dusk. When the Acropolis dropped its anchor, they were packed and ready to disembark. The crew had rolled dice to see who would row them ashore, and that task was accomplished in silence by the losers. Standing on the harbor wall, surrounded by their luggage, Zoe wanted to weep at the injustice of it, but did not, for Omie’s sake. Omie had been unnaturally quiet for the last two days, and Zoe thought it wisest to leave her alone, rather than engage her in conversation filled with false brightness. Watching the dinghy being rowed back to the ship, Zoe wished she could draw a lightning bolt down from the sky to wipe out everyone aboard who had condemned them.

  Omie tugged at her sleeve. “Mama, can we go home from here, please?”

  “Yes. Home.”

  They found passage on the Tiger Shark, bound for Charleston, and began their return voyage to America. The dark man was seen only twice; there were no ghost trains or phantom riders; no one aboard died or thought overmuch about the girl with the blue mark on her face, or her one-armed mother. Zoe and Omie never learned that two days after weighing anchor to continue eastward, the Acropolis ran into more rough weather, and Doolin fell from the mainmast to split his skull open on the deck below.

  39

  From the high western slope of the valley they could see the cabin with ease. It was a broad valley, the one sign of human habitation an isolated oblong of weather-worn logs and crumbling sod. A corral beside the cabin held seven horses. Clay and his new partner could not approach the place during daylight, the area around it being open as it was, nothing but high plains grasses turning brown in the summer heat. If they wanted the men inside, it would have to be a night raid.

  Aemon Jennings was still not sure about Dugan. The man had a reputation for keeping a cool head in a tight corner, but there had been evidence since they teamed up together that Clay’s bottle had assumed an equal role in the partnership. Jennings was keeping a close watch on his partner while they hid out among the trees above the valley. Both men had worked the most distant reaches of Wyoming before, but never for such prey as occupied the cabin below.

  Wiley and Casper Bentine had set out to establish themselves as the natural inheritors of the James brothers’ mantle of celebrated outlawry, but quickly proved themselves lacking in Frank and Jesse’s cunning and skill in the planning and execution of criminal acts. The money on the Bentines’ heads was solely on account of the mayhem they had caused during their clumsy attempts at fame. For a sum just short of four hundred dollars, the brothers had killed eight people during a single robbery in Thermopolis. The reward posted for them within days of the fiasco (Wiley and Casper had obligingly left their names at the scene, for the convenience of newspaper reporters) was double that amount.

  Aemon Jennings received a tip from a cousin of the Bentines that they were hiding out in an old cabin a friend of their father’s had built up in the Wind River Range near the great divide. Jennings had been told the brothers were heavily armed, committed to their freedom and their goal of becoming living legends. Two such fools would likely be hard to take alone, and so Jennings hired Clay Dugan to assist him. Dugan would take one fourth of the reward money, and Jennings’s informant another fourth, leaving a worthwhile profit for Aemon.

  He and Clay set out for the Wind River Range, confident they could take care of the Bentines inside of two weeks, but halfway there, it became clear that Clay was a drinker. He carried several bottles in his saddlebags, and a reserve supply on his packhorse. He was not ungenerous, offering Aemon a swig every time he took one for himself, but was turned down each time. Aemon hoped enough of these blunt refusals would let Clay know sobriety was what his partner required of him, but Clay had chosen to ignore the hints, and drunk on, until Aemon told him, “Either those bottles go, Dugan, or you do. I need a man that can think fast and shoot straight when the time comes, hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Clay said, and immediately dismounted to remove all the whiskey from both his horses. He placed the bottles under a log at the side of a stream, saying he would pick them up on their way back, following the death or capture of the Bentines. Aemon Jennings found the arrangement fair; he could not have cared less what Clay did once the business he was hired for had been taken care of. They rode on together, the subtle air of discord between them smoothed somewhat by the quickness of Clay’s decision.

  The next two nights were difficult for both men. Clay woke from sleep several times, disturbed by dreams of sailing ships, he said, but Aemon could tell there was more to the dreams than that. He ascribed his partner’s restless nights to the sudden removal of alcohol from his life, and was reasonably sure the situation would be in hand by the time the Bentines’ cabin in the high lonesome was found.

  Locating the right valley required several days. An observation post had been established among the trees above the cabin, and Aemon shared his binoculars with Clay, maintaining a constant watch on the place until they were sure the brothers were inside. A third man, short and completely bald, presumably the cabin’s permanent occupant, was with them. There were no dogs to catch wind of the watchers should they come closer, but the great expanse of open ground presented a problem only d
arkness could solve. They decided to wait one more day, to ensure that the moon would be at its dimmest before an approach was made.

  While they waited, Jennings became aware of another unexpected condition of Clay’s; the man suffered from kidney stones, and the passage of these from the kidney to the bladder was almost as excruciating to behold as to experience. Clay would double over and clutch at his abdomen, his face turning white with pain as the stones eased their way through tubes less broad than they, and far smoother.

  “That why you had the liquor?” asked Aemon.

  “Partly …” Clay gasped, made honest by agony. He had begun the steady drinking shortly after being run out of Dry Wash by his vengeful wife. That incident had been too much to bear without whiskey, and he had adopted the habit of drinking a little and often ever since, even though the original smarting of his public humiliation had worn off. The dreams he had known for years, the ones inhabited by the blue-faced girl, were another reason to embrace the bottle, since Clay assumed he was going crazy by degrees. The kidney stones were just another kind of torment directed at him by fate, Clay felt, to balance his mind’s anguish with something for his physical self to endure.

  A doctor in Grand Junction had told him there was no cure that guaranteed banishment from the jagged lumps that eventually scraped their way through Clay’s penis and were pissed out into the world, but he did have a suggestion for relieving the urethra’s final agony. Clay bought a glass eyedropper with a rubber bulb at its wide end, and a bottle of mineral oil. As each stone passed from his bladder to the root of his manhood and began its ultimate descent, Clay filled the eyedropper with oil and injected a measure of the slimy stuff through the eye of his penis; thus lubricated, the urethra allowed its transient stone easier passage, even if this meant Clay’s under-clothing became greasy and soiled from the overflow. The doctor had advised inserting a clean handkerchief around the region of the crotch each day to absorb much of this, but since leaving for the mountains to hunt down the Bentine brothers, Clay had found little opportunity to wash his laundry.

  It was an embarrassment to squirt the oil into himself during close proximity to Jennings, but there was no other way to assist the small crystalline lumps out. Clay’s sense of who and what he was had altered in no small way since Sophie’s attempted shooting of him. He felt some essential part of his inner self eroding, becoming less with every day that passed, and imagined sometimes that his courage, his stoicism, the things that had allowed him to live in the world without being crushed, were leaking away, leaving him forever, perhaps in the very stones that caused him such suffering. The prickly, brownish fragments might have been his soul breaking apart, jettisoning its rough edges prior to complete disintegration. Maybe Reverend Wixson had been right about the existence of a tangible soul within the physical body of every man, but it was no ghostly thing of trailing robes and spectral luminosity. The soul, as Clay saw it, was probably as ugly as anything that could be seen pickled in a jar of formaldehyde in a doctor’s office, a soft and lumpy organ of negligible size and nondescript appearance, most likely a pinkish white when healthy, made hard and brittle and brown when under attack. Clay had neglected his soul, and the inevitable had occurred; his soul was deserting him in tiny, excruciating chunks.

  Aemon Jennings was beginning to doubt his own wisdom in selecting Dugan as a partner. The man clearly had deteriorated since the founding of his reputation among the bounty hunting brethren some years before. Aemon had sympathy for him over the kidney stones, and was able to condone a measure of liquor to ease the pain of such things, but his misgivings ran deeper than that; Clay Dugan’s eyes were no longer those of a man in charge of his destiny. Aemon had met Clay twice before in the Rocky Mountain region, and exchanged professional courtesies. He had not liked him, but Dugan’s obvious aura of menace had produced respect; now that aura was gone, replaced by a haunted look behind the eyes. The man was breaking up inside somehow, harboring demons within himself, allowing them to eat him alive. The dreams that woke Clay several times each night were an annoyance to Aemon, disturbing his own sleep as they did, at a time when he and his partner both had to maintain vigilance in their watch over the cabin. None of it could be helped now; he would simply have to trust Dugan to do what had to be done, in a timely and efficacious manner, or both of them might wind up as dead men.

  Clay had his back turned while he squirted more oil into himself. Aemon shook his head and viewed the cabin again through his binoculars. Wiley Bentine was strolling toward the outhouse, unhitching the galluses from his shoulders. Casper was smoking a pipe by the door, while the bald man busied himself feeding the horses. One more night and one more day of watching, and then the moonless dark would let them sneak up on the cabin to catch the Bentines and their hairless friend asleep. Aemon hoped the extra time would also give Dugan a chance to recover from his troubles.

  It was near dusk when the four riders came. Clay saw them first, and beckoned for Aemon to join him at the lookout point. Together they watched the horsemen approach from the south, and saw the Bentines appear in their doorway with drawn guns, only to put them aside at their host’s request as the riders came nearer. Shouted words of welcome came drifting through the purple evening air. The lead horseman, who wore a feather in his hatband, raised a hand to the bald man who had made the Bentines lower their guns, and all four dismounted. The man with the feathered hat embraced the bald man, and their laughter came on a shift in the breeze, the easy laughter of friends.

  “Complicates the situation,” said Clay.

  “It does,” agreed Jennings. “Those fellers aren’t horse traders, not if they know the bald one so well.”

  “Make out that tall one with the feather’s face at all?”

  “Not in this light,” Aemon said, squinting through the binoculars. “Him and Baldy are talking like long-lost brothers. I don’t think the rest of them know him … no, one of them does, but not the other two. Looks like no one knows the Bentines at all. They’re hanging back in the doorway there like a couple of wallflowers.”

  “Could be they’ll be gone by tomorrow night.”

  “Don’t fool yourself. The party just got started, I’m thinking. Come daylight we can maybe figure out who they are. Anyone knows Baldy that way, and him knowing the Bentines, they’ve just got to be bad, the whole bunch. Dugan, we might just be looking at a couple thousand dollars or more worth of outlaws down there, booted and breathing.”

  “Seven to two is long odds.”

  “Not if you went across the valley and we could catch them in a crossfire come morning.”

  “I’m not good with a rifle.”

  “I don’t intend letting men worth cash money slide out of here without you and me taking as many as we can, Dugan.”

  “If I can get close, they’re mine. A rifle, though, that won’t do it. My eyes aren’t made for distance shooting, Jennings, and that’s a fact, so build yourself another plan.”

  “Well, then, since the easy way doesn’t suit you, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. Maybe some of them won’t stay around too long.”

  Clay said nothing. Jennings was beginning to irritate him. Clay had ditched his entire supply of whiskey to please the man, and because it made good sense to sober himself up for the job ahead, but his sacrifice seemed to have lowered him even further in Jennings’s eyes, if that was possible, and there was no sympathy at all over his belly stones. “Had an uncle one time with the same problem,” Jennings had said, “but it never killed him. He just went about his business and kind of squeezed his mouth tight, you know. Tough old bird, that uncle.”

  “Maybe his stones were small,” said Clay, but he could see Aemon Jennings was not impressed by such an argument. This would be the first and last time Clay ever hired himself out to another man in the same line of work as himself. He was made to operate alone, and would always do so in future. A partnership that grated was not something that would likely produce the kind of results b
oth men wanted.

  “There they go, unsaddling. Guess he made them good and welcome, all right. These fellers are no-goods, Dugan, I can smell the bad on them, even from here.”

  It had been a long hard ride up from Colorado. Lodi had insisted on a change of state following the train robbery outside Buena Vista, and Drew was not inclined to contradict him. One of the men who had taken part in that raid was dead simply because he had wanted his cut of the proceeds before Lodi was inclined to allow a split-up, and after that quick death, another man had sneaked away into the night rather than face a possible dose of the same if he opened his mouth. Both had been amateurs, but the sixth man in their party, Levon, had proved himself able to take orders. Drew liked him a little, but thought that his preference for Levon was amplified by his dislike of Nate Haggin and Lodi. Levon was not so entertaining an individual as Clarence Dustey had been, but was amiable enough. They rode together for most of the way, with Nate and Lodi up ahead, and had bunched up only as they approached the cabin in the Wind River Range. Lodi said it housed a firm friend of his from the old days in Montana, when he had ridden with Arch Powell on mining-payroll robberies.

  Horace Neet was the name of Lodi’s friend. Drew had never before seen a man so bald; there was not a single hair to be found on his head. Horace wouldn’t wear a hat to cover his cranial nakedness except when he went outside in the hours of daylight, to prevent sunburn. As he prepared a meal for the new arrivals, he told them how he came to be so bald. Lodi already knew the story, but saw that Horace was distracting everyone else’s attention with the tale so his old friend had a chance to run his nose over the Bentines. Lodi didn’t like what he saw. The brothers were listening to Horace with resentment on their faces, and Lodi knew they resented the bald man’s sudden talkativeness now that others had come to share the cabin. Horace hadn’t told them the story because he didn’t like them, and Lodi had always valued Horace’s horse sense when it came to judging men. Horace only had to introduce them, and Lodi recalled the recent news concerning Wiley and Casper’s bloodbath in Thermopolis. He knew they would want to join up with him, but Lodi didn’t want fools on his team.