Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  “May I ask what it is you’re doing?” inquired Mrs. Garfinkle.

  “Gotta get ’em straightened out,” said Bob, doing just that. He began twisting the sheets into a rope. Sheriff Simms had promised him two hundred dollars and a whore for taking care of the man, and three hundred dollars and two whores for taking care of the woman, that being a more odious task. The man had already been visited. Bob had initial misgivings over the woman, being that a nice lady like the one in the cell seemed an unlikely murderer, but the sheriff had shown him the peculiar-looking dagger and the money he had found in their home. That was all the evidence required, the sheriff had said. Bob still could not quite figure out what Garfinkle had been talking about when he finally beat some information out of him, but the sheriff seemed to, and Bob was not about to question his judgment.

  But there was a problem, Simms had told him; the Garfinkles were Jews, and you couldn’t trust them not to be sprung from jail by other Jews, who were a fanatical bunch and very clever when it came to protecting their own, probably part of some deal they made with the devil. Simms said that folks would be so incensed if the Garfinkles got away that they’d likely storm the courthouse and haul the sheriff and deputy into the street and lynch them, so it was Bob’s duty to take care of the Garfinkles before that happened. Real justice would be served, and Bob would save the town the cost of a trial besides.

  Mr. Garfinkle had struggled a lot for such a little fellow, and Bob had been obliged to string him up on a sheet rope while in a state of unconsciousness brought about by Bob’s large and merciless fists. He hoped the woman would be more cooperative, since beating a woman was not something he cared to do unless it was strictly necessary. He began shaping a crude noose.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothin’ as makes a difference.”

  “But … what exactly are you doing with my sheets?”

  “You just hush now.”

  “I will not. Stop that!”

  Mrs. Garfinkle had divined the purpose of the object taking shape in the deputy’s hands. “I won’t be scared off by that kind of nonsense, you know.… Don’t think you can fluster me with such silliness.”

  “All right,” said Bob, testing the strength of his creation between both hands. It would hold. He moved in her direction, holding the noose.

  “What are you doing? Go away.…”

  “You never should’ve done it to him.”

  “Done what? What are you saying? Done it to whom?”

  “That feller. Feller you brung home to do that to.”

  “What … what fellow? Please, I don’t understand what it is you’re saying.…”

  “Should’ve let him alone, missus.”

  “Get away.… Get out of here this instant!”

  Bob felt bad, doing what he was about to do, but justice had to be served. If he didn’t do it, someone else would have to, and that would be a cowardly thing for Bob to do, make someone else kill a woman that needed killing, so he closed his ears and hardened his heart and went ahead. The woman backed herself into the corner, then stumbled over her own shit bucket, and while she looked down in distress at the mess emptied onto the floor, Bob pounced.

  Once he had the noose around her neck the rest was easy, and when he was certain she had died, he tied the end of the sheet rope around the upper bars of the cell, making sure her toes couldn’t touch the floor. He wondered, as he arranged Mrs. Garfinkle there, if the whores made available to him would be pretty ones.

  44

  He wondered now if his heart was truly set for more of the same work. Hauling in the usually dead bodies of outlaws for cash payment seemed futile somehow, a low grade of employment, and yet he was suited for no other. Clay was beginning to doubt all those aspects of himself which in former times had been the source of his strength, his conviction. There were bad people galore, and those bad people had to be caught and locked away, if not killed outright, before they did more mischief than they already had done. No one made bad people do what they did; they chose to do it, and so Clay had chosen to stop them from doing it, and had met with a measure of success in his field.

  But now the certainty was gone. There were too many bad people, more than he could ever hope to round up in a lifetime of seeking them out. If he stopped, if he found a new kind of work, the world would continue to spin as before, with bad people preying on good people, as if he had never stalked any of them down and killed them, as if no one had. Badness was a permanent part of the landscape, he had decided, and Clay’s acceptance that this was so came as a disheartening surprise. He had always pictured bad men being weeded one by one from a garden, until that garden became free of weeds, but now he knew the weeds would always spring up anew behind his back to mock his efforts. There was no perfect garden to be had, nor had there ever been one. And he was no gardener, although he had pulled weeds for years now, with a steady rage at their proliferation underfoot.

  In the absence of any other line of work he could realistically engage in, Clay made a decision to revive his enthusiasm for bounty hunting by pursuing the one man everyone in the nation agreed was so bad he deserved a category of badness all his own. Clay would go after Slade.

  A long time ago he had considered collecting the bounty on Panther Stalking and Kills With a Smile, but had not followed through. He had regretted that decision after the Apache brothers finally were caught, and had committed mutual suicide in their jail cell. If he had been the one to capture them, preferably dead, his reputation as dispenser of justice would have been without peer. There could not have been a more rewarding memory to take with him into old age than knowing he was the one who had ended a terrible reign of blood lust. And now, in that same region of the country, another ghoul was taking the lives of innocent people, opening their bodies and strewing their insides around for the flies and buzzards to feast on. Slade was barely human, so heinous were his acts; at least the brothers had been Apaches, their killings to be expected, but Slade was a white man. Capturing him would be worth more than the killing of a hundred ordinary bad men. As the one who rid the world of Slade, Clay could hold his head up high, and also collect the reward offered by mining magnate Leo Brannan, currently standing at ten thousand dollars. With money like that, he could retire while still young, and have the leisure to find another direction for his life. Capturing Slade would set the capstone on a career too often blighted by feelings of shame, of being some kind of pariah, even if the work he did was necessary. Everyone would applaud him without reserve for having taken the shadow of Slade away. Of course, he would have to collect his reward and disappear pronto, or Sophie would read of his fame and come hurrying in his direction with her thirst for vengeance and her gun.

  Dreaming of success was one thing, earning it another. Clay took himself and his horses by train to Santa Fe, and began his search from there. He had no formal plan; there were no clues to Slade’s habits, apart from a clear preference for rugged desert country where he could hide with impunity. There were no traitorous companions prepared to sell Slade out, no gang members to trail toward some hidden redoubt. Slade came and went with the desert wind, descending on his prey like a demon from the air, leaving no tracks that could be followed, even by expert trackers with Indian blood. Among the Indian population a cult was growing around the cannibal. Slade, it was said, was not a white man after all, but the vengeful spirit of all Indians who had suffered defeat and death at the hands of whites. The Indians ascribed to Slade supernatural powers of the most outrageous kind: the ability to turn himself into a coyote or an eagle; the ability to see from afar, even by night; the ability to sense the presence of danger, and fly away to evade capture. Slade had to date killed and eviscerated no Indians at all, and so the belief persisted and grew that he was killing whites on behalf of red men, and his exploits were carefully monitored, and his legendary status grew.

  For Clay, the means to be employed in capturing the man-eater would have to be unorthodox, since the territori
es Slade hovered over like a cloud were becoming filled with bounty hunters and glory seekers of every ilk, all determined to be the one who found and destroyed the monster. If Clay was to succeed where legions of the like-minded had thus far failed, he would have to do what others had not done. He did not know what this unconventional method might be, since his own procedures were in no way unique. He would have to think of something.

  The first order of Clay’s plan was to isolate himself, in order that he might be visited by inspiration. He stocked up on water and supplies, including several bottles of mineral oil to inject up his suffering penis, and left Santa Fe in the dead of night, to shake off any lesser hunter who might be tempted to follow along, with notions of sharing the prize. Clay wanted to capture Slade unassisted; one bad man captured by one good man—that was how the story should end.

  He rode into the wilderness with a new and urgent need within himself; this quest for Slade would exonerate Clay of all his sins. He was unclear over the precise nature of these sins, but he had of late felt unclean in some indefinable way, as if the smell of every man he brought in for federal reimbursement had wiped off on his hands, his face, the clothes he wore, smothering him with the reek of death, down to the very roots of his hair. When he caught Slade he would become sweet-smelling, in a figurative sense, and the past would be wafted away on lavender breezes, wiping him clean of all wrongdoing, creating him all over again, in a newer, more acceptable image. He would be reborn, without recourse to religion, a state of being well worth this final burst of dedicated manhunting. His nose was to the feral winds that would bring to him the stench of evil, Slade’s unmistakable scent. He knew, without knowing how or why he knew, that where all others had failed, he would win through and emerge triumphant, Slade’s body slung over a packhorse like so many before.

  The days were hot, the nights cold, and even as his supplies ran low, Clay did not cease to believe in the destiny he wished upon himself. Somewhere in the arid void of mountains and canyons there dwelt a demon, a beast in human guise, and like some knight come riding into the lair of a dragon, Clay would strike down the thing that haunted and terrorized and preyed upon the innocent. He would do it for the dead who could not return, and for the living who would not join the dead until their appointed time; but above all, he would do it for the purification of his own soul, if he had one.

  But search as he might, there came to him no mystic glimpse of Slade’s location, no smattering of Slade’s intent, not the slightest inkling of where or when he might strike, not even any sense that Slade was alive and cognizant of the threat bearing down upon him with two thin horses and a dwindling supply of coffee. Clay’s faith began to waver. Where was the sign that would bring himself and Slade together as they should be, good man and bad man; where was the fullness of purpose in which he had begun his search?

  Hope and expectation were running from him now like flour from a ruptured sack. Every sunrise swept across his eyes, the oldest of light, revealing nothing, for nothing was there. Skies without rain, land without succor, and in every sun-blasted arroyo, across every empty mesa, came whisperings of the greater emptiness beyond. He found deserted farms, entire adobe villages abandoned in advance of Slade’s inevitable coming. The territory was emptying itself of people, it seemed, and as he wandered, Clay saw no distant riders he could not identify at a glance—hunters like himself, swirling motes in the vastness of red earth and rock, searching for the one who would not leave. He took what he needed from pantries left to desert mice, raised precious water from wells undrawn, and ignored when he chanced upon them, lined up before the scabrous mirrors in dusty-floored cantinas and saloons, the remnants of liquor he once would have drained.

  His circlings through and round about the emptiness were weakening him. He felt flesh falling from his bones, blood seeping from his veins, boiling out through skin turned to leather. He was becoming a husk, blown this way and that by the turgid air, but somewhere inside Clay his great desire for one last kill rattled like a dried pea, and would not go away. The rattling pea drove him on. His packhorse died, and Clay rode on. His saddle horse fell, and Clay drove the suffering from it with a shotgun shell, and walked on with his gun and empty canteen and rattling pea, until finally he came to a place, another place of nothing, and fell down himself, and at last the pea was silent. This is my time of dying, thought Clay, and I never did see the son of a bitch.

  He closed his eyes against the afternoon light, but it was too bright still, so he dragged himself to shade beneath a rock ledge, and arranged his body for a comfortable leave-taking. His head was filled with a steady swishing sound, insistent but not distracting. Clay stared across the barren ground he had covered, watched it dance and shimmer before his eyes in languid waves of heat, saw the dust funnels raise themselves and scuttle nervously across the earth before falling apart in the air and drifting downward again. He had come a long, long way to be in that place, and the trip had not been worth it, because he had failed. Life itself was ebbing within him, and had already ebbed too far for caring. Soon he would depart from there, like everyone else, leave it all to the rattlesnakes and Slade, who must have been a man of smoke and dust to survive so long without being seen.

  Clay’s kidneys gave him no peace, even so close to the end, but insisted on pushing another stone down through his belly’s side, its passage eased not at all by the absence of water in his tubes. To die unfulfilled was harsh enough, but to die with the pain of a kidney stone prodding at him was downright cruel. The stone would get maybe halfway down, then stop, because Clay would be dead by then, and that would be his revenge against the stone, to strand it partway to its destination, never allow it to plunge into the warm lagoon of his bladder or ride his yellow foaming rapids out into the light. The stone might one day be found among his bones, nestled there like a croquet ball among a tangle of hoops, and the man who discovered the stone would carry it away to place upon his mantel shelf and tell his wife how lucky he had been to find it there.

  Now it was dusk. Purple shadows came slowly down from the rock escarpment behind him to steal along the ground, silently bleeding its purple darkness back into the sky. Clay hurt. He hurt everywhere, but mainly in the left side of his belly and between his eyes. The pain was keeping him alive, drawing him back when he attempted to escape its clawing, and he would willingly have cried in sympathy with himself and his suffering if only his body could have summoned the moisture.

  Darkness at last. He felt his skin cracking in the cooler air. The pain was easing a little, as if realizing its own pointlessness. With luck, he might be able to slip away quietly, without provoking another attack. He could have hastened the process, of course, by placing the barrels of his sawed-off into his mouth and pulling both triggers, but that end held no appeal. Clay admitted he had lost out in his last game, strewn his cards carelessly instead of holding them close against his chest. It had all been a sorry waste, he told himself, this life he had used up too soon. There was nothing at all to show for it, no children to bear his name, nobody to weep over his body and trim the wild grasses from his marker down through the years. At his birth there had been a woman; at his death there would be no one.

  Cold was creeping inside him. Soon he could go, and in the morning the empty shell that had been Clay Dugan would be made warm again by sunlight, and the mornings and afternoons to follow would turn him to dust fit only for blowing away. His arms and legs already were immovable, and his head could barely turn on his neck. Sometimes his eyes opened, and when they did he saw herds unlike any he had seen before. Creatures tall as ostriches ran like the wind, their striped backs and tails undulating smoothly. Lizard heads out-thrust, they dashed among impossibly tall trees, scampering lightly through the shadows, phantom runners beneath a larger moon than Clay ever knew. The forest of his dreaming rang with mysterious trumpetings and forlorn cries, whether animal or human Clay could not be sure. He thought he might already have died and been taken to some darkling world for his s
ins among humanity, and his crimes against himself. The forest was a lonely place, and Clay was glad to see it fade away as the sun came up.

  He should have been gone by then. It really was too bad. Now he’d have to endure more heat, more agony from his kidney stone, and be that much longer in the dying. Even death was not going to do Clay any favors.

  The girl was easily recognized because of her blue-sided face, even if Clay had never seen her before in daylight, nor at any time when he had not been dreaming. He was not dreaming this time; his body hurt him too much. The girl was truly there, and yet she was not. She cast no shadow, and the light she was illuminated by was not from the same direction as the sun. Clay knew then that he either was mad or else finally had died, and was being greeted on the other side by this familiar ghost. He nodded at her.

  “Are you sick?” she asked, her voice hollow, as if she spoke into a tin can.

  “Dying, I guess,” said Clay. He could not remember talking to the girl before. In his dreams they simply shared the same time and space, and were sometimes able to shout at each other without receiving any reply. She seemed like a well-mannered girl, and he was glad of the company.

  “Over there,” she said, pointing. “There’s some water over there, just a little way off.”

  “Water?”

  “Not very much, though.”

  Clay stared in the direction she had pointed, along the escarpment. It looked like more of the same dreary desert to him, and he turned back to tell the girl so, but found himself alone.

  “Little girl …? Little girl …!”

  She was gone, and he was crushed by her absence. He had been looking forward to asking her if he was mad or dead, and now that wouldn’t happen. Worse, he was confronted with a choice—to see if there really was water where she had indicated, or ignore the episode as some kind of mirage, like the forest he had seen in the night. He could die where he was, in considerable discomfort, or give himself more pain on top of what he already had, in hopes of finding the water and surviving. To trust a dream spirit, or not.