“And yours?” she asked, a little testily now. “Is it Dugan or is it not?”
“Zoe … it’s me, Clay.”
“Clay?”
“And me, Zoe … I’m Drew,” said her brother.
“What are you saying …? You both are quite shamefully drunk.…”
“Zoe, it’s us! It’s really us.…”
“No. Stop this!”
Clay attempted to rise, and fell over his long legs. Zoe stepped back from him. Drew sat with a smile of serendipity on his handsome face, a smile directed at Zoe, who felt as if she had somehow blundered into an asylum populated by cruel but prescient madmen.
“It’s us, Zoe, truly … Mr. Pigeontoes and Mr. Duckfeet!”
The ludicrous names from so many yesterdays ago hit her hard. The drunken men at her feet were declaring themselves to be her brothers, her wonderful brothers of long ago, but they could not be, could not possibly be Clayton and Drew, never, not these two with their jug and their whiskey smell and slurred beseechment in their voices.
“She doesn’t believe it,” said Drew.
“I don’t blame her,” said Clay. “It’s not possible … you and me … then us and her. It couldn’t happen, not this way.…”
“But it did, Zoe, it did happen!” Drew was on his feet, surprising himself with the sudden lurch up from the ground. He wavered for a moment, then straightened himself and said, “Zoe, it’s truly me, and he’s Clay. Look at us! Remember the train? You were the first one to go, back there in …”
“Indiana …,” said Zoe, belief coming to her now in small ripples of acceptance. “But how can this have happened …?”
Drew shrugged, and pulled so exaggeratedly comical a face he made Clay laugh, and Zoe found herself laughing also, a nervous, skittering laugh that tripped glancingly across the improbabilities, the sheer impossibilities standing between the likelihood of such a reunion, at this time and place. All three had been utterly ignorant of one another, and then, in a trice, were laughing and crying and believing, accepting the bumptious miracle wrought, it seemed, by whiskey’s loquacious tendency and whatever etheric stirrings the finger of fortune had contributed. It was them. They were hers, part of her missing flesh and blood returned to her. She felt her head might explode, and realized the thing swelling her from within like a balloon was joy, simple and unstoppable, eager to be let free.
She took several steps toward her brothers, and Drew put his arms around her thin shoulders. Clay found his feet and lunged at them with opened arms, so tall he swept them both up and held them tight. Zoe was ashamed of the mewling sound coming from her throat, but could not make it quit. The men lost to her were brought back. Brothers and sister, they stood together, their bodies held closer than the embrace of any husband or wife or lover, and they continued standing so until their heads leaned even closer, and they inhaled the breath of their other selves and wept.
51
For two days they talked, holding back nothing of themselves. Clay told for the first time of his experiences hunting down the killer mistakenly known as Slade in the desert, and of Omie’s unwitting help in keeping him alive; Omie herself had no memory of it, and remained silent throughout most of the three-way exposition filling the cabin. Drew was stunned to learn that Kindred had not only survived but gone on to search for the human soul, first with a foolish machine, then with a hatchet.
Zoe confessed to having murdered a man who attempted to rape her on the trail across Missouri, and wished she had done the same to the man who gave her Omie. “Don’t feel so bad,” Clay told her. “I burned down his barn.” She admitted also to having married Leo Brannan while being unsure if Bryce Aspinall still lived. “He’s dead now, though,” she added, and showed them the tattered newspaper clipping sent by her anonymous friend in Glory Hole. “I believe it was Leo who arranged it. He sent someone to kill us both in Durango.”
“Does he know a fellow by the name of Jones in Denver?” Clay asked.
“I have no idea who his acquaintances are.”
Clay apologized to Zoe before stating that he and Fay had been hired to steal Omie away from her, using Fay’s line of contact with Drew. Zoe said, “Leo has not expressed any interest in Omie for a long time, since she isn’t his by blood. No, this man Jones must want her for other reasons.”
“Well, he won’t get her,” said Drew, “and he won’t get you either, not with Clay and me standing in between.”
Delving into the finer details of their biographies, Clay learned that Drew had been among the visitors to the cabin in Wyoming where the Bentine brothers hid from the law and met their deaths at the hands of Lodi’s outfit.
“God Almighty,” said Clay. “We were within talking distance of each other when I snuck down to look through the window there.”
Everyone laughed over the fact that Drew had attempted to take Zoe’s ring during the Buena Vista holdup, and been prevented from doing so by Omie, who was called “my little watchdog” by Zoe for her defense against Leo’s hired killer in a dress.
Feeling somewhat left out by so much revelation, Fay stated again that she had not betrayed Lodi, and had only joined forces with Clay under the direction of the mysterious Mr. Jones because she wanted to see Drew again. “I just can’t get used to not calling you Bones anymore.”
They discussed over and over the simple things that had separated them, and the complex things that had drawn them together again, and when the intertwining of their lives was fully comprehended, the Dugans were faced with deciding if it had been the workings of destiny, or sheer coincidence that effected the reunion; if just one small incident in any one of their lives had been different, the chances of their coming together as they had would have been impossible. It was the biggest question of them all, and the most imponderable.
“It happened the way it happened,” said Clay at last, on the afternoon of the second day, “and we ought to be thankful it did, that’s all.”
“So now we have to ask—what next?”
Zoe understood Drew’s comment; should they stay where they were and await the coming of Lodi, or should they leave and begin again, as a family, in some other place far from Colorado. She had told them of the money sequestered in a safe place, almost a million dollars, more than enough to support them for life, and yet she wished to stay and administer further vengeance on Leo, for his betrayal of her and his attempts at murder by proxy.
“He has not suffered an appropriate loss,” she said, “and I intend that he should. I don’t expect assistance from anyone, if they don’t wish to play a part in what I have planned. That will be Lodi’s job, if he accepts it.”
“We’re in it too,” Drew assured her, but Clay was silent. He was being asked, despite Zoe’s assertion to the contrary, to participate in a train robbery. He had spent all his adult life in furtherance and loose application of the law, and punishment for those who broke it. He did not imagine he was himself a perfect man, a moral exemplar above reproach, but he had never broken the law. Now his newly restored sister expected it of him, by way of a family obligation to redress the wrongs that had been perpetrated upon her. It was Zoe’s fight, Zoe’s cause, but he could not shrug off his own responsibility for a choice. Choosing right over wrong was implicit in his view of the world. Leo Brannan was a despicable man, and a robbery committed at his expense was probably no grievous ethical transgression, if posited within the larger picture, but the dilemma confronting him caused Clay several minutes of moral anguish. Law versus family: it was as simple as that. They were all waiting for his answer, but he could not give it, not yet.
“Think I’ll take a stroll before sundown,” he said, and went outside to be alone.
The pines were moving softly in a cool breeze, the whisper of their needles calming. Clay walked among them, debating with himself the course of action or inaction he should pursue, but no resolution came to mind that was not swept away again by powerful arguments opposing it. He attempted to solve the impasse by standi
ng still, but that gave him no deliverance at all, and so he walked on, weighing his options—there were only two, as distinct as black and white—and asking himself for guidance, since he did not believe in seeking it from God.
Racked by his own weakness, still unable to decide, Clay sat on a fallen tree, its trunk turned to rock-hard grayness, and placed his long chin in his hands. Zoe was his sister, and had been wronged. Brannan was no friend of Clay’s, a multimillionaire whose wealth was based on Omie’s gift of second sight. He did not truly deserve what Zoe wished to take away from him, and it was not as though she wanted everything he owned, just one thing, the very symbol of his pride and his decadence. But Zoe’s way was against the book of law, and Brannan’s property was made sacrosanct within that same ponderous volume, not a single page of which Clay had actually studied. He sat in disconsolate thought, reaching for the courage to choose.
He became aware of Omie’s presence through a discreet tugging at the left side of his brain. She stood a short distance away, her blotched face partially hidden by shadows and foliage. Clay smiled at her. They had not talked, face-to-face, since she had knocked him down with her waves of invisible rage two days before.
“Come on over and keep me company,” he called, and she moved shyly closer, until they were separated by only a few yards. Clay felt she was still afraid of and confused by him, just as he had been of her.
“I will never hurt you,” he said. “Those times when we saw each other before, in the dreams, that was another kind of seeing, and we didn’t know then what we both know now. I’m your uncle, and I’m your friend. Drew’s your uncle and your friend too, but just between you and me, I think we’ve got something special, because we knew each other a long time ago, at least to look at. So that’s the way it is, and you don’t need to be afraid anymore, not of me, because I’m blood of your blood, and there isn’t a closer tie.”
“Mama said so,” agreed Omie.
“And she’s right, the way mamas should be.”
“You can’t make up your mind,” Omie said, “can you?”
“No, I can’t. Do you know what it is I can’t make up my mind about? Can you see it inside me?”
“Whether to rob a train for Mama or not.”
“That’s it. Any advice?”
“You don’t need to.”
“Don’t need to what?”
“Decide. I saw you there already.”
“Saw me where?”
“On the train, robbing it. Drew’s there too, and the hummingbird.”
“What hummingbird?”
“The one that’s there.”
Clay waited a moment to organize his question, then asked, “Have you seen the robbery that hasn’t happened yet?”
“I just told you,” said Omie, a hint of vexation creeping into her voice.
“Me and Drew and a hummingbird.”
“Yes.”
“No one else? You can’t rob a train with just two men.”
“That’s all I saw.”
“So I don’t need to make up my mind about being there, because you’ve already seen that I will be.”
Omie nodded. The dead pine needles around her boots were swirling slowly, like iron filings drawn by magnets into spiking arcs that crawled as if alive. Clay felt the hairs on his neck rise, and hid his consternation behind a crooked smile.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” said Omie, and he understood from her thoughts that she was referring to the parade of needles around her ankles. “It just happens.”
“Yes, it just happens. Sometimes I think everything just … happens, only sometimes it looks like it was meant to happen, and maybe it is. You say I’ll be there on the train, and I haven’t even decided to be there, so maybe it’ll happen because it was meant to, like everything else. Or maybe not. I don’t understand any of it, do you?”
“No.”
“But I’ll be there anyway.”
“Yes.”
Clay laughed softly. The horns of this dilemma had grown around and joined, forming a circle, trapping him inside. “Maybe we should go back to the others,” he said, and they did so, hand in hand, with a cold wind blowing around them.
Fay was left out. She knew the Dugans all were attempting to include her in their conversations, but what was there for her to contribute? Her own life had nothing to do with their lives; even her affection for Drew was the merest conjunction of lines on a page, crossing each other for an instant as they aimed themselves in different directions. This time, here at the cabin, was probably the centerpiece of those crossed lines, and even then she could not have him to herself, had barely spoken to or touched him since the first evening. Fay had once worked as a waitress at a fashionable restaurant in Saint Louis, and remembered the vague sense of dislocation encountered each time she approached a table of friends who were eagerly talking, one with another, her presence beside them barely noticed, an adjunct to the scene, not a part of it.
She listened now as she had listened then, and felt Drew taken from her by the voices of his kin. She supposed she loved him, but was worldly enough to know such feelings might change if he was forever at her side, whispering sugar talk into her ear. The further he was taken from her, the more she wanted his return, his eyes on her, his body beside her own again. But he was smitten by the past, by the springing to life of shadows left behind; he could not get enough of Clay and Zoe and his peculiar niece, spent every moment with one or another or all of them, and spared no part of himself for Fay. She began to mope, but he did not notice this either, and for a while Fay became angry, then she began sinking into a genuine sadness.
There had been a number of men who passed through her life and her bed without leaving much of an impression on either, but Drew was different. He was decent, without being the fool many decent men were, and he was not rough and uncaring when they held each other naked; in short, he met the minimum requirements for love. Fay had never allowed herself to love before, and now that she had found a man worth opening her heart for, he was swept away on tides of fantastic circumstance, of joyous reunion and the brighter light of rekindled family involvement. Fay had never shared anything of herself with her mother, and her father had been absent more often than not. She envied Drew his rediscovery, even as she became more jealous of the man and woman and girl who monopolized his days and nights with their remembrances and plans. She should not have felt that way, she knew, but could not stop herself.
For Omie, everything had changed. The sudden introduction into her life of two uncles, each very different from the other, was so disconcerting she did not know what to think, how to feel. It was clear Mama was made happy by what had happened, but Omie had grown used to being Zoe’s only protector, was proud of her role, and saw it whisked away almost from the moment Clay and Drew revealed themselves for who they were. It was their job now to make sure no harm came to Mama, and that left Omie with nothing inside her but a forlorn kind of gladness over the smile creasing her mother’s face with unaccustomed regularity. She felt abandoned, without fully comprehending why, and so she upset small things around the cabin to remind everyone she was still there, still a force in Zoe’s life to be reckoned with.
She had liked Drew very much before learning he was her uncle, back when he was still Doogle, the man she had taken away from jail, but his true identity had distanced them, and Omie turned her awesome attentions to the other uncle, the one she had always called the tall man. Where Drew was handsome, Clay was fascinatingly ugly, the ragged scars on his cheeks where the holes had healed over a thing she caught herself staring at often, and Clay often caught her staring, but never by a word or a look let her know he thought her rude for inspecting his ugliness. Looking inside him, she saw a man of great and constant sorrows, a darkly flickering flame of a man, not so dreadful to look upon as his fleshly self. The hidden Clay was more to Omie’s liking, and she decided he was her favorite after all, especially since the new lady who had come with Clay had eyes that followed
Drew everywhere. Omie could have beaten her off if she chose, but was magnanimous in relinquishing Drew to Fay; she had the more interesting man after all.
Dogging his steps to the fallen tree had been a good idea. He talked to her and shared a little of his inner self, speaking of things inside him Omie already knew of. She had done her best to help him by sharing her own thoughts, the ones that came to her from time-yet-to-be, and he seemed to appreciate her comfort. She had, as she told him, seen Clay there on the train that would be robbed, and Drew also, and a hummingbird for which she had no explanation. What she did not tell Clay was that she had seen herself there too.
On the third day, Omie pointed to the east and said, “They’re coming.” An hour or so later, Lodi and Nate entered the clearing and rode across to the cabin. Confronted by strangers and the woman he thought responsible for his being chased away from the Cortez hideout, Lodi said nothing as he dismounted. He simply beckoned to Drew, who followed him to the corral. Nate unsaddled the horses while Lodi walked Drew further away.
“Where’s Levon?” Drew asked.
“Stayed in Carbondale to visit with his uncle a few days. Bones, I know you’ve got a reason for having all these people here, and I’m curious to hear it.”
“The lady with one arm and her girl are the ones who got me out of the Leadville jail.”
“I heard about that. Who’s the one with the face like death?”
“My brother.”
“Never knew you had one. Is he someone we can use?”
“Ask him that.”
“What’s that bitch doing here, Bones?”
“She’s not the one who sold you out. It was the land agent you bought that place from. You should’ve used a different alias.”
“Land agent? Says who?”
“A man called Jones, some big wheel in Denver. He told Fay when he hired her along with Clay—that’s my brother.”
“Hired them for what?”
“To kidnap Omie—that’s my niece.”
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