Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  Drew saw the light himself now, a dim glow reflecting poorly around wooden curves, suggesting the source was not far behind. Drew paused and listened to the sound of the engine; it had slowed even more, almost to the point of stalling on the track. He had suggested this might happen when Omie presented her plan; with an engine crew paralyzed by fear, the boiler would very likely not be attended to, and the train would come to a halt long before it could reach the end of the shed, especially since it would be laboring against an uphill grade. “Then go in and meet it before that happens,” Fay had suggested, with a touch of sarcasm; Fay was not inclined to look upon the Dugans with favor, not when they had money to burn, yet insisted on doing what they intended doing. “You Dugans,” she had said to Drew, “you think you’ve got the right to do what you want. Well, you haven’t. Don’t do this stupid thing. I won’t help you do it. You’re a bunch of crazy people even to think of it.” Drew was aware that Fay simply wanted to hold greater influence over him than his brother and sister and niece did, and he knew there was no real chance that Fay would succeed, not against those odds.

  The light ahead was growing brighter. Now the lamp on the engine’s nose shone into his eyes, and the walls either side of Drew were suddenly less threatening; he could see thin white lines between the boards where snow had pushed through. He could smell the smoke that spilled occasionally into the lamp’s beam, diluting its glare, and with that smell came another, which Drew recognized instinctively as the rank odor of human panic and fear. He could not tell what might have happened aboard the train, but it was clear that Omie’s fog of panic and distraction had penetrated as deeply as planned, and wrought some fundamental change. Drew turned out his lantern in case someone aboard the engine was still peering ahead with his hands on the throttle, although that seemed unlikely, given the sluggish progress it was making toward him. He kept on walking, keeping his head tilted slightly down so the locomotive’s lamp, blindingly bright now, was hidden by his hatbrim. The smell lurking behind the smoke was thick in his nostrils, and Drew was forced to stop and vomit again between the rails. He leaned against the shed wall, stomach lurching in dry spasms, his head suddenly filled with a need to be still, for fear of encountering some deeper morass of pure terror. The train would have to come to him.

  And come it did, at an increasingly slower pace. Eventually the snowblade slid past Drew’s knees, and he readied himself for a fast climb up the iron ladder into the cab. The drive wheels went rolling by; the ladder was visible in the light spilling from the cab, and Drew reached for it. Climbing inside, he saw two men on the floor and one at the controls, but that man appeared to be as dead as the first two, despite his upright position on the driver’s seat. Drew attempted to take the gauntleted hand from the throttle, but it seemed to be frozen there in some kind of death rigor, so he maneuvered the man’s entire arm instead, and fed more power to the wheels. That done, he opened the firebox and began shoveling coal inside to keep up steam pressure. The locomotive responded gradually. Drew kept feeding the firebox until he could see daylight seeping along the snow shed walls.

  Clay picked up Omie and carried her aside when it became clear she had no intention of moving out of the way. The engine rolled past while she was still in his arms. Clay saw Drew wave from the cab window, and set Omie down on her feet beside her mother. The tender came next, then a boxcar with a number of bullet holes in its sides, holes that had been blasted from within; and then came the flatcar bearing the golden elk, its glory tarnished now by oily smoke. The rest of the train was gone.

  Drew applied the brakes, then jumped down to apprise Clay of the three men in the cab. “I thought they were dead in there, but they’re all still breathing.” Together they entered the boxcar and found seven men dead of gunshot wounds, and one other, without a scratch, who sat facing a corner, muttering nonsense to himself. “All the live ones get put off here,” Clay said, “before they wake up and start shooting.” Three of the four living men were lifted down and placed in open sunlight beside the track, but the driver could not be prized from his throttle. Clay said, “All right, let him stay. I’m not going to break a man’s arms.”

  Throughout these preparations, Omie stared wordlessly at the elk. It had come to her as it said it would, but now that the creature of her dreams was made real before her eyes, she experienced a pang of disappointment. It was only a statue after all, even if it was made of gold, and in no way resembled the splendid animal that had stepped through her mind so long ago, leaving its cloven prints there. When her uncle Clay had stepped forward from her skull and into her life, Omie’s reaction had been intense, a rush of fear and anger, but even though the golden elk now stood within touching distance at last, she felt almost nothing. Clay and Drew had talked of dead men inside the boxcar; Omie supposed she had done that, and did not want to see them. There were not supposed to be any dead men aboard the train, only men who had fainted out of sheer dread. It had all gone wrong, even if the object of the plan had been delivered.

  Zoe stood gazing at the elk also, seeing in its greasy flanks the sorry spectacle of her husband’s hubris. It was a magnificent yet pathetic monument to Leo’s aspirations, a thing that rightly belonged to a girl, and now the girl had taken back what was hers. The cost, though, was high. Zoe went with Fay to examine the boxcar, and both got no further than the doorway. The dead lay sprawled in their own blood, surrounded by the fallen weaponry that had brought about their deaths. It was impossible to see Omie as the cause, but difficult to exonerate themselves, the adults who had permitted, and even encouraged, Omie to do what she had done.

  Zoe and Fay and Omie climbed into the engine cab, and Drew set the train rolling. No one spoke as the miles between the snow shed and the Sky Gorge bridge were covered. The final act in Zoe’s revenge would be completed with an air of somber detachment, one last move necessary for the public humiliation of Leo Brannan.

  Drew stopped the train midway across the trestle. The women remained in the cab while he and Clay let themselves down onto the narrow walkway alongside the rails and carefully made their way back to the flatcar and began releasing the ropes and chains binding the elk to its wooden bed. Far below, the cataract tumbled and roared. No man knew its depth, but the waters raced so swiftly through the narrow defile they were never able to freeze, even in the coldest months of winter. The elk would be held forever beneath a foaming maelstrom of whiteness.

  “Hold it,” said Clay.

  Lodi and Nate were walking along the bridge between the rails, approaching them from the rear. The last of the elk’s bonds had been thrown aside by then. Drew had his pistol; Clay’s shotgun was back along the line, with the horses, since gunplay had never been anticipated. Lodi was smiling, Nate was not.

  “Seems I didn’t give the little lady her due,” said Lodi, swinging up onto the flatcar’s end. Nate joined him.

  “Seems like,” said Clay. “Want to give us a hand tipping this big fellow over the side?”

  “Be glad to, but we’d like to take what you might call a souvenir first.”

  “Nobody takes anything,” said Drew. “It goes into the water just like it is.”

  “That’s a waste of gold, don’t you think?” reasoned Lodi.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Here’s what we want, Nate and me. We want an antler each. That sounds kind of strange, don’t it, but that’s what we want. We figure they can be taken off easy, being small at the base. We even came prepared. Show them, Nate.”

  Nate produced a heavy blacksmith’s hammer from beneath his coat. Clay noticed the hammer was in Nate’s left hand, leaving his gun hand free.

  “Nobody takes any part of the elk,” Drew said again. “We took it, so it’s ours to do with as we please.”

  “Ordinarily I’d agree with you,” said Lodi, still smiling, “but there’s nothing ordinary about any of this, not to my mind, so we’ll just be taking a small chunk of that crittur, if you please. Why don’t you two take a leg each yoursel
ves, maybe? Nate’ll lend you the hammer, won’t you, Nate?”

  “Sure will.”

  “Get off this train,” said Clay. “You never wanted any part of this deal, so no part of it is what you’ll get.”

  “Where’s Levon?” asked Drew. “Is he out there somewhere with a rifle on us?”

  “Levon went to Carbondale. He’s not in on this.”

  “And neither are you,” Clay said. “Get going.”

  “Can’t do it,” said Lodi, drawing his gun. “I’ll thank you both to let us do what’s right. Throwing a million-dollar elk into eternity, that’s just plain wasteful, so step back now and don’t make trouble where none’s needed.”

  Drew pulled his Colt fast, but Lodi shot him faster, and Nate stepped forward to put three more bullets into him. Drew felt each one slam into his body. He should have kept his gun holstered and tried to reason with Lodi, or waited until Nate was on top of the elk, hammering at the antlers. He had been hasty, and soon he would be dead. He had not been smart. This was what happened to a man who was not smart enough. He had always considered himself smarter than most, but here was the proof that it wasn’t so.

  He felt pain in his chest and stomach, but the pain was not close to him. The pain was happening to some other man. Instead of pain, Drew felt the tiny breeze created by a hummingbird’s frantically beating wings as it hovered before his face. He had seen the hummingbird inside his hat while the gang waited to rob the payroll train, but he had seen it one other time before that, years ago, but only now recalled the incident. He had gone fishing along the Mohawk River with Clay, back in Schenectady, before their father left the Dugans on their own. It had been a warm August day, and Drew had fallen asleep on the riverbank, to be awakened by the hummingbird. It had hovered before his slowly opening eyelids, a shimmering bauble suspended in the air on blurred wings, just inches from his nose, and Drew had marveled at its loveliness, its body an exquisite ornament held before him like some impossible promise. He had stared at the hummingbird and felt his heart fill with an emotion that could not be named, and when the brilliant creature suddenly dived away and was lost to sight, he felt a sense of loss that could not be borne. Clay had asked why he was crying, and Drew had been unable to answer. Now the hummingbird had returned to fan him with its tiny wings again, and peer at him with the jet beads of its eyes, and assure him there was nothing to fear, just a long sleep on the riverbank, and an eventual awakening that would surprise him very much. Drew gave the hummingbird his thanks, and fell into an inexorable vortex.

  Clay felt his limbs turn to lead. His brother lay on the flat-car with a curious smile on his face. Drew looked very young, younger than he had in life. He was a boy again, a dying boy, too young for death but dying anyway, and Clay, unarmed, could do nothing but watch him die, and feel inside himself the beginnings of a hole, that familiar hole he had always known since the orphan train separated them, and now, on this other train, he was parted from Drew again, this time forever, and there was nothing he could do, nothing to halt the separation, nothing to punish the separators, whose crime against the brothers was magnified by the smallness of the time they had shared together before flying apart again. It was more than a crime, it was a sin, and Clay could do nothing to punish the sinners, could only look at the handsome face of his brother, lost, then found, only to be lost a second time, and feel all over again the opening of the hole within himself that only a living Drew could occupy. He felt the hole growing inside him as Drew’s eyes closed upon the world, until the hole was everything, without dimension or end, a yawning emptiness beyond calculation or reconciliation, simply a hole wherein he would have to spend the remainder of his days.

  “You get back now,” Lodi warned, “or you’ll get the same. I mean it. Nate, get working with that hammer.”

  Nate holstered his gun and leapt onto the back of the elk. The hammer was drawn from his coat and raised to strike a first blow against the unsullied golden head, when the side of his neck blew out in a fountain of blood. Nate fell slowly from the beast, his hammer falling onto the flatcar near the golden hooves. Lodi raised his own pistol too late; a bullet took him in the chest, and he staggered several steps backward, bumping his spine against the elk’s hindquarters before the second bullet tore away his temple and he slid down the elk’s back legs onto the flatcar’s bed and lay still, his head inches from Nate’s left boot.

  Clay turned. Zoe stood atop the fuel tender, her arm and pistol still outstretched.

  There seemed nothing else to do but follow their plan, though it had gone disastrously awry. Clay set about using the firebox shovel to try and tip over the elk. He could not bear to think of Drew, lying nearby; the elk had to disappear, be gone from the flatcar, or Drew had died for nothing. Lodi had been right; it was a robbery committed by fools. Now there was nothing to do but finish things off the way they had planned, and be done with it. The women helped him, shoving at the elk’s belly, but it did little more than rock on its hooves an inch or two each way. With Drew’s help and a couple of long crowbars, the job might have been accomplished. Without him, it seemed hopeless.

  Now Omie had only one uncle. The handsome one was gone, lying in a sprawl no different from those of the men who had killed him. She kept thinking of a hummingbird, but did not understand why. No one else was looking at Drew. They were all trying to push the statue off the train. It would tumble down and splash into the roaring waters so very far beneath them, and be lost forever. But they could not move it. Omie threw the weight of her inner self at the elk, and saw it shudder. The others felt it too, and without being aware that it was Omie who caused it to shift, they leaned against it with all their might. Omie had to smile crookedly at that. They were not capable, all three, of doing with their bodies what she knew she could do without even touching the elk. She poured hatred into it, for the death of Drew, and for the men who had done it, and for the fathers who had left her, and the man dressed as a woman who had come to kill her, and for all that was not good among the teeming pastures of the earth.

  And the elk began to lean outward, its antlers like toppling trees, its hooves on the near side lifting free of the flatcar’s planks. It trembled on two legs, perfectly balanced, until Omie gave it a final contemptuous shove. The elk fell stiffly over the edge without even touching the bridge, and by the time everyone but Omie had rushed to see it hit the water, the elk had already vanished, the commotion of its landing whipped away instantly by the rushing torrent below. It was as if the statue had disappeared into the very air of Sky Gorge, disassembled its own trillion atoms for dispersement on the wind.

  With its passing came an end to the misadventure. They returned to the cab, and Clay mimicked Drew’s various manipulations of the engine’s levers until he discovered how to throw the train into reverse. The driver sat as before on his seat, eyes fixed on the tracks ahead even as his train returned to the snow shed. He was not aware of the passengers in his cab, nor of their careful removal, as the locomotive stood and panted steam, of a young dead man from the flatcar. He did not react when Clay climbed back into the cab and set the throttle for a slow climb up the grade again, this time with the intention of reaching Glory Hole.

  Clay jumped down when the wheels began to turn, then lifted and carried his brother away into the trees where the horses were tied.

  55

  Leo was waiting at the station when his train arrived more than an hour late. It was in fact just half a train, and its engineer rammed the locomotive slowly into the barriers at the end of the line. The man was found to be in some kind of trance, from which he was not to recover for several days, and even then he was unable to recall anything, including the two dead men on an otherwise empty flatcar that should have carried a golden elk. The ropes and chains were there, but the elk was not.

  The boxcar contained more dead men. As the crowd that had gathered to see the elk milled about the train, a telegram from Leadville was handed to Leo. It explained the missing boxcar and caboos
e, but contained no word on Leo’s elk. Subsequent investigation along the track before the day was done found three men by the Glory Hole end of the snow shed. These men, like the engineer, were without coherent memory of the events that had left them where they were found. Three bodies, one female, were discovered at the Leadville end of the shed. The circumstances surrounding their deaths were explained by the Pinkerton agent in charge, although he could not deny the three had attacked the train with nothing more lethal than snowballs.

  In the days following the arrival of the half-train, Lovey Doll waited with some trepidation for Leo to make known to her his wishes concerning their future together. She drank heavily while waiting, knowing he must have been driven almost to the point of madness by the disappearance of their precious elk, as was she. When finally he did arrive at her door, he bore a bottle of champagne tied about the neck with a red silk ribbon.

  “I’ll hear not a single word tonight about The Mystery,” he said, employing the term the newspapers had coined. “Not a word, do you hear?”

  “Yes, Leo.”

  “One of those fellows they found, he was your friend, the one who gave you the casket. Can you tell me what in heaven’s name he was doing out there?”

  “I understood you wanted no mention of the incident, Leo.”

  “Answer me!”

  “I … have no idea why he was there.…”

  “So you had no part in this business, Lovey Doll?”

  It was the first time he had used her real name. Lovey Doll wondered if this represented a new and more honest beginning for them, or the end of whatever it was that Leo felt for her. But if he had come with finality in mind, why had he brought champagne?

  Noticing the direction of her gaze, Leo said, “To celebrate our betrothal, my sweet.” His smile was meager, but she forgave him. Despite his concerns over what already was being referred to as “The Theft of the Century,” he had come to her with a message of love and reconciliation. She was forgiven her lies, and Lovey Doll decided at that moment she would forgive Leo his deplorable physical assaults upon her person. Now everything would be different, she was sure. Maybe, in some perverse manner, the inexplicable theft of the elk had summoned in Leo the lineaments of a better man, the man he once had been. Lovey Doll smiled with genuine hope as the bottle was uncorked.