Power in the Blood (35 page)

On her second day she applied at those places she had avoided on the first, but the meaner hotels and hash houses were as uninterested in her plight as their more prosperous competition. Zoe returned to Omie with dragging feet, and together they went out to eat a cheap meal in silence. This was to be their last night at the hotel. Zoe rehearsed her story, hoping to find the proprietor in a charitable frame of mind come morning. He had seemed friendly enough on Zoe’s arrival, and might countenance a rent-free period of several days, just until she found work.

This hope was short-lived. The proprietor listened with sympathy, but could offer Zoe nothing more than a promise to hold her luggage and effects in the back room until she found somewhere else to stay, rather than subject her to carrying these possessions with her around the town. Zoe asked if he could find work for her, however lowly, on the premises. He regretted he could not.

Futile as it might be, Zoe went out to comb the streets again for some kind of employment, this time taking Omie with her. She would even have considered a position as laundress, truly a backbreaking profession, had one been available, but Leadville’s laundry was monopolized by Chinese, and Zoe found their appearance and alien chatter intimidating, and so did not apply among them for a job she would not have been given in any case.

As if directed by fate, she found herself in the afternoon standing outside Gods of the Dance, inspecting with resignation its unlovely facade, the cheap gilt of its sign and the tawdriness of the colored lamps awaiting the evening to be made bright and beckoning. She had known even as she turned the corner that the dance hall was her destination. It took all her strength to push open the doors. The sight of Omie walking through under her arm gave Zoe gooseflesh; a child had no place inside such a den of vice.

The place seemed unnaturally quiet without music or dancers, and the smell of tobacco smoke was considerably less. She approached a middle-aged man sweeping the floor, and for one mad moment considered begging him to relinquish his broom, hand it and his job to her that she might avoid the pit yawning to receive her. No mother should have had to be in that place with her daughter, simply to pay for food and rent. The world was a heartless place, if something or someone did not intervene to prevent Zoe from taking the step she intended taking.

“Help you?” asked the man, pausing to look up.

“Is … Mr. Taffy here?”

“In the office. Know where that is?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Zoe went to the door and knocked. Taffy’s voice ordered her in. She allowed Omie to enter first, perhaps as unconscious emissary of goodness to ward off what was to come. Taffy, however, expressed no surprise. “Good afternoon, ladies.” He beamed: He offered Omie the use of his swiveling chair to distract her while he directed Zoe to the settee. “You don’t look well, Mrs. Dugan,” he said, taking his ease at the settee’s far end.

“The weather is warm.”

“For hereabouts, yes.”

Zoe stared at the floor, unable to explain her presence there, knowing no explanation was required.

19

Clay’s quest for further authority in the region was aided by an act of God—the county seat was struck by a devastating tornado and demolished almost completely. Rather than rebuild, most of the inhabitants packed up their few remaining possessions and moved to Keyhoe, which, with the sudden influx of population swelling its electoral rolls, became qualified virtually overnight to assume the mantle of county seat. The former county sheriff having been literally borne away on the wind (his body was identified some weeks later, much gnawed upon by wildlife, recognizable only because of the badge still pinned to a remnant of shirt), it became clear to the citizens of Keyhoe that Clay Dugan should inherit the late officeholder’s powers of arrest and enforcement.

A hasty election was held. There was no real competition against Clay, and he won an easy victory. Some townspeople were disturbed, in the days that followed, to learn that Clay Dugan had no intention of relinquishing his other badge, that of town marshal, simply to accommodate the newer piece of metal sharing his vest. It was clear he considered himself capable of handling both jobs from the one office, and banking both salaries. “Neither one’s what you’d call princely,” he explained.

When a newspaper editorial suggested there might be something unconstitutional about one man wearing two badges, Clay made it known he didn’t give a damn what the editor thought, so long as the arrangement was acceptable to the people of Keyhoe and to the state government that paid him to maintain the law and strike down or otherwise apprehend those individuals caught flouting it.

Most people thought Clay’s attitude showed gumption, and a rival sheet, newly arrived to set up its presses from the ruins of the former county seat, seized upon the local man’s gaffe and proclaimed its endorsement of Clay Dugan for sheriff, marshal, chief alderman, tax collector and dogcatcher. Readership loyalty shifted from one paper to its fledgling rival overnight, and Clay’s unusual position was confirmed by public opinion.

To his wife, however, Clay was less than a hero. Sophie was convinced that only she could see him for what he was—a meanspirited man who thought only of Clay Dugan, to the detriment of all others, principally herself. It was true, he appeared to dote upon their son, but Sophie suspected he did this only because Silan was an extension of himself, a kind of mirror in which to admire his own reflected glory.

It irritated her beyond measure to see people nodding to her husband on the street, as if they were his proud owners. His nodding in return to the men, or smooth touching of fingertip to hatbrim for the benefit of the women, struck Sophie as the quintessence of hypocrisy. She knew for a fact that he despised almost everyone in town for a fool or weakling who could not stand up to a stiff breeze without the assistance of hired help. That was his puzzling description of his twin professions—hired help—yet he made no secret of his enjoyment in their practice.

Sophie concluded that this was because the work allowed him to be a bully. He enjoyed his dominance over others in a way her first husband never could have done; Grover Stunce may have been a man of extensive personal limitation, never truly comfortable with the power that was his to wield, but no one could ever have characterized him as a bully. Sophie felt it should be possible to make people do what the law obliged them to, without smashing the side of their head with a sawed-off shotgun, or emptying its barrels into the more obstreperous of them. No, there should be a method somewhere between Grover’s benign fumbling and Clay’s remorseless administering of public order.

An even greater source of Sophie’s anger was his behavior at home. Clay did not love his wife, probably never had, and took no pains to hide this unpleasant truth from her. He never bothered to approach her as a wife anymore, and spent his sleeping hours alone on the sofa. It was the final insult, this rejection of her flesh. She heard no whisper, saw no evidence of another woman, but such a figure began stalking her thoughts more often. Was Clay so inhuman as to have no need of the marriage bed? His purely masculine needs should have directed him to her, whatever the state of their love. His abstinence was wholly unnatural, and Sophie saw herself as its victim. She had her needs, and not one of them, apart from being maintained in a comfortable home, was being met by her husband. He spoke seldom, and would not respond when she cautiously broached the subject of their life together.

Sophie’s only comfort was Silan. He was a loving boy, still too young to be aware of the gulf separating his parents. When he was with Sophie, he enjoyed following her from room to room as she performed the domestic chores, and even offered to assist her with them. That endearing habit ceased when Clay came home unexpectedly one afternoon, to find Silan happily washing dishes. Clay ripped the apron from him and said, his voice heavy with controlled anger, “Don’t you ever do that again, boy. That’s women’s work, not something for you to be getting into, you hear me?”

“Yessir.”

Clay looked forward to teaching Silan the things a boy should know: riding and shooting. Silan told his mother he wanted to be the sheriff and the marshal himself when he grew up, just like Papa. Sophie gave him a sickly smile and informed him that there remained plenty of time in which to find his own path in life. Silan’s expression indicated that he didn’t see the need for being anything other than what his tall and famous papa was. Sophie felt heartsick for days afterward.

Clay rode Sunrise as often as his official capacity allowed. Being responsible for the entire county, he was able to ride its length and breadth whenever he chose, and would often take the time to serve legal papers or collect small fines from the county’s furthest corners himself, rather than send one of his two deputies. Clay knew why he did this; it was simply to escape from his wife and the town of Keyhoe for a while. Alone beneath a sky so broad it appeared curved, he could appreciate what it meant to be himself. Not husband or father, not lawman: just plain Clay Dugan.

The feelings that invaded him on these extended rides among the badlands of his inner self disturbed Clay. He could not quite get a handle on precisely who he was. The things that defined him—his twin badges, his shotgun, his horse of many colors, which had become every bit as much of his popular image as the healed-over holes in his cheeks—were not enough to reassure him that he was indeed the person everyone accepted as their custodian, their guardian. Was anyone standing guard over Clay? He felt something missing, some essential part of himself that was nearby but separate from him: a key; a dislodged brick from some wall around a secret.

He wondered if the missing part of himself was so obvious a thing as the brother and sister he had thrown away hope of ever finding. Could the answer be so simple? The clearly limned portraits his memory had retained of Drew and Zoe were blurred now, reduced to a few facial expressions and bodily or vocal characteristics that he was aware were being steadily eroded by time. Once, alone by a campfire, he felt a presence so strongly beside him he snatched up his weapon and turned to the darkness in fear. He thought he saw a girl standing just beyond the firelight’s reach, a girl with some kind of partial mask over her eyes, but then she was gone, probably a fragment of a waking dream Clay had not even been aware was taking place within his mind. Shaken, he built up the fire, then found himself crying, his mustache soaking up the inexplicable tears.

One of Clay’s pleasures on these lonely rides around his county was the sight of his horse cropping grass in the shining moments just before and just after the appearance of light in the sky. So aptly named, Sunrise glowed like a spectral creature from an earlier time, a fairy horse stripped of wings, confined to earth until some magical spell could be broken. The sight always moved Clay in ways beyond his understanding.

He found cause for sorrow in the fact that his senses were never so moved as when he saw Sunrise at the special time of dawning. He should have felt such wonder when looking at his wife and child, but he did not. Even Silan could not provoke in Clay’s chest the same elation, the same sense of perfection, as Sunrise, a dumb beast. The fault for this misplacement of emotion lay in himself, he was sure. He was an incomplete man. Those parts of himself that were present were arranged in all the wrong places, and it seemed there was nothing he could do about it.

Silan always expressed admiration for Sunrise. He begged Clay often to let him share the saddle on the colored horse, and was always refused. “He’s too tall for you, boy. When you’re older I’ll get you a pony of your own.”

“You could hold me on. Why can’t I, just for a little while?”

“Because I say. He’s my horse, and I’m your father, so you heed what I tell you if you don’t want a switching.”

“You never switched me yet, so I don’t believe you.”

Clay laughed. He knew he indulged his son. “Comes a first time for everything, so you watch your tongue, you hear?”

“But can I ride on Sunrise with you?”

“No, and don’t be pestering me again about it.”

Sophie overheard this exchange in the yard from the kitchen window. There was never awkwardness between Clay and the boy, the way there was between husband and wife. Inside the man there was a small wellspring of affection, but none ever ran in Sophie’s direction. She was herself loving toward Silan, but only when Clay was not present. Like him, she felt it was not appropriate to fuss over the boy while under spousal scrutiny. The family spent so little time together in one room that the tension between Sophie and Clay, and the mutual ignoring of their son, never became obvious enough to cause embarrassment.

On a day in midsummer when he found his duties irksome, Clay finally relented, and agreed to take Silan up onto the saddle before him while he rode Sunrise from one side of town to the other. There was no real risk, since his arm was around the boy at all times, squirm though he might with excitement at finally being allowed onto the horse he considered the most wonderful in the world.

Together, father and son reached the edge of town and turned to amble back to the livery stable. That was when the dog, someone’s mongrel, rushed from a yard to attack the horse. Sunrise reared to his highest reach. Clay grabbed with both hands at the reins to control him, and Silan, panic-stricken by the commotion and sudden elevation, fell backward against Clay’s stomach, rolled sideways without encountering the supporting arms he was expecting, and slipped from his perch. He was gone from the plunging saddle in an instant. Clay made a futile grab at his receding jacket, then had to concentrate on reining in Sunrise before he was thrown himself from the horse’s back.

When he had control again, Clay saw Silan’s body lying still on the ground. He leapt from the saddle and allowed his horse to gallop away down the street. Scooping Silan into his arms, he murmured the boy’s name over and over, a low babbling of sound that came directly from his heart. The back of Silan’s head was caked with dirt and blood. The dog had followed Sunrise along the street. A crowd was gathering around the two figures in the dust.