Power in the Blood

  “Glasses,” Leo said, and she fetched her finest.

  He poured generous measures and they sipped, bubbles touching their noses.

  “Please dress yourself in the red gown,” Leo requested.

  “Of course, my darling.”

  Lovey Doll hurried to her room, and returned wearing Leo’s favorite. She found him standing by the crystal casket, and began to doubt that he believed her claim of noninvolvement. She truly could not understand how a man such as Nevis Dunnigan could attempt so foolhardy a change of profession as to become a train robber, she truly did not.

  Leo said, “I wish to see you beneath the glass.”

  “Dearest, you know I find it uncomfortable.”

  Leo thrust a full glass of champagne at her. “Not with more of this inside you, my darling.” He smiled. “Indulge me, do, just this once.”

  “Very well, only for you, my dearest one.”

  She quaffed the champagne in one unladylike gulp, then looked at Leo to see if he disapproved of such unfeminine conduct, but he was smiling, this time with conviction, and so she stepped up and laid her body down on the casket’s velvet bed. It was less irksome to perform this task than it had been the first time; scarcely had she arranged herself comfortably than Lovey Doll felt a ring slipped onto her finger. “This,” said Leo, “is the seal of our betrothal.”

  Now it was real. Lovey Doll raised the beautiful object to her face and watched the sparkling lights that leaped from Leo’s diamond. The flashes of white fire were beyond comparison with any other thing that might have excited her blood. It had been worthwhile after all, the deceptions and the personal humiliations; Leo wanted her for his wife. Her new ring shone with a splendid radiance, and the hand supporting it became heavy even as she gazed with enraptured eyes. Lovey Doll felt her arm fall to her side, but was not alarmed, since Leo attended to it by arranging it along her thigh. He wished her to be without discomfort. How very kind he was this night, as if determined to atone for his wrongdoing. She forgave him all over again. There was a taste at the back of her throat that Lovey Doll found puzzling, but she could not bring her thoughts to bear upon it. Her eyes were closing with languorous ease. The casket really was a fit place for her to take her rest after all.

  Leo watched with detachment as Lovey Doll slid into a narcotic stupor. He had been troubled by the possibility of her detecting the strange taste of his powders, but she had said nothing, had drunk it down like a child her medicine, and now she slept. His doctor had assured him that his troubles of these last few days would be pushed aside by the drug of his prescription, and Leo had given Lovey Doll a week’s dosage.

  When she began to snore, he lowered the lid, and made sure that the vacuum screw was tightly in place. As Lovey Doll peacefully exhaled, moisture began building inside the casket, hiding her form behind a fine misting of the glass. Leo watched as her features became lost, made vague by her own breath. It required almost a half hour before the building up of mist inside the casket ceased. He would leave her in the casket’s poisoned air until morning, just to be sure she was really dead, and would sit beside her until then. To maintain a solitary vigil by the deceased was the least he could do, Leo thought.

  Drew was buried along the great divide, his grave left unmarked, and the remaining Dugans proceeded to Provo, where Zoe had left her money in a bank vault. Fay left them there, declaring herself sickened by the entire family, their foolishness in allowing a girl to set up a robbery, and their arrogance in throwing away the thing they stole, a thing that had cost Drew his life. She would accept no money from Zoe, and returned to Carbondale, for want of any other place to go. There she met again with Levon. Fay persuaded him to retire from outlawry, and within a month was married to him. They swore a wedding oath never to reveal the location of the elk. Levon did relent and tell his grandson in 1927, but was not believed.

  The Dugans moved to Washington state and found a large house for themselves by the ocean. Clay walked often along the shore. Zoe invested her money carefully and was able to support them all. Her one indulgence was a small sailboat, which she handled with dexterity despite her missing arm. Omie became uncontrollable during her puberty, and was thought to be connected somehow to the death by unknown means of a handsome boy from the nearest town, whom she had fallen in love with and been rejected by. There being no direct evidence of implication, Omie was not officially charged with any wrongdoing. She refused to discuss the matter with her mother and uncle. The Dugans had always held themselves in isolation, and the rumors drove them further from society.

  Omie waited for Drew to appear in some ghostly guise, but he never did, even when Omie begged his spirit to manifest itself. His brother’s nonappearance greatly disappointed Clay; he had somehow expected more of Omie, who thereafter spent much of her time alone. She did, however, warn Clay of a dangerous woman traveling from the east to do him harm. Clay knew who that was, and began carrying a pistol. He would not shoot Sophie with it, just make her go away and allow the dead to sleep apart from the living.

  When he was approached on the beach several days later, he knew the woman with her hands buried at her waist inside a fur muff was his wife, come to attempt vengeance again on behalf of their son. Clay intended asking her if the controversy over Omie and the local boy had been the thing that set her on his trail again, but before she had even come within speaking distance, the woman pulled a pistol and began firing. Clay fired back, despite a bullet in his left side, and killed her with his third shot, by which time he had received another wound, to the thigh.

  Stooping to examine the face of his attacker, Clay detected a faint shadow of beard growth along the jawline, and took himself up to the house, bleeding steadily, to berate Omie for having got it wrong. Tatum was taken out to sea in Zoe’s sailboat that night, and dumped overboard with a sack of stones chained around his ankles. Nobody in the town believed Clay Dugan had shot himself accidentally, twice, as he claimed, and further notoriety was heaped upon the family. Zoe suggested they move to another state, and Clay agreed it would be wise. Omie said nothing; she knew they would be living in California within a month.

  When Clay was able, he resumed his lonely walks along the beach, and one day was surprised to see a man come down from the cypress trees along the shore to join him on the sand. The man waved in a friendly manner, and Clay stopped out of politeness, wondering who he might be. As the man came closer, Clay thought he detected a face beneath the straw boater that was familiar to him, but could not be sure; he must get new glasses, he reminded himself. The man was only a few steps from Clay when a gun was pulled. Clay stared at it in surprise, and watched the muzzle jump and flash as he was shot five times by Sophie, who then turned the pistol on herself and sent the last bullet into her brain.

  The two were found later that afternoon by Zoe, who knew now that she had delayed too long in moving. They could have gone elsewhere to live before the house was sold, but she had insisted on waiting, and this was the result. She felt as guilty over Clay’s death as she had over Drew’s, and Omie’s silence on the subject as she assisted her mother to dispose of both bodies as they had done with Tatum, convinced Zoe that Omie considered her guilty too. As Clay and his wife disappeared beneath the moonlit swell, Zoe was tempted to throw herself in after them. Omie broke her silence with one word—“No”—and mother and daughter returned to shore.

  The Praetorians gradually succumbed to massive subversion by Big Circle, and the roles of both bodies were subtly reversed, the greater absorbing the lesser, rather than the intruder taking over its host. Rowland Price was among the last of the holdouts who still believed that Leo Brannan might one day be in the vanguard of a new political force in the land, until Mr. Jones took pity on his foolishness and showed him a report detailing the extent to which his dream had become a joke. Rowland had been instrumental in disposing of Lovey Doll Pines’s body after Leo told him the woman had committed suicide, and he expected some reward for having been so invaluable an
aide. He hurried back to Glory Hole to plead a sudden need for cash, but Leo, having received the same report by mail, would not involve himself further with a man who had brought him into so inept an organization. Price wished he were able to set Tatum on Jones and Leo both, but the man had disappeared some time before. Rowland Price moved east to protect himself from possible reprisal instigated by these wealthy men, found himself still frightened on Cape Cod, and so took ship for England.

  When Zoe died of a heart attack in San Bernardino in 1905, Omie destroyed the inside of their home while sitting in an armchair. She explained the destruction to her cleaning lady the next day as the work of vandals. These vandals struck again several months later, and at regular intervals after that, but by then the police department was not interested in apprehending them. Omie Dugan was a pariah.

  Four years after the death of her mother, Omie received a visitor, who arrived in a gleaming automobile. A man of great age, he introduced himself as Mr. Jones, but before he could state his business further, Omie told him his wife was inaccessible to his need for an interview, having already been reborn as a male in Idaho. Mr. Jones turned away, and suffered a fatal stroke less than five minutes later, while on his way to the train depot.

  When Omie was forty-three she was judged to be insane. She had neglected to wash her person or care for her property in any way for a number of years, following the departure of the last in a lengthy roster of maids and cooks and gardeners. Omie had driven them all away with her strange behavior, except for the last, who left her when it became known that Omie had no money left to pay for hired help.

  When county officials came to inform her that she was to be taken to the asylum, Omie laughed at them, and pushed them off her porch while standing behind her screen door. They returned the following day with several large men, but when they attempted to break down the front door, a sudden gust of flame from an instantaneous fire in the hallway drove them back. The fire appeared to ignite spontaneously in all parts of the house, upper floors and lower, and although two fire engines soon were at the scene, it was generally agreed that the best they could do was set their hoses to spray the roofs of the houses on either side. No one saw Omie Dugan alive, and her bones were never found among the charred rubble.

  The mystery of the golden elk’s vanishment took hold of Noble Burgin’s imagination and was rendered into a play, The Shining Stag, in which Noble proposed that the statue had been removed from the train by a hot-air balloon. This aerial theft, perpetrated by a brilliant madman-inventor of the Jules Verne type, was Noble’s most audacious stage effect, and was itself hailed as the work of a genius. The production proved to be even more successful than his two previous offerings, Red Hellions and The Man-eater! Noble retired from the theater a happy man, believing he had won a permanent place for himself upon the stage of high art, and he died some years later of a ruptured appendix. In time, Noble’s great works would be forgotten completely.

  In 1900, Slade’s arm was broken when he fell against an endless belt and pulley system while harvesting wheat in Alberta. The break was not set properly, and his usefulness as a worker diminished from that time. He was angry over the incident, and angry over the incompetence of the horse doctor who set the break so poorly, but there was nothing he could do about any of it. Slade had been proud of his strength and his ability to outwork men half his age, and now the source of his pride was gone. The harvest was in, his term of hire was finished in any case, so he moved on, as he always had.

  Riding an empty boxcar across the emptiness of Canada, Slade saw that his life was effectively over. Unable to perform work with an arm that grew steadily weaker, he was good for nothing. To be a cripple and a beggar was more than Slade could endure, yet that was the future awaiting him. He could not recall his past with any certainty beyond a year or two, and always thought in terms of what he did with his life in the present. No past, no future, and now the present had become a burden to him. Slade found a measure of his old pride in being able to consider the facts without flinching. He had never wanted sympathy, had no use for love, but would have surrendered his other arm to know who he was.

  For a time he begged for food and such work as a man with a crippled arm was capable of performing, but not enough of either came his way, and Slade despised himself for having to ask anything of anyone. Whatever the nature of his life had ever been, it had not included groveling for charity, of that he was sure. As winter came on, Slade decided he would not live to see the spring. It was the only choice available to him that did not gore his pride, the one thing remaining to him, and he took no food into his body from that moment on.

  A slow death by starvation was not what he wanted for himself, so at the first opportunity, Slade took himself away from the world of men and entered the world of snow. It was the season’s first heavy fall, a blizzard of whiteness, perfect for Slade’s needs. He walked out of the town in which his decision had been reached, and within minutes had no idea where he was, so thickly did the falling snow surround him. He walked as long as he could across open prairie, his extremities beginning to lose feeling, and when he was certain he had become completely lost, and that the snow would continue falling for at least another day, he sat down and closed his eyes to await the coming of old man death, whom Slade was prepared to greet as an equal.

  The process of dying by cold took longer than he had anticipated, but was far easier, once he was genuinely reconciled to quitting the earth. The warmth left his body steadily, and was replaced by a comforting numbness. He congratulated himself on having chosen wisely. This was the way to go, on his own terms, in his own company. It was a shame that he could bid a silent farewell to no one, since no one but himself existed in his memory, and even that man was reduced to one name only. His leaving of life was an anticlimax to its living, he felt, even if he could not recall who and what he truly was. It was better to end such an empty life, since it was the remembrance of his years that provided satisfaction to a dying man, assuming those years had been well spent. Slade had no idea what he might or might not have done, the attacks of memory loss had become so frequent in recent years. Sometimes it had taken an entire day to remember his own name, and in the end he had assured himself of that one thing by having SLADE tattooed onto his arm, lest he forget himself entirely.

  It was slipping from him by degrees, his notion of aliveness, as the snow began burying him beneath its blanket of neutrality. He began to doubt the arrangements for his own demise when he saw a woman approaching him. What was a woman doing out in the cold and snow? Slade sat very still as she came near, hoping she would pass blindly by and leave him to die in peace, but the woman came directly to him, and stood before Slade with a look of great pity on her face.

  Staring at her, trying to conceal his annoyance, Slade found himself attempting to give the intruder a name, and the name came to him at the same instant that he recognized her as his wife of long ago. It was Nettie standing before him, of all people. He asked her how it was possible that she had found him amid all the swirling and frigid emptiness of his chosen place, and she told him it was easy; she had been told to be with him at the last, to remind him of his life, the thing that he had chosen to leave behind. His decision would be respected, Nettie told him, but before he would be permitted to depart, he must remember everything he had forgotten.

  And as she told him this, Slade remembered it all, the life of his younger self sweeping back into him like air into an unstoppered vacuum; the courtship of and marriage to Nettie; his work in the railyards of Schenectady; his gradual souring of temperament when the children came, three of them, and his love of liquor, which smothered the obligation to Nettie and the boys and girl they had produced. Slade felt shame overcome him as the night of his escape aboard a freight train was depicted before his eyes; he had ridden it west, exultant to have evaded responsibility at last. Then he saw the wreck in Ohio that cracked his skull and cured him of any need to drink by robbing him of his identity.

/>   James Slade Dugan was his name, and Nettie Lamb had been the woman he gave that name to, as sweet a girl as he could have wished for, and he had treated her like a dog. She stood before him now, neither sad nor exultant, as young as she had been when they met, and if the freezing air would have allowed it, Slade would have wept for what had been his and he had thrown away out of sheer foolishness, to embrace an empty life of drifting and forgetting and careless murder. He saw the face of every victim, relived every blow delivered by the stranger with his face, the monster that had been himself.

  “Why did you have to tell me …?” he asked his wife, and she said it was to punish him, since punishment must come from within himself, and that could not happen without a reckoning with his past, a mirror held before him like a sheet of ice, in which was reflected his weakness and folly and loss. And when it was revealed to him, the agent of his restoration of self began immediately to fade, her slender form melding with the snow, white upon white, until she disappeared.

  Slade was left to stare at the great nothingness he had engendered, and into which he now plummeted like a stone, the first of the Dugans to die in the new century, the first of the last of the line; and that fact was shown to him also as he fell, so that he might know that the blood freezing in his veins would never be passed on. They all would die, the blighted Dugans he and Nettie had made, without any offspring but virginal Omie. When he had swung aboard the train so long ago he had taken himself away from his past, away from his future, and the future of the Dugans. It all would come to nothing, the passing of the blood from his father’s fathers, and it had been he who let fall the precious chalice. It had been Nettie’s blood that died the most, since she had stayed behind to do what was right. They were her children more than his; Slade had done nothing more than dilute the blood of Nettie Lamb. Now he understood his crimes, understood also that there would be no absolution. He knew, as his soul was shredded like mist in sunlight, that none was due.