“And he stays there,” said Fay.
Drew went to the window and raised a hand to someone in the street below, then turned back to her. “I’ll bet you’ve got a piece of explaining just busting to get out of your mouth.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Lodi thinks it was. I had the same opinion myself when I saw those torches coming for us.”
“It wasn’t me. They were watching you for a long time.”
“And you just so happened to visit and leave before they made their move.”
“Yes.”
“How do you know they were watching?”
“Because they arrested me before I got on the stage, that’s why. There were badges everywhere. They kept me there for two days.”
“But you didn’t tell them a thing.”
“When I heard everyone got away except Lodi, I told them my mother worked for him, and I was visiting her, that’s all. I said I had an argument with her and left.”
“And they believed you.”
“I don’t know. I was put on a train with a marshal and taken away. That’s when I met Zeebub. He walked right up and hit that marshal so hard over the head he just fell down on the floor. He might even have killed him, I don’t know.”
“And he swept you up and put you on a waiting horse and away you went.”
“He had two horses. The train was stopped at a water tower just outside of Alamosa.”
“And you were so grateful you brought him along with you to the place your mama told you about.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Drew sat down and shook his head. “He’s a federal man, or else a Pinkerton, one or the other. The whole thing was set up to get you free so you’d lead them to me.”
“He isn’t a law, I can tell.”
“Oh, you can, can you?”
“Yes, I can.”
“Why does he call himself that stupid name?”
“I suppose he has a sense of humor. He keeps it buried deep, though.”
“Fay, you shouldn’t have brought him here. You shouldn’t have come here yourself.”
“I go where I choose to go.”
“Lodi won’t believe any of this.”
“Is he coming here?”
“Your friend Zeebub tell you to ask that?”
“No, but he wants to work with him. I haven’t done anything wrong. I didn’t sell out Lodi or you. God, Bones, why would I set the laws on my own mother!”
“Maybe you and Ellen don’t get along so good, or maybe you figured they’d let her alone, seeing as she’s nothing but a shirt washer.”
“You’re a fool if you believe that.”
“And you’re a bigger fool if you think I believe you.”
“I asked you to come away with me. I asked you to choose, didn’t I?”
“That you did.”
“And why the hell do you think I did that?”
“I couldn’t say, offhand.”
“If you were standing closer, I’d slap you.”
Drew stood up and came to her. Fay slapped him.
“Care to again?” Drew invited, and Fay obliged.
Drew grabbed her and attempted to plant a kiss on her lips, but Fay fought him off. That was when Clay stepped into the room without bothering to knock. Drew flung himself away from Fay and pulled a pistol from beneath his jacket.
“Put that down, boy,” Clay told him. To Fay he said, “You all right?”
“Yes … Bones, put it down.”
“When I feel like it,” said Drew. “Mister, sit yourself in that chair.”
Clay went to the chair and sat. Bones was a good-looking young man, and he could see why Fay wanted him, and had been prepared to do something dangerous that might bring herself closer to him. Clay wasn’t afraid of the gun in Bones’s hand. Clay could tell when a man was willing to use a gun, and when he wasn’t. Bones simply wanted the upper hand while they discussed matters that needed discussing. Clay would play along on his own terms. He felt calm, ready to lie without sprouting a single drop of sweat. He was being paid to seize a girl, not this nervous outlaw.
“B. L. Zeebub,” he said, “and I guess you’d be Bones. Put that gun up, I’m not armed.”
“When I’m ready. What’s your line of business, Zeebub?”
“I do what I can, for the best money available, that’s what I do. I’d appreciate it, Bones, if you could see fit to let Lodi size me up, kind of a thank you for delivering your ladylove here.”
Fay snorted. “I’m not that,” she said.
“Any problem you lovebirds have, I’m plain not interested. Lodi’s the man I want to see. You set that up for me, Bones, and I’ll be your friend.”
“I’m not setting up a goddamn thing, mister.”
Drew was not sure what to make of Zeebub. The man was ugly and scarred, and had named himself in acknowledgment of his appearance; he looked like one of Satan’s lieutenants on earth, eyes filled with the pain of his duty there; a demon who consigned souls to hotter places than Colorado and maybe shed a steaming tear as he did so. Drew put his gun away. Zeebub intrigued him. If they became friends, Zeebub might take Drew’s side in whatever showdown was looming between himself and Nate Haggin.
“Maybe I’ve heard of you by another name,” he suggested.
“Might have,” said Clay, “might not have.”
“He helped me, that’s all you need to know,” Fay said.
“It’s not all Lodi needs to know.”
“Be happy to talk with the man,” said Clay. “You let me know when, Bones.”
He got up from the chair, went to the door and let himself out with no further word. Drew and Fay were left staring at the door, then turned warily toward each other.
“So I’m supposed to believe everything,” Drew said.
“Believe what you want, only get out.”
“You came all this way, and now you want me to get out.”
“That’s right, get out if you can’t behave like a man and not a pig.”
“Don’t start calling me names.”
“I wouldn’t even want to talk to you.”
“Remember us, up on the Rim?”
“No; did something happen worth remembering?”
Drew picked up his hat and went to the door. His hand was already turning the handle when Fay said, “I remember.”
Clay had to listen to them through the wall for half the night. He had seldom felt lonelier.
By midmorning Drew had horses for them both, and led them away from Carbondale. They followed a narrow trail to the west for almost an hour before Drew stopped and produced two bandannas from his saddlebag. “From here on in you need to wear these; that’s the rule.”
It seemed a reasonable request to Clay, and he tied one across his eyes without protest. Fay was less inclined to cooperate. “Why do I have to,” she said, and her tone suggested to Clay that, having slept with their guide the night before, she felt she should be counted among the trustworthy. He had to smile.
“Put it on,” said Drew, “or we don’t go any further.”
A moment later, he said, “All right, just let your reins go loose and your horses will follow mine. Keep your heads down.”
Clay appreciated the advice within minutes, when his hat was almost swept from his head by a low aspen bough already denuded of foliage by the crisp nights and breezy days of October. They continued on for what Clay estimated to be another thirty or forty minutes, before being told they could remove the bandannas.
The mountain meadow they were entering was less than three hundred yards across, an oasis of grass surrounded by uninterrupted thickets of pine. At the far side stood a log barn and corral and a cabin. A woman stood in the doorway, watching them approach, and Clay could see, even though she stood in shadow, that she had only one arm.
They dismounted in front of the cabin and tied their horses to the hitching rail. “They’re friends,” Drew said to the woman, then added with a grin, ??
?That is, I hope they are.”
The one-armed woman was staring at Clay, a look of consternation on her face. He attempted a smile to lessen his intimidating ugliness, and said, “Afternoon to you, ma’am,” in his friendliest voice, but the woman barely nodded in reply, and kept staring.
Omie was playing among the trees, which grew around the cabin so thickly she had to walk only a little way to imagine herself lost in a vast forest filled with terrifying creatures and Indians. She amused herself by sending fallen pine cones bowling along the heavily needled ground, and when she tired of that sport she picked up nearly a dozen and set them spinning about her head like tiny planets in orbit around herself, until that, too, began to bore her, and she let them tumble to the ground.
What she really needed was larger playthings, so Omie concentrated with her inner eye on a tree nearby, and commanded it to lean over and fall down. The tree stirred not at all, and she resented its stillness. Her anger was a sudden heat inside her skull, like a fire-warmed blade slicing her brain in two, and the tree she had chosen as its target shivered perceptibly for several seconds. Now her head hurt. Omie accepted that the tree was simply too big to obey her, but she reasoned that her hidden eye might very well be like a muscle, which must be exercised often to develop its strength. The pain in her head was easing now. If she did the same thing again tomorrow, it might be accomplished with less of a headache, and if she practiced using her eye for such tricks, as other girls practiced at their pianos and violins, she fully expected that someday a tree could be brought down at her command, as if it had been struck by lightning.
Omie decided she was hungry, and set her eye to locating the cabin. It did this by seeking out the mind of Zoe, and when she felt its colors at the edge of her inner vision, Omie turned her body to face them. She was able to do this with subtlety nowadays, with barely any infringement upon her mother’s brain. Her first panic-stricken attempts to locate Zoe after she wandered too far from the cabin had resulted in her finding her way home by following the direction of the scream her probing had caused. She had found Zoe on the ground by the corral, and been unable to revive her for fully ten minutes. Now she was able to perform the same task without Zoe even knowing Omie was searching for her colors.
But this time something different occurred. When she sought out her mother, Omie received a picture in reply; it came unbidden into her mind from Zoe, and Omie sensed immediately it was not a thing that Zoe was thinking of, but rather a thing she was at that very moment seeing, and the thing was a tall man with a broad hat and holes in his face. Zoe’s fear of the man, whom Omie had several times described to her, both before and after their truncated ocean voyage, came to her along with the picture, and Omie felt her stomach begin to knot. The tall man had come for her, the figure that had chased her and been chased by her through the darkened corridors of Elk House, and waltzed with her on the tilting deck of a ship at sea, and more lately taken her with him on a strange journey through a desert; this man was here now, in the flesh, driving his awfulness into Zoe like a spear, and the spear went straight through her and through the trees to Omie, who felt it enter her heart and brain simultaneously and cleave her open like a butchered hog.
The one-armed woman was still staring at him. Clay knew Bones and Fay had noticed now, but he could think of nothing to do but stare back at her, the smile dropping slowly from his face as he watched blood drain from the woman’s. Suddenly she threw her hand up to clutch at her head, and gasped as if struck hard in the belly. Her eyes rolled upward inside her head, and she fell in the doorway before anyone could move to prevent it.
“Mrs. Brannan? Ma’am …?”
Drew knelt beside her and lifted Zoe’s head.
“What happened?” asked Fay. “Oh, God, what’s that …?”
Clay turned in the direction Fay was looking, and saw a girl approaching from the trees across the clearing, running faster than he thought anyone possibly could, her dress flapping behind her. And then he saw the reason for her speed—her feet did not touch the ground, but were dragged behind her through the very tops of the grass; and he saw also that her face was familiar to him, the half-blue face of his guardian angel. Then Clay knew he must be dying; why else would she be rushing toward him so, her hair streaming behind her head like a galloping horse’s tail, and he accepted the coming of death, just as he had accepted everything that came his way since his time in the desert. He wondered, as his knees began giving way beneath him, why he could not breath anymore, and why his skull was awash with flame, and why the face of his guardian angel was twisted with hatred of him and fear for the fallen woman; and he understood, before consciousness was whisked from him like a rug from beneath his unsteady boots, that the angel believed he had killed her mother. Clay’s final thought, as he plunged into darkness, was that everything happening at that moment was a colossal mistake, an unfortunate configuration of stars, their unkind alignment set in motion long before the time of his birth, to herald the time of his dying.
50
Fay still was not sure, hours afterward, what had occurred. First the one-armed woman had collapsed, then the girl had come flying from the trees, and Dugan had collapsed also at the sight of her, and when the girl reached them she, too, fell in a heap, but not before Fay herself felt a pain within her head like no other she had ever experienced, and Bones had fallen against the hitching rail to vomit.
They all had recovered within a short while, but Fay, the least affected, was aware of feeling like some kind of outsider. Even Bones ignored her, and spent his time with the others. All three adults and the girl seemed unable to get enough of feasting their eyes on one another, but it was the Brannan females and Dugan who appeared most entwined. They held long conversations interrupted by longer silences, during which they simply stared at each other, while Bones hovered nearby. Fay wanted him to pay her more attention, but he apparently had become very attached to the Brannans following their rescue of him from Leadville. She, on the other hand, was still a suspect in the Cortez debacle, and would probably remain so until Lodi arrived to pronounce her innocent, if he chose to. It was irritating all the same, to see a man who had used her body less than twenty-four hours earlier concerning himself with others of less intimate acquaintance. The scene in the cabin that evening reminded Fay of some awkward family gathering, a clan reunited after many years, a roomful of strangers who knew little or nothing about each other, yet were bound by blood.
Omie disturbed her the most. The blue birthmark stood out like a splash of ink against her white face. The girl spoke little after waking up outside the door, and could not keep her eyes off Dugan. Fay couldn’t see why; he was no uglier than the girl. Strange things happened as the afternoon wore on and became evening; small articles inside the cabin moved about of their own accord, trembling and jumping in a nervous fashion that made them appear alive; a coffee can flung itself against the wall; Bones’s pistol drew itself from his holster and leapt onto the table, where it spun in circles before coming to rest with its barrel pointing at Dugan, who seemed not in the least worried. A sampler on the wall flew across the room and its frame broke against the timbers; when Fay picked it up she read: THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME. Sudden gusts of cool air swept across the cabin, but no window or door was open; the stove chimney pipe bent itself before her eyes, then straightened out again; Omie Brannan’s hair unbraided itself without the assistance of human hands, and floated around her head like seaweed beneath the waves.
Fay could follow only a small portion of the elliptical conversations that erupted sporadically around her, and was frightened by the inexplicable occurrences taking place before her eyes. She beckoned Bones outside and said, “I don’t like this place. Something’s evil here.…”
“No it isn’t. It’s Omie, she just does things that don’t make sense. She doesn’t mean any harm by it.”
“But her and her mother, they keep saying things to Zeebub, like they knew him before, but they didn’t.…”
/> “I know; I heard some of it. I don’t know what they’re talking about, myself, but there’s nothing evil in it.”
“I want to go back to town.”
“You came here looking for me, and this is where I live. You and Zeebub can stay here till Lodi gets back, or else you can damn well move on. I’ll put the blindfold on you again and take you away and turn you loose where you’d never find your way back here. I’ll do that if you want, but listen, I don’t believe Zeebub would go with you. He’s not scared of anything, that man, I can tell. So you tell me what you want to do.”
“You don’t care for me at all, do you?”
“That’s not so. I just don’t like the way you expect everything to happen exactly how and when you want it to. When I took you back to Cortez in the wagon, you wanted me to go with you then and there, no other way would suit you, and so I didn’t go. Now you want something else, because you’re scared of a little girl with a funny face and strange ways.”
“You still think I sold you out down there.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“But you’ll have me, meantime.”
“I don’t recall forcing myself on you.”
Drew waited for a slap, but none came. He didn’t want Fay to go away, nor did he want her to complain about the situation she found herself in. The dramatic meeting that afternoon between Zeebub and the Brannans had left Drew in mind of a play by Shakespeare he had watched while in Denver, after posing for an artist, a play in which the stage had been littered with dead bodies when the final curtain fell. He did not understand why it had happened, that cataclysmic coming together of Fay’s alleged rescuer and his own, but he was not afraid of it, wanted in fact to question them all closely, so he might be made privy to the unusual circumstances existing among them. He had caught snatches of talk passing between them, but none of it made sense to him, and he was mildly resentful of the fact that Zeebub had somehow inserted himself between the Brannans and himself.
Drew had been getting along fine with Omie and her mother before Fay showed up with her friend, and he was not sure why it was that he now felt everything was different; a corner had been turned, but he did not know why, or in what direction. Zeebub was more than he seemed, but Drew could not tell what that hidden part of him might be; nor could he tell what consequences there might be in it for himself, but he did not doubt that change of some kind was heading his way, a significant overturning of everything he knew and could understand. He was waiting for it to arrive, as he waited for Lodi, but the changes that would come from the people already inside the cabin would make Lodi’s return a minor event by comparison; Drew knew that much, although he could not have explained why.