Power in the Blood (102 page)

She hoped Mr. Garfinkle was not suffering unduly; he was plagued by a weak stomach, and required special meals only his wife could provide. Mrs. Garfinkle was filled with pride. She and Mr. Garfinkle were little people, unimportant people, yet they had spoiled the selfish plans of a man richer than many a king, and there was little or nothing that Brannan could do to silence them, should he attempt to stifle news of what they had done. She truly was not intimidated, and hoped Mr. Garfinkle was similarly emboldened in the face of such blatant bullying as had been practiced against her by Simms, who clearly was one of Brannan’s minions.

Her only regrets were the disgusting toilet arrangements and the fact that she was separated from her husband by several thicknesses of brick. She had imagined quite some time ago now that she heard his voice crying out at a distance, through the intervening walls, but was able to convince herself that she had imagined the sound.

All that was required of her was fortitude and the courage to submit for a time to inhuman conditions. Mrs. Garfinkle had heard about jails and the many kinds of hell in evidence there, but thus far her term of imprisonment had not been unduly harsh. She was determined to maintain a brave face, eat the dreadful fare provided by the deputy, and use the bucket as little as possible; this should be the first place fitted with Brannan’s much-vaunted flushing commodes, she decided.

When the deputy unlocked her door, she was a little surprised to note that he carried no tray of food. Mrs. Garfinkle was quite hungry by then, having had her last tray removed a long time ago, it seemed; the deputy was always reluctant to tell her how long she had been held.

“Good afternoon,” she said. “Or is it morning, or night?”

“Makes no difference,” said the deputy.

“I suppose not.” Mrs. Garfinkle smiled, deeming agreeableness the appropriate response to so primitive a creature as this one. He was very large and stupid, the type of man she could best describe as “limited” if she wished to be kind. His name was Bob, but he had told her no more than that.

Bob went to the bed and began stripping off the sheets.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Garfinkle said. “They were becoming a little gamy. I really must insist that you place at my disposal a washbowl and jug of clean water, plus soap and a towel. You may get them from my home if these things are not available here.”

“Makes no difference,” said Bob, now shaking out the sheets.

“May I ask what it is you’re doing?” inquired Mrs. Garfinkle.

“Gotta get ’em straightened out,” said Bob, doing just that. He began twisting the sheets into a rope. Sheriff Simms had promised him two hundred dollars and a whore for taking care of the man, and three hundred dollars and two whores for taking care of the woman, that being a more odious task. The man had already been visited. Bob had initial misgivings over the woman, being that a nice lady like the one in the cell seemed an unlikely murderer, but the sheriff had shown him the peculiar-looking dagger and the money he had found in their home. That was all the evidence required, the sheriff had said. Bob still could not quite figure out what Garfinkle had been talking about when he finally beat some information out of him, but the sheriff seemed to, and Bob was not about to question his judgment.

But there was a problem, Simms had told him; the Garfinkles were Jews, and you couldn’t trust them not to be sprung from jail by other Jews, who were a fanatical bunch and very clever when it came to protecting their own, probably part of some deal they made with the devil. Simms said that folks would be so incensed if the Garfinkles got away that they’d likely storm the courthouse and haul the sheriff and deputy into the street and lynch them, so it was Bob’s duty to take care of the Garfinkles before that happened. Real justice would be served, and Bob would save the town the cost of a trial besides.

Mr. Garfinkle had struggled a lot for such a little fellow, and Bob had been obliged to string him up on a sheet rope while in a state of unconsciousness brought about by Bob’s large and merciless fists. He hoped the woman would be more cooperative, since beating a woman was not something he cared to do unless it was strictly necessary. He began shaping a crude noose.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothin’ as makes a difference.”

“But … what exactly are you doing with my sheets?”

“You just hush now.”

“I will not. Stop that!”

Mrs. Garfinkle had divined the purpose of the object taking shape in the deputy’s hands. “I won’t be scared off by that kind of nonsense, you know.… Don’t think you can fluster me with such silliness.”

“All right,” said Bob, testing the strength of his creation between both hands. It would hold. He moved in her direction, holding the noose.

“What are you doing? Go away.…”

“You never should’ve done it to him.”

“Done what? What are you saying? Done it to whom?”

“That feller. Feller you brung home to do that to.”

“What … what fellow? Please, I don’t understand what it is you’re saying.…”

“Should’ve let him alone, missus.”

“Get away.… Get out of here this instant!”

Bob felt bad, doing what he was about to do, but justice had to be served. If he didn’t do it, someone else would have to, and that would be a cowardly thing for Bob to do, make someone else kill a woman that needed killing, so he closed his ears and hardened his heart and went ahead. The woman backed herself into the corner, then stumbled over her own shit bucket, and while she looked down in distress at the mess emptied onto the floor, Bob pounced.

Once he had the noose around her neck the rest was easy, and when he was certain she had died, he tied the end of the sheet rope around the upper bars of the cell, making sure her toes couldn’t touch the floor. He wondered, as he arranged Mrs. Garfinkle there, if the whores made available to him would be pretty ones.

44

He wondered now if his heart was truly set for more of the same work. Hauling in the usually dead bodies of outlaws for cash payment seemed futile somehow, a low grade of employment, and yet he was suited for no other. Clay was beginning to doubt all those aspects of himself which in former times had been the source of his strength, his conviction. There were bad people galore, and those bad people had to be caught and locked away, if not killed outright, before they did more mischief than they already had done. No one made bad people do what they did; they chose to do it, and so Clay had chosen to stop them from doing it, and had met with a measure of success in his field.

But now the certainty was gone. There were too many bad people, more than he could ever hope to round up in a lifetime of seeking them out. If he stopped, if he found a new kind of work, the world would continue to spin as before, with bad people preying on good people, as if he had never stalked any of them down and killed them, as if no one had. Badness was a permanent part of the landscape, he had decided, and Clay’s acceptance that this was so came as a disheartening surprise. He had always pictured bad men being weeded one by one from a garden, until that garden became free of weeds, but now he knew the weeds would always spring up anew behind his back to mock his efforts. There was no perfect garden to be had, nor had there ever been one. And he was no gardener, although he had pulled weeds for years now, with a steady rage at their proliferation underfoot.

In the absence of any other line of work he could realistically engage in, Clay made a decision to revive his enthusiasm for bounty hunting by pursuing the one man everyone in the nation agreed was so bad he deserved a category of badness all his own. Clay would go after Slade.

A long time ago he had considered collecting the bounty on Panther Stalking and Kills With a Smile, but had not followed through. He had regretted that decision after the Apache brothers finally were caught, and had committed mutual suicide in their jail cell. If he had been the one to capture them, preferably dead, his reputation as dispenser of justice would have been without peer. There could not have been a more rewarding memory to take with him into old age than knowing he was the one who had ended a terrible reign of blood lust. And now, in that same region of the country, another ghoul was taking the lives of innocent people, opening their bodies and strewing their insides around for the flies and buzzards to feast on. Slade was barely human, so heinous were his acts; at least the brothers had been Apaches, their killings to be expected, but Slade was a white man. Capturing him would be worth more than the killing of a hundred ordinary bad men. As the one who rid the world of Slade, Clay could hold his head up high, and also collect the reward offered by mining magnate Leo Brannan, currently standing at ten thousand dollars. With money like that, he could retire while still young, and have the leisure to find another direction for his life. Capturing Slade would set the capstone on a career too often blighted by feelings of shame, of being some kind of pariah, even if the work he did was necessary. Everyone would applaud him without reserve for having taken the shadow of Slade away. Of course, he would have to collect his reward and disappear pronto, or Sophie would read of his fame and come hurrying in his direction with her thirst for vengeance and her gun.

Dreaming of success was one thing, earning it another. Clay took himself and his horses by train to Santa Fe, and began his search from there. He had no formal plan; there were no clues to Slade’s habits, apart from a clear preference for rugged desert country where he could hide with impunity. There were no traitorous companions prepared to sell Slade out, no gang members to trail toward some hidden redoubt. Slade came and went with the desert wind, descending on his prey like a demon from the air, leaving no tracks that could be followed, even by expert trackers with Indian blood. Among the Indian population a cult was growing around the cannibal. Slade, it was said, was not a white man after all, but the vengeful spirit of all Indians who had suffered defeat and death at the hands of whites. The Indians ascribed to Slade supernatural powers of the most outrageous kind: the ability to turn himself into a coyote or an eagle; the ability to see from afar, even by night; the ability to sense the presence of danger, and fly away to evade capture. Slade had to date killed and eviscerated no Indians at all, and so the belief persisted and grew that he was killing whites on behalf of red men, and his exploits were carefully monitored, and his legendary status grew.

For Clay, the means to be employed in capturing the man-eater would have to be unorthodox, since the territories Slade hovered over like a cloud were becoming filled with bounty hunters and glory seekers of every ilk, all determined to be the one who found and destroyed the monster. If Clay was to succeed where legions of the like-minded had thus far failed, he would have to do what others had not done. He did not know what this unconventional method might be, since his own procedures were in no way unique. He would have to think of something.

The first order of Clay’s plan was to isolate himself, in order that he might be visited by inspiration. He stocked up on water and supplies, including several bottles of mineral oil to inject up his suffering penis, and left Santa Fe in the dead of night, to shake off any lesser hunter who might be tempted to follow along, with notions of sharing the prize. Clay wanted to capture Slade unassisted; one bad man captured by one good man—that was how the story should end.

He rode into the wilderness with a new and urgent need within himself; this quest for Slade would exonerate Clay of all his sins. He was unclear over the precise nature of these sins, but he had of late felt unclean in some indefinable way, as if the smell of every man he brought in for federal reimbursement had wiped off on his hands, his face, the clothes he wore, smothering him with the reek of death, down to the very roots of his hair. When he caught Slade he would become sweet-smelling, in a figurative sense, and the past would be wafted away on lavender breezes, wiping him clean of all wrongdoing, creating him all over again, in a newer, more acceptable image. He would be reborn, without recourse to religion, a state of being well worth this final burst of dedicated manhunting. His nose was to the feral winds that would bring to him the stench of evil, Slade’s unmistakable scent. He knew, without knowing how or why he knew, that where all others had failed, he would win through and emerge triumphant, Slade’s body slung over a packhorse like so many before.

The days were hot, the nights cold, and even as his supplies ran low, Clay did not cease to believe in the destiny he wished upon himself. Somewhere in the arid void of mountains and canyons there dwelt a demon, a beast in human guise, and like some knight come riding into the lair of a dragon, Clay would strike down the thing that haunted and terrorized and preyed upon the innocent. He would do it for the dead who could not return, and for the living who would not join the dead until their appointed time; but above all, he would do it for the purification of his own soul, if he had one.

But search as he might, there came to him no mystic glimpse of Slade’s location, no smattering of Slade’s intent, not the slightest inkling of where or when he might strike, not even any sense that Slade was alive and cognizant of the threat bearing down upon him with two thin horses and a dwindling supply of coffee. Clay’s faith began to waver. Where was the sign that would bring himself and Slade together as they should be, good man and bad man; where was the fullness of purpose in which he had begun his search?

Hope and expectation were running from him now like flour from a ruptured sack. Every sunrise swept across his eyes, the oldest of light, revealing nothing, for nothing was there. Skies without rain, land without succor, and in every sun-blasted arroyo, across every empty mesa, came whisperings of the greater emptiness beyond. He found deserted farms, entire adobe villages abandoned in advance of Slade’s inevitable coming. The territory was emptying itself of people, it seemed, and as he wandered, Clay saw no distant riders he could not identify at a glance—hunters like himself, swirling motes in the vastness of red earth and rock, searching for the one who would not leave. He took what he needed from pantries left to desert mice, raised precious water from wells undrawn, and ignored when he chanced upon them, lined up before the scabrous mirrors in dusty-floored cantinas and saloons, the remnants of liquor he once would have drained.