Power in the Blood (120 page)

Leo pored over the reports arriving daily from Pittsburgh. The elk was cast; the elk was cooling; the elk was stripped of its mold; the elk was flawless, an outstanding success despite having been created in record time. The nation’s newspapers were talking of nothing else. The elk soon would be ready for shipment across half a continent, under armed guard all the way to Glory Hole and on up to the stone pedestal nearing completion outside Elk House.

He received almost as much pleasure from sharing the reports with Lovey Doll, who cooed and purred over them as if the sheets of paper in her hands were bank notes. Leo encouraged her to believe that the day of the elk’s arrival was to be special in another, more personal way; that would be the day, he hinted, that a ring of engagement would be placed on her finger.

“But tonight,” he said, “we’ll indulge in something different, my dear.”

“Yes, Leo?”

“Remove your clothing and join me by the crystal coffin, if you please.

“Cabinet, Leo, not coffin. You have such morbid thoughts.”

“To be sure. Hurry now.”

When she was undressed, Leo opened the glass lid and instructed Lovey Doll to climb inside.

“Leo, no …!”

“Do it for your love of me, darling.”

“Oh, very well.”

She climbed inside and lay down on the velvet cloth, resting her head on the velvet pillow. She felt her scalp crawl at the thought of the dead Indian having lain where she lay. Leo’s face appeared upside down above her own, frightening her; he seemed to have a mouth in the middle of his forehead, eyes beside his nostrils and a balding beard.

“You look so very lovely there,” he said, “so deeply in repose.”

“Well, I’m not. This is silly, Leo.”

“No, no, it was made for you. How charming your white flesh would look under glass. One moment.”

He closed the lid, and Lovey Doll became very cross.

“Leo, stop this silliness immediately! Let me out!”

Her voice was tiny, a voice from far away. The cabinet was indeed airtight. He raised the lid. “Don’t worry, my pumpkin. I wouldn’t leave you where I couldn’t touch you.”

He lowered his head and began passing his lips along her thighs. “Such wonderfully soft skin you have …”

Lovey Doll watched the ceiling and waited for Leo’s instruction to get down from the cabinet. When it came, in the breathless voice he produced when aroused, she did as he instructed, and while allowing him his pleasure, Lovey Doll thought about the golden elk and the golden ring that would arrive on the same day.

He couldn’t stand to be in the cabin, so Nate moved out to the stable. He accepted food, but would not eat inside at the table with the rest. Lodi told him to stop behaving like a man afraid, but Nate would not change. “I don’t like them, any of them, especially the girl. She … does things she oughtn’t to do.…”

“I’ve seen it. She’s got a little chunk of Satan inside her, all right, but she’s only a kid. Keep on the right side of her and you don’t need to worry.”

“She watches me! Every time I turn around, there she is, just watching. She don’t do that to anyone else.”

She didn’t do it to Lodi, and Levon, when he arrived, was fascinated by Omie’s talents. The girl was a trickster, some kind of changeling or elf. Growing up in Wisconsin, Lodi had heard tales of such beings from the Norwegians, without ever believing them, but the girl was definitely not a human being in the same sense as regular folk. He was glad Omie had picked Nate to dislike and not himself.

Zoe Brannan’s plan was the thing to consider, and a poorly organized thing it was. She had not progressed beyond the basic notion, and mistaken that for an actual plan, but there was none, only a willingness to make her husband look like a fool, and that was why she had come to him, to let him work out some way of achieving it. Nate said, “I ain’t going back in there while she’s inside, nor them others.”

“That’s up to you.”

“That Dugan, the tall one—I don’t trust him.”

“He’s in it for his sister.”

“Maybe she’s not his sister and she ain’t Brannan’s wife either. I don’t believe any of it, and Bones is in with them on this. It’s a move to get us trapped somehow. They don’t even look like each other.”

“You never really believed he had a name like Bones, did you? Sure he’s a Dugan, and chances are the others are too. Why would the bounty man tell us to our faces that’s what he was, if he’s not here to rob Brannan? Nobody takes chances like that. They’re here for the reason they say they’re here, and you better decide if you’re in this game, or out.”

“I reckon I haven’t decided,” said Nate, disappointed to find Lodi so easily fooled by the newcomers.

Lodi went with Levon back to Carbondale and arranged with Levon’s uncle for the fast dispatch of any news relating to the train that was rumored to be leaving Pittsburgh soon. Levon stayed in town to act as messenger, should any hard facts be learned. Lodi wanted the timetable that would apply once the train reached the Rockies and began passing through the valleys up toward Glory Hole. He was already familiar with much of the Denver and Rio Grande track layouts in the region, having studied them for the Brannan Mining payroll robbery.

Zoe Brannan had made the point that her husband would not be expecting Lodi to rob him again so soon after the first job, and he certainly would not expect to be hit in the same place along the line, which was the basis for Zoe’s so-called plan. The only good spot along the spur to Glory Hole suitable for such an attack had worked out well, but that had been against a train less well defended than the next one would be, and sacks of paper money were easier to transport across rough country than a gold elk weighing several tons. That was where Zoe’s plan fell on its face.

“The trick to pulling this off,” he said that night, “is to steal the train. That’s the only way to carry something like this. We can’t pack it out on muleback.”

“There’ll be dozens of hired guns aboard,” Drew said. “How do we get them all off?

“There must be something that would make them leave the train,” Zoe said.

“They won’t back down from bullets or dynamite. That’s what they’re being paid to face, not that I think they’ll be expecting anything. There aren’t enough of us to pin them down that way anyhow, even if we got the train to stop.”

“Then what can they be made to fear?” Zoe asked.

“A rockslide,” said Fay, “something that looked like it would crush the train. They’d all jump off quick if that happened.”

“But we can’t wreck the train, or we’d have nothing to carry the elk away on,” said Drew.

“And assuming we do get away somehow,” Lodi said, “what do we do with a thing that big and heavy and recognizable? Every state and territory around Colorado would be telegraphed within the hour, and we’d be stuck on that train with nowhere to go. You can’t steal something and call the job a success if you don’t get away with the goods. A thing big as that elk is said to be, you’d have to cut it into pieces and smelt it down into ingots for easy transportation. That’d take days we just won’t have available to us.”

“Are you the best train robber in the business?” Zoe asked him.

“I like to think I am, but part of what makes a successful robber, ma’am, is figuring out in advance exactly what needs to be done with whatever it is you’ve stolen. Cash is easy—you stash it or spend it. A gold elk, that’s different, maybe a hundred times harder to work with.”

“But there simply must be a way.”

“I don’t like to be personal, but if it’s revenge you’ve got in mind, why not just rob Mr. Brannan of another payroll? The man has fat payrolls, one every month. Why not let this elk go by, and tackle something that’s easier done?”

“I want that elk. I want nothing else.”

“And I’m trying to think how it can be done, but if I can’t, then it won’t be done, no matter how much you want it. And one thing more—we don’t have a lot of time on our side, not if this thing’s already made and set for delivery.”

Zoe laid her hand firmly on the table. “We must all think harder, that’s all.”

Omie listened to this and other equally fruitless conversations for two days. She understood that Mama wanted to rob Leo of a statue, a golden elk that soon would be brought across the country by train, surrounded by men with guns so it could not be stolen. Omie empathized with Mama’s wish to steal the elk, but could see also that the man called Lodi had many reasonable objections and doubts concerning the robbery. It did sound impossible, given the size and weight of the statue, not to mention all the men with guns. Omie wanted very much to contribute to the planning, but could think of no scheme that might overcome Lodi’s logistical barriers.

On the second evening following Lodi’s return, Omie went outside to pee, and on her way back to the cabin paused a moment to look at the sky. Sometimes, if she waited long enough, she saw lights among the stars, always in pairs, one red and one green, with a flashing star in between. She had asked Zoe what these might be, and Zoe had suggested—with a wry smile that told Omie not to take her seriously—that the lights were angels watching over the earth, each bearing in one hand a red apple from the garden of Eden, and in the other hand a green apple from the gardens of the moon. Omie knew her mother did not believe any such thing, but it was a wonderful picture to hold in her mind. She sometimes heard the sound of the angels as they passed overhead, a distant whistling and rumbling that always seemed to lag far behind the lights of red and green.

But tonight there were no lights passing across the sky. She stood in the open grass before the cabin for some time before resigning herself to their nonappearance, and wondered, as her thoughts turned to other things, if the golden elk her papa-that-used-to-be was bringing to Colorado was the one that had visited her in a dream a long time ago. She had not recalled the dream until that moment, and assumed it had returned to her memory because everyone inside the cabin was talking about the statue and how to steal it. Mama had often told the story of how Omie saw a herd of golden elk beneath the ground at Glory Hole, and so begun the mining empire both of them had been thrust away from by Leo, but the elk she remembered now was different. It had told her (it seemed perfectly natural to Omie that the elk could speak) that it had been brought by her from beneath the earth, and belonged to her forever. Those had been its words, and Omie pondered them. She knew from what everyone had quoted from the newspapers that Leo’s elk was made from gold that came from his own mines, and that might be what the talking elk had meant. So the golden elk belonged to Omie, not to Leo. She went over the details of her memory once again, to be sure she had not misremembered or misinterpreted anything. It seemed quite clear—the statue was hers. That meant she could stop listening to what the grownups were saying and tell them what to do, since it was her own statue they were planning to steal. It had spoken to her a long time ago, but time, in such instances, was without meaning. The golden elk of years before was the golden elk so recently cast in Pittsburgh, and he was Omie’s by self-declaration. If she allowed him to, the elk might speak to her again, and let her know how he wanted to be stolen.

Omie closed her eyes and waited for the elk to appear before her secret eye, but he did not. Instead, she became aware of a blackness approaching her from behind, a kind of cloud in the shape of a man, and when she turned she saw Nate Haggin standing a little way off, his face white in the moonlight, and a smell streaming from him that made Omie feel slightly sick. He continued to stare, so Omie did the same.

“I ain’t afraid of you,” he said.

Omie knew this was a lie, but let it pass.

“You’re the devil’s child,” he said, taking a step or two closer. “I see through you, little girl, I do.”

Omie doubted that Nate could see beyond his nose, but again she let his words pass. He was a man of tremendous ugliness, not so much in his flesh as in his other self, the one that extended several feet beyond the body that carried him around. It was a dark and shapeless thing, more or less manlike, but it churned and wavered and re-formed itself into many shapes representing nothing at all that Omie could recognize. By comparison, her uncle Clay, who was indeed a homely man, had a shadow self even taller than his bones and hat combined, and the tallness of him was rendered in strong purples and reds that flashed and throbbed and rearranged themselves constantly, but always in the approximate shape of a man. Uncle Clay had been dark all over when first she peered inside him and around him, but since they both found out he was her uncle, Mama’s brother from long ago, his colors had brightened overnight, it seemed.

Uncle Drew was not so tall, and his colors were much more varied, but not so strong. Mama’s colors had improved also, following the revelation of not just one brother but two; Zoe was very nearly golden sometimes, when she was near them both. The other lady was insubstantial somehow, but she did brighten when Drew was near, and Omie knew Fay loved him, as well she might, because Uncle Drew was a nice man and very handsome when he smiled. Lodi was an unusual combination of colors and shapes, but none of them extended very far beyond himself. Omie tolerated him, but knew he would play no part in her life, or in the life of anyone else quite soon. But Nate was a shadow all his own, and she despised him for the reek he carried with him everywhere. It was a good thing he slept in the barn, or Omie would have had to make him do so.

“You and the rest,” Nate whispered, “you don’t belong here. You go on out of here now, all of you, before it’s too late, and … it’ll be too late pretty soon now.”

He Was so far beneath her Omie found it difficult to care what he said. She gave him a nudge, and he stumbled backward several feet, then laughed. “How do you do that?” he asked. “Tell me how you do that, little girl.”

He moved forward again, and she saw a picture in his head of Nate and herself doing something Omie could not comprehend, but it was an ugly picture, the two of them being so close, so she pushed him further away still, and he fell over, laughing softly, and she understood that he was drunk, and that was what caused his shadow to be so elusive and threatening. When her uncles had gotten drunk on the first night at the cabin, she had seen them glow like fireflies, but Nate was a bad man through and through, without hope of redemption through color. His heartbeat was small and mean, like a toy drum, and he picked himself up and backed slowly away from her, his drumbeat angry, made irregular by hatred and a partially hidden pulse of fear.