Power in the Blood (21 page)

“Grover doesn’t want me here anymore.”

“For what reason?”

“When you find out, I’d like to know.”

“He wouldn’t tell you?”

“Not in words that made any sense. Anyway, he wants me gone, and I’m not about to argue.”

Sophie felt unfamiliar panic take hold of her chest. He was going, the ugly young-old man who lived in the yard and ate his silent meals without ever complimenting her cooking unless Grover did so; the man who listened as she talked, but never offered a contrary opinion, although she could see plenty behind his eyes; the man who had single-handedly established respect for the office of marshal. Grover was jealous, she saw it immediately, and could not hide from herself her own part in making much of Clay’s accomplishments to Grover when they were alone. What a fool she’d been, to do that, and now he was leaving!

“Clay!” she barked, and he looked up from his packing, as surprised at the tone of her voice as Sophie was herself.

“Clay … this is not at all sensible.”

“I’m in agreement, but it’s his place.”

“No; as a matter of fact, it isn’t. This house is mine, left to me by my father. You’re my tenant, not Grover’s.”

Clay was struck by the novelty of this, but not for long. “I can’t stay if he wants me out, not if you want peace and quiet in your house, Sophie.”

It was the first time he had ever used her first name, and he had only done so now because he was leaving. It was a last-minute intimacy that made her quite faint. She actually felt a little sick at this sudden development. She could have kicked Grover for his insensibility and childishness. Clay mustn’t go from her, not now, not because of Grover.

“No,” she said, and felt herself step up to the edge of a cliff.

Clay looked at her, unsure what to do or say. Did the look of resolution on her face mean she had a plan of some kind? He wasn’t all that interested if she did; after what Grover had said, it would be impossible to share a meal again, no matter what Sophie did. He closed the satchel, turned around to pick up his gun, and on turning back to leave found himself chest to chin with Sophie Stunce. He was so alarmed at her abrupt proximity he took a step back, but Sophie followed. “No,” she said again, her voice lower, softer this time.

She was so close he could smell her. Clay couldn’t have said if it was a good smell or bad; to him she smelled simply of woman. It began at his nose and traveled clear down to his boots, filled him like smoke in a jar, and he knew he was in trouble now, because this was what Grover had been talking about—Clay and his wife: it was clear as day, only he’d been too stupid to see, and within a half hour of his hearing the unfounded suspicions, they were coming true.

He couldn’t breathe for the woman smell of her invading him, flooding him with a kind of slow quaking. He could even feel the push of her heavily corseted breasts against him. No female had been this close to Clay since Nettie bathed his cuts and bruises. He heard the heavy satchel fall, and had the presence of mind to toss his shotgun onto the bed. With both hands free, his arms seemed to curl of their own accord around the woman pressed against him, and as soon as they had her fully encircled she softened and sagged, obliging him to hold her even tighter or drop her to the rug. Her entire body appeared to have become limp. He could tell which parts of her were flesh, and which parts whalebone, and the small bulges of woman where they met in conflict were under his fingers no more than a moment before those same fingers began clutching and tearing at the back of her dress.

Grover worried that he hadn’t been firm enough with Clay. He hadn’t been fooled by Clay’s pretense at not understanding the hints Grover threw down like cards. It was perfectly obvious there was something between his lodger and his wife, at least it was perfectly obvious to Grover. He stopped walking, realizing he’d gone and sent Clay home to pack up and get out, and home was where Sophie was. Grover didn’t doubt that there had been many clandestine visits during working hours, before he started accompanying Clay everywhere, but it was intolerable that there should be one more meeting of the two betrayers, especially at Grover’s request. He’d slipped up there, because of his anger. It had been a mistake, but he could go home himself and make sure the farewells that took place were no fonder than they needed to be.

Or maybe he wouldn’t. It was unlikely they would do anything, now that they knew Grover was onto their game. Clay would just breeze in and breeze out again, most likely. Grover didn’t really want to be there with the both of them allied against him. This was the second time he’d told Clay to go elsewhere, and if Clay refused, right there in front of Sophie, Grover would look a perfect fool. No, he’d stay away and let events sort themselves out. He was on duty in any case, and the town would go to hell without at least one peace officer in evidence to hold back the ungodly.

When Grover entered a saloon called Minnie’s Place he did so with a worried mind. He knew as soon as he set foot inside that he should never have come. A silence laden with contempt descended as the drinkers saw who he was. Someone at the back of the room, a coward hidden by tobacco smoke, bleated like a sheep, and the sound produced guffawing that swept across Grover like a cold wind.

He couldn’t understand why they hated him. Before Clay came to Keyhoe he had managed to keep the place pretty much on the rails, even been complimented occasionally by ladies on the street for the way he kept things quiet, or as quiet as a Kansas cow town had a right to expect. What had he done wrong? It was Clay’s doing, somehow. Clay had shot a man, and by so doing had made Grover look weak, despite the fact that Grover himself had killed a man in the line of duty not so very long ago. By what convoluted logic did these cattle punchers and whores assume he was inferior to his own deputy. It was an insult, personal and direct! He couldn’t let the moment pass, or the last scraps of his dignity and professional standing in the community would be torn away. Having no other choice, Grover went to the rear of the bar where the bleating had come from. There were at least eight men there who might have been responsible, all of them staring at him with faces like stone.

“Which one of you made that sheep sound?”

There were no volunteers. The men were together, had driven a herd of beeves from Texas up to the railhead at Hays City, and now were returning home to do the same thing over again. None among them had made the sound. They all knew it was a skinny drinker a short distance from them who had done it, but they were disinclined to turn him in, especially to a lawman as foolish as this one. They would say nothing and hope he went away again, so they could resume their drinking and plan further entertainment. Any town in which the locals openly made fun of their own marshal would likely turn out to be a wild place where they could really let rip over the next day or so. The Texans awaited the next development with interest.

“Well?” demanded Grover.

“Tolerable,” said a cowboy, and Minnie’s Place erupted with laughter again.

This time Grover knew his man. “You,” he said, pointing to the joker. “You’re under arrest.”

“Me?”

“Come here, and put your hands inside your belt.”

“Haven’t finished my drink. You go along without me and I’ll follow on later.”

More laughter, lacking the previous level of hilarity, rippled by Grover’s burning ears. “You do what I say, when I say it,” he said, feeling his throat begin to close with fear. He should never have gone in there, should have gone home to be with his wife whom he loved, but Clay was there, so he couldn’t, which was another mistake he’d made already that night, and the result of all his confusion and misery and miscalculation was this—an unwanted confrontation with some stranger who had done nothing more than mock him gently in front of an audience that already mocked him day after day. The whole thing was Clay’s fault.

“You get over here now,” said Grover, but his voice had to squeeze past the fear clenching his throat, which made him begin to cough, so his words came out raspingly, without the least authority, and the cowboy stayed right where he was. To have responded to so feeble an order would have made him look foolish in front of his friends.

Grover stifled his coughing. He desperately wanted to be somewhere else, far from Minnie’s, and far from his wife as well; she wasn’t worth it. The faithless hussy probably had done a terrible job of hiding her marital treachery from the neighbors, which would account for the way everyone in town was laughing at him lately. Far from Sophie, that was the place he wanted to be, where he wouldn’t have to listen to any more snickering, or see the kind of smirk the cowboy in front of him wore, the kind that said Grover was a pathetic fool who couldn’t be taken seriously, an opinion so grossly unwarranted it made Grover angry, and so he did the only thing he could have done under the circumstances fate seemed to have arranged for him that night. He drew his gun to arrest the one who smirked, the one who had provoked unjustified laughter, and then, without fully intending it, Grover pulled the trigger.

His tormentor took a bullet in the abdomen, but managed to draw his own gun and fire before beginning to slide along the bar and onto the floor. The others already had their guns out and pointing at the marshal, but it was not necessary to fire a shot; their friend had put a hole in Grover Stunce’s chest, a surefire dead shot, and the fool with the badge was dying as he fell, the pistol dropping with a clatter beside a rolling spittoon his foe had overturned.

It took almost an hour to locate the deputy. Someone finally caught sight of Clay on the street and dragged him to Minnie’s. Both parties to the shooting were dead by then, the cowboy having had time to dictate a succinct will that disposed of his few disposables. Several of the Texans were unashamedly tearful, and in no mood for interrogation by someone as biased as the dead marshal’s deputy was bound to be. They were surprised when Clay listened, rather than gave orders. When he had talked with others who witnessed the event, Clay declared that no charges could be pressed against any living person. He further told the cowhands that their dead companion would be buried at the county’s expense.

The town was not greatly surprised when, two months after the death of Grover Stunce, Clay Dugan married his widow.

13

It was the heat, rather than the flies, that exasperated Drew so much. It never went away, even at night. It had taken Yancy and himself a month to reach Galveston, and in that time they passed from the dry heat of the desert to the humidity of the Gulf of Mexico. Yancy had promised cool ocean breezes, but Drew had yet to experience any such thing. The air, when it moved, was like molasses: heavy and thick, tasting of salt tang and fish. Clothing pasted itself against his body within minutes of his dressing, and his socks became damp as bar cloths inside his boots.

“My hometown,” Yancy said with pride. He had already told Drew he was born in Arkansas, but Drew was becoming used to his lies. Drew reasoned that the information Yancy provided could be divided into two categories—things that mattered, and things that didn’t. It didn’t matter if Yancy wasn’t born where he said he was born, so Drew didn’t bother challenging him over that and similar contradictions. Hard facts were alien to Yancy, but he had offered good advice on how to handle the frisky mare and powerful Winchester Drew had taken in New Mexico Territory.

Yancy’s “embellishments,” as he unblushingly called them, were reserved for details of his personal life. Drew thought maybe the truth was too sad to tell of, so he forgave Yancy’s lying, because he liked the man. He considered himself a kind of plodding older brother to an immature sibling who just couldn’t help but tell whopping fibs, try as he might to curb the habit. It was a minor flaw, made harmless by Drew’s understanding nature.

It was clear that Yancy was not a man of any permanent or legal trade, but Drew simply accepted this aspect of him along with the rest of his charming defects. Yancy seemed genuinely to like him, and at no time condescended to Drew in the usual manner of men toward boys.

“All I ask of you, Drew, is that you never deliver me into the hands of my enemies.”

“Who are they?”

“Anyone at all, at any time, and I sure don’t lie. Being independent as I am, I do things to please myself, but the world oftentimes won’t accept a fellow that does what he likes. Ever been around the army at all?”

“No.”

“Worst kind of hell. The army life is for dunces who don’t know if they should pull their boots on or take a shit without the sergeant tells them to. Cavalry’s bad enough, but infantry’s worse. To be an infantryman you have to be certifiably stupid. They know right away if you are, because only a certifiably stupid person would ever voluntarily offer his body for purgatory in uniform.”

“Were you in the army, Yancy?”

“Do I strike you as being stupid in any way?”

“No, you’re smart.”

“And there lies your answer.”

Which meant that he had been in the army, by the topsy-turvy logic Drew was becoming accustomed to when dealing with Yancy’s past. He couldn’t imagine Yancy taking orders from a sergeant, but he was learning that the world was bristling with things he had never been able to imagine.

The place they lived in, for example, was tenanted mostly by young women too lazy to dress themselves even in the middle of the day. They were very friendly for the most part, especially Winnie, who was just a few years older than Drew, although she practiced the same mode of undress as all the rest. Drew knew she was friendly because she kept winking at him. He had thought at first it was some kind of nervous twitch of the eyelid, the kind a young man back in Illinois had, that everyone said he never had before he was in the war. That young man’s eye had twitched constantly, but Winnie’s seemed to flicker only when Drew passed her in the hallway on his way to the outhouse. They hadn’t spoken as yet; it was Yancy who told Drew her name, and the names of some of the other lazy women.

“Why don’t they get dressed? Is it because it’s so hot?”