Power in the Blood (103 page)

His circlings through and round about the emptiness were weakening him. He felt flesh falling from his bones, blood seeping from his veins, boiling out through skin turned to leather. He was becoming a husk, blown this way and that by the turgid air, but somewhere inside Clay his great desire for one last kill rattled like a dried pea, and would not go away. The rattling pea drove him on. His packhorse died, and Clay rode on. His saddle horse fell, and Clay drove the suffering from it with a shotgun shell, and walked on with his gun and empty canteen and rattling pea, until finally he came to a place, another place of nothing, and fell down himself, and at last the pea was silent. This is my time of dying, thought Clay, and I never did see the son of a bitch.

He closed his eyes against the afternoon light, but it was too bright still, so he dragged himself to shade beneath a rock ledge, and arranged his body for a comfortable leave-taking. His head was filled with a steady swishing sound, insistent but not distracting. Clay stared across the barren ground he had covered, watched it dance and shimmer before his eyes in languid waves of heat, saw the dust funnels raise themselves and scuttle nervously across the earth before falling apart in the air and drifting downward again. He had come a long, long way to be in that place, and the trip had not been worth it, because he had failed. Life itself was ebbing within him, and had already ebbed too far for caring. Soon he would depart from there, like everyone else, leave it all to the rattlesnakes and Slade, who must have been a man of smoke and dust to survive so long without being seen.

Clay’s kidneys gave him no peace, even so close to the end, but insisted on pushing another stone down through his belly’s side, its passage eased not at all by the absence of water in his tubes. To die unfulfilled was harsh enough, but to die with the pain of a kidney stone prodding at him was downright cruel. The stone would get maybe halfway down, then stop, because Clay would be dead by then, and that would be his revenge against the stone, to strand it partway to its destination, never allow it to plunge into the warm lagoon of his bladder or ride his yellow foaming rapids out into the light. The stone might one day be found among his bones, nestled there like a croquet ball among a tangle of hoops, and the man who discovered the stone would carry it away to place upon his mantel shelf and tell his wife how lucky he had been to find it there.

Now it was dusk. Purple shadows came slowly down from the rock escarpment behind him to steal along the ground, silently bleeding its purple darkness back into the sky. Clay hurt. He hurt everywhere, but mainly in the left side of his belly and between his eyes. The pain was keeping him alive, drawing him back when he attempted to escape its clawing, and he would willingly have cried in sympathy with himself and his suffering if only his body could have summoned the moisture.

Darkness at last. He felt his skin cracking in the cooler air. The pain was easing a little, as if realizing its own pointlessness. With luck, he might be able to slip away quietly, without provoking another attack. He could have hastened the process, of course, by placing the barrels of his sawed-off into his mouth and pulling both triggers, but that end held no appeal. Clay admitted he had lost out in his last game, strewn his cards carelessly instead of holding them close against his chest. It had all been a sorry waste, he told himself, this life he had used up too soon. There was nothing at all to show for it, no children to bear his name, nobody to weep over his body and trim the wild grasses from his marker down through the years. At his birth there had been a woman; at his death there would be no one.

Cold was creeping inside him. Soon he could go, and in the morning the empty shell that had been Clay Dugan would be made warm again by sunlight, and the mornings and afternoons to follow would turn him to dust fit only for blowing away. His arms and legs already were immovable, and his head could barely turn on his neck. Sometimes his eyes opened, and when they did he saw herds unlike any he had seen before. Creatures tall as ostriches ran like the wind, their striped backs and tails undulating smoothly. Lizard heads out-thrust, they dashed among impossibly tall trees, scampering lightly through the shadows, phantom runners beneath a larger moon than Clay ever knew. The forest of his dreaming rang with mysterious trumpetings and forlorn cries, whether animal or human Clay could not be sure. He thought he might already have died and been taken to some darkling world for his sins among humanity, and his crimes against himself. The forest was a lonely place, and Clay was glad to see it fade away as the sun came up.

He should have been gone by then. It really was too bad. Now he’d have to endure more heat, more agony from his kidney stone, and be that much longer in the dying. Even death was not going to do Clay any favors.

The girl was easily recognized because of her blue-sided face, even if Clay had never seen her before in daylight, nor at any time when he had not been dreaming. He was not dreaming this time; his body hurt him too much. The girl was truly there, and yet she was not. She cast no shadow, and the light she was illuminated by was not from the same direction as the sun. Clay knew then that he either was mad or else finally had died, and was being greeted on the other side by this familiar ghost. He nodded at her.

“Are you sick?” she asked, her voice hollow, as if she spoke into a tin can.

“Dying, I guess,” said Clay. He could not remember talking to the girl before. In his dreams they simply shared the same time and space, and were sometimes able to shout at each other without receiving any reply. She seemed like a well-mannered girl, and he was glad of the company.

“Over there,” she said, pointing. “There’s some water over there, just a little way off.”

“Water?”

“Not very much, though.”

Clay stared in the direction she had pointed, along the escarpment. It looked like more of the same dreary desert to him, and he turned back to tell the girl so, but found himself alone.

“Little girl …? Little girl …!”

She was gone, and he was crushed by her absence. He had been looking forward to asking her if he was mad or dead, and now that wouldn’t happen. Worse, he was confronted with a choice—to see if there really was water where she had indicated, or ignore the episode as some kind of mirage, like the forest he had seen in the night. He could die where he was, in considerable discomfort, or give himself more pain on top of what he already had, in hopes of finding the water and surviving. To trust a dream spirit, or not.

Clay thought he would be unable to rise, and once having accomplished this, believed he could not possibly start walking, and when he had gone a quarter mile or so, was shocked to find himself still upright. He stayed close to the escarpment, glad of its shade, and only occasionally fell over the rocks that time and weather had spawned and tumbled from the sheer cliff beside him. The water, when he found it, was seeping into a shallow pool no more than two feet across. Clay dropped to his knees and began drinking.

He literally drank the pool dry over the course of an hour or so, and had to wait for it to refill itself. He saw the tiny rippling of liquid as it entered the natural cup from below, and restrained himself until it had acquired a depth sufficient for him to scoop up water in his hands again. He drank now to free the stone and flush it through into his bladder. Clay was determined not to leave the tiny soak until the stone had completed its journey. He crawled into deeper shade as the sun came around to strike him, and ventured out only to sip some more from what he called the girlpool. She had saved him, and he decided she must be his guardian angel, despite her unusual, distinctly unheavenly appearance.

The stone began to shift again, scraping its way down through passages that now ran with water like spring freshets, and by early evening it had entered Clay’s overflowing bladder. The pain died away within minutes. Sometime between dusk and dawn it would begin its second tight squeeze, along his penis. Clay still had his bottle of mineral oil and eyedropper; he would no more have parted from it than he would from his canteen or sawed-off.

When dusk came he stood and took his filled canteen from the girlpool, and began walking. Lubricated again, his body worked as it always had, supplying a steady loping gait that caused his head to bob up and down slightly as he proceeded across the desert floor beneath a three-quarter moon. His stone was held in abeyance, and his head was no longer troubled by humming or pounding. Clay’s mood was almost jaunty. He was alive, in good health, considering, and his mood was one of determination again, not the wan acceptance of, if not actual beckoning for death that had overcome him the night before. He was alive, and he would live for as long as the water in his canteen lasted, and a little bit longer besides. And even then, if the water should give out, he would find more, because he had a guardian angel. Clay was beginning to doubt the underpinnings of his atheism. If guardian angels were real, might not the regular kind also be flitting about in abundance, presumably invisible to human eyes, especially those of a doubter like himself? And if there were angels, did that oblige God to climb onto a throne somewhere? Would there be judgment after death, a siphoning of good souls heavenward, a deluge of sinners sent cascading down to hell? The whole thing troubled him; he did not know if he was a good man after all, or just a man less bad than the worst of them. If his life was truly a test, he should definitely begin setting it in order. If he walked out of the desert alive (which he would, with the assistance of his blue-faced friend), he must begin anew. There must be an end to manhunting, a seeking-out of less bloody work. He had no idea what form this new work would take, since killing or apprehending bad men was all he knew, but he would find something. His life had been spared for a reason, a purpose of some kind, and he would not ignore so explicit an imperative.

When he first saw it, the ranch appeared deserted in the moonlight, another home abandoned in fear of Slade. The place was small, one adobe house with a stable and corral. No dogs barked, no lamps burned. The deep window wells were black with emptiness. Clay could hear a windmill somewhere, slowly creaking, but could not see it. The ranch was tucked away into a shallow draw, the windmill presumably somewhere more open to the air; he would find it tomorrow, and hope it was still pumping water into a cattle pond. His first need was for food.

The door yielded to his touch, the latch rising with a faint squeal. He smelled cold stove ashes as he searched for a lamp and for food. He found neither, but continued blundering through the darkness of the house, opening shutters to allow moonlight inside. They had taken everything edible, those frightened people, but left their few articles of hand-hewn furniture, too heavy for their wagon, maybe, thought Clay. Although the place was poor, it was a shame to leave such stuff as they had owned behind them as they had. Fear made men act in haste, he concluded, and lay down on an actual bed for the first time in over a month. Its straw-tick mattress caused him to moan with pleasure as he sank into its rustling embrace, and sleep came rushing over him despite his hunger and his blistered heels. The last sound Clay was aware of, as he fell into the welcome darkness of oblivion, was the windmill cranking out its one fractured, rusting note time and again, a metronome for the damned.

Daylight woke him. Clay felt much refreshed but ravenously hungry, and so began searching the house in earnest, now that he could see his way from room to room. The former occupants had left a lot more than his first inspection had revealed, in fact it seemed that they had done no more than take their food and run, and not very long ago either. There was little dust on the floor and other horizontal surfaces; clothing of the many-times-patched kind hung on pegs; there were three chickens in the yard. Why hadn’t they taken their chickens along? What had scared them so badly that they fled in a panic, leaving behind most of what they owned? Even fear of Slade could not account for it.

Clay found some tortilla flour and set about building a fire in the stove. The kitchen utensils were hanging on the wall. He baked himself several tasteless rounds and crammed them into his stomach. There was a coffeepot, but no coffee. Now he was beginning to feel a vague disquiet, a sense that something was not right with the house. It held an air of menace not fully explained by the presumed circumstances of its abandonment. The feeling gnawed at him, unsettling the glaze of physical contentment granted by a good night’s rest and a full belly. Some enigmatic displacement of the ordinary was impinging on him, brushing his awareness with a feather’s touch, unsettling him for reasons beyond his understanding.

He began looking again, hoping that a more thorough search would reveal to his eyes what the deepest part of his brain was attempting to assimilate, so that he might be warned. Panic, the thing he had self-righteously assigned to the owners of the house, began to prick at Clay. He was fretting over the inexplicable, worrying himself about what had or might have happened there. That something bad had left its imprint upon the walls and air within the house he no longer doubted. He asked his guardian angel to appear and explain everything to him, but she remained where angels tread. He was whimpering now, like a frightened dog, anxious yet fearful to know why it was he felt as he did.

The stable, he told himself, and went there in full expectation of answers, but there were none; in fact his confusion was deepened by the discovery there of a wagon. Why had the owners fled on foot? The hidden windmill continued its ceaseless creaking. No animals, but their dung was fresh, no more than a day old. Clay was becoming frantic, shaming himself with the noises that came unbidden from his throat. He could not control his thoughts, which formed no particular notion or picture, but were flooded with an unspecified dread. What was there in the house, or around it, to make him feel that way?

The windmill. It had been calling him since his arrival. He would attend to it now, having exhausted every place else. Clay went outside and followed its dismal creakings, found a pathway to higher ground and came through a thicket of scrub to stand before the source of the endless grinding and clanking. The windmill was large, a more expensive model than Clay had expected for such a lowly spread; the owners must have scrimped and saved to pay for the tall metal tower and the twelve-foot span of vanes. One of the owners was spread-eagled across those vanes, wrists and ankles bound by wire, the body’s nakedness so smeared with blood it was impossible to guess its gender. Turning and turning upon its gutted axis, the featureless body had emptied its intestines onto the small utility platform beneath. At the base of the tower was another adult, and a boy, both naked, opened and emptied. The boy’s skull was smashed open, the adult’s head removed completely. Flies formed a small and noisome cloud about their gaping wounds and the truncated neck. Coming closer, Clay saw that the adult on the ground was male, the one turning in circles above him female. He knelt and vomited the tortillas that had required so much effort to make, and the one word his mind was capable of formulating could not even pass his lips: Slade.