Power in the Blood (20 page)

Clay understood; the Stunces were better off in their community because of what he had done to the fool he’d killed. Clay didn’t begrudge them their newfound propriety, but didn’t wish to share in it, even if he was actually its cause. He had killed because he felt justified in doing so, not in order to inflate the social prestige of Grover Stunce and his wife. He felt uncomfortable. Clay fully intended killing more stupid men who dared to cross him, but this future winnowing of society’s fools was to take place in an aura of personal judgment and retribution, not out of some moral or legal code acceptable to the majority.

Clay’s itinerary was his own, conducted by himself, for himself, under the convenient aegis of state-mandated law enforcement. It had nothing to do with the Stunces, or with Keyhoe, or the price of silk in China. Sophie’s triumph was something Clay found objectionable, a trivial thing clinging to the coattails of his act, his ridding the town of an inferior human being. Did she understand? It was unlikely. He felt a little sorry for her, despised the obvious joy she was trying to bring him with her great news of extended credit. Sophie Stunce knew as little of what went on inside Clay’s head as she did of the moon’s dark side.

He knew better than to reveal his thoughts. Clay was politeness personified that evening, an avid listener at Sophie’s dining table as she held forth on whatever took her fancy. The subject of her choice was usually culled from newspaper articles. Grover was not a great reader of newsprint, and relied on his wife to supply him with tidbits while he ate. He seldom commented on anything she quoted, a frustrating reaction to a woman of such gregariousness as Sophie, so she aimed her reading and commentary in equal measure at Clay, in hopes of a conversational partner.

Clay played his part with reluctance, feeling that any response to another man’s wife, in full view and hearing of that man, had of necessity to be both circumspect and uninflammatory. While he agreed with some of what she said regarding the political news, he had to remain silent when Sophie ventured opinions contrary to his own. Clay reminded himself it didn’t matter what she thought, or what he thought; neither of them, or Grover Stunce, mattered a damn in the wide world. She could spout and opinionate as much as she pleased; the planet would turn at its own speed and life proceed as if none of them was there. His rejoinders over supper were therefore of the tamest.

He sensed Sophie’s frustration with him, and ignored it. Heated debate with Grover’s wife under the nose of Grover would have constituted a gross breach of etiquette, Clay felt, and he was not about to antagonize the man who had given him a job in which it was Clay’s legal right to eliminate those persons who stepped from the narrow path of righteousness. Such was Clay’s chosen work, and he would jeopardize it for no woman. He had a sneaking admiration for her anyway, if only because Sophie was a handsome individual despite her faint mustache.

The town was indeed a quiet place for more than a month following the shooting. Then, as the incident receded from the common experience of Keyhoe’s transients, and a fresh wave of cattle herders swept into the saloons, boisterousness and gunplay were heard on the streets again. Clay had known it would be only a matter of time before new targets were set up before him.

He felt no disquiet, no misgivings over blood that would soon be spilled in the course of his self-appointed task. The merits of every man within range of his scattergun would determine how well or badly he fared in Keyhoe. Clay genuinely felt the thousand possible outcomes of every evening were determined not by himself and his readiness to kill anyone deserving of it, but by some vast web of fateful influences, a flux of events that could snare a man unaware of its invisible workings. Clay’s job was to pick off those foolish enough to put themselves in harm’s way.

He did not imagine himself to be some custodian of society, a guardian of public morals; Clay didn’t even like people very much. It was something more personal than that, a part Clay had cast himself in without consultation. He chose to be this person, this haggard angel of death, and thought it was kind of funny the way folks believed he did it on their behalf.

He hauled drunks to the jail every night, then became sick of having to clean out the cells the next morning. Far better for these men to vomit in the streets and fall asleep under wagons; Clay wanted nothing to do with them. Only when a drinker became careless with his gun did Clay consider intervention justified. His manner in these arrests was always civil, smilingly calm despite his readiness to turn the simple matter of a request to hand over the offending weapon into a life or death confrontation. He was neither glad nor disappointed when, time after time, the cowhands looked at his face and slowly realized they should do what he said. There would come a time when one would not.

While he waited, Clay became aware of tension in the Stunce household. Grover was an uncommunicative man, at home or at work, and Clay was not about to ask for details concerning a man’s trouble with his wife. Clay knew most men would have liked to side with their companion against a woman, but Grover was no companion of Clay’s, in fact Clay had determined that Sophie, not Grover, was the stronger of the pair, therefore more deserving of his support. He said nothing, did nothing, gave no indication he was aware of enmity between the two. Sometimes it was a relief to leave the house and retire alone to his shack in the yard.

Clay thought more often about marriage than he used to, and supposed this was a result of having lived in proximity to a married couple. So far he hadn’t seen anything to recommend the institution, nor any specific reason to reject it. The Stunces appeared no more or less happy than anyone else, including Clay. It was a fact, he admitted, that he often felt lonely, even if he had just that moment left Grover and Sophie in the middle of another burst of silent warfare. Was he perhaps missing out on some essential human experience?

He often pictured the couple in bed together, not necessarily engaging in sexual intercourse, just lying there. Clay’s understanding of sex was a limited commodity; he remained a virgin, no matter how often the hurdy-gurdy girls and flat-out whores propositioned him on his beat. He knew a lot of them by their first names, and was unfailingly correct in his treatment of them, but Clay could never have assented to intercourse with any such creature.

There was in Keyhoe a well-known character called Captain Switchback, a middle-aged syphilitic whose spinal disks, so Clay was informed, had been eaten away by the disease, thereby allowing the vertebrae to grow together into a single inflexible rod. Captain Switchback couldn’t bend an inch, and had to turn his entire body rather than his trunk or neck alone. His unfortunate condition obliged him to walk with a comical throwing-out of the feet and frequent jumps to correct his path along the sidewalk. When the Captain turned a corner with legs flying and head bobbing, he reduced small boys to fits of howling, which only served to make him spring in circles, trying to identify and kick his audience. Captain Switchback was fast becoming senile as well, the syphilis having affected his spine as far up its stem as the brain. No, Clay would never risk such a possibility for himself. It was bad enough having to endure the stares his scarred cheeks brought him.

Sophie began to think she had done herself and Grover a disservice in encouraging Clay Dugan to remain in town. True, he did an excellent job of maintaining law and order with his ugly face and his shotgun, but the result was an increasing laxness on the part of Grover toward his duties. He often wanted to stay at home when he should have been out patrolling the streets with Clay who, for his part, made not the slightest protest. This indicated to Sophie that Clay considered her husband an untrustworthy partner, useless in a dangerous occupation such as theirs. His lack of complaint was an insult in disguise. She who had originally encouraged Grover to abandon the field of police work now wished he would distinguish himself in the public eye, and not leave most of the daily sidewalk strolling to his deputy.

One morning Grover returned home less than an hour after having left, and suggested to his wife that they go upstairs to engage in the marital act. Sophie had been married to him almost eighteen months, and this was the first time he had ever made so outrageous a suggestion. Had the first Mrs. Stunce consented to intercourse in the hours of daylight? Sophie had no idea how to cope with the situation, and so collapsed onto the kitchen floor she had been engaged in scrubbing when Grover returned home with his contemptible proposal.

Grover immediately rushed for the salts of ammonia to revive her, and when Sophie appeared to recover, he begged her forgiveness. “Forgiveness?” said Sophie, apparently still dazed. “For what, pray tell?” Grover said nothing. The shock of what he had done had driven recollection of his words clear out of Sophie’s mind, and it was as well to leave the moment lost.

He hurried back to work as soon as his wife had regained her feet, and vowed never to insult her virtue in so shameful a fashion again. It was maddening, though, the way she had lately taken to refusing him access to her body. He knew of instances where men had divorced their wives for such acts of selfishness, but Grover loved Sophie too much to do that. He tried to analyze her behavior, track down its beginnings and see if some event at its inception might possibly have caused her to change. It required only a few minutes to realize that Sophie’s impatience with him in general, and her lack of inclination to couple with him in bed, had worsened with the arrival in Keyhoe of Clay Dugan.

Could there be a connection? It seemed unlikely, Dugan being as unattractive as he was, but then, Grover had heard tell that women sometimes overlooked an ugly face if there was something else about a man, some indefinable aspect of personality or character to make up for the lack of physical comeliness. Did Clay have any of that, maybe? Grover couldn’t see where he did, but that didn’t necessarily rule him out as having found favor in Sophie’s eyes. He would have to watch and listen for the clues that would reveal, if anything could, the game going on behind his back, assuming there was such, which he didn’t believe for a moment.

Awareness of a fundamental change in his relations with Grover came slowly to Clay. Whereas the marshal had been content to allow his deputy free rein to patrol the saloons alone at night, when danger was most likely to unfold, he now accompanied Clay everywhere. Clay had assumed until then that Grover recognized his own ineptitude when dealing with the drunken element, which constituted the bulk of their arrests, and was content to let Clay do what Clay did best, without interference. The sudden change of tactic puzzled him for a while, then he reasoned that Sophie had been nagging at Grover to get out and show himself around town, as he used to before Clay came. Clay didn’t like the way Grover stuck to him up one street and down another; it made them both look cowardly, too afraid to enter the bars alone.

“Why don’t you handle this side of the street and I’ll take the other. It’ll be twice as fast that way, then we’ll trade sides later on for another go-round.”

“No.”

Grover offered no explanation for his rejection of a perfectly sensible plan, and Clay didn’t push him for one. The new regimen was clearly of domestic origin, and Clay was still inclined not to mess with whatever anxieties were at work inside the Stunces. It was none of his business, but maintaining order was, and Grover was jeopardizing, with his unwanted presence, the ambience of subtle menace Clay had built around himself of late. He was ruining everything, and for no reason.

Grover kept it up night after night, to Clay’s irritation. They never spoke to each other, and Clay managed always to keep one or two steps ahead of the shorter-legged Stunce, just to let the man know he didn’t want or need him along. Grover was undeterred, and their dual footsteps became a recognizable pattern on the wooden sidewalks. “Here comes Boney and Phony again, boys,” was just one of the comments Clay overheard.

At last he had had enough, and steered the marshal down an alley for a whispered confrontation.

“You quit it, this dogging me all over.”

“You work for me, so you do what I say. You don’t give orders.…”

“Like hell I work for you. We both work for the state. Now quit following me around like a lost kid.”

“I go my own way, Dugan.”

“I just wish you would.”

“I bet you do, then you could double back home and I’d never know the difference.”

“What?”

“You can get out tonight, so far as I’m concerned. I want you out of that shack and into a room somewhere else. Don’t fool yourself I haven’t got eyes.…”

“Mind telling me just what it is you’re saying?”

“Out by morning, and you can damn well turn your badge in too, first thing tomorrow.”

“Again? Is this something you do every full moon, Grover? Just tell me, so I’ll know when to expect it next time.” Clay was almost laughing, the conversation was so ridiculous. He really didn’t know what was eating at Grover, but was fairly sure it had something to do with whatever problems the man was having with his wife. Clay was glad at that moment he wasn’t married, not if matrimony turned men into fools on a regular basis.

“You get!” Grover hurled at him, and Clay began walking away, not so amused anymore. He wondered if Grover was working himself up to some kind of brainstorm that would require doctoring and a long spell in bed. That would be fine by Clay, who would then be able to resume his customary progress around the town alone.

He would take Grover’s order seriously for the present, though, in order to avoid any further confrontation when both men arrived back at the Stunce house. Clay planned on being gone by the time Grover came home.

When he entered the house and walked straight through to the backyard, Sophie was puzzled; Clay had never come home in the middle of his evening patrol before. She followed him out to the shack, and found him packing the few things he owned into a leather satchel.

“Why are you doing that?”