Power in the Blood (14 page)

He bought a horse, a tall gelding with a coarse mane and tail, an unkempt-looking animal, but deep in the chest. Edwin had taught Clay about horses. He bought a saddle and bridle, then rode his new horse to a haberdashery. “A big hat,” he told the salesman. “Wide in the brim.”

“Heading west, are we, sir?”

“We are.”

He had realized it himself only that morning, after buying the Colts. There was no surprise in the decision; Clay simply intended doing at last what he’d always planned on doing, and today was the day.

He left the haberdashery with his latest purchase casting a shadow across his shoulders, picked up his guns and rode west out of town, came to his senses several miles beyond the outskirts of Kansas City and turned back to spend more cash on a packhorse and supplies. Angry with himself, he set out again late in the day, and lost himself on the prairie to learn the art of the shootist.

An insufficiency of suitable targets became his first problem. He shot at clumps of grass, and managed to miss them more often than not. Clay persuaded himself his bullets were actually hitting their mark, but grass yields no sign of impact; he needed hard things, objects that would fly apart when hit. In time he came upon a meandering creek, its banks held together with willows and cottonwoods, providing dead branches for target practice. To Clay’s dismay, he was unable to hit them more than one time in twelve. Even the trees themselves seemed to dance sideways when he pulled the trigger. Were his beautiful Colts defective?

He loaded and fired, reloaded and fired again, and again, then faced the truth—he was a dreadful shot, an appalling shot. Clay changed his tactic, concentrated now on drawing the guns from their holsters, ignoring for the moment the inconvenient fact that, once drawn, his weapons wouldn’t hit anything Clay wanted to hit. Even this simple operation, the extraction of the gun from its holster at speed, proved impossible. Clay’s big hands fumbled and missed; his thick fingers had to search before locating and worming behind the trigger guard; his thumbs failed to haul back the narrow hammers without slipping, and often left the guns dangerously half-cocked. His hands were so large his little fingers found themselves tucked under the butts, with nowhere to take hold.

The guns had felt so good in the store. How had they changed, out there in the open air? Clay practiced till his fingers were sore, and when all one thousand rounds of ammunition were gone, he forced himself to face the unsettling fact that he could neither draw his weapons with alacrity nor hit anything at which he aimed. Even when he rested the barrels on top of a fallen trunk and took his time about aiming, he still missed the rocks, the branches—he doubted he could even hit the sky. Clay felt humiliated.

It was the hands, those big stupid hands of his, the farmer’s hands that could snap a branch like a twig. He felt like a clod, a dunce, a clumsy bonehead. All those years of dreaming about handling fine weaponry had been wasted time; he just wasn’t cut out to be a gunman. Expertise with six-shooters would never be his, thanks to the big fumbling hands and a general lack of coordination.

He knew now why it was he’d wanted so very badly to prove himself adept at shooting; it was so he could kill bad men, human scum like the Chaffey brothers. Killing those two had been a wonderful experience, the only flaw being the ill-timed misfirings of Delaney’s old pistol. New pistols, Clay had reasoned, would facilitate his ability to remove bad men from the face of the earth, but he had to reconsider that plan now, in light of his ineptitude.

Clay packed the Colts away and returned to Kansas City. He sold his gunslinger’s rig to a firearms store as far away from the site of their original purchase as possible, and recovered two-thirds of the cost. Turning to leave, he noticed a rack of shotguns, and saw a way out of his dilemma.

When he left Kansas City for the final time, Clay cradled a shotgun with the last two feet of its twin barrels expertly removed. Around his waist he wore an ammunition belt, the stitched leather loops accommodating twelve-gauge shells. He used his new toy often, blowing bushes to smithereens even when firing from the hip. He never fumbled a draw, since the gun was always in his hands, ready at a moment’s notice to be aimed and fired. Clay was happy.

9

Lovey Doll was almost stepped on by a horse as she crossed the street. The rider didn’t even notice her, a circumstance Lovey Doll was unused to, so she studied him hard as the horse carried him by. Even mounted, he was obviously tall, a long and lanky man with a face to match that of his horse, and a sawed-off shotgun in his arms. Lovey Doll found him repellent. She liked handsome men, well-dressed fellows with plenty of money to spend on her. The tall man’s packhorse also came close to treading on her little button boots.

“Watch where you ride, why don’t you!”

The horseman turned to look at her. His scrubby beard couldn’t hide the holes in his face. The scars were ugly enough to make Lovey Doll sick, but the eyes above the holes were even more compelling: black pools without expression of any kind—a madman’s eyes, she thought. It was a relief for Lovey Doll when he turned away and continued on down the street. It was one of Kansas City’s main streets, and it led directly to the westbound road, so she felt she wouldn’t have to face the ugly man again. The road was for poor people who couldn’t afford an easy ride west on the train from Independence, or for sodbusters with their heavy wagons filled with stoves and seed and children.

Lovey Doll entered a narrow doorway and ascended the stairs to the topmost floor of a four-story building. She was very late for her appointment, but was not troubled by it; the man waiting for Lovey Doll was very much in love with her, and would forgive her quickly if she just batted her eyes a little at him. He was a fool, like most men. Lovey Doll sometimes thought if she ever found a man who wasn’t a fool, she’d pretend to be a virgin, make him fall in love with her and get married. Of course, if the man wasn’t a fool, he’d never believe she was a virgin. It was a problem, but in any case, the chances of finding a man who wasn’t a fool were slimmer than Lovey Doll’s tiny waist.

She entered Dunnigan’s room without bothering to knock, this being her way of letting him know she didn’t care about being so late. His easel was set up in readiness beneath the skylight, his paints laid out, the podium laden with enough pillows to ensure her comfort without concealing with their bulk the pillowy softness of Lovey Doll herself when naked.

She began immediately to undress. Nevis hadn’t said a word since she flounced in, and now was pretending not to watch as her clothing fell away. Lovey Doll deliberately slowed her disrobing to tease him.

“Would you please hurry a little,” he finally begged.

“Well,
I am,
so don’t be snippy with me. Someone almost squashed my foot with his horse just now, the ugliest man I ever saw. You could paint a picture of him and call it a portrait of the devil.”

“Please, Lovey Doll …”

“I’m hurrying,” she assured him, wiggling with exaggerated slowness out of her camisole. Nude, she was at her most powerful. No man had ever seen her thus without exhibiting interest, or trying hard not to, like Nevis Dunnigan. It amounted to the same thing, and was even preferable from Lovey Doll’s perspective, since the confusion her body aroused in such men made them far more pliant, more manageable, than those coarse brutes who simply admired her shape and wanted, in the most forthright manner, to penetrate her private parts with their own.

Lovey Doll referred to the male appendage as Moses’ rod, for just as that patriarch’s wooden staff was turned to a snake and back again, so the one-eyed worm of maleness could be at one moment a sluggardly drooping thing of comical unloveliness, and the next rise to attention like a ship’s prow, aimed always at Lovey Doll’s snug port of call. She had, when first encountering the phenomenon, assumed men carried such hardened rods at all times inside their pants; the discovery that its capacity for change was an essential characteristic of the organ fascinated her. Lovey Doll’s naïveté at fourteen had long since turned to semiscornful bemusement; she was now just one month shy of seventeen.

“Your position, please,” Nevis said.

Lovey Doll turned and strode to the podium, aware that Nevis watched every enticing jiggle of her buttocks as she mounted the steps, aware of his eyes on her bosom as she lay down among the pillows and propped an arm behind her head. Her hair was still up, but Nevis liked to do the unpinning. It was remarkable, the things men liked to do, apart from the actual act of fornicating. They were like children, really, and Lovey Doll still had not divined the reason why they chose to be that way.

Feeling Moses’ rod inside her was uncomfortable at worst, a sweaty bore at best. The attraction she felt for men lay not in their foolish probings and pantings, but in their ability to buy for her the things she truly wanted: fine things, expensive things, clothing for the most part, and trinketry to adorn herself with. If a thing was not of direct use to Lovey Doll, she had no interest in it. Nevis’s painting-in-progress, for instance: she saw that he was talented with his brushes and colors, and was developing a fine likeness of her on canvas, but it was nothing Lovey Doll could ever use, nothing she wished to touch with her fingers, her body; she couldn’t wrap a painted canvas around herself and admire the result in a mirror, couldn’t draw pleasure from the feel of it against her precious skin.

She failed to see why art had monetary value at all, since its purpose was nothing more than to be hung on a wall and be gawked at by men Lovey Doll wouldn’t touch with the longest of poles. It was one more example of the stupidity of males, of their pathetic infatuation with female flesh. It was ridiculous, but apparently it was the way of the world, and Lovey Doll would use it to her advantage. She didn’t doubt she would one day marry a rich man, a very rich man. She deserved no less.

Nevis was approaching her, his long fingers literally twitching with anticipation. “I’ll just let down your hair,” he said, a trifle breathlessly. He proceeded, with care and delicacy, to do so. Lovey Doll tried hard to contain her impatience. Such protracted fussing as this infuriated her after more than a few minutes. Nevis’s hands fluttered hither and thither like moths, accomplishing little with their excess of motion, their nervous tremblings. She could feel his breath on her face and shoulders, and was unaccountably irritated by it.

Eventually she rejected Nevis and his infatuated bumbling. “Back!” she ordered, and completed the unpinning herself. This brought Nevis close to her again, for the purpose of arranging the long swatches of hair in such a manner as to emphasize, rather than conceal, her roundly audacious breasts. The grand finale to this traditional rite was approaching. This was Lovey Doll’s seventh sitting for Nevis Dunnigan, and she knew him through and through.

“Oh, Lovey Doll …,” he moaned, collapsing beside her, his heavily oiled head sliding between what Lovey Doll insisted on calling her bubbies. This was Nevis’s favored resting place. She had to inhale the scent of his cheap pomade for several minutes at the beginning of every sitting, before his professional instincts dragged him away to the easel and his work. She knew the application of paint to canvas would be anticlimactic for Nevis, following contact with her skin, her odor, her aura of utterly approachable yet frustratingly distant sensuality. The next hour or two would be without interest for Lovey Doll also. The high point of each sitting was the ludicrous positioning of Nevis’s head on her chest, a tableau maintained for only a short while before work on the canvas commenced.

The painting was titled “Venus Revealed.” Lovey Doll thought it appropriate that she represent the goddess of love. She had never loved anyone, but love, at least in the abstract, was an important thing, the thing that made the world go around, she’d heard, so Lovey Doll was pleased to personify so essential a cosmic ingredient. Her true name was Griselda, but she had always known she deserved better.

As he worked, Nevis forced himself to be less concerned with Lovey Doll as a female; she was a model,
his
model; a collection of planes, masses and lines, an exercise in chiaroscuro, in draftsmanship and painterly execution. She was himself, or a part of himself; there was just as much of Nevis Dunnigan on the canvas as there was of Lovey Doll Pines. He thought his efforts worthy of comparison with similar studies by Ingres and Delacroix; Rembrandt’s nudes, and Rubens’s, were far too fat. Lovey Doll was perfectly proportioned, despite her shortness of stature (she barely reached his shoulder, and Nevis was by no means tall), a real little pocket Venus. He would never find another like her—never.

It hurt him to love her as he did. Lovey Doll had made it clear she believed herself destined for the bed of a rich man. She made no bones about finding and winning such a millionaire, be he old or ugly or senile; the money was the thing. “Everything could be wonderful,” she told him, “with lots of cash to spend.” It was a deplorable philosophy, but he forgave her, as he forgave her lack of interest in him. She knew nothing of art, could read only with difficulty, was ignorant of most things in the world, yet very pleased with herself nonetheless.

It distressed Nevis to know she would probably get exactly what she wanted, and would in all likelihood enjoy to the utmost the riches she sought and found. Lovey Doll was without morality or scruple, was not even terribly intelligent, but the shape of her luscious little body, the perfect Cupid’s bow of her upper lip, these things alone made him love her. It was humiliating, this love he had for a girl far beneath him intellectually and spiritually, but Nevis couldn’t help himself.

He had heard that in Paris, artists routinely made lovers of their models; it was
de rigueur
, traditional, an indispensable part of the artist’s life. Even in New York City it happened, but not to Nevis. He had studied himself in mirrors and made innumerable self-portraits in an attempt to discover why it was that women, especially young and pretty women, had no wish to be his partner. Even proposals of marriage had never advanced his cause beyond thwarted gropings and sweatily nervous hand-holding. He tried impressing females with his talent for painting, showed them everything he had ever produced, from charcoal sketches to oils the size of a dining room table. They always murmured polite phrases of appreciation, but he could tell they wanted to be gone from his studio, gone from the painful, anxious nearness of him.