Power in the Blood (51 page)

“Nitrous oxide?” Clay inquired, as Maxwell made his preparations.

“Far too unpredictable. Ether’s my preference.”

An assortment of wicked-looking instruments was laid out alongside Clay while Maxwell hummed tunelessly to himself. Clay began to rise, but the dentist pressed him down again with a reassuring hand. “The moment of truth, Mr. Dugan. Do you submit to my process of guaranteed painlessness, or do you invite facial deformity within twelve months or less? The choice is yours.”

“Go ahead, but I want plenty of that ether, you hear?”

“I never stint my patients, sir, you may be assured.”

Maxwell unstoppered a small bottle and tipped a portion of the contents onto a handkerchief. The cloth was brought to Clay’s face like a funeral shroud, and laid over his nose. He felt a mule kick him slowly between the eyes, then experienced a sinking that carried him down through the unyielding hotel mattress to a place of welcoming darkness where thought was neither possible nor desirable.

His gradual return to consciousness was unpleasant. Clay’s mouth howled with absence of the familiar pegs; each had been replaced with a white-hot iron screw, it seemed, and Clay was upset that Dr. Maxwell’s promise had been reneged upon. Between his upper and lower gums there existed a region of torment no man should have had to endure without whiskey to blur its borders, and Clay had none, or did he? He could not recall in detail the exact nature of his circumstances prior to Maxwell’s application of the ether-drenched handkerchief. The operation had certainly taken place, but where was the good doctor?

Clay levered himself upright, and was appalled at the bloody mess lacing his chest and shirt. He could feel dried blood around his neck like a crackling collar, and found he could not separate his jaws for the red cement bonding them. The room was occupied only by himself. It shouldn’t have been that way. Clay was beginning to feel angry, when anger was replaced by shock at what he saw on the bedside bureau. A set of dentures grinned with skeletal cheeriness at him, surrounded by thirty-two lumps of rotting human ivory, each extracted tooth nested firmly in a bed of dull scarlet tissue; evidently the parting of the ways had not been without difficulty. Clay thought for a moment he might vomit, but was able to restrain himself by remembering that he was unable to open his mouth. Anger returned, magnified many times. He hurt. He hurt a great deal, and his thirty-two dollars had been set down as a guarantee against any such physical insult. He would get the money back, and maybe extract by fist a number of Maxwell’s own molars and incisors.

On his feet at last, Clay was able to stagger toward the small mirror above the washbasin and jug. What he saw there caused his bloodied jaws to separate with shock, enabling them to begin bleeding anew. The lower portion of his face had been reduced, made less, shrunken somehow despite obvious swelling along the jawline. Were the obscene false teeth leering at his bedside supposed to fill it out again? Where was that goddamn doctor! Now that his mouth could be opened, Clay stared into a maw unrecognizable as his own, and was frightened by its ugliness and the renewed gobbets of blood spilling down his stubbled chin.… He had shaved the morning he came to Maxwell’s room, hadn’t he? How much time had passed while he lay unconscious?

Clay lunged unsteadily for the door and flung it open. He pawed his way along the corridor walls to the stairs, and eased himself down to the lobby, where he encountered a clerk whose face registered considerable alarm the moment Clay began lurching toward him.

“Whay yay inth thiyy!” Clay demanded.

“I … pardon me?”

“Whay nyay inth thiyy, gonndammith!”

“What … day, sir? Wednesday, sir …”

“Wenschnay …?”

“Yessir …”

“Wher’th Noctor Mathwell?”

“Dr. Maxwell? He left yesterday, sir. He left instructions not to disturb you.…”

“He wha …? Hunnavabith!”

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Hrain?”

“Pardon me, sir?”

“Mathwell tae the hrain?”

“The train, yessir, he did.”

“Gonndamn!”

“Can I get you anything, sir!”

“Whithkey!”

“Yessir, I’ll send a boy up directly.”

“Waih … Mathwell pay?”

“Pay? For the room, sir?”

Clay nodded. The desk clerk shook his head. “He … he said you’d take care of that, sir.…”

“Hunnavabith!”

While he recovered from Maxwell’s ministrations, Clay planned several kinds of revenge, all centered upon pain of one kind or another. He would track the dentist down with the same determination he employed to find outlaws, and when he caught up with Maxwell there would be nothing so merciful as an ultimatum and a bullet. For the deceitful dentist there would be torture, probably administered with his own tools, but Clay would not be without clemency; he would allow the doctor to give himself a stiff dose of ether first. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Clay’s fury was restoked when, after three days, he tried fitting the rubber gums, with their embedded porcelain teeth, into his gradually healing mouth, and found that, like some simple yet abstruse equation, two into one simply would not go.

Remembrance had returned after Clay’s first bout with the whiskey bottle. He was in Pueblo, Colorado, and his pockets had been stuffed with bills of small denomination earned by the capture of one William Sneed, escapee from a federal penitentiary. His two horses were stabled at the livery down the street, and he had not even had time to find a room for himself before noticing Maxwell’s flier pasted onto a wall. His teeth had been tormenting him for months, and Clay knew, to blunt the pain, that he was drinking far too much, so he asked directions and went straight to the dentist’s hotel room, the room he had woken up in twenty-four hours later. Maxwell had not gone through his pockets before departing, so although Clay was without teeth, he was not without cash. The situation could have been worse.

Clay’s temper began to mellow as his gums healed, and the rubber monstrosities fitted a little easier into his violated oral cavity each day. Maybe Maxwell had been a professional after all, even if his bedside manner allowed much latitude for doubt. Clay was becoming heartily sick of soup and mush by then, and yearned with the passion of a beef-eating man for steak, thick and rich and sizzling, a slice of heaven awaiting the onslaught of teeth, real or manufactured.

Ten days after Maxwell’s extractions, Clay found he could cram the dentures inside his mouth and keep them there for up to an hour at a time. They occupied his head with the snugness of a pair of boot heels, and were about as useful; biting an apple was an exercise in mess and humiliation. Clay practiced eating alone until he could consume a meal without spoiling his vest.

Three weeks after his teeth had come out, Clay decided he required another correction to his former self, and visited an optician, where he was fitted with spectacles. The crisp new world he saw around himself was almost compensation enough for the bitterness he felt at looking like some bookish type. He consoled himself with the thought that he no longer looked quite so mean, which might allow him to approach his prey in disguise, so to speak, without them suspecting the true nature of his calling. Of course, the holes in his cheeks gave the lie to that notion. He was simply a peculiar-looking man, who had become even more peculiar-looking during his stay in Pueblo. The upper row of false teeth resembled tightly packed tombstones, and the lower set stood together like a phalanx of Roman shields. They were larger than his original teeth, and the added thickness of the rubber gums distorted his jaw, making his long face even longer. He didn’t like the new bulkiness inside his mouth, or the constant rubbery taste against his tongue, and he didn’t like the weight of the spectacles across the bridge of his nose, or the irritating wire hooks behind his ears. Clay left town a discontented man.

Traveling south, he learned of a proclamation issued by the Chicago headquarters of the Army Division of the Missouri, which effectively encompassed all of the central United States. Citizens in the area involved were encouraged to turn in army deserters for punishment. Soldiers apparently were leaving their units in record numbers, and the government could not spare the manpower to hunt them down for recapture and court-martial. A modest reward was offered for each man returned to army custody, and Clay decided he would add deserters to his list of two-legged quarry. He had no grudge against them, the way he did against lawbreakers of more serious ilk, but if a man was moron enough to join the army, he should stay there, in Clay’s opinion, and so he felt there was justification in rounding up the runaways, even if the pay for doing so was not comparable with the bounty on killers and thieves.

In Walsenburg he stopped to cut the dryness in his throat with whiskey, and saw in the bar, not fifteen feet from him, a pair of boots with the unmistakable cut of the cavalry. The man inside the boots was young, and evidently not very bright, since his tight pants also were army issue, the yellow leg stripes having been removed to reveal a strip of darker blue material beneath; even the galluses holding up his pants were standard army issue. Clay couldn’t credit the young man’s foolishness; he had deserter written on him as surely as if he carried a sign.

The deserter was not alone, however. He drank with several other men, and the ease with which they talked among themselves and with the barman suggested they were locals. Clay reasoned that if they had grown fond of the deserter among them, they would most likely resist any attempt on Clay’s part to drag the young man away for incarceration. No normal man would blame another for leaving so constricting an institution as the army. Clay himself could see their point, but the young man drinking beer along the bar represented fifty dollars, and Clay was low on funds after purchasing teeth and spectacles for himself. He would have to wait until his prey was alone; in effect, he would have to kidnap him.

Clay remained in the bar till evening, nursing just three shots of liquor, keeping his eyes down to avoid attracting attention to himself, yet maintaining a constant watch on the young deserter. At sundown a woman just out of girlhood came inside and stood near the same knot of drinkers Clay had been watching. When finally her presence was noticed, the young man went to her, followed by comments from his friends concerning the length of the woman’s apron strings. The couple left, the man happier than the woman.

Clay was not pleased with this development. Were they married? He didn’t wish to take a husband from his wife. Still, a deserter should know better than to mix matrimony with the military. He waited less than thirty seconds, then went outside. The couple could be seen on the sidewalk a short distance away, the man leaning on the woman, talking loudly and singing off-key. Clay followed them along the darkening street to the edge of town, and watched them enter a small frame house with a stable in the rear. He walked around the house to count the doors and windows capable of allowing a man a fast exit, then stopped beside the stableyard. A mule stood near the pole fence, and even in the dwindling light of evening, Clay could clearly make out the U.S. branded onto its rump. Clumsy efforts had been made to alter the letters to 0.8., and a broad arrowhead or rafter was included above them to complete the change. Clay found he had even less respect for the young man now that he had seen how incredibly slipshod were the means he had employed to disguise his crime. Clay bet the fool still had his service pistol stashed in a trunk somewhere, with the army holster and belt wrapped around it. Anyone that dumb, he reasoned, was just asking for time in the stockade.

Clay returned to the center of town and found the only restaurant. He ate slowly, making plans. The waiter watched him closely, with suspicion, and Clay was obliged to set his mind at ease by opening a conversation about the weather, until the waiter accepted that the stranger with a face like a bad dream was simply an ugly nonentity. Clay had coffee, paid and left.

He led his horses to the frame house, noting with satisfaction the distance between it and the nearest dwelling; if he could get the fool outside without too much squawking, he could be on his way to a town larger than Walsenburg, where the deserter could be handed over to federal authorities. The woman would probably be a problem, though. Clay didn’t want to tie and gag her to ensure cooperation. He would meet the situation as it developed.

Before knocking on the door, he stepped through the stableyard fence and caught the mule by its halter, then saddled and bridled it, ready for use by the man who soon would be his prisoner. At least the young man had seen fit to dispose of his army saddle and use the regular type. Clay tied the mule to the stable door, then led his horses around to the front of the house. He hitched them to the rail, and knocked on the door.

The young man opened it. “Evening,” he said, still drunk. Behind him, Clay could see the woman sulking at a table.

“Evening. Interested in selling your mule?”

“Mule? No; I like him plenty.”

“I could make you a more than fair offer. I need a good mule.”

“There’s a horseyard in town that’ll sell you one.”

“Well, I was more partial to yours. How much you want for him?”

“Mister, I wouldn’t sell that animal for twenty new dollars.”

“How about twenty-five?”

“Take it,” said the woman, approaching the door. “Let him in and don’t be so rude.”

“You mind your mouth,” the young man advised her, but stepped aside for Clay to enter the house.

“Get you something?” the woman asked.

“Thank you, ma’am; I just now ate.”

“Well, sit yourself down anyway,” she said.

Clay took a chair at the table, and the young man sat opposite him. The woman busied herself by the stove, pretending not to listen.

“Bill Adams,” said Clay.

“Euen Christy. Twenty-five dollars, you said.”

“I did.”

“That’s a lot more’n he’s worth, but I expect you already know that, am I right? What kind of work are you in, mister?”

“All kinds. I move around. I need a reliable mule.”