Power in the Blood (94 page)

“Be sure and write Zoe Aspinall,” Leo said, his voice gentler now that it was obvious he had bested her, flattened her with the heavy truths of yesterday.

One million dollars. She signed.

41

When he saw the man-shaped shadow, almost hidden beneath the ledge, Nevis asked himself if liquor was responsible. He had been hacking at the ice for less than ten minutes, at some distance from Nightsoil Smith, further down the ice slope. The area immediately beneath the ledge’s overhang was particularly cold to work in, and Smith had declared himself unable to cope with it, his chest being what it was that day, so Nevis Dunnigan worked his way up toward the thickest ice in the ledge’s deepest shade, and began to hack at it with his pick, unresentful at having been obliged by Smith’s wheezing chest to perform the hardest work on his own.

The shadow of the man within the ice was indistinct, unrecognizable at first as human, but as he hacked a little deeper, and began to concentrate on the shape revealing itself slowly to the pick, Nevis convinced himself the thing was a man. It was impossible to tell how deeply it lay, the ice distorting depth as it did, but Nevis thought he could dig out his find with some assistance from his friend, and so called Smith up to his perch beneath the ledge.

When Smith at last joined him, red of face and short of breath, Nevis pointed with significance at the ice before him. “What?” said Smith, put out by his exertions.

“Look harder,” Nevis advised, smiling.

“I am. Ice. Tomorrow I’ll show you some shit.”

He began to move away, and Nevis caught his shoulder. “Look again. Trust me, there’s something there, my friend.”

“All right, there’s something there, but what is it?”

“It’s a man, can’t you see? There’s the head, there the feet, and in between, the body and legs, for heaven’s sake! You can’t see him?”

“Is he … kind of curled up?”

“He is indeed. My congratulations to you. Shall we dig him out?”

“He won’t be alive.”

“I know that, but my curiosity demands that I see his face. The fellow might have been there for hundreds of years, possibly thousands!”

“Aww, not that long,” said Smith, for whom the nation’s founding fathers were as remote as the Old Testament’s prophets.

“Help me dig him out. He may have some article on his person to indicate how many years have passed since he felt the sun.”

“Think he’s a white man? He looks awful dark to me.”

It required an hour’s labor simply to bring the shadow man’s features closer to air and light, his body being wedged into as tight a space beneath the ledge as it was, but at the end of that time it was proven that the thing was truly human, although its race was still in question.

“Long hair,” said Smith. “It’s an Injun.”

“The fur trappers of yesteryear were hairy fellows also, I believe.”

“But they had beards, and this one don’t.”

“But it may be a woman, you see. Let’s dig on.”

“We don’t have hardly any ice yet for the wagon, and you want to waste more time digging out an Injun? What for?”

“Simple curiosity, or respect for the dead, perhaps. If you don’t care to assist me, I’ll do it by myself.”

“Don’t be taking that tone with me now, or I’ll let you, and you’ll be here till sundown chipping it out.”

They stayed until sundown anyway, both men working faster as the air around them descended the Fahrenheit scale and caused their flesh to shiver. The figure trapped in ice was awkward to reach by pickax, and the best part of the daylight hours were used up before a block containing the complete article was hacked free of the slope. Released from its larger prison, the block immediately escaped the clutches of Nevis and Smith and began sliding down toward the patiently waiting mules.

“Noooo …,” breathed Nevis, as the shining sarcophagus accelerated toward the rocks below. It broadsided into a large boulder and shattered into many pieces, some of which flew upward to catch the last rays of sunlight spilling over the valley’s western rim, then these shards descended with the rest around the small dark figure slithering still to the very bottom of the ice slope. It arrived quite close to the mules, which greeted its arrival with the same aplomb with which they had accepted the small explosion preceding it.

Smith reached it first, and had drawn his conclusions by the time Nevis joined him. “Injun, definite.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“See that on the foot? What’s that if it ain’t a moccasin?”

Nevis squinted in the failing light. He had seen ceremonial moccasins before, exquisitely beaded things, quite beautiful to look at. The things wrapped around the feet of their find were graceless bags of animal hide bound clumsily about the ankle. The legs themselves were remarkably ugly, shrunken to a sticklike thinness inside pants of the same material that clothed its feet. Ice still clung to the upper torso, making further examination impossible.

“Let’s get the crittur back to town and take a real close look.”

“This is a man, Smith, therefore deserving of our respect.”

“Well, I do respect him, but my goddamn hands are froze from being up here all goddamn day, and we wasted every minute of it for not even a nickel’s worth of ice!”

“Our haul today is more important than that.”

“Does he look like he carries a wallet?”

“In a scientific age, science pays the piper, Smith.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means our shrunken fellow here may be worth more than you and I could make in a year of chipping ice and hauling dung.”

Smith shook his head. He expected they would even have to pay for the little man’s funeral, once they took him down to Glory Hole.

Winnie objected to the presence of the thing immediately. It was dead, and it was clearly an Indian. The remainder of the ice had fallen from its upper body during the descent to town, its deerhide vest and the feathers in its braids revealed. “It’s an object of scientific value, Winnie,” Nevis told her, and was told in return to put it out in the stable. “It stinks!” she said. Nevis could not see how this might be of consequence in so odoriferous a household as Smith’s, but his partner sided with Winnie, and the Indian was removed to the stable, where its closer proximity to the honey wagon rendered all objectionable odors redundant. Nevis thought his friends were exaggerating; how could something as deeply frozen as the corpse possibly begin to smell so soon after its release from the ice?

Over dinner he proposed that their unique find be made available to a paying audience, after the fashion of P. T. Barnum’s various freaks and curiosities. “There’s money to be had from such displays,” he told them, but Smith and Winnie were unconvinced.

“It’s just a dead old Injun, not like a famous king or something that folks’d want to see,” protested Smith.

“And it’s ugly,” added Winnie. “You can see the ribs poking through, practically, and he’s got no lips.”

The face of the frozen man was indeed startling, its tendon-tough rictus giving it the appearance of a skull tightly encased in old leather. The teeth, seemingly in excellent condition, leered unpleasantly below the empty nasal passage. Its eyes, like poorly molded marbles, were set crookedly beneath lids distorted by cold and time. It was, Nevis had to admit, an object without aesthetic appeal, but this was the very characteristic that would, he insisted, bring paying customers to the glass case containing such a curiosity.

“What glass case?”

“Use your imagination! We’ll order one built, a special airtight case to keep him fresh and presentable without losing his ugliness. I only wish he had two heads or a third leg to make him even more repellent, but you can’t expect to have everything.”

Smith said, “I seen a two-headed baby in a bottle one time. It made me cry, it did, seeing something like that.”

“You big baby,” said Winnie, not without affection.

“I was only seven,” Smith defended himself.

“Are we united in this enterprise or not?” Nevis demanded.

“I guess it’s worth a shot,” Smith conceded. “We lost a day’s work over it, so maybe we should try and get it back.”

“Just as long as you take it away from here,” Winnie said, “and don’t expect me to be touching it at all.”

“Your tiny hands will not be soiled,” Nevis assured her, then stood and put on his hat. “No time to lose now,” he said. “I’m off to alert the newspaper fellows. Our discovery will doubtless be front-page news in tomorrow’s edition.”

The office of the
Glory Hole Sentinel,
owned by Leo Brannan himself, as were most other enterprises in town, was a brisk walk away, on Brannan Boulevard. Nevis found the place lighted and filled with activity despite the hour’s lateness. He asked to see the editor, and was informed the editor was at home, dining.

“But he should be here to receive important news,” protested Nevis.

“What news is that?” asked the printing crew’s boss.

Nevis told him about the Indian in the ice.

“A dead Injun? That all? I grant you it’s good news when another one dies, but that don’t make it something to put in the paper.”

The printing boss wanted Nevis to leave; the man stank of shit. “You the feller that runs the honey wagon with Smith?”

“I am, but we found the object while engaged in our other line of work, namely ice collecting.”

“That’s right, I heard you did that too. Well, there’s an item you and Smith’ll be real interested in reading come tomorrow, let me tell you.”

“Item, sir?”

“Come on along back here and I’ll show you.”

Nevis followed the printing boss to the clanking presses. A freshly printed sheet was taken from a pile and thrust at him. “There, read that there, halfway down.”

Nevis saw the bold headline:
NEW IMPROVEMENTS FOR GLORY HOLE
. The article sent a chill crawling across his skin. Leo Brannan intended bringing the town up-to-date by building an electrical generating plant, which, as well as providing brighter lights for the community, would also power a small ice-making factory. Brannan was not content to stop there, but had committed himself to installing modern plumbing in every home and building, all at his own expense. The projects were to begin just as soon as the plans were finalized.

“Why …?” asked Nevis.

“Why? So folks can read the news without getting bad eyes from it, and have a real cold beer, and not have to smell your wagon rolling around town. It’s progress, see.”

“But it will put Smith and myself out of work.…”

“Well, what kind of work is it anyway, huh? You can get yourselves better jobs, can’t you, huh? Can’t stop progress. Brannan, he knows that. Had a bug up his ass about progress ever since his old lady left town again, permanent this time, they say. He’s got to have progress here, and no mistake. It’s a rich man’s distraction, that’s how I see it, to keep his mind off of how she went away like she did. Mind you, what man wants a wife with just one arm, when he’s got a piece like he’s got stashed on Bowman Street. I had a piece like that, I’d tell my wife to go someplace else too.”

“May I … may I keep this?”

“Sure you can; no charge. Listen, just you go bury that dead Injun before the law finds out. Dead men have to be buried, that’s the rules in this town, mister.”

Nevis hurried back to Smith and Winnie with the news sheet, and their faces blanched as he read to them the obituary of their twin professions. “A double blow,” he said, laying the paper down. “If it was only an ice factory he intended building, or just the modern plumbing … but both! This is the end for us, Smith.”

“The shitty bastard!” Winnie raged. “Why’s he have to do that to us! Why doesn’t he give his money to poor folk if he wants to get rid of it! Shitty rich man …!”

“We never done nothing to him. Hell, he don’t even have poop pots in his house, got that plummery instead, up on the hill and at that fancy lady’s place that he keeps. Fancy plummery, and now he wants everyone to have it, so’s we can’t do the work anymore. Why would he do that to us?”

“Brannan isn’t doing it to us. He very likely doesn’t even know we exist. He simply wants to give his town the latest and best. It’s an unfortunate coincidence that the very improvements he wishes to make will force us to seek other employment.”

“Not me,” Smith said. “This is what I do, and it’s a good living. What’s he want to spend money making ice for, when we can get it for free just up the valley?”

“For us, it’s free, but we charge anyone who takes it from us. That is the free enterprise system upon which our nation is built. We’re obliged to change our ways to accommodate a changing world. I abandoned art for the same reason, my friend. No one wanted it, so I ceased to create it. The lessons of change are harsh, but we all must learn them in the end.”

“Quitter,” Winnie sneered.

“Realist,” countered Nevis.

“Weakling,” she said.

Nevis was hurt. He could see that Winnie had been drinking for the better part of the day while he and Smith labored to release their Indian from the ice, but drunkenness alone could not excuse such insults.

“I’m a pragmatist, Winnie. Life has fashioned me that way. You may hate Brannan for the thing he intends doing; but he’ll do it anyway, without ever knowing you hated him for it. That is the gulf that yawns between rich and poor.”

“We ain’t poor,” Smith said. “We make a good living, doing what we do. You ever starve for a meal or a drink since we teamed up? It’s a good living, and the son of a bitch wants to wipe it out for us.”

“Progress, Smith …”

“Shit on it! And shit on Brannan too! Maybe he owns the town, but he don’t own me!”

“Me neither!” declared Winnie.

Nevis was fast becoming upset at the way in which his friends seemed to have assumed he was taking Leo Brannan’s side, when he was not. He knew Winnie and Smith were unsophisticated individuals, but couldn’t they see how inevitable it was that their lowly work would someday be made redundant by progress, which seemed to have become the nation’s watchword of late?

“Nor I,” said Nevis, but the mildness of his voice seemed only to infuriate the other two. He saw now that both had been drinking heavily during his absence, and resented their selfishness. Nevis had walked all the way to the newspaper office to make some money for them, and yet here they were, siding against him as if he had somehow been responsible for the disastrous news he returned with. It was not fair that someone of his intelligence and integrity be accused thus, and he took a drink from the bottle on the table and told them so.