The Alien Sheriff -- Part 11
by James Patrick Cobb

In the last episode, Buck attempted to teach Graax the basic skill of the cowboy - riding a horse.

Episode #11

We stopped off at Nuñez’s and Guzmán's shacks first. They were small, mean little buildings built largely of leftover wood and tin from my hacienda. When they weren't working for me, they kept their quarters in good repair. Their wives and combined seven children planted and tended a large vegetable garden and small flower and herb gardens. They also raised chickens and pigs.

Despite more than a little machismo, they were good men: hard working and hard playing.

I had to tell them they needed to count the head and pick one or two for slaughter, I think. We weren't shipping but few of them, waiting for prices to increase. The meat was for us. They'd butcher the steers and make carne seca, dried meat.

"He's on a horse today?" Guzmán asked incredulously, seeing Graax.

"It's a regular red-letter day," I said.

"¿Que? First ride out of the house?"

"And first ride on a horse yet."

"You like it?" Guzmán asked Graax

"Don't know what I'm doing yet," Graax replied.

Both of my vaquerós snorted. "El hefe don't know what he's doing either. You come to Juan or me to learn anything the right way," Guzmán said, snorting.

"Well, Guzmán, har-de-har. Too bad I pay you for your work instead of your jokes," I said.

"If you did. I'd be richer than you, and you'd owe me money," Guzmán replied, echoed by another series of laughs from Nuñez.

We trotted off with Graax nervously glancing up, down and sideways, tense from the natural swaying motion of a horse.

"You'll get used to it," I assured him. "For now, we need to tighten up those stirrups." I halted '49er and dismounted, and went over to fix him up.

Even though the alien was only three-quarters the size of your typical man, he cut a weirdly imposing figure with the sombrero and silver suit. "You look like you've been doing this all your life. You're taking to this like a bird takes to the sky. You look great," I said in turn.

"You're a good teacher, and Prettygirl is fun," he said.

I winked and laughed. "A pretty girl can be a lot of fun - especially if she's got a few drinks in her."

To my surprise, Graax understood my joke and trilled a laugh that sounded as weird as he looked.

I taught him simple commands like Ya! And Whoa! Prettygirl already knew them. I showed him which way to pull the reins to get the horse to change her direction.

"When we started riding this morning, you were afraid. You just got on and started riding. That's a good thing. If you want to learn anything, you just got to go and do it," I said, telling a professional learner how to go about his business.

He looked at me deeply. "You are, you’re right, Buck."

I mused about the differences between our planets, remembering one conversation where he talked about the great machines on Squaattoos that carried people between and within the cities. That got me to wondering how people on Squaattoos got around before those machines were built.

"How'd they do that? Didn't they have some kind of an animal like a horse?" We were behind his planet in technology. The Squaattoosians had to have built their civilization up like we did with the locomotive, I figured.

"Nothing that will carry a pack like your horse will," Graax said. "The animals were of the right size for such a use, but the wrong manner. The people before would have liked to have something like your horse." He said he wondered how their history would have differed if they had the horse.

He had me wondering too. "I don't know," I said, not believing we could have something up on a people who traveled from world to world. "It'd be like saddling up a deer or bear, I bet. Only heard of that in stories I don't believe."

"Right! You wouldn't want an animal like that to pack, either," Graax said. "Whatever a deer or bear is. Becky has drawn them for me, but I haven't seen one."

"I'll show you sometime. We'll go on a hunt.

"So how'd all your people get around?" I said, asking the natural question.

"Walked," he said.

Nodding my head, "I guess you could, though it wouldn't be too fast," I said.

"It made Leepox Deesheepon want to find a faster way," the creature said.

"It would make me want to find a faster way too." I paused. "Leepox Dee-who?"

"The man who made the first machine to carry people and things around. He was a good man," Graax said.

"Anybody who can find an easier, better way to do something is good enough."

The day went on. We talked back and forth real easy like the blowing breeze.

"These horses are one of the good things on your planet. It is good to be working on a ranch," he said.

I smiled, pleased. "Glad you think so,” I said, thinking that it’s starting to sound like I'll get some work out of him yet! "Sometime when it gets rough and you're tired, and it's hot enough to peel the hide off of a gila monster, maybe even you too, I want you to remember what you just said.

"This is hard work, not easy, like today is leading you to believe. This weather is just kissing Spring. Unfortunately, there's work to be done in December and July too.

"I suppose it's a good time to be learning."

"It's always a good time to be learning."

"That's your trade, right?"

"Right," the alien affirmed, nodding.

"There's easier ways to make a living, but if you're the type of a man who hates the thought of being caged up indoors, this is the only way," I said, remembering how tired I was of ranching. Still, I was seeing my trade through new eyes and it didn't look too bad.

Then I wondered about how anybody can get paid on a regular basis for learning. A professional apprentice? If so, where’s the master?

The alien looked like he missed something. "Here, there is a choice. That is the good thing about your Earth. On my planet, there's little choice about whether you will work outside or indoors."

I wondered why he'd cry about that. Perhaps I was lucky to be born on Earth. Still, I'd have liked to fly in the sky. "Sorry about that Graax. Doesn't have to be that way for you now though. You've always got a place with me and the family," I said.

I suspected him of trying to flatter me about what I did for a living. To hear him talk, he came all of these millions of miles across outer space just to ride through the mesquite on my property and punch cattle.

A part of me thought: Sure! And I'm President Cleveland!

"How are the ranches where you come from? Y'all eat meat. You've got to have ranches," I said. I talked about some of the same things over and over again with Graax because, as he learned more English, he was better able to describe Squaattoos.

"There are people who are not like people working there," he said, attempting to explain.

I looked at him, not understanding what he was saying: "What?"

"I do not know how else to tell this to you. These people, who are built, do the work of the vaqueró," he said.

Someone built? Weird. Or, I figured, he just didn't know enough English words speak clearly. "I guess that'll have to be another story for another day," I said.

"Let me try." He insisted to my surprise.

"Shoot."

"The people who are not like people are like a large doll, larger than some of Becky's, but they move. They follow instructions. They work with spleetebechh and lebbetebechh."

I imagined china-faced dolls walking around without horses, working on the ranch. "Are those sple-something and lebb-somethings like cattle?"

"Yup," he said, nodding. "But they are cows for good food. Most food animals we grow in big pots. Can eat right out of pots," he said. "They do it that way because there's too much time spent waiting for the spleetebechh and lebbetebechh to grow bones and such nobody eats."

I didn't understand everything he told me, though I pretended to. "That would be great to be able to do something like that," I said. "Think of all of the profit. Wouldn't have to ride around like this either."

"Yes, they make money. But growing animals this way makes them taste better my people say," Graax countered. "That is why animal grown this way on Squaattoos costs so much more money and why it is a goody. The government says some meat is certain meat in that way."

"The things you go and tell me," I said, marveling at the alien. "I can't begin to understand the wonders you describe! Must truly be something to see."

We drove each other mad with our questions. He asked me how cows give milk, how they produced calves and how I predicted the weather.

I gave him answers as good as my patience and knowledge permitted. He wasn't condescending at all though I'm sure some of the things I told him were patently wrong.

"You really don't have a good idea of what the weather is going to be like," he said seriously.

"Sometimes you can tell, sometimes you can't."

"We can't predict it well on Squaattoos either," Graax said.

I asked him about his family. What do the women of his race look like? What does he miss the most about his planet? I'd have liked to think I was an expert on Squaattoos after hearing his answers, but I could have only been called an expert on his planet if Graax could have been called an expert on ours. "Expert" is a relative title, I reckon.

He answered those questions and told me more than I wanted to know. He stunned me. He intrigued me. He made me laugh when he told me spleetebechh and lebbetebechh come from eggs.

"Chicken-cattle?"

"Bigger than chicken and different than cattle. Spleetebechh is just spleetebechh. Lebbetebechh is just lebbetebechh. That is all there is," he said.

"What else can you say?" I agreed, shrugging.

Graax was candid. It was my fault I didn't understand his answers. I might be dumb in that one area, but they sounded crazy sometimes. Most of the things I talked about to him might have sounded mad too if there weren't examples of everything I was talking about right in front of me. He had the advantage.

My questions kept coming. There was a universe full of oddness opening in front of me whenever I talked to him. It reflected in his eyes and green skin. He could have told me anything, and I would've believed it if I had understood it. The only collateral proof I needed was his appearance.

It was like being a kid again, talking to him. Everything seemed new. I began to understand how Edith was able to keep her mind on her medical studies even when there were other distractions. I never could do it before. The reason is, when you learn something new, you feel new. That's better than old.

The way of the frontier was the only way I knew before the alien's crash. Thinking my way of life might be considered odd to some other beings in the universe. That there were planets around the stars and stars themselves orbiting the center of the galaxy, was far more than I'd ever thought of before. All that gave me a headache, which is one of the bad effects of learning something new.

Edith used to talk to me with wonder in her voice about the little animals that we couldn't see that lived on and around us that she read of in her medical books. Though her words were tinged with passion, they passed right through my ears.

When I heard her go on about that, I didn't listen. I had decided none of that should be any concern. I halfway didn't believe what she was saying. If you can't see it, you can't really acknowledge it. If all those little animals were going to make me sick, there wasn't much I could do about it, I concluded. You can only fight what you can see.

Now that I was learning about the universe, I started feeling insignificant. My little worries and enterprise started becoming pointless in the larger scheme of things.

It hurt to think. I stopped and tried to concentrate on what was useful, what I needed to know to make it from day to day.

"What could you possibly want with all I'm telling you about farming and ranching?" I asked Graax one day. "Why do you even bother to ask?"

"Do I ask odd questions?"

I reflected on that. "I suppose not. There's just a lot of them. Course I ask you a lot too. I suppose it's natural."

"I know different things. I need to know much of it in order to work for you. Then, too, someday when I get together with my people again, I will have a whole book on farming and ranching on your planet in my head. That information will be compared to what we have on farming and ranching on other planets by our experts. Then they will know more about farming and ranching than before," he said.

"But what use is that? You're only going to have to feed yourself on one planet," I said, looking at Caleb and Bear silently take in everything we were saying. The alien was having a good effect on him, forcing him to talk less if he was going to learn about another world.

"To know is better than not to know. We call it pelattishh," he said. "It is how we live our lives."

"Doesn't sound practical," I said.

"You don't know what was most important until the end of life," Graax said.

"You can get a fair hunch with just a little thinking about it," I retorted.

"You don't have all the answers in the beginning. That is hopeless. The learning is a game shaping you. It is like trying to run a distance in a certain amount of time. You try to lessen and lessen the amount of time. To the man who runs who tries to make his body understand how to run the distance in a certain time, he is making himself the best he can. That is pelattishh. We do it with knowledge. Do you understand? This is how we honor the creature who created us," Graax said.

"We do that too," I said. "Our creator is interested in us being good. We honor him by being good, like when I helped you when you were smashed up in your spaceship."

"But that is a knowledge too, the two beliefs, Pelattishh, and in your God, are like," he said.

"I don't understand."

"Being good is a knowledge."

I let that go. "I ain't no scientist," I said. "I'm not the man you should be talking to if you are writing a book on agriculture. You need to talk to somebody who knows more about raising things."

"I'd like to meet some of those people, but we are also interested in the knowledge of the people who do, too," he said. "I also owe you gratitude."

"You need to go to the universities and talk with the smartest people," I said.

I thought about what I had said, though, and about the hostilities existing between the Lazy-R and the K-10, "But that's going to have to wait until we get this all settled with the Renners." I didn't believe what I said next. It was an impulse from an extremely generous portion of my soul. "You don't really owe us anything. You were our guest. You have an important mission. Enroll in class at the university in Tucson." When I say such things, I gratefully doubt myself to be the skinflint I know myself to be.

"Like with Becky?"

I laughed. "Probably a little different. It's run by adults, and you'll need money, and I can't spare you a grant, but if you save up your wages, you can manage.

We'd have to have a serious talk about money. Now was as good of a time as any, I figured. "The usual wage for a hand is twenty-five dollars a month, with, say six dollars of that as partial payment for your food and shelter. You won't want to have your own place, will you? Not if you're going to move on to Tucson. You save your money and you get in when you've come up with enough for tuition," I said.

"I owe you for doctoring me back to health," he said. "I'd never be able to repay that.”

"Edith enjoyed practicing her skills," I said.

"Thank you, Buck," he said. "You seem fair, though I don't know enough to see you next to others, I reckon."

"Thank you, Graax," I replied. "I think."

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