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Buck learns more about Squaattoos from Graax. There’s the animals they eat called spleetebechh and lebbetebechh. There’s Leepox Deesheepon who invented a faster way to travel. The people there raise animal tissue in pots while believing the animals ranched the natural way by robots taste better.
He also learns the belief system that brought Graax to Earth is called pelattishh. One of the tenants of which is that a person needs to learn everything because you don’t know what the most important bit of knowledge is until you’re dead.
Graax is still struggling with the language but he’s learning.
Episode 12
Some religious types might say the things Graax told me regarding the universe aren't true. They might be right. He might have been lying to me. Who can really tell when anyone is telling the truth?
They say to look into a man's eyes. If the look is clear and unwavering, then he's telling the truth. That's just a myth. It doesn't work. I've known plenty of people who could look you in the face and lie all day.
Still, Graax didn't have a reason to lie. All the time I knew him, I never caught him in one.
I figure he'd know better about things such as stars, planets and comets and their creation than some minister or Earth-bound astronomer. He'd been out there among the heavens himself. I'd seen what he crashed in. Looked to me like a space vehicle. If it wasn't, it was all a ruse to convince me that he came from another planet, right along with his look, the pleebk and the brrkup. Right. And who am I to go to all the trouble of impressing?
It was a hard choice to make: Believe in his description of the universe and feel the slow-tarring of sacrilege on my psyche. Disbelieve, and feel like an inflexibly ignorant savage. I was someone akin to Prometheus who coveted the fire of the gods and well aware of his and Icarus' fate.
It took a lot of reading and mental wrestling for me to pin my thoughts and feelings down in my mind.
It would have been rude to tell him to shut up when we sat at the table or out back when the workday was done. As emissary of humanity, host and employer, my character had many flaws.
Inhospitality couldn't be counted among them. Rudeness to a person from another planet felt awkward to me, like seeing muttonchops on a woman or tits on a man.
In some ways I wish I hadn't started listening. In some ways I wish I'd been paying better attention. I won't write the things he said here. Half of them, I can't remember. Man will learn them in his own time, if they're correct. A lot of people wouldn't believe him anyway. They only have my poor words printed out on a page. Who am I to believe? They can't see his oversized, earnest, oval eyes framed by sockets of lightly verdant skin and the dungarees he wore. He was there, alive as you and me. Maybe if they'd see all that then they'd believe too.
The alien sat in my parlor night after night playing checkers, talking, telling me of life on Squaattoos, providing detail after insignificant detail. He related a fantasy more enticing to a man than a come-hither glance from an attractive woman: Mankind can walk among the stars someday. We can know the shimmering jewels of the night sky. To know them is as good as owning them. His people had done it. There's no reason why we couldn't either.
It's okay if people don't believe the things he said. It's a heavy burden. Still, it's heartening. The Creator is greater than we supposed. Seeing Graax and how he obviously doesn't come from Earth, it only follows there are many other planets with civilizations.
Still, none of it really mattered. My world and universe consisted of the K-10 and the land around it. Other people's universes are their work and home too. There are types who'd insist otherwise, but I'd still differ. The fact there are creatures, big and little, smart and dumb, living on worlds millions of miles from us throughout the night sky isn't going to change a thing about death and taxes. The only thing it will change is the way you feel about the night sky when you look up at it.
There was plenty of work for everyone on the K-10. Too much, really. Having the Renners as neighbors in itself guaranteed a certain measure. The drought only increased the fiscal and material strain on my operation. I would have liked to hire more men, but I couldn't afford to pay them. I was glad for Nuñez, Guzmán and my son. Things were rough, before, even then. Having Graax about and helping gave everyone a break.
We had to check the fence we shared with the Lazy-R every day. I was so sure hostilities would erupt, I never sent anyone out to check the fence alone. We'd want two guns to counter Renner's one.
Renner's spread laid in a low box canyon. I was his only neighbor and the ranchers in the rest of the valley were glad for it. Things would have been different if there was someone else for him to steam up besides me.
"Why don't you go in there with guns blazing? Kill the varmint," Jed said. Brucker isn't going to do anything about it. He knows what kind of a man Renner is. "Soon you'll have no other choice."
I shrugged. His suggestion made sense. There were times to fight. This was one of them. Likely, my side would win.
I had ideas I didn't feel right in telling anybody. I might have looked like something of a coward, too. I'd be lying if I said it didn't bother me. Likely, Jed didn't think of me as one. He knew me better than that.
"You have a good point. And I don't know why I don't," I said to Jed. "I've just been hoping something else comes along to solve this whole mess."
"You didn't turn Quaker did you?" he said archly.
"Ha!" I said, laughing.
"I didn't think so, but that's Quaker talk, God's will and all of that. You can spend all your life hoping for something, Buck," Jed said. "Don't mean you're going to get it. There must be something you're not telling anyone."
"Maybe I've got those too."
Most times Caleb bucked up about having to go and fix the fence every day. "Can't we do something else?"
"You do it because I say so," I'd say. My reasons were my own. They served his benefit, though he didn't know it and didn't need to know. I didn't tell him my plans for the Lazy-R because I didn't want him getting any possessive ideas about the place. I didn't want any rancor between him and the men if something happened to me. I find it best in life to hold your cards close to your chest and not let anyone see your hand or your plan unless it serves your purposes. Letting him in on my plans didn't serve mine. "Sure son, I'd like to be only having to check it once a week. We do that with the other ranches bordering ours. Fences come down on their own sometimes even if you take your time with them. Those neighbors don't cut them.
"The Renners are different. If we did that with them, there'd be no fence after a week! Then they'd be grazing their entire herd over here and we'd be as bad off as they are," I said.
"We should try talking to them," Caleb said.
"I've tried it," I said. "You know I've never taken a fancy to going out here in the cold and heat to look at a dang fence. Nobody would."
"Did you really try?"
"Course I tried! Look, son, some people are just going to lie. There's nothing you can really do about that. They lie to themselves as well. You can't say anything to them," I said.
"But . . . ," he began. "I bet if he thought you were going to shoot him, he'd get the idea he can't go cutting the fence."
"Maybe, but I think you're wrong. Renner's stupid and has nothing to lose. He might even want that. There's nothing you can say to someone like that."
With each strand of barbed wire I restrung and twisted, with each post I pounded back down, with each emaciated steer I herded back to the Lazy-R, my heart filled with hatred until Renner became not just a fool trying to make a living on the range but the quintessence of Evil. Guzmán, Nuñez and Caleb felt much the same way. They didn't understand me but they did what they were told - that's all that mattered.
Nothing could change my disposition toward him. I couldn't help myself. I fondly hoped it didn't cloud my good sense as venom can, though I knew it did. I wanted to execute my plan, and him too, at the same time. I wanted him dead and I wanted to kill him myself with my bear hands, feel his life force flow out onto the rocks.
I wanted to buy the Lazy-R when Renner gave up trying to make a living from it. He'd be more likely to sell to me if everything stayed civil. Partly, I wanted the drought to continue. He'd let me buy for little. First, he had to admit he didn't know what he was doing. He wasn't there yet.
"You should let me run some of my cattle over there," Renner suggested to me one day before the conflagration boiled over. Caleb and I had rode up on him fingering pliers, getting ready to start to the wire. We'd suspected he'd been taking the fence down, but wanted to accuse judiciously. You want to think the best of humanity.
I suppose Renner figured he might as well ask first anyway.
"Well, don't see I can," I began. "With the drought, the forage is dry. If I did, it would harm my operation. So how much would you be willing to pay for rights?" I knew he'd come into some money. That's what got his operation set up. I didn't know how much was left. Supposing there was some, it might do us better to let out our land to the cretin.
He'd apparently spent it all for he said, "I don't have any money. If I did, I buy feed! These aren't good times."
"You need to get rid of some of your cattle, then."
"I'd get less than what I paid."
"They are boney," I acknowledged. "They're worth more alive than dead."
His features clouded over with reined in anger. "So would you let me put some of mine over there."
"I've got my own. Don't have any room for yours."
"That ain't neighborly."
"That's business. You should have seen to yours before you got into it."
"You ain't Christian. You might say you are, but you ain't."
"Christian, yes, but businessman too. This is my private property. If you can't cope with the vicissitudes of the business, you best get out."
"What the Hell did you say?"
"Please don't talk nasty around my son, Mr. Renner. I can't help you out, though I wish you well. I hear there's quite a bit of money to be made in prospecting."
"This is my land. I'm staying. I came all the way . . . what the Hell do you care!" He tucked the wire clippers in his back pocket and hopped up on his horse and galloped off.
"That's well and good, but I better not catch any of those cattle over here," I called after him.
The longer he held the land, the more dilapidated it'd get. The sooner he'd admit his ignorance, and the herd was sold off, the sooner the forage would start growing back.
Maybe the Contention City State Bank owned a mortgage on it. I'd asked, but Phinneas Majors told me it was none of my business. Still, maybe they'd seize it.
I could try to buy it from the bank, but I didn't want to. It's far better to do business with a clod than someone with some smarts. In wetter times, it would be a good piece of real estate, with a spring in wetter times. Renner probably didn't have to dig a deep well even now.
Still, just because someone is stupid, it doesn't mean they're going to sell you their ranch for a trifling. Though them being stupid helps your cause in negotiating.
I knew Renner would give it up, too. It was obvious he wasn't cut out for farming or ranching. Still, he had to realize that for himself.
The way I saw it, the thing I had to do until then was to remain a hail-fellow-well-met despite our conflict. Then, when the time was right, offer to buy his shacks and land for a "reasonable sum" while jovially mentioning how the law would get involved if the fence persisted in coming down. I'd seen him out there with wire snippers already.
Where he and his wife and their litter went after that, I cared not.
The drought had left me short of funds as it had left most of the ranchers in the valley. The Lazy-R, in its condition, wouldn't fetch much in the best of times. I was the only possible buyer. Other people believed the spread to be ruined for a lifetime. I knew it could recover within a few growing seasons if no cattle were grazed on it.
Caleb, Nuñez and Guzmán, could have benefited from a healed Lazy-R. They were in their twenties.
The past few years had been full of hardship. Nuñez and Guzmán were as loyal and intelligent as hired hands come. They showed both qualities by not going off prospecting and leaving me to face Renner on my own. They easily could have. They've shown loyalty in the face of Renner's threats.
One of the great reasons I'm alive was the threat of retribution from them. They wouldn't hesitate to put a slug between his eyes if shot me. The conflict would ascend to a new stage and be finished.
They deserved better than they had. It was my duty to see they got it.
The sooner Renner realized he wasn't cut out for ranching the better it would be for everyone. Until then, I had to play at being a tightrope walker. I'd never have been able to be the way I needed to be if I was the only person to benefit. I'm high-minded. But because it was for the sake of two men and a boy I cared about, my plan was made easier. I wanted my son to have the same opportunity I'd known and I wanted to help the two Mexicans. I wanted it all.
I replied to everyone's questions about the matter with a vacant look and shrug.
They'd understand everything soon enough.
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