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In the last episode, Buck realized he doesn’t
have any reason to believe Graax is lying to him. Still, many of the things
the alien tells him are hard to believe.
The men of the K-10 have to check the boundary
with the Lazy-R everyday. A fight Buck knows he will likely win easily is
brewing. He just doesn’t want to leave the consequences of that fight as his
legacy. He’d like to have the Lazy-R property as well as his own, if only to
pass on to his son and men. Eventually the drought will be over and
the rangeland will recover.
Episode 13
"You cannot have this Renner sending his cattle
over here to eat when there isn't enough grass for your own animals,"
Graax said soon after he started riding the range with the men and me.
"Why don't you shoot him? That is an action by your people, right?"
Inwardly I groaned when he said that. I didn't want
him starting in on me too. "I have my reasons Graax," I said
tiredly. "The reasons are all business and not cravenness. It won't be
long, and he'll be out of business and back on the trail."
"This is against the law, what he does?"
Graax asked.
"You better believe it, buckaroo!" I
barked, nettled at the question. "Course it is!"
Unaffected, Graax continued questioning: "Why
is he not stopped? There's nobody to keep the law? Do you have to do it
yourself?" Graax said.
"There's Brucker, the sheriff down in
Contention, but he has his hands full with all of the miners, grifters and
drifters in the town."
"So, there's nobody to enforce the law
here?" Graax said.
"That's right. We need our own Johnny Law out
here, but we don't have enough money to pay him," I replied. "Too
few people."
"You might not need either a Johnny Law or a
Sheriff Brucker. When I crashed, you took something out of the ship that may
help your problem," Graax said.
"Some kind of weapon?" I said. "I
don't want the varmint killed. I've got my reasons."
"The thing I have is a weapon, and it isn't a
weapon," Graax said, clear as mud.
"What in tarnation do you mean by that?"
"I can change him."
"Nobody can change anyone who doesn't want to
change," I said, my mind completely made up on that matter.
"I can."
Graax's impossible existence in itself was reason
enough for me to question the impossible. I wanted to believe, but I didn't
dare hope.
Because of his limited vocabulary, I couldn't
understand what he was talking about. However, I did understand enough to
gradually harbor hope Renner's trespassing would stop and everything would
come out well.
I picked my men up at their shacks after Graax and I
parleyed.
"Go get your guns," I said, riding up on
them as they were making repairs to their garden fence.
"Que?" Guzmán said.
"We're going to ride against Renner - just like
y'all have been itching to do."
"Finally, it comes to our little amigo,"
Guzmán said, making a handgun with his thumb and forefinger and regarding in
fondly. "I've been waiting for you to do this!"
"And we are now pistoleros, the
different jobs we do," Nuñez said, smiling.
"Not quite. Graax says he can make a new man
out of him, and we don't have to kill him," I said. "I think I
believe him."
"Bah! A new man? Change his mind? Nothing will
work," Nuñez said, flitting between Spanish and English. "This is
all a time of waste!"
"No esta en sus cabales! Maybe a bullet
will change him from live to dead. That will make him a new man," Guzmán
quipped. "We aren't going to kill him?"
"Only if this doesn't work. We've got to give
Graax a chance," I said. "Still, we might have to."
"It will be a pleasure," Nuñez said.
"I don't want to, but we've got to do what
we've got to do," I said.
"What are we going to do?" Guzmán said.
I shrugged. "I don't know yet."
Both of them regarded me strangely. Then they looked
at each other. Then at me again. Then they guffawed at me.
"Come on! He barely learned to speak!" I
said, chagrined. “I can only understand him half as well as you two!”
Guzmán and Nuñez preguntad the alien about what he
had planned and couldn't understand what it exactly was either. Still, we
talked of our strategy during most of the ride to the Lazy-R as best we could
and hoped it wouldn’t be a flop. When we were a quarter-mile away, we fell
silent so Renner wouldn't hear us coming. We didn't want to give him time to
set up in the bush to fire on us.
I thought about setting Guzmán or Nuñez in the
brush with orders to shoot Renner if it looked like he was going to fire at
us. I didn't do it. Despite their bravado, neither man was a sharpshooter. Put
one of them out there, they'd likely as not shoot one of us.
As we rode into the ranch, Renner stepped out of his
front door with a shotgun aimed squarely at the center of my chest - nobody
else's. From his wild, glassy-eyed stare and stagger, I pegged him as drunk.
If he was drunk at two p.m., it was no wonder the Lazy-R was failing. I
faintly smelled the vapors from a still that caught on the wind. He'd been
brewing something. He wouldn't hesitate to kill me and would have enjoyed it.
"Well, well. If it isn't the Christian
gentleman from the K-10," Renner said, spitting on the dirt. "What
have y'all come to accuse me of today?"
"Nothing Renner. You got a drink for all of
us?" I said, jovially.
He ignored me. "Who is this weird looking dude?
You come from some funny part of Mexico?" he said to Graax, laughing at
his own attempt at a joke. "Somebody should shoot you, you're so damned
funny looking." He wasn't going to be the one though. The barrel never
pointed away from my chest.
"Quit it Renner!," I said. "We come
here all friendly."
If Graax or either of my men made the slightest move
for their sidearm, I'd dive right off '49er. At this range, I'd have a
fifty-fifty chance of surviving a shotgun blast and a hundred percent chance
of taking some buck. Forty-niner's big body would absorb most of the blast. I
felt a little better, though, knowing Renner was pickled.
"We came here to talk, not fight. Put the gun
down," I said.
"Don't see I have anything to say to you
Turner. Why don't you just turn them horses around and get off my damn
land?" Renner retorted.
I paid no mind to what he said. "Graax here is
one of the new hands on my ranch. We came here to talk about the boundaries of
our property and how your cattle frequently cross it."
Renner cocked the shotgun. "I don't know
nothing about that. I've told you that before. You calling me a liar?"
It was going no different than I'd expected.
"Don't see how that can be Mr. Renner," I said, wanting to yell at
him up and down for all the trouble he caused me. I stayed cool, reminding
myself that wouldn't be smart when he had a shotgun trained on me.
"Y'all get the Hell out of here. There ain't
nothing I have to say to any of you! I ain't no cheater. You ought to be
strung up for slander. Get off . . . " he began, never finishing his
utterance. His mouth gaped open like a stuck fish. A string of drool descended
his chin.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Graax make a
covert motion with a metal bar. My attention had been on Renner who now stared
straight ahead idiotically, saying nothing for a pleasant change.
"Damn," I said tonelessly, impressed.
"You really did it." I looked at Guzmán and Nuñez. Their
open-mouthed expressions resembled Renner's catatonia, except that they
blinked. We were steeled up for a fight. Even though it would have ruined my
business plans, I itched to see Renner's body riddled with holes and left
bleeding from a variety of new orifices. I never could abide a liar.
"Dios mio!," Guzmán said softly.
"He stops inmediatamente!”
Graax calmly explained what happened as best he
could, a thin smile playing on his lips. He held a small metal bar between his
fingers. "This pleebk goes through the air and doesn't allow the head to
work, if it is in there good."
Graax said there was science behind the action of
the pleebk. To me, it might as well have been magic out of a fairy tale.
"Don't see how it can go through the air if it
just stays in your hands," I said.
Graax thought for a moment about what I had said.
"It doesn't. I reckon I don't have all of the words I need to tell
you."
"Still, that's one damn handy
contraption," I said. "Hope it solves our problems with him."
Renner's wife came out of the house. "What did
you men do to Ike?" she asked hysterically.
"Not a thing ma'm," I said, calmly
reassuring her. "We're trying to help y'all. This will help him!"
She spun around, trying to go back inside her house.
Renner undoubtably owned more than one gun, I thought. I didn't want her
aiming it at us. The day's events might not have had a happy outcome if she
did.
Quickly, I slid off of my steed and pinned her arms.
"Why don't you stay here with us?"
"Let me go!" she screamed into my ear,
trying vainly to bite me.
"Settle down ma'm! Did anybody ever tell you,
you have quite a screech? He's going to be a new man after this," I said
calmly. "Well, if you're fond of him now, you're going to like him a lot
more after we’re done," I said in a low voice into her ear. I hoped my
tone would lead her to lower her voice as well.
It didn't work. "Let me go!" she hollered,
struggling.
As long as she was out there with us, we weren't
going to be fired on by any of the Renner children - if they had any sense.
Knowing their pa, that was questionable.
Graax fished a bug-sized clip out of the pockets of
his dungarees. In broken English, he explained what he was doing. I couldn't
understand much of what he said thanks to Mrs. Renner. I wished he'd pleebk
her too.
"This is a brkupp," Graax explained.
"When I put this in his nostril, it will move with its legs up the trail
in his head and go to his brain. When he thinks of cheating, his head will
hurt. That will guide him toward rightness.
"The worse the wrong thing is he wants to do,
the more his head will hurt. He will not bother your side of the fence anymore
Buck."
With her fighting, Mrs. Renner wouldn't and couldn't
hear any of it: "Get that out of him! You're hurting him!"
I laughed at the irony. "Well, my dear," I
said firmly. "I used to ask your husband to keep his cattle off of my
side of the fence. He didn't. Think of this clip as my uninvited
intrusion."
I didn't believe in hitting women, though for her, I
could see myself making an exception. The whole clan made me rabid.
"With him having to act decently for a change,
you might even be thanking me next week," I said, forcing a chuckle.
After that, she bit me and almost got away from me.
She spun around and got a lucky shot kneeing me in the privates. I doubled
over in intense pain. She made a beeline for the shotgun that lay at her
husband's side and was able to bring it up and hold it to Graax's head.
Guzmán and Nuñez fixed their weapons at her.
"You better put that down! We didn't hurt him
and we ain't going to. Just let us get done here, and we'll clear out!" I
said through gritted teeth.
She showed a better head than her fool husband,
letting the shotgun down. I didn't want to shoot her. That I'd really have a
time justifying to myself.
"Get off my land you smug rich bastard! Take
your Mexicans and this . . . monster with you!" she said callously.
"Lady, I’m far from rich. We'll leave soon
enough. You make one move toward that gun, and I'll shoot you - and I can hit
you from further away than you can hit us."
"We can leave now," Graax said after a
tense minute.
We mounted up and rode back home. I turned around to
see Mildred Renner put down the shotgun and cradle her husband's head in her
lap.
Though Ike Renner wronged me many times, amazingly
he'd done right by her. Her tears told me that. I couldn't make out what she
was telling his unconscious form.
Even if he had always done right by her, he'd treat
her even better with that thing Graax put in his brain, I reasoned. I'd bet
any guy who could go and steal so regularly from his neighbor had a lot of
other character flaws underneath the surface.
If the Renners were the kind of people you could
talk to, I'd have been able to spare her a whole lot of anguish. But if you
won't fess up to things you do, how can you have an honest talk about
anything?
We rode back to the K-10. "Is there any way she
can get that out of his nose?" Guzmán asked.
"Not without opening his head up," Graax
said.
"She might do that. Hope she doesn't," I
said. "She loves him. You could see it when she was holding him. It makes
me sick."
"Will this work?" Guzmán asked.
"I hope so," I said.
"It should," Graax replied. "The
brrkup can make itself work. If not, you can go on with what you were planning
to do."
"Not really, Graax. That's okay. It might not
have worked anyway," I said. "You have anybody in jail on your
planet?"
"No, I didn't know of prisoners except by
stories of the past until Becky told me. We don't have prisoners because of
pleebks and brkupps," he said.
"And what you put up Renner's nose was a brkupp?"
I said.
"Correct!" Graax replied.
"¡Muy bueno! I like the pleebks and
brkupps," Guzmán said, mangling the Squaattoosian words even further with
his thick Mexican accent, though being human you couldn't say them anything like
Graax with his ever-present gargle. I mangled them as well.
Even though Renner might now live by the Golden Rule,
he still could give up the Lazy-R, I figured. Graax didn't say the brkupp didn't
do anything to increase his share of brains. Renner fell far short of what was
needed to run a ranch. He was lucky he knew enough to chew food.
I decided I might take him on as a cowhand. It might
work with the brkupp. The Golden Rule was really the only law someone had to
follow. As Jesus said in the Bible, if someone followed that one, the rest of
the commandments kept themselves.
All I wanted out of any of my men was an honest day's
work for an honest day's pay. If Renner was able to give me that, I'd try to
forget how he'd tried to cheat me. It was the Christian thing to do. Besides,
Graax fixed his flaw. I had the gut feeling Graax wouldn't let me down, and the
profound hope my gut feeling was right.
Renner would have to do something about that shrew he
was married to before I took him on. As I rode back to the K-10, my groin still
smarted from her kicks. I had a headache from her screech. The woman could have
used a brkupp herself, if they worked. I pledged to myself to see she got one.
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