The Alien Sheriff -- Part 22
by James Patrick Cobb

In the last episode, Buck faced the daunting task of trying to sell himself to the skeptical Contention City Council.

Episode 22

I shouldn't have agreed to let Hank Atwell, the man who wore all the hats at the Contention City Chronicle, interview me. I didn't know any better at the time. I might as well have told him to write whatever he wanted and not bother taking the time to talk to me. The results would have been the same.

He quoted me as saying, "Any man who thinks they can go and do whatever they want on our streets has got another thing coming. I'm going to see to it that the will of the law is carried out. Miscreants will pay for their digressions with their life. I'm quick to draw and not afraid to pull the trigger. My aim is true. "

Outside of a cheap story magazine, who talks like that?

"I'm tougher than Jack Brucker ever was. I'm the toughest man I ever met. If the Thomas Brothers bothered Contention City with me in charge, they would have been the ones to die. Not me!"

Fighting words, sure to bring trouble on anyone foolish enough to say them, I knew. Furthermore, they were disrespectful of Brucker's memory. I cringed, reading them.

Further along in his story, he left the "er" off of the end of my name, misspelling it, and never mentioned Graax, though I told him all about my alien cohort. People should know they were going to have co-sheriffs, I figured. Furthermore, it was relevant to the story to tell people Graax came from another planet.

Atwell was either lazy, deaf, forgetful, loco, or a plain troublemaker. I should have been suspicious when he didn't take notes.

The day after I read his story, I saw the Atwell, a small man with a scarred, bearded face walking past my office window. I jumped up from my desk and called to him.

"Sheriff Turner?" he said, as friendly as can be. "How do you do?"

"Come in here."

As he stepped inside and sat in the chair opposite my desk, I said, "I'm surprised you didn't call me ‘Sheriff Turn.’ That's what you wrote. You have trouble hearing?"

Atwell put his valise down and looked around for something to comment on in his warbley voice. There was nothing except wanted posters on my walls. Any other kind of art distracts the mind.

"This office suits you fine," he said.

"Why?"

"It's neater than when Jack Brucker was in it."

"That doesn't mean anything."

"'A neat desk is the surest sign of an orderly mind' the nuns back in Madison, Wisconsin used to say. They'd say that you, sir, have an orderly mind. Do you believe that?"

"Sometimes I don't know what to believe - your paper, for example. How could you go and print that? I never said any of those things. You didn't even get my name right!"

Atwell shrugged and looked directly at me without meeting my glare. "You might not have said those things exactly, but they're what you meant, right? I worked up what you said to make it sound better, makes better reading. That's my business."

"No. What you're doing is making me sound like I'm calling someone out to fight. You made me sound like a jackass," I said calmly. "Hasn't there been enough fighting in Contention?"

He shrugged again. "People don't pay attention to what they read in the paper anyway. Most of them can't even read."

"They don't have any reason to pay attention to what they read if all they're going to see are lies. Some people believe everything they read. You do this again, you and I are going to have trouble. Hear?"

The issue where he wrote about the death of Sheriff Brucker sold a lot of copies, I expect. He was eager to repeat the feat. Fights made for interesting reading, especially with the reckless way he quoted people.

The charlatan smiled his thin, sickening smile, making me want to punch him. It was difficult to hold back. I imagined right then that he looked forward to writing poetically about my death like he had written about Sheriff Brucker's. "You have to expect fights, being the law, 'Sheriff, ‘" he said. "You want to stay out fights? Then you had no business taking the job."

"You just want to see more shooting and killing!" I said, slamming my fist down on my desk, indignant and angry. "You just want to sell more copies of your scandal sheet!"

"That's not true." His eyes grew wide and mouth gaped open as he pretended shock. "Everything is going to be all right. You look like you're a right good fighter."

"You don't know that, worm!"

He sighed like the trouble was all with me. "I hoped you and I could have gotten along better than this, like I got on with Jack Brucker." He stood up and cooly stretched, puffing himself up like I'd seen some toads do.

"Then you shouldn't have lied in print. I've got no use for liars."

"Liar? That's a fighting word more than anything I've got you saying."

"And you're welcome to print it too. Damn liar."

"I've got to be going. You're scared to fight - aren't you Turner? You shouldn't have taken this job!"

He was trying to strike at a nerve, calling me a coward. That wouldn't work. I know I'm not a coward and the only person I have to answer to is me. "Just one more thing!" I said, reaching across my desk and putting my hand on his shoulder, forcing him to sit. "I'm not through with you."

He was the one who was scared then. He didn't even try to brush my hand away. I could feel him tremble. Atwell waited for my next words, wide-eyed and fearful that I might hurt him.

"Atwell, I don't care if you like me or not, but if you're going to write about the activities of this office, you need to start telling the truth. Print the real news, not the lies you're passing off as the news.

"Someone kills me, there's no safety in this town. When there's no safety, there's no prosperity. We've got to take this town beyond all this violence. That's what I'm trying to do. I've heard about what happened to the Crawford family and between Wilson and Prickett and at MacMillian's Dry Goods. Yeah, it might make for interesting reading. But everybody leaves town you'll be out of business.

"People come here in search of treasure, but how long can the veins at the T.T., the Bronco and the others hold out? Or, there might still be argentite, but everything can get flooded like at Tombstone. There's other towns too, other money in these parts. What's to stop the people from going to Gleeson, Ruby, Fairbank or Prosperity? They might want to take their chances on a place with less bloody fame. You want to build your enterprise into something that's more permanent, you're going to need the miners, but you're also going to need the ranchers and farmers and their families. Miners will go anywhere. You need to start telling the truth.

"If other businesses cannot do their business, your business cannot grow. They can't survive with all the fighting. It's in your interest to support me in my efforts to clean up this town. I can't do my job if I have a bunch of idiots with guns want to see if they're tougher than me come gunning for me. Comprende?

His flat-mouthed expression didn't change. I couldn't tell if he heard a word I said.

I found only one more word was worth saying: "Leave."

Atwell stood and quickly turned to leave, forgetting his valise. At the doorway, he remembered it and hurriedly returned to pick it up.

I couldn't figure that man out. Atwell ignored everything I told him. In the next edition, he wrote about me interrupting a fight between Edgar Rockman and John Dixon at the End of the Trail by firing my pistol into the air and saying: "'The next round is going through one of you unless you two stop this right now.'

"Both men cowered in fear before the new sheriff, humbled before the power of justice.

I swore aloud when I read his article.

"You read it?" Deputy Anaya said of the Chronicle, laughing at my vexation. "Don't pay attention to anything he writes. Nobody else does," he said. "He's just for laughs."

"It don't matter how good a story is if it isn't true," I said. "I talked to him, and warned him."

That might have been how Jack Brucker became a legend. I was tempted to let Atwell have his way and do the same for me. We all have a certain amount of vanity in our nature. Still, I expected Jack Brucker could back up Atwell's mellifluous words and phrases with his fists and guns better than I could.

What really happened at the End of the Trail was I whistled and told Rockman and Dixon to take their quarrel outside the city limits. "We can't have fighting here," I said.

Both men had quick tempers and forgave each other minutes later. Later, they hugged and bought each other drinks. Atwell had fabricated the incident into something else entirely.

Rockman came by the office after he read what had happened in the Chronicle. Fear, anger, betrayal and hate raged forth from the spindly man's eyes.

"You tell him to write that? You're saying I'm yellow!" Rockman yelled. "I'm not afraid of you or anyone!" His face was fiery red, he was so angry. He didn't care whether or not I was the sheriff. He would have decked me either way.

"And Anaya said nobody would pay attention to what Atwell wrote," I said, thinking out loud. "I wouldn't say that about anyone."

"Huh?" he said, disbelieving, taken aback suddenly.

"I don't tell Hank Atwell what to write - not even the words he has me saying. He has a yen to spin yarns."

"I'll teach him not to lie," Rockman shouted angrily, smacking his bony fist into his palm.

"Ed! Let me fix this. I've got my ways - and ways to help you with your problems as well," I said, unsheathing the pleebk and fingering a brrkup.

Invisible waves of calmness washed over Rockman. "Feeling better?"

"Yes," Rockman said.

"This won't hurt a bit," I said assuringly.

"This won't hurt a bit," he repeated.

"That's right," I said and inserted the brrkup into the man's left nostril. The chandler was then able to control his temper for good.

I found Atwell lying in some pasture south of town, gazing up at the clouds later that week. My temper about the whole matter had cooled significantly and I was finally able to talk to him without yelling.

I explained how I wanted him to do a story on brrkups. "I'm sure you can say it far more eloquently than I would be able to," I said. "And I want you to be accurate about it."

"Well, I don't know about that," he said.

"Why's that?"

"Your ideas and mine are different. People read the newspaper for entertainment."

Then let them pick up a storybook, I thought. "This story is entertaining and true."

"Why not just tell me right here?"

"I got something to show you back at the office."

"What is it?"

"You've got to come to the office to see."

It took him a couple of days to show up. His habit was to conduct all of his financial business in the first part of the week and write all the stories in the second.

"Try this out," I said when he showed up one morning, holding the brrkup up.

"What's that?"

"It's what we're going to be using on the local criminals. I've already put it in some of them. It doesn't hurt. It comes from the planet my co-Sheriff comes from, the alien I told you about, the one you left out of your article? You'll see him sometime." I took out the pleebk.

"This helps sometimes," I said comfortingly, squeezing the end of the emitter to activate it.

"Don't be afraid. I'll demonstrate. Hold still," I said.

"I'm not afraid. You'll demonstrate," Atwell repeated.

"That's right." I held the brainclip under his nose. The little legs started moving up his nose, ending up where it needed to be. "There. That'll do you some good. Didn't hurt a bit, did it?"

"It didn't hurt a bit," Atwell agreed, his eyes popping open wider than I'd expect they ever had before.

"That's good," I said, smiling.

Then Atwell suffered a sudden, severe headache. I knew the brrkup was on its way to making him into a new man.

He had to get some rest and recover from the headache before we could talk about the big story. I also wanted to be sure his thinking had changed.

It did, after a week. While his articles lost some of their lyricism, they improved factually. His devotion to accuracy became something to behold. He began writing down quotes in a notebook when he interviewed people.

I was proud of the new Hank Atwell. The only thing I was sorry about was that it took two inaccurate articles about me to get me thinking about brainclipping him.

I wouldn't hesitate so long to brainclip anyone ever again.

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