by John Boyd
“No’m. Sheriff Faust got me thinking along other lines. He wanted the fifty acres to grow hops to make beer for his old age, but I ain’t much of a beer drinker. If the land grows corn and the creek water’s good, the ravine behind your barns would be a fine place to put a still and cook up a few batches of moonshine to sell to the Indians. The government don’t allow nobody to sell whiskey to the Indians, so I’d have the whole market to myself.”
“Red men like whiskey same as white men, maybe better, and the government ain’t got no right to keep them poor people from having fun. By selling whiskey, I could do a lot of good for that poor, downtrodden race, and get paid for my kindness.”
“I’d be all for it, Ian,” Liza said, with qualified enthusiasm, “but you know Gabe would never approve of moonshining. That’s against the law, and selling the stuff to Indians is against another law.”
“Laws are for people who don’t know better,” Ian said, thinking: She kept prodding the conversation back to the same old corral. It was about time for him to grab the halter.
He poured them both another round of drinks, which finished the bottle, and spoke carefully and deliberately.
“Liza, I figure Gabe will be marrying Three-finger Peyton now he’s converted, and she’ll be too busy raising children at two dollars a head to worry much about what’s going on down behind the hen house.”
Liza’s face grew suddenly thoughtful, then soft, and her great, dark eyes misted over. Bemusedly she sipped her cup, then nodded slowly in agreement.
“You’re right, Ian. If she married Billy Peyton, she’d be the richest woman in the valley down there on all that rich land. When she wasn’t teaching school, she’d be riding out over that fancy spread of hers all the time, and she’d forget her old ma, despite all I’ve done for her.”
Ian had presented the widow with a breakdown in the dowry negotiations, but Liza seemed hardly concerned with the import of his remarks about Peyton. Instead, she seemed intent on some private and secret hurt of her own as she continued in a plaintive yet indignant tone.
“Yes, sir. Sometimes I think she’s a little ashamed of my chickens… But I tell you one thing, her and that backsliding Mormon would make a good pair. He don’t know nothing, and she ain’t got the skills of an older woman to teach him with.
“There’s lots of tricks a woman can teach her daughter, things they don’t put in books, but how can a woman do it when her daughter’s too educated and snooty even to talk about it with her?… You know that snit was always trying to get me to take off my shoes before I came into the house from the chicken yard?”
Liza’s face was contorted as she struggled to hold back the tears, and her tears would disturb him. He drained his cup to bolster his courage and said bluntly, “Liza, if you’re willing to put in your thirty acres with my fifty, that’d give us ninety good acres, with hen house fertilizer, to grow enough corn for the whole reservation, and we wouldn’t have to build a house. Yours is good enough, and it’d be handy to our still. Then I’d give you the gray horse in the bargain.”
At his remark, her beginning tears seemed to evaporate.
“Are you and me talking business, boy?”
“In a way, I reckon, I ain’t got a thing against Gabriella. A man couldn’t ask for a better stepdaughter. But I always thought you had a pretty level head, yourself, Liza, on one of the nicest pair of shoulders I ever did see, and down below you’ve got the biggest…”
“Keep talking, boy!”
“… heart I ever found in a woman. And you’ve got a strong stomach, too. Talking business with you is more fun than courting a lot of other women, and if you’re willing to give me Gabriella as a stepdaughter, I’d be mighty pleased.
“You see, Liza, I ain’t no young whelp no more. I’m twenty-eight going on forty, and I reckon you’re about thirty-five going on thirty. Now, I’ve seen some bargains in my day, but, I tell you, Liza, you’re worth twice as much as that big gray outside, and you’ll have to admit it’s some horse.”
“Ian McCloud, are you proposing to me?”
“Well, ma’am, if you want the horse…”
“If you’re proposing to me, boy, what kind of answer do you expect from a woman who’s been widowed a year and before that was married to a man who read books? Do you expect me to flutter my eyes and say, ‘Maybe?’ ”
“I’ll throw in The Sergeant’s pinto, too. It’d make a good plowhorse for our cornfield.”
“Slow down, boy. No need for you to try to sweep me off my feet or drag me off with horses… There’s only one thing I want you to do for me, Ian. I’ll tell you when I want it done, but first I’ll tell you why I want it done.
“When I heard about you taking dead aim and shooting Billy Peyton’s finger off, I said to myself, there’s a kind man, just the one to comfort a widow. Then, when you came to my house looking like a lost ball in high weeds when Gabe started talking books, I said to myself, here’s a man who won’t keep a woman waiting while he finishes a story he’s reading. Then, when you ate all that chicken, I knew you were a man who appreciates the finer things of life. But what cinched me was when you rode the pinwheeler, Midnight. I knowed, then, you were just the buster for this bronc.
“Ian, it pleases me no end that you recognize a real woman when you see one. No spindle-legged, schoolteaching flibbertigibbet is good enough for Ian McCloud.”
“Liza, it pleases me to hear you say all them kind things, but what do you want me to do for you?”
“Move your desk out of the way because I’m too drunk to walk around it, and it wouldn’t be proper for me to climb over it to get to you.”
“But what’s your answer, Liza?”
“What was the question?”
“Will you marry me?”
“Hell, yes! Somebody’s got to help them poor, downtrodden Indians, and it might as well be you and me.”
Remaining seated, Ian gripped the edge of the desk and flipped it onto its back, sending it sliding across the floor to lodge in front of and to bar the front door. Liza stood and fell into Ian’s exposed lap, hugging and kissing him with an ardor he had seldom encountered north of the border. But Ian’s swivel chair proved an unstable arena for Liza’s gyrations. It tilted backwards and over, spilling its occupants, who landed in a welter of arms and legs. Ian’s squirming to get from under her seemed to set Liza off. She shoved the fallen chair away with her free leg and wrapped the other around Ian, pinning his shoulders to the floor.
Her dark black hair flowed into his eyes; the perfume of her was in his nostrils. She flowed over him and around him, and he was helpless to resist when she whispered, “Ian, honey, your pistol’s bruising me something terrible, so I’m going to take your gun belt off.”
Incredibly deft, her fingers moved as she spoke, and she had barely voiced her intentions when he heard her say with astonishment, “Well, I swan!”
That which G-7’s bumbling host had failed to accomplish in weeks, Liza accomplished in minutes. For the angel, the widow’s promises of pneumatic bliss proved delightfully false, else the whiskey Ian had drunk was scrambling its sense of metaphor; her ovate spheroids, firm yet resilient, were more in the nature of cushioned hydraulic rams, an impression G-7 considered more in harmony with the totality of impressions the female created. Liquid was the word for Liza. To a luminosity, she was exotic yet not totally unfamiliar, suggestive of a whorl of lubricated light. And paradoxical. Immense yet delicate, massive yet buoyant, she focused the liquefaction of her thighs with such exquisite and controlled compaction that even its host—that heretofore aesthetic clod—was drawn into the flowing wonder of her ways. For its part, G-7 could make universal comparisons and it knew that nowhere, not even on Vulvula, existed the being with even a quiver of Liza’s understanding of the mechanics of applied aesthetics.
For instance, the art of Liza Stewart was subtly heightened by an otherwise peculiar practice which G-7 could recognize as a by-product of her life experience: Even the full
measure of devotion Liza gave to pleasure was intensified, or spiced, by the piquancy of pain. The woman was an inveterate chicken plucker. Her fingers fluting over Ian plucked notes of passion from chords G-7 was positive her overly fastidious schoolteacher daughter would never have tweaked.
G-7’s analysis was continuing apace when, for the second time in twenty-four hours, it lost its detachment. While half-amused by and half-applauding the esoteric exoticism of the widow, it had a vision of itself lifting off on a pillar of fire, and that vision, sublime and exalting, throbbing with the primal flame, so shivered its tendrils that it was one, not merely with its host but, as it were, its hostess. It could never turn from these revels in derision. It was involved forever with mankind. Throughout its existence it had been launching itself from a seemingly endless array of planets, always leaving, always going. Now it was home. At long last, G-7 had come.
“God of galaxies, be with me now and in the moment of my dissolution. Amen.”
“What’d you say, hon?”
“Nothing, Liza. I reckon I’m half-asleep. I ain’t done nothing all day but kill two men and get engaged the easy way, but I’m plumb tuckered out. Of course, I didn’t get much sleep last night, but that ain’t it. I feel like I’ve fought a war and lost.”
“You stretch out, lover boy, and get yourself some shut-eye. I’ll stand guard. One thing Widow Stewart does—she takes care of her man.”
“You ain’t getting no argument from me on that score. After a short snooze, I’ll see Brother Winchester about making an honest woman out of you, and, after we’re hitched, we’ll ride over to Pocatello for a two-day honeymoon.”
G-7 could no longer look upon the face of its beloved because Ian closed his eyes. No matter—it was concerned now with a concern that never troubled its host, a sense of duty. One final task it must perform as a galactic scout. Disengaging itself from the neurons of the man, it floated upward and outward through the closed door.
G-7, too, had almost succumbed in the struggle on the mountain. True, it felt it had won the battle, but in winning the battle it might have lost the war. Ian had developed a social consciousness of sorts and seemed willing to accept the restraints of matrimony, but the man’s respect for the law still seemed somewhat dubious.
Moreover, G-7 was beginning to share the doubts of its host. The law against bringing whiskey onto an Indian reservation seemed unequal to G-7 and therefore unjust, particularly after its own encounter with whiskey had been so pleasant. To deny spirits to a people because of skin color struck G-7 as a legal immorality which, in an oblique manner, illuminated a vaster moral problem confronting the being.
Conceivably all laws were immoral, the ground rules for one great, self-deceiving fraud.
Fluttering along the force lines of Earth, G-7 sought the easy gradients, the long glides, sacrificing speed for ease. Once it settled to the ground to cogitate.
All of its remnant honesty informed G-7 that it was justifying beforehand a course of action already committed to, but even its remnant honesty had grown suspect. Perhaps its honesty was a matter of indoctrination based on false, even if sincere, assumptions, and if the seed premise was false, all the fruits thereof would be false.
Yet it had to be true to itself, and the truth was, it was yielding to the bestiality of the planet, becoming a spendthrift of energy, and there were strong elements of personal desire prompting it to its ends. On the other hand, being true to oneself was playing checkers with a mirror image; whatever the left hand decided the right hand agreed to, and the game was foredoomed to a pointless draw.
The spirit tried to weigh these problems and resolve them before moving on, but the spirit was too weak. Morality lay heavily upon it like an unwilling sleep. Brushing aside all reservations, it rose to continue its journey, steeling itself for the final act of separation.
Whatever else, it could not permit other galactic scouts to come to this planet and assess the extent of its failure here. Other scouts, rich with unfissioned ions and driven by the indomitable spirit of their race, would attempt to rouse G-7 to further efforts: They would be urging it to conserve energy, exhorting it to reform the unreformable, and, no doubt, they would be playing around with G-7’s women.
Besides, G-7 admitted, the ethereal race might be taking its righteousness too much for granted. Perhaps it had been force-fed precepts of harmonics and energy conservation that were not beyond being questioned. Possibly it was best that these human beings seize their revelry, live madly and upon the hour, then die.
Of what value was immortality to humankind? Men were not Grecian urns, glass flowers, or any undying artifact; they were ephemera who needed palsied age and death to make their fleeting youth the sweeter. They needed flat D notes to teach them appreciation of harmonics. They needed pricks of pain to enhance the joys of pleasure, as Liza, its Liza, so artfully understood.
Looking on itself from the viewpoint of an Ian McCloud, it could see itself not as a message bearer but as a celestial meddler, flitting from one star group to another to invest more forcible hosts and impose on them the dull conformity of unrelieved goodness, the ethics of conservationism, interfering in the free movement of mobile organisms which loss of entropy was bound to get, anyway, sooner or later. Then what? A universe peopled only with angels flitting aimlessly through the cold of dead galaxies? Better this Resmonda’s Bowl than that darkness.
Seize the day, G-7 thought. Don’t conserve it. Time’s value lay in its transience. Burn time into the soul with fires of passion. Better time’s traces remain as a scar than that it be allowed to wane, unmarked and unremembered. Better twenty years of Shoshone Flats than a cycle of Doremia.
But it was exhorting itself needlessly. Already scarred, it had seized the moment and was determined to make Earth its private preserve as long as it had one circulating photon remaining.
G-7 had reached the building site of the McCloud Comfort Station. Hovering over the ground, it monitored close-in data.
O’Shea had been active in Ian’s absence. Foundation trenches had been excavated, stakes planted, cords stretched, and the cornerstone moved to its approximate location on the northeast corner of the building site. A measure of its indoctrination by Earth-thinking, G-7 realized, lay in the fact that it now regarded its starship, the apex achievement of a millennium-old technological culture, primarily as the cornerstone of a rather elaborate outhouse.
G-7 drifted over and into the spaceship, entered the compression chamber, and emerged from there into the communications room. Though now homogenized and condensed, G-7 was barely a halo of its former self, and it knew that the time for diplomatic language was done. Without wasting energy on rephrasing, it scanned a message directly into the scanner.
Emergency dispatch from G-7 to Galactic Central: Earth inhabitants hereby rejected for Brotherhood. Organisms are spiritual antimatter with capacity to transmute evil into something still damned but attractive. They find pleasure in sin, elevate vice to morality. G-3 was here! Empathetic proof that G-3 succumbed to entropy on this planet. G-7 is expiring.
Attention all scouts, here follows an edict:
QUARANTINE EARTH!
So, it was done. G-7 in Earth’s fellowship was one. But since the edict was a formal writ, never to be revoked or violated, the scout signed the transmission with the full official acronym of the Galactic Brotherhood’s Interplanetary Exploration Legions: GABRIEL.
The angel compressed the message into the scan chamber, set the transmitter to emergency power, and sent the super-microblip at tachyon speed toward Galactic Central. Then it actuated the “Destruct” photoelectric cell and drifted into the diffusion chamber, although its diffusion now was hardly more than a formality. Outside, it wavered from the ship to the nearest magnetic force line going its way. In a matter of minutes, the starship’s self-destruct mechanism would become operative and the boulder’s interior would change, become indistinguishable from the granite boulders surrounding it.
Or so G-7 as
sumed. It had not reckoned with its own weakness. When it pressed the “Destruct” button with its limber digit of light, it had not mustered enough lumens to actuate the photoelectric cell.
G-7 began its veering, fluttering progress back to Shoshone Flats, back to its home and perhaps its crypt in the skull of Ian McCloud. Sadly, it knew, there would be no Saint Ian the First to lead his species to the light. Ian McCloud was damned.
Yet, though mortally weakened, G-7 was held on course by eagerness and sustained aloft by a buoyant purpose. If it survived the two days in Pocatello, its remaining photons would be used to make Ian McCloud the best damned moonshiner west of the Wind River Range.
But, with its old remnant honesty, G-7 knew it was not particularly interested in the quality of whiskey Ian distilled. It wanted to assure itself that Ian was always welcomed on the reservation, particularly by the Shoshone squaws. Plan ahead, as Colonel Blicket always said.
And after the anima of Ian McCloud perished—after the gunfighter’s reflexes slowed and G-7’s skullhouse was blasted to Earth, a vacant shrine then if it had had any photons left—Earth’s second Gabriel might try again, this time with a more malleable host.
Travelers now within that valley use Highway 89, and, at 70 miles an hour, few motorists notice a cluster of buildings a mile off the highway to the east. Since the post office was moved to Alpine, Shoshone Flats is no longer listed on the map, but to Old West history buffs and to collectors of esoterica the locale is not unknown. A few hundred yards southwest of the almost deserted village stands a structure of native stone, its function long since rendered obsolete by technological progress, which is listed in the pages of Strange Facts as the smallest building in the world with flying buttresses.
In local legend, the building goes by another name, the Haunted Outhouse. The few children in the area avoid the building at night, for a strange sound, unaccounted for by the winds, disturbs the building. Those who have heard the sound, which emanates from a particular corner of the old comfort station, describe it as an eerie humming, with varied and distinct modulations of tone.