Less Than Human

by Raisor, Gary

  "The voices in your head made you do bad things, only you got to where you liked the voices in your head. You got to like the bad things. So you quit taking it. You knew right from wrong."

  Steven looked in the pit, tried again to speak, and this time he was able, even though the sound was muddy. "Don't do this. We were friends once. Kill me."

  "You're right, we were friends once, but what you did was wrong. I'm not going to kill you. That'd be too good for you."

  The substance inside Steven Adler poured out of the hole in his head, spit in two, and stretched upward toward Earl. In the dark, it looked as if the vampire had suddenly grown horns.

  Manny, Jesus, and Ernesto made the sign of the cross, backed away.

  Earl lifted the blond vampire high above his head, and the duster that Steven wore spread like dark wings as he was thrown into the pit waiting below.

  They never heard him strike bottom.

  Outside, Earl pressed a button on a remote and a series of explosions occurred. The cliffs crumbled, fell.

  "Dynamite," Earl explained. "He'll spend eternity beneath those stones."

  "Wouldn't it have been kinder to have killed him?" Kevin asked.

  "Yes, son, it would have." Earl strode toward the coach in the predawn light.

  They gathered around Earl as he climbed up in the stagecoach and gathered the reins.

  "You don't have to go," Manny said.

  Boyce seconded that sentiment. "You can stay with us for as long as you want."

  "I appreciate your offer, boys, believe me I do, but this is the way I got into this, and this is the way I'd like to get out." Earl began turning the coach. "A long time ago, I used to drive a wagon from town to town, selling snake oil. Had me a little white dog that wouldn't do any tricks." He smiled down at them. "It wasn't much of a life but at least it was mine."

  They appealed one last time.

  "No, it's time for me to go. I had me a good life, so don't worry about old Earl."

  With those last words, Earl pointed the stagecoach toward the desert, due east, and he drove into the rising sun.

  And legend.

  Epilogue

  Crowder Flats, the Navajo Graveyard—Two Years Later

  The day was gray, chilly, with rows of dark clouds running across the sky like some endless train, sometimes hiding the sun for several minutes at a time. When the sun popped out, it held no warmth or cheer. Rain had been threatening for a week, but had never materialized.

  Amos Black Eagle and Lefty Thunder Coming had just finished laying flowers on the unmarked grave, weighing the wreath down with stones to keep the wind from blowing it away.

  They stood back to check their work.

  The wind rose and the wreath began flapping.

  Amos laid another stone on it. "I think that'll hold."

  "I don't know." Lefty sat on the stone fence, lit himself a smoke, and listened to the wind sigh through the pines. "The wind don't ever let up around here."

  "I know what you mean. Sometimes I think I hear it calling MY name."

  "Me too."

  They stared across the gray landscape, each lost in his own thoughts.

  Lefty was the first to speak, and he repeated the names of the people in the unmarked grave, his voice taken by the wind. "Billy Two Hats, Martin Strickland, Doralee Strickland, Nicholas Strickland, Chester Roberts, and Bobby Roberts." After a moment he added, "May God have mercy on your souls." He turned to Amos. "I wished they could have had a proper Christian burial."

  "I do too, Lefty, but nobody can ever know about what happened here. They just wouldn't believe. This is one burden we're going to have to carry all by ourselves. We're taking a chance even putting down a wreath."

  The small Apache's face was eroded with sadness and he raised up his bottle of Jack Daniel's and took a long drink. "I keep seeing them, Amos, not alive, but the way they looked when we found them in the creek bed. Martin scalped, Doralee without no eyes, Bobby all cut up." He shook the bottle, as if to assure himself it wasn't empty. "If it wasn't for this, I don't think I'd be able to sleep at night. I don't see how you quit drinking."

  "It wasn't easy, but I made a promise to Jesse."

  Lefty took another drink. "You heard from him lately?"

  "He's coming home for Thanksgiving." Amos smiled proudly. "College boys always need two things, money and something to eat. He's getting a little uppity; he told me we can't have corn on the cob."

  "Amy coming with him?"

  "Yeah, then they're going out to Missouri to stay with John and Louise Warrick for a couple of days at the farm." Amos instantly regretted bringing up that subject.

  "Missouri, that's a strange place for those two to end up, if you ask me. John doesn't know anybody in Missouri, and he damn sure don't know nothing about farming." Lefty took another drag on his cigarette and jumped down off the fence, dusted off the seat of his pants. "You know, I still can't figure out how John pulled through that night. My cousin knows a girl who dates an orderly at the hospital over to Holbrook who was there when John was admitted. My cousin says John should have been dead when he came in."

  "How come every time something happens, you got a cousin that just happens to know what's going on?"

  "I got a lot of cousins," Lefty answered, unoffended. "They hear things."

  "Things like John was down to his last pint of blood? You bring that up every time we come out here, and I gotta tell you, Lefty, that story is sure getting on my nerves."

  "I been thinking about this," Lefty insisted, "so hear me out, okay?"

  Amos watched the sun dip behind the mountains, flashing off the large white cross before throwing the graveyard into sudden shadow. A shiver passed through him. "All right, Lefty, tell me what happened."

  "Who was the first person to see John that night at Jake's?"

  "Louise."

  "Amy?"

  Amos was becoming exasperated. "All right, who was it?"

  "Earl Jacobs."

  "So it was Earl Jacobs. What's your point?"

  "I think Earl Jacobs and John Warrick are the same person, or at least…," Lefty floundered, "a part of Earl somehow got inside John. I think Earl did that transfer thing on John before he went outside and killed Steven Adler."

  "I think you scrambled your brains with that whiskey," Amos said.

  "Well, then you think about this. John and Louise had themselves a little girl, and everyone says that John and his new daughter are inseparable. They said they never seen nothing like it."

  "That's your proof?"

  "He's got himself a little white dog that he's been trying to teach tricks to."

  "I got a dog; too, his name is Custer. I been trying to teach him to protect my chickens for the last five years." Amos paused, became suddenly still. "You hear that?"

  "No, what is it?"

  "Sounded like voices." Amos shook his head, laughed uneasily. "The wind up here makes me hear things." They moved nearer to the dynamited cliffs and Amos placed his ear against one of the stones. His hearing wasn't what it used to be, still, there for a second, he thought he heard a faint voice. Then it was gone.

  This was crazy. Steven Adler was dead, buried under tons of rock for the last two years.

  "Come on," Amos said to Lefty as they moved away from the rocks, "let's get home. Jesse's and Bobby's old running buddies are coming over for a while."

  "That'll be good. Give us a chance to catch up on what they're doing these days." Lefty watched the pine trees dotting the hillside sway in the wind, and he listened to their murmuring voices for a moment. They too sounded sad. "I heard tell Manny, Ernesto, and Jesus finally got themselves that little gas station over in Albuquerque."

  "Yeah, they did. They're all equal partners."

  "Hell, those three can't agree on anything. They'll never get anything done."

  Amos couldn't argue with that. "You hear anything from Boyce and Nash?"

  "Last time I talked to them, they were still trying to buy a p
iece of the Broken R. They said they're going to raise beef for the Japanese. I think it's just crazy enough that the bank's going to go for it."

  "Too bad Kevin didn't live long enough to hear that."

  The grizzled Apache ground out his cigarette butt beneath the heel of his boot. "Kevin lives through all this, only to die of a ruptured appendix seven months later. God takes him at twenty-two and leaves two old farts like us. It doesn't seem fair, does it?"

  "No, it doesn't, and I can't give you any kind of answer. I wish I could."

  They said nothing for a long while.

  "I heard tell Boyce got himself a girlfriend," Lefty said, brightening a little.

  "Now, you don't expect me to believe that, do you?" Lefty got a twinkle in his eyes. "I think this calls for a bottle of tequila."

  As they walked toward the pickup, Amos nudged Lefty with an elbow. "What do you say, after everybody leaves, we play us a little pinochle? I'll give you a chance to win back part of that ten million you owe me."

  "Sounds good to me." Lefty grinned. "I'm gonna kick your butt. I feel lucky tonight."

  "You say that every night."

  They climbed into Amos's pickup; the one Jesse had given him, and drove away.

  Soon after the taillights vanished into the twilight, the wind rose and the wreath worked loose from its perch and sailed across the hard ground, flipping end over end like a tumbleweed, until it finally fetched up against the rocks that covered Steven Adler's grave. The wreath became trapped there.

  And even though the wind blew hard, the wreath remained wedged in the rocks as though it belonged there.

  It stayed there until it became dust.