Riverworld and Other Stories

by Philip José Farmer

  Blotch seen me hanging on so the mealymouth strolled over and sneered at me up and down.

  “You ain’t going to sling me into the calaboose again,” I said. “I’m suffering from a little liver stroke, but I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  I was hoping he’d buy my story. The boss expected me to get into trouble Saturday night, but he’d be mad if I didn’t show for work Monday morning. Besides, the thought of spending another day behind bars while Blotch read temperance tracts to me was enough to make me even sicker.

  To get his mind off me, I said, “Who’s that hombre you was just talking to?”

  “It’s none of your business,” he said. “But he’s Mr. Bub, first name’s Bales, come from New York to put the squeeze on your boss. I’ll be serving the foreclosure papers on that Abomination of Desolation you call the XR unless Rich comes up with the money. You’ll be out of a job soon, you booze-soaked rowdy. Woe unto them that rise early in the morning that they may follow strong drink. Isaiah, five-eleven.”

  If my Levis wasn’t so tight my heart would of been down in my boots. Things had really been going bad for the old man. After his jeep overturned and he was paralyzed from the waist down, bad luck stuck to him tighter’n crabs from a Nogales whorehouse. The dam in the mountains burst and washed away three guest houses. The stable caught fire and burned up ten horses. Rustlers stole a hundred cows and a pedigree bull. Yeah, I know, but rustlers is even more active now than when my grandpa was operating.

  Then one of the cowboy studs, Raunchy Sanders, give three guests the clap. Word got around, and we only had half the dudes we usually get.

  Blotch quit grinning, and he squinted at me.

  “Mr. Bub was inquiring about a saddle tramp named J.C. Marison. Said he owed him money and would like to repay him. Know anybody of that name?”

  That sobered me a little. Bub didn’t look like he’d chase you unless you owed him money. So I said I never heard of Marison. Us debtors have to stick together.

  I had to put up with a ten-minute lecture from the sheriff-reverend, but he finally let me go. On the way out I passed the clapboard church Blotch built with the help of God—so he said. Actually it was jail labor done it. There was a big billboard out front of The Church of the Last Days calculated to scare the whiskey right out of us sinners. It showed Jesus riding down from the sky on an ass. But it looked more like a jackrabbit than a donkey. The cheapskate Blotch got a drunken vagrant artist to do it instead of ten days in the clinker.

  Behind Jesus was a bunch of angels right out of Revelations. The lead angel looked mighty like Blotch and he was carrying a rope with a hangman’s knot. Running away from the fierce angels was a mob of dissipated-looking people, many carrying fifths of booze, all headed toward a fiery pit. One of the sinners more than resembled me. In the background was the Great Whore of Babylon. The model for her was Swede, another one of Blotch’s pet hates. Only, big as her boobs are, they ain’t that big. I oughta know.

  That sign always made me mad, so I floored the accelerator and only took fifteen minutes to get to the ranch. J.C., grinning all over, came out of the boss’ house followed by Mary Rich. She was under his spell, I could tell that, so I reminded myself to tell him he wasn’t hired to pleasure the boss’ daughter. I barreled past them into the living room, where Xavier Rich sat in his wheelchair.

  I blurted out the news about Mr. Bub, but the boss wasn’t as shaken up as I thought he’d be.

  He said, “Things ain’t as bad as they look. I think maybe I can float a loan with Mrs. Lott. She was in here earlier complaining about the lack of entertainment—you and I know what she means by that—when this good-looking J.C. with the bulge showed up. She fell for him like she was a tree he’d axed. I think he can butter her up, if he’s got the stamina. She’ll loan me the money to keep them fat-ass New York bankers off my neck for a while.”

  I thought that was like a drowning man asking for somebody please throw him the anchor, but I didn’t say so. Wanda Lott, who us hands referred to as Wants-a-Lot, was a big handsome New Yorker separated from her wealthy husband. She was fifty, though she claimed forty-one. When she come down every spring for two months she always brought along some of her rich hot-pants women friends with her.

  “The only trouble with J.C.,” the boss said, “is his bad manners. He wouldn’t take off his hat indoors even when there was women present.”

  I was about to tell him Mrs. Lott wasn’t interested in what his hat covered, but Mary came in then. He dismissed me and I went out to unload the pickup. After lunch, I rode out to help drive a bunch of prime beef on the hoof into the feeding pens. I also kept an eye on J.C. He seemed to know one end of a horse from the other, but when I saw a steer get away from him and run down a wash I wasn’t so sure.

  So I followed him, one, to check him out, and two, to warn him about Bub. But the steer upped and overed the banks of the wash and took off for the broken rocks and the cactus. No way was even that big white horse of his’n going to get near the critter. Then J.C. did something that made me want to lie down and wait for the DT’s to pass. He put away the rope and took off his hat. Something shone in the sun, but it couldn’t be what I saw.

  It was a halo. Yes, that’s what I said. A halo, a ring of light. What? Yes, thank you. Make it a double.

  He took that halo in his right hand and flipped it out like it was a Frisbie. It sailed out, widening out as it went, and slipped down over the beast’s neck. It stopped dead. J.C. rode up and removed the halo, which then shrank back to normal size, and he put it over his head and the hat over it.

  Pretty soon the steer, meek and mild, came trotting back with J.C. behind him. He didn’t see me because I ducked back down into the wash.

  Then I see the sheriff’s jeep on top of McGiddow’s Hill, where a road ran on top of it. Blotch was standing by it looking at J.C. through field glasses. I wasn’t too surprised he was sneaking around up there. He was always pussyfooting around to catch us in some sort of evildoings. I think he must of thought we was buggering the calves, which none of us had done since we started shaving.

  I didn’t say nothing to nobody about the halo. What I seen was enough to make even a cowboy think. When the usual barbecue was held that evening, with lots of booze, gorging, singing, and dirty jokes, I helped serve. Mrs. Lott kept closer to J.C. than a nursing calf to its mother. Mary Rich was angry about that, I could tell, and her father was mad because she was mad. But neither could do anything about it.

  All of a sudden, the boss called me to his chair.

  “Goddamn it, Soapy, you didn’t bring enough booze! How come? You drink most of it on the way back? Get your ass into town fast and get two more cases each of gin, whiskey, and vodka.”

  I walked away hot under the collar even if it was my fault. J.C., who was rid of Wants-a-Lot for a minute ’cause she had to take a piss, stopped me.

  “What’s the trouble, Soapy?”

  I told him, and he said, “I’ll get it.”

  Before I could protest, he was gone. But I followed him since Nab wouldn’t give him credit unless he had a note from Rich. I was about ten steps behind him when he went into the bunkhouse. But I stopped when I saw through a window what he was doing. He’d started filling three empty gallon jugs with water from the sink faucet. What the hell?, I thought. Pretty soon he filled them and he come out carrying a jug under each arm. I followed him back to the barbecue, and what do you know? He pours the jug water in to the empty bottles, and from one comes gin and from the other vodka!

  I ain’t lying; I tested them both.

  Just as I was going back to the bunkhouse to check out the third jug, I seen Mr. Bub drive up. Cool as the devil, he introduced himself to the boss, who was about ready to explode when Bub said he thought he’d like to look at what was gonna be his property. But Bub didn’t see J.C, though he looked around for him. J.C. had disappeared.

  Mrs. Lott didn’t seem to mind. One look at that big handsome dude with the giant swelling, an
d she just natural gravitated to him. That kept the boss from running Bub’s ass off the place, of course, since he couldn’t afford to offend her.

  I hotfooted it to the bunkhouse and drank some of the stuff in the third jug. It was whiskey, as good as Wild Turkey!

  Just as I was going fast out the door before J.C. came back, Sheriff Reverend Blotch grabbed hold of me from the dark and pulled me around the corner. He smelled like he’d crapped in his pants, which, as a fact, he’d done.

  “I seen the halo!” he cried. “And I seen the miracle of the water turning into booze! I know you saw him both times, too! What in shit’s going on?”

  I said, “That ain’t no kind of language for a preacher. Anyway, you’re trespassing on private property.”

  Slobbering, he said, “You dumb, booze-soaked cowboy. If you knew anything about the Bible, you’d be scared shitless. I am. Only I really don’t have nothing to fear! But you, Soapy, are among the goats.”

  “Now listen,” I said, “if you think I’m one of them there sodomists, you’re crazy. I don’t fuck goats at my time of life.”

  “You numbskull!” he said. “The blind shall lead the blind. Matthew, fifteen-fourteen. But … The eyes of the blind shall be opened. Isaiah, Thirty-five-five. Can’t you see who J.C. really is? Don’t you know what place this is? You saw the miracles of the halo and the transformation of water into liquor. You shouldn’t need a voice from a burning bush to reveal the truth!”

  A chill passed over me, and for a moment I thought I was going to fill my britches like he done.

  “You mean,” I whispered, “J.C. is the initials for …?”

  “No!” he thundered. “J.C. ain’t Him! He’s just pretending to be! J.C.’s the Antichrist! If you read the Bible ’stead of those filthy girl magazines, you’d know that before the true Christ comes, the false one comes! But the faithful will be able to discern between the true and the false!”

  “How’d you figure all this out?” I said.

  He gasped. “Surely, you benighted heathen, you’ve heard of Armageddon? Where the last battle between the evil and the good’ll be fought? Where the devil and his henchman, the Antichrist, will be defeated! I always thought Armageddon’d be in Palestine! But I was wrong! This is the place! How do I know? See McGiddow’s Hill!”

  He spun me around so I could see it, though I knew it was there, the hill named after the prospector who found gold on it in 1885.

  “Armageddon,” he bellowed, “means the Hill of Megiddo! Say ‘McGiddow’s Hill’ fast, and you can hardly tell the difference! And this is the XR ranch! XR’s the first two letters in the Greek name for Christ! But the wicked have staked out a claim here first, and Antichrist is J.C. Marison! Get it? J.C., son of Mary! That saddletramp is really the false Messiah posing as the true one! Now are you convinced?”

  I was convinced he’d been eating loco weed. But I said, “Yeah? Don’t tell me the true one’s the stranger in the black hat? Using your reasoning, Bales Bub sounds like Beelzebub. You got it backwards. Would Christ pretend to be the devil? No way!”

  That stopped him cold. The idea that he might’ve mistook one for the other and so be one of them hellbent goats woulda knocked the crap outa him if he hadn’t already emptied his bowels down his leg. He sobbed like a baby someone snatched his candy from, and he let loose of me. I ran like I just heard there was free drinks at the Last Chance. Knowing he might follow me to the party where he’d raise a ruckus and so piss off the women guests who was figuring on getting laid, I headed away from it.

  Blundering around in the dark, I run right into a cholla cactus. You shoulda heard me cussing then. Hell must be a place where nothing but cholla grows, and you can’t turn around without getting a hundred of those fishhook needles in your bare ass. Then I heard Blotch yowl when he run into one. I thought I could cuss, but he had professionals like Isaiah and Jeremiah to draw on.

  By then I was near a guest house with a light coming through its open window. By the time I got my wind back, I see it was Mrs. Lott’s. And from the moaning and the carrying-on I knew she’d found herself the entertainment she wanted. I ain’t no Peeping Tom, and I always took Gramps’ advice about avoiding danger. He was in bed with a whore when Wyatt Earp came looking for him. Instead of fighting or going out the window, Gramps hid behind one of them thick fancy drapes old-fashioned cathouses had. Later, when he was asked why he didn’t shoot it out, he said, “Discretion is the better part of velour.”

  It wasn’t exactly what Bill Shakespeare had his character Falstaff say. But it fit.

  So I was gonna tippytoe away, but Blotch saw me in the light. He come astumbling and swearing, but when he heard noise from the window, he forgot about them devil’s needles.

  “What hellish iniquitous fornications’re taking place here?” he choked. “You trying to tell me Marison is Jesus but he puts up with this shit? You’re wrong! He has to be Antichrist!”

  It was no use trying to shush him.

  “I’ll bet my soul it’s that wicked serpent himself in there with a scarlet woman. The devil enjoys fucking. I’ll denounce him to the whole world, and the Last Days will’ve started. He may kill me with his dark powers, but I’ll be a martyr and stand on the right hand of God! Glory, hallelujah!”

  He did have guts, I’ll give him that. He thought he was going to face Satan himself and get blasted on the spot, but he was going through with it. So, since he was taking a look-see, I might as well, too. But only a quick gander. It don’t hurt to watch the competition. I ain’t no slouch in the saddle myself—when I’m sober—and once a woman tied a blue ribbon on my pecker for first prize. ’Course I was younger then.

  Blotch went to the window, and he gasped and shaked like a horse seeing the vet coming at him with a big syringe. The red in his face drained out like watery catsup. I looked over his shoulder, and what I seen I don’t ever want to see again.

  It was Mrs. Lott all right, naked except for spurred boots. Bub was on top of her, naked except for his hat, his ass a blur like he was in a speeded-up porno movie. I never even seen a rattlesnake go so fast. I was flabbergasted. But I couldn’t help thinking that he was like J.C. in always keeping his hat on. And wondering if maybe there wasn’t some family tie there. Why’d he ask about J.C.? And wasn’t the devil, who was a fallen angel, and Jesus cousins of a kind?

  You see, I was getting to believe that maybe the reverend had something. Then, when Bub stopped pumping for a moment, leaving half of his dick, about eight inches, out, I believed down to the bottom of my rotten soul. Only a devil could have such a tallywhacker.

  From where I stood I could see the upper part of it, and then I see it’s ringed by a blue crackling light.

  “The devil’s halo!” I gasped.

  Blotch clutched my hand as if he needed something human, even me, to hang on to. His eyes bulged like the gas in his stomach was going the wrong way. His stink got worse. It was awful and should of warned them someone was watching. But they was too busy to notice. The end of the world could of come then, and they would of thought it was themselves.

  Mrs. Lott moaned and dug the rowels on her boots into Bub’s ass until the blood come. He started up again. When that whopper came out during the strokes the blue ring crackled, snapped, and popped. It was a minute before I caught on that it was real electricity and that every time the charge went in it was giving her a sensation that would of burned out most women. Though with that monster you wouldn’t think he needed an auxiliary generator.

  She had a hell of a fuse, must of been a hundred-amps rating, and she wasn’t going to blow, not in that sense, anyway.

  How long it went on, I don’t know. Anyway, I wasn’t going to interrupt them, specially if he was the devil here to stop the second coming. Not his but his enemy’s.

  Blotch, though, finally got up his courage. He yelled, “Ah, hah, Beelzebub, also named Satan and Lucifer! I’ve caught you with the Great Whore of Babylon!”

  Before I could give him Gramps’ adv
ice about such situations, he was through the window and was raving and quoting the Bible left and right though without giving the sources like he usually done. Mrs. Lott started screeching, and Bub jumped up and turned toward Blotch. And I like to died.

  He didn’t have just one monstrous pecker. He had two, one above the other. And I seen from its coating he’d been plunging the bottom one into the lower hole at the same time he’d been pistoning the upper.

  Now I’ve heard a lot of strange things about the devil, but I never heard of anything like that.

  Even that didn’t faze Blotch. He strode right up to him with a bravery that was downright stupid. Bub’s red hair beneath his hat was standing up on end as if each hair had a hard on, and those blue eyes was like the open door of a crematorium furnace. I seen in them all of hell I want to know about.

  “Thus I expose the ancient evil!” Blotch shouted, and he snatched off Bub’s hat.

  Mrs. Lott’s scream drowned out even mine.

  That hat had hid two horns. They were broad and flat and curled back close to the head and then rose up into sharp tips.

  I think Blotch would of been ripped to shreds by Bub, but the door burst open.

  J.C. stepped in, bellowing, “Hold it, Beylzabub! There’s no need harming these Earthpeople!”

  Bub cried out, “So, I got you now, Jayseemarson!”

  And he wheeled and pointed his two rigid peters at J.C. like he was going to blast him with them. Which he meant to do, I’m sure, but he’d shot so much juice into Mrs. Lott he didn’t have more’n a few feeble flashes. They never got halfway to J.C., who otherwise would’ve been fried if Bub’s battery wasn’t run down.

  J.C. grinned and said, “I used her as a Delilah to your Samson.”

  Then he took off his hat and roped and hog-tied Bub with his halo. Bub struggled to get his arms loose, but he was helpless and knew it.

  “You’ve been chasing me long enough,” J.C. said. “My orders were to keep you running after me as a diversion while The Project was completed. It’s done now, and you’ll be going as my prisoner to Quixpot. Anyway, an armistice has just been declared. You would’ve received the news if your antennae hadn’t been tuned only to sex. If the treaty is signed, Earth’ll be off-limits from now on.”