by Barry Reese
Now the talk about Pat in town was starting to get a bit ugly. In particular, folks were starting to pick at his funny appearance, something that had never been an issue before everybody found a reason to dislike him. It wasn’t like Pat was the only funny looking person in town – Ron Flaherty had a pair of ten gallon ears, Temperance Calhoun had one eye that was half as big as the other, and that was just for starters – but it was easier to make fun of his slate gray skin and his big black eyes than it was to admit to jealousy. It would have hurt Pat to hear these things being said about him, but he was so cut off from town life by this time that chances were he wasn’t even aware of it.
About a week into Pat’s second planting, the General came out to see him. He rode out on his own horse, in the middle of the night. It was a show of respect, but it was also a practical matter. During the day Pat was shut up in his shack, whether sleeping or working some new magic for his crops. At night, he worked one of the tripods, standing beneath it and rotating the glowing blue box. The General might have sensed, whether he admitted it to himself or not, that this was the only time Pat would have accepted a visit from him or anybody else.
“Pat,” the General began, “I’m hoping I can persuade you to share some of your incredible agricultural techniques with your fellow Salinans.”
“Of course,” Pat replied. “I always planned to, General. I just haven’t had time.”
The General was happy to hear this, but it wasn’t the only thing he’d come to discuss. “About that, Pat. What are the chances you could slow down a little?”
“Slow down?”
“You’ve only got forty acres, Pat, but you’re on your way to dwarfing the production of every other farmer in the Valley. If you pull back a bit, you’d get some much-needed rest, and that’ll give you leisure time to share your secrets with the rest of us.”
Pat shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. Maybe after next spring.”
“But Pat…”
“I need to make as much as I can as quickly as I can so I can bring my family here, sir. I haven’t seen them in years, and this may be the only opportunity I have to make my fortune. I should have enough after the spring season, sir. Then I’ll slow down.”
“I don’t know if that’s gonna do it, Pat.”
“It has to, sir.” Then he went back to spinning the glowing blue box, as if the conversation was over. The General was livid at being dismissed in this way, but the land legally belonged to Pat now. There was nothing he could do but get back on his horse and ride home and drink his anger away.
Pat squeezed three crops into the fall growing season, and while the grumbling and moaning of the people of Salina was beginning to grow unanimous, they kept on buying his corn.
Over the winter, Pat used the money he’d made to buy more land. His forty acres was surrounded on three sides by the General’s land, and the General wasn’t going to let him have any of that. But to the west was a 160 acre cotton farm owned by Saul Katers, a 60 year-old widower who’d always been the town hard luck case. Pat bought his land for a song and spent the winter plowing all the cotton under.
He didn’t have enough of the little rectangular boxes to cover all this extra land, so as the winter drew to a close he pulled some new tricks out of his oversized hat. He started by seeding the dry irrigation canals on his property. As the spring season began, a weird orange fungus blossomed there, and any crop that was downstream of that fungus grew better than it ever had before. Of course, the concentration was on Pat’s land so he got the most benefit from it, but the folks downstream were happy for what they could get.
As Pat’s two hundred acres were filling up with their first batch of spring corn, the General paid another visit, looking to remind Pat of his promise to share his secrets come the spring. The fact was that even the General was starting to feel the pinch from Pat’s success. He had a lot of land devoted to livestock and lettuce, but people were buying so much of Pat’s corn that it was starting to affect all the non-corn food markets too.
This time Pat wouldn’t even see him. Said he was trying to breed a bigger ear, and couldn’t be distracted from his work. The General laid the poor sap who relayed this information on his back with one punch – even pulling up on sixty, he still packed a wallop. Then he got up on his horse and rode off, promising Pat that he wasn’t going to get away with putting every other farmer in Salina out of business.
But that’s exactly what he proceeded to do. By the end of the spring growing season, he’d made enough with his super corn to buy up even more land. By the end of that year, his plot was nearly as big as the General’s, and he was growing cotton and raising pigs to boot. It had been almost eighteen months since Pat rode back into town at the front of a posse with a Navajo chief’s wife tied to his saddle, eighteen months since Pat had been Salina’s favorite son. Now Salina was well on its way to disowning him. Most people claimed they had never trusted him over drinks in Salina’s saloon, even when those same people were reporting to his fields to work the next morning. The General organized a halfway successful boycott of Pat’s produce, but Pat simply started shipping his vegetables and ham to the surrounding towns. The boycott quickly crumbled when it became clear that it wasn’t making the least dent in Pat’s profit.
On the few occasions Pat took a moment to talk to anyone, it was always talk about his family, and how fortune (and the Navajo) had given him this opportunity to build a place for them here. Pat didn’t make himself available for these kinds of talks very often, though. Mostly he just stuck to his shack and kept working on ways to improve his yields.
Nearly everyone worked for Pat now, including men he had worked for prior to the Navajo incident. He owned half of Salina, and the land – which had been a barren desert when the General had started building his canals and only a little better after he’d built them – was as lush and fertile as it had ever been. At least this was so on Pat’s land, and the land that existed downstream from his land along the canals. The General, who’d positioned himself at the farthest upstream point of the canals and had always reaped the maximum benefit from them, now found himself with the saddest crops in the region.
The General’d had enough. He called a community meeting, not bothering to try to keep it a secret since he knew Pat wouldn’t show anyway. When nearly every other adult in Salina was gathered in the Salina town hall, this grand old building that the General had designed and helped build with his own hands, he railed at them for hours about how Pat was walking off with their livelihoods, how he’d wheedled his way into their hearts, beat the Navajo through trickery, stolen the General’s land under false pretenses (the General didn’t even believe this part himself, but he was on a roll and no one objected when he said it), and proceeded to turn everyone in this town – this town that had adopted him, this community that had brought him into their homes despite his freakish appea-rance – to turn them all into his serfs.
The General had reached his station in life largely based on his ability to spin a yarn and get people fired up with it, so he had a primed mob on his hands by the time he was done, set to explode at the slightest ignition. He provided that ignition by smashing his gavel down on the podium, lifting his shotgun off of the bench where he’d left it, and marching out of the hall with murder in his eyes. The entire town followed him.
The General led the mob atop his black stallion, tall and stern and looking like Judgment itself. They made a commotion tromping onto Pat’s land. Some of Pat’s men tried to head them off, but they were warned off at gunpoint.
Some of the mob had thought to bring torches, and the General had a vague plan of burning Pat’s shack down, smoking him out. But Pat was waiting for them when they arrived, standing in front of his home with his oversized black eyes pinched and angry. He was wearing a pistol on one hip.
“I’m going to have to ask you to take these people and get off my land, General.”
“No, Pat,” the General sneered, leaning down in his saddle
. “You’ve got your mind set on destroying this town, and we will not stand for it.”
“I understand your grievance, sir,” Pat said. His thin chest was heaving, his fingers trembled near the grip of his pistol. “And I admit I have been focused on my own goals to a fault. I will be happy to address this with you. In private. Tomorrow.”
“You will address them with me today, Pat. In public. You lost your chance to do this with dignity long ago.”
“I’m asking you one more time, sir. As one man to another—”
“One man to another!” the General scoffed. “Look at you, Pat! I don’t know what you are, but you ain’t never been no ‘man’—”
Pat drew and fired. Blue lightning sketched itself across the air and smashed home into the side of the General’s stallion. The horse and the General screamed at roughly the same pitch and then the horse exploded. The crowd should have been showered with gore, but there wasn’t even that much left of the poor animal. Only black ash.
The General was thrown to the ground, the leg that had been on Pat’s side of the horse blackened and splitting like an overcooked ham. Some of his mob rushed to help him, while most of the others drew down on Pat.
Pat hadn't lowered his own gun. It looked sort of like it had when he'd used it against the Navajo, only it had been taken apart to create his crop-growing rays and put back together since then. The soldering on the side was visible. It looked like a rush job, but nobody had any illusions about the pistol not working anymore. He kept it trained on the General, and the low humming it made seemed to rise along with the tension in the crowd. Pat's thin arms quivered with anxiety and rage, and the General just screamed and screamed.
“Get off my land,” Pat repeated. “Get off now or so help me—”
An arc of blue lightning erupted from the side of Pat's pistol and looped back on itself, looking for a moment like one long thin. Pat's angry eyes went wide, and then the pistol exploded in his hand. Blue light washed over the mob and the shack and most of Pat's fields, and when it was over, Pat was dead on the ground. Half of him was anyway. There wasn't really anything left of the right side of his strange little body.
The mob simply stared at the body in shock, a low murmur rising only to let the ones in the rear know what had just happened. For a minute, that and the General's moaning were the only sounds.
“We got him, sir,” somebody said. “We got him. Now things can go back to normal.”
The General shook his head, trying not to look at the charred wreck of his left leg. “Didn't... want him dead, you fool. Just... wanted him to tell us... how he did it.”
Nobody knew what to say to that, so someone changed the subject. “Come on, General. We gotta get you to the doc. You, go get some of that wood alongside the building there so we can make a litter...”
The speaker trailed off as darkness fell over the mob. As one, they looked up into the sky, and found there half a dozen floating, silver disks. Each one was a quarter-mile across and each one produced that same low humming that Pat's pistol had, and not much louder either. On the bottom of each was a blue ball that glowed and pulsed.
“What in the hell...?” someone muttered.
“Pat's family,” the General coughed. “That's... that's why he didn't want us to talk today. This is the day they arrived.”
There was a pause, and then the good people of Salina started screaming even before the blue lightning roared down from the spheres on the bottom of the ships.
The Navajo eventually blocked the canals and reclaimed the river that the whites had stolen. They also began to tell stories about Pat, honoring him as a worthy enemy, but these stories don’t mention the disks that fell from the sky to avenge Pat's death. They don’t need to. If you go there today, you can see that part of the story plainly. The once fertile Salina Valley is nothing but jagged black glass now, and no man or beast has lived there since.
THE LOST VALE
by Joel Jenkins
This story is adapted from a fragment of a manuscript which is purported to have been inscribed by the hand of Asuncion Ramirez.
Lone Crow, the last of his tribe, led the Wild Bunch to their doom, passing through a little-known vale in the Cordillera de Guanacaste, in the shadow of the Orosi Volcano. The hooves of the horses threw up clots of fertile soil and the narrow trail led them between walls of tree ferns and palms, where it was a simple matter to conceal a well-traveled group of bounty hunters.
Butch and Sundance hoped to cross the border into Nicaragua before the posse of Costa Rican Federales caught up with them. The horses of the Wild Bunch were heavy with bulging burlap bags full of silver coin that had been stolen at gunpoint and dynamited from the safe at the Currency Mint in San Jose. And to add insult to injury, Kid Curry rode with the kidnapped granddaughter of national hero, Gregorio Ramirez, tied to his saddle horn. He'd spotted the dark-haired beauty during the hold-up, and being of a somewhat impulsive and reckless nature, he decided that baggage as pretty as she would be worth the extra effort.
“You better know where you're going, injun,” called Butch Cassidy from the back of his horse. He glanced nervously over his shoulder as if expecting a troop of Federales to ride him down at any moment. “If you don't get us across the border by nightfall, I'm going to put a bullet in your head.”
Lone Crow halted a moment, adjusted the brim of his hat and appraised the outlaw. “Wouldn't that ruin your reputation for never having killed a man?”
At this Sundance and the rest of the Wild Bunch, including Jorje and Javier, a couple of bandito brothers who'd fallen in with them as they passed through Mexico, laughed uproariously.
“He killed three men inside the mint alone,” called Kid Curry. “Not to mention the two Carvey killed when he blew the safe.” Asuncion Ramirez slumped in the saddle before him, black hair draped over her face, and Lone Crow could see her fingers furtively working at the rope that bound her to the saddle.
“Don't you start believing what those newspapermen have to say about me,” said Butch. “I've killed plenty of men and killing an injun won't bother me none. I'd sooner kill an injun than put down a dog.”
Lone Crow shifted the bow on his shoulder. He was accustomed to carrying an Eagle-butt Peacemaker .45 – one that had been blessed by a prophet in the salty wastes of Utah that night the dead came lurching to life – but when Crow had come into the employ of Butch Cassidy, the outlaw had insisted that he carry the handsome pistol until Crow had finished leading them through the Guanacaste Mountains. It seemed that Cassidy had lived this long only due to a certain amount of suspicion – and in this case it was well-founded, because Lone Crow and his partners from Tombstone had spent months tracking down the Wild Bunch, and it had been no accident that Cassidy had come across Crow in that Costa Rican tavern just as they were in need of someone to guide them into Nicaragua.
Perhaps it was Cassidy's disdain for the red men or lack of respect for weapons that weren't driven by quantities of gunpowder that had prompted him to allow Crow to retain his bow, tomahawk, and Bowie knife. Already Crow had brought down a wedge-headed tapir with his bow, and dressed the carcass with his Bowie, so he had proven himself adept with the weapons. However, at this point the gang was famished and the tapir meat had been similar to pork in flavor, so they grew to appreciate Crow's usefulness and let him keep the bow and knife.
“We're on the right trail,” said Crow. “I passed this way less than two weeks ago. I can still see remnants of my tracks.”
Sundance, a slender man with a quick grin seized upon this bit of information. “Just who was it you were guiding through here two weeks ago?”
“I find wisdom in keeping the business of my employers confidential,” said Crow.
“Hah,” laughed Sundance. “He talks like a city slicker! Where did you learn English, redman?”
“My tribe was exterminated when I was a youth and I was taken in by white settlers in the Colorados.”
“Well, I'll be tarred and feat
hered,” said Sundance. “Was it Custer and his men that wiped out your tribe?”
“It was the Comanches,” said Crow. “Long before white men started killing the red men, the red men were killing each other.”
Kid Curry took a moment to smell a few strands of Asuncion's perfumed hair and grunted from beneath a wild bristle of mustache. “The more dead injuns the better off the rest of us are.”
Though Cassidy concurred with this assessment he made no comment upon it. “Tell me what an injun from the Colorados is doing in Costa Rica.”
“What's a man from the Utah Territory doing here?” responded Lone Crow, and for a moment he thought he might have overplayed his hand, letting on that he knew more about Cassidy than a new acquaintance should.
However, Cassidy took this in stride, apparently taking it for granted that strangers should know personal information because of the widely distributed newspaper articles and dime novels about him and his gang. “Just get us across the border and you'll be one hundred pieces of silver richer. Maybe that'll buy you some reprieve from whatever it is that chased you down here.”
“At least it will buy a few kegs of fire water,” snorted Curry.
This brought appreciative calls from the other members of the gang, the Tall Texan and News Carver. Lone Crow ignored the jibes. He had no interest in fire water of any sort. With carefully measured steps he led the Wild Bunch and their heavily-laden train of horses onto a trail so narrow that only an attentive scout would have noticed its existence, the trail head concealed behind the overhanging branches of a mangrove. A howling monkey, upset by their intrusion on his nap time, leaped from limb to limb screaming at the invaders below while hurling broken twigs. Curry's pistol was in his fist in a flash. He fired twice and the monkey dropped through the branches, stone dead.
