The Sheriff of Yrnameer

by Michael Rubens

  The wind had shifted directions just before the Benedict dropped on the Bad Men, bringing Reg around once more. Huh, he thought, Teg’s ship. How odd. Then off he rolled.

  The dog survived.

  He trotted over the rolling hills, away from the wreckage and the town, toward the welcoming forest. If it were possible to accurately render dog thoughts, they might best be summed up as Good riddance.

  Cole was dreaming.

  He’d passed through a period of feverish nightmares, of hands clawing at him and Charlie’s eyes and of the Big Nothing. But now he was dreaming of the woman he loved, the only woman he’d ever loved, seeing her smiling at him, radiant, sensing her warmth and her calm and it was poetry and songs and spring mornings. She smiled and she spoke to him.

  “Cole,” she said.

  And her serene warmth embraced him and filled him, spreading life throughout his numb body, carrying him in a cloud.

  “MaryAnn,” he whispered.

  “Yes, Cole. It’s me,” she said, and she smiled once more.

  “MaryAnn,” he said, and then “MaryAnn” again. “Oh, MaryAnn, I can’t tell you how much I’ve wanted to … to …”

  “Yes, Cole?”

  “Wanted to …”

  “Yes?”

  “Wanted to …” His dream hands lifted and reached out to dreamily fondle her dream breasts.

  “Cole!” she said, and slapped him in a very nondreamlike fashion.

  “Wha?!” he said, and jerked upright to a sitting position in the bed, where his face met a pitcherful of frigid water traveling in the opposite direction. He gasped and sputtered, the water burning inside his nasal passages.

  “Cole!” said MaryAnn again.

  He wiped his eyes, blinking and coughing, a horrible suspicion growing that he wasn’t dreaming, a horrible suspicion he was doing his best to keep from transforming and hardening into an even more horrible certainty.

  “MaryAnn?” he said weakly. “Is it really you?”

  “It’s me. Hello, Cole.”

  Horrible certainty declared victory.

  “Oh, God,” he said.

  She gave a pained half smile and gestured behind him. He turned. Flashes went off, half blinding him, and the town band, packed into the smallish bedroom along with what appeared to be most of the rest of the villagers, kicked into a celebratory march.

  “Yaaayyy!”

  Mugs knocked together, beer slopping over Cole’s arm and onto the floor, already sticky from previous toasts of equal enthusiasm. Hands and other appendages patted him on the back and mussed his hair, which was also sticky. Cole had a fuzzy recollection of someone who looked like a purple shag rug screaming “Whoo -hooo!!” in his face and emptying a pint glass over the both of them.

  It was a very good party.

  The toasting and patting and mussing had been going on for several hours now. The villagers had crowded into the town hall to meet Cole and the others, and they swarmed around him excitedly, making sure that his glass was never empty, that his back never wanted for patting and his hair for mussing. The hall was a broad, high building at the end of Main Street that doubled as the town’s ecumenical house of worship; a small sign announced that on Ser-day evenings they had duck-pin bowling.

  Somewhere in the room a trio was playing rousing, catchy music, and little nuclei of dancers would form spontaneously, pulling Cole in and swirling him around before releasing him again to get more to drink. At one point he was spun around near the trio and he saw that it wasn’t a trio at all, just a very talented alien of a sort that Cole had never seen before.

  It was a good enough party that Cole was able to blot out the memory of his nondream. Mostly blot it out. Occasionally he’d remember it and wince, and he’d search the crowd for MaryAnn, half fearful that he’d spot her. So far he hadn’t.

  Their arrival on Yrnameer had furnished yet another incident to be registered in the Benedict’s unsafe flight log—specifically, emerging from bendspace within the limits of a planet’s atmosphere.

  More specifically, within the limits of a planet’s atmosphere and approximately nine meters above the ground.

  The children and other passengers were unharmed. The Benedict was mostly unharmed. The bandits were extremely harmed. As for Cole, the landing had knocked him unconscious. When he woke, they told him that he’d slept for three straight days, MaryAnn sitting by his bedside and tending to him the whole time.

  The song ended and Cole joined in the applause. The one-creature band struck up another tune, something fast and intricate and impossibly propulsive. Someone grabbed Cole’s arm and pulled him into another group of dancers. As he was whirled around he spotted Joshua, gingerly sipping a beer and making a face. Cole was spun again and delivered to another partner, catching a glimpse of Fred and Peter the ‘Puter, participating in some sort of line dance. An arm was linked in his, redirecting Cole yet again, and now he was briefly dancing with a sembluk, his sluglike skin less clammy and slimy than Cole had expected. As they orbited each other something niggled in the back of his mind—recognition? But then he was twirling in another direction, forgetting about the sembluk as his current partner two-stepped him to where Bacchi was leaning in close to an attractive young female with blue skin. “You know, this nose ain’t just for smelling,” Cole heard him say, but was wheeled and spun away before he got to see the bowl of dip hit Bacchi’s face.

  And so the party went. At some point the mayor knocked on his glass, calling for silence. The music ceased. All eyes turned to Mayor Kimber as he raised his drink high.

  “Here’s to our heroic hero, Cole, for his heroism, and his heroic, eh, his, eh, here’s to him!”

  “Yayyy!” cheered everyone.

  “Tell us again how you did it!” said Vern, who looked like a large hedgehog.

  “Right,” said Cole. “Well, as we came out of the cloud layer I could distinctly see trouble. …”

  Philip scowled as he nursed his lemon water, watching Joshua watch Cole with undisguised admiration.

  “I can’t bear it any longer!” said Philip.

  “He got us here, Philip,” said Nora. “And the kids are safe on the farm. Let him have his fun.”

  Cole was having fun. “You know, at times like that, you don’t even think. It’s all instinct. I actually had my eyes closed, just sort of feeling my way down, you know, feeling—”

  He paused. MaryAnn was standing near the entrance, watching him.

  “Feeling?” prompted Vern.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” said Cole.

  He made his way across the room to her, still receiving back pats and hair musses. When he reached her he slowed and hooked his hands in his pockets and did a little foot-dragging shuffle, wishing he’d taken more time to figure out what it was he wanted to say.

  “Hi,” he settled on finally, not having much else.

  “Hi,” she said. It seemed like a promising start. There was a pause. “Everyone seems to be having fun,” she offered.

  “Oh, yeah, great folks. Really great. Mayor Kimber, Vern … the purple guy. Gal. Thing. Whatever.”

  Another pause. He noticed Nora, halfway across the room, watching them. He turned away to face MaryAnn.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’m really sorry about—”

  “No, forget it,” she said, and smiled at him.

  “I really don’t know what happened, I just …” He stopped, shook his head, reset. “It’s amazing to see you. Unbelievable. It’s so random that you’re here, and I’m here—I mean, what’s it been, twenty years? And, wow, I mean, you look great.”

  She smiled again.

  “How do I look?” asked Cole.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said. Cole let it drop.

  “I never thought I’d see you again,” she said quietly. He remembered that about her, how she could be so quiet, a quietness that he always envisioned coming from some deep, serene place. A quietness that pulled him in, made him listen to her.

&nb
sp; “You left so suddenly,” she said. “Everyone was saying such horrible things about you. Terrible.”

  He dropped his gaze. Whatever they’d been saying, it was probably true.

  “But I never believed them.”

  He raised his gaze and found that smile again.

  “That was really courageous, what you did,” she said. “Saving all those orphans, wiping out the bandits like that.”

  “Oh, that? Yeah, you know …,” said Cole.

  “It’s all so exciting. I reported on it in yesterday’s IPR broadcast.”

  “So that’s what you’re doing here, huh? Reporting for IPR.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I wanted to know if the legend was true, to see the last unspoiled spot in the universe.”

  Cole wasn’t so much listening to her as drinking her in, watching her every move, telling his brain that she really was here, that it was really her. He had to fight the urge to reach out and touch her face to make sure.

  “Cole? You okay?” she said.

  “What? Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” he said. “So, wow. Here you are. That’s really impressive. I always knew you’d go on to do something like that, something important. IPR, wow …” He trailed off, nodding. Then, “Inter … Inter …?”

  “Intergalactic Public Radio.”

  “—Public Radio, right!” he said, trying to speed his words out so that they caught up with hers. “Fantastic!” he added.

  “Here,” she said, “I brought you a tote bag.”

  “Oh, wow, great!” said Cole, taking the rough, unbleached canvas bag from her. The bag immediately turned bright red.

  “You are legally inebriated,” it said.

  “Sorry,” said MaryAnn. “It does that.”

  “Your cholesterol level is—”

  “Okay, I’m going to put this down now …,” said Cole, lowering it to the floor.

  “Alert: you may be carrier of Antean gonorr—”

  Cole’s boot muffled the rest of the bag’s sentence. When he looked up, MaryAnn was regarding him thoughtfully. Cole had just started to explain that he’d had it treated when she cut him off.

  “I thought a lot about you over the years, Cole. I always wondered what happened to you. I guess you became a hero.”

  He held up a hand, stopping her. “MaryAnn,” he said. “C’mon. I’m just a guy. Who maybe did something heroic. Does heroic things once in a while. But that doesn’t necessarily make me a hero.”

  “Maybe not. But your commitment to this town does.”

  “Well, sure, but—what commitment?” he said, when his brain finally processed her last statement.

  “Hey, Sheriff!”

  It was Bacchi, smelling of sour cream and chives, a bottle of something in his hand.

  “You gonna introduce me to your friend?” he said. He turned to MaryAnn. “You know, this nose is hey!” as Cole grabbed him and pulled him aside.

  “What did you just call me?” he asked.

  Mayor Kimber interrupted before Bacchi could answer. “Everyone, hello!” he said from the center of the hall. “Hello! Attention! Uakoy, cut the music for a moment. Thank you.”

  The music stopped, along with the dancing. Attention focused on the mayor. “I’ve got another announcement,” he said, “and it’s great news! Cole has just informed us that he’ll be staying here—and he’d like to be our sheriff!”

  The hall erupted in a massive, unanimous cheer.

  “Heh heh,” said Bacchi. “You’re farged now.”

  Cole’s head throbbed. He recognized the throb, a dull and tenacious sort that resulted from drinking too much of one type of alcohol, then compounded by drinking too much of a second type of alcohol that was incompatible with the first, and then further aggravated by the addition of a third or fourth type of alcohol that was incompatible with most organic forms of life. It was the kind of throb that made him wish he could go right back to sleep, and then die, while preventing him from doing just that.

  “Oooooh,” he said, and sat up into something that produced a dull bonging sound and made his head hurt even more. He lay back down and clutched his skull and made the appropriate moaning noises. After a bit the object above him revealed itself to be a desk lamp.

  Rolling to the side to avoid it, he got himself into a sitting position. From this vantage point he could better understand the presence of the desk lamp—he had been lying atop a desk.

  He was in a simple, unadorned room, the equally simple desk against the wall. Other than the lamp, there was only a single overhead light, which thankfully seemed to be on a dimmer. There was more light coming into the room from his right, blooming through the gap at the bottom of a closed door. He squinted, the light painful.

  He thought back to last night, trying to reconstruct what had happened. He remembered the dancing, and the singing, and the drinking. Mostly the drinking. He remembered that everyone had been very happy—ecstatic, really—about something, something involving him. It wasn’t just the thing with the bandits. Something else.

  The light glinted off an object on his chest. He looked down. It was a badge of some sort, pinned to his shirt.

  “Wuzzis?” he said out loud, examining it stupidly.

  SHERIFF, it said, in proud, raised letters.

  “Congrats, Sheriff.”

  Cole twisted to the left, suddenly aware that there was more room in that direction. It was Bacchi who’d spoken to him. He was lying on his back on a plain cot, shielding his eyes with his forearm. His sorry condition mirrored Cole’s. It took Cole a moment to realize that there were bars between the two of them. Prison bars.

  “What am I in for?” asked Cole.

  “I was going to ask you that,” said Bacchi.

  Cole stared at him, then twisted to his right again and looked back at the door. His twisted to his left and looked at Bacchi. Bacchi didn’t have a door on his side of the bars. Nor did he have a badge on his chest saying SHERIFF. A few not-very-complex pieces fell into place with almost audible clunks.

  “Let me out of here, Cole,” said Bacchi.

  “No.”

  “What did I do?”

  “I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

  Cole stood up, accidentally knocking an empty tin mug off the desk onto the wood floor, where it made an impressive clatter.

  “Arrrgh!” said Cole and Bacchi in unison, engaging in some reflexive skull clutching. Cole staggered back and leaned against the desk. He looked at the badge again. A few more pieces arranged themselves into a coherent pattern.

  “Sheriff,” he said to himself. “Sheriff Cole.” He liked the sound of that.

  Bacchi sniggered.

  “What?”

  “Cole,” said Bacchi, “you being a sheriff is like me being a … uh …”

  “A sheriff?”

  “Yes.”

  Cole rubbed his head. It was starting to clear a bit, the pain ebbing just enough to give Cole hope that he might have some options other than dying.

  “Sheriff Cole,” he repeated to himself. He liked the sound even more.

  He noticed a small text panel on the otherwise bare walls and read it, squinting at the type. JAIL, it said, BY KPOTAM. NATURAL WOOD, BRICK, IRON, PLASTER, NATURAL PIGMENT PAINT. The type got smaller after that:

  Jail is a conceptual work that through its very realism comments both directly and obliquely on the surrealistic nature of transgressive …

  Which is as far as Cole got before his eyes unfocused in self-defense.

  “Cole,” said Bacchi, “what would you know about being sheriff?”

  “I think it would suit me just fine,” said Cole. “Free room and board, salary, I’ll probably get some bribes … and how much actual sheriffing will I have to do? Arrest you every week or so?”

  “What about the bandits?”

  Cole chuckled. “I’m sorry, maybe you didn’t understand how I got this job. The bandits are gone.”

  Bacchi started to laugh wheezily.

  “
What?” said Cole. “What?!”

  Someone pounded on the door. “Arrgh!” repeated Cole and Bacchi, once again grabbing their heads. The door burst open. It was Joshua.

  “C’mon, Sheriff!” he said, “you’re gonna be late!”

  Joshua reminded Cole of one of those herding dogs—just like he’d done on the satellite, he’d sort of scurry excitedly ahead of Cole, and then turn and wait impatiently for him to catch up, then scurry ahead again, all springy and full of energy. Cole, walking unsteadily, his eyes half closed against the bright sunlight, wasn’t in the mood to be rushed.

  They were walking down Main Street to where it dead-ended at the town hall. The entire population of the town seemed to be out, walking or oozing or whatevering toward the whitewashed, simple building, everyone moving with a distinct sense of purpose. Those who spotted Cole greeted him cheerfully as they passed.

  “Morning, Sheriff!”

  “Good to see you, Sheriff!”

  “Hello, Sheriff Cole!”

  Cole did his best to keep up, nodding and waving back. “Hi. Hello. Hiya. Yeah, hi,” he said. “Everyone is extraordinarily loud here,” he muttered under his breath.

  “They got all sorts here, huh, Sheriff?” said Joshua. “Kolags, Subets, Conlans, Pels … look, those are Hennies, right?”

  Joshua indicated a trio of three humanoids. Cole had never seen a real Henny before—to him they looked exactly like humans in sheep costumes. One approached him, a big grin on his ovine face.

  “Sheriff!” said the Henny, grabbing Cole’s hand and shaking it vigorously. “I’m Ed, remember? I own the general store?”

  “Right, right,” said Cole, not remembering at all. The hearty handshaking was sending unpleasant shock waves through his system.

  “You know, you were pretty baaaaaad last night,” bleated Ed, winking at him. “Just kidding—we don’t really talk that way!” He gave Cole a big thump on the back and trotted away.