Please enjoy this excerpt of The Sinful Seven: Sci-fi Western Legends of the NCAA, an ebook by Spencer Hall, Richard Johnson, Jason Kirk, Alex Kirshner, and Tyson Whiting. It’s a book about how college sports came to look the way they do today, with non-fiction stories and fiction tales that <shh> tell their own truths about how the NCAA runs.
If you like what you see, you can preorder the ebook here for a minimum of 99 cents (or whatever you want to pay), with 20% of the profits going to Feeding America, the nationwide food bank network. It comes out around August 1.
1: The Sheriff, by Spencer Hall
The afternoon train was late into the town of Lexington. Mary — stout, graying, and as taciturn as a desert tortoise — waited on the train platform, getting antsy.
The air practically stank with the heat. The sun beat straight down from a hateful sky so blue it looked like the afterglow of a photographer’s flash. This time of afternoon, the dogs wouldn’t even follow the butcher’s wagon down the streets.
Out here, the train came when it came, though. And it was important that she see what kind of a man the Association had sent their way, and that he be greeted properly. She had walked with a battered sun parasol from her home at the edge of town, squinting through the light until she settled herself and waited under the pitiful shingle of a roof the town called a train station.
Someone else — as they usually were, invariably — was late.
Mary checked a brass pocket watch. She sighed, pulled a tiny spyglass from her purse, and focused it on the horizon. The land to the east lay flat as a skillet. The growing black shape in her sight was too big even for the heat waves rising off the desert floor to obscure. Inbound from Indianapolis and other sites east, the Pioneer’s Progress approached, carrying the first official Sheriff of the town of Lexington, crown jewel of the minimally regulated Western territory La Cademia.
As she pocketed the spyglass, she heard light, feathery steps behind her. For the moment she ignored them.
Mary was making a point of meeting the Sheriff at the station for specific business reasons. She’d survived a long time on the frontier. This was in part because she was lucky, yes, but also because she knew more, saw more, and took the time to learn more than the long-dead peers of her youth. Staying above ground in her line of work took effort and study, and even in her golden years, she worked to stay at the head of her class.
Also, as far as the Sheriff knew, she was a pillar of the community. La Cademia had very few other citizens over 40 anyway, much less those who looked like they could claim pillar status. She even had an assistant with her, as all important people did. An assistant, mind you, who was late for work.
Cavallera, standing behind Mary, cleared her throat.
“Fine weather we’re having for the arrival of the Sheriff, don’t you think?”
“If he likes an honest introduction to the town, yes,” said Mary. “You’re late.”
“I was on time. Everyone else was rudely early.”
“This is one of the reasons I don’t do business with you. That, and the time you tried to convince me selling prairie dogs through the post would be a viable enterprise.”
“With some faith and follow-through, it would have been. Would you believe a golden eagle stalked me on the way here? And trying to evade it, I took a particularly indirect route?”
“And lies. Just unprofessional in every way, Cavallera.”
“And yet you call me when it’s time to meet this Sheriff? Curious, Mary.”
“In a drought, sometimes you have to drink whatever’s in the well.”
“Well then. Drink me in.”
Mary then turned to look at Cav for the first time that day. She preened, proud of herself for no reason in particular. Her assistant costume was apparently her idea of a normal ladies’ uniform: A long pioneer’s skirt, white blouse, summer cattleman’s jacket, and the sneaky boots. What irked Mary was Cav’s insistence on pairing this inconspicuous getup with her broad cavalier hat, complete with a riotous orange plume jutting from the band.
Cav met her beady eyes with a broad grin. Mary slowly turned from her and returned to looking down the track at the oncoming train. It was all the comment she felt was necessary.
“You have any advance warning on this man, Mary?”
“Only that he’s never been out here, and is from the Midwest.”
“Ah. A dullard.”
“A dullard with a badge and no experience. That can be dangerous, Cav. Maybe more dangerous than most, actually. Let me talk. You’ll only confuse him.”
“I will try, but the moment does seize me sometimes.”
Mary turned and tried to stare a hole through the back of the Virginian’s skull. As Mary balled her fist and thought about boxing the hat off Cav’s head, something in the younger woman’s countenance changed. If Mary hadn’t had experience with her before, she could have sworn it looked like the expression of someone listening.
“Run interference,” Mary said. “Keep old friends occupied so the Sheriff doesn’t associate us with them. Stay quiet.”
Cav nodded. Mary smoothed the plaits of her own dress, stood as tall as her frame would allow, and attempted to present a picture of respectability for the new arrival.
♠♣♥♦
The train groaned into the station. A short, lithe man who appeared to be around 40 exited the passenger car. He wore long sleeves despite the heat, suspenders, and had a mustache like Teddy Roosevelt’s. He moved with the snippy steps and mannerisms of a man who had been short his entire life, and thus had to substitute energy and vigor for the authority of size.
“Hello. I am your new Sheriff. Are you the Mayor’s wife?”
Mary smiled politely while Cav mostly stifled a giggle.
“I’m afraid not, though he’s a very nice man. Call me Mary, Sheriff, and welcome to Lexington. I’m to give you the tour of the town. This is my assistant, Miss Cavallera.”
The Sheriff inspected both of them and looked vaguely disappointed in both.
“I’m not to receive the grand tour, then?”
A moment of silence. Mary was about to answer when Cav opened her mouth, something she was not supposed to do.
“That would require some grandiosity in Lexington. And we’re a bit short on that at the moment.”
Another awkward silence. The Sheriff sat stone-faced, looking back and forth at both of them. Then he laughed with a high-pitched bark that made Mary’s stomach turn.
“The pioneer’s humor! I have read about that in my files.”
Mary relaxed.
“Yes, forgive us,” she said. “We do have our own unique way of saying things.”
The Sheriff waved his hands.
“Pardon my overeducation, Mary. I’ll speak plainly and slowly for your benefit, then. I would very much like a tour of the territory’s greatest city.”
“Of course. Please follow me. Oh, and Miss Johnston, would you please hold the gentleman’s bag for him?”
“Certainly.”
Cav took the weighty bag no gentleman would ask a lady to tote, and bit her tongue from saying the many kinds of things she was not supposed to say, as she followed the two off the railway platform and onto the filthy streets.
Not a hundred steps from the train station, there was a house labeled “WILDCAT BATHS.” The dirty appearance of the men coming out of the house suggested the business would fail. The horses parked out front and voices hollering from within, however, suggested otherwise.
Mary and Cav led the Sheriff past and instead proudly noted the practicing physician’s office. Doctor Wilson put his patients under with half of the new-fangled ether brought straight off the train into Lexington. The other half of the supply disappeared into the good doctor’s lungs nightly, as frontier surgery was stressful to the provider. Alcohol left even the best doctor feeling poisoned, while ether seemed to only refresh the mind. Mary did not tell the Sheriff this, nor how she herself got a warm feeling from the ether — not from ingesting it, necessarily, but from her markup for smuggling it on the railway.
She pointed out the rundown general store, lauding its many conveniences and virtues, and also highlighted the mountains to the west, the bridge before it, and the town’s two tack shops, both stocked to provide whatever he would need. Mary did not mention she owned one of the tack shops under a long-dead husband’s name, or that it made decent money selling horse tack, but did a bustling trade in small arms and laudanum.
The Sheriff took it all in blankly. He seemed incurious, something confirmed when Mary and Cav walked him straight past the law offices at the end of the main drag, a skinny two-storied building with a placard reading “THE THAUMATURGICAL FIRM OF VILLA AND BALDWIN” hanging out front and a curiously tall fence surrounding its back lot.
While the Sheriff strode along with no questions, listening to Mary’s dry tour of Lexington, Cav drew up her own list of questions about the Sheriff. She wondered why he dressed like an attorney playing cowboy. She wondered why he’d choose to walk Lexington in the polished boots of a show pony rider, shoes that would be no match for the layers of spit, horse shit, and mud blessing the town’s main drag. She wondered how much help he’d have, or whether he’d get shot in the first couple days.
Cav wondered if there were different reasons Mary and the Sheriff both stepped directly over a man sleeping in the street, his face set in an expression of piggish happiness, rather than stepping around. Mary surely did it because a man sleeping in the mud of Lexington did not constitute anything remarkable. She suspected the Sheriff did it because he did not notice enough to recognize the figure as a man.
♠♣♥♦
After 10 minutes of saluting Lexington’s sights and non-attractions, the Sheriff finally asked a question.
“Are you a native Lexingtonian, Miss Mary?”
“I’ve been here since aught-seven, Sheriff. There ain’t much here I didn’t see go up. Used to sleep right over by the tracks myself in a spacious tent for two.”
“Did you have a husband?”
“I did. I lost him to a rattlesnake.”
“Rattlesnake was a better cook,” muttered Cav behind them.
The Sheriff turned around. “Excuse me, did you say something, young lady?”
“I said: Rattlesnakes are a curse! Check your boots for them, sir!”
He gave a dim smile and continued walking. Cav could not see Mary’s face, but did notice her large fist ball up again at her side. The old pro plowed forward anyway. They had turned around, walked all the way back down the street, and now stood in front of a half-painted building on one edge of Lexington’s ramshackle town square.
Mary gestured broadly — a little too broadly, as if introducing the main act of a subpar circus.
“The pride of Lexington! The post office-jail-Mayor’s office. A tripartite convenience, you have to agree.”
“Such vocabulary! Did your departed husband attend a four-year institution?”
Mary smiled through gritted teeth. While she looked for the exact response, Cav again forgot that she was not to speak.
“He did spend four years at an institution, yes.”
Mary need not worry about the Sheriff taking offense to a valet being disrespectful to her betters. Being a man, the question was strictly in service of his own thoughts anyway.
“I attended Northwestern University,” he said. “As you undoubtedly know already, it is very prestigious. I then attended the law school at the University of Chicago, and authored several important articles regarding the overreach of individual rights in property law cases.”
“The Mayor will be very impressed by this,” Mary said. “He keeps office hours here on Tuesdays from 1 to 3 p.m. every other week. But first things first! Let’s get you settled into your official offices.”
The Sheriff’s mustache twitched at the idea of seeing something official. His mustache then drooped when he beheld the sad interior of Lexington’s lone administrative building.
There stood what passed for the city jail, little more than bars stabbed into the wooden floor. Everything the Sheriff saw alarmed him. With the key sitting in the lock, it worked more like a free hostel for those witless enough to get caught by the disorganized posses rounded up occasionally to serve random justice. There was a vault for the city’s treasury — a wide-open vault, kept unlocked to allow whoever needed cash to take it, and with no one to guard it. There was money in it, but not much. A pile of IOUs spilled onto the sawdust floor.
The Mayor’s desk, in the middle of the higgledy-piggledy room, sat like an island of disastrous bureaucracy, full of papers and surrounded by the aromas of a thousand recent cigars. The Mayor’s chair was empty, save for a .45-caliber revolver. The Sheriff picked it up.
“It’s loaded.”
“That makes it a true Lexingtonian, then,” said Cav, heaving the Sheriff’s heavy bag onto the desk.
Mary could not even be bothered to correct Cav. She was pretty certain the Sheriff would not listen to anyone he thought beneath him, especially two unpedigreed women like she and Cav. He surveyed the offices, then turned to the older woman and spoke with the imperious air of someone reading a proclamation.
“I am to speak with Mayor Rutgers. It’s my first official item of business here.”
“We can do that. He’s probably in his summer office.”
“Was that the … baths?”
“No,” said Cav. “Hank prefers to clean himself from the inside out.”
“Take me to him. And, please, hold this.”
The Sheriff held the revolver out, barrel down. Cav took it, weighed it in her hand, and realized that though her first instinct was to put it in her waistband, she had nowhere to stow the gun, as she was dressed to blend in with townswomen who did not prefer the comfort of men’s riding gear. Cav disdained guns anyway, and preferred the civilized heft of a sword.
“I think we might just leave that here, Sheriff,” said Cav, setting the monster back on the desk. “I wouldn’t even know what to do with it!”
Mary’s eyes rolled for an instant, but only an instant.
“Sheriff, my assistant is correct. I know I’d feel better if the man here carried the weapon.”
“Mary, I first want you to know I detest violence,” he said, “and by extension of that principle, guns. But I feel that given my business, I could use some protection. My most trusted man will arrive in Lexington shortly, yes, but until then, I must make requests of people like you. This protection should continue at least until the terms of my business here, and my powers therein, are made clear to the populace.”
Mary arched her eyebrow and looked genuinely curious for once. She spoke.
“Sheriff, you need a sheriff?”
♠♣♥♦
The Sheriff walked over to the cell, tapping the key in the door as he spoke.
“The law should be its own compulsion to live for good, ladies. If men were true in their hearts, they would need no money to sing the day’s work song and plow the fields. The factory would not need to call. There would be no strikes, no anarchists in the shadows. In our beloved sport of the field, our charges would play strictly for the love of the game. The bounty of life would be enough, and gold would gather dust in the vaults of Zurich.”
Cav posted up against the doorframe. Mary assumed she stopped listening at the words “the law.” The Sheriff had started talking to himself. It might be some time before he stopped, so Mary assumed a pose she’d had to practice too frequently: That of someone pretending to listen to a bore in charge.
“It should be enough. But those at the bottom see those with just a bit more and imagine more will make them happy. Thus does Eve’s lust for knowledge deprive the snake of his apple, and thus does Eden fall. He who is a good servant makes a better master. Et cetera.”
Mary nodded along. Nodding along was important in this game, as was responding with words the bore in question might think sounded important.
“Indubitably.”
“Yes. This country, if it is to be civilized, needs to protect its vital organs,” the Sheriff continued still. “The railroad benefits all, so it must run where the shape of the growing body dictates it must run. As the arteries of the system, the pipeline keeps everything warm and replenished. The pipeline must wind where it must so that Lexington — its heart — may beat, and that this office, its brain, may command it to live up to its highest ideals.”
The Sheriff kept going. Mary kept eying him, trying to pry out his weaknesses. The little man remained so focused on his speech — and Mary on him — that they both missed all the noise in the street.
Through the window, Cav watched three figures fly through the saloon doors and into the mud.
The one doling out the most punishment was the man everyone in town simply called “Irish.” He had a terrible problem with authority in every direction, and beat up and stole from everyone equally. Most avoided him completely, both out of fear and a deserved respect for his outlaw status. To her knowledge, Irish was the only man in the territory who’d beaten the hide off a klansman, a wolverine, and reportedly an entire Army squad.
His two opponents were newer in town. Cav still knew them, though. The small, pugnacious blonde woman wrapped around Irish’s considerably sized skull was named Charlie. She came from a military family in South Carolina, fought too frequently for her own good, and had a serious inferiority complex due to her size and the typical reaction to her outsized accent.
The brunette wrapped around Irish’s leg was a shooter named Lexie. Cav knew her to be quieter, but no less dangerous, especially at a distance. She had heard a rumor about Lexie shooting the nose off the commandant of the Virginia Military Institute for daring to take out a warrant on her. In Cav’s mind, checking to see if that was true defeated the chief point of the rumor.
The two ran together and had just started a partnership stealing from wagon trains. Evidently they fought together, too — foolishly, in this case. Irish could take a whole bar by himself, much less two mean but relatively inexperienced banditas.
♠♣♥♦
In the office, next to Mary, the Sheriff droned onward.
“We need our diversions to be pure, Mary. This country needs revelry like the gentleman needs philosophy, but it must be free of the interests of those who would pervert it with too much regulation. The Association and its bylaws provide both without the weighty, clumsy interference of the government.”
Cav watched as Irish picked up the scrapper called Charlie and threw her through the open window of the saloon.
“Do you know what I have been asked to do here, ma’am?”
Mary arched an eyebrow.
“I didn’t hear that, Sheriff.”
“That’s right. I came here by order of the principals. The days of this …”
The Sheriff gestured at the muddy ball of brawlers in the street.
“… and these half-literate banditos out there are over. Fences must be built. A code must be established. Sanity must be protected.”
Cav tried to avoid looking openly impressed at Charlie crawling back through the window, visibly gesturing at Irish and asking for more.
“Protected from what?” asked Mary.
“From Mammon. From those who would burden the working person with too much wealth.”
Cav watched Lexie disappear into the saloon, leaving Charlie to fight alone with the wild man. No one dared help. Cav assumed Lexie was probably going to fetch something heavy, to hit Irish over the head. It’s what any sensible person would have done.
“Back to the thrust of my argument here, Miss Mary. I am to peaceably restore the concept of fairness. I am here to rid our frontier of the stain of big money. It is something I believe in deeply.”
Mary nodded her head to affirm the Sheriff’s noble cause. Cav did the same, silently congratulating herself for being right. With a bell-like toll and sickening thud, Lexie had indeed brained Irish with a spittoon. Little could knock Irish out, but staggering him was enough to make the big brute — who had Charlie held at length with one arm like a tantruming child — drop her like a sack of corn in the street. A stunned Irish wobbled towards the saloon doors. The two women, satisfied with a draw, followed.
“Miss Mary, if I may be so bold: Do you believe in my cause?”
“Oh, yes, certainly. It seems to be precisely what this town needs.”
The Sheriff stopped, just like Mary hoped he would. Someone with money didn’t ask questions to hear answers. Someone with more money had already given them the answers. The sooner someone learned how to get men like the Sheriff to stop talking, the sooner someone could get on with the day’s business of stealing something.
“I need to see Mayor Rutgers,” the Sheriff said. “Then, please, take me to my lodgings.”
“Of course,” said Mary. “I must warn you, though. The Mayor might not be as receptive as we have been.”
“Is he an anarchist?”
Mary bade the Sheriff forward through the door.
“No, not at all. He is just a man of leisure most days.”
“Mary means the ones that end in -y,” said Cav.
The Sheriff paused in the door.
“Your assistant does realize … every day ends in -y?”
Mary hustled the Sheriff down the rickety set of steps and into the street.
“Sheriff, he may be found at this bar across the street. The one to the right of the one that spat out Irish and his opponents a minute ago.”
The Sheriff stopped, standing still in the middle of the street under the reddening light of afternoon.
“Mary, did your assistant forget the pistol?”
“No, she didn’t. It’s right on the desk where she left it.”
“In order to do my job—”
Cav cut the Sheriff off. Mary, in this instance, let her.
“Sheriff, this is no job for a lady. We are not as practiced at violence, nor as sure of the law. That is why my superior here, Miss Mary, who has been so kind as to show you our town this afternoon and welcome you, suggested you, as Sheriff, must hold the gun. Should violence occur, we would wish it to be the kind backed by authority. That’s correct, right Miss Mary?”
“Absolutely, Miss Johnston.”
“I abhor violence,” the Sheriff stammered, “and would never …”
Cav cocked her head at the Sheriff, the plume on her hat leaning like a willow in the breeze. She spoke out of turn, again.
“… ask someone else to do it for you.”
The Sheriff looked blankly at Mary. Flummoxed, he stepped back inside the office with a long, huffy sigh.
Mary retreated to the shade of the office’s porch and waited. The sun blasted down.
She thought of all the nice things in La Cademia that had nothing to do with civilization. The mornings when it was cold that turned to middays when it was hot before leveling back to a perfect, cool balance somewhere in between. Watching the kids turn the spigots on to irrigate the great green field at the end of Main. The water running all the way down from the mountains, cold as a well digger’s ass, turning the dirty land into a sprawling polygon of green. The horses grazing on open land without a care. The men and women who came west to work for a few dollars while they could, and maybe dream of owning a tiny piece.
Mary had helped build a lot of this. It wasn’t hers. She had to remind herself all the time of this, because that was the one lesson she learned here. America never let anyone have anything, not even the people who’d been here before America, not even in a place like this one, a place near the edge.
♠♣♥♦
Listening to the Sheriff in the office bored her to the point of pain. But it confirmed what she suspected: The Association had sent the Sheriff in to repossess the West for its new landlords. That angered her, as did the Sheriff trying to justify it. Thieves, she didn’t mind. Look at Cav, thought Mary, watching the Virginian kick rocks in the street out of boredom. Cav was a perfect bandit. She took things without speeches about morality. A bandit would never insult someone by explaining how theft wasn’t wrong. She did you the favor of simply stealing them.
Someone like Mary would do a person the favor of just stealing, and save the victim the insult of turning it into a reflection of the natural order.
Mary peered up into the window. The Sheriff, bent over with his head in the safe, had the gun poking clumsily out of his jacket pocket. She watched him take a stack of bills out of the open safe. What a greedy little swine, Mary thought, watching the Sheriff tiptoe down the stairs and out into the street like nothing had happened at all.
Mary, Cav, and the Sheriff found Mayor Hank Rutgers holding other-office hours across the street. The Mayor worked hard all the time, in his own way. Today’s variation on working hard meant one bottle almost empty on the table and another in transit from the bar.
“Ayyyyyyy, look at these freakin’ guys!”
“Mayor,” said Mary.
“I keep tellin’ you! Call me Hank! Have a seat, lady.”
The Sheriff placed the Mayor’s violent accent as New Jerseyite. He assessed his condition as pisspoor to pissmiddling. The Mayor’s tweed pants were worn at the knees, his red velour jacket rubbing threadbare at the elbows and seams. A yellowed campaign button on his tattered lapel read: THANK HANK!
Mary noted the Mayor’s shoes were on the correct feet this time. She also watched as Cav finagled a shot glass from the bar and poured herself a generous shot from the open bottle on the Mayor’s table. Mary did not worry. The Sheriff, aghast at a bureaucrat in such disrepair, didn’t much hear Mary’s broad introduction of the town’s Mayor.
“Mayor Hank,” she then said, “I’d like you to meet the new man in town.”
The Sheriff was standing stockstill, waiting to sit and Mary thought perhaps he was waiting huffily to be introduced as a man of status.
Mayor Rutgers was too drunk to notice. He gazed off at the spot where the piano had been, before they’d burned it for warmth two years prior, during the Great Snow Bowl.
“Mary, I tell you, I’ve loved a lot of things about being Mayor.”
“Mmhm.”
“But burning a fuckin’ PIANO! That was somethin’, friend,” the Mayor said, his Jersey accent soaring. “I’D DO IT EVERY. FREAKIN’. DAY IF I COULD.”
Mary could feel the Sheriff vibrating with peevish anger. She enjoyed it, frankly, after listening to him talk for more than an hour. Still, she tried to play along.
“I’m sorry, let me try this again, Mayor Hank. This is the new Sheriff.”
“Hey! Sheriff, sit down, you’re gonna draw vultures, standing there like that.”
The Sheriff peered around the room. Cav guessed he was literally scanning for vultures.
“Another bottle for our new Sheriff here.”
“I do not drink, Mr. Mayor.”
“Neither do I. This is medicinal, and I can’t have important people getting sick on me. Armando, my friend! Bottle of your best.”
The Mayor slumped in his chair. The Sheriff thought he looked like a jellyfish.
Mayor Rutgers had no real duties any more. His biggest claim to fame was founding the town with some money he’d won in a craps game on the way out West, building its first sporting field, gambling on the first usage of the field, and thus doubling the town’s treasury. Since then, he’d done mostly nothing and accomplished less, shuffled by barkeeps from one unpaid tab to the next.
The Mayor would tell anyone in the range of his horrific voice how “he was the daddy of this freakin’ town,” and how when he got to Lexington there was nothing but “two trees, four jackrabbits, and only one jackass.” He’d point to himself when he said that and laugh at his own joke. Everyone else had heard it too many times to laugh politely any more.
Mayor Rutgers’ kids rarely visited. They hung in more prestigious circles. He was a well-loved embarrassment to some of his children and just an unqualified embarrassment to others.
Mary thought the Mayor just wanted to be remembered fondly. It didn’t seem like too much on paper, but sitting at the battle-scarred table of Unnamed Bar #2 (the actual name of the bar, according to paperwork Mary had found while filing the deed for her tack shop/smuggling emporium), Mary could see what drove the Mayor to drink. Every other pioneer had blown past him on the way to the future, leaving him with the curse of being first, but not best. The Mayor floated on a flimsy raft of forgotten accomplishments, amid oceans of amnesia.
“Mayor, I hope you’ve been briefed on my duties here,” said the Sheriff, oozing contempt.
“I have!” (He had not.)
“Good. I will be using office space in the … town hall. Petty cash will be provided by your city.”
The Mayor’s lolling head snapped upright when the Sheriff said “cash.”
“Absolutely. Right. Yes, duties, and the cash.”
The Mayor winked. The Sheriff shuddered with undisguised disgust.
“And, as there are no other known authorities in this territory, I will assume all jurisdiction necessary to track down and apprehend subjects of my investigations as necessary, here in Lexington and in the greater environs of La Cademia Territory.”
Mary and Cav cast a quick glance at each other. The Sheriff had just vaguely expanded his jurisdiction on the spot. The Mayor, drunk as a lord, just casually signed off on it. Mary felt a rush of alarm in her limbs. Cav was merely impressed with the hustle.
“Here for it, brother. You want lunch? Cause I’m gonna get lunch. BARKEEP! BOTELLA!”
The Mayor’s head lifted skyward for a second, then fell to the table like a hammer. Mary and Cav picked up the Mayor, each supporting him under one arm, and began toting him out of the back of Unnamed Bar #2.
The Sheriff followed, taking notes on a small pad. As the Sheriff walked on the uneven ruts of Lexington’s back alleys, the butt of the jumbo-sized revolver jutted out of his coat pocket.
“Where are you taking him?”
“To his other office, Sheriff,” Mary said. “He prefers to work late afternoons elsewhere.”
“Please take him somewhere else. I would like to begin clearing that desk out for my work.”
“Not that office,” said Cav.
The Sheriff looked back down at his notepad and continued scribbling, offering no help to the two ladies carrying the pot-bellied figure of the Mayor. Cav and Mary grunted and dumped the Mayor into his chair in the back of Unnamed Bar #1. He’d wake up around 3 or 4 in the afternoon. The two bars — each a mirror image of the other, sharing a common wall and identical twin brothers serving as barkeeps — looked so much alike, Mayor Rutgers might not even notice the move.
The Sheriff looked up from his pad, studying Unnamed Bar #1, finding it far too crowded for such an hour. As he scanned the bar stools, his mustached mouth fell agape.
♠♣♥♦
Irish and his two opponents from the street stood shoulder to shoulder, laughing. He was shirtless, covered in filth, and drinking something brown and evil straight from the bottle. Each time one slapped another on the back, big clouds of dust spewed from their shoulders. Mary thought it looked like cattle having a hootenanny. The Sheriff saw three golems in a sandstorm.
“Mary, pardon me, but I must exercise some degree of my powers as Sheriff here. I did my reading on the train on the way here, and reviewed my files. That shirtless gentleman’s name? That is George Irish, yes?”
Mary’s eyes widened, and she regretted letting him go back to get the pistol.
“That, Sheriff, is a man named George Irish, yes.”
“Well. It is time to execute my first warrant.”
The Sheriff walked toward the three of them.
“Excuse me. Are you named George Irish?”
Irish whipped his muddy face around, his red hair caked with filth and his green eyes burning through the dirt. The look on Irish said he hated the Sheriff on sight, right down into the marrow. Irish’s whole body coiled up like a snake’s. He radiated with hate, with the whiplike strength of a man made of taut wires.
Cav put a hand on Mary’s shoulder.
“Irish … will … he’ll absolutely kill this man.”
“Oh, Cav. I suspect the Sheriff can’t fight. As in, not at all. This is bad. Perhaps the I-won’t-even-enjoy-it kind of bad.”
“Is one certain about that, Mary? Think before answering.”
The Sheriff, now looking up at a mud-caked demon drunk off brown liquor and adrenaline, somehow showed zero fear. Mary assumed this was because Irish barely looked human. Cav assumed the Sheriff was just achingly oblivious to the certain gory murder in front of him.
“Well?” said Cav.
“No, I am, on second thought, afraid I might enjoy this.”
At that point, the Sheriff did the stupidest thing he could have done. He kept talking.
“George Irish, your record precedes you in the worst of all possible ways. In the name of the Association and its represented institutions, I hereby arrest you for corruption across interstate lines, general mythmaking, and war profiteering. Place your hands on your head.”
Lexie and Charlie fell out laughing. Irish did not.
He led with a headbutt. It caught the Sheriff with such force that the civilized man couldn’t do much but suck air, tottering in his bad shoes on the sawdust-covered floor like a man speaking with only the Lord. Lexie and Charlie continued to laugh. Cav laughed. Against best instincts, even Mary laughed. The whole bar lost it at the sight of the Sheriff, wobbling like a top in the middle of Unnamed Bar #1, bleeding from a split forehead after trying by himself to arrest the most obviously terrifying man in town.
Irish hauled back and swung his skull forward again. The sound of his skull whipping through the air made its own distinct noise. The thwack against the Sheriff’s tiny noggin made another, more sickening sound. The bar erupted with cheers, and several drinkers heaved their beers into the air.
The Sheriff’s bloody face slumped forward. He gave up all resistance to the earth, taking what seemed like minutes to collapse forward, along with a fine mist of lager. Mary saw the revolver jostling out of the Sheriff’s pockets, slipping loose of the coat and dropping toward the floor.
The gun tipped forward with the Sheriff’s falling body, tumbling end over end and landing on its stock. Mary heard the bang first, then watched the recoil spin the weapon in reverse. It was beautiful, a little dance she got to watch, alone in a crowd of people focused on Irish’s head whipping back from a bullet’s impact.
The entire room stood stunned as pieces of Irish’s head hit the saloon ceiling.
Mary had started the day wanting to know what kind of man had been sent to tame the frontier. She now knew. They had sent a man so stupid and loyal to order he would kill those in his way, even if by accident. He would be too stubborn to accept anything else. Knowing the nature of people, she assumed they would be stupid enough to agree with him.
As Mary had the Sheriff taken to Doc Wilson’s office to be bandaged up, she figured she had a choice. She would find a way to live with the new order immediately, or she would fight it as long as she could before, as an unchanged warhorse of the old frontier, surrendering what she had earned out here. She sat in town for a while and then walked home beneath the billion stars of the desert, thinking about whether she would get the privilege of deciding for herself at all.
Cav came to another conclusion entirely. Meeting the Sheriff and watching him attempt the first actual, official arrest in the history of the territory made her want to do the thing that brought her the greatest joy of all.
It made her want to steal.
The first entry in the Legislative Services Database
When the Sheriff woke up on the office cot in the middle of the night with a bandaged head, he first dragged himself to his desk to send a telegram.
He detailed his arrest of Irish: A great success, though the sheer number of agitated bystanders required the careful application of violence. He would need help, and therefore requested the hastened arrival of his trusted subordinate, the promising young Agent Byers, along with funds for the hire of additional agents.
He also requested immediate warrants for the arrest of two outlaws: a tall woman with brown hair named Lexie, and a squat South Carolinian known locally as Charlie Delle. Their crime: failing to assist an officer in the course of applying the law.
The Sheriff then dragged himself back to sleep until the light of dawn awoke him. He arose, opened the back door, and looked out at the warming red doomscape.
He’d heard people talk of magnificent vistas here, about the space and range and colors of the high desert. The Sheriff saw none of that, not on the long train ride into town, and not in the glow of a rising sun on the condemned rocks surrounding him.
In the West, he only saw a constant corruption: Rivers smuggling the earth through canyon wounds one grain of sand at a time, buffalo taking what they like without fences, birds flaunting the impermissible benefit of flight. He came from the Midwest, where all water was marshaled into lakes for supervision. Here even the cacti hoarded water for themselves.
The Sheriff knew the shameless land would be made to repent. The rivers would be dammed. The deserts would bloom. Fences — miles and miles of beautiful, straight fences — would enclose the amoral wilderness into squares. With enough discipline and hard work, the wastes of La Cademia could be as productive and orderly as the fields of Ohio. The West’s detestable people, God willing, could only follow suit. Sanity would be encoded.
Having judged the land and found it reprehensible, the Sheriff walked to begin his day at his desk. There, he found two new items.
One was a telegram response from the Association, congratulating him on his first arrest, and granting all requests made by the Lexington office.
The other: someone had placed the revolver back in the chair where they’d first found it. It was as cold and mean as he remembered it. He held the gun up in a ray of light streaming through the window, eyeing its ivory handle. The Sheriff pulled a pocket knife from his jacket, carefully working a single notch into the white bone of the gun’s grip.
It made him happier than he had ever felt before.
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