The Sheriff sat down, stared thoughtfully at the animal whose rump still clung to the air, whose injured nose lay hidden. Then, slowly, he reached for it, lifted it with a brief grunt until its chest was on his lap. And he waited until the nose was uncovered, while it probed blindly, and at last allowed his fat cheek to be licked, touched with blood. He chuckled, “She’s been out back.”
After shoving and kissing the round face of the Sheriff — the tongue that was clamped between its own teeth flicked once the lobe of his ear — the slick keen head of the pointer dropped and with slow high climbing motions the dog stepped and pawed ungainly hind legs against his trousers, attempted to thrust and double its whole body onto his knees. The Sheriff held his breath, slowly pushed the pointer to the floor.
Without a murmur it slunk off. “She’s sick,” said the Sheriff and watched for some expression to curl across the healer’s cleft face. Not a grimace appeared, but slowly, with slackening pulse, he seemed to unwind and, reaching once more the tin can for a whiff of salts, dropped a white hand tolerantly to the desk top. There was a switch up his spine, a spark of truth in the watery tapping of his fingers. “Don’t say anything,” the Sheriff stepped forward, then behind the desk, “I’ll do the talking.” He rubbed the prognosticator’s pamphlet against his beard. “He’ll listen,” thought the Sheriff, “no traveling man’s that good.”
Beyond them bloomed the desert that had starved to silence the calls of loveless dogs, buried under successive sand waves the hoof prints of single fading riders or the footprints of man and woman running with clothes bundled quickly beneath their arms. Any nomad tribes that had once burned raiding fires at night were gone, human drops sprinkled and spent in the sand, as bodies slipped from the edge of the horse blanket, had been settled upon and obscured by wingless insects or fried, like the heads of small but ruddy desert flowers, in the sun of one afternoon.
“I said,” stuffing a fistful of tobacco over the white ash in the bottom of the pipe, “there’s just one man who died out here. Only the one death that come to anything. For ten, even twelve years, in all that time there ain’t been a single robber shot in the head, no rancher fatally struck by snakes. It hasn’t been long enough for any man to grow old enough to die…”
The jail, with its door standing open and another locked, kept all men who spit or talked within its walls comfortable on gray lead painted floor or dry cane, confidential, close, by its very smell and heat of confinement, preserved them amidst the circles of the desert. No sound passed between the padlock and smoky boulder. The scratching of infected toes, the whispering from swollen, hair covered throats, died near the foundations of the jail. Away, no voice called for help, the desert might have sunk from sight, beyond detection and points of the compass.
Only the soft voice croaking full of stories and the listener, at that hour, feeling just old enough to wait. The Sheriff looked up and down the page, turned, flipped another one and paused. “ Aquarius is poor,” he said and thought, “That will hold him, ain’t a chemical sounds that good to the ear.” He added, “ Sagittarius is poor, also.”
The purveyor of menthol, iodine, and peppermint stepped to the window as the drone continued. There were no dark house fronts, no flashing signs. Only the dented black plains stretched from the window to the horizon without a flicker of movement except for a shadow that now and then crossed the buzzing screen. For a long while Cap Leech stood pressed against the wall, listening. He looked toward the cow country for some speck of a herd against the night sky or a lone rider nodding over the pommel. The mosquitoes ticked against the screen in his face.
The Sheriff scowled into the magic page. “ Trim no trees or vines when the Moon or Earth is in Leo. For they will surely die.” He stopped reading, marked his place, and began to talk.
It is a lawless country.