Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas Read online

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  _The place called Sodom was bad enough. But right down the road was the other town--and that was even worse!_

  Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

  By R. A. LAFFERTY

  Illustrated by RITTER

  Manuel shouldn't have been employed as a census taker. He wasn'tqualified. He couldn't read a map. He didn't know what a map was. Heonly grinned when they told him that North was at the top.

  He knew better.

  But he did write a nice round hand, like a boy's hand. He knew Spanish,and enough English. For the sector that was assigned to him he would notneed a map. He knew it better than anyone else, certainly better thanany mapmaker. Besides, he was poor and needed the money.

  They instructed him and sent him out. Or they thought that they hadinstructed him. They couldn't be sure.

  "Count everyone? All right. Fill in everyone? I need more papers."

  "We will give you more if you need more. But there aren't so many inyour sector."

  "Lots of them. _Lobos_, _tejones_, _zorros_, even people."

  "Only the _people_, Manuel! Do not take the animals. How would you writeup the animals? They have no names."

  "Oh, yes. All have names. Might as well take them all."

  "Only people, Manuel."

  "_Mulos?_"

  "No."

  "_Conejos?_"

  "No, Manuel, no. Only the people."

  "No trouble. Might as well take them all."

  "Only people--God give me strength!--only people, Manuel."

  "How about little people?"

  "Children, yes. That has been explained to you."

  "_Little_ people. Not children, little people."

  "If they are people, take them."

  "How big they have to be?"

  "It doesn't make any difference how big they are. If they are people,take them."

  That is where the damage was done.

  The official had given a snap judgement, and it led to disaster. It wasnot his fault. The instructions are not clear. Nowhere in all theverbiage does it say how big they have to be to be counted as people.

  Manuel took Mula and went to work. His sector was the Santa Magdalena, ascrap of bald-headed and desolate mountains, steep but not high, and sotorrid in the afternoons that it was said that the old lava sometimesbegan to writhe and flow again from the sun's heat alone.

  In the center valley there were five thousand acres of slag andvitrified rock from some forgotten old blast that had melted the hillsand destroyed their mantle, reducing all to a terrible flatness. Thiswas called Sodom. It was strewn with low-lying ghosts as of people andobjects, formed when the granite bubbled like water.

  Away from the dead center the ravines were body-deep in chaparral, andthe hillsides stood gray-green with old cactus. The stunted trees werelower than the giant bushes and yucca.

  Manuel went with Mula, a round easy man and a sparse gaunt mule. Mulawas a mule, but there were other inhabitants of the Santa Magdalena of agenus less certain.

  Yet even about Mula there was an oddity in her ancestry. Her paternalgrandfather had been a goat. Manuel once told Mr. Marshal about this,but Mr. Marshal had not accepted it.

  "She is a mule. Therefore, her father was a jack. Therefore his fatherwas also a jack, a donkey. It could not be any other way."

  Manuel often wondered about that, for he had raised the whole strain ofanimals, and he remembered who had been with whom.

  "A donkey! A jack! Two feet tall and with a beard and horns. I alwaysthought that he was a goat."

  Manuel and Mula stopped at noon on Lost Soul Creek. There would be notravel in the hot afternoon. But Manuel had a job to do, and he did it.He took the forms from one of the packs that he had unslung from Mula,and counted out nine of them. He wrote down all the data on nine people.He knew all there was to know about them, their nativities and theirantecedents. He knew that there were only nine regular people in thenine hundred square miles of the Santa Magdalena.

  But he was systematic, so he checked the list over again and again.There seemed to be somebody missing. Oh, yes, himself. He got anotherform and filled out all the data on himself.

  Now, in one way of looking at it, his part in the census was finished.If only he had looked at it that way, he would have saved worry andtrouble for everyone, and also ten thousand lives. But the instructionsthey had given him were ambiguous, for all that they had tried to makethem clear.

  So very early the next morning he rose and cooked beans, and said,"Might as well take them all."

  He called Mula from the thorn patch where she was grazing, gave her saltand loaded her again. Then they went to take the rest of the census, butin fear. There was a clear duty to get the job done, but there was alsoa dread of it that his superiors did not understand. There was reasonalso why Mula was loaded so she could hardly walk with packs of censusforms.

  Manuel prayed out loud as they climbed the purgatorial scarp above LostSouls Creek, "_ruega por nosotros pecadores ahora_--" the very gulchesstood angry and stark in the early morning--"_y en la hora de neustramuerte._"

  Three days later an incredible dwarf staggered into the outskirts ofHigh Plains, Texas, followed by a dying wolf-sized animal that did notlook like a wolf.

  A lady called the police to save the pair from rock-throwing kids whomight have killed them, and the two as yet unclassified things weretaken to the station house.

  The dwarf was three foot high, a skeleton stretched over withbrown-burnt leather. The other was an un-canine looking dog-sized beast,so full of burrs and thorns that it might have been a porcupine. It wasa nightmare replica of a shrunken mule.

  The midget was mad. The animal had more presence of mind: she lay downquietly and died, which was the best she could do, considering the statethat she was in.

  "Who is census chief now?" asked the mad midget. "Is Mr. Marshal's boythe census chief?"

  "Mr. Marshal is, yes. Who are you? How do you know Marshal? And what isthat which you are pulling out of your pants, if they are pants?"

  "Census list. Names of everybody in the Santa Magdalena. I had to stealit."

  "It looks like microfilm, the writing is so small. And the roll goes onand on. There must be a million names here."

  "Little bit more, little bit more. I get two bits a name."

  They got Marshal there. He was very busy, but he came. He had been givena deadline by the mayor and the citizen's group. He had to produce apopulation of ten thousand people for High Plains, Texas; and this wasdifficult, for there weren't that many people in the town. He had beenworking hard on it, though; but he came when the police called him.

  "You Marshal's little boy? You look just like your father," said themidget.

  "That voice, I should know that voice even if it's cracked to pieces.That has to be Manuel's voice."

  "Sure, I'm Manuel. Just like I left, thirty-five years ago."

  "You can't be Manuel, shrunk three feet and two hundred pounds and ageda million."

  "You look here at my census slip. It says I'm Manuel. And here are ninemore of the regular people, and one million of the little people. Icouldn't get them on the right forms, though. I had to steal theirlist."

  "You can't be Manuel," said Marshal.

  "He can't be Manuel," said the big policemen and the little policeman.

  "Maybe not, then," the dwarf conceded. "I thought I was, but I wasn'tsure. Who am I then? Let's look at the other papers and see which one Iam."

  "No, you can't be any of them either, Manuel. And you surely can't beManuel."

  "Give him a name anyhow and get h
im counted. We got to get to that tenthousand mark."

  "Tell us what happened, Manuel--if you are. Which you aren't. But tellus."

  "After I counted the regular people I went to count the little people. Itook a spade and spaded off the top of their town to get in. But theyput an _encanto_ on me, and made me and Mula run a treadmill forthirty-five years."

  "Where was this?"

  "At the little people town. Nuevo Danae. But after thirty-five years the_encanto_ wore off and Mula and I stole the list of names and ran away."

  "But where did you really get this list of so many names written sosmall?"

  "Suffering saddle sores, Marshal, don't ask the little bug so manyquestions. You got a million names in your hand. Certify them! Send themin! There's