The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes Read Free Book Online

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 calledfor 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.

 
    i n the beginning, before the sights were even taken for Mistletoe, Government City, before the women and children arrived, when stray cows could stop wherever they pleased below the high ground to water, and the water in its turn could slug downstream to flood, when the nearest city, not including Clare which was only a post on the plain, was over the line into the next state—at that time, as winter came on and workers migrated to the project anyway, upon the whole head of the bluff there was founded a colony of a thousand tents that smoked like an Indian village through the hard snow. Ten or twenty men to a tent, they penny-anted by lantern light and only came out into the falling snow to watch when a load of shovels arrived or the crated yellow tractor was slid from the rear of a truck and left in a shallow dune to await spring. For days the men tramped out in small groups to lean over, and touch,