A Blip in Modernity – Opening Chapters

 

1

A RARE ARRIVAL

THE DILAPIDATED RAILWAY station lay sleeping in the searing heat of the American Southwest desert sun. It was just a single wooden platform attached to a simple wooden building. Opposite the platform, on the other side of a single glistening steel track, sprawled a thirsty sun-baked sandy desert with a heat haze, making it seem like a sea of golden waves.

The station had been sleeping for three years, dreaming its lonely endless dream, abandoned and in a state of extreme disrepair. Trains would only threaten to awaken it. In a few minutes, the midday train would speed through from the east … At three in the afternoon, another train would speed through from the west … Both trains would share the single track. Day after day after day, they would surge past the station, shaking the twisted and weather-warped wooden platform floorboards. In three years, they had never stopped to wake the station from its dream …

The station building combined a waiting room with a ticket office. Once it entertained the staff and passengers, but now it only entertained the high-pitched crying of a mild breeze sucking itself in through the open scars of the walls and ceiling. In the past, when the station was regularly in use, the station was dutifully re-painted bone-white every few years. Now the outside of the building was grey and lifeless, as the unyielding sun had blistered the white paint and all but peeled and blown it away. The matchboard overhang drooped forlornly, offering barely enough shade to the platform below. And swinging lazily and squeakily in the mild breeze from this overhang on a pair of rusty chains was a large rectangular metal signpost. Unlike the rest of the station, it was reasonably well preserved. And it read, almost apologetically: LITTLE TUMBLEWEED.

The tiny town clung to the railway line where it cowered, barely alive, miserable and forgotten. It was an insignificant island floating in the sea-like desert whose waves of sand, rocks and cactus plants rose and fell in their infinitude as they disappeared towards every compass point of the heat-wavering horizon. Little Tumbleweed: a study of isolation; a tour de force of irrelevance; a home to 129 inhabitants. Little Tumbleweed, scorching beneath the daily sun, a place where the townsfolk moved in slow motion and insects seemed hardly to move at all.

The world of 2098 was racing ahead with science and technology—for this was the Age of Modernity—but Little Tumbleweed was simply not interested. In fact, Little Tumbleweed despised modernity. And with such a passion that it spat in modernity’s eye and stabbed at its very heart. The town was an anachronism within an anachronism: a nineteenth century Wild West culture, supplemented with a late 1960s technology. Its only connection with the outside world was the twin strips of the singular glistening steel railway track. But in Little Tumbleweed, the station was no longer used and just a place for the town to collectively turn its back on modernity by ignoring the speedy high technology trains that shot by. Yes, the town was dreaming itself into oblivion … until—

“Hey!” cried Benson from the chunky cowhide upholstered barber’s chair. His keen olive-green eyes had noticed something unusually exciting in the barber’s mirror.

“Keep still, damn it!” said the bald, portly barber in the slow pedestrian Southwestern drawl of Little Tumbleweed. And he jerked Benson’s manly, heavily tanned head roughly to the correct cutting angle, redirecting it the exact opposite way it wanted to go; the way only barbers can do.

“Hell and damnation,” retorted Benson, his particular silver-tongued drawl for once uncharacteristically and paradoxically hurried. Suddenly, he flew into action. Wildly shaking his head, he sprang out of his chair while ripping off his hairdressing cloak. The cloak went flying into the air, shedding clumps of his hair. And even before the cloak had drifted to the floor, in a blur, he had charged out of the shop with his characteristic sleepy eyes unusually wide-awake.

The barber stormed to the open doorway roaring, “Hey, Bense, where’s my twenty bucks?” But he stood in hope more than in expectation on the raised wooden platform of the shop-side High Street walkway in his black cotton apron and trousers. Old Willy Henderson, the barber, would rarely leave the vicinity of his shop in working hours. He held his hands up to the searing sun, looking like a beetle peeping out from under a stone.

Suddenly, the long-lost memory of a high-speed train air braking assaulted his ears. His head turned instantly from Benson to a distant slowing train, which he could see passing through the gaps of the various ramshackle shops on the opposite side of the High Street. It was going to stop at the station!

“What in tarnation?” Henderson forgot about the price of a haircut, shed his apron, and joined in the maddening chase with Benson, exclaiming: “Christ the Lord. Hal-le-luia! What can it mean? What can it mean?”

There were fifteen townsfolk who noticed the slowing train, and all of them were charging down the High Street towards the railway station, which was about to be rudely awakened from its endless dream. The men, except for the marshal in his leather waistcoat and the beetle-like barber, were a mass of leather boots and spurs, jeans and cotton shirts. The women, a trail of long colourfully patterned cotton dresses. Movement this fast, kicking up a cloud of dirt in its wake, seemed out of kilter with Little Tumbleweed’s High Street. It looked like a cross between a chase by the keystone cops and a traditional Wild West free-for-all.

Excitement radiated from the widened eyes of the galloping throng. However, excitement comes in many forms. Some eyes looked fearful, some simply angry, but most were awash with curiosity. Why was the train stopping? Surely, no one could be visiting Little Tumbleweed; and God forbid, no one could possibly be leaving. Perhaps the train had suffered a fault. But that just never happens in these technologically reliable days of modernity.

The train’s klaxon screamed jarringly through the midday heat as the train pulled into Little Tumbleweed, rousing the station from its three-year dream like an unwelcome alarm clock.

Benson was first on the scene, arriving on the platform’s grey wooden floorboards, which groaned beneath his six-feet-plus muscular frame. He was just in time to see the train squeal to a stop. He swivelled a bit into a favourable position, almost in slow motion, one of his trademark mannerisms. He was an ice-cool dude. Nothing fazed Benson; nothing. He seemed to be leaning back on thin air, so relaxed. On his face, a message was clearly visible. It said that the cheek of this train daring to stop in his li’l ol’ town needed his undivided attention.

Next to arrive was a sweating, panting exasperated Hillier, the town’s marshal, closely followed by the follically challenged barber, who despite having earlier removed his apron still had his scissors in his hand. In a way, that scissors was his hand.

“Look!” shouted Benson, pointing accusingly up the platform to the head of the train where a carriage door hissed open.

By now, a dozen townsfolk had gathered behind Benson whose tall imposing frame and wagonloads of charismatic Wild West charm had acted as a magnet. They were all waiting impatiently, excitedly, curiously, to see what would disembark from the train …

Calmly, out of the carriage emerged a confident and handsome man dressed sharply in a blue pinstriped suit—a modern collarless one! He had no luggage, and he appeared to be in his late thirties, Benson’s age. No sooner had the man dusted down and adjusted his clothing when a whistle shrilled somewhere at the front of the train. The carriage door hissed closed, and the train quickly pulled away from the station, almost as if it knew it had no right being there in the first place.

The visitor started to stride confidently along the creaking platform floorboards towards the huddled townsfolk, now numbering fifteen. They watched suspiciously, as he neared them seeking the only exit out of the station where they formed a threatening barrier.

The visitor stopped at the exit, blocked by the townsfolk, headed by Benson and Marshal Hillier. His fresh pink face looked out of place among the rugged golden-mahogany sun-kissed faces blocking his path. His cologne aftershave was excessive by Little Tumbleweed standards, and many a nose from the huddle twitched in disdain. Just as much as Little Tumbleweed did not belong in the world of modernity, he did not belong in Little Tumbleweed.

Benson stepped forwards towards the visitor. He loomed large and daunting, a fearsome unit of a man. He looked down his sharply chiselled nose with ultimate contempt at the visitor who was a similar build to him but a few inches shorter. His sleepy eyes, just inches from the poker-faced visitor’s, narrowed to two horizontal slits. And there, Benson remained motionless, like a statue, tight-lipped with his ample square jaw jutting out. His demeanour would have scared even the strictest of military drilling instructors.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the visitor, seemingly unfazed, in a well-spoken modern manner, “would you mind letting me through?”

“Listen, boy,” began Benson, in his smoothest lazy and mumbling Southwestern drawl. “You can’t come to li’l ol’ Tumble bold as brass, in your best bib and tucker, smelling like grandma’s roses, all dolled up like a fancy woman’s sugar daddy, ’specting no questions.”

“What is this?” replied the visitor indignantly. “I see no reason to discuss my personal business with anyone.” He paused, then added curtly, “Certainly not you.” He fixed his wide-open resolute midnight-blue eyes on Benson’s equally resolute olive-green eyes, partially and menacingly hidden behind the slits of his narrowed eyelids.

There was a brief moment of uncomfortable silence as the two men of similar powerful builds and dogged determination assessed each other. Though their eyes remained fixed in the glare of each other’s, it was nevertheless evident that their minds were looking each other up and down, minds that burned deep into the heart of their respective souls. A meeting of two different worlds united only by a rough commonality of language.

Benson simply spat out a laugh, relaxed his posture, and serenely drew out a half-full open packet of unfiltered cigarettes from his cotton red-and-white checked shirt. Despite his recent sprint and the oven heat of the day, he looked miraculously dry. Not a drop of sweat tainted his clothes or his rubbery skin. Benson was coolness personified. Relaxed but still opposing the visitor, he said provocatively: “How about a light, boy? Seems I left my li’l ol’ lighter at home.”

Marshal Hillier at last interjected. “Okay, Bense, knock it off. Light your own smokes. The day you leave your lighter at home is the day Mrs Raleigh’s farm hogs will turn up in fancy clothes for the town’s annual square dance.”

Hillier’s brown leather waistcoat could not conceal the sweat that stained his dull white cotton shirt about his chest and underarms. He had a rugged face, the kind that looked as if it could do with a shave even after it had just had one, the kind a troublemaker might try to strike a match on. He had the bearing of a man that was doing the job because no one else wanted it. The way Benson was sarcastically grinning at him, you could tell the marshal could only control Benson if Benson felt it convenient to let him.

“Yep,” added a young woman’s voice from the huddle, “Hell would freeze over before you left home without your lighter, Mr Benson.”

“If Hell froze over, why, I’d use my li’l ol’ lighter to thaw it,” said Benson, winking at the woman, causing her to hide her blushing face behind a fluttering bamboo fan.

Hillier rolled his eyes at Benson’s riposte before turning his attention to the visitor.

“Now look here, mister, I’m the marshal of this very small but very proud and respectable town of ours. The last time a train stopped here was jest over three years ago. And that was only to bring supplies after the Big Windy disaster of 2095. We were darned lucky the town was spared a direct tornado hit. But we still got scared, and we couldn’t git supplies from yonder ’cause so many of our distant neighbours were darned-well gutted. We ain’t never had a direct hit”—he tapped at the side of his head—“touch wood.”

“Supplies? I think you received a bit more than that,” said the visitor.

“There was a couple of vis—” began Hillier, but he was checked by Benson’s elbow digging into his ribs. Hillier coughed as if to cover up a rising blush, before quickly gathering himself. “You see, it’s like this, sonny; we’re simple folk, and we don’t like modernity. Yes, siree, we’ve darned near turned our backs on it. What’d it ever bring but winds and oven temperatures—it’s a 48 °C max ’spected today! Ain’t a DigiHub device in the whole town. No, mister, we don’t want all that crime that comes with the Hub. No Media-net players either. We make our own music—square dance style. We have our own theatre too. Yes siree, we perform our own Christmas play in it. Regular like. Every darned year. The only communications we use are walkie-talkies and an internal wire telephone system—mid-twentieth century style. Ever heard of those, sonny? I doubt it. We have a local twentieth century TV system.”

“You’re wrong, sir,” put in the visitor. “As it happens, your rejection of modernity has not gone unnoticed. You live a Wild West way of life with the bonus of 1960s devices. Strange, but true. Make the most of it while you can.”

“Heck, we intend to,” said Hillier. “There’s no rightful law that can stop us. Yeah, we broadcast films ‘tween noon and midnight. Twentieth century Westerns mainly, with the odd spattering of World War II films—well, anything up to the late 1960s. We watch the odd mid-twentieth century Sci-Fi film too. We’re not prehistoric, nor Luddites, you know. We don’t destroy modernity, we jest don’t want nothin’ to do with it. No modern phones. No ’puters. No fancy things whatsoever. And no problems, see.” Hillier slowly looked the visitor up and down before adding, “You wouldn’t like it here, mister. No, siree.”

Benson interjected, to stress the point. “Boy, you ain’t never gonna fit in here,” he said, looking disapprovingly at the visitor’s left ear, which had a DigiHub earpiece attached to it. “You’re as out of place as a hen in a weasel house.” Benson’s packet of cigarettes had found their way back into his shirt pocket.

The marshal continued addressing the visitor. “Anyhows … Name’s Hillier. As I said, I’m the law around these parts, and I say we gotta right to know why you’re visiting?”

“Really,” replied the man. “I don’t think you do. It’s a free country, and a man or a woman, or even an android—especially an android—has the right to keep their business to themselves.”

“Android!” barracked Hillier. “Why, that newfangled pinnacle of modernity. Jest a machine in a dummy, don’t care how much you dress it up. And next they’ll be ’specting the full legal rights that we’s got.”

“Coming from you—the representative of law in this town—that’s an irony to beat all ironies,” said the visitor.

“Huh?” Hillier looked confused.

“Forget it,” said the visitor. “But for your information (which is probably in need of a serious three-year update) premium-modernity androids do have all the rights you have. Oh, except for one. They can be switched off—unlike you!”

The marshal stopped for a suspicious moment, rubbing his prickly chin. “See here, mister, you wouldn’t happen to be one of those darned premium-modernity la-di-da robots?”

The visitor pulled up his right-hand suit sleeve, undid the cuff button of his shirt, and then pulled up his shirtsleeve to expose the back of his very human-looking forearm. But then he pressed a slight bump on the back of his forearm with the index finger of his right hand. Immediately beneath the bump, a rectangle of skin dissolved to expose a weaving mass of metal, silicon, plastic, crystals and flashing LEDs. The huddle of townsfolk behind Benson and Hillier gasped in astonishment. Hillier shook his head slowly. Benson’s nose wrinkled and his eyebrows gripped his forehead. The visitor gave his captive, somewhat disapproving, audience a crooked smirk before pressing his forearm bump once again. The skin from the edges of the open rectangle “magically” grew and covered the exposed forearm, so that once again it looked completely, and ordinarily, human.

The huddle of townsfolk shuffled uneasily on the platform at the visitor’s demonstration. Subsequent vibrations caused by the shuffling ran up a nearby supporting grey wooden roof column, causing the metal Little Tumbleweed signpost to let out a series of little squeaks as it begun swinging on its rusty chains from the roof’s overhang.

“That’s quite a trick, metal boy,” remarked Benson. “Particularly modern.”

“That’s quite a particular modern-looking haircut for such a Neanderthal,” fired back the visitor. This surprising comment caused the townsfolk to notice Benson’s interrupted haircut. Benson turned his attention to Henderson the barber, giving him an ironic wink.

During the moment of hesitation, the visitor took the opportunity to squeeze between Benson and Hillier. He broke through the huddle, which divided like a biblical parting of the Red Sea, and zipped up back together again almost immediately he had passed through it.

After a few determined steps, the visitor turned back to face his welcome-party. He looked at Benson, who had “magically” moved near the platform edge and had lighted up an unfiltered cigarette. He was blowing a huge smoke ring high towards the Little Tumbleweed signpost, leaning cowboy fashion against a roof support column, with his skin-tight jean attired right leg raised up at the heel, his brass boot spur digging into the dry grey wood of the column. The aroma of tobacco competed admirably with the visitor’s lingering cologne aftershave. Benson gave the visitor a sideways look.

Hillier pushed to the front of the huddle. He whipped out his marshal’s badge and pinned it with some difficulty to his waistcoat, and said: “Jest keep your visit short ‘n’ sweet, sonny.”

“Particularly short ‘n’ sweet, metal boy,” said Benson through a huge smoke ring that rose and completely encircled the Little Tumbleweed signpost before evaporating.

The visitor carefully removed his DigiHub earpiece and tucked it carefully away into his suit pocket. He gave his audience one last crooked smirk. “The name’s Peck, George Peck, and I’ll stay according to my own schedule.”

And with those final words ringing through the dilapidated station, Peck, with a smile as bright as the burning Little Tumbleweed midday sun, turned about, marched briskly away, and turned left out into the High Street.

Hillier looked vexed as he caught the last glimpse of Peck leaving the station; Benson didn’t, but the way his smoke rings began to lose their circular shape showed he was. Hillier looked back at Benson. Both men gave each other a knowing nod that said: “There would be trouble ahead …”

 

2

DEPUTY BENSON INCOGNITO

“OKAY, FOLKS THE SHOW’S OVER,” announced Hillier. “Go back to your business and spread the word that there’s an android in town. Tell folks to be mighty wary. Be sure to tell ’em he won’t be staying long. We don’t do modernity.”

The huddle began to disperse from the station, a hubbub of chit-chat.

“Not you, Bense,” said Hillier. “I gotta job for you. We’ll discuss a short but highly lucrative contract as a deputy.”

“I sure like short-term highly lucrative contracts, mister,” said Benson, the use of the word “mister” being the closest he usually came to showing the marshal respect, and money was something he always respected. He then somehow flicked up his half-finished cigarette with his lips and caught it flush on the tip of his boot. He flicked up this boot a little, sending the cigarette floating up in the air, and then looped his boot around the cigarette, and as the cigarette eventually came down and hit the platform floorboard, he swivelled his boot heavily down upon it. “No point burning down the station, even if it ain’t supposed to be used. As you said, we ain’t no damn Luddites.”

“We’ll sort the contract details out in the jailhouse,” said Hillier. “Let’s git.”

“Whoopee-doo, boy,” said a smiling Benson, brandishing a remarkably polished white and perfect set of teeth.

Hillier and Benson made their way out of the station, turning left at the exit and headed westwards to the jailhouse down the High Street. The station could at last relax.

Along the High Street walked Benson and Hillier, almost shadow-less beneath the blinding midday sun, their leather boots scratching at the dry dirt thoroughfare of the street. The jailhouse was on the same side of the street as the station and stood directly opposite the barber’s shop.

As they approached the jailhouse, and as they moved up onto that side of the street’s raised grey wooden platform walkway, Benson spotted someone in the barber’s shop …

“Jumpin’ Mexican beans, look-a who’s over yonder in the cutters!”

“Who?” said Hillier, leaning with his hands on the wooden handrail of the platform, and looking across to the other side of the High Street at the barber’s.

Benson joined the marshal, leaning with his hands on the handrail and squinted his sleepy eyes. “It’s our friend, metal Pinocchio.”

Hillier lifted one of his hands to his forehead to shield his eyes from the beating sun and pushed his head forward a touch to get a good look into Henderson’s windows. “Good Lord, what’s he doin’ in there?”

“Having an argument with old Henderson’s scissors. What d’you you think he’s doin’ in there!”

“Whoever heard of an android having a haircut? Crazy metal vermin.” Hillier now had both hands on the platform walkway handrail and was eyeing Benson.

“As much as I loath to talk of modernity”—Benson spat over the handrail onto the dirt road of the High Street, managing to drown a lonesome pine beetle—“I guess I best, as times are a-wanting.” Benson eyed Hillier with a serious look. “The fact of the matter is, the latest Scandinavian models, premium-modernity models, are so life-like they grow hair at a natural human rate as well as eat and drink, and do everything else humans do.”

“How on earth do you know that?”

“The Doc, li’l ol’ Tumble’s concession to modernity. Him with the solar car—jest as well he never has need of it. Lord knows what we’d do if he actually took it out of his driveway.”

“But what were you doin’ talking to the likes of the Doc?”

“When Snowy went down with hoss flu, he got him back on his feet. It was the least I could do to invite him in for a drink and exchange flannel. I spoke about hosses and rattlesnakes and the perfection of a silvery desert moon in a twinkling starry blue-ink sky. He spoke about the ‘greatness’ of Scandinavian modernity and the perfection of their premium-modernity androids, androids that were destined to be the better of any human. The Doc spoke some mighty bang-up words, even if they were more twisted than a snake chasing its tail. If he’d stayed another drink more, I’d have made him squat on his spurs—’cept he’s the only man in Tumble who don’t wear ’em.”

“Welp, we can’t do nothin’ about the Doc. It’s the only law we have to abide by. Every doc must be externally qualified and have a fast vehicle to git to folks in need.”

“Yeah, Marshal, but a hoss is mighty fast.”

“These docs can’t always ride a hoss.”

“Gawddamn too true. Our Doc couldn’t ride a seaside pony.”

“That’s what modernity does to a man. It’s a disease. Ironic that the Doc’s the only person in Tumble to have an ‘illness’, ain’t it. He’s only good for a vet in Tumble.” Hillier attempted to spit down at the same pine beetle Benson had drowned so admirably in his saliva earlier. He missed by a good foot.

“You said it, mister. Yes siree, six bullets plumb in a six-shooter barrel.” Benson once again spat down at the helpless pine beetle—covering it in saliva. He looked back over to Henderson’s windows, seemingly unaffected by the powerful overhead blinding sun.

“Scandinavian android, you say?” said Hillier, once again trying his best to spy into the barber’s shop, shielding his eyes from the sun.

“Yip,” said Benson. “Doc said the nineteenth century belonged to the Brits; the twentieth, to us Americans—the one we naturally like to live in; and the twenty-first, where we are right now, to the Chinese. But he said the twenty-second, which we’re galloping towards, will belong to the Scandinavians.”

“Scandinavians? They’re too small financially. Not enough population.”

“So were all those other nations when they started out, in one way or another. But the Doc says they jest got stale; past their sell-by date. Scandinavia is the new kid on the block.” Benson turned to Hillier. “Marshal, if you were a young modernity gun, where would you go to build your dream?”

“Scandinavia,” answered Hillier, nodding his head slowly at Benson, as if he had just realised a universal truth.

“You got it, mister. Build it, and they will come.” Benson gave Hillier a grimacing smile.

“Welp, at least our country never lost all its wealth—we’re still the fifth biggest economy in the world,” said Hillier.

“Talking about the economy, let’s git in the office and sort my contract,” said Benson, lifting himself off the handrail.

The two of them sauntered in to the jailhouse.

The inside of the jailhouse fared hardly better than the outside. It was a shabby affair dominated by a large, heavy pine desk with a couple of rickety pine chairs and two iron-barred cells. One of the cells was occupied by a drunk sleeping it off, sprawled on a heavily stained mattress. Benson turned his nose up at the sight. It was no secret that he disliked men who couldn’t take their liquor.

Hillier walked over to the desk and crumpled into the heavy wooden chair. “Okay,” he said, lifting out a Temporary Deputy Contract form out of one of the desk’s drawers. “Five hundred dollars a day and a two-thousand bonus when metal Mickey is turfed out of li’l ol’ Tumble. Is it a deal?” He kicked out a chair and gestured for Benson to sit with him at the desk.

Benson ignored the chair and hovered over Hillier. “Jest give me one thousand now, and one-thousand-five hundred at the end of the day, and you’ve got yerself a deal.”

“Done.” Hillier thumped his fist down on the desk, sending a chipped coffee mug into a rattling spasm.

Benson spat on the palm of his hand and offered it to Hillier.

They shook hands.

Once more, Hillier offered the chair, and this time Benson accepted his offer and sat down grinning.

“Jest a minute while I git yer start-off,” said Hillier. He rose from his chair and waltzed to a nearby small steel safe … He soon returned to his desk chair with one thousand dollars in fifty 20-dollar bills.

Benson gratefully accepted the wad of notes. “Boy, do I like odd-jobs,” he said, joyously and rapidly counting through the wad of notes before tucking them safely away into the front pockets of his jeans.

Hillier quickly filled out the contract form, and Benson only had to sign it. Within minutes, Hillier placed the form back in the desk drawer he had taken it from.

“Welp, seein’ as you’re on the payroll now, you can get rid of Thompson for me,” said Hillier, leaning back in his chair and flicking his head towards the man sprawled prostrate on the mattress in the cell. “He’s so roostered up, even in his dreams he’s drinking.”

Benson licked his lips. “Yes, siree … Keys?”

“It’s open. Where d’you think a dude like that can go?”

Benson rubbed his hands together gleefully. He sprang enthusiastically from his desk chair, sending it sprawling across the wooden floorboards. He charged over to the occupied cell and violently pulled open its iron-barred door. A loud, jarring clang of metal exploded in the jailhouse as the door hinged back and crashed against the bars of the cell’s iron-barred front.

Hillier put his hands up to his ears and jumped up from his desk chair. The explosion of noise disturbed Thompson and pinched him from his drunken stupor. “Oooh, my aching head,” he murmured.

“Git!” directed Benson, with a jerk of his head towards the jailhouse door.

“But I have not rightly slept it off yet. Tell ’im, Marshal.” Thompson pleaded with crying eyes.

Benson suddenly burst into action like a jaguar striking a wounded buffalo. He charged into the cell and ripped Thompson off the mattress by his collar and held him up high in the air. He then lowered him to his feet and frogmarched him (despite Thompson’s pathetic protests) towards the closed jailhouse door. On reaching the door, Benson, still holding Thompson in a vice-locking grip, kicked out his foot and easily managed to pull down the door-handle. He then pulled back the door until it was wide open. The sun poured in, and … Thompson was about to pour out.

Benson launched Thompson headfirst out of the jailhouse with almost superhuman force. Thompson cannoned out, smashing right through the platform walkway handrail and down to the ground where he furrowed a few feet into the dirt track of the High Street.

“You best learn how to take your liquor, boy,” shouted Benson after him, dusting his hands against themselves in a self-congratulatory way. “We ain’t no free hostel for spongers.”

Benson turned back into the jailhouse and closed the door behind him.

Meanwhile, in the barber’s shop, Peck had been watching the scene unfolding in the mirror. He looked at the reflection of the body lying belly down, sleeping it off on the uncomfortable dirt track of the High Street. Such a scene could not pass without a comment. “Interesting form of Law and Order you’ve got around these parts.”

“Mister, we know how to sort our problems,” said Henderson, clipping deftly at a tuft of Peck’s jet-black hair. “You be just the latest for us to figure. An android demanding a haircut, well I never. Jest as well you had the hoss sense to pay up front.” Then somewhat roughly, he jerked Peck’s head into the correct hair-cutting position, in true barber style, so Peck couldn’t see the jailhouse in the mirror. “Why didn’t they build you with shorter hair?”

Peck did not bother to answer Henderson, and seemed more interested in gleaming information about some of the townsfolk.

Back in the jailhouse, Hillier, who was now leaning back in a sitting position at his desk, commented: “That’s very impressive law enforcement, Bense, but I’m docking one hundred dollars off your day’s salary for the handrail.”

“Big deal, I know where to get that one hundred dollars from: he’s lyin’ in the road, eating dirt for breakfast.”

“Huh? Thompson? He ain’t got a dime.”

“He will have—after a week’s labour in my wife’s saloon.”

“What! He’ll drink you dry, Bense.”

“Not if I get him working in the kitchen.”

Hillier straightened himself up and drew some pink coloured forms out of one of his desk’s drawers. “Welp, anyways, unfortunately, you’ll have to fill some extra paperwork in before I can let you deal with Peck,” he said, placing the forms on the desk and picking up the chair that Benson had earlier sent sprawling. “We got bye-laws to deal with strangers,” he continued, placing the chair to face the forms, “be they flesh or metal. Just got to do it legal like.” Hillier offered Benson the carefully placed desk chair once again, which faced some forms lying on the desk.

“I gotta do more than just sign ’em?” Benson, still standing, looked down apprehensively at the pink forms.

“Yip. Don’t sweat it, Bense, I’ll help you.”

“Shucks, I hate paperwork,” said Benson, lowering himself into the chair.

“Who doesn’t? Hell, it’s better than having ’puters!”

“Here, give me a pen so I can attempt to fill up these pesky forms.”

Benson began filling up the forms with some help from Hillier: Benson’s English was not one of his strengths. Education and Benson were things that didn’t quite go together.

About halfway through the form filling, Hillier noticed something through the jailhouse window. “Hey, that android Peck is leaving the cutters.”

Benson kept his eyes glued to his forms. “There’s a wagon load of time for me to deal with that pampered android. He can’t go far without me tracking him down in a matter of minutes. Must git these forms finished. Darned bureaucracy.”

About fifteen minutes later, everything was legal, and Hillier was shoving the completed forms into a desk drawer.

“D’you wanna Deputy badge?” asked Hillier, plucking a silver star-shaped badge out of a smaller desk drawer.

“Nope. I prefer to work incognito,” said Benson, giving Hillier a conspiratorial wink.

Hillier replaced the badge into the drawer. “Welp, start the wagon wheels a-rollin’, and git out there and vermoosify that obscene pinnacle of modernity, that lump of metal and wires, that pretence of human desires.”

“Heck, I can’t vermoosify anyone until I finish my own business with ol’ Henderson’s scissors,” said Benson, looking at his unfinished haircut in the jailhouse mirror.

Hillier watched Benson slink to the jailhouse door. He watched him pull it open with his boot (even though his hands were now free). He watched him take a huge sniff in the fragrant summer air. He gazed in admiration at the archetypal cowboy silhouetted in the doorframe by the blazing sunshine: a non-fictional man perfectly depicting a fictional bygone romantic, wild and woolly age. He watched Benson cock his head back just a fraction, so Hillier could hear his parting comment: “It’s a mighty fine day for a weddin’—or a funeral.”

Hillier watched as the door slammed closed, shutting out the direct sunshine and the archetypal cowboy. “Brother, I wouldn’t like to be no premium-modernity android today,” he murmured, reaching for a bottle of whiskey on a shelf to the right of the desk.

 

3

CALLING SNOWY

AT 1:20 PM, HENDERSON the barber was brushing off the loose hair that had found itself under the protective cloak of Benson, having just removed it. Benson, still in the barber’s chair, gave his reflection a trademark lopsided grin as he dusted off the bits Henderson’s brush had missed with a silk necktie he kept in the back pockets of his jeans.

“So where did this robot-in-a-suit say he was going?” asked Benson, watching Willy Henderson opening his till in preparation for his expected payment.

“He mentioned Mrs Raleigh’s farmhouse. Asked for transport. I tells ’im there are hosses for hire. But oh no, he wants a jalopy. I tells ’im in the whole of Tumble there’s only the Greengrocer’s ’lectric van and the Doc’s fancy solar business.”

Just then, Henderson’s 14-year-old son, Henry, popped his head out of the door that divides the shop area from the family quarters. “Pa, he’s gone off with the Doc in his fancy car, jest five minutes ago. The car’s heading west. Charlene Tinsel just spread the news on her walkie-talkie.”

“That Charlene sure is a regular blabber-mouth, but I reckon she’s as honest as a judge’s newborn baby. Sounds like the android’s heading for Mrs Raleigh’s farm all right.” Henderson then shouted at his son, “Now you git!” The door quickly closed … then opened just a sliver.

Benson lifted easily from the chunky cowhide upholstered barber’s chair. He took out the wad of one thousand dollars. Henderson’s eyes bulged a little. “Here’s your twenty dollars,” he said, pinching out a single 20-dollar bill from the wad. “Keep the change.”

“But there ain’t no change. You’ve paid twenty dollars on the nose.”

“Then reduce your prices, boy.”

Benson eased effortlessly to the shop door. He swivelled around before exiting, and flicked a cigarette at Henderson, who juggled it into his hands and pocketed it. “There. Don’t ever say Benson doesn’t leave a tip.”

“Skinflint,” said Henderson, as he slid shut his till, twenty dollars fuller.

“Overcharging scorpion!” mumbled Benson under his breath as he ambled out through the open shop door.

Benson stepped down from the shop’s platform walkway and walked right out into the centre of the dirt track thoroughfare. He looked pleased to see that the drunk, Thompson, had gone.

Suddenly, a little girl came running out of the hardware store next to the barber’s shop. She was dressed in a cotton gingham dress with blue and white checks, and had matching blue ribbons in her blonde hair. She took to leaning on the handrail of the store’s raised side-street platform, and she had a happy expectant look on her face. She was eyeing Benson excitedly. Her little legs were jumping as if expecting something entertaining to happen. She was not to be disappointed …

Benson stood still in the middle of the road like a statue, his head bowed, his hands on his big silver buckle, and his hip jutting out with his legs crossed. His body seemed to be leaning slightly against an invisible post. This was Benson being Benson. The girl was jumping a bit faster now—there was obviously more to come.

Benson slowly raised his head and took in an enormous breath of fragrant summer fresh air. Then he lifted his right hand from his buckle and put his little and index fingers into his mouth and produced the loudest whistle humanly possible. It was as loud a sound as the earlier blaring train klaxon, only it was a higher pitched and had a definite calling quality.

The girl let go of the handrail, placed her hands on her ears and danced a merry jig. Benson then resumed his head-bowed position and scraped the ground with the point of his left boot, in long lazy arcs. He leaned into the air a little like a human Leaning Tower of Pisa. The girl was back on the handrail now, sharing her view between Benson and the west end of the High Street, to her right. Benson’s slant became even more obtuse, an almost impossible angle; as if his lopsided grin was counterbalancing him.

A thundering noise gathered in the distance. The girl was now looking steadily to her right to the west end of the High Street, where the growing sound seemed to be coming from …

Suddenly, out of a distant side street appeared an impressive milky-white stallion galloping in a cloud of dust, kicking up dirt and stones in its wake.

The animal took a sharp turn and charged down the High Street towards Benson. The girl was jumping up and down, giggling deliriously as if she were a stereotypical inbred. “Snowy! Snowy!” she cried, but her voice could hardly be heard above the horse’s thunder of hooves.

Snowy reached Benson and skidded to a halt, in an almost cartoon fashion. He stopped so that he was facing due east; Benson was close to his side, facing due west, the direction that leads to Mrs Raleigh’s farmhouse.

The little girl waited for the final act …

Benson suddenly swivelled a quarter turn so Snowy’s saddle was directly behind him. Benson could see the little girl in front of him and to his left. He winked at her with one of his special lopsided grins. The girl waved in appreciation. Then suddenly and amazingly, Benson leapt backwards, kicking his legs way high into the air, and he ended in a perfect sideways handstand on the saddle. Next, he lifted his right hand to reach for his cigarettes, leaving himself in a one-handed handstand. And he managed to flick a cigarette into his mouth. He then exchanged his pack of cigarettes for his li’l ol’ lighter and lighted up successfully. He tucked away his lighter, still in a one-handed handstand. Then he swivelled around a quarter of a turn on his one hand. He was now facing east, as was Snowy. Then he lowered himself down a touch on his bent load-bearing arm … before jack-knifing himself upwards and backward at great speed, springing upright while grabbing specially located long horse reins. He had now ended up standing on Snowy’s saddle facing due west, so that he was standing back-to-front with the reins held behind his back.

He then jumped and span around to face due east—a relatively easy move for him. “Turn Snowy, turn!” he shouted.

Snowy responded.

Finally, Benson was facing due west, albeit standing up on Snowy’s saddle, blowing a huge smoke ring. The little girl was excitedly applauding.

Benson then shouted: “Yeehaaww!” as he pulled a little on the reins.

Snowy responded instantly. He lifted his front legs, pedalling them into almost a blur, neighing loudly. Eventually Snowy stopped his pedalling and lowered his front legs down into the dirt, and he bucked back his back legs in one majestic kick. Then, at last, he hurtled off in a cloud of thunder with Benson standing upright and riding the horse as if he was riding a chariot. Of course, he had managed to wave to the little girl, who quickly disappeared back into the hardware store now that the show was over.