The Judas Steer
Sheldon Lee Compton
Somewhere along the plain, a shimmer seizure-flashes the darkness.
***
Blue sky the bluest. Cloudless. The sky is blocked up over a typical expanse of western plain—a few stubborn but bare bushes, the occasional small boulder. The wind is blowing as evidenced by the lifting and twirling of sand and the slight dance of the dying bushes. And the wind can be heard, a low droning. The cowboy, Sam, is dressed in a poncho, black cowhide pants, and extremely worn boots. His pensive face sits above it like a worried sunset. That stunning blue sky squared up above him. He looks away for a long moment, unable to shake a deep, troubling notion that everything he sees is little more than a flash of small light in a vacuum of night unimaginable.
***
It was to have been one hard rush across the southern end and be done with it. Sell a hundred heads and move on, hopefully to that brighter tomorrow that takes up so much of poetry and vainglorious pursuits—the entitlement of white men through a deified destiny. Sam didn’t think in this way. Not of destiny and white or black or red or yellow. He thought in terms of success and failure. Whatever events along the way that might aid him or hinder him were beyond his control and beyond his attention.
As for the Judas steer, Sam may have asked for it, the betrayal. May have been too hard on the animal, all the animals. Too hard on himself, for that matter. But it itched him in a fierce way. More than a hundred head of top cattle went before him not more than a day ago. The Judas steer had been doing great. It always had. He had stopped to camp after the first five hours of the drive to eat and rest. After beans and jerky, he made a quick pallet from blankets and was asleep within minutes.
The rain woke him. The sky had gone gray while he slept and then finally opened up into a drizzle. By the time it woke him the drizzle had become a steady pour. The lonely sound rain makes across the plain kept him from realizing right away that the entirety of his herd was gone. Normally he would have taken notice to the shifting and kicking up of dust from the cattle, the low series of snorts rumbling through the herd that had been their typical mood for the past day, wary of some unseen threat. As it was, Sam only heard and felt the lonesome rain.
He gathered his blankets just as lightning split the full width of the sky. Nearly a half hour later he found an overhang just big enough for shelter. It was then he allowed himself to register what happened. The cattle were gone, led away, likely as the storm approached. To randomly pick a direction and start off in search was risky. He fumed beneath the overhang until the storm passed and continued on the path he would have taken with the herd.
***
Focus is on the Judas steer. It treads a full twenty feet in front of the herd that has chosen to follow it. Trusted it to lead. A close search of its eyes confesses nothing, only the enlarged pupil, dark as a shadow, the muddy sclera, as deep and hollow as a forgotten well. There is no motive in such a beast of burden. There is only forward motion, rest, or retreat.
If this image is blurred—blurred so that the background can become clear—the herd will be seen as not nearly so stoic. Their eyes are broken and groundward, their bodies so worn out to the point of quivering like reflected light. Everything about them spells followers, and so the Judas steer keeps forward motion.
There is only this and nothing more. No man riding along. Only this herd and this leader moving across an expanse of land so minimal it is barely perceptible apart from the empty blue sky. Forward motion until there’s reason for rest or retreat.
A final image held on the Judas steer’s eye now shows the pure focus of a clear determination.
***
Sam arrived at last to an establishment of two-story main street buildings called False Ford, a place traversable within minutes, one end to the other. Unlike most townships, there were no buildings painted yellow and others painted bright purple, used to guide travelers to the bars and whore houses. False Ford was all desert floor and mud and unvarnished, rough wood. He stopped at the first building and tied off his horse. The exhausted animal immediately crouched to lap from the water trough, making sounds like lungs flapping wet and worthless.
Sam pushed the door open and found that the first building was a kind of general store. Plow blades lined the wall to his left. Another was covered in stacks of bins full of fabric. Behind the counter sat four large glass bowls of various candies. He wanted someone to show themselves behind the counter, or from a back room. Anybody, really. He needed to say what had happened out loud, and hear what someone might say back to him.
When the owner did appear, Sam quickly realized there would be little or no conversation. The man was malformed in some way not immediately discernible. But it was clear the malformation was the worst in his features. There was a mouth, but it was twisted to such a degree that the man’s teeth peeked out at the corners of his lips. It was as if someone had pinned his smile right down the middle. This alone might not have prohibited the man from speaking, but the half-dollar sized hole in his neck certainly seemed to. Rather than greet Sam, the storekeep only offered a spat of grunts and swung his arm out to present the goods. Look, choose, and buy, the arm said.
***
Absolute silence. The kind of panoramic shot that widens the eyes exactly as the plains widen. From left of the perspective we see the Judas steer still out ahead of the herd. Somehow the total quiet informs that the herd is hundreds of miles from anything or anyone. They have been led so far astray as to have been lost to the world entirely.
From this distance the space between the Judas steer and the herd seems much less. In fact, it is now more than fifty feet ahead of the rest. Then at once the Judas steer stops. The view pans ahead to show a large slaughterhouse rising like a great, gray slab of concrete up from the desert floor.
A closer view shows the Judas steer has started to shimmer in the late evening light. The shimmer weakens, holds, and then weakens further. During this flashing of life and unlife the herd begins moving in one slow crawl to the slaughterhouse entrance. No more than a few seconds later, the Judas steer shimmers once more and is gone.
***
Any progress with more elaborate conversation with the storekeep had stopped. Instead, Sam roamed around the shop trying to kill a few minutes before leaving for the bar. The best remedy for putting this entire day behind him could absolutely be found at the bar. After passing the same hanging row of axe handles three times, he gave the keep an exaggerated goodbye wave and turned to leave. As he did, he heard a knocking behind him. He faced the keep again and the man rapped the counter once more, three times with a closed fist. Look, choose, buy, the fist said.
There was no reason not to, Sam thought, and heard his father rebuking him for bending so often to the whims of other people and their needs. He set his shoulders and nodded to the man. Beneath the counter, locked in a glass casing, were a line of pistols. He had never carried one on a drive, not even a solo drive. Only his rifle. He would have money freed up due to the setback and loss of a whole day hunting for his herd. There was enough in the budget for a decent pistol.
He motioned to the glass case and asked to see the pearl .45. The keep brought it out and flopped it onto the counter, and, for the first time, attempted something close to language. The noise startled Sam and he stepped back. It was mostly guttural, spit jostling from the corners where his teeth were exposed to spray across a sunbeam through the window. When Sam saw that he wasn’t going to stop soon, he told him that he’d take the .45 and ten full chamber rounds. Wherever the herd turned up, there was definitely the possibility of conflict. Likely someone had already laid claim to it and was driving west. Or else trying to sell now. He made no motion this time when leaving. His only thought was that he would be able to think better in a bar.
With drinks in hand and more than several already settling warmly in the middle of his belly, Sam watched the bar windows grow darker with twilight. There was little use in trying anything other than a night’s rest in False Ford and heading out in the morning in a fresh state. Had he been sober he would have balked at anyone suggesting staying the night when a herd was somewhere out there, driving to parts unknown. But he allowed himself to convince himself and did little to resist.
The bar had a lively mix of patrons. The usual fare, but also a traveling side show of some kind, three men and a tiny third man who recited poetry from a far corner, near the piano. In another section sat four women suited so regally in monarchical dresses Sam figured them for a type of European outfit of actresses likely traveling with a high-end theater troupe. The three men listening to the tiny third man argued about which poems and by which poet, only stopping long enough to order more rounds, and starting again. The little man looked more like a child, and Sam began feeling bad for him. By the time he started with shot glasses, he had worked up a simmering frustration at the spectacle. Treating a kid like that. They ought to be ashamed.
When the bartender brought him another shot of Mule Skinner blackberry bourbon, Sam nudged his arm. He asked who the group of men were, the ones ragging on the little guy. The bartender only shook his head, told him the last bartender who stuck his nose into people’s business was running the general store now, for far less pay and no chance for tips.
So he drank. And drank more. And the events of the past two days rolled in constant and painful motion inside his head. He recalled bowing his head for all those years while his father continued to preach, even as a sickness ate him away until there was nothing left. He prayed all during that time and there was nothing that ever came of it. If life was a gift, then God had made it too hard. Sam began to think that it wasn’t too much for people to ask for a leveling of peace. It was only right. But the absence of simple fairness—the way an entire herd could go missing when there was no reason for it to happen, the general lack of respect among his fellow man, a good father who spent his last years worshipping an imagined deity like an orphaned son—this absence of a sense of fairness weighted Sam down, tugged at his patience, and so he allowed his anger to fully bloom. He pushed away from the bar and began making his way to the small man and his tormentors. The troupe of actresses noticed him moving across the bar and collectively gasped. Sam, now drunk and unaware, trudged along with the .45 clutched in his hand. He stopped and fumbled to load the chambers. When he raised his head, the small man stood in front of him. Without a thought, and before his brain caught up with his actions, he sighted in and fired. The small man gave a single, long high-pitched squeal and fell over, pushing both hands into the red mess of his throat. The bullet had torn through his neck, and gouts of blood pulsed onto the sawdust door.
The scent of blood-copper and cordite, the sudden image of a man’s life shooting out from him in thick ropes to form puddles beside him froze Sam instantly. Still holding the .45, he became dimly aware of the men rushing him from the corner yet remained fixed in place, his panicked and debauched wet brain sending thousands of flee and survive signals for every second he stood immobile. This, and then suddenly his body caught up and he bolted from the bar. He turned left and made an immediate loop to the back of the bar and then burst into a full sprint into the darkness of the plain.
Sam sensed the Judas steer long before it appeared to him. He felt a pressure pushing back on him, slowing him down no matter how hard he pumped his legs. Despite this, he pushed forward for as long as he could until he might as well have been walking in quicksand. Before he was forced to stop, he looked behind him and was relieved to see no one followed closely. It seemed the men were gone.
When he turned to lean into the strange, thick pushback, to start again to escape, the Judas steer stood before him, its head lowered, eyes lost in the black sheet of nightfall. Only its outline and its breath smoking out into the chilled desert air. At the exact second he saw the Judas steer, a sensation of total obedience overcame him. When it began walking toward him and then passed him in its start at retracing his steps directly to a sure death, Sam knew no other thing to do but follow it like a ray of light bending to an unrelenting mass.
Sheldon Lee Compton
Somewhere along the plain, a shimmer seizure-flashes the darkness.
***
Blue sky the bluest. Cloudless. The sky is blocked up over a typical expanse of western plain—a few stubborn but bare bushes, the occasional small boulder. The wind is blowing as evidenced by the lifting and twirling of sand and the slight dance of the dying bushes. And the wind can be heard, a low droning. The cowboy, Sam, is dressed in a poncho, black cowhide pants, and extremely worn boots. His pensive face sits above it like a worried sunset. That stunning blue sky squared up above him. He looks away for a long moment, unable to shake a deep, troubling notion that everything he sees is little more than a flash of small light in a vacuum of night unimaginable.
***
It was to have been one hard rush across the southern end and be done with it. Sell a hundred heads and move on, hopefully to that brighter tomorrow that takes up so much of poetry and vainglorious pursuits—the entitlement of white men through a deified destiny. Sam didn’t think in this way. Not of destiny and white or black or red or yellow. He thought in terms of success and failure. Whatever events along the way that might aid him or hinder him were beyond his control and beyond his attention.
As for the Judas steer, Sam may have asked for it, the betrayal. May have been too hard on the animal, all the animals. Too hard on himself, for that matter. But it itched him in a fierce way. More than a hundred head of top cattle went before him not more than a day ago. The Judas steer had been doing great. It always had. He had stopped to camp after the first five hours of the drive to eat and rest. After beans and jerky, he made a quick pallet from blankets and was asleep within minutes.
The rain woke him. The sky had gone gray while he slept and then finally opened up into a drizzle. By the time it woke him the drizzle had become a steady pour. The lonely sound rain makes across the plain kept him from realizing right away that the entirety of his herd was gone. Normally he would have taken notice to the shifting and kicking up of dust from the cattle, the low series of snorts rumbling through the herd that had been their typical mood for the past day, wary of some unseen threat. As it was, Sam only heard and felt the lonesome rain.
He gathered his blankets just as lightning split the full width of the sky. Nearly a half hour later he found an overhang just big enough for shelter. It was then he allowed himself to register what happened. The cattle were gone, led away, likely as the storm approached. To randomly pick a direction and start off in search was risky. He fumed beneath the overhang until the storm passed and continued on the path he would have taken with the herd.
***
Focus is on the Judas steer. It treads a full twenty feet in front of the herd that has chosen to follow it. Trusted it to lead. A close search of its eyes confesses nothing, only the enlarged pupil, dark as a shadow, the muddy sclera, as deep and hollow as a forgotten well. There is no motive in such a beast of burden. There is only forward motion, rest, or retreat.
If this image is blurred—blurred so that the background can become clear—the herd will be seen as not nearly so stoic. Their eyes are broken and groundward, their bodies so worn out to the point of quivering like reflected light. Everything about them spells followers, and so the Judas steer keeps forward motion.
There is only this and nothing more. No man riding along. Only this herd and this leader moving across an expanse of land so minimal it is barely perceptible apart from the empty blue sky. Forward motion until there’s reason for rest or retreat.
A final image held on the Judas steer’s eye now shows the pure focus of a clear determination.
***
Sam arrived at last to an establishment of two-story main street buildings called False Ford, a place traversable within minutes, one end to the other. Unlike most townships, there were no buildings painted yellow and others painted bright purple, used to guide travelers to the bars and whore houses. False Ford was all desert floor and mud and unvarnished, rough wood. He stopped at the first building and tied off his horse. The exhausted animal immediately crouched to lap from the water trough, making sounds like lungs flapping wet and worthless.
Sam pushed the door open and found that the first building was a kind of general store. Plow blades lined the wall to his left. Another was covered in stacks of bins full of fabric. Behind the counter sat four large glass bowls of various candies. He wanted someone to show themselves behind the counter, or from a back room. Anybody, really. He needed to say what had happened out loud, and hear what someone might say back to him.
When the owner did appear, Sam quickly realized there would be little or no conversation. The man was malformed in some way not immediately discernible. But it was clear the malformation was the worst in his features. There was a mouth, but it was twisted to such a degree that the man’s teeth peeked out at the corners of his lips. It was as if someone had pinned his smile right down the middle. This alone might not have prohibited the man from speaking, but the half-dollar sized hole in his neck certainly seemed to. Rather than greet Sam, the storekeep only offered a spat of grunts and swung his arm out to present the goods. Look, choose, and buy, the arm said.
***
Absolute silence. The kind of panoramic shot that widens the eyes exactly as the plains widen. From left of the perspective we see the Judas steer still out ahead of the herd. Somehow the total quiet informs that the herd is hundreds of miles from anything or anyone. They have been led so far astray as to have been lost to the world entirely.
From this distance the space between the Judas steer and the herd seems much less. In fact, it is now more than fifty feet ahead of the rest. Then at once the Judas steer stops. The view pans ahead to show a large slaughterhouse rising like a great, gray slab of concrete up from the desert floor.
A closer view shows the Judas steer has started to shimmer in the late evening light. The shimmer weakens, holds, and then weakens further. During this flashing of life and unlife the herd begins moving in one slow crawl to the slaughterhouse entrance. No more than a few seconds later, the Judas steer shimmers once more and is gone.
***
Any progress with more elaborate conversation with the storekeep had stopped. Instead, Sam roamed around the shop trying to kill a few minutes before leaving for the bar. The best remedy for putting this entire day behind him could absolutely be found at the bar. After passing the same hanging row of axe handles three times, he gave the keep an exaggerated goodbye wave and turned to leave. As he did, he heard a knocking behind him. He faced the keep again and the man rapped the counter once more, three times with a closed fist. Look, choose, buy, the fist said.
There was no reason not to, Sam thought, and heard his father rebuking him for bending so often to the whims of other people and their needs. He set his shoulders and nodded to the man. Beneath the counter, locked in a glass casing, were a line of pistols. He had never carried one on a drive, not even a solo drive. Only his rifle. He would have money freed up due to the setback and loss of a whole day hunting for his herd. There was enough in the budget for a decent pistol.
He motioned to the glass case and asked to see the pearl .45. The keep brought it out and flopped it onto the counter, and, for the first time, attempted something close to language. The noise startled Sam and he stepped back. It was mostly guttural, spit jostling from the corners where his teeth were exposed to spray across a sunbeam through the window. When Sam saw that he wasn’t going to stop soon, he told him that he’d take the .45 and ten full chamber rounds. Wherever the herd turned up, there was definitely the possibility of conflict. Likely someone had already laid claim to it and was driving west. Or else trying to sell now. He made no motion this time when leaving. His only thought was that he would be able to think better in a bar.
With drinks in hand and more than several already settling warmly in the middle of his belly, Sam watched the bar windows grow darker with twilight. There was little use in trying anything other than a night’s rest in False Ford and heading out in the morning in a fresh state. Had he been sober he would have balked at anyone suggesting staying the night when a herd was somewhere out there, driving to parts unknown. But he allowed himself to convince himself and did little to resist.
The bar had a lively mix of patrons. The usual fare, but also a traveling side show of some kind, three men and a tiny third man who recited poetry from a far corner, near the piano. In another section sat four women suited so regally in monarchical dresses Sam figured them for a type of European outfit of actresses likely traveling with a high-end theater troupe. The three men listening to the tiny third man argued about which poems and by which poet, only stopping long enough to order more rounds, and starting again. The little man looked more like a child, and Sam began feeling bad for him. By the time he started with shot glasses, he had worked up a simmering frustration at the spectacle. Treating a kid like that. They ought to be ashamed.
When the bartender brought him another shot of Mule Skinner blackberry bourbon, Sam nudged his arm. He asked who the group of men were, the ones ragging on the little guy. The bartender only shook his head, told him the last bartender who stuck his nose into people’s business was running the general store now, for far less pay and no chance for tips.
So he drank. And drank more. And the events of the past two days rolled in constant and painful motion inside his head. He recalled bowing his head for all those years while his father continued to preach, even as a sickness ate him away until there was nothing left. He prayed all during that time and there was nothing that ever came of it. If life was a gift, then God had made it too hard. Sam began to think that it wasn’t too much for people to ask for a leveling of peace. It was only right. But the absence of simple fairness—the way an entire herd could go missing when there was no reason for it to happen, the general lack of respect among his fellow man, a good father who spent his last years worshipping an imagined deity like an orphaned son—this absence of a sense of fairness weighted Sam down, tugged at his patience, and so he allowed his anger to fully bloom. He pushed away from the bar and began making his way to the small man and his tormentors. The troupe of actresses noticed him moving across the bar and collectively gasped. Sam, now drunk and unaware, trudged along with the .45 clutched in his hand. He stopped and fumbled to load the chambers. When he raised his head, the small man stood in front of him. Without a thought, and before his brain caught up with his actions, he sighted in and fired. The small man gave a single, long high-pitched squeal and fell over, pushing both hands into the red mess of his throat. The bullet had torn through his neck, and gouts of blood pulsed onto the sawdust door.
The scent of blood-copper and cordite, the sudden image of a man’s life shooting out from him in thick ropes to form puddles beside him froze Sam instantly. Still holding the .45, he became dimly aware of the men rushing him from the corner yet remained fixed in place, his panicked and debauched wet brain sending thousands of flee and survive signals for every second he stood immobile. This, and then suddenly his body caught up and he bolted from the bar. He turned left and made an immediate loop to the back of the bar and then burst into a full sprint into the darkness of the plain.
Sam sensed the Judas steer long before it appeared to him. He felt a pressure pushing back on him, slowing him down no matter how hard he pumped his legs. Despite this, he pushed forward for as long as he could until he might as well have been walking in quicksand. Before he was forced to stop, he looked behind him and was relieved to see no one followed closely. It seemed the men were gone.
When he turned to lean into the strange, thick pushback, to start again to escape, the Judas steer stood before him, its head lowered, eyes lost in the black sheet of nightfall. Only its outline and its breath smoking out into the chilled desert air. At the exact second he saw the Judas steer, a sensation of total obedience overcame him. When it began walking toward him and then passed him in its start at retracing his steps directly to a sure death, Sam knew no other thing to do but follow it like a ray of light bending to an unrelenting mass.