Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

and Gomorrah, Texas, by
Raphael Aloysius Lafferty

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Title: Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas
Author: Raphael Aloysius Lafferty
Illustrator: Ritter
Release Date: October 24, 2007 [EBook #23161]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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AND GOMORRAH, TEXAS ***

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[Illustration]

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't
qualified. He couldn't read a map. He didn't know what a map was. He
only 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
not need a map. He knew it better than anyone else, certainly better
than any mapmaker. Besides, he was poor and needed the money.
They instructed him and sent him out. Or they thought that they had
instructed 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 in
your sector."
"Lots of them. Lobos, tejones, zorros, even people."
"Only the people, Manuel! Do not take the animals. How would you
write up 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 was
not his fault. The instructions are not clear. Nowhere in all the verbiage
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, a scrap of bald-headed and desolate mountains, steep but
not high, and so torrid in the afternoons that it was said that the old lava
sometimes began to writhe and flow again from the sun's heat alone.
In the center valley there were five thousand acres of slag and vitrified
rock from some forgotten old blast that had melted the hills and
destroyed their mantle, reducing all to a terrible flatness. This was

called Sodom. It was strewn with low-lying ghosts as of people and
objects, formed when the granite bubbled like water.
Away from the dead center the ravines were body-deep in chaparral,
and the hillsides stood gray-green with old cactus. The stunted trees
were lower than the giant bushes and yucca.
Manuel went with Mula, a round easy man and a sparse gaunt mule.
Mula was a mule, but there were other inhabitants of the Santa
Magdalena of a genus less certain.
Yet even about Mula there was an oddity in her ancestry. Her paternal
grandfather 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 father
was also a jack, a donkey. It could not be any other way."
Manuel often wondered about that, for he had raised the whole strain of
animals, and he remembered who had been with whom.
"A donkey! A jack! Two feet tall and with a beard and horns. I always
thought that he was a goat."
Manuel and Mula stopped at noon on Lost Soul Creek. There would be
no travel 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 their antecedents. He knew that there were only nine regular people
in the nine hundred square