The place called Sodom was bad enough. But right downthe road was the other town—and that was evenworse!
Sodom
and
Gomorrah,
Texas
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 ta