The Biology of Hate

The Biology of Hate

  …  by Bill Gadbow  …

Cowboy Pesto liked to hit the sauce. He didn’t drink. He used empty salsa bottles for target practice.
Sheriff Jalapeno Ortega stared at Cowboy Pesto, who was standing in front of the post office attempting to read a letter. “I hate Pesto,” Ortega growled.
The deputy responded, “Me too, boss. I prefer a nice marinara. Or a meat sauce.” The deputy had taken a cooking class and had been attempting to impress his fiancé with his sense of style. The sheriff wasn’t buying it.
“No, you idiot. Him.” The sheriff glowered at the deputy and pointed his gun down the street at Cowboy Pesto.

**********************************

Marilyn stopped the book on tape to look up the meaning of the word “glowered”.
“It means to have an angry or sullen look on one’s face, or to scowl. He could have just said ‘glared’. That would have been better I think.”
Sean said, “I thought that we were listening to this to better understand the roots of American culture, as demonstrated by tales of the Old West. Or are we supposed to be doing a literary analysis?”
Marilyn restarted the tape.

**********************************

“Go down there and see what he’s doing,” Ortega ordered his deputy.
“Sure, boss.”
The deputy began a slow walk down the wooden sidewalk of the one street town. The deputy was a slow walker, but Pesto was an even slower reader. When the deputy finally got close enough to Pesto to say “Howdy”, Pesto was still staring at the paper.
“Want some help with that?” Pesto’s friend, Pedro los Dias, came out of the post office and looked over Pesto’s shoulder.
“Pesto, you dog.” Pedro slapped Pesto on the shoulder. “You’re getting married. On Sunday. Why didn’t you say something? You didn’t give us much time to plan a celebration.”
Pesto looked over at his friend and smiled.
“What’s she like? How did you meet her? It says here that she’ll be here on Saturday night. Is she pretty? Do you love her? Of course, you do.”
Pesto said to his friend, “Mail order.”
“Have you got a picture?”
Pesto reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. On it was a drawing of a woman wearing a low-cut dress that billowed out around her legs. Her hair was piled up high, tied with ribbons. There was a tobacco stain on part of her face, but the drawing made her out to be young and decent looking.
Pedro pulled out his gun and fired it in the air. “My friend is getting married!” he yelled.
The deputy turned around and walked back to the sheriff.
The deputy said, “He’s getting married.”

**********************************

It was a warm starlit night on the prairie. Cowboy Pesto was playing guitar on the steps of his ranch house. Pedro sat next to him whittling a piece of wood. The ranch hands were sitting on the steps and leaning on the porch rails. Cowboy Pesto began to sing:
“With his horse and his cattle and his lucky sombrero
The lonely young cowboy road crost the range
He thought of his true love back in Laredo
The tear on his cheek, he thought it was strange.”
Pesto stopped strumming his guitar. From out in the darkness, the long moo of a steer sounded softly in the night. Pedro spat on the floorboards of Pesto’s porch. He said, “It’s a dark night out there.” Which was perfect for what Sheriff Ortega was planning.
Ortega had hated Pesto for as long as he could remember. His father had been a sheep man and Pesto’s father had been a cattle man, so it was natural that they would hate each other. But it went farther back than that. Ortega’s family had been in the West for so long that they could not even remember the name of the first Ortega who had come to steal land from the Indians. His last name had probably been Ortega, but they didn’t even know that for sure. The sheriff understood the need to steal land. He didn’t really hate the Americans for moving in and trying to steal the Ortega land. He hated them for being successful at it.
While Pesto was singing at the ranch house, Ortega was cutting barb wire out in the darkness. By morning, most of Pesto’s cattle would be roaming across the prairie. Pesto would get a lot of them back, but he wouldn’t get them all back. And that would take days and all his manpower. While Pesto and his ranch hands were away from the ranch searching for their lost cattle, the sheriff had additional plans. He was going to salt the vegetable garden and burn down the ranch house.
The sheriff cut another strand of the fence and the wire snapped back and whipped against the fence post. A steer was startled by the noise and let out a loud bleat.
“Shut up, you dumb cow,” the sheriff hissed.
The guitar playing from the ranch house stopped. The sheriff froze, listening. After a few minutes, the faint sound of the guitar began again.
“Bastard,” the sheriff growled.

**********************************

Marilyn stopped the tape.
“Why would he want to salt the vegetable garden? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?” she asked.
Sean didn’t get it either.
They texted Bungle Boy who responded that the sheriff wasn’t intending to salt the vegetables. He was going to spread salt over the ground, which would make the dirt unusable for growing anything. It was definitely a bad thing.
Marilyn restarted the tape.

**********************************

Pesto rode into town the following morning. Pedro was with him. Pesto tied up his horse and walked to the center of the street in front of the jailhouse. The deputy was sleeping outside the jailhouse with his chair tipped back against the wall and his feet on a large piece of wood.
“Ortega,” Pesto yelled. “Come out. I know it was you.”
Sheriff Ortega came out of his office. He stepped into the street and pulled his jacket away from his gun.
“You don’t know shit.” The sheriff’s voice was low and cold and mean.
Although the sheriff hadn’t spoken loudly, something about his voice woke up the sleeping deputy. The deputy’s boots slammed down hard on the wooden sidewalk. At the noise the startled sheriff drew and fired. His bullet hit Pesto in the leg and threw Pesto to the ground. The sheriff stood his ground and took careful aim at Pesto. Before the sheriff could fire at the helpless cowboy, Pedro drew his gun and shot Ortega dead. The deputy was now awake enough to draw his gun and aim at Pedro, but Pesto, lying in the dirt of the street, pulled out his gun and shot the deputy.
Pedro ran to his fallen friend and helped him up.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” he yelled at Pesto. “We can ride back to the ranch, get the bullet out of your leg, then we need to ride for Mexico.”
“You can go,” Pesto said. “I’m staying.”
“You can’t stay here,” Pedro said. He made a sweeping gesture at the two dead lawmen.
“I’m getting married on Sunday.”
“I don’t think you are.”
The townspeople, who had been hiding in the houses and shops, started to come back out into the street. Pesto sat down on the edge of the sidewalk. Pedro got on his horse and quickly rode away.

**********************************

Was that really necessary?” Marilyn asked.
Bungle Boy attempted to give the story some context. “This is a typically American story, but humans have been killing each other for their entire history. It’s very unusual in nature. Very few animals kill their own kind. Males fight each other over mates and sometimes one of them dies, but that is mostly an accident. The point wasn’t to kill the other male. The fighting was meant to just get him to go away. And when animals kill other species, that is almost always for food. The only animal that I can think of who kills for fun, besides humans, is cats. Amazing animals, cats. Very agile and tough.”
“Humans and cats do seem to like killing,” Sean commented.
Bungle Boy continued, “A lot of their killing is still one individual on another, like in the story, but in the last few hundred years, they have been learning warfare. They organize like ants and attack in a coordinated manner, killing thousands at a time. In the last century, with advanced weaponry, they have gotten their body counts into the hundreds of thousands and in a few cases up into the millions. And it isn’t just guns and bombs. They have used starvation, disease, gas attacks, and deliberate environmental destruction to kill whole populations. They call that genocide.”
Marilyn and Sean were aware of these activities. They had been around a lot longer than Bungle Boy had been. Sean said, “We know. But what we don’t really get is why the killing persists. It seems like the tendency to kill one’s own species would have negative biological implications. The individuals who like to kill should be less likely to survive to pass on their genetic tendencies. So, the desire to kill should either be bred out of the species, or the species should fail and go extinct.
“Precisely what I was thinking,” Bungle Boy responded. “Homo sapiens is only thirty or forty thousand years old. It is a very new species. It hasn’t really had an opportunity to hit that sweet spot in its evolution where a species stabilizes in harmony with its biospheres. Part of the problem is that humans keep impacting their own biospheres, requiring additional adaptation. Also, it is way too soon to know if homo sapiens will last long enough to stabilize.”

**********************************

On Saturday night, the town was full with every person from many miles around. They had all come to see the hanging of Cowboy Pesto. The gallows had been constructed in the usual spot in front of the jailhouse. The crowd filled the street on both sides of the gallows and stretched all the way back to the ends of the town. When the stagecoach arrived, it couldn’t get into town and discharged its passengers at the far edge of the crowd. A girl in a low-cut dress got out.
“It looks like you are a popular guy,” said the hanging judge. The judge looked out at the throng. “This is the biggest crowd that we’ve had for a hanging in years. My grocery store should do a pretty good business today. Thank you for that.”
“You’re welcome,” said Pesto politely.
“You aren’t being sarcastic, are you?” said the judge. “You don’t want your last words to be sarcastic, do you?”
“No sir. I wasn’t being sarcastic.”
“How’s that leg. I bet it hurts.”
“Yes. It hurts pretty bad.”
“Can you stand all right on it. It’s only for like a minute, but if you need help, I can get someone to get you something to lean on.”
“I can stand okay for a minute or two.”
“Good. Well then, let’s not keep you waiting. Any last words? I find that the people seem to like it when the convicted admits his guilt and says that he’s sorry. That usually makes the women cry.”
“I didn’t shoot the sheriff.”
“But you did shoot his deputy?”
“Yes. I shot the deputy.”
“Good enough,” the judge said, nodding to the executioner. The executioner pulled a lever and the floor dropped away under Pesto’s feet.
From far back in the street a woman’s voice carried above the crowd. “I love you, Cowboy Pesto,” she cried.