Cormac McCarthy - Cities of the Plain

Vete con Dios, she whispered.

Y toe.

She put her arms around him and held him against her breast and then she let him go and he rose and walked to the door. He turned and stood looking back at her.

Say my name, he said.

She reached and parted the canopy curtain. Mande? she said.

Di mi nombre.

She lay there holding the curtain. Tu nombre es Juan, she said.

Yes, he said. Then he pulled the door closed and went down the hall.

The salon was empty. It smelled of stale smoke and sweet ferment and the fading lilac rose and spice of the vanished whores. There was no one at the bar. In the gray light there were stains on the carpet, worn places on the arms of the furniture, cigarette burns. In the foyer he unlatched the painted half door and entered the little cloakroom and retrieved his hat. Then he opened the front door and walked out into the morning cold.

A landscape of low shacks of tin and cratewood here on the outskirts of the city. Barren dirt and gravel lots and beyond them the plains of sage and creosote. Roosters were calling and the air smelled of burning charcoal. He took his bearings by the gray light to the east and set out toward the city. In the cold dawn the lights were still burning out there under the dark cape of the mountains with that precious insularity common to cities of the desert. A man was coming down the road driving a donkey piled high with firewood. In the distance the churchbells had begun. The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of the claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transiencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.

THE OLD ONEEYED CRIADA was the first to reach her, trotting stoically down the hallway in her broken slippers and pushing open the door to find her bowed in the bed and raging as if some incubus were upon her. The old woman carried her keys tied by a thong to a short length of broomstick and she wrapped the stick with a quick turn of the bedclothes and forced it between the girl's teeth. The girl arched herself stiffly and the criada climbed up onto the bed and pinned her down and held her. A second woman had come to the doorway bearing a glass of water but she waved her away with a toss of her head.

Es como una mujer diab-lica, the woman said.

Vete, called the criada. No es diab-lica. Vete.

But the housewhores were gathering in the doorway and they began to push through into the room all of them in facecream and hairpapers and dressed in their varied nightwear and they gathered clamoring about the bed and one pushed forward with a statue of the Virgin and raised it above the bed and another took one of the girl's hands and commenced to tie it to the bedpost with the sash from her robe. The girl's mouth was bloody and some of the whores came forward and dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood as if to wipe it away but they hid the handkerchiefs on their persons to take away with them and the girl's mouth continued to bleed. They pulled her other arm free and tied it as well and some of them were chanting and some were blessing themselves and the girl bowed and thrashed and then went rigid and her eyes white. They'd brought little figures from their rooms and votive shrines of gilt and painted plaster and some were at lighting candles when the owner of the establishment appeared in the doorway in his shirtsleeves.

Eduardo! Eduardo! they cried. He strode into the room backhanding them away. He swept icons and candles to the floor and seized the old criada by one arm and flung her back.

Basta! he cried. Basta!

The whores huddled whimpering, clutching their robes about their rolling breasts. They retreated to the door. The criada alone stood her ground.

Por quZ est++s esperando? he hissed.

Her solitary eye blinked. She would not move.

He'd brought from somewhere in his clothes an Italian switchblade knife with black onyx handles and silver bolsters and he leaned and cut the sashes from the girl's wrists and seized the covers and pulled them up over her nakedness and folded the knife away as silently as it had appeared.

No la moleste, hissed the criada. No la moleste.

C++llate.

GolpZame si tienes que golpear a alguien.

He turned and seized the old woman by the hair and forced her to the door and shoved her into the hallway with the whores and shut the door behind her. He'd have latched it but those doors latched only from without. The old woman nevertheless did not enter again but stood outside calling that she needed her keys. He stood looking at the girl. The piece of broomstick had fallen from her mouth and lay on the bloodstained sheets. He picked it up and went to the door and opened it. The old woman shrank back and raised one arm but he only threw the keys rattling and clattering down the corridor and then slammed the door shut again.

She lay breathing quietly. There was a cloth lying on the bed and he picked it up and held it for a moment almost as if he might bend to wipe the blood from her mouth but then he flung it away also and turned and looked once more at the wreckage of the room and swore softly to himself and went out and shut the door behind him.

WARD BROUGHT THE STALLION out of the stall and started down the bay with it. The stallion stopped in the middle of the bay and stood trembling and took small steps as if the ground had got unsteady under its feet. Ward stood close to the stallion and talked to it and the stallion jerked its head up and down in a sort of frenzied agreement. They'd been through it all before but the stallion was no less crazy for that and Ward no less patient. He led the horse prancing past the stalls where the other horses circled and rolled their eyes.

John Grady was holding the mare by a twitch and when the stallion entered the paddock she tried to stand upright. She turned at the end of the rope and shot out one hindfoot and then she tried to stand again.

That is a pretty decent lookin mare, Ward said.

Yessir.

What happened to her eye?

Man that owned her knocked it out with a stick.

Ward led the walleyed stallion around the perimeter of the paddock. Knocked it out with a stick, he said.

Yessir.

He couldnt put it back though, could he?

No sir.

Easy, said Ward. Easy now. That's a sweet mare.

Yessir, said John Grady. She is.

He walked the stallion forward by fits and starts. The little mare rolled her good eye till it was white as the blind one. JC and another man had entered the paddock and closed the gate behind them. Ward turned and looked past them toward the paddock walls.

I aint tellin you all again, he called. You go on to the house like I told you.

Two teenage girls came out and started across the yard toward the house.

Where's Oren at? said Ward.

John Grady turned with the skittering mare. He was leaning all over her and trying to keep her from stepping on his feet.

He had to go to Alamogordo.

Hold her now, Ward said. Hold her.

The stallion stood, his great phallus swinging.

Hold her, said Ward.

I got her.

He knows where it's at.

The mare bucked and kicked one leg. On the third try the stallion mounted her, clambering, stamping his hindlegs, the great thighs quivering and the veins standing. John Grady stood holding all of this before him on a twisted tether like a child holding by a string some struggling and gasping chimera invoked by sorcery out of the void into the astonished dayworld. He held the twitchrope in one hand and laid his face against the sweating neck. He could hear the slow bellows of her lungs and feel the blood pumping. He could hear the slow dull beating of the heart within her like an engine deep in a ship.