Cormac McCarthy - Cities of the Plain

I know it. You just hang on.

I think maybe I'm goin to need that sup of water.

You just hang on. I'll get it. I wont be a minute either.

He set the candlestub in its saucer of grease on the shelf and backed out and let the curtain fall. As he trotted out across the vacant lot he looked back. The square of yellow light that shone through the sacking looked like some haven of promise out there on the shore of the breaking world but his heart misgave him.

Midblock there was a small cafe just opening. The girl setting up the little tin tables started when she saw him there, wild and sleepless, the knees of his breeches red with blood where he'd knelt in the bloodsoaked mat.

Agua, he said. Necesito aqua.

She made her way to the counter without taking her eyes off him. She took down a tumbler and filled it from a bottle and set it on the counter and stepped back.

No hay un vaso m++s grande? he said.

She stared at him dumbly.

Dame dos, he said. Dos.

She got another glass and filled it and set it out. He put a dollar bill on the counter and took the glasses and left. It was gray dawn. The stars had dimmed out and the dark shapes of the mountains stood along the sky. He carried the glasses carefully one in each hand and crossed the street.

When he got to the packingcrate the candle was still burning and he took the glasses both in one hand and pushed back the sacking and crouched on his knees.

Here you go, bud, he said.

But he had already seen. He set the waterglasses slowly down. Bud, he said. Bud?

The boy lay with his face turned away from the light. His eyes were open. Billy called to him. As if he could not have gone far. Bud, he said. Bud? Aw goddamn. Bud?

Aint that pitiful, he said. Aint that the most goddamn pitiful thing? Aint it? Oh God. Bud. Oh goddamn.

When he had him gathered in his arms he rose and turned. Goddamn whores, he said. He was crying and the tears ran on his angry face and he called out to the broken day against them all and he called out to God to see what was before his eyes. Look at this, he called. Do you see? Do you see?

The Sabbath had passed and in the gray Monday dawn a procession of schoolchildren dressed in blue uniforms all alike were being led along the gritty walkway. The woman had stepped from the curb to take them across at the intersection when she saw the man coming up the street all dark with blood bearing in his arms the dead body of his friend. She held up her hand and the children stopped and huddled with their books at their breasts. He passed. They could not take their eyes from him. The dead boy in his arms hung with his head back and those partly opened eyes beheld nothing at all out of that passing landscape of street or wall or paling sky or the figures of the children who stood blessing themselves in the gray light. This man and his burden passed on forever out of that nameless crossroads and the woman stepped once more into the street and the children followed and all continued on to their appointed places which as some believe were chosen long ago even to the beginning of the world.

HE LEFT three days later, he and the dog. A cold and windy day. The pup shivering and whining until he took it up in the bow of the saddle with him. He'd settled up with Mac the evening before. Socorro would not look at him. She set his plate before him and he sat looking at it and then rose and walked down the hallway leaving it untouched on the table. It was still there when he went out through the kitchen again ten minutes later for the last time and she was still there at the stove, bearing on her forehead in ash the thumbprint of the priest placed there that morning to remind her of her mortality. As if she had any thought other. Mac paid him and he folded the money and put it in his shirtpocket and buttoned it. When are you leavin? In the mornin.

You dont have to go.

I dont have to do nothin but die. You wont change your mind?

No sir.

Well. Nothin's forever. Some things are.

Yeah. Some things are. I'm sorry Mr Mac.

I am too, Billy.

I should of looked after him better. We all should oPS

Yessir.

That cousin of his got here about a hour ago. Thatcher Cole.

Called from town. He said they finally got hold of his mother.

What did she have to say?

He didnt say. He said they hadnt heard from him in three years. What do you make of that?

I dont know.

I dont either.

Are you goin to San Angelo?

No. Maybe I ought to. But I aint.

Yessir. Well.

Let it go, son.

I'd like to. I think it's goin to be a while.

I think so too.

Yessir.

Mac nodded toward his blue and swollen hand. You dont think you ought to get somebody to look at that?

It's all right.

You've always got a job here. The army's goin to take this place, but we'll find somethin to do.

I appreciate that.

What time will you be leavin?

Early of the mornin.

You told Oren?

No sir. Not yet.

I reckon you'll see him at breakfast.

Yessir.

But he didnt. He rode out in the dark long before daylight and he rode the sun up and he rode it down again. In the oncoming years a terrible drought struck west Texas. He moved on. There was no work in that country anywhere. Pasture gates stood open and sand drifted in the roads and after a few years it was rare to see stock of any kind and he rode on. Days of the world. Years of the world. Till he was old.

In the spring of the second year of the new millennium he was living in the Gardner Hotel in El Paso Texas and working as an extra in a movie. When the work came to an end he stayed in his room. There was a television set in the lobby and men his age and younger sat in the lobby in the evening in the old chairs and watched the television but he cared little for it and the men had little to say to him or he to them. His money ran out. Three weeks later he was evicted. He'd long since sold his saddle and he set forth into the street with just his AWOL bag and his blanketroll.

There was a shoe repair place a few blocks up the street and he stopped in to see if he could get his boot fixed. The shoeman looked at it and shook his head. The sole was paper thin and the stitching had pulled through the leather. He took it to the rear and sewed it on his machine and returned and stood it on the counter. He wouldnt take any money for it. He said it wouldnt hold and it didnt.

A week later he was somewhere in central Arizona. A rain had come down from the north and the weather turned cool. He sat beneath a concrete overpass and watched the gusts of rain blowing across the fields. The overland trucks passed shrouded in rain with the clearance lights burning and the big wheels spinning like turbines. The eastwest traffic passed overhead with a muted rumble. He wrapped himself in his blanket and tried to sleep on the cold concrete but sleep was a long time coming. His bones hurt. He was seventyeight years old. The heart that should have killed him long ago by what the army's recruiting doctors had said still rattled on in his chest, no will of his. He pulled the blankets about him and after a while he did sleep.

In the night he dreamt of his sister dead seventy years and buried near Fort Summer. He saw her so clearly. Nothing had changed, nothing faded. She was walking slowly along the dirt road past the house. She wore the white dress her grandmother had sewn for her from sheeting and in her grandmother's hands the dress had taken on a shirred bodice and borders of tatting threaded with blue ribbon. That's what she wore. That and the straw hat she'd gotten for Easter. When she passed the house he knew that she would never enter there again nor would he see her ever again and in his sleep he called out to her but she did not turn or answer him but only passed on down that empty road in infinite sadness and infinite loss.