Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

Go get Boyd',

Yessir.

Boyd aint goin nowhere.

If I am he is.

Boyd's a juvenile. They aint goin to turn him over to you. Hell. You're a juvenile yourself.

I aint askin.

Son, dont get crosswise of the law over this.

I dont intend to. I dont intend for it to get crosswise of me neither.

He took his hat off his knee and held it briefly in both hands and then stood. I thank you for the papers, he said.

The sheriff put his hands on the arms of his chair as if he might be going to rise but he didnt. What about the descriptions on them horses? he said. You want to write them out for me?

What would be the use in it?

You didnt learn no manners down there while you was gone, did you?

No sir. I guess not. I learned some things but they sure wasnt manners.

The sheriff nodded toward the window. Is that your horse out there?

Yessir.

I see that scabbard boot. Where's the rifle at?

I traded it.

What did you trade it for?

I dont think I could say.

You mean you wont say.

No Sir. I mean I aint sure I could put a name to it.

When he walked out into the sun and untied the horse from the parking meter people passing in the street turned to look at him. Something in off the wild mesas, something out of the past. Ragged, dirty, hungry in eye and belly. Totally unspoken for. In that outlandish figure they beheld what they envied most and what they most reviled. If their hearts went out to him it was yet true that for very small cause they might also have killed him.

THE HOUSE where his brother was staying was out on the east side of town. A small stucco house with a fenced yard and a front porch. He tied Bird at the fence and pushed open the gate and started up the walk. The dog came around the corner of the house and bared its teeth at him and raised its hackles.

It's me, numbnuts, he said.

When it heard his voice it flattened its ears and began to squirm across the yard toward him. It hadnt barked and it didnt whine.

Hello the house, he called.

The dog twisted itself against him. Git away, he said.

He called the house again and then went up on the porch and knocked at the front door and stood. No one came. He walked around to the back. When he tried the kitchen door it was unlocked and he pushed it open and looked in. It's Billy Parham, he called.

He entered and shut the door. Hello, he called. He walked through the kitchen and stood in the hallway. He was about to call again when the kitchen door opened behind him. He turned and Boyd was standing there. He stood with a steel pail in one hand and his other hand on the doorknob. He was taller. He leaned against the jamb.

I reckon you thought I was dead, Billy said.

If I'd of thought you was dead I wouldnt be here.

He shut the door and set the pail on the kitchen table. He looked at Billy and he looked out the window. When Billy spoke to him again his brother wouldnt look at him but Billy could see that his eyes were wet.

Are you ready to go? he said.

Yeah, said Boyd. Just waitin on you.

They took a shotgun from a closet in the bedroom and they took nineteen dollars in coins and small bills from a white china box in a bureau drawer and stuffed it all into an oldfashioned leather changepurse. They took the blanket off the bed and they found Billy a belt and some clothes and they took all the shotshells out of a Carhart coat hanging on the wall at the back door, one doubleaEU'ought buckshot and the rest number five and number seven shot, and they took a laundry bag and filled it with canned goods and bread and bacon and crackers and apples from the pantry and they walked out and tied the bag to the horn of the saddle and mounted up and rode out the little sandy street riding double with the dog trotting after them. A woman with clothespins in her mouth in a yard they passed nodded to them. They crossed the highway and they crossed the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railway and turned west. Come dark they were camped on the alkali flats fifteen miles west of Lordsburg before a fire made of fenceposts they'd dragged out of the ground with the horse. East and to the south there was water on the flats and two sandhill cranes stood tethered to their reflections out there in the last of the day's light like statues of such birds in some waste of a garden where calamity had swept all else away. All about them the dry cracked platelets of mud lay curing and the fencepost fire ran tattered in the wind and the balled papers from the groceries they opened loped away one by one downwind into the gathering dark.

They fed the horse on oatmeal they'd taken from the house and Billy skewered bacon along a length of fencewire and hung it to cook. He looked at Boyd where he sat with the shotgun across his lap.

You and Pap ever get your differences patched up?

Yeah. About half way.

Which half?

Boyd didn't answer.

What is that you're eatin?

A raisin sandwich.

Billy shook his head. He poured water from the canteen into a fruitcan and set it in the coals.

What happened to your saddle? Boyd said.

Billy looked at the saddle with the mutilated offside fender but he didnt answer.

They'll be huntin us, Boyd said.

Let em hunt.

How are we goin to pay em back for what all we took?

Billy looked up at him. Maybe you better just get used to the idea of bein a outlaw, he said.

Even a outlaw dont rob them that's took him in and befriended him.

How much of this are we goin to have to listen to?

Boyd didnt answer. They ate and unrolled their beds and turned in to sleep. The wind blew all night. It burned up the fire and burned up the coals of the fire and the balled and twisted shape of redhot wire burned briefly like the incandescent armature of an enormous heart in the night's darkness and then faded to black and the wind blew the coals to ash and blew the ash away and scoured the clay where coals and ash had been till other than the blackened wire there was no trace of fire at all and all night things passed in the dark that had of themselves no articulation yet had a destination for that.

Are you awake? Billy said.

Yeah.

What did you tell em?

Nothin.

Why?

What would be the use in it?

The wind blew. The migrant sands seethed past.

Billy?

What?

They knew my name.

Knew your name?

They called for me. Called Boyd. Boyd.

It dont mean nothin.

Go to sleep.

Like we was friends.

Go to sleep.

Billy?

What?

You dont have to try and make it better than what it is.

Billy didnt answer.

It is what it is.

I know it. Go to sleep.

In the morning they sat eating and they watched across the flats where something was articulating in the sunrise far out on the steelcolored clay of the playa. After a while they could see that it was a rider. He was perhaps a mile out and he approached in a series of thin and trembling images which in those places where the footground was flooded would suddenly augment in their length and then shrivel and draw up again so that the rider appeared to advance and recede and advance again. The sun rose into the red reefs of cloud along the eastern shore and the rider came on, crossing a lake ten miles wide and three inches deep. Billy got up and got the shotgun and came back and put it under the blanket and sat again.

The horse was either the color of the terrain or was stained so by it. The rider advanced over the shallow standing water and the water displaced under the hooves of the horse brightened in the light and vanished instantly like lead dishing in a vat. He rode off of the lake and threaded a path along the sandy soda shore through the sparse tussocks of grass until he sat the claycolored horse before them and looked down at them from under the shade of his hat. He didnt speak. He looked at them and he looked back across the playa and leaned and spat and looked at them again. You aint who I thought you was, he said.