Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

Billy knew afterward that he had seen the actual riflebullet. That the suck and whiff at his ear had been the bullet passing and that he had seen it for one frozen moment before his eyes with the sun on the side of the small revolving core of metal, the lead wiped bright by the rifling of the bore, slowed from having passed through his brother's body but still moving faster than sound and passing his left ear with the suck of the air like a whisper from the void and the small jar of the shockwave and then the bullet caroming off of a treebranch and singing away over the desert behind him that by a hairsbreadth had not carried his life away with it and then the sound of the shot come lagging after.

It rang out across the river lean and flat and echoed back from the desert. He was already running among the frantic and careening horses and he knelt and turned his brother over where he lay in the bloodstained dirt. Oh God, he said. Oh God.

He lifted his head out of the dust. His ragged shirt wet with blood. Boyd, he said. Boyd.

It hurts, Billy.

I know it.

It hurts.

The rifle cracked again from across the river. All of the horses had run out of the trees save Nino who stood stamping at the dropped reins. He turned toward the sound and raised one hand. No tire, he called. No tire. Nos rendimos. Nos rendimos aqui.

The rifle cracked again. He laid Boyd down and ran for the horse and caught the trailing reins just as the animal turned to quit the place. He hauled the horse around and trotted with it to where his brother lay and he stood on the reins while he picked his brother up and then he turned and pushed him up into the saddle and threw the reins over the horse's head and grabbed the pommel and swung up behind him and seized him around the waist where he sat tottering and leaned and dug his heels into Nino's belly.

Three more shots rang out as they came out of the trees and into the open country but by now he had put the horse into a gallop. His brother lolled against him all loose and bloody and he thought that he had died. He could see the other horses running on the plain before them. One of them had dropped back and appeared to be injured. The dog was nowhere in sight.

The horse he overtook was Bailey and he had been shot just above the rear hock and when they passed him he stopped altogether. When Billy looked back he was just standing there. As if the heart had gone out of him.

He overtook the other two horses in the length of perhaps a mile and they fell in behind. When he looked back he could see all five horsemen on the plain coming hard after him in a thin line of dust, some of them whipping over and under, all carrying their rifles held out at their side, all of it clear and stark in the new morning sun. When he looked ahead he saw nothing but grass and the sporadic palmilla that dotted the plain stretching away to the blue sierras. There was nowhere to run and nowhere to stand. He whacked Nino with the heels of his boots. Bird and the Tom horse were already beginning to fall back and he turned and called to them. When he looked ahead again he saw in the distance a small dark form crossing the landscape left to right in a trail of dust and he knew that there was a road there.

He leaned forward clutching his brother to him and he talked to Nino and dug in with his heels under the horse's flanks and they went pounding over the empty plain with the stirrups flapping and kicking out. When he looked back Bird and the Tom horse were still with him and he knew that Nino was tiring under the double riders he carried. He thought that the horsemen behind had dropped back some and then he saw that one of them had stopped and he saw the white puff of smoke from the rifle and heard the thin dead crack of it lost in the open space but that was all. Ahead the carrier on the road had vanished in the distance and left only a pale hovering of dust to mark its passage.

The road was raw dirt and as there was neither selvedge nor bar ditch to mark it he was in it before he knew it. He reined up skidding and hauled the gasping horse around. Bird was coming hard behind him and he tried to head him but then when he looked to the south he saw laboring towards him out of the emptiness an ancient flatbed truck carrying farmworkers. He forgot Bird and turned and put the horse south along the road toward the truck waving his hat.

The truck had no brakes and when the driver saw him he began to grind slowly down through the gears. The workers crowded forward along the bed looking down at the wounded boy.

Tomelo, he called to them. Tomelo. The horse stamped and rolled its eyes and a man reached and took the reins and halfhitched them about one of the stakes in the truckbed and other hands reached for the boy and some clambered down into the road to help lift him up. Blood was a condition of their lives and none asked what had befallen him or why. They called him el guerito and passed him up into the truck and wiped the blood from their hands on the front of their shirts. A lookout was standing with one hand on top of the cab watching the riders out on the plain.

Pronto, he called, pronto.

Vamonos, Billy shouted to the driver. He leaned and pulled the reins loose and hammered the truckdoor with the side of his fist. The men in the truck reached down their hands to help aboard those in the road and the driver put the truck in gear and they lurched forward. One of the men held out a bloodstained hand and Billy clasped it. They'd made a place for Boyd on the rough boards of the truckbed with shirts and serapes. He couldnt tell if he was alive or dead. The man gripped his hand. No to preocupes, he shouted.

Gracias, hombre. Es mi hermano.

Vamonos, the man shouted. The truck labored forward up the road in a low whine of gears. Out on the prairie the riders were already dividing, two of them cutting away to the north to follow the truck. The workers waved and whistled at him where he sat the horse in the road and they gestured with their hands in great circles over their heads to they gestured to him to go on. He'd already boosted himself forward into the saddle and found the stirrups and the blood was soaking cold through his trousers. He booted Nino forward. Bird was a mile ahead on the prairie. When he looked back the riders were less than a hundred yards out and he leaned along Nino's neck and called upon him to give his life.

He rode Bird down on the prairie but when he overtook him he had in his eye much the same look as the Bailey horse and he knew that he had lost him. He looked back at the riders and he called one last time to his old horse to give him heart and then he rode on. He heard again that distant flat report that a rifle makes over open ground and when he looked back one of the riders had dismounted and was kneeling beside his horse firing. He leaned low in the saddle and rode on. When he looked back again the two riders had diminished on the plain and when he looked one final time they were smaller yet and Bird was nowhere in sight. He never did see the Tom horse again.

Midmorning alone in that country he led the drenched and bottomed horse afoot up a cobbled arroyo. He talked to the horse and kept to the rocks and where the horse put a foot in the sand of the arroyo floor he dropped the reins and went back and repaired the mark with a whisk of grass. His trouserlegs were stiff with dried blood and he knew that both he and the horse were going to have to find water very soon.

He left the horse standing with the latigo loosed and climbed up and lay in the arroyo breaks and studied the country to the east and to the south. He saw nothing. He climbed back down and picked up the reins of the standing horse and took hold of the pommel of the saddle and he looked at the dark shape of the blood in the leather and he stood for a moment with the reins doubled in his fist and his forearm across the wet salt withers of his father's horse. Why couldnt the sons of bitches have shot me? he said.