Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

They rode all day. It was dark when they entered La Boquilla and he rode through the town as he had come with the shotgun upright before him. When they passed the spot where the manco had fallen she made the sign of the cross and kissed her fingers. Then they rode on. The sparse trunks of the painted alameda trees stood pale as bone in the light from the windows. Some windows of glass but mostly oiled butcherpaper tacked up in frames and behind them neither movement nor shadow but only those sallow squares like parchments or old barren maps long weathered of any trace of their terrains or routes upon them. On the outskirts of the settlement there was a fire burning just off the roadside and they slowed and rode past cautiously but the fire appeared to be only a trashfire and there was no one about and they rode on into the dark country to the west.

That night they camped in a swale at the edge of the lake and shared the last of the provisions she'd brought. When he asked her would she not have been afraid to ride through this country by herself at night she said that there was no remedy for it and that one must put oneself in the care of God.

He asked if God always looked after her and she studied the heart of the fire for a long time where the coals breathed bright and dull and bright again in the wind from the lake. At last she said that God looked after everything and that one could no more evade his care than evade his judgment. She said that even the wicked could not escape his love. He watched her. He said that he himself had no such idea of God and that he'd pretty much given up praying to Him and she nodded without taking her eyes from the fire and said that she knew that.

She took her blanket and went off down by the lake. He watched her go and then shucked off his boots and rolled his serape about him and fell into a troubled sleep. He woke sometime in the night or in the early morning and turned and looked at the fire to see how long he'd slept but the fire was all but cold on the ground. He looked to the east to see if there were any trace of dawn graying over the country but there was only the darkness and the stars. He prodded the ashes with a stick. The few red coals that turned up in the fire's black heart seemed secret and improbable. Like the eyes of things disturbed that had best been left alone. He rose and walked down to the lake with the serape about his shoulders and he looked at the stars in the lake. The wind had died and the water lay black and still. It lay like a hole in that high desert world down into which the stars were drowning. Something had woke him and he thought perhaps he'd heard riders on the road and that they'd seen his fire but there was no fire to see and then he thought perhaps the girl had risen and come to the fire and stood over him where he slept and he remembered tasting rain on his face but there was no rain nor had there been and then he remembered his dream. In the dream he was in another country that was not this country and the girl who knelt by him was not this girl. They knelt in the rain in a darkened city and he held his dying brother in his arms but he could not see his face and he could not say his name. Somewhere among the black and dripping streets a dog howled. That was all. He looked out at the lake where there was no wind but only the dark stillness and the stars and yet he felt a cold wind pass. He crouched in the sedge by the lake and he knew he feared the world to come for in it were already written certainties no man would wish for. He saw pass as in a slow tapestry unrolled images of things seen and unseen. He saw the shewolf dead in the mountains and the hawk's blood on the stone and he saw a glass hearse with black drapes pass in a street carried on poles by mozos. He saw the castaway bow floating on the cold waters of the Bavispe like a dead serpent and the solitary sexton in the ruins of the town where the terremoto had passed and the hermit in the broken transept of the church at Caborca. He saw rainwater dripping from a lightbulb screwed into the sheetiron wall of a warehouse. He saw a goat with golden horns tethered in a field of mud.

Lastly he saw his brother standing in a place where he could not reach him, windowed away in some world where he could never go. When he saw him there he knew that he had seen him so in dreams before and he knew that his brother would smile at him and he waited for him to do so, a smile which he had evoked and to which he could find no meaning to ascribe and he wondered if what at last he'd come to was that he could no longer tell that which had passed from all that was but a seeming. He must have knelt there a long time because the sky in the east did grow gray with dawn and the stars sank at last to ash in the paling lake and birds began to call from the far shore and the world to appear again once more.

They rode out early with nothing to eat save the last few tortillas dried and hardening at the edges. She rode behind him and they did not speak and in this manner they rode at noon across the wooden river bridge and into Las Varas.

There were few people about. They bought beans and tortillas at a small tienda and they bought four tamales from an old woman who sold them in the street out of a steel oildrum sashed up in a wooden frame with castiron wheels from off an orecart. The girl paid the woman and they sat in a stack of pinon firewood behind a store and ate in silence. The tamales smelled and tasted of charcoal. While they were eating a man approached them and smiled and nodded. Billy looked at the girl, she looked at him. He looked at the horse and at the stock of the shotgun jutting from the boot under the saddle.

No me recuerdas, the man said.

Billy looked at him again. He looked at his boots. It was the arriero last seen on the steps of the opera caravan in the roadside grove south of San Diego.

Le conozco, Billy said. Como le va?

Bien. He looked at the girl. Donde esta su hermano?

Ya esta en San Diego.

The arriero nodded sagely. As if he understood some situation.

Donde esta la caravana? said Billy.

He said he did not know. He said that they had waited by the side of the road but that no one had ever returned.

Como no?

The arriero shrugged. He made a chopping motion with the heel of his hand out through the air. Se fue, he said.

Con el dinero.

Claro.

He said that they'd been left without resources or any means to travel. At the time of his own departure the duena had sold all the mules save one and bickering had broken out. When Billy asked what she would do he shrugged again. He looked away down the street. He looked at Billy. He asked him if he could spare him a few pesos so that he could get something to eat.

Billy said that he had no money but the girl had already risen and walked out to the horse and when she returned she gave the arriero some coins and he thanked her a number of times and bowed and touched his hat and put the coins in his pocket and wished them a good voyage and turned and went off down the street and disappeared into the sole cantina in that upland pueblo.

Pobrecito, the girl said.

Billy spat into the dry grass. He said that the arriero was probably lying and besides he was only a drunk and she should not have given him money. Then he got up and walked out to where the horses were standing and buckled the latigo and took up the reins and mounted up and rode out up through the town toward the railroad tracks and the road north without even looking back to see if she would follow.

In the three days' riding that took them to San Diego she spoke hardly at all. The last night she had wanted to keep riding on in the dark to reach the ejido but he would not. They camped on the river some miles south of Mata Ortiz and he built a fire of driftwood on a gravel bar in the river and she cooked the last of the dried beans and tortillas which was all the rations they'd had to eat since they left Las Varas. They ate seated across from each other while the fire burned down to a frail basket of coals and the moon rose in the east and overhead very high and very faint they could hear the calls of birds moving south and they could see them trail in slender cipherings across the deeply smoldering western rim and into the dusk and the darkness beyond.