Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

The shill shrank in his grip, he cast a despairing look back over his shoulder toward the pitchman who stood waiting with his cane resting across the rostrum before him. All had turned to see the winner at the outermost reach of the lights. The woman by the wheel stood coquettishly, her forefinger twisted into the dimple in her cheek. The pitchman raised his cane and made with it a sweeping motion. Adelante, he cried. Que paso?

He pushed the shill from him and released his wrist but the shill far from being cast down only crept to his side and plucking with small motions of his fingers at his clothes began to whisper at his ear of the attractions of the spectacle within the caravan. The pitchman called out to him again. He said that everyone was waiting. But Billy had already turned to go and the pitchman called after him a last time and made some comment to the crowd which set them laughing and trying to see over their shoulders. The shill stood forlornly with the barata in his hands but the pitchman said that there would be no third assay with the wheel but rather the woman who turned the wheel would make a selection herself as to who should enter free. She smiled and scanned the faces with her painted eyes and pointed out a young boy at the forefront of the crowd but the pitchman said that he was too young and that it would not he permitted and the woman made a pout and said that all the same he was muy guapo and then she selected a brownskinned peon who stood stiffly before her in what may have been rented clothes and came down the steps and took him by the hand and the pitchman held up a roll of tickets in his fist and the men pressed forward to purchase them.

He walked out beyond the strung lights and crossed the field to where he'd left his horse and he paid the establero and led Nino clear of the other animals and mounted up. He looked back at the haze of the carnival lights burning in the crisp and smoky air and then rode out across the railtracks and took the road south out of Madera toward Temosachic.

A week later he rode again through Babicora in the early morning dark. Cool and quiet. No dogs. The hoofclop of the horses. The blue moonshadow of the horses and the rider passing slant along the street in a constant headlong falling. The road north had been freshly graded with a fresno and he rode along the selvedge through the soft dirt of the endspill. Dark junipers out on the plain islanded in the dawn. Dark cattle. A white sun rising.

He watered the horses at a grassy cienega where ancient cottonwoods stood in an elfin round and rolled himself into his soogan and slept. When he woke a man was sitting a horse watching him. He sat up. The man smiled. Te conozco, he said.

Billy reached and got his hat and put it on. Yeah, he said. And I know you.

Mande?

Donde esta su companero?

The man lifted one hand from the pommel in a vague gesture. Se murio, he said. Donde esta la muchacha?

Lo mismo.

The man smiled. He said that God's ways were strange ones.

Tiene razon.

Y su hermano'

No se. Muerto tambien, tal vez.

Tantos, said the man.

Billy looked toward where the horses were grazing. He'd been sleeping with his head on the mochila where his pistol was buckled away. The man's eyes followed his where they looked. He said for every man that death selects another is reprieved and he smiled in a conspiratorial manner. As one met with another of his kind. He leaned forward with his hands squared on the pommel of his saddle and spat.

Que piensa? he said.

Billy wasnt sure what it was that he was being asked. He said men die.

The man sat his horse and weighed this soberly. As if there might be some deeper substrate to this reflection with which he must reckon. He said that men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destinv. He said that moreover it could not be otherwise that men's ends are dictated at their birth and that they will seek their deaths in the face of every obstacle. He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was mire correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.

Que piensa usted? he said. Billy said that he had no opinion beyond the one he'd given. He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it. He said that while it was true that men shape their own lives it was also true that they could have no shape other for what then would that shape be?

Bien dicho, the man said. He looked across the country. He said that he could read men's thoughts. Billy didnt point out to him that he'd already asked him twice for his. He asked the man could he tell what he was thinking now but the man only said that their thoughts were one and the same. Then he said he harbored no grudge toward any man over a woman for they were only property afoot to be confiscated and that it was no more than a game and not to be taken seriously by real men. He said that he had no very high opinion of men who killed over whores. In any case, he said, the bitch was dead, the world rolled on.

He smiled again. He had something in his mouth and he rolled it to one side and sucked at his teeth and rolled it back. He touched his hat.

Bueno, he said. El camino espera.

He touched his hat again and roweled the horse and sawed it around until its eyes rolled and it squatted and stamped and then went trotting out through the trees and into the road where it soon disappeared from sight. Billy unbuckled the mochila and took out the pistol and thumbed open the gate and turned the cylinder and checked the chambers and then lowered the hammer with his thumb and sat for a long time listening and waiting.

On the fifteenth of May by the first newspaper he'd seen in seven weeks he rode again into Casas Grandes and stabled his horse and took a room at the Camino Recto Hotel. He rose in the morning and walked down the tiled hallway to the bath. When he came back he stood in the window where the morning light fell slant upon the raw cords in the worn carpet underfoot and listened to a girl singing in the garden below. She was sitting on a cloth of white canvas and piled on the canvas were nueces or pecans some bushels in quantity. She sat with a flat stone in the crook of her knees and she was breaking the pecans with a stone mano and as she worked she sang. Leaning forward with her dark hair veiled about her hands she worked and sang. She sang:

Pueblo de Bachiniva

Abril era el mes

Jinetes armados

Llegaron los seis

She crushed the hulls between the stones, she separated out the meats and dropped them in a jar at her side.

Si tenia miedo

No se le veia en su cara

Cuantos vayan llegando

El guerito les espera

Splitting out with her fineboned fingers the meat from the hulls, the delicate fissured hemispheres in which is writ we must believe each feature of the tree which bore them, each feature of the tree they'd come to bear. Then she sang the same two verses over. He buttoned his shirt and got his hat and went down the stairs and out into the courtyard. When she saw him coming across the cobbles she stopped singing. He touched his hat and wished her a good day. She looked up and smiled. She was a girl of perhaps sixteen. She was very beautiful. He asked her if she knew any more verses of the corrido which she sang but she did not. She said that it was an old corrido. She said that it was very sad and that at the end the guerito and his novia die in each other's arms for they have no more ammunition. She said that at the end the patron's men ride away and the people come from the town and carry the guerito and his novia to a secret place and bury them there and the little birds flew away but that she did not remember all the words and anyway she was embarrassed that he had been listening to her sing. He smiled. He told her that she had a pretty voice and she turned away and clucked her tongue.