Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

That night they camped at a warm spring atop a hill amid old traces of Spanish masonry and they stripped and descended like acolytes into the water while huge white leeches willowed away over the sands. When they rode out in the morning it was still dark. Lightning stood in ragged chains far to the south, silent, the staccato mountains bespoken blue and barren out of the void. Day broke upon a smoking reach of desert darkly clouded where the riders could count five separate storms spaced upon the shores of the round earth. They were riding in pure sand and the horses labored so hugely that the men were obliged to dismount and lead them, toiling up steep eskers where the wind blew the white pumice from the crests like the spume from sea swells and the sand was scalloped and fraily shaped and nothing else was there save random polished bones. They were all day among the dunes and in the evening coming down from the last low sandhills to the plain below among catclaw and crucifixion thorn they were a parched and haggard lot man and beast. Harpie eagles flew up screaming from a dead mule and wheeled off westward into the sun as they led the horses out onto the plain.

Two nights later bivouacked in a pass in the mountains they could see the distant lights of the city below them. They crouched along a shale ridge in the leeward wall of the gap while the fire sawed in the wind and they watched the lamps winking in the blue floor of the night thirty miles away. The judge crossed before them in the dark. Sparks from the fire ran down the wind. He took his seat among the scrabbled plates of shale out there and so they sat like beings from an older age watching the distant lamps dim out one by one until the city on the plain had shrunk to a small core of light that might have been a burning tree or some solitary encampment of travelers or perhaps no ponderable fire at all.

As they rode out through the tall wooden gates of the governor’s palace two soldiers who had been standing there counting them past stepped forward and took Toadvine’s horse by the headstall. Glanton passed him on the right and rode on. Toadvine stood in the saddle.

Glanton!

The riders clattered into the street. Glanton just beyond the gates looked back. The soldiers were speaking to Toadvine in Spanish and one held an escopeta on him.

I aint got nobody’s teeth, Glanton said.

I’ll shoot these two fools where they stand.

Glanton spat. He looked down the street and he looked at Toadvine. Then he dismounted and led his horse back into the courtyard. Vamonos, he said. He looked up at Toadvine. Get off your horse.

They rode out of town under escort two days later. Upward of a hundred soldiers herding them along the road, uneasy in their varied dress and arms, wrenching their horses about and booting them through the ford where the American horses had stopped to drink. In the foothills above the aqueduct they reined to one side and the Americans filed past and wound up through the rocks and nopal and diminished among the shadows and were gone.

They rode west into the mountains. They passed through small villages doffing their hats to folk whom they would murder before the month was out. Mud pueblos that lay like plague towns with the crops rotting in the fields and what stock not driven off by the indians wandering at will and none to herd or tend it and many villages almost wholly depopulated of male inhabitants where the women and children crouched in terror in their hovels listening until the last hoofclop died in the distance.

At the town of Nacori there was a cantina and here the company dismounted and crowded through the doorway and took tables. Tobin volunteered to guard the horses. He stood watching up and down the street. No one paid him any mind. These people had seen Americans in plenty, dusty laggard trains of them months out of their own country and half crazed with the enormity of their own presence in that immense and bloodslaked waste, commandeering meal and meat or indulging a latent taste for rape among the sloe-eyed girls of that country. Now it was something near to an hour past noon and a number of workers and tradesmen were crossing the street toward the cantina. As they passed Glanton’s horse Glanton’s dog rose up bristling. They veered slightly and went on. At the same moment a deputation of dogs of the village had started across the plaza, five, six of them, their eyes on Glanton’s dog. As they did so a juggler leading a funeral rounded the corner into the street and taking a rocket from among several under his arm he held it to the cigarillo in his mouth and tossed it into the plaza where it exploded. The pack of dogs shied and scrambled back save for two who continued into the street. Among the Mexican horses tethered at the bar before the cantina several shot out a hind leg and the rest stepped about nervously. Glanton’s dog did not take his eyes from the men moving toward the door. None of the American horses even raised an ear. The pair of dogs that had crossed in front of the funeral procession veered off from the kicking horses and came on toward the cantina. Two more rockets exploded in the street and now the rest of the procession had swung into view, a fiddler and a cornetplayer leading with a quick and lively tune. The dogs were trapped between the funeral and the animals of the mercenaries and they halted and flattened their ears and began to sidle and trot. Finally they bolted across the street behind the pallbearers. These details should have stood the workers entering the cantina in better stead. They had turned and they stood now with their backs to the door holding their hats to their chests. The pallbearers passed carrying on their shoulders a bier and the watchers could see in her burial dress among the flowers the graylooking face of a young woman jostling along woodenly. Behind came her coffin, made from rawhide blacked with lampblack, carried by dark-clad porters and looking much like a rude hide boat. At the rear advanced a company of mourners, some of the men drinking, the old women in their dusty black shawls helped weeping over the potholes and children bearing flowers who looked shyly at the spectators in the street as they passed.

Within the cantina the Americans had no more than seated themselves before a muttered insult from a nearby table brought three or four of them to their feet. The kid addressed the table in his wretched Spanish and demanded which among those sullen inebriates had spoken. Before any could own it the first of the funeral rockets exploded in the street as told and the entire company of Americans made for the door. A drunk at the table rose to his feet with a knife and lurched after them. His friends called after him but he waved them away.

John Dorsey and Henderson Smith, two boys from Missouri, were the first into the street. They were followed by Charlie Brown and the judge. The judge could see over their heads and he raised one hand to those behind him. The bier was just passing. The fiddler and the cornetist were making little bows to each other and their steps suggested the martial style of the air they played. It’s a funeral, said the judge. As he spoke the drunk with the knife now reeling in the doorway sank the blade deep into the back of a man named Grimley. None saw it but the judge. Grimley put a hand on the rough wood frame of the door. I’m killed, he said. The judge drew his belt pistol and leveled it above the heads of the men and shot the drunk through the middle of the forehead.

The Americans outside the door were all but looking down the barrel of the judge’s pistol when he fired and most of them dove to the ground. Dorsey rolled clear and got to his feet and collided with the workers who’d been paying their respects to the passing cortege. They were putting their hats on when the judge fired. The dead man fell backward into the cantina, blood spouting from his head. When Grimley turned they could see the wooden handle of the knife protruding from his bloody shirt.