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

Arrest ye?

Toadvine didnt answer. He was sitting in the sand and he made a tripod of three fingers and stuck them in the sand before him and then he lifted and turned them and poked them in again so that there were six holes in the form of a star or a hexagon and then he rubbed them out again. He looked up.

You wouldnt think that a man would run plumb out of country out here, would ye?

The kid rose and slung the flask by its strap over his shoulder. His trouserleg was black with blood and the bloody stump of the shaft jutted from his thigh like a peg for hanging implements upon. He spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and he looked at Toadvine. It aint country you’ve run out of, he said. Then he made his way across the sink and up the bank. The judge followed him with his eyes and when the kid reached the sunlight at the top he turned and looked back and the judge was holding open the satchel between his naked thighs.

Five hundred dollars, he said. Powder and ball included.

The expriest was at the kid’s side. Do him, he hissed.

The kid took the pistol but the expriest clung to his arm whispering and when the kid pulled away he spoke aloud, such was his fear.

You’ll get no second chance lad. Do it. He is naked. He is unarmed. God’s blood, do you think you’ll best him any other way? Do it, lad. Do it for the love of God. Do it or I swear your life is forfeit.

The judge smiled, he tapped his temple. The priest, he said. The priest has been too long in the sun. Seven-fifty and that’s my best offer. It’s a seller’s market.

The kid put the pistol in his belt. Then with the expriest at his elbow importunate he circled the crater and they set out west across the pan. Toadvine climbed up and watched them. After a while there was nothing to see.

That day their way took them upon a vast mosaic pavement cobbled up from tiny blocks of jasper, carnelian, agate. A thousand acres wide where the wind sang in the groutless interstices. Traversing this ground toward the east riding one horse and leading another came David Brown. The horse he led was saddled and bridled and the kid stood with his thumbs in his belt and watched while he rode up and looked down at his old companions.

We heard you were in the juzgado, said Tobin.

I was, said Brown. I aint now. His eyes catalogued them in every part. He looked at the piece of arrowshaft protruding from the kid’s leg and he looked into the expriest’s eyes. Where’s your outfits? he said.

You’re lookin at them.

You fall out with Glanton?

Glanton’s dead.

Brown spat a dry white spot in that vast and broken plateland. He had a small stone in his mouth against the thirst and he shifted it with his jaw and looked at them. The Yumas, he said.

Aye, said the expriest.

All rubbed out?

Toadvine and the judge are at the well back yonder.

The judge, said Brown.

The horses stared bleakly at the crazed stone floor whereon they stood.

The rest gone under? Smith? Dorsey? The nigger?

All, said Tobin.

Brown looked east across the desert. How far to the well?

We left about an hour past daybreak.

Is he armed?

He is not.

He studied their faces. The priest dont lie, he said.

No one spoke. He sat fingering the scapular of dried ears. Then he turned the horse and rode on, leading the riderless animal behind. He rode watching back at them. Then he stopped again.

Did you see him dead? he called. Glanton?

I did, called the expriest. For he had so.

He rode on, turned slightly in the saddle, the rifle on his knee. He kept watch behind him on those pilgrims and they on him. When he was well diminished on the pan they turned and went on.

By noon the day following they had begun to come again upon abandoned gear from the caravans, cast shoes and pieces of harness and bones and the dried carcasses of mules with the alparejas still buckled about. They trod the faint arc of an ancient lake shore where broken shells lay like bits of pottery frail and ribbed among the sands and in the early evening they descended among a series of dunes and spoilbanks to Carrizo Creek, a seep that welled out of the stones and ran off down the desert and vanished again. Thousands of sheep had perished here and the travelers made their way among the yellowed bones and carcasses with their rags of tattered wool and they knelt among bones to drink. When the kid raised his dripping head from the water a rifleball dished his reflection from the pool and the echoes of the shot clattered about the bonestrewn slopes and clanged away in the desert and died.

He spun on his belly and clambered sideways, scanning the skyline. He saw the horses first, standing nose to nose in a notch among the dunes to the south. He saw the judge clad in the gusseted clothing of his recent associates. He was holding the mouth of the upright rifle in his fist and pouring powder from a flask down the bore. The imbecile, naked save for a hat, squatted in the sands at his feet.

The kid scuttled to a low place in the ground and lay flat with the pistol in his fist and the creek trickling past his elbow. He turned to look for the expriest but he could not find him. He could see through the lattice of bones the judge and his charge on the hill in the sun and he raised the pistol and rested it in the saddle of a rancid pelvis and fired. He saw the sand jump on the slope behind the judge and the judge leveled the rifle and fired and the rifleball whacked through the bones and the shots rolled away over the dunelands.

The kid lay with his heart hammering in the sand. He thumbed back the hammer again and raised his head. The idiot sat as before and the judge was trudging sedately along the skyline looking over the windrowed bones below him for an advantage. The kid began to move again. He moved into the creek on his belly and lay drinking, holding up the pistol and the powderflask and sucking at the water. Then he moved out the far side and down a trampled corridor through the sands where wolves had gone to and fro. Off to his left he thought he heard the expriest hiss at him and he could hear the creek and he lay listening. He set the hammer at halfcock and rotated the cylinder and recharged the empty chamber and capped the piece and raised up to look. The shallow ridge along which the judge had advanced was empty and the two horses were coming toward him across the sand to the south. He cocked the pistol and lay watching. They approached freely over the barren pitch, nudging the air with their heads, their tails whisking. Then he saw the idiot shambling along behind them like some dim neolithic herdsman. To his right he saw the judge appear from the dunes and reconnoitre and drop from sight again. The horses continued on and there was a scrabbling behind him and when the kid turned the expriest was in the corridor hissing at him.

Shoot him, he called.

The kid spun about to look for the judge but the expriest called again in his hoarse whisper.

The fool. Shoot the fool.

He raised his pistol. The horses stepped one and the next through a break in the yellowed palings and the imbecile shambled after and disappeared. He looked back at Tobin but the expriest was gone. He moved along the corridor until he came to the creek again, already slightly roiled from the drinking horses above him. His leg had begun to bleed and he lay soaking it in the cold water and he drank and palmed water over the back of his neck. The marblings of blood that swung from his thigh were like thin red leeches in the current. He looked at the sun.

Hello called the judge, his voice off to the west. As if there were new riders to the creek and he addressed them.

The kid lay listening. There were no new riders. After a while the judge called out again. Come out, he called. There’s plenty of water for everybody.