Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West

Has he always been like that? said the judge.

Yessir. He was born that way.

He turned to go. Glanton emptied his cup and set it before him and looked up. Were you? he said. But the owner pushed open the door and vanished in the blinding light without.

The lieutenant came again in the evening. He and the judge sat together and the judge went over points of law with him. The lieutenant nodded, his lips pursed. The judge translated for him latin terms of jurisprudence. He cited cases civil and martial. He quoted Coke and Blackstone, Anaximander, Thales.

In the morning there was new trouble. A young Mexican girl had been abducted. Parts of her clothes were found torn and bloodied under the north wall, over which she could only have been thrown. In the desert were drag marks. A shoe. The father of the child knelt clutching a bloodstained rag to his chest and none could persuade him to rise and none to leave. That night fires were lit in the streets and a beef killed and Glanton and his men were host to a motley collection of citizens and soldiers and reduced indians or tontos as their brothers outside the gates would name them. A keg of whiskey was broached and soon men were reeling aimlessly through the smoke. A merchant of that town brought forth a litter of dogs one of whom had six legs and another two and a third with four eyes in its head. He offered these for sale to Glanton and Glanton warned the man away and threatened to shoot them.

The beef was stripped to the bones and the bones themselves carried off and vigas were dragged from the ruined buildings and piled onto the blazed By now many of Glanton's men were naked and lurching about and the judge soon had them dancing while he fiddled on a crude instrument he'd commandeered and the filthy hides of which they'd divested themselves smoked and stank and blackened in the flames and the red sparks rose like the souls of the small life they'd harbored.

By midnight the citizens had cleared out and there were armed and naked men pounding on doors demanding drink and women. In the early morning hours when the fires had burned to heaps of coals and a few sparks scampered in the wind down the cold clay streets feral dogs trotted around the cookfire snatching out the blackened scraps of meat and men lay huddled naked in the doorways clutching their elbows and snoring in the cold.

By noon they were abroad again, wandering red-eyed in the streets, fitted out for the most part in new shirts and breeches. They collected the remaining horses from the farrier and he stood them to a drink. He was a small sturdy man named Pacheco and he had for anvil an enormous iron meteorite shaped like a great molar and the judge on a wager lifted the thing and on a further wager lifted it over his head. Several men pushed forward to feel the iron and to rock it where it stood, nor did the judge lose this opportunity to ventilate himself upon the ferric nature of heavenly bodies and their powers and claims. Two lines were drawn in the dirt ten feet apart and a third round of wagers was laid, coins from half a dozen countries in both gold and silver and even a few boletas or notes of discounted script from the mines near Tubac. The judge seized that great slag wandered for what mille

XVII

Leaving Tucson — A new cooperage — An exchange — Saguaro forests — Clanton at the fire — Garcia's command — The paraselene — The godfire — The expriest on astronomy — The judge on the extraterrestrial, on order, on teleology in the universe — A coin trick — Glanton's dog — Dead animals — The sands — A crucifixion — The judge on war — The priest does not say — Tierras quebradas, tierras desamparadas — The Tinajas Atlas — Un hueso de piedra — The Colorado — Argonauts — Yumas — The ferrymen — To the Yuma camp.

They rode out at dusk. The corporal in the gatehouse above the portal came out and called to them to halt but they did not. They rode twenty-one men and a dog and a little flatbed cart aboard which the idiot and his cage had been lashed as if for a sea journey. Lashed on behind the cage rode the whiskey keg they'd drained the night before. The keg had been dis­mantled and rebound by a man Glanton had appointed cooper pro-tern to the expedition and it now contained within it a flask made from a common sheep's stomach and holding perhaps three quarts of whiskey. This flask was fitted to the bung at the inside and the rest of the keg was filled with water. So provisioned they passed out through the gates and beyond the walls onto the prairie where it lay pulsing in the banded twilight. The little cart jostled and creaked and the idiot clutched at the bars of his cage and croaked hoarsely after the sun.

Glanton rode at the fore of the column in a new Ringgold saddle ironbound that he'd traded for and he wore a new hat which was black and became him. The recruits now five in number gri

They wont ride at night, said Brown.

The recruit looked back at the figures gathered about the keg in that scoured and darkening waste.

Why wont they? he said.

Brown spat. Because it's dark, he said.

They rode west from the town across the base of a small mountain through a dogtown strewn with old broken earthen­ware from a crockery furnace that once had been there. The keeper of the idiot rode downside of the trestled cage and the idiot clutched the poles and watched the land pass in silence.

They rode that night through forests of saguaro up into the hills to the west. The sky was all overcast and those fluted columns passing in the dark were like the ruins of vast temples ordered and grave and silent save for the soft cries of elf owls among them. The terrain was thick with cholla and clumps of it clung to the horses with spikes that would drive through a bootsole to the bones within and a wind came up through the hills and all night it sang with a wild viper sound through that countless reach of spines. They rode on and the land grew more spare and they reached the first of a series of jornadas where there would be no water at all and there they camped. That night Glanton stared long into the embers of the fire. All about him his men were sleeping but much was changed. So many gone, defected or dead. The Delawares all slain. He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and na­tions, whether it should cease. He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.