Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West

He studied the recruit through the bars. Petit wiped his fore­head with his sleeve. Brown scooped the coins back into the poke and handed them out to him.

You think we caint trust one another? he said.

The boy stood holding the sack of coins uncertainly. He tried to push it back through the bars. Brown stepped away and held his hands up.

Dont be a fool, he hissed. What do you think I'd of give to have had such a chance at your age?

When Petit was gone he sat in the straw and looked at the thin metal plate of beans and the tortillas. After a while he ate. Outside it was raining again and he could hear riders passing in the mud of the street and soon it was dark.

They left two nights later. They had each a passable saddle-horse and a rifle and blanket and they had a mule that carried provisions of dried corn and beef and dates. They rode up into the dripping hills and in the first light Brown raised the rifle and shot the boy through the back of the head. The horse lurched forward and the boy toppled backward, the entire foreplate of his skull gone and the brains exposed. Brown halted his mount and got down and retrieved the sack of coins and took the boy's knife and took his rifle and his powderflask and his coat and he cut the ears from the boy's head and strung them onto his scapular and then he mounted up and rode on. The packmule followed and after a while so did the horse the boy had been riding.

When Webster and Toadvine rode into the camp at Yuma they had neither provisions nor the mules they'd left with. Glanton took five men and rode out at dusk leaving the judge in charge of the ferry. They reached San Diego in the dead of night and were directed to the alcalde's house. This man came to the door in nightshirt and stockingcap holding a candle before him. Glan­ton pushed him back into the parlor and sent his men on to the rear of the house from whence they heard directly a woman's screams and a few dull slaps and then silence.

The alcalde was a man in his sixties and he turned to go to his wife's aid and was struck down with a pistolbarrel. He stood up again holding his head. Glanton pushed him on to the rear room. He had in his hand a rope already fashioned into a noose and he turned the alcalde around and put the noose over his head and pulled it taut. The wife was sitting up in bed and at this she commenced to scream again. One of her eyes was swollen and closing rapidly and now one of the recruits hit her flush in the mouth and she fell over in the tousled bedding and put her hands over her head. Glanton held the candle aloft and directed one of the recruits to boost the other on his shoulders and the boy reached along the top of one of the vigas until he found a space and he fitted the end of the rope through and let it down and they hauled on it and raised the mute and strug­gling alcalde into the air. They'd not tied his hands and he groped wildly overhead for the rope and pulled himself up to save strangling and he kicked his feet and revolved slowly in the candlelight.

Valgame Dios, he gasped. Que quiere?

I want my money, said Glanton. I want my money and I want my packmules and I want David Brown.

Como? wheezed the old man.

Someone had lit a lamp. The old woman raised up and saw first the shadow and then the form of her husband dangling from the rope and she began to crawl across the bed toward him.

Digame, gasped the alcalde.

Someone reached to seize the wife but Glanton motioned him away and she staggered out of the bed and took hold of her hus­band about the knees to hold him up. She was sobbing and pray­ing for mercy to Glanton and to God impartially.

Glanton walked around to where he could see the man's face. I want my money, he said. My money and my mules and the man I sent out here. El hombre que tiene usted. Mi companero.

No no, gasped the hanged man. Biiscale. No man is here.

Where is he?

He is no here.

Yes he's here. In the juzgado.

No no. Madre de Jesus. No here. He is gone. Siete, ocho dias.

Where is the juzgado?

Como?

El juzgado. Donde esta?

The old woman turned loose with one arm long enough to point, her face pressed to the man's leg. Alia, she said. Alia.

Two men went out, one holding the stub of the candle and shielding the flame with his cupped hand before him. When they came back they reported the little dungeon in the building out back empty.

Glanton studied the alcalde. The old woman was visibly tot­tering. They'd halfhitched the rope about the tailpost of the bed and he loosed the rope and the alcalde and the wife collapsed into the floor.

They left them bound and gagged and rode out to visit the grocer. Three days later the alcalde and the grocer and the alcalde's wife were found tied and lying in their own excrement in an abandoned hut at the edge of the ocean eight miles south of the settlement. They'd been left a pan of water from which they drank like dogs and they had howled at the booming surf in that wayplace until they were mute as stones.

Glanton and his men were two days and nights in the streets crazed with liquor. The sergeant in charge of the small garrison of American troops confronted them in a drinking exchange on the evening of the second day and he and the three men with him were beaten senseless and stripped of their arms. At dawn when the soldiers kicked in the hostel door there was no one in the room.

Glanton returned to Yuma alone, his men gone to the gold fields. On that bonestrewn waste he encountered wretched par­cels of foot-travelers who called out to him and men dead where they'd fallen and men who would die and groups of folks clus­tered about a last wagon or cart shouting hoarsely at the mules or oxen and goading them on as if they bore in those frail caissons the covenant itself and these animals would die and the people with them and they called out to that lone horseman to warn him of the danger at the crossing and the horseman rode on all contrary to the tide of refugees like some storied hero toward what beast of war or plague or famine with what set to his re­lentless jaw.

When he reached Yuma he was drunk. Behind him on a string were two small jacks laden with whiskey and biscuit. He sat his horse and looked down at the river who was keeper of the crossroads of all that world and his dog came to him and nuzzled his foot in the strirrup.

A young Mexican girl was crouched naked under the shade of the wall. She watched him ride past, covering her breasts with her hands. She wore a rawhide collar about her neck and she was chained to a post and there was a clay bowl of blackened meatscraps beside her. Glanton tied the jacks to the post and rode inside on the horse.

There was no one about. He rode down to the landing. While he was watching the river the doctor came scrambling down the bank and seized Glanton by the foot and began to plead with him in a senseless jabber. He'd not seen to his person in weeks and he was filthy and disheveled and he tugged at Glanton's trouserleg and pointed toward the fortifications on the hill. That man, he said. That man.

Glanton slid his boot from the stirrup and pushed the doctor away with his foot and turned the horse and rode back up the hill. The judge was standing on the rise in silhouette against the evening sun like some great balden archimandrite. He was wrapped in a mantle of freeflowing cloth beneath which he was naked. The black man Jackson came out of one of the stone bunkers dressed in a similar garb and stood beside him. Glanton rode back up along the crest of the hill to his quarters.

All night gunfire drifted intermittently across the water and laughter and drunken oaths. When day broke no one appeared. The ferry lay at its moorings and across the river a man came down to the landing and blew a horn and waited and then went back.