Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

  The approach to any watering place in that desert was marked by the carcasses of perished animals in increasing number and so it was now, as if the wells were ringed about by some hazard lethal to creatures. The travelers looked back. The judge was out of sight beyond the rise. Before them lay the whitened boards of a wagon and further on the shapes of mule and ox with the hide scoured bald as canvas by the constant abrasion of the sand.

  The kid stood studying this place and then he backtracked some hundred yards and stood looking down at his shallow footprints in the sand. He looked upon the drifted slope of the esker which they had descended and he knelt and held his hand against the ground and he listened to the faint silica hiss of the wind.

  When he lifted his hand there was a thin ridge of sand that had drifted against it and he watched this ridge slowly vanish before him.

  The expriest when he returned to him presented a grave appearance. The kid knelt and studied him where he sat.

  We got to hide, he said.

  Hide?

  Yes.

  Where do you aim to hide?

  Here. We'll hide here.

  You cant hide, lad.

  We can hide.

  You think he cant follow your track?

  The wind's taking it. It's gone from the slope yonder.

  Gone?

  Ever trace.

  The expriest shook his head.

  Come on. We got to get goin.

  You cant hide.

  Get up.

  The expriest shook his head. Ah lad, he said.

  Get up, said the kid.

  Go on, go on. He waved his hand.

  The kid spoke to him. He aint nothin. You told me so yourself. Men are made of the dust of the earth. You said it was no pair ... pair ...

  Parable.

  No parable. That it was a naked fact and the judge was a man like all men.

  Face him down then, said the expriest. Face him down if he is so.

  And him with a rifle and me with a pistol. Him with two rifles. Get up from there.

  Tobin rose. He stood unsteadily, he leaned against the kid. They set out, veering off from the drifted track and down past the wagon.

  They passed the first of the racks of bones and went on to where a pair of mules lay dead in the traces and here the kid knelt with a piece of board and began to scoop them a shelter, watching the skyline to the east as he worked. Then they lay prone in the lee of those sour bones like sated scavengers and awaited the arrival of the judge and the passing of the judge if he would so pass.

  They'd not long to wait. He appeared upon the rise and paused momentarily before starting down, he and his drooling manciple. The ground before him was drifted and rolling and although it could be fairly reconnoitred from the rise the judge did not scan the country nor did he seem to miss the fugitives from his purview. He descended the ridge and started across the flats, the idiot before him on a leather lead. He carried the two rifles that had belonged to Brown and he wore a pair of canteens crossed upon his chest and he carried a powderhorn and flask and his portmanteau and a canvas rucksack that must have belonged to Brown also. More strangely he carried a parasol made from rotted scraps of hide stretched over a framework of rib bones bound with strips of tug. The handle had been the foreleg of some creature and the judge approaching was clothed in little more than confetti so rent was his costume to accommodate his figure. Bearing before him that morbid umbrella with the idiot in its rawhide collar pulling at the lead he seemed some degenerate entrepreneur fleeing from a medicine show and the outrage of the citizens who'd sacked it.

  They advanced across the flats and the kid on his belly in the sand wallow watched them through the ribs of the dead mules. He could see his own tracks and Tobin's coming across the sand, dim and rounded but tracks for that, and he watched the judge and he watched the tracks and he listened to the sand moving on the desert floor. The judge was perhaps a hundred yards out when he stopped and surveyed the ground. The idiot squatted on all fours and leaned into the lead like some naked species of lemur. It swung its head and sniffed at the air, as if it were being used for tracking. It had lost its hat, or perhaps the judge had replevined it, for he now wore a rough and curious pair of pampooties cut from a piece of hide and strapped to the soles of his feet with wrappings of hemp salvaged from some desert wreck. The imbecile lunged in its collar and croaked, its forearms dangling at its chest. When they passed the wagon and continued on the kid knew they were beyond the point where he and Tobin had turned off from the trace. He looked at the tracks. Faint shapes that backed across the sands and vanished. The expriest at his side seized his arm and hissed and gestured toward the passing judge and the wind rattled the scraps of hide at the carcass and the judge and the idiot passed on across the sands and disappeared from sight.

  They lay without speaking. The expriest raised himself slightly and looked out and he looked at the kid. The kid lowered the hammer of the pistol.

  Ye'll get no such a chance as that again.

  The kid put the pistol in his belt and rose onto his knees and looked out.

  And what now?

  The kid didnt answer.

  He'll be waiting at the next well.

  Let him wait.

  We could go back to the creek.

  And do what.

  Wait for a party to come through.

  Through from where? There aint no ferry.

  There's game comes to the creek.

  Tobin was looking out through the bones and hide. When the kid didnt answer he looked up. We could go there, he said.

  I got four rounds, the kid said.

  He rose and looked out across the scavenged ground and the expriest rose and looked with him. What they saw was the judge returning.

  The kid swore and dropped to his belly. The expriest crouched. They pushed down into the wallow and with their chins in the sand like lizards they watched the judge traverse again the grounds before them.

  With his leashed fool and his equipage and the parasol dipping in the wind like a great black flower he passed among the wreckage until he was again upon the slope of the sand esker. At the crest he turned and the imbecile squatted at his knees and the judge lowered the parasol before him and addressed the countryside about.

  The priest has led you to this, boy. I know you would not hide. I know too that you've not the heart of a common assassin. I've passed before your gunsights twice this hour and will pass a third time. Why not show yourself?

  No assassin, called the judge. And no partisan either. There's a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.

  The imbecile stood and raised its hands to its face and yammered weirdly and sat again.

  You think I've killed Brown and Toadvine? They are alive as you and me. They are alive and in possession of the fruits of their election. Do you understand? Ask the priest. The priest knows. The priest does not lie.

  The judge raised the parasol and adjusted his parcels. Perhaps, he called, perhaps you have seen this place in a dream. That you would die here. Then he descended the esker and passed once more across the boneyard led by the tethered fool until the two were shimmering and insubstantial in the waves of heat and then they were gone altogether.

  They would have died if the indians had not found them. All the early part of the night they'd kept Sirius at their left on the southwest horizon and Cetus out there fording the void and Orion and Betelgeuse turning overhead and they had slept curled and shivering in the darkness of the plains and woke to find the heavens all changed and the stars by which they'd traveled not to be found, as if their sleep had encompassed whole seasons. In the auburn dawn they saw the halfnaked savages crouched or standing all in a row along a rise to the north. They got up and went on, their shadows so long and so narrow raising with mock stealth each thin articulated leg. The mountains to the west were whited out against the daybreak. The ab
origines moved along the sand ridge. After a while the expriest sat down and the kid stood over him with the pistol and the savages came down from the dunes and approached by starts and checks across the plain like painted sprites.

  They were Dieguenos. They were armed with short bows and they drew about the travelers and knelt and gave them water out of a gourd. They'd seen such pilgrims before and with sufferings more terrible. They eked a desperate living from that land and they knew that nothing excepting some savage pursuit could drive men to such plight and they watched each day for that thing to gather itself out of its terrible incubation in the house of the sun and muster along the edge of the eastern world and whether it be armies or plague or pestilence or something altogether unspeakable they waited with a strange equanimity.

  They led the refugees into their camp at San Felipe, a collection of crude huts made from reeds and housing a population of filthy and beggarly creatures dressed largely in the cotton shirts of the argonauts who'd passed there, shirts and nothing more. They fetched them a stew of lizards and pocketmice hot in clay bowls and a sort of pinole made from dried and pounded grasshoppers and they crouched about and watched them with great solemnity as they ate.

  One reached and touched the grips of the pistol in the kid's belt and drew back again. Pistola, he said.

  The kid ate.

  The savages nodded.

  Quiero mirar su pistola, the man said.

  The kid didnt answer. When the man reached for the pistol he intercepted his hand and put it from him. When he turned loose the man reached again and the kid pushed his hand away again.

  The man grinned. He reached a third time. The kid set the bowl between his legs and drew the pistol and cocked it and put the muzzle against the man's forehead.

  They sat quite still. The others watched. After a while the kid lowered the pistol and let down the hammer and put it in his belt and picked up the bowl and commenced eating again. The man gestured toward the pistol and spoke to his friends and they nodded and then they sat as before.

  Que paso con ustedes.

  The kid watched the man over the rim of the bowl with his dark and hollow eyes.

  The indian looked at the expriest.

  Que paso con ustedes.

  The expriest in his black and crusted cravat turned his whole torso to look at the man who'd spoken. He looked at the kid. He'd been eating with his fingers and he licked them and wiped them on the filthy leg of his trousers.

  Las Yumas, he said.

  They sucked in air and clucked their tongues.

  Son muy malos, said the speaker.

  Claro.

  No tiene companeros?

  The kid and the expriest eyed each other.

  Si, said the kid. Muchos. He waved his hand to the east. Llegaran. Muchos companeros.

  The indians received this news without expression. A woman brought more of the pinole but they had been without food too long to have appetites and they waved her away.

  In the afternoon they bathed in the creek and slept on the ground. When they woke they were being watched by a group of naked children and a few dogs. When they went up through the camp they saw the indians sitting along a ledge of rock watching tirelessly the land to the east for whatever might come out of it. No one spoke to them of the judge and they did not ask. The dogs and children followed them out of the camp and they took the trail up into the low hills to the west where the sun was already going.

  They reached Warner's Ranch late the following day and they restored themselves at the hot sulphur springs there. There was no one about. They moved on. The country to the west was rolling and grassy and beyond were mountains running to the coast. They slept that night among dwarf cedars and in the morning the grass was frozen and they could hear the wind in the frozen grass and they could hear the cries of birds that seemed a charm against the sullen shores of the void out of which they had ascended.

  All that day they climbed through a highland park forested with joshua trees and rimmed about by bald granite peaks. In the evening flocks of eagles went up through the pass before them and they could see on those grassy benches the great shambling figures of bears like cattle grazing on some upland heath. There were skifts of snow in the lee of the stone ledges and in the night a light snow fell upon them. Reefs of mist were blowing across the slopes when they set out shivering in the dawn and in the new snow they saw the tracks of the bears that had come down to take their wind just before daylight.

  That day there was no sun only a paleness in the haze and the country was white with frost and the shrubs were like polar isomers of their own shapes. Wild rams ghosted away up those rocky draws and the wind swirled down cold and gray from the snowy reeks above them, a smoking region of wild vapors blowing down through the gap as if the world up there were all afire. They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey. They drank from the cold mountain streams and bathed their wounds and they shot a young doe at a spring and ate what they could and smoked thin sheets of the meat to carry with them. Although they saw no more bears they saw sign of their vicinity and they moved off over the slopes a good mile from their meatcamp before they put down for the night. In the morning they crossed a bed of thunderstones clustered on that heath like the ossified eggs of some primal groundbird. They trod the shadowline under the mountains keeping just in the sun for the warmth of it and that afternoon they first saw the sea, far below them, blue and serene under clouds.

  The trail went down through the low hills and picked up the wagontrack and they followed where the locked wheels had skidded and the iron tires scarred the rock and the sea down there darkened to black and the sun fell and all the land about went blue and cold. They slept shivering under a wooded boss among owlcries and a scent of juniper while the stars swarmed in the bottomless night.

  It was evening of the following day when they entered San Diego. The expriest turned off to find them a doctor but the kid wandered on through the raw mud streets and out past the houses of hide in their rows and across the gravel strand to the beach.

  Loose strands of ambercolored kelp lay in a rubbery wrack at the tideline. A dead seal. Beyond the inner bay part of a reef in a thin line like something foundered there on which the sea was teething. He squatted in the sand and watched the sun on the hammered face of the water. Out there island clouds emplaned upon a salmoncolored othersea. Seafowl in silhouette. Downshore the dull surf boomed. There was a horse standing there staring out upon the darkening waters and a young colt that cavorted and trotted off and came back.

  He sat watching while the sun dipped hissing in the swells. The horse stood darkly against the sky. The surf boomed in the dark and the sea's black hide heaved in the cobbled starlight and the long pale combers loped out of the night and broke along the beach.

  He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

  XXII

  Under arrest - The judge pays a call - An arraignment - Soldier, priest, magistrate - On his own recognizance - He sees a surgeon - The arrowshaft removed from his leg - Delirium - He journeys to Los Angeles - A public hanging - Los ahorcados - Looking for the expriest - Another fool - The scapular - To Sacramento - A traveler in the west - He abandons his party - The penitent brothers - The deathcart - Another massacre - The eldress in the rocks.

  Going back through the streets past the yellow windowlights and barking dogs he encountered a detachment of soldiers but they took him for an older man in the dark and passed on. He entered a tavern and sat in a darkened corner watching the groups of men at t
he tables. No one asked him what he wanted in that place. He seemed to be waiting for someone to come for him and after a while four soldiers entered and arrested him. They didnt even ask him his name.

  In his cell he began to speak with a strange urgency of things few men have seen in a lifetime and his jailers said that his mind had come uncottered by the acts of blood in which he had participated. One morning he woke to find the judge standing at his cage, hat in hand, smiling down at him. He was dressed in a suit of gray linen and he wore new polished boots. His coat was unbuttoned and in his waistcoat he carried a watchchain and a stickpin and in his belt a leathercovered clip that held a small silvermounted derringer stocked in rosewood. He looked down the hallway of the crude mud building and donned the hat and smiled again at the prisoner.

  Well, he said. How are you?

  The kid didnt answer.

  They wanted to know from me if you were always crazy, said the judge. They said it was the country. The country turned them out.

  Where's Tobin?

  I told them that the cretin had been a respected Doctor of Divinity from Harvard College as recently as March of this year. That his wits had stood him as far west as the Aquarius Mountains. It was the ensuing country that carried them off. Together with his clothes.

  And Toadvine and Brown. Where are they?

  In the desert where you left them. A cruel thing. Your companions in arms. The judge shook his head.