The Crossing

by Cormac McCarthy

  Give him a peso, Billy said.

  Boyd dug out the pocketbook and unsnapped it and took out the coin and Billy gave it to the old man and the old man took it with grace and dignity and removed his hat and put it on again and they shook hands all around and the old man pocketed the coin and turned and walked out across the little blighted zocalo and disappeared up the street without looking back. When he was gone the men on the bench began to laugh. One of them rose to better see the map.

  Es un fantasma, he said.

  Fantasma?

  Si, si. Claro.

  Como?

  Como? Porque el viejo esta loco es como.

  Loco?

  Completamente.

  Billy stood looking at the map. No es correcto? he said.

  The man threw up his hands. He said that what they beheld was but a decoration. He said that anyway it was not so much a question of a correct map but of any map at all. He said that in that country were fires and earthquakes and floods and that one needed to know the country itself and not simply the landmarks therein. Besides, he said, when had that old man last journeyed to those mountains? Or journeyed anywhere at all? His map was after all not really so much a map as a picture of a voyage. And what voyage was that? And when?

  Un dibujo de un viaje, he said. Un viaje pasado, un viaje antiguo.

  He threw up one hand in dismissal. As if no more could be said. Billy looked at the other three men on the bench. They watched with a certain brightness of eye so that he wondered if he were being made a fool of. But the one seated at the right leaned forward and tapped the ash from his cigarette and addressed the man standing and said that as far as that went there were certainly other dangers to a journey than losing one's way. He said that plans were one thing and journeys another. He said it was a mistake to discount the good will inherent in the old man's desire to guide them for it too must be taken into account and would in itself lend strength and resolution to them in their journey.

  The man who was standing weighed these words and then erased them in the air before him with a slow fanning motion of his forefinger. He said that the jovenes could hardly be expected to apportion credence in the matter of the map. He said that in any case a bad map was worse than no map at all for it engendered in the traveler a false confidence and might easily cause him to set aside those instincts which would otherwise guide him if he would but place himself in their care. He said that to follow a false map was to invite disaster. He gestured at the sketching in the dirt. As if to invite them to behold its futility. The second man on the bench nodded his agreement in this and said that the map in question was a folly and that the dogs in the street would piss upon it. But man on the right only smiled and said that for that matter the dogs would piss upon their graves as well and how was this an argument?

  The man standing said that what argued for one case argued for all and that in any event our graves make no claims outside of their own simple coordinates and no advice as to how to arrive there but only the assurance that arrive we shall. It may even be that those who lie in desecrated graves--by dogs of whatever manner--could have words of a more cautionary nature and better suited to the realities of the world. At this the man at the left who'd so far not spoke at all rose laughing and gestured for the two boys to follow and they went with him out of the square and into the street leaving the disputants to their rustic parkbench tertulia. Billy untied the horse and they stood while the man pointed out to them the track to the east and told them certain landmarks in the mountains and that the track terminated at a station called Las Ramadas and that they must trust in their luck or their friendship with God to make their way across the divide to Los Horcones. He shook hands with them and smiled and wished them luck and they asked how far it was to Casas Grandes and he held up one hand with his thumb folded across the palm. Cuatro dias, he said. He looked toward the square where the other men were yet haranguing one another and he said that they must attend a funeral that very evening for the wife of a friend and that their mood was idiosincratico and to pay them no mind. He said that far from making men reflective or wise it was his experience that death often leads them to attribute great consequence to trivial things. He asked if they were brothers and they said that they were and he told them to care for one another in the world. He nodded again toward the mountains and he said that the serranos had good hearts but that elsewhere was another matter. Then he wished them luck again and called upon God to be with them and stepped back and raised his hand in farewell.

  When they were out of sight of the old men they quit the road and went down to the river and followed the river path until they had picked up the other horse and the dog. Boyd mounted Keno and they rode on until they came to the ford where they crossed the river and took the road east into the mountains.

  Such road as it was soon ceased to be road at all. Where it first left the river it was the width of a wagon or more and had in recent times been scraped or graded with a fresno and the brush cut back yet once clear of the town the heart seemed to have gone out of this enterprise and they found themselves on a common footpath following the course of a dry arroyo up into the hills. At just dark they came upon a small holding, a clutch of pole huts staked out upon a trinchera or terrace shored up with rock. They made their camp just above this place on the next level ground and hobbled the horses and made a fire. Below them through the scrub pine and juniper they could see a yellow houselamp. A little later as they were boiling their pail of beans a man came up the road carrying a lantern. He called to them from the road and Billy stepped to where the shotgun stood leaning against a tree and called back for him to approach. He came to the fire and stood. He looked at the dog.

  Buenas noches, he said.

  Buenas noches.

  Son Americanos?

  Si.

  He held the lantern up. He looked at the shapes of the horses in the dark beyond the fire.

  Donde esta el caballero?

  No hay otro caballero mas que nosotros, Billy said.

  The man's eyes wandered over their meager possessions. Billy knew that he'd been sent to invite them to the house but he did not do so. They spoke briefly of nothing at all and then he took his leave. He walked back out to the road and through the trees they saw him raise the lamp to his face and lift the glass in its bail and blow out the flame. Then he walked back down to the house in the dark.

  The day following their way led them into the mountains shutting in the Bavispe River Valley under the western slope. The trail grew more wretched yet with washouts where the riders were obliged to dismount and lead the horses clambering along the narrow floor of the arroyo and up along the switchbacks and there were places where the track diverged and where separate schools of thought wandered off through the pine and scrub oak. They camped that night in an old burn among the bones of trees and among the shapes of boulders that had broken open in the earthquake half a century before and slid down the mountain on the face of their cleavings and grinding stone on stone had struck the fire with which they'd burnt the woods alive. The trunks of the pollarded and broken trees stood at every angle pale and dead in the twilight and in the twilight small owls flew in utter silence hither and yon about the darkening glade.

  They sat by the fire and cooked and ate the last of their bacon with beans and tortillas and they slept on the ground in their blankets and the wind in the dead gray pilings about them made no sound and the owls when they called in the night called with soft watery calls like the calls of doves.

  They rode for two days through the high country. A fine rain fell. It was cold and they rode with their blankets about them and the dog trotted ahead like some mute and mindless bellwether and the breath from the horses' nostrils plumed whitely in the thin air. Billy offered that they take turn about riding the saddled horse but Boyd said that he would ride the Keno horse by preference saddle or no. When Billy then offered to swap the saddle to the other horse Boyd only shook his head and booted the bareback horse forward.


  They rode through the ruins of old sawmills and they rode through a mountain meadow dotted with the dark stumps of trees. Across a valley in the evening with the sun on it they could see the tailings of an old silvermine and camped in withy huts among the rusted shapes of antique machinery a family of gypsy miners working the abandoned shaft who now stood aligned all sizes of them before the evening cookfire watching the riders pass along the opposing slope and shading their eyes against the sun with their hands like some encampment of ragged and deranged militants at review. That same evening he shot a rabbit and they halted in the long mountain light and made a fire and cooked the rabbit and ate it and fed the guts to the dog and then the bones and when they were done they sat gazing into the coals.

  You reckon the horses know where we're at? Boyd said.

  What do you mean?

  He looked up from the fire. I mean do you reckon they know where we're at.

  What the hell kind of question is that?

  Well. I reckon it's a question about horses and what they know about where they're at.

  Hell, they dont know nothin. They're just in some mountains somewheres. You mean do they know they're in Mexico?

  No. But if we was up in the Peloncillos or somewheres they'd know where they was at. They could find their way back if you turned em out.

  Are you askin me if they could find their way back from here if you cut em loose?

  I dont know.

  Well what are you askin.

  I'm askin if they know where they're at.

  Billy stared at the coals. I dont know what the hell you're talkin about.

  Well. Forget it.

  You mean like they got a picture in their head of where the ranch is at?

  I dont know.

  Even if they did it wouldnt mean they could find it.

  I didnt mean they could find it. Maybe they could and maybe they couldnt.

  They couldnt backtrack the whole way. Hell.

  I dont think they backtrack. I think they just know where things are.

  Well you know moren me then.

  I didnt say that.

  No, I said it.

  He looked at Boyd. Boyd sat with the blanket over his shoulders and his cheap boots crossed before him. Why dont you go to bed? he said.

  Boyd leaned and spat into the coals. He sat watching the spittle boil. Why dont you, he said.

  When they set forth in the morning it was still gray light. Mist moving through the trees. They rode out to see what the day would bring and within the hour they sat the horses on the eastern rim of the escarpment and watched while the sun ballooned like boiling glass up out of the plains of Chihuahua to make the world again from darkness.

  By noon they were on the prairie again riding through better grass than any they had seen before, riding through bluestem and through sideoats grama. In the afternoon they saw far to the south a standing palisade of thin green cypress trees and the thin white walls of a hacienda. Shimmering in the heat like a white boat on the horizon. Distant and unknowable. Billy looked back at Boyd to see if he had seen it but Boyd was watching it as he rode. It shimmered and was lost in the heat and then it reappeared again just above the horizon and hung there suspended in the sky. When he looked again it had vanished altogether.

  In the long twilight they walked the horses to cool them. There was a stand of trees in the middle distance and they mounted up again and rode toward them. The dog trotted ahead with lolling tongue and the darkening prairieland sank about them cool and blue and the shapes of the mountains they'd quit stood behind them black and without dimension against the evening sky.

  They kept the trees skylighted before them and as they approached the glade they rode the groaning shapes of cattle up out of their beds. The cattle shook their necks and trotted off in the dark and the horses sniffed at the air and at the trampled grass. They rode into the trees and the horses slowed and stopped and then walked carefully out into the dark standing water.

  They hobbled Bird and then staked Keno where he would keep the cows off of them while they slept. They'd nothing to eat and they made no fire but only rolled themselves in their blankets on the ground. Twice in the night in his grazing the horse passed the catchrope over them and he woke and lifted the rope over his brother where he slept and laid it in the grass again. He lay in the dark wrapped in the blanket and listened to the horses cropping the grass and smelling the good rich smell of the cattle and then he slept again.

  In the morning they were sitting naked in the dark water of the cienaga when a party of vaqueros rode up. They watered their mounts at the far end and nodded and wished them a good morning and sat astride the drinking horses rolling cigarettes and taking in the country.

  Adonde van? they called.

  A Casas Grandes, said Billy.

  They nodded. Their horses raised their dripping muzzles and regarded the pale shapes crouched in the water with no great curiosity and lowered their heads and drank again. When they were done the vaqueros wished them a safe journey and turned the horses out of the cienaga and rode them at a trot out through the trees and set off across the country south the way they'd come.

  They washed their clothes out with soapweed and hung them in an acacia tree where they could not blow away for the thorns. Clothes much consumed by the country through which they'd ridden and which they had little way to repair. Their shirts all but transparent, his own coming apart down the center of the back. They spread their blankets and lay naked under the cottonwoods and slept with their hats over their eyes while the cows came up through the trees and stood looking at them.

  When he woke Boyd was sitting up and looking out through the trees.

  What is it?

  Look yonder.

  He raised up and looked across the cienaga. Three indian children were crouched in the reeds watching them. When he stood up with the blanket about his shoulders they went trotting off.

  Where the hell's the dog at?

  I dont know. What's he supposed to do?

  Beyond the trees woodsmoke was rising and he could hear voices. He pulled the blanket about him and walked out and got their clothes and came back.

  They were Tarahumaras and they were afoot as their kind always were and they were headed back into the sierras. They drove no stock, they had no dogs. They spoke no Spanish. The men wore white breechclouts and straw hats and little else but the women and girls had on brightly colored dresses with many petticoats. A few among them wore huaraches but for the most part they were barefoot and their feet shod or no were clublike and stubby and thick with callus. Their equipage was done up in bundles of handwoven cloth and all of it piled under a tree together with half a dozen morawood bows and goathide quivers with long reed arrows standing in them.

  The women at the cookfire regarded them with little interest where they stood at the edge of the glade in their newly laundered rags. An old man and a young boy were playing homemade violins and the boy stopped playing but the old man played on. The Tarahumara had watered here a thousand years and a good deal of what could be seen in the world had passed this way. Armored Spaniards and hunters and trappers and grandees and their women and slaves and fugitives and armies and revolutions and the dead and the dying. And all that was seen was told and all that was told remembered. Two pale and wasted orphans from the north in outsized hats were easily accommodated. They sat on the ground a little apart from the others and ate from tin plates too hot to hold a kind of succotash in which they recognized the seeds of squash and mesquite beans and bits of wild celery. They ate with the plates balanced on the insides of their boots where they'd drawn them up before them heel to heel. While they were eating a woman came from the fire and dished up from a gourd a brickcolored mucilage made from God knew what. They sat looking at it. There was nothing to drink. No one spoke. The indians were dark almost to blackness and their reticence and their silence bespoke a view of a world provisional, contingent, deeply suspect. They had about them a wary absorption,
as if they observed some hazardous truce. They seemed in a state of improvident and hopeless vigilance. Like men committed upon uncertain ice.

  When they'd done eating they said their thanks and withdrew. Nothing was acknowledged. Nothing spoken. As they passed out through the trees Billy looked back but not even the children had been watching them leave.

  The Tarahumara moved on in the evening. A great quiet settled over the glade. Billy took the shotgun and walked out through the grass with the dog and studied the country in the long red twilight. The lean and tallowcolored cattle watched from the cottonwoods and acacia and snorted and went trotting. There was nothing to shoot save the little ringdoves coming in to water and he would not waste a shell on them. He stood on a slight rise out on the prairie and watched the sun set beyond the mountains to the west and he walked back in the dark and in the morning they caught the horses and saddled Bird and set out once more.

  They reached the Mormon settlement at Colonia Juarez in the late afternoon and rode the horses through the orchards and vineyards and picked apples from the trees and put them in their clothing. They crossed the Casas Grandes River on the narrow plank bridge and rode past the tidy whitewashed clapboard houses. Trees lined the little street and the houses were kept with garden and lawn and white picket fences.

  What kind of a place is this? Boyd said.

  I dont know.

  They rode on to the end of the street and when they turned the first bend in the narrow dusty road they were on the desert again as if the little town were no more than a dream. In the evening on the road to Casas Grandes they rode past the walled ruins of the ancient mud city of the Chichimeca. Among those clay warrens and mazes there burned here and there in the dusk the fires of squatters and where the squatters rose and moved about they cast their shadows lurching across the crumbling walls like drunken stewards and the moon rose over the dead city and shone upon the terraced embattlements and shone upon the roofless crypts and the pitovens and upon the mud corrals and upon the darkened ballcourt where nighthawks were hunting and upon the dry acequias where bits of pottery and stone tools together with the bones of their makers lay enleavened in the cracked clay floors.