He found Tobin kneeling in the creek bathing his wound with a piece of linen torn from his shirt. The ball had passed completely through his neck. It had narrowly missed the carotid artery yet he could not make the blood to stop. He looked at the kid crouched among the skulls and upturned ribtines.
You’ve got to kill the horses, he said. You’ve no other chance out of here. He’ll ride you down.
We could take the horses.
Dont be a fool lad. What other bait has he?
We can get out as soon as it comes dark.
Do you think there’ll be no day again?
The kid watched him. Will it not stop? he said.
It will not.
What do you think?
I’ve got to stop it.
The blood was running between his fingers.
Where is the judge? said the kid.
Where indeed.
If I kill him we can take the horses.
You’ll not kill him. Dont be a fool. Shoot the horses.
The kid looked off up the shallow sandy creek.
Go on lad.
He looked at the expriest and at the slow gouts of blood dropping in the water like roseblooms how they swelled and were made pale. He moved away up the creek.
When he came to where the horses had entered the water they were gone. The sand on the side where they’d gone out was still wet. He pushed the revolver along before him, moving on the heels of his hands. For all his caution he found the idiot watching him before ever he saw it.
It was sitting motionless in a bower of bones with the broken sunlight stenciled over its vacant face and it was watching like a wild thing in a wood. The kid looked at it and then he shoved on past in the tracks of the horses. The loose neck swiveled slowly and the dull jaw drooled. When he looked back it was still watching. Its wrists were lying in the sand before it and although there was no expression to its face yet it seemed a creature beset with a great woe.
When he saw the horses they were standing on a rise of ground above the creek and looking toward the west. He lay quietly and studied the terrain. Then he moved out along the edge of the wash and sat with his back to the bone salients and cocked the pistol and took a rest with his elbows on his knees.
The horses had seen him come out of the wash and they were watching him. When they heard the pistol cock they pricked their ears and began to walk toward him across the sand. He shot the forward horse in the chest and it fell over and lay breathing heavily with the blood running out of its nose. The other one stopped and stood uncertainly and he cocked the pistol and shot it as it turned. It began to trot among the dunes and he shot it again and its front legs buckled and it pitched forward and rolled onto its side. It raised its head once and then it lay still.
He sat listening. Nothing moved. The first horse lay as it had fallen, the sand about its head darkening with blood. The smoke drifted away down the draw and thinned and vanished. He moved back down the wash and crouched under the ribs of a dead mule and recharged the pistol and then moved on toward the creek again. He did not go back the way he’d come and he did not see the imbecile again. When he came to the creek he drank and bathed his leg and lay listening as before.
Throw that gun out now, said the judge.
He froze.
The voice was not fifty feet away.
I know what you’ve done. The priest put you up to it and I’ll take that as a mitigation in the act and the intent. Which I would any man in his wrongdoing. But there’s the question of property. You bring me the pistol now.
The kid lay without moving. He heard the judge wade the creek upstream. He lay counting slowly under his breath. When the roiled water reached him he stopped counting and let go on the current a dry twist of grass and tolled it away downstream. At that same count it was scarcely out of sight among the bones. He moved out of the water and looked at the sun and began to make his way back to where he’d left Tobin.
He found the expriest’s tracks still wet where he’d left the creek and the way of his progress marked with blood. He followed through the sand until he came to that place where the expriest had circled upon himself and lay hissing at him from his place of cover.
Did you do for them lad?
He raised his hand.
Aye. I heard the shots all three. The fool as well, aye lad?
He didnt answer.
Good lad, hissed the expriest. He’d bound up his neck in his shirt and he was naked to the waist and he squatted among those rancid pickets and eyed the sun. The shadows were long on the dunes and in the shadow the bones of the beasts that had died there lay skewed in a curious congress of garbled armatures upon the sands. They’d close to two hours till dark and the expriest said so. They lay under the boardlike hide of a dead ox and listened to the judge calling to them. He called out points of jurisprudence, he cited cases. He expounded upon those laws pertaining to property rights in beasts mansuete and he quoted from cases of attainder insofar as he reckoned them germane to the corruption of blood in the prior and felonious owners of the horses now dead among the bones. Then he spoke of other things. The expriest leaned to the kid. Dont listen, he said.
I aint listenin.
Stop your ears.
Stop yours.
The priest cupped his hands over his ears and looked at the kid. His eyes were bright from the bloodloss and he was possessed of a great earnestness. Do it, he whispered. Do you think he speaks to me?
The kid turned away. He marked the sun squatting at the western rim of the waste and they spoke no more until it was dark and then they rose and made their way out.
They stole up from the basin and set off across the shallow dunes and they looked a last time back at the valley where flickering in the wind at the edge of the revetment stood the judge’s nightfire for all to see. They did not speculate as to what it fed upon for fuel and they were well advanced on the desert before the moon rose.
There were wolves and jackals in that region and they cried all the forepart of the night until the moon came up and then they ceased as if surprised by its rising. Then they began again. The pilgrims were weak from their wounds. They lay down to rest but never for long and never without scanning the skyline to the east for any figure intruded upon it and they shivered in the barren desert wind coming out of whatever godless quadrant cold and sterile and bearing news of nothing at all. When day came they made their way to a slight rise on that endless flat and squatted in the loose shale and watched the sun’s rising. It was cold and the expriest in his rags and his collar of blood hugged himself. On this small promontory they slept and when they woke it was midmorning and the sun well advanced. They sat up and looked out. Coming toward them over the plain in the middle distance they could see the figure of the judge, the figure of the fool.
XXI
Desert castaways – The backtrack – A hideout – The wind takes a side – The judge returns – An address – Los Diegueños – San Felipe – Hospitality of the savages – Into the mountains – Grizzlies – San Diego – The sea.
The kid looked at Tobin but the expriest sat without expression. He was drawn and wretchedlooking and the approaching travelers seemed to evoke in him no recognition. He raised his head slightly and he spoke without looking at the kid. Go on, he said. Save yourself.
The kid took the water bottle from the shales and unstoppered it and drank and handed it across. The expriest drank and they sat watching and then they rose and turned and set out again.
They were much reduced by their wounds and their hunger and they made a poor show as they staggered onward. By noon their water was gone and they sat studying the barrenness about. A wind blew down from the north. Their mouths were dry. The desert upon which they were entrained was desert absolute and it was devoid of feature altogether and there was nothing to mark their progress upon it. The earth fell away on every side equally in its arcature and by these limits were they circumscribed and of them were they locus. They rose and went on. The sky was lumi
nous. There was no trace to follow other than the bits of cast-off left by travelers even to the bones of men drifted out of their graves in the scalloped sands. In the afternoon the terrain began to rise before them and at the crest of a shallow esker they stood and looked back to see the judge much as before some two miles distant on the plain. They went on.
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 aborigines 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 Diegueños. 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 piñole 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.
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Vintage International) Page 30