For a while they rode almost parallel toward the gates of the city, the two parties bloody and ragged, the horses stumbling. Glanton called out to them to surrender but they rode on. He drew his rifle. They were shambling along the road like dumb things. He pulled up his horse and it stood with its legs spread and its flanks heaving and he leveled the rifle and fired.
They were for the most part no longer even armed. There were nine of them and they halted and turned and then they charged across that intermittent ground of rock and scrub and were shot down in the space of a minute.
The horses were caught and herded back to the road and the saddles and trappings cut away. The bodies of the dead were stripped and their uniforms and weapons burned along with the saddles and other gear and the Americans dug a pit in the road and buried them in a common grave, the naked bodies with their wounds like the victims of surgical experimentation lying in the pit gaping sightlessly at the desert sky as the dirt was pushed over them. They trampled the spot with their horses until it looked much like the road again and the smoking gunlocks and sabreblades and girthrings were dragged from the ashes of the fire and carried away and buried in a separate place and the riderless horses hazed off into the desert and in the evening the wind carried away the ashes and the wind blew in the night and fanned the last smoldering billets and drove forth the last fragile race of sparks fugitive as flintstrikings in the unanimous dark of the world.
They entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of the citizenry for whose protection they had contracted. The scalps of the slain villagers were strung from the windows of the governor's house and the partisans were paid out of the all but exhausted coffers and the Sociedad was disbanded and the bounty rescinded. Within a week of their quitting the city there would be a price of eight thousand pesos posted for Glanton's head. They rode out on the north road as would parties bound for El Paso but before they were even quite out of sight of the city they had turned their tragic mounts to the west and they rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun.
XIV
Mountain storms - Tierras quemadas, tierras despobladas - Jesus Maria - The inn - Shopkeepers - A bodega - The fiddler - The priest - Las Animas - The procession - Cazando las almas - Glanton takes a fit - Dogs for sale - The judge prestidigitant - The flag - A shootout - An exodus - The conducta - Blood and mercury - At the ford - Jackson restored - The jungle - An herbalist - The judge collects specimens - The point of view for his work as a scientist - Ures - The populace - Los pordioseros - A fandango - Pariah dogs - Glanton and judge.
All to the north the rain had dragged black tendrils down from the thunderclouds like tracings of lampblack fallen in a beaker and in the night they could hear the drum of rain miles away on the prairie. They ascended through a rocky pass and lightning shaped out the distant shivering mountains and lightning rang the stones about and tufts of blue fire clung to the horses like incandescent elementals that would not be driven off. Soft smelterlights advanced upon the metal of the harness, lights ran blue and liquid on the barrels of the guns. Mad jackhares started and checked in the blue glare and high among those clanging crags jokin roehawks crouched in their feathers or cracked a yellow eye at the thunder underfoot.
They rode for days through the rain and they rode through rain and hail and rain again. In that gray storm light they crossed a flooded plain with the footed shapes of the horses reflected in the water among clouds and mountains and the riders slumped forward and rightly skeptic of the shimmering cities on the distant shore of that sea whereon they trod miraculous. They climbed up through rolling grasslands where small birds shied away chittering down the wind and a buzzard labored up from among bones with wings that went whoop whoop whoop like a child's toy swung on a string and in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood.
They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wild-flowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian and wild vines of blue morninglory and a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like a gingham print to the farthest serried rimlands blue with haze and the adamantine ranges rising out of nothing like the backs of seabeasts in a devonian dawn. It was raining again and they rode slouched under slickers hacked from greasy halfcured hides and so cowled in these primitive skins before the gray and driving rain they looked like wardens of some dim sect sent forth to proselytize among the very beasts of the land. The country before them lay clouded and dark. They rode through the long twilight and the sun set and no moon rose and to the west the mountains shuddered again and again in clattering frames and, burned to final darkness and the rain hissed in the blind night land. They went up through the foothills among pine trees and barren rock and they went up through juniper and spruce and the rare great aloes and the rising stalks of the yuccas with their pale blooms silent and unearthly among the evergreens.
In the night they followed a mountain torrent in a wild gorge choked with mossy rocks and they rode under dark grottoes where the water dripped and spattered and tasted of iron and they saw the silver filaments of cascades divided upon the faces of distant buttes that appeared as signs and wonders in the heavens themselves so dark was the ground of their origins. They crossed the blackened wood of a burn and they rode through a region of cloven rock where great boulders lay halved with smooth uncentered faces and on the slopes of those ferric grounds old paths of fire and the blackened bones of trees assassinated in the mountain storms. On the day following they began to encounter holly and oak, hardwood forests much like those they had quit in their youth. In pockets on the north slopes hail lay nested like tectites among the leaves and the nights were cool. They traveled through the high country deeper into the mountains where the storms had their lairs, a fiery clangorous region where white flames ran on the peaks and the ground bore the burnt smell of broken flint. At night the wolves in the dark forests of the world below called to them as if they were friends to man and Glanton's dog trotted moaning among the endlessly articulating legs of the horses.
Nine days out of Chihuahua they passed through a gap in the mountains and began to descend by a trail that ran carved along the solid stone face of a bluff a thousand feet above the clouds. A great stone mammoth watched from the gray escarpment above them. They picked their way down singlefile. They passed through a tunnel hewn in the rock and on the other side miles below them in a gorge lay the roofs of a town.
They descended by rocky switchbacks and across the beds of streams where small trout stood on their pale fins and studied the noses of the drinking horses. Sheets of mist that smelled and tasted of metal rose out of the gorge and crossed over them and moved on through the woods. They nudged the horses through the ford and down the trace and at three oclock in the afternoon in a thin and drizzling rain they rode into the old stone town of Jesus Maria.
They clattered over the rainwashed cobbles stuck with leaves and crossed a stone bridge and rode up the street under the dripping eaves of the galleried buildings and along a mountain torrent that ran through the town. Small oremills had been ground into the polished rocks in the river and the hills above the town were everywhere tunneled and scaffolded and scarred with drifts and tailings. The raggletag advent of the riders was howled about by a few wet dogs crouched in doorways and they turned into a narrow street and halted dripping before the door of an inn.
Glanton pounded on the door and it opened and a young boy looked out. A woman appeared and looked at them and went back in. Finally a man came and opened the gate. He was slightly drunk and he held the gate while the horsemen rode through one by one into the little flooded courtyard and then he closed the gate behind them.
In the morning the rain had stopped and they appeared in the streets, tattered, stinking, ornamented with human parts like cannibals. They carried the huge pistols stuck in their belts and the vile skins they wore were deeply stained with
blood and smoke and gunblack. The sun was out and the old women on their knees with bucket and rag washing the stones before the shopdoors turned and looked after them and shopkeepers setting out their wares nodded them a wary good morning. They were a strange clientele among such commerce. They stood blinking before the doorways where finches hung in small withy cages and green and brassy parrots that stood on one foot and croaked uneasily. There were ristras of dried fruit and peppers and clusters of tinware that hung like chimes and there were hogskins filled with pulque that swung from the beams like bloated swine in a knacker's yard. They sent for cups. A fiddler appeared and crouched on a stone doorsill and began to saw out some Moorish folktune and none who passed on their morning errands could take their eyes from those pale and rancid giants.
By noon they'd found a bodega run by a man named Frank Carroll, a low doggery once a stable whose shed doors stood open to the street to admit the only light. The fiddler had followed in what seemed a great sadness and he took up his station just without the door where he could watch the outlanders drink and clack their gold doubloons on the board. In the doorway there was an old man taking the sun and he leaned with a goathorn eartrumpet to the rising din within and nodded in continual agreement although no word was spoken in any language he had understanding of.
The judge had spied the musician and he called to him and tossed a coin that clinked upon the stones. The fiddler held it briefly to the light as if it might not serve and then slipped it away among his clothes and fitted his instrument beneath his chin and struck up an air that was old among the mountebanks of Spain two hundred years before. The judge stepped into the sunlit doorway and executed upon the stones a series of steps with a strange precision and he and the fiddler seemed alien minstrels met by chance in this medieval town. The judge removed his hat and bowed to a pair of ladies detoured into the street to bypass the doggery and he pirouetted hugely on his mincing feet and poured pulque from his cup into the old man's eartrumpet The old man quickly stoppered the horn with the ball of his thumb and he held the horn with care before him while he augered his ear with one finger and then he drank.
By dark the streets were filled with besotted bedlamites lurching and cursing and ringing the churchbells with pistolballs in a godless charivari until the priest emerged bearing before him the crucified Christ and exhorting them with fragments of latin in a singsong chant. This man was drubbed in the street and prodded obscenely and they flung gold coins at him as he lay clutching his image. When he rose he disdained to take up the coins until some small boys ran out to gather them and then he ordered them brought to him while the barbarians whooped and drank him a toast.
Spectators drifted away, the narrow street emptied. Some of the Americans had wandered into the cold waters of the stream and were splashing about and they clambered dripping into the street and stood dark and smoking and apocalyptic in the dim lampfall. The night was cold and they shambled steaming through the cobbled town like fairybook beasts and it had begun to rain again.
The day that followed was the feast of Las Animas and there was a parade through the streets and a horsedrawn cart that bore a rude Christ in a stained and ancient catafalque. Lay acolytes followed all in company and the priest went before ringing a small bell. A barefoot brotherhood clad in black marched in the rear bearing sceptres of weeds. The Christ jostled past, a poor figure of straw with carven head and feet. He wore a crown of mountain briars and on his brow were painted drops of blood and on his old dry wooden cheeks blue tears. The villagers knelt and blessed themselves and some stepped forward and touched the garment the figure wore and kissed their fingertips. The parade trundled past mournfully and small children sat in the doorways eating pastry skulls and watching the parade and the rain in the streets.
The judge sat alone in the cantina. He also watched the rain, his eyes small in his great naked face. He'd filled his pockets with little candy deathsheads and he sat by the door and offered these to children passing on the walk under the eaves but they shied away like little horses.
In the evening groups of townfolk descended from the cemetery on the side of the hill and later in the dark by candle or lamp light they emerged again and made their way up to the church to pray. None but passed clutches of Americans crazed with drink and these grimy visitants would doff their hats oafishly and totter and grin and make obscene suggestions to the young girls. Carroll had closed his squalid bistro at dusk but opened it again to save the doors being stove. Sometime in the night a party of horsemen bound for California arrived, every man of them slumped in exhaustion. Yet within the hour they'd ridden out again. By midnight when the souls of the dead were rumored to be about the scalphunters were again howling in the streets and discharging their pistols in spite of rain or death and this continued sporadically until dawn.
By noon the day following Glanton in his drunkenness was taken with a kind of fit and he lurched crazed and disheveled into the little courtyard and began to open fire with his pistols. In the afternoon he lay bound to his bed like a madman while the judge sat with him and cooled his brow with rags of water and spoke to him in a low voice. Outside voices called across the steep hillsides. A little girl was missing and parties of citizens had turned out to search the mineshafts. After a while Glanton slept and the judge rose and went out.
It was gray and raining, leaves were blowing down. A ragged stripling stepped from a doorway by a wooden rainspout and tugged at the judge's elbow. He had two pups in his shirtfront and these he offered for sale, dragging one forth by the neck.
The judge was looking off up the street. When he looked down at the boy the boy hauled forth the other dog. They hung limply. Perros a vende, he said.
Cuanto quieres? said the judge.
The boy looked at one and then the other of the animals. As if he'd pick one to suit the judge's character, such dogs existing somewhere perhaps. He thrust forth the lefthand animal. Cincuenta centavos, he said.
The pup squirmed and drew back in his fist like an animal backing down a hole, its pale blue eyes impartial, befrighted alike of the cold and the rain and the judge.
Ambos, said the judge. He sought in his pockets for coins.
The dogvendor took this for a bargaining device and studied the dogs anew to better determine their worth, but the judge had dredged from his polluted clothes a small gold coin worth a bushel of suchpriced dogs. He laid the coin in the palm of his hand and held it out and with the other hand took the pups from their keeper, holding them in one fist like a pair of socks. He gestured with the gold.
Andale, he said.
The boy stared at the coin.
The judge made a fist and opened it. The coin was gone. He wove his fingers in the empty air and reached behind the boy's ear and took the coin and handed it to him. The boy held the coin in both hands before him like a small ciborium and he looked up at the judge. But the judge had set forth, dogs dangling. He crossed upon the stone bridge and he looked down into the swollen waters and raised the dogs and pitched them in.
At the farther end the bridge gave onto a small street that ran along the river. Here the Vandiemenlander stood urinating from a stone wall into the water. When he saw the judge commit the dogs from the bridge he drew his pistol and called out.
The dogs disappeared in the foam. They swept one and the next down a broad green race over sheets of polished rock into the pool below. The Vandiemenlander raised and cocked the pistol. In the clear waters of the pool willow leaves turned like jade dace. The pistol bucked in his hand and one of the dogs leaped in the water and he cocked it again and fired again and a pink stain diffused. He cocked and fired the pistol a third time and the other dog also blossomed and sank.
The judge continued on across the bridge. When the boy ran up and looked down into the water he was still holding the coin. The Vandiemenlander stood in the street opposite with his pizzle in one hand and the revolver in the other. The smoke had drifted off downstream and there was nothing in the pool at all.
He made a circuit of the streets and emerged in the plaza again, kicking the animal viciously in the flanks. As he turned a shot rang out and the mule fell stone dead under him with a musketball lodged in its brain. Glanton rolled clear and scrambled to his feet firing wildly. An old woman sank soundlessly to the stones. The judge and Tobin and Doc Irving came from Frank Carroll's on a dead run and knelt in the shadow of a wall and began to fire at the upper windows. Another half dozen Americans came around the corner at the far side of the square and in a flurry of gunfire two of them fell. Slags of lead were whining off the stones and gunsmoke hung over the streets in the damp air. Glanton and John Gunn had made their way along the walls to the shed behind the posada where the horses were stabled and they began bringing the animals out. Three more of the company entered the yard at a run and commenced to tote gear out of the building and to saddle horses. Gunfire was now continual in the street and two Americans lay dead and others lay calling out. When the company rode out thirty minutes later they ran a gantlet of ragged fusil fire and rocks and bottles and they left six of their number behind.
An hour later Carroll and another American named Sanford who'd been residing in the town caught them up. The citizens had torched the saloon. The priest had baptized the wounded Americans and then stood back while they were shot through the head.
Before dark they encountered laboring up the western slope of the mountain a conducta of one hundred and twenty-two mules bearing flasks of quicksilver for the mines. They could hear the whipcrack and cry of the arrieros on the switchbacks far below them and they could see the burdened animals plodding like goats along a faultline in the sheer rock wall. Bad luck. Twenty-six days from the sea and less than two hours out from the mines. The mules wheezed and scrabbled in the talus and the drivers in their ragged and colorful costumes harried them on. When the first of them saw the riders above them he stood in the stirrups and looked back. The column of mules wound down the trail for a half mile or more and as they bunched and halted there were sections of the train visible on the separate switchbacks far below, eight and ten mules, facing now this way, now that, the tails of the animals picked clean as bones by those behind and the mercury within the guttapercha flasks pulsing heavily as if they carried secret beasts, things in pairs that stirred and breathed uneasily within those bloated satchels. The muleteer turned and looked up the trail. Already Glanton was upon him. He greeted the American cordially. Glanton rode past without speaking, taking the upper side in that rocky strait and shouldering the drover's mule dangerously among the loose shales. The man's face clouded and he turned and called back down the trail. The other riders were now pushing past him, their eyes narrow and their faces black as stokers with gunsoot. He stood down off his mule and drew his escopeta from under the fender of the saddle. David Brown was opposite him at this point, his pistol already in his hand at the off side of his horse. He swung it over the pommel and shot the man squarely in the chest. The man sat down heavily and Brown shot him again and he pitched off down the rocks into the abyss below.
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West Page 19