Texas Blood

by Roger D. Hodge

  Near the beginning of the book, Llewelyn Moss, poaching antelope on the land of someone McCarthy calls Harkle, just west of Lozier Canyon, in Terrell County, Texas, happens upon the remains of a shoot-out among drug smugglers. Moss finds a suitcase full of money and takes it, and from this decision all else in the novel follows. Anton Chigurh searches for the money, leaving a trail of bodies—sheriff’s deputies, random drivers, hotel clerks—in his wake. The chase takes us west to Sanderson, then east to Del Rio and Ciudad Acuña, south to Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras. McCarthy’s stark descriptions are often limited to the mere motion of these characters as they move through space and time, a narrative behaviorism that corresponds well to the flattened perspective of a world in which the only significant scale of meaning and value is monetary. Whereas in McCarthy’s previous works blood was the measure of all things, in No Country for Old Men the yardstick of all thought and action, both physical and metaphysical, is an abstraction that his characters can scarcely comprehend.

  Cedar Station

  “We’re bein bought with our own money,” Sheriff Bell worries late in the novel, shortly after he asks a county prosecutor if he knows who Mammon is: “And it aint just the drugs. There is fortunes bein accumulated there that they dont nobody even know about. What do we think is goin to come of that money? Money that can buy whole countries. It done has….The other thing is the old people, and I keep comin back to them. They look at me it’s always a question. Years back I dont remember that. I dont remember it when I was sheriff back in the fifties. You see em and they don’t even look confused. They just look crazy.”

  It is not only the old people in this novel who have lost their way. Moss takes the money he finds in the desert with the full knowledge that in doing so he will forfeit all that he loves. And yet he cannot leave it. Leaving it would be unthinkable; the world in which he finds himself has foreclosed that possibility. That world, of course, is precisely the world of the thriller, and it could very well be that the impoverished world of the thriller is the one in which we find ourselves as well.

  In places where life is harsh and cruel, in barren lands where human habitation finds only precarious purchase, McCarthy follows a causality strict and inevitable. As Guy Davenport wrote in a 1968 essay, every sentence in McCarthy’s fiction conveys swift and significant action: “He does not waste a single word on his character’s thoughts.” Such austerity may offend the self-appointed guardians of bourgeois consciousness, but book reviews leave little trace in the strata of literary history. What lasts are those monuments, like the pictographs and painted pebbles of the Pecos River people, like the stone water trough whose image closes No Country for Old Men, that are made to last ten thousand years:

  You could see the chisel marks in the stone. It was hewed out of solid rock and it was about six foot long and maybe a foot and a half wide and about that deep. Just chiseled out of the rock. And I got to thinkin about the man that done that. That country had not had a time of peace much of any length at all that I knew of. I’ve read a little of the history of it since and I aint sure it ever had one. But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasnt that nothin would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know bettern that….And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I dont have no intentions of carvin a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise.

  Cormac McCarthy takes the long view, and any reading of his work that fails to understand that, any reading that suggests that this most disciplined and rigorous novelist had any object in mind other than making a novel that will outlast our cities of the plains, has failed to reckon with his art.

  Not all art will comfort us as we age, and McCarthy’s least of all. His fiction, like so much of our oldest literature, is tragic, and as such is held together by the very warp of the world. Sometimes his subject is the tragedy of history, in which two laws equally just and true come into unavoidable and violent conflict. Sometimes it is that of transgression, as when a brother and sister come together in the darkness and out of that furtive grappling are undone. Most often it is the simple natural drama of predator and prey, of hawks and wolves, trappers and hunters and snake catchers and those who run dogs under the moon; the drama of muskrats and field mice and catfish, wild house cats aloft in the claws of owls, all of which fall prey to man, who hunts all things. In No Country for Old Men, we witness the drama of householders and peaceful folk who wish only to be left alone but who are drawn in to inevitable strife with the world’s hidden powers. At its root, McCarthy’s fiction arises from the tragedy of all wild creatures, of whatever is begotten, born, and dies, the tragedy of autonomous life in a world increasingly circumscribed by a rage for order and captivity. More than merely human, it is the tragedy of warm blood itself, of blood and time.

  —

  Lozier Canyon lies about twenty miles west of Langtry, along a lonely stretch of road that McCarthy’s readers have encountered more than once in the Border Trilogy. And just west of Lozier Canyon lies my family’s eastern fence. McCarthy presumably took the name Harkle, whose land he says this is, from Harkell Canyon, which lies some miles to the northeast and opens onto the Pecos River. Shortly after reading No Country for Old Men for the first time, I got my father on the telephone. McCarthy several times refers to Harkle’s cattle guard, and as far as I remembered, the only cattle guard along the highway anywhere near Lozier was ours. My father agreed that based on the landmarks mentioned in the text, it did appear that Bell and his deputies, Moss, Chigurh, and several anonymous corpses were all trespassing on our Cinco de Mayo ranch.

  I thought I should see for myself, and so I flew from New York to San Antonio and then drove 150 miles to Del Rio, where I spent the night with my grandmother. The next day, my father, my stepmother, and I drove out to the Cinco, tracing in reverse Moss’s path across Amistad Reservoir and through the town of Comstock. The road to Pandale, where in All the Pretty Horses Jimmy Blevins first picks up the trail of John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins, forks off to the right. Low hills spread out in all directions, covered in purple cenizo blossoms. Mesquite and black brush thrive in this landscape, as does the creosote bush, an aggressive competitor for water that can live more than ten thousand years. Vicious, thorny plants such as dog cactus, prickly pear, ocotillo, catclaw, lechuguilla, and Spanish dagger lie in wait for unprotected limbs.

  Cattle guard

  We crossed the high bridge over the Pecos River, green and salty in its deep canyon, big black crows perched on dead trees near its confluence with the Rio Grande. We passed by Langtry, the legendary home of Judge Roy Bean, and Eagle Nest Canyon, across from a massive nest on the Mexican side that has remained in a cross-shaped cliff hollow for more than a hundred years. After we passed through Lozier, we began to slow down. When we reached the cattle guard, we pulled off the highway. In No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh did the same, then “he drove across the bars of the cattleguard and got out and closed the gate again and stood there listening. Then he got in and drove down the rutted track.” We too drove down that primitive road, heading south toward Mexico.

  McCarthy imagines pickups crisscrossing this jagged canyon country, off road, all the way down to the Rio Grande. He describes volcanic gravel, lava scree, the caldera of some long-extinct volcano. He populates it with antelope. All of these details are false. The geology here is upper and lower Cretaceous limestone, Del Rio clay, the Devils River and Buda and Eagle Ford formations. Volcanoes lie far to the west, near Marfa and Alpine, or down in the Big Bend. This is canyon country, the geologic record of water’s inexorable erosion of the western reaches of the Edwards Plateau as it seeks the Rio Grande. Although from the highway it might seem that a sturdy pickup could make its way over what looks to be a gently rolling greasewood flat, countless ravines, arroyos, draw
s, and canyons cut through the land, carving bluffs that appear without warning, and eventually one approaches the great cliffs of Palma draw and Lozier Canyon. (Anyone hoping to build a wall through this country would soon come to grief.) Passage to the river is extraordinarily difficult, and the cliffs along the Rio Grande, which here makes a broad horseshoe-shaped arc, are three hundred feet in places. Mule and white-tailed deer, not antelope, populate the area.

  But McCarthy’s liberties with landscape, it seems to me, can be excused. His factual sins are committed in the service of story. He prefers the volcanic subtext because it is violent, and its violence gives his story a geologic narrative to go with its historical one. Why, then, did he not set his novel farther south and west, in the Big Bend, where volcanism and mountain building produced the most graphically violent landscape in the state? Perhaps because the area near Langtry remained wilder longer than any other part of the state. Because it was, and is, a place of outlaws and smugglers and rustlers. It is also the site of a lost culture whose traces are still visible in the ancient rock shelters along its canyon walls.

  In No Country for Old Men, as in every other novel he has written, McCarthy insists on the relics of ancient, vanished peoples in his landscapes. And he makes no secret of his view that those whose lives he describes are no less ephemeral. Indeed, what the landscape of West Texas suggests is that the ranchers who have peopled the last four novels are a good deal more likely to vanish without a trace than were the Indians, whose art, exposed to the elements for thousands of years, still bears witness to their lifeways. The metal implements used by the ranchers to make horseshoes and axes and elaborate irrigation systems have rusted and are crumbling into dust, together with concrete water troughs and cedar picket stock pens. Some of these artifacts may survive to be puzzled over by future generations, though perhaps it will be the opium tins and pipes and iron woks of the Chinese workers who populated railroad camps for a year or two along the Rio Grande in the 1880s. Or other nameless implements that were used to chisel passages and tunnels for the railroad. Or the clever wire swivels used by Mexican goatherds to stake kids under rock lean-tos in kidding camps. This landscape, which appears almost empty today, is a palimpsest of cultures. All of them lost, undone.

  The Pecos Canyon had made passage through this land difficult and dangerous, and stagecoaches, mail riders, emigrants, and cattle drives had to cross the river far to the north. It was still Indian country long after most of the state had been settled. In historic times, the Lipan Apaches and the Jumanos were known to hunt the area; the Comanches and the Kiowas traveled all the way from the Llano Estacado to gather peyote. So far as we can tell, humans first passed through the Pecos region about fourteen thousand years ago, when piñon pine forests covered the hills and prehistoric horses, camels, bison, and mammoths ranged through it. Small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers made homes in the shallow rock shelters and caves; when the climate changed and the desert advanced, some remained, made do with what the landscape provided, and eventually began to record their experiences in vivid colors along the limestone walls of their dwellings. By the time Cabeza de Vaca journeyed through the Trans-Pecos in 1535, the people who inhabited these canyons for so many thousands of years, painting their stories in their shelters, had vanished.

  Handprints left by the Pecos River people

  On a warm October afternoon, Jack Skiles, a local historian and author of Judge Roy Bean Country, took us into an ancient Indian shelter, in Eagle Nest Canyon, not far from his home along the edge of the caprock. From the mouth of the east-facing shelter we could see Highway 90 as it crossed the gorge, providing drivers with a brief glimpse of the steep limestone cliffs. A nearby spring explained the Indians’ choice of this spot, and on the far rim of the canyon the remains of a windmill built by Guy Skiles, Jack’s father, testified to more recent attempts to exploit that precious resource.

  A talus slope of burned rocks spilling down from Eagle Cave immediately announced that humans once made their dwelling here. We saw a deep metate ground into the limestone bedrock by generations of hands. Scrambling up the talus, we entered the shelter, and Jack explained that humans lived here almost continuously for ten thousand years. We were standing on a midden composed of more than ten feet of ash and garbage and burned stone. Bits of sotol cud, a fibrous plant chewed for its high sugar content, lay here and there all over the floor, as did grindstones and bits of chipped and worked rock, a charred jawbone of some small critter, thousands upon thousands of empty snail shells. Excavation and archaeological analysis have revealed countless grasshopper mandibles, minnow bones, dart and arrow points, a dead child.

  Four-thousand-year-old pictographs in the Pecos River style adorned the walls: a faded shaman, circles and beasts and hunting symbols in what appears to be a ritual narrative. Jack told us that the shelter had been used near the turn of the century as a shearing barn, which explained all the sheep dung that littered the floor. As a consequence, many of the pictographs were lost, rubbed off by the sheep as they milled about in their timeless, mindless anxiety.

  Not far up the canyon was Bonfire Shelter, a kill site where fourteen thousand years ago pre-Clovis hunters drove herds of animals off a cliff.

  In a small building adjacent to his home in Langtry, Jack was kind enough to show us his private collection of local artifacts. First among them was a twelve-hundred-year-old mummy that his father dug up in a cave along the Pecos. The man died a horrible death: his bowels, which look like huge, petrified cow patties, were compacted as a result of Chagas’ disease, an infection carried by the bloodsucking conenose bug. He lay wrapped in a finely woven mat made from sotol; around his midsection, presumably to help support his painfully swollen gut, were long strips of deer hide, tanned and dyed red with local ocher. The leather, a piece of which I held in my hand, was still soft and supple. Binding this burial package together was a hundred-foot length of rope, made of human hair.

  All along the walls of Jack’s museum was further evidence of the ingenuity of the Pecos River people: delicate drawstring bags, and sandals woven from lechuguilla and embellished with rabbit fur; fire sticks and stone tools for grinding meal and baskets so finely woven they were used to carry water; other baskets used for cooking; a variety of arrow points, and atlatls used to propel them; painted pebbles, some dating back six thousand years, in enigmatic patterns.

  And there was another sort of evidence as well. In a glass case, carefully displayed, were two heads: a mother and child. Lithified brains, now released from their containers, lay side by side. Just below the skulls was the mother’s hip bone, an arrow still protruding from it. Both skulls had been crushed.

  El Paso, Texas

  —

  I was wandering through downtown El Paso, not far from the old neighborhood of Chihuahuita, when I saw the white van. It was parked in the shade, under a tree, and spray painted across the side was the word YAHWEH. I parked and walked over. Two people were sitting inside, a black man and a white woman. Their son was asleep in the back. I asked about the words on their van. They told me to read the other side, so I walked around that way. YAHWEH SAID: GIVE ME YOUR HANDS!! EXO CHAP 20. The handles of the van’s doors formed exclamation points.

  They were travelers, coming from California and heading back toward Ohio. We talked about God for a little while, and I had a hard time following what the man was saying. I asked them what they thought about the whole border situation. The man looked at me and said he didn’t want to go all Nazi or anything, but it wasn’t anything a few machine guns couldn’t take care of. He wasn’t talking about the drug smugglers.

  And God said, Make an altar of earth for me and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, your sheep and goats and your cattle. Wherever I cause my name to be honored, I will come to you and bless you. If you make an altar of stones for me, do not build it with dressed stones, for you will defile it if you use a tool on it. And do not go up to my altar on steps, or your private parts
may be exposed.

  Later that day I met Rudy Garcia for the first time. He gave me a tour of his mountain shrine, a very high altar indeed. I came back a few months later, on the last Saturday in October 2011, the day before the annual pilgrimage of Cristo Rey, a mountain straddling the Mexican border just west of El Paso, crowned with a forty-two-foot-high statue of Jesus standing before his cross. Up to thirty thousand pilgrims were expected on Sunday, and preparations were under way. Garcia, a longtime member of the Mount Cristo Rey Restoration Committee, had invited me to spend the night on the summit with him to guard against the depredations of what he called “the Satanics from Juárez.” No barrier other than the mountain itself would protect us from the most dangerous city on earth.

  I arrived shortly before 10:00 a.m. after driving west through El Paso alongside the Rio Grande on Paisano Drive, a stretch of road that only a decade before had been subject to cross-border bandit attacks, past a weedy, dilapidated park commemorating the spot where in 1598 Don Juan de Oñate forded the river with his colonists and his army and his priests to give El Paso its name, past the remaining buildings of Old Fort Bliss, now converted into seedy apartment buildings. An enormous smokestack displaying the word “ASARCO” dominated the view, not quite rivaled by the novelty of the fifteen-foot-high Homeland Security border fence looming over the roadway. Eventually, after crossing the Rio Grande into the state of New Mexico, I turned off the macadam onto a gravel road that led through the bleak and blasted landscape of a defunct silica mine where paleontologists study lithified dinosaur remains. The winding road led me across the tracks of the Union Pacific Railroad and up to the base of my destination, the jagged Cristo Rey pluton, an igneous intrusion exposed by eons of erosion, jutting upward from its ancient cradle in the sediment of shallow seas. I left my rental car along the edge of an expanse of an empty parking area and walked up toward a rock, cement, and galvanized-steel shelter surrounded by human figures. It was already getting hot. Jeeps and pickups drove this way and that, fine powdery dust billowed and hung in the air. Several ranks of blue portable toilets stood off to the side, and the doors of storage sheds and containers swung open, disgorging their contents. A dozen or more men and women busied themselves in obscure tasks, laughing and calling out to one another in Spanish and English. Walkie-talkies crackled, and power tools whined. The music was loud.