You want me to look at it?
What for? You caint do nothin for it.
Well. You suit yourself.
I aim to, said Sproule.
They went on. Twice in the night they heard the little prairie vipers rattle among the scrub and they were afraid. With the dawn they were climbing among shale and whinstone under the wall of a dark monocline where turrets stood like basalt prophets and they passed by the side of the road little wooden crosses propped in cairns of stone where travelers had met with death. The road winding up among the hills and the castaways laboring upon the switchbacks, blackening under the sun, their eyeballs inflamed and the painted spectra racing out at the corners. Climbing up through ocotillo and pricklypear where the rocks trembled and sleared in the sun, rock and no water and the sandy trace and they kept watch for any green thing that might tell of water but there was no water. They ate piñole from a bag with their fingers and went on. Through the noon heat and into the dusk where lizards lay with their leather chins flat to the cooling rocks and fended off the world with thin smiles and eyes like cracked stone plates.
They crested the mountain at sunset and they could see for miles. An immense lake lay below them with the distant blue mountains standing in the windless span of water and the shape of a soaring hawk and trees that shimmered in the heat and a distant city very white against the blue and shaded hills. They sat and watched. They saw the sun drop under the jagged rim of the earth to the west and they saw it flare behind the mountains and they saw the face of the lake darken and the shape of the city dissolve upon it. They slept among the rocks face up like dead men and in the morning when they rose there was no city and no trees and no lake only a barren dusty plain.
Sproule groaned and collapsed back among the rocks. The kid looked at him. There were blisters along his lower lip and his arm through the ripped shirt was swollen and something foul had seeped through among the darker bloodstains. He turned back and looked out over the valley.
Yonder comes somebody, he said.
Sproule didnt answer. The kid looked at him. I aint lyin, he said.
Indians, said Sproule. Aint it?
I dont know. Too far to tell.
What do you aim to do?
I dont know.
What happened to the lake?
I couldnt tell ye.
We both saw it.
People see what they want to see.
Then how come I aint seein it now? I sure as hell want to.
The kid looked out over the plain below.
What if it’s indians? said Sproule.
Likely it will be.
Where can we hide at?
The kid spat dryly and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. A lizard came out from under a rock and crouched on its small cocked elbows over that piece of froth and drank it dry and returned to the rock again leaving only a faint spot in the sand which vanished almost instantly.
They waited all day. The kid made sorties down into the canyons in search of water but he found none. Nothing moved in that purgatorial waste save carnivorous birds. By early afternoon they could see the horsemen on the switchbacks coming up the face of the mountain below them. They were Mexicans.
Sproule was sitting with his legs outstretched before him. I was worried about my old boots lastin me, he said. He looked up. Go on, he said. Save yourself. He waved his hand.
They were laid up under a ledge of rock in a narrow shade. The kid didnt answer. Within the hour they could hear the dry scrabble of hooves among the rocks and the clank of gear. The first horse to round the point of rock and pass through the gap in the mountain was the captain’s big bay and he carried the captain’s saddle but he did not carry the captain. The refugees stood by the side of the road. The riders looked burnt and haggard coming up out of the sun and they sat their horses as if they had no weight at all. There were seven of them, eight of them. They wore broadbrimmed hats and leather vests and they carried escopetas across the pommels of their saddles and as they rode past the leader nodded gravely to them from the captain’s horse and touched his hatbrim and they rode on.
Sproule and the kid looked after them. The kid called out and Sproule had started to trot clumsily along behind the horses.
The riders began to slump and reel like drunks. Their heads lolled. Their guffaws echoed among the rocks and they turned their mounts and sat them and regarded the wanderers with huge grins.
Qué quiere? cried the leader.
The riders cackled and slapped at one another. They had nudged their horses forward and they began to ride them about without aim. The leader turned to the two afoot.
Buscan a los indios?
With this some of the men dismounted and fell to hugging one another and weeping shamelessly. The leader looked at them and grinned, his teeth white and massive, made for foraging.
Loonies, said Sproule. They’re loonies.
The kid looked up at the leader. How about a drink of water? he said.
The leader sobered, he pulled a long face. Water? he said.
We aint got no water, said Sproule.
But my friend, how no? Is very dry here.
He reached behind him without turning and a leather canteen was passed across the riders to his hand. He shook it and offered it down. The kid pulled the stopper and drank and stood panting and drank again. The leader reached down and tapped the canteen. Basta, he said.
He hung on gulping. He could not see the horseman’s face darken. The man shucked one boot backward out of the stirrup and kicked the canteen cleanly from between the kid’s hands leaving him there for a moment in a frozen gesture of calling with the canteen rising and turning in the air and the lobes of water gleaming about it in the sun before it clattered to the rocks. Sproule scrambled after it and snatched it up where it lay draining and began to drink, watching over the rim. The horseman and the kid watched each other. Sproule sat back gasping and coughing.
The kid stepped across the rocks and took the canteen from him. The leader kneed his horse forward and drew a sword from its place beneath his leg and leaning forward ran the blade under the strap and raised it up. The point of the blade was about three inches from the kid’s face and the canteen strap was draped across the flat of it. The kid had stopped and the rider raised the canteen gently from his hands and let it slide down the blade and come to rest at his side. He turned to the men and smiled and they once again began to hoot and to pummel one another like apes.
He swung the stopper up from where it hung by a thong and drove it home with the heel of his hand. He pitched the canteen to the man behind him and looked down at the travelers. Why you no hide? he said.
From you?
From I.
We were thirsty.
Very thirsty. Eh?
They didnt answer. He was tapping the flat of the sword lightly against the horn of his saddle and he seemed to be forming words in his mind. He leaned slightly to them. When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf. He smiled at them and raised the sword and ran it back where it had come from and turned the horse smartly and trotted it through the horses behind him and the men mounted up and followed and soon all were gone.
Sproule sat without moving. The kid looked at him but he would look away. He was wounded in an enemy country far from home and although his eyes took in the alien stones about yet the greater void beyond seemed to swallow up his soul.
They descended the mountain, going down over the rocks with their hands outheld before them and their shadows contorted on the broken terrain like creatures seeking their own forms. They reached the valley floor at dusk and set off across the blue and cooling land, the mountains to the west a line of jagged slate set endwise in the earth and the dry weeds heeling and twisting in a wind sprung from nowhere.
They walked on into the dark and they slept like dogs in the sand and had been sleeping so when something black flapped up out of the night ground and perched on
Sproule’s chest. Fine fingerbones stayed the leather wings with which it steadied as it walked upon him. A wrinkled pug face, small and vicious, bare lips crimped in a horrible smile and teeth pale blue in the starlight. It leaned to him. It crafted in his neck two narrow grooves and folding its wings over him it began to drink his blood.
Not soft enough. He woke, put up a hand. He shrieked and the bloodbat flailed and sat back upon his chest and righted itself again and hissed and clicked its teeth.
The kid was up and had seized a rock but the bat sprang away and vanished in the dark. Sproule was clawing at his neck and he was gibbering hysterically and when he saw the kid standing there looking down at him he held out to him his bloodied hands as if in accusation and then clapped them to his ears and cried out what it seemed he himself would not hear, a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world. But the kid only spat into the darkness of the space between them. I know your kind, he said. What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.
In the morning they crossed a dry wash and the kid hiked up it looking for a tank or a hole but there was none. He picked out a sink in the wash and fell to digging with a bone and after he had dug some two feet into the sand the sand turned damp and then a little more and a slow seep of water began to fill into the furrows he dredged with his fingers. He took off his shirt and pushed it down into the sand and watched it darken and he watched the water rise slowly among the folds of cloth until there was perhaps a cupful and then he lowered his head into the excavation and drank. Then he sat and watched it fill again. He did this for over an hour. Then he put on the shirt and went back down the wash.
Sproule didnt want to take off his shirt. He tried sucking up the water and he got a mouthful of sand.
Why dont you let me use your shirt, he said.
The kid was squatting in the dry gravel of the wash. Suck on ye own shirt, he said.
He took off the shirt. It stuck to the skin and a yellow pus ran. His arm was swollen to the size of his thigh and it was garishly discolored and small worms worked in the open wound. He pushed the shirt down into the hole and leaned and drank.
In the afternoon they came to a crossroads, what else to call it. A faint wagon trace that came from the north and crossed their path and went on to the south. They stood scanning the landscape for some guidance in that emptiness. Sproule sat where the tracks crossed and looked out from the great caves in his skull where his eyes lay. He said that he would not rise.
Yonder’s a lake, said the kid.
He would not look.
It lay shimmering in the distance. Its edges rimed with salt. The kid studied it and studied the roads. After a while he nodded toward the south. I believe this here is the most traveled.
It’s all right, said Sproule. You go on.
You suit yourself.
Sproule watched him set off. After a while he rose and followed.
They had gone perhaps two miles when they stopped to rest, Sproule sitting with his legs out and his hands in his lap and the kid squatting a little ways from him. Blinking and bearded and filthy in their rags.
Does that sound like thunder to you? said Sproule.
The kid raised his head.
Listen.
The kid looked at the sky, pale blue, unmarked save where the sun burned like a white hole.
I can feel it in the ground, said Sproule.
It aint nothin.
Listen.
The kid rose and looked about. To the north a small movement of dust. He watched it. It did not rise nor did it blow away.
It was a carreta, lumbering clumsily over the plain, a small mule to draw it. The driver may have been asleep. When he saw the fugitives in the trace before him he halted the mule and began to saw it around to go back and he did get it turned but by then the kid had seized the raw leather headstall and hauled the animal to a standstill. Sproule came hobbling up. From the rear of the wagon two children peered out. They were so pale with dust, their hair so white and faces pinched, they looked like little gnomes crouched there. At the sight of the kid before him the driver shrank back and the woman next to him set up a high shrill chittering and began to point from one horizon to the other but he pulled himself up into the bed of the cart and Sproule came dragging after and they lay staring up at the hot canvas tarp while the two waifs drew back into the corner and watched blackeyed as woodmice and the cart turned south again and set off with a rising rumble and clatter.
There was a clay jar of water hung by a thong from the bowstay and the kid took it down and drank from it and gave it to Sproule. Then he took it back and drank the rest. They lay in the floor of the cart among old hides and spills of salt and after a while they slept.
It was dark when they entered the town. The jostle of the cart ceasing was what woke them. The kid raised himself up and looked out. Starlight in a mud street. The wagon empty. The mule wheezed and stamped in the traces. After a while the man came from the shadows and led them along a lane into a yard and he backed the mule until the cart was alongside a wall and then he unhitched the mule and led it away.
He lay back in the tilted cartbed. It was cold in the night and he lay with his knees drawn up under a piece of hide that smelled of mold and urine and he slept and woke all night and all night dogs barked and in the dawn cocks called and he heard horses on the road.
In the first gray light flies began to land on him. They touched his face and woke him and he brushed them away. After a while he sat up.
They were in a barren mudwalled courtyard and there was a house made of reeds and clay. Chickens stepped about and clucked and scratched. A small boy came from the house and pulled down his pants and shat in the yard and rose and went in again. The kid looked at Sproule. He was lying with his face to the wagonboards. He was partly covered with his blanket and flies were crawling on him. The kid reached to shake him. He was cold and wooden. The flies rose, then they settled back.
The kid was standing by the cart pissing when the soldiers rode into the yard. They seized him and tied his hands behind him and they looked in the cart and talked among themselves and then they led him out into the street.
He was taken to an adobe building and put in an empty room. He sat in the floor while a wild-eyed boy with an old musket watched him. After a while they came and took him out again.
They led him through the narrow mud streets and he could hear music like a fanfare growing the louder. First children walked with him and then old folk and finally a throng of brown-skinned villagers all dressed in white cotton like attendants in an institution, the women in dark rebozos, some with their breasts exposed, their faces stained red with almagre, smoking small cigars. Their numbers swelled and the guards with their shouldered fusils frowned and shouted at the jostlers and they went on along the tall adobe wall of a church and into the plaza.
There was a bazaar in progress. A traveling medicine show, a primitive circus. They passed stout willow cages clogged with vipers, with great limegreen serpents from some more southerly latitude or beaded lizards with their black mouths wet with venom. A reedy old leper held up handfuls of tapeworms from a jar for all to see and cried out his medicines against them and they were pressed about by other rude apothecaries and by vendors and mendicants until all came at last before a trestle whereon stood a glass carboy of clear mescal. In this container with hair afloat and eyes turned upward in a pale face sat a human head.
They dragged him forward with shouts and gestures. Mire, mire, they cried. He stood before the jar and they urged his consideration of it and they tilted it around so that the head should face him. It was Captain White. Lately at war among the heathen. The kid looked into the drowned and sightless eyes of his old commander. He looked about at the villagers and at the soldiers, their eyes all upon him, and he spat and wiped his mouth. He aint no kin to me, he said.
They put him in an old stone corral with three other ragged refugees from the expedition. They sat stunned and blinking
against the wall or roved the perimeter around in the dry tracks of mules and horses and retched and shat while small boys hooted from the parapet.
He fell in with a thin boy from Georgia. I was sickern a dog, the boy said. I was afraid I was goin to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.
I seen a rider on the captain’s horse up in the country from here, the kid told him.
Aye, said the Georgian. They killed him and Clark and another boy I never did know his name. We come on into town and the very next day they had us in the calabozo and this selfsame son of a bitch is down there with the guards laughin and drinkin and playin cards, him and the jefe, to see who gets the captain’s horse and who gets his pistols. I guess you seen the captain’s head.
I seen it.
That’s the worst thing I ever seen in my life.
Somebody ought to of pickled it a long time ago. By rights they ought to pickle mine. For ever takin up with such a fool.
They drifted as the day advanced from wall to wall to keep out of the sun. The boy from Georgia told him of his comrades displayed on slabs cold and dead in the market. The captain headless in a wallow half eaten by hogs. He ran his heel out in the dust and gouged a little place for it to rest. They fixin to send us to Chihuahua City, he said.
How do you know?
That’s what they say. I dont know.
That’s what who says?
Shipman yonder. He speaks the lingo some.
The kid regarded the man spoken of. He shook his head and spat dryly.
All day small boys perched on the walls and watched them by shifts and pointed and jabbered. They’d walk around the parapet and try to piss down on sleepers in the shade but the prisoners kept alert. Some at first threw stones but the kid picked one from the dust the size of an egg and with it dropped a small child cleanly from the wall with no sound other than the muted thud of its landing on the far side.
Now you gone and done it, said the Georgian.
The kid looked at him.
They’ll be in here with whips and I dont know what all.
The kid spat. They aint about to come in here and eat no whips.
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Vintage International) Page 7
