Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Vintage International)

by Cormac McCarthy

  Bueno, he called. Puedes ver?

  No.

  Nada?

  Nada, said the woman.

  Bueno, said the juggler.

  He turned with the deck of cards and advanced toward Glanton. The woman sat like a stone. Glanton waved him away.

  Los caballeros, he said.

  The juggler turned. The black was squatting by the fire watching and when the juggler fanned the cards he rose and came forward.

  The juggler looked up at him. He folded the cards and fanned them again and he made a pass over them with his left hand and held them forth and Jackson took a card and looked at it.

  Bueno, said the juggler. Bueno. He admonished caution with a forefinger to his thin lips and took the card and held it aloft and turned with it. The card popped once sharply. He looked at the company seated about the fire. They were smoking, they were watching. He made a slow sweep before him with the card outheld. It bore the picture of a fool in harlequin and a cat. El tonto, he called.

  El tonto, said the woman. She raised her chin slightly and she began a singsong chant. The dark querent stood solemnly, like a man arraigned. His eyes shifted over the company. The judge sat upwind from the fire naked to the waist, himself like some great pale deity, and when the black’s eyes reached his he smiled. The woman ceased. The fire fled down the wind.

  Quién, quién, cried the juggler.

  She paused. El negro, she said.

  El negro, cried the juggler, turning with the card. His clothes snapped in the wind. The woman raised her voice and spoke again and the black turned to his mates.

  What does she say?

  The juggler had turned and was making small bows to the company.

  What does she say? Tobin?

  The expriest shook his head. Idolatry, Blackie, idolatry. Do not mind her.

  What does she say Judge?

  The judge smiled. With his thumb he had been routing small life from the folds of his hairless skin and now he held up one hand with the thumb and forefinger pressed together in a gesture that appeared to be a benediction until he flung something unseen into the fire before him. What does she say?

  What does she say.

  I think she means to say that in your fortune lie our fortunes all.

  And what is that fortune?

  The judge smiled blandly, his pleated brow not unlike a dolphin’s. Are you a drinking man, Jackie?

  No more than some.

  I think she’d have you beware the demon rum. Prudent counsel enough, what do you think?

  That aint no fortune.

  Exactly so. The priest is right.

  The black frowned at the judge but the judge leaned forward to regard him. Wrinkle not thy sable brow at me, my friend. All will be known to you at last. To you as to every man.

  Now a number of the company seated there seemed to weigh the judge’s words and some turned to look at the black. He stood an uneasy honoree and at length he stepped back from the firelight and the juggler rose and made a motion with the cards, sweeping them in a fan before him and then proceeding along the perimeter past the boots of the men with the cards outheld as if they would find their own subject.

  Quién, quién, he whispered among them.

  They were right loath all. When he came before the judge the judge, who sat with one hand splayed across the broad expanse of his stomach, raised a finger and pointed.

  Young Blasarius yonder, he said.

  Cómo?

  El joven.

  El joven, whispered the juggler. He looked about him slowly with an air of mystery until he found with his eyes the one so spoken. He moved past the adventurers quickening his step. He stood before the kid, he squatted with the cards and fanned them with a slow rhythmic motion akin to the movements of certain birds at court.

  Una carta, una carta, he wheezed.

  The kid looked at the man and he looked at the company about.

  Sí, sí, said the juggler, offering the cards.

  He took one. He’d not seen such cards before, yet the one he held seemed familiar to him. He turned it upside down and regarded it and he turned it back.

  The juggler took the boy’s hand in his own and turned the card so he could see. Then he took the card and held it up.

  Cuatro de copas, he called out.

  The woman raised her head. She looked like a blindfold mannequin raised awake by a string.

  Cuatro de copas, she said. She moved her shoulders. The wind went among her garments and her hair.

  Quién, called the juggler.

  El hombre … she said. El hombre más joven. El muchacho.

  El muchacho, called the juggler. He turned the card for all to see. The woman sat like that blind interlocutrix between Boaz and Jachin inscribed upon the one card in the juggler’s deck that they would not see come to light, true pillars and true card, false prophetess for all. She began to chant.

  The judge was laughing silently. He bent slightly the better to see the kid. The kid looked at Tobin and at David Brown and he looked at Glanton himself but they were none laughing. The juggler kneeling before him watched him with a strange intensity. He followed the kid’s gaze to the judge and back. When the kid looked down at him he smiled a crooked smile.

  Get the hell away from me, said the kid.

  The juggler leaned his ear forward. A common gesture and one that served for any tongue. The ear was dark and misshapen, as if in being put forth in this fashion it had suffered no few clouts, or perhaps the very news men had for him had blighted it. The kid spoke to him again but a man named Tate from Kentucky who had fought with McCulloch’s Rangers as had Tobin and others among them leaned and whispered to the ragged soothsayer and he rose and made a slight bow and moved away. The woman had ceased her chanting. The juggler stood flapping in the wind and the fire lashed a long hot tail over the ground. Quién, quién, he called.

  El jefe, said the judge.

  The juggler’s eyes sought out Glanton. He sat unmoved. The juggler looked at the old woman where she sat apart, facing the dark, lightly tottering, racing the night in her rags. He raised his finger to his lips and he spread his arms in a gesture of uncertainty.

  El jefe, hissed the judge.

  The man turned and went along the group at the fire and brought himself before Glanton and crouched and offered up the cards, spreading them in both hands. If he spoke his words were snatched away unheard. Glanton smiled, his eyes were small against the stinging grit. He put one hand forth and paused, he looked at the juggler. Then he took a card.

  The juggler folded shut the deck and tucked it among his clothes. He reached for the card in Glanton’s hand. Perhaps he touched it, perhaps not. The card vanished. It was in Glanton’s hand and then it was not. The juggler’s eyes snapped after it where it had gone down the dark. Perhaps Glanton had seen the card’s face. What could it have meant to him? The juggler reached out to that naked beldam beyond the fire’s light but in the doing he overbalanced and fell forward against Glanton and created a moment of strange liaison with his old man’s arms about the leader as if he would console him at his scrawny bosom.

  Glanton swore and flung him away and at that moment the old woman began to chant.

  Glanton rose.

  She raised her jaw, gibbering at the night.

  Shut her up, said Glanton.

  La carroza, la carroza, cried the beldam. Invertido. Carta de guerra, de venganza. La ví sin ruedas sobre un rio obscure …

  Glanton called to her and she paused as if she’d heard him but it was not so. She seemed to catch some new drift in her divinings.

  Perdida, perdida. La carta está perdida en la noche.

  The girl standing this while at the edge of the howling darkness crossed herself silently. The old malabarista was on his knees where he’d been flung. Perdida, perdida, he whispered.

  Un maleficio, cried the old woman. Qué viento tan maleante …

  By god you will shut up, said Glanton, drawing his revolver.

&nbs
p; Carroza de muertos, llena de huesos. El joven qué …

  The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element. He put his arms around Glanton. Someone snatched the old woman’s blindfold from her and she and the juggler were clouted away and when the company turned in to sleep and the low fire was roaring in the blast like a thing alive these four yet crouched at the edge of the firelight among their strange chattels and watched how the ragged flames fled down the wind as if sucked by some maelstrom out there in the void, some vortex in that waste apposite to which man’s transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate. As if beyond will or fate he and his beasts and his trappings moved both in card and in substance under consignment to some third and other destiny.

  In the morning when they rode out it was that pale day with the sun not risen and the wind had abated in the night and the things of the night were gone. The juggler on his burro trotted out to the head of the column and fell in with Glanton and they rode on together and they were so riding in the afternoon when the company entered the town of Janos.

  An ancient walled presidio composed wholly of mud, a tall mud church and mud watchtowers and all of it rainwashed and lumpy and sloughing into a soft decay. The advent of the riders bruited by scurvid curs that howled woundedly and slank among the crumbling walls.

  They rode past the church where old spanish bells seagreen with age hung from a pole between low mud dolmens. Darkeyed children watched from the hovels. The air was heavy with the smoke from charcoal fires and a few old pelados sat mute in the doorways and many of the houses were caved and ruinous and stood for pens. An old man with soapy eyes lurched out at them and held forth his hand. Una corta caridad, he croaked to the passing horses. Por Dios.

  In the square two of the Delawares and the outrider Webster were squatting in the dust with a weathered old woman the color of pipeclay. Dry old crone, half naked, her paps like wrinkled aubergines hanging from under the shawl she wore. She stared at the ground nor did she look up even when the horses stood all about her.

  Glanton looked down the square. The town appeared empty. There was a small company of soldiers garrisoned here but they did not turn out. Dust was blowing through the streets. His horse leaned and sniffed at the old woman and jerked its head and trembled and Glanton patted the animal’s neck and dismounted.

  She was in a meatcamp about eight mile up the river, said Webster. She caint walk.

  How many were there?

  We reckoned maybe fifteen or twenty. They didnt have no stock to amount to anything. I dont know what she was doin there.

  Glanton crossed in front of his horse, passing the reins behind his back.

  Watch her, Cap. She bites.

  She had raised her eyes to the level of his knees. Glanton pushed the horse back and took one of the heavy saddle pistols from its scabbard and cocked it.

  Watch yourself there.

  Several of the men stepped back.

  The woman looked up. Neither courage nor heartsink in those old eyes. He pointed with his left hand and she turned to follow his hand with her gaze and he put the pistol to her head and fired.

  The explosion filled all that sad little park. Some of the horses shied and stepped. A fistsized hole erupted out of the far side of the woman’s head in a great vomit of gore and she pitched over and lay slain in her blood without remedy. Glanton had already put the pistol at halfcock and he flicked away the spent primer with his thumb and was preparing to recharge the cylinder. McGill, he said.

  A Mexican, solitary of his race in that company, came forward.

  Get that receipt for us.

  He took a skinning knife from his belt and stepped to where the old woman lay and took up her hair and twisted it about his wrist and passed the blade of the knife about her skull and ripped away the scalp.

  Glanton looked at the men. They were stood some looking down at the old woman, some already seeing to their mounts or their equipage. Only the recruits were watching Glanton. He seated a pistolball in the mouth of the chamber and then he raised his eyes and looked across the square. The juggler and his family stood aligned like witnesses and beyond them in the long mud facade faces that had been watching from the doors and the naked windows dropped away like puppets in a gallery before the slow sweep of his eyes. He levered the ball home and capped the piece and spun the heavy pistol in his hand and returned it to the scabbard at the horse’s shoulder and took the dripping trophy from McGill and turned it in the sun the way a man might qualify the pelt of an animal and then handed it back and took up the trailing reins and led his horse out through the square toward the water at the ford.

  They made camp in a grove of cottonwoods across the creek just beyond the walls of the town and with dark they drifted in small groups through the smoky streets. The circus folk had set up a little pitchtent in the dusty plaza and had stood a few poles about mounted with cressets of burning oil. The juggler was beating a sort of snaredrum made of tin and rawhide and calling out in a high nasal voice his bill of entertainments while the woman shrieked Pase pase pase, sweeping her arms about her in a gesture of the greatest spectacle. Toadvine and the kid watched among the milling citizenry. Bathcat leaned and spoke to them.

  Look yonder, chappies.

  They turned to look where he pointed. The black stood stripped to the waist behind the tent and as the juggler turned with a sweep of his arm the girl gave him a shove and he leaped from the tent and strode about with strange posturings under the lapsing flare of the torches.

  VIII

  Another cantina, another advisor – Monte – A knifing – The darkest corner of the tavern the most conspicuous – The sereno – Riding north – The meatcamp – Grannyrat – Under the Animas peaks – A confrontation and a killing – Another anchorite, another dawn.

  They paused without the cantina and pooled their coins and Toadvine pushed aside the dried cowhide that hung for a door and they entered a place where all was darkness and without definition. A lone lamp hung from a crosstree in the ceiling and in the shadows dark figures sat smoking. They made their way across the room to a claytiled bar. The place reeked of woodsmoke and sweat. A thin little man appeared before them and placed his hands ceremonially upon the tiles.

  Dígame, he said.

  Toadvine took off his hat and put it on the bar and swept a clawed hand through his hair.

  What have you got that a man could drink with just a minimum risk of blindness and death.

  Cómo?

  He cocked his thumb at his throat. What have you got to drink, he said.

  The barman turned and looked behind him at his wares. He seemed uncertain whether anything there would answer their requirements.

  Mescal?

  Suit everbody?

  Trot it out, said Bathcat.

  The barman poured the measures from a clay jar into three dented tin cups and pushed them forward with care like counters on a board.

  Cuánto, said Toadvine.

  The barman looked fearful. Seis? he said.

  Seis what?

  The man held up six fingers.

  Centavos, said Bathcat.

  Toadvine doled the coppers onto the bar and drained his cup and paid again. He gestured at the cups all three with a wag of his finger. The kid took up his cup and drained it and set it down again. The liquor was rank, sour, tasted faintly of creosote. He was standing like the others with his back to the bar and he looked over the room. At a table in the far corner men were playing cards by the light of a single tallow candle. Along the wall opposite crouched figures seeming alien to the light who watched the Americans with no expression at all.

  There’s a game for ye, said Toadvine. Play monte in the dark with a pack of niggers. He raised the cup and drained it and set it on the bar and counted the remaining coins. A man was shuffling toward them out of the gloom. He had a bottle under his arm and he set it on the tiles with care together with his cup and sp
oke to the barman and the barman brought him a clay pitcher of water. He turned the pitcher so that the handle of it stood to his right and he looked at the kid. He was old and he wore a flatcrowned hat of a type no longer much seen in that country and he was dressed in dirty white cotton drawers and shirt. The huaraches he wore looked like dried and blackened fish lashed to the floors of his feet.

  You are Texas? he said.

  The kid looked at Toadvine.

  You are Texas, the old man said. I was Texas three year. He held up his hand. The forefinger was gone at the first joint and perhaps he was showing them what happened in Texas or perhaps he merely meant to count the years. He lowered the hand and turned to the bar and poured wine into the cup and took up the jar of water and poured it sparingly after. He drank and set the cup down and turned to Toadvine. He wore thin white whiskers at the point of his chin and he wiped them with the back of his hand before looking up again.

  You are sociedad de guerra. Contra los barbaros.

  Toadvine didnt know. He looked like some loutish knight beriddled by a troll.

  The old man put a phantom rifle to his shoulder and made a noise with his mouth. He looked at the Americans. You kill the Apache, no?

  Toadvine looked at Bathcat. What does he want? he said.

  The Vandiemenlander passed his own threefingered hand across his mouth but he allowed no affinity. The old man’s full he said. Or mad.

  Toadvine propped his elbows on the tiles behind him. He looked at the old man and he spat on the floor. Craziern a runaway nigger, aint ye? he said.

  There was a groan from the far side of the room. A man rose and went along the wall and bent to speak with others. The groans came again and the old man passed his hand before his face twice and kissed the ends of his fingers and looked up.

  How much monies they pay you? he said.

  No one spoke.

  You kill Gómez they pay you much monies.

  The man in the dark of the far wall moaned again. Madre de Dios, he called.