Toadvine had made his way around the excavation until he reached the expriest and they lay watching the retreat of the savages through the heat shimmering off the pan in the late sunlight.
He’s a deadeye aint he?
Tobin nodded. He looked down the pit to where the kid sat loading the pistol, turning the powderfilled chambers and measuring them with his eye, seating the balls with the sprues down.
How do you stand by way of ammunition?
Poorly. We got a few rounds, not many.
The expriest nodded. Evening was coming on and in the red land to the west the Yumas were gathering in silhouette before the sun.
All night their watchfires burned on the dark circlet of the world and the kid unpinned the barrel from the pistol and using it for a spyglass he went around the warm sand selvage of the well and studied the separate fires for movement. There is hardly in the world a waste so barren but some creature will not cry out at night, yet here one was and they listened to their breathing in the dark and the cold and they listened to the systole of the rubymeated hearts that hung within them. When day broke the fires had burned out and slender terminals of smoke stood from the plain at three separate points of the compass and the enemy had gone. Crossing the dry pan toward them from the east was a large figure attended by a smaller. Toadvine and the expriest watched.
What do you make it to be?
The expriest shook his head.
Toadvine cupped his hand and whistled sharply down at the kid. He sat up with the pistol. He clambered up the slope with his stiff leg. The three of them lay watching.
It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed. The three at the well watched mutely this transit out of the breaking day and even though there was no longer any question as to what it was that approached yet none would name it. They lumbered on, the judge a pale pink beneath his talc of dust like something newly born, the imbecile much the darker, lurching together across the pan at the very extremes of exile like some scurrilous king stripped of his vestiture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die.
Those who travel in desert places do indeed meet with creatures surpassing all description. The watchers at the well rose the better to witness these arrivals. The imbecile was fairly loping along to keep the pace. The judge on his head wore a wig of dried river mud from which protruded bits of straw and grass and tied upon the imbecile’s head was a rag of fur with the blackened blood side out. The judge carried in one hand a small canvas satchel and he was bedraped with meat like some medieval penitent. He hove up at the diggings and nodded them a good morning and he and the idiot slid down the bank and knelt and began to drink.
Even the idiot, who must be fed by hand. He knelt beside the judge and sucked noisily at the mineral water and raised his dark larval eyes to the three men crouched above him at the rim of the pit and then bent and drank again.
The judge threw off his bandoliers of sunblacked meat and his skin beneath was strangely mottled pink and white in the shapes of them. He set by the little mud cap and laved water over his burnt and peeling skull and over his face and he drank again and sat in the sand. He looked up at his old companions. His mouth was cracked and his tongue swollen.
Louis, he said. What will you take for that hat?
Toadvine spat. It aint for sale, he said.
Everything’s for sale, said the judge. What will you take?
Toadvine looked uneasily at the expriest. He looked down into the well. Got to have my hat, he said.
How much?
Toadvine gestured with his chin at the strings of meat. I reckon you want to trade some of that tug for it.
Not at all, said the judge. Such as is here is for everybody. How much for the hat?
What’ll you give? said Toadvine.
The judge studied him. I’ll give one hundred dollars, he said.
No one spoke. The idiot crouched on its haunches seemed also to be awaiting the outcome of this exchange. Toadvine took off the hat and looked at it. His lank black hair clove to the sides of his head. It wont fit ye, he said.
The judge quoted him some term in latin. He smiled. Not your concern, he said.
Toadvine put the hat on and adjusted it. I reckon that’s what you got in that there satchel, he said.
You reckon correctly, said the judge.
Toadvine looked off toward the sun.
I’ll make it a hundred and a quarter and wont ask you where you got it, said the judge.
Let’s see your color.
The judge unclasped the satchel and tipped and emptied it out on the sand. It contained a knife and perhaps a half a bucketful of gold coins of every value. The judge pushed the knife to one side and spread the coins with the palm of his hand and looked up.
Toadvine took off the hat. He made his way down the slope. He and the judge squatted on either side of the judge’s trove and the judge put forward the coins agreed upon, advancing them with the back of his hand forward like a croupier. Toadvine handed up the hat and gathered the coins and the judge took the knife and slit the band of the hat at the rear and cut through the brim and opened up the crown and then set the hat on his head and looked up at Tobin and the kid.
Come down, he said. Come down and share this meat.
They didnt move. Toadvine already had a piece of it in both hands and was tugging at it with his teeth. It was cool in the well and the morning sun fell only upon the upper rim. The judge scooped the remaining coins back into the satchel and stood it aside and bent to drink again. The imbecile had been watching its reflection in the pool and it watched the judge drink and it watched the water calm itself once more. The judge wiped his mouth and looked at the figures above him.
How are you fixed for weapons? he said.
The kid had set one foot over the edge of the pit and now he drew it back. Tobin did not move. He was watching the judge.
We’ve just the one pistol, Holden.
We? said the judge.
The lad here.
The kid had risen to his feet again. The expriest stood by him.
The judge in the floor of the well likewise rose and he adjusted his hat and gripped the valise under his arm like some immense and naked barrister whom the country had crazed.
Weigh your counsel, Priest, he said. We are all here together. Yonder sun is like the eye of God and we will cook impartially upon this great siliceous griddle I do assure you.
I’m no priest and I’ve no counsel, said Tobin. The lad is a free agent.
The judge smiled. Quite so, he said. He looked at Toadvine and he smiled up at the expriest again. What then? he said. Are we to drink at these holes turn about like rival bands of apes?
The expriest looked at the kid. They stood facing the sun. He squatted, the better to address the judge below.
Do you think that there is a registry where you can file on the wells of the desert?
Ah Priest, you’d know those offices more readily than I. I’ve no claim here. I’ve told you before, I’m a simple man. You know you’re welcome to come down here and to drink and to fill your flask.
Tobin didnt move.
Let me have the canteen, said the kid. He’d taken the pistol from his belt and he handed it to the expriest and took the leather bottle and descended the bank.
The judge followed him with his eyes. The kid circled the floor of the well, no part of which was altogether beyond the judge’s reach, and he knelt opposite the imbecile and pulled the stopper from the flask and submerged the flask in the basin. He and the imbecile watched the water run in at the neck of the flask and they watched it bubble and they watched it cease. The kid stoppered the flask and leaned and drank from the pool and th
en he sat back and looked at Toadvine.
Are you goin with us?
Toadvine looked at the judge. I dont know, he said. I’m subject to arrest. They’ll arrest me in California.
Arrest ye?
Toadvine didnt answer. He was sitting in the sand and he made a tripod of three fingers and stuck them in the sand before him and then he lifted and turned them and poked them in again so that there were six holes in the form of a star or a hexagon and then he rubbed them out again. He looked up.
You wouldnt think that a man would run plumb out of country out here, would ye?
The kid rose and slung the flask by its strap over his shoulder. His trouserleg was black with blood and the bloody stump of the shaft jutted from his thigh like a peg for hanging implements upon. He spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and he looked at Toadvine. It aint country you’ve run out of, he said. Then he made his way across the sink and up the bank. The judge followed him with his eyes and when the kid reached the sunlight at the top he turned and looked back and the judge was holding open the satchel between his naked thighs.
Five hundred dollars, he said. Powder and ball included.
The expriest was at the kid’s side. Do him, he hissed.
The kid took the pistol but the expriest clung to his arm whispering and when the kid pulled away he spoke aloud, such was his fear.
You’ll get no second chance lad. Do it. He is naked. He is unarmed. God’s blood, do you think you’ll best him any other way? Do it, lad. Do it for the love of God. Do it or I swear your life is forfeit.
The judge smiled, he tapped his temple. The priest, he said. The priest has been too long in the sun. Seven-fifty and that’s my best offer. It’s a seller’s market.
The kid put the pistol in his belt. Then with the expriest at his elbow importunate he circled the crater and they set out west across the pan. Toadvine climbed up and watched them. After a while there was nothing to see.
That day their way took them upon a vast mosaic pavement cobbled up from tiny blocks of jasper, carnelian, agate. A thousand acres wide where the wind sang in the groutless interstices. Traversing this ground toward the east riding one horse and leading another came David Brown. The horse he led was saddled and bridled and the kid stood with his thumbs in his belt and watched while he rode up and looked down at his old companions.
We heard you were in the juzgado, said Tobin.
I was, said Brown. I aint now. His eyes catalogued them in every part. He looked at the piece of arrowshaft protruding from the kid’s leg and he looked into the expriest’s eyes. Where’s your outfits? he said.
You’re lookin at them.
You fall out with Glanton?
Glanton’s dead.
Brown spat a dry white spot in that vast and broken plateland. He had a small stone in his mouth against the thirst and he shifted it with his jaw and looked at them. The Yumas, he said.
Aye, said the expriest.
All rubbed out?
Toadvine and the judge are at the well back yonder.
The judge, said Brown.
The horses stared bleakly at the crazed stone floor whereon they stood.
The rest gone under? Smith? Dorsey? The nigger?
All, said Tobin.
Brown looked east across the desert. How far to the well?
We left about an hour past daybreak.
Is he armed?
He is not.
He studied their faces. The priest dont lie, he said.
No one spoke. He sat fingering the scapular of dried ears. Then he turned the horse and rode on, leading the riderless animal behind. He rode watching back at them. Then he stopped again.
Did you see him dead? he called. Glanton?
I did, called the expriest. For he had so.
He rode on, turned slightly in the saddle, the rifle on his knee. He kept watch behind him on those pilgrims and they on him. When he was well diminished on the pan they turned and went on.
By noon the day following they had begun to come again upon abandoned gear from the caravans, cast shoes and pieces of harness and bones and the dried carcasses of mules with the alparejas still buckled about. They trod the faint arc of an ancient lake shore where broken shells lay like bits of pottery frail and ribbed among the sands and in the early evening they descended among a series of dunes and spoilbanks to Carrizo Creek, a seep that welled out of the stones and ran off down the desert and vanished again. Thousands of sheep had perished here and the travelers made their way among the yellowed bones and carcasses with their rags of tattered wool and they knelt among bones to drink. When the kid raised his dripping head from the water a rifleball dished his reflection from the pool and the echoes of the shot clattered about the bonestrewn slopes and clanged away in the desert and died.
He spun on his belly and clambered sideways, scanning the skyline. He saw the horses first, standing nose to nose in a notch among the dunes to the south. He saw the judge clad in the gusseted clothing of his recent associates. He was holding the mouth of the upright rifle in his fist and pouring powder from a flask down the bore. The imbecile, naked save for a hat, squatted in the sands at his feet.
The kid scuttled to a low place in the ground and lay flat with the pistol in his fist and the creek trickling past his elbow. He turned to look for the expriest but he could not find him. He could see through the lattice of bones the judge and his charge on the hill in the sun and he raised the pistol and rested it in the saddle of a rancid pelvis and fired. He saw the sand jump on the slope behind the judge and the judge leveled the rifle and fired and the rifleball whacked through the bones and the shots rolled away over the dunelands.
The kid lay with his heart hammering in the sand. He thumbed back the hammer again and raised his head. The idiot sat as before and the judge was trudging sedately along the skyline looking over the windrowed bones below him for an advantage. The kid began to move again. He moved into the creek on his belly and lay drinking, holding up the pistol and the powderflask and sucking at the water. Then he moved out the far side and down a trampled corridor through the sands where wolves had gone to and fro. Off to his left he thought he heard the expriest hiss at him and he could hear the creek and he lay listening. He set the hammer at halfcock and rotated the cylinder and recharged the empty chamber and capped the piece and raised up to look. The shallow ridge along which the judge had advanced was empty and the two horses were coming toward him across the sand to the south. He cocked the pistol and lay watching. They approached freely over the barren pitch, nudging the air with their heads, their tails whisking. Then he saw the idiot shambling along behind them like some dim neolithic herdsman. To his right he saw the judge appear from the dunes and reconnoitre and drop from sight again. The horses continued on and there was a scrabbling behind him and when the kid turned the expriest was in the corridor hissing at him.
Shoot him, he called.
The kid spun about to look for the judge but the expriest called again in his hoarse whisper.
The fool. Shoot the fool.
He raised his pistol. The horses stepped one and the next through a break in the yellowed palings and the imbecile shambled after and disappeared. He looked back at Tobin but the expriest was gone. He moved along the corridor until he came to the creek again, already slightly roiled from the drinking horses above him. His leg had begun to bleed and he lay soaking it in the cold water and he drank and palmed water over the back of his neck. The marblings of blood that swung from his thigh were like thin red leeches in the current. He looked at the sun.
Hello called the judge, his voice off to the west. As if there were new riders to the creek and he addressed them.
The kid lay listening. There were no new riders. After a while the judge called out again. Come out, he called. There’s plenty of water for everybody.
The kid had swung the powderflask around to his back to keep it out of the creek and he held the pistol up and waited. Upstream the horses had stopped drin
king. Then they started drinking again.
When he moved out on the far side of the creek he came upon the hand and foot tracks left by the expriest among the prints of cats and foxes and the little desert pigs. He entered a clearing in that senseless midden and sat listening. His leather clothes were heavy and stiff with water and his leg was throbbing. A horse’s head came up streaming water at the muzzle a hundred feet away over the bones and dropped from sight again. When the judge called out his voice was in a new place. He called out for them to be friends. The kid watched a small caravan of ants bearing off among the arches of sheepribs. In the watching his eyes met the eyes of a small viper coiled under a flap of hide. He wiped his mouth and began to move again. In a culdesac the tracks of the expriest terminated and came back. He lay listening. It was hours till dark. After a while he heard the idiot slobbering somewhere among the bones.
He heard the wind coming in off the desert and he heard his own breathing. When he raised his head to look out he saw the expriest stumbling among the bones and holding aloft a cross he’d fashioned out of the shins of a ram and he’d lashed them together with strips of hide and he was holding the thing before him like some mad dowser in the bleak of desert and calling out in a tongue both alien and extinct.
The kid stood up, the revolver in both hands. He wheeled. He saw the judge and the judge was in another quarter altogether and he had the rifle already at his shoulder. When he fired Tobin turned around facing the way he’d come and sat down still holding the cross. The judge put down the rifle and took up another. The kid tried to steady the barrel of the pistol and he let off the shot and then dropped to the sand. The heavy ball of the rifle passed overhead like an asteroid and chattered and chopped among the bones fanned over the rise of ground beyond. He raised to his knees and looked for the judge but the judge was not there. He reloaded the empty chamber and began to move again on his elbows toward the spot where he’d seen the expriest fall, taking his bearings by the sun and pausing from time to time to listen. The ground was trampled with the tracks of predators come in from the plains for the carrion and the wind carrying through the breaks bore with it a sour reek like the stink of a rancid dishclout and there was no sound except the wind anywhere at all.
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Vintage International) Page 29
