That was a hell of a shot, said John Grady.
That was blind dumb-ass luck is what that was. I just raised up and shot.
Still a hell of a shot.
Let me have your beltknife. If we dont founder on deermeat I’m a chinaman.
They dressed out the deer and hung it in the junipers to cool and they made a foray on the slope for wood. They built a fire and they cut paloverde poles and cut forked uprights to lay them in and Rawlins skinned the buck out and sliced the meat in strips and draped it over the poles to smoke. When the fire had burned down he skewered the backstraps on two greenwood sticks and propped the sticks with rocks over the coals. Then they sat watching the meat brown and sniffed the smoke where fat dropped hissing in the coals.
John Grady walked out and unsaddled the horses and hobbled them and turned them out and came back with his blanket and saddle.
Here you go, he said.
What’s that?
Salt.
I wish we had some bread.
How about some fresh corn and potatoes and apple cobbler?
Dont be a ass.
Aint them things done yet?
No. Set down. They wont never get done with you standin there thataway.
They ate the tenderloins one apiece and turned the strips of meat on the poles and lay back and rolled cigarettes.
I’ve seen them vaqueros worked for Blair cut a yearling heifer so thin you could see through the meat. They’d bone one out damn near in one long sheet. They’d hang the meat on poles all the way around the fire like laundry and if you come up on it at night you wouldnt know what it was. It was like lookin through somethin and seein its heart. They’d turn the meat and mend the fire in the night and you’d see em movin around inside it. You’d wake up in the night and this thing would be settin out there on the prairie in the wind and it would be glowin like a hot stove. Just red as blood.
This here meat’s goin to taste like cedar, said John Grady.
I know it.
Coyotes were yapping along the ridge to the south. Rawlins leaned and tipped the ash from his cigarette into the fire and leaned back.
You ever think about dyin?
Yeah. Some. You?
Yeah. Some. You think there’s a heaven?
Yeah. Dont you?
I dont know. Yeah. Maybe. You think you can believe in heaven if you dont believe in hell?
I guess you can believe what you want to.
Rawlins nodded. You think about all the stuff that can happen to you, he said. There aint no end to it.
You fixin to get religion on us?
No. Just sometimes I wonder if I wouldnt be better off if I did.
You aint fixin to quit me are you?
I said I wouldnt.
John Grady nodded.
You think them guts might draw a lion? said Rawlins.
Could.
You ever seen one?
No. You?
Just that one dead that Julius Ramsey killed with the dogs up on Grape Creek. He climbed up in the tree and knocked it out with a stick for the dogs to fight.
You think he really done that?
Yeah. I think probably he did.
John Grady nodded. He might well could of.
The coyotes yammered and ceased and then began again.
You think God looks out for people? said Rawlins.
Yeah. I guess He does. You?
Yeah. I do. Way the world is. Somebody can wake up and sneeze somewhere in Arkansas or some damn place and before you’re done there’s wars and ruination and all hell. You dont know what’s goin to happen. I’d say He’s just about got to. I dont believe we’d make it a day otherwise.
John Grady nodded.
You dont think them sons of bitches might of caught him do you?
Blevins?
Yeah.
I dont know. I thought you was glad to get shut of him.
I dont want to see nothin bad happen to him.
I dont either.
You reckon his name is Jimmy Blevins sure enough?
Who knows.
In the night the coyotes woke them and they lay in the dark and listened to them where they convened over the carcass of the deer, fighting and squalling like cats.
I want you to listen to that damned racket, said Rawlins.
He got up and got a stick from the fire and shouted at them and threw the stick. They hushed. He mended the fire and turned the meat on the greenwood racks. By the time he was back in his blankets they were at it again.
They rode all day the day following through the hill country to the west. As they rode they cut strips of the smoked and half dried deermeat and chewed on it and their hands were black and greasy and they wiped them on the withers of the horses and passed the canteen of water back and forth between them and admired the country. There were storms to the south and masses of clouds that moved slowly along the horizon with their long dark tendrils trailing in the rain. That night they camped on a ledge of rock above the plains and watched the lightning all along the horizon provoke from the seamless dark the distant mountain ranges again and again. Crossing the plain the next morning they came upon standing water in the bajadas and they watered the horses and drank rainwater from the rocks and they climbed steadily into the deepening cool of the mountains until in the evening of that day from the crest of the cordilleras they saw below them the country of which they’d been told. The grasslands lay in a deep violet haze and to the west thin flights of waterfowl were moving north before the sunset in the deep red galleries under the cloudbanks like schoolfish in a burning sea and on the foreland plain they saw vaqueros driving cattle before them through a gauze of golden dust.