All the Pretty Horses(92)

They dismounted and walked around to the far side of the tinaja and lay on their bellies on the rocks where the day’s heat was still rising and sucked at the water cool and soft and black as velvet and they laved water over their faces and the backs of their necks and watched the horses drink and then drank again.

He left the captain at the tank and hobbled with the rifle up the arroyo and gathered dead floodwash brush and hobbled back and made a fire at the upper end of the basin. He fanned the blaze with his hat and piled on more wood. The horses in the firelight reflected off the water were rimed with drying sweat and shifted pale and ghostly and blinked their red eyes. He looked at the captain. The captain was lying on his side on the smooth rock incline of the basin like something that had not quite made it to water.

He limped around to the horses and got the rope and sat with his knife and cut hobbles from it for all the horses and looped them about their forefeet. Then he levered all the shells out of the rifle and put them in his pocket and took one of the water bottles and went back to the fire.

He fanned the fire and he took the pistol out of his belt and pulled the cylinder pin and put the loaded cylinder and the pin in his pocket along with the rifle shells. Then he took out his knife and with the point of it unscrewed the screw from the grips and put the grips and the screw into his other pocket. He fanned the coals in the heart of the fire with his hat and with a stick he raked them into a pile and then he bent and stuck the barrel of the pistol into the coals.

The captain had sat up to look at him.

They will find you, he said. In this place.

We aint stayin in this place.

I cant ride no more.

You’ll be surprised at what you can do.

He took off his shirt and soaked it in the tinaja and came back to the fire and he fanned the fire again with his hat and then he pulled off his boots and unbuckled his belt and let down his trousers.

The rifle bullet had entered his thigh high up on the outside and the exit wound was in a rotation at the rear such that by turning his leg he could see both wounds clearly. He took up the wet shirt and very carefully wiped away the blood until the wounds were clear and stark as two holes in a mask. The area around the wounds was discolored and looked blue in the firelight and the skin around that was yellow. He leaned and ran a stick through the gripframes of the pistol and swung it up and away from the fire into his shadow and looked at it and then put it back. The captain was sitting holding his arm in his lap and watching him.

It’s fixin to get kindly noisy in here, he said. Watch out you dont get run over by a horse.

The captain didnt answer. He watched him while he fanned the fire. When next he dragged the pistol from the coals the end of the barrel glowed at a dull red heat and he laid it on the rocks and picked it up quickly by the grips in the wet shirt and jammed the redhot barrel ash and all down into the hole in his leg.

The captain either did not know what he was going to do or knowing did not believe. He tried to rise to his feet and fell backwards and almost slid into the tinaja. John Grady had begun to shout even before the gunmetal hissed in the meat. His shout clapped shut the calls of lesser creatures everywhere about them in the night and the horses all stood swimming up into the darkness beyond the fire and squatting in terror on their great thighs screaming and pawing the stars and he drew breath and howled again and jammed the gunbarrel into the second wound and held it the longer in deference to the cooling of the metal and then he fell over on his side and dropped the revolver on the rocks where it clattered and turned and slid down the basin and vanished hissing into the pool.

He’d seized the fleshy part of his thumb in his teeth, shaking in agony. With the other hand he reached for the waterbottle standing unstoppered on the rocks and poured water over his leg and heard the flesh hiss like something on a spit and he gasped and let the bottle fall and he raised up and called out his horse’s name to him softly where he scrabbled and fell on the rocks in his hobbles among the others that he might ease the fright in the horse’s heart.

When he turned and reached for the water bottle where it lay draining on the rocks the captain kicked it away with his boot. He looked up. He was standing over him with the rifle. He held it with the stock under his armpit and he gestured upward with it.

Get up, he said.

He pushed himself up on the rocks and looked across the tank toward the horses. He could only see two of them and he thought the third one must have run out down the arroyo and he couldnt tell which one was missing but guessed it was the Blevins horse. He got hold of his belt and managed to get his breeches back on.

Where is the keys? said the captain.

He pushed himself up and rose and turned and took the rifle away from the captain. The hammer dropped with a dull metallic snap.