Blood Meridian(40)

They were four left out of a party of seven that had set out for the mountains to prospect for precious metals. They had been barricaded in the old presidio for three days, fled here from the desert to the south pursued by the savages. One of the men wasshot through the lower chest and he lay propped against the wall in the office. Irving came in and looked at him.

What have you done for him? he said.

Aint done nothin.

What do you want me to do for him?

Aint asked you to do nothin.

That's good, said Irving. Because there aint nothing to be done.

He looked at them. They were foul and ragged and half crazed. They'd been making forays at night up the arroyo for wood and water and they had been feeding off a dead mule that lay gutted and stinking in the far corner of the yard. The first thing they asked for was whiskey and the next was tobacco. They had but two animals and one of these had been snakebit in the desert and this thing now stood in the compound with its head enormously swollen and grotesque like some fabled equine ideation out of an Attic tragedy. It had been bitten on the nose and its eyes bulged out of the shapeless head in a horror of agony and it tottered moaning toward the clustered horses of the company with its long misshapen muzzle swinging and drooling and its breath wheezing in the throttled pipes of its throat. The skin had split open along the bridge of its nose and the bone shone through pinkish white and its small ears looked like paper spills twisted into either side of a hairy loaf of dough. The American horses began to mill and separate along the wall at its approach and it swung after them blindly. There was a flurry of thumps and kicks and the horses began to circle the^ compound. A small mottled stallion belonging to one of the Delawares came out of the remuda and struck at the thing twice and then turned and buried its teeth in its neck. Out of the mad horse's throat came a sound that brought the men to the door.

Why dont you shoot that thing? said Irving.

Sooner it dies the sooner it'll rot, they said.

Irving spat. You aim to eat it and it snakebit?

They looked at one another. They didnt know.

Irving shook his head and went out. Glanton and the judge looked at the squatters and the squatters looked at the floor. Some of the roofbeams were half down into the room and the floor was filled with mud and rubble. Into these ruinous works the morning sun now slanted and Glanton could see crouched in a corner a Mexican or halfbreed boy maybe twelve years old. He was naked save for a pair of old calzones and makeshift sandals of uncured hide. He glared back at Glanton with a sort of terrified insolence.

Who's this child? said the judge.

They shrugged, they looked away.

Glanton spat and shook his head.

They posted guards atop the azotea and unsaddled the horses and drove them out to graze and the judge took one of the packanimals and emptied out the panniers and went off to explore the works. In the afternoon he sat in the compound breaking ore samples with a hammer, the feldspar rich in red oxide of copper and native nuggets in whose organic lobations he purported to read news of the earth's origins, holding an extemporary lecture in geology to a small gathering who nodded and spat. A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The judge smiled.

Books lie, he said.

God dont lie.

No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words.

He held up a chunk of rock.

He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools.

That evening the main part of the company quartered themselves on the dry clay of the compound under the stars. Before morning rain would drive them in, huddled in the dark mud cubicles along the south wall. In the office of the presidio they'd built a fire in the floor and the smoke rose through the ruined roof and Glanton and the judge and their lieutenants sat about the blaze and smoked their pipes while the squatters stood off to one side chewing the tobacco they'd been given and spitting at the wall. The halfbreed boy watched them with his dark eyes. To the west among the low dark hills they could hear the howling of a wolf that the squatters did mistrust and the hunters smiled among themselves. In a night so beclamored with the jackal-yapping of coyotes and the cries of owls the howl of that old dog wolf was the one sound they knew to issue from its right form, a solitary lobo, perhaps gray at the muzzle, hung like a marionette from the moon with his long mouth gibbering.

It grew cold in the night and it blew stormy with wind and rain and soon all the wild menagerie of that country grew mute. A horse put its long wet face in at the door and Glanton looked up and spoke to it and it lifted its head and curled its lip and withdrew into the rain and the night.