Blood Meridian(60)

The Americans debouched into the dancing hall by ones and twos and by groups, chairs pushed back, chairs pushed over to lie where they fell. Wall lamps in their tin reflectors had been lit all about the room and the celebrants foregathered there cast conflicting shadows. The scalphunters stood grinning at the dames, churlishlooking in their shrunken clothes, sucking their teeth, armed with knives and pistols and mad about the eyes. The judge was in close conference with the band and soon a quadrille was struck up. A great lurching and stomping ensued while the judge, affable, gallant, squired first one and then another of the ladies through the steps with an easy niceness. By midnight the governor had excused himself and members of the band had begun to slip away. A blind street harpist stood terrified upon the banquet table among the bones and platters and a horde of luridlooking whores had infiltrated the dance.

Pistolfire soon became general and Mr Riddle, who was acting American consul in the city, descended to remonstrate with the revelers and was warned away. Fights broke out. Furniture was disassembled, men waving chairlegs, candlestands. Two whores grappled and pitched into a sideboard and went to the floor in a crash of brandyglasses. Jackson, pistols drawn, lurched into the street vowing to Shoot the ass off Jesus Christ, the longlegged white son of a bitch. At dawn the shapes of insensate topers lay snoring about the floor among dark patches of drying blood. Bathcat and the harpist lay asleep upon the banquet table in one another's arms. A family of thieves were tiptoeing through the wreckage turning out the pockets of the sleepers and the remains of a bonfire that had consumed a good part of the hotel's furnishings smoldered in the street before the door.

These scenes and scenes like them were repeated night after night. The citizenry made address to the governor but he was much like the sorcerer's apprentice who could indeed provoke the imp to do his will but could in no way make him cease again. The baths had become bordellos, the attendants driven off. The white stone fountain in the plaza was filled at night with naked and drunken men. Cantinas were evacuated as if by fire with the appearance of any two of the company and the Americans found themselves in ghost taverns with drinks on the tables and cigars still burning in the clay ashtrays. Horses were ridden indoors and out and as the gold began to dwindle away shopkeepers found themselves presented with debits scrawled on butcherpaper in a foreign language for whole shelves of goods. Stores began to close. Charcoal scrawls appeared on the limewashed walls. Mejor los indios. The evening streets stood empty and there were no paseos and the young girls of the city were boarded up and seen no more.

On the fifteenth of August they rode out. A week later a company of drovers reported them investing the town of Coyame eighty miles to the northeast.





The village of Coyame had for some years been laid under annual contribution by Gomez and his band. When Glanton and his men rode in they were fallen upon as saints. Women ran alongside the horses to touch their boots and presents of every kind were pressed upon them until each man rode with an embarrassment of melons and pastries and trussed chickens gathered in the bow of his saddle. When they rode out three days later the streets stood empty, not even a dog followed them to the gates.

They traveled northeast as far as the town of Presidio on the Texas border and they crossed the horses and rode dripping through the streets. A soil where Glanton was subject to arrest. He rode out alone on the desert and sat the horse and he and the horse and the dog looked out across the rolling scrubland and the barren peppercorn hills and the mountains and the flat brush country and running plain beyond where four hundred miles to the east were the wife and child that he would not see again. His shadow grew long before him on the banded wash of sand. He would not follow. He had taken off his hat for the evening wind to cool him and at length he put it on again and turned the horse and rode back.

They wandered the borderland for weeks seeking some sign of the Apache. Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them. Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.

They killed wild meat and they took what they required by way of commissary from the pueblos and estancias through which they passed. One evening almost within sight of the town of El Paso they looked off toward the north where the Gilenos wintered and they knew they would not be going there. They camped that night at the Hueco tanks, a group of natural stone cisterns in the desert. The rocks about in every sheltered place were covered with ancient paintings and the judge was soon among them copying out those certain ones into his book to take away with him. They were of men and animals and of the chase and there were curious birds and arcane maps and there were constructions of such singular vision as to justify every fear of man and the things that are in him. Of these etchings—some bright yet with color—there were hundreds, and yet the judge went among them with assurance, tracing out the very ones which he required. When he had done and while there yet was light he returned to a certain stone ledge and sat a while and studied again the work there. Then he rose and with a piece of broken chert he scappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been. Then he put up his book and returned to the camp.