Blood Meridian(68)

The judge sat alone in the cantina. He also watched the rain, his eyes small in his great naked face. He'd filled his pockets with little candy deathsheads and he sat by the door and offered these to children passing on the walk under the eaves but they shied away like little horses.

In the evening groups of townfolk descended from the cemetery on the side of the hill and later in the dark by candle or lamp light they emerged again and made their way up to the church to pray. None but passed clutches of Americans crazed with drink and these grimy visitants would doff their hats oafishly and totter and grin and make obscene suggestions to the young girls. Carroll had closed his squalid bistro at dusk but opened it again to save the doors being stove. Sometime in the night a party of horsemen bound for California arrived, every man of them slumped in exhaustion. Yet within the hour they'd ridden out again. By midnight when the souls of the dead were rumored to be about the scalphunters were again howling in the streets and discharging their pistols in spite of rain or death and this continued sporadically until dawn.

By noon the day following Glanton in his drunkenness was taken with a kind of fit and he lurched crazed and disheveled into the little courtyard and began to open fire with his pistols. In the afternoon he lay bound to his bed like a madman while the judge sat with him and cooled his brow with rags of water and spoke to him in a low voice. Outside voices called across the steep hillsides. A little girl was missing and parties of citizens had turned out to search the mineshafts. After a while Glanton slept and the judge rose and went out.

It was gray and raining, leaves were blowing down. A ragged stripling stepped from a doorway by a wooden rainspout and tugged at the judge's elbow. He had two pups in his shirtfront and these he offered for sale, dragging one forth by the neck.

The judge was looking off up the street. When he looked down at the boy the boy hauled forth the other dog. They hung limply. Perros a vende, he said.

Cuanto quieres? said the judge.

The boy looked at one and then the other of the animals. As if he'd pick one to suit the judge's character, such dogs existing somewhere perhaps. He thrust forth the lefthand animal. Cin-cuenta centavos, he said.

The pup squirmed and drew back in his fist like an animal backing down a hole, its pale blue eyes impartial, befrighted alike of the cold and the rain and the judge.

Ambos, said the judge. He sought in his pockets for coins.

The dogvendor took this for a bargaining device and studied the dogs anew to better determine their worth, but the judge had dredged from his polluted clothes a small gold coin worth a bushel of suchpriced dogs. He laid the coin in the palm of his hand and held it out and with the other hand took the pups from their keeper, holding them in one fist like a pair of socks. He gestured with the gold.

Andale, he said.

The boy stared at the coin.

The judge made a fist and opened it. The coin was gone. He wove his fingers in the empty air and reached behind the boy's ear and took the coin and handed it to him. The boy held the coin in both hands before him like a small ciborium and he looked up at the judge. But the judge had set forth, dogs dangling. He crossed upon the stone bridge and he looked down into the swollen waters and raised the dogs and pitched them in.

At the farther end the bridge gave onto a small street that ran along the river. Here the Vandiemenlander stood urinating from a stone wall into the water. When he saw the judge commit the dogs from the bridge he drew his pistol and called out.

The dogs disappeared in the foam. They swept one and the next down a broad green race over sheets of polished rock into the pool below. The Vandiemenlander raised and cocked the pistol. In the clear waters of the pool willow leaves turned like jade dace. The pistol bucked in his hand and one of the dogs leaped in the water and he cocked it again and fired again and a pink stain diffused. He cocked and fired the pistol a third time and the other dog also blossomed and sank.

The judge continued on across the bridge. When the boy ran up and looked down into the water he was still holding the coin. The Vandiemenlander stood in the street opposite with his pizzle in one hand and the revolver in the other. The smoke had drifted off downstream and there was nothing in the pool at all.

Sometime in the late afternoon Glanton woke and managed to struggle free of his bindings. The first news they had of him was in front of the cuartel where he cut down the Mexican flag with his knife and tied it to the tail of a mule. Then he mounted the mule and goaded it through the square dragging the sacred bandera in the mud behind him.

He made a circuit of the streets and emerged in the plaza again, kicking the animal viciously in the flanks. As he turned a shot rang out and the mule fell stone dead under him with a musketball lodged in its brain. Glanton rolled clear and scrambled to his feet firing wildly. An old woman sank soundlessly to the stones. The judge and Tobin and Doc Irving came from Frank Carroll's on a dead run and knelt in the shadow of a wall and began to fire at the upper windows. Another half dozen Americans came around the corner at the far side of the square and in a flurry of gunfire two of them fell. Slags of lead were whining off the stones and gunsmoke hung over the streets in the damp air. Glanton and John Gunn had made their way along the walls to the shed behind the posada where the horses were stabled and they began bringing the animals out. Three more of the company entered the yard at a run and commenced to tote gear out of the building and to saddle horses. Gunfire was now continual in the street and two Americans lay dead and others lay calling out. When the company rode out thirty minutes later they ran a gantlet of ragged fusil fire and rocks and bottles and they left six of their number behind.