Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

V

With darkness one soul rose wondrously from among the new slain dead and stole away in the moonlight. The ground where he’d lain was soaked with blood and with urine from the voided bladders of the animals and he went forth stained and stinking like some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself. The savages had moved to higher ground and he could see the light from their fires and hear them singing, a strange and plaintive chanting up there where they’d gone to roast mules. He made his way among the pale and dismembered, among the sprawled and legflung horses, and he took a reckoning by the stars and set off south afoot. The night wore a thousand shapes out there in the brush and he kept his eyes to the ground ahead. Starlight and waning moon made a faint shadow of his wanderings on the dark of the desert and all along the ridges the wolves were howling and moving north toward the slaughter. He walked all night and still he could see the fires behind him.

With daylight he made his way toward some outcroppings of rock a mile across the valley floor. He was climbing among the strewn and tumbled boulders when he heard a voice calling somewhere in that vastness. He looked out over the plain but he could see no one. When the voice called again he turned and sat to rest and soon he saw something moving along the slope, a rag of a man clambering toward him over the talus slides. Picking his way with care, looking behind him. The kid could see that nothing followed.

He wore a blanket over his shoulders and his shirtsleeve was ripped and dark with blood and he carried that arm against him with his other hand. His name was Sproule.

Eight of them had escaped. His horse had carried off several arrows and it caved under him in the night and the others had gone on, the captain among them.

They sat side by side among the rocks and watched the day lengthen on the plain below.

Did you not save any of your possibles? Sproule said.

The kid spat and shook his head. He looked at Sproule.

How bad is your arm?

He pulled it to him. I’ve seen worse, he said.

They sat looking out over those reaches of sand and rock and wind.

What kind of indians was them?

I dont know.

Sproule coughed deeply into his fist. He pulled his bloody arm against him. Damn if they aint about a caution to the christians, he said.

They laid up in the shade of a rock shelf until past noon, scratching out a place in the gray lava dust to sleep, and they set forth in the afternoon down the valley following the war trail and they were very small and they moved very slowly in the immensity of that landscape.

Come evening they hove toward the rimrock again and Sproule pointed out a dark stain on the face of the barren cliff. It looked like the black from old fires. The kid shielded his eyes. The scalloped canyon walls rippled in the heat like drapery folds.

It might could be a seep, said Sproule.

It’s a long ways up there.

Well if you see any water closer let’s make for that.

The kid looked at him and they set off.

The site lay up a draw and their way was a jumble of fallen rock and scoria and deadlylooking bayonet plants. Small black and olivecolored shrubs blasted under the sun. They stumbled up the cracked clay floor of a dry watercourse. They rested and moved on.

The seep lay high up among the ledges, vadose water dripping down the slick black rock and monkeyflower and deathcamas hanging in a small and perilous garden. The water that reached the canyon floor was no more than a trickle and they leaned by turns with pursed lips to the stone like devouts at a shrine.

They passed the night in a shallow cave above this spot, an old reliquary of flintknappings and ratchel scattered about on the stone floor with beads of shell and polished bone and the charcoal of ancient fires. They shared the blanket in the cold and Sproule coughed quietly in the dark and they rose from time to time to descend and drink at the stone. They were gone before sunrise and the dawn found them on the plain again.

They followed the trampled ground left by the warparty and in the afternoon they came upon a mule that had failed and been lanced and left dead and then they came upon another. The way narrowed through rocks and by and by they came to a bush that was hung with dead babies.

They stopped side by side, reeling in the heat. These small victims, seven, eight of them, had holes punched in their under-jaws and were hung so by their throats from the broken stobs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky. Bald and pale and bloated, larval to some unreckonable being. The castaways hobbled past, they looked back. Nothing moved. In the afternoon they came upon a village on the plain where smoke still rose from the ruins and all were gone to death. From a distance it looked like a decaying brick kiln. They stood without the walls a long time listening to the silence before they entered.

They went slowly through the little mud streets. There were goats and sheep slain in their pens and pigs dead in the mud. They passed mud hovels where people lay murdered in all attitudes of death in the doorways and the floors, naked and swollen and strange. They found plates of food half eaten and a cat came out and sat in the sun and watched them without interest and flies snarled everywhere in the still hot air.

At the end of the street they came to a plaza with benches and trees where vultures huddled in foul black rookeries. A dead horse lay in the square and some chickens were pecking in a patch of spilled meal in a doorway. Charred poles lay smoldering where the roofs had fallen through and a burro was standing in the open door of the church.

They sat on a bench and Sproule held his wounded arm to his chest and rocked back and forth and blinked in the sun.

What do you want to do? said the kid.

Get a drink of water.

Other than that.

I dont know.

You want to try and head back?

To Texas?

I dont know where else.

We’d never make it.

Well you say.

I aint got no say.

He was coughing again. He held his chest with his good hand and sat as if he’d get his breath.

What have you got, a cold?

I got consumption.

Consumption?

He nodded. I come out here for my health.

The kid looked at him. He shook his head and rose and walked off across the plaza toward the church. There were buzzards squatting among the old carved wooden corbels and he picked up a stone and squailed it at them but they never moved.

The shadows had grown long in the plaza and little coils of dust were moving in the parched clay streets. The carrion birds sat about the topmost corners of the houses with their wings outstretched in attitudes of exhortation like dark little bishops. The kid returned to the bench and propped up one foot and leaned on his knee. Sproule sat as before, still holding his arm.

Son of a bitch is dealin me misery, he said.

The kid spat and looked off down the street. We better just hold up here for tonight.

You reckon it would be all right?

Who with?

What if them indians was to come back?

What would they come back for?

Well what if they was to?

They wont come back.

He held his arm.

I wish you had a knife on you, the kid said.

I wish you did.

There’s meat here if a man had a knife.

I aint hungry.

I think we ought to scout these houses and see what all’s here.

You go on.

We need to find us a place to sleep.

Sproule looked at him. I dont need to go nowheres, he said.

Well. You suit yourself.

Sproule coughed and spat. I aim to, he said.

The kid turned and went on down the street.

The doorways were low and he had to stoop to clear the lintel beams, stepping down into the cool and earthy rooms. There was no furniture save pallets for sleeping, perhaps a wooden mealbin. He went from house to house. In one room the bones of a small loom black and smoldering. In another a man, the charred flesh drawn taut, the eyes cooked in their sockets. There was a niche in the mud wall with figures of saints dressed in doll’s clothes, the rude wooden faces brightly painted. Illustrations cut from an old journal and pasted to the wall, a small picture of a queen, a gypsy card that was the four of cups. There were strings of dried peppers and a few gourds. A glass bottle that held weeds. Outside a bare dirt yard fenced with ocotillo and a round clay oven caved through where black curd trembled in the light within.

He found a clay jar of beans and some dry tortillas and he took them to a house at the end of the street where the embers of the roof were still smoldering and he warmed the food in the ashes and ate, squatting there like some deserter scavenging the ruins of a city he’d fled.

When he returned to the square Sproule was gone. All about lay in shadow. He crossed the square and mounted the stone steps to the door of the church and entered. Sproule was standing in the vestibule. Long buttresses of light fell from the high windows in the western wall. There were no pews in the church and the stone floor was heaped with the scalped and naked and partly eaten bodies of some forty souls who’d barricaded themselves in this house of God against the heathen. The savages had hacked holes in the roof and shot them down from above and the floor was littered with arrowshafts where they’d snapped them off to get the clothes from the bodies. The altars had been hauled down and the tabernacle looted and the great sleeping God of the Mexicans routed from his golden cup. The primitive painted saints in their frames hung cocked on the walls as if an earthquake had visited and a dead Christ in a glass bier lay broken in the chancel floor.

The murdered lay in a great pool of their communal blood. It had set up into a sort of pudding crossed everywhere with the tracks of wolves or dogs and along the edges it had dried and cracked into a burgundy ceramic. Blood lay in dark tongues on the floor and blood grouted the flagstones and ran in the vestibule where the stones were cupped from the feet of the faithful and their fathers before them and it had threaded its way down the steps and dripped from the stones among the dark red tracks of the scavengers.

Sproule turned and looked at the kid as if he’d know his thoughts but the kid just shook his head. Flies clambered over the peeled and wigless skulls of the dead and flies walked on their shrunken eyeballs.

Come on, said the kid.

They crossed the square in the last of the light and went down the narrow street. In the doorway there lay a dead child with two buzzards sitting on it. Sproule shooed his good hand at the buzzards and they bated and hissed and flapped clumsily but they did not fly.

They set forth in the morning with first light while wolves slank from the doorways and dissolved in the fog of the streets. They went by the southwest road the way the savages had come. A little sandy stream, cottonwoods, three white goats. They waded a ford where women lay dead at their wash.

They struggled all day across a terra damnata of smoking slag, passing from time to time the bloated shapes of dead mules or horses. By evening they had drunk all the water they carried. They slept in the sand and woke in the cool early morning dark and went on and they walked the cinderland till they were near to fainting. In the afternoon they came upon a carreta in the trace, tilted on its tongue, the great wheels cut from rounds of a cottonwood trunk and pinned to the axletrees with tenons. They crawled under it for shade and slept until dark and went on.

The rind of a moon that had been in the sky all day was gone and they followed the trail through the desert by starlight, the Pleiades straight overhead and very small and the Great Bear walking the mountains to the north.

My arm stinks, said Sproule.

What?

I said my arm stinks.

You want me to look at it?

What for? You caint do nothin for it.

Well. You suit yourself.

I aim to, said Sproule.

They went on. Twice in the night they heard the little prairie vipers rattle among the scrub and they were afraid. With the dawn they were climbing among shale and whinstone under the wall of a dark monocline where turrets stood like basalt prophets and they passed by the side of the road little wooden crosses propped in cairns of stone where travelers had met with death. The road winding up among the hills and the castaways laboring upon the switchbacks, blackening under the sun, their eyeballs inflamed and the painted spectra racing out at the corners. Climbing up through ocotillo and pricklypear where the rocks trembled and sleared in the sun, rock and no water and the sandy trace and they kept watch for any green thing that might tell of water but there was no water. They ate piñole from a bag with their fingers and went on. Through the noon heat and into the dusk where lizards lay with their leather chins flat to the cooling rocks and fended off the world with thin smiles and eyes like cracked stone plates.

They crested the mountain at sunset and they could see for miles. An immense lake lay below them with the distant blue mountains standing in the windless span of water and the shape of a soaring hawk and trees that shimmered in the heat and a distant city very white against the blue and shaded hills. They sat and watched. They saw the sun drop under the jagged rim of the earth to the west and they saw it flare behind the mountains and they saw the face of the lake darken and the shape of the city dissolve upon it. They slept among the rocks face up like dead men and in the morning when they rose there was no city and no trees and no lake only a barren dusty plain.

Sproule groaned and collapsed back among the rocks. The kid looked at him. There were blisters along his lower lip and his arm through the ripped shirt was swollen and something foul had seeped through among the darker bloodstains. He turned back and looked out over the valley.

Yonder comes somebody, he said.

Sproule didnt answer. The kid looked at him. I aint lyin, he said.

Indians, said Sproule. Aint it?

I dont know. Too far to tell.

What do you aim to do?

I dont know.

What happened to the lake?

I couldnt tell ye.

We both saw it.

People see what they want to see.

Then how come I aint seein it now? I sure as hell want to.

The kid looked out over the plain below.

What if it’s indians? said Sproule.

Likely it will be.

Where can we hide at?

The kid spat dryly and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. A lizard came out from under a rock and crouched on its small cocked elbows over that piece of froth and drank it dry and returned to the rock again leaving only a faint spot in the sand which vanished almost instantly.

They waited all day. The kid made sorties down into the canyons in search of water but he found none. Nothing moved in that purgatorial waste save carnivorous birds. By early afternoon they could see the horsemen on the switchbacks coming up the face of the mountain below them. They were Mexicans.

Sproule was sitting with his legs outstretched before him. I was worried about my old boots lastin me, he said. He looked up. Go on, he said. Save yourself. He waved his hand.

They were laid up under a ledge of rock in a narrow shade. The kid didnt answer. Within the hour they could hear the dry scrabble of hooves among the rocks and the clank of gear. The first horse to round the point of rock and pass through the gap in the mountain was the captain’s big bay and he carried the captain’s saddle but he did not carry the captain. The refugees stood by the side of the road. The riders looked burnt and haggard coming up out of the sun and they sat their horses as if they had no weight at all. There were seven of them, eight of them. They wore broadbrimmed hats and leather vests and they carried escopetas across the pommels of their saddles and as they rode past the leader nodded gravely to them from the captain’s horse and touched his hatbrim and they rode on.

Sproule and the kid looked after them. The kid called out and Sproule had started to trot clumsily along behind the horses.

The riders began to slump and reel like drunks. Their heads lolled. Their guffaws echoed among the rocks and they turned their mounts and sat them and regarded the wanderers with huge grins.

Qué quiere? cried the leader.

The riders cackled and slapped at one another. They had nudged their horses forward and they began to ride them about without aim. The leader turned to the two afoot.

Buscan a los indios?

With this some of the men dismounted and fell to hugging one another and weeping shamelessly. The leader looked at them and grinned, his teeth white and massive, made for foraging.

Loonies, said Sproule. They’re loonies.

The kid looked up at the leader. How about a drink of water? he said.

The leader sobered, he pulled a long face. Water? he said.

We aint got no water, said Sproule.

But my friend, how no? Is very dry here.

He reached behind him without turning and a leather canteen was passed across the riders to his hand. He shook it and offered it down. The kid pulled the stopper and drank and stood panting and drank again. The leader reached down and tapped the canteen. Basta, he said.

He hung on gulping. He could not see the horseman’s face darken. The man shucked one boot backward out of the stirrup and kicked the canteen cleanly from between the kid’s hands leaving him there for a moment in a frozen gesture of calling with the canteen rising and turning in the air and the lobes of water gleaming about it in the sun before it clattered to the rocks. Sproule scrambled after it and snatched it up where it lay draining and began to drink, watching over the rim. The horseman and the kid watched each other. Sproule sat back gasping and coughing.

The kid stepped across the rocks and took the canteen from him. The leader kneed his horse forward and drew a sword from its place beneath his leg and leaning forward ran the blade under the strap and raised it up. The point of the blade was about three inches from the kid’s face and the canteen strap was draped across the flat of it. The kid had stopped and the rider raised the canteen gently from his hands and let it slide down the blade and come to rest at his side. He turned to the men and smiled and they once again began to hoot and to pummel one another like apes.

He swung the stopper up from where it hung by a thong and drove it home with the heel of his hand. He pitched the canteen to the man behind him and looked down at the travelers. Why you no hide? he said.

From you?

From I.

We were thirsty.

Very thirsty. Eh?

They didnt answer. He was tapping the flat of the sword lightly against the horn of his saddle and he seemed to be forming words in his mind. He leaned slightly to them. When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf. He smiled at them and raised the sword and ran it back where it had come from and turned the horse smartly and trotted it through the horses behind him and the men mounted up and followed and soon all were gone.

Sproule sat without moving. The kid looked at him but he would look away. He was wounded in an enemy country far from home and although his eyes took in the alien stones about yet the greater void beyond seemed to swallow up his soul.

They descended the mountain, going down over the rocks with their hands outheld before them and their shadows contorted on the broken terrain like creatures seeking their own forms. They reached the valley floor at dusk and set off across the blue and cooling land, the mountains to the west a line of jagged slate set endwise in the earth and the dry weeds heeling and twisting in a wind sprung from nowhere.

They walked on into the dark and they slept like dogs in the sand and had been sleeping so when something black flapped up out of the night ground and perched on Sproule’s chest. Fine fingerbones stayed the leather wings with which it steadied as it walked upon him. A wrinkled pug face, small and vicious, bare lips crimped in a horrible smile and teeth pale blue in the starlight. It leaned to him. It crafted in his neck two narrow grooves and folding its wings over him it began to drink his blood.

Not soft enough. He woke, put up a hand. He shrieked and the bloodbat flailed and sat back upon his chest and righted itself again and hissed and clicked its teeth.

The kid was up and had seized a rock but the bat sprang away and vanished in the dark. Sproule was clawing at his neck and he was gibbering hysterically and when he saw the kid standing there looking down at him he held out to him his bloodied hands as if in accusation and then clapped them to his ears and cried out what it seemed he himself would not hear, a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world. But the kid only spat into the darkness of the space between them. I know your kind, he said. What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.

In the morning they crossed a dry wash and the kid hiked up it looking for a tank or a hole but there was none. He picked out a sink in the wash and fell to digging with a bone and after he had dug some two feet into the sand the sand turned damp and then a little more and a slow seep of water began to fill into the furrows he dredged with his fingers. He took off his shirt and pushed it down into the sand and watched it darken and he watched the water rise slowly among the folds of cloth until there was perhaps a cupful and then he lowered his head into the excavation and drank. Then he sat and watched it fill again. He did this for over an hour. Then he put on the shirt and went back down the wash.

Sproule didnt want to take off his shirt. He tried sucking up the water and he got a mouthful of sand.

Why dont you let me use your shirt, he said.

The kid was squatting in the dry gravel of the wash. Suck on ye own shirt, he said.

He took off the shirt. It stuck to the skin and a yellow pus ran. His arm was swollen to the size of his thigh and it was garishly discolored and small worms worked in the open wound. He pushed the shirt down into the hole and leaned and drank.

In the afternoon they came to a crossroads, what else to call it. A faint wagon trace that came from the north and crossed their path and went on to the south. They stood scanning the landscape for some guidance in that emptiness. Sproule sat where the tracks crossed and looked out from the great caves in his skull where his eyes lay. He said that he would not rise.

Yonder’s a lake, said the kid.

He would not look.

It lay shimmering in the distance. Its edges rimed with salt. The kid studied it and studied the roads. After a while he nodded toward the south. I believe this here is the most traveled.

It’s all right, said Sproule. You go on.

You suit yourself.

Sproule watched him set off. After a while he rose and followed.

They had gone perhaps two miles when they stopped to rest, Sproule sitting with his legs out and his hands in his lap and the kid squatting a little ways from him. Blinking and bearded and filthy in their rags.

Does that sound like thunder to you? said Sproule.

The kid raised his head.

Listen.

The kid looked at the sky, pale blue, unmarked save where the sun burned like a white hole.

I can feel it in the ground, said Sproule.

It aint nothin.

Listen.

The kid rose and looked about. To the north a small movement of dust. He watched it. It did not rise nor did it blow away.

It was a carreta, lumbering clumsily over the plain, a small mule to draw it. The driver may have been asleep. When he saw the fugitives in the trace before him he halted the mule and began to saw it around to go back and he did get it turned but by then the kid had seized the raw leather headstall and hauled the animal to a standstill. Sproule came hobbling up. From the rear of the wagon two children peered out. They were so pale with dust, their hair so white and faces pinched, they looked like little gnomes crouched there. At the sight of the kid before him the driver shrank back and the woman next to him set up a high shrill chittering and began to point from one horizon to the other but he pulled himself up into the bed of the cart and Sproule came dragging after and they lay staring up at the hot canvas tarp while the two waifs drew back into the corner and watched blackeyed as woodmice and the cart turned south again and set off with a rising rumble and clatter.

There was a clay jar of water hung by a thong from the bow-stay and the kid took it down and drank from it and gave it to Sproule. Then he took it back and drank the rest. They lay in the floor of the cart among old hides and spills of salt and after a while they slept.

It was dark when they entered the town. The jostle of the cart ceasing was what woke them. The kid raised himself up and looked out. Starlight in a mud street. The wagon empty. The mule wheezed and stamped in the traces. After a while the man came from the shadows and led them along a lane into a yard and he backed the mule until the cart was alongside a wall and then he unhitched the mule and led it away.

He lay back in the tilted cartbed. It was cold in the night and he lay with his knees drawn up under a piece of hide that smelled of mold and urine and he slept and woke all night and all night dogs barked and in the dawn cocks called and he heard horses on the road.

In the first gray light flies began to land on him. They touched his face and woke him and he brushed them away. After a while he sat up.

They were in a barren mudwalled courtyard and there was a house made of reeds and clay. Chickens stepped about and clucked and scratched. A small boy came from the house and pulled down his pants and shat in the yard and rose and went in again. The kid looked at Sproule. He was lying with his face to the wagonboards. He was partly covered with his blanket and flies were crawling on him. The kid reached to shake him. He was cold and wooden. The flies rose, then they settled back.

The kid was standing by the cart pissing when the soldiers rode into the yard. They seized him and tied his hands behind him and they looked in the cart and talked among themselves and then they led him out into the street.

He was taken to an adobe building and put in an empty room. He sat in the floor while a wild-eyed boy with an old musket watched him. After a while they came and took him out again.

They led him through the narrow mud streets and he could hear music like a fanfare growing the louder. First children walked with him and then old folk and finally a throng of brown-skinned villagers all dressed in white cotton like attendants in an institution, the women in dark rebozos, some with their breasts exposed, their faces stained red with almagre, smoking small cigars. Their numbers swelled and the guards with their shouldered fusils frowned and shouted at the jostlers and they went on along the tall adobe wall of a church and into the plaza.

There was a bazaar in progress. A traveling medicine show, a primitive circus. They passed stout willow cages clogged with vipers, with great limegreen serpents from some more southerly latitude or beaded lizards with their black mouths wet with venom. A reedy old leper held up handfuls of tapeworms from a jar for all to see and cried out his medicines against them and they were pressed about by other rude apothecaries and by vendors and mendicants until all came at last before a trestle whereon stood a glass carboy of clear mescal. In this container with hair afloat and eyes turned upward in a pale face sat a human head.

They dragged him forward with shouts and gestures. Mire, mire, they cried. He stood before the jar and they urged his consideration of it and they tilted it around so that the head should face him. It was Captain White. Lately at war among the heathen. The kid looked into the drowned and sightless eyes of his old commander. He looked about at the villagers and at the soldiers, their eyes all upon him, and he spat and wiped his mouth. He aint no kin to me, he said.

They put him in an old stone corral with three other ragged refugees from the expedition. They sat stunned and blinking against the wall or roved the perimeter around in the dry tracks of mules and horses and retched and shat while small boys hooted from the parapet.

He fell in with a thin boy from Georgia. I was sickern a dog, the boy said. I was afraid I was goin to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.

I seen a rider on the captain’s horse up in the country from here, the kid told him.

Aye, said the Georgian. They killed him and Clark and another boy I never did know his name. We come on into town and the very next day they had us in the calabozo and this selfsame son of a bitch is down there with the guards laughin and drinkin and playin cards, him and the jefe, to see who gets the captain’s horse and who gets his pistols. I guess you seen the captain’s head.

I seen it.

That’s the worst thing I ever seen in my life.

Somebody ought to of pickled it a long time ago. By rights they ought to pickle mine. For ever takin up with such a fool.

They drifted as the day advanced from wall to wall to keep out of the sun. The boy from Georgia told him of his comrades displayed on slabs cold and dead in the market. The captain headless in a wallow half eaten by hogs. He ran his heel out in the dust and gouged a little place for it to rest. They fixin to send us to Chihuahua City, he said.

How do you know?

That’s what they say. I dont know.

That’s what who says?

Shipman yonder. He speaks the lingo some.

The kid regarded the man spoken of. He shook his head and spat dryly.

All day small boys perched on the walls and watched them by shifts and pointed and jabbered. They’d walk around the parapet and try to piss down on sleepers in the shade but the prisoners kept alert. Some at first threw stones but the kid picked one from the dust the size of an egg and with it dropped a small child cleanly from the wall with no sound other than the muted thud of its landing on the far side.

Now you gone and done it, said the Georgian.

The kid looked at him.

They’ll be in here with whips and I dont know what all.

The kid spat. They aint about to come in here and eat no whips.

Nor did they. A woman brought them bowls of beans and charred tortillas on a plate of unfired clay. She looked harried and she smiled at them and she had smuggled them sweets under her shawl and there were pieces of meat in the bottom of the bowls that had come from her own table.

Three days later mounted on little malandered mules they set out for the capital as foretold.

They rode five days through desert and mountain and through dusty pueblos where the populace turned out to see them. Their escorts in varied suits of timeworn finery, the prisoners in rags. They’d been given blankets and squatting by the desert fires at night sunblackened and bony and wrapped in these serapes they looked like God’s profoundest peons. The soldiers none spoke english and they directed their charges with grunts or gestures. They were indifferently armed and they were much afraid of the indians. They rolled their tobacco in cornhusks and they sat by the fire in silence and listened to the night. Their talk when they talked was of witches or worse and always they sought to parcel from the darkness some voice or cry from among the cries that was no right beast. La gente dice que el coyote es un brujo. Muchas veces el brujo es un coyote.

Y los indios también. Muchas veces llaman como los coyotes.

Y qué es eso?

Nada.

Un tecolote. Nada mas.

Quizás.

When they rode through the gap in the mountains and looked down on the city the sergeant of the expedition halted the horses and spoke to the man behind him and he in turn dismounted and took rawhide thongs from his saddlebag and approached the prisoners and gestured for them to cross their wrists and hold them out, showing how with his own hands. He tied them each in this manner and then they rode on.

They entered the city in a gantlet of flung offal, driven like cattle through the cobbled streets with shouts going up behind for the soldiery who smiled as became them and nodded among the flowers and proffered cups, herding the tattered fortune-seekers through the plaza where water splashed in a fountain and idlers reclined on carven seats of white porphyry and past the governor’s palace and past the cathedral where vultures squatted along the dusty entablatures and among the niches in the carved facade hard by the figures of Christ and the apostles, the birds holding out their own dark vestments in postures of strange benevolence while about them flapped on the wind the dried scalps of slaughtered indians strung on cords, the long dull hair swinging like the filaments of certain seaforms and the dry hides clapping against the stones.

They passed old alms-seekers by the church door with their seamy palms outheld and maimed beggars sad-eyed in rags and children asleep in the shadows with flies walking their dreamless faces. Dark coppers in a clackdish, the shriveled eyes of the blind. Scribes crouched by the steps with their quills and inkpots and bowls of sand and lepers moaning through the streets and naked dogs that seemed composed of bone entirely and vendors of tamales and old women with faces dark and harrowed as the land squatting in the gutters over charcoal fires where blackened strips of anonymous meat sizzled and spat. Small orphans were abroad like irate dwarfs and fools and sots drooling and flailing about in the small markets of the metropolis and the prisoners rode past the carnage in the meatstalls and the waxy smell where racks of guts hung black with flies and flayings of meat in great red sheets now darkened with the advancing day and the flensed and naked skulls of cows and sheep with their dull blue eyes glaring wildly and the stiff bodies of defer and javelina and ducks and quail and parrots, all wild things from the country round hanging head downward from hooks.

They were made to dismount and were driven afoot through the crowds and down old stone steps and over a doorsill worn like soap and through an iron sallygate into a cool stone cellar long a prison to take their place among the ghosts of old martyrs and patriots while the gate clanked shut behind them.

When their eyes lost their blindness they could make out figures crouched along the wall. Stirrings in beds of hay like nesting mice disturbed. A light snoring. Outside the rattle of a cart and the dull clop of hooves in the street and through the stones a dim clank of hammers from a smith’s shop in another part of the dungeon. The kid looked about. Blackened bits of candlewick lay here and there in pools of dirty grease on the stone floor and strings of dried spittle hung from the walls. A few names scratched where the light could find them out. He squatted and rubbed his eyes. Someone in underwear crossed before him to a pail in the center of the room and stood and pissed. This man then turned and came his way. He was tall and wore his hair to his shoulders. He shuffled through the straw and stood looking down at him. You dont know me, do ye? he said.

The kid spat and squinted up at him. I know ye, he said. I’d know your hide in a tanyard.