All the Pretty Horses (36 page)

He rode all day and the day clouded before him and a cool wind was coming downcountry. He’d reloaded the rifle and he carried it across the bow of the saddle and rode with the serape over his shoulders and looseherded the riderless horses before him. By evening all the north country was black and the wind was cold and he picked his way across the rim country through the sparse swales of grass and broken volcanic rock and he sat above a highland bajada in the cold blue dusk with the rifle across his knee while the staked horses grazed behind him and
at the last hour light enough by which to see the iron sights of the rifle five deer entered the bajada and pricked their ears and stood and then bent to graze.

He picked out the smallest doe among them and shot her. Blevins’ horse rose howling where he’d tied it and the deer in the bajada leapt away and vanished in the dusk and the little doe lay kicking.

When he reached her she lay in her blood in the grass and he knelt with the rifle and put his hand on her neck and she looked at him and her eyes were warm and wet and there was no fear in them and then she died. He sat watching her for a long time. He thought about the captain and he wondered if he were alive and he thought about Blevins. He thought about Alejandra and he remembered her the first time he ever saw her passing along the ciénaga road in the evening with the horse still wet from her riding it in the lake and he remembered the birds and the cattle standing in the grass and the horses on the mesa. The sky was dark and a cold wind ran through the bajada and in the dying light a cold blue cast had turned the doe’s eyes to but one thing more of things she lay among in that darkening landscape. Grass and blood. Blood and stone. Stone and the dark medallions that the first flat drops of rain caused upon them. He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

In the morning the sky was clear and it was very cold and there was snow on the mountains to the north. When he woke he realized that he knew his father was dead. He raked up the coals and blew the fire to life and roasted strips cut from the
deer’s haunch and cowled in his blanket he sat eating and watching the country to the south out of which he’d ridden.

They moved on. By noon the horses were in snow and there was snow in the pass and the horses trod and broke thin plates of ice in the trail where the snowmelt ran out over the wet black ground dark as ink and they toiled up through the patches of snow glazing over in the sun and rode through a dark corridor of fir trees and descended along the northern slope through pockets of sunlight, pockets of shadow, where the air smelled of rosin and wet stone and no birds sang.

In the evening descending he saw lights in the distance and he pushed on toward them and did not stop and in the dead of night in deep exhaustion both he and the horses they reached the town of Los Picos.

A single mud street rutted from the recent rains. A squalid alameda where there stood a rotting brushwood gazebo and a few old iron benches. The trees in the alameda had been freshly whitewashed and the upper trunks were lost in the dark above the light of the few lamps yet burning so that they looked like plaster stagetrees new from the mold. The horses stepped with great weariness among the dried rails of mud in the street and dogs barked at them from behind the wooden gates and doors they passed.

It was cold when he woke in the morning and it was raining again. He’d bivouacked on the north side of the town and he rose wet and cold and stinking and saddled the horse and rode back into the town wrapped in the serape and driving the two horses before him.

In the alameda a few small tin foldingtables had been set out and young girls were stringing paper ribbon overhead. They were wet from the rain and they were laughing and they were throwing the spools of crepe over the wires and catching them again and the dye was coming off the paper so that their hands were red and green and blue. He tied the horses in front of the tienda he’d passed the night before and went in and bought a sack of oats for the horses and he borrowed a galvanized bucket with
which to water them and he stood in the alameda leaning on the rifle and watching them drink. He thought he’d be an object of some curiosity but the people he saw only nodded gravely to him and passed on. He carried the bucket back into the store and went down the street to where there was a small cafe and he entered and sat at one of the three small wooden tables. The floor of the cafe was packed mud newly swept and he was the only customer. He stood the rifle against the wall and ordered huevos revueltos and a cup of chocolate and he sat and waited for it to come and then he ate very slowly. The food was rich to his taste and the chocolate was made with canela and he drank it and ordered another and folded a tortilla and ate and watched the horses standing in the square across the street and watched the girls. They’d hung the gazebo with crepe and it looked like a festooned brush-pile. The proprietor showed him great courtesy and brought him fresh tortillas hot from the comal and told him that there was to be a wedding and that it would be a pity if it rained. He inquired where he might be from and showed surprise he’d come so far. He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.

By midmorning the rain had stopped. Water dripped from the trees in the alameda and the crepe hung in soggy strings. He stood with the horses and watched the wedding party emerge from the church. The groom wore a dull black suit too large for him and he looked not uneasy but half desperate, as if unused to clothes at all. The bride was embarrassed and clung to him and they stood on the steps for their photograph to be taken and in their antique formalwear posed there in front of the church they already had the look of old photos. In the sepia monochrome of a rainy day in that lost village they’d grown old instantly.

In the alameda an old woman in a black rebozo was going about tilting the metal tables and chairs to let the water run off. She and others began to set out food from pails and baskets and
a group of three musicians in soiled silver suits stood by with their instruments. The groom took the bride’s hand to help her negotiate the water standing in front of the church steps. In the water they were gray figures reflected against a gray sky. A small boy ran out and stamped in the puddle and sprayed a sheet of the muddy gray water over them and ran away with his companions. The bride clutched her husband. He scowled and looked after the boys but there was nothing to be done and she looked down at her dress and she looked at him and then she laughed. Then the husband laughed and others in the party also and they crossed the road laughing and looking from one to the other and entered the alameda among the tables and the musicians began to play.

With the last of his money he bought coffee and tortillas and some tinned fruit and beans. The tins had been on the shelves so long they’d tarnished and the labels faded. When he passed out along the road the wedding party was seated at the tables eating and the musicians had stopped playing and were squatting together drinking from tin cups. A man sitting alone on one of the benches who seemed no part of the wedding looked up at the sound of the slow hooves in the road and raised one hand to the pale rider passing with blanket and rifle and he raised a hand back and then rode on.

He rode out past the last low mudbuilt houses and took the road north, a mud track that wound up through the barren gravel hills and branched and broke and finally terminated in the tailings of an abandoned mine among the rusted shapes of pipe and pumpstanchions and old jacktimbers. He crossed on through the high country and in the evening descended the north slope and rode out onto the foreplain where the creosote deep olive from the rains stood in solemn colonies as it had stood a thousand years and more in that tenantless waste, older than any living thing that was.

He rode on, the two horses following, riding doves up out of the pools of standing water and the sun descending out of the dark discolored overcast to the west where its redness ran down
the narrow band of sky above the mountains like blood falling through water and the desert fresh from the rain turning gold in the evening light and then deepening to dark, a slow inkening over of the bajada and the rising hills and the stark stone length of the cordilleras darkening far to the south in Mexico. The floodplain he crossed was walled about with fallen traprock and in the twilight the little desert foxes had come out to sit along the walls silent and regal as icons watching the night come and the doves called from the acacia and then night fell dark as Egypt and there was just the stillness and the silence and the sound of the horses breathing and the sound of their hooves clopping in the dark. He pointed his horse at the polestar and rode on and they rode the round moon up out of the east and coyotes yammered and answered back all across the plain to the south from which they’d come.

He crossed the river just west of Langtry Texas in a softly falling rain. The wind in the north, the day cold. The cattle along the breaks of the river standing gray and still. He followed a cattletrail down into the willows and across the carrizal to where the gray water lay braided over the gravels.

He studied the cold gray rips in the current and dismounted and loosed the girthstraps and undressed and stogged his boots in the legs of his trousers as he’d done before in that long ago and he put his shirt and jacket and the pistol after and doubled the belt in the loops to draw shut the waist. Then he slung the trousers over his shoulder and mounted up naked with the rifle aloft and driving the loose horses before him he pushed Redbo into the river.

He rode up onto Texas soil pale and shivering and he sat the horse briefly and looked out over the plain to the north where cattle were already beginning to appear slouching slowly out of that pale landscape and bawling softly at the horses and he thought about his father who was dead in that country and he sat the horse naked in the falling rain and wept.

When he rode into Langtry it was early in the afternoon and
it was still raining. The first thing he saw was a pickup truck with the hood up and two men trying to start it. One of them raised up and looked at him. He must have appeared to them some apparition out of the vanished past because he jostled the other with his elbow and they both looked.

Howdy, said John Grady. I wonder if you all could tell me what day this is?

They looked at each other.

It’s Thursday, the first one said.

I mean the date.

The man looked at him. He looked at the horses standing behind him. The date? he said.

Yessir.

It’s Thanksgiving day, the other man said.

He looked at them. He looked out down the street.

Is that cafe yonder open?

Yeah, its open.

He lifted his hand off the pommel and was about to touch up the horse and then he stopped.

Dont neither of you all want to buy a rifle do you? he said.

They looked at each other.

Earl might buy it off of you, the first man said. He’ll generally try and help a feller out.

He the man that runs the cafe?

Yep.

He touched the brim of his hat. Much obliged, he said. Then he put the horse forward and rode on down the street trailing the loose horses behind him. They watched him go. Neither spoke for there was nothing to say. The one holding the socket-wrench put the wrench on the fender and they both stood watching until he turned the corner at the cafe and there was nothing more to see.

He rode the border country for weeks seeking the owner of the horse. In Ozona just before Christmas three men swore out papers and the county constable impounded the animal. The
hearing was held in the judges chambers in the old stone courthouse and the clerk read the charges and the names and the judge turned and looked down at John Grady.

Son, he said, are you represented by counsel?

No sir I aint, said John Grady. I dont need a lawyer. I just need to tell you about this horse.

The judge nodded. All right, he said. Go ahead.

Yessir. If you dont care I’d like to tell it from the beginning. From the first time ever I seen the horse.

Well if you’d like to tell it we’d like to hear it so just go ahead.

It took him almost half an hour. When he was done he asked if he could have a glass of water. No one spoke. The judge turned to the clerk.

Emil, get the boy a glass of water.

He looked at his notepad and he turned to John Grady.

Son, I’m fixin to ask you three questions and if you can answer em the horse is yours.

Yessir. I’ll try.

Well you’ll either know em or you wont. The trouble with a liar is he cant remember what he said.

I aint a liar.

I know you aint. This is just for the record. I dont believe anybody could make up the story you just now got done tellin us.

He put his glasses back on and he asked John Grady the number of hectares in the Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción spread. Then he asked the name of the husband of the hacendado’s cook. Lastly he laid down his notes and he asked John Grady if he had on clean shorts.

A subdued laughter went around the courtroom but the judge wasnt laughing nor the bailiff.

Yessir. I do.

Well there aint no women present so if you wouldnt find it to be too much of a embarrassment I’d like for you to show the court them bulletholes in your leg. If you dont want to I’ll ask you somethin else.

Yessir, said John Grady. He unbuckled his belt and dropped his trousers to his knees and turned his right leg sideways to the judge.