Driving Blood Meridian, Part 2

Crossing the high mesas in the days to follow they began to come upon burned-out pits in the ground where the Indians had cooked mescal and they rode through strange forests of maguey- the aloe or century plant- with immense flowering stalks that rose forty feet into the desert air.

(Aloes, French Joe Canyon, Whetstone Mountains, Arizona)

Glanton would not turn back. His calculations concerning the enemy included every duplicity. He spoke of ambushes. Even he in all his pride could not have believed that a company of nineteen men had evacuated an area of ten thousand square miles of every living human.

(Transmountain Expressway, looking down into Texas, Mexico and New Mexico, El Paso, Texas)

Two days later when the scouts returned in the afternoon and reported finding the Apache villages abandoned…They dismounted and moved among the shelters…the hovel doors were waist high and faced the east and few of the shelters were tall enough to be stood in.

(Apache wicciup, Apache Pass, Arizona)

Two mornings later the Delawares returned from their dawn reconnaissance and reported the Gilenos camped along the shore of a shallow lake…They saw to their arms, drawing charges from their pieces and reloading them…The party was crouched in a stand of willow half a mile from the fires of the enemy…Glanton addressed them. We got an hour, maybe more. When we ride in it’s every man to his own. Don’t leave a dog alive if you can help it…Don’t waste powder and ball on anything that cant shoot back…the riders put rowels to their mounts and lined out for the camp behind the dogs with their clubs whirling and the dogs howling in a tableau of some hellish hunt, the partisans nineteen in number bearing down upon the encampment where there lay sleeping upward of a thousand souls…Within that first minute the slaughter had become general. Women were screaming and naked children and one old man tottered forth waving a pair of white pantaloons. The horsemen moved among them and slew them with clubs or knives…The dead lay awash in the shallows of the lake…They moved among the dead harvesting the long black locks with their knives and leaving their victims rawskulled and strange in their bloody cauls.

(Seasonal Lake, near Wilcox, Arizona)

One evening almost within sight of the town of El Paso they looked off toward the north…They camped that night at the Hueco Tanks…Two nights later bivouacked in a pass in the mountains they could see the distant lights of the city below them. (Looking down on El Paso from the Transmountain Expressway, the only pass through the Franklin Mountains)

They entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of the citizenry for whose protection they had contracted. The scalps of the slain villagers were strung from the windows of the governor’s house and the partisans were paid out of the all but exhausted coffers…Within a week of quitting the city there would be a price of eight thousand pesos posted for Glanton’s head. They rode out on the north road as would parties bound for El Paso but before they were even quite out of sight of the city they had turned their tragic mounts to the west and they rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun.

(Sunset, Deming, New Mexico)

They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fire blacked palo verde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung grey and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they’d been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests…Among their barbarous hosts they had met with neither favor nor discrimination but had suffered and died impartially.

(Palo Verde Tree, AZ90, Arizona)

They rode that night through the mission of San Xavier Del Bac, the church solemn and stark in the starlight.

(San Xavier del Bac Mission, Tucson, Arizona)

He set the horse’s face north toward the stone mountains running thinly under the edge of the sky and he rode the stars down and the sun up. It was no country he had ever seen and there was no track to follow into those mountains and there was no track out. Yet in the deepest fastness of those rocks he met with men who seemed unable to abide the silence of the world.

(Whetstone Mountains, Arizona)

He first saw them laboring over the plain in the dusk among flowering ocotillo…They were led by a pitero piping a reed and then n procession a clanging of tambourines and matracas and men naked to the waist in black capes and hoods who flailed themselves with whips of braided yucca and men who bore on their naked backs great loads of cholla…and a hooded man in a white robe who bore a heavy wooden cross on his shoulders…This troubled sect traversed slowly the ground under the bluff where the watcher stood

(Whetstone Mountains, Arizona)

Then he saw the pilgrims. They were scattered about below him in a stone coulee dead in their blood. He took down his rifle and squatted and listened…The company of penitents lay hacked and butchered among the tones in every attitude. Many lay about the fallen cross and some were mutilated and some were without heads. Perhaps they’d gathered under the cross for shelter but the hole into which it had been set and the cairn of rocks about its base showed how it had been pushed over and how the hooded alter-christ had been cut down and disemboweled who now lay with the scraps of rope by which he had been bound still tied about his wrists and ankles

(Looking down at the bottom of French Joe Canyon, Arizona)