The judge smiled. No, he said. It was never me. But why lurk there in the shadows? Come here where we can talk, you and me.
The kid stood against the far wall. Hardly more than a shadow himself.
Come up, said the judge. Come up, for I’ve yet more to tell you.
He looked down the hallway. Dont be afraid, he said. I’ll speak softly. It’s not for the world’s ears but for yours only. Let me see you. Dont you know that I’d have loved you like a son?
He reached through the bars. Come here, he said. Let me touch you.
The kid stood with his back to the wall.
Come here if you’re not afraid, whispered the judge.
I aint afraid of you.
The judge smiled. He spoke softly into the dim mud cubicle. You came forward, he said, to take part in a work. But you were a witness against yourself. You sat in judgement on your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgements of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprise. Hear me, man. I spoke in the desert for you and you only and you turned a deaf ear to me. If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay. Even the cretin acted in good faith according to his parts. For it was required of no man to give more than he possessed nor was any man’s share compared to another’s. Only each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not. Can you tell me who that one was?
It was you, whispered the kid. You were the one.
The judge watched him through the bars, he shook his head. What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. But if I was your enemy with whom would you have shared me? With whom? The priest? Where is he now? Look at me. Our animosities were formed and waiting before ever we two met. Yet even so you could have changed it all.
You, said the kid. It was you.
It was never me, said the judge. Listen to me. Do you think Glanton was a fool? Dont you know he’d have killed you?
Lies, said the kid. Lies, by god lies.
Think again, said the judge.
He never took part in your craziness.
The judge smiled. He took his watch from his waistcoat and opened it and held it to the failing light.
For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?
He looked up. He pressed the case shut and restored the instrument to his person. Time to be going, he said. I have errands.
The kid closed his eyes. When he opened them the judge was gone. That night he called the corporal to him and they sat on either side of the bars while the kid told the soldier of the horde of gold and silver coins hid in the mountains not far from this place. He talked for a long time. The corporal had set the candle on the floor between them and he watched him as one might watch a glib and lying child. When he was finished the corporal rose and took the candle with him, leaving him in darkness.
He was released two days later. A Spanish priest had come to baptize him and had flung water at him through the bars like a priest casting out spirits. An hour later when they came for him he grew giddy with fear. He was taken before the alcalde and this man spoke to him in a fatherly manner in the Spanish language and then he was turned out into the streets.
The doctor that he found was a young man of good family from the east. He cut open his trouserleg with scissors and looked at the blackened shaft of the arrow and moved it about. A soft fistula had formed about it.
Do you have any pain? he said.
The kid didnt answer.
He pressed about the wound with his thumb. He said that he could perform the surgery and that it would cost one hundred dollars.
The kid rose from the table and limped out.
The day following as he sat in the plaza a boy came and led him again to the shack behind the hotel and the doctor told him that they would operate in the morning.
He sold the pistol to an Englishman for forty dollars and woke at dawn in a lot underneath some boards where he’d crawled in the night. It was raining and he went down through the empty mud streets and hammered at the grocer’s door until the man let him in. When he appeared at the surgeon’s office he was very drunk, holding onto the doorjamb, a quart bottle half full of whiskey clutched in his hand.
The surgeon’s assistant was a student from Sinaloa who had apprenticed himself here. An altercation ensued at the door until the surgeon himself came from the rear of the premises.
You’ll have to come back tomorrow, he said.
I dont aim to be no soberer then.
The surgeon studied him. All right, he said. Let me have the whiskey.
He entered and the apprentice shut the door behind him.
You wont need the whiskey, said the doctor. Let me have it.
Why wont I need it?
We have spirits of ether. You wont need the whiskey.
Is it stronger?
Much stronger. In any case I cant operate on a man and him dead drunk.
He looked at the assistant and then he looked at the surgeon. He set the bottle on the table.
Good, said the surgeon. I want you to go with Marcelo. He will draw you a bath and give you clean linen and show you to a bed.
He pulled his watch from his vest and held it in his palm and read it.
It is a quarter past eight. We’ll operate at one. Get some rest. If you require anything please let us know.
The assistant led him across the courtyard to a whitewashed adobe building in the rear. A bay that held four iron beds all empty. He bathed in a large riveted copper boiler that looked to have been salvaged from a ship and he lay on the rough mattress and listened to children playing somewhere beyond the wall. He did not sleep. When they came for him he was still drunk. He was led out and laid on a trestle in an empty room adjoining the bay and the assistant pressed an icy cloth to his nose and told him to breathe deeply.
In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. In the white and empty room he stood in his bespoken suit with his hat in his hand and he peered down with his small and lashless pig’s eyes wherein this child just sixteen years on earth could read whole bodies of decisions not accountable to the courts of men and he saw his own name which nowhere else could he have ciphered out at all logged into the records as a thing already accomplished, a traveler known in jurisdictions existing only in the claims of certain pensioners or on old dated maps.
In his delirium he ransacked the linens of his pallet for arms but there were none. The judge smiled. The fool was no longer there but another man and this other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men’s fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end.
The light in the room altered, a door closed. He opened his eyes. His leg was swathed in sheeting and it was propped up with small rolls of reed matting. He was desperate with thirst and his head was booming and his leg
