Blood Meridian

The kid refuses to abandon the “drawn and wretchedlooking” Tobin (202). They try to hide, though Tobin is convinced that Holden will find them anyway. From their hiding place, they see Holden pass. He has Cloyce’s brother on a leash, a small arsenal of guns, plenty of water, and a parasol made “from rotted scraps of hide stretched over a framework of rib bones bound with strips of tug” (204). Tobin rues their missed opportunity to kill Holden. As they plot their next move, they hear Holden’s thundering voice. Holden accuses the kid of being “mutinous” (205); he believes that the kid betrayed him by refusing to kill Native Americans and insists that Toadvine and Brown are alive. Then, he disappears into the dunes.

The kid and Tobin are found by Diegueno Native Americans. The Diegueno take the kid and Tobin back to their camp. As they eat, a man repeatedly reaches for the kid’s pistol. The kid draws the gun, aims it at the man’s head, then puts it back in the holster. He tells his hosts how he and Tobin came to be in this situation. The next day, Tobin and the kid travel west. They rest at a ranch and then begin to ascend into the mountains. On the other side, they pass by broken wagons and, eventually, they reach San Diego. The kid goes to the beach and sees seabirds and horses while Tobin searches for a doctor.

The kid visits a tavern in San Diego. Once inside, he is arrested and thrown in jail. The kid tells his jailors “with a strange urgency of things few men have seen in a lifetime” (209); they assume that he has lost his mind. The kid wakes up in jail and finds Holden asking the jailors to visit him. Holden tells the kid that Tobin has lost his mind, that Toadvine and Brown are still in the desert where the kid left them, and that the authorities have accepted Holden’s version of events, in which the kid is solely responsible for the slaughter at the ferry crossing having conspired with the Native Americans. The kid has been sentenced to death. Holden accuses the kid of judging him and betraying him; he accuses the kid of bringing a curse on Glanton’s gang because he “pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprise” (210). When the kid suggests that Holden killed their associates, Holden makes his excuses and leaves because he has other “errands” (211).

At night, the kid speaks to his jailor. He tells the jailor that he knows the location of the gang’s buried treasure and offers it as a bribe in exchange for his freedom. The jailor is unimpressed. Two days later, a Spanish priest comes to baptize the kid. Then, the kid is taken to a magistrate. The magistrate lectures him about morality and then releases him. The kid searches for a surgeon to heal the wound in his leg. The next day, the kid arrives for his operation already drunk and argues with the surgeon. The surgeon gives the kid a powerful anesthetic, which makes him dream that Holden has come to visit him. He sees Holden as a “great shambling mutant, silent and serene” (212). In the kid’s delirious dreams, Holden tries to forge his face into a coin without the use of fire during an endless night.

The kid wakes up after the operation with the arrowhead removed from his leg. After a week, he can use crutches to navigate the streets. No one he asks knows anything about Tobin. By the following June, the kid has traveled to Los Angeles. There, he sees men being hanged and later learns that the condemned men were Brown and Toadvine. In Los Angeles, the kid gets in fights and has his possessions stolen. One night, he thinks he sees Cloyce’s brother in a cage in a woman’s room, then realizes that the caged man is “not Holden’s fool but just some other fool” (213). He buys Brown’s necklace of “heathen ears” (213) and finds a job as a cowboy in Sacramento. After some months, however, he quits and drifts from town to town. He buys a gun, a horse, and a Bible, even though he cannot read. He sees San Francisco burn twice. Everywhere he goes, people treat him as a wise and experienced man. Everywhere he goes, he feels as though Holden has preceded him. At the age of 28, he leaves a job and travels north. He passes a group of performers and the next day sees their dead and murdered bodies in a ravine. When he approaches a nearby old woman, he tries to touch her, only to realize that she is “just a dried shell and she had been dead in that place for years” (215). 

By 1878, the kid is now the man. He travels alone across the plains of North Texas. He sits one evening and talks with a hunter who explains how man hunted the buffalo to extinction and now they are gone, as though “they’d never been at all” (216). The hunter wonders whether there are other worlds or whether “this is the only one” (217). Continuing his journey, the man passes a wagon belonging to a team of bone collectors. That evening, a group of young boys from the bone collectors approach his campfire. After talking to the man for some time, one of the boys named Elrod refuses to believe the man’s story about how he acquired his necklace of ears. The man insists that Elrod leave; if he ever sees Elrod again, he says, he will “kill him” (220). Later in the night, Elrod returns with a rifle. The man shoots the boy. Elrod’s friends collect the body at dawn, and they admit to the man that they knew their friend would die. They bring Elrod’s orphan brother with them to introduce him to the man.

The man arrives in a tavern, where a woman plays piano while a bear in a dress dances. The man is shocked to find Holden sitting near him, “little changed or none in all these years” (222). Holden is delivering one of his trademark lectures to a group of men. An argument results in the dancing bear being shot. Holden approaches the man and asks him whether he believes that “it’s all over” (223). He encourages the man to drink whiskey because “this night thy soul may be required of thee” (224). Then, Holden talks about life as though it were a dance that leads inevitably toward death. Holden continues to talk even though the man barely listens. Eventually, the man retires to his room with a sex worker. Later that night, he reluctantly goes outside to use the outhouse. He opens the door and sees Holden inside, naked. Holden drags the man into his arms, “against his immense and terrible flesh” and closes the door (227). Later, two drunk men find the man’s dead body. Inside the tavern, Holden dances naked and wildly. He declares that he will never stop. He begins to play the fiddle. He repeats that he will never sleep, and he will “never die” (228).

In a short Epilogue, a man wanders across the plain. As he walks, he stops and makes holes in the ground using a special tool. Behind him are the “wanderers in search of bones” (230). Some of these men stoop to pick up the bones. The more the man moves across the landscape, the more people follow him.