The Crossing

Billy, incredibly drunk, decides to sleep in an abandoned home in the pouring rain. In the morning, he meets some children. He lets them ride his horse until a woman comes and warns him that the rain was the only thing that kept him from being robbed in the night. The woman reads his palm and tells him she sees two brothers, “Uno que vive, uno que ha muerto” (One who lives, one who is dead, 369). Billy does not know which is which.

Billy rides San Diego to find the Muñoz house empty. A man tells him they’ve all gone. He continues riding through towns he visited three years ago on his journey, then rides to Namiquipa. On the way, he passes wedding party. No one else seems to be in town, and he enters a random home to find a dead man dressed in a suit awaiting burial. Billy meets up with the wedding party and learns that the girl Boyd ran away with is long gone and is known as a bandida with a price on her head. She may have been killed. The woman who tells him this reveals she knows who Billy is. Billy asks her where Boyd is, and she tells him that he is buried in San Buenaventura.

Billy rides for several weeks asking after his brother, He learns that Billy has become a folk hero in corridos. Billy stops at a carnival one night and is given a tarot card with a skull on it, which wins him free entry. When he recognizes the opera troupe’s wagon, painted over with the new attraction, he walks off without seeing the show and rides on.

A few days later in Barbícora, Billy is woken by one of the men he rescued the girl from with Boyd. The man tells him his companion is dead and that it was a fate he made for himself. He says that he holds no grudge toward other men, especially over a woman, and he rides off again.

At a hotel in Casas Grandes, Billy hears a woman singing a corrido about a young, fearless güerito. He asks her to sing the rest, but she does not know it, just that it’s a sad story of a blond man and his lover dying in each other’s arms when they run out of ammunition.

Billy rides into the mountains and camps there for some time until he runs into Quijada, who invites him into his home. Quijada tells him the true story of Boyd: He is dead, buried in San Lorenzo, and the girl was taken away covered in blood, but no one knows what became of her. Boyd killed two men, including a friend to Pedro Lopéz, the local alguacil. Quijada still works for Lopéz and the Hearst estate, and Billy realizes they should be enemies. When Billy asks him about the corrido, Quijada says “Even if the güerito in the song is your brother he is no longer your brother. He cannot be reclaimed” (386). Billy says he’d like to take Boyd’s body home, and Quijada cautions him against it, in part because of the danger and in part because it is a denial of Boyd’s fate.

Billy rides to San Lorenzo and finds his brother’s grave. It bears no name, but a wooden cross has a dedication from “sus hermanos en armas” (his brothers in arms, 389). In the church, he meets an old woman praying for her dead family but finds no gravedigger. He digs Boyd up himself, working through the day. When he uncovers the body, he tries to use the horses to pull the coffin out, but it breaks. He doubts his goal, thinking he could just fill the hole back in, before wrapping Boyd’s uncovered remains in a blanket and placing them on the pack horse.

He rides unceasingly through the night toward America, passing Casas Grandes on the second night, before he is stopped by a group of riders. They surround him and demand to know what’s on the pack horse. Billy tells them the truth, but one of the men takes a knife, cuts the pack loose, and sends the horse off. He opens up Boyd’s blanket and kicks at his corpse, demanding to know where the money is while Billy tries to get to his pistol in Niño’s saddlebag. The man comes after Billy and grabs Niño’s reins; Niño panics and tramples Boyd’s remains, and while the other men look on laughing, the man stabs Niño in the chest.

Billy tries to hold Niño’s wound closed while the man rummages through his belongings. He finds Billy’s pistol and holds it to his head, demanding money, to which Billy replies, “You go to hell” (397). The other men convince the man with the gun that they need to leave.

Billy puts clay in the wound to try and stop it bleeding and leads Niño to water. They go into the shade and Billy gathers up his brother’s remains; the pack horse is nowhere to be found. He covers Niño with a blanket and goes to sleep. When he wakes, he recovers the man’s knife and dries out his things. That night, he dreams of Boyd approaching his fire; when he wakes, he tries to think of where Boyd could be, but “Boyd was dead and wasted in his bones” (400).

In the morning, a group of nomadic muleteers passes by carting an ancient, disassembled airplane. They help Billy tend to Niño; one of them offers to buy the horse, which gives Billy confidence that it will live. While they wait for the men to prepare the medicine, Billy asks about the airplane, and the leader of the group explains that it is one of two very similar airplanes lost in the mountains. This one was commissioned to be recovered by the father of the pilot, who died. Billy asks what it would mean if they had the wrong plane, and the man muses on the nature of men’s attachment to objects and their meaning. He considers that the father wants the plane because as long as it is in the mountains, the son’s story ends there and will continue to haunt the father. The man tells the story of the other plane, which was washed away in the Rio Papigochic after he and his men tried to float it downriver. The men were caught in 10 days of flooding rains that washed away their endeavor. They climbed out of the gorge and hitched a ride back to their client. In this way, the man says, God decided which plane was the correct one. The man tells Billy that there is a third story to tell that contains the truth, which is the story of telling the story: “Es que ultimadamente la verdad no puede quedar en ningún otro lugar sino en el habla” (Ultimately the truth cannot remain anywhere but in the telling, 411).

The wanderers treat Niño and ready to leave. The man tells Billy one more story of his father, who collected old daguerreotypes and hung them from his wagon. As a boy, the man realized that the pictures represented a futile desire for permanence. He concludes that people are both victims of impermanence and the very embodiment of it. The muleteers depart, refusing payment.

In the evening, a man who speaks English meets Billy at his camp. He claims to be the man who hired the muleteers to recover the plane. He is incredulous about Niño’s stabbing and impressed with the muleteers keeping their word in recovering the plane. He makes small talk with Billy about his dislike for Mexico; Billy tells him “This is my third trip. It’s the only time I was ever down here that I got what I come after” (416). Billy asks the man about the airplane. The man tells him that the Muleteer’s stories aren’t true and warns Billy about the dangers of Mexico. Billy begins to tell the man about his father, his mother, and finally his deceased sister, but the man says he needs to go. Billy tells him Boyd was better than him at everything. When the man says, “This world will never be the same,” Billy responds “It aint now” (420).

Billy rides home and enters the Animas Valley on Ash Wednesday, where he buries Boyd. He wanders and works again throughout New Mexico. One night, he finds an abandoned building to sleep in near the Organ Mountain so he can stay out of the rain. As he’s eating dinner, an old dog comes to the doorway. Billy throws mud at the dog, then advances on it with a length of pipe, yelling at it to leave. He chases it down the road throwing rocks at it as it howls.

That night, he wakes, thinking it’s daylight. Billy is actually witnessing the Trinity nuclear weapons test. As the light fades, he calls for the dog to return to no avail. He sits down in the road and weeps as the sun rises.