American Idyll

yes, the river knows

Saturday, January 29, 2022

The Judge He Holds A Grudge


GRAND SCENIC DIVIDE FROM HAVASUPAI POINT
KATHLEENS NIPPLE
COLORADO RIVER BELOW GARNET CANYON
SEVENTY-FIVE MILE CANYON WITH PILGRIM
Bob Dylan: Most Likely You'll Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)

The judge had spied the musician and he called to him and tossed a coin that clinked upon the stones. The fiddler held it briefly to the light as if it might not serve and then slipped it away among his clothes and fitted his instrument beneath his chin and struck up an air that was old among the mountebanks of Spain two hundred years before. The judge stepped into the sunlit doorway and executed upon the stones a series of steps with a strange precision and he and the fiddler seemed alien minstrels met by chance in this medieval town. The judge removed his hat and bowed to a pair of ladies detoured into the street to bypass the doggery and he pirouetted hugely on his mincing feet and poured pulque from his cup into the old man's eartrumpet. The old man quickly stoppered the horn with the ball of his thumb and he held the horn with care before him while he augered his ear with one finger and then he drank.
--Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

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