The Son

by Philipp Meyer

Everyone stopped looking at me. Glenn and our cattle no longer had anything to do with this. They settled on their knees and haunches, as if, without a single word exchanged, they had all decided that I did not exist, the way a flock of birds changes direction without any individual appearing to lead. There was a shot somewhere to my right, and then, all at once, a rolling volley from our line. I heard and felt the bullets crack past my head and I fell to the grass.

This is what white men do. They gather in groups and kill the Other.

silver. The Garcias had once been quite wealthy and I knew when I returned I would find the house completely plundered.

White men, thieves and murderers.

But the whites do not think this way—they prefer to forget that everything they want already belongs to someone else. They think, Oh, I am white, this must be mine. And they really believe it, Tiehteti. I have never seen a white person who did not look surprised when you killed them.”

This!!!

Considered mentioning that several of the “greasers” (Vargas and Rivera, at least) had gone to college in Mexico City while Gilbert and his cross-eyed brothers were diddling heifers in Eagle Pass.

You cannot build junk and expect to survive in today’s world. People want things that last.

Wait a few decades.

The best of us had either fled or died in the plague.

The war sickness was a disease of the white man, who fought in armies far from his home, for men he didn’t know, and there is a myth about the West, that it was founded and ruled by loners, while the truth is just the opposite; the loner is a mental weakling, and was seen as such, and treated with suspicion.

“But you knew the other side would eventually have them. A gun with which one man can kill forty.”

parfleche. “Magic will not touch you, Eli. I saw it from the first time I met you. But of course that is also a curse.”