THE CITY
Early in the novel, the nameless protagonist, “the kid,” running away from his drunken father, a man enraged at the son whose mother “did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off,” is drawn into the revival meeting of a Reverend Green. Any chance for salvation is thwarted, however, by the arrival of an enormous, hairless man proclaiming that the reverend is an illiterate fraud, an atheist, and a known pedophile who sometimes resorts to bestiality. Women faint, men prepare a lynching, and gunfire rings out as the tent collapses leaving “folk trampled underfoot in the mud.” The source of the chaos, “the judge,” departs for drinks, cheer‐ fully admitting he has lied, that he knows nothing of Reverend Green, an admission prompting widespread admiration and revelry. The judge appears to have destroyed a religious leader and the community made possible by religion for no other reason than he could. An act of sheer choice, of pure will, using sexual mores and norms to spark violence. The breakdown of social control is contagious. The kid gets into several vicious fights, fleeing town, to the smiling delight of the judge, with dying men and a burning hotel in his wake. Thus infect‐ ed, it is no surprise that the kid joins the gang of Captain Glanton to take Apache scalps for bounty. The gang is without mercy or order, killing randomly anyone they happen to meet. To the kid’s surprise, Judge Holden is also a member of the gang, although he seems to have some unique authority or jurisdiction over everyone in the group. Indeed, every man in the gang claims, just like the kid, to have come under the judge’s influence prior to joining up with Glan‐ ton, an uncanny improbability. The judge has authority, like some perverse Moses leading his peo‐ ple through the desert. At some point prior to his membership, the gang runs out of gunpowder and helplessly flees from pursuing Apaches: “there was no place to run and no place to hide.” As they flee, they “come upon the judge on his rock there in that wilderness by his single self.” There is only one rock in the wasteland, an oddity causing some in the gang to suspect that “he’d brung it with him … to mark him out of nothing at all.” Appearing in the vastness without apparent cause, “you couldn’t tell where he’d come from,” he is without horse or canteen, just sitting on this rock “like he’d been ex‐ pectin us.” When Glanton informs him of their situation, Judge Holden takes charge, calmly leading the men “behind him like the 84