All The Pretty Horses

Three days later, the boys are loaded into a pickup truck, accompanied by the captain and several guards. They begin the daylong journey to Saltillo. At midday, they stop near Cuatro Ciénegas and order the boys out of the truck. A guard comes to take Blevins away with the captain. Before he is led off, Blevins takes off his boot and pulls out his money, which he gives to John Grady. The guard marches Blevins into the wilderness. John Grady and Rawlins stand aghast until they hear one gunshot, then another. Only the captain and the guard return, and they drive on.

At Saltillo, the captain tells them that the guard who led Blevins off is the brother of one of Blevins’s victims; the guard had a failure of nerve and paid the captain to shoot Blevins. The captain warns the boys that they must “make arrangements” to leave, otherwise they will die in Saltillo, which will lead to problems for him. The boys have no money for a bribe. John Grady insists that the captain didn’t have to kill Blevins. The captain relates a story: When he was young, he and his friends went out drinking, and everyone in the group had sex with a woman, but when his turn came, she refused. It is heavily implied that he raped or killed the woman, because “A man cannot go out to do some thing and then he go back. Why he go back? Because he change his mind? A man does not change his mind” (181).

The boys are led to a cell, and in the morning, their names are not on the prison roster, a troubling sign to Rawlins. They spend the next several days fighting constantly with other prisoners, and they are badly hurt. John Grady insists they have “to kill us or let us be. There aint no middle ground” (183). By the end of the third day, things calm down, and they buy some clothes and food with Blevins’s money. They observe a cinderblock house in one corner of the prison and wonder who lives there. 

Two days later, the man who lives in the house, Emilio Pérez, summons them. Pérez, who claims he is in prison because of political enemies, says that Americans don’t have a good time in Saltillo and suggests they bribe him to get them out. Pérez insists that they must trust him or they will die in Saltillo.

The next day, Rawlins is attacked by a man with a knife. He’s badly wounded, and John Grady helps him to the guards, who take him away. Alone, John Grady waits for the cuchillero (knife-wielder) who will come for him next and learns what he can about the prison’s factions. After several days of no word on Rawlins, John Grady goes back to Pérez.

Pérez is cagey about Rawlins’s condition and jokingly asks to hear stories of John Grady’s life of crime. Really, he wants his bribe. John Grady insists that they don’t have the money, and Pérez claims all Americans have a rich relative and says that John Grady needs to act before the authorities find a crime to pin on him. He explains that Americans are misguided about good and evil, reveals that Rawlins is alive, and warns John Grady that he cannot control everything that happens in the prison.

John Grady finds an Indigenous man who agrees to sell him a knife. He gives the man the last of Blevins’s money, and they meet later in the day at a spot where the knife has been buried. He inspects the blade, then the dinner horn is called.

In the cafeteria, he sits at a table with a boy who bears gang tattoos. John Grady realizes the boy will be his attacker. The guards leave, and John Grady waits for the boy to rise. A vicious fight ensues as the boy uses his metal cafeteria tray and a knife to batter and slash at John Grady. John Grady fights back just as aggressively, but is slashed several times and collapses. When the boy reaches to slit John Grady’s throat, John Grady plunges his knife into the boy’s heart and breaks off the handle. As he stumbles away from the scene, John Grady is met by Pérez’s man, who carries John Grady to the house.

John Grady wakes in a dark room. A demandadero (prison servant) attends to him and brings him food. Over several days, John Grady thinks of his father’s time in a prisoner of war camp; he didn’t previously want to know what happened during that time, but now he does. Realizing that he’ll probably never see his father again and does not know what will happen with Alejandra, he “thought about horses and they were always the right thing to think about” (204).

A doctor visits and changes his dressings, then a man in military dress who wants to see if he can walk. John Grady isn’t sure how much time passes, but he is eventually led to the office of the comandante, who hands him an envelope full of money and tells him he’s free to go.

John Grady is reunited with Rawlins, and the two are put on a bus. They don’t speak of their predicament and get off in the center of town. John Grady buys them food, and as they eat, he presumes that the money is from Dueña Alfonsa and correctly assumes that Alejandra set up their release. Rawlins reveals that he saw a boy die in the hospital and that he wasn’t kept under guard and could have left at any time, but he didn’t. When John Grady says he knew Rawlins wouldn’t leave him, Rawlins says “That dont mean it aint dumb” (210).

Rawlins knows John Grady will go back for Alejandra and their horses and doesn’t try to stop him. John Grady doesn’t want Rawlins to come this time. Rawlins cries over Blevins and the possibility of John Grady being killed in the same way.

They get a hotel, and John Grady tries to give Rawlins half the money. He refuses. They talk about God, and John Grady expresses guilt over the boy he killed, even though he had no choice. The next morning, they buy new clothes, and John Grady sees Rawlins onto a bus back to the United States.