Cormac McCarthy · 1998 · overland

The last book of the Border Trilogy, and the one that brings its two heroes together. John Grady Cole of All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham of The Crossing are working the same New Mexico ranch in 1952, with the army about to buy the land out from under them - and John Grady falls in love with a girl in a Juarez brothel.

1. 1
   Alamogordo

   1952, and the Cross Fours ranch in the Tularosa basin, which the army is about to buy for White Sands - John Grady Cole and Billy Parham working cattle on land that has about a year left as a working outfit.

2. 2
   El Paso

   The last of the old border towns, and the two of them coming in on Saturday nights - Billy older and careful, John Grady nineteen and about to do the one thing Billy cannot talk him out of.

3. 3
   Juarez

   The White Lake, and Magdalena, a sixteen-year-old epileptic prostitute belonging to a pimp called Eduardo - and John Grady decides he is going to marry her, and starts fixing up an abandoned adobe house to bring her to.

4. 4
   The border

   Eduardo will not sell and Magdalena runs anyway, and is found with her throat cut in the darkness between the two countries - the crossing that gives the trilogy its whole subject, made one last time and fatally.

5. 5
   Juarez

   John Grady goes back for Eduardo with a knife, and the two of them fight in an alley for six pages - and he kills him and dies of it in Billy's arms in a doorway, aged twenty.

6. 6
   Arizona

   The epilogue jumps fifty years. Billy is seventy-eight, working as a film extra and sleeping under a highway overpass, and a stranger tells him a dream about a traveller and a stone table.

7. 7
   Portales

   A family takes him in and he sits at their table with his hat in his lap - and the last line of the trilogy is a woman telling him he is welcome here, which is more than the border ever gave anybody in it.