Cormac McCarthy’s Motorcycle
Excerpt from ‘The Counselor’
Author Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, No Country For Old Men, The Road) died on June 13, 2023, five weeks shy of his 90th birthday. The Coen brothers’ film adaptation of No Country (2007) raked in $171 million on a $25 million budget. Of its eight Academy Award nominations, it won four, including Best Picture. The Coen brothers won Achievement in Directing (Best Director) and Best Adapted Screenplay. The Ridley Scott film The Counselor (2013) was McCarthy’s first spec script, and while it didn’t have as much success as No Country, it included motorcycles and drugs.
Here’s an excerpt from the screenplay, first published in The New Yorker on June 3, 2013. The film was released on October 25, 2013, grossing $71 million worldwide on a $25 million budget.
Mexican garage. A welder in coveralls and goggles is cutting a line along the side of the tank of a Ford F-650 septic-tank truck with an acetylene torch. The tank of the truck has been cut in two laterally and a hoist is lowering a fifty-five-gallon drum into the open top of the tank. The welder is standing in the tank waiting to unfasten the hooks and the cable.
Mexican garage. The welder is welding the top of the tank back in place.
A small Mexican port town on the Gulf of California. Several trucks are being unloaded and are driven along the dock toward a warehouse with a sign over the door that says “Aduana.” One of the trucks is the septic-tank truck. It is waved aside and the driver hands a brown envelope down to the customs inspector, who puts it inside the front of his coat, and the truck drives out to the road.
Southwestern desert. The septic-tank truck is sitting in the chaparral. The driver opens the door and stands up, holding on to the roof of the cab and the top of the open door. Another man watches through the windshield with a pair of binoculars. In the distance, a line of stragglers crossing through the chaparral, men and women, carrying suitcases and laundry bags over their shoulders. The standing man takes a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lights it and blows the smoke gently.
Desert. The sun has just set. Bare purple mountains are dark against a darkening sky streaked with deep red. There is the high, thin scream of a motorcycle in the far distance, very slowly becoming louder. Then it streaks across the middle distance in a small part of a second, really just a blink of lights, and whines away.
A small grocery store. A young man dressed in a bright-green leather motorcycle outfit—jacket and tight pants and green boots and gloves—is waiting in line, his helmet hanging over his arm. He is somewhat dark. Part Mexican. The woman in front of him has unloaded her groceries onto the conveyor belt and the clerk is adding them up. She turns and smiles at the man. He is holding a ten-pound bag of dog food.
Southwestern desert. The septic-tank truck and a pickup are parked in the chaparral. The two Mexican drivers are talking to two other men. They squat on the ground. One passes around a pack of cigarettes. Then he picks up a stick and draws a map in the dirt.
A warehouse with floodlights. The metal door clanks upward and the green-leather motorcyclist comes whining through on a Kawasaki ZX-12R and brakes and does a doughnut on the concrete floor and stops and shuts off the bike and takes off his helmet. A Doberman runs to him and stands up and he hugs her and tousles her ears and steps off the bike. There is a black late-model Cadillac Escalade parked toward the rear of the warehouse. He crosses the room, with the dog leaping about him, to an island in the far corner that contains a kitchen and a bed, a tin locker, and a leather easy chair, taking the bag of dog food with him. He fixes the dog a bowl of food and turns on the stereo and opens the refrigerator and takes out a frozen dinner and puts it in the microwave and opens a beer and sits, watching the dog eat. He puts the beer on the table and stands up and takes off the leather jacket and unzips a pocket and takes out a clear plastic bag and pitches it onto the table. It is full of hundred-dollar bills.
Night. Northern Mexico at the U.S. border. The septic-tank truck is lumbering over the desert, driving with only the parking lights on. The truck crests a slight rise and grinds to a halt. In the distance are the lights of a city.
Yard of the Pump Masters Septic Tank Pumping Company. Early morning. The trucks are pulling out one by one and the yard master is checking them off on his clipboard. When they are all gone, there is one truck left in the yard.
A large motorcycle store in the city. A man enters and stands looking. He crosses to where a Kawasaki ZX-12R motorcycle is circling slowly on a motorized dais. The dais is marked off with a blue velvet rope and the man approaches and stands looking at the bike for a moment, then unhooks the rope and lets it fall to the floor and mounts the dais and stands circling with it. A clerk talking to a customer nearby sees him. The clerk comes over to the dais. The man has taken a steel tape measure from his coat pocket and is measuring the height of the Kawasaki at the handlebars.
Border city. Evening. An outdoor café adjoining a parking lot. Metal chairs and tables. Traffic. A Mexican man is sitting at one of the tables with a cup of coffee before him and a newspaper. The young man in green pulls up on the Kawasaki ZX-12R. He takes off the gloves and the helmet and puts the gloves inside the helmet and steps off the bike and walks to where the man is sitting and kicks back a chair and sits down.
The man at the table rises and goes, leaving the paper on the table. The kid sits at the table and opens the newspaper and reads.
The kid rakes an object from under the paper into his helmet and puts down the paper and stands and puts the helmet under his arm and crosses the plaza to his bike and puts his foot over the bike and starts it and pulls his gloves from the helmet and lays them on the tank in front of him and pulls on the helmet and fastens the strap and then pulls on the gloves and kicks back the stand and pulls away into the traffic.
Night. Two-lane blacktop road through the high desert. A car passes and the lights recede down the long straight and fade out. A man walks out from the scrub cedars that line the road and stands in the middle of the road and lights a cigarette. He is carrying a roll of thin braided wire over one shoulder. He continues across the road to the fence. A tall metal pipe is mounted to one of the fence posts and at the top—some twenty feet off the ground—is a floodlight. The man pushes the button on a small plastic sending unit and the light comes on, flooding the road and the man’s face. He turns it off and walks down the fence line a good hundred yards to the corner of the fence and here he drops the coil of wire to the ground and takes a flashlight from his back pocket and puts it in his teeth and takes a pair of leather gloves from his belt and puts them on.
Then he loops the wire around the corner post and pulls the end of the wire through the loop and wraps it about six times around the wire itself and tucks the end several times inside the loop and then takes the wire in both hands and hauls it as tight as he can get it. Then he takes the coil of wire and crosses the road, letting out the wire behind him. In the cedars on the far side, a flatbed truck is parked with the bed of the truck facing the road. There is an iron pipe at the right rear of the truck bed mounted vertically in a pair of collars so that it can slide up and down and the man threads the wire through a hole in the pipe and pulls it taut and stops it from sliding back by clamping the wire with a pair of vise grips. Then he walks back out to the road and takes a tape measure from his belt and measures the height of the wire from the road surface. He goes back to the truck and lowers the iron pipe in its collars and clamps it in place again with a threaded lever that he turns by hand against the vertical rod. He goes out to the road and measures the wire again and comes back and wraps the end of the wire through a heavy three-inch iron ring and walks to the front of the truck, where he pulls the wire taut and wraps it around itself to secure the ring at the end of the wire and then pulls the ring over a hook mounted in the side rail of the truck bed. He stands looking at it. He strums the wire with his fingers. It gives off a deep resonant note. He unhooks the ring and walks the wire to the rear of the truck until it lies slack on the ground and in the road. He lays the ring on the truck bed and goes around and takes a walkie-talkie from a work bag in the cab of the truck and stands in the open door of the truck, listening. He checks his watch by the dome light in the cab.
He turns off the walkie-talkie and takes the cigarette from his mouth and grinds it into the dirt and shuts the door of the truck. He looks at his watch. Very thin in the distance we can hear the high-pitched scream of the Kawasaki bike flat out at eleven thousand r.p.m.
Shot of the green rider bent low over the bike at a hundred and ninety miles an hour. Suddenly, the floodlight comes on and he raises up and turns his head to look at it.
The truck. The desert is suddenly lit to the north of the wire man and he takes the ring and carries it forward and pulls it over the hook. The wire hums.
Shot of the green rider with his face turned back to the floodlight, which is now behind him. Suddenly, his head zips away and, in the helmet, goes bouncing down the highway behind the bike. The bike continues on, the motor slows and dies to silence, and in the distance we see a long slither of sparks recede into the dark.
The truck. The man clips the wire at the ring with a pair of wire cutters and the wire zips away. He walks out to the road with the walkie-talkie. In the road, he shines the light down the blacktop and then walks down the roadside ditch until he comes to the helmet.
He puts away the walkie-talkie and bends over and picks up the helmet. It is surprisingly heavy. He goes back to the truck and opens the cab door on the driver’s side and puts the helmet on the floor and shuts the door and goes out to the road and crosses to the fence, where he cuts the wire free from the fence post and begins to wind it up as he walks, passing the wire over his elbow at each turn to make a coil. He stows the wire in a toolbox under the bed of the truck and gets in the truck and starts it and turns on the lights and drives out into the road.
Desert, night. The truck drives past the headless body sprawled in the road. Then it stops. The man looks out the window of the truck at the body, then backs up the truck and gets out. He picks up the feet and drags the body into the ditch and wipes his hands on his pants and then gets back in the truck and pulls away down the highway.
Front gate of the septic-tank company. The flatbed truck pulls up and the wire man gets out and shuts the door. He is holding a battery-driven die grinder in one hand and he watches the road behind him, where a single light is approaching. Sound of a motorcycle. The cycle pulls up and the rider gets off and kicks down the stand, and the wire man goes to the gate and turns on the die grinder and bends to cut the padlock on the gate. A sheaf of sparks lights up the area, and the lock falls to the ground in about twenty seconds. He pushes open the gate and then bends and picks up the lock and juggles it in his hand and throws it into the bushes.
Cormac McCarthy’s words aren’t for everyone. For those curious to see what he wrote in five weeks for director Ridley Scott to shoot in seven, here’s the PDF.
So glad you posted this! The one instance I can recall of motorcycles X Cormac. Such an inspiring writer, Blood Meridian is my writing bible.