Legends of the Fall (8 page)

After a sleepless night Amador picked him up for a meeting with the local governor and a member of the film commission. The provincial government was headquartered in a huge palace once owned by an eighteenth-century duke. Cochran paused to look at some splendid imitation of Diego Rivera murals, a colorful agitprop display rendering rather honestly the torments of the
peónes
and
campesinos.
The head of the film commission met them in the hall and seemed very nervous about Amador, which pleased Cochran who knew it was best to have a badass on your side. Amador waited in the hall as he and the film man had a polite cup of coffee with the governor who made him nervous with his florid reminiscences of Barcelona.

Cochran and Amador were escorted to a limousine for a trip to an active movie set on the property owned by John Wayne, who had made a number of westerns in the area. At the last moment the film man was called to the phone and he asked Amador why he made the man so nervous. Amador told the chauffeur to stand outside and laughingly said that the film man was a gentleman while he, poor Amador, was responsible for the security of a number of big American-owned ranches and mines and his methods were occasionally a bit crude.

Out at the movie set, which had absurdly tight security, Cochran noted the huge size of the crew. It never occurred to him that it took so many people beyond those you saw on the screen. He had been distracted on the way up the valley because the corn crop looked so rich and green that if you squinted to block the mountains you could have been in Indiana. He remembered the boredom of cultivating corn on the rickety old Ford tractor. His brother had been much better at farming though he had been glad to move to San Diego. Indiana farmers made good Navy men and good fishermen. In his youth his father and uncles had gone on fishing expeditions up in Michigan returning severely hung over but with coolers full of bluegills, bass and trout. He had been taken on the last trip before the move and had been allowed to drink cut-rate A&P beer and play poker, though in recognition of his low status he cleaned fish far into the night.

He ordered the car stopped when the chauffeur said
corallo.
Amador wanted to kill the snake but Cochran said no, and followed it off the road and into the dry grass where it wriggled under a rock. Once when he was at Torrejón he had taken a hop on a C5A down to Nairobi. They only had a twenty-four-hour layover which had limited his view of Africa, other than from the air, to a long night of gambling, and later, the company of a Galla woman from Ethiopia, a tribe legendary for the beauty of their women. But he had a few hours to kill the next morning and had taken a taxi to the Nairobi Herpetarium where he wandered slowly among the tourists looking at the snakes in the glass cages. His favorite had been the green mamba—long, thin, a translucent green resembling a green buggy whip with motions so abrupt and quick one backed away from the cage. He reflected on the beauty of threat: the fatal equipment of the mamba owning a beauty shared by the grizzly, rattler, hammerhead shark, perhaps even the black Phantom he flew—an utterly malign black death instrument.

Two guards at the cattle gate had waved them on. The guards stooped in the hot dust watching a scorpion they had dropped on an anthill. Beyond the fence a mare watched with her ears tilted back while her foal pranced sideways, then was still in the shimmering heat. He turned to watch the brown cloud of dust from the passing car float over them. This idiotic charade increased his taste for the kill.

Cochran was introduced to the producer who happened to be down from Hollywood for a few days. The man was very short, wore a French denim suit and smoked a big stogie. He attached himself to Cochran with a string of inane patter, smelling the obvious money and circling Cochran in the heat of the canyon like a rabid ferret. The director was a noncommittal, stylish Englishman who spoke halting Spanish and Cochran asked him questions to the exclusion of the producer. The actress-model was brought forward, dripping wet, wearing a towel around her head, and a lightweight white cotton robe. He bowed and kissed her hand, catching a glance in a part of the robe of her pubic mound behind wet flesh-colored panties. She called out for a translator and the director offered his services.

"These yo-yos have had me in the river through seven takes. I look so awful but it's the obligatory piece of skin, you know." She primped while the director translated.

"On the contrary, you look edible."

She laughed raucously hearing the translation. "Tell him I would love to be part of such a dinner."

Some hundred yards away beneath an immense cottonwood tree a pickup was parked next to a semi holding the gaffer's equipment. In the pickup a man watched the scene through binoculars. He wondered what Amador was doing with the elegant gentleman who walked to the fine piece of ass he had just watched swimming through the binoculars. He focused on the gentleman, stared for a long moment and sharply drew in his breath. It was the man who made love in the desert and whom his dead friend had beaten in the cabin, the lover of Tiburón's wife. He exhaled as he started the truck in confusion, knowing he should report to Tibey immediately.

At that moment Tibey was sitting at the desk of his study, far up in the mountains in the ranch house near Tepehuanes. He was sweating profusely from quail hunting and his hunting companions from Mexico City were eating lunch in the dining room. He would join them when he finished his business which offered itself in the form of a supplicating ranch foreman, the one whom Miryea had stabbed. Tibey was twirling a .357 in whirling circles with a pen through the trigger guard on the inkblotter.

"I've known you since you were a child. Now your big mouth says that you will strangle my wife for stabbing you. I don't blame you but you have forgotten whose wife she is. I could kill you . . ." Tibey paused and aimed the pistol, pulling the trigger and the hammer clacked against the empty chamber and the man shrieked, falling to his knees. "But I won't kill you. Leave for Mérida by tomorrow. Never return. Here is the name of a man who will give you a job." Tibey scrawled a name on a slip of paper and held up his hand to silence the man who tried to speak. "Take this pistol as a gift. It will help you remember your mouth." The man scurried off with a dark ring in his crotch where he had pissed his pants. Tibey joined his friends at lunch with a smile. "I have learned my cattle are doing especially well this fall."

Miryea had lapsed after her comparatively pleasant hiatus. The autistic children did not respond; she could not penetrate their brains to the extent of even a minimal response. They sat next to her on the bench uttering the moans of the damned and she imagined that she looked to them as a photo would to an animal, that is, an incomprehensible shadow to which neither the memory nor the senses brought an offering. She ate very little and had become painfully thin and sallow. The mother superior fretted over her profitable charge, not understanding that Miryea was what a previous century had called "pining away," drawing inward in her own peculiar autism caused by love and the aching vacuum of the loss of love, so that her nights had become insomniac and barren of hope; nights of extreme consciousness shared by those on the edge of severe breakdown, terminal patients in the cancer ward whom drugs have assuaged into a state of nonlocalized dread. A flowering tree they had looked at when they were ten years old and spending a lonely afternoon will come back to them with lucid poignancy so they may once again smell a magnolia blossom they picked up idly from the grass.

Tibey was having a nightcap in bed reading a week-old
Wall Street Journal
when his man drove up in the courtyard. Late arrivals always meant bad news and he threw the paper in disgust.

The man entered the bedroom accompanied by Tibey's bull mastiff who had, not incidentally, bitten a hand off a young
peóne
the week before. The young
peóne
had hoped to snatch a mallard from a flock Tibey raised for the table. In the not so distant past Tibey would have regarded the event as just, but he had spent a day considering destroying the old dog, rejected the idea; then that evening he rode his prize Arab mare over to the
peóne's
hut. While the wife prepared an herbal tea Tibey dangled the frightened man's two children on his knees, giving the little boy an expensive jackknife and the girl a small gold cross he wore around his neck. He told the man to appear at the bank in Tepehuanes the first day of every month where one hundred dollars would be waiting for him, and that the following day some men would arrive to move the family to much better quarters with those who worked his ranch. The man, who was a good horseman, would be expected to keep an eye on the foals. Tibey had begun to do oblique penance for what he had done to his wife, no matter her sins.

The man who stood by the bed remembered the night he had held the arms of Tibey's wife and his hands had come away flecked with her blood as she slipped to the floor. It was good that Tiburón didn't know that he had visited the brothel repeatedly and had given the woman a taste of his own private sexual tortures so that even in her heroin narcosis she dreaded his appearance.

He gave Tibey the news as simply as possible and was surprised at Tiburón's impassiveness. He added that perhaps it was the gringo who had killed the huge man whom they lovingly referred to as The Elephant.

"Doubtless. Watch him carefully. He'll never find her and if he comes close to me we'll kill him."

After the man left Tibey poured another nightcap and was distracted by memories of what a fine time they had had playing tennis and skeet shooting. Under Cochran's tutelage he had been on the verge of developing a fine backhand. He felt foolish standing there in a silk robe thinking of an absurdity like tennis when he should be thinking of killing the betrayer. Of course he would have to kill Cochran unless he went back to the States, or maybe he would anyway, and have Miryea poisoned to wipe the slate clean and have something that resembled a fresh start, which he recognized as an equally absurd idea. The die was cast so deeply in blood that none of them would be forgiven by their memories. Meanwhile he would let his former friend eat his heart away in the fruitless search for his beloved.

At the southern outskirts of Durango Amador had taken the temporary lease of a sprawling, elegant villa for Cochran. There was a pool, a lovely statuary, and the rooms were a cool-vaulted brick with many fireplaces and a well-equipped kitchen where Amador's sister prepared the meals. Amador had taken on another relative, a tall, thin man from the mountains as an additional guard so he could sleep with comfort, and do some snooping in town.

But the dog days had begun and Cochran found it difficult not to crack under the strain: days dense with heat and windless evenings when he did nothing but sit on the patio, drink Carta Blanca, and watch the insects fluttering against the backdrop of clouds beneath which in lazy gyres the vultures seemed to sleep in the air. The clouds were the most wonderful clouds on earth. Amador told him that scientists came all the way to Durango to study the clouds and he readily believed it. He stared at the clouds until they entered his dream life where they accelerated and rolled, hurtled past, as they had done at extreme speeds from his jet fighter.

Amador was plainly stymied and hated to admit it, though he knew Cochran understood. Amador had a passing acquaintance with Tiburón for a decade and considered him a master criminal of superlative wit and taste. He never admired Tiburón's wealth—there were many wealthy fools among the Americans whose property he protected—but he was a little envious of the man's consummate skills at engineering big deals to the extent that he no longer had to trifle with the filth of his past. To Amador, finding Miryea was another instance of Tiburón's wit: the woman had apparently disappeared from earth in a less than immaculate ascension. Wiped out. Erased. And not among all of Amador's reliable connections was there a whisper or shred of evidence to trace her whereabouts. Amador would not have been surprised if she had been dropped down some fathomless, abandoned mine shaft, or lay bound in a bag of rocks at the bottom of a mountain lake. He said so to Cochran who merely nodded in stony agreement one late evening when they had had a great deal to drink.

The cover for Cochran's visit was quickly becoming exhausted. They had visited every available ranch for sale in the area, heard every imaginable spiel from the film commission people on the advantages of the Durango area, visited every antiqued and genuinely bedraggled movie set from the past—at best a haunting procedure where movies from the past were recognized and the past that went along with the movies emerged from its peculiar tunnel. They had gone to a daffy cocktail party given by the movie people on one of the sets, with a lavish buffet table set up, and a mariachi band. The liquor flowed and the
campesinos
watched with curiosity from a polite distance. The actress-model had become angry with Cochran's indifference which she believed had to be feigned. On the drive home with Amador after the party Cochran suggested morosely that they go to Tepehuanes and blow Tibey out of his socks with the Ruger 30.06 that Amador kept in the truck. It would be fun, Cochran said, to watch the motherfucker buck and somersault through the air with half his head disintegrating into separate pieces of meat.

"Then you would never find her," Amador said.

"You're right, friend. I am only exercising my fantasy life. I see him in the crosshairs of a scope when I don't even want to shoot him. I want to take her away. That's it. Plain and simple."

"If she's alive."

"I'll have to ask you not to mention that possibility."

"I'm sorry, friend." Then Amador smiled at how he had put a roast piglet left untouched at the buffet under his arm and had given it to an old man beyond the fence. The old man would have a happy night of indigestion.

A few days later Amador said that there was gossip about his continuing presence in Durango. They sat drinking coffee by the pool trying to concoct additional plans: the last of the bribes had been paid fruitlessly to the former madam who had been traced to Mazatlán. She had invented a tale that had sent them eagerly all the way to Zacatecas to the frowsiest pigsty of an address. The trip kept reemerging in pieces; a half-comic nightmare, a costume mission of terror on a side street in a slum.