Legends of the Fall (9 page)

When they finally had found the whorehouse Cochran became uncontainable. Amador held the madam and two pimps at bay in a dimly lit hallway while Cochran methodically kicked in a half-dozen doors in a state of whirling whiteness, so that the gun he held on the occupants held a terror beyond a simple gun: its owner had become red-eyed, utterly berserk. When he reached the last door he somehow believed Miryea had to be there and when the whore was found facedown beneath a shocked fat man, the man was uprooted from his perch and flung into a corner. Cochran turned the head of the comatose whore revealing the blunt face of an Indian woman in her forties and he howled then, running from the room. He set upon the pimps until Amador restrained him. Amador knew by then they had been duped and on the way back home he was wordless in his anger and drank deeply, a rarity for him. Cochran sat massaging his foot and ankle against the dashboard in his private agonies which included a sense of defeat, however momentary, that had taken over the marrow in his bones. In this state he had decided to sneak away from Amador, drive to Tepehuanes and shoot Tibey. (That very evening Tibey had dressed a peasant girl in a dress of Miryea's and then hurled her out of the house in disgust. His drunken regret made him sleepless and he wandered around his property in the waning moon until he wrapped himself in a horse blanket and slept with his bird dogs.) In private, Amador was planning the capture of Tiburón's headman, the man who had replaced The Elephant after his death. But that would be a last-ditch effort, a gesture of panic. Amador owned a Latin patience not possessed in any degree by Cochran. He let grudges pass for years until the appropriate time came to relieve himself of their burden. But now he needed to buy more time.

"You must have that beautiful actress over for dinner. Then everyone in town will think you are just another rich Spanish nitwit trying to relieve the pressure in his balls." Amador was pleased with his idea.

Cochran looked up at the elongated cirrus clouds that reminded him of what it must be like to be inside the skeleton of a whale. He agreed with Amador though he felt curiously sexless. A half hour after he gutted the big man and was driving down the road in the Texan's pickup he had felt an immediate lust for a girl standing under a tree by the side of the road but had been mildly embarrassed. In Da Nang after washing off the reeking sweat of a mission he had enjoyed whores who fixed a meal before he bedded them. Without at least a glimmer of the illusion of the romantic he felt dead sexually, and had since the age of thirty when in a state of depression he vowed not to sleep with a woman he did not want to talk to, eye to eye, at breakfast. He was so much more sophisticated in human-sexual terms than he had ever, until Miryea, had an opportunity to show. Without really thinking about it he had traveled unreturnably far from the glandular collisions of popular culture. He was immersed in love distant from the technical strenuosities of what had become a belabored map of sexual ecology where the proper steps yielded everything and nothing. A man who had been ineluctably married to fatality on a basis far surpassing that of ordinary domesticity did not want to piss away his life on nonsense. And he felt the generalized fearfulness of his approaching age: Miryea seemed transparently his first, last and only shot at filling his life to a fullness that everything else could only dimly suggest. If you added it up, without her there was nothing—but with her even the simplest gestures of walking a bird dog in the desert, or selecting the ingredients for a meal for two rather than one took on an ineffable charm. One evening she had brought over a half-dozen types of fish and shellfish to make a Malaga seafood stew, not forgetting a pound of fresh ground beef for Doll who had been charmed away from her usual indifference to women. Cochran sat there through the afternoon staring at the clouds, letting the sun burn him while Amador's mother brought him a succession of cold drinks and snacks which he left for the appetites of the flies.

Amador had gone off rather happily to invite the actress-model for dinner, stopping at a florist's for a dozen roses, also at an amused drug wholesaler to shop for what he was sure was included in an actress's pharmacopoeia: some spectacular marijuana and at least serviceable to strong cocaine. He needed to arrange this repast to buy time. His friend had shown him the cigar box and had given him five thousand dollars as a gift for starters. Amador wished to add to his small ranch in the foothills where he raised a few cattle and knew the ease and sweetness that had only been occasional since his youth.

At the set the actress had been a bit haughty accepting the flowers, but immediately relented into a state of eager cooperation. She was fascinated by this man who lapsed in and out of her past few weeks, so unlike anyone she had met in her profession. She would be there at the stated time and during the rest of the day's shooting, on the uncomfortable back of a quarterhorse, she thought about what she would wear and how she would act.

After Amador presented the bouquet he glanced around, fixing for a moment on a particular pickup which he almost subliminally recognized—he had seen it too often of late. He walked a bit closer looking askance as if interested in the nonsense of making movies. He put on his sunglasses and took a cup of water from the back of the food truck letting his eyes sweep past the pickup. He recognized Tiburón's headman leaning against the tailgate affecting interest in the mountains.

That evening the actress-model arrived for dinner and stayed under uncommon circumstances. She brought her cat which was amusing except to Amador's mother. Amador slid off leaving his tall cousin to stand watchfully in the shadows of the portico. Cochran began the drinks and dinner bored as if flipping the pages of a magazine while wanting or waiting to do something else. But he was hospitable across the table until the attempt at communications became silly in their separate languages. She nervously gulped her wine, sitting there brittle but radiant in a white satin sheath dress.

"I have to skip this horseshit. I have confidential business here and if you blow my cover your throat will be cut back to the neckbone," he said in a flat Indiana accent.

He was surprised when she laughed, saying that she remembered his first words at the airport. They became friends in an odd way, and she moved in though no mention was made of her utilitarian purposes. It was pleasant enough for her not to bother asking. It had been years since a straight man had been around her without trying to paw. She gave her most preposterously seductive shot and he obliged only as a robot obliged. He listened attentively to her griefs and told her to sit quietly on off days and simply watch the clouds. On one occasion, he prevented her from taking delivery of a canary from the marketplace to let her cat chase in her bedroom. She became hysterical, perhaps from the cocaine that Amador had supplied, until he took her for a walk in the field behind the villa and her cat caught his first mouse. The cat bit off the head of the mouse and lay purring in the grass; she was delighted announcing Pooky to be decidedly natural and not at all a Hollywood cat.

Cochran realized that she was trying the patience of all of them, him less than Amador or his relatives from the mountains or mother because he was cold and tight and believed however ignorantly that it was coming to an end. He fingered the necklace that Mauro's mother had given him as if it were not a rosary at all, but a powerful talisman, in that peculiar way that a soldier on a night mission can feel invincible uttering a prayer from childhood. The heart wants life so much and the brain is shocked at the approach of death. The soldier always thinks it will be someone else, the man before or behind him, or hopefully no one he knows will ever die.

Amador's mother had come running with a robe when she saw that the actress-model was speaking to her son while wearing only her bikini bottoms. Amador laughed but was secretly irritated that the woman didn't show his mother more respect. And one late night under the portico when Cochran had refused her company she seduced Amador's nephew while he stood guard. She became angry when he covered her quickly, refusing to take off his gun. His kind uncle was paying him more than he made in a year for a week's work. In rebellion the next day she sent the propman for three more canaries which she snuck into the house after the day's shooting. She sat in her room smoking in her underthings watching Pooky chase the birds. She removed the drapes to deny the birds a vantage point beyond the cat's reach. She began weeping then and wept for hours until Cochran heard her, entered the room and held her, speaking the necessary soothing words until she slept. He dusted yellow feathers off his pant leg, petted the cat and left. He understood his cruelty toward her but was helpless, as self-sunken as he was in his own somnambulistic torment.

One morning Miryea did not awake. When she was found missing at breakfast her guardian nun discovered her charge so deep in fever that she had lost consciousness. The mother superior drove off with her handyman to Durango to seek permission from Señor Mendez's man for a doctor to visit. She was told cynically to go back to wait. Not only had the man lost his dear friend The Elephant but his boss had become so distracted and drunkenly sentimental that he had begun to lose his manhood. Tiburón had become so suddenly older that the man feared for the future of his job. It was all this nonsense over his faithless wife whose throat should have been cut the night in the cabin. He would have been glad to do it though he admitted the delight he had taken in her body. The conversation took place in a small fish restaurant called the Playa Azul. He did not know that the dozing
peóne
leaning on the building across the street was Amador's nephew.

The report was received by Cochran and Amador with only momentary puzzlement and then it became obvious. Amador said there were only three nunneries in the area. Cochran was electrified and ran to the bedroom where he strapped on the .44 in its shoulder holster. He kissed his private rosary and hung it around his neck. Amador followed him pinning him to the door.

Cochran struggled, but Amador held him firmly. He said that they had to plan carefully or neither the woman nor he who had become close to him would leave the country alive. Tiburón had to be confronted or they would be hunted down instantly. Now that they knew of the nun any fool could find Miryea but the point was to find her and not die. Amador led him down the hall and into the kitchen where he poured drinks and told his mother to prepare a pot of strong coffee. He called in his nephew and told him to give Cochran a change of clothes and not to leave his mother's side. Amador rehearsed plans while cleaning their weapons laid out upon the table. He put ham and bread and beer in a canvas bag. They left as the actress pulled up after her day's work. She began to comment on Cochran's costume, then looked at their eyes and stopped talking. Cochran kissed her on the forehead and they left.

Up in the mountains at Tepehuanes Tibey had dispatched a plane for Mexico City to pick up a society doctor who owed him a fortune in gambling debts. He had become sickened with his revenge to the extent that he planned to move to the top floor of his hotel in Cozumel. He had given up his notion, held for three days, of going into Durango and shooting Cochran. He was tired of love and death and wanted a particular Mayan girl he knew in Valladolid. She was a schoolteacher and not an inappropriate woman to take to Paris when the weather became bad in Cozumel. Now he wanted Miryea to live or he would surely go to hell, or at the very least, continue to live in hell. He seriously considered shooting his man as he talked to him, freeing everyone from the psychopath's threat. He knew that this wave of generosity might pass when he became drunk again so he avoided liquor and went hunting until it became dark. He roasted the quail in the fireplace as he had as a young man. And ate them with his hands squatting before the fireplace.

The ride up to Tepehuanes took several hours. They pulled up behind a small cantina around midnight and went into a tin shed kitchen lit by an oil lamp. They ate some supper and spoke to the cook, an old man, who was Amador's contact and mostly Indian. Tiburón had been going hunting every morning early. Surely Amador remembered the valley. His henchman, referred to as The Crazy One, had arrived and would probably be with him. Tiburón had become crazy himself and even had got drunk in this same cantina with the
campesinos
who feared him. The old man laughed saying that Tiburón was so deranged that he was trying to find out if "who he is understands who he is," at which point a man becomes what he remembers as best. The old man said he had become a cook after a lifetime as a
caballero
because he remembered how he enjoyed cooking for his brothers and sisters when their mother died. Amador nodded saying that in between those times the man had been a wonderful bandit and whoremonger. The old man laughed and jumped around, then offered them a drink from his bottle of mescal. Amador refused saying they were on business of a very grave nature.

Amador drove up a mountain two-track, stopping when the trail became too treacherous for the car. They sat in silence for an hour with Cochran lighting one cigarette with another, listening to the ticking of the heat fading from the motor. Amador turned on the car radio and they were amused to pick up in the high altitude a New Orleans country music station aimed at truckers. It made Cochran homesick until he realized he had no home. Next to Miryea he missed his daughter terribly and he doubted his emergence from the gaps, the holes that he tore, or had been torn in the fabric of his life. But then his heart lifted as he thought of Miryea hidden in some country nunnery patiently waiting for him to take her away to Seville. His mind fixed on seeing the old Roman aqueduct in the moonlight with her. Maybe his daughter could come spend the weeks around Christmas with them.

Amador interrupted his thoughts by saying that they had to make a long walk a few hours before dawn. There was a good position to intercept Tiburón in a place where the valley narrowed into a gorge and the trail ran along a creek. They had to assume that Tibey would make no variance in his recent habits. It was up to Cochran to make what peace he could with the man, a long shot at best. He, Amador, would be hiding with his 30.06. The negotiations should be far easier when they had the drop on the enemy. Amador jerked his head around and Cochran flicked off the radio thinking that he too had heard something. They rolled the windows down and heard the sharp barks, yelps and short quavering howls of the coyotes talking to one another. Amador told a story of how, when he was young, he had found an old, dying coyote lying by a stream. He raised his gun to shoot it out of pity then lowered the gun not wanting to interrupt the coyote's last hours of life.