Mendoza in Hollywood (28 page)

“I don’t suppose there’s any way you could tell him the truth?” I asked Porfirio. “That his memories are all screwed up, that his father was the real bastard and you were the good guy?”

Can you think of any way I could get him to listen to me
? transmitted Porfirio bitterly.
And even if I could, what then? He thinks he had a father who loved him and died in his mother’s defense. Her version of the story’s a lot more palatable, isn’t it? What happens when the pretty paper is stripped off my ugly present of truth? His mother becomes a liar, at the very least
.

“She sounds like a crazy bitch anyway. Why should she hate you?” I said.

I killed the man she loved. She would have forgiven him anything, but she’ll never forgive me. And I shouldn’t be forgiven! I could have prevented this. If I’d been quicker, I might have stopped the bullet that killed Bartolo. I might have disabled Jaime without killing him. I might have been there for the boy all these years. God in heaven, see what she’s done. The family is broken, scattered, when I’d fought so hard to keep them together where I could look out for them. How will I ever find Juan and Agustin again? Are they even alive? And she, look at what she’s become, look at what she’s done to that boy. If I had only stayed. . 
.

“You couldn’t have, man,” Einar said. “You know that. You belong to the Company. First time Dr. Zeus had a job for you somewhere else, you’d have had to go. And even if you’d stuck around, do you think you could have kept on micromanaging their lives forever? We may be immortals, but we can’t control mortal destinies. We can help them when they want help, but that’s it. When they want to destroy themselves, not even God can stop them.”

“That is so true,” I said, with all my weary heart. “It’s that lousy rotten free will of theirs. All we do is run around cleaning up after it.”

“We’re the everlasting janitors in the Big Bathroom,” Einar agreed. “Our only consolation is knowing how much worse things would be if we weren’t part of the equation. Anyway, kids: here’s an idea, culled from my centuries of wisdom and cinema expertise: We’ve all seen films where a guy fakes his own murder.”

“I can think of several,” Imarte said. And then, “Oh.”

Let him shoot me
?

“We’ll load his gun with blanks and fix you up ahead of time with a full suit of charges and stage-blood bags. He’ll think he’s blown you away and go home with the revenge thing all finished.” Einar jumped up in his excitement and began to pace. “Six Cawelti squibs, a sheet of body armor, some red dye and corn syrup—man, we can make you look like you had breakfast at the OK Corral!”

I
T TOOK NO MORE THAN
a week to prepare, during which time Tomas was getting stronger. Against Imarte’s entreaties, he set up a target on a tree and practiced shooting at it. Juan Bautista tried to talk him into going home, but there was no arguing with the boy: as soon as he was well enough, he planned to take the stagecoach out to Calabasas, famed locally for its bandit population, to see if Porfirio had gone there to hide from justice. On the day he was finally strong enough to ride, however, Einar came riding up from the bottom of the canyon at a dusty gallop.

“Hey! Amigo!” he called out in crude Texan Spanish. Tomas turned. He’d been target shooting. “Yeah, you. I think I finally got a line on that no-good murdering hombre that killed your pa. Looks like he’s holed up not five miles from here. You want to go see if you can get him?”

I looked up from the cookfire to watch the boy’s reaction. He stood frozen, staring with those enormous dark eyes. Slowly and deliberately he holstered the pistol. “Will you have the kindness to loan me a horse, señor?”

“Get him a horse, Juanito,” Einar said.

Juan Bautista gulped. “You don’t want to do this,” he told Tomas. “Think how bad you’ll feel afterward.”

“No. If I get it over with, I can be my own man,” said Tomas.

So Juan Bautista brought out a horse, saddled and bridled, and Tomas climbed awkwardly into the saddle. He looked sick and dizzy up there.

Einar reached over and took his pistol out of its holster. He spun the empty chambers. “Won’t do you any good unless you reload, son. Here, take mine.” He handed off the gun full of blanks, and I looked meaningfully at Juan Bautista. First bit of stage business in our play accomplished.

Tomas stuck the gun in his belt and drew a deep breath. “Let’s go, señor. Take me to that murdering son of a whore.”

They rode away down the canyon, dust clouds spiraling up. Juan Bautista stood looking after them, wringing his hands. “I have to see,” he said, and ran for the stable, from which he emerged a moment later leading another horse.

I ran to him as he got into the saddle. “Take me along. This ought to be some show.”

He put out a hand, and I leaped up behind him, just as Imarte came running out of the inn. “What is it? Is it time? Don’t tell me they’ve left—”

“We’ll let you know how it went,” I said, and we galloped away.

We followed the dust clouds north through the pass, up the grade to Dark Canyon, and over the flank of Cahuenga Peak. We were coming to the high ground behind Mount Hollywood, which sloped gently down toward the river, and I wondered if Einar had chosen the spot deliberately. You could call it an appropriate location for a shootout; this was the site of an immense graveyard in the distant future. Nearer our time, Griffith would shoot the battle sequence from
Birth of a Nation
here, and for all I knew the battle scene that ended
Intolerance
too. Einar had told us about it enough times, in his babbling enthusiasm. Now, before it became that famous place, it would serve as a small and private theater for a grim farce.

But where were the actors?

We saw the two horses tethered in a stand of oak trees. And, just creeping over a ridge and peering into the hollow beyond, there were Einar and Tomas. Juan Bautista urged our mount forward.

Porfirio was advertising his presence. A plume of smoke rose thinly. He’d made a cookfire.

“Up there,” I said, pointing to our right. We could climb a winding trail for a better view. Juan Bautista hesitated, then swung the horse’s head uphill, and we ascended hurriedly, peering through the oak trees.

Porfirio was sitting by his fire, warming his hands. He looked tired. He glanced up as Einar broadcast,
We’re here, man. Is it a good day to die
?

Always
. Porfirio looked down at the embers again, deliberately ignoring the mortal boy’s clumsy approach through the weeds. Oh, God, the kid slipped, was tumbling down to land in a crouch not ten yards from where Porfirio sat. Did he really want to do this? Up on the ridge, Einar pulled out the little electronic control and waited.

Porfirio raised his face. Tomas made a stifled sound and staggered backward. We couldn’t see his face, but we had a fine view of Porfirio as he got to his feet and held out his hands, his empty hands.

“Very good,
mi hijo
. It’s my turn. Blood for blood, so you can be a man.”

Then the boy was firing wildly,
bang bang bang
, and the charges detonated in perfect time with his shots. The blood bags exploded outward, and Porfirio spun and fell. The noise of the shots echoed; it hit the face of the ridge like a wave breaking and rolled back down the slope, prolonging the moment, washing us in the sound. Out on the valley floor beyond the river, a dog began to bark.

It’s a wrap. Beautiful
, Einar transmitted.
You all right
? He came jumping down the slope, stuffing the detonator remote into the pocket of his jeans.

Damn things hurt
came the answering transmission. I confess I was relieved to hear Porfirio reply; that had been a truly convincing death scene. Look at him now, the way he lay there ashen and motionless,
his lean villainous face frozen in a snarl like a dead animal’s. But then, who could counterfeit death better than an Immortal? We see so much of the real thing.

Tomas had dropped the gun and was doubled up, retching. Einar caught him and steadied him. “Come on, boy. We have to get out of here. No sense getting yourself hanged. Let’s go, let’s go.” He practically carried him up the slope and down the other side, to the place where their mounts were waiting. Juan Bautista spurred our horse through the sagebrush toward them.

“Did you get him?” I asked, playing my part.

“Got him, all right,” Einar said, boosting Tomas into the saddle. “Now this boy’s satisfied his debt of honor and he can go home to his ma with a clear conscience. Isn’t that right, son?”

Juan Bautista rode up to Tomas and peered into his face worriedly. Tomas looked deathly ill again, as bad as on the night he’d been shot.

Then we all thundered away through the November evening, and the sun was setting red as blood, and the shadows were long. Tomas wept the whole way, and when we walked our horses into the innyard, he tumbled off his horse and into Imarte’s waiting arms.

She folded him into her bosom.

“You poor brave boy. You come with me, tell Marta all about it,” she cooed.
I trust everything went off as planned
?

You shoulda seen
, Einar transmitted.

If anyone had bothered to tell me in time, I might have
, she replied, giving me a nasty look. She turned and pulled Tomas away with her into the inn, doubtless to obtain a first-person narrative from him and gain valuable insights into the culture of machismo. The damned harpy.

She nursed him through the hysterics, and I think she rewarded him the way a man wants to be rewarded, and as the evening wore on it, she gave him aguardiente too to bolster his sense of worth. He cheered up tremendously and began to swagger and sing, as I’d never heard him do before. We all assumed it was the relief of being out from
under this burden he’d carried his whole young life. But Juan Bautista listened for a while and then vanished silently up the canyon, taking Marie and Erich with him. I busied myself with making some plain beef stew—I’d had all the Chaldean Surprise I could stand—and Einar bounced around taking care of his innkeeper duties, still pleased with himself at the way his special effects had turned out. Even he began to look a little concerned, though, as the noise level in Imarte’s room rose.

I was trying not to listen to what seemed to be an argument developing, when I picked up Porfirio on the ridge behind us, just arriving.

Mendoza
?

Yes
.

I could use some hot food
.

Hang on
.

I ran and got a blanket from my room, and half a case bottle of aguardiente, wrapping them together. I got a bowl of stew and a spoon and hurried up the canyon. As I ran, I could hear Tomas emerging from the inn, shouting to Imarte to leave him the hell alone.

“Whoa, son, where are you going?” Einar said, getting up.

“Set up the bottles!” the boy shouted. “Set up the bottles and give me that gun!”

Target shooting again? I shrugged and kept climbing.

Porfirio was sitting quietly in the darkness, gray as a ghost, which he looked like in his serape with the holes and bloodstains all over it. I put the bowl of stew into his hands and threw the blanket around his shoulders.

“Thanks.” He turned the bowl in his hands, savoring the warmth. I sat down beside him and uncorked the aguardiente bottle.

“How is he?”

“I think he’s having some kind of hysterical reaction,” I answered delicately. “But I guess that’s normal if you think you’ve just killed somebody. It looked great, by the way.”

“The kid’s drunk,” Porfirio said with a scowl, gazing at the circle of light around our cookfire. “Listen to him.”

Gunfire, followed by Tomas’s shrill laughter. He was telling Einar to bring more bottles to shoot at. I had a gulp of aguardiente myself. Porfirio spooned stew into his mouth, but he never took his eyes from the fire. They were dark and cold.

“Listen to him, down there,” he said. “He thinks he’s some killer, he thinks he’s one hell of a man.”

“You did your best,” I said. “What else could you do, Porfirio? At least this way he can go home and make his mother happy.”

“She’ll never be happy,” he said, emptying the bottle and throwing it away. “My fault, I guess.”

More shots. We could hear Einar making a very tactful suggestion and being refused indignantly. Porfirio exhaled hard.

“I was so relieved when she married Jaime. At last, I thought, somebody who’ll take care of her, and he’s even got money. But see how that turned out. I could go looking for Juan and Agustin, I guess, when this job is over; I could try to track them down and see if they’ve married, if they’ve kept the family going. But what am I going to do about her? And what am I going to do about that kid?

“Look at him down there, strutting around with his gun. He’s bought into the whole damned lie about blood and honor and revenge. He was made to feel like a little nobody all his life, but now it’s payback time. Nobody’s ever going to tell
him
what to do again, not now that he’s killed somebody. Ay, ay, ay.”

Porfirio buried his head in his arms. “Who will take this curse off my family?” he asked the night.