Legends of the Fall

  “Then don’t. It makes your mouth taste terrible. For me, I like to drink but only off duty. I can sneak you booze but it’s forbidden here:’ He winked and left.

  When Antonio left, Cochran struggled out of bed and shuffled gingerly to the window. His chest ached and the cast on his left arm threw him off balance. He became dizzy at the window and held on tightly to the sill, focusing his eyes on his bare feet. He liked what he saw behind the hacienda: it was a green world, a huge vegetable garden with the rows raised between small trenches for irrigation, and beyond that, some sheds and corrals holding a big Percheron and three sorry-looking quarter horses, a few sheep, a large pen of pigs and some milking goats. The oldest woman in the world slid from behind a bush and stared through the window at him, not a foot away. He was utterly impassive and so was she, then she broke into a smile and he smiled back and she disappeared.

  Back in bed he felt hungry and examined the large needle wound in his right arm that told him he had been fed intravenously. He felt hollow as an Easter egg that had been emptied by a pinprick. He slept deeply but awoke with a start when he dreamt of sitting in the sand laughing next to his car looking up at a lovely nude woman whose mouth was bleeding horribly. He yelled then until his eyes bulged and came fully awake in the twilit room. Diller, Mauro and Antonio came running, Diller still chewing on some food and holding his bag.

  Cochran found himself saying, “I’m sorry I disturbed you. It was a dream.” Diller approached him with a hypodermic and Cochran said, “I want something to eat.” Antonio left and Diller smiled. The man is polite, he thought, and went back to his dinner. Mauro stared at him in his faded-green work clothes and drooping moustache and eyelids.

  “I found you and thought you were dead,” he said, then paused. “I wish you safety from your enemies and vengeance if that’s what you wish.”

  Antonio, carrying a tray, passed Mauro going out the door. The tray held a bowl of soup, a glass of goat’s milk and some corn tortillas.

  “You must begin gently with food. I am sure you are an intelligent man by your appearance and will not listen to any Injun hocus-pocus of Mauro. Sometimes I think he and his daughter are ghosts though they are kind. When you get your money you might give them a few dollars for finding you. God knows I’m only a poor lonely boy dedicated to the science of medicine and you needn’t listen to me, but if you wish to borrow my radio, have me take a letter because my English is perfect, or just read to you let me know. I hope to move to Los Angeles someday. Where is it that you come from?”

  “Indiana. I come from Indiana.”

  Antonio was stymied for a moment then announced with conviction, “I know its reputation well. It is close to Georgia and full of strife. You would be better off in Los Angeles. Now you should eat and sleep and tomorrow begin walking or your fine body will lose its shapeliness.”

  Antonio arranged the pillows behind him and left. Cochran ate a few bites then fell deeply asleep, tipping over the soup. Mauro’s daughter came to pick up the tray and cleaned up the mess, replacing the bed clothing. Cochran awoke terrified, thinking he saw Miryea as an adolescent.

  He sat on the porch for two weeks watching the brown dust of August arise in clouds around walking feet. His beard grew and at the end of the month Diller took a chisel and mallet and broke the cast on his arm which looked bleak and pale. When it was damp his ribs still hurt. He was polite and extremely distant. The Federale captain came and went, issuing a tourist card to him for want of anything else to do with his bleary and distant silence. Finally he wrote a note to his daughter, something he ordinarily did once a week. Then one day he explained that the timing gear on Diller’s Powerwagon was off and he would fix it, which he did with Mauro assisting. Diller kept a polite distance and during dinner he included Cochran in his blessing. They spoke obliquely about Mexican history and about Cozumel, which they had both visited. Diller was not disturbed, preferring the present to any knowledge of men’s tortured histories with which he was all too familiar. After all, the man had begun to make himself useful, attended the services in the crude cement-block chapel, and most of all was intelligent and conversant on all matter of things as long as it remained impersonal.

  Early in September Cochran began working hard in the garden. He cleaned the manure out of the sheds and rode the broad back of the Percheron around the valley, a better mount by far than the barely broken horses that Mauro rode. When the Percheron had arrived several years before at the mission as a pointless gift from Diller’s hometown, Mauro decided to break the horse for riding as they had no harness or fields to work him. But when he mounted the horse it merely walked around at his bidding and now the great bulk of Diller rode it on calls into the mountains inaccessible to the truck. Mauro liked Cochran who even helped deftly with the slaughter of a steer, two sheep and a small goat that they roasted when the Federale arrived again with a gentleman who was a friend of Cochran’s.

  It was the Aeromexico pilot who laughed in relief when he saw him. Cochran was polite but saw his old friend as a possible interruption in his plans that had begun forming when he was running and climbing in the mountains. His running amused everyone for September was still hot, though an old man dying of cancer who had mescal smuggled into him told Cochran that running might turn him into a mountain lion. Life was better if you were no one’s victim. The old man said he had been a Maderista in his youth, then changed his fidelity to Zapata. It had been a just and proper pleasure to shoot his enemies.

  Cochran and his friend from Aeromexico sat in the dining room drinking coffee in strained silence. Antonio peeked in to check out so important a visitor. The visitor intended to wait out the silence of his friend.

  “You don’t look like you’ve been playing much tennis.” He smiled, then was baffled by Cochran’s look of incomprehension. He took another tack. “Is she dead?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I want to find out.”

  “You’ll probably die. The doctor said you almost did. Perhaps I understand what you want to do. But I wish you would come back to Tucson.”

  “Not for a while.”

  The pilot sighed and looked around the room in embarrassment. He was somewhat of a romantic himself and recognized his friend’s affliction with doom. He suspected that Tibey had not been kind to Miryea and that there was a matter of unavoidable vengeance.

  “Okay. You must work it out. But please accept some advice. You look like a peóne now, a hippie peóne. Stay that way and you will not be conspicuous. Take this money I brought along in case it is needed to soften the way.”

  Antonio interrupted by bringing in more coffee and they fell silent. When Antonio left the pilot went on to say that his older brother was high in the government in Mexico City and could be trusted. That was how he found Cochran. It would be best not to stay at the mission longer as Tibey might change his mind and could easily trace him there. The pilot added some of his own identification to the envelope of money and wrote down the name and number of his brother. Then he pulled up a pant leg and took his boot halfway off, revealing a small .22-caliber Beretta in a half-holster. He handed it to Cochran.

  “This is for when someone gets as close as they have already been. If you live through this you must get your face fixed.” He stood and they embraced. Cochran walked him out to a jeep but his throat was choked and he found nothing to say.

  That afternoon he made up two envelopes, each containing five hundred dollars in pesos for Diller and Mauro, keeping a thousand for himself, the better share of it stuffed behind the pistol against his calf. Diller was overcome and prepared a carpetbag of secondhand peóne clothes, a Spanish bible and a bottle of pain pills. He apologized for the poor clothing that actually was leftover. from those who died. They joked about the fact and Diller said he would be sadly missed and prayers would be said. He did not pry into Cochran’s plans. In a booming voice he ordered up an elaborate meal in honor of his patient’s recovery and departure and his own insatiable appetite.

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sp; Before. dinner Cochran and Mauro sat on the porch watching the evening shadows slide down the mountains. It had been very difficult to get Mauro to accept the money which was an immense amount for him. Mauro gave him his pearl-handled knife saying that it was a lucky knife, razor sharp, and perfect for cutting off the balls of those who had beaten him and left him for dead. Cochran said that if anyone came in search of him he should leave a phone message in care of a certain gentleman in Mexico City. Mauro wanted to go along and it took Cochran a while to convince him that he could not.

  At dinner Cochran chose to sit with Mauro, his daughter and mother and felt a strong rush of sentiment over his new life that made the old seem a light-year away, Rat and stale as a bad magazine article except for his daughter. He was wary to the point that when he wrote his daughter he included no return address. Now he was at a table groaning with food with a dozen people chattering in Spanish, intermittently singing along to the radio which Diller decided to allow. Under the table Cochran and Mauro poured glasses of mescal, the first alcohol for Cochran in two months. Diller ordered everyone to sing a song and there was an eerie silence after Mauro’s mother did a hypnotic Indian chant in a language no one recognized. But after that Antonio sang a buffoonish ditty, and the old cancer patient did a powerful rendition of a song welcoming spring, a spring six months away that everyone at the table knew he wouldn’t see. The old man nearly passed out from the effort and Mauro snuck him a glass of mescal that revived him wonderfully. Mauro refused to sing and instead recited a version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” he had learned somewhere that turned out very comic. When it was Cochran’s turn he stood and sang the Guadalajaran folk song that Miryea did so beautifully: but halfway through the song he was overcome, tears came to his eyes and he rushed from the room.

  It was fortunate for him that he did not know, in the unique state of drunkenness that mescal offers, the precise condition of his beloved, the search for whom would begin at dawn. There is an impulse for vengeance among certain men south of the border that leaves even the sturdiest Sicilian gasping for fresh air.

  Tibey Baldassaro Mendez was born in Culiacán of grotesquely impoverished parents. His mother was half Mescalero Apache, a tribe not noted for humility or gentleness. By the time he was fourteen he was a full-sized man, quick of mind, improbably arrogant and a pimp in Mazatlán. He gradually left pimpdom for a large part of the drug traffic in Culiacán. Now he was only peripherally involved in the drug traffic as a majordomo, but it had been the axis of his holdings in Mexico City real estate, resort hotels in Venezuela and Rio and Mérida, a huge, internationally flavored stock portfolio. One of his sons was a doctor and the other a lawyer. His first two marriages were local and had been shed as he rose in the world. Miryea was an implausible showpiece, a woman striven for over a period of years, and finally an access to Mexican social life that had been totally denied him. With the socially impeccable Miryea his great fortune was bathed overnight, not an uncommon event anywhere in the world.

  The betrayal by Cochran whom he hoped had become a friend was a great blow to him. He even forgave the first few clandestine meetings that Cochran and Miryea had naively assumed were secret. Tibey knew and understood the vagaries of a woman’s emotional life and Cochran was a thoroughly attractive character. He had made a veiled warning to the man’s friend, the Aeromexico pilot, and there was a white rose on the case of champagne, the money and the ticket to Paris. How much warning did the fool need? The taps on her phone were outrageous and filled him with shame. He became desperate when he heard of a tape of Miryea telling her sister in New York about the new and final great love of her life who asked her to run away to Seville and perhaps she would. Tibey broke down then and put the muscle of his full operation into following the lovers to their surprise in the cabin. He hated to do it because he would be known in his own world as a cuckold and the word would spread to Culiacán to Mexico City and back to Tucson. That thought fueled his rage and rekindled his pimp’s essential disgust for women. He would let no one know that he suddenly felt old and that losing her meant everything to him. He would teach her a lesson that would accompany and mitigate any gossip about his cuckoldry. He made love to her the final time on the day before she left and then went to his own bedroom and wept. He suddenly envied his simple contabandistas with their whoring, drinking life and the way they happily shot down the government planes that came to spy on their marijuana and poppy crops. Tibey could easily call the infamous, albeit intelligent and dignified, assassin, EI Cociloco, but it was necessary in the crime of cuckoldry to do your own revenging. He drank incessantly to work up a rage, because he, in fact, was so tired of it all that he wished to go to Paris, say to the Plaza Athénée, eat and drink and forget. But that would mean the end of his pride and he would have nothing left except money.

  When the limousine had left the brutal scene at the cabin Tibey tried to expunge his near regret and horror until four hours later and halfway to Durango he was nearly incoherent. He had the chauffeur stop a little while later and in the bare dawn light he examined the sedated Miryea and slapped her bloodied face. Partly for histrionics-the men in the car would spread the story of his vengeance-he screamed and ranted: “O my love whom I wanted to bear sons, you fucking faithless whore, you thankless evil bitch, you want to fuck you shall be fucked fifty times a day before you die.”

  And that was what happened for Tibey was a master of revenge: for three days in a bare white room Miryea sat on a high stool dosed with amphetamines while a half-dozen rattlesnakes crawled around the floor. When she was on the verge of slipping to the floor she was administered ever-increasing doses of heroin over a period of two weeks, then prettified by a hairdresser and taken to the crudest of whorehouses in Durango, patronized by the poorest cowboys and miners and riffraff. Her lips and torn ear which had been sewn up by a veterinarian had begun to heal but the blotched-up job was heartbreaking on her otherwise flawlessly beautiful features. Despite this she was the most popular girl in the house, mostly because everyone knew the story and the men were conscious of feminine infidelities, real and imagined, and the slight pale figure of Miryea on the soiled sheets aroused their lust to previously unknown levels. Toward the end of the month, though, the madam erred out of greediness and cut Miryea’s heroin dosage to the point that she recaptured her consciousness and sank a knife into a man’s neck, drawing it secretively from his pocket as he was punishing her. The man was a foremen on a big ranch and the incident created a scandal. Tibey relented and had Miryea placed in an asylum run by an order of nuns for terminally insane women and girls. A heavy donation was made and would be repeated every year as long as she was kept there. During this period Tibey returned to a small ranch he owned near Tepehuanes, north of Durango. He was in mourning in his soul and deflowered a number of peóne girls in manic fits which alternated with periods of despondency so severe he wished to go to the whorehouse, and after that, the nunnery and try to claim back the happiness that had been so briefly his.

  Mauro woke before dawn, dressed and then jogged the mile down the mountainside to the mission. He would drive his mysterious friend and benefactor, for no one knew his name, except the Federales, to Hermosillo to catch a bus or plane, he didn’t know which. When he got to Cochran’s room which was attached to the sheep-shed, Cochran was fully dressed and packed and sat as if in a trance on the edge of his bed. Mauro sat down in a chair and folded his hands in thought; he realized the gravity of the man’s mission, and wished to go along and protect him as his new friend seemed to be too much of a dreamer to . deal with the hard facts of killing. Then the door began to open and Cochran was up in a Hash with the gift knife extended but it was only Mauro’s mother bringing them coffee and pan dulce. Cochran apologized at his welcome saying that he didn’t recognize her footsteps which made Mauro happy-a man who memorized footsteps can’t be that much of a dreamer.

  It took half the day in the old Powerwagon to get to Hermosillo. When they reached the main road Cochran
had been shocked to see his first cars in two months, and recoiled when he saw a new car with an Indiana license plate drift past at a high speed. The truck made too much noise for talk and Cochran thought idly that he wouldn’t like to be on the wrong side of Mauro who, like a Malamute, would never bark before he bit. Mauro was at the same time sleepy and lethal. Cochran was bright enough to realize that such simplicity and decisiveness were out of any truly civilized man’s reach. At least he had never met such a man out in the world and doubted whether there were any. One Sunday when he had ridden the Percheron up to Mauro’s small adobe cabin he felt he had begun to understand the man; on a dresser there had been a small shrine to his dead wife, and beneath the garishly tinted wedding picture, lying on a mountain lion pelt with a silver cross between a bleached mountain lion skull and a coyote skull, there was a fresh vase of votive flowers his daughter replaced daily though she barely remembered her mother. The vase sat on an unused Spanish bible that Diller had given them. Mauro couldn’t read.

  Now in the truck Cochran had the wit to recognize he was in the right frame of mind for what he had set out to do: he had few thoughts, only a purpose; the thoughts were so few that they would not interfere with his mission which clearly to him was to kill Tibey and to get Miryea back if she was alive. He had been so empty of thought that the world had begun, in an odd way, to delight him again because there was nothing in his mind to interfere with ·the beauty of the valley or, for that matter, the energetic ugliness of the contemporary world he was entering.