Legends of the Fall

CHAPTER 1

You could not tell if you were a bird descending (and there was a bird descending, a vulture) if the naked man was dead or alive. The man didn't know himself and the bird was tentative when he reached the ground and made a croaking sideward approach, askance and looking off down the chaparral in the arroyo as if expecting company from the coyotes. Carrion was shared not by the sharer's design but by a pattern set before anyone knew there were patterns. The vulture had just eaten a rattler run over by a truck outside of Nacozari de García, a little town well off the tourist run about a hundred miles from Nogales. The coyotes would follow the vulture's descent out of curiosity whether or not they were hungry from the night's hunt. As the morning thermals developed more vultures would arrive until the man's dying would have an audience.

As the dawn deepened into midmorning and the heat dried and caked the blood on the man's face, the blood lost most of its fresh coppery odor. The man was dying fitfully now, more from the heat and dehydration than from his injuries: an arm twisted askew, chest a massive blue bruise, one cheekbone crushed in with a hematoma rising like a purple sun, his testicles inflated from a groining. And a head wound that darkened the sand and pebbles and drew him down into his near fatal sleep of coma. Still, he kept breathing, and the hot air whistled past a broken tooth and when the whistle was especially loud the vultures were disturbed. A female coyote and her recently weaned pups stopped by but only for a moment: she snapped at the pups saying this pitiful beast is normally dangerous. She nodded in passing to a very large, old male coyote who watched with intense curiosity from the shadow of a boulder. He watched, then dozed, even in sleep owning an alertness unknown to us. His belly was full of javelina and watching this dying man was simply the most interesting thing to happen his way in a long time. It was all curiosity though: when the man died the coyote would simply walk away and leave it to the vultures. And it had been a long vigil for him, having been close by when the naked man had been thrown from the car the night before.

In the first comparative coolness of the evening a Mexican peasant (peóne in Mexican slang) and his daughter walked along the road making short forays into the brush for stray pieces of mesquite firewood. Rather, the man walked doggedly under his light load of wood and the daughter pranced, hopping from one foot to another, skipping, running then waiting for her father. She was his only child and he wouldn't let her pick up firewood for fear she would be bitten by a scorpion, or a corallo, a coral snake which unlike the rattlesnake gave no warning though it was shy and retiring and meant no harm. It simply bit when cornered or provoked, then slid away and calmed its nerves under another log or stone. The daughter carried a bible. She helped in the kitchen of the Mennonite mission where her father had long been the custodian.

The daughter began to sing and that flushed the vultures still another hundred yards down the road. They were about to leave anyway for the safety of their mountain rookery before evening deepened. The coyote withdrew a little farther into the gathering shadows. He recognized the voices of the man and his daughter and knew from the seven years of his life that they weren't dangerous to him. He had watched them on their way to the mission countless times but they had never seen him. The great birds flushing in the evening sun aroused the curiosity of the father and he quickened his pace. He had a hunter's inquisitiveness, not unlike the coyote's, and he remembered the time when he had found a large deer freshly fallen from an escarpment by following a descending gyre of vultures. He told his daughter to wait at a distance and he cautiously entered the dense chaparral along the road. He heard a rush of breath and a faint whistle and quickly opened a long pearl-handled knife. He crept noiselessly toward the whistling, smelling a trace of blood amidst the vulture dung. Then he saw the man and whistled himself, kneeling to feel the pulse. At odd times he had accompanied the missionary who was also a doctor on his treks into the mountains and he had learned the elements of first aid. Now he stood, whistled again in unison with the dying man, and looked at the sky. He was mostly Indian and his first thought was to simply walk away and avoid any contact with the Federales. But then the doctor was friends with the Federales and the man remembered the parable of the good Samaritan and looked back down at the body somewhat fatalistically, as if to say, I'll help but I think it's too late.

He came out of the brush and sent his daughter running to the mission a half mile down the valley. He squatted in the roadway and rolled pebbles back and forth with the blade of his knife. The sight of someone so gravely injured had quickened his heartbeat but he coolly rehearsed his story of finding the body. In his youth, in addition to being a hunter, he had been a small-time bandit and he understood that when speaking to authorities it was best to keep things simple.

At the mission Diller sat at his loin of pork roast with sauerkraut and potatoes. His VHF radio was tuned into a mariachi station in Chihuahua. Though he was a Mennonite and officially disapproved of radios, he felt he deserved certain concessions and had begun listening to such music ten years before when he came to the mission under the guise of speeding his learning of colloquial Spanish. Huge and rubicund, he was likely to bray along with the music to the amusement of the women in the kitchen. The church allowed neither alcohol nor tobacco but Diller owned an unproscribed vice: gluttony. He savored the pork loin that was prepared for him every Thursday night as the sole remnant of his life in the States. He much preferred Mexican foods which he consumed in volumes that made him fabled throughout the area. Not that he wasn't profoundly devout, but he understood it was his doctoring, his medical skill, that made his particular brand of Jesus popular in the impoverished mountain country. He no longer returned to the States for his annual month's leave. It bored him to sit around for thirty days in North Dakota and pray for the heathen throughout the world. Diller rather preferred the heathen and the bleak beauty of their country, their long-suffering ironies and pre-Christian fatalism. He loved to eat the chickens, pigs, piglets, goats and lambs the people brought him as presents when he performed some medical miracle. He even loved his absurd pansy male nurse, Antonio, who was forever inventing reasons to drive off to Nogales or Hermosillo. The year before the Director of Missions had visited and questioned Diller, wondering if Antonio weren't a "bit peculiar." Diller played dumb, cherishing Antonio's knack for fancy dishes beyond the reach of the cooks, and his singing of ballads even though the gender in the ballads tended to get switched around.

Diller groaned when Mauro's daughter rushed in announcing the wounded man up the mountain. Mauro's daughter lugged his medicine bag out to the Dodge Powerwagon that served as an ambulance, with a canvas cover and cot in the back. Diller followed carrying the casserole with him. He liked best the sauerkraut in the bottom soaked with pork fat. He paused on the porch of the hacienda and breathed deeply the odor of the evening air: dung and sweet cloves, crushed and rotting flowers, the smell of overheated rocks and sand fading into night. He loved this valley that seemed somber and umbrous even in the brightest sunlight.

At the scene Mauro held the flashlight while Diller wiped pork grease from his hands onto his pants and stooped by the body, said a prayer and made his inspection and prognosis. He suspected the man would live but it would be chancy for the first twenty-four hours, so severe was his dehydration. The skull wasn't fractured but from the flittering eyeballs he saw the depth of the concussion. Diller took his penlight from the bag and bent close to the naked man's eyes seeing the bulge in the optical disc, papilledema, a severe concussion. Then he ran his big hands skillfully over the man's body determining the only fractures were in the ribs and left arm. Diller slipped his arms under the man and picked him up. Mauro took the bag and led the way with the flashlight.

Back at the clinic Diller worked through the night with Mauro in attendance. He wished that Antonio were there to help but Antonio had disappeared for the usual spurious reasons. Diller was more than a bit mystified by his patient. Under the flashlight he had assumed that he had yet another sorry, battered victim of the drug wars that raged beneath the border. Such refugees provided Diller with some of his most interesting cases, alternating the routine of the aged cancer victims whom he dosed with the potent Dilaudid to ease their way heavenward. The naked man proved to be pure gringo when the blood was washed off: his hair was finely barbered, expensive gold fillings in his teeth, trimmed nails, a strong tan demarcation, a well-conditioned body, all qualities that made him an unlikely smuggler.

Near dawn Diller smiled at the improved pulse rate, and the response to the intravenous liquids. He probed gingerly at the shattered jawbone that later would require plastic surgery if the man wished. Mauro bathed the sunburn with vinegar and applied hot compresses to the swollen testicles, joking in his fatigue that it was a much better job for Antonio. The doctor laughed in spite of himself—it was impossible to remain prissy in such matters. The doctor sang "La Paloma" as he wrapped the ribs with Mauro filling in on the difficult trilling bars of the wonderful song.

Mauro and the doctor moved the man to the only private room in the clinic and then went out to the porch where Mauro's daughter served them coffee in the first light of dawn. Diller winked at Mauro, gave him a Dexamyl and took one himself. Mauro smiled at this little secret they indulged in during emergencies when sleep was impossible, though he would have much preferred the bottle of mescal hidden under his bed, having publicly in the chapel sworn against alcohol. The doctor's thoughts were synchronous: only once in his adult life had he tasted alcohol. Long ago in his second year at the mission his wife had left forever, explaining in hysterics that she could not endure life in Mexico and that she no longer loved him. Diller had sat in the dirt of the courtyard all night and wept while the nervous help had watched from the porch and hacienda. In the middle of that pathetic night Mauro brought Diller a whole liter of mescal which Diller drank hungrily. Diller slept throughout the hot day in the dirt with everyone taking turns shading his face and keeping away the flies. Diller smiled at the remembrance of the pain.

Now the first rays of the sun were hitting in the fawn-colored side of the mountain top. The peculiar blurred brownness of scree always reminded him of the flank of a deer and this morning the flank of the deer reminded him of venison chops. The pork and sauerkraut had not set well, and he decided to give it up and go completely native. The rooster crowed and he thought of roast chicken. The cook called out and Mauro and Diller went into the kitchen where they ate huge bowls of menudo and corn tortillas. The doctor believed along with the Mexicans that this tripe stew was a restorative though he wouldn't have believed so had he not loved the dish. He was a man of certain tastes. And he was mindful that his tastes were killing him slowly as he eased up toward three-hundred pounds despite his huge frame and heavy musculature. The Dexamyl made the blood drum in his ears; adopting the doom that pervaded the countryside, he enjoyed his flirtation with death. After breakfast, he sang little ditties of love and death as he made his rounds. He remarked to himself that the patient would need a strong stomach to endure the pain when he emerged from the coma.

That evening Hector, the captain of the regional Federales, stopped by to make a report on the wounded man. When he received the radio report at midday he became happy and ordered his assistant to ready the jeep for an overnight trip. A visit to the doctor meant a fine dinner and a long evening of chess, discussions on gardening, politics, the raising of animals for food, and a chance to talk at length about his health, for Hector was somewhat of a hypochondriac in his mid-fifties and worried about his waning potency. He respected the doctor's deeply religious nature so he approached the medical aspects of potency very subtly, which amused the doctor who advised that he reduce his use of alcohol and tobacco and take plenty of exercise. As a final teasing thrust he suggested that Hector might forget his conchitas in favor of more spiritual concerns. The doctor had only recently felt the rare terror of lust when he had treated an attractive mountain girl for a scorpion bite on her upper thigh. He prayed mightily but it didn't seem to help much, casting his thoughts back to his first year of marriage in North Dakota when he and his young wife had exhausted themselves with lovemaking.

When Hector and the assistant arrived they went immediately to view the wounded man in order to rid themselves of the irksome detail so the evening could be enjoyed. The doctor forbade fingerprints at the time saying that he would send them along when the injuries mended somewhat. In this case he would merely send his own fingerprints, not wanting to cause problems for anyone. Mennonites never go to the law over each other and the doctor applied this principle to his practice. He cared for souls and bodies and believed that civil authorities had the equipment to conduct their business without his aid. Hector was happy enough to make a return trip for his interrogation at which point the doctor would advise the patient to feign amnesia if he so chose, anything to escape the red tape and the severity of the Mexican penal code. The assistant made out a perfunctory report with Mauro's scanty information and then went off to a country tavern down the valley to impress the locals. Hector and the doctor sat down to an elaborate dinner, Hector with the air of a man who had done a long day's work he has no intention of remembering.

On the third day after finding the wounded man Diller became a little doubtful. The man had a mild touch of pneumonia and did not respond quickly to penicillin and the doctor prayed he wasn't allergic. Diller didn't want to lose the man to the superior facility of Hermosillo via helicopter. Two more days and the fever passed but not the coma. Now Diller decided he would give the coma two more days before calling Hector on the radio. He liked the symmetry of working in twos and his curiosity about the wounded man was so great that he longed for excuses to keep him. The night before the morning of the deadline he noticed that Mauro had hung a necklace of coyote teeth over the post of the bed. The necklace was no doubt from Mauro's mother who fed the animals and who the other help tended to avoid for her reputation as a herbalist and witch. Diller lectured often on the dangers of these old superstitions but now he smiled at her good intentions which he recognized as a form of love. As Diller turned out the light and left he did not realize that the wounded man watched through the slit of his one unbruised eyelid.

It is not necessary to know too much about the wounded man squinting up at the darkness and the soft whirr of the oak-paddled ceiling fan. His name is Cochran and he hears the chugging of the diesel generator, the whine of a single mosquito in the room, and farther off and faintly, the music from the doctor's radio, so heartlessly sad and romantic it seems to make the night as bruised as his body. But all his tears were shed in the past few semiwakeful days when, as any animal that plays dead, he tried to learn the nature of his immediate threat. And now that he knew there was no immediate threat, rather than relief he felt a suspension, as if he were dangling in some private dark while outside the universe continued on rules he had no part in making.

He had been beaten far past any thought of vengeance. He saw his beating as a long thread that led back from the immediate present, from this room almost to his birth. Rather than the obvious balm of the amnesiac, his mind owned a new strangeness in which he could remember pointillistically everything along the thread up to the unbearable present. He couldn't avoid anything, anymore than his chest could escape of itself from the swathes of tape. He hurt too much to sleep and tomorrow he would have to let the doctor know he was conscious to get relief from the pain. He felt half-amused at his caginess, a will to live past anything he understood consciously. He was past regretting for the moment how he tracked mud from one part of his life into another. He was bored with his regrets and the sole energy left that night was to figure out how it all happened, a mechanical ambition at best.

It would be his longest night, and the energy that fueled it was akin to a hard, cold, clear wind blowing through the blackness of the room: first there was the doctor muttering some prayer, and before that an old lady hanging a necklace on the bedpost and placing her hands over his eyes, then a young man with the gestures of a dancer who pulled back the sheet to look at him. Then a long, black space of pure nothing interrupted by a shutter click in which he saw the vermilion wattles on a buzzard's neck and heard a guttural sound that came from the yellow eyes of a coyote as the buzzard flapped skyward and the coyote stared at him, both of them impenetrable beyond these simple gestures, and his breath whistling through a broken tooth. Before that the car exhaust and the jouncing when he lay bleeding in the trunk and kept coughing painfully to clear the blood from his throat and there was almost too much of it. Then being hurled through the air, falling through the brush, his chest striking one rock, then rolling and his head striking another.

It's not necessary to know too much about the man who was wounded so badly because he was wounded badly enough to alter his course of life radically, somewhat in the manner that conversion, the sacrament of baptism, not the less an upheaval for being commonplace, alters the Christian, satori the Buddhist. You could, though, jump over the incoherence of his suffering and look at what we like to call the simple facts, a notion we use quite happily when we want to delude ourselves out of whatever peculiar sump our lives have become.

The morning before Mauro and his daughter had found him by the roadside, excepting the following morning when he was nothing but a dying piece of meat rotting through the day into evening, he had awakened in an uncommon state of what he thought was love. He lived in a moderately expensive apartment complex on the outskirts of Tucson, the chief winning aspects of the place being a lime tree in his small private courtyard and three clay tennis courts. He subletted the quarters, which was a condominium owned by a New Yorker who had recovered sufficiently from his asthma to have another go at the money game back East.

He was in love and he called his lover the moment he awoke, a gesture usually associated with the young or dopey, or, jumping across two decades, to those who fall in love strongly in their late thirties or early forties. The lovers spoke hurriedly, lapsing back and forth between Spanish and English with ease. They would meet in a little while in public, conduct their public business, then drift casually away to a small cabin the man leased and used in the borderland south of Agua Prieta, Mexico, primarily for hunting quail.

He had really nothing to get away from, he thought in the shower. He had been at the end of his tether for two years in a time when the meaning of tether had long been forgotten. At forty-one, and in front of the mirror and shaving, he no longer paused to admire the good shape he was in, because the eyes were usually tired and showed signs of being dominated by barbiturates.

In the living room he toweled off, let his bird dog, an English setter named Doll, out the sliding doors and began an elaborate series of semiyogic stretching exercises. He paused to put Debussy's La Mer on the stereo and to smile at a large poster he had made out of his daughter's fifth-grade class picture. He felt a pang behind his smile, a small electric current of loneliness, remembering when he was stationed at Torrejón outside of Madrid and he and his daughter would go to the market on Saturdays to do the shopping for their big Sunday dinner. She had her mother's golden hair and liked to ask for everything in Spanish, which charmed the clerks. Then they would go to a café where he would have a half bottle of white wine and she an orange juice that she would draw out slowly in her child's voice, "jugo de naranja al natural." The old Spanish men liked to watch her eat a plate of tapas, expostulating about her depth of "soul" for eating pickled squid, tentacles and all. Now she lived with her mother in San Diego. His tour in Laos among other things (alcohol, womanizing, an incapacity for sitting still) had broken their marriage. Over Laos he took a 75, ejected from his Phantom leaving a dead navigator, and spent two months with some friendly fishermen in a junk avoiding the Pathet Lao and the Cong. He was essentially antipolitical and now the war only reappeared in nightmares. He had been a twenty-year man from nineteen to thirty-nine, a fighter pilot, and now he could not bear the sight of a plane. He drove everywhere in a battered Mark IV bought on a drinking spree in California.

After he finished the exercises he drank a cup of coffee and examined his three C6 Trabert graphite tennis racquets. The day before he had placed second in a club tournament, only losing to a young man half his age who was considered the most promising pro prospect in Arizona. Today he and his partner were considered the favorite for the doubles that were easier on his legs. Yesterday the match had gone 7-5, 4-6 and 6-4 on a very hot day and even when he won the second set he knew his legs didn't have it for the third. Tibey had had his man put a case of Dom Perignon in the car with a single white rose taped to the card. Now he looked at the white rose that he couldn't figure out and thought of Miryea who was Tibey's wife.

Tibey's actual name was Baldassaro Mendez. Like many extremely wealthy Mexicans he kept a spare house in the States. They were a small community and traveled to each other's parties in Palm Beach, Dallas, Phoenix and San Antonio. They invested heavily in real estate, the simplest thing to keep a distant eye on, and entered social circles easily because of their great wealth and continental charm. Tibey used him as a ringer in matches at his home and Cochran admired the man for his sometimes coarse energy. He always refused money from Tibey though he accepted trips to Mexico City where as doubles partners they suckered two Texans in a rooftop match at the Camino Real. He pocketed three grand for that which was nearly the amount Tibey blew in a banquet for twenty at Forquet's.

Miryea. He put down the racquets deciding the strings were in good shape. He took the society page photo from his wallet and looked at her cold, slender figure mounted

on a thoroughbred jumper. What patent nonsense. He had been through enough of the battles of love to regard love almost as a disease, a notion prevalent in former times when the world seemed younger and wiser.

He lay on the floor and breathed deeply, trying to forestall the knot forming in his head. He had always laughed when other pilots had presentiments of doom, as if the void were already forming under their breastbones and beginning to spread. But then it happened the day of his near-fatal mission; a nondirectional chokiness, a kind of free-floating dread. Doll scratched at the sliding doors and he let her in, refreshed her water, and then petted her in her nest on the couch. She was always so slight, feminine, coy at times, and he marveled that when he got her into the field she became an utterly serious hunting machine.

Everyone wishes a measure of mystery in their life that they have done nothing in particular to deserve. Before he met Miryea he had a short love affair with a girl from Corpus Christi who had just graduated from Wellesley, but the mystery soon dissolved into bitching and he recognized he had "willed" himself into the affair out of unrecognized boredom. He had spent two years trying to get the handle on civilian life, realizing that he had never exactly had a handle on the Navy which had been some sort of quarrelsome mother and he an adopted orphan whom she treated as well as he performed his job. The Texas girl was lovely, long-limbed, intelligent but far too young and daffy: she was a house that wanted to be haunted while Miryea, only a few years older, was haunted. He had played tennis at Tibey's house for more than three months before she did anything more than casually recognize him. Then after a dinner at Tibey's, during which far too much wine had been consumed, she had caught him looking at the books in her library while the other men had begun a high stakes billiards game and the women were talking about the new Givenchys and how corny Halston had become.

After tours at Guantánamo when he first entered the service and his later tour at Torrejón he spoke fluent Spanish. He could not bear to be stupid—as a boy in Indiana he had disassembled a Ford V-8 to see how it worked, and only entered the Navy to work on jet engines. He was always amazed how civilians underestimated the intelligence it took to fly a jet fighter. His incursions into Spanish had been as thorough and methodical. The Midwest specializes in a certain lonely farmboy type who wants to know everything and he began at Guantánamo by simply wondering why people spoke different languages, not the less fascinating for being such a simple question. But these farmboys own a visionary energy and he loved the idea of the artificiality of language and learned Spanish as a test case, studying like an idiot savant who is familiar with the Chinese calendar and keeping up through novels and poetry. None of his friends and bunkmates had the temerity to question him because he was a natural leader and the best at everything he chose to do whether pool, snorkeling and gradually tennis—the native ability to monopolize the bullshit and be enviably crazier and bolder than anyone else.

Now this lovely creature approached him as he held one of her books, a collected Lorca he was familiar with, printed on onionskin and bound in leather in Barcelona. He had been totally confused by her inattention in the past three months. The situation had gone way beyond the idea of making a "move" into an area of reserved tension so that when he saw her he seemed to lose his easy grace and mastery. He felt thrown off stroke at her merest glance and the day before while swimming he needed a drink to watch her take one bite of a club sandwich before she decided on a nap and Tibey shrugged in that universal gesture of incomprehension. He felt that as a friend of Tibey's she assumed he was a business moron and he did everything he could to subtly disabuse her of the idea. When she approached him at the bookcase it was the first moment he had found to speak to her alone. She tipped the book in his hands reading its title upside down. She smiled and quoted from Lorca, "Quiero dormir el sueño de las mansanas, alejarme tumulto de los cementerios . . ." ("I want to sleep the dream of apples, far from the tumult of cemeteries.") He thought he, had never heard anything more beautiful and stared at the ceiling in an unaffected schoolboy blush and quoted back from the same poet: "Tu vientre es una lucha de raices/ y tus labios una alba sin contorno. / Bajo las rosas tibias de la cama/ los muertos gimen esperando tumo." ("Your belly is a battle of roots,/ your lips are a blurred dawn./ Under the tepid roses of the bed/ the dead moan, waiting their turn.")

She stared at him a moment and his temples pounded witlessly. She flushed and looked away and he wished to say something stupid to ease the tension but could find no words. She tilted her chin upward as if looking at some faraway object and he looked at her throat thinking he could detect an odor somewhere between clover and an orange. He dropped the book to the floor and she laughed and walked away. He swallowed a gobletful of brandy that rose in his throat and brought tears to his eyes.

When he got home that night he found himself pacing and sleepless despite pills and alcohol. At dawn he took Doll out in the desert and let her work some quail but she lost interest because it was August and the season wasn't open yet so he didn't carry a gun. She pointed a small owl in a mesquite then ran in circles over the joke she had played on him. He decided a long trip was in order. Not since he was eighteen had there been a relationship with a woman in which he wasn't in complete control. She reminded him clearly of those Modiglianis he had seen in a museum in Paris. He remembered saying when he looked at one painting that there is a woman I could love. It was absurd. Doll pawed and whined at his feet as he stared sightlessly at the landscape of yucca and mesquite.

Driving back he had a splitting headache and changed the tapes in the tapedeck a half-dozen times. He listened to Jimmy Buffett's "The Pirate Turns Forty" and was filled with self-disgust. He invited Doll into the front seat, a rare event, and petted her head thinking he would return happily to waitresses and stewardesses. He had always disliked rich ladies. A few months earlier he had gone swimming with the girl from Corpus Christi who had forgotten to take off her Tiffany watch and he had reflected that the watch would have supported his family for a year when he was growing up in Indiana. They had owned a small farm and an auto-and-tractor repair shop. When pressed his father might trade a used battery for three chickens for Sunday dinner. He wondered what he was doing so desperately in love with the wife of a Mexican millionaire, or a great deal more as Tibey owned a Lear jet and a twin Piper Comanche for smaller airports. He decided to call Vonetta when he got home. She worked as a hostess in a steak house, was his age and a great lay, twice a divorcée. She had gone with him on several hunting and fishing trips, and could cook quail over a bed of mesquite coals beautifully. Of course she told hopelessly banal jokes all the time and the walls of her apartment featured paintings on black velvet, including a fiery-eyed bull and a Tahitian sunset. He had become angry with her one morning when he awoke to find her out on the driveway washing his car.

When he got home he took two sleeping pills, a hot shower and barely struggled to bed, covering the phone with pillows. He smiled as he fell asleep thinking of a note he got from his father. He had sent his daughter a photo of himself holding a trophy from a tennis tournament. His wife had married his oldest brother who worked with his father on the family tuna boat out of San Diego. They had left Indiana in his early teens, an event that still aroused sadness in him, but his father thrived in California. In the note he had said: "I saw the picture, big shot. When you get tired of running around in short pants there will be room for you on the boat. Love, Dad."

But when he awoke in midafternoon to a knocking on the door the nightmare began again. Miryea sent a messenger with an elaborately wrapped box of books from her library, all leatherbound with many of her notes in the margin. There were some Barója novels, also The Family of Pascual Duarte by Camilo J. Cela, Nina Huanca by Faustino Gonzalez-Aller, and books of poems by Machado, Guillén, Octavio Paz, Neruda and Nicanor Parra. The note only said, "These are some of my favorites. I hope you'll like them. Miryea." She added a postscript: "La luz del entendimiento/ me hace ser muy comedido." ("The light of understanding/ has made me most discreet.")

He drank three cups of coffee, adding brandy to the third, looking for the source of the quotation which he assumed to be from Lorca. He finally found it in La Casada Infiel (The Faithless Wife). He poured another drink and picked up the phone but only got a servant saying that Señor Mendez was in Mérida. He didn't dare ask for Miryea directly. He walked around the living room, lightheaded and cursing. Now he couldn't simply drop by under the pretense of seeing Tibey. Tibey's servants seemed to be bodyguards too, having none of the comatose air of the usual domestic. For the first time he allowed himself to imagine her naked. He swore and hurled his glass against the wall above the couch. Doll barked hysterically and he gave her a hamburger patty to quiet her down. He dialed Tibey's house again hoping that she might answer but the same servant was there as if perched over the phone. He took a shotgun from the gun cabinet thinking he would go shoot skeet then put it back knowing he had neither the taste nor the concentration. He put on his hiking boots thinking a long evening walk in the desert might calm him down.

He was getting into his car when she pulled into the empty space beside him. He was dumbfounded enough that when she said she didn't want to interrupt his evening he had no answer. She smoothed back her hair and adjusted the scarf around her neck, then laughed at his speechlessness. He took her hand and kissed it in a parody of a courtly fool. She kissed his hand, then bit it and laughed again. "I've been thinking about being with you a long time."

They made love throughout the evening but at nine she said she had to go home to avoid suspicion. He said but Tibey is in Mérida, and she said but I have a half-dozen husbands who would kill anyone who harmed me. Then she told him to leave the room because she wanted to write him a note that he must not open until the morning. She left while he stood waiting in the bathroom mugging at himself happily in the mirror. He heard the door close and raced out of the bathroom and out the door only to see her ducking into her white BMW. She waved and sped away. Doll met him at the door. Whenever a woman visited him she either slept or pretended to sleep all the time in some shy form of jealousy. He ripped open the note that only said she hated good-byes and repeated "I love you" seven times. He cooked himself a huge steak singing giddily at the stove but only ate half of it handing the plate down to Doll. He slept well that night for the first time in months. It was as if his soul had gotten over some prolonged and terrible wisdom toothache.

That had all been only three weeks before. The dread that pervaded him as he packed his tennis bag was not unfounded. One evening she had spilled hot coffee on her bare breasts and wept. He ran to get some ointment but she waved him away saying that she was not burned, only so sad because there was nowhere to go. He tried to kiss the pink splotch the coffee had made on her white breasts and she became frantic asking him not to touch her. He stood there a half hour as she sat rigidly staring at him. He had never looked upon so profoundly beautiful a body and he finally knelt and kissed her knee and she drew him to her. He told her in a rush that he had it all planned and he would take his savings and they would run away to Seville which was his favorite city on earth and no one would find them there. But she said that if he mentioned it again she would never see him again. She was oddly cold to him when she left that night.

Neither of them knew when they kissed at her car that a "servant" watched leaning against a palm tree a hundred yards away.

The real warning and break in their secrecy came when he happily confessed his affair over drinks with his doubles partner who immediately turned white. His partner was his only friend and confidant in Tucson and a pilot for Aeromexico. And he said you shithead, you fool why do you think Tibey is called Tibey and he didn't know and was shocked at the reaction and his partner said, "Tibey is for tiburón tiburón tiburón which is shark. Get out of here tomorrow and never come back. That bitch in heat has killed you if you don't go. You'll be buried so deep in the desert." He hit his friend and the friend seemed not to notice pouring them both a huge drink and saying he had connections and could secure a false passport for secrecy and besides could give him money if he needed it.

It was an ugly and frightening evening that seemed benign when he awoke the next day. He mentioned it, though, in passing to Miryea and she laughed her high-trilling laugh and said don't be silly he won't kill you he'll kill me and refused to speak of it again. That was only a few days before. Now after the tournament they would have three full days together because Tibey was in Caracas. The ruse was that she was going to visit her sister who was the wife of a UN diplomat in New York. The chauffeur would take her to the airport after the tournament and he would pick her up there; then off to Douglas, a border town across from Agua Prieta, and they would reach the cabin the next morning.

All went well except the tennis match that dragged unmercifully on a blistering afternoon. He couldn't see Miryea in the crowd and after winning the first set by the grace of his partner they lost the second 6-2 and got off to a bad start in the third. His partner glowered at him and his legs felt leaden. He yelled at a woman in the crowd who stood up during his serve. Then Miryea came in and she winked shyly at him and he remembered how happy he was supposed to be and finished the third set electrically. When he was showering, Tibey's chauffeur came into the locker room and blithely handed him an envelope announcing that Señor Tibey wanted to make him a present. After toweling off he opened the envelope and found a one-way first-class ticket to Paris and then Madrid and several thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills, with a note saying I knew you would win days ago my friend. He examined the ticket several times thinking the return might have been left out by mistake. He decided not to mention it to Miryea. Why ruin the weekend? he thought, trying to calm the palpable discomfort he felt deep in his stomach.

On the way to the airport he stopped to pick up Doll and his bag at the apartment. He had a quick glass of wine to try to dispel the butterflies that came in intermittent surges. He laughed at himself, thinking of all those years spent, often at Mach II, twisting and turning high above Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, occasionally peeing in his pants while avoiding a rocket. Or even ejecting over the gulf off Eglin when the electrical fire started consuming the Phantom, or those near misses on night carrier landings. One of his closest friends had eaten it at Boca Chica, near Key West, after surviving a hundred missions over Southeast Asia. He tended to regard civilian life as utterly benign and this new danger alternately nagged and excited him with the adrenal rush that any mammal feels.

Nearing the airport the sky over Tucson looked bloated and filthy with a yellowish-pale cast by rush hour auto exhaust. A tape stuck in the deck and when he pulled it out it unwound like spaghetti all over the seat. Despite the air-conditioning the car stunk of ozone and he longed for the trip through the mountains with Miryea. He had decided to skip the hotel stop and Douglas. They would have dinner in a fine restaurant he knew in Agua Prieta, then make the small cabin near Colonia Marelas by nightfall. Perhaps Tibey had friends in Douglas and the discomfort of traveling farther on was mitigated by the thought of getting caught red-handed in a hotel. His friend, the pilot from Aeromexico, had insisted that Tibey was involved in every form of financial chicanery, legal and illegal, right up to and including the vast border heroin traffic. When he got home on Monday he would call an old friend in Naval Intelligence who could run a check on Tibey for him through Washington. Not that it would have mattered though; he liked Tibey very much and in three months they had gone from being casual acquaintances to something close to friendship. The last three weeks with Miryea had caused him some pain on this count but he was unbearably in love and held on to it as the first totally grand thing in his life in years. In fact he was as lovesick as a high schooler of an especially sensitive sort who wonders if he dare share a poem with his beloved or whether she will laugh at him. He does read her the poem and her feminine capacity for romanticism for a moment approaches his own and they are suffused in a love trance, a state that so ineluctably peels back the senses making them fresh again whatever ages the lovers might be. You see it happening from grade schools to retirement communities: the certainly accidental cohesion of two souls and bodies, often resulting in terror and unhappiness because so much previously unknown energy is released. It had been so long since he had felt anything remotely similar; he had had a half-dozen solid infatuations with women ranging from a Madrid television actress to the recent Texas girl, not counting his marriage which added up more to an affectionate companionship than anything else. She had been a nurse at the base in Guam, a farm girl from Indiana, and they became married almost by the force of nostalgia alone.

At the Braniff entrance he slipped a porter ten bucks to keep an eye on the car and went directly to the V.I.P. lounge where Miryea sat sipping a drink, breathtakingly tailored and cool. He had a Stolichnaya martini and she told him she went so far in her deception as to check a bag through to New York which was full of gift clothes to her sister. The two attracted far more attention than they would have thought possible: he was impeccably tanned and fit, looking a half-dozen years younger than his forty-one if you didn't look closely around the eyes, dressed casually but expensively with a Rolex on his wrist. And she was the vortex of attention nearly anywhere, especially when the audience was sophisticated, say in Rome or London or Paris. She was born in Mexico City with a Guatemalan-Barcelona background and educated in Lausanne and Paris. She had spent much of her young life (she was twenty-seven) in being cold, neutral and tasteful, under which patina burned a passionate and knowledgeable young woman. She was a little shorter than he was, about five eight, and owned an almost alarming grace so that when she did something so simple as to sit down in the Braniff lounge, light a cigarette and look at a magazine, many eyes were on her. Even now a thickset older man with a calf-bound briefcase watched occasionally from behind the pages of Forbes. He was a lieutenant of Tibey's out of Mexico City that she did not recognize. When they left he casually followed making a CB call and turning away from them at the first freeway exit ramp.

In the car she was happy and in a girlish mood, rewinding the splayed tape and singing him some Guadalajaran folksongs he liked. Outside the city limits she took her bag from the backseat and changed her formal Balenciaga suit for a light summer dress. He said he couldn't bear to see her sitting there at seventy miles an hour in her underthings and she said my love no one asked you to bear it so he drove off a desert two-track-rutted road and they made love in the late afternoon bent over the hood of the car. Some four hundred yards away on a knoll a man watched them with Zeiss-Ikon binoculars. He leaned against an anonymous pickup and sighed to himself as Miryea's legs raised, fell and clutched at the man. He took a Tres Equis from a cooler on the seat, feeling as feverish as the hot air that wavered and distorted the view through the binoculars.

He thinks to himself that if Tiburón were there he would take the rifle from under the seat and shoot them as one would a deer or mountain goat. Meanwhile he watches them complete their love and her mouth open in laughter that he barely hears. She dances in a circle and the viewer swears as the man slumps to the ground and yells something. He lowers the binoculars a moment and thinks he can't fault the gringo on his taste and that she is a vision, and he had only seen her once from a distance when Tiburón visited his old mother in Durango for a week.

Back in the car she said she felt like a wonderful whore what with her sweating and her damp hair sticking to her temples. And how grand it was to go for a trip in a car and how it had been years since she had done anything but fly. He had begun to wonder paranoiacally about the pickup a quarter-mile back, thinking he had noticed it before they stopped. But the pickup had turned off in Benson and he left off worrying until they passed through Tombstone and she had shut her eyes thinking it was a terrible name for a town. He remembered making a tombstone when he was ten for his horse who had entangled herself in barbed wire so badly his father had to shoot her. He had painted on a large rock: SUSY BORN IN 1943 DEAD IN 46 HERE LIES A GOOD MORGAN MARE OWNED AND LOVED BY J. COCHRAN WHO MOURNS HER PASSING. He got the last part out of the newspaper in the county seat that printed commemoratives in the personals column.

They were in Douglas by seven, bought some supplies and drove over the border into Agua Prieta where he bought her a purse from a saddlemaker and they had a dinner of shrimp soup and roasted cabrito, a young haunch of goat that the cook dressed with oil and garlic and fresh thyme. He loved Mexico and asked her about Durango, Tibey's hometown down in the Sierra Madres. She said Durango was hopelessly vulgar, a ranching and mining center that went unmentioned in the tourist books and that was why she liked it so much. Tibey had a ranch there and he had been invited for the shooting in a few months. Miryea said it looked like Montana or parts of Catalonia or Castile and that there were a lot of quail and wild turkey on the ranch where she kept her horses. Tibey had built a clay tennis court and drove her crazy with it to the point that she refused to play, whereupon he had trained several of his henchmen with the help of a tennis pro imported from Mexico City.

They neared the cabin in the last of the twilight, carefully moving up the mountain two-track. Twice he stopped and left the car to remove rocks washed down in flash floods from the arroyos. He wished that he could get a hold of good topographical maps of the area but there were none. In his usual methodical way he already knew more about Mexico and Mexicans than all but a few visiting Americans. He read Wolmack's Zapata and the Mexican Revolution and a half-dozen other available texts on recent Mexican history. He was still somewhat of a professional warrior and like the Japanese samurai it was an instinctual part of his code to be mindful, to know and understand as completely as possible where he was and why. He was just as instinctually a nonspectator and could not bear to have his immediate energies directed by anyone else. In the service this had made him unpopular with senior officers, and somewhat of a natural hero to everyone else. In the vacuum of his first two years of civilian life he was competent to no particular purpose. Here in Mexico, after only a few visits, he was known and warmly welcomed in a little mountain village cantina. The locals teased him about his Castilian pronunciation, doing elaborately humorous imitations.

When they got to the cabin he could tell immediately that she liked it. Doll went berserk snuffing around her hunting grounds but wary as she was trained of the scorpion and rattlesnake. He unloaded the car and started a fire in the small fireplace in the last light. He unrolled the double sleeping bag on the bed as she stared at the fire, listening to a brief shower beat off the tin roof. The dry wood smelled almost of perfume and she asked him to bring the foam rubber cushion and the sleeping bag to the hearth. He turned the kerosene lamp down low and thought of the morning walk he would take her on to where a small mountain creek made a clear green pool in the rock. They made love slowly and he marveled at the way the flickering light of the fire ran moving shadows up and down her body. They were mildly tipsy and he moved a large log away from the fire as the room seemed dense and overheated. She dozed for a while and he made another drink trying to remember when he felt so full and at the same time so alive and totally released.

Now we must back away from the lovers and let them rest but only for the shortest of moments. Let us perch on the log mantel, an impassive stone-eyed griffon, for it is best to have stone eyes for what we are going to see. The room is turning cool and the lovers hug themselves for warmth, then move, still in sleep, to each other. The light of the lamp is low and the shadow of the fire has become cold and weak. Outside the wind has picked up and hums under the eaves like the keening of a warlock. Doll is restless by the door and growls and whines, then barks frantically as the door bursts open. The room is flame-blue as a shotgun blasts the life from the dog. Three men rush into the cabin, one of them grotesquely huge. They pounce upon the lovers and Cochran howls as the wind is crushed from him and he is caught in a choke-hold by the huge man who is shouting in Spanish. Miryea is caught by her arms and she faints, held tightly by the man we saw watching with the binoculars. Tibey stands back and turns up the oil lamp. He revives the lovers with a pitcher of water from the table. His eyes look even wider apart than usual and his mouth hangs open though he is wordless. The huge man holds Cochran close so that he may watch as Tibey takes a razor from his pocket and deftly cuts an incision across Miryea's lips, the pimp's ancient revenge for a wayward girl. Lips may never be sewn back up perfectly especially when there is a long delay, which there will be. Tibey nods. It is Cochran's turn. The big man begins beating on him with long powerful punches, propping him up against the fireplace. Miryea faints again but Tibey, holding her by the ear, forces the lids of her eyes open with his other hand. As Cochran passes out he thinks he sees her ear come off in Tibey's hand. Tibey groins Cochran with a boot then washes his hands. The smaller man gives Miryea an injection and they are loaded into the trunk of a limousine down the trail. Tibey sits in the limousine breathing deeply, saying out loud to himself that perhaps they are making love in the trunk. The big man and the smaller man busy themselves spreading kerosene throughout the cabin. They back Cochran's car up against the door. The smaller man throws a match in the cabin and as they walk down the road they are silhouetted by the burning cabin. It is a long drive to Durango and Tibey lays back drinking from a bottle of Scotch as they jounce down the trail toward the road. He sees the explosion of the car dimly in the rearview mirror. About thirty miles down the road, still far from the main highway, they stop and pitch a body into the brush.

CHAPTER 2

The change was akin to dreaming that you were on another planet only vaguely similar to our own, then waking in a state of vertigo to find that you were on that planet. It was as strange as permanent déjà vu, so that what he thought of as his own reality drifted farther away from him every moment, dwindled until only an occasional picture floated from his mind—his daughter, the road in front of an Indiana farm, his bird dog. In the month in the room he had systematically exhumed and exhausted his memory so that when he was finally ready to leave the room he somehow did not recognize the world as the one he left behind. The resemblances simply weren't strong enough to draw him back and at night when the pictures came he felt no attachment so the pictures hurriedly left. At first he thought the concussion in its severity had scrambled his brains, but he quickly lost interest in medical explanations. There was an impenetrable ache that he localized and insulated, and would protect to keep him alive. When the image arose he saw it again through the reddish tinge of the blood that had blurred his eyes, the dog flung across the room and high shrill white screams that still burned against his eardrums and that he could recapture as clearly as putting a record on a phonograph. He only remembered idly how his arm had given way in a sharp crack, the jaw and cheekbone and ribs caving. They were of no interest to him, only the voice of the other he could recreate so that it would eerily sing or whisper to him.

After that long night he let Diller know he was fully conscious in the morning and Diller began with Demerol without trying to draw him out. Diller only asked if there were someone who should be notified, adding that he was out of danger: the arm and the ribs had set okay but one side of his face was a mess and he should seek surgery back home wherever that was. Diller took a small mirror from the wall and showed him the swelling had subsided but the injury drew his eye down until he squinted to compensate. Then the doctor added that a captain of the Federales would be coming by in a few days but he need say nothing, with the concussion he had as an excuse to the law.

Later a young man came into shave him but he refused. He said his name was Antonio and then proceeded to bathe Cochran in an irritatingly familiar way. Antonio said that if he needed cigarettes or anything he would advance him the money and get the cigarettes until money came from the States. Antonio laughed and whirled to the door saying that they never had a patient arrive so strangely nude as if he had been born battered and flayed in the bushes. Cochran decided that Antonio was crazy enough to be appealing. Then he was disturbed because he couldn't remember if he smoked. "I don't remember if I smoke," he said.

"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.

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, flat 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 contrabandistas 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, El 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 flash 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.

When they came to the outskirts of Hermosillo he told Mauro he wished to eat something then go to a place to catch a bus, but not inside the city because there was no point in taking a chance on being recognized. Mauro's uneasy confidence in his friend was further fortified.

On the far side of Hermosillo they found a roadhouse cantina with a full parking lot that also served as a stop for buses heading south. In a field beside the cantina parking lot they helped a Texan who was walking an unruly quarter-horse stud. Cochran realized the Texan was a first-rate horseman but he was coughing hard and seemed weakened by illness and had been knocked flat. Mauro picked up the Texan while Cochran calmed the horse and put him back in the trailer. The Texan began cursing in Spanish as he staggered, then leaned against his pickup.

"That sonofabitch has got me about buffaloed but boys I tell you I'm not quite myself or I'd throw him and put the goddamn boot to that cocksucker expensive as he is because he's bought and sold or I would sure as shit put a bullet between his fuckin' eyes but I want to deliver him in good shape so I'm going to dope the fucker so they think they got a good calm stud, then I'm getting the fuck out of this country which gives me the shits the minute I cross the fucking border."

Then the Texan offered his hand to Mauro and Cochran and they spoke about the problems of hauling stud horses. Cochran oddly took his cue from Mauro who saw the man as guileless. The Texan was caught awry when Cochran spoke perfect English.

"Hey buddy I thought you was a fucking campesino, you know a peóne. You get the shits in this place too? Let's eat on me. Have a few drinks."

They went into the cantina. Mauro had a beer and said it was time for him to leave for the long drive back. The Texan insisted he stay but it was a bad thing to leave the mission without its ambulance overnight. Cochran walked out to say good-bye in private—the noisy cantina put him on edge—and Mauro seemed embarrassed. He handed him a small package.

"My mother asks that you wear this. She says it will help you destroy your enemies. I know that you are an intelligent man but it can't hurt to wear it under your shirt."

Cochran unwrapped the package. It was the necklace of coyote teeth. He had not a trace of superstition in his bones but appreciated the gesture.

"Tell her I'll wear it gladly. I'm sure it will help."

Back in the cantina the Texan was drinking shots with beer chasers. The food had arrived but the Texan only picked at it. He rambled on about picking up the stud horse in Arizona for delivery in Torreón. He got a ten percent cut for engineering the deal between two wealthy breeders and delivering the horse.

"Tell you the truth pardo, I'm plumb fucking tired of this racket. Had a good string of mares myself on a little ranch over by Van Horn but my wife left and I just pissed away these good mares on booze and ladies. You oughta stop and visit someday because there's always two deer in the freezer and a few good old girls stopping by. You ain't a dope addict behind that beard are you?"

"Nope. I'm on the run from the IRS, you know." Cochran liked his invention.

"Fuck'em. Don't pay a cent. I work on cash and they don't know I'm alive, friend. If they come in your yard just shoot the cocksuckers." He paused and drank deeply. "You give up and go to prison and the crazies are liable to booger you. Never let them take you alive. Where you going anyhow?"

"Down toward Durango, I think . . ."

"Shit, why didn't you say so. Got to go to near there myself. You got a free ride. You don't want to ride on no bus where everyone pisses on the seat."

The Texan ordered a drink and it occurred to Cochran that he was being shimmied pleasantly into a driver's job which was fine by him. The Texan looked to be in his early fifties but it was hard to tell, he had obviously lived so hard. He was an arrogant old peacock with a concho belt and Tony Lama python skin boots. The Texan winked and lifted back the lapel of his denim coat revealing a cold blue .44.

"Anybody goes for that horse he's liable to get his nuts shot off. I can shoot the pecker off a running buck at one hundred yards. Maybe more."

Cochran ate with relish but limited himself to two beers thinking of the bleak wave of sentiment drinking with Mauro had caused. He looked up hearing a booming voice at the door and his heart raced, he shivered and his body turned cold and clammy. It was the huge man from the night at the cabin, elegantly dressed and with two scruffy bodyguards. Cochran watched as the man's eyes swept over the cantina passing him without noticing anything.

"You seen a goddamn ghost or something?" The Texan looked at Cochran, then watched the huge man walk back toward the men's room while his guards sat at a table and began flirting with a waitress.

"Big sonofabitch."

"Please go start the truck. I'll be with you in a moment." Cochran's voice was so cold and level the Texan nodded soberly, stood up and threw a hundred peso note on the table.

"Be waiting for you kiddo. Be careful."

Cochran moved swiftly to the men's room keeping his eyes down and walking slightly atilt like a drunken peóne. At the men's room door he palmed Mauro's knife and exhaled his breath. The big man was standing at the mirror combing his hair and barely glanced at Cochran, who owned the invisibility of the poor. Cochran splashed water messily on his own face and on the huge man who turned in instant rage and raised his arm to club the idiot peóne. Cochran stooped as if to take the blow and brought the knife upward, holding the handle in both hands, ripping upward with all his strength starting at the huge man's balls, upward to his sternum where he pivoted and swiped the knife across the man's neck laying it open to the neck-bone. As the big man teetered he kicked open a toilet stall and pushed him in where he crashed against the stool. Cochran glanced in the mirror checking himself for blood, grinned and left unhurriedly.

The Texan had pulled the truck and horse trailer up to the front of the cantina and smiled as Cochran came out diffidently swinging Diller's carpetbag. "Always liked a winner," the Texan said as Cochran got in the truck.

"That one wasn't even close." He leaned back in the seat and sorted through the tapes as the Texan pulled onto the highway. The Texan wanted to make Culiacán by dark but then Ciudad Obregón had the best whorehouse in the world and maybe he had one more hard-on left in his system.

By midafternoon Cochran took over the driving while the Texan slept off his lunch with a three-hour nap. He stopped in Los Mochis for gas and the Texan awoke coughing violently and gasping for breath. He tore open his kit and shook out a half-dozen pills which he swallowed with a beer from the cooler. The Texan held his head in his hands for a long while and Cochran was alarmed as he pulled back on the highway. He was oddly unworried about pursuit, knowing the local police would interpret the killing as a dope revenge number and a Texas-licensed truck hauling a stud horse was an unlikely prospect. The Texan slumped back in the seat and tried to breathe deeply, and smiled.

"Jesus, you drove right through Ciudad Obregón and I was thinking of stopping for a piece of ass. You never know when it's your last and it appears I'm hanging on a short string." He paused, listening to a Willie Nelson tape on the deck. "I heard him sing years ago over in San Antonio and he sure looks like a pisshead hippie but he sings good."

"I hope you feel okay."

"Boy, if I could give you a list of what's wrong but it'd bore the piss out of anyone. At the VA Hospital because I'm a bonafide veteran they said to me now we don't know why you're alive and I said I been too sick to die for years. I'm just going to disappear, right. They wanted my body and I said piss on you I'm going to be buried in Van Horn next to my mother."

They stayed that night at a coastal hotel outside of Mazatlán. It was moderately expensive and the Texan loaned Cochran some clothes saying he was far enough south not to need that bean-picker costume. In the room the Texan swallowed a big glass of tequila and said he was ready for a woman and when he asked for his expenses from a rich horse breeder they had to throw in an extra five hundred bucks for what he explained as "whores, booze, tattoos and shit medicine."

After dinner the Texan invited Cochran to accompany him to a whorehouse but he declined saying he'd feed, walk and water the horse.

"Strikes me you had a big day and some poontang might ease your mind."

"Nope. Killed a man I hated today and I don't want to mix my pleasures. I want to lay in bed and think how good it felt."

The Texan nodded and lit a cigar. He was no man's fool. "I expect you had your reasons. I blew the foot off a man years ago who screwed my wife. Did a year for it but I smiled thinking of that bastard's empty boot."

The Texan made an arrangement with a waiter who called a cab. Cochran went back to the room, looked in the mirror and barely recognized himself. He rinsed the dried blood off Mauro's knife in the sink, then fingered the strange necklace. He whistled that folk song and one bar soared tremulously against the back of his brain. He knew he had barely begun and couldn't care less if he died in the trying. In a curious way he was one of those pilots to whom the distance from the ground never removed the threat of death: his imagination was too great for that. He went out to walk the horse thinking morosely that the Texan was tottering precariously on the edge of death, knew it, and was stepping on the gas.

He awoke just after dawn and was alarmed to see the Texan hadn't returned. He found him in the pickup, gray-faced with his shirtfront caked with blood and vomit. He examined him for wounds and found none, then took his pulse which was irregular. He walked the horse a few minutes wondering what to do. Back in the truck the Texan squinted at him and asked feebly for a beer. He drew a beer from the tepid water of the cooler and watched the Texan swallow his pills.

"You got to see a doctor, friend."

The Texan nodded and fell asleep. Cochran found Route 40 to Durango and Torreón, then stopped for coffee to think things over. He knew the wise blood would say to abandon the man and get on with his business. But he hadn't the heart to do it and it should be anyway just another day. He walked back to the truck and now the Texan's eyes were open.

"I can see what you're thinking. Is this old fucker going to die on my hands? What will I do with him for Jesus's sake and what will I do with the fucking horse? So don't worry, just help me deliver the horse and I'll make it worth your while. I says to this lady last night, make it good it might be my last and she made it pretty good." He mumbled all of this and Cochran stared out the window embarrassed, driving intensely along the twisting mountain road to Durango, as the Texan fell into a deep sleep.

The Texan perked up somewhat after lunch in Durango and they had started on the road for Torreón. The air-conditioning had given out and it was nightmarishly hot. He talked giddily about the horse business while Cochran brooded about Durango. He thought that once you got off the tourist tract Mexico became a lot less comprehensible, almost feudal and difficult to move in without notice. He needed desperately to devise some sort of cover and horse trader wouldn't do. He might have to use his friend's Mexico City government connection though he wished not to. He had to be smart enough to reach Miryea without getting murdered in the process. He was startled halfway to Torreón to find the Texan grasping his arm.

"Was that the big man that shoved in your face? Maybe more?" Now the man was flushed and clenched his hands repeatedly. "You don't have to say nothing. Tell you the truth I think I'm shitcanned but this is good-looking country and I never wanted to die where it was ugly. I dreamed I'd die in Big Timber, Montana. Just put me under a fucking rock as I don't want buzzards to get me."

A little later they reached a resplendent hacienda with two sets of gates with guards, concentration camp barbed wire, formal gardens, swimming pool, a clay tennis court, jumping ring for horses, a lavish home and stables. They drank sherry waiting for the baróne to arrive. The Texan accepted the open cigar box of money and closed the box without counting the money.

"I assume I'll be able to reach my home without being relieved of this money," the Texan said in surprisingly formal Spanish.

The baróne laughed and said in Oxford English, "I sympathize with your worries." He handed the Texan his card. "Just repeat the name to anyone who would bother you. They will shit down their legs and run like rabbits." They were shown to a guesthouse next to the stables where they were served a meal and a bottle of Scotch. During the night the Texan began talking to his mother and walked around alternately laughing and weeping and drinking. He died just after three A.M. and Cochran adjusted him in a sitting position so rigor mortis would cooperate with the seat of the pickup. At first light he loaded the Texan into the pickup and drew his Stetson over his eyes. He waved to the guards on the way out through the double gates and buried the Texan a few miles down the road under the rocks as he had desired. Three cows watched with momentary curiosity. Cochran drove straight through to Mexico City with occasional brief naps. On the way back through Durango he whistled Miryea's little song which gave him strength. He was a hard man to beat now; he was on his way. Somebody had stolen his soul and he meant to have it back. He made Mexico City in twenty-four hours and abandoned the truck and trailer in the parking lot of the airport. In the trailer he dressed in the Texan's best clothes and caught a cab for the Camino Real with a cigar box under his arm.

The nunnery in which Miryea was held as a prisoner was seven miles or so from Durango in the country house of an eighteenth-century nobleman, now fallen a bit over the edge of decay but pleasant to look at from a distance where it reminded you of Normandy. After a detoxification process to cure her of her month's forced addiction in the brothel, she was let out of her room and left to wander in the courtyard with the other patients who were considered well mannered enough to be given this minimal freedom. She was watched closely by a homely mean-minded nun with a trace of a moustache. No chances would be taken with so profitable a prisoner. Miryea especially disgusted the mother superior; how could a woman of such noble birth and good education become a drug addict and a crazed prostitute in the cheapest brothel and have her features severely marred by some pimp. The letter given her by Señor Mendez's chauffeur was a heartbreaking plea to save the poor woman's soul. But the mother superior was essentially kind, if a trifle venal, and after a month she allowed Miryea to order some books from Mexico City though she inspected the letter carefully. The young girls, barely more than children and schizoid, received a great deal of mothering attention from other inmates, but there were three little autistic girls who were left totally alone in their mute darkness because they responded to no one. Miryea decided to make them her own special charge and sought books on the subject. She sat for days on end in the sunny courtyard with the three children, helped dress and feed them, sang them to sleep and used her considerable wit to try to get any conceivable response. She nervously rubbed the scar on her lips which had healed into a thin cord of hardened tissue. She was traumatized to a degree that her thoughts turned mostly to her childhood summers on Cozumel. She and her sister would swim all day, pick flowers, collect seashells, and when their household held no other guests, accompany their father out into the Gulf on his big sportfishing boat. Her father had died years before or he would have surely come to her aid. One of the boatmates had made love to her sister when she was only thirteen and her father had had the man conveniently drowned on a long trip looking for sailfish. She dared not believe her lover would come for her though she refused to believe him dead. Someday she would leave this place and find out the great harm she had done him, and perhaps, if he were not repelled by the scars, they would be lovers again, if only on the moon. Often she would lose contact totally in her dreaming and on becoming conscious again, would be surprised she was alive, would touch her hands together and look around the room or courtyard with truly appalled curiosity. When her dread became especially great she subtly looked for ways to escape but there were none and then she would find a place to weep until she had sufficient composure to return to her charges, who looked at her with no signs of seeing or hearing, like blind and deaf puppies.

Back on his ranch outside of Tepehuanes, Baldassaro Tibey brooded the autumn away. From his breakfast room he could see the cordillera of the Sierra Madres but the mountains brought him bad thoughts of his father whom he considered far nobler than himself. His father had been a close friend of Eufemio Zapata, the brother of Emiliano, and a lieutenant in the Revolution. He died when Tibey was ten from the remnants of wounds and years of hard riding, drinking and fighting. Many old men in Culiacán still spoke of his father and despite Tibey's great wealth they did not give him remotely equal honor. Tibey, shrewd as he was, owned an idealistic streak and dreamed in his youth of leading some preposterous insurrection. He lived as a victim, albeit prosperous, of those dreams he built at age nineteen when all of us reach our zenith of idealistic nonsense. Nineteen is the age of the perfect foot soldier who will die without a murmur, his heart aflame with patriotism. Nineteen is the age at which the brain of a nascent poet in his rented room soars the highest, suffering gladly the assault of what he thinks is the god in him. Nineteen is the last year that a young woman will marry purely for love. And so on. Dreams are soul chasers, and forty years later Tibey was feeling cornered. He slept badly and became careless and haggard. He went out with his ranch foreman in the helicopter and shot three dozen coyotes who were bothering the sheep, knowing full well it was likely one decrepit coyote doing the damage. Miryea had made him promise not to shoot coyotes and showed him a book on the subject that he read with curiosity. He made the promise. He was often a baby in her arms. She was the only release he owned from what he was on earth. She had drawn him back to nineteen. Now, both in nightmares and in waking moments, he felt the tick in his hand when the razor went through her lips and struck against her teeth.

At the Camino Real Cochran was told there was nothing available except a suite which he signed up for with an affected Texas accent to accompany his clothing. He wanted to get out of this lobby suddenly, remembering the feast after the tennis match win with Tibey. He ordered up dinner and a bottle of wine, feeling bone-tired and jittery. He had a quick shower, taking the cigar box with the money paid for the stud horse packed inside. Over dinner he would count the money for no reason he could think of, and someday trace the Texan's heirs in Van Horn, perhaps pay the horse breeder though he doubted it. He called the brother of his friend, the Aeromexico pilot. The man welcomed him cordially to Mexico City, told him that it was not good to speak on the phone, not to leave the room, and that he would be there at midmorning to offer any help he could. Cochran slept well with the Texan's cold blue .44 under his pillow.

At dawn he ordered up coffee and sat on his balcony looking down at the gardens in a reverie until the first human, a gardener, arrived, at which point he went back into the suite to meditate on his plans for both vengeance and survival, two instincts which are rarely married with any security.

When the man arrived Cochran at first didn't like the suavity contained in the pale-gray pin-striped suit, the outward shell painted so deftly on the surface of the politician. Then the man became nervous, ordered a drink on the room service, and asked Cochran to speak in Castilian as well as he could. Satisfied, the man said he could do nothing to help Cochran with Tibey other than offer him an identity and the aid of the only man he could trust, a lifelong friend of honor who lived in Durango. The man explained that they made many movies in Durango, usually American and Mexican westerns and Cochran would be able to move freely under an identity as a textile mill owner from Barcelona who was interested both in real estate and the movie business. He opened his briefcase and gave Cochran some convincing letters of introduction, and money which Cochran refused saying he had plenty. And a .38 Police Special that his brother passed along. Cochran laughed and said he was already overarmed. The man turned grave and handed him a folder on Tibey which he refused saying that he knew enough.

"You understand that Señor Mendez is what you call laundered; I mean he is powerful politically and his money is clean now. You will surely die and my brother whom I love cares for you. But even in this absurd suit I know it's probably better to die than to live with it. My friend in Durango has found no trace of the woman but is working hard on the search."

Now Cochran liked the man and tried to reassure him but the man swallowed his drink in a single gulp and looked away. He said he had received a message from a Mauro at the mission, the man who had taken Cochran to Hermosillo, and soon after they had left that dawn a huge man and two henchmen had come looking with murder in their eyes.

"I gutted that fucker like a big fat pig," Cochran said with a wry smile.

The man nodded, acting reassured. Before he left he asked Cochran to destroy his phone numbers after memorizing them. He had a brother, but he also had a wife and children and hopefully a future.

He spent the afternoon getting himself tailored to look like a wealthy businessman from Barcelona. He took out a few thousand dollars and packed the cigar box inside the television set. He bought several suits and accoutrements, and had his hair styled and his beard trimmed, had a manicure and made his reservations for Durango for the next morning on an early plane. He practiced the sort of good foreigner's English where a stray indefinite article is left out. He posted a long ruminating letter to his daughter saying that he hoped to be home soon, and that he had been a little sad lately because his bird dog Doll had been hit by a car. Early in the evening he packed in a new, expensive piece of luggage. He ate lightly and lay naked in the dark on his bed listening to a Bach concerto on the radio.

He lay there sleeplessly remembering a minor quarrel he had one evening with Miryea in the apartment. It was over some silly literary matter about who killed whom in Pascual Duarte, that murderous book, and a certain coolness entered into the evening as he blathered on. He knew he was arguing on hormones, stirring his brain with his dick, as it were. He was a beautiful talker but she pursued his wrongheadedness without mercy, reminding him that language was a convenience of the heart, not something to bludgeon people with. He slapped a pillow over his face in embarrassment and yelled for Christ's sake forgive my big mouth. He heard her laugh and under the darkness of the pillow he felt her mouth caressing him. He slid the pillow back above his eyes and saw her knee and had an awakening of sorts, a prolonged and lucid sense that he had never looked at a woman's knee. His eyes moved upward until he saw all of Miryea and for a moment it seemed he was looking at her incomprehensibly and for the first time. He repeated this newness of vision, sweeping his eyes from her curled toes to her falling black shiny hair over his belly. His love for her became at the same time complete, fearsome and unbearable. Afterward he spoke to her about it and she seemed to understand perfectly. There was a lightness to the mood as if for the first time he comprehended the reality of life on earth outside himself; it calmed him in a strange way so that he slept easily because he no longer cared if he slept. He gave up quickly trying to attune the experience to a language construct, as if life were an especially filthy mirror and speechless love cleansed this mirror and made life not only bearable but something lived with eagerness, energy, an expectancy whose pleasure didn't depend on fatality.

In the morning he slept calmly through his departure time, but just as calmly chartered a Beechcraft, ate breakfast and took a taxi to the airport. It was a clear sunny morning and a brief rain in the night plus a wind from the north had swept the normally filthy air of Mexico City clean and clear. Standing on the tarmac he looked to the mountains in the south out of which a religion lost to the present had been born. The pilot was deferential and they flew into a brisk headwind and low to look at the country.

They flew over Celaya, Aguascalientes, over the Quemada ruins and Fresnillo, over the Zacatecas border and into the province of Durango and its capital of the same name. They beat the airline which had a layover in Guadalajara by a few minutes. A man named Amador was waiting for him.

CHAPTER 3

The appearance of Amador confused Cochran momentarily. He wished to be a great deal more anonymous than is possible in Mexico. They exchanged pleasantries in Spanish, then turned in alarm to watch a woman who was screaming. Cochran recognized her as an American actress-model.

"Dónde esta my fucking gato vivo," she screamed over and over while the baggage man flipped through the suitcases in alarm. "Oh, you fuckers probably eat cats." Others at the baggage counter stepped back shocked, then began smiling. Cochran approached and attempted to calm her down, but she was inconsolable. Then another baggage wagon arrived and the cat was found. She opened the small cage sobbing, "Oh my dear Pooky, my lover, I won't let them eat you." She looked up at Cochran and smiled but Amador drew him away gripping his arm tightly.

In the car Amador admonished him, speaking English in a southern drawl, explaining he had once been on the Dallas police force. It was unthinkable of Cochran to speak in public the way he had when his cover had been so carefully prepared. "In this town it isn't a game."

Cochran felt a little depressed and apologized and Amador laughed. "My friend, I don't want us to get our asses shot off." Then he fell silent and Cochran looked at him sensing the badness of the news and not wanting to ask. On the floor by the seat was an ugly looking sawed-off shotgun with a scarred and worn stock. The statue of Saint Christopher on the dashboard seemed to stare down at the gun with a pastel stare, the silly pink lips open in benediction. Amador was of only medium height but thickset, with a massive neck and arms. He slowed down for a cow ambling across the road.

"I am sorry to say that the woman you are looking for was kept in a whorehouse for a month, shot up with smack. Now Señor Mendez has removed her from the whorehouse and taken her God knows where. I've not found out yet."

Cochran was suddenly wet from head to toe. He gazed at the green fertile valley and brown mountains beyond. He forgot to breathe and felt vertigo to the point that the car seemed to float.

"I must tell you that you'll be shot like a dog unless you are careful and probably shot like a dog anyway."

In the hotel suite at the El Presidente Amador ordered up some food and drink. He told Cochran that he had found a house because a hotel was too public to be suitable. Señor Mendez, or Tiburón as he was known locally, was at his mountain ranch but there were a dozen men in Durango in his employ. Cochran should move to the house in a few days when it became available, meanwhile there were necessary meetings with políticos under his guise as a film and land investor. They both relaxed a little over the meal and Amador spoke of the Aeromexico pilot and his brother in Mexico City, for whom his mother had served as a nursemaid in their youth. Then Amador lapsed into silence, drew inward and his face became impassive.

"The truth is she stabbed a man while he made love to her. This man has announced he will strangle her. So she is in double danger. I would think Tiburón would put her in a place where no one could reach her but I have no idea where. I know you must do nothing without me."

Amador left early in the evening after elaborating on possible plans and accepting a large amount of money to be used as bribes for information. Cochran lay on the bed feeling waves of nausea roll through his soul, shaking him until the bed rattled, clenching his fists and his legs cramping in a rage far past weeping. He had been foolish enough to believe that as he recovered over the past few months the world might be recovering with him, that in the back of his mind Miryea might be found in reasonably good health and he could convince Tibey how hopeless it was and he and Miryea would fly off happily as if in some tragic but pleasant-ending movie. But now he felt murderous and at the same time without hope. He touched the small pistol strapped to his calf, then got up and put on the shoulder holster with the .44. He put on his suit coat and checked himself in the mirror. He had visibly aged a half-dozen years in a few months. He poured a glass of tequila and sat down out on the balcony sipping at the bittersweet liquid and watching the full moon of late September cast sweeping shadows through the scudding clouds. The shadows swept intermittently across the courtyard of the hotel which was an elegantly remodeled prison. The moon shone white on the back wall where prisoners had no doubt once been lined up and shot for reasons too simple to be worth remembering. He thought of Tibey in the distant mountains in the direction of the moon, then wondered if Miryea could see the moon. All three of them were, in fact, watching the moon in their separate agonies, all of them envious of the moon in its aerial distance floating so far above earthbound agonies. He remembered a hot summer night in Tucson when they turned out the lights and took an air mattress out to the balcony and made love under the full moon. Both the moon and their entwined bodies had been hot and still, and the sheen of Miryea's damp neck had caught the moonlight. There had been people below them in the distance drinking wine on a blanket on the lawn and listening to classical music on a radio.

He grew restless and went downstairs to the hotel lobby and bar. The actress-model was sitting with two producer types parodically dressed in pressed denim and lavish Indian jewelry. Cochran pretended not to notice her but she jumped to her feet and approached holding her cat. She thanked him profusely for helping her recover the cat. Cochran glanced around at the dozen pairs of watching eyes, bowed and said something polite in Spanish and walked away. She stood there puzzled for a moment and shrugged. He had a drink and thought about the woman whose photo he had seen so often in magazines. In person she glistened with her cold, hard classical features becoming more angular and rough at the same time. She had glittery cocaine eyes and the low husky voice of a pissed off barmaid.

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.

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.

"It's sad that you can't simply shoot the man. It would be so simple. And get us all killed."

"I figure it's far past killing him unless it's necessary. I'd like to think he knows when he's beat."

"Neither of us knows when we are beat. How can we expect it of him? Losing a woman isn't being beat, it's losing a woman. It happens to everyone." Amador paused. "I lost my wife when I was a young man but I was a fool. She was less a fool than me and walked away."

"Same thing with me. The business of killing doesn't make good husbands. I miss my daughter but my wife is now married to my brother. I was her father by accident and now he's her true father." Cochran paused to listen to the coyotes, then fingered the teeth around his neck. He felt the ache of a man who had followed his passion far into the nether reaches of human activity with the full understanding that a return was improbable. Any number of men would go to the moon on a rocket designed for a one-way trip. It was stupidly enough in the genes, either as a molecular mishap or a simple throwback to a time when a knight would go off to the Thirty Years War and be surprised when no one recognized him when he walked back in the door. That was why he revered the year at Torrejón though he had seemed anxious and hearth-bound teaching young pilots. But as the year receded into the past it provided the single total grace note of his adult life: his wife as a country person loved walking too, and they covered the old districts of Madrid, and Barcelona and Seville too when he had taken a few days' leave. Once they had gone to Málaga for a week and lived in a seaside pensióne, spending the days watching their daughter swim and their nights talking about the future, deciding to invest all their substantial savings in his father's tuna boat that badly needed new engines. Then he would have a full share in the business when he left the service. The debt had long been repaid but he had let it lie fallow in the bank in San Diego.

Amador shook him awake and offered a cup of coffee from a Thermos. Music full of night laments and broken hearts and busted guts came from the radio and for a moment he thought himself back at Diller's mission with the grand fat man checking his pulse through the night, muttering his prayers and humming to the first shrill bird-song of dawn.

"It's a long walk in the dark but I know the way. Too cold for snakes and we have a three-quarter moon."

They got out of the car and he shivered and the coffee steamed upward from his cup in the moonlight. He smelled the strange animal smell of the oil Amador had put on his rifle. In the distance a mountain wall cast a huge shadow beyond which the tips of the pines picked up the shimmering moonlight. He traced his fingers on the frost on the car hood, blew on his hands and felt for the .44 behind the warm goatskin vest borrowed from Amador's nephew. He walked around the car and touched Amador's shoulder.

"Look, friend. If this gets messy your first thought must be to save yourself. It makes sense for me to die. But not for you."

"Don't worry." Amador breathed deeply watching the vapor turn cold and visible. "I had a dream last week that I'd die an old man, you know, in a rocking chair on the porch of my little ranch. I trust my dreams." Then he laughed, "And my skills. This is the only thing I was ever good at."

They made the long hike in total silence following a winding shepherds' path. Once they paused on an escarpment to watch a creek glittering silver far below. They were startled by a mule deer crashing through the brush but the sound of the coyotes grew farther and farther distant.

They reached the spot early and stood by the creek smoking cigarettes. Then the first light came from the east as a faint gray smear on the horizon through the neck of the canyon. The birds started then, and Amador walked to a cottonwood tree ten yards off the trail.

"You sit here under the tree. I'll be hidden on the hillside. Tiburón will think you are a ghost. Have your hands out-turned and empty to show you aren't armed. And trust me."

"Of course. What else?" They shook hands and Cochran watched Amador scramble easily up the hillside with the rifle swaying from the strap on his back. He waved when Amador stopped and turned around, then he sat under the tree and stared at the small meadow beside the creek. He sat so still and long that the birds came close and a doe and her fawn drank from the creek. He sat through his miseries until he had no more thoughts by the time the dawn warmed and he no longer could see his breath. A crow passed giving him a sideward glance and a puzzled squawking. The first vulture appeared catching sun on his wings far above the canyon's cool shadows. He was watching the vulture when he first heard the horses in the distance. Then Tibey's bird dogs, a male and a female English pointer, trotted past, swiveling suddenly at his scent. The male approached growling while the female stayed on the trail, curious and wiggling with excitement. He shushed the male and it sat wagging its tail in a thump against the ground. He petted the dog and pointed with his hand and the dogs, obedient to hand signal, rushed off looking for quail.

The Crazy One was riding lead but Tiburón had come into view behind when the lead horse neighed and twisted, his neck catching the scent of the man under the tree. They both saw him at once staring blankly through them. The Crazy One raised his shotgun and Tiburón raised his hand to say no when Amador's first shot tore through The Crazy One's head, catapulting him from the saddle. Two more shots sent him sprawling on the grass. Tiburón reined his rearing horse while the riderless horse galloped off. Then Tiburón dismounted without turning around to look at the dead man. He tethered his horse on a bush and sighed deeply. Tiburón stopped in front of him and then suddenly between his thighs and out of the sight of Amador there was a gun in his hand and Cochran was staring down the small black hole of the barrel.

"Perhaps we should both die now," Tibey whispered.

"Maybe so," Cochran nodded coldly. Tibey was red-eyed and haggard, smelling of last night's whiskey. Tibey shrugged and looked up at the bows of the trees catching the first rays of the sun to enter the canyon. He flicked the gun away into a clump of grass.

"I ask you as a gentleman and a former friend to ask my forgiveness for taking my wife away from me."

"I ask your forgiveness for taking your wife away from you."

Both men stood then and Amador scrambled down the hillside shaking his head at the pistol in the grass. They walked off following the same path Amador and Cochran had taken in the night. At the car they drank a lukewarm beer thirstily and Amador and Tibey spoke about the mountains.

They reached the nunnery by noon and the mother superior was shocked at the sudden appearance of Señor Mendez and the two sweating ruffians with so noble a gentleman. She apologized to Tibey for the condition of his wife and said the doctor was with her. Tibey put his arm on her shoulder and smiled.

"What kind of gossip have you listened to? It is the wife of my friend here. You take care of him."

The woman led them to Miryea's room where Cochran sat on the edge of the bed, then leaned kissing her wounded and fevered lips. The doctor came to the door where Amador and Tibey stood looking at their feet.

"I doubt that anything may be done for her. She is too weak to move."

Tibey's face contorted and he hissed. "Make her well or I'll put your heart in your mouth, you fucking pig." Amador led Tibey and the startled doctor away. The mother superior stood there for a moment then followed them down the corridor sighing and offering prayers.

Cochran sat there for an afternoon and a night—drinking coffee, holding Miryea's hands, caressing her brow, pacing the room when the doctor entered. At first light she regained consciousness and they embraced wordlessly. She slept for a while and he dozed off sitting in the chair until the afternoon heat awakened him. Then he had to be restrained as the doctor gave her a tracheotomy to ease her breathing and then she was near death for another night and day. He lay on the floor in the night refusing all thought, listening to her rasping breathing through the oxygen unit Amador had brought from town. The pauses in her breathing at times became agonizing in their length and then short and staccato. When he no longer could bear it he ran down into the courtyard and screamed. The lights were turned on and the patients returned his screams hearing his particular voice for the first time. Amador, Tibey and the doctor came running from their temporary quarters in the kitchen. He fought them until Amador subdued him with a choke-hold. Tibey helped hold him down and the doctor gave him a shot to allow him to sleep.

Hours later when he awoke on his pallet in a strange room he stood and glanced at the hot sun through the barred window. He found the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee while Amador, Tibey and the doctor sat at the table. The doctor nervously averted his glance.

Later on the afternoon of the third day Miryea regained consciousness. He spoke eagerly and in a rush of nearly incoherent words. She whispered that she wanted to go out in the garden. He ran for the doctor who shrugged in defeat and followed him back to the room and bandaged Miryea's throat. Cochran carried her down into the garden where the patients were being herded in for dinner. The autistic children passed them without seeing, keening their private dirges like hoarse earthbound birds whose sufferings would never be answered on earth. He held her tightly in his arms remembering how light a dead bird felt when he picked it out of a thicket in the Indiana woods. He spoke again in a rush trying to keep her alive by the power in the energy of his words: it was as if his brain had split open and he plunged, raked, dug, mining any secret he might hold to bring her to health. He put the necklace from Mauro's mother around her neck remembering with horror that she had said he would only take vengeance on his enemies. He invented a universe of words but they were only words. He invented a child for them to walk with in Seville and she smiled and nodded yes. Twilight passed into near dark and Amador watched impassively, partly hid by a column. He stopped the doctor from approaching them. The half-moon came up windblown but shrunken and a gust whipped the flowers from a flowering almond. Cochran whispered on and then as full dark descended she sang the song he knew so well in a throaty voice that only faintly surpassed the summer droning of a cicada. It was her death song and she passed from life seeing him sitting there as her soul billowed softly outward like a cloud parting. It began to rain and a bird in the tree above them crooned as if he were the soul of some Mayan trying to struggle his way back earthward.

EPILOGUE

There was one man digging under the tree and two men watching. The man dug with a mechanical intentness, using an ax for the tree roots, a pick for the rocks, and a shovel for the heavy soil. He noted the marbling and striations of soil as he descended into the earth on a hot afternoon. The man named Amador sat on a bench and drew down his sombrero and sang in a hushed voice. The man named Tiburón, Tibey, Señor Baldassaro Mendez sat on the bench and held his face in his hands as the man dug with terrible energy, methodical, inevitable. The mother superior watched with a mildly bored priest from beneath the portico. A number of patients idled back and forth, distracted by the activity. A pine casket lay on top of two sawhorses. On the casket a large bouquet of wild flowers sat wilting in the sun. When the hole was dug the man paused, sweating, then pulled himself up and over the edge. He knelt by the side of a pile of soil and the two men on the bench slid forward and knelt beside him. The priest and the nun moved forward with the insane crowding behind them. The priest said a short service and the two men in front of the bench lowered the casket into the hole. The man who had dug the hole lowered himself into the earth, knelt and kissed the flowers. He lifted himself from the hole, picked up the shovel and threw in some earth with a thump he would hear on his own deathbed.