by Jim Harrison
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 break-fast 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
III
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 suit-cases 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 Cod 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 EI 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 politicos 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 cotton-wood 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 Tiburon’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.”