第2章 Revenge (1)

Revenge is a dish better served cold.

(Old Sicilian adage)

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 (peón 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 Power-wagon 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 optic disk, 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 the fawn--colored side of the mountaintop. 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 Feder-ales, 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 an herbalist and a 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, any more than his chest could escape of itself from the swaths 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, 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, with those who fall in love strongly in their late thirties or early forties. The lovers spoke hurriedly, lapsing back and forth between Spanish and En-glish 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 anti-political 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 Fouquet'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 sue?o de las manzanas, alejarme del 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 / tus labios son un alba sin contorno. / Bajo las rosas tibias de la cama / los muertos gimen esperando turno." ("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 tape deck 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 Baroja 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 Se?or Mendez was in Mérida. He didn't dare ask for Miryea directly. He walked around the living room, light-headed 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 Se?or 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 2, 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 from 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 VIP 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 for 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 folk songs 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 re-create 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 in to 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 mustache 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 manner 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 in to 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 peón now, a hippie peón. 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 peón 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-size 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, EI Cociloco, but it was necessary in the crime of cuckoldry to do your own revenging. He drank incessantly to work up a rage, because he, in fact, was so tired of it all that he wished to go to Paris, say to the Plaza Athénée, eat and drink and forget. But that would mean the end of his pride and he would have nothing left except money.

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

And that was what happened for Tibey was a master of revenge: for three days in a bare white room Miryea sat on a high stool dosed with amphetamines while a half-dozen rattlesnakes crawled around the floor. When she was on the verge of slipping to the floor she was administered ever-increasing doses of heroin over a period of two weeks, then prettified by a hairdresser and taken to the crudest of whorehouses in Durango, patronized by the poorest cowboys and miners and riffraff. Her lips and torn ear which had been sewn up by a veterinarian had begun to heal but the botched-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 peón 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 peón. 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 peón. 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 peón. 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 neckbone. 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 bona fide 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 intently 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 track 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 barón 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 barón 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 mustache. 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 Se?or 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 boat mates 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 pinstripe 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 Se?or 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.