When they came to the outskirts of Hermosillo he told Mauro he wished to eat something then go to a place to catch a bus, but not inside the city because there was no point in taking a chance on being recognized. Mauro’s uneasy confidence in his friend was further fortified.
On the far side of Hermosillo they found a roadhouse cantina with a full parking lot that also served as a stop for buses heading south. In a field beside the cantina parking lot they helped a Texan who was walking an unruly quarter-horse stud. Cochran realized the Texan was a first-rate horseman but he was coughing hard and seemed weakened by illness and had been knocked flat. Mauro picked up the Texan while Cochran calmed the horse and put him back in the trailer. The Texan began cursing in Spanish as he staggered, then leaned against his pickup.
“That sonofabitch has got me about buffaloed but boys I tell you I’m not quite myself or I’d throw him and put the goddamn boot to that cocksucker expensive as he is because he’s bought and sold or I would sure as shit put a bullet between his fuckin’ eyes but I want to deliver him in good shape so I’m going to dope the fucker so they think they got a good calm stud, then I’m getting the fuck out of this country which gives me the shits the minute I cross the fucking border.”
Then the Texan offered his hand to Mauro and Cochran and they spoke about the problems of hauling stud horses. Cochran oddly took his cue from Mauro who saw the man as guileless. The Texan was caught awry when Cochran spoke perfect English.
“Hey buddy I thought you was a fucking campesino, you know a peóne. You get the shits in this place too? Let’s eat on me. Have a few drinks.”
They went into the cantina. Mauro had a beer and said it was time for him to leave for the long drive back. The Texan insisted he stay but it was a bad thing to leave the mission without its ambulance overnight. Cochran walked out to say good-bye in private-the noisy cantina put him on edge-and Mauro seemed embarrassed. He handed him a small package.
“My mother asks that you wear this. She says it will help you destroy your enemies. I know that you are an intelligent man but it can’t hurt to wear it under your shirt.”
Cochran unwrapped the package. It was the necklace of coyote teeth. He had not a trace of superstition in his bones but appreciated the gesture.
“Tell her I’ll wear it gladly. I’m sure it will help.”
Back in the cantina the Texan was drinking shots with beer chasers. The food had arrived but the Texan only picked at it. He rambled on about picking up the stud horse in Arizona for delivery in Torreón. He got a ten percent cut for engineering the deal between two wealthy breeders and delivering the horse.
“Tell you the truth pardo, I’m plumb fucking tired of this racket. Had a good string of mares myself on a little ranch over by Van Horn but my wife left and I just pissed away these good mares on booze and ladies. You oughta stop and visit someday because there’s always two deer in the freezer and a few good old girls stopping by. You ain’t a dope addict behind that beard are you?”
“Nope. I’m on the run from the IRS, you know.” Cochran liked his invention.
“Fuck’em. Don’t pay a cent. I work on cash and they don’t know I’m alive, friend. If they come in your yard just shoot the cocksuckers.” He paused and drank deeply. “You give up and go to prison and the crazies are liable to booger you. Never let them take you alive. Where you going anyhow?”
“Down toward Durango, I think . . . ”
“Shit, why didn’t you say so. Got to go to near there myself. You got a free ride. You don’t want to ride on no bus where everyone pisses on the seat.”
The Texan ordered a drink and it occurred to Cochran that he was being shimmied pleasantly into a driver’s job which was fine by him. The Texan looked to be in his early fifties but it was hard to tell, he had obviously lived so hard. He was an arrogant old peacock with a concho belt and Tony Lama python skin boots. The Texan winked and lifted back the lapel of his denim coat revealing a cold blue ·44·
“Anybody goes for that horse he’s liable to get his nuts shot off. I can shoot the pecker off a running buck at one hundred yards. Maybe more.”
Cochran ate with relish but limited himself to two beers thinking of the bleak wave of sentiment drinking with Mauro had caused. He looked up hearing a booming voice at the door and his heart raced, he shivered and his body turned cold and clammy. It was the huge man from the night at the cabin, elegantly dressed and with two scruffy bodyguards. Cochran watched as the man’s eyes swept over the cantina passing him without noticing anything.
“You seen a goddamn ghost or something?” The Texan looked at Cochran, then watched the huge man walk back toward the men’s room while his guards sat at a table and began flirting with a waitress.
“Big sonofabitch.”
“Please go start the truck. I’ll be with you in a moment.” Cochran’s voice was so cold and level the Texan nodded soberly, stood up and threw a hundred peso note on the table.
“Be waiting for you kiddo. Be careful.”
Cochran moved swiftly to the men’s room keeping his eyes down and walking slightly atilt like a drunken peóne. At the men’s room door he palmed Mauro’s knife and exhaled his breath. The big man was standing at the mirror combing his hair and barely glanced at Cochran, who owned the invisibility of the poor. Cochran splashed water messily on his own face and on the huge man who turned in instant rage and raised his arm to club the idiot peóne. Cochran stooped as if to take the blow and brought the knife upward, holding the handle in both hands, ripping upward with all his strength starting at the huge man’s balls, upward to his sternum where he pivoted and swiped the knife across the man’s neck laying it open to the neck-bone. As the big man teetered he kicked open a toilet stall and pushed him in where he crashed against the stool. Cochran glanced in the mirror checking himself for blood, grinned and left unhurriedly.
The Texan had pulled the truck and horse trailer up to the front of the cantina and smiled as Cochran came out diffidently swinging Diller’s carpetbag. “Always liked a winner,” the Texan said as Cochran got in the truck.
“That one wasn’t even close.” He leaned back in the seat and sorted through the tapes as the Texan pulled onto the highway. The Texan wanted to make Culiacán by dark but then Ciudad Obregón had the best whorehouse in the world and maybe he had one more hard-on left in his system.
By midafternoon Cochran took over the driving while the Texan slept off his lunch with a three-hour nap. He stopped in Los Mochis for gas and the Texan awoke coughing violently and gasping for breath. He tore open his kit and shook out a half-dozen pills which he swallowed with a beer from the cooler. The Texan held his head in his hands for a long while and Cochran was alarmed as he pulled back on the highway. He was oddly unworried about pursuit, knowing the local police would interpret the killing as a dope revenge number and a Texas-licensed truck hauling a stud horse was an unlikely prospect. The Texan slumped back in the seat and tried to breathe deeply, and smiled.
“Jesus, you drove right through Ciudad Obregón and I was thinking of stopping for a piece of ass. You never know when it’s your last and it appears I’m hanging on a short string.” He paused, listening to a Willie Nelson tape on the deck. “I heard him sing years ago over in San Antonio and he sure looks like a pisshead hippie but he sings good.”
“I hope you feel okay.”
“Boy, if I could give you a list of what’s wrong but it’d bore the piss out of anyone. At the VA Hospital because I’m a bonafide veteran they said to me now we don’t know why you’re alive and I said I been too sick to die for years. I’m just going to disappear, right. They wanted my body and I said piss on you I’m going to be buried in Van Horn next to my mother.”
They stayed that night at a coastal hotel outside of Mazatlán. It was moderately expensive and the Texan loaned Cochran some clothes saying he was far enough south not to need that bean-picker costume. In the room the Texan swallowed a big glass of tequila and said he was ready for a woman and when
he asked for his expenses from a rich horse breeder they had to throw in an extra five hundred bucks for what he explained as “whores, booze, . tattoos and shit medicine.”
After dinner the Texan invited Cochran to accompany him to a whorehouse but he declined saying he’d feed, walk and water the horse.
“Strikes me you had a big day and some poontang might ease your mind.”
“Nope. Killed a man I hated today and I don’t want to mix my pleasures. I want to lay in bed and think how good it felt.”
The Texan nodded and lit a cigar. He was no man’s fool.
“I expect you had your reasons. I blew the foot off a man years ago who screwed my wife. Did a year for it but I smiled thinking of that bastard’s empty boot.”
The Texan made an arrangement with a waiter who called a cab. Cochran went back to the room, looked in the mirror and barely recognized himself. He rinsed the dried blood off Mauro’s knife in the sink, then fingered the strange necklace. He whistled that folk song and one bar soared tremulously against the back of his brain. He knew he had barely begun and couldn’t care less if he died in the trying. In a curious way he was one of those pilots to whom the distance from the ground never removed the threat of death: his imagination was too great for that. He went out to walk the horse thinking morosely that the Texan was tottering precariously on the edge of death, knew it, and was stepping on the gas.
He awoke just after dawn and was alarmed to see the Texan hadn’t returned. He found him in the pickup, gray-faced with his shirtfront caked with blood and vomit. He examined him for wounds and found none, then took his pulse which was irregular. He walked the horse a few minutes wondering what to do. Back in the truck the Texan squinted at him and asked feebly for a beer. He drew a beer from the tepid water of the cooler and watched the Texan swallow his pills.
“You got to see a doctor, friend.”
The Texan nodded and fell asleep. Cochran found Route 40 to Durango and Torreón, then stopped for coffee to think things over. He knew the wise blood would say to abandon the man and get on with his business. But he hadn’t the heart to do it and it should be anyway just another day. He walked back to the truck and now the Texan’s eyes were open.
“I can see what you’re thinking. Is this old fucker going to die on my hands? What will I do with him for Jesus’s sake and what will I do with the fucking horse? So don’t worry, just help me deliver the horse and I’ll make it worth your while. I says to this lady last night, make it good it might be my last and she made it pretty good.” He mumbled all of this and Cochran stared out the window embarrassed, driving intensely along the twisting mountain road to Durango, as the Texan fell into a deep sleep.
The Texan perked up somewhat after lunch in Durango and they had started on the road for Torreón. The air-conditioning had given out and it was nightmarishly hot. He talked giddily about the horse business while Cochran brooded about Durango. He thought that once you got off the tourist tract Mexico became a lot less comprehensible, almost feudal and difficult to move in without notice. He needed desperately to devise some sort of cover and horse trader wouldn’t do. He might have to use his friend’s Mexico City government connection though he wished not to. He had to be smart enough to reach Miryea without getting murdered in the process. He was startled halfway to Torreón to find the Texan grasping his arm.
“Was that the big man that shoved in you: face? May-be more?” Now the man was flushed and clenched his hands repeatedly. “You don’t have to say nothing. Tell you the truth I think I’m shitcanned but this is good-looking country and I never wanted to die where it was ugly. I dreamed I’d die in Big Timber, Montana. Just put me under a fucking rock as I don’t want buzzards to get me.”
A little later they reached a resplendent hacienda with two sets of gates with guards, concentration camp barbed wire, formal gardens, swimming pool, a clay tennis court, jumping ring for horses, a lavish home and stables. They drank sherry waiting for the baróne to arrive. The Texan accepted the open cigar box of money and closed the box without counting the money.
“I assume I’ll be able to reach my home without being relieved of this money,” the Texan said in surprisingly formal Spanish.
The baróne laughed and said in Oxford English, “I sympathize with your worries.” He handed the Texan his card. “Just repeat the name to anyone who would bother you. They will shit down their legs and run like rabbits.”
They were shown to a guesthouse next to the stables where they were served a meal and a bottle of Scotch. During the night the Texan began talking to his mother and walked around alternately laughing and weeping and drinking. He died just after three A.M. and Cochran adjusted him in a sitting position so rigor mortis would cooperate with the seat of the pickup. At first light he loaded the Texan into the pickup and drew his Stetson over his eyes. He waved to the guards on the way out through the double gates and buried the Texan a few miles down the road under the rocks as he had desired. Three cows watched with momentary curiosity. Cochran drove straight through to Mexico City with occasional brief naps. On the way back through Durango he whistled Miryea’s little song which gave him strength. He was a hard man to beat now; he was on his way. Somebody had stolen his soul and he meant to have it back. He made Mexico City in twenty-four hours and abandoned the truck and trailer in the parking lot of the airport. In the trailer he dressed in the Texan’s best clothes and caught a cab for the Camino Real with a cigar box under his arm.
The nunnery in which Miryea was held as a prisoner was seven miles or so from Durango in the country house of an eighteenth-century nobleman, now fallen a bit over the edge of decay but pleasant to look at from a distance where it reminded you of Normandy. After a detoxification process to cure her of her month’s forced addiction in the brothel, she was let out of her room and left to wander in the courtyard with the other patients who were considered well mannered enough to be given this minimal freedom. She was watched closely by a homely mean-minded nun with a trace of a moustache. No chances would be taken with so profitable a prisoner. Miryea especially disgusted the mother superior; how could a woman of such noble birth and good education become a drug addict and a crazed prostitute in the cheapest brothel and have her features severely marred by some pimp. The letter given her by Señor Mendez’s chauffeur was a heartbreaking plea to save the poor woman’s soul. But the mother superior was essentially kind, if a trifle venal, and after a month she allowed Miryea to order some books from Mexico City though she inspected the letter carefully. The young girls, barely more than children and schizoid, received a great deal of mothering attention from other inmates, but there were three little autistic girls who were left totally alone in their mute darkness because they responded to no one. Miryea decided to make them her own special charge and sought books on the subject. She sat for days on end in the sunny courtyard with the three children, helped dress and feed them, sang them to sleep and used her considerable wit to try to get any conceivable response. She nervously rubbed the scar on her lips which had healed into a thin cord of hardened tissue. She was traumatized to a degree that her thoughts turned mostly to her childhood summers on Cozumel. She and her sister would swim all day, pick flowers, collect seashells, and when their household held no other guests, accompany their father out into the Gulf on his big sportfishing boat. Her father had died years before or he would have surely come to her aid. One of the boatmates had made love to her sister when she was only thirteen and her father had had the man conveniently drowned on a long trip looking for sailfish. She dared not believe her lover would come for her though she refused to believe him dead. Someday she would leave this place and find out the great harm she had done him, and perhaps, if he were not repelled by the scars, they would be lovers again, if only on the moon. Often she would lose contact totally in her dreaming and on becoming conscious again, would be surprised she was alive, would touch her hands together and look around the room or courtyard with truly appalled curiosity. When her dread became esp
ecially 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.