Jim Harrison - Legends of the Fall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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