Jim Harrison: Legends of the Fall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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