Legends of the Fall (10 page)

"It's sad that you can't simply shoot the man. It would be so simple. And get us all killed."

"I figure it's far past killing him unless it's necessary. I'd like to think he knows when he's beat."

"Neither of us knows when we are beat. How can we expect it of him? Losing a woman isn't being beat, it's losing a woman. It happens to everyone." Amador paused. "I lost my wife when I was a young man but I was a fool. She was less a fool than me and walked away."

"Same thing with me. The business of killing doesn't make good husbands. I miss my daughter but my wife is now married to my brother. I was her father by accident and now he's her true father." Cochran paused to listen to the coyotes, then fingered the teeth around his neck. He felt the ache of a man who had followed his passion far into the nether reaches of human activity with the full understanding that a return was improbable. Any number of men would go to the moon on a rocket designed for a one-way trip. It was stupidly enough in the genes, either as a molecular mishap or a simple throwback to a time when a knight would go off to the Thirty Years War and be surprised when no one recognized him when he walked back in the door. That was why he revered the year at Torrejón though he had seemed anxious and hearth-bound teaching young pilots. But as the year receded into the past it provided the single total grace note of his adult life: his wife as a country person loved walking too, and they covered the old districts of Madrid, and Barcelona and Seville too when he had taken a few days' leave. Once they had gone to Málaga for a week and lived in a seaside
pensióne,
spending the days watching their daughter swim and their nights talking about the future, deciding to invest all their substantial savings in his father's tuna boat that badly needed new engines. Then he would have a full share in the business when he left the service. The debt had long been repaid but he had let it lie fallow in the bank in San Diego.

Amador shook him awake and offered a cup of coffee from a Thermos. Music full of night laments and broken hearts and busted guts came from the radio and for a moment he thought himself back at Diller's mission with the grand fat man checking his pulse through the night, muttering his prayers and humming to the first shrill bird-song of dawn.

"It's a long walk in the dark but I know the way. Too cold for snakes and we have a three-quarter moon."

They got out of the car and he shivered and the coffee steamed upward from his cup in the moonlight. He smelled the strange animal smell of the oil Amador had put on his rifle. In the distance a mountain wall cast a huge shadow beyond which the tips of the pines picked up the shimmering moonlight. He traced his fingers on the frost on the car hood, blew on his hands and felt for the .44 behind the warm goatskin vest borrowed from Amador's nephew. He walked around the car and touched Amador's shoulder.

"Look, friend. If this gets messy your first thought must be to save yourself. It makes sense for me to die. But not for you."

"Don't worry." Amador breathed deeply watching the vapor turn cold and visible. "I had a dream last week that I'd die an old man, you know, in a rocking chair on the porch of my little ranch. I trust my dreams." Then he laughed, "And my skills. This is the only thing I was ever good at."

They made the long hike in total silence following a winding shepherds' path. Once they paused on an escarpment to watch a creek glittering silver far below. They were startled by a mule deer crashing through the brush but the sound of the coyotes grew farther and farther distant.

They reached the spot early and stood by the creek smoking cigarettes. Then the first light came from the east as a faint gray smear on the horizon through the neck of the canyon. The birds started then, and Amador walked to a cottonwood tree ten yards off the trail.

"You sit here under the tree. I'll be hidden on the hillside. Tiburón will think you are a ghost. Have your hands out-turned and empty to show you aren't armed. And trust me."

"Of course. What else?" They shook hands and Cochran watched Amador scramble easily up the hillside with the rifle swaying from the strap on his back. He waved when Amador stopped and turned around, then he sat under the tree and stared at the small meadow beside the creek. He sat so still and long that the birds came close and a doe and her fawn drank from the creek. He sat through his miseries until he had no more thoughts by the time the dawn warmed and he no longer could see his breath. A crow passed giving him a sideward glance and a puzzled squawking. The first vulture appeared catching sun on his wings far above the canyon's cool shadows. He was watching the vulture when he first heard the horses in the distance. Then Tibey's bird dogs, a male and a female English pointer, trotted past, swiveling suddenly at his scent. The male approached growling while the female stayed on the trail, curious and wiggling with excitement. He shushed the male and it sat wagging its tail in a thump against the ground. He petted the dog and pointed with his hand and the dogs, obedient to hand signal, rushed off looking for quail.

The Crazy One was riding lead but Tiburón had come into view behind when the lead horse neighed and twisted, his neck catching the scent of the man under the tree. They both saw him at once staring blankly through them. The Crazy One raised his shotgun and Tiburón raised his hand to say no when Amador's first shot tore through The Crazy One's head, catapulting him from the saddle. Two more shots sent him sprawling on the grass. Tiburón reined his rearing horse while the riderless horse galloped off. Then Tiburón dismounted without turning around to look at the dead man. He tethered his horse on a bush and sighed deeply. Tiburón stopped in front of him and then suddenly between his thighs and out of the sight of Amador there was a gun in his hand and Cochran was staring down the small black hole of the barrel.

"Perhaps we should both die now," Tibey whispered.

"Maybe so," Cochran nodded coldly. Tibey was red-eyed and haggard, smelling of last night's whiskey. Tibey shrugged and looked up at the bows of the trees catching the first rays of the sun to enter the canyon. He flicked the gun away into a clump of grass.

"I ask you as a gentleman and a former friend to ask my forgiveness for taking my wife away from me."

"I ask your forgiveness for taking your wife away from you."

Both men stood then and Amador scrambled down the hillside shaking his head at the pistol in the grass. They walked off following the same path Amador and Cochran had taken in the night. At the car they drank a lukewarm beer thirstily and Amador and Tibey spoke about the mountains.

They reached the nunnery by noon and the mother superior was shocked at the sudden appearance of Señor Mendez and the two sweating ruffians with so noble a gentleman. She apologized to Tibey for the condition of his wife and said the doctor was with her. Tibey put his arm on her shoulder and smiled.

"What kind of gossip have you listened to? It is the wife of my friend here. You take care of him."

The woman led them to Miryea's room where Cochran sat on the edge of the bed, then leaned kissing her wounded and fevered lips. The doctor came to the door where Amador and Tibey stood looking at their feet.

"I doubt that anything may be done for her. She is too weak to move."

Tibey's face contorted and he hissed. "Make her well or I'll put your heart in your mouth, you fucking pig." Amador led Tibey and the startled doctor away. The mother superior stood there for a moment then followed them down the corridor sighing and offering prayers.

Cochran sat there for an afternoon and a night—drinking coffee, holding Miryea's hands, caressing her brow, pacing the room when the doctor entered. At first light she regained consciousness and they embraced wordlessly. She slept for a while and he dozed off sitting in the chair until the afternoon heat awakened him. Then he had to be restrained as the doctor gave her a tracheotomy to ease her breathing and then she was near death for another night and day. He lay on the floor in the night refusing all thought, listening to her rasping breathing through the oxygen unit Amador had brought from town. The pauses in her breathing at times became agonizing in their length and then short and staccato. When he no longer could bear it he ran down into the courtyard and screamed. The lights were turned on and the patients returned his screams hearing his particular voice for the first time. Amador, Tibey and the doctor came running from their temporary quarters in the kitchen. He fought them until Amador subdued him with a choke-hold. Tibey helped hold him down and the doctor gave him a shot to allow him to sleep.

Hours later when he awoke on his pallet in a strange room he stood and glanced at the hot sun through the barred window. He found the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee while Amador, Tibey and the doctor sat at the table. The doctor nervously averted his glance.

Later on the afternoon of the third day Miryea regained consciousness. He spoke eagerly and in a rush of nearly incoherent words. She whispered that she wanted to go out in the garden. He ran for the doctor who shrugged in defeat and followed him back to the room and bandaged Miryea's throat. Cochran carried her down into the garden where the patients were being herded in for dinner. The autistic children passed them without seeing, keening their private dirges like hoarse earthbound birds whose sufferings would never be answered on earth. He held her tightly in his arms remembering how light a dead bird felt when he picked it out of a thicket in the Indiana woods. He spoke again in a rush trying to keep her alive by the power in the energy of his words: it was as if his brain had split open and he plunged, raked, dug, mining any secret he might hold to bring her to health. He put the necklace from Mauro's mother around her neck remembering with horror that she had said he would only take vengeance on his enemies. He invented a universe of words but they were only words. He invented a child for them to walk with in Seville and she smiled and nodded yes. Twilight passed into near dark and Amador watched impassively, partly hid by a column. He stopped the doctor from approaching them. The half-moon came up windblown but shrunken and a gust whipped the flowers from a flowering almond. Cochran whispered on and then as full dark descended she sang the song he knew so well in a throaty voice that only faintly surpassed the summer droning of a cicada. It was her death song and she passed from life seeing him sitting there as her soul billowed softly outward like a cloud parting. It began to rain and a bird in the tree above them crooned as if he were the soul of some Mayan trying to struggle his way back earthward.

There was one man digging under the tree and two men watching. The man dug with a mechanical intentness, using an ax for the tree roots, a pick for the rocks, and a shovel for the heavy soil. He noted the marbling and striations of soil as he descended into the earth on a hot afternoon. The man named Amador sat on a bench and drew down his sombrero and sang in a hushed voice. The man named Tiburón, Tibey, Señor Baldassaro Mendez sat on the bench and held his face in his hands as the man dug with terrible energy, methodical, inevitable. The mother superior watched with a mildly bored priest from beneath the portico. A number of patients idled back and forth, distracted by the activity. A pine casket lay on top of two sawhorses. On the casket a large bouquet of wild flowers sat wilting in the sun. When the hole was dug the man paused, sweating, then pulled himself up and over the edge. He knelt by the side of a pile of soil and the two men on the bench slid forward and knelt beside him. The priest and the nun moved forward with the insane crowding behind them. The priest said a short service and the two men in front of the bench lowered the casket into the hole. The man who had dug the hole lowered himself into the earth, knelt and kissed the flowers. He lifted himself from the hole, picked up the shovel and threw in some earth with a thump he would hear on his own deathbed.

Nordstrom had taken to dancing alone. He considered his sanity to be unblemished and his nightly dances an alternative to the torpor of calisthenics. He had chided himself of late for so perfectly living out all of his mediocre assumptions about life. The dancing was something new and owned an almost metaphysical edginess to it. At forty-three he was in fine but not spectacular shape, though of late he felt a certain softness, a blurring in the perimeters of his body. After cleaning up the dishes from a late dinner he would dim the lights in the den and put an hour's worth of music on the stereo though recently he often increased it to two hours; the selection was eclectic depending on his mood and might on any evening include music as varied as Merle Haggard, Joplin's
Pearl,
the Beach Boys, Stravinsky's
The Rite of Spring,
Otis Redding and The Grateful Dead. The point was to keep moving, to work up a dense sweat and to feel the reluctant body become fluid and graceful.

The fact of the matter is that Nordstrom wasn't a very good dancer but when you're dancing alone, who cares?

Beginning with his childhood in Wisconsin he had been an excellent swimmer, a fair fly-caster and bird hunter, a fair basketball player, a fair linebacker, a fair golfer and a fair tennis player. Only the swimming haunted his dreams, all other sports had been discarded. Perhaps swimming was dancing in the water, he thought. To swim under lily pads seeing their green slender stalks wavering as you passed, to swim under upraised logs past schools of sunfish and blue-gills, to swim through reed beds past wriggling water snakes and miniature turtles, to swim in small lakes, big lakes, Lake Michigan, to swim in small farm ponds, creeks, rivers, giant rivers where one was swept along easefully by the current, to swim naked alone at night when you were nineteen and so alone you felt like you were choking every waking moment, having left home for reasons more hormonal than rational; reasons having to do with the abstraction of the future and one's questionable place in the world of the future, an absurdity not the less harsh for being so widespread.