by John Nichols
As might have been foreseen, an unforeseen development occurred. The magnets created in the livestock a rabid desire for poptops, nails, thumbtacks, you name it. So that shortly after the program started, entire herds were crazed with an obsession to eat metal. Tethered close to homes, instead of grazing on weeds, lawns, or fallen apples, cows, sheep, and horses wound up browsing through bald areas for nails, drill-bit shavings, or automobile bodywork leavings. The valley’s last ranchers looked on apprehensively, thankful that these valuable animals were protected by those thumb-sized magnets keeping the dangerous metals away from fragile stomach walls. Twice, Eloy Irribarren’s Daisy broke out of her little corral in order to forage for tin cans, nails, and junk TV sets around the mobile homes in the Irving Newkirk Trailer Park down the road.
Almost in unison, approximately two weeks after the magnets were introduced en masse, nearly all the remaining Chamisa County livestock belonging to desperate old-timers like Telesforo Arrellano, Tuburcio Casados, and the grave-digging Vigil brothers, Anselmo and Roberto, dropped dead. Ruined beyond repair, these impoverished Chicanos sold out and slunk from the valley—dismayed, defeated, destroyed.
Two VISTAs and Chamisaville’s last Chicano farmer, Eloy Irribarren, slit open Daisy’s belly. They discovered that her stomach was completely engorged with, and perforated by, an enormous metallic ball resembling a porcupine or a medieval mace. Jaws agape, the volunteers stared at this lethal weapon, then apologized profusely. “Win a few, lose a few,” they grinned sickly … and began talking about forming cricket-raising cooperatives with an idea toward exporting the little critters to Indonesia, where apparently they were considered a great delicacy.
But before that could happen, the VISTA program was disbanded for want of floundering Chicano farmers to eradicate.
Eloy Irribarren gathered old tires from the dump and burned his beloved cow. “And the greasy smoke, in an inky cloak, went streaking down the sky.”
Other unforeseeable complications continued to run rampant. Tipped into insanity by Eloy’s unsuccessful investment in the stomach-magnet program, and not wishing to be a further burden on her loving husband, Teresita Irribarren stole the last two hundred dollars from their sugar jug, and ran away from their tiny house, moving into the shabby Dynamite Shrine Motor Court to die. Eloy was frantic. He searched far and wide for Teresita, but never thought to check out so unlikely a haven as the deteriorating motel.
On her first day in exile, Teresita wandered up to the post office where she had received a letter from a famous Texas department store, pushing its Christmas sales, suggesting that she buy his-and-hers airplanes, a six-thousand-dollar mouse ranch, or music lessons with a world-renowned pianist at four grand for each half-hour shot. Unbalanced by these offers, Teresita wandered downtown to the courthouse and threatened to turn Judge Michael Cooper into a toad. Then she trudged back to the motor court and mail-ordered a single pair of pliers to pull her last tooth. Four days later she received a letter from the mail-order house asking why she wanted ten thousand pliers. Timidly approaching a lawyer, Lafe Stryzpk, Teresita asked him to explain that she only needed a single pair, which he did. A week passed, then Teresita received twenty large reinforced cardboard boxes containing ten thousand pliers. Baffled, she explained to the postmaster, Cal Spooner, that there had been a terrible mistake. In no mood for excuses, having severely sprained his back that morning lugging the boxes in off the rear dock, Cal screamed at her, saying the boxes could only go back to the mail-order house if Teresita paid the return postage, a cool three hundred dollars. Weeping, the puzzled old woman limped over to Irving Newkirk’s pawnshop and unloaded her wedding ring for the required amount. But on her way back to the post office, a teen-age hoodlum snatched her purse, slugged her in the face with it, knocking out that remaining tooth, and fled. At the post office, Teresita tried to explain that chain of events to Cal Spooner. He growled, dialed the county sheriff, Eddie Semmelweis, and said, “You better come quick, Edward, I got a real lulu on my hands.” Eddie started for the post office, but on his way he heard shots ring out in Irving Newkirk’s cafe, home of Chamisaville’s 110-Percent Pure-Beef Horsemeat-burger. Slamming on the brakes, Eddie swerved into the café parking lot just as two men waving guns sprinted out the door looking backward as they fired at somebody inside. They galloped smack into Eddie’s cruiser, which was still going about forty in a braking fishtail. Eddie jumped out, crossed himself, and ran inside, where the cook, Morty Gimbell, who had signed on with Irving during one of the emergency ambulance service’s perennial collapses from lack of county funds, was sitting on the floor between the counter and the kitchen, a bullet lodged in his abdomen. “What the hell happened?” Eddie asked.
“They said I gave them lousy cheeseburgers.”
Meanwhile, Teresita Irribarren had returned to her room. She lay on her bed, exhausted, listening to a KKCV news program emanating from her small electric heater. After a while, she plugged in the electric blanket and picked up a Texas country-and-western program issuing from the blanket’s coils. Then she noticed somebody was selling clothes in Spanish on a program being broadcast from the light switch. Teresita shrugged and went to sleep. She thought she could hear the violin of an aged friend, Espeedie Cisneros, back in the old days, playing a faint Sunday melody, the beautiful “Vals de Entriega.” And was that Juan Ortega’s accordion?—but he had died three, or was it four? years earlier. His music was related to a time now characterized as “Long Ago.”
Across town, Eloy Irribarren sat behind the wheel of his decrepit pickup truck, weeping quietly, exhausted from his fruitless search, and all out of money he needed to buy more gas to travel around the valley, searching for his beloved wife.
Fifteen minutes after Eddie Semmelweis put out an all-points, hoping to identify the fingerprints of the two dead gunmen who’d plugged Morty Gimbell, a Southern Pacific Gas Company odorant machine, used to scent the normally odorless gas so people could tell if their pipes were leaking, dumped fourteen times the normal amount of stink juice into Chamisaville’s natural gas lines, causing utter panic. Stores, office buildings, bars, homes, and tourist traps emptied. The streets became clogged with hysterical people convinced the entire town would explode within seconds. To make matters worse, those who dialed Southern Pacific Gas Company headquarters for an explanation found themselves listening, instead, to a tape-recorded dirty joke dealing with three traveling salesmen, a farmer’s daughter, and a watermelon patch, apparently the prank of a demented person who had tapped the phone lines and wired in the recording.
Next morning, Teresita Irribarren awoke at dawn, dressed, walked out her front door, and almost toppled into a six-foot-deep hole that had appeared at her cabin’s front stoop during the night. She limped unhappily over to the mayor’s office, and Sonny Christiansen sent Robert Needles to investigate. By the time Robert arrived, the hole was ten feet in diameter and eight feet deep. Robert contacted Jim Bob Popper, an ex-cop now head of city sanitation, asking him to dump a truckload of refuse into the Dynamite Shrine sinkhole: Jim Bob happily complied. But that first truckload of garbage vanished into the pit like a peanut disappearing into a zoo elephant. Jim Bob blinked, and called for a second dump-truck load: it also vanished. With that, Jim Bob advised Robert that they had a “live one” on their hands. And for the next eight hours the town’s two garbage trucks lumbered in and out of the Dynamite Shrine courtyard, feeding that insatiable hole. By dusk it had slowed down a bit, digesting the day’s garbage made by thousands of people. But next morning the hole had widened slightly, devouring Teresita’s front stoop—once more she summoned the mayor.
Sonny Christiansen, Peter Moose, Ken Eagleton, Robert Needles, and Jim Bob Popper gathered at the edge of the hole, frowning. Then they sent a fleet of town and county trucks to Randolph Bonney’s wrecking yard, and proceeded to dump about a hundred old rubber tires into the hole. The tires joggled, settled, and disappeared. Sonny tapped his upper lip thoughtfully with a pencil eraser, wondering,
pensively, if the jig was up. Maintaining a calm exterior, however, he marshaled a group of town employees to wrestle over a few car hulks from the Bonney Junke Yarde, and the wrecks were duly toppled into the hole. They settled slowly into a foreign bubbling substance, and disappeared.
Puzzled, the men paced around the hole, squatted, and sniffed its odor, frowned concernedly, thoughtfully pinched their chins between thumb and forefinger, and stamped about on the ground at various distances from the cavity.
Then, at an impasse, and also at the end of a working day, the disaster technicians decided to close up shop and tackle the problem afresh in the morning.
That night, while Teresita Irribarren lay still listening to a babble of radio programs issuing from the light switch, the electric heater, and her electric blanket, the hole widened and her little cabin slid into it. Awake and alert, fully aware of what was happening, the old woman remained alive for several minutes at the heart of an historical darkness as profound and dismaying as that which must have captured many a dinosaur of yore. Then she was mercifully suffocated by the heavy, engulfing environment, joining eternity, becoming fossil; a slight, white memory of a different, more compassionate age.
* * *
AS THE SEVENTIES neared extinction, things calmed down in Chamisaville. The transition, so to speak, had completed itself. Only Eloy Irribarren, a stubborn old man, hung on to his tiny farm, which everybody but everybody wished to wrest from his grasp.
Beyond that, Chamisaville’s agricultural heritage had finally gone the way of the dodo, and a new society reigned, teeming with adventures of a different mettle. Middle-class America ruled the picturesque valley: Progress had triumphed.
1
SATURDAY NIGHT
Six at the top means:
One falls into the pit.
It was a springtime Saturday night in Chamisaville. The moon over the Pueblo’s sacred peak, Hija Negrita, seemed as soft as the color of a newborn colt. Stars hovered like awed fireflies above the nervous little city. Honky-tonk music from dozens of funky bars danced among the valley’s myriad security lamps forever frozen at the foot of the mysterious mesa wave that unfurled from the base of the Midnight Mountains and extended its graceful, sage-flecked spume westward to the Rio Grande Gorge. North of town, the brightly lit lime-green bubble over Tennis Heaven’s indoor courts glowed silkily. Into the enchanted night faintly echoed a rhythmic thwock! caused by rackets leisurely pummeling high-altitude balls inside that rippling diaphanous gem. A tinkle of cocktail ice sounded at the nearby open-air restaurant. The sizzling odor of charcoal-broiled steaks wafted onto the mesa. Candlelight flickered; perfume pulsed; bare and milky white shoulders gleamed. The laughter of young, tanned, and healthy couples evoked reminiscences of a nostalgic yesteryear.
A small executive jet, its green and red lights blinking lazily, landed at the airport. Greyhounds streaked around the Pueblo track: the glare of stadium lights was softened by the appleblossom- and chamisa-scented air. Echoes from the loudspeaker carried west beyond the Ya-Ta-Hey Hotel (on the shores of man-made Bonatelli Lake): they could be faintly heard west of the North-South Highway at the renovated hot-baths complex, where late-night diners finished off their Alaskan crabs, and several bathers still cavorted in the steaming mineral pools so seductively illuminated by underwater bulbs. And strains of old-fashioned mood music issued from an orchestra plying the geriatric pilgrim crowd shuffling about the mahogany floors of the King Cole Executive Room of the Dynamite Shrine Dining Salon, above which a peculiarly insistent star twinkled like a gem born of some less than radiant, but still highly provocative, foam.
At first, that pearl-sized glow high above the hot springs seemed immobile. But then it moved, casually floating through the velvet obscurity, growing larger as it leisurely approached the earth a half-mile west of the Dynamite Shrine complex. A flying saucer? Chamisavillians certainly had a reputation for spotting all kinds of distinctive UFOs. Yet nobody down below remarked on this phenomenon. It shimmered, but not eerily; the thing seemed almost shy, unwilling to bask in splendor. Shape- and size-wise, as it neared the sagebrush plain, it seemed chrysalis oblong and enclosed, and twice as large as a birchbark canoe. The light emanating from its soft skin was dulcet, pussy-willow calm. It settled into pungent mauve vegetation and quivered relaxedly for a moment, then grew very still.
After a while, a human-shaped phantom seeped through the vehicle’s wall, assembled its fluffy molecules into an even tighter form, and spent some minutes meticulously brushing off its toga.
An angel, by God! Complete with big wings and a real-life halo!
And in its hands? A piece of paper, upon which was written a single name:
JOE MINIVER
ON THE PLAZA, when he descended from his dilapidated VW bus and headed for the Hanuman Follies Benefit Dance at the Cinema Bar above the Plaza movie theater, Joe Miniver—former ad copywriter and currently an “independent sanitation engineer”—was a nervous wreck. His life, his future, his well-being, perhaps even his freedom (and no doubt his sanity, not to mention his incipient stomach ulcer) were on the line.
Just that afternoon he had committed himself, on paper, and with three thousand dollars in earnest money, to purchasing the last piece of virgin land in Upper Ranchitos. Picturesque, relevant, and useful, the 1.7 acres included verdant pastures, two irrigation ditches, a host of cottonwoods and chinese elms, a few scraggly fruit trees, a tiny old adobe ruin (inhabited by Eloy Irribarren, a crippled octogenarian), and even a hand-dug well.
Naturally, it would cost Joe an arm and half a leg, if he managed to raise the balance due (in cash) by the scheduled closing ten days hence. Since Joe’s Chamisaville arrival three years ago, land values in that part of the valley, only a mile west of the plaza, had zoomed from around four thousand to twenty thousand an acre.
“If only we had bought land and a house three years ago,” Joe had recently moaned to his wife, Heidi.
“If only Santa Claus was Mongolian,” she had replied, “reindeer would have it easy.”
The problem, of course, was that Joe possessed not nearly enough bread to plunk down at the closing for this lovely parcel of vestigial greenery that had recently fallen, like a plump South American tapir, into the piranha-infested waters of Chamisaville’s real-estate scene. And if he did not somehow accumulate the wherewithal by a week from this upcoming Monday, Joe would not only sacrifice the three-thousand-dollar holding fee, but he would no doubt suffer a breakdown watching as the other valley hustlers interested in this final piece of Chamisaville’s agricultural heritage maneuvered for the right to rape it loyally.
Working against Joe from the start had been his lack of access to financial muscle. In his favor, however, was Eloy Irribarren’s determination to sell to the Minivers if at all possible.
Naturally, Joe had a plan. Born out of desperation, it was a long shot that spotlighted his life savings of fifteen thousand dollars, featured a reprobate East Coast pal named Peter Roth (and five pounds of uncut cocaine) due in on tonight’s 2:35 A.M. Trailways bus, involved two Chamisaville buddies—Tribby Gordon and Ralph Kapansky—who’d promised to help step on, and then unload, the shit, and was, of course, a highly illegal operation.
For many Americans of Joe’s background, education, and aspirations, such a plan would have been a routine adventure. Joe, however, had never done anything illegal. On top of that, he was terrified of drugs, drug people, drug transactions, and drug culture. His wife enjoyed an occasional joint. And Joe had even toked up on occasion. But he absolutely prohibited Heidi from growing the stuff at home in clay pots on their window ledges. And he had always insisted that her household stash never exceed the quantities that could push a conviction out of the misdemeanor into the felony range.
Still, these days, how was a fellow to purchase some land for the benefit and heritage of his family, let alone build a comfortable house to go on it? Inflation of fifteen percent, and interest rates in double figures on home-loan mortgages th
at were nearly impossible to come by anyway in the tight money market, had made it all but impossible for folks in Joe and Heidi’s middle-class income bracket to score a home through hard work and conscientious parsimony.
Never a whiz at figures, or at the economic legerdemain necessary to manipulate capitalism into a benevolent financial overextension guaranteeing all the amenities America had to offer, Joe had, for the past month, been boggled by the complexities involved in finagling for Eloy’s pretty acreage. The old man himself had no desire to sell. Cantankerous, clever, and proud, he was an anachronism, a lost soul, the final human being of his race and cultural line afloat in the valley. During the last few years, as he stubbornly held out against the myriad interests grasping for his little piece of property, Eloy had become a legend in his own time:
Eloy Irribarren, irascible old coot and tenacious SOB—the Last Chicano.
Like a fanatical dervish, Eloy had begged, borrowed (and many said stolen) to save his place, pay for his dying wife Teresita’s final illness, and hire lawyers to tangle with the banks, loan sharks, realtors, bill collectors, and other assorted thugs interested in his terrain. Only recently, a week after his wife’s funeral, had it become clear to Eloy that the jig was up. He had signed too many promissories, itemized fees, and loan agreements to stall any further. The best he could hope for, once the vieja had been interred, was to avoid foreclosure by selling out quickly to someone who might treasure the land in its native state, simple and green and agricultural, the only monument to Eloy’s life and beliefs, the only true reflection of his soul.