by John Nichols
Such minuscule and lackadaisical murder! Joe actually turned a little and reached out to nip death in the bud. But his paralyzed hand only barely twitched as the bullet casually floated by. His eyes could follow it, however. For sure, when that lazy projectile reached Eloy’s blue workshirt, it would bounce harmlessly off the cloth, clattering to the floor. Yet instead, it burrowed as if by magic into the cloth and disappeared between the ribs, leaving a tiny hole behind.
Twisting violently, the old man kicked over backward, landing with a scary thump—he skidded several yards across the floor.
Astonished, Joe returned his attention to Tom Yard just in time to catch another puff of smoke—a slug zipped past his ear, smashing into glass behind his head. Instinctively, Joe raised the hand that should have held his gun—but it was empty: he’d left the fucking revolver on the seat of Eloy’s truck! Then his left leg kicked backward from underneath him, and, as he dropped, another explosion sounded.
With that, Joe woke up, terrified, scrambling for his life … on his knees … toward Eloy. The floor at his fingertips exploded into fragments that stung his arm and belly but didn’t stop him. He grabbed Eloy’s rifle, swung it around wildly, and fired a shot; Tom Yard dove over a partition for cover. Dropping the .30-.30, Joe grabbed Eloy, and, with superhuman strength, yanked him erect. In the same desperate fluid motion, he whirled, staggering for the door. Two more loud reports deafened them: another slug, hitting Eloy, knocked them both over: they crunched into the glass door. On his knees, Joe banged open the exit with his head, struggled frantically upright, and plummeted outside, Eloy more or less in his arms.
They were drenched in hot, gooey blood.
The gum-chewing kid saluted them again: “Hiyah, monkeys—what’s funky?”
Blindly, getting there by sheer instincts alone, Joe lugged Eloy to the passenger side of his pickup. Enraged, he yanked open the door, almost tearing it off its hinges, and thrust Eloy inside. He slammed the door—it wouldn’t close, bouncing off Eloy’s ankle: Joe kicked the offending foot away, and banged the door shut for good, then leaped around the hood, achieved the driver’s seat, fired up the vehicle, and took off, his open door ricocheting off a shiny Chrysler and bouncing shut as they leaped into their getaway. Tom Yard crouched in the First State doorway, gun held in both hands, arms extended straight in front of him, aiming. Joe saw no smoke, heard no blast, yet the entire windshield shattered. Then they escaped, rocketing into a freedom of squealing rubber, shattering tin and expectations, groans, terror, and vehicular mayhem.
If startled pedestrians didn’t give ground he would kill them … so they stepped aside. They leaped into ditches, flattened against buildings, crashed through fences, and smacked into each other; they dived, packages flew from their arms … a dog yelped … curses trailed their flight. Farther down the road, a crew of orange hardhats scattered, a backhoe driver bailed out in terror, and only at the last moment did Joe swerve enough to avoid plunging into a sewer pit. At that, the right rear tire caught on the edge of the hole, swinging them sideways: a terrific thump ensued, their rear end dropped, then they bounded so high Joe’s head bashed the crippled ceiling of Eloy’s pickup, almost knocking him out.
Yet it also brought him to his senses—the blow. Joe braked, skidded onto a shoulder, stopped, and yanked off his mask. Then he pushed Eloy upright, and, tenderly, removed the old man’s gorilla disguise. Eloy gulped for air. His cheeks were soaked and crimson.
“We’re not far from the hospital,” Joe said.
“Take me home, boy. I have to clear up some things.”
“You might not live if you do.…”
“I’ll live long enough to complete my chores.”
Astonishingly, they ran the rest of the maze unhindered: no construction snafus, fallen trees, steaming pits, or unsavory detours shackled their travel intentions. Perhaps Eloy’s defiant will to arrive home—a power as strong as Nancy Ryan’s amazing ability to blithely negotiate the Chamisaville snarl—led them there. In any case, the battered truck floated across town as if guided by an infallible laser homing-beam, and within minutes they had reached Eloy’s driveway.
* * *
MOST HANUMAN-NIKS had dispersed; grass was trampled flat, churned into dust. A few worshipers remained, sitting cross-legged near the open U-Haul, gazing at the monkey idol, meditating. A half-dozen others meandered dazedly among the temporary poplars and cook cauldrons, dreamily cleaning up paper plates and cups and plastic spoons.
Eloy said, “I wish I hadn’t rented them the land for their stupid fiesta.”
“Where’s Geronimo?”
“I tethered him up by the house.”
“Where’s the geese? And all the little dogs? What about the chickens and turkeys?”
“All gone.” Eloy coughed. “Maybe I knew this place was lost when I heard about your cocaine.” Blood glistened on his lips. “So I drove them into the hills yesterday evening. They’re on their own. Perhaps a stray coyote will get a good meal.”
The engine died. “Oh shit,” Joe murmured, “we blew it.” A great rage wrestled with mind-boggling bewilderment inside him: he had no idea what to do or suggest, and despised his helplessness. Impotent—a sorrowful excuse for a human being—he awaited orders on how best to die.
“Now you can do me a big favor,” Eloy said, as they both descended from the truck.
“I’ll try. Whatever you say.”
“Geronimo has to die. Also Duke, and Wolfie. But I can’t kill them myself. I tried. I couldn’t pull the trigger.”
Joe was horrified. “You can’t shoot them!”
“Where will they live? If I don’t kill them, an impersonal executioner will do the job once I’m gone. Please, let’s do it quickly. Then we’ll clean the acequia and irrigate the back field. It’s the only way I know to say good-bye.”
Grasping at straws, Joe said, “But we lost our guns at the bank.”
“You still have a pistol in your pocket.”
Diana’s gun! How could he have forgotten? His hand, disembodied from his heart, emerged from a front pocket clutching that little .22. He turned the gun over—it resembled a toy. Middle-class city child that he was, Joe had never killed an animal.
Eloy circled the truck, limping, and leaned on one fender. A dark stain drenched half his shirt; a soaked pantleg was plastered against one scrawny thigh.
“Do it quickly, please—shoot him.”
“How do you kill a horse?”
“Poke the barrel between his eyes.”
Joe raised his arm, bringing the barrel to within an inch of the fuzzy white patch between Geronimo’s eyes. Unspooked, nostrils fluttering faintly, the horse gave a soft compassionate whinny, and did not move his head. Instead, he lifted his tail.
“Stop a minute,” Eloy cautioned. “Let him shit.”
Joe waited while enormous, light-yellow globs of steaming dung fell heavily onto the dull earth. When the horse had finished, Eloy issued a command: “Thumb back the hammer.”
Joe did.
“Now pull the trigger.”
Out in the open like this, the report was no louder than a cap pistol. Geronimo’s legs seemed to buckle even before the slug cleared the barrel; instantly dead, he dropped heavily. Not a single bloody droplet oozed out of the tiny hole. Joe shivered, unable to comprehend that he could render inert such an enormous bulk of muscle, bone, and blood with that minuscule piece of lead.
“Now the dog.”
Duke knew it was coming. Yet he had not flinched when the gun discharged, killing Geronimo. Instead, he lay as always in front of Eloy’s door, his massive scarred head lodged against his awkward oversized paws. Avoiding Joe, his melancholy eyes gazed sadly at Eloy.
“Point the barrel at the same place.”
Joe obeyed. Duke uttered a barely audible sound, a sorrowful, remote whimper.
“Thumb back the hammer.”
Duke died instantly. His head twitched and settled, his eyes remained open, his body stiffened s
lightly, then relaxed, without altering its posture.
“Hell, this is no fun.” Joe fought crying. Eloy was dry-eyed as he said, “Now for the wolf.”
Together, dazedly, they walked past the empty pens and corrals to Wolfie’s lair. Joe knew he was hit in the leg—his left side, from the crotch down, burned numbly, without pain. He was afraid to look down or touch himself; his foot made a sloshing noise in his sneaker. Eloy staggered once, but when Joe reached to steady him, the old rancher swatted the helping hand away, leaving red goop on Joe’s wrist. Immediately, he apologized:
“Excuse me, Joe. You do me a great favor, but I’m angry at you for being a killer. I’ll be all right in a minute. Pay no attention.”
At the pen, Eloy lifted a wooden peg out of the lock-clasp holding the door. Wolfie waited expectantly. Eloy said, “Hello, Lobo. Here comes the Sebastiana.”
The wolf faced away from them slightly, and stiffened, staring into the back field where grasses grew and killdeer fluttered about hunting their meals, raising families. A meadowlark called. Starlings twittered in the four Chinese elms.
“Touch it to the back of his head, right behind the ear.”
Again, Joe followed instructions.
“Adiós, Lobo.”
The wolf never took his eyes off the green grass, the killdeer, the trees, and the starlings. Unlike the others, he did not drop when the bullet took his life, but remained standing, feet firmly planted, eyes still sucking in the springtime for almost ten seconds before he settled apologetically to earth, landing in an almost composed posture, eyes closed, forever asleep.
“Now,” said Eloy, “we will clean the acequia.”
“Are you strong enough?”
“I’m all right. I have exactly enough strength left to do what I have to do.”
* * *
ELOY HANDED the newer shovel to Joe, keeping the old one for himself. Together, they entered the back field. Removing his hat, Eloy said, “This is some day.” He revolved slowly, committing the mood to memory before they began their chore.
How to describe this suddenly beautiful and innocent afternoon? Joe wondered. The sky enfolded the planet like a little girl cuddling a kitten. The air was pure enough to have been a contestant in the Miss Teen-age America Pageant. The lilt to birdsongs totally belied their claim to be territorial imperatives. Suddenly, all ornithological music was made for the sheer joy of it. Tree leaves shimmered like a priceless chlorophyll treasure. More noisy starlings had landed in the Chinese elms. On fence posts, meadowlarks unleashed their sensationally lucid belltones. On every cattail in the valley, a redwing blackbird sang chinking melodies. And magpies cavorted in Eloy’s orchard, arguing for the sheer exhilarating fun of it like big-city cornerboys. And Joe wondered: If I hold my shovel in front of me and let go, will it levitate, held up by the buoyancy of this marvelous unflawed weather?
Such peace, at the end of the line, was almost religious. Joe shook his head, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply, ears keyed for the sound of distant sirens.
Instead, a magpie scrawked. Eloy said, “Let’s start.”
They began at the upper fenceline, cleaning the small acequia, and headed slowly north. They trenched the bottom of the knee-deep ditch and chopped at the sides, widening it a little. All the excavated dirt went on the banks, building them up a little. It seemed like a tiny and insignificant artery: I’m working on a toy acequia, Joe thought. Yet the sunshine warmed his bones; his leg remained numb and without hurt. Incredibly, despite their sorrowful situation, he could feel tugs on his heart—it wished to warble. And beside him, all of a sudden, Eloy began to whistle. Terrified by the amount of crusting blood on Eloy’s clothes, Joe could only venture quick peeks at the indomitable octogenarian. In a cracked but defiant voice Eloy sang a Spanish song. Soon they were both sweating. Eloy said, “Doing this work has always made me feel happy. I refuse to let today be an exception.”
When they encountered dry grasses along the ditch banks, Eloy struck a wooden kitchen match on his thumbnail and flicked it into the brown stalks, which caught fire instantly. Leaning on their shovel handles, they watched dreamily as flames raced along the ditch. The serenity seemed otherworldly. Eloy even gathered strength as they moved along. Apparently his wounds had quit bleeding. And when Joe briefly confronted his eyes, they were alive and bright and determined.
Nevertheless, he understood that Eloy was going to die. Death was bright and beautiful and intimate all around the man.
The acequia wandered through backyards, it almost touched the foundations of newly built homes. Where burrowing dogs had blocked it, they had to clear it out again. Where planks, over which cars traveled, had flattened the banks, they worked to build up those banks again.
Unable to reflect for long on their tragedy-in-the-making, Joe worked quietly, on the verge of tears, yet almost happy. Eloy remained dry-eyed. Obviously, some newcomers occasionally used the acequia water for their lawns and gardens. But basically, the agricultural area the ditch had once served was extinct. They cleared out no horse dung, they patched no muskrat excavations. Instead, they removed from the channel smashed tricycles, overturned doghouses, and bald car-tires. They lifted out a wrecked TV set, shifted a jungle gym thoughtlessly constructed atop the acequia, moved a woodpile completely blocking it, and pushed aside a dozen fifty-five-gallon oil drums, the refuse of a home builder who was into solar collectors.
Often people sunning themselves in their yards challenged Eloy and Joe: “Hey, what are you people doing on this property?”
“We’re just cleaning the ditch.” Eloy always answered without looking up as he methodically redug, rearchitected, and revitalized the ditch after its winter of disuse.
“But what’s the point?” a Harvard-Law-grad-turned-cocaine-dealer asked. “Who uses it anymore?”
Eloy explained: “We have a field, and we plan to irrigate it once again. Our water rights are in order. So please don’t interrupt the water flow while we’re using it.”
“I’m tired of having that trench in my backyard,” a woman complained. “It’s dangerous. I twisted my ankle in it last autumn.”
Eloy apologized politely and ambled ahead, rhythmically scooping out dirt, repeating a ritual as old as the first Indian tribes that had entered the Chamisa Valley nine centuries ago. “This is a public thoroughfare,” he told the woman, without once breaking his chopping rhythm.
“Well, I’m sick of it. Nobody ever uses it anymore.”
“We use it,” Eloy said.
“Why are you all bloody?” she asked.
“I fell on my shovel.”
She stared after them, offended by their raggedy-ass, bloody clothes.
A few minutes later they climbed over a chain link fence into Vincent and Marion Bailey’s yard and shoveled up to the back line of a badminton court while a spirited game was in progress.
“Hey, Joe,” Vincent complained, “what’s going on here?”
Eloy said, “You aren’t allowed to block the acequia.”
“What’s an ‘acequia’?”
Joe said, “It’s the ditch that transports irrigation water to our field.”
“But this is our badminton court. You can’t just come in here and—”
Eloy removed a dirty old manila envelope from his dungaree pocket. “I got all the papers in here, if you want to look at them. This acequia is the Lovatos Ditch, and it has a legal priority date of 1790. It’s still a valid artery, because we are using it. All the correct papers are on file down in the state engineer’s office, if you don’t believe me.”
“Wait a second.” Deftly, Vincent loaded and packed a pipe, and rather portentously lit it. “Now, first of all, the two of you are trespassing on private property.”
“The acequia is public property,” Eloy reiterated calmly. “It has a three-foot easement on either side.”
“All right, let’s have a look at those papers.”
Eloy handed over the blood-soaked documents, and everybody else
lolled around, impatiently cooling their heels, while Vincent frowned, puffed, and prepared to wade through the papers. Now, finally, Joe heard sirens: across the valley, miles away, cop-car cherrytops were blinking.
“Hey,” Vincent cried. “These are all in Spanish!”
“It’s the law,” Eloy explained. “For many years they had to be in both Spanish and English. You can get an English copy on file at the courthouse.”
Vincent tried another tack. He smiled, shook his head, toed the earth. “Look, this is silly. I mean, nobody can tell me what to do with my own backyard. When I bought this land nobody said I had to leave this trench open so that water could go through. If I’d known that … listen. I mean, what’s this water used for? None of my neighbors irrigates.”
“I use it to grow grass and alfalfa,” Eloy said.
“Aw, come on. Nobody grows alfalfa anymore. Hey, I’ve got an idea. You can sell your water rights, no? I mean, for cash on the barrelhead?”
Eloy nodded.
“Okay, then here’s what we’ll do. Since nobody except you uses it anymore, I’ll buy it. Or anyway, me and my neighbors, we’ll chip in and purchase the rights from you. Then we can fill in this hole, and everybody will be happy. How much are they worth, your water rights? A hundred dollars? Two hundred?”
“Two hundred thousand.”
“What?”
While Vincent, Marion, and their perspiring guests looked on aghast, Eloy led Joe up through the center of the badminton court, restoring the trench to its original depth, and building ramparts on either side.
“Why are you two all bloody?” one of the guests called to Joe.
“We fell on our shovels.”
Further along people glowered, chided, or made hostile jokes as Joe and Eloy progressed through one yard after another, clearing a channel for the trickle of Midnight River water that would irrigate the diminutive back field, perhaps for the final time.