The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  Bunny Ortega, Bruce Maés, and the new man replacing Bernardo Medina (who had also died), Gilbert Otero, smiled sadly but with much sympathy when Sally and Ricardo accompanied the body to the Ortega Funeral Home in Chamisaville.

  “Well, well,” Bunny said solicitously. “So the old man finally passed away.”

  “No-no-no,” Sally sobbed. “This is my brother … his son!…”

  “Ai, Chihuahua!”

  And here it was, two years later more or less, and Joe Mondragón had precipitated a crisis, and Amarante Córdova had never been so excited in his life.

  One day, during his Doña Luz daughter’s weekly visit, Amarante told her, “Hija, you got to write me a letter to all the family.”

  Sally burst into tears. “I can’t. I won’t. No. You can’t make me.”

  “But we have to tell everyone about what José has done. They must see this thing and take part in it before they die. Tell them the shooting is about to start—”

  So Sally dutifully advised her surviving siblings about what Joe Mondragón had done; she informed them that the shooting was about to start.

  Maybe they read her letters, maybe they only looked at the postmark, but to a man jack they all replied: “Send us your next letter after Papa is dead!”

  “That’s the trouble with this younger generation,” Amarante whined petulantly. “They don’t give a damn about anything important anymore.”

  * * *

  Joe Mondragón was thirty-six years old and for a long time he had held no steady job. He had a wife, Nancy, and three children, and his own house, which he had built with his own hands, a small tight adobe that required mudding every two or three autumns.

  Joe was always hard up, always hustling to make a buck. Over the years he had learned how to do almost any job. He knew everything about building houses, he knew how to mix mud and straw just right to make strong adobes that would not crumble. Though unlicensed, he could steal and lay his own plumbing, do all the electric fixtures in a house, and hire five peons at slave wages to install a septic tank that would not overflow until the day after Joe died or left town. Given half the necessary equipment, he could dig a well, and he understood everything there was to understand about pumps. He could tear down a useless tractor and piece it together again so niftily it would plow like balls of fire for at least a week before blowing up and maiming its driver; and he could disk and seed a field well and irrigate it properly. “Hell,” Joe liked to brag, “I can grow sweet corn just by using my own spit and a little ant piss!” He could raise (or rustle) sheep and cattle and hogs, too, and slaughter and butcher them all. And if you asked him to, he could geld a pony or castrate a pig with the same kind of delicate authoritative finesse Michelangelo must have used carving his Pietà.

  Joe had his own workshop crammed full of tools he had begged, borrowed, stolen, or bought from various friends, enemies, and employers down through the years. In that shop he sometimes made skinning knives out of cracked buzz saw blades and sold them to hunters in the fall for five or six bucks. At the drop of a five-dollar bill he could also fashion an ornate Persian wine goblet from an old quart pop bottle. Then again, if the need arose and the money to pay for it was resting lightly on his main workbench like an open-wingèd butterfly taking five, Joe probably could have invented the world’s tiniest dart gun, to be used by scientists for crippling, but not killing, mosquitoes. Just to survive there had to be almost nothing Joe couldn’t or would not at least try to do.

  The Mondragón house was surrounded by junk, by old engines, by parts of motors, by automobile guts, refrigerator wiring, tractor innards. One shed was filled with wringer washing machines, and when Joe had the time he puttered over them until they were “running” again; then he tried—and often managed—to sell them … with pumps that went on the fritz (or wringer gears that neatly stripped themselves) ten minutes after Joe’s three-month warranty (in writing) expired. This presented no problem, however, because for a very small consideration Joe was more than willing to fix whatever broke in whatever he had sold you.

  In a sense, Joe was kept perpetually busy performing minor miracles for what usually amounted to a less-than-peanuts remuneration. Still, when something, when anything was wrong in town, when a pump was frozen or a cow was sick or the outhouse had blown down, the call went out for Joe Mondragón, who would defy rain, hail, blizzards, tornadoes, and earthquakes in order to skid his pickup with the four bald retreads and no spare to a stop in your front yard and have the thing or the animal or whatever it was temporarily patched up and functioning again. Reeking of energy like an oversexed tomcat, Joe was always charging hell-bent for election around town in his old yellow pickup, like as not with a beer clutched tightly in one fist—arrogant little Joe Mondragón, come to fix your trouble and claim your two bits, who didn’t take no shit from no body.

  But he was tired, Joe had to admit that. He was tired, like most of his neighbors were tired, from trying to earn a living off the land in a country where the government systematically gathered up the souls of little ranchers and used them to light its cigars. Joe was tired of spending twenty-eight hours a day like a chicken-thieving mongrel backed up against the barn wall, neck hairs bristling, teeth bared, knowing that in the end he was probably going to get his head blown off anyway. He was tired of meeting each spring with the prospect of having to become a migrant and head north to the lettuce and potato fields in Colorado where a man groveled under the blazing sun ten hours a day for one fucking dollar an hour. He was tired, too, of each year somehow losing a few cows off the permits he had to graze them on the government’s National Forest land, and he was tired of the way permit fees were always being hiked, driving himself and his kind not only batty, but also out of business. And he was damn fed up with having to buy a license to hunt deer on land that had belonged to Grandfather Mondragón and his cronies, but which now resided in the hip pockets of either Smokey the Bear, the state, or the local malevolent despot, Ladd Devine the Third.

  Usually, in fact, Joe did not buy a license to hunt deer in the mountains surrounding his hometown. Along with most everybody else in Milagro, he figured the dates of a hunting season were so much bullshit. If he hankered for meat, Joe simply greased up his .30–06, hopped into the pickup, and went looking for it. Once a Forest Service vendido, Carl Abeyta, had caught Joe with a dead deer, a huge electric lamp, no license, and out of season to boot, and it cost Joe a hundred dollars plus a week in the Chamisa County Jail. In jail he half-starved to death and was pistol-whipped almost unconscious by a county jailer, Todd McNunn, for trying to escape by battering a hole in the cheap cinderblock wall with his head.

  Joe had been in jail numerous times, usually just for a few hours, for being drunk, for fighting, for borrowing (and consuming) Devine Company sheep, and each time it had cost him fifteen or twenty-five dollars, and usually he had been manhandled, too. The corrections personnel laughed when they clobbered Joe because he was funny, being so small and ferocious, weighing only about a hundred and twenty-five pounds, kicking and hitting, trying to murder them when he was drunk, and when he was sober, too. Sometimes they tried to hold him off a little for sport, but Joe was too dangerous, being the kind of person—like the heralded Cleofes Apodaca of yore—who would have slugged a bishop. So they tended to belt him hard right off the bat and then let him lie. Joe had lost a few teeth in that jail, and his nose had been operated on by police fists, clubs, and pistol butts so as to conform to the prevalent local profile. Outside the jail Joe had broken fingers on both his hands hitting people or horses or doors or other such things. “I ain’t afraid of nothing,” he bragged, and thought he could prove it, although when he said that his wife Nancy hooted derisively: “Oh no, that’s right, you’re not afraid of anything.”

  But Joe was tired of the fighting. Tired of it because in the end he never surfaced holding anything more potent than a pair of treys. In the end he just had his ass kicked from the corral to next Sunday, and nothing ever cha
nged. In the end half his gardens and half his fields shriveled in a drought, even though Indian Creek practically formed a swimming pool in his living room. In fact, Milagro itself was half a ghost town, and all the old west side beanfields were barren, because over thirty-five years ago, during some complicated legal and political maneuverings known as the 1935 Interstate Water Compact, much of Milagro’s Indian Creek water had been reallocated to big-time farmers down in the southeast portion of the state or in Texas, leaving folks like Joe Mondragón high and much too dry.

  This situation had caused a deep, long-smoldering, and fairly universal resentment, but nobody, least of all Joe Mondragón, had ever been able to figure out how to bring water back to that deserted west side land, most of which, by now, belonged to Ladd Devine the Third and his motley assortment of dyspeptic vultures, who (not surprisingly, now that they owned it) had figured out a way to make the west side green again.

  But then one day Joe suddenly decided to irrigate the little field in front of his dead parents’ decaying west side home (which Joe still owned—in itself a miracle) and grow himself some beans. It was that simple. And yet irrigating that field was an act as irrevocable as Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Castro’s voyage on the Granma, or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, because it was certain to catalyze tensions which had been building for years, certain to precipitate a war.

  And like any war, this one also had roots that traveled deeply into the past.

  For several hundred years, and until quite recently, Milagro had been a sheep town. Nearly all the fathers of Joe Mondragón’s generation had been sheepmen. There was no man, however, and there had been no men for more than a hundred years, perhaps, who had truly made a living off sheep, the basic reason for this being that Milagro was a company town, and almost every herder, simply in order to survive as a sheepman, had been connected to the Ladd Devine Sheep Company. And being a sheepman connected to the Devine Company was like trying to raise mutton in a tank full of sharks, barracudas, and piranha fish.

  For this, the people of the Miracle Valley had the U.S. Government to thank. Because almost from the moment it was drawn up and signed in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which not only ended the war between the United States and Mexico, but also supposedly guaranteed to the Spanish-surnamed southwestern peoples their communal grazing lands, was repeatedly broken. Shortly after the war, in fact, the U.S. Congress effectively outlawed their communal property, passing vast acreages into the public domain, tracts which then suddenly wound up in the hands of large American ranching enterprises like the Devine Company. Later, during Teddy Roosevelt’s era, much remaining communal territory was designated National Forest in which a rancher could only run his animals providing he had the money and political pull to obtain grazing permits.

  Hence, soon after the 1848 war, most local ranchers found themselves up to their elbows in sheep with no place to graze them. In due course the small operators were wiped out either from lack of access to grazing land or from trying to compete with the large companies that now dominated the public domain and Forest Service preserves. The sheepmen who survived did so only by becoming indentured servants to the large companies that controlled the range and the grazing permit system.

  In Milagro, this meant that since the last quarter of the nineteenth century most sheep ranchers had been serfs of the Devine Company, which, during the seventies and eighties, in one of those democratic and manifestly destined sleights of Horatio Alger’s hand (involving a genteel and self-righteous sort of grand larceny, bribery, nepotism, murder, mayhem, and general all-around and all-American nefarious skulduggery), had managed to own outright, or secure the grazing rights to, all the property on the Jorge Sandoval Land Grant in Chamisa County.

  At the end of each year since this takeover, every sheepman, woman, and child in Milagro had discovered themselves heavily in debt to the Devine Company. In fact, after an average of ten years under the sheep company’s tutelage, just about every man, including men like Joe Mondragón’s father, Esequiel, had owed the rest of whatever resources he might accumulate in his lifetime to whichever Ladd Devine happened to be sitting on the family nest egg at that particular moment.

  Of course, the Ladd Devine Company had not only been interested in land and sheep and its company (now Nick Rael’s) store. It owned controlling interests in both the First National Bank of Chamisaville and its Doña Luz branch. The Dancing Trout Dude Ranch and Health Spa had been operating on the Devine estate up in Milagro Canyon ever since the early twenties. When the Pilar Café was constructed across from the company store in 1949, it was a Devine operation. And when, more recently, the Enchanted Land Motel was built on the north–south highway to handle the new breed of pudgy tourists who simpered by in their baroque apartment houses on wheels, it was a Devine-financed and Devine-controlled operation.

  To be truthful, the Devine Company, which had gotten fat on sheep, was not dealing in wool anymore. The company had much more interest in a project called the Indian Creek Dam, a structure—to be located in Milagro Canyon—that was considered the essential cornerstone of a Devine development endeavor known as the Miracle Valley Recreation Area.

  A dam in Milagro Canyon had been the dream of both Ladd Devine Senior and the present caudillo, Ladd Devine the Third, who took over the Devine operation when his grandfather (who was eighty-nine at the time) was caught alone and on horseback up beyond the Little Baldy Bear Lakes in an early autumn snowstorm back in 1958. Ladd Devine the Second, a profligate and playboy who married five times, put a bullet in one ear and out the other on the Italian Riviera at the age of thirty-nine, thus accounting for Ladd Devine the Third’s early ascendancy to the throne.

  The Ladd Devine Company had started drawing up plans for the recreation development about the same time people were losing their water rights and beginning a wholesale exodus from the hapless west side. The original Ladd Devine had not objected much to the unfair 1935 water compact shenanigans, which somewhat damaged his sheep operations by driving many of his herders elsewhere, because he was too busy buying up those herders’ momentarily worthless land at bargain-basement prices. In this way, during the years immediately following World War II, when the water compact really began to be enforced, almost all the abandoned and apparently worthless land on the west side passed into Devine hands.

  And now—Que milagro!—the Indian Creek Dam was conveniently going to restore water rights to the west side so Ladd Devine the Third could bless the few surviving small farmers of Milagro with a ritzy subdivision molded around an exotic and very green golf course.

  The dam would be built across Indian Creek at the mouth of Milagro Canyon, establishing a mile-and-a-half-long lake whose easternmost shore would extend up to within hailing distance of the Dancing Trout’s main lodge. And the dam—or paying for it, that is—would be made possible by creating a conservancy district whose boundaries, for taxation purposes, would incorporate almost all the town’s largely destitute citizens.

  Wherein lay a rather profound rub.

  At least one person understood this rub. Hence, right after Ladd Devine the Third announced plans for the Miracle Valley Recreation Area (which would include the Indian Creek Reservoir, the Miracle Valley Estates and Golf Course, and the Miracle Mountain Ski Valley) by erecting an elaborate wooden sign on the north–south highway just below town, the old bartender at the Frontier, Tranquilino Jeantete, began telling anybody who would listen:

  “You watch. The conservancy district and the dam is a dirty trick. Like the 1935 water compact, it’s one more way to steal our houses and our land. We’ll be paying the taxes for Ladd Devine’s lake. And when we can’t pay our conservancy assessments, they’ll take our land and give it to Devine. And that fucking Zopilote will sit up there on his throne in his fucking castle putting pennies on our eyes as they carry us to the camposanto, one by one.”

  But most farmers, completely baffled by the complexity of a conservancy district, did not know what
to do. Should they hire a lawyer and fight the vulture? Or should they just sit tight and let this terrible thing happen the way terrible things had been happening now ever since the 1848 war, trusting that, like Amarante Córdova, they could somehow, miraculously, survive?

  In the end, after much talk and many heated arguments, the people shrugged, laughing uneasily and a little ashamedly. “That conservancy district and that dam,” they philosophized, “will be as hard to live with as Pacheco’s pig.”

  Pacheco being an enormous, shifty-eyed, hysterically lonely man who—in the time-honored tradition of Cleofes Apodaca and Padre Sinkovich—had been losing his marbles at a vertiginous rate ever since his wife died six years ago, and who owned one of the world’s most ornery sows, an animal he could never keep penned. For years it had been a regular thing in Milagro to see unsteady, mammoth Seferino Pacheco staggering across fields or splashing through puddles in the dirt roadways, searching for his recalcitrant porker, which was usually inhaling a neighbor’s garden or devouring somebody’s chickens. Pacheco was forever knocking on front doors and back doors and outhouse doors, asking after his sow. And people were forever shouting at, and shooting at, and throwing rocks at Pacheco’s gargantuan, voracious animal. Yet for a long time the pig had led a charmed life, nonchalantly absorbing high-powered lead lumps in its thick haunches, or else—it being also a rather swift pig—escaping on the run unscathed. “Maybe that marrana carries a chunk of oshá in her cunt that protects her from poisonous people,” Onofre Martínez once giggled. And because the pig, with Pacheco gimping crazily after it, had become such a familiar sight all over town, sayings had grown out of the situation. Such as: “He’s more trouble than Pacheco’s pig.” Or: “She’s got an appetite like Pacheco’s pig.” And again: “It’s as indestructible as Pacheco’s pig.”