The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  “Which won’t be nothing new,” Shorty interrupted, flashing a bright impudent grin at his boss.

  “No, I think whatever you decided to do, they would back you up,” Harlan insisted. “I know I sure would. And Nick Rael, that’s the way he feels—”

  “Which isn’t too surprising,” Shorty said, “considering that Ladd here’s got so many notes on Nick’s business, not to mention the mortgage on his house—shit, fellas.” Shorty bit off the end of a cigar, rolling it in his puckered lips for a moment before he scratched a match on his zipper and lit it. “I got nothing against Nick, understand, but he’s owed the Devine operation so much for so long that all he’s got on his mind now is how best to kiss ruddy bums from here to Christmastime so’s to build up credit until Valentine’s Day, and I wouldn’t trust his opinion any more than I’d trust you, Harlan, to dish me up a piece of cherry pie for breakfast that wasn’t made from fruit in a can.”

  Flossie giggled. She loved Horsethief Shorty. In fact, she had always wanted to make love with Shorty. Once, a long time back, when her husband was away and the help more or less off for the day, they got drunk together, her and Shorty, under some weeping willows, drinking bourbon, seated in mammoth wooden armchairs built by an alcoholic local santo carver named Snuffy Ledoux, who had left town years ago (during the Smokey the Bear statue riot, in fact) to seek his fortune in the capital. When they both had a mellow buzz on, laughing and giggling intimately together, Flossie asked, “Can I take my clothes off, Shorty, and would you diddle me if I did?” And Shorty’s eyes popped open wide as he exclaimed, “Shit, Flossie, I ain’t that drunk!” When she burst into tears, he went over and tenderly cuddled her head for a moment, crooning, “Listen, honey. It ain’t what you maybe think, and it sure ain’t nothing personal. But all my life I’ve had the bad habit of sticking my tool into anything that would spread its legs or its cheeks or open its mouth, and right now, much as I hate to admit it, I got a dose.” She never learned if that was true or not, but he went on and unpinned her hair, letting the long yellow curls flow and bounce around her shoulders, and then he sat on the thick grass in front of her while they talked about screwing and other things. Some talk was sad, some funny. Shorty recounted terribly raunchy stories about the whorehouses in Juarez and Agua Prieta and Nogales; he also gave her the straight poop on a couple of women he had loved. She didn’t have anything approximating his experience, but she told him about groping around in the back seats of enormous convertibles with crew-cut boys in tuxedos who sucked on her big breasts like newborn babies. They became very close that afternoon, like brothers and sisters, and at one point Shorty unzipped his fly, letting her ogle his wong for a minute; after that she unbuttoned her blouse and pried out a breast for him to inspect. He went and kissed the nipple, which touched off her tears again, but nothing else happened. Since then they had been close, and sometimes Flossie talked to Shorty about things that bothered her, or else she just described to him the nebulous thoughts floating like lazy tropical fish through her brain, and she never felt Shorty was mocking her, not even silently in his mind. They had much in common, being both lonely and sad, but comfortable; and they felt at ease with each other; and somehow, God knows how, they had handled it perfectly for a long time, so that no chisme or rumor had ever linked them in a compromising fashion.

  “Jerry G.,” Devine said. “What do you think?”

  Jerry G. furrowed his brow, pursed his lips, and for a long time said nothing. Eventually he dislodged the following:

  “I think this small act is part of a larger problem which could become serious.”

  “That’s it?”

  Not one to adorn an opinion, Jerry G. nodded.

  “What would you do about it?”

  Again he frowned, steeped in plodding, methodical, concentrated thought. At the end of this session he drawled:

  “I hate to say ‘Let’s just wait and see how the thing develops before making a move,’ but I’m afraid that’s all I can think to say right now.”

  Ladd Devine settled back. “Anybody here got any idea why he did it?”

  “Why does that little bugger do anything?” Carl Abeyta said.

  “Anybody else?” Devine asked.

  “He’s curious to see what’ll happen,” Shorty suggested. “I don’t think he knows why he did it himself. One thing for sure, nobody put him up to it. But if I was you I wouldn’t let nobody, least of all nobody from the valley you don’t trust for sure, see those plans for the conservancy district where you and Nelson Bookman got almost all that new water made possible by the dam going into that beanfield acreage you been buying up over on the west side for a golf course ever since the 1935 water compact killed all the little farmers over there.”

  Devine blew cigarette smoke carefully out through his nose. Then, leaning forward abruptly, he said, “Well, boys, for the time being I guess that’s it. Sorry to put you out, but this meeting is already over. I think for now we’ll simply have to wait and see how things develop—”

  And the last of the men had just departed when the phone rang.

  Peter Hirsshorn, manager of the Enchanted Land Motel, blurted, “Hey, Ladd? Look. Listen, I’m really sorry. But we’ve had an accident down here. The couple in 12B—well, the guy, he’s from someplace around Austin, he’s a fishing nut. They were gonna go over to Betchel’s Buck-A-Fish highway robbery, catch a few moron trout, and this guy, his name is Carson, Phil Carson—he’s in space electronics or something—well, he was outside beyond the pool, casting with his new rod, trying it out or practicing or something, with one of those big grasshoppers on it, you know? The ones Fred Quintana ties that Harlan sells in the café, he had one of those on, a number six which I know is crazy—for the Rio Grande, maybe, but not Harlan’s mud puddle—but he had it on anyway, dry casting it on the lawn like I said, and he just got it caught in his ear. The hook went all the way through his fucking ear. So instead of coming up to your place I had to drive him down to the clinic here in Doña Luz. That’s where I’m calling from, and I’m really sorry…”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Devine said. “No sweat. Everything is under control.”

  * * *

  Five men were seated around a large oval table in a conference room off the governor’s office in the state capitol. There was the governor himself, a tall, heavily built man with small nervous eyes that never really looked at anybody and a cowboy twang when he spoke, a successful rancher who had parlayed a number of hunches into some successful oil interests, and close—but largely disguised—ties to several big-time land developers who were moving into the state. He walked slowly and spoke slowly, and almost everything he said publicly was bland, or a cliché, or just plain stupid. Yet, though ridiculed by the press and slandered unmercifully by his enemies, he had come out on top in a very crooked election and he could control a political machine better than any person in the state had ever controlled one, and he was worth over four million dollars.

  The other men with the governor in the room were the state engineer, Nelson Bookman; a lawyer from the state engineer’s office named Rudy Noyes; a short swarthy aid to the governor—his bodyguard, actually—called Myron Cloon; and an undercover agent for the state police. The agent, Kyril Montana, was a tall, sunny-looking Anglo with straw-colored hair and wide blue eyes, an all-American nose, straight thin lips, and an athletic physique. He had a nice smile, a pretty wife who had been runner-up in a state beauty contest fourteen years ago, and two good-looking kids. Kyril Montana wore a neatly pressed pink shirt, a bolo tie, beige, tapered western pants, and cowboy boots, and he carried a pack of filtertip cigarettes in his shirt pocket over the heart. In overall appearance he came on like a young, good-natured cowboy. He had been a cop for over fifteen years, however, and he was very sensitive to police work and to people’s attitudes about the police. He was not a gung-ho cop; he wasn’t quick to make an arrest, or to pull a gun, or to nail people just on general principles. He had done several stints on the narco
tics beat at the state university, mingling with kids, acting like a student, drawing up detailed lists of drug users and their connections, but he had never set up a massive bust of psychedelic dopers or pot smokers. Even when there had been political pressures to arrange something that would grab headlines and squash longhairs for a while, Kyril Montana had played it cool, had kept maneuvering through the drug subculture hoping to nail the hard-drug pushers and suppliers, and he had usually managed to keep his superiors off his back until he finally had one of the big fish, until he finally had tiptoed through the smack or cocaine hierarchy to a source. Then, as quietly as possible, he had set up the bust, and more often than not it was so clean and so quiet that hardly anyone realized what had happened, the agent receiving no publicity at all. Occasionally he had been called off assignments when his superiors felt he was proceeding too cautiously. But the agent took these periodic lumps without comment, and in this way he had survived. He was a good cop, a cynical but not unhappy man. He liked his children and was true to his wife. With her he rarely talked shop. They played golf together and went out often—to movies, to the theater occasionally, to triple-A baseball games, and to the state university football games. Their sex together wasn’t that imaginative, but it was all right, still satisfying. They were a clean-cut couple with clean-cut kids, a suburban house with a water sprinkler on the manicured front lawn and a small pool in back, and the agent himself was a clean-cut professional cop who managed to keep his work surprisingly free of depressing fuckups.

  The state engineer, Nelson Bookman, and his personal special assistant, Rudy Noyes, knew more water law than the rest of the state put together. For the past seventeen years Bookman had been the state engineer, meaning he was more responsible than any other person or group for what water the state had obtained during that time through interstate pacts and reclamation projects and so forth. Rudy Noyes, who was still young at thirty-six, had been with the office, had, in fact, been Bookman’s personal sidekick, apprentice, and mouthpiece for eleven of those seventeen years. During that time they had weathered the heaviest political storms to sweep the state. They had also sweated, plotted, finagled, begged, twisted, and driven their way to what they felt was their state’s fair share of Colorado River Basin water; they had made deals with Texas and California, with Arizona and Colorado and Utah; and they had created lobbies in Washington to have dams built and rivers channeled; they had set into motion adjudication suits to determine how much water people did or did not have in all areas; they had literally decided how the rivers would run and which people must benefit the most from those rivers. In so doing they had constantly played the state’s southern agribusinessmen off against the small northern farmers, and somehow they had come through. The conservative farmers in the south hated State Engineer Bookman and his little sidekick, Rudy Noyes, because they felt the north was getting too much water—in fact, they felt any water allocated to the north was wasted water. If Bookman and Noyes explained that the northern farmers owned priority rights because they had been using the water for centuries, the southern farmers pointed to their cotton and grain fields, asking, “But who’s growing cash crops, who’s providing the stuff for export, who’s keeping the state’s economic head above water?” And you couldn’t argue with that. Farming in the north was subsistence farming, nothing more; and nothing could be less.

  But the farmers in the north hated Bookman and Noyes also because those two had betrayed their water interests and rights, they had worked deals whereby much of the north’s centuries-old water rights had gone to the southern agribusinessmen, and they felt that Bookman and Noyes, more than any other state political figures, headed those forces most responsible for the death of little towns like Milagro, whose residents spoke a different language from the people of the south.

  But Bookman and Noyes did not have it in for the Northerners. They divided up the state’s water—as nearly as was possible—in direct relationship to a region’s political clout and economic pull. It was that simple, and it meant that by dealing with the realities of the given situation, Bookman and Noyes had quietly overseen the transfer of water and water rights from the small-timers in the green northern valleys to the big businessmen and development enterprises in the flat plains and deserts of the south. Both Bookman and Noyes believed in the American concepts of “growth” and “progress”; hence, they could see no justification for the small farmers’ wrath. “Why don’t those fucking old-fashioned irrelevant Tinkertoy coyotes face up to the economic realities?” was the way Bookman usually put it. “Who do those pathetic illiterate old geezers think they are, sitting on one-acre beanfields, demanding more water, when there’s a man down south with an eight-thousand-acre farm that’s crying to be irrigated?”

  Noyes, a skinny red-headed man, never said much. And certainly not in public. He wore impeccable three-piece Brooks Brothers suits, Bostonian loafers, and staid horn-rimmed glasses, and he knew the law. He sat beside Bookman at Interstate Streams Commission meetings—when, say, the environmentalists were trying to defeat a Bureau of Reclamation water salvage project—and while Bookman, who knew more than anybody else about water, was tearing apart his opponent’s arguments, Noyes never said a word, unless Bookman, without even turning sideways or taking his eyes off a particularly offensive ecology witness, asked, “What’s the law on that, Rudy?” And then Rudy Noyes would state the law, precisely, clearly, and flawlessly, and usually as he stated the law he would be riffling through the state’s book of statutes or water laws or whatever until, just at the moment he finished talking, he would land on exactly what Bookman wanted, and he’d read that too, clipped, sharp, without faltering, and with no extraneous comments added.

  In this way, Bookman and Noyes had been a formidable team. They always had on hand more information, more facts to support their theories and their projects, than did the other side. They scared people with their efficiency and their knowledge. Bookman used language like a scalpel. He cut carefully and cleanly, never misstepping, building arguments that were irrefutable, even if erroneous or morally repugnant. He could do this not just thanks to his own critical intellect, but because in Noyes he had a wizard of a researcher with a photographic mind and an absolutely articulate way of laying out a thing during the closed, man-to-man skull sessions lasting up to an hour the two had every day between nine and ten in the morning. In a sense, or at least in one important—the most important—area, they had more political power than the governor. The governor was a land man. He understood a lot about how to speculate for land, graze it, subdivide it, make it pay dividends. But still, the land in a desert state was worth nothing without water, and Bookman and Noyes controlled the water. In their back pockets, they had the arteries of the state, the rivers and streams, the creeks, and the ponds and the reservoirs that created its valleys of life. All that was in their hands, their heads, their legal notebooks. However they planned their water, that is how and in what directions the state would grow.

  Now these men, the governor, the undercover agent, Kyril Montana, the state engineer, Nelson Bookman, and his special assistant, Rudy Noyes, and the governor’s aide and bodyguard, Myron Cloon, were gathered in the conference room off the governor’s office for a very specific reason, and that reason was Joe Mondragón.

  “Alright,” said the governor. “Here’s a half-pint son of a bitch cut water he has no rights to into a half-pint field that’ll never grow a decent bean, and what the hell are we going to do about it?”

  “Let’s review the facts first,” Bookman said, and he wasn’t talking to the governor, but rather to Kyril Montana, who was sitting back comfortably with his hands folded under his chin, politely listening. “The facts are that this man’s name is Mondragón—Joe A. Mondragón. He’s a general handyman who lives and has always lived in Milagro. He has four pieces of land, only one of which has irrigation rights, the acre directly surrounding his house. His other pieces are five acres of sageland in the eastern section of Milagro known a
s Coyote Arroyo and another 1.7-acre piece near the north–south highway that never had any rights so far as our office knows. After that there’s this piece in question, seven-tenths of an acre. It’s fed by a ditch they call Roybal’s ditch that comes off the Acequia Madre del Sur that used to have a headgate on Indian Creek. There has been no water in Roybal’s ditch for fifteen, twenty years. We have aerial photographs proving this. When the 1935 Interstate Water Compact was set up, all the land on this ditch was adjudicated, and all the people made an offer of no rights. We could do this because so many farmers from Milagro had never filed title to their rights with our office. Now it’s normal procedure, in a case such as this, for people to come into the office with proof of water rights if they disagree with our offer. At the time of the compact this land under question was owned by Esequiel Mondragón, Joe’s father. He never came in, never signed the adjudication papers, and so we made a default judgment of no water rights. There was never any trouble. At that time I think the old man was sick with malaria and had quit working his fields anyway; later he raised a stink. But, in fact, this particular field in question, during the Second World War, lay fallow for longer than four straight years, and so automatically, according to state law, lost its rights anyway. But in any case, those fields along Roybal’s ditch, all of which were given no rights offers, simply fell from usage completely when people understood what had happened. Many people—in fact, most small farmers in that part of town—have sold their land to Ladd Devine, the heir to the old sheep company and the present-day developer of the Miracle Valley Recreation Area project, which includes a luxury subdivision on the west side land that would be built around a Robert Trent Jones golf course. Hence, when we consider this problem and all its ramifications, we’ve got to keep in mind that what could be seriously compromised, not only by Joe Mondragón’s beanfield, but also by mishandling the affair, are Ladd’s interests, and—quite frankly—the interests of this office also. We’ve worked hand in hand with Ladd Devine for a long time, and I personally feel that his Miracle Valley project can open up the north to a progressive economic development on a scale that we would not even have dared to dream about five years ago. All this is tied in with the Indian Creek Conservancy District and Dam, of course, which I won’t go into right now except to state an irony in the situation. Which is that once we create the conservancy district and build that dam, Joe Mondragón will receive water to irrigate his field. Of course, he may understand—I don’t know, and I’m certainly not going to tell him—that with development of that golf course and the subdivision, his land value and the taxes and conservancy assessments on it are going to skyrocket so high he’ll never be able to raise the cash for those costs by growing beans. And, since the chances are a million to one against his ever being able to raise the capital to develop that small plot, he’ll wind up having to sell out or else he’ll simply lose it to the state, which would, of course, pass it on to Ladd Devine where I’m afraid it belongs. That’s the nature of the situation, and the people up there understand it instinctively, although they certainly don’t understand the finer points nor the mechanism that can bring all this about.”