The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  Bookman paused, lighting a cigarette, slightly rearranged the single sheet of eight by eleven typing paper that lay in front of him, and continued.

  “Now for whatever reasons, a short time ago Joe Mondragón decided to irrigate his field. This was around the fifteenth, I think. He probably spent an hour cleaning Roybal’s ditch to the point where it diverted into his seven-tenths of an acre, then opened the headgate on the Acequia Madre del Sur and flooded the field. Apparently no one was around. At least nobody stopped him.”

  The governor stood up and went to the window where he paused, both hands in his pockets, staring thoughtfully down at the capitol parking lot jammed with cars. But none of the other men moved. Only the state engineer was smoking and the smoke from his cigarette curled quietly in the still air.

  “The Roybal ditch has no mayordomo,” Bookman continued. “It’s been out of use too long. The mayordomo on the Acequia Madre is a man called Vincent Torres, who’s a cousin of Mondragón’s.”

  “They’re all cousins up there,” the governor’s aide said. “They been inbreeding up there for centuries. It’s a wonder they’re not all insane.”

  There was no response to this comment from the other men, all of whom thought Cloon an insufferable dolt. Bookman went on.

  “It’s a cinch Mondragón didn’t ask Vincent Torres for permission to irrigate. We’ve had an investigator up there twice already, and he’s spoken with Torres both times, and both times Torres has acted shocked, as if he can’t believe Mondragón is irrigating. So our man took him to the field and he just scratched his head and said he’d keep an eye out and let us know if he caught anybody…”

  “Bullshit,” muttered Cloon to himself, to nobody.

  Bookman said, “Our man spoke with the two commissioners on the Acequia Madre, Meliton Mondragón, also a cousin, and Filiberto Vigil, no relation. They likewise registered surprise, and stayed surprised when our people took them to the field.”

  “It’s a conspiracy,” Cloon muttered, and Kyril Montana allowed just a flicker of annoyance to ripple his brow. The governor continued to stare out at the parking lot, where a man was flitting from car to car testing doors, and then, as Bookman continued, the governor saw the man open a door and lean in quickly, rifling through a glove compartment, and the governor never said a word to interrupt the state engineer, nor moved a muscle nor an eyelash while the car was ransacked.

  “We saw Mondragón next,” Bookman continued, “and he denied everything. He wouldn’t come to the field with us, said he was busy. He was working in his shop, welding together a horse trailer. We gave him copies of the offer of judgment clearly stating he has no water rights on that land and then left because he was growing hostile.”

  “What do you mean by hostile?” Kyril Montana asked.

  “He threatened to kick my man’s butt out of there. And he said if any more feds came around his place bothering him when he was at work, he’d ‘dust their asses with buckshot’ because they were trespassing on his private property.”

  The governor turned, chuckling briefly, walked back to his chair, and sat down. Kyril Montana smiled quietly.

  “We’ve talked with some other people in Milagro,” Bookman said. “With the mayor, Sam Cantú, with the sheriff, Bernabé Montoya, with the general store manager, Nick Rael. They were all upset about the thing, but didn’t exactly know what to do about it. They referred us back to the commissioners of the Acequia Madre del Sur and the mayordomo; all were downright sullen and hostile. A rancher we talked with, an Anglo named Ray Gusdorf, who owns a small spread at the mouth of Milagro Canyon just below Ladd Devine’s Dancing Trout ranch, told us he minded his business and the other people in town minded theirs and that’s the way he liked it. In short, in one way or another everybody seemed to know about this situation, but nobody was willing to take the bull by the horns.”

  Cloon got up and approached the window. He was a short, wiry-haired, stocky man, strong and agile, with a smooth slick face and bored eyes, and a short flat .38 in a shoulder holster you could see whenever he leaned slightly forward and his sport coat lapel fell away from his chest. Resting one foot on the low windowsill, he gazed grumpily down at the parking lot.

  “Alright,” said Kyril Montana. “So tell me exactly what the nature of the problem is.”

  “We’ve gone back to Milagro twice since then,” Bookman said. “After he irrigated that first time, Mondragón plowed the field and then disked it and planted it. With beans. With irrigation trenches beside each row. By now those seeds should be sprouting. The third time we went up the earth in the field was wet and green grass was growing around the edges, and, more sparsely, down along the ditches. Obviously the field was receiving water regularly.”

  “Hey,” Cloon muttered from over at the window. “There’s a bastard down there robbing cars.”

  Kyril Montana said, “So—?”

  Bookman leaned back with his hands clasped behind his head: “So we almost served him with papers to show cause that he has water rights on that piece of land.”

  “What’s the procedure for that? What exactly does that mean?” the agent wanted to know.

  “He’d have thirty days to prove he has water rights to that piece of land. If he couldn’t prove it, the state could order him to stop irrigating. There’d be a hearing before a special water master, of course. But it would be open and shut; our records confirm that. Problems might be witnesses to testify that Mondragón is irrigating his own land. But we have more than enough evidence, I don’t foresee any difficulties there. Otherwise, if—after the hearing—he continued to irrigate, we’d have to arrest him, I suppose. And that could get sticky. Which is why we’re still holding onto those show-cause papers.”

  Bookman took his hands from behind his head, shook another cigarette out of the pack on the table before him, and lit it.

  “Sticky, you understand, because there’d be a lot of attendant publicity, maybe hostility, which could hurt the conservancy district, the dam, and the whole Miracle Valley setup with Ladd Devine. It’s a tricky business to try and implant a tourism-oriented development in the middle of a hornet’s nest, in a tense situation that might be violent, that would certainly have racial overtones. It could even develop into a minor revolution of sorts. Those people up there have traditionally had long fuses, but they do have fuses as any of you gentlemen who’s studied this state’s history a little knows.”

  “What makes you feel there’d be so much publicity?” Kyril Montana asked.

  “Well, for one thing, and maybe we can discount this as no threat, there’s a lawyer,” Bookman said, leaning back again, taking his time now. “He happens to be Joe Mondragón’s lawyer, and he also sometimes writes articles for a small monthly paper published in the capital here, The Voice of the People. Maybe you’ve read it.”

  “Sure,” the agent said. “I’ve glanced through a few copies.”

  “Alright. Now, this lawyer, he’s a strange fellow, a displacement from the East Coast. He worked in Colorado for a while, in Alamosa, in the Legal Aid program up there. Then he moved to Milagro. He’s thirty-seven years old, married to a twenty-nine-year-old Chicano woman—they have two kids. He has an informal practice up there after a fashion; in a quiet way he defends the poor. He’s not a raving liberal, though he has done cases for chickens, tomatoes, and cucumbers. But never—as far as I know—for land, so he’s acquired a certain trust up there, I imagine. We’ve crossed with him twice on water rights issues. He’s articulate but not that good. I sense that he’s as frightened of rocking the boat as we are. Of course, he may be a better lawyer than the last time we faced him in a small matter over a year and a half ago, I don’t know.”

  “What’s his name?” the agent asked, taking a small pad and a cheap ball-point pen from his front shirt pocket, and when Bookman said “Charley Bloom,” Kyril Montana started to write it down, then suddenly stopped, nodding, and put his pen away.

  While this went on the governor sat passi
vely in his chair, hands folded in his lap, little eyes lost beneath his brows, staring at the edge of the table, at the tip of a boot, at nothing. Myron Cloon slumped down in a chair by the window, chewed off a fingernail, and began playing with it in his teeth.

  “I take it you had in mind a specific article he did for the Voice,” Kyril Montana said, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke out slowly.

  “Right. Naturally, he’s talked with his client. He’s talked with a lot of other people up there, also, and he wrote a story, not implicating anybody, but in a general way running down Ladd Devine’s relationship to the town, the conservancy district and the dam and so forth, the poverty of the Miracle Valley, all that. It’s a very technically vague but emotionally clever story. Rudy—?”

  Rudy Noyes placed the folder he had been holding in his lap on the table, flipped it open and neatly extricated a Xeroxed copy of the typewritten article, which he turned around in his hands much like someone turning a knife around so the handle would be first, and handed across the table to Kyril Montana.

  “He treats it like nobody knows who’s irrigating the field. He makes it out that the entire town is irrigating the plot. It’s a propaganda article, a socialist tract in a way, I suppose, but it might be effective. He’s done some research into the 1935 water compact, also gotten a number of quotes about how bitter the small farmers up there feel over their land and water situation.”

  Kyril Montana wrote something down in his notebook.

  “Nobody, or at least hardly anybody, reads the Voice,” Bookman said after a pause. “I don’t think their readership is much more than fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand, and half that is from out of state—you probably know that as well as we do.”

  The agent nodded.

  “But you never can tell,” Bookman added. “We don’t want this to blow up into something symbolic. If we could stop publication of Bloom’s article, that would be nice—but I don’t see how we can. We can buy it up—we’ll do that—no problem. It would be bad, though, if the regular media got hold of it and decided to play it up. Now that’s your department more than mine, you know the people, you have the information—”

  Kyril Montana nodded again and jotted a few more notes on his pad. Bookman waited until he was through writing before resuming.

  “Like I said, we don’t want this to blow up into something symbolic. The way things stand right now, that lawyer’s article is romantic bullshit, the town is not really behind Joe Mondragón. But they’re not against him either. I’ve talked with Ladd Devine, and of course he knows there’s a deep-rooted underlying resentment in that town, and that the Miracle Valley project is going to have to tiptoe into Milagro like a drunk husband with his shoes off. Still, most of those people are scared stiff of authority. They’re tough, sure, else they wouldn’t have survived up there this long, but they don’t want trouble. Yet they are also curious right now. I’ll wager some are really drawn to Joe Mondragón. He’s a town character. He’s feisty, he talks a lot, talks big, fights to back up his words. He’s a little bulldog, that’s what he is, and I’ll tell you frankly, I don’t want to misjudge his capacity for drawing those people together and causing trouble. He doesn’t know it but he might be a leader. And what my office wants, what I personally hope for, is that we can end this thing before some of those old galoots up there take it into their heads to join him. Maybe it doesn’t seem so now, but that’s potentially one hell of a volatile area up there, in the north…”

  Kyril Montana said, “What are his chances of proving he has water rights to that field?”

  “Zero. He has no rights.”

  “Suppose at a hearing your special water master was to find that Joe Mondragón did have water rights to that field—wouldn’t that help you out of the situation?”

  “The rest of the fields Devine doesn’t yet own, including maybe four or five acres he needs for that golf course but hasn’t gotten yet, would immediately come under irrigation,” Bookman said, “making it that much harder to consolidate the entire area.”

  “The problem is,” said the governor, “that this man has to be discouraged before we ever even get to the hearing stage.”

  Cloon suggested, “So scare him.”

  “I don’t think he’s going to scare that easily,” Bookman said.

  “Buy him off,” Cloon rasped.

  Irritated, Bookman stubbed out his cigarette and continued to address Kyril Montana: “Two, maybe three things,” he said. “First, we should see if there’s any way to squash the Bloom article. I doubt there is so we’ll make arrangements to corner as many copies of the magazine as possible. Then we should probably check out the lawyer himself.”

  Kryil Montana said, “And then—?”

  “And then we go after Mondragón. I don’t know that much about how it might be handled. That’s your department. We go to Milagro, maybe, talk with people, find the weak links. Maybe float a little money, see who nibbles, make a few promises, I don’t know. Seed a rumor. Mondragón has a hair-trigger temper. Get him to assault someone, an official of our office perhaps, or a cop—put him away for a time until things cool down. I don’t know exactly how, but I don’t think it would be too difficult.”

  Through all this the governor, who was good friends with everybody present, seemed not to be paying attention, and Cloon suddenly appeared to fall asleep. Rudy Noyes sat impassively beside Bookman, and Kyril Montana studied the wire binding holding his small notebook together.

  At length the agent said, “Do you think if he lost the hearing he would quit?”

  Bookman said, “I know he wouldn’t. Sooner or later we’ll have to arrest him.”

  “How do you know he won’t quit?”

  “I’ve just got a feeling,” Bookman said. “I know the north, and something like this has been building for a long time. The war never ended in 1848, you know. We simply don’t want this hearing and we don’t want to arrest Joe Mondragón for using water that he lost in 1935 to grow beans today. The worst thing we could do is make him a martyr.”

  The governor said, “What do you think, Ky?”

  Kyril Montana put his notebook away and stubbed out his cigarette. “I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll go up there. Study the town, talk a little. I’ve got a close friend in real estate up there, we’ll chat. I think we already have a file on Bloom. I’m not positive he’s got a vulnerable profile, but if memory serves me there’s a couple of decent-sized holes in his life. So although right now I can’t say for sure, perhaps we’ll start with the lawyer.”

  They all got to their feet then and returned to their separate offices.

  * * *

  There were no windows in Amarante Córdova’s remaining one room: long ago he had adobed them up solid to preserve heat. All the same, he awoke on this morning, as he did every morning, at first daylight and slowly commenced his day, climbing out from under about twenty-five pounds of crazy quilts and old army blankets and hastily drawing on his sloppy old suit over his patched, foul-smelling long underwear. Then he took a shot from a half-pint brandy bottle and, before rolling a cigarette, hefted a couple of piñon logs from a corner stack and stuffed them into his twelve-dollar Sears tin heater. Usually the coals from the night before were still so hot in the heater that after a minute, if he just dropped a lit kitchen match in there—which he now did—the logs burst into flame.

  This accomplished, he swung the circular cover back on the stove, unbolted and opened his door, and stood in the doorway a moment assessing the day. The view from this one opening into his room was a view like many another in Milagro. A well housing in the front dirt yard, a rusty 1949 Oldsmobile with bullet holes across the windshield sinking on its rims nearby, big yellow tumbleweed skeletons scattered among a few sunflowers, then the raggedy cottonwoods along the creekbed across the road and the majestic snowcapped Midnight Mountains beyond.

  The old man coughed, scratched his balls, snagged a coffeepot with one arthritic paw, and shuffled over to the hand-dug
well. Letting the bucket drop slowly to the water thirty feet below, he only a quarter filled it, then slowly, resting after each tug, pulled the bucket up and tipped some water into the coffeepot, which he carried back and set atop the heater.

  Next, he proceeded cautiously around his dwelling to the backyard outhouse. And while he camped there with the door open so he could watch the turquoise-silver bluebirds flying about his crumbling farmhouse, he also slowly and shakily, though in the end expertly, rolled a cigarette and lit it, contentedly puffing away as he crapped.

  After that, Amarante creaked around to his room again and made a cup of instant coffee, poured some brandy into it, and for almost an hour, while the day began, he sat on a white stump next to his front door, bathed in the early sharp sunlight, letting his eyes go bleary as he sipped the piping hot, spiked coffee and rolled and smoked another cigarette. During this time he talked to himself about his wife, his children—those still living and others dead and gone. He also carried on long, intricate, nonsensical dialogues with his good friend Tranquilino Jeantete, and with God, a number of devils, a few saints, and the Virgin Mary. And another thing during this quiet breakfast time: he had the habit of remembering scenes, moods, geography, little moments—memory blips—that had occurred yesterday or maybe fifty years ago. And so he would picture green fields full of confused and immobile meadowlarks during a late May snowstorm; or he would recall the way lightning had exploded jaggedly all around the Chamisaville drive-in theater when his daughter Sally had taken him to a John Wayne movie fifteen years ago; or maybe he would see his wife, Betita, straining, holding his hands, turning purple and howling with her legs spread wide, crushing his hands (she broke his finger once) during the birth of a child.…