The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  And on this morning, as on other recent mornings after he had put on his thick-lensed eyeglasses, Amarante also observed Joe Mondragón several fields away, irrigating his bean plants.

  The old man watched Joe’s work with interest, with a certain feeling of pride, even with a kind of reverence. Amarante had been born on Milagro’s west side, in this same house when it was intact; he had worked the fields that now lay fallow about him, and someday he would die on the west side, in his room, or from a heart attack while splitting wood, or maybe he would freeze to death in a ditch some sparkling winter night on his way back from the Frontier Bar—but whatever, Amarante had stuck with the west side through all the thick shit and all the thin shit, saying good-bye to his neighbors one by one while refusing to budge himself, until he had wound up alone with the swallows and the bluebirds and the crumbling houses whose rooms were full of tumbleweeds. Then here, suddenly, was a stubborn, ornery little bastard who had decided to put some life back into the west side. And as Joe Mondragón’s bean plants started to grow, Amarante fixed his eyes on that patch of green, feeling excited and warm and a lot less lonely, too.

  It hadn’t taken long, though, for Amarante to realize that Joe’s beansprouts were really going to stir up something in Milagro.

  And so on this morning Amarante had a special plan. Spending less time than usual on the stump beside the front door, he drank only one cup of coffee and forewent his customary wood-chopping session. In its stead he hastily gummed down two Piggly-Wiggly tortillas wrapped around some tiny Vienna sausages, made sure a full book of food stamps was stashed safely in his inside breast pocket, and then from a peg driven into the mud wall over his bed he removed a cracked leather gun belt and holster, which he buckled around his skinny waist.

  From a tin box on whose cover fading blue asters had been painted Amarante then removed a well-oiled revolver, an old, very heavy Colt Peacemaker. His father had given him the gun eighty years ago: it was the weapon he’d carried as sheriff of Milagro. Amarante had never discharged it at anybody; in fact, the gun had rarely been used, even for target practice. But it had always been, and yet remained, his most cherished possession.

  The old man fitted this monumental weapon into the holster, made certain his sheriff’s badge was pinned correctly to his suit lapel, and hit the road.

  Shoulders hunched, leaning way forward, Amarante stomped with a rickety bowlegged gait along the potholed dirt path, eyes fixed straight ahead, absolutely determined—once in motion—to let nothing break his feeble rhythms until he had arrived where he planned to go.

  He stopped once, however, near Joe’s beanfield, swayed uncertainly for a moment before leaving the road, climbed up the Roybal ditch bank, and carefully picked his way over stones and dry weeds to where water left the ditch and entered the field.

  He waved at Joe, who was leaning against his shovel, and Joe called, “Howdy, Chief. What’s with the pistol this morning?”

  Grinning toothlessly and gesturing with his hand, Amarante offered Joe a shot of cheap brandy. So Joe splashed over and fastened onto the bottle, tipping it to his lips while the old man squinted his eyes and watched eagerly, nodding happily as the young man drank.

  “Ai, Chihuahua!” Joe said. “What is this crap, burro piss?”

  Amarante cackled and sucked off a swallow for himself, then patted his gut. “It’s good for you,” he said. “Keeps you warm.”

  “So how come the hardware?” Joe asked again.

  Winking conspiratorially, Amarante put his bottle away and laid a hand on Joe’s shoulder. “I’ll be back soon,” he said. “I’ll take care of you. I’ll take care of this field.”

  “Sure, you do that for me, Chief.” Gently, Joe cuffed the old man’s face. “You and me together, friend, we’ll keep those bastards at bay, qué no?”

  Abruptly, Amarante plunged toward the road. But he halted a couple of times, and, looking back, muttered, “I’ll be right back…”

  In town a few minutes later, instead of heading as usual for the bar, he hoofed it directly into Rael’s General Store and, pulling the gun from its holster, laid the weapon atop the rubber change mat on the counter in front of Nick Rael.

  “Hello, Pop,” Nick said, wondering, what in hell is this old looney up to now?

  “What kind of bullets does this take?” Amarante asked. “I forget.”

  After Nick had turned the gun admiringly over in his hands once or twice, he set it back on the rubber mat again.

  “Why buy bullets?”

  Amarante was a little confused; he could hardly hear anyway. “What kind of cartucho?” he asked again. “I want to buy some shells.”

  “Sure.” Nick swung out from behind the counter, ambling across the store to his ammo shelves. “But what for?”

  Following Nick, the old man watched with interest as the storekeeper, after searching among the ammunition for a moment, selected a box of .45 shells, which he slapped into Amarante’s hands. Back at the counter the old man asked, “How much?”

  “Three dollars and twenty-nine cents, plus fourteen pennies for the governor, equals three-forty-three altogether,” Nick said bemusedly. “What are you gonna do, Pop, go hunting for bear?”

  “How much?”

  “Three-forty-three!” Nick fairly shouted into his ear.

  Grinning, Amarante produced the food stamp book and, while Nick looked on incredulously, painstakingly tore out four one-dollar stamps which he laid carefully on the counter.

  Nick pushed them back toward the old geezer, shaking his head. “Hey, Grandpa,” he explained. “You can’t buy bullets with food stamps. You got to pay me money.”

  Puzzled, Amarante held up the stamps. “What’s the matter with these? They’re no good?”

  “They’re for buying food,” Nick rasped. “You can’t use food stamps for bullets. You need money. Real dollars.”

  Amarante scrutinized the pieces of paper in his hand. At length he said, “This is money.”

  “For food, yeah,” Nick sighed. “They’re only good for food, man.”

  “I don’t want food. Only these bullets.”

  “Then put those food stamps away and gimme three dollars and forty-three cents,” the storekeeper said.

  The old man laid the food stamps on the counter again. “This is the same as money,” he explained.

  “Aw, come on, Pop. You know as well as I know that there’s some things you can’t buy with food stamps. You can’t buy dog food or beer or nonedible stuff like shampoo or toothpaste or razor blades.”

  Smiling, Amarante picked up the shells and dropped the box in his pocket.

  “Hey wait a minute—” Nick started to grab the old man’s arm, but let go quickly. “Money,” he said, moving his lips exaggeratedly as if talking to a lip reader. “Not food stamps, you dumb old coot—money. I need money for those shells.”

  Once again, Amarante nodded toward the food stamps on the counter, hoisted his gun and jammed it carefully into the holster, touched the front brim of his rumpled hat by way of saying good day, and lurched off.

  Cursing as he did so, Nick snatched up the food stamps and slapped them into the space under the black plastic cash pan in the till.

  Amarante teetered into the Frontier Bar, saluted his comrade, Tranquilino Jeantete, tugged himself onto a stool, placed the pistol and the box of shells on the bar, and, while Tranquilino watched, he slowly and very carefully loaded the gun.

  “What do you want to load a gun for?” the bartender asked. “Life isn’t hard enough, you’re out looking for more trouble?”

  His feeble hand resting lightly atop the mammoth gun lying on the bar, Amarante said, “Sometimes it’s necessary to carry a gun.”

  “I bet you can’t even pull the trigger,” Tranquilino replied petulantly. “You’re not even as heavy as a little bag of dried-up aspen leaves.”

  “I can shoot this gun.”

  “And what could you hit—a dead elephant from two feet away?”

 
“I can shoot this gun.”

  “Your brains are scrambled,” Tranquilino said. “The defunct ones from the camposanto must be dancing around in there. You’re going to give all us rotten old bastards a bad name.”

  “Sometimes a man should carry a gun.”

  “Who do you think you are?” the bartender accused. “Pancho Villa? The Lone Ranger?”

  Offended by his friend’s bad taste, Amarante looked stonily straight ahead, his wrinkled old hand still lying firmly atop the gun.

  “Put the safety on, at least,” Tranquilino finally grumbled in a more gentle, friendlier tone. “I don’t want any bullets flying around my bar.”

  Refusing even to acknowledge that he’d heard, Amarante remained stiff backed, his shriveled sunken lips as tight as he could make them.

  After a long silence, Tranquilino creaked onto his feet and fetched two glasses, filling both a third full of cheap bourbon. Placing one glass next to Amarante’s gun hand, he said, “Let’s both have a drink to your stupid gun.”

  Amarante cracked no smile, but he did move his hand from the gun to the glass, and the two old-timers drank.

  About half an hour later, as his friend left the bar, Tranquilino called, “Hey, Pancho Villa, you forgot your cannon!”

  Amarante returned, almost daintily lifted the weapon off the bar and stuck it in the holster, and then suddenly they both started to laugh.

  “Shit,” Tranquilino cackled after they had each survived minor coughing jags brought on by their laughter. “Carrying around all that extra weight I bet you get a heart attack!”

  Out in the sunshine Amarante swayed and blinked. The road was littered with squashed grasshoppers; and, their wings crackling, a number of live grasshoppers sailed through the air back and forth across the road as if the summer sun, having thawed out their nearly frosted bodies, had set them abruptly to sizzling. A pickup carrying plumbing for a frame house being built by a Texas couple in the canyon slowed down and stopped, and the woman from the Strawberry Mesa Body Shop and Pipe Queen, Ruby Archuleta, poked her red bandannaed head out the window.

  “Hey Amarante. What are you going to do with that gun?” she asked.

  He grinned, tipping his hat to her. “Hello,” he said. “How are you today, Mrs. Archuleta?”

  She pointed. “How come the hardware, cousin? Who you gonna plug?”

  “A Thanksgiving turkey,” the old man suddenly barked. “A big Thanksgiving turkey.”

  Ruby arched her eyebrows, laughing again, ground the stickshift into first, and, with the admonition “Make sure it’s pointed in the right direction before you squeeze the trigger!” she bolted her truck away.

  Whereupon Amarante Córdova, shining in a triumphal light, pirouetted clumsily in the middle of the plaza area to acknowledge the attention and admiration of any other onlookers. But at this moment the heart of town, such as it was, was deserted. Disappointed, the old man toppled painfully into gear, bumping into Seferino Pacheco, who had tears in his eyes.

  “My pig is gone again,” Pacheco moaned.

  “Fuck your pig! Fie on your pig! Death to your voracious pig!” the old man spat, circling huffily around the stunned, slope-shouldered Pacheco.

  “She was in her pen just this morning,” Pacheco called. But Amarante couldn’t have cared less—he was heading home.

  The old man reached the highway just as the sheriff was turning in. Bernabé Montoya’s pickup coasted a little past him, and, without even looking around, Amarante could tell the truck had stopped. Guiltily, he waddled across the highway.

  Bernabé negotiated a tight U-turn, paused to let a two-ton flatbed, piled high with hay bales from Colorado, zoom down the highway, then crossed the road and pulled over slightly ahead of Amarante.

  The old man halted. For effect, Bernabé took his time slouching out of the cab.

  “Uh, how come you’re wearing that antique buffalo gun?” the sheriff wanted to know.

  Unable to think of answers, Amarante just stood still, his hat off in the presence of the law, grinning and wheezing laboriously, playing the fool.

  “Excuse me,” Bernabé said, gently lifting the pistol from its holster. When he’d ascertained that it was loaded he rolled his eyes wearily to the sky, moaning unhappily. “What’s happening all of a sudden that this town is filling up with troublemakers? What kind of charge does a wrinkled little old prune like you, Mr. Córdova, get out of walking around with a two-thousand-year-old shooting iron on your hip and your pockets full of bullets? What do you want to do, incite this poor town into another Smokey the Bear santo riot or something? Take the bullets out of the gun, Mr. Córdova—” And here the sheriff actually removed the cartridges himself, plip-plopping them into the old man’s palm.

  “If it’s loaded,” he explained sorrowfully, shoving the gun carefully back into its holster, “it can go off. Hang it back on the wall where it belongs, Mr. Córdova. Please, huh? Nobody wants violence.”

  Amarante said, “I can go home now?”

  “Yeah, sure. Whatever you want…” Bernabé backed up, hesitating momentarily at the door of his truck, disturbed by the old man who was grinning absurdly in his direction. But finally, with a shrug and a worried “Ai, Chihuahua,” he climbed behind the wheel and effected another U-turn.

  Amarante waited until the sheriff was gone before moving on. Slowly he rattled along the dusty road to where he had to climb the Roybal ditch bank, and once he had accomplished that he teetered along the bank to the field.

  Joe was gone. Amarante surveyed the damp earth, the glistening green bean plants, the faint yellow irrigation foam left around the stalks, the mud cracking softly in some freshly watered rows. A few robins, starlings, and blackbirds were still scavenging. The old man trundled off a ways into the shade afforded by dusty, silver-leafed cottonwoods and sat down on a log.

  Spastically, dropping a half-dozen bullets, he reloaded the gun, placing it on the log beside him. Next he rolled a cigarette, and, quietly smoking, he listened woozily to faint meadowlark songs drifting melodically on the clear summer air.

  From here on in, he thought, if anybody like Eusebio Lavadie or Zopi Devine tried to mess with José Mondragón’s beanfield, they would have to reckon with Amarante Córdova first.

  But he was sleepy, his head buzzed drowsily. Grasshoppers crackled, a locust buzzed, a woodpecker blammed against a faraway hollow tree. Somewhere, too, a chain saw was droning.

  Amarante lowered himself so that his back pressed against the log on which he’d been sitting. The gun he laid carefully in his lap. His eyes flickered and were about to close when he noticed something odd hovering over town. For a moment the thing was so out of place that his mind could not translate what it saw. Then he realized that, even though no rain had fallen at all for the past few days, the arching vision, shining faintly but unmistakably over Milagro, was a rainbow.

  Too tired to worry about such a sight, Amarante fell asleep. But no sooner had he begun to snore than that queer rainbow appeared in his dream, shimmering faintly in the hot dry air muffling Milagro, and a few minutes later an angel showed up to complicate the miracle.

  No shining angel with a golden halo straight from Tiffany’s, a French horn, and wings fabricated out of pristine Chinese swansdown arrived to bless Amarante’s fertile imagination; rather, a half-toothless, one-eyed bum sort of coyote dressed in tattered blue jeans and sandals, and sporting a pair of drab moth-eaten wings that looked as if they had come off the remainder shelves of a disreputable cut-rate discount store during a fire-damage sale, appeared.

  This grisly sight limped along the Milagro–García spur pausing every now and again to blow its bulbous gray nose onto a greasy unhallowed sleeve, after which it rumbled and choked for a while like an old crone dying of TB.

  “Hey, Angel,” Amarante called out in his dream. “What’s a rainbow doing over our town on a sunny day like today?”

  The angel, startled by Amarante’s voice, froze stiff with its ears lying back flat; and
then, realizing there was no immediate danger, it turned to observe the puzzling natural phenomenon.

  “Who knows, cousin,” the coyote apparition mumbled at last. “Maybe it’s because for once in your lives you people are trying to do something right.”

  Abruptly, then, the angel disappeared. And Amarante went on to dream he was on a horse, carrying a rifle across the pommel of his saddle, tracking a deer through snow in the high open country around the Little Baldy Bear Lakes.

  * * *

  Bernabé Montoya, his face screwed up with concern, lumbered into Rael’s store. “Hey, Nick,” he almost whined. “How come the old geezer’s wearing that prehistoric revolver?”

  Nick shrugged. “It’s that beanfield, Bernie. Somebody should go talk with José in no uncertain terms before it’s too late.”

  “The last time he wore that rig was during César Pacheco’s trial over in Ojo Prieto, wasn’t it?” the sheriff mumbled dejectedly, more to himself than to the storekeeper.