by John Nichols
“He’s out of his head,” Nick said. “He don’t know what’s going on. Of course, he puts that thing on when he votes, too. And for the Feast of San Isidro.”
“But there’s no holidays this week, Nick.”
“He doesn’t know that. Maybe he thinks it’s time for next month’s Chamisaville fiesta.”
“The goddam thing was loaded.” Bernabé stripped the paper off a Milky Way candy bar. “That gun was stuffed full of live ammunition, can you believe it?”
“I know. He bought shells from me earlier. With food stamps.”
“Food stamps?”
Dolefully, Nick shrugged. “It turned out to be easier,” he grumbled by way of explanation. “That old bastard’s as stubborn as Pacheco’s pig.”
Bernabé retrieved a Nehi orange from the soda bin. “Shit,” he observed. “Something is rotten in Chamisa County.”
“Oh, I don’t think he’ll hurt anybody,” Nick said. “He can’t even pull the trigger.”
“Where there’s a will, there’s always, sooner or later, some kind of way,” Bernabé scowled, loudly scuffing his boot heels as he ambled mournfully out of the store. “I wish to Christ him and José would drop dead.”
* * *
As Bernabé Montoya propelled himself disconsolately off Rael’s porch wishing that Joe Mondragón and Amarante Córdova would drop dead, a mottled-green, 1953 Chevy pickup, with a huge three-legged German shepherd perched arrogantly on the cab’s roof, clanked to a stop on the other side of the dirt area that passed for the town plaza. And as this scruffy vehicle coasted noisily to a colorful exhaust-belching halt, it happened to obliterate from Bernabé’s view the lone parking meter in town.
This meter had been the brainstorm of the mayor, Sammy Cantú, his two councilmen, Bud Gleason and Ricardo P. Córdova (a second cousin of Amarante Córdova’s son, Ricardo A. Córdova, who was still being slowly dispatched by bone cancer), and the sheriff, Bernabé Montoya.
The parking meter’s purpose was to earn funds for the sheriff so that law and order might prevail in Milagro. Supposedly, donations to the meter would buy gas for Bernabé’s truck and provide dimes for the sheriff’s on-the-job official phone calls, which he often made from the pay phone on Rael’s front porch.
Since its installation two years before, however, the parking meter had rarely collected dimes. Most motorists simply parked elsewhere. One reason they usually parked elsewhere was because one-armed Onofre Martínez, the Staurolite Baron and father of Bruno Martínez the cop, always parked his mottled-green, 1953 Chevy pickup in front of the meter.
Although he never contributed a dime.
This had led to what might be called a feud between Onofre and the sheriff.
In fact, for two years hand-running, almost daily, and in spite of the three-legged shepherd’s fang-baring snarls, Bernabé had been ticketing Onofre’s perambulating junk heap. The tickets he wrote out were long and convoluted and very elaborate. They were printed on stiff, expensive paper, and each ticket pad cost the town two dollars and sixty cents. Hence, every time Bernabé wrote out a parking violation on that meter it cost him twenty cents in citation paper, ink, and his own valuable time to do so.
The fine for illegal parking in Milagro was fifty cents. But Onofre Martínez was not about to cough up four bits for the privilege of being ticketed in front of the Pilar Café, especially since his own son Bruno had developed into such a rotten apple by joining the state police. Thus, each time Bernabé affixed a citation to his windshield, Onofre plucked the ticket out from under the wiper with his left—and only—hand, bit down on one edge of the glossy cardboard, and commenced ripping it to shreds.
For two years now, in all seasons, these shreds had lain like a perpetual New Year’s Eve confetti all across that hapless dusty area in the middle of the Rael’s General Store–Frontier Bar–Pilar Café downtown commercial center of Milagro.
Onofre Martínez had as good a reason as any man for shredding parking tickets.
“Listen,” he enjoyed telling Bernabé Montoya every time the sheriff sighed, almost cried, and in a desultory halfhearted manner threatened Onofre with hellfire and damnation for his belligerent lawless attitude, “I’m seventy-nine years old, I got one arm, I had three wives, I got four brothers and a sister still living, six of both sexes already dead, I got six children—three girls and three boys, one a mental retard, and one who went to school and became a Communist, and another who shamed my name by becoming a state chota—but anyway, all my kids are living, and I got sixteen grandchildren and some great-grandchildren, too, and ever since I learned how to drive the same year they invented cars I been parking where I wanted to park and nobody ever tried to make me pay money to do it, especially not my own son (so why you?), and I’ll be goddamned if I’ll start now. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, so screw you, Bernabé, go put the bite on somebody else.”
In answer to this, Bernabé usually tried to reason with Onofre. The sheriff’s reasoning went like so:
“Alright, you one-armed, bandy-legged pipsqueak, pubic hair, and maricón. If you keep violating the law like this, if you keep deliberately committing a crime in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of your long-suffering fellow citizens, I’ll make sure they lock you in the Chamisa County Jail for a hundred years in a row, and I’ll tell Ernie Maestas to personally see to it there are worms and fly larvae and things like that in every piece of food you eat!”
Onofre Martínez’s reaction to Bernabé’s reaction, first off, was the reaction of just about all the poor people in Milagro to just about any statement from a cop. But then, calming himself, Onofre would offer these philosophical comments about crime and punishment:
“If you try to arrest me, Bernabé, you know what’s gonna happen? First of all I’m gonna plead innocent. Then I’m gonna get a lawyer; I’ll get Bloom. Then we’re gonna have a trial. Maybe in the end I’m guilty, but you know how much it’s gonna cost Milagro to take me to trial? More money than that parking meter could shit at you in twenty years.”
Which was a true statement: Onofre Martínez knew his rights.
And anyway, how could Bernabé Montoya expect to reason with a man who had named all his three sons Onofre after himself: Onofre Carlos (called Bruno Martínez), the one who became a chota; Onofre Jesús (O. J. Martínez), the retarded one who delivered the Capital City Reporter to the people of Milagro; and Onofre Tranquilino (O. T. Martínez), the one who got educated and became a Communist.
“You keep giving him tickets, though,” Sammy Cantú growled morosely, “and one of these days we’ll think of something. Maybe we can get an OEO loan from the government to prosecute that son of a bitch.”
By rough estimates, it had cost the town approximately two and a half to three dollars a week for over two years just to ticket Onofre Martínez. Nobody else, no citizen from Milagro, that is, parked in front of the meter because there was ample parking elsewhere. Even tourists seldom patronized the meter because the rest of the “plaza,” not to mention all the dusty side streets in town, were open to their monstrous automotive freakshows.
In fact, since it was first installed at a cost of two hundred and thirty-six dollars to the Milagro exchequer, that parking meter had received only fourteen dimes, eight nickels, and eleven pennies.
Or exactly one dollar ($1) and ninety-one cents ($.91).
To date, the meter had cost the town as follows:
In private, Bernabé Montoya, Sammy Cantú, and the two council members, Bud Gleason and Ricardo P. Córdova, christened that parking meter “The Wart on the Asshole of Milagro.”
Publicly, however, the parking meter had to stay so long as the mayor, the council, and the police force were locked in a life-and-death struggle with Onofre Martínez. Admittedly, they did not know how to nab, stab, or otherwise stop that one-armed lunatic without throwing away a fortune in legal fees and court costs, but they kept hoping desperately that some kind of deus ex machina would intercede for them.
; To all the stubborn parties obstinately concerned with this matter, it was The Principle of the Thing.
Still, Onofre Martínez was not a bad, vile, or vindictive hooligan. Rather, he was something of a poet, an inventor of on-the-spot ballads called corridos, and at one time he had been able to read and write in both English and Spanish. In the old days these peculiar talents had made him the official letter writer in the village, since until the latter stages of the first half of the twentieth century literacy had been a rare phenomenon in Milagro. Hence Onofre had written a thousand love letters for a thousand lovers, and he had also read those love letters to the persons who received them. For this service he had been paid both by the sender and by the recipient; and so Onofre had certainly garnered his share of whatever was passing for loot—chickens, hog cracklings, a bag of jerky—in his time.
Nobody, including Onofre himself, knew how he learned to read and write—certainly he had never attended school. But all at once, when still a child, Onofre had awakened able to read. His sudden skill was a miracle of sorts, on a par with the unexplained underground barking of Cleofes Apodaca’s lost sheepdog Pendejo or the bell whose ringing caused Padre Sinkovich to undermine the foundations of his very own church.
Onofre Martínez could no longer write, however, because he had lost his literate arm, and he had no more been able to transfer literacy to his left arm than Bernabé Montoya had been able to wheedle a fine out of Onofre for all those parking meter violations.
Maybe not a miraculous, but certainly a rather curious, story lay behind Onofre’s dearth of an appendage.
The normal way to lose an arm, leg, or whatever in Milagro was by having it mangled in tractor sickle bars or crushed beneath a horse. The deputy sheriff, Meliton Naranjo, had lost a finger when, as he was fussing with a fan belt in a truck, his kid had climbed behind the wheel and turned the motor over. Cristóbal Mondragón, Joe’s third-youngest brother, had half his pinkie bitten off when he lost hold of the nose twitch on a horse he was worming. Tranquilino Jeantete had lost one ear tip to frostbite during the same long-ago winter that the Strawberry Mesa Body Shop and Pipe Queen operator, Ruby Archuleta, killed a deer with her bare hands. Marvin LaBlue donated half his left thumb to a scissors jack at the Body Shop and Pipe Queen, and Claudio García dedicated the first joint of his right hand’s middle finger to that same beastly machine. Many arms, pieces of tongues, and parts of legs had been left by various Milagro residents in the rear seats of their head-on collisions with cows and horses on the north–south highway. And back in the late 1700s, so the story goes, an old man who had been courting a witch suddenly lost his penis, but not his life, to a lightning bolt that struck from a quiet winter snowstorm.
And each generation, of course, owned somebody who had lost an eye to a BB gun.
But Onofre Martínez claimed to have lost his arm to butterflies.
At least, that’s the way Onofre himself liked to tell the story when he had an audience of children and other gullible creatures who believed in werewolves, flibbertigibbets, and miracles.
“On the day it happened, all morning I’m irrigating my fields, so by lunch time I felt real tired. I went and sat down under a tree and ate a burrito and an extra piece of cheese. Then, just as I’m dozing off, along comes a big orange butterfly and lands on my arm, on the part called the bicep, up here. I didn’t move, and she sits there with her wings open, and after a minute I notice she’s putting some sticky stuff on my skin, and in this sticky stuff there’s a bunch of little white bumps, which after another minute it hits me are her eggs. Eventually she flutters away and I’m left with this little sticky circle on my arm full of teeny white huevos. I was curious so I didn’t brush them off. I went home, and for the next few days I’m real careful not to move my arm, you know, so as not to disturb those eggs. Then one morning I woke up and the eggs had hatched into little gusanos and these little gusanos had already eaten a hole in my arm. They looked like maggots. It didn’t hurt though, so I let them go ahead. They ate right into my arm and disappeared and not a drop of blood came out of the hole, I guess they sucked it all up along the way. It still didn’t hurt, so I’m just waiting for something to happen, being careful not to move my arm too much, of course. After a while I notice they’re eating up all the meat under the skin of my lower arm. But still, don’t ask me why, it didn’t hurt. And these little gusanos are growing and getting real fat, until pretty soon I didn’t have any more meat in my arm down there, and then a couple of them gnawed through my bone up by the bicep, up here, and my arm fell on the ground. Which is when they started flying out of my arm like out of a cornucopia, all these beautiful crimson butterflies, flying all around me like hungry bats for a minute until the wind blew them up into a tree. And for just a minute, even though it was August, a little snow fell on the cottonwood trees and on those blood red butterflies. The snow was so cold it killed all the butterflies in a wink, and they fell from the tree onto the ground like autumn leaves. I picked up my arm, which only had the skin intact with the rest hollowed out, thinking maybe it would make a good wind sock at the Chamisa V. airport. But I tumbled into a ditch on the way home and lost it. This happened a long time ago before you were born. Maybe dogs ate what was left of my arm, or perhaps tecolotes used it to line their nests.…”
But anyway, on this particular summer day Bernabé Montoya walked out of Rael’s just as Onofre’s mottled-green, 1953 Chevy pickup with the three-legged dog on top hiccupped to a stop at the town’s lone parking meter and, with a dispirited—call it a lonely—“Ai, Chihuahua!” the sheriff reached for his citation pad. Bitterly he began to write, thinking as he did so that if ever all the cantankerous streaks in people like Amarante Córdova, Joe Mondragón, and Onofre Martínez were united behind a common cause, there would be much more than all hell to pay.
Onofre’s three-legged shepherd leaped to the ground as the Staurolite Baron slammed the door, and, with a triumphant grin riding on his face like a soaring hawk, Onofre pulled out the driver’s side windshield wiper, making it that much easier for Bernabé to slide his ticket into place. After that, staggering swiftly forward like a man about to fall flat on his face, Onofre chugged toward the Pilar. On his way up the steps he encountered Bud Gleason, decked out in a madras sport coat and bow tie, coming down and Onofre tipped his cowboy hat good day with his invisible arm. At least, Onofre always insisted he used his nonexistent right hand to tip the hat, and it certainly looked that way, because his left and visible arm never swung up from his other side. Skeptics, though, said the hat tip was just a trick Onofre had learned to do by wiggling his scalp.
Yet at least one person in town, Joe Mondragón, claimed that he had once had his lip split in a Saturday night argument at the Frontier by the invisible fist residing at the end of Onofre’s invisible arm.
* * *
For years many stories and quite a few unconfirmed rumors about the Strawberry Mesa Body Shop and Pipe Queen tycoon, Ruby Archuleta, had circulated between Milagro and Doña Luz. Some folks swore she was a witch; a few misguided harpies insinuated she had poisoned or otherwise murdered the three husbands who had died on her. Various highly impeachable sources suggested that Eliu Archuleta, her eighteen-year-old son, was actually the offspring of an affair between Ruby and the expatriot santo carver who had disappeared right after the Smokey the Bear statue riot, Snuffy Ledoux, a clandestine relationship that supposedly occurred while her second husband, Sufi Menopoulos, a Greek who had owned the Eagle Motel on Route 26 leading east from Chamisaville, lay dying of cancer at St. Claire’s Hospital in the capital. Then again, for years a few hardcore gossips had whispered that Eliu was actually the product of a virgin birth.
Getting down to more verifiable facts, though, Ruby Archuleta was an uncertified midwife who had been safely delivering babies since 1940. She also qualified as one of the best fishermen in the area and was a deer hunter supreme. And whenever raspberries ripened in the local canyons a thousand jars of Ruby’s raspberry jam appeared a
lmost instantly on the shelves of Rael’s store in Milagro, Benny’s in Doña Luz, and the Flowering Wheat Health Food Store in Chamisaville, and she raked in the dinero hand over fist.
This dynamo measured five feet two inches tall, was forty-nine years old, and her misty red hair had mostly turned to gray. With her son Eliu, her gigantic lover, Claudio García, and a roly-poly hillbilly mechanic named Marvin LaBlue, she lived in a mud-plastered railroad tie house situated on a hill overlooking the Body Shop and Pipe Queen, an enterprise inherited from her first husband, a charismatic hustler named Ray Mingleback, who had drowned on Halloween night, 1958, when his Rolls Royce dove off the north–south highway into the Rio Grande about twenty miles below Chamisaville.
In the Archuleta house candles always flickered, and santos—some made from cornhusks, a number fashioned by Ruby herself, and still others carved by that disillusioned expatriot Snuffy Ledoux—lined the walls. Curious people from all over the state, running the gamut from well-known artists to shadowy hunted outlaws, continually stopped in transit to share a meal with Ruby and her crew; they puttered and chewed the fat, embraced Ruby affectionately, and pushed on at dawn. An aura of mystery and of knowledge surrounded Ruby Archuleta, and so of course the average Milagro citizen both envied and resented her, both loved her and hated her guts, thought she must be a Communist, refused to have his automotive or plumbing needs catered to by anyone else … and nobody knew Ruby very well although everyone had known her all their lives.
Actually, there was nothing that peculiar about the Body Shop and Pipe Queen (as some jokers occasionally called her). Awake each morning at five, Ruby dressed in a work shirt, weathered jeans, and cowboy boots, cooked breakfast for the men, tied her long hair up in a red-checkered bandanna, and marched outside to start overhauling cars or organizing plumbing jobs. She cut pipe and welded metal joints, installed shocks and stripped down engines—you name it. Whatever Claudio García, Marvin LaBlue, or her son could do, Ruby could do better. Hence, though a small-time operation, like everything else Ruby tackled, the Body Shop and Pipe Queen was the best operation of its kind in the county. And not because this tiny woman with dusty green eyes, a sharp nose, high cheekbones, and severe, beautiful lips possessed the sort of witchcraft that could produce giant beanstalks and golden eggs either—she just worked bloody hard. She shouted orders, made split-second decisions, helped to manhandle machinery, operated the wrecker in all kinds of weather, and when she needed parts or supplies she jumped in a truck and whizzed down to the capital and got them—and to hell with the U.S. Mail!