The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  But then, all during the time Bloom had known Joe he had understood that sooner or later the relationship was going to lead to trouble; and who knows, perhaps that is even why he had protected their friendship. When it happened, then, when Joe danced by after the fact to announce with pride what he had done, Bloom almost gratefully dropped an arm around his neighbor’s shoulders, saying, “Don’t worry, man, if they come down on you we’ll fight them every inch of the way.” Though, of course, as soon as Joe left he reconsidered, wondering was he crazy to encourage such a hopeless and inflammatory act? Whereupon, afraid for his own hide, Bloom almost (but not quite, thank God!) called Joe up to tell him to quit playing childish games.

  About the situation Linda understood two things: why her frightened husband had refused to cop out when for the health of them both he should have, and also what grave consequences might develop from the affair. And she deeply resented the fact that Bloom could jeopardize their fragile marriage in this way.

  Thus immediately, two minutes after Joe dropped by with the news about his west side beanfield, Linda and Charley Bloom were very much on edge with each other, waiting for the sky to fall.

  “Do you really want to do this?” Linda asked in a small, uneven voice. “Do you really want to become involved?”

  “Of course. I mean actually of course not, I suppose. I mean … I don’t know…”

  Later that same afternoon Bloom walked out back to survey his small, secure kingdom. There was his garden and the Rototiller with which he’d turned it over. There were his irrigation boots and a spade for cutting water out of the Acequia del Monte into his back field, or into his apple and plum trees, or into his garden. There were the two beehives Onofre Martínez had built and which the one-armed man cared for, supplying the Blooms with honey as a kind of rent. And there was the chicken coop Linda and he had built together, and the chickens wandering in the yard.

  Bloom sensed all of it was terribly tentative, doomed. A time bomb was ticking at the heart of their outwardly placid, inwardly unstable little family universe, and he was afraid.

  Naturally, Linda’s lack of support pissed him off.

  And he could feel his temperature rising as with her eyes, but never again with her voice, she urged him to back out while the backing was good.

  When Bloom read his beautiful girls, Pauline and María, their bedtime stories, he nearly burst into tears. Having blundered into something he really did not want to do, simply because it was something that probably ought to be done, he was terrified of the dues that would have to be paid.

  And when he and Linda went to bed at night they clung together wordlessly, waiting for unseen fatal blows to split open their skulls.

  One weekend afternoon, the lawyer was outside on his front lawn desultorily hacking away at some piñon with a dull ax when Joe Mondragón’s pickup entered the drive like a crippled jet fighter and made a one-point landing that stopped just short of plowing into the woodpile.

  Straightening up, Bloom greeted Joe the way a timid cat might greet a very large fat rat. Joe smiled back, waving hello, and jumped nervously down from the cab, tossing a white package one-handed jumpshot style across the hood of his truck toward Bloom, who dropped the ax but bobbled the package anyway.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “Goat meat. We just killed a cabrito. It’s good. You’ll like it.”

  “So what’s happening?” Bloom asked.

  Picking up the ax, Joe ran his thumb along the edge. “Jesus Christ!” he exploded. “Why don’t you sharpen your fucking ax, Charley? You’ll kill yourself trying to break wood with this thing.”

  Bloom shrugged, grinning foolishly: “What can I say?”

  “I got a file.” Joe fetched it from the toolbox cached underneath what was left of his front seat, sat down on that seat with the door open, and began to sharpen the ax.

  “You came over just to give me a package of dead goat?” Bloom asked suspiciously, fearing the worst.

  “I dunno … you know,” Joe said. “I just wondered if, well, if you read up anymore on water law, shit like that.”

  “I know one thing,” Bloom said.

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “The inspection sticker on your truck here expired a year and a half ago.”

  Joe looked up blandly, readjusting his cowboy hat. “So what?”

  “Don’t you ever get a ticket for that?”

  “Not so far. Who’s gonna be stupid enough to try and give me a ticket? Nobody in this town would be driving if we had to keep our stickers up to date. Bernie Montoya, his sticker expired two years ago!”

  Bloom shrugged hopelessly. He couldn’t stand such blithe defiance of petty laws. It was arrogant and stupid and caused a lot of useless trouble. And because Joe was stupid and arrogant he was no doubt also going to make a lot of stupid and useless trouble for Bloom, which the lawyer was going to let him do because he felt guilty, or noble, or was just too chickenshit to refuse a case that was doomed from the start.

  Joe turned the ax over, starting to file along the other edge. He said, “Hey, Charley, why don’t you run down for me again what the law is about that water, okay? Just so I can get it straight in my mind.”

  Bloom settled uncomfortably into an old wooden chair he had been meaning for months to refinish, and for the umpteenth time summarized the 1935 Interstate Water Compact and the state water laws in general, detailing how, legally, the state could go after Joe if he kept irrigating on the west side, by calling a hearing and so forth. He explained what the special water master could and probably would try to do to Joe, and he wrapped up his brief narration by observing, “You understand, of course, that we’ve got about as much chance of winning this as a one-legged man has got of winning an ass-kicking contest.”

  Joe had listened intently, grinding hard with the file, and when Bloom finished he quit sharpening the ax. They sat silently for a moment while Joe (wanting to scream because it was all still a muddle in his mind) lit a cigarette, and Bloom (wanting to scream because he had seen his explanations flying like scared doves into one of Joe’s ears and out the other) stuffed and lit a pipe.

  Eventually, Joe said, “I got some free time the next couple days, you got anything else around here needs fixing?”

  The lawyer shook his head. After all, the more he accepted, the more he would be obliged to offer, and he was already in well over his head, thanks anyway.

  Jumping out of the truck, Joe leaned the ax against the woodpile. “Well,” he said hastily, avoiding Bloom’s eyes, “you lemme know when you got something around here needs fixing, okay? And I’ll let you know when those bastards try to arrest me or send me a summons in the mail or something, okay?”

  “Okay,” Bloom said, making an effort to smile. “Thanks for the cabrito, Joe.”

  Behind the wheel of his truck, Joe metamorphosed instantly into a cocky madman, jauntily tipped his hat, and catapulted his jet fighter back onto the public road, leaving the lawyer engulfed in a robin’s egg blue exhaust cloud. Bloom brushed the poisonous fog away from his face, went over to check the ax blade … and promptly cut his thumb.

  Sucking on his thumb, Bloom entered the kitchen and tossed the cabrito package to Linda. When she asked “What’s this?” he rolled his eyes to the ceiling, mock moaning, “Goat meat. Kid goat meat.”

  “Well, at least it’s not venison.”

  Linda popped the package into their refrigerator’s freezing compartment which already held quite a few gifts from Joe Mondragón—namely, three packages of venison (one of which was two years old), some brown trout wrapped in tinfoil, a small hunk of smoked rattlesnake, and an entire (nicely skinned, perfectly dressed) jackrabbit.

  Confronted, as he sucked on his thumb, by this freezer compartment full of what Linda (and, yes, himself a little, too) considered inedible goodies, Bloom didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  * * *

  How Charley Bloom felt was nothing compared to the thoughts roiling
in Herbie Goldfarb’s brain. Herbie Goldfarb being a twenty-two-year-old conscientious objector and VISTA volunteer from Brooklyn, New York, and a recent graduate of CCNY where he’d majored in English literature. Herbie planned to go to graduate school, but had reasoned upon graduation that he ought to take a year off and see the world. And if you did this by joining VISTA, which qualified as an alternate service to the draft, you were much less likely to find yourself suddenly in the army seeing that part of the world which included Vietnam. So Herbie had spent a few weeks in the East boning up on VISTA lore, and then he’d been shipped on a bus with six other peagreen do-gooders to Chamisaville, where he had wanted to be stationed. But it turned out Chamisaville had arranged for the six volunteers to be scattered into deserving remote areas, and so that’s how come Herbie found himself, quite early one summer morning, descending from the Trailways bus at Rael’s store in Milagro with a guitar in one hand and a suitcase full of books and sneakers and T-shirts and Levi’s in the other, and the mayor, Sammy Cantú, who was supposed to meet him, didn’t.

  So began what Herbie later on in his life would refer to as “that nightmare summer.” He tried to call up the mayor, only to discover Cantú had no phone. When he entered the store to ask Nick Rael for help, Nick just cocked his head suspiciously, asking “Who are you?” and then “What’s VISTA?” and then, incredulously, “You came here to teach us things?”

  Herbie spent a couple of hours out on the porch after that, blushing every time a local resident, who was usually practically vibrating with what Herbie interpreted as hostility, approached the store. And when some older men tipped their cowboy hats, mumbling, “Buenos días, cómo le ha ido, amigo?” it suddenly dawned on Herbie that maybe these people he had come to help spoke Spanish. And sure enough—they did. And he didn’t.

  Not one word.

  Somewhat dumbfounded by this revelation, Herbie stared at the thousand confetti bits of torn-up parking meter tickets littering the plaza area, and tried to ignore the sweet little old lady in a nearby yard who was methodically stoning him with minuscule gravel bits.

  About ten o’clock on that first morning a pudgy, cheerful, prosperous-looking man wearing a suit and a bolo tie emerged from a late model Plymouth that had just parked in front of Herbie, and, on his way into the store, tipped his cowboy hat and smiled, saying in English, “Hi there, how you doing?” By then Herbie was desperate, and so, leaping at the chance to converse with a relatively friendly English-speaking person, he blurted, “Excuse me, sir, but maybe you can help me, I’m looking for Mr. Cantú.”

  The man said, “Sammy Cantú, Bill Cantú, Meliton Cantú, Felipe Cantú, Amarante Cantú, Eloy Cantú, or Chemo Cantú?”

  “Isn’t your mayor named Cantú?” Herbie asked meekly.

  “Sure.” The man really grinned. “I’m the mayor. My name is Sammy Cantú. What can I do for you, young man?”

  “Uh, Mr. Cantú, my name is Herbert Goldfarb, I’m the VISTA volunteer.”

  The mayor regarded him blankly.

  Herbie mumbled, “Didn’t anybody tell you about me?”

  Sammy Cantú squinted semisuspiciously, asking, “What’s a VISTA volunteer?”

  “Mr. Cantú,” Herbie blurted, “I’m supposed to come and live here for a year. Mrs. Appleby down in Chamisaville, she said that all the arrangements were made, if I would only just check in with you when I got here.”

  “What do you mean, arrangements?” the mayor asked.

  “Well, you know. A place to stay. People to talk with in the beginning about setting up some programs…”

  “In Milagro?” Sammy Cantú looked really puzzled.

  “You mean nobody told you I was coming—?”

  The mayor shrugged. “Nobody told me. But that doesn’t mean nobody told nobody. Maybe somebody told somebody, but they didn’t tell me.”

  “Well, what do you think I should do—” Herbie almost burst out crying.

  “You say you’re supposed to live here for a while?”

  Herbie nodded.

  “Well, I know a place you could live if you’re not too particular. My wife’s brother, he’s a cousin of Pancho Armijo, and when Tranquilino Armijo died he willed Pancho the big house, and Annie’s husband, the brother Felix, he was willed this little one-room kind of smokehouse next door. It don’t have no fireplace, but there’s one of those Monkey Ward tin stoves in there, you could keep warm, and there’s a ditch runs in back of the house usually has water in it you could drink so long as nobody farther up the line is using it in a field, and the rent probably wouldn’t be very steep.”

  “Sure. That sounds great!” Herbie almost shouted, and proceeded to gush over with thanks.

  He might have saved his applause for a more appropriate moment, though. The place was minuscule, it had one small, very high-up window, no electricity, and it was always cold. Skunks lived under the floorboards. The chimney of the tin stove wouldn’t draw properly and it took him an hour to start a fire. Herbie owned no truly warm clothes because, having associated “Southwest” with “desert,” he had figured the temperature would always be hovering around eighty-five degrees. Instead, he was living in a mud hut at seventy-four hundred feet, surrounded by twelve- and thirteen-thousand-foot snowcapped mountains, and the temperature, in June, even in July, dove to the high thirties and low forties with regularity at night. When it rained, which was almost every day for a while, his dirt roof with sunflowers growing in it leaked. Then winds that blew day and night, sucking the moisture out of the earth and knocking over old dried-up cottonwoods (one of which splintered his outhouse), kept driving sand into his sensitive eyes. And, with sties in both eyes and a cottonwood tree in his lap, his asshole aching from diarrhea that probably came from drinking irrigation ditch water, Herbie soon found himself all too often seated in his open-air outhouse (which he only dared use at night), wondering if it would take as long as two months before he cracked.

  When he cleaned the house on his first day in it, Herbie discovered three black widow spiders. Next week their relatives were spinning new webs in the corners and between the legs of the tin stove. Because the hut lacked electricity he read by candlelight; literally hundreds of six-penny candles were soon set obscenely into pop bottles on the floor beside his sleeping bag. His only furniture was the suitcase, on end beside the window during the day, the chair on which he constantly perched reading Malamud, Katherine Anne Porter, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, and Joyce Carol Oates.

  Asleep, Herbie dreamed the black widows were getting him. When he patronized the outhouse late at night he was terrified rattlesnakes would end this experiment in social consciousness; or else one of his brooding savage neighbors, thinking him a deer, would send his college-trained, intellectual brains foaming into the air with a slug from a .30–30.

  One day his southern neighbor, Joe Mondragón, loafed over. Herbie was outside in the yard, sitting on a rock, playing his guitar. Joe said, “Hey, man, that’s a pretty nice-sounding guitar, lemme have a whack at it.” Herbie handed the instrument over and, with one foot on the rock, Joe stroked a few chords—he couldn’t play worth shit. But then he started singing and Herbie had never heard a voice like that—lusty and high, almost piercing, but especially melodic too, singing in Spanish songs that to Herbie seemed rare and exotic, although he could have found them on any $1.79 Al Hurricane or Tiny Morrie record in the Chamisaville Whacker’s store.

  Joe said, “This is a nice guitar, you mind if I borrow it, just for a day? I want to sing my kids to sleep tonight.”

  “Sure,” Herbie said, desperate for friends. “Go ahead. Keep it as long as you like. I don’t play it that much anyway.”

  “Well, when you want it, holler,” Joe said.

  That was the last Herbie saw of his guitar. It disappeared into the Mondragón house and never came out again. Maybe Joe had forgotten about it, or maybe he’d stolen it or pawned it—they seemed pretty poor over there. Or
maybe the kids had busted it. “If that’s the case,” Herbie mumbled to himself, “of course the Mondragóns can’t pay…” And so to save everybody embarrassment Herbie never went over to ask for his guitar back.

  In fact, the more he thought about it the more Herbie became convinced the kids had busted his guitar. They were terrors, those little Mondragón brats. The oldest one, who looked about six, got his kicks from hiding behind a big rabbitbrush bush at the Mondragón boundary fence and winging BBs at Herbie or at Herbie’s window with a homemade innertube slingshot. Herbie never landed on the kid for this because he was afraid of the parents, even though several times in the beginning, after the guitar-lending incident, Nancy had come over with things for him to eat—a bowl of chili, another of posole, a bag of hot sopaipillas. He had thanked her profusely, wondering if they were payment for his splintered guitar. “Come on over and eat with us or watch television whenever you want,” Nancy said brightly, but Herbie never took her up on that. Mostly because he was too shy, and because also he had been brought up in a society where such invitations were often largely a matter of social course and not to be taken that seriously. After a while Nancy stopped bringing food, and Herbie never went over. Of course, it did not occur to him others might be just as shy as himself.

  And as for the guitar? Several times Nancy chided her husband, saying, “José, you got to give that poor boy back his guitar.” But Joe pooh-poohed her concern. “He said keep it as long as I like. When he wants it back he’s gonna holler—”

  On another day early in Herbie’s stay, a huge pig wandered into the Goldfarb yard. Herbie picked up a rock, but instead of running away the pig charged, and the volunteer had to run for his life, leaping high into the cottonwood that lay across his splintered outhouse.

  Presently a hulking, crazy-eyed man toting a stiff lariat appeared on the scene. Without introducing himself he grumbled, “Oye, primo, ayúdame con esta pendeja marranita cabrona.”

  “I’m sorry,” Herbie said, “but I don’t speak Spanish.”