The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

Seferino Pacheco stopped, looking vaguely askance and threateningly at the Easterner perched in the fallen cottonwood.

  “How come you don’t speak no Spanish?”

  “I never learned. I didn’t realize so many people spoke so much Spanish so much of the time around here.”

  Pacheco grunted. “Well, help me catch this pig, will you?”

  The pig wandered through the open door into Herbie’s house. Exclaiming triumphantly, Pacheco leaped forward, slamming shut the door. Then he turned around and sat down on the small concrete stoop, rolling a cigarette while the pig went crazy inside, banging against the wall, crunching into the stove, squealing and grunting and bellowing—almost like a mule, Herbie thought. And then it was suddenly quiet in the little house.

  “When it calms down I’ll put this rope around it,” Pacheco explained.

  “I think your pig is eating my books,” Herbie offered nervously. The window was so small and so high he couldn’t look in to verify his fears.

  “What kind of books?”

  “Oh, you know, different people, mostly fiction…”

  “You got anything by Hemingway?” Pacheco asked.

  Herbie was a little taken aback. “Sure … I mean, yes, I got a couple…”

  “You ever read Old Man and the Sea?”

  Herbie nodded. “Sure…”

  “That was a good book,” Pacheco said. “My wife, she read it to me. I never learned to read. She read To Have and Have Not to me too, but I thought it was a bullshitty book. She read me a lot of stuff and a lot of it I liked. I’m the most learned illiterate man in this town. I know about people like James Joyce and Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck. Me, I enjoyed especially books like that Of Mice and Men and The Red Pony. And The Grapes of Wrath. That’s the kind of Anglo stuff people like me can relate to a little, I guess you’d say. But there are a lot greater writers than Steinbeck. You ever hear of Juan Ramón Jiménez, or read his book Platero y Yo? For that they gave him a Nobel Prize. Or how about Pablo Neruda? Or the Guatemalan, Asturias? Or the Argentinian, Jorge Luis Borges? My wife, she read all those people to me. Federico García Lorca. And how about the epic poem that boxer wrote, Yo Soy Joaquín? And you know what we did once? We left this town for a month and drove across the country, just to see the Orozcos in the Dartmouth College Library—”

  Pacheco halted, cocking his head, belaboring Herbie with a crusty, almost evil eye. Then he said:

  “Sometimes, after she died, when I used to get down to the capital, I’d listen to the records and tapes in the blind people’s library. I knew a guy who worked there and he didn’t mind. But I don’t get away from this place anymore—I lost my mobility. I’m a little too crazy to function on the outside, I think. How do you like your neighbors?”

  “I don’t even know my neighbors.”

  “You got Pancho Armijo over there, and José Mondragón behind us. Armijo, every two years he loses the sheriff race to Bernie Montoya by three votes. Which is okay because Bernie’s not too smart but he’s not mean either—he’s a good person to have for sheriff. His way of keeping the lid on is by steering clear of people’s affairs. José Mondragón, he’s another kind of fish. He’s got such a hot head you’d think he was plucked off a chili plant instead of born natural like the rest of us. He’s one of those little guys likes to beat the shit out of big guys. When he was high school age he used to kick my Melvin down one side of the playground and up the other side every recess time. Melvin got killed in Korea. The only thing people around here are professionals at is producing cannon fodder for that pendejo Tío Sam. Later on José and me we built frame houses together when the mine first came into Doña Luz, so we got to be friendly. And now I can’t hold any grudges. Except if somebody asked me to name the six or seven people in town who, if that big pig in there ever got into their fields, would most likely not only kill it but have the animal butchered and packed away in their freezers before I even knew about it, I’d have to say he would be one of them.”

  Uncomfortable with this lopsided, wild-eyed man, Herbie said, “Excuse me, sir, but I really am afraid your pig is eating my books.”

  The look Pacheco cast his way practically nailed Herbie to the cottonwood trees behind him. It was part angry, part hurt, but mostly unhappy and very lonely. Then Herbie realized that Seferino Pacheco had made himself comfortable on that stoop with an eye toward talking, and all at once the volunteer regretted pushing the panic button, but he couldn’t pull back his words. And he was worried about his books.

  Pacheco stood up, carefully opened the door, and darted inside. In due course, after a brief but noisy scuffle, he emerged with the pig trussed in a curious way, the rope around its neck and one leg so that it hobbled meekly along beside its master, grunting complacently.

  Herbie said another thing he immediately wished he hadn’t: “Isn’t that pig big enough to slaughter?”

  Pacheco returned a self-effacing, almost apologetic, somewhat embarrassed smile. “If I killed this miserable hog, then I wouldn’t have an excuse, qué no?”

  Later on in Herbie’s western summer, as things—instead of developing—remained more or less the same or got worse, he wished Pacheco’s pig would come around once more so they might chew the fat again. But it never did. Hence, he spent most of his time reading in his dismal room, wishing he could play his guitar, walking the three hundred yards to town for groceries—and somehow he just couldn’t begin. He couldn’t approach people, talk with them. He never saw the affable mayor again. Everybody seemed so far away, unreachable. He was a Connecticut Yankee in Milagro’s court, and a blind man could see that whatever he might know enough about to teach somebody would be totally irrelevant to these people. He felt ashamed, and when he went out for walks he hunched his shoulders, wanting to be as invisible as an insect with diaphanous wings. People who actually would have been very friendly had he dared talk with them seemed sullen in his eyes: he imagined them kneeling before ornate little altars in their bedrooms at night, praying for him to take a powder—and he wanted to go home.

  Once a week he hitchhiked to Chamisaville for lunch with the other volunteers, and for a shower at the KOA Kampgrounds a mile north of town. “Hey,” one kid said, “I found this dynamite old guy who’s teaching me Spanish.” Another, a woman, gloated, “This really suave old lady is teaching me how to make tortillas.” But basically they all felt sheepish and so out of their element it was crazy. “This is a great experience for all of us,” Herbie said, “but what are we doing for the people?”

  When he returned to Milagro from these Chamisaville trips and hurried, hunched over, to his miserable home, Herbie plunged back into literature with a vengeance, wrote long sorrowful letters home to a girl friend and to his parents, plinked imaginary lackluster rhythms on his forgotten, stolen, or busted guitar, and cursed the remote people and their remote village and especially himself for being unable to cope. Most of all, though, he cursed the skunks under his floorboards whose perpetual low-key stink was driving him insane—his eyes continually watered, his nostrils had become raw and almost bloody.

  So sat Herbie Goldfarb, alone in his one-room house in the eye of a gathering storm, reading Hemingway, Joyce, McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor, the only inhaling and exhaling lump in Milagro oblivious to the fact that something was beginning to get ready to hit the proverbial fan.

  Part Two

  “United we flounder, divided we flounder.”

  —Benny Maestas

  Inevitably, Kyril Montana paid a visit to Milagro. He came in on the north–south highway driving an unmarked state car, a beige, four-door Ford Galaxie which had a police radio and a .38 police special in the glove compartment. The agent rarely carried a gun on his person, and had never had occasion to fire a gun at another human being. He was, however, an expert and deadly shot, a good hunter, also a conservationist. He was very careful about shooting the right kind of deer in the right season, and never violated the point system on ducks and upland game. He usually
applied for a special elk and bighorn sheep permit, and such were the rules of the game within the various state agencies, that he was always granted a permit, and he always got his sheep or his elk. Too, the agent was an excellent bow hunter; and he sometimes went with an old college friend—the Milagro real estate agent Bud Gleason—varmint calling. But he was not into overkill, and there was nothing bloodthirsty about his hunting habits. A careful and cautious man who picked his shots, never drank while carrying a firearm, and always stayed in shape, Kyril Montana thoroughly enjoyed the outdoors with or without a gun. He was a member of the Isaac Walton League, the Sierra Club, and Ducks Unlimited. He loved to backpack with his family on weekends, and he had an intricate professional knowledge of many mountain ranges in the state.

  Kyril Montana was also a person who usually traveled with a plan. In hunting he always sized up the territory ahead, he always took into consideration all the factors involved before moving in on his game. He liked to set things up, and had an abhorrence of blundering along without having considered the alternatives well in advance. He was a person who laid an extensive—sometimes his superiors felt too extensive—foundation, before attacking the heart of a matter. His caution in the past may have cost him an arrest or two, but he had rarely, if ever, made a serious mistake.

  So when the agent steered his unmarked car off the north–south highway into the western section of Milagro, he had a plan, and his plan was first of all simply to “case the joint,” as it were. On the seat beside him, on top of a clipboard holding papers, photographs, lists, and names of Milagro citizens, he had a large map with the houses of perhaps a dozen people—among them Joe Mondragón’s and Charley Bloom’s—inked in.

  He drove west on the Milagro–García spur, a dirt road partially shaded by some cottonwoods and Russian olives growing alongside Indian Creek. The agent was so familiar with the map and with the landmarks he should be looking for that he never had to stop the car to orient himself. He knew exactly how far it was from the north–south highway to the Acequia Madre del Sur headgate; and once he spotted the headgate, it was no problem, despite the clustering trees and some patches of tall flowering rabbitbrush, to trace the route of the acequia to where the Roybal ditch branched off, creating a thin lush path directly to the small field, green and almost garish now between bordering patches of dusty earth, where Joe Mondragón’s bean plants were arrogantly growing.

  Kyril Montana experienced little emotion when he saw the field for the first time. He did not entertain the crosscurrents of conflicting emotions that were often aroused in others upon sighting “the enemy.” In fact, it would never have occurred to him to consider Joe an enemy. Instead, he was a problem to be dealt with, and an interesting problem at that, and people like Joe were why Kyril Montana found his work enjoyable. So he never changed the pace of his car as he drifted quietly past the green, shimmering beanfield.

  Beyond Joe’s field, and as the road curved north along the course of Milagro Creek, no land had been irrigated for years. Magpies drifted from cottonwoods across the deserted road, and bluebirds and swallows flitted in and out of abandoned adobe farmhouses. Rusting car hulks cast the only shadows across deserted yellow yards; in many places barbed wire had snapped between fence posts and now curled frozenly toward the sky. The timbers of small corrals were broken, well housings aslant, outhouses blown over and destroyed. When the road swung away from the stream course heading back toward the north–south highway, the ruins tailed away to the west. Still, you could make out the old irrigation ditches which had once fed the larger and still-fenced bean- and alfalfa fields, dry and dead now but for tumbleweed and numerous yellow bun-shaped snakeweed bushes and sparse tufts of gramma grass. The land here was flat, flowing into a sagebrush terrain as you approached the highway again, leading to piñon foothills and the high mountains in the east, to the gorge and a formation of delicate gray and beige mesas in the west.

  Back on the highway, Kyril Montana drove a mile and a half south to the eastern turnoff into town where the surviving population of Milagro was settled. He cruised past the Pilar Café, the Frontier Bar, the Forest Service headquarters—and that was it. Some kids gathered along Rael’s porch sucking on Dr. Peppers glanced at the car as it stirred up a small storm of parking ticket confetti; Mercedes Rael chucked a few pebbles that pinged off his hood; and a three-legged German shepherd, leaping off the roof of a rattletrap pickup, charged after the agent’s vehicle for a few yards, barking furiously.

  Then a huge pig was standing in the middle of the road. The agent braked, but the pig stood pat, challenging the automobile. Not wishing to call attention to himself, the agent gave the horn a brief beep, then drove right up to the pig, which snorted desultorily, refusing to move on. So Kyril Montana lurched his car forward and hit the animal; it toppled over with a surprised squeal, scrambled quickly to its feet, and lumbered bluntly off the road.

  As the houses petered out, the agent nosed his car onto a dirt road that twisted up the side of Capulin Hill past a small deserted elementary school, continuing on up to the white Milagro water storage tank, which had numbers—’68, ’70, ’71—painted all over it by graduating Doña Luz Junior High School classes: students who went on to high school were bussed farther south to Chamisaville.

  Parking in the tank’s shadow, Kyril Montana sat behind the wheel of his car looking over the town. A compact, simple unit, Milagro was cut in two by the north–south highway, a curious division of green here and desert there—Entre verde y seco, the agent thought: Between what’s lush and what’s dry. And there was Joe Mondragón’s beanfield, completely out of place to the west, an absurd green bauble in the otherwise desolate landscape slated to become a posh golf course. But on this side of the highway green fields led directly up to the road’s eastern shoulder—an unnatural setup; obviously the result of a strange, possibly a bad, law.

  The agent scrutinized the town, getting it down right in his mind, giving himself time for everything to register, the houses of people he didn’t know and the houses of those in whom he was interested, the network of irrigation ditches and small dusty roads, the minuscule orchards and small herds of sheep and horses. He watched where a jeep, a pickup, an old Chrysler, a young man on a horse went; he followed, for a moment, the movements of a woman hanging wash on a line; and then he shifted his attention to two teen-age boys mixing mud and straw in a shallow pit for adobes.

  Kyril Montana stayed beside the water storage tank only until comfortable with his feel of the place, then he started his car and swung around and down the hill to take care of business.

  * * *

  Except for Bud Gleason, all six men present were afraid of Kyril Montana, or at least unnaturally nervous in his presence. They were gathered in the real estate agent’s living room, and among them were the sheriff, his deputy Meliton Naranjo, the mayor, Nick Rael, and Eusebio Lavadie. Kyril Montana sat on a comfortable couch with his clipboard on a low coffee table in front of him, and the other men were spread around in various chairs, each man nursing a beer, compliments of Bud Gleason, who had arranged the meeting.

  “This is a simple matter,” the agent said quietly. “Or at least it should be a simple matter. And I’d like to go through it quickly because I don’t want to take any more of your time than is necessary. You all know Joe Mondragón. At least I’m assuming you all know him—” he looked up and swiftly around.

  “We all know him,” Lavadie said somberly, and the other men nodded yes, muttering agreement, some smiling, some looking grim.

  “Alright.” The agent pressed open the spring on his clipboard, extracting six issues of the Voice of the People, which he gave to the man on his left, Sammy Cantú, with a nod to pass them around. “First of all, or rather after this meeting, all of you should read the article in this magazine, an article written by a Milagro resident, the lawyer Charley Bloom.”

  “Sure,” Lavadie said. “Charley Bloom. He lives here.”

  “You know him? Do all of you kn
ow him?”

  “I do,” Lavadie said. And Bud Gleason nodded. “I sold him his house.” The others shrugged or shook their heads.

  “Okay.” The agent paused dramatically for a second as the magazine went around, then he plunged into a brisk summary of the problem. “Joe Mondragón, as you may or may not know—though I’m assuming you all do know, and if you don’t you will by the time you finish that article—Joe Mondragón has diverted some water from the creek on the west side of the highway, and for a while now he’s been irrigating a small beanfield over there, which is strictly illegal, as Sheriff Montoya here knows, and as Mr. Naranjo knows too, and as the rest of you are probably aware also. There is in this case, however, a problem, a delicate sort of situation which exists—an extenuating circumstance. We know that some people here in Milagro support Joe Mondragón despite the possible grave consequences, and simply to arrest and jail Mr. Mondragón for his flagrant illegal actions would probably cause more trouble than it would cure. I’m sure all of you are aware of that—I mean, you know this town much better than I do—you’re aware of what’s going on. Yet what’s going on, at least insofar as we see it down in the capital, is not something that most of you in this town fully understand. In fact, I think whatever support Mr. Mondragón has is coming from citizens who honestly do not question his motives—”

  Kyril Montana paused to let that sink in.

  “—who do not question his motives, who believe that all Mr. Mondragón wants to do is lodge a protest against, say, the 1935 water compact by growing a field of beans.”

  Most of the men were waiting now, quietly, not so much with the attention of men waiting to learn something new, but rather with the guarded attention of men who understand exactly what is being driven at and where everyone stands, but are wondering how it’s going to be worded and what their commitment to what must follow is going to have to be.

  “Alright. As far as it goes maybe that’s part of it. You men grew up with Mr. Mondragón; I did not. But I think you should know certain facts that we are aware of down in the capital, and I think that you should think very carefully about those facts and what they could do to your lovely town here. In the first place, after you’ve read that article, you’ll understand a little more about Charley Bloom. Read the entire magazine and you’ll understand even more. You’ll understand, I think, that Mr. Mondragón isn’t acting entirely on his own. In fact, we have reason to believe that this beanfield is not even Mr. Mondragón’s idea, but a plot hatched up by the lawyer Charley Bloom.”