The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  “Oh, you know, what the hell. She’s okay.” Everything with Bernabé’s wife was always pretty much the same from one day to the next.

  “I saw her in the Safeway, when was it I was there with Bert. On Tuesday? I think it was Tuesday.”

  “I guess that’s when she came down, I don’t remember.”

  Vera said, “Huh…”

  They sat in silence after that, sipping slowly, in no real hurry to go anywhere, do anything. Except Bernabé would have loved to talk. This was nothing unusual with him, he had always wanted to talk with the women he bedded. But all his life he’d found that the women in his affairs were exactly like Carolina; some kind of mystery about them or an aura about them, or some kind of barrier erected by the macho culture in his blood made it impossible for him to converse. Often they prattled like guinea hens to him, baring their souls (as he so fervently wished to bare his) while he listened; that’s all it ever seemed he could do, just listen. Even if the words roiling in his guts caused miserable cramps and gas pains, even if tormented confessions battled against the backs of his teeth like bats trying to escape a cave at dusk, he couldn’t speak. Wanting to talk, all he could do was hearken to their patter … and lay them … and hearken some more. And every time he located a new lady he did so with a hunger that was not half as sexual as it was social—desperately he wanted to communicate, get things off his chest, share secrets, confess, bare all, ask for advice, probe and interrogate, let loose torrents of rage, or maybe even release whatever it was he might have to say about love. But he was terrified; he had visions of his own awkwardness, of how clumsy he would sound, of how startled and ashamed the women would be. And so he kept his trap shut.

  Often the sheriff looked at himself in the mirror. Not to primp, comb his hair, shave, or to practice sneering. He simply stared at himself, Bernabé Montoya, forty-three years old and the two-bit bumbling sheriff of Milagro, who had a million questions to ask people about things but had never asked them, who was growing old all bottled up, who would never have considered confronting men with his dilemma, and who had been unable to forge a repository for the gathering pronouncements of his stormy soul in the arms of a hundred clandestine paramours.

  With dumpy, warm, sometimes shrill, often soft Carolina snoring dispassionately beside him, he’d had dreams. To be sure many of these dreams, especially of late, depicted one-armed Onofre Martínez tearing up Bernabé’s fucking parking tickets in front of Milagro’s lone parking meter. But other dreams dealt with Bernabé Montoya, the human piñata. Wrapped in gaudy holiday paper he twirled giddily at the end of a silver thread, while all the women he had ever humped on the so-called sly, jaybird naked and glistening like the butterplump, self-basting turkeys you could buy in the Safeway, pranced underneath him, blindfolded and wielding wooden bats with which they struck the piñata Bernabé. Back and forth he swung as they giggled and whacked, their droopy breasts and wide sagging buttocks joggling and flopping like beached fish, but none could ever bash him hard enough to split his guts, allowing his candies and pieces of silver, in the shape of eager words, question marks, and pathetically confused babblings, to cascade all around them, making small bruises on their spreading brown flesh like the marks from summer hailstones—

  Right now Bernabé was especially curious about, and afraid of, Kyril Montana. But he was also curious about the things that made all human beings tick. He had an irresistible need to dissect people and study their mechanisms; he had almost an artist’s desire to cut open their hearts (the way he cut open fish stomachs to check their feed) in order to discover what kind of secrets might come bulging out. Whenever he came into contact with dead bodies, with shocked and staring car-accident victims, say, or with a hippie OD frozen beside the highway in winter snow, he stared long at them, trying to discover knowledge about life and death, trying to catch sight of a soul, perhaps, that was late in flapping off to heaven, trying to penetrate the camouflage that had protected their real personalities during life. Death awed the sheriff because he’d always had an inarticulate but very passionate reverence for the life of people. And, no matter how healthy a perfectly normal man, how bright and shapely a woman, he sensed they were twisted, one-eyed, half-crazed, crippled beings, awash in subterfuge, aflutter with ominous ideas and devious thoughts—like himself—with furtive hungers and reckless desires and arcane yearnings that were almost supernatural, a murderer’s row of outwardly pleasant and monotonous dumdums. It was an incredible mystery to Bernabé why people did not go off their rockers every five minutes.

  But all this he sensed; he didn’t know anything, not really. Not about people, not even about himself or Carolina. He had always wanted to learn, though, always wanted to ask a million intimate questions he had never formulated, let alone popped; perhaps because he understood people would always be afraid to answer, or else they would stab him with butcher knives for daring to imply that they were what they really were. Then too, Bernabé did not know what he wanted to learn; he had no idea where or how to start … it was all so haphazard and vague. In his lifetime the sheriff had never really forged any starting points; his sluggish brain was like a transistor radio whose batteries kept running low on juice during the most crucial broadcasts; his life had been belabored by melancholy endings that occurred before page one.

  Vera said, “Saturday, I think it was, I went over to Laura Martínez’s, you know, the sister of William, the assistant manager at Safeway?”

  “Yeah.” Glumly he nodded.

  “We picked crab apples. I’m gonna make jelly. I went over with Mary Ann Trujillo, the one who’s a secretary for that lawyer, Timmy Morris, you know, Tomás’ daughter, the one that went to college.”

  “Which Tomás? I know six Tomás Trujillos.”

  “The one who used to sell coal. You know, out by the Ranchitos Bar.”

  “Oh, that Tomás. The tuerto, the one with the eye that points at the birds.”

  “No, that’s his brother Pete has the funny eye.”

  “I thought Pete moved to El Paso. Who told me he moved to El Paso?”

  “No, that was Pete Trujillo from Cañon. Pete Trujillo, Tomás’ brother, always lived in Llano. He’s the one who had the peacock, and then his little daughter, Isabella, got run over by the school bus, so he gave the peacock to that Anglo with the funny last name, Flipper or something, and the Anglo shot himself in the hand when he was out hunting, but he never even knew about the bad luck of peacocks, and nobody told him—”

  She talked. He poured them both another drink and listened, not listening. He was thinking about Kyril Montana, who made him extremely nervous, and about Joe Mondragón’s beanfield, and about the state cops, and about Amarante Córdova and Carolina, and Eusebio Lavadie and Ladd Devine and Horsethief Shorty, trying to put together the pieces of what worried him so profoundly. And then about halfway through his second drink he got up and went over to her and, standing between her legs, pulled up her sweater and began fondling her breasts, and a moment later they undressed and the sheriff climbed on top of her like some slow and weary, big but fragile animal about to mate in the sand of a lonely beach after a long, exhausting swim through dangerous ocean waters.

  He couldn’t get a hard-on, though. He lay between her legs as limp as the dangle on a castrated horse, with strange scared screams on his lips but only nervous grunts coming out for her to hear, while she cooed softly and smoothed her hands over his back and kept from complaining even though his heaviness hurt her some.

  Finally, with a wry, sardonic little shudder, Bernabé said, “Welcome, ball fans, to the World Series of Sex,” and he pushed down a little, dropping his thick lips over one breast. She held his head but did not press it into her. After a while he fell asleep, and she lay there holding his head, deriving a small but important comfort, even faintly smiling as she stared at the ceiling.

  * * *

  Milagro awoke early. Although the sun rose late because the town lay at the base of high mountains, most citizens were
up long before the first bright rays fell across the narrow eastern fields of pasture hay and alfalfa. In the predawn summer gray, vehicles, most of them old pickups with their lights on, pulled out of the hard-packed shiny dirt yards and began threading through the town’s narrow back roads. Some trucks carried hay bales which farmers dumped into dusty corrals or into minuscule overgrazed plots for horses and sheep. Other trucks headed back along the many primitive dirt roads that led to National Forest land where permit cattle grazed. A few people headed up toward jobs at the Dancing Trout Dude Ranch in Milagro Canyon. But most trucks—their occupants ritualistically saluting Ladd Devine’s Miracle Valley sign with obscene gestures—headed south on the main highway to jobs in the Doña Luz mine, or to tourist-oriented shitwork in the motels, hotels, and restaurants of Chamisaville.

  One truck, this particular morning, crossed the highway onto the Milagro–García spur and stopped near Joe Mondragón’s beanfield. Joe himself hopped out, grabbed a shovel from the back, and proceeded, in a few minutes, to divert water from Indian Creek into the Roybal ditch that led to his illegal field. Walking a little ahead of the flow he chopped at a few grassy tufts in the ditch, cut a water snake in half, then stood on the bank watching the clear cold liquid surge into the furrows between his bean plants.

  And standing there during the blue pastel moments before dawn, Joe harbored feelings he hadn’t had since he was a kid. He felt truly tough and arrogant, indestructible and happy. His beanfield, purely and simply, was beautiful. And for a few seconds he experienced an almost embarrassing and awkward sensation of well-being and importance. Like he was the King of the Castle. Number One—

  El Numero Uno.

  And if illegal use of Indian Creek water brought down the wrath of the gods in the state capital, so be it. Fuck Carl or Ken or whatever the hell his first name was Montana! Joe—all five feet six inches of him—could kick the living shit out of all comers, and especially out of any two-bit, lambe, pistol-packing chota! He would rip the tin stars off their marshmallow chests and chew them up in his mouth and spit them back, in the shape of bullets, at those blue-suited faggots!

  Stature. Maybe that’s what Joe felt for the first time in a long time. And maybe that’s what this beanfield could impart to a down-in-the-dumps, dog-eared town like Milagro. Of course, nobody talked or even thought about it in that way. In fact, despite the building tensions, hardly anybody had even admitted to Joe they knew the beanfield existed. Most people still did not want to get involved. They wanted to lie back and see what might happen before they committed themselves either to the right or to the left. They wanted to see if Joe could get away with it. They were waiting for a sign from God that it was all right. In fact, thought Joe, they were a bunch of scared-stiff goatherds and sheep-fucking drunks who sure as hell weren’t going to throw their hand in with anybody until they understood what kind of shit was going to come down on them. Then they would form their allegiances. Yessir, then they would all drive down to Anglada’s Floral City in Chamisaville and load up with gaudy plastic bouquets to heap on Joe’s rocky mound in the Milagro camposanto! Then they would putter around dressed in black and shedding saccharine tears and talking about how “Triste” was “La Vida,” and about how Dios would pay up debts to Joe Mondragón in heaven for the terrible suffering he had done on earth.

  Laughing, Joe seated himself on a dead cottonwood trunk near his beanfield, lit a cigarette, and watched the rattletraps heading down the highway toward menial fifty-cent-an-hour, maybe a dollar-an-hour, at most a dollar-sixty, a dollar-eighty-an-hour jobs in Doña Luz and Chamisaville. A bunch of lousy chambermaids, cooks, and babysitters, Joe thought. And abruptly the strangest feeling he had ever known came over him; as suddenly as a summer hailstorm in the mountains, it caught him by surprise, and it damn near made him fall over backward. Just like that, something tender he had never felt before took over his bones and seeped into his guts like a golden molasses, making him want to cry.

  Which was a hell of a spooky thing to happen to Joe, because about the only time he ever cried was when he chopped onions to sprinkle on Nancy’s enchiladas, or when he ate a really hot jalapeño.

  No getting around it, though: suddenly he held a profound tenderness for his people, that’s what it was. His people. His gente. His bunch of inbred, toothless, tubercular, flea-bitten, illiterate vecinos, sobrinos, primos, cuates, cabrones, rancheros, and general all-around fregado’d jodidos.

  Suddenly he loved the people he lived with, he cared about their lives. And this feeling, this tenderness oozing throughout his body, made him almost weak.

  Then, while magpies jabbered like a bunch of excited monkeys in the branches overhead, and with two sparrowhawks quiet on the telephone lines across by the highway, Joe fell into a peculiar reverie. His childhood, something he had all but forgotten, drifted out of a dim, misty place, clouding his mind and his heart, working on that softness he felt within, prodding him gently, releasing frail human sensitivities Joe had always scorned.

  He was with his father, Esequiel Mondragón, a small stoop-shouldered and very quiet person who had lonely pale-green eyes and silky gray hair. On horseback, they were driving their sheep home from summer pasture fifty miles west, far on the other side of the Rio Grande gorge. Three dogs circled around the sheep, barking, keeping the animals in order. His father didn’t say much as they rode through the dust behind the slow-moving herd; he simply chewed tobacco and sat hunched over in his saddle, all his attention, in a vague sleepy-eyed way, on the sheep. Joe was riding bareback. On either side of them, in the Curandero Valley, aspen trees were a lovely buttery yellow, shivering in the Indian Summer breezes. Several times they spotted small bunches of mule deer moving along the upper meadow slopes near the tree line. For eight days they were together with the sheep, heading home. Slowly, they descended along a rocky trail into the gorge, the sheep moving single file, and, once in the gorge, they came across a rattlesnake, which his father killed so Joe could skin it. Later he tanned the skin and made a belt; he had worn it for years.

  Today, that road in the Curandero Valley had been paved; there was a fancy new bridge over the gorge, and you were not allowed to drive your sheep along the road anymore. The state had also bulldozed some lakes in the valley and stocked them with rainbow and cutthroat trout, and there were half a dozen manicured campgrounds along the route.

  Joe remembered summer nights with his father and the sheep in the high mountains, on the steeply sloping alpine ridges where the marmots with their bushy tails ran for cover in the rocks and small gray pikas stared at him while he sat unmoving in the grass. There was the summer his father shot a bear. And the coyotes howling, which had scared him as a kid until he got used to it and until he began to travel with a .22, killing the coyotes. But the bobcats had always scared him with their now-guttural, now-piercing and effeminate, bloodcurdling screams. And his father’s scare gun firing at intervals throughout the lightning-ribbed night to scare away all predators … but you were not allowed to use those scare guns anymore.

  He was four, maybe five years old, and he had never seen a rattlesnake. His dad stopped their old truck and pointed to a snake in the Conejos Junction road. It was dusk, the snake gleaming dustily in the yellow headlight beams. While Joe peered through the cracked windshield his father got out with a stick and poked at the snake to make it coil, then he tried to make the snake strike, but it wouldn’t strike the cold stick. Finally, though, he goaded it into striking by tapping its nose, and only then did the snake give a warning buzz. His father explained to Joe what poison was and warned him to always stay away from this kind of snake. Then, as a strange dispassionate afterthought, he hit the snake with the stick, breaking the serpent in two or three places, and crushed its head under his boot heel. They drove over it and continued on. Later Esequiel gave his son a piece of oshá, warning him to carry it in his pocket at all times as protection against rattlers.

  His father hunted as all men hunted. Joe remembered being on hors
eback with the old man, heading up through snowy hills, looking for elk and deer. And he remembered his father stripped to the waist and covered with blood, gutting an elk that was strung up on a homemade block-and-tackle rig in the backyard, and then later his father was almost hidden inside the huge animal, washing it out with the hose.

  He remembered sitting in the back of the pickup on wild-strawberry summer evenings heading down to the fiesta in Chamisaville. Nighthawks dashed around in the darkening sky as the truck rattled southward. Joe was spit-polished and clean, wearing a chartreuse cowboy shirt and new boots, and as they chugged along he took potshots at roadside prairie dogs with his .22 and never hit a one, so far as he could determine—the truck bounced too much.

  Esequiel Mondragón had been a strange man. A silent man who never got drunk at the fiesta, who herded sheep, who sometimes was gone all summer, following the sheep for outfits in Montana and Wyoming or doing seasonal farm labor up in Colorado, and then all winter he hung around doing odd jobs like Joe himself now did odd jobs, and somehow getting by.

  In the autumn they went fishing together. The old man never taught his son how to fish. In the beginning, only he carried a rod and Joe tagged along, observing and learning. His father fished with flies that he tied himself at home. The streams were small and so narrow you could jump right across them, and his father crept up along the banks all hunched over, sometimes snapping out his line instead of casting, or else, wearing irrigation boots, he walked up the center of the stream in the shallow places. When the fish hit he jerked them out quickly so they wouldn’t get tangled up in roots and dead branches. The fish were only seven or eight inches long, and when Joe was young they were all beautiful native cutthroats. But then when he had reached his teens about all they ever caught were German browns, because the big logging companies that cleared roads in the forest and clear-cut areas had dropped slash into the tiny streams, ruining the cutthroats’ habitat.