The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  Practically no living things crossed his path during those days in that universe of gorgeous frozen light. A small bird here, a skittish mouse—nothing more. At night, huddled in his snow holes with the starry darkness absolutely dumb overhead, he slept like a puppy behind a warm stove, like a cat on a sunny windowsill, like a baby fresh from its mother’s breast.

  And it was during those nights that the Billy the Kid legend died.

  Three days passed: after them, Ray Gusdorf quietly emerged from the Midnight Mountains a different human being—mature, introspective, curiously subdued. He quit work at the Dancing Trout, fell in love with and married Jeanine Juniors, started his own small spread as close to those mountains as he could, had one kid, and then a whole bunch of children in rapid succession, learned Spanish and became a respectable citizen, a silent man, but understood and well liked. Ray had arrived, as few people have the good luck to arrive, at home.

  Since then, all through the subsequent years, Ray had carried those three days in his heart; they were constantly being pumped anew with his blood throughout his veins and arteries; and although he had never since returned to the winter country, it was as if he had somehow remained up there forever.

  “For three hundred years, maybe longer,” Ray said to Joe Mondragón one evening while they were both sitting on Rael’s porch, the one killing a Pepsi, the other working on a beer, “the people around here have starved to death, but somehow they always survived. Now comes a ski area, probably motorcycles, winter snowmobiles, a subdivision, and so forth, jobs for everybody say Bud Gleason and Ladd Devine, money in the bank … and in five years we’ll all be gone.”

  He paused thoughtfully, watching diners move about in the café across the plaza area. Then he turned his head sideways, focusing on the mountains that loomed over the town, the same mountains that were nestled in his heart.

  “I figure I can live with hunger,” he said gently, “a hell of a lot better than I could ever live with fat.”

  * * *

  The phone rang; Charley Bloom answered. It was his lawyer friend and also the Voice of the People editor, Sean Carter, calling from the capital with some bad news.

  “Christ, are we ever up shit creek without the old proverbial paddle,” Sean began.

  Bloom prickled with a sudden chill: “How so?”

  “Well, to begin with I think we have to suspend publication.”

  Bloom’s heart leaped back up from where it had fallen; he didn’t dare speak, he just waited.

  “The machines got stolen, you know all about that.”

  “Sure.” And to make himself sound convincing, he added: “Those bastards.”

  “I can’t get ’em back unless I come up with that bread, but who am I, Jesus Christ tearing apart loaves and fishes and dollar bills—?”

  “I’ll type up some stuff,” Bloom offered unenthusiastically, cursing his hypocrisy. “There’s other people with typewriters.”

  “Of course, man. Thanks. But that isn’t the half of it.”

  “Give me the rest then.”

  “You sitting down—?”

  “Oh come on, Sean, cut the melodrama.”

  “Mirbaum, the printer, he sends me a bill for six hundred and eighty fat ones today, with a little note attached, to the effect that either we cough up the bread or else he doesn’t print the next issue.”

  “What about John and Mary?” They were the typesetters.

  “I talked to them. They’re okay for another issue, except we owe them two hundred and ninety bucks, and they’re about to go under, too, so I feel kind of guilty about that.”

  “How much do we have in the bank?”

  “What are you, Charley, a comedian? The last time I dared look it was a hundred and fifty, something like that. Tish went back East to see her folks or an old boyfriend or somebody, so that means we can’t get the July and August renewals out until she comes back. But that ain’t all—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Bloom sighed, outwardly morose, inwardly almost ecstatic, sensing that at the end of this telephone call he was going to be off at least one hook. “Lemme guess. Adams suddenly decided he wants his back rent or out we go.” Adams was the landlord.

  “Congratulations. I guess you work for the Voice a little you become almost psychic about these matters.”

  “Well what’s with that bastard?” Bloom said, trying to sound irate. “I thought him letting us use his building was an arrangement of love. He’s floundering in gold, he doesn’t need our rent!” It was the right tone of voice, Bloom knew; he had come across.

  “Who knows?” Sean mumbled. “Maybe somebody talked to him, maybe he got scared, I don’t know. That burglary freaked him a little. He’s afraid next time it’ll be a fire. I mean, that robbery was no accident. Oh, and by the way. Guess what?”

  “Don’t tell me, I think I’ve had enough.”

  “The phone company called up this morning. I got until 4:30 P.M. to hit Sierra Bell—bless her electronic titties!—with a check for three hundred and eighty bucks, otherwise tomorrow morning we start communicating with smoke signals and tom-toms.”

  Bloom tried to sound bitter: “What else? Is there anything else? What happened with all those foundations?”

  “We sent out thirty-eight letters. Nobody had any bread they wanted to lay on our stellar organization.”

  “I thought Manny Gale was going to get in touch with that guy in Boston—what’s his face?—you know, the one with all the z’s and x’s in his name.”

  “You don’t mean Cartright?”

  “Yeah. And fuck you.”

  “I dunno. I’m not sure. You can never trust a radiclib. I haven’t even seen Manny, either, for the past three weeks. His car broke down; they busted him for carrying a couple of joints in the glove compartment; then he broke up with Tania, and shit, I guess things just fell apart in general.”

  “There was another person, a woman, Mrs.—you know. The artsy-craftsy philanthropist who lives practically next door to you on Camino de los Arbolitos.”

  “I saw her. You think I’d miss a trick? It was beautiful. I sat in a six-hundred-dollar chair in a hundred-thousand-dollar house whose walls were lined with Fritz Sholders and Georgia O’Keefes, sipping raspberry wine, listening to the old bitch sing the poverty blues.”

  “But didn’t she offer to throw a party, or organize a benefit or something?”

  “In the first letter she wrote—yes. But when we talked she wasn’t that hot to trot. I dunno, suddenly she had reservations about the Voice. She talked about how we’re becoming a little too radical, irresponsible, shit like that. We were losing our objectivity. But then she had a great idea for a soiree.”

  “I bet.”

  “She said, why didn’t we set up a cocktail bash in her home, invite all the heavies, make a pitch. And then, because you gotta have entertainment at these shindigs, you know what she suggested—?”

  “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “A tap dancer.”

  “A what?”

  “A fucking tap dancer.”

  “No!”

  “Yeah. Can you picture it? We get all the heavies stoned, and then hit ’em with a tap dancer. Wow! And the other great idea she had was why didn’t the editorial board of the Voice write a best-selling political sex novel.”

  “Oh Christ, man. What did she suggest we call it, Naked Came the Candidate?”

  “There’s more,” Sean said almost gleefully.

  “Go ahead. I’m alright.” You bet he was all right.

  “A letter arrived this morning by registered mail, from the firm of Slosser and Bendix, representing guess who?”

  “That AMPEX subdivision on the San Gervasio reservation.”

  “Bingo.”

  “They’re going to sue for that article Jane Moran did last month?”

  “Double bingo.”

  “But how can they do that? What did she say that they could sue for? Where’s the libel?”

  “Honesty is no def
ense,” Sean said pleasantly. “You know that.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Bloom said quietly, trying to modify the sensations arising in his body that were almost akin to joy.

  Sean said, “Again, I think somebody talked to them. I called Herb Slosser—I mean, Herb and me, we were in Harvard Law together, weren’t we? I called him, I said, ‘Herb, what goes?’ He was really uptight, evasive. He mumbled something about he couldn’t afford not to advise them to do it. His partner, Bendix, you know, he’s got a big piece of the AMPEX action.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Bloom asked.

  “I’m not sure. Mostly, there’s nothing we can do. The Voice is dead. Who do you know who’s crawling with money he wants to give away? I’ve hit up everybody I know, and the good people are honestly all tapped out. We’ll have to suspend, the way I figure it, until we can raise the bread, and in the process, no doubt, we’ll lose the second-class mailing permit. I’ll put out a letter, of course, to all the subscribers, with the sustainer plea—you know. But we’ve already hit on our sustainers twice this year.”

  “Oh shit,” Bloom muttered sadly, wanting to shout “Hallelujah!” After all, he was out of it, then—with honor.

  “I’m sorry. Listen, Charley, I wanted you to know because you’ve been close to the paper, but I got to get off now. If you’re working on another piece for the twenty-fifth deadline, don’t kill yourself. Because unless a miracle happens, we’re not coming out next month.”

  “I wasn’t working on an article,” Bloom said, his voice literally dripping with false disappointment, phony gloom.

  “Well, if you do write something, send me a carbon. I’d really dig reading it no matter what…”

  They said good-bye, then, and Bloom cradled the phone with a smile lighting up his features like a photographer’s floodlamp. He was free … out of it … released!

  Someone knocked on the door and Bloom went to answer. Standing on the welcome mat was a small, ruggedly pretty Chicano woman of about fifty whom he had seen around. Then, even before she extended her hand, saying hello and giving her name, he remembered that she was the Body Shop and Pipe Queen owner, Ruby Archuleta.

  “Sure, come in, sit down, please. I’ll get you some coffee—”

  “I don’t got the time right now to come in,” Ruby said. “I just wanted to ask a favor.”

  “Of course. What is it?”

  “There’s gonna be a meeting in the church about the conservancy district and about that dam. We’d like your help, you know? José Mondragón, he says being a lawyer you know pretty much all there is to know about it. He showed me that article you wrote in the magazine, and I liked it very much. José says, too, that you got maps and you got books and things that could help explain it to the people. We want you to come to the meeting and help us to understand better this thing that is happening in the valley—can you do that?”

  What could he say? With every voice in his body, heart, and soul screaming No! he said, “Yes.”

  She smiled and shook his hand again, telling him that when the word had been spread and the people had talked among themselves a little more, the meeting would take place, and she would let him know exactly when that would be. Then she walked quickly back to her truck.

  The lawyer, stunned, sat down. And for a long while he remained very still with his head in his hands, feeling doomed. He had been released, and then abruptly rejailed. He had lived the short happy life for no longer than a heartbeat.

  “I should have told her to go to hell,” he moaned aloud in the quiet kitchen. “Why can’t I tell people to go to hell? I’m not a decent human being, so why do I keep pretending to act like one?”

  But then all at once his misery parted just long enough to allow another emotion its brief moment of glory. Because—to tell the truth—he also felt flattered.

  “People like me,” Bloom whispered aloud with a wry melancholy smile, “are called Yo-Yos.”

  * * *

  In the early days there had been no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny to decorate the sacrilege, piety, or greedy whimsy of Milagro’s various religious seasons. In their stead, the Abuelo, a shady and gnarled old man—more closely related in spirit to the bogeyman than to old Saint Nick—scrambled around in the winter or spring shadows, trying to lay his icy fingers on irreligious little kids who strayed from the straight and narrow. When he latched onto a victim, the hairy old Abuelo, who dressed in rags and occasionally smoked a cigar, made the kid kneel on the ground, whipped him heartily with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and then ordered the child to say his prayers. If the youngster didn’t know his prayers the Abuelo was liable to kick him around in the snow until his body became a white ball, or else he would burn off the tip of the kid’s frosty nose with his cigar.

  For dozens of decades the Abuelo had hung around at one festive time of year or another, beating up kids or shining flashlight beams into burros’ eyes until they went crazy, and in general causing a great deal of malicious mischief.

  But as the modern age intruded upon Milagro, bringing with it the Cinemascope and Technicolor versions of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and cutesy Day-Glo Halloween skeleton suits, the ferocious Abuelo began to fade from the sanitized scene like the image in an old tintype.

  Still, every town, and particularly a town with a heritage of crazies like Milagro, needs some sort of bogeyman, banshee, witch, frog-eating Cleofes Apodaca shaped like a dog, or Abuelo with which to terrorize children during the holiday seasons, and also with which to explain many of the unexplainable things that happen year-round in the neighborhood.

  Of course, Pacheco’s pig in certain ways had become just such a scapegoat, taking up some of the slack created by the Abuelo’s demise. But long before Pacheco’s indestructible sow rose to prominence in the townsfolk’s fertile imaginations, another phantom was born to roam through the Miracle Valley wreaking all manner of curious havoc.

  This phantom was Onofre Martínez’s missing arm.

  As legend would have it, Onofre Martínez’s missing arm floated around town doing nasty deeds because it had been eaten either by butterflies or by dogs or by snakes or by coyotes … but whatever the case, it had never received a proper Christian burial. And, bitter over this, the arm had sworn to plague the town for eternity in revenge.

  In this capacity, of course, the arm served a traditional and useful purpose. Mothers told their very young children all about El Brazo Onofre, and, once the child’s imagination had thoroughly grasped the image of that powerful, invisible, and very evil appendage drifting through the Milagro air searching hungrily for nasty things to do, mothers tried to extract obeisance from their small fry by threatening: “You watch out, Alfredo; if you’re not a good boy El Brazo Onofre will choke you in your bed tonight—” Or: “Eat your stew, Eloy, or tonight El Brazo Onofre will open your window and steal your piggy bank—” Or again: “Adelita, you better be a good girl over the holidays or else El Brazo Onofre will strangle Santa Claus and you won’t get no presents.”

  Occasionally, El Brazo Onofre could be a good phantom. Thus, all during the boxing career of Amarante Córdova’s son Gabriel, it was said that the Milagro Mauler’s most special punches, the ones that gained for him all his victories, were usually the invisible haymakers landed by Gabriel’s patron saint—El Brazo Onofre. And teen-age kids from Milagro who boxed down in the Chamisaville High School always winkingly attributed their victories to the fact that they had had El Brazo Onofre in their corner.

  If you went into it at all, El Brazo Onofre actually possessed quite a diverse character. Once, as a small child, when caught by Nick Rael walking out of the general store (then the Devine Company Store) with his pockets stuffed full of stolen candy bars, Joe Mondragón had automatically, instinctively squealed: “I didn’t do it! I didn’t know I even had those candy bars! I was framed by El Brazo Onofre!”

  And when Joe, or Amarante Córdova, or any other men in town sneaked into the National Forest to set a fire so all the men
in town would have hard work at good pay for a while, they always stood around afterward with their hands in their pockets gazing innocently up at the sky, lips pursed, carelessly whistling “Dixie” as they declared the fire must have been set by that unconscionable rapscallion, El Brazo Onofre.

  This ubiquitous appendage also had quite a sex life. Milagro boys claimed there were no true virgin girls in Milagro because El Brazo Onofre liked to prowl around at night invading the bedrooms of little Ana Marías who were just beginning to bud or flow, as the sayings go, and apparently the hand at the end of El Brazo Onofre was always stimulating these diminutive females into very erotic nightmares.

  Then again, there were some people to be found, mostly among the town’s adolescent boys, who often leeringly suggested that El Brazo Onofre was a maricón that went hither and yon jerking off the young males in Milagro, thus accounting for about 95 percent of the village’s wet dreams.

  All this, then, by way of background to the envelope which turned up on Ladd Devine the Third’s desk one morning, and to the note inside that envelope, scrawled in a semi-illegible hand, that said:

  El Brazo Onofre is looking for you,

  Mr. Zopilote Devine, and when it finds

  you, you son of a bitch, it’s gonna choke

  you to death.

  Devine walked out of his office and down the hall to Emerson Lapp’s office and over to Emerson Lapp’s desk. Settling the note dramatically in front of his startled secretary, he asked:

  “What the hell is this?”

  Lapp read the note, scanned it again, then wrinkled his upper lip, squinched his nose until the bridge was thoroughly grooved, and weighted down his entire prissy face with a formidable, puzzled frown.

  “Christ, Mr. D., you sure got me. What’s this El Brazo Onofre?”

  “El Brazo means ‘The Arm,’” Devine said. “I don’t know what Zopilote means.”