by John Nichols
Once Bernabé had mentioned his uneasiness about the painted cattleguard to Nick Rael.
“Listen,” Nick said. “A bandido walks into a bank, he’s got a gun in his right hand, he asks for the teller’s money or her life. Maybe the gun in his hand is carved out of soap, maybe it’s just one of those clever replicas you send away for, maybe it’s nothing but a lousy cap pistol. On the other hand, who knows for sure it ain’t a real gun? And who wants to be the chump to find out, is it the real McCoy or isn’t it the real McCoy?”
“I see what you mean,” Bernabé said.
“Well, that’s the way it is with Lavadie’s cows and that painted cattleguard,” Nick said.
Still, the whole thing unsettled Bernabé. He sensed an inherent unfairness residing in that painted cattleguard. How come, if you couldn’t fool a horse or a man or a goat with such a simplistic phony design, you could nevertheless twist the tail, udder if it had one, and both horns off a cow with it?
Bernabé rolled the concept of painted cattleguards around in his brain the way a lapidary rolls a rough stone around in a rock tumbler to make it smooth. Bernabé never could take the rough edges off that concept, though, the way a lapidary’s tumbler could take the rough edges off his rock, making almost any mineral chunk shine like a jewel.
So Bernabé never truly understood the deep-down discomfort caused in himself by that painted cattleguard.
Nobody else understood his discomfort, either.
One day Bernabé decided that the painted cattleguard just south of the Zopilote’s Miracle Valley sign had a lot in common with Joe Mondragón’s beanfield.
Or should that be vice versa?
Bernabé, for one, didn’t know.
But he tormented himself like this over useless questions all the time.
People said because of this nonsensical bent, the sheriff was driving himself bananas. Why worry, they reasoned, about something so irrelevant? If a thing worked, it worked. And painted cattleguards had always worked just like a little piece of oshá in the pocket had always kept away poisonous snakes. Start questioning why a thing that worked worked, people warned, and you were asking that thing to stop working. The time to start worrying about how things worked was when they broke down or fell apart, and not before.
Seferino Pacheco understood, though. Several years back he had told Bernabé: “Six hundred years ago maybe you could have grown up to be somebody like Michelangelo.”
“Who was Michelangelo?” the sheriff asked.
Disgusted by such philistine ignorance, Pacheco reconsidered. “On second thought, maybe you wouldn’t of grown up to be somebody like Michelangelo. Maybe even six hundred years ago you just would of grown up to be somebody in the tradition of our own Cleofes Apodaca or Padre Sinkovich. Maybe you just would of grown up to be somebody like yourself, all the time tripping over the hem of your own toga.”
Bernabé had asked Nick Rael: “Who was Michelangelo?”
“He was an ancient philosopher,” Nick teased, “who believed that men’s souls were round like apples, the color of pearls, and had little white wings.”
Well, on the night a bullet went through Joe Mondragón’s window, Bernabé studied Joe’s beanfield, and he studied the painted cattleguard, and he wondered about the relationship between them, but he never really got anywhere with either.
His headache only grew worse.
The sheriff would have liked a mind that could deal with abstract thoughts and ideas. Instead, he possessed a mind capable of tinkering with things just enough to make them impossibly confusing and himself so dissatisfied with his own intellectual inadequacies that he would never be happy.
As a teen-ager, Bernabé had taken apart a 1939 Plymouth, but he had never been able to get it back together again.
“A fool and his reason are soon parted,” Carolina once said reproachfully.
“Ai, Chihuahua,” the sheriff had grumbled.
Finally, on the night a bullet knocked the crucifix off the bedroom wall onto Joe Mondragón’s head, Bernabé drifted back into an uneasy sleep. He dreamed about the piñata Bernabé, and about all the naked women he had ever loved hitting him with sticks. They flailed away, giggling and prancing, their breasts bouncing like happy puppies, while Bernabé twisted and twirled, reversing direction with every blow, eyes closed, hugging his knees, spinning this way and that way, getting all black and blue, and unable to burst no matter how hard he tried.
* * *
Ladd Devine sat on the edge of a mahogany table; Jerry Grindstaff stood over by a window; Emerson Lapp was seated at an antique rolltop desk with a pen in his hand and a pad of legal-sized yellow paper in front of him; two state cops, William Koontz and Onofre Martínez’s shameful offspring, Bruno Martínez, were perched uncomfortably side by side on a delicate brocaded couch; located across from them on a stiff divan were the two Forest Service personnel, Carl Abeyta and Floyd Cowlie; and Horsethief Shorty was lounging in a wing-back chair with one leg dangling over an arm, smoking a cigar. Emerson Lapp had a headache because of Shorty’s cigar. He always got headaches from Shorty’s cigars. In fact, Shorty himself often gave Lapp a monumental headache. It had something to do with Shorty’s overall smell, sloppy bearing, and arrogance, and the way Ladd Devine tolerated all this. Lapp himself would not have tolerated Shorty for a minute. Neither of the two cops nor the Forest Service people nor Jerry G. would have tolerated Shorty either. And as for Shorty?—he just sat there languidly chewing on his cigar, basking—as he always had—in their hostility.
Devine said, “Jesus H. Christ.”
There was silence in the room, everybody except Shorty—who was grinning almost imbecilically—wearing their longest faces.
Devine continued: “I’d like to know who was the dumb jerk took a shot at Joe Mondragón’s house, I really would.”
Again there was a profound, maybe guilty, silence in the room.
Eventually Shorty said, “You don’t suppose, do you, that it might have something to do with that Secret Service baboon your friends in the capital sent up here, do you?”
“I don’t know and I don’t give a shit,” Devine said. “But when people start throwing hot lead around this town like that—well, Christ. What do they think I’m sinking my money into this Miracle Valley project for, for kicks? Is that what they think? Do they think I’m sticking my neck out just so the bottom can fall out because a lot of trigger-happy hoodlums have turned the valley into a shooting gallery?”
“We’re gonna try and find out who did it, sir,” Bruno Martínez said, practically choking on that “sir,” because he happened to dislike Ladd Devine as much as the next man and besides, he thought he knew who had fired that bullet.
“Well boys I sure hope so,” Devine said. “Because that’s all we need right now is a lot, or even just a little, slaphappy stuff like that. As it is, if this gets out to some of my backers—” With a handkerchief he wiped his forehead. “And I mean it, too. I want you fellows—” he nodded at the two cops “—to put the word out, understand? Shorty, you too. You know how things stack up around here.”
“What did happen at that meeting with the undercover flatfoot?” Shorty asked. “How come I wasn’t invited?”
“We weren’t there either,” Bill Koontz said.
“I don’t know who sent him,” Bruno Martínez added. “You ask me, downstate should keep their noses out of this.”
“Looks to me like a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing,” Shorty drawled.
Emerson Lapp said, “This whole affair has become rather unbelievably sticky.”
All heads turned toward Lapp, all eyes except Shorty’s assessing him with the dull disdain of macho eyes confronting a little Lord Fauntleroy.
Irritated by the distraction, Devine broke in, “Explain to me, Shorty, will you? just what you know about the meeting they had.”
Shorty shrugged. “They called a meeting; I wasn’t invited to that one either. The lawyer Bloom, he got up
and explained the dam, the conservancy district, and your role in this town.”
Devine blurted, “Who the hell does Bloom think he is?”
“He thinks he’s so scared he almost fainted in front of all those people,” Shorty said with a wide grin.
“You know, Shorty, this really isn’t that amusing,” Devine observed.
“Amusing?” Shorty arched his eyebrows. “Excuse me, Ladd—” Both Jerry G. and Emerson Lapp flinched, as they always flinched when Shorty used their boss’s first name. “Excuse me, Ladd, but this whole situation is pretty fucking funny, if you ask me. Downstate doesn’t know what upstate is doing; everybody in the valley is totally confused and disorganized; we’re trying to get it together and they’re trying to get it together, and nobody knows what to do, including the state’s most influential song-and-dance team of Bookman and Noyes. In fact, nothing has happened but everybody’s hysterical, and all because an uneducated half-wit Mexican decided to grow a half-acre field of beans.”
“Shorty,” Devine remarked patiently, “what do you suggest we might have done about that meeting?”
“We could of set up a .50-caliber machine gun and shot the old geezers as they tottered out,” Shorty grinned, touching a match—arrogantly lit on his fly zipper—to the end of his cigar.
In the ensuing quiet, Emerson Lapp expelled a long exasperated sigh.
At length, Jerry G. said, “If we let them get away with stuff like this meeting, they’ll just get worse.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they’ll just get more confident.”
“And if we attempt to sabotage their next meeting—?”
“They might burn down the Dancing Trout,” Shorty said glibly.
“So what do we do?” Devine asked.
“Ignore them,” Shorty proposed. “What’s that phrase I heard an educated man once use about this country—the ‘Tyranny of Tolerance’?”
“Oh God, Shorty,” Emerson Lapp muttered under his breath. “You’re so erudite.”
“There must be a way to control this thing.” Devine looked to the cops, then to Floyd Cowlie and Carl Abeyta.
“Maybe there’s some way we could forbid them to open the church again, because it’s unsafe or a health menace or something,” Bruno Martínez suggested unconvincingly.
“They’d come up here and hold their meetings on the Dancing Trout baseball diamond,” Shorty asserted gleefully.
“Shorty,” Devine said, “I think I’d like a little more out of you than sarcasm.”
“Ladd, you know I’ve always given you 110 percent.”
Emerson Lapp rolled his eyes to the ceiling and banged his pencil down against the legal pad. Jerry G. shifted uncomfortably, moving his eyes nervously from Devine to the cops to Shorty.
“I think maybe the lawyer is one of their really weak links,” Devine said.
“Maybe you’re right. He’s a chickenshit, so far as I know, from the word go.”
“Just how far do you know, Shorty?”
“Not very. I see him around. We never officially met.”
Ladd Devine stood up and paced over toward the rolltop desk, turned, and walked back to the table. “I could talk with him,” he said. “I’m not sure what I’d say, though.”
“You could offer to buy him off, or threaten to cut him up into little pieces and feed him to the loan sharks.”
“Very funny,” Devine murmured, glumly eyeballing Shorty.
“As I see it, there’s an inherent problem in all this.” Shorty suddenly swung himself up so that he was seated on the arm of the chair. “You want to pull the rug out once and for all from under the people in this valley, Ladd, and you don’t really give a shit how you do it, with guns or with money, with state cops or with hired hoodlums—speaking of which, what’s the name of that police strong-arm junkie out at the Evening Star, anyway—Lord Rhino? You might ask him about who fired the shot at Joe’s place. But anyway: if you can just wipe ’em out with pieces of paper covered with legalese, so much the better. The problem is: how to do it without pulling the rug out from under yourself, right? That’s all. That’s what’s under discussion here. Very simple.”
Wearily, Devine looked at Shorty. Then he looked at Jerry G., whose gaze fell to the floor. Then he looked at Emerson Lapp, whose eyes also dropped to the floor. After that he looked at the two cops, who became very interested in the hands in their laps. The Forest Service men also abruptly commenced scrutinizing their thighs. So he looked back at Shorty, who was looking fearlessly back at him, and Devine realized that if he was going to make it safely through this mess he would have to put a lot of his eggs in Shorty’s basket.
With that, Shorty said, “Say, Ladd, why don’t you have Floyd and Carl here set a forest fire?”
“Hey, just a minute!” Carl Abeyta stiffened self-righteously and stifled an urge to lunge across the room at Shorty. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Setting a fire,” Shorty said calmly. “Christ, that’s one of the few ways those men down there have earned a living around here. I know of a dozen guys from town, the past twenty years, who’ve gone up and set the trees on fire. For crissakes, man, it’s—what is the pay now? Two-fifty an hour around the clock? Three dollars? And the Forest Service—God bless Smokey the Bear!—packs in potatoes and all the fresh-killed beef you can eat. You want to get this town’s mind off that beanfield, light the forest and hire all the heavies to put it out. And keep lighting little fires here and there—”
“Oh, hey, Shorty,” Carl Abeyta whined. “Don’t you have any idea of how much money we get for trees when we sell them to timber companies?”
Shorty said, “Okay, then. Ladd, why don’t you build maybe four more cottages down there beyond the tennis courts?”
“Why should I? We don’t need them.”
“You could hire maybe fifteen people from town to work on them, building the frames, laying foundations, making adobes—”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“If you’re paying them they aren’t gonna slit your throat, are they?” Shorty was suddenly angry at his boss, at the dude ranch, at himself. “I’ll go down there myself and offer Joe Mondragón two months of work he can’t possibly refuse. Buy your toilets, all your plumbing materials from Ruby Archuleta’s Pipe Queen and there’s another few leaders of this thing on your side. It’s time to throw the peasants a bone, Ladd.”
“It doesn’t make sense to construct houses I don’t need. That would just be money down the drain.”
“Why not call it insurance?” Shorty said, nodding to the cops, and then to Emerson Lapp, as he walked out.
The room stayed silent while Devine lit a small cigar.
“What’s eating Shorty?” Carl Abeyta finally asked.
“What’s eating all of us,” Bruno Martínez noted sourly. “I can’t even visit home for a meal these days; my old man throws me out of the house.”
“With just one arm?”
Bruno nodded and shrugged. “He sics that fucking three-legged mastiff on me even before I get out of the police car.”
“Ah, what the hell,” Devine sighed. “Let’s break it up for now, my friends…”
After they had gone, Devine and Emerson Lapp remained alone in the room.
“It’s a bitch,” Lapp said reflectively, tapping his front teeth with the eraser tip of his pencil.
“Yeah.” Devine loosened his belt, unlaced his shoes, and set his stocking feet up on a glass coffee table. “You’re right, it sure is a bitch.”
The boss let his guard down now, as he did but rarely, and then usually only when alone, or occasionally—as now—with his longtime secretary.
“Yessir,” Devine repeated, “it sure is a bitch.” And he added, “Em, do you think it can be done?”
“Oh for God’s sake, Mr. D., of course it can be done.”
Devine smoked his cigar quietly for a while. Then he chuckled: “Hey, let’s you and me ride on up into the hills and se
t that forest on fire, Em.”
“Why don’t we go ahead and burn down the Dancing Trout while we’re at it, Mr. D.”
Devine guffawed, sputtered a little, giggled once or twice. “Better yet, Em, let’s just burn down the town and pave it over for a parking lot.”
The secretary shrugged, smiling painfully; they lapsed into silence for a minute.
“Now you take my grandaddy,” Devine began again abruptly. “There was a remarkable man. He never flew in an airplane. You know why? He said to me, he said: ‘Always go on the ground, Laddy’—that’s when I was a kid he said that. He said, ‘Always go on the ground, Laddy, otherwise you’ll lose contact with everything important.’ And I think people down there, around here, I think they actually liked the crusty old son of a bitch.”
“Things were different then, Mr. D. People were different.”
“Oh, my grandaddy sucked blood,” Devine said. “You can bet he sucked blood. He hurt people in a big way. He had a cruel and brutal style.”
Again the secretary shrugged. “I guess it’s the nature of the beast.”
“Yes, I suppose so…” A great fatigue suddenly swept over Devine. “Oh shit,” he mumbled. “I loved that old bastard, Em, I really did. He had class, you know? I don’t have any class. Or not much, anyway. Sometimes I wonder if I have any class at all—I don’t think so. I don’t think people like me much, but I don’t even think they hate me, Em, do they? I think I’m just neutral. I’m a neutral S.O.B. An anonymous tycoon. And you know how that feels—?”
Lapp, surprised by his employer’s sudden dive into a maudlin mood, did not reply.
Devine grinned: “It just feels neutral,” he chuckled. “Not good, really. Not bad, either…”
But, incredibly, there was a tear in one eye. And Emerson Lapp—horrified—quickly left the room.
“My old grandaddy,” Devine called after him. “My old grandaddy, he would have set the forest on fire! Did you know, Em, that he once slit the throat of a Mexican whore who tried to rob him and then he let her have it while she bled to death on the floor!”