by John Nichols
Joe had a permit to graze two head of cattle in the National Forest from June through October. Only twenty-five years ago, Joe’s father, Esequiel, had had a permit to graze one hundred sheep and sixty cows in the National Forest. Joe had inherited this permit from his father (promptly losing 10 percent of the animals allowed on each permit through an official attrition policy akin to inheritance taxes), and down through the last fifteen years he had seen the number of animals allowed on it steadily reduced through some kind of governmental bureaucratic black magic, until he had grazing rights for only two cows left from that rich heritage bequeathed to him by his father.
Joe’s case was not unique: all Milagro was in more or less the same boat. Everybody could remember those days when, even though they had lost much communal land, they had still been allowed permits to run cattle and sheep and goats galore in the National Forest. And everybody was a little stunned by how these permits had been miraculously whittled away, until today almost nobody, except for Eusebio Lavadie and Ladd Devine, had the right to run much more than a token animal up there in the tourist and timbering country, which was so green and lush the odor coming off it into Milagro on the evening breezes could make a skinny horse just about scream.
One way the permits had been reduced was simply by annually upping their cost by about two cents per head. An even quicker and more popular way to shave permits was by impounding cattle that strayed out of their designated government areas (or off private land onto the unfenced National Forest), and fining people exorbitantly to get them back. Along with the fine (which was usually twenty dollars—the lifetime savings of most town residents), the head count on a rancher’s permit was often cut as punishment; and in this way the small farmers’ permits had been reduced to almost nothing over the past years in order to make room in the forest for the far more lucrative tourists and big-game hunters and timbering interests.
Joe’s animals survived because Joe hustled twenty-eight hours a day to keep them alive. But also they survived because they were tough. No animal in Joe’s herds, or in Milagro for that matter, except for the sheep, were ever allowed into any structure that resembled a shed or a barn. Hence, on a typical winter morning when the sun rose, any number of fuzzy white beasts could be seen moving stiffly around in the white fields, their fur frozen solid, snow piled high on their backs, their eyelashes looking like Christmas tree branches. Often it rained on a January evening and then froze an hour later, so that the horses and cows became ice sculptures that could not move until they were thawed out some fifteen hours later by the next day’s sunshine. Other times, on chill winter mornings, cattle and horses might be seen standing very still in the boggy vegaland, having been frozen into place overnight, and—again—they were waiting for the sun to melt the icy ground so they could recommence pawing through the snow for food.
Like everyone else in town, Joe was also constantly engaged in the aforementioned game of musical pastures, begging friends and neighbors and even enemies for the right to rent or use their fields for one or more of his animals for one or more days, weeks, or what have you. Thus, at any given time he might have two cows on a permit up in the forest, one cow in Panky Mondragón’s quarter-acre backyard, the other cow in with Bernabé Montoya’s cows up on Bernabé’s canyon land, one horse eating hay at home and another horse in a half-acre pasture belonging to Nick Rael, the third horse on a tether beside the highway eating the Right of Way grass for nothing, and his ten sheep spread into groups of three, three, and four each, grazing in overgrazed pastures belonging to Pete Apodaca, Ray Gusdorf, and Seferino Pacheco, respectively. Meanwhile, of course, Pete Apodaca had both his horses in a pasture rented from Eusebio Lavadie, and Ray Gusdorf had his seven cattle split up into groups that were on a Forest Service permit, in a Nick Rael field, in Joe Mondragón’s backyard, and running loose (by “accident”) along the same lush highway Right of Way on which Joe’s tethered horse was grazing.
Since Eusebio Lavadie had more pastureland than everyone else, people were always trying to work deals whereby their animals could graze on his grass for a nominal fee. Lavadie himself owned many animals, but he had permits to graze them on either Bureau of Land Management or National Forest land, so his own bottomland could be rented out to others, which he was only too glad to do. Naturally, he charged exorbitantly for the right to graze on his land, and was thus able to pay for his BLM and National Forest permits and turn a tidy profit to boot. Which was the unhappy way the ball had been bouncing in Milagro for quite some time, and which was just another reason Eusebio Lavadie was not a particularly well-liked person in the Miracle Valley.
Given the situation, much illegal grazing went on in the Milagro area. Joe Mondragón often cut a horse or two loose onto the BLM land controlled by Eusebio Lavadie, and Ray Gusdorf often cut his own fences so that his cows could wander by mistake into the Dancing Trout’s verdant pastures. In fact, fences were constantly being snipped accidentally so that skinny cows, horses, or sheep might wander off their owner’s mini-dustbowls into their neighbors’ less parched fields. Quite often the irate neighbors responded by shooting the offensive intruders, but such shootings amounted to pyrrhic vengeance, because the law read a person had to fence animals “out,” not “in,” and thus if a rancher shot an animal that had wandered onto his property, the blame for it being on that property was always the rancher’s, never his neighbor’s, and the rancher always wound up shelling out in spades in court for destroying his neighbor’s livelihood.
This law held true for private property owners only, however. For if a private cow happened to wander out of its barren pasture onto National Forest land, the cow’s owner, and not the Forest Service, was to blame.
One day a cow belonging to Joe Mondragón walked through a rusty fence surrounding Seferino Pacheco’s back field and wandered up the Milagro Canyon road past the Dancing Trout, turned left into a lush meadow owned by the United States of America, and was immediately impounded by Floyd Cowlie and Carl Abeyta, who lassoed the gaunt animal and led it back into the stock pen behind Forest Service headquarters in town, and then dutifully sent Joe a gleeful letter announcing that if he didn’t pick up his cow and pay the twenty-dollar fine within five days, the cow would no longer be his. The letter also mentioned that since this was the third time a Mondragón cow had been discovered poaching on government greenery, the amount of cattle allowed on Joe’s permit, number 37765, was being reduced from two to one.
The letter was posted in the Milagro Post Office at the back of Rael’s store, and the postmaster, Nick Rael, threw it into the mail bag which would be picked up by Teddy Martínez and taken to Chamisaville for sorting and canceling, a process that might take two days, and then Teddy Martínez would bring the bag of Milagro mail back up to Rael’s store, where it would sit for a day or so until Nick, or his kid, Jerry, got around to putting it out in the boxes.
Before all this could happen, however, Joe showed up at Pacheco’s to drop a salt block into the field, and when he discovered his cow had flown the coop he started screaming at Seferino, who just glowered lopsidedly at him during the five-minute tirade. When Joe finally stopped for air, the big morose drunkard said, “José, I let you put that sick cow in my field for nothing, so I didn’t have no obligation to mend no fences.”
“Sure, you let me put it in for nothing,” Joe snarled. “There wasn’t no grass in that field you could charge me for anyway!”
“Well, why did you put it there in the first place, then?” Pacheco wanted to know.
Joe threw a fistful of dirt on the ground, unleashed a string of curses by way of an adios, and stomped off to search for his skinny animal.
It was on his way back into town after a fruitless search that he caught sight of the cow munching on a bale of mildewed government hay in the pen behind Forest Service headquarters. And when Joe saw his cow in that corral his heart almost stopped, because he knew straight off that, not only was the steer’s freedom going to cost him twenty dollars he di
dn’t have, but also a permit head as well.
So Joe went home and got drunk. After about his third beer he fetched his .30–06 from the bedroom and loaded it up; then he went back into the kitchen and laid the rifle across the table and popped open another tallboy, getting himself revved up to do what just about anybody else in town in his position would have done, given tradition and the nature of these particular circumstances.
“What are you getting ready to do, José?” Nancy asked warily, knowing only too well what her husband was getting ready to do.
“I’m gonna go over to Pacheco’s place and shoot his fucking pig and his fucking chickens and maybe even his fucking self for letting my fucking cow get out of that fucking field,” Joe said.
Nancy sighed wearily and sat down at the table, absentmindedly sticking her pinkie in the gun barrel’s snout.
“Oh, you are so stupid, José,” she said. “The Floresta is kicking you in the butt, so what do you do, you go and kick Pacheco in the butt. Then maybe Pacheco will go and kick Onofre Martínez in the butt, and to get back at him Onofre will charge Ray Gusdorf three times what he should charge him for a load of wood, and in retaliation Ray Gusdorf will tell Pete Apodaca to take his cows out of Ray’s field, and Pete Apodaca will give his wife Betty a black eye or a broken arm in payment for that, and meanwhile Floyd Cowlie and Carl Abeyta will be rolling around on the Floresta office floor laughing about what a lot of dumbbells we all are.”
Joe stared at her, hostility gleaming out of his eyes.
“Well, where am I gonna get that twenty bucks?” he asked acidly. “Maybe God will leave it under my pillow tonight?”
“I don’t know,” Nancy pouted. “But I’m sick of the way it’s always a hundred of us who wind up paying that measly twenty bucks, and you still lose another cow off the permit.”
Joe polished off his beer, hoisted up the rifle, and said “I’ll see you around” as he kicked open the kitchen door and staggered out, murder humming through his blood.
About halfway to Seferino Pacheco’s house, Joe hit the brakes hard and skidded to a stop. Then he popped the clutch, lunged forward, and stalled.
And he just sat there in the truck in the middle of the dirt road, thinking.
Onofre Martínez’s mottled-green, 1953 Chevy pickup with the three-legged German shepherd on the cab roof and Onofre behind the wheel, and with his great-grandchildren Chemo and Chepa in back, came down the road toward Joe and lurched to a stop: Onofre waved and then beeped for Joe to pull over a little, and Joe gave him the finger.
Onofre turned off his truck, got out, and walked over to the driver’s side of Joe’s vehicle.
“What’s up, cousin?” he asked warily. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I had a cow in Seferino Pacheco’s field and he let it get out, and now it’s eating mildewed hay in that fucking corral in the back of the fucking Floresta office.”
Onofre whistled softly, almost gently, the way all people in Milagro had a tendency to whistle whenever they learned about a disaster of such gigantic proportions.
Then he asked, “But how come you’re sitting in the middle of the road like this?”
“I dunno,” Joe said, puzzled over his own indecision. “I was going over to Pacheco’s place to pay him back for letting my cow get loose.”
Onofre said, “What’s the point of that? All of us are always paying each other back when the Floresta arrests one of our animals. So then instead of just one person suffering, two people or three people or four people or twenty people all suffer, and the Floresta just sits in their wood-paneled office having a good laugh about what a bunch of lamebrained idiots the lot of us are.”
“Yeah, I know,” Joe said. “Nancy was just telling me.”
Onofre’s eyes narrowed, growing a little sleepy-looking as he suggested casually: “You’d think that someday somebody in this town would have the intelligence to lay the blame where the blame deserves to be laid, qué no?”
“I suppose so,” Joe said, his own eyes narrowing a little in that sleepy, thoughtful manner—
One-half hour later a small cluster of pickups belonging respectively to Joe Mondragón, Onofre Martínez, Ray Gusdorf, the Body Shop and Pipe Queen, and Sparky Pacheco appeared at the corral behind the Forest Service headquarters, and after Marvin LaBlue and Sparky Pacheco had opened the corral gate, Joe lassoed his cow.
Both Floyd Cowlie and Carl Abeyta came hurrying out the back door of the office shouting, “Hey, what the hell do you men think you’re doing?”
“I just came for my cow,” Joe said. “No problem.” And he grinned.
“That’s right,” Onofre Martínez confirmed, “he just came to pick up his cow.”
“Well, you’ll have to come into the office and sign a form,” Carl said. “Have you got the twenty bucks?”
“I think this time I’ll just take my cow without signing the forms or paying the twenty bucks,” Joe observed calmly, casually tying the other end of his rope to the pickup bumper.
“Hey, hold on a minute,” Floyd Cowlie protested. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
And, dropping a hand onto his gun, Carl Abeyta called loudly, “Come on, Joe, you know that ain’t regulations.” Then more softly, to his partner: “Floyd, you hustle into the office and give Bernabé a call—”
As Floyd Cowlie headed back into the office, Joe said, “Carl, this is my cow and I don’t got the twenty bucks to pay for it, and you can take your regulations and shove them.”
“Goddammit, you men are breaking the law, do you know that? This is a felony. You can be thrown in jail. I’ll hand you your pimpled asses on a silver platter—”
“You do that, Carl,” Onofre Martínez drawled, “and I got a feeling you’d be transformed overnight into the equivalent of a jackrabbit on a target range.”
Joe grinned at Carl, swung into his truck, and moved off slowly, leading the cow out of the corral. Claudio García dropped off the fence and shut the gate. Whereupon Carl Abeyta drew his gun.
As soon as Carl drew his gun, he realized it was 130 percent the wrong thing to have done. But once it was out, how could he stick it back in the holster? And anyway, once it was out, and once he had shouted, “Okay, you bastards, you’re under arrest for stealing government property!” how could he have sheathed the weapon without inviting them to point their rifles at him (there were eight weapons visible, either tucked in the crooks of their arms or arranged menacingly in pickup window racks) and perhaps even discharge a bullet or two in his direction?
There followed a particularly quiet standoff. None of the men moved, but they all harbored looks of disdain which suggested that nobody considered Carl was pointing anything much more menacing than a popgun. They also knew what Carl knew, namely, that if he so much as fired one shot at them, the death of Bonnie and Clyde would read like a Walt Disney fairy tale compared to the annihilation of Carl Abeyta and Company.
The group was assembled in this manner when Bernabé Montoya drove up. As soon as the sheriff assessed the situation, he sighed heavily, wishing to hell that he’d never had a phone installed in his living room. Then he opened the cab door, slouched out onto the ground near the corral, and said, “Carl, why don’t you holster that gun before somebody gets hurt?”
Carl stammered, “If I do, Bernie, they’ll kill me.”
“Oh cut the crap,” Bernabé said. “Not while I’m around nobody’s shooting anybody, qué no, boys?”
The boys let their eyes shift vagrantly over to Bernabé, and they gave him a cluster of cool, sleepy-eyed glances that almost made him shiver. Then they allowed their eyes to float back over to Carl, who was so drained he looked like an Anglo.
“Well, how about if somebody told me what the problem is here?” Bernabé proposed.
“Joe there, he’s stealing government property,” Carl said.
“You stole my property,” Joe snarled.
“I take it that cow is what all this fuss is about?” Ber
nabé said.
“We impounded that cow yesterday,” Floyd Cowlie explained. “And Joe over there, he refused to pay the fine, and now he’s stealing it out of our corral, and this corral is U.S. Government property that those men broke into, and until such time as Joe pays for that cow the animal is government property.”
“Carl,” Bernabé suggested, “first off, why don’t you sheathe that fucking pistol, because as far as I can see it’s just creating antagonism.”
“Not on your life, Bernie. I do and they’ll shoot me down in cold blood.”
“Aw, for crissakes,” Bernabé muttered disgustedly. “Hey, you boys, if Carl puts away that gun are you gonna shoot him in cold blood?”
And to a man, smiling faintly, chillingly, loving the act, the boys all just slightly nodded their heads yes.
Bernabé figured he better try a different tack. Addressing Carl, he said, “Uh, I guess you found that cow up in the forest, that’s why you arrested it, qué no?”
Carl swallowed dryly and just barely tilted his head yes, keeping his eyes all the while on the “boys.”
“And you found it up there yesterday, is that right too?”
Floyd Cowlie answered: “Yup, that’s right.”
“Now José,” Bernabé said carefully, “when was it that cow got out of Pacheco’s field, do you remember?”
“It was yesterday,” Joe said, keeping his eyes on Carl Abeyta instead of shifting them over to the sheriff.
“Well, perhaps you found that cow before it even ate a handful of government property,” Bernabé said to Carl, “and so maybe you didn’t have no right to arrest it since it hadn’t yet technically broke any of the rules.”