The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  The men had a good laugh. Nick, for one, quit laughing about seven minutes after Bud and Shorty had left—that is, his mirth died in conjunction with the flamboyant return of Joe Mondragón, who barged into the store accompanied by five big stern-looking people, two of whom carried rifles.

  “Hi, cousin,” Joe said. “I come to purchase a little ammo.”

  “Me too, cousin,” each of the other men crowed. The biggest of them, six-foot-six-inch Claudio García, approached the counter, opened the breech on his scope-fitted .30–06, and showed it to Nick.

  “See?” he said. “It’s empty. It ain’t got no more bullets.”

  Whereupon this entire group, excluding Nick, laughed heartily. Then they stocked up on ammo, and Joe gleefully affixed his signature to the charge sheet while Nick fumed. This accomplished, and wishing to affirm that he was a scrupulously honest person who always paid his debts, Joe fished in his pocket for a nickel, which he dropped insolently on the counter, explaining, “I had a soda the last time around and forgot and took the bottle home—here’s your fucking deposit, Nick.”

  The six men had purchased a few other odds and ends, candy bars, Slim Jims and jerky and piñon nuts, and now they hung around for a moment, unwrapping stuff and with exaggerated politeness practically tiptoeing across the store to discard the little wads of crumpled paper in the waste can, while they kept up a running superinnocent patter on the weather, the hay, the sheep and cattle, the tourists and whatnot, and Nick stood behind the counter with eyes as dark as thunderheads and his mouth frozen in a hating—but polite—little smile.

  Eventually, the men scuffled arrogantly onto the porch, sitting around a little longer out there, drinking pop and, in loud voices that were sure to drift back inside to Nick, shooting the breeze about how nice and quiet and peaceful and friendly it was here in Milagro.

  In due course, they moseyed off into the nearby narrow roads and alleyways. After them, it was mostly singles who came in: a few more Dancing Trout employees; Fred Quintana, the fly-tying short-order cook from the Pilar Café; the Enchanted Land Motel’s manager, Peter “The Pedo” Hirsshorn; and a number of old men, among them Sparky Pacheco, Onofre Martínez, Juan F. Mondragón, Panky Mondragón, Ray Gusdorf, and Martín Arguello. Most of these old duffers purchased a single box of ammunition for a .30–30 rifle, joking as they did so about either the fish, grasshoppers, prairie dogs, coyotes, butterflies, or rattlesnakes they were planning to kill.

  Around eleven-thirty, Charley Bloom threaded his way through the members of the Senile Brigade still trading gun stories on the porch and entered the store. Nick watched him with interest. Obviously terribly nervous, the lawyer walked around almost aimlessly, up and down Nick’s aisles, looking over the food a little too carefully, pinching this and handling that, putting everything back until finally he selected from the cooler a six-pack of beer which he clunked down self-consciously on the glass counter beside the cash register. Only then did he pretend to notice the used guns on prominent display along the top shelf of the counter behind which Nick stood. Carelessly, almost gaily, the big bluff lawyer said, “You know, Nick, for quite some time now I’ve been meaning to buy a gun. Nothing fancy, of course, just a little something to keep around, to carry in the glove compartment, you know, just in case—”

  “Sure,” Nick said. “I know.”

  “What kind of gun would you suggest for that sort of thing? Like, what kind is that one over there, in the corner?”

  “That’s a .32,” Nick said. “That’s the kind they call a Saturday night special.”

  “Oh.” Bloom blushed. Suddenly he couldn’t believe that he had not only grown up in America, but also had grown half-old in it without ever having fired a gun. “What about that one?” he asked.

  “That’s a .45 revolver,” Nick said.

  “Jesus. That’s a big mother gun.”

  “You want to see it?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  Nick handed it to Bloom, who turned it over kind of helplessly in his hands.

  “How do you load it?” he asked finally.

  Nick flipped back the shell guard and showed him.

  “Doesn’t the cylinder come out? I thought the cylinder was supposed to come out.”

  “Nope, you just push down the ejector rod here—see? Like that. For spent shells. If they’re not spent, they’re heavy enough to just fall out.”

  “Nothing happens when I pull the trigger,” Bloom said.

  “It’s a single-action revolver. You got to pull the hammer back.”

  “How come the cylinder won’t go around?” Bloom laughed nervously. “In the movies they always spin the cylinders around.”

  “Pull the hammer back two clicks.”

  Bloom pulled it back two clicks and tried to thumb the cylinder around.

  “I guess I was wrong. Try three clicks,” Nick said.

  Bloom tried three clicks, but it still didn’t work.

  “Here, lemme see.”

  Nick took the gun and fiddled with the hammer, pulling it back to various stops, but he couldn’t get the cylinder to turn.

  “Shit,” he muttered with a disappointed smile. “I guess I’ll have to strip the fucker down and see what’s the matter.”

  “What do the bullets for a gun like that look like?” Bloom asked.

  Nick pried open the flap on a carton of .45s and stood a cartridge up on end on the counter.

  “Christ, that’s a big shell, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Maybe for you the best gun I got is this one here.” Nick removed a .22 with a four-inch barrel. “It’s light, you can carry it around easy, your wife, she could handle it too. It’s a double action.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You can shoot it either by pulling the trigger or by pulling back the hammer. You could squeeze the trigger six times in a row and get off six shots.”

  “Oh.”

  Bloom held the gun, managed to rotate the cylinder and even spring it out, click it back in; then he pushed the ejector rod in and out of all the chambers.

  “I don’t know,” he said indecisively. “I know this sounds funny, but I just never owned a gun before.”

  “You came to the wrong place not to own a gun,” Nick said. “You wanna see something?”

  Nick unbuttoned the two lowest buttons on his shirt and pulled the tails out of his pants, exposing a wide scar tissue patch that covered a large part of his stomach and continued under his belt down across his abdomen.

  “Jesus,” Bloom whispered.

  “My cousin did that to me when I was seventeen,” Nick said matter-of-factly. “He shot me with a .38. He was drunk.”

  Bloom felt sick. “That … that must have been something.”

  Nick shrugged and buttoned up, tucking in his shirttails.

  Then the storekeeper said, “So?”

  Bloom set the .22 down carefully on the glass beside the .45. “I dunno,” he mumbled. “I just never owned a gun. There’s something weird about buying a gun. You know? I mean, why am I even looking at weapons in the first place? I guess I’m a little paranoid. Things are getting a bit jumpy in this town. But who’s to say a gun like this, carrying it around in the car—maybe I’d just be more uptight. I mean, once you get one, that changes your status, doesn’t it? And suppose somebody has a beef with you. If he knows you own a gun he’ll come after you with a gun. But if you don’t own a gun…”

  “Then it’s much easier to kill you,” Nick said. “If he knows you have a gun maybe he’ll be too chicken to ever come around at all.”

  Bloom stared at the guns for quite a while. When he broke the silence, it was only to mutter unhappily, “Six of one, half-dozen of the other. That’s the way everything turns out, isn’t it, Nick?”

  The storekeeper leaned back, folding his arms, and stared sideways out the front window, faintly whistling a tune.

  Bloom handled the .22 again, asking, “What’s the best way to shoot one of these?”

 
; Nick smiled. “Keep it pointed away from your own head.”

  The lawyer chuckled as if appreciating the joke. “No, I mean, how do you hold it? Would you rest the barrel across your other fist like this?”

  “If you wanted to burn the shit out of your hand, I guess that’s how you’d do it.”

  Bloom thought: This wise bastard is making fun of me. He said, “So how’s the best way to hold it?”

  The storekeeper shrugged. “Hold your arm out straight, I guess. Maybe hold your wrist with your other hand. I dunno. Usually, if you’re shooting people, they’re pretty close so you don’t have to aim much. Just point it in their general direction and shoot.”

  “I hadn’t really planned on shooting people,” Bloom said tightly.

  “What else you gonna shoot with that kind of handgun?”

  Nervously, Bloom flickered a glance at Nick, then at the gun in his own hand. “Ooh … I guess not,” he said suddenly. “I guess I don’t really want a gun.” He let go of the weapon like a hot potato. “I’m sorry—”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” Nick said.

  Bloom walked out—ashamed at having exposed himself, his weaknesses, his fear—just as Bernabé Montoya walked in.

  “Lemme have a box of .38s,” the sheriff grumbled dejectedly, taking an Eskimo Pie from the ice cream freezer.

  “You’re lucky I got any left.”

  “How come?”

  “Today I been selling ammo at about two hundred times the normal rate I usually sell it.”

  “Wonderful,” the sheriff groaned, stabbing his teeth through a hunk of the ice cream bar. “That’s really good news. That makes my day. Who fired that bullet at José’s house the other night?”

  “He go to you about it?”

  “Would he go to a rattlesnake about it—?”

  “I don’t know who did that. I was at home. In bed. I didn’t even hear the report.”

  “Sure. Everybody was at home in bed. I guess that bullet must have been fired by El Brazo Onofre.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Nick said. “I just know I sold enough ammunition already today to start our own little Vietnam here. You were at the meeting at Bud’s with that Wyoming guy.”

  “Montana. And screw him.” The sheriff licked the wooden ice cream stick clean, flipped it in the general direction of the wastebasket, and selected another Eskimo Pie.

  “The God damn state police and the God damn state engineer should keep their God damn noses out of our God damn affairs,” he grumbled heatedly. “We should of sat this thing out with little or no fanfare. But oh no, they had to push a panic button. Now you just wait and see what happens. Put the bullets on my card, Nick, and don’t sell any ammo to José or any of those other bandits.”

  “He already came back,” Nick said. “With five others, including Claudio García, and two of them had rifles.”

  “Did they threaten you?”

  “Well, not exactly … but you know how it is.”

  “How much did you sell them?”

  “Couple of .30–30s, an ought six, .38s, .270s, like that.”

  “Ai, Chihuahua.”

  Outside, the sheriff sat on the porch for about five minutes, chewing up a pack of Juicy Fruit, tossing out each stick of gum as soon as the flavor left. An ill wind, blowing no good, was rising. What he ought to do was take his lovely tin star over to that bastard Pancho Armijo and let him have the fucking job.

  While Bernabé was sitting there, sorrowful-eyed and whining Seferino Pacheco limped into focus.

  “Hey!” the crazy drunk shouted, wavering unsteadily in front of the sheriff. “You seen my pig?”

  “Screw your pig!” Bernabé snapped, bolting up and striding past the huge woozy man, who teetered around a bit more, watching the sheriff depart, then staggered over to the porch and sat down with a thud, holding his big miserable head in his big, but curiously delicate, hands.

  The VISTA volunteer, Herbie Goldfarb, all sneakers and CCNY sweatshirt, came nervously down the road; Pacheco surveyed his approach with a narrowed, suspicious eye. Herbie carried a knapsack on his back, and after he had shuffled obsequiously past Pacheco with his arm upraised to avoid the flurry of pebbles from Mercedes Rael, he ferreted nervously among Nick’s wares, loading up on corned beef hash, bean dip, potato chips, powdered milk, and the like, all of which he would lug home in the mildewed knapsack.

  At the counter, Nick—who usually refrained from speaking to Herbie because he wanted the skunk smell out of his store as fast as possible—had an idea. So he asked, “How’s it going up at your place?” And Herbie, startled, grinning too wide, said, “Oh, okay, I guess. You know. I’m having a little trouble getting started, but I imagine that pretty soon I’ll get into the swing of things. I’m learning Spanish, but I haven’t really practiced on anybody yet. I’m still very self-conscious about it.”

  Nick proceeded quickly to the point: “Aren’t you getting tired of those skunks up at your place?”

  “You’re not kidding I’m tired. I can’t sleep anymore. My eyes water all night long. I feel sick twenty-four hours a day.”

  “I think what you need is a gun,” Nick said.

  “A gun? What would I do with a gun?”

  “Put those skunks out of their misery, for one.”

  “Do you really think so?” Herbie’s heart hammered at the thought of actually owning, let alone pulling the trigger of, a gun.

  “Sure. Christ, you wouldn’t catch me sleeping three minutes on top of a bunch of stinking skunks. It’ll give you the GIs, after a while your skin will peel, your eyes will puff almost shut, and you’ll have to move out.”

  “What kind of gun would a person use to kill a skunk?” Herbie asked meekly.

  “How much money can you spend?”

  “I don’t have much. Only about seventy-five dollars right now.”

  “Well, how about this .38?” Nick chuckled. “It belonged to a nice little old lady who never drove it over forty.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “A joke,” Nick explained. “Seriously, I’ll give it to you for forty bucks, box of ammo included. You can’t go wrong. And anyway, living out there where you do, next door to Mad Dog Joe Mondragón on one side, and Thrill Killer Pancho Armijo on the other side, I’d think you would want something for self-protection. Also, you never know when a bear might come around, or something like that, trying to get into your bacon and beans. Me, I wouldn’t be caught dead in a wide open frontier town like this without some kind of self-protection, you want my honest opinion.”

  “But how would I kill the skunks?”

  “There’s a hole, ain’t there? Under the edge of the house somewheres?”

  “Sure, there’s two big holes that I’ve noticed.”

  “Well, that’s how they got under there in the first place. What you want to do, see, is sit down a little ways away, round about suppertime, and just blow them apart when they poke their heads out. Or hell, stick your hand down the hole and blast off a cylinder or two. Even if you don’t hit anything, skunks are pretty smart, they’re bound to get the idea.”

  “I never owned a gun before,” Herbie said.

  “Every man should own a firearm,” Nick admonished. “Christ, I got my first gun when I was eight years old. A .22 rifle. By the time I was nine I could thread a bullet up a prairie dog’s ass and out his nose from thirty yards away while he was on a dead run. I killed my first deer when I was twelve.”

  “You really think this type of gun would be the kind to use on a skunk?” Herbie said.

  “Sure. You could use it on just about any kind of skunk,” Nick sniggered.

  “I guess maybe I’ll buy it then,” Herbie said abruptly, his heart racing like a stuck throttle.

  “You ‘guess maybe,’ or you actually want to buy it?”

  “Yes, alright, I mean, I’ll buy it,” Herbie—flustered—mumbled. “Would you show me how to load it, and how it works and everything?”

  Fifteen minutes
later Herbie Goldfarb, pacifist, conscientious objector, VISTA volunteer, walked out of there like a young man who had just lost his virginity, the gun and a box of bullets tucked down snug in his pack among the corned beef hash and Spam cans, peanut butter, Bunny bread, and beer. It felt to him as if he had just undergone some powerful rites of passage and now belonged to the western mountains instead of to the East Coast, fair-haired college culture. He was so eager to be home that he almost broke into a trot, pack and all. But then, envisioning the spectacle that would be, he slowed down, and, uncomfortably aware of the Chicano faces following his progress with utter disdain, if not out-and-out hatred, he walked slope-shouldered and humbly the rest of the way home.

  There, having opened and drained a beer, he straightaway loaded the gun, and, moving swiftly before second thoughts could sabotage his determination to rub out the skunk colony that was making his life so miserable, he kneeled at the larger of the two entrances to their lair, shoved down his arm, leveled the gun as best he could, and pulled the trigger.

  The first explosion hit him with the wallop of a bomb, the sheer volume of sound scaring him so much that he shrieked, yet somehow he managed to pull the trigger again, driving a slug up through his own wooden floor, and with the third shot the gun kicked right out of his hand and he tumbled over backward, expecting the house, or at least the nearest wall, to collapse violently on his head.

  In the Pilar Café, Bernabé Montoya knocked over his coffee cup, spilling the hot fluid onto his egg salad sandwich as he cried “Oh shit it’s beginning!” and dove off his stool. Grabbing a .38 from a shoebox on the shelf under the cash register, Harlan Betchel leaped after the sheriff out the door. Bernabé swung up behind the wheel of his pickup, and Harlan just made it into the passenger seat as the sheriff gunned the truck, spinning his wheels and veering in a sharp U-turn that almost sliced off Seferino Pacheco’s knees. They careened into the narrow lane that led to Joe Mondragón’s house three hundred yards up the road.

  “Get that gun off the rack!” Bernabé panted. “There’s a clip in the glove compartment!”