The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  Okay. Joe got up. He browsed through the refrigerator, fashioned himself a peanut butter, mayonnaise, and green chili sandwich, drummed up a Baggie full of cracklings that he wished had come from Seferino Pacheco’s ravenous thundering pig, turned on the radio to “Heartbreak Theater,” and settled himself regally at the table, munching on his sandwich and chugging swiftly through two beers while bemusedly regarding his fluttering centerpiece and listening to the lovesick deeds of one Big Bill Killeen and his small-town starstruck consort, Melody Applebaum, coming from the radio.

  Nancy said, “How can I read with that crap on the radio?”

  Joe felt perky, saucy, wicked, cool. Damned if he would pay her even an ounce of attention. So Nancy got up, stomped into the kitchen, and clicked off the radio. Smiling like Pancho Villa, Joe looked right through her; he didn’t even arch his eyebrows; he said not a word.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Nancy cast a curious glance over the ballot jar at her husband. “You’re acting goofy. And by the way, since when don’t you take your hat off at the table?”

  “Since when don’t you turn your mouth off when I’m eating?” Joe said haughtily, laughing on the inside, suddenly in love with his wife and proving it by this kind of jeering banter.

  Making a sort of squinched, twisted face, Nancy flopped back onto the couch in the living room area. The house was very quiet because the kids were four houses down the road, driving their grandparents crazy.

  Joe brushed some crumbs from his fingers and, polishing off his second beer, decided to go make some hunting knives in his workshop. On the way out he lifted the lid off his centerpiece, liberating all the sparrows inside the house.

  He was outside, laughing, running for his shop, when Nancy bellowed: “You son of a bitch!”

  “Hah!” Joe laughed. Suddenly, just like that—for only a moment, maybe, but for a good moment, at least—he was in love, on top of the world, and just about as tough as they come. The mood wouldn’t last long; these moods never did with Joe. But still, he was grateful for them: they were one of those small miracles that somehow kept recurring to make his life worthwhile.

  * * *

  That same night, at 10:42 P.M., a call came into the state police headquarters at Doña Luz to investigate vandalism at the state trout hatchery, which was located about midway between Doña Luz and Milagro, about a mile west of Ruby Archuleta’s Strawberry Mesa Body Shop and Pipe Queen, on the Rio Lucero. Officer Bill Koontz and the Staurolite Baron’s son, Bruno Martínez, were dispatched to the scene. On arrival they found the hatchery head, Glen Wesley Gore, standing beside the lunker pool with a hurt and extremely puzzled expression on his face. The lunker pool was the smallest of the fish “bins,” a circular structure about fifteen feet across, in which from thirty to forty-five enormous trout usually swam. On a pole beside the pool was a vending machine that, for a dime, dispensed small packets of fish food for tourists to feed the lunkers. The pool was the hatchery’s main attraction.

  “What’s the problem, Glen?” Bruno Martínez asked. “Seems pretty quiet around here. Nobody on the road leading in, and nobody on the highway either.”

  “Look at this frigging pool, will you?”

  They looked. Bill Koontz whistled softly, “Where’s all the fish?”

  “That,” Glen moaned, “is for me not to know, and for you boys to find out.”

  Removing his hat, Bruno scratched his head. “You mean somebody came in here tonight and stole all those fish?”

  “You bet that’s what I mean,” the director said bitterly. “We had one fish in there, old Yellow Belly, a cutthroat, that must have weighed fifteen pounds.”

  “What in crissakes is somebody gonna do with all that fish?” Bill Koontz wondered aloud.

  “They ain’t gonna use them for fertilizer,” Glen said.

  “When did this happen, Glen?”

  “Just now. I had to run over from the house. I heard voices, somebody laughing, but by the time I got dressed they were heading out. I heard the vehicle, but when I came round the corner of the path leads up from the house, they’d already squealed around that bend in the road over there, so I got no idea what they were driving. Sounded like a truck to me…”

  A few minutes later, as Koontz and Martínez drove off the hatchery spur onto the highway, where they could see for a number of miles north, Bruno said, “Hey, Bill, you tell me. Isn’t that a fire up there, say just around the Milagro turnoff?”

  Koontz squinted his eyes, trying to make out the patch of red beside the road. “Yeah, I think you’re right, man. I think that is a fire.”

  “What do you figure it could be?”

  “Beats me—wait a minute. Isn’t that just about where Ladd Devine’s Miracle Valley sign is located?”

  The radio dispatcher, Emilio Cisneros, cut into their conversation. “A–47–A … you guys at the fish hatchery?”

  “Naw, we went there,” Bruno radioed back. “We just pulled onto the highway.”

  “Can you see a fire up north?” the dispatcher asked. “We just got a call Devine’s sign, you know, that big wooden one south of town, is on fire.”

  “No shit, Dick Tracy.”

  “Well, you fellas better proceed on up there and see what goes. After that gunplay this morning, who knows what’s going to happen.”

  “Check,” Bruno said. “We’re on our way.”

  When they arrived, everything except the concrete base of the sign was demolished. Worried, haggard, fitfully puffing on a cigarette, Bernabé Montoya separated himself from the group of about a hundred onlookers and trudged over to the state cops.

  “Who did it?” Koontz asked.

  “Now Bill,” Bernabé said slowly, “if I knew that would I be standing around here with the rest of this town, warming my nuts and toasting marshmallows?”

  “We just came from the hatchery,” Bruno said. “Somebody stole all the fish out of the lunker pool.”

  “Somebody what?”

  “You heard him,” Koontz said. “Somebody stole all the lunkers.”

  “So what we’re all supposed to be on the lookout for, I suppose, is somebody driving a truck full of fat fish and gasoline cans, qué no?”

  “This hasn’t been a very funny day,” Koontz said.

  “He’s telling me,” Bernabé snapped at Bruno.

  “Let’s go in and arrest Joe Mondragón,” Koontz said.

  “That’s what whoever set this would love for you to do.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Koontz snapped.

  “That’s supposed to mean,” Bernabé said wearily, “that the situation is such in this town that all we got to do is pick up José Mondragón on a trumped-up or even on a legitimate charge, and people will just line up and start shooting at each other.”

  “Ladd Devine know about this?” Bruno asked.

  “I sent Naranjo to the store to call him.”

  Koontz laughed. “Some operation you run up here, Bernie. Police calls from a fucking pay phone on the porch of a general store.”

  “Take it easy, Bill,” Bruno cautioned. “Everybody’s tired. Been a bad day.”

  “What was the evidence at the scene?” Koontz asked. “Or did you bother to look?”

  “Nothing much. Except the concrete and part of the ground around it is soaked with gasoline.”

  In a notebook, Koontz wrote down some times and mentioned the gas.

  “If you fellas don’t mind, I think I’ll just ask around a bit and see what comes home on the grapevine before I move on anybody,” Bernabé said.

  “Sure. Be our guests,” Koontz said. “What the hell…”

  Later that night, while dark clouds obscured the moon, a person or number of persons ushered about twelve sheep belonging to Eusebio Lavadie from the narrow hay field in which they were grazing into a neighboring field, also belonging to Lavadie, of green alfalfa. At dawn, the sheep began to eat; by 9:00 A.M., when Lavadie discovered what had happened, three of the sheep were alrea
dy lying on their sides, dead and bloated. Lavadie, who in spite of his rural background was squeamish about such things, rushed back into his house and phoned Joe Mondragón, gurgling frantically at him to come running with a trocar. A trocar being a sheathed sort of ice pick instrument you stab into the bellies of foundering ruminants to let out the deadly gases. “I’ll give you three bucks for every animal you can save!” Lavadie shouted hysterically.

  “De acuerdo,” Joe said. “Be right over.”

  Joe hung up and returned to the kitchen table, slumped back into his chair, and lazily sipped from a cup of lukewarm coffee.

  “Who was that?” Nancy asked.

  “That yellow-bellied pendejo, Lavadie,” Joe murmured lazily.

  “What did he want?”

  “Somebody let some of his sheep into one of his green alfalfa fields and a bunch of them got bloated. So he asked me to come and punch holes in them with my trocar.”

  “Well—?” Nancy said.

  “Well, I guess when I finish this cup of coffee I’ll amble on over there and punch a few holes in his woolly balloons,” Joe giggled.

  “At the rate you’re going his sheep will all be dead by then.”

  “Now wouldn’t that be a crying shame.” Joe frowned concernedly as he pushed out of his chair and moseyed into the bathroom to brush his teeth: “I guess I better get my ass in gear, qué no?”

  The following morning, a package mailed from Chamisaville and addressed to Ladd Devine arrived at the Dancing Trout. Flossie opened the package—which contained about twenty huge trout heads—and burst out crying.

  Fifteen minutes later her husband, Horsethief Shorty, and Jerry Grindstaff entered the Pilar Café, where Bernabé Montoya, over cherry pie and coffee, was talking fishing with Fred Quintana.

  Devine set down the fishheads in the center of the table; Shorty and Jerry G. pulled over chairs from another table.

  Bernabé sighed. “The lunkers from the fish hatchery, I presume?”

  “None of our guests caught them,” Shorty grinned.

  “Any leads develop over that sign burning?” Devine asked.

  “I went over to José’s. We chatted a little, and he mentioned that Brazo Onofre, remember? And then he asked me to leave. I questioned a couple other people. Naturally nobody knows a thing.”

  “No witnesses?”

  “If a hundred naked people wearing Indian headdresses and shooting off pistols and shouting ‘Que Viva Snuffy Ledoux!’ had set that fire, Mr. Devine, I wouldn’t be able to dig up a witness.”

  Shorty said, “It appears the natives are getting ever more restless. Cigar—?”

  “The natives been restless a long time,” the sheriff said, accepting the cigar.

  “It’s this conservancy district and the dam, isn’t it?” Devine asked.

  Bernabé shrugged. “That’s the whatchamacallit—you know, the … the thing, it’s a chemistry term, when you put something into a test tube that starts everything else in to bubbling and smoking—”

  “A catalyst.” Shorty moved over as Harlan Betchel joined them, took a peek in the cardboard box, and whistled softly.

  “Those the hatchery trout?”

  “One and the same,” Shorty piped.

  “What are you going to do?” Devine asked.

  Bernabé shrugged again. “I dunno. What do you want me to do, look for fingerprints on these fishheads?”

  “I don’t mean about these fish, Bernie. I mean just in general. Wouldn’t you say things are getting a bit out of hand?”

  The sheriff shrugged yet again, gloomily regarding the fishheads. At length he admitted, “Yeah, I guess things are a little out of hand.”

  “When are you going to arrest somebody?”

  “Who do you want me to arrest, Mr. Devine? Right now the only person I got anything on is that VISTA kid for discharging a firearm within the city limits.”

  “Arrest Joe Mondragón for irrigating that beanfield.”

  “You honestly think that would stop anything?”

  “If that field doesn’t get irrigated, that’s the end of the symbol, and people will calm down. Besides, these men and women are conservative folk. Plus they scare easy. Put Joe away and the rebellion is over.”

  “You want to bet?” Bernabé said softly.

  “If you don’t, things might go rough on you,” Devine threatened quietly. “You haven’t been the world’s best sheriff, you know.”

  “I’ve kept the lid on, Mr. Devine.”

  “You call what happened yesterday keeping the lid on?”

  Bernabé flushed. “At least nobody died.”

  Devine said, “I think you better pick up Joe before somebody does die.”

  Bernabé shook his head. “It wouldn’t do no good, sir.”

  “I think it would.”

  “Nope. Somebody else would irrigate that field for him.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like maybe me,” Bernabé said angrily.

  Ladd Devine tried to face him down. After a long tense silence, the Dancing Trout owner dropped his eyes and said, “Why you, Bernie?”

  “Because I don’t like getting pushed around, Mr. Devine. I don’t like being ordered to do things that go against my nature or against the nature of the situation. I’m handling this the best I know how and I’m praying nobody gets killed. I seen this coming ever since I was with my grandfather with his sheep when I was a kid. I’ve lived here all my life, Mr. Devine, I’ve bought most of my groceries and a lot of my ammunition from your store. Right now I’m eating cherry pie in your café. When I had an affair with Mabel Mascarenas from Doña Luz, we used to spend every Thursday afternoon in your Enchanted Land Motel across the highway over there. I’ve seen this coming, I’ve watched it building for a long time. And I’m scared because I’m afraid it’s gonna cost me my job. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to handle it. But I know how not to handle it. So I won’t handle it the way I don’t think it should be handled, even if I don’t know how it should be handled. I’d just as soon put up with a thousand burned signs and a million dead trout, as make an arrest that would start the human bloodshed.”

  Devine stood up. “Do you want to take these fishheads down to the state police, Bernie, or would you rather I did it?”

  “I’ll take them. What the hell.”

  “Okay. Let’s go, Shorty, Jerry G. Maybe we’ll talk to Joe Mondragón ourselves.”

  “Anything happens to Joe,” Bernabé called after them, “and I’ll be damn sure to arrest the three of you!”

  “God forbid,” Shorty grinned. “Jesus Christ himself couldn’t command any more respect from me than does José Mondragón.”

  After they’d left, Harlan Betchel asked, “What’s the matter with you, Bernie? You gone soft in the head?”

  “How much do I owe you?” the sheriff growled.

  “It’s on the house. It’s always on the house. You know that.”

  “How much?” Bernabé insisted morosely. “Once a decade I get this overpowering urge to pay. In fact, from now on I’m gonna insist on squaring my tab—”

  “Screw you.” Harlan pushed back, rising—he walked away. “I’m not giving you a bill because you don’t owe me anything.”

  “They’ll hit your fucking Buck-A-Fish trout pen next,” Bernabé said nastily. “And if you don’t gimme a bill I won’t give a shit.”

  “So don’t give a shit, then, Bernie. You couldn’t catch a common thief anyway, not even if he took a crap in your back pocket in broad daylight.” Harlan disappeared into the kitchen.

  Bernabé tore the floppy wrapping paper off the fishhead package, crumpled it in a ball which he left in the ashtray, then lugged the box out to his truck. Turning south on the highway, he pulled over to pick up a hitchhiker, the VISTA volunteer, Herbie Goldfarb.

  “Going someplace?” Bernabé asked.

  “Just down to Chamisaville, sir,” Herbie said timidly. “I need a break. Also a shower. Also I’m pretty scared.”


  “What are you scared of?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’s just everything that happened yesterday. I don’t want to get shot, sir, I really don’t. When I came out here I was a conscientious objector. I came here to avoid a war…”

  “Nobody’s gonna get shot,” the sheriff said stubbornly.

  “Well, I don’t know…” Herbie lapsed into silence. They drove that way, listening to a religious program in Spanish from KKCV in Chamisaville, down to the Doña Luz state police headquarters where Bernabé let off the volunteer on the highway shoulder, then turned in.

  He banged the carton of fishheads on the counter. Bruno Martínez was on duty, along with Granny Smith; a woman, Tina Valerio, was typing.

  Bruno peeked into the box and made a wry face. “Where’d these come from, Bernie?”

  “They were mailed to the Zopilote from Chamisaville yesterday morning.”

  “What time yesterday morning?”

  “Doesn’t it say on the postmark?”

  “What postmark? The address, the postmark, the stamps, they’ve been tore off or something.”

  Ai, Chihuahua! Bernabé sat down and shakily lit a cigarette. I am a dumb cop, he thought, remembering the crumpled ball he’d left in the Pilar Café ashtray. I don’t know my ass from a hole in the ground. Pancho Armijo, that S.O.B., he’s gonna win by a landslide in November.

  And then what’ll I do for a living? the depressed sheriff wondered sarcastically: dig cesspools for Ladd Devine?

  * * *

  When Amarante Córdova was young he used to throw stones at birds in flight. Of course he never hit a bird with one of those stones, and that was probably why it was fun to throw them—knowing absolutely that the birds would always dodge, or be going too fast for either his pitching arm or the missiles it released. In fact, as he remembered it, there had always been a kind of joy in attacking a thing that could not be hurt, a kind of satisfaction to be derived by all parties involved.

  Amarante had stopped chucking rocks at little birds around the time he became sheriff, but in an old age that might be called a reversion to his childhood, he suddenly returned to a variation of his former pastime. The precise moment that he reverted into his former self occurred during one of the old man’s daily jaunts into town, when he spied a redwing blackbird drinking from a small rain puddle in the Milagro–García spur and for some reason decided to throw a stone at it. With considerable effort he stooped over and selected a golf ball–sized weapon, straightened up, tiptoed a little closer, and then flung the rock at his target. But as his skinny, bent fingers could not release the projectile in time, he wound up drilling it against his own foot instead of at the bird. This smarted a little, and Amarante croaked a string of feeble curses as he limped around in the road, amazed by what a flabby uncoordinated old geezer he had become.