The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  And then the butt of his mammoth, archaic six-gun collided with his wandering gaze; abruptly he quit stumbling around.

  Obviously unafraid of such a decrepit old fart, the redwing blackbird was still dawdling around down by the puddle, nailing whatever insect tidbits had drifted close to shore.

  Moving—now that he’d decided to hunt the bird—with a deliberate and cunning dexterity, Amarante removed his huge Peacemaker from its scabbard, and, holding it in both hands after laboriously cocking the hammer, he aimed for almost a minute at the blackbird, then pulled the trigger. By some sort of miracle the bullet, which was immediately projected forth at a high rate of speed amid a flash of fire, a boom of noise, and a spurt of smoke, drilled the bird squarely amidships, causing it to disintegrate in a great puff of black and yellow and red feathers, some of which—as the smoke cleared—floated tenderly back down like autumn leaves, alighting delicately on the puddle.

  Well, at first Amarante was shocked, because he had not intended to kill the bird, just as he had never intended to kill the little feathered creatures when he’d been a kid hurling stones at them.

  But then it occurred to him that this was a sign, a message, an omen—maybe even from God himself: Amarante Córdova, useless old man, protector of Joe’s beanfield, had been blessed with an aim that was accurate and true, the better to defend the beanfield, to save Milagro, to conquer the forces of evil and Ladd Devine—

  Amarante gathered up some feathers and waddled into town as fast as his bowed arthritic legs could carry him. Plunking onto a stool at the Frontier, he jubilantly splashed the feathers across the bar, then banged down his six-gun on the hard mahogany top.

  “A rat killed a blackbird out at your place?” Tranquilino Jeantete asked, adjusting his hearing aid and popping them both a beer.

  “I shot a blackbird from a hundred paces,” Amarante bragged, lying through his teeth because the bird had only been about twenty feet away.

  “Sure. And I strangled a wolf bare-handed last night,” the crusty old bartender retorted, sucking on his thumb because he had cut it a little on the second poptop.

  “You make fun of me,” Amarante complained. “Everybody makes fun of me. But then … everybody made fun of Jesus Christ himself.”

  “If Jesus Christ himself walked into my bar and ordered a shot of blackberry brandy or tequila, I wouldn’t make fun of him,” Tranquilino said. “But when Amarante Córdova walks into my bar telling me that with his lousy eyesight he could even see, let alone kill with a pistol that weighs a ton, a blackbird at one hundred paces, then I got a right to mock, because somebody is lying through their teeth, what’s left of them.”

  Amarante was hurt. “But I did,” he protested. “You can walk back over to the Milagro–García spur and see for yourself the rest of the feathers and all the blood and gore.”

  “No thanks, cousin. Every morning I walk a hundred yards to the bar, I’m out of breath all morning. But I’m a fair man, my friend—” And so saying he tottered around the bar and lugged a wooden stool over to the far end of the room and set an almost-empty sherry bottle atop the stool. Then, plugging in the jukebox so that its internal gleam would shed some garish blue light on the target, he said, “Okay, you go ahead and prove to me you killed a blackbird at one hundred paces.”

  “In the bar?” Amarante was astonished.

  “In the bar,” Tranquilino insisted firmly. “It won’t be the first time somebody discharged a firearm in here.”

  Amarante scrutinized Tranquilino to see if his old friend had gone off his rocker, but the bartender had his eyes sarcastically trained on the bottle and his hearing aid turned off, so how could a Gunfighter Supreme by recent Order of the Lord refuse to accept the challenge?

  Amarante creaked gingerly off his stool, took forever to sight in his blunderbuss—and, along with a million painful fragments of gunshot echo, a thousand pieces of amber-colored glass ricocheted off the wall and sprinkled across the floor like stars during the creation of a small universe.

  “Hijo, Madre, puto, cabrón!” Tranquilino Jeantete commented.

  Then he located another almost-empty bottle and set it up on the stool and retreated behind the bar, saying “Whenever you’re ready, maestro.”

  Ignoring the sarcasm in his lifelong friend’s voice, Amarante thumbed back the hammer, took careful aim … and blew the second bottle into just as spectacular smithereens.

  The glass had barely tinkled to rest around their feet when Harlan Betchel, Nick Rael, Ray Gusdorf, Bernabé Montoya, Betty Apodaca, Carl Abeyta and Floyd Cowlie, and Sparky Pacheco and Tobías Mondragón careened into the bar to see who was getting laid out. Naturally, when they saw the two old men, or more specifically, when they saw Amarante’s huge six-iron, all of them ground to a halt; but before anybody could speak, Tranquilino said matter-of-factly, “Watch this, friends,” and he carted another bottle over to the stool.

  Bernabé Montoya knew he should have called a halt to the target practice right then and there, but like everyone else he was curious, so instead of saying no he said nothing, and, of course, having condoned the first demonstration, which ended with bottle fragments no bigger than BBs falling on all their heads like rain, he was powerless to stop the subsequent carnage.

  By the time Tranquilino had begun setting up half-full liquor bottles, at least four dozen people were gathered in the back and in the doorway of the Frontier; Nick Rael had already donated a box of .45 shells free, and Amarante Córdova was so drunk with his own power and accuracy that he could hardly stand up straight, let alone focus on what he was trying to hit … and yet, thus far he had not missed a single bottle. So incredible was this feat that everyone present had become hushed, reverent, awestruck, aware they were probably witnessing a miracle. In fact, the tension among the onlookers had grown almost unbearable. Also, the slugs from Amarante’s Peacemaker had almost dug a small round hole in the bar’s adobe wall.

  Suddenly, however, Amarante felt a nerve twitch somewhere deep inside his body: he held his fire, blinked his eyes, and then lowered the gun.

  Nobody said anything. Finally Amarante announced, “That’s enough.”

  “Whatta you mean, that’s enough?” a handful of people complained.

  “That’s just enough,” Amarante said complacently, because he knew—quite simply—that if he fired again he would miss.

  He holstered the gun, and, shooting his three brown teeth at everyone from a wide grin as he politely tipped his hat to the onlookers, he walked outside and headed home.

  Amarante veered off the road at Joe’s beanfield, however, having decided it wouldn’t hurt to stand watch for an hour or two; and he was almost asleep, with his back to a bleached cottonwood log, when he realized a plane was coming up from the south.

  Now normally there would be nothing unusual in a plane coming up from the south. But today was a strange day. Amarante’s eyes popped open, and he fumbled in his suit pockets for his glasses, which he finally located and lodged in front of his eyes so as to identify the oncoming aircraft. Pretty soon he could begin to make out the markings on the plane. By the time the small Cessna reached Milagro he knew it belonged to Ladd Devine, and he had already unconsciously cocked the hammer on his Peacemaker while waiting eagerly for whoever was at the controls to guide that Cessna within pistol range.

  Amarante did not know it, of course, but there were four men in the plane: Ladd Devine, Bud Gleason, the state engineer, Nelson Bookman, and the governor. They were all guests at a real estate conference slated to begin in Chamisaville that noon; the governor would give a keynote address, opening the two-day festivities. They were all taking an opportunity to become a little more familiar with the situation in Milagro, and for this reason they had decided to make a pass over the scene while Ladd Devine and Bud Gleason ran down the various Miracle Valley enterprise facts and figures, and also offered off-the-cuff comments on the local flora, fauna, and fulleros.

  Down below, Amarante wasn’t thinking much
about the consequences of shooting Ladd Devine’s plane from the sky, he was more or less allowing himself to be led by divine guidance, as it were. And so, as the little plane buzzed closer, he raised the pistol, and, overcome with a great calmness inside, he began to sight on the merrily droning target, waiting for it to approach a little closer so that God could pull the trigger.

  “There’s the beanfield,” Bud Gleason said, and all eyes in the plane turned left and downward to take in, almost with respect if not awe, the tiny green plot among those barren west side fields that was causing such a hoopla.

  And as Ladd Devine tilted the plane slightly to give them a better view, Amarante pulled the trigger, causing the hammer to snap forward driving the firing pin into the center of the .45 cartridge aimed at the slowly turning plane.

  Nothing happened, however.

  The cartridge was a dud.

  * * *

  Before Herbie Goldfarb arrived in Milagro he had a passing familiarity with cockroaches and silverfish, but he had a very spotty record vis-à-vis ants. A vague impression, floating around in his head like a wayward wisp of cloud, told him there existed one insect of that species called an army ant, which hailed from either Togo or Peru, and this ant liked to mow down everything—from forests to people—that got in its way. Herbie also had it on various untrustworthy authorities that ants profited from radiation, thus they would survive an atomic war, and the irony of their survival, of course, was that ants were one of the very few other living organisms which enjoyed waging organized war against each other.

  Aside from this, Herbie had been led to believe ants could lift loads ten or fifteen or twenty times their own body weight, and supposedly they were fairly intelligent. He understood also that some people in foreign countries nibbled on chocolate-covered ants instead of on M & Ms. Too, various ants could fly, others couldn’t; some ants were red and some ants liked to sting, and some ants were black and didn’t sting that much except when you rolled them under your thumb against your bicep on a picnic, trying to do them in. As for ant mythology, Herbie knew the story about the grasshopper and the ant, but he was familiar with only two expressions: “She (or he)’s got ants in her (or his) pants.” And: “He (or she)’s a little antsy.”

  But the fact is, Herbie really hadn’t given ants or ant lore (he’d never even owned an ant farm as a kid) much of a tumble prior to his westward journey as a Volunteer in Service to America.

  It didn’t take Herbie long to become very aware of ants in his new home. This new awareness began (one week after he sprained his thumb shooting skunks) when he bought a hummingbird feeder from Nick Rael, filled it with boiled sugarwater and red food coloring as instructed, and attached it to a branch of the tipped-over cottonwood vivisecting his outhouse. Nick had cautioned Herbie against bees, so the volunteer outfitted his feeder’s glass nozzle with a big yellow bee guard, which worked fine: it separated (or strained out) the bees from the rapacious ants, who then had the sugarwater all to themselves. They marched up the tree trunk, out onto the limb, down the plastic wire attached to the inverted feeder jar, and then, like lemmings, they ate their way up the narrow glass spout, became stuck in the sugarwater stickiness, and drowned. Three days after Herbie first dangled the feeder from a limb, only a few tiny red drops remained inside the jar—the rest of the feeder was crammed full of well-fed dead ants.

  “What you wanna do,” Nick advised, “is have you got any oil? Olive oil, like for salads? No? Well, buy yourself a small jar, they’re on the other side of that row over there, and smear a ring of oil around the branch the feeder’s hanging on.”

  Herbie followed these directions, cleaned about a quarter pound of dead ants from the hummingbird feeder, and poured in a fresh sugarwater solution. During this operation Herbie was a little sloppy, allowing some of the sweet formula to splash on his wooden floor. Then he hung the feeder back up, forgetting to replace the bee guard, and sure enough, the oil kept the ants at bay, although the bees, like lemmings, poured into the feeder’s unguarded snout, gorging themselves and drowning, so that within a few days Herbie’s bottle, devoid of liquid but jam-packed with dead or ecstatically dying bees, resembled an apiarist’s ossuary.

  Gagging sporadically, the volunteer patiently scraped out the corpses, cooked up another sugar solution, and rehung the feeder, although already he was beginning to despair of ever attracting a hummingbird to his humble, accursed digs.

  As it turned out, there were ample grounds for the volunteer’s despair. Because before hummingbirds could discover his upside-down bottle, a bunch of flying ants happened by, and in no time they drove themselves like lemmings up the glass tube into Herbie’s jar-shaped slaughterhouse.

  Considerably conscious of ants, now that he was locked into frustrating mortal combat with them, Herbie began to notice thin and curiously unbroken straight lines of the tiny beasts trickling down his walls and parading out onto his floor, heading for all those spots where sugarwater drops had spilled while he was loading the hummingbird feeder.

  Paralyzed by the implication of those determined lines, Herbie could only sit and stare. In due course, however, as the black circular mass around each errant—and by now dried-up—sugarwater splash grew to the size of a half-dollar, the volunteer bestirred himself into action. That is, he arose and, with apologies to Mahatma Gandhi and to all those other Indians who wore fine-gauze masks throughout their lives so as not to breathe in and snuff out even the smallest microbic bug, Herbie proceeded jerkily over to each little ant rally and stepped on it, almost able to hear thousands of tiny screams as those wee bugs were suddenly extinguished beneath his merciless heel.

  Such quick, arbitrary, effective, and wholesale annihilation fazed the surviving ant armies not one whit. They kept steadily coming at about the same pace. So that even as Herbie rested, feeling slightly queasy from the executions, the dead ants were replaced at the sugarwater splashes by vigorous live ants, and in no time the busy black circles threatened to become as large as small Frisbees.

  What else could this sad pacifist do? Donning his God outfit once more, in a matter of seconds Herbie stamped out the newcomers. But not even a quiver of apprehension rippled from the circles of death up along the descending lines, which were being steadily fed through little holes in the adobe walls around the vigas.

  Herbie’s heart sank as he observed new ants methodically plodding into the death arenas around the sugary spots; they paid no attention to the shapeless compatriots over which their tiny feet scrabbled.

  Grabbing a T-shirt, the volunteer ran outside, soaked the shirt in the irrigation ditch, raced back inside, stamped out the new ant congregations, and then scrubbed each sugar spot with all his might for about five minutes.

  Meanwhile, at the hummingbird feeder, regular, nonflying ants, who had only been momentarily routed by the oil ring around the main feeder limb, were crawling onto the branch above the feeder and dropping down—like lemmings—onto the sticky glass jar, drinking out the liquid and drowning as they did so, again packing the feeder with their corpses.

  Herbie shuffled wearily back into Rael’s store, where he put this question to Nick:

  “What have you got, Mr. Rael, that murders ants?”

  “Well, I got this here powder; it’s pretty good, if you like powder. Or these ant buttons; you just put a drop of water in each day and stir, and they do okay if you like buttons. Then there’s these ant traps, if you like ant traps. They all got the extra added attraction of the ants don’t die out in the open where you can see them, they eat the poison and go back into their houses and drop dead, out of sight.”

  “That’s the way I want it to be,” the volunteer admitted grimly. “If they’ll just die in private I think I can handle it. I better get a half-dozen ant traps and buttons, and also a can of powder.”

  “Gettin kind of bloodthirsty in your old age, ain’t you?” Nick teased.

  “I can’t help it,” Herbie whined politely. “There’s so many ants in my house, when
I walk they just about crunch under my feet like peanut shells.”

  “Ants are one holy pain in the ass,” Nick said. He might have added, “Ants are indestructible,” but he didn’t. Every year Nick made a mint unloading various half-baked ant-poisoning devices onto the people of Milagro, who persisted in believing in the myth of the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, or in the story of David and Goliath, and so forth.

  Herbie punched open his traps, wet his buttons, spread his powder, and snuggled down comfortably into his rancid sleeping bag, secure in the knowledge that tomorrow morning his ants would be extinct.

  He dreamed the ants crawling all over his hummingbird feeder and clogging it with their bodies were a special kind of Milagro piranha ant. Whenever hummingbirds hovered at the spout to take a sip, hundreds of ants jumped on them, and for about six seconds there was a furious blurry thrashing in the air, then a spanking clean hummingbird skeleton dropped with a minuscule clunk onto the earth. All day long this went on, so that in the evening when Herbie scuttled out back to the splintered outhouse, a pile of tiny hummingbird skeletons, sparkling like rare jewels, littered the ground underneath his feeder.

  But in the morning, in real life, perhaps half a million, not-yet-dead ants that had fed at the volunteer’s various poisoned banquets were writhing on the smokehouse floor. They limped about in crippled, teetering circles; on their backs they frantically scriggled paraplegic legs; on their sides, twisted into grotesque agonized shapes, they arched and jerked and quivered. Their swollen abdomens seemed to glow with an evil, slow-murdering phosphorescence; their antennae drooped like wilted lettuce.