by John Nichols
About a mile from where a foot trail led down to some hot springs in the Rio Grande gorge, Shorty dismounted and pulled the reins over Gingersnap’s head, letting them dangle down so the animal wouldn’t move. Then he squatted a little distance away and rolled and lit a joint, taking a couple of long lazy tokes. Shorty had been smoking marijuana ever since his adolescence, and he had his own private pot plot by the river north of the Dancing Trout. He never would have dealt with local growers or with the Evening Star pot farmers for his weed, because of late it had become too easy to get in trouble buying dope. In the old days around here, though, people had smoked grass much as they drank tea or chokecherry wine. Why, when Shorty first turned up in Milagro there had even been some old señoras dressed in black who would sit in rockers on their porches in the evening, smoking the mota in little pipes—
After a fourth toke, Shorty pinched out the spark in his joint and tucked it into his front shirt pocket. Then he removed the .30–30 from the saddle scabbard and walked north, into a faint evening breeze. Above him, nighthawks fluttered jaggedly, uttering their deep resonant beeps; a touch of sensual peace and magic lay like a mist across the sagebrush and snakeweed mesa.
About a quarter-mile from the horse, Shorty stopped. He pinched off some yellow rabbitbrush flowers and tossed them into the air just to be sure of the slight wind, then squatted again at the edge of a small open area populated by two medium-sized anthills and a cluster of prickly pear cactus. With the gun held across his knees, Shorty began to call for a coyote, popping his cheeks and making a kind of soft-harsh snuffling and grunting noise that sounded perhaps more like a pig than anything else, interspersing it with a succession of low, quick barks and then some mouse squeaks, but staying away from any high-pitched eager shrieks. He called for a while, then rested, and then made the noises again, in no hurry, and not really caring, growing mellow from the grass.
It didn’t take long, though, to get an answer. At first it came hesitantly, quick, not that far away; Shorty barked and chattered, keeping it very low and unurgent. And then suddenly the coyote trotted right out of the sage and saw Shorty and started to turn away as he swung up the gun and, without aiming, killed the varmint with one shot, firing again as it flopped over, just to be sure.
He stayed there a little longer, still squatting, watching the animal as it cooled. Shorty was tough, not given to a literary frame of mind nor to particularly intellectual sensitivities, but he was moved in curious ways by the sudden and almost gentle death of this small, bony, and very ragged critter. He wasn’t quite certain, either, why he had shot it, because Shorty was not the type who slaughtered wild animals for fun. Maybe it was simply that he wanted to reassure himself of a skill he’d always had in his bones; maybe he wanted to make doubly certain that skill, that sharpness, hadn’t leaked out of his body when he wasn’t looking. Because Shorty had a feeling he was going to have to draw on those particular resources sometime soon.
It was almost dark; stars were out; the sage rustled, eager for the rain it could feel and Shorty could smell, rain that probably lay hidden beyond the mountains due east, waiting for the wind to change. Shorty straightened up, removed a hunting knife from the leather belt-sheath tucked into his back pocket, quickly skinned the coyote, and walked back to the horse with the pelt tucked under his arm.
Shorty rode off the mesa and across the highway as the first soft waves of night spread into town. Dismounting at Rael’s, he bought some cigarettes and a tin of snuff, then crossed to the Frontier Bar, which was almost deserted, very quiet, and dark. Joe and Nancy Mondragón were hunched over beers at the bar; the Staurolite Baron, Onofre Martínez, was hunched over the pay pool table quietly shooting up a rack; and Tranquilino Jeantete was hunched in his wooden chair behind the bar. It was impossible to see anyone’s face.
“Como te has ido, prim?” Shorty said, addressing the ancient bartender. “Sacame una cervezita.” Then, “How’s tricks, José? Howdy, Nancy. ’Lo, ’Nofre.”
Everybody nodded, smiled. Tranquilino set a beer on the bar and snapped open the poptop for Shorty, who immediately drank off half the can, wiped his lips, opened the snuff tin and rolled his pinkie in it, then drilled the tobacco powder up either nostril with his little finger, sniffed hard and sneezed three times, and, gasping, polished off his beer.
“It’s gonna rain,” Shorty announced. “Que me la pongas una otra, Tranky.”
“Sure it’s gonna rain,” Nancy said. “You can smell it. I could smell it this morning.”
“I ain’t got that good a nose,” Shorty grinned.
Joe smiled in a not altogether friendly manner: “What do you expect from a gringo nose?”
“I was just out on the mesa,” Shorty said, “and I shot myself a Chicano coyote.”
Joe and Nancy laughed; Tranquilino grimaced comically; Onofre Martίnez dropped the eight ball into a side pocket.
Nancy said, “What did you have to use to kill it, a howitzer?”
“Nope,” Shorty grinned. “I just pointed my finger and spit and it dropped dead from fear, like a borrega. That’s all it takes to knock off one of those ratty little Mexican foxes.”
As he said this, Shorty lounged off his stool and scuffed across the hard-packed dirt floor to the jukebox. Thumbing a quarter into the slot, he selected three country and western songs.
“Boy, is this stuff ever God’s music,” he called tauntingly across to Joe and Nancy. Making a grotesque, mocking face, Nancy clapped hands over her ears. Joe, pretending to look bored, muttered loudly, “God blew a fart and that hillbilly music was born.”
Suddenly, however, Shorty wasn’t into the banter. It didn’t feel right, it lacked a correct rhythm—there was something almost malicious and hostile in all their voices. For nearly thirty years Shorty had felt at home in this funky local bar, but tonight he was almost like an intruder. He had interrupted something when he walked in, and now his selection of country music only made it worse.
Well, it was not anything Shorty couldn’t handle, but why stick around? He paid and tipped his cowboy hat and walked out.
For a while, as the night breezes picked up, growing cooler, shifting, Shorty sat on Rael’s porch near his quiet horse, looking across the road at the Pilar Café. The plate glass windows had gotten a little steamy, figures inside were indistinct. The jukebox in there was playing taco pop music down low; the strains of his country and western songs issued from the bar. Then Shorty noticed a pickup parked in the shadows between the café and the locked-up Forest Service headquarters; its radio was tuned onto a Juárez station, and an old man and his thirty-year-old son seated in the cab were silently killing a six-pack between them.
Dogs barked; a couple of bats hunted moths around Harlan Betchel’s mercury vapor security lamp; the evening pulsed gently like a calm heart. There was peace; there was also this tension. Because of the breezes not too many mosquitoes were out. So let’s thank God for small favors anyway, Shorty thought dispiritedly. Trouble was brewing, even though you couldn’t exactly pinpoint what it would be or where it would come from, just as you couldn’t pinpoint the pending rain. They were all going to wind up in it as sure as flies wound up in molasses syrup, though. And Shorty had not killed that coyote for nothing—no sir.
Shorty mounted up and headed home. At the Dancing Trout he stopped by the bunkhouse to shave, change underwear, and squirt some deodorant in his armpits, then he walked past the main building, the pool, and down a sloping lawn that surrounded the tennis courts, and knocked on the door of cottage number twelve—Rattlesnake Roost—wherein a forty-three-year-old woman from Houston, Texas, named Sabrina Oatman awaited him. Every year this tiny, shapely woman with a deep tan, peroxide yellow hair, and an oil baron hubby spent six weeks at the Dancing Trout, and for eight years, now, she and Shorty had been trysting.
Sabrina adored making love. But Shorty had always found it something of a trick to manage her amorous quirks. To begin with, Sabrina didn’t mind shedding clothes, but she kept her
jewelry on. Meaning that grappling with her was like grappling with an Aztec–Navajo artifact museum: in Shorty’s embrace, Sabrina rattled like a hundred ghosts of Christmas Past. Her arms were lined with crystal-sounding bracelets; her fingers bulged with bright knobby rings that made black and blue welts all over Shorty’s skin; her svelte lovely neck was circled with dozens of gold and turquoise and squash-blossom beads and baubles and jangles; silver hoops and pearls and jade tongs laughed out loud in her earlobes; she even wore a slim, solid-gold buddy chain around one ankle. Sometimes Shorty wound up practically butchered, not from her long powder-pink fingernails, but from all that hardware. In fact, just last year Shorty had somehow gotten his penis caught in a bracelet, Sabrina had rolled away, he’d screamed, his wong had practically been severed in two, and, in fact, a vein had been crushed, some permanent damage done. So that now, where the bracelet had struck, he had a scar-tissue callous growing that was causing his penis to bend painfully at right angles to where it should have been when hard. And although he had seen a doctor, who whistled, shook his head, and prescribed some green pills, so far as Shorty could make out those pills hadn’t done much good.
Sabrina’s other peculiarity, when it came to lovemaking, had to do with her athletic vision of how and where the act should take place. She adored coupling in the bathtub, seated on the toilet, backed against a wall, in an easy chair, on her back under a bed, in a closet, bent over an ironing board, on a lawn, in the swimming pool, on a tennis court at midnight, up in trees or down in the river, in the back seats, front seats, or trunks of automobiles, in airplanes or in the changing room at the Chamisaville J. C. Penney’s, in gas station restrooms or in the momentarily empty main salon of a ritzy art gallery; she loved to get it and dish it out from fore and aft, did not mind crawling on her hands and knees all over the place with Shorty riding her seated far back (and inserted) the way he would seat a burro, and in particular she dug doing it with her legs wrapped around an upright Shorty’s waist, him lugging her around in his arms—they could even fuck like that while Shorty was at the kitchenette stove making a cup of coffee; and, in short, Sabrina loved making love in every way, shape, place, and form except on her back, on, or in, a bed.
Shorty was in no mood to trifle, however. Thus, when Sabrina, jangling like the bells of St. Mary’s, gleefully opened the door, he plunged inside and, without so much as a howdy (and also like a champion chicken plucker), tore all of her clothes and her jewelry off in about six seconds flat, pushed her back onto the neatly made bed, and, before Sabrina had time even to squeak, he embedded himself in her, but good, and right then and there did their loving up brown—in the most conventional way imaginable—like it had never been done up before.
When he had finished, Sabrina sat up, patted back her hair, said “Whew,” and asked: “What’s eating you, Shorty?”
But Shorty just lay there with his hands clasped behind his head, staring at the ceiling.
Sabrina kissed his lopsided penis, then crawled around the rug, gathering in her clothes and jewelry, and disappeared into the bathroom. While he listened to her shower melody, “I’m as Corny as Kansas in August,” Shorty just kept on lying there, puzzled about the strange sensations buffeting his body. Something unusual was going on inside, something he could not for the life of him define, except that if pressed for a metaphor he might have talked about spring thaws and snow melting, about ice breaking up in the Rio Grande—and he wondered if such a metaphor could possibly make much sense. Whatever was happening, it had Shorty on edge and defensive; things, in Milagro and in Horsethief Shorty Wilson himself, were coming to a head.
Jangling like a carnival midway, Sabrina emerged from her shower looking mighty spiffed up and sexy in a tight black turtleneck jersey, purple pedal pushers, and little golden slippers, and she smelled like strawberry champagne.
“Put on your duds, Shorty,” she whispered sexily, bending over to kiss his nose, “and let’s you and me go for a little promenade.”
Shorty got dressed, except for his boots and socks: those he left just outside her door. When she asked, “What do you want to do that for?” all Shorty could say was, “Don’t ask me no questions, woman, and I won’t tell you no lies.”
They meandered across a damp lawn past the swimming pool, wandered down a slope, and circled the tennis courts, heading toward a simple white gazebo backed by a grove of yellow willows and some aspen trees near Indian Creek.
Sabrina halted, pointing at the sky: “Hey, there’s the Big Dipper!” And they were both gazing at the bright stars when four men wearing cloth bags over their heads jumped from the willows and attacked. One thug whacked Shorty across the shoulders with a baseball bat, and, as the foreman tried to spin around, another man kicked him in the balls and he sat down, half-blacking out, half-vomiting. He heard Sabrina start to shout, but her cry was cut in half by a thud, and there followed another thud, accompanied by a great jangle of bracelets, and then they ran away.
“Oh shit,” Shorty gurgled, trying to lift his head, but he couldn’t, the pain was as if cement had suddenly hardened in all his veins. He gagged and rocked, unable to catch his breath, until finally he tumbled backward, and, like that, lying on his back, he finally managed, with a tortured gasp, to force apart the knot in his gut and throat and suck in a mouthful of air.
Shorty needed more than a minute to start breathing semiregularly; then he tilted a little onto his side and heaved and flopped back again, his eyes fixed on the starry sky.
He didn’t hate them; he wasn’t angry; he wasn’t afraid; he had no bitterness. The only feeling inside, other than the pain, was one of extreme sadness. Times they were a-changing. And while waiting for his head to clear, for the cement to melt in his veins and arteries so that he could move, Shorty remembered one line from a cowboy song, and it drifted through his saddened fuzzy brain while he blinked at the stars and struggled to recover:
Oh bang the drum slowly and play the fife lowly …
The line floated through his dizziness, floated through the blue sensation of sorrow fogging his pain, floated through the smell of grass and sage and the smell of the West and the smell of horses and of that coyote and of Milagro-grown mota: Shorty’s life.
Oh bang the drum slowly and play the fife lowly …
Maybe five minutes passed before he managed to sit up.
Sabrina Oatman was just a few feet away, on all fours, wagging her head at him, breathing hard, with one eye already puffed shut and blood splashed hysterically across her face, and most of her front teeth missing.
“Oh shit,” Shorty groaned unhappily. “I’m sorry about your teeth.”
But Sabrina smiled bravely through her tears and the blood as she lisped: “It ain’t as bad as it looks, Shorty—they were all of them false.”
Then, even though the sky directly above was clear and sprinkled with the glittering souls of infant children who had died, a wind sprang up and rippled across the grass, carrying rain.
* * *
It rained, all right. For four days and four nights the water came down, and the people in town agreed they had never seen anything like it before, leastways not during summertime when the most anyone could hope for were hour-long showers in the midafternoons of otherwise brilliantly turquoise days. But rain it did, nonstop for all that time. Immediately rivers rose, spreading out into the bottomlands; irrigation ditches overflowed; fields that were already pretty soggy became dyed-in-the-wool Okefenokees; and all the roads, which had been skillfully constructed by master craftsmen so as to have absolutely no drainage, turned into quagmires.
In short, everything that had been dust in Milagro turned into mud.
Milagro mud, called zoquete by the people, was not just run-of-the-mill mud, however. A mixture of sand and fine brown adobe clays and gray caliche, it had the texture, viscosity, and crippling powers of a tar pit. It sucked off boots and shoes and ruined the brake linings on cars and trucks; it built up crippling deposits under horse and cattle hoove
s. It became as everpresent as a plague bacteria; it was like a mold or fungus gone berserk. The very air people breathed was somehow permeated with mud—nostrils grew clogged; ranchers hawked out great brown globs from their throats. The mud in the roads actually seemed to flow with currents, as in the rivers and streams, but when it hardened it would be worse than cement. People awoke in the mornings to find their eyebrows caked with mud, and somehow brown crud deposits turned up on toothbrushes and in refrigerator ice cubes. Nobody and nothing escaped the mud. It stuck to people, animals, and inanimate objects like peanut butter. Tree leaves, coated with mud shells, fell off their branches, landing with audible thuds. Sheep became bumpily sheathed with the stuff so that they looked like big ambulating wasp nests; birds, having absorbed the zoquete in their feathers, labored erratically through the air, almost unable to fly. Chickens laid eggs that had two shells, the outer one of mud. Dogs, lambs, and little pigs suddenly disappeared under waves of heavy goo, and some storytellers said you could actually hear the landscape burp contentedly after such a meal.
Only Onofre Martínez’s three-legged German shepherd avoided the mud by refusing to stray from the Chateau Martínez’s Astroturf lawn.
Pacheco’s sow, on the other hand, reveled in the glop; she floated blissfully around town with her eyes half-closed, looking like a queer sensual dirigible, happy as a pig in shit. And people, trying to scrape the goo off their boots and shoes, were often heard to complain angrily: “This crap is as hard to get rid of as Pacheco’s pig!”