The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  Joe was so nervous he had to get up every fifteen minutes to take a leak. And it wasn’t until the town roosters had already begun to crow that he finally drifted uneasily into dreams.

  * * *

  When a copy of the so-called Milagro Land and Water Protection Association’s petition, compliments of Bud Gleason (who had received it from Harlan Betchel, who had found it under a table in the Pilar where Claudio García had accidentally dropped it), arrived at Kyril Montana’s desk, the agent pored over it for a spell.

  Then he phoned the state engineer, Nelson Bookman, and a half-hour later the agent, Bookman, and Bookman’s mouthpiece, Rudy Noyes, met in the state engineer’s office. Bookman read over the one-paragraph complaint and then handed it to Noyes, who read it expressionlessly; then Bookman called in a secretary and gave her the petition with orders to have some Xeroxes made. He offered the agent a cigarette, but Kyril Montana only smoked the filtered kind, and so lit up one of his own.

  Bookman said, “There’re no signatures on this copy. How many signatures do you figure they’ve got overall?”

  “I’m convinced the Milagro Land and Water Protection Association doesn’t even exist,” the agent said. “At least, to date nothing has been filed with the State Corporation Commission. As to how many up there have signed—I think, and my sources inform me, practically nobody.”

  “Whose idea was this petition?” Bookman wanted to know. “Our friend Joe Mondragón?”

  “No. It’s the brainstorm of a woman named Ruby Archuleta who runs a garage and a plumbing business south of town. Apparently the meeting they had in their church was her idea too.”

  “Who is Ruby Archuleta?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Nobody up there really knows her that well either. She’s been married three times, never stirred up any political trouble before. She’s in her late forties, does the job of ten men, so I’m told; she’s a midwife among other things, and some people up there think she’s a witch.”

  Nelson Bookman leaned back in his chair, straightened out the Xerox copies a different secretary dropped on his desk, and suddenly grinned.

  “Let’s burn her at the stake,” he said huskily, abruptly lurching forward to stub out his cigarette.

  The agent smiled; Rudy Noyes did not drum up even the faintest wisp or flicker of amusement.

  “Ah, fuck ’em,” Bookman growled. “They give me a royal pain in the ass, those people up there. For thirty-five years, in one capacity or another, I’ve been tiptoeing through their lives. I’ve got cramps in my calves. What do you think, Rudy, should we quit crapping around and just go in there and lower the boom on Joe Mondragón and screw the consequences?”

  Now Rudy Noyes smiled. “Well, Nelson, we know the case is cut-and-dried, so that really isn’t the problem, is it? My feeling is if we go to trial, though, they’ve got something concrete to hang their cause on, which we’d still like to avoid, if possible. If we hit Joe Mondragón with an order to show cause he’s got a right to that water, they’ll know exactly what to protest against, we may throw them all together, they’ll fill up pages of these petitions, find themselves in a position to organize, and, of course, that won’t queer the conservancy district and the Indian Creek Dam, but it’ll sure make them that much more difficult and expensive to realize. So I would say at this juncture still, the less we give them the better.”

  “Precisely the way I had it figured,” said Kyril Montana.

  “Then what’s to discuss?” Bookman asked. “It seems to me there’s nothing to do except wait for the break that will nab Joe Mondragón outside the framework of irrigation rights and that damn beanfield.”

  “Good.” Kyril Montana stood up, shaking hands with them both. “I just wanted to be sure you knew.”

  “Anytime,” Bookman said. “Anytime at all. Thanks for keeping us posted—”

  All the same, as he reached the street outside, Kyril Montana felt something uncomfortable nagging at the back of his mind. It was not, compared to many cases he had worked on, that big a deal. Yet he suspected there was something nobody had yet touched upon in this thing. Perhaps it was simply that all over the country people were changing, they were acting differently than they ever had before, so much so that it had become impossible to foretell how they might react in any given situation.

  Or maybe it was simply that he was too far removed from the people and from whatever was going on up there in Milagro—

  A car honked. The agent had almost stepped off the curb without looking both ways.

  * * *

  The day after the rodeo, Nancy Mondragón left her three kids with Linda Bloom because she had to drive her mother-in-law to the Doña Luz clinic, and Linda decided to ferry all the children to the Rio Lucero gorge for a swim. Herding them into the VW bus, she set off gaily enough, heading south on the highway and across Strawberry Mesa for a ways, and finally into the narrow, pretty gorge. At a point where the stream flowed about forty feet below the road she pulled over and guided the children down a fairly steep slope to the water. The stream was shallow here, perfect for youngsters, running slowly along a wide pebbly bed for a ways, then curling around moderate-sized volcanic boulders to form several foot-high waterfalls and a string of foamy, but still quite shallow and gentle, pools.

  After Linda helped the kids undress or roll up their trousers, she settled herself on a large warm rock, cradling their clothes in her arms. She kept a sharp eye on her charges as they waded peacefully, gathering stones or stalking lizards along the shore. It was a peaceful, wonderfully sunny day. A hundred swallows darted between the gorge walls overhead, their shadows blipping across the shining water, across the children’s bodies and happy glistening faces. Linda, watching over her brood, thought: This is how I’d like my life to be. This is why we live in Milagro.

  An old van halted on the road above; two men tumbled out. At first, owing to the stream’s noise, Linda didn’t notice them. The men, who had perhaps been drinking, teetered on the brink of the cliff as they unzipped their flies and pissed down the embankment, an act neither Linda nor the children witnessed. In fact, nobody looked up until a splash occurred in midstream, a splash obviously too large to have been made by a child throwing a stone. Startled, Linda lifted her eye just as another fist-sized stone loudly smacked the water just below her observation post.

  Although both men, one hefty and yet almost cherubic looking, and the other very tall and lanky, seemed vaguely familiar, Linda recognized neither. Afterward, she would remember that the skinny one had a moustache and that they both appeared to have reddish, bizarrely bloated faces, maybe from excessive boozing. But at first, thinking they were merely trying to attract attention in order to say hello, Linda smiled self-consciously and waved. Instead of waving back, however, both men stooped over to gather more rocks. And with that menacing gesture, Linda suddenly realized something was terribly wrong.

  Her mind struggled to deny what was about to happen; so she bestirred herself almost languidly, sitting up and staying immobile for a moment, gazing perplexedly at the men, the buttery lazifying sunshine still in control of her flesh. Then dreamily she rose to her feet. Each man had collected an armload of heavy rocks, any one of which, hitting a child or even Linda in the head, could have been fatal.

  And now the scene, their slow and deliberate gathering actions, broke apart insanely as the two men began to pelt Linda and the five children in deadly earnest, aiming their rocks, trying to murder them.

  Linda shouted, “Hey kids, they’re throwing rocks!” But the children, even little María, had sensed what was up, they understood perfectly the danger represented by those two men above their heads, and they were already moving, starting to run, heading automatically downstream.

  “Run!” Linda shouted. “Run! Run! Run!”

  Splashing into the shallow water, she pushed Larry Mondragón, his brother Billy, and his sister Luisa and her own Pauline ahead of her.

  “They’re trying to kill us!” she blurted.
“Run fast!”

  The kids stumbled through the water, over and around boulders, through sand and muck and thick bank grass and willow thickets. María toppled forward, Linda yanked her upright and practically flung her ahead into the other kids, who were in a loose bunch, running well. Later, Linda would be amazed by how quickly they all had reacted correctly to the situation, these silly little kids. She would remember how Larry Mondragón slipped and Pauline tugged him to his feet; she would remember how little Billy Mondragón, who was only four (and one of the clumsiest preschoolers she had ever seen), went over a series of black rocks in their path like a lizard or an agile mountain goat. And Linda herself: she sprinted among them with her head turned, always looking up, trying to keep track of the rocks coming down. Once she dropped to her knees to avoid a stone that nearly grazed her head; another time she shoved María sideways into a pool to avoid a rock. Above them the men staggered along the rim, firing rhythmically, if drunkenly, shouting words she never heard, stopping occasionally to stock up on ammunition, which they pitched rapidly at the woman and children, striking at their heels, missing the fleeing kids by inches.

  Then, as suddenly as it began, the terrifying assault ended. The men quit, gestured obscenely, about-faced, swayed leisurely back to their van, started it up, and drove out of the gorge.

  Linda kept the children moving for another twenty-five yards, then ordered them to stop. They gathered around her, gasping, wide-eyed, speechless; but nobody, not even the smallest child, was crying. Linda said, “I think it’s alright now, I think those men left, I think they went away.”

  And they had.

  Cautiously, trembling now that there was time to think about what had happened and wanting very badly to generate a release through tears, Linda pushed them all ahead of her up the steep embankment to the road. Quickly, they trotted back to the bus. Linda slid open the side door, and, tossing in the bundle of clothes she’d hugged in one arm all during their flight, she was amazed to realize that somehow not even a sock had been lost.

  There was another, more roundabout way out of the gorge, and Linda took it, afraid that if she headed back onto the mesa the way they had come the men might be waiting at an impromptu roadblock. Lined along the rear seat, bunched on the floor, the kids sat quietly; in fact, since it had all begun, not one of them had peeped. Finally, Linda called back to everybody: “Hey, you guys, let’s sing a song!” And with that she leaped into “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” The children joined in, immediately animated, excited, starting to laugh again.

  So they climbed out of the gorge and sped along the mesa in a dust cloud, singing fervently and almost joyously together, until suddenly the car hit a confused jackrabbit and Linda burst into tears.

  * * *

  “Who the hell did it?” Nancy demanded furiously of her friend. “What did those bastards look like? Were they Anglos? Or Chicanos? Didn’t you get the license number? You tell me who did it and José and me, we’ll kill them for you, for all of us! We’ll tie them to trees and shoot off their toes and let them bleed to death! So help me God!”

  “What good will that do?” Hopelessly, Linda swayed her head. “It’s over,” she whimpered. “They were just drunk. They didn’t know what they were doing. I don’t think they were even from around here.”

  “Tourists?”

  “No. I don’t know. I just don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “How can you let somebody attack your kids and not want revenge?” Nancy asked. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, goddammit! They were from the Dancing Trout, qué no? A pair of the Zopilote’s pendejos. It’s because of José’s beanfield, and because Charley’s gonna help, that this happened.”

  “No.” Linda kept shaking her head. “I told you, I never saw them before. It’s over. They were drunk. They didn’t know what they were doing. One of them even had such a pleasant, little boy face…”

  Nancy sat down across from her friend, regarding her critically for a short while.

  “Next time they’ll kill one of our kids, Linda.”

  But again the exhausted woman shook her head. “Violence just makes more violence just makes even more violence,” she whispered through silent tears. “I don’t want revenge.”

  And then she sat there, never having felt this brittle before, waiting to calm down, waiting for the nightmare to end, slowly and desperately and like a little child shaking her head.

  Suddenly it hit Nancy: Linda’s statement about the “little boy face.” “I know who they were!” she exclaimed. “At least I know who one of them was. What’s the name, José, of that guy out at the Evening Star, the huge one with the pretty, little kid face, the one who works for the chotas?”

  “Lord Elephant—?”

  “That’s who it was! That son of a bitch must be on the Zopilote’s payroll too! I’ll cut off his balls!”

  * * *

  Lord Elephant’s real name was Bobby Joe Tucker; his hometown was Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He lived in his hogan on Strawberry Mesa with a woman, Lady Elephant, whose real name was Christina Cupcoe, and whose hometown was Silvermine, Connecticut. Like Benny Maestas, Bobby Joe Tucker was a Vietnam vet; unlike Benny Maestas, he was also a junkie. In Vietnam, Bobby Joe spent many months on the line, during which time he became hooked on skag; later he was stationed at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport, working in warehouses that gift-wrapped bodies of American soldiers in patriotic red, white, and blue for shipment back home. While thus occupied, Bobby Joe became part of a ring that sent drugs—heroin, opium, grass, cocaine—back to the States sewn up in the bodies of dead soldiers or stashed in their coffins or included with their personal belongings. In this way Bobby Joe built up some interesting and valuable connections and with their help, just before leaving Vietnam, he worked out a daring plan to send himself a “body.” The plan worked, he picked up his body immediately upon touching down on North American soil, and then he disappeared into the Yankee heartland with both an honorable discharge and ten pounds of uncut horse riding on his hip.

  With luck, Bobby Joe could have become a rich man. But lacking an excess of smarts to begin with, he had pulled off this caper largely due to the efforts of some brainier military personnel who set the thing up for him in Saigon; to make matters worse, right off the bat he shot himself up too pure on three occasions, almost killing himself with each exaggerated fix, and by the time he had just barely survived his third OD, the gears in his brain had become pretty well stripped. Then, in Kansas City, he bumped into one of the former soldiers who had helped land him in the States with that fortune of uncut H, and this soldier wanted in on Bobby Joe’s business, which at that point Bobby Joe still hadn’t figured how to set up.

  During the next three months, Bobby Joe traveled with his friend to New Orleans, Miami, Washington, D.C., and finally New York, trying to arrange a big score for all their junk, but playing it very tight to the vest for fear of running into a bunch of undercover narcs, or else getting ripped off or just offed by the people with whom they wished to bargain.

  In the end, in New York, Bobby Joe’s friend simply up and split with the smack, leaving Bobby Joe high, dry, and very strung out. After that, Bobby Joe wandered, doing odd jobs, stealing for his daily fixes, moving with one old lady and then another, always more or less in a fog or on the nod and desperate for smack and bread, until he landed in the Evening Star commune out on Milagro’s Strawberry Mesa with Lady Elephant, née Christina Cupcoe, on his arm.

  Lord and Lady Elephant set up housekeeping in that Evening Star hogan without an invitation from the other members of the tribe, who disliked them intensely, afraid that his hard-drug habit would bring the cops down on Strawberry Mesa like a ton of blue bricks. By the time Bobby Joe staggered into the commune, however, he didn’t much care about the social amenities. In fact, despite his cherubic, blue-eyed baby face that always put people off their guard, he had developed, over the past few years, into one big, mean, son of a bitch. Anybody who did not see eye to
eye with Bobby Joe was likely to regret it. Bobby Joe even carried a piece, a little .32-caliber, single-action revolver, which further petrified the peace-loving Strawberry Mesa crowd. So when the lord and his lady showed up one day looking for a place to crash, and Bobby Joe smiled innocently at everybody while nonchalantly inspecting the barrel of his gun with his blank blue eyes, the occupants of the lord’s and lady’s present hogan politely bowed their heads, gathered in their belongings and kids, and moved into another building nearby.

  Bobby Joe had a persistent habit, though, and it eventually led him by the nose into the Chamisaville methadone program. Of course, as soon as he was enrolled in the methadone program the various police agencies in town were led by their noses to Bobby Joe Tucker, and—metaphorically speaking—the police tied Bobby Joe’s hands behind his back, touched the barrel of a cocked revolver to his head, and advised him of his rights in the following manner:

  “Bobby Joe Tucker, alias Lord Elephant, we’re gonna let you stay in Chamisa County up there in the Evening Star commune on Strawberry Mesa with that cute little girl with the big titties you’re screwing whose folks back in Connecticut have a runaway warrant out on her, and we’re gonna let you continue getting your treatment from the methadone clinic, and we’re even gonna look the other way during many of the dope-related activities you’re involved in, just so long as you cooperate with us in certain ventures; just so long as you hearken to our beck and call every now and then when we need you to do a job or provide some information for us.”

  Well, Bobby Joe was all played out by this time and tired of being hassled by the pigs; he even sort of liked Strawberry Mesa, and he was actually thinking vaguely about reforming himself enough to become more a part of the commune, helping out with animals and the garden and so forth, and he’d gotten used to Lady Elephant, too, who was a sexy lay, not too bright, but a rather tender person, maybe one of the most gentle souls Bobby Joe had ever traveled with. And so he told the cops, “Whatever you say, fellas.”