by John Nichols
That is, he became what might be called a police informer, supplying a certain amount of drug information that enabled the various police agencies to meet the quota of busts they needed to make themselves look good: he delivered reports on transients, too, turning in, for example, a whole slew of runaways in return for being allowed to cohabit with his own particular runaway, Lady Elephant. And he occasionally carried out strong-arm tactics for the cops and their allies, who either paid him in hard cash for his trouble, or else sometimes in confiscated hard drugs.
Yet several days after rocks were thrown at Linda Bloom and those kids in the Lucero gorge, Bobby Joe Tucker’s Chamisa County sojourn came to an abrupt end.
There wasn’t much fanfare to the incident that put him back on the road again. Toward sunset five rattletrap pickups jounced along the final rocky slope to the Evening Star commune, and eight men carrying rifles descended from the trucks, which had coasted to a stop in a slight semicircle about fifteen yards from the front door of Lord and Lady Elephant’s hogan. In a tight group these eight men walked up to the hogan and one man knocked on the door, which Lady Elephant answered. “Your husband, is he here?” the man who had done the knocking asked, and when Lady Elephant, smiling serenely, nodded yes, the man said, “Will you bring him to the door, please?” Lady Elephant, still smiling, backed into the darkness, and, naked from the waist up, Lord Elephant appeared in the doorway, his beautiful little boy face contorted into a harsh sneer as he said, “What do you people want?”
The man who had done the knocking said, “We’re giving you and your wife about two minutes to gather up whatever you can carry, and then we’re gonna take you for a ride up to the Colorado border, and if we ever find out that you came back to this county we’ll kill you.”
Bobby Joe’s pale eyes flickered, then swiftly assessed the faces of the men confronting him. They were old and weather-beaten local faces, lined and brown and composed harshly, tight-lipped, unforgiving, determined that he should do this thing. Bobby Joe could smell their skin and their old dusty clothes, and he could smell their guns. It was unequivocally evident that if Bobby Joe went for his little .32 they would kill him harder and faster and with less emotion than most men, marked for extinction, had the opportunity to get killed. Still, Bobby Joe dropped his jaw to begin a protest, to ask an outraged question, but some little movement, maybe just a slight alteration in the expression of one man’s eyes, or the way another man’s shoulders changed their set when Bobby Joe’s jaw dropped, shut him up. There was nothing to argue about, his life in Chamisa County had ended; he was lucky they offered an opportunity to walk out alive.
Bobby Joe said, “Chris, get together some things, we’re splitting.”
The men waited in the doorway while Bobby Joe and his old lady scraped together a few clothes, some books, and stuffed these and some rocks and feathers and a branch of sagebrush into a small gray suitcase. Then Lord and Lady Elephant walked quietly through the little group of men to a pickup and got in. Escorted by that caravan of trucks, they were driven, without a word, up through a crimson sunset and the occasional energetic wing bursts of horned larks, to the Colorado border.
Part Four
“I wish to Christ that all of a sudden winter would come.”
—Bill Koontz
What might be called the deadly game of “Waiting for the War to Start” was beginning to get a few people down, and one Milagro citizen suffering more than most was the sheriff, Bernabé Montoya.
It was the kind of day when mundane tasks were needed to reduce the building tension. Bernabé carried the ash drawer from his kitchen stove out to the chicken pen and dumped the ashes over the fence so the chickens could fluff it into their feathers and kill mites. Then he spooned a few dozen cat turds from the blue plastic boat serving as their kitty’s catbox into a trash can, loaded four metal trash cans into his pickup, and headed down the north–south highway for the official Milagro dump.
There were, of course, a good many unofficial town dumps, starting with just about every citizen’s backyard crammed full of useful “useless” junk, and moving on to all the oil drums people owned in which they still burned their paper refuse in defiance of state and county antipollution laws strictly forbidding this practice. And then there were spots in various arroyos—for example, the east side Arroyo del Marrano and the south side Arroyo de la Urraca—where people dumped all their empty cans and jars and dead dogs and chickens that had died from encephalitis and old washing machines and cars, because the official dump was too far—three miles!—away. And finally, there was the favorite—what might be called the “official unofficial”—dump, which was located in a gravel pit on west side mesaland belonging to Eusebio Lavadie, who had posted signs (to no avail) at the gravel pit, threatening, in both English and Spanish, to keelhaul, garrote, draw and quarter, fine, jail, and, in general, “prosecute to the full extent of the law” all trespassers, garbage dumpers, deadbeats, lewd lovers, and so forth. About once a month Lavadie had to tack up a fresh sign because the old one, perforated by bullet holes, became illegible—Lavadie’s gravel pit also happening to be the place to sight in one’s rifle during the several months preceding deer season, during which time Lavadie didn’t even bother to replace his sign lest somebody decide to adjust his crosshairs against the bridge of Lavadie’s nose, or across the third brass button from the top of his vest, which was situated more or less directly over his heart.
Lavadie’s gravel pit was also where those people engaged in construction activities who did not rip off their earthen or mineral materials from State Highway Department pits alongside the major north–south route stole the sand and gravel necessary to their various enterprises.
But Bernabé Montoya, being the staunch upholder of law and order that he was, had to travel three miles south to the official dump, and when he got there this particular morning, in spite of state and local ordinances to the contrary, the dump was burning, and about a hundred ravens were stalking around in the foul-smelling smog, eating breakfast.
Theoretically, ever since the strict environmental laws of the year before (which forebade open-air trash burning), Milagro had been required to bury its garbage. To satisfy this requirement, the county had purchased a bulldozer for fifteen hundred dollars from Joe Mondragón; the county had then turned the bulldozer over to the Milagro mayor, Sammy Cantú, who, in turn, turned it back over to Joe, who was given the biweekly job of interring the garbage, but Joe promptly turned over the bulldozer, period. And somehow nobody, in the past eight months, had gotten together the necessary apparatus to right the machine, so there it lay, like a mammoth turtle in the hot sun, helpless and useless on its back, and Sammy Cantú, for the past eight months, had been siphoning several bucks a week out of the town treasury to pay one-armed Onofre Martínez and his great-grandchildren, Chemo and Chepa Martínez, to wake up before dawn once a week and steal down to the dump and soak the garbage in kerosene and touch a match to it. Of course, nobody ever knew how the dump was set on fire. Among themselves, people winked and giggled and attributed the mischief to El Brazo Onofre. In fact one morning Nancy Mondragón actually threatened her eldest son Larry in the following manner: “Lorenzito,” she said, “if you keep shooting BBs at the hummingbirds trying to feed at that poor Herbie Goldfarb’s feeder, El Brazo Onofre is gonna sneak into your room tonight and set your hair on fire and burn you up just like it burns up the dump!”
When some huffy environmentalists, accompanied by a Chamisaville News reporter, expressed outrage over the burning, most of Milagro’s officialdom shrugged its shoulders, scratched its head, and piously attributed the greasily smoking mountains of garbage to a direct hit by lightning, or else maybe to spontaneous combustion. The State Environmental Protection Agency had even sent an investigator named Jon Nickerson up once, and Sammy Cantú had sincerely promised to station a cop out at the dump on twenty-four-hour watch for a week in case ”teen-age vandals” were to blame for the flames. And although no cop,
vigilante, or even teen-ager with a slingshot ever spent five minutes on guard at the dump, at the end of a week Onofre Martínez dictated a letter to Jon Nickerson from Sammy Cantú, elaborately explaining that unfortunately an around-the-clock vigil had netted no culprits. After that, the EPA probably saw the writing on the wall; in any case, it quit bugging Milagro’s dump.
As for the bulldozer, Joe Mondragón kept promising “to see a man” in Chamisaville who had the kind of rig that could right the machine, and Onofre Martínez kept accepting bribes to set all that crap on fire—and to Bernabé Montoya, who couldn’t have cared less one way or the other, it looked as if this kind of suspended animation was going to be the state of affairs at the Milagro dump until either hell froze over or the environmentalists in the Friends of Chamisa County organization attacked in force, surrounding the dump with four-wheel-drive vehicles sporting .50-caliber machine guns while they proceeded self-righteously to bury the garbage with picks and shovels wielded by high school students trying to brown nose their way into As in their “democracy in action” or civics projects.
So, one by one, grunting heavily, wheezing bitterly, Bernabé pushed the trash cans to the rear of his pickup, dropped down to the mucky ground, and heaved the cans off the truck, tipping them over into the oozing smoky sludge. The fourth and final can he swung off the tailgate onto his toe. Releasing a hideous frozen gurgle, he closed his eyes and shivered until his face was almost purple and the veins bulged across his forehead, then he bellowed and kicked over the garbage can, and almost at the same instant drew his revolver and fired six times at the most concentrated pocket of ravens. The huge birds flapped frantically skyward, bumping into each other in their haste to flee, and perhaps one bird broke its wing against another bird, or perhaps—the law of averages notwithstanding—Bernabé actually hit one. Whatever, after a hundred ravens had boiled noisily off, one mammoth black beast remained, flapping around hysterically in the smoke.
Nervously, Bernabé punched out the spent shells, reloaded from bullets he held in his gun belt, aimed carefully at the cripple, and fired. A fan of garbage spewed up to the left. He fired again—a fan spewed up to the right. He fired once more, hitting a tin can that ricocheted into the desperately flopping bird. The fourth time he fired a pop bottle six feet from the raven exploded straight up like a Yellowstone geyser.
Cursing, Bernabé stumbled through heaps of mud and refuse in order to get a closer shot, but the raven scrambled frantically away. So the sheriff stopped and shot twice more, aerating the dump but not the bird.
“Ai, Chihuahua!” he wailed, discovering he had only four shells left. When these were lodged in his weapon, he fired once more from a steady standing position, and then, insanely plowing through the redolent glop, slipping and pitching forward, sideways, and back, he blasted away on the run three more times, hitting in rapid succession: the windshield of a discarded car, a leaky plastic jerry can, and the upside-down bulldozer.
At this point the raven toppled over a small cliff into a gully. Bernabé ran to the edge and began pelting the bird with rocks. But it kept flip-flopping around down there, impossible to hit. So with a suicidal primeval cry, Bernabé leaped into the gully, landing atop the tiring raven, and for a moment he hugged that bundle of outraged black fury to his chest, until finally, sobbing, he grabbed the bird by the neck, guided its beak into his mouth, and, among bloody and very surprised and gurgling protests from both parties, savagely bit off its head and contemptuously spat it out.
The broad wings went through a final incensed salvo and then quit whipping Bernabé’s aching body, and somehow the hole in the neck, bubbling blood, released a last defiant scrawk.
Dumbfounded, panting, astonished by his own stupidity and rage, and spitting blood, Bernabé just sat there for a while. After a long time, he shakily pushed onto his feet, picked up the head and threw it away over his left shoulder, pulled out some wing and tail and breast feathers the Pilar Café’s short-order cook Fred Quintana might want to use for his fly tying, and, wheezing almost asthmatically, he crawled up the bank and spent a half-hour searching (successfully in the end, thank you, Saint Anthony!) for his pistol, which he had dropped before he leaped.
“I don’t know why I did that,” he bleated aloud to a couple of low-lying, inquisitive, and also disapproving clouds, “unless José Mondragón’s beanfield has finally driven me up the wall!”
Still and all: better to have mangled a raven than another human being. At least, that’s what Carolina would have said.
* * *
Charley Bloom went fishing a lot. When he and Linda first moved to Milagro he bought a fiber glass fly rod and some salmon eggs, and that had been one way to work the tension from his system.
Nowadays, Bloom only used artificial flies for bait. Not because he had developed into a fishing snob, but simply because he had found that once you learned a few basics about fly fishing, it was as easy (and more fun) to catch the small trout in the streams around Milagro on artificial lures as it was to catch them on bait.
A half-dozen small but fine trout streams were within an hour of his home. There was, of course, Indian Creek, which practically ran through the backyard. This river received heavy fishing pressure during the summer months, particularly back up in the canyon past the Dancing Trout where the National Forest campsites began, an area the Fish and Game Department kept regularly stocked with stupid rainbows that were also bad eating. Every Tuesday morning in June, July, and August a huge tank truck driven by Glen Wesley Gore of the Strawberry Mesa State Fish Hatchery threaded its way slowly up the Little Baldy Bear road past greedily grinning, wall-to-wall, out-of-state tourists clutching fishing rods that dangled salmon eggs and marshmallows, backed up to a siding just below the Guachupangue Junction bridge, and, after Glen had crossed himself and begged the Lord’s forgiveness, dumped a wriggling mass of ten-inch rainbows into the stream. Whereupon a mile and a half of blundering fishermen went berserk, jumping into the stream and charging after the prey with everything except hatchets and hand grenades. The first time Bloom witnessed this melee was also the last time. Men in chest-high waders wandered up and down the two-foot-deep waters excitedly flailing the currents, using their fishing rods like cat-o’-nine-tails to create a froth, splashing, chattering loudly to each other, throwing stones, casting across each other’s lines, and yet somehow, probably because the fish were so confused, they caught the hatchery trout.
In fact, if Glen made the dump about nine, the river was usually cleaned out by noon, the shore for that mile and a half littered with discarded salmon egg jars, hook packages, snarled leaders, piles of fly-covered fish guts and children shit, candy bar wrappers, soda pop cans and tab tops.
It took about a month after the battles of June, July, and August for Indian Creek to work itself back into shape. But then, starting in about mid-September and continuing through the end of the season on November 30, Bloom often worked the stream from the Guachupangue Junction bridge all the way down through Milagro and into the narrow gorge that eventually ended at the Rio Grande. At the upper end, by the bridge and then west to Milagro, there were a few hard-to-catch surviving rainbows; farther down in the Indian Creek gorge, where the water rushed between huge and almost erotically sculpted lavic boulders into deep foamy pools, there were a number of foot-long brown trout, and even some two- to three-pound whoppers.
The Rio Puerco, Dixonburgh Creek, and the Little Baldy River were very different streams. They flowed out of the high country, and all three entered Indian Creek either before, or right around, Milagro. They were shallow, not more than ten or fifteen feet across at their widest points, and, for most of their journey from the snowpack down, they were lined by impenetrable willows, overhanging junipers, a million young aspens, bushes, brambles—a veritable flycaster’s nightmare. The streams were also crisscrossed by rotting trees and logs that had been felled by age or by extensive logging operations. Adding insult to almost incomparable injury, the diminutive cutthroat and br
own trout (an eight-inch fish was a monster) that lived in these waters were so spooky and wild that stalking prong-horned antelopes and mountain sheep was child’s play compared to approaching these pint-sized fish.
“Those three creeks,” Bloom once complained, “are the God damn ninth circle of trout fishing in America.”
Bloom couldn’t get enough of those streams, though. Local myth had it that of the last out-of-state tourist to try a Milagro creek nothing had been heard for months until Horsethief Shorty Wilson (who could have caught hummingbirds blindfolded with tweezers if he’d wanted) stumbled across his bones high up on the Little Baldy River. And that was at once the nemesis and the attraction: the Little Baldy, the Rio Puerco, and Dixonburgh Creek were for the people who lived in Milagro. Period. And even then, very rarely did you meet a local crazy enough to go through what you had to go through to harvest a skinny little fish from one of those narrow streams.
Just about the only way for a fisherman to work such tight waters was to bull through willows and brush and trees into the stream and then walk slowly up it, hunched over so that his nose was practically touching the water, snapping the fly ahead about ten or fifteen feet into likely pools and riffles. Eight out of ten times, no matter how far he could snap out the line, the fly always got caught in an overhang, and he had to destroy the fishing for the next twenty yards by straightening up to free the hook. In fact, fishing those creeks was like fishing a tunnel. And even if a person was lucky enough to snap the fly out to where he wanted it in the fast-flowing water, it was hell, in such cramped quarters, to retrieve the line fast enough to keep it taut so that he could successfully strike a fish if one hit. Then, if he did hook something, there was no such thing as playing it. A fisherman had about a tenth of a second, before the trout shot into sunken branches, logs, weeds, and roots, to horse it out of the stream. And, in whipping the fish clear of the water and into the willows, like as not (the line becoming entangled in a thousand interlacing branches) the fish would end up flopping in the air three feet above the river, and of course, at least half the time, as the fisherman lunged to grab it, his prey would loose itself from the hook and splash back into water so icy that, boots or no, middle of summer or not, a man’s feet were always numb.