by John Nichols
Nick Rael spent every other night in this den of mild iniquity. As did Carl Abeyta and Floyd Cowlie, the Forest Service personnel, and also Eusebio Lavadie. Rounding out this nefarious Who’s Who of Milagro gambling were the two state cops Bruno Martínez and Granny Smith, who whiled away plenty of time and dollars down there when they weren’t aboveground keeping a sharp eye out for the heinous shenanigans of pernicious and unruly characters like Joe Mondragón, Benny Maestas, and Amarante Córdova.
There was one night, however, when crime returned the compliment by taking the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak: that is, Evil Doings came to El Casino Pilar where they caught Granny Smith holding three kings, Bruno Martínez scratching his balls after having folded, Bud Gleason staring disbelievingly at a royal straight flush, Eusebio Lavadie drunk as a coot and pouring another, Harlan Betchel breathlessly dealing himself a final card, and both Jim and Peter Hirsshorn anxiously scrutinizing Harlan in an effort to interpret his reaction as he peeked at that card. Almost one hundred and fifteen clean greenbacks glowed vociferously in the center of the table, waiting for the lucky winner to claim them all.
This hand’s lucky winner turned out to be none of the men seated around the table, however. For just as Harlan took a hefty glaum at the card giving him a full house in sixes and sevens, the stairway door clattered open and three desperadoes entered the room, changing the name of the game from Poker to Armed Robbery.
“Anybody moves, and especially either one of you state chotas so much as breathes a little too loudly, and all of you will be kissing worms tonight,” the first person into the room announced calmly, poking a double-barreled, over-and-under, sawed-off shotgun at Granny Smith. This peppery person, who was barely over five-feet tall, and who had a strange rasping voice, wore a black cowboy hat pulled low, a woman’s stocking and a red-checkered bandanna over the face, a puffy dark blue ski jacket, dungarees, and plain brown cowboy boots.
The man behind the sawed-off shotgun, who was six-feet tall and dressed and disguised similarly, brandished a pump shotgun, which he waved a little, explaining: “Gentlemen, this is a 12-gauge shotgun and I got number 4 Winchester express duckloads in it, and I took the hunting pin out, so that means I got five shells instead of three, understand? Okay. I want everybody’s hands in sight, on the table, palms up, now.”
These were clear enough instructions, easy to follow, and, needless to say, immediately complied with.
“Don’t nobody even twitch,” the third person now said. He was of medium height, dressed like the others, with a thick Spanish accent when he spoke, and his perhaps excessive authority derived from a .357-magnum pistol held tightly in his right fist.
All three stickup men were somehow very familiar to each person in the room. But because their hair was hidden under dark hats and their faces were obscured behind stockings and bandannas, and also because each robber was obviously putting on an act and an accent with his voice (not to mention the fact that the cardsharks, from Bruno Martínez through to Bud Gleason, were shitting ice cubes), it was difficult to say just which local personalities were responsible for this outrage.
“Take the money,” Harlan stammered. “You can have all of it—”
“Thanks,” said the sawed-off shotgun, “don’t mind if we do. How about raking all that moola into a neat little stack, okay?”
“Sure,” Harlan agreed, but he wasn’t so terrified that he would let them trick him into dying. “Can I move my hands to do it?”
“Slow-ly,” said the .357 magnum. “Ver-y slowly.”
“Is this too fast?”
“No, that’s per-fect. Just like that. Nice and eas-y.”
Harlan carefully scraped together all the cash, patting it and tunking it softly until it was in a single neat stack.
“Okay, now, draw that stack over near the edge of the table by your right arm,” the pump gun hissed melodramatically. “And remember, one false—”
Bud Gleason blurted, “Excuse me, sir, but I … I think I’m gonna sneeze—”
“No tricks!” snarled the sawed-off shotgun. “You sneeze and I’ll paint the table with your brains!”
“Aim so the money doesn’t get gooey,” the .357 magnum advised.
“Listen, you assholes—” Granny Smith began.
“I’ll give you a second asshole right between your eyes if you finish that sen-tence!” the .357 magnum barked.
“Say, isn’t that a line from a movie—?” Eusebio Lavadie began.
“Oh God,” Jim Hirsshorn whispered between clenched teeth. “Take it easy, everybody. Shuttup, Granny, please. You too, Lavadie. Don’t anybody be smart. Don’t anybody move.”
“But I got to sneeze,” Bud Gleason moaned, sniffling up some snot. “Can I please pinch my nose?”
“Pinch your nose and you’re gonna be kissing worms tonight instead of your wife,” the sawed-off shotgun snorted.
“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to kill me then,” Bud groaned—and he sneezed. Gasping, he twitched his head painfully, and immediately uncorked another blast, a gigantic phlegm-spraying detonation that scattered money all over the table, all over Harlan Betchel’s shirt front, and all over the floor.
The .357 magnum crossed behind Bud, touched the barrel to the back of the real estate agent’s head, and said, “You son of a bitch.”
The sawed-off shotgun moved behind Peter Hirsshorn and poked his weapon against the back of the motel manager’s head.
“Oh no,” Peter moaned. “Oh please not me, oh no, oh please no…”
“You,” said the pump gun, pointing his weapon at Harlan Betchel. “Clean up that money. Fasssst.”
“Yessir.”
“But slowly, too, unnerstand? Move deliberately, I mean. I wanna see every move—”
“Yessir.”
Harlan did exactly as he was told and had the money in a stack again in a jiffy.
Bud Gleason, eyes closed, about to faint or suffer his fourth major coronary, moaned, “I’m gonna sneeze again.”
“Grab the mon-ey,” the .357 magnum ordered, and the pump gun picked it neatly off the table, slipping the wad into his front blue jeans pocket.
Bud sneezed. And sneezed again. These attacks, which happened occasionally, were nearly impossible to stop. Each time he sneezed Bud’s head bumped against the .357 magnum. Everyone else in the room, the three gunmen, all seven card players, stared at Bud, waiting for him to stop so the holdup could proceed. But once started, how could he stop? Bud sneezed and gasped, choked, and sneezed some more. Two, three times he begged the bandits to let him pinch his nose, but each time the .357 magnum warned, “You move your hands, wise guy, anybody moves their hands, in fact, and this room is gonna look like what happened on St. Valentine’s Day in St. Louis.”
And so the tableau of the sweating terrified card players with their palms turned up on the table and the three Jesse Jameses awaiting one false move persisted while Bud—popeyed, redfaced, and with sweat droplets spraying off his cheeks—continued to sneeze.
Finally the pump gun declared, “Oh shit, let’s get on with it. He ain’t gonna stop.”
“Okay.” At the same time that the sawed-off shotgun moved quickly behind Granny Smith and relieved him of his service revolver, the .357 magnum collected Bruno Martínez’s pistol from its holster, and, after unloading the guns, they tossed the useless weapons onto the table.
“Anybody else got a piece?” the sawed-off shotgun asked.
Seven heads shook no in unison.
“Okay, now listen very carefully,” the sawed-off shotgun continued. “I’m gonna give you some directions, and I want everybody to follow these directions just the way I tell them to you, comprendes? Because if you make even just a little itty-bitty mistake, tonight, instead of kissing your wives and sweethearts, you’ll be kissing worms. Okay?”
Sucking in wind and making a sound like a train getting derailed, his eyes positively apoplectic, his chest rioting with pain, Bud Gleason crashed out another mucus-splatter
ing sneeze.
“Okay. Now you’re gonna do this with the right hand, not the left hand, the right hand, see? This one. Everybody raise their right hand just a little bit, say about six inches off the table, so I can see is there anybody can’t tell his right hand from his left hand, okay? Okay. So do it.”
Everybody except Bud raised his right hand as ordered. The .357 magnum jabbed Bud’s head: “Do it!”
Confused, faint, and feeling nauseous from sneezing, tears streaming down his flushed cheeks, Bud raised his left hand. “Other hand,” the .357 magnum snarled, jabbing again, and this time Bud raised the correct hand.
“Okay. Using this right hand you will all reach into your back pants pockets and remove your wallets and set them very, ver-y quietly on the table.”
The men did as they were told, the sawed-off shotgun chuckled “Splendid,” and the pump gun moved swiftly around the table plucking swag from the wallets. The highest contribution—eight hundred dollars—came from Bud Gleason; the lowest contribution—a hundred and fifty—from Granny Smith. In between, Bruno Martínez coughed up two hundred, Peter Hirsshorn two-eighty, his brother three-forty, Eusebio Lavadie lost an even four hundred, and Harlan Betchel shelled out five hundred and twenty-seven. They had been planning to gamble all night.
“Well,” the .357 magnum sniggered, “I guess that just about wraps it up, Chet.”
“Tell them about the newspapers, David,” the pump gun smirked contemptuously.
“Oh yeah.” The three gunmen backed toward the door while the sawed-off shotgun spoke. “We just want you gentlemen to know: you try to find out who’s responsible for this heist, and we’ll blow the whistle on this little gambling joint and who was here tonight to the Chamisaville News, to the Capital City Reporter, and to every other newspaper, publication, and civic crusader we can uncover in the northern half of this state.”
“So just sit tight, amigos,” the .357 magnum chortled. “Think it over. And keep your little handsies just like that for as long as you can stand it, we don’t wanna end this little fiesta with no gunfight, qué no?”
With that, they flitted away. But they did so very quietly. In fact, strain as they might, not one card player heard a door open or close upstairs, nothing, no sounds at all. For all they could ascertain, the bandits had turned into ghosts and melted through the upstairs walls; they had simply evaporated.
Thoroughly mortified, the men eyed each other cautiously. The first one who dared move was Bud Gleason; raising a hand, he wearily pinched his nose.
“Do you think it’s safe?” Harlan Betchel whispered.
“I guess so.” Furiously, Granny Smith reached for his gun.
“Okay,” Peter Hirsshorn said. “I’m going upstairs to notify the police.”
“The police is here,” Bruno Martínez growled bitterly.
“And nobody,” Granny Smith added, “get that—nobody reports nothing to nobody because the police was here, and gambling in this fucking state, especially unlicensed gambling, is very, ver-y—like the little man said—illegal.”
Each man stared at his hands on the table; you could have heard a mosquito crawling across the green baize.
“Tell anybody about this,” Bruno Martínez sighed ruefully, beginning even to smile a little, “and I swear to Christ you’ll all wind up kissing worms.”
“This just never happened,” Granny Smith insisted. “Does everybody understand that?”
Bud Gleason sucked in a tortured gasp, shot up his eyebrows and lowered his eyelids, wrinkled his upper lip and twitched his nose, going “Ah … ah … aaah…”
But it didn’t come.
Suddenly—at last—he couldn’t sneeze.
“Wasn’t that St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago?” Eusebio Lavadie asked.
* * *
Several days later an event probably unrelated to the Casino Pilar robbery occurred. A deposit of over two thousand dollars, in the name of the Milagro Land and Water Protection Association, was made in the Doña Luz branch of Jim Hirsshorn’s and Ladd Devine’s First State Bank.
* * *
Amarante Córdova, guarding Joe’s beanfield again, may or may not have been dreaming when he encountered his second angelic apparition. Afterward he just could not recall if he’d fallen asleep. But anyway, there he was in his customary lookout beside a large dead cottonwood log, letting his eyes drift lazily from Joe’s robust bean plants to the permanent rainbow that was still glimmering faintly but persistently in the dusty afternoon sunshine choking Milagro, when that same coyote angel reappeared, limping desultorily off the Milagro–García highway spur and along the Roybal ditch bank to Amarante’s outpost. The one-eyed angel nodded a perfunctory “Hola” to Amarante, folded its beat-up wings—whose feathers rattled obscenely like those of a zopilote—and, like someone catering to hemorrhoids, eased painfully down nearby with an audible “Whew.” After mopping its brow with a filthy handkerchief, the angel lit a cigarette by clicking together two nails on its left paw, inhaled deeply, and immediately had a long drawn-out coughing jag. When this had somewhat abated, and the coyote angel was only wheezing and gasping a little, Amarante dared to speak.
“I see that rainbow is still there,” he murmured politely. “That’s one tough rainbow if you ask me.”
The angel glowered at the rainbow for a second, then shifted its sullen, yellowy eye onto Amarante.
“Listen, cousin,” it said wearily, “the way things are supposed to work out, one day the struggles of all you little screwed-up underdogs will forge a permanent rainbow that’ll encircle this entire earth, I should live so long.”
“I still don’t understand exactly how come the rainbow,” Amarante said.
“It’s like this, man,” the disgruntled coyote figure said, its lone jaundiced eye staring blankly at the sky. “You know how down in the Chamisaville Headstart at the end of a day those teachers paste a little gold or silver star on the forehead of any kid who did good that day—?”
“I don’t,” Amarante said. “But I’ll take your word for it.”
“Well, this rainbow is kind of like that.”
After which the exhausted angel suffered yet another smoker’s hacking jag that lasted a full minute. When this fit had subsided, the ethereal being struggled wearily to its feet and snapped the butt into Joe’s beanfield.
“Jesus Christ,” the angel whimpered, staring forlornly at the healthy bean plants. “Three hundred years, and just about all you old farts got to show for it is seven-tenths of an acre of frijoles. And I hadda draw the assignment. You people don’t deserve a gold star, let alone a rainbow. I’ll see you around—”
Whereupon, with a grotesque rattle of its vulture wings and a little pained, snuffling grunt, the angel disappeared.
* * *
At this point, the first manifestation of what developed into a singularly curious and imaginative terrorism campaign was noticed by Jerry Grindstaff on his way down to Rael’s for some hot dogs and rolls, relish, mayonnaise, and mustard to be consumed by the Chamisaville Boy Scouts led by their scoutmaster, Jim Hirsshorn, who was taking them on a picnic using Dancing Trout horses and other paraphernalia that afternoon.
Having passed the dude ranch softball field, Jerry G. was just negotiating the curve around Ray Gusdorf’s small spread when he noticed a freshly painted and inscribed wooden cross beside the road. In normal times Jerry G. probably wouldn’t have given the cross a tumble; such roadside markers were a common occurrence. When people died in car accidents, for example, their relatives often erected similar humble monuments on the spots where they expired, and the victim’s relatives usually kept the crosses brightly adorned with no-fade plastic flowers for years. Also, during some funerals, wherever—along the route to the camposanto—a cortege on foot halted to rest, the mourners erected a cross to sanctify that place, called a Descanso, and they often inscribed this cross with the following: Passerby, pray for the soul of Onofre González (or Ricardo Tafoya, or whoever inhabited the box th
ey were lugging to the graveyard).
But something about this particular cross made the foreman do a double take about thirty yards below it, and he braked the Dancing Trout station wagon so hard the car fishtailed a little, causing Jerry G., who detested seatbelts, almost to catapult through the windshield. Hurriedly, in reverse, he sped back to the roadside marker, and, after the dust cloud had drifted away from his vehicle, gazed perplexedly for a full sixty seconds at the insolent inscription on the cross before angrily kicking open his door and circling around the car and ferociously tugging that hallowed symbol from the ground and chucking it irreligiously into the rear of the station wagon.
Then he backed over a cattleguard into a driveway, turned around, and sped home to the dude ranch where, puffing laboriously, he barged into Ladd Devine’s office and dramatically displayed the cross’s message to Devine and Emerson Lapp, who had been double-checking some figures.
“I don’t understand,” Lapp said. “What does that mean?”
Devine let out a weighty sigh, asking quietly: “Where the hell did that thing come from?”
“Beside the road, sir. A short piece beyond Ray Gusdorf’s place.”
“Just erected by the side of the road?” Devine asked.
“That’s right. The ground was fresh. It must of been stuck in there only last night or early this morning.”
“What is it, somebody’s idea of a joke?” Lapp asked bemusedly.
“Not a very funny joke, Em, if you’ll pardon my saying so. Okay, Jerry G. Take that thing out to the incinerator and burn it for now.”
“You don’t want to hold it as evidence? I’ll show it to the state police. They could dust for fingerprints—”