The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  “All I want is for you to take that thing over to the incinerator and burn it,” Devine ordered. “When I want mountains made out of molehills, when I want to legitimize their puerile actions by paying attention to them, I’ll let you know.”

  “Yessir.” Jerry G. carried the cross downstairs, heaved it back into the station wagon, and drove a half-mile south through sagebrush land to the dude ranch incinerator. There he bumped into Horsethief Shorty, who was lifting a similar cross from the bed of a Dancing Trout pickup.

  “Good Christ! Where’d you find that one, Shorty?”

  “Right across from the entrance to our beloved driveway. Where’d you get yours?”

  “Just a little bit farther down the road.”

  “Somebody’s feeling their oats,” Shorty said. “But I figured, what the hell, if I showed it to the old man he’d probably drop a nut or lose a good night’s sleep, so why bother?”

  “I showed him this one,” Jerry G. said.

  “Oh yeah? How’d he take it?”

  “He told me to burn it.”

  “You see?” Shorty chuckled. “The difference between you and me, Jerry G., is I got ESP.”

  “I don’t see what’s so funny,” the foreman muttered.

  “Nobody sees what’s so funny, that’s the trouble with this outfit. We’re all a bunch of impotent, wrinkled-up prunes, if you ask me.”

  “Shorty,” Jerry G. remarked in his most caustic drawl, “when are you going to grow up?”

  “I dunno. I reckon maybe I’ll grow up about the same time you manage to work that broom handle clear of your pinched asshole, cousin.”

  Jerry G. retreated silently to the station wagon, fetched a gas can, and soaked the crosses. Shorty struck a match on his zipper and casually flipped it at the two markers, which exploded into flame. Within seconds the fire had devoured both identical inscriptions, to whit:

  Passerby, pray for the soul of Zopilote Devine!

  This petulant auto-da-fé did not herald the end of the roadside crosses however: quite the contrary.

  It signaled the commencement of their almost delirious proliferation.

  * * *

  Come rain, come shine, come whatever, Bernabé Montoya had eyes that functioned just about like everybody else’s eyes in Milagro: they popped open, wide awake, each morning at 5:00 A.M. In summertime this event occurred around sunrise; in the winter, of course, it happened well before dawn. During the summer Bernabé had no special early-hour chores to do: he owned cattle, but they grazed on National Forest permits up in the hills; he also harbored a few ratty chickens in the backyard. But he was not irrigating fields, milking cows, or otherwise performing feats of agricultural masochism which might warrant such early rising. Nevertheless, at 5:00 A.M. Bernabé’s eyes snapped up like runaway window shades, and whether he wanted it to or not, his day began.

  Usually the sheriff lay in bed, his skin flushed and silky from sleep, quietly regarding the ceiling while inwardly contemplating a number of subjects ranging from his soul to his navel, until finally he swung out from under the old-fashioned, home-sewn quilts, dressed slowly and luxuriously, and padded into the kitchen to fix breakfast for himself and for Carolina, a late riser who usually didn’t make an appearance until after six.

  Always, then, just before starting the coffee, Bernabé ambled into his backyard to check out the sun. Every morning he did this in unison with three-quarters of the other people in Milagro whose eyes had also snapped open (almost with the sharp, whip-crackling, wide-awake pops of little Chinese firecrackers) at 5:00 A.M.

  In fact, you might say that any longtime Milagro resident who did not wake up shortly before, or at least right at, dawn and hurry outside to check on the sun (just as he had checked on the moon the last thing before bed eight hours before) had probably died in his sleep sometime during the night.

  But in any case, on the particular morning now in question, Bernabé’s eyes boinged open as usual, and he stared at the ceiling for ten minutes cogitating about useless things; then, because early mornings were also his sexiest times, the sheriff prodded Carolina a little, and, still mostly asleep, she nevertheless responded ardently while he assaulted her with that mute desperate urgency of his, asking, always asking with his body, inarticulately pleading for impossible answers.

  After that, humming “Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the morning,” Bernabé dressed, then trotted outside to make sure the sun was rising directly above Pancho Armijo’s rabbit hutch a quarter-mile away. And sure enough it was not only there, but also—Bernabé having checked his watch with the time-of-day recording on the free long-distance line to Sierra Bell’s castle in the capital—right on time.

  Satisfied that neither Mother Nature (nor Sierra Bell, God forbid) had gone berserk overnight, Bernabé turned around, along with two hundred other people in Milagro, and walked back inside to start, along with two hundred other people in Milagro, a piñon fire in his kitchen’s combination wood and gas stove. No matter that it was a relatively warm summer morning: if you had lived in Milagro all your life, you started a fire in your combination stove first thing after checking out the sun.

  Just as Bernabé commenced feeding piñon logs and kerosene-soaked wood chips into the left-hand side of his stove, however, the phone rang. When it did, the sheriff felt his heart dive-bomb down to his toes. And sure enough, who should be on the other end but a frantic Nick Rael.

  “Bernie? Last night some punks broke into the store and cleaned me out of rifles, half my handguns, and all the rest of my ammo!”

  With an “Ai, Chihuahua,” Bernabé sat down.

  Then he added, “Oh shit.”

  After that he asked hopefully, “Did you call the state chotas?”

  “Sure I called them. But nobody answered down there. So get your tail over here, will you please? I haven’t disturbed a thing. I’m even calling from the pay phone on the porch.”

  Hanging up, Bernabé poked a gun-shaped finger against his temple and made a wry face as he softly sputtered, “Bang.”

  Swaddled in an old-fashioned robe, Carolina appeared in the doorway: “I heard the phone.”

  “Yeah.” Bernabé dropped a match onto the kerosene-soaked wood chips. “I’ll bet you did.”

  “Trouble always comes in threes,” she said vaguely.

  The sheriff nodded. “Somebody stole guns from Rael last night.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “You’re not kidding, ‘Oh dear.’ It’s gonna be like World War III,” Bernabé sighed. “I bet old man Devine up there is already pouring concrete for pillboxes. Welcome, ball fans, to the World Series of Death.”

  “It’s an ill wind—” Carolina began.

  “You’re not kidding it’s an ill wind.”

  Strapping on his gun belt, Bernabé stopped in front of her, slipping one hand inside her robe to cup a heavy breast. Tits, her tits, Vera’s tits, everybody’s tits mystified him. Maybe he loved tits more than any other thing, piece of anatomy, or even person on this earth. When Bernabé’s rough hand curled around or crept over or grabbed onto or crushed a breast, no matter what the size, shape, age, or weight, it was always as if for a moment, at least, he had plugged into The Crucial Connection, the one that supplied All the Answers. Afterward, the rest of their female bodies, all of womankind, either disappointed him or disturbed him like painted cattleguards. And no breast, even though he often found himself pressing hardened nipples into his ears, had ever whispered words to Bernabé, unveiling answers that could placate his insatiable curiosity about the souls of people, the conditions of the universe.

  Bernabé cupped Carolina’s breast for a moment in a comradely and loving manner, slightly amazed—as always—by its sexy resonant pudding texture, then he kissed her, saying, “Wish me luck,” and departed.

  Perched glumly on the front porch, Nick Rael had invisible smoke curling quietly out of his ears when Bernabé arrived. The sheriff overshot where he wanted to park by a few feet, so he jammed
the truck into reverse, but it was muddy here and his wheels spun a little; he rocked the truck, dug small holes with the tires, finally managed to go forward, braked, and leaped back; killed the engine; got out.

  This performance Nick observed with a jaundiced eye that proclaimed: Asking Bernabé Montoya to investigate this case, or any case, is like asking a pet goldfish to eat a crate of bananas.

  “Hey, Bernie,” Nick called sarcastically as Bernabé squucked through the muck. “Don’t tell anybody, but your boots are on the wrong feet.”

  “I was in a hurry…” the sheriff mumbled, sitting down beside Nick in order to correct the goof. “When did you discover they robbed your place?”

  “Thirty seconds before I called you. I just got here, saw they broke the glass in the door and jimmied it open, and I went in and took maybe a five-second look around, then I called you.”

  Boots on the right feet, Bernabé heaved up and slouched over to the door. For no particular reason he wiggled the handle, observing “Hell, it still works,” and then he startled the piss out of Nick by kicking in the rest of the glass.

  “Hey!” the storekeeper protested. “What’d you do that for?”

  “It was already broken. Somebody could of got cut. Now, show me where they took those guns from.”

  After Nick, behind Bernabé’s back, had derisively crossed himself, he walked around the store, describing the crime. “Well, see, these are their footprints in the sawdust because I swept up last night and put fresh sawdust down. You can tell they came over here and grabbed the handguns, and then went down this row to where the rifles were, see, on all these racks, and then moved over here—”

  Bernabé tagged along behind Nick. Leaning against the glass counter in which the handguns had been kept, he sourly contemplated their empty display boxes, then trundled over to the rifle racks where he ran his finger in several empty U-hooks that had held the guns, and blew the dust from his fingers. Likewise, he smeared dust off the half-empty ammo shelf, unconsciously slapping his palm on his pants to clean it, then shook his head.

  “You got any idea what time they might of hit this place, Nick?” As he spoke, Bernabé paced between rows, casting his eyes nervously—but actually blankly—about, as if searching for clues.

  “I dunno. I leave around eight, you know that. So it hadda be after eight.”

  “Yeah.” Bernabé uncorked a wry, despondent smile. “I don’t suppose I could get so lucky, like if they just wandered in and stole everything while you were standing behind the cash register smoking a cigar, and gave you their calling cards as they left.”

  “Very funny.” Puffing out his cheeks, Nick went up and down on the balls of his feet a few times, cautioning himself to stay cool. He grumbled, “Uh, why do you figure they wanted all those guns?”

  “Dunno.” Bernabé quit pacing, he scratched his head. “Way things have been going, though, I got a feeling they ain’t gonna use ’em for deer hunting.” He fished unsuccessfully in his pocket for a coin. “Say, Nick, got a dime?”

  “What for?”

  “I wanna try the Doña Luz pendejo factory again.”

  “Use the house phone, for crissakes.”

  This time Bill Koontz answered. And about twenty minutes later, after both the Bunny bread and the Coors beer trucks had made their early-morning deliveries to the store, Koontz and Bruno Martínez arrived, bundling sleepily out of their patrol car with a fingerprint kit in tow. Immediately Nick’s mom appeared in the Rael front yard and started winging pebbles at the state cops, who paid no attention.

  “Shit,” was Bruno’s first remark. “Why did they have to shatter the entire front door?”

  “Maybe to make it tough to find prints,” Koontz theorized, already powdering the doorknob. “Boy, this thing is an unholy mess.”

  Nick Rael cast an Oh-Christ-Almighty-God-Please-Save-Us eye at Bernabé Montoya, who cast an Oh-Christ-Almighty-God-Please-Save-Me eye at the floor.

  Bernabé’s eye bounced on the sawdusted floor about the same time Bill Koontz’s eye bounced on that same floor, causing Koontz to exclaim: “Hey—what was there in here doing this job anyway, a fucking army?”

  Astonished, Bruno added, “Jesus. They did so much shuffling and scuffling we’d never get a decent footprint. Looks to me like somebody ran twenty head of buffalo through here just to destroy the evidence.”

  Bernabé cleared his throat once while ambling nonchalantly onto the front porch. There his eyes met his own pickup, and he was staring at this vehicle feeling uncomfortable, though unable to ascertain the reason for his disquiet, when Bruno Martínez sauntered out the front door and articulated the reason for Bernabé’s discomfort:

  “Oh for the luvva Mike,” Bruno complained. “Who’s truck is that? No, wait a minute, lemme guess. That’s your truck, Bernie?”

  “Yeah, that’s my truck.”

  “Nick’s back door is still locked,” Bruno said quietly, “which means they must of parked in front.”

  Koontz joined them, incredulously surveying the damage that Bernabé, by parking in the mud, getting stuck, rocking his vehicle, sideslipping and whatnot, had done.

  “Well, that’s that,” Koontz said quietly.

  “Yessir. That sure is that,” Bruno echoed. “You sure can’t say that isn’t that, not unless you’re crazy.”

  Colored blue, Nick proceeded shakily to one end of the porch and sat down, placing his head in his hands, staring dismally at the muddy mess caused by Bernabé’s pickup.

  “Okay,” Bernabé mumbled, seating himself at the porch’s other extremity: “I fucked up.”

  “But good,” Koontz observed.

  “It was early in the morning,” the sheriff explained, knowing that for Milagro there could not be a more feeble excuse.

  “On top of everything else you let those deliverymen carrying bread and beer tromp all over the store?”

  “He even helped them,” Nick groaned.

  Later, state police reports from the capital confirmed that the only legible fingerprints in Rael’s store belonged to Bernabé Montoya. “And they literally coated every surface,” Bill Koontz said with a relish, “the way flies coat hot horseshit.”

  And so the stolen guns and ammunition became just one more event in the Miracle Valley beanfield war that would never be explained. In due course conflicting rumors claimed the theft had been engineered by Horsethief Shorty (acting for Ladd Devine) or by the state police themselves, in order to deprive Milagro’s more humble (and more militant) citizens of their God-given constitutional right to buy and bear and flaunt and discharge all manner of lethal instruments in the no-holds-barred shooting conflagration which was certain to break out soon.

  * * *

  The last job James (“Dust Devil”) Vincent ever did for the state police was the dynamiting of the Milagro District Forest Service Headquarters.

  He was recruited to do this job, not by Kyril Montana, but rather by some other higher-up undercover police functionaries who had decided Montana’s approach to the whole affair was much too conservative.

  Of course, the state police’s undercover wing was not dynamiting the Milagro District Forest Service Headquarters just for kicks, or just because of an intragovernmental feud either, but because they planned to pin the job on Joe Mondragón, thus railroading him into disgrace, jail, or worse, and ending once and for all the dangerous game people were playing up there.

  The plan was simple enough, and James Vincent and a friend, Leroy Middleton, carried out the first stage of it without a hitch. Arriving in Milagro at 3:00 A.M. on a very dark night, they immediately steered onto the narrow dirt lane leading past Joe Mondragón’s house and the many ramshackle outbuildings surrounding it. Cruising slowly into Joe’s territory, these two shady operators cased the outbuildings for about fifteen seconds, then, braking the car, Middleton pointed and James Vincent jumped from the car and heaved twenty bundled-together dynamite sticks into an open lean-to structure crammed with junk.

 
Back in the car, as they proceeded stealthily on, both men suffered brief grim giggle fits, an understandable reaction, as the provocateurs were very keyed up, about to be rich, and not a little surprised at how easy it had been, up until now, to earn their loot.

  About five minutes later, however, they aborted the caper. Afterward, James Vincent could not figure out for the life of him what happened. But it had to do with the careless handling of a blasting cap which somehow exploded while he was setting two dynamite sticks alongside the cement foundation of the Forest Service headquarters. And this explosion—which immediately atomized three fingers on James Vincent’s right hand—caused both Vincent and Leroy Middleton to panic.

  In fact, almost simultaneously with the blasting cap’s roar, Leroy Middleton jammed the car into low and, minus his partner, hauled ass, nearly clobbering James Vincent on the way out. After that, the deserted saboteur staggered around the plaza area bellowing the word “Shit!” at least two hundred times before Granny Smith and Bruno Martínez, who had received an anonymous phone tip fingering Joe Mondragón, squealed into the plaza area, almost flattening the dazed and bleeding Vincent. Granny braked; and Bruno jumped from the car, gun drawn, just as Harlan Betchel, toting a shotgun, came running from his house behind the Buck-A-Fish trout pond.

  “Don’t kill me!” James Vincent screamed. “I’m on your side!”

  “Holy cow!” Bruno shouted. “Look at his hand!”

  “Let’s get this poor bastard to the clinic fast,” Granny said.

  “Who is he?” Bruno wondered, ushering Vincent into their vehicle.

  “I don’t know who he is, but I know who he ain’t. He ain’t Joe Mondragón.”

  “Radio Emilio to call Trucho and tell him what happened.”

  “First go check if there’s dynamite over by the headquarters.”

  Harlan Betchel, who had been standing there, mouth agape, asked, “What happened?”

  “If I knew, Harlan, would I—” And then suddenly something registered in Granny Smith’s brain, a warning, an instinct telling him to order everybody to wait just a goddam minute here—