The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  “I got it!” Bruno called, running back. “Two sticks, that’s all!”

  “Harlan,” Granny Smith said, “you’re a witness. You better come right down to the station.”

  “Sure, Granny, if you say so. But I got to put on my shoes. I—”

  “Fine, Harlan. You do that. But move your tail, hear? And Harlan, don’t tell anybody, huh? Do all of us a big favor: no phone calls, nothing; just don’t tell anybody. Put on your shoes and jump in your buggy and open-throttle that car down to Doña Luz as fast as you can. Okay?”

  “Yes … sure … fine.”

  “Come on,” Bruno urged, working to get a tourniquet on James Vincent’s arm. “Let’s make tracks.”

  Signal light flashing, they were speeding down the highway at eighty miles an hour when Bruno said, “Wait a minute, you better slow down, look, up ahead—hey! What’s with that guy? Jesus, Granny—STOP!”

  Leroy Middleton, having just survived unscathed a ninety-mile-an-hour crash during which his car had sailed almost twenty yards through the air and then rolled over thirteen times, staggered like a blind drunk onto the highway directly into the path of the oncoming patrol car, which swerved and screeched to a halt, then reversed and backed up to where the would-be victim stood swaying. Bruno jumped out and grabbed his shoulders, shoving him into the car.

  “Radio Emilio,” Granny said. “Tell him to wake Doc Gómez and open that clinic!”

  The dispatcher took the call, then informed them: “By the way, Trucho is having a fit. He says lay off Joe Mondragón, and if there were any witnesses get them out of that town and down to headquarters here ten times faster than on the double. That’s a direct quote, that ‘Ten times faster than on the double.’”

  “We’re gonna drive these guys to the clinic, Emilio, then we’ll be in. Harlan Betchel should be down. Hold him there if you have to shoot him to do it. Call Koontz and order him to get his ass in like it was on fire!”

  James Vincent babbled, “Don’t kill me, don’t kill me, please, I’m really on your side—” Then he fainted.

  Leroy Middleton groaned, “Oh boy, this is the living end, this is really the cat’s pajamas, this is sweet, oh this is really dynamite, oh we did it, we’re gonna get a medal for brains.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Bruno demanded.

  “Oh you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. You really wouldn’t.”

  They arrived, with James Vincent alive but very pale, and both men considerably shaken, at Doña Luz headquarters about an hour later. Bill Koontz was there; so was Harlan Betchel.

  Koontz, who’d had an incredibly scary confab with Xavier Trucho in the capital, said, “I think everybody better siddown. It’s gonna take me a little time to explain this, see, but all of us here are gonna have to get things very straight, because if we don’t, if any of this ever gets out … and that means you, Harlan, and me, and you, Granny, and you two boys there, Mr. Vincent and Mr. Middlesex—”

  “Middleton…” the getaway driver whined.

  * * *

  Four days later, while rummaging in an outbuilding for a hose that wasn’t so moth-eaten it looked like a sprinkler system, Joe Mondragón discovered the dynamite bundle meant to pin the Forest Service explosion on him. Of course, Joe understood immediately that this dynamite had not just fallen from heaven in order to increase the personal wealth and power of Joe Mondragón, all-around handyman and bean farmer par extraordinaire. In fact, putting two and two together—even though (miraculously) no word as yet of the blasting cap incident had reached his ears—Joe had a pretty good idea that he at least ought to go tell Bloom about his discovery and ask for some legal advice.

  But then Joe got to thinking what a person might do with this much boom if his lawyer never had a chance to make him turn it in. Like, suppose a fellow wanted to dig a big hole or move a big rock or knock down an old house in order to build a new house in its place, or blow up a dam—?

  With these considerations firmly in mind, Joe carried the dynamite into his shop, wrapped it in thick plastic sheeting and tied it all together tightly, and then he stored it where no team of state chotas, no matter how stupid, would ever be able to find it.

  * * *

  Ladd Devine reclined under the midsummer stars in a chaise longue on the roof over his office; Flossie was arranged quietly beside him, bathed in gentle light, at peace, and as usual killing a bottle. Devine was not at peace. That morning his nineteenth El Brazo Onofre note had arrived.

  Querido pendejo Devine:

  El Brazo Onofre is weaving a hangman’s

  noose to fit around your money-green

  miser’s neck. Sleep tight tonight.

  Don’t let the vampires bite!

  The letter came at ten. Around noon, Emerson Lapp phoned the dude ranch all in a twit because while he’d been parked at the Forest Service headquarters downtown somebody let the air out of all the station wagon’s tires, and since Rael’s hose was broken, Horsethief Shorty had to go down there with several cans of Instant Inflate to bail him out.

  Lapp had been at Forest Service headquarters trying to convince Carl Abeyta and Floyd Cowlie to run more patrols along that section of Indian Creek running through Dancing Trout territory, because lately prowlers had been violating the National Forest land that Ladd Devine owned special-use permit rights to. Poachers were even harvesting trout at night, using large electric lamps. Worse, only three days ago two Dancing Trout swinglers from Kansas City had been startled by a bunch of arrogant midnight anglers who had spot-lighted them nakedly intertwined in a leafy grove near the creek. Obnoxiously giggling and firing off crude and lascivious remarks, the nocturnal fishermen had kept a light on the petrified lovers for at least thirty seconds before hee-hawing back into the blackness.

  The embarrassed swinglers had not complained to Devine, but Horsethief Shorty had gotten word of the incident from Sabrina Oatman, who immediately wanted to make love with Shorty in that same grove where the swinglers were caught with their pants down in hopes a similar incident could happen to them. “I mean, wouldn’t that be a ball to end all balls!” she trilled excitedly to Shorty, who was not very excited by her enthusiasm.

  In the end, this noon Lapp had returned empty-handed from Forest Service headquarters, reporting to his boss: “They’re not even going to venture out of the office, Carl said, until their request to the regional headquarters for bulletproof vests is filled.”

  Which left Devine wondering whether Carl Abeyta and Floyd Cowlie hadn’t flipped, and also whether he should hire armed men to patrol his recreation fiefdom’s borders after the sun went down. A practical idea, perhaps, the way things were going, but suppose an accidental shooting took place? And how would Dancing Trout guests react if it suddenly occurred to them they were vacationing in a state of siege?

  Ladd Devine did not know about the Pilar Café stickup, nor had Shorty told him about getting rolled with Sabrina Oatman. All the same, a great many little things—like the Forest Service’s refusal to patrol, and the men’s room incident at the Chamisaville General Custer Drive-In (which Jerry G. had duly reported)—were pockmarking the normally smooth texture of Devine’s summer days. Only just last Tuesday Flossie was thrown from a horse that had apparently been stung in the flank by a ball bearing or BB fired from an unseen slingshot.

  “I heard it hit the horse,” Flossie explained sadly, “and then everything turned upside down.”

  But the worst outrage was those crosses. Like mushrooms in damp leaves, they sprouted every night by a dozen roadsides—downtown, up in the canyon, out on the north–south highway. Their inscriptions always either advised the passerby to Pray for the soul of Zopilote Devine, or to Pray for the dear departed soul of the Miracle Valley Recreation Area. A few times, even, flowery bouquets had been laid at these contemptible monuments commemorating a death or deaths which had not yet occurred. It was impossible, of course, to ignore the crosses, and each morning Jerry G. and Horsethief Shorty, occasionally aided by B
ernabé Montoya and the state cops, had to uproot a dozen epitaphs. Devine, obsessed by those repugnant crosses, could not stomach the thought that one of them, somewhere, somehow, might survive, mocking him into eternity. He had taken to counting the crosses, and he had also personally begun to saturate them with gasoline each day around 11:00 A.M. when the men returned from their patrols. If the crosses were meant to intimidate, they had succeeded: Devine simply could not stand the ridicule. He had even paid off-duty state policemen good money to patrol the highway and the town at night, but somehow the culprits were never caught: because the cross planting was just another prank by the mystical and ubiquitous El Brazo Onofre? Or could the lack of a pinch be more accurately attributed to the fact that the off-duty cops simply pocketed Devine’s dough, parked in a deserted place, and logged eight hours of shut-eye every night?

  Whatever, the crosses were still officially considered a “jest”; and they certainly had everybody chuckling no end, everybody, that is, except Devine, whose dignity was on the line. Wasn’t mockery of an almost hundred-year-old reign involved?

  What had begun as a mere nuisance had become a pain in the royal ass.

  So now, under the stars beside his outrageous and gentle amazon of a wife, Devine felt slightly bewildered. For years his intricate affairs had rolled along smoothly; he and his partners, his backers, his help, the people on his team—they had all proceeded cautiously, carefully, conservatively, successfully. Devine had only tackled and moved ahead with sure things; he had seldom received any flak; he could not recall ever having seriously misjudged the peasants downtown; like his roguish grandfather, he was used to winning.

  But today a spiritual claustrophobia had set his internal organs to aching, sapping his strength. To be honest, the boss was a little pooped; a bit under the weather; unhappy, and baffled too; call it at loose ends. Somehow life had become fragmented, confusing; for a moment he had lost his unwavering drive. A dangerous lassitude hovered just out of range in his body; it was accompanied by a defeatist torpor. He was scared. And in this somber condition, his pale skin iridescently gilded by the bright stars while Flossie casually stroked his thighs, Devine remembered his grandfather; he remembered boyhood days in these mountains and canyons that his family had for so long controlled.

  In particular, Devine remembered a single day in his youth, an experience, a brief moment of horror that had not returned to plague him for decades.

  They had been up in the mountains on horseback, little Ladd (who was nine at the time) and his arrogant grandfather, collecting raspberries. All morning they picked, filling jars with lush red fruit and loading the jars into saddlebags. Then a rainstorm suddenly struck. “Follow me,” the old man said. “If I remember correctly, we ain’t too far from Bear Wallow cabin.” Swiftly they drove their horses across a meadow, through shivering aspen groves until, sure enough, the small log edifice his grandfather called Bear Wallow cabin turned up. The crusty old man helped little Ladd dismount, telling him, “You go on inside out of the rain, Sonny, while I tend to these horses.” And, obeying him, Ladd pushed open the door.

  Three men, or rather the mossy, spider-webbed skeletons of three men, hung from a ceiling beam. In one skeleton’s pelvic area mountain bluebirds had built a nest, and in it the female bird, surrounded by peeping young, stared beadily at the startled boy. Rain clattered loudly in the surrounding forest; lightning and thunder boomed. After a moment Ladd Devine Senior appeared in the doorway behind his grandson, laid powerful hands gently on the boy’s shoulders, and jovially mused: “Well, ain’t that a queer place to raise a brood!”

  On the roof over his office almost forty years after this incident, Devine shuddered. Drowsily, Flossie unbuckled his belt and undid the zipper, lifting out his penis—gently she caressed it. Devine closed his eyes, trying to remember why it was so important to keep growing, building, expanding and absorbing and accumulating things and power and making money, and making more money on top of that. What did it all add up to: something as incongruous and as crazy as raising a brood in a skeleton? Lowering her head, Flossie quietly slipped her lips over his penis, sucking him off tenderly. He glided a hand laxly into her loose hair, twisting those soft yellow strands around his thin fingers which felt fragile and likely to snap, as if made of hollow, unhinged porcelain. He didn’t like himself very much; he never had. And he guessed he did not really love anybody at all.

  Too bad.

  Or as the French said: Tant pis.

  Time passed. Devine opened his eyes, startled, and his fingers gripped her head tightly, his body—coming—rigid … and the flagrant untouchable stars were so stilled they seemed to have been painted up there. Or they were chips from imaginary skeletons; lost virgin souls; pieces of pretty, insensitive ice; their loveliness an untouchable joke. Flossie swung her head to meet his, and Devine experienced a terribly powerful but undefined longing as they kissed, and he licked his own sperm from off her tongue.

  That had not happened in a while, and he whimpered, almost like a little boy.

  “It’s alright,” Flossie consoled sadly. And: “I’m sorry,” she added. And then of course, with an utterly serene melancholy: “I reckon I love you even if nobody else does, you sweet thing, you sorrowful bastard, Ladd Devine.”

  * * *

  As much, perhaps, as Bernabé Montoya wished to communicate with his wife, Carolina, or with his girl friend Vera Gonzáles, his wife, Carolina, would have liked to communicate with him. But she could not talk to her husband, and had never understood the reason for this. Somehow, they shared a compatibility that allowed them to be loving, to make love, to discuss business and gossip and the weather, things of that nature; but they could never communicate in words the human passions, the thoughts and feelings, fears, frustrations, and joys underlying everyday mundane existence. Often it felt to Carolina as if they tacitly understood each other; but times came when they were as hopelessly estranged, she thought, as if a witch had cast a spell, making their lives and human emotions mute, irrevocably voiceless and sad.

  Already, for too long the house had been silent. And often these days, with Bernabé gone and she alone among her saints, Carolina would find herself seated in a chair by a rear window, with her hands tucked under the band of her skirt, lightly massaging the still-prominent stretch scars across her plump belly, all that remained to her today of the six children she had carried and given birth to, even before reaching twenty, children already long gone, although she and her husband were hardly middle-aged. Five boys and a girl had forged those scars with the bulks of their unborn selves. Now two of the five boys were in the army overseas; a third had died from leukemia in childhood and was buried in the west side camposanto; the two other boys had married and moved away, one settling in Oregon, the other in Utah; and the girl—married, divorced, and recently remarried—lived in Tucson. All the children were still so young, and yet lost, as Carolina saw it; forever gone; communicating with their parents erratically, on postcards, in badly written and awkward letters, as they adapted to the outside modern world that Carolina had never liked, nor even remotely understood.

  She was not unhappy; she had friends. Betty Apodaca, Stella Armijo, Nancy Mondragón and many others, for Carolina was a part of the girls, the women, the town. But when not with her friends or her husband, when she caught herself in a rare in-between time, the house carefully scoured, the groceries put away, dinner prepared, the week’s baking done, her vegetable and flower gardens manicured, new squashes drying on racks in the sun, and the time she usually spent every day on exquisite colcha embroidery which she sold at two craft outlets (one in Chamisaville, the other in the capital) over—when those moments of sunny and almost languorous late-afternoon solitude arrived, she would sit by that open rear window gently stroking her scars, feeling slightly dizzy from, and a bit puzzled by, how fast it had all happened.

  The curtains fluffed slightly in a summer breeze, ticking gently against an old gray cat drowsing on the sill; her saints were c
omfortable in the shadowy silence behind her, their sanctity practically murmuring softly; hummingbirds made buzzing sounds as they crisscrossed the backyard, feeding at tall hollyhocks. And her children were gone. So many postcards—from Disneyland, Tijuana, the Golden Gate Bridge—perched among the saints over the fireplaces, in wall crannies, but the boys and the girl were gone. And looking back it seemed to Carolina as if the children had been an explosion of no more than a moment’s duration, instead of a twenty-five-year travail. Her memories were clouded, jumbled together, confused; it had all happened too quickly, and there were so many years yet to go, and her grandchildren would be born and raised in cities faraway.

  Often this summer, and particularly as the beanfield tension mounted, she had found herself suddenly pausing during a labor to cock an ear as if she had heard something, either just behind her shoulder, a minute whisper, or else faraway and faintly transposed across miles of sagebrush, like a distant coyote or the tremor of a train.

  Whatever it was, it startled Carolina, giving her a brief, undefined chill that stayed with her for a minute or sometimes throughout the day, nagging, inarticulate, untouchable, mysterious—perhaps like the aura from her saints.

  On occasion it was not so much a sound that she seemed to have heard, but rather a smell that was in the air; and this smell, although never quite caught and confirmed, was an autumn aroma, an unsettling wisp of yellow aspen, smoking grass, apples, and frost. On the evening of a hot July day it would suddenly be there; or rather, she would think that it had just been there, over her shoulder, or on a puff of air carried through the open window as she sat lovingly touching her child-bearing scars. Autumn, crisp, and smelling of piñon and cold ditch water and tangerine clouds and hay; and the sound of the dry brown and twisty sweet pea shells suddenly splitting open, spitting out their seeds, while crickets crackled in dry grass—was that the sound she heard? It was suddenly there, that’s all—the essence of those things … yet always gone before she could decide if it had been there or not. And how was she to explain why it gave her such a start, that far call or near whisper that was never quite there, that sudden whiff of autumn that always disappeared into the lazy hot July dust and sunshine and summer rain smell before she could decide if it had actually been on the air.