by John Nichols
It was a lovely sensation, one the agent had always appreciated, catapulting from the twisty dark gorge onto that flatland, with a straight highway aiming exactly north. The treeless panorama ahead was among the most breathtaking sights in the state, even on a darkish night like this. To the left, across gently sloping sageland, the gorge opened for a startling instant. To the right stretched the Midnight Mountains, snowcapped for all but a few summer months and boasting the highest mountain in the state, 13,180-foot Hija Negrita, in the shadow of which lay—scattered like stars in the dark plain—Chamisaville’s twinkling lights.
The car tires thrummed over a cattleguard and Kyril Montana stepped on the gas. From some roadside carrion an owl, huge and dark, its large yellow eyes glinting briefly in the headlight beams, took off, flying directly into the car’s path. The agent neither lifted his foot off the gas, nor swerved, as—with a staggering wing-flapping whoosh—the bird swooped across the windshield and over the roof, missing death by inches. In another wet area a few miles closer to Chamisaville, tiny toads gallantly hopped across the road. Farther on the car whizzed past or over some kangaroo rats. To the west lightning flickered in sheets broken by jagged streaks. And, bound for El Paso, a Trailways bus boomed by.
Two miles outside Chamisaville the agent stopped at the state police bungalow. Although lights burned inside, the doors were locked. He had a passkey, entered, and called ahead to Doña Luz.
“Pacheco’s still alive,” an operator whom he did not know informed him. “In fact, they think already his condition is improving. Apparently he’s a tough old fart.”
“Where’s Trucho?” the agent wanted to know.
“He’s still up in Milagro chewing fingernails. Him and Bruno Martínez and Bill Koontz. Sal Bugbee, too. I guess they’re still talking with the people. Things are pretty quiet up there. They got a posse organized to go out tomorrow around dawn.”
The agent signed off and checked the gas pump outside, but it was locked and he didn’t have a key, so five minutes later he pulled into a station on the northern outskirts of Chamisaville, filling up the tank on his credit card.
After that he kept his mind fairly blank over the eighteen miles to Doña Luz. It hailed for a minute, then the sky was empty and luminescent; clumps of sagebrush along the roadside glowed like torches. But soon lightning began flickering again off to the west while mist drifted from the close eastern mountain canyons toward the road. He passed a group of big, gaunt, slope-faced horses walking dumbly in a line along the shoulder—Indian horses, the agent guessed instinctively—and after that he crossed the Rio Colorado into Doña Luz.
One state police car and one county car were parked outside the small headquarters building. Inside three men sat around drinking coffee and chewing the fat—the radio operator with whom Kyril Montana had spoken, a handsome young kid by the name of Emilio Cisneros; the jovial gray-haired county sheriff, Ernie Maestas; and a crew-cut state higway patrolman the agent knew, though not well, Bill Koontz.
“That José Mondragón, that little son of a bitch,” Ernie Maestas laughed. “I knew that bastard was gonna kill somebody someday. You know what he did to me once? I had him in the isolation tank, county jail, maybe three years, two—ahhh, I don’t remember—a while ago, anyway. Johnny Roop brought him in, remember Johnny Roop?”
“Didn’t he shoot himself dicking around with somebody else’s gun in the jail a couple years ago?”
“Horseplay,” Maestas chuckled. “He grabbed Pete Lujan’s gun out of Pete’s holster and somehow shot himself in the stomach, and the assistant DA—that chingón Robertson—he called it an accidental death due to ‘horseplay.’”
“Who’s got a full report on the Pacheco thing?” Kyril Montana asked impatiently. “Did anybody make out a report yet?”
“Who’s gonna call Tina and ask her to type out a report at 1:00 A.M.?” Koontz joked dryly.
“Type it,” Maestas laughed. “Fuck it, who’s gonna write it at 1:00 A.M.?”
“Well, let me see the preliminary folder at least,” the agent said wearily as Ernie Maestas chortled on about Joe Mondragón.
“Like I said, we had him in the pit. I don’t remember what for. I think he went after some drunken bastard with a timing chain, who the hell remembers? But anyway, he asked me for a blanket, said his nuts were cold, I told him to suck his dick to keep warm. So you know what that feisty little rat did—?”
Annoyed—though his features remained impassive—Kyril Montana leafed hastily through some scribbled sheets in the Pacheco–Mondragón folder, but came across no new information.
“He took his pants off, stuck them in the crapper, and started flushing like a madman. He had the whole cell plus half the county jail flooded before we could turn off the water—”
“How come all the downstate cheese is crawling around up here?” Koontz asked, offering Kyril Montana a cigarette the agent refused.
“We get out of touch down there,” the agent joked humorlessly, heading for the door. “Every now and then Mr. Trucho likes us to participate in something like this just to keep our hands in.”
“Yeah, God forbid you should ever get out of touch with us poor Chicanos up here,” Ernie Maestas laughed, slapping the agent’s shoulder as he went by. “You got to hunt down a cabrón from the norte every now and then just to test how good you are, verdad? The gabachos down south, they don’t know assault and murder from a hole in the ground, qué no? Going after them is like shooting patitos in a pinball gallery, right? But up here things are different—”
Kyril Montana closed the door gently, backed his car around, pulled onto the highway again, and ran the last thirteen miles up to Milagro in less than ten minutes. A mile below town he stopped at a one-car block manned by the two Chamisaville state personnel, Loren McKay and Buddy Namath, who added nothing to the plethora of noninformation he already had.
Then, instead of stopping immediately in Milagro, the agent drove north to the other block, manned by a county undersheriff and another state cop, Sal Bugbee, who also had nothing else to report.
With that he turned around and drove to Bud Gleason’s house.
* * *
When Joe Mondragón shot Seferino Pacheco, Charley Bloom practically jumped for joy. Saved! he cried to himself when nobody was around. He would defend Joe on an assault or a manslaughter charge, and in the process the beanfield would be forgotten. It was what everybody wanted—qué no? He almost wished he had the guts to tell Bernabé Montoya, or the Doña Luz state cops, or the county sheriff, Ernie Maestas, to set an excessively high bail so that Joe would cool his heels out of action while the beanfield went to hell.
But after that first sensation of relief, the bottom fell out. He despised his gutless reaction to Joe’s dilemma; he couldn’t stand his cowardice. And he knew, too, there was no way that beanfield could go to hell; Joe or no Joe it would flourish, maybe now even more than before.
Whereupon, like a man doomed, he called up Bernabé Montoya. “Bernie? Charley here. Charley Bloom. Listen, I don’t know the extent of what Joe’s done, I don’t even know if he did anything, and I don’t know where he’s hiding if he’s hiding. But I want you to understand I’m his lawyer, and he has certain rights I’m sure you’re familiar with. And if you and your deputies go after him like a pack of crazy wild dogs and shoot him down in cold blood or even manhandle him a little, I’m telling you right now I’ll do everything I can to hang the lot of you from the rafters by your balls, if I have to go all the way to the Supreme Court to do it, understand? I don’t know how you’re going to handle it, but you better make damn sure you haven’t got some trigger-happy boob in your posse, if that’s what you’re planning to form. If Joe shot Pacheco, he did it in self-defense, the way I understand it, and if he doesn’t come out of the hills alive and in good shape, I’m going to hold you personally responsible, and, like I said, I’ll try to have the book thrown at you, I’ll make damn sure you get hit with everything including the kitchen sink.”
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“Take it easy, take it easy,” Bernabé replied nervously. “Don’t get so excited, dammit. Nobody’s going off half-cocked, I assure you.”
“I just want to make sure you understand this is a ticklish situation that could have severe consequences,” Bloom said.
“You think I don’t know that—?” Bernabé croaked desperately. “Jesus Christ, man!”
He hung up on the lawyer.
Bloom cradled the phone, and, bowing his head, pressing his palms against his eyes, he shed a few quiet tears.
Linda had just put the kids to bed. She sat down in a chair staring helplessly at him from across the room.
“I don’t know how to handle it,” Bloom moaned, swaying a little. “I just don’t know how to handle it. I feel so ambiguous. What kind of wishy-washy person am I anyway?”
“Handle exactly what?” Linda asked.
“This. That. Anything. Everything. I don’t want to be involved in Joe’s affairs. He shot a man, for God’s sake. I’m like you, I never wanted to spend my life in the company of violent people. I don’t want to be associated with a man who killed another person. I don’t want to defend that kind of human being…”
Bloom’s face looked shocked and unholy and drained. “I’m afraid,” he whispered tiredly. “I’m afraid of losing, afraid of winning, afraid of the fight. I’ve always been afraid. I want to be safe. Like you too, right? I spent my whole life looking around for the big rock-candy mountain. I can’t stand the fact there isn’t a Santa Claus. The people around here—” He stood up abruptly, waving one hand. “The people around here, if they ever saw Santa Claus in the neighborhood, they’d fall all over themselves scrambling for their .30–30s so they could put a little reindeer meat in their freezers! I hate their illiterate guts! I’m sick and tired of doing their dirty work. And of not doing their dirty work. Why don’t you teach one of your own bloody people to be a lawyer? Why don’t they learn to read and write? Every damn Friday when we come back from Chamisaville with the Sunday before’s New York Times I feel guilty as sin. And I’m sick and tired of feeling guilty as sin!”
In pain he gripped his temples, ran fingers through his hair, turned away from her, toward her, paced across the room and back, stopped at a window, lowered his voice.
“We should get a gun,” he said. “Learn how to shoot it. A rifle. A pistol to keep in the glove compartment. This autumn I’ll get a hunting license, I’ll go out and kill a deer.”
Bloom sat down.
“I don’t want a gun. I don’t want to have to feel we need to protect ourselves like that. I came out West to escape that kind of shit. So what are we doing in a medieval little town where everybody and his brother practically sits around picking their teeth with bayonets all day? You know how kids around here get lead poisoning?—from eating .30–30 bullets, that’s what from. And you know what I’m tired of? I’m tired of every time I pull up in back of a pickup truck there’s a fucking gun on a fucking rack on the fucking rear window.”
Silence. This was her speech in his mouth, and Linda just sat there, staring at her hands in her lap, a sense of imminent disaster riding like ice through her bones.
“I don’t know,” Bloom said, shaking his head. “I just don’t know. Maybe I never should have left the East Coast. Maybe I shouldn’t have been a lawyer. I don’t have the temperament to be a lawyer. I’m not tough enough. I don’t have the kind of compassion it would take to be good. I don’t know what I have the temperament to be, you want to know the truth. Probably we shouldn’t have gotten married. What’s going to happen if everything falls apart again? Where will you go? Who gets the children? How will we support each other and the girls when everything is split apart—?”
Quietly, without moving, Linda started crying.
“Oh brother.” Bloom stood up, turned stupidly in circles, slumped down, picked up a pencil off the desk and aimlessly broke it in two. Then he selected another pencil from a leather cup, broke it, and set the pieces in a row on the wide green blotter, and selected another one to break. And another.
He broke them all, lined the pieces up carefully, and sat there, elbows on the desk, hands covering his face, breathing heavily.
“I don’t get any exercise,” he murmured unhappily. “I’m fat, bloated, I jiggle when I walk. How much booze do I consume in a day? Two beers for lunch. Bourbon before dinner. Wine with the meal. I wake up in the morning, I start nibbling. I can’t stop eating. I light a cigarette, smoke it, light another: I chain-drink coffee. My hands are always trembling; my nerves are shot. My veins bulge. My whole flabby body shakes from caffeine jitters, and I can’t stop. What’s the matter with me? Why don’t you do something about it? Why don’t you tell me to stop killing myself? What are you doing, counting the minutes until I die and you’ll be free?”
Bitterly, the lawyer laughed. His veins bulged, his eyes were sore, his head ached: in the vernacular, he was strung—far fucking—out. Maybe he was killing himself; it was true he couldn’t breathe right. Self-pity clogged all his pores.
“I used to think life was beautiful,” Bloom moaned. “Everybody in my family thought life was beautiful. We grinned at each other morning, noon, and night. We had real-life Pepsodent smiles. Nobody ever got angry at anybody else. Life was a bed of roses!”
He was shaking his head again, back and forth.
“All my life I been waiting to grow up,” he whispered. “Instead I only grow old. I hate growing old. I’m gonna go down to the capital tomorrow and buy a wig and some of that magic cream that hides liver spots and makes people look ten years younger. How come there isn’t any Geritol in our medicine cabinet? When are we going to get a color TV?”
Linda sniffled and wiped her nose on the back of her hand.
“We don’t have enough sex anymore,” Bloom blurted suddenly. “I beat off at least twice a week, how about that? And, except for when we went up in the mountains, we always make love in the dark now, and we always make love the same way, the same tired old positions. I want to fuck. I wish I was married to somebody who knew better what to do in bed. I wish something kinky would take place some night in our bed. We used to be so erotic. We used to laugh and joke in the hay. I don’t think I can stand much more of this sugar-is-sweet bullshit, timid do-nothing hanky-panky anymore. Oh God.”
Bloom rose and wandered dazedly around the room touching things, avoiding Linda’s chair, stopping once to cough. He went to the kitchen, located a toothpick, and began busily to pick his teeth. From the kitchen he could see her sitting there, in her hair—already—streaks of gray. She was a dark, once-sensual girl—he had never been able to call her a woman—who’d had two lovely daughters by cesarean, and he guessed he loved her, but she was nothing like his first wife, whom he had hated while also lusting after her sensual way in the hay.
Bloom dug into a clay jar, latched onto a chocolate chip cookie, ate it.
“Forget what I said,” he called softly into her. “I’m not a good person. I’m sorry.”
Linda didn’t move, said nothing, he could not hear if she was crying—he hoped she was crying—but he couldn’t reenter that room to find out.
“Let’s forget about it,” he whispered, eating another cookie, gulping it almost hysterically. “I should keep my mouth shut. When you get this old you should keep your mouth shut.”
But he had to laugh ironically over that. “All my life I kept my Casper Milquetoast mouth shut. When they bury me they better gag me, because I’ll probably start screaming from the grave, everything I never said.”
“Oh shut up,” she whispered unevenly. “Go away.”
“I don’t want to go away. Where would I go? There’s probably some violence freak outside waiting to plug me. And anyway, suddenly I really feel like hurting you.”
“Maybe there isn’t somebody out there waiting to shoot you because you’re not as important as you think,” Linda said.
“Oh screw you,” he spat sourly, and went outside.
In t
he moonlight, tears streaming down his face, he wandered around their place, their house but not a home. Since birth had he ever lived in a home? And what now for Charley Bloom? He sighed. The ponies whinnied quietly as they trotted over to see if he had sugar, a carrot, or anything else. He scratched Sunflower’s forehead, gazing at the mountains, struck by their clear, ghostly peace. Once he had sworn never to leave the ocean, convinced that his soul craved sand and the green expanse stretching all the way to his ancestral home in Europe. But mountains did as much for a soul as the ocean, and they were more mystical and more alive, and more accessible, too.
Bloom journeyed into his back field. The grass was silvery, damp with dew. The valley all around him, what he could see of it, was dark and secretive, beautiful and serene.
Tomorrow he would leave. Good-bye, Linda: adios, my children: so long, Joe—roast in hell, kids.
No, he wouldn’t leave.
He was exhausted.
His daughters dreamed the rainbow-colored Raggedy Ann dreams of contented children. And he loved them. And he loved his wife. And fuck it. His life was over. The adventures he had always dreamed of, also the serenity and the security, were already a part of the past, impossible fantasies. If he had ever been free, he didn’t know when. Joe Mondragón was important right now, he needed a defense if he survived, and Bloom could probably do a decent job, so he would do a decent job.
What the hell.
He returned to the house. In her puffy blue robe, eyes red rimmed, Linda leaned against a kitchen counter waiting for coffee water to boil. He nodded hello; she nodded back, dropping her eyes. Bloom fetched a sweater from the bedroom and came back to the kitchen, buttoning it up. She put a teaspoon of instant coffee into two mugs and poured the water. They stood in the kitchen, Linda leaning against the counter, Charley leaning against the fridge, sipping the coffee. Dogs started to bark and howl, kept it up for a few minutes—the racket died down. Then the faint odor of a faraway skunk drifted into the kitchen.