The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  “I apologize for my outburst,” Bloom said slowly.

  She shrugged, making a small sound.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

  “I don’t either,” she whispered, staring at the floor.

  “Everything will be alright in the morning,” Bloom said. “Or at least it will be better.”

  And after a long silence he added: “I love you.”

  * * *

  Much later on that night, Bloom suddenly awoke out of a bad dream and discovered that she was up on one elbow staring at him.

  “Oh shit,” Bloom whispered despairingly. “I just feel too … God … damn … mortal.”

  * * *

  “So,” Bernabé Montoya sighed wearily, “Pacheco’s pig tried to eat José’s beanfield, so José shot Pacheco’s pig, so Pacheco tried to shoot José, so José shot Pacheco, and all because of that damn pig and that damn drunk I got to go up into the mountains and bring back José, only José ain’t gonna want to come back, so somebody else will get shot, probably me.”

  Carolina, who was seated in her chair by the open rear window, said vaguely, “Cheer up, querido, things could be worse.”

  “Sure they could be worse,” Bernabé muttered morosely, applying shoe polish to one of his boots. “The bullet José put in the middle of Pacheco’s chest could of ricocheted off a rib, traveled a half-mile across the highway, passed in one of Mercedes Rael’s ears and out the other just as she was throwing a stone at Harlan Betchel, and then bounced off one of those tin gutters on the Frontier Bar, come through that window you’re sitting at, and struck you right between the eyes. Sure, it could of been worse—”

  “I didn’t mean…” Carolina began defensively, startled by her husband’s bitter tone. “I didn’t think…”

  “Oh yeah … heck … I’m sorry…” Bernabé fumbled with words, came up mute. And then abruptly released what he’d not admitted before: “I guess I’m a little scared, that’s all.” He smiled weakly, shrugged self-effacingly.

  It was a curious, lambent time then, in their house, in that room. A late-afternoon sprinkle had stirred up the dust, and now a slow breeze carried in an almost-radiant smell of dust and dry piñon pine and sage.

  The room was growing dark; something had happened. They both felt raw, tender, exposed. A crack, a minute fissure had opened between them: Carolina, with her fingertips still touched against her child-carrying scars, held her breath; the evening’s dusty pulse was almost too reminiscent, too saturated with a call to memory. Then Carolina, whispering, admitted, “I’m scared too.”

  And they waited. And they had much to say. Because they loved each other. Because they had failed each other. Because they were embarrassed to try and be articulate. Because life was half-over. Because, because, because.…

  Bernabé, the human piñata; Carolina, with her shiny stretch marks, her dreams about Benjamin, her all-day-every-days in the house among sacred murmurations.

  Last night in the bathroom, while seated on the can, Bernabé had noticed a spider spinning its web in a corner several feet away. He watched it passively for a moment, until of a sudden he realized it was a female black widow doing her thing not three feet from his toes. When he had finished, drawing up his pants and buckling his belt, Bernabé knelt on the floor near the spider, watching it work. A hundred times he had confronted black widows, and—BLAM!—always, unthinkingly, he had smashed them with his hand the way most men and women in Milagro eradicated the pests. But last night, on his knees, curious, fascinated as this most beautiful of all spiders wove her web, he held back for a second, impressed by the delicate geometric designs that deadly little creature was making in order to survive.

  Then, on one of those impulses that are among the most impenetrable and yet somehow also most joyous of mysteries, he reached out and interrupted the spider’s work, touching it with his finger, making it freeze, startled, in a defensive posture, and then he cupped the puzzled black widow in his palm, and the spider remained in that wrinkled bowl of brown skin poised high on its thin aristocratic legs, wonderfully dangerous, unmoving. Carefully, then, Bernabé raised the poisonous thing until the thread extending from the abdomen broke; after that he sat down on the edge of the bathtub, just staring at the small ebony spider, which, with a single bite, could probably cause him more discomfort than he had ever known; which, with a single bite, could kill a child, an old woman, an old man. And he remembered—

  Being a teen-ager, working one summer at the Dancing Trout. In those days the old man, the senior Ladd Devine, had kept a small greenhouse; and for a while Seferino Pacheco had been his gardener—Bernabé, Pacheco’s assistant. Whenever they transferred seedlings from table beds into small flowerpots, they always ran into a slew of black widows nesting in the little stacked flowerpots that were kept in a dark shed beside the greenhouse. The first time Bernabé unstacked and cleaned those pots for the transplantings, Pacheco ordered: “Collect all them spiders in a milk bottle, and I’ll show you something.” So Bernabé tapped the female spiders into a milk bottle, and when there were about thirty in the bottle, Pacheco told him: “Watch this.”

  Whereupon the alcoholic, who was not yet an alcoholic back then, turned over the bottle, and, as if pouring nothing more dangerous than milk, sprinkled the spiders onto his bare forearm. They scrambled out; they fell; they plopped onto his muscled hairy arm and quivered there, uncertain, frightened, dangerous—and then they began to walk all over his arm while he smiled quietly at Bernabé, not even deigning to look at the creatures decorating his vulnerable flesh as they promenaded gingerly about, threading among each other, deadly and confused, but unwilling to bite.

  “Jesus!” the teen-ager Bernabé exclaimed.

  “Have you ever heard of Orozco?” Pacheco asked.

  Bernabé shook his head no.

  “Have you ever heard of Diego Rivera?”

  No again.

  “How about García Lorca?”

  No again. No again. No.

  “Well—this is just a literary sort of exercise,” Pacheco told him scornfully, at last awarding the spiders a disdainful glower. “They could kill me, but they probably won’t. All the questions and games concerning souls, mortality, life and death, religion, great art, and banality are brought into play here. And as for me? I say fuck these stupid spiders!”

  And as for Bernabé—? Last night, with the black widow in his palm, he had finally muttered, “Fuck this stupid spider,” after which, practically overwhelmed by acute feelings of sadness, he had clapped his hands together, killing the thing.

  Carolina at the window, feeling her scars, wanted to verbalize a memory, but couldn’t. They were young, she and Bernabé, courting. He was working at the Dancing Trout that summer; for Pacheco the florist. One Sunday they took a picnic far up the Little Baldy River: Bernabé immediately set to fishing. Carolina, who did not especially like to fish, wielded a rod anyway, because she was in love with her husband-to-be. But while he fished upstream, she was downstream picking the lush red, wild raspberries that grew along the banks and whole handfuls of mint. Other bushes were laden with purpling currants; butterflies abounded; and at every step grasshoppers whirred off, some crackling like the snappers kids placed against their bicycle tire spokes.

  Later in the afternoon clouds drifted over the mountains, over the Little Baldy: it was the rainy season; hail began to fall. They joined for a meal of tortillas and beans and chokecherry wine; they ate sheltered by spruces and pines. All around their place hailstones bounced, laying down a white cover that soon resembled snow. Since they were in love, urgent and alone, they made love. Bernabé smelled of fish, her body smelled like mint, and both their hands were stained red from the wild raspberries they had been eating. Afterward, while rain, instead of hail, fell steadily, they lay in the shallow brook, laughing and joking, washing off the raspberry stains their hands had left all over their bodies.…

  Thirty years later, with Carolina quietly kneading her s
cars and Bernabé shining his boots before heading to the meeting at Bud Gleason’s house, they both stopped their restless activities, captured and imprisoned, if only for a breath’s length, by memories; and the air became almost heavy and damp with the urge, the need, the lust to speak, reveal, articulate, tell, talk at last—

  But the opportunity passed: the moment—along with the air—cooled. The darkening room gave way to the damp, dusty odor, the beautiful aroma of rainy sage. Bernabé, Carolina, both wishing to touch and support each other, coo and fondle, maybe even weep in each other’s arms at this crisis time, stared out the window instead, silent until one, or the other, commented upon how lovely was the land they lived in.

  After another long silence, Carolina felt compelled to say: “Well, it’s always darkest before the dawn.”

  At which Bernabé rolled his eyes, half in frustration, also half-lovingly, as he sarcastically crowed: “Welcome, ball fans, to the World Series of Darkness!”

  And Carolina, although a little distressed by his tender mockery, quietly smiled.

  * * *

  Many who were involved in it now and would be involved in it tomorrow were gathered in Bud Gleason’s living room. They had been almost ready to pack it in for the night when Kyril Montana arrived. Xavier Trucho, a lean, hangdog, yet almost delicate-looking, cynical man, was slumped disconsolately in an armchair, smoking a cigarette. Bernabé Montoya and his deputy, Meliton Naranjo, stood tiredly with their backs to an adobe fireplace. Scattered about the room were Granny Smith and Bruno Martínez, the mayor, Nick Rael, Harlan Betchel, Eusebio Lavadie, and four other men: two Anglos, a Chicano who had been deputized to help lead the posse in the morning, and the helicopter pilot, Mel Willard. The room was stale from smoke; a few beer cans were scattered around.

  “That crazy bastard Pacheco won’t die,” Trucho whined. He had a thin, almost high, almost effeminate voice.

  “I heard.”

  “Everything is very quiet, though,” Trucho added. “Thank Christ for small favors. This town is so quiet you could hear a throat being slit, isn’t that right, Mr. Cantú?”

  The mayor nodded hopelessly. All he had ever wanted in life was his petty share of what others skimmed off the top, and maybe a good time.

  “There ain’t anybody doing anything,” Trucho said. “Nothing stirring, not even a ratoncito.” He smiled at that. “All we can do now is we’re waiting for the morning. There ain’t any press here, nobody, so everything is very cool. It’s very very quiet. It’s so quiet you could hear blood drip…” And he smiled at that, too.

  “What do people think?” Kyril Montana asked.

  “Our people or his people?” Trucho asked.

  “I’m not sure I’d put it exactly that way.”

  “How would you put it?” Trucho wanted to know.

  “What about the posse? How many people do we have signed up for the posse?”

  Trucho nodded toward Bernabé Montoya. “Mr. Montoya, how many men have you contacted for this posse tomorrow?”

  “Thirty, maybe thirty-five men. All with guns,” Bernabé said.

  “Hello, Mel,” Kyril Montana said to the helicopter pilot. “Sorry, I didn’t notice you at first.”

  Mel Willard nodded back, smiled.

  “The people here,” Trucho said after an uncomfortable pause, “they don’t think Joe Mondragón’s been in these mountains for a long time. They feel he’s gonna stick to the established routes, the tourist trails. There’s a handful of little lakes about four miles up in the direction where he’s headed—”

  “The Little Baldy Bear Lakes,” Kyril Montana said.

  “Yeah. What do you call them around here, Mr. Montoya?”

  “Osito Calvo.”

  “The Osito Calvo Lakes,” Trucho said, leaning forward to stub out his cigarette. “Now he may or he may not be heading for those lakes, we don’t know, we can’t tell. In fact, we don’t know a thing. He could of doubled around back into town for all we know. He could even be hitchhiking for Juárez. Or Denver. We got an all-points out…”

  Bud Gleason sneezed. Eusebio Lavadie said, “I don’t think he’s gonna leave his home territory.”

  “What Mr. Lavadie here means,” said Trucho, “is this is where Joe has people. His people. His gente, know what I mean? So we got to figure he’s not gonna stray too far. We got Pete Gilliam keeping an eye on his wife’s house, and on that lawyer’s house, too. Mr. Martínez and Mr. Smith here are probably going to visit the wife, and maybe even that lawyer, Mr. Bloom, sort of surpriselike tomorrow sometime, just to make sure they don’t have any guests we’re looking for. But I doubt it. I figure Joe Mondragón is up in those mountains getting his butt frostbitten and I figure also that even if he hasn’t been up there in quite a while, he knows those hills like the inside of his asshole, and we’re not just going to beat him from the brush like a rabbit the first fifteen minutes out. As for me,” said Trucho, abruptly heaving to his feet, “I got other things to look after, now. I’m going back to the capital; I’m going home. Kyril, check with Mr. Montoya here, and Granny and Bruno, they’ll fill you in.” He nodded perfunctorily, shrugged, put on his hat, and walked out.

  “We’re going to assemble where in the morning?” Kyril Montana asked.

  “Right here,” Bernabé said. “We told everybody right here, qué no?”

  “Sure,” Bud Gleason nervously confirmed. “I guess that’s okay…”

  “I assume,” the agent said, “that this is going to be handled basically as a local thing—?”

  Bruno Martínez nodded. “Yeah. That’s the way we been asked to play it. Bernie here—it’s his bailiwick, his jurisdiction, as the saying goes, right Bernie?”

  The sheriff nodded glumly. “I’m afraid it looks that way…”

  “Who’s in charge of the weapons count?” the agent asked.

  “Huh?”

  “This morning, every man that shows up here who’s a part of this posse, who’s carrying an arm, you got to take down a description of that weapon, a serial number, and the amount, make, and type of ammunition that man is carrying. Somebody gets shot up there in the hills it won’t hurt to know who did it. Although the best thing that could happen, I don’t think I need emphasize, is that we return with Joe Mondragón hale and hearty and very much alive.”

  Bruno Martínez said, “Don’t forget, the little bugger’s got a gun.”

  The agent sat down. Quietly, and suddenly quite tiredly, but wanting to say this now before a lot of witnesses, he warned, “If our thirty-five guns kill Joe Mondragón tomorrow it’s only going to be the beginning of a real bad time. A real bad public time and a real bad all-around time for this little town, know what I mean? Did anybody here talk with his wife?”

  “She slammed the door in Trucho’s face.”

  “Anybody talk with the lawyer?”

  Nobody said anything until finally Granny Smith spoke. “Trucho figured at this point, what the hell. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “So who’s slated for what until daybreak?”

  Granny Smith said, “The boys on the highway will stay there until dawn, then Bruno here and me, we’ll take the north end position, and I don’t know who’s coming up from Chama V., but they’ll have two people up sometime for McKay and Buddy. Trucho said hang in until noon, and then fuck it.”

  “What about Mel, here? He’s not going to fly alone—”

  The Milagro deputy sheriff, Meliton Naranjo, raised his hand to waist level and mumbled unintelligibly. Mel explained, “He’s going with me. Unless you want to change what Trucho decided.”

  “Whatever Trucho decided is more than good enough for me.” The agent added, “So I guess we might as well get some shut-eye.”

  Bud Gleason said, “Whoever wants to can sleep on the couch here, or in a guest room, and we could even put an extra mattress in Katie’s, in my daughter’s, room.”

  The two uniformed state cops and Kyril Montana shook their heads. “We’re going back to Doña Luz,” Bruno said
. “There’s a couple bunks in back, so we’ll probably stay right at the station case anything breaks.”

  “Thanks Bud, but I think I’ll look around,” the agent said. “I’ll catch my winks in the car…”

  “You’re welcome, Ky—” Bud began, but his friend, smiling coldly, interrupted: “Like I said, I’ll probably drive around a little. Maybe later I’ll come back and park in your yard, if that’s alright. But most probably I’ll wind up on the highway with one of the block teams.”

  Uneasily, they broke up, going home or heading down the highway, whatever. Kyril Montana waited in his car until the others had left, then moved slowly out the muddy driveway, but instead of going west toward the highway he turned right, aiming toward the mountains, and once again he climbed the winding road up Capulin Hill to the water tank on which so many junior high schoolers had painted their class years.

  There, with the radio off so its static would not disturb his concentration, he gazed out the open window at the town. Bright, silent sheet-lightning still flashed occasionally across the gorge in the west. Somber but not thundering clouds remained stationary near the eastern mountaintops behind him, and Kyril Montana wondered if it had either hailed or snowed in the high country, not an uncommon occurrence at twelve to thirteen thousand feet, even in July.

  The moon directly over Milagro was clear and bright, almost full, the town dully luminous, trees and houses casting shadows. Few lights burned; but from a half-dozen chimneys slow, almost phosphorescent piñon smoke emerged, dissipating in a flat way over the town, seeping into bushy cottonwood foliage. Cows were lying down in some fields, horses still moved about in others. The police cars and officers manning the roadblocks were clearly visible. Every ten or fifteen minutes a lone car careened up or down the highway, at which point the patrol car emergency lights went on and snap-flickered as the car was waved to a stop and tiny flashlight needles jerked across the road for a moment—then the car started on and everything went out, returning to stillness again.