by John Nichols
Strangely, no insects sang; all dogs and coyotes were quiet. The agent waited alertly for some movement down among the adobe houses, for some telltale stir in the shadows between buildings or in the cottonwood darkness along Indian Creek. At any moment he expected a car to start up and swing, with its lights extinguished, onto a muddy back lane, heading surreptitiously out. But nothing happened. Not in the heart of the minuscule town, nor in the surrounding fields, nor in the area around Joe Mondragón’s house, nor around the lawyer’s home either.
A few bats fluttered in the air near the car and he could hear their high screeching sonar—then they were gone. A cow groaned, something coughed, a sheep bell clinked once as the animal changed position. Never stopping, the agent’s eyes roved slowly around town, along roads, through trees and the animal herds, probing, pausing to inspect anything that seemed even slightly out of place, quartering the community and circling around it and returning to quarter it again, waiting for something to happen, for Joe Mondragón to appear down there somewhere heading for home or for the highway—what would the man do? He didn’t, couldn’t, know.
At one point, without relaxing his vigil, the agent poured himself a thermos cup of coffee and ate Marilyn’s chicken salad sandwiches. After which he got out and stretched his legs. The night had become chilly, almost cold enough to lay down a frost, he thought; it must be freezing at the higher elevations.
Around three-thirty he realized, abruptly, and with a real shock, that he had forgotten to call his wife. That kind of slip up bothered him a lot, and for maybe five minutes he could not concentrate as he should have on the ground below. It wasn’t his style to make a goof like that. But if he let it get his goat now that would be even less his style, and so he forced it to the back of his mind and had some more coffee. Then all at once he realized he was exhausted, and with that he rolled up the driver’s side window part way, slumped behind the wheel, and fell asleep.
But he was awake—suddenly—about an hour later, just before dawn. There was activity below him now, cattle and horses and sheep moving, the sheep bells clanging, and birds—magpies and bluebirds and killdeer—everywhere. The air was full of sound, and from out the valley’s chimneys a white and pungent smoke arose.
Already several cars and some horses had gathered in Bud Gleason’s front yard. The agent snapped on his radio and, as he watched more cars head for Bud Gleason’s, contacted Doña Luz and the highway roadblocks to see if anything had happened. He was informed that a sixty-year-old woman, her twenty-two-year-old daughter, and the daughter’s five-month-old son had died at 2:45 A.M. when their pickup hit a horse on a Chamisaville bridge and flipped over into the Pueblo Creek; nothing else had occurred.
Kyril Montana spent a final peaceful moment on the hillside overlooking Milagro, listening to the magpies’ chatter and to roosters crowing. Then, as the wide sky became translucently pink and azure with the moon still shining brightly from the center of it, he drove down the hill to Bud Gleason’s house.
Five cars were parked in the yard when he arrived; eight men had gathered in a single group smoking and talking quietly—one man had a bottle. As soon as the agent drove in, Bernabé Montoya detached himself from this group and walked over to the unmarked car. Squatting down beside the front door so that his head was below the agent’s, he said:
“That field over there—somebody irrigated it again last night.”
“Joe’s field?”
“You guessed it.”
“Who did it?”
“How should I know? There’s something else, too…”
“Namely—?”
“They took the pig. Pacheco’s pig. We just left it there, you know? So they took the pig. Probably they slaughtered it, I dunno. But somebody took that pig.”
Kyril Montana opened the door, got out. “Nobody saw anything?”
“You must be kidding.”
“You think it was Joe irrigated it?”
Bernabé shook his head. “I know it was others.”
“How do you know?”
“You can feel it,” the sheriff said morosely. “That’s all.”
Then, after an almost desperate silence on his part, Bernabé added: “You really think it’s worth going into them mountains today?”
“Yes.”
Kyril Montana looked at the sky. Already the pink had faded; it was being replaced by delicate mauve interlaced with cottony cloud wisps. He heard the chopper coming up from the south, and within a few minutes Mel Willard had set the small bubble copter down in the alfalfa field directly behind Bud Gleason’s opulent adobe home. By that time almost twenty-five men had gathered in the front yard; some were poring over U.S. Geological Survey maps spread out on the hoods of their automobiles.
It was dawn; it was time to start hunting Joe Mondragón.
* * *
While the posse moved tensely on foot into the Midnight Mountains, Milagro began its day in the same old way. In a hundred valley houses fires started burning in combination wood and gas stoves, and men, dressed already in irrigation boots, quietly ate breakfast with their wives and children. The Valley Star milk truck halted at Rael’s grocery before full daylight infused the small community, and the driver, Johnnie Gómez, swung milk crates down to Nick and his son Jerry who lugged the crates inside. Even before the Valley Star truck had sloshed out of the muck near Rael’s front porch, Tim Goldhorn guided the Coors beer truck to a stop near the store, and while cartons of six-packs, tallboys, and quintos were going into the Rael coolers, along came the Trailways bus.
As he parked his cumbersome vehicle, which immediately came under attack by Mercedes Rael, the bus driver, Bill Thorpe, announced over the intercom that this was Milagro. In response a pale, taut little man wearing a floppy, sweat-stained cowboy hat and carrying a cheap cardboard suitcase held shut with greasy twine, pushed along the aisle through a blue smokers’ haze and the gulping snores of strung-out voyagers and tottered unsteadily down the steps to his native earth. There he stood somewhat bewilderedly beside his suitcase as Bill Thorpe raised the side hatches and Nick flung a package into the luggage space. Then Bill swung a bundle of Capital City Reporters onto the ground; and as he did this a gaunt, crew-cut man wearing a T-shirt, dungarees, and hightop basketball sneakers propelled himself awkwardly off Rael’s porch and hoisted the heavy bundle into his arms.
This middle-aged man was Onofre Jesus Martínez, the mentally retarded son of one-armed Onofre Martínez, and he was also the town’s paperboy.
Lugging the papers over to the porch, O. J. produced pliers with which he cut the wires holding the bundle together, and, brow furrowed darkly, he counted off the ten copies that went in the store.
“So how they hanging?” Bill Thorpe asked, sticking his tongue out good-naturedly at Mercedes as he got the tickets on the package from Nick.
“Oh, can’t complain, can’t complain,” Nick said.
“Christ, you oughtta thank your lucky stars you live in a nice peaceful place like this where all you got to contend with is ax murderers and a mother who’s crazy as a loon,” Bill joked. “You should of seen the smog down south this morning. And the stink.”
Nick smiled, stowing the receipts Bill had signed in his shirt pocket. The driver nodded toward the passenger who had disembarked. “You know that guy? He from here? He don’t speak a word of English. Maybe he’s a wetback. He got on in the capital…”
“Sure, that’s Snuffy Ledoux,” Nick said. “He’s from around here. Been gone a long time, though. Maybe ten years.” And in Spanish, to Snuffy, Nick said, “Hey, cousin. Welcome back.”
Snuffy smiled at him, but puzzledlike.
“You think he’s alright?” Bill asked. “I’d hate to let another one like that ax nut get off here.”
“Well, you know—” Nick smiled. “Snuffy is as alright as anybody else around town.”
Bill laughed and swung up into his bus. “See you later, alligator,” he called as the door hissed shut. Having begun his stin
t in the capital three and a half hours ago, he would drive the bus another hour north into the Colorado town of Fort Dempsey, eat a second breakfast at the Fort Dempsey Taco Wagon, hang out for a few hours, then bring the southbound El Paso bus through around one o’clock.
After the blue bus-exhaust clouds had dissipated, Snuffy Ledoux came unglued. Leaving the suitcase where it stood, he crossed to the porch, and, nodding at O. J., who merely glared back, he walked inside.
“I been gone a long time,” Snuffy said in Spanish to Nick.
“Boy, you can say that again. I haven’t seen you for I don’t know how many years.”
“Nine years,” Snuffy said. “I been working in the capital. I been a groundskeeper out at the triple-A baseball stadium.”
“You lucky stiff. You got to see all those ball games.”
“I didn’t earn much money, though,” Snuffy said sadly. “I got no money in my pocket, in fact. So I need a couple things on credit.”
Nick shrugged. “Sure. You get a severance check?”
Snuffy nodded. “It should be here Monday.”
“Fine,” Nick said. “That’ll be just fine. Take your pick of the store. Live a little.”
“Okay. Gimme a pack of Camels and a Coors tallboy. No, wait a sec, make that Hamms, there’s a boycott on Coors.”
“You can get the Hamms yourself back in the cooler.” Nick dropped the cigarettes on the change mat, raised the lid on his charge account box, dialed L, and wrote out a sheet with Snuffy’s name on top and the items he had bought underneath and the price. Placing the box on the counter, he handed the man a ball-point pen, Snuffy made a shaky X, and Nick wrote in his name.
“That okay?” Snuffy asked.
“One hundred percent correct.”
“Well, thanks…” Outside, Snuffy seated himself on the porch, smoking a cigarette and tugging luxuriously on his beer while O. J. Martínez counted and recounted his newspapers. The Frontier Bar was still closed: butterflies danced nervously in the air, zigzagging across the road, and on the other side of the dirt area some big yellow swallowtails were sucking nectar from flowering lilacs beside the Pilar Café. Harlan Betchel hadn’t opened up yet; his guard dog, Brutus, sat in the window, staring alertly across the street at O. J. and Snuffy Ledoux. As always, the plaza area was littered with a thousand fragments of recently torn-up parking tickets that looked like muddy stars.
Pointing with his beer, Snuffy asked O. J.: “Tranquilino Jeantete, does that old man still run the bar?”
The forty-year-old paperboy, who didn’t understand Spanish, just glared at him suspiciously.
“Sure is quiet around here,” Snuffy said good-naturedly. “What’s happening, man?” He grinned. “Who’s doing what to who?”
O. J. frowned more darkly and cocked his head.
“I been gone nine years,” Snuffy said. He held up nine fingers so the retarded man would understand. “I been gone nine fucking years. That’s a long time. What happened since I went away? Did anything happen at all?”
O. J. said, “Talk English.”
Snuffy shrugged, crumpled the aluminum beer can and dropped it in the weeds alongside the porch, stood up and stretched. And kept smiling. “Nine years, son of a bitch. That’s a helluva long time. Nine years I worked down there and I didn’t save no money.” He patted his pockets to prove it. “I don’t got a single peso, how about that?” He removed a wallet from his back pocket, demonstrating to O. J. Martínez that it was empty. The paperboy shrugged, jerking his hostile eyes away.
“Well,” Snuffy cooed happily, “I guess I’m home, ain’t I? Yep, I guess I’m home, alright.” He lit another cigarette, and, with a fat smile crinkling his whole face, he chuckled to nobody, to the town, to the gorgeous crystal morning: “I didn’t earn a God damn fortune down there after all. I didn’t come home in a silver Cadillac, no sir, I sure did not do that.” He went back inside the store and signed another X for another tallboy.
With thirty-odd newspapers tucked under one strong arm, O. J. Martínez moved out on foot into the town’s narrow dirt roadways to deliver the news to Milagro. Dogs barked at his heels wherever his long-legged stride carried him, and he snarled back at them, sometimes even spitting, which only made the flea-bitten mongrels yap more hysterically. Men and boys who were already in the fields irrigating looked up, laughing, and the women of Milagro watched O. J. come and go from their front doorsteps or parlor windows. Frowning, deadly serious lest he make a mistake, the half-wit loped through town, oblivious to hummingbirds whistling around the abundant hollyhocks, casting knifelike glances at shimmering magpies, recoiling almost in pain whenever turkeys, guinea hens, or geese added their shrill gobbles and honks and squeals to the furious canine cacophony that every morning except Saturday (when the Reporter didn’t publish) trailed at his heels wherever he went.
O. J. returned to Rael’s around eight, the papers safely distributed; the town quieted down. Exhausted, the half-wit bought a Nehi orange and a peanut butter Nabs from vending machines on the front porch, and sat down as far away as possible from Snuffy Ledoux, who was working on his fourth tallboy.
“Christ, man, you sure make a racket delivering those blats,” Snuffy laughed. “You’re like a cat with a bunch of tin cans tied to its tail.”
A faded yellow pickup sputtered to a stop nearby. Esquipula Gurulé, his wife, Fructosa, and their children, Emma Jean, Filiberto, and Bobby, all carrying burlap feeding sacks, jumped from the truck and fanned out across the immediate area scavenging for aluminum beer cans. Already, this early in the day, they had a dozen filled-up sacks in the back of the truck; by midmorning, after they had canvassed the area down by the river where everyone went to drink or get laid, they would have a pretty full load. Then they would head for the Capital City recycling center, filling their quota on the way down, usually from the Doña Luz lover’s lane. On every day of the week, beginning at 6:00 A.M. usually, and collecting until a little after noon, they worked various areas in the county, never failing to arrive in the capital with a full load. Working at this job full time, the family made a living.
Now, as the Gurulés scurried about casting their haunted, hunting eyes busily through weeds and in and out of likely looking nooks and crannies, Snuffy Ledoux suddenly shouted, “Hey, everybody, I’m back! Miren! Miren! Miren! Estoy p’aca!”
Fructosa Gurulé straightened up and, with her hands on her hips, matter-of-factly asked, “How come you returned?”
“I got homesick.”
“Well,” Fructosa whined bitterly, “it’s worse than when you left. Welcome back to nothing.”
“What’s happening?” Snuffy asked eagerly. “Who’s alive, who died since I been gone? How much money did the Zopilote make off my brothers and sisters since I went away?”
Esquipula said, “Seferino Pacheco is dying because José Mondragón shot him yesterday after he shot at José because José shot to death Seferino’s sow who was eating the bean plants in José’s old man’s beanfield José is irrigating illegally over there on the western side of the highway.”
“Don’t tell me, lemme guess,” Snuffy cackled. “They got José down there in the Chamisa V. cage hanging by fishhooks stuck in his ears and attached to the ceiling.”
“It’s not funny,” Fructosa whined. “He ran away to the mountains, and there’s a posse up there right now looking for him and when they find him they’re going to kill him.”
“No, they’re not going to kill him,” Esquipula contradicted. “They wouldn’t do that. He’s one of us.”
“Oh, they’ll kill him, alright,” Fructosa declared. “Zopi Devine, they say he’s gonna pay them to kill him. You’ll see. You’ll see what happens,” she threatened darkly, suddenly commencing to canvass again.
“Don’t listen to her, they’re not going to kill him,” Esquipula repeated apologetically. “But it’s not a happy state of affairs no matter what happens. There’s going to be a lot of trouble.”
“All I hope and pray for,” Fr
uctosa groaned, “is that you stay out of it whatever happens.”
“There’s going to be a war—?” Snuffy asked incredulously.
“A war? What is a war?” Fructosa complained. “Everyday life here is a war. Survival is a war. Look at us. Look what we are doing now for a living. Now that you’re back, what will you do for a living? God forbid it should be to carve more Smokey the Bears.”
“I’m gonna carve santos and sell them to the tourists up in the canyon,” Snuffy laughed. “That’s my suitcase over there, and it’s full of beautiful carvings.”
“You have no shame,” Fructosa moaned.
“The queen of the beer cans tells the santo carver he has no shame?” Snuffy hooted, pitching over to the suitcase. “Wait till you see this!” Deftly he snapped open the blade on his pocket knife, cut the cords holding the suitcase together, and the two halves fell open. There were half a dozen newspaper-wrapped bundles inside. Snuffy unwrapped one, holding in his hand an awkward wooden carving of a hollow-eyed and gaunt virgin squeezing a bellowing fat kid against her breasts.
“Ai, Chihuahua!” Fructosa sneered disdainfully. “That’s too ugly. What’s it supposed to mean? If it’s a santo it’s unreligious.”
Esquipula squinted his eyes, cocked his head, wrinkled his upper lip: “That’s crazy,” he muttered at length. “Who’ll buy something crazy like that? It’s not nice at all. What happened to you down in the capital?”
“Okay,” Snuffy said. “I guess I’ll go back to Smokey the Bears.”
“Oh God,” Fructosa wailed, rolling her eyes. “Things aren’t bad enough, yourself arrived to make them worse!”
Amarante Córdova lurched into view, staggering—it appeared—from the weight of his archaic six-gun. Ignoring everybody, he loped through the scene without so much as an hola, veered into the bar door, banged it open, and plunged inside.