by John Nichols
By eight o’clock they had completed the first of the five circles that would eventually take them up Deerhair Canyon to the lowest Little Baldy Bear. The mist had lifted, disappeared. They had risen some four hundred feet and were now into tighter aspen stands, well above all piñon trees. From small clearings, now, they could see in the distance the rocky peaks rising above the Little Baldy Bear Lakes; some saddles between peaks still carried slim patches of snow. The sky was an ultrabright blue, but everyone in the posse knew that around noon clouds would begin to gather, and by three o’clock it would probably begin to rain, hail, and perhaps (who could ever tell?) it might even snow.
Together for a moment, they rested. Kyril Montana spread out a map; some of the men gathered around. He pointed to where they were, to where they would be going this next circle. While he talked they could hear the helicopter a mile or so above, flying low, sidedrifting suddenly into open places, Meliton Naranjo beside the pilot quickly sweeping the tree lines with binoculars, hoping to catch sight of a sudden evasive movement.
Bernabé Montoya sat with his back against a tree, smoking a cigarette and trying to look stern and dedicated, although his wishy-washy mind was boggled by this useless amateur bush-beating.
“I think if we catch him in an operation like this,” the sheriff finally said guardedly, “it will only be because he wants to get caught.”
Kyril Montana asked, “How would you do it?”
Bernabé shrugged self-effacingly. “Oh, I dunno really. I guess I wouldn’t be in no hurry, though. Probably I’d wait.”
“Where?”
“I’d go home and wait,” the sheriff said. “Sooner or later he’s got to come home for a meal or a piece of ass, qué no? He’ll get tired of the mountains. It’s boring in the mountains. José isn’t exactly a Boy Scout.”
“How long before he might come down out of here?” the agent asked.
“Oh two, maybe three days.”
“That’s all?”
A young man who’d been listening chortled, “Shit, man, it gets cold in these mountains at night.”
“What’s he gonna eat up here?” Bernabé asked. “Berries? Trout? He don’t have no fishline.”
“Yeah. And you shoot these truchas with a .30–06, you got no fish,” the young man laughed.
“He isn’t gonna kill a deer either,” Bernabé added. “Or roast a bird. Hell, he’s probably got a freezer full of beef from that feedlot in Colorado. He’s got a wife that makes tortillas, enchiladas. José is probably so fucking hungry right now—”
“He’s probably back there with Nancy right now, stuffing himself with beans,” the young man griped good-naturedly, “while we’re chasing his ass to hell and gone up in these hills.”
Kyril Montana looked around at the men taking five. They were dressed in a ragtag assortment of dungaree jackets and old army coats; some wore straw cowboy hats; most wore Levi’s and boots; all carried their own personal deer rifles, .30–06s and .270s and .30–30s, and a few carried pistols in hip holsters. Half to three-quarters of them were smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Mostly, too, these were middle-aged to old people, with grizzled faces, many teeth missing, and sly—occasionally almost giggling—smiles.
“If everybody is so sure we’re not going to flush Joe Mondragón, what are we all doing up here?” Kyril Montana asked.
Bernabé shrugged. “It’s what you people want, ain’t it?”
“You’re the sheriff,” Kyril Montana said. “What do you want?”
“I dunno. A man got shot, of course. A man should be brought to justice, I guess,” Bernabé said. “At best, we got to keep up some appearances, qué no?”
Whereupon Kyril Montana experienced a rare sensation. These men were all Chicanos, and he was a white man, the person theoretically in charge of this search. That’s all, it was nothing more than that, but it gave him a start all the same, made him uncomfortable for a minute. Only rarely, in fact maybe never, had he really felt that these kinds of people, that these Chicanos, belonged to a race not his own. Most of his partners, his immediate superiors and inferiors down in the capital, were Chicanos, and this had never bothered him. But up here, high in the wilderness behind Milagro with this lax, motley crew, he experienced a momentary and an almost terrifying race-consciousness, and felt like a foreigner, a real stranger and intruder in their territory.
The agent stood up to show that the break was over. Obediently, the men all stood with him, flicking cigarette butts into the damp brush and they spread out to start beating the bushes again.
* * *
“I’m going over to see Nancy,” Bloom said to his wife. “Maybe you better come along.”
“I don’t want to. But you go.”
“She’s your friend.”
“They’re your clients.”
“Well, God damn…”
Bloom stopped himself from slamming the door, closed it gently, crossed his front yard. He could smell fresh-cut hay and alfalfa; their immediate next door neighbor, Eusebio Lavadie, was on a tractor nearby starting his second cutting. Bloom waved at the man, whom he disliked intensely, and Lavadie waved back, grinning broadly. The pastoral valley calm, that bastard Lavadie serenely cutting hay while Joe Mondragón fled for his life, struck the lawyer like a brutally unfair blow.
He bent expertly between barbed wire strands and crossed a wide, soggy, overgrazed field, part of which was honeycombed with treacherous hummocks and leached-out grass clumps. Several massive, shaggy work horses stood up to their knees in muck among dense cattail stands in which hundreds of noisy redwing blackbirds cavorted. Killdeer, dragging false broken wings, ran screeching ahead of him on the shaved ground. In the next field grasshoppers burst up from under his feet like the shrapnel from land mines, and with a swipe of his hand Bloom caught one in midair.
And stopped.
Oh brother, he thought miserably. Turning slightly in wonderful, thick grass almost as high as his waist, he confronted the mountains, pale green on their lower slopes where the piñon and juniper were, dark, rich green higher up where the ponderosa began, interspersed with lovely summer-green aspen, and then higher up bald and rocky gray, patched with snow. Today, last night’s tomorrow, was not better as he’d promised Linda it would be, but rather a little worse.
He felt very bad. He was thirty-seven years old and it was all going to fall apart again. He would never know security or flow peacefully and rapturously into his wife or any other woman when he made love. His eldest daughter, Miranda, no longer wrote him the happy illustrated letters she’d regularly sent his way throughout her earlier girlhood. They hadn’t met in eight years; no longer could he bear the thought of their reunion, but he loved her desperately, and loved her mother too, even yet, yearning for a final session in her bed before he died, knowing he would probably murder her if she ever granted him a last shot like that.
Bloom felt sorry for himself. He was supposed to be a professional, in control. Instead he was a child, perpetually on the verge of a breakdown. It was insane, pathetic, almost criminal for a man pushing forty to feel so inept, so ashamed of his body, his heart, his work ethics, his Tinkertoy soul. He wanted to drive the car a hundred miles to someplace where he was not known, shack up with a sexy lady and a lot of booze, and end it that way—with a bang (he chuckled miserably) instead of all these sackfuls of whimpers he carried around night and day.
He wanted to lie down in this redolent field, curl up in the green womb in the dazzling aura of these mountains, growing warm and drowsy under the sun, abdicating all responsibilities—and sleep. Instead he had to push on, face Nancy, console her, advise her, be strong.
Dogs, all happy, bent-leggèd cripples, barked and danced ferociously as he entered the yard: Nancy opened the door before he knocked.
“Hi, Charley,” she said cheerfully, backing up as he scraped mud off his feet on an iron half-moon sunk into the earth beside the door and entered the warm kitchen. “How you doing this morning?”
“Oh, so so, I guess, thanks. I don’t suppose Joe is around, that I might talk to him?”
“He’s up in the mountains.”
“Yeah, I know, I heard all about that. I’ve got a tendency not to believe all I hear around here, though,” Bloom said with what he hoped was a wry, at-ease smile.
Halfway to the living room he suddenly stopped. Ten old men, all wearing cowboy hats and faded jeans and work boots or western-style boots, each with a rifle held butt against the floor between his knees, were sitting around watching a giveaway program on TV. Nearby, the three Mondragón kids were stretched out on the threadbare carpet, intent on the tube.
Bloom nodded, “Hello, Sparky; hi, Panky; how are you, Onofre?” and the men nodded, mumbling hello back.
“What’ll it be, Charley? Tea or coffee? Or would you like a beer?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing, Nancy, thanks. Can’t stay too long, really. Just wanted to come over and see if there’s any way I could get in touch with Joe.”
“Not so far as I know. He ran into those mountains like a beep-beep last night.”
“Like a what?”
“Like that roadrunner in the cartoons. Beep-beep.” She smiled. “The one Wiley Coyote is always chasing, but never catching. Don’t you watch TV, Charley?” The silent men in her living room didn’t smile, but they looked amused.
“I guess not that much.” Bloom laughed awkwardly. The guns, the quietude, the serenity of those old geezers, and the idiotic TV program, the enthralled children without a care in the world—it had upset him, he couldn’t get his bearings straight. “But as Joe’s lawyer,” he said, “I wanted to get word to him.”
“You could tell me. Then I could send him a telegram or something like that.”
“Or ‘something like that’?”
She nodded brightly. Several men chuckled audibly.
Bloom waved a hand carelessly, trying to seem nonchalant. “What have you got going here in this living room of yours, a reunion of the 101st Cavalry Unit of the Grenadine Fusiliers?”
“José just thought me and the kids should be protected in case anything funny developed.” She smiled again, a pretty little butterfly burst of sunshine.
“This isn’t funny, Nancy. There’s thirty or forty heavily armed men up in the forest looking for Joe. Half those men, I’d bet, if they see him, they’ll shoot him. Whether he’s got a gun, whether he shoots at them first or not, they’ll kill him on sight, claim it was self-defense, and get away with it because everybody knows about Joe’s temper—”
Nancy sat on a couch beside a hunched, watery-eyed old man named Tranky Apodaca, the uncle of Betty who worked in the Pilar.
“The thing is,” she said, flippantly lighting a cigarette, “they aren’t going to find José. You can be assured of that.”
“He can’t hide out forever.”
“You wanna bet?” This time Nancy’s smile had no fun in it; it was hard, sailing frostily across the room. “If he doesn’t want to be caught there’s nobody gonna catch him. We’ve lived here all our lives.”
“The longer he’s gone, I think the worse it’s going to be. Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re not. Just remember, there’s others who’ve lived here all their lives looking for Joe. In another ten hours, somebody—like Ladd Devine—is going to make an offer of one thousand dollars, or maybe more, for information leading to Joe’s arrest. With that kind of price on his head you know there’s going to be people digging up prairie dog holes and uncovering fresh graves in the camposanto looking for Joe. And those people, they know Joe won’t be taken peacefully, so if they get a lead he’s in this outbuilding or that shack, they’re liable to shoot up the building backwards and forwards before they even knock on the door or give him a chance to walk out peacefully.”
“So what happens if he turns himself in?” Nancy asked angrily. “The chotas will kill him.”
“They won’t be able to if he’s with me.”
“Excuse me for laughing, but that’s bullshit. The cops would spit in your face.”
“I’m his lawyer. I’m trying to help you both. Legally, so far, he’s got all the grounds in the world to stand on. There’s no doubt it was self-defense. But the longer he stays out, the more everybody gets on edge, the more likely we are to have a tragedy in this town.”
“The Zopilote already has a price on José’s head.”
“He’s got no such thing. But he’s as scared as both of you. He can’t be expected to act rationally much longer either. This has been building for a long time. Everybody is just too damn uptight.”
“Who said we were scared?” she shot back at him with a clipped little sneer.
“Nancy, what do you want me to do, get down on my knees and beg? I’ve been your lawyer. I think I know how to handle this case. I’m afraid of the violence that might develop. I don’t want Joe or anybody else to get killed. Everybody, at this point, is afraid. Even Ladd Devine is probably looking for an honorable out. But if he or Joe, or I don’t know who—the state cops, Bernie Montoya—if among them one or two people get pushed to the brink, or their nerves crack, well shit, we’ll pass a point of no return.”
“Charley, this isn’t putting you down, but for many years everybody around has been letting things get settled by the Mr. Devines and Jimmy Hirsshorns and Bill Koontzes and Bruno Martínezes, people like that. On their terms. Maybe now it’s time to decide something for ourselves. On our terms. And in our own sweet time.”
“This could be suicide,” Bloom said.
“To fight for what you believe in isn’t suicide,” Nancy said.
“Oh cut out that stupid patriotic bull.” Bloom felt like crying. It was hopeless. These people were bound and determined to slit their own throats.
Everybody stayed silent, all staring at the flickering screen.
“How do you know so much about everything anyway?” Nancy finally asked.
“Oh hell, I don’t. You should know that. Mostly I’m just guessing. Look, so far a kind of miracle has happened. Namely, nobody is dead. Pacheco will probably survive; a couple dozen trout were beheaded; a sign was burned—”
Nancy stood up. “Come here, Charley.” She opened the kitchen door. “I want to show you something.” When Bloom was beside her, she pointed to the town’s water tank on Capulin Hill. A Dancing Trout pickup and a Forest Service truck were parked under the tank, cigarette smoke drifting out the driver’s window of the dude ranch vehicle.
“That’s Horsethief Shorty up there, and both Carl Abeyta and the new guy, Floyd what’s-his-name. They’ve got a radio, telescopes, binoculars, everything. They’re just sitting up there waiting for José to show himself in case he doubles back into town, then they’re going to radio the chotas and the chotas are going to come in and kill him. They’ve got two cars on the highway, and there’s a bunch of them drinking champagne and telling jokes up at the Dancing Trucha, and another bunch of them at the Doña Luz pendejo factory. There’s some in the Floresta too, looking for José. And you want me to tell José to just walk out into the open and say ‘Here I am everybody, kill me?’ You’re asking me to do that?”
“If I’m with him nobody would dare try anything,” Bloom said.
“You think so?” Nancy picked up a stone, throwing it at a magpie on a nearby fence post. “I’ve heard a lot of things lately, Charley, maybe I better tell you where it’s at with you in their eyes. A man up from the capital not too long ago, an undercover police agent, he talked with some of our citizens here. And he talked about your first wife, you know? And about your divorce, and about what they said you did to your daughter back East. He said it was your fault that José was irrigating his father’s beanfield. He said it was a plot. He told these citizens you were a radical because you defended César Pacheco—”
Bloom sagged back into the kitchen and leaned against a counter. “An undercover cop—?” Was it the FBI? How come he hadn’t heard?
“I don’t know what they know, or what’s real and what isn’t,
” Nancy said. “I don’t care either. I wouldn’t believe anything those creeps said in the first place. And I pretty much trust you. But that’s what this undercover man said, and he’s the one who went into the mountains with the posse today. So it’s not just José, Charley. It’s not just him at all.”
Bloom actually felt faint. Turning, he poured a glass of water from the kitchen spigot, drank it slowly. Then, lowering onto a stool, he stared at the giveaway program without hearing or seeing it, without thinking, either. He was aware of his face being hot. And of a queasy sensation in his stomach. His ears, too, burned. His legs were weak. He sat there among the old men and the three kids and Nancy, more terrified than he’d ever been in his life, more terrified, even, than he’d been toward the end of his divorce when the whole thing had gotten so ugly that he had wanted to murder his wife.
Nancy settled nearby with coffee, sipping quietly from the cup, her alert eyes fixed on the tube.
“So we’re waiting,” Nancy said without taking her eyes off the program. “We’re waiting for them to make their moves and for them to finish making their moves and for them to go away. If we have to wait a year for them to leave, we’ll wait a year. Who’s in a hurry? Not us.”
She seemed astonishingly brave and strong. Bloom stood up. “I’m going home,” he said. “If you change your mind about Joe going in with me, give me a call.”
Outside in the pastoral quiet, Bloom felt threatened, exposed; he was a target. Up there they had glasses trained on him, on this house, probably on his house too. They had rifles with telescopic sights that could easily kill him from that distance—and he had nothing. He was a plump, not even middle-aged, man with a wide ass who’d never really wanted to become involved. He was a fainthearted, well-educated eastern white person you could push over with a semistiff turkey feather, a terrified human being who had always wanted to be decent, but had never been willing or able to pay the price. And now, in a town where he’d sought to get away from it all, he had somehow backed into a showdown. They’d have him disbarred; Bud Gleason would no doubt see that Hirsshorn foreclosed on his house.…