by John Nichols
Bloom stood quietly in the warm summer sunshine, absorbed by the two trucks parked beneath the water tank. A man—not Horsethief Shorty—got out of one truck, circled behind it, took a leak.
In a trance, Bloom bent between barbed wire strands into the first field. He had always admired Horsethief Shorty from a distance. The man had character and spunk and Bloom had considered him an attractive original, had always known he was the real McCoy. He had heard a hundred stories about Shorty’s feats, always told with admiration, much laughter, occasionally envy. No one, so far as Bloom could ascertain, bore a grudge against Shorty. Men and women who disliked Ladd Devine, who had nothing but scorn and riducule for Flossie and Jerry Grindstaff and Emerson Lapp, liked Shorty, maybe even loved him: his boisterous wild-card personality had carved for him a niche of welcome, or at least of respect, on both sides. Shorty had the stories, the personality, the deadeye with a rifle in deer season. Shorty spoke Spanish and understood the ways of white people and brown people and Indians. Shorty could mend anything, lay pipes, design houses, make adobes, read and write, talk crops and politics, and he’d parlayed his talents, some people felt, into a big piece of the Devine empire, but they didn’t begrudge him what he had gotten, because he’d fought like a son of a bitch to get there; he hadn’t been born into it; he had made it the hard way, and he’d never truly left the people.
But he was up there right now, with his glasses trained on the valley, on the town, a radio by his side, searching for Joe Mondragón.
Suddenly, Bloom was enraged. Raising one arm he carefully formed an exaggerated obscene gesture, aiming it emphatically at the pickups. For a long time nothing happened, they didn’t notice, they had not been watching. Bluebirds flew low across the field, butterflies drifted, oily blue smoke coughed out of Eusebio Lavadie’s tractor as he mowed his fields, and several cats, one of them pure white, trotted into the cut part to catch distraught field mice, to eat their babies in butchered nests.
Then Bloom saw it, caught the motion, a hand out the Dancing Trout pickup window, Horsethief Shorty’s hand, up in a gesture, not obscene, but friendly—he waved.
“Fuck you,” Bloom whispered, dropping his arm. And he headed for home where his wife’s haunted eyes awaited, where his children’s bright smiles would flutter through the sunny rooms like all these pretty summer butterflies.
* * *
At about noon that day a backhoe driven by Jerry Grindstaff emerged from the Dancing Trout’s white gravel drive, turned right, and descended the bumpy road past thick pastures in which Morgan horses grazed, and past tennis courts where Bostonians and Dallasites, clad in snowy white, exercised. Then it chugged slowly past orchards that eventually gave way to the valley’s overgrazed fields, which were pocked with animal shit and smelled strongly of ammonia, and the backhoe continued on through the tightly clustered houses at the heart of town, past Rael’s, the Frontier, the Forest Service headquarters, and the Pilar, and across the highway onto the Milagro–García spur. Jerry G. braked at Joe Mondragón’s beanfield and, as he surveyed the scene, motor idling, he lit a cigarette.
There was nobody around. Jerry G. had come on orders from the boss, who felt that policies so far had only led to more trouble than might have occurred had the beanfield been leveled long ago, Joe Mondragón arrested, and the matter fought out then and there, perhaps savagely—but at least it would have ended quickly, and by now would have been all but forgotten. As it was, things had gone much too far. A hands-off policy had backfired, the insurgents had gathered strength. And so, with Joe on the run and half the town chasing him, and with the rest of the town hiding behind barricades (and having consulted neither the state engineer nor the state police nor his own partner, Jim Hirsshorn, nor Horsethief Shorty), Ladd Devine had decided to kill the heart of the controversy, namely Joe’s tiny beanfield.
Letting his eyes laze around, Jerry G. took his time with the cigarette. Wind puffs rattled the cottonwoods, dust swirled in the road stirring grasshoppers up into their crackling, chili-red flights. A dust devil twirled eastward from the sage across the flat deserted fields, catching tumbleweeds, bouncing them along and letting them go, weaving among the crumbled houses and rusty car hulks—a truly desolate scene.
Increasingly, Joe’s beanfield had made Jerry G. mad. He hadn’t gone into exactly why, but the damn field threatened everything he had worked for all his life, it was holding a knife to the throat of the established order. Somehow just a few lousy green plants that wouldn’t bring a plug nickel on anyone’s market were a menace to Jerry G.’s future. So he sure hadn’t balked (as he never balked) when Ladd Devine told him to have at it. In fact, for the first time in almost a week, he had smiled.
Flipping the cigarette, Jerry G. shifted into gear, climbed off the roadbank, chugged along the flatland beside the Roybal ditch, and hopped off the machine to open the barbed wire gate into Joe’s beanfield.
But when he swung the gate open and turned around, a little old bespectacled man whom Jerry G. had seen often around town (usually drunk), but whose name escaped the foreman just now, was standing beside the backhoe’s rear wheel, aiming the biggest goddam shooting iron Jerry G. had ever seen directly at his heart.
“Hey … what—?”
“You come a step closer,” Amarante Córdova said in Spanish, “and I’ll blow your head into pieces like it was a rotten pumpkin.”
Now the foreman did not understand these words, but there was enough unmistakable authority in the ninety-three-year-old voice and also in the size of his Colt Peacemaker’s snout to make Jerry G. freeze.
“Put the gate back up,” Amarante ordered. “You put it back up right now.” He gestured slightly with the gun, and Jerry G. savvied; he hopped to do as he was bid.
“Okay, go home,” Amarante said. “Or I’ll make a hole big enough for an owl to nest in in your chest.”
The drift of this, too, Jerry G. managed to grasp perfectly. Hands awkwardly raised, he circled warily around the old man, backed up to the ditch bank, and walked sideways along the bank to the road. At the road he halted, briefly apprehensive about the backhoe, but he recommenced his hasty retreat with a jump as the old man bleated, “Get going! Beat it! Go home!” On the double, Jerry G. hightailed it for the highway.
Amarante grinned, giggled, holstered his oversized blunderbuss, and, grimacing awkwardly, trembling from the effort, clawing a bit like a man falling off a cliff, he somehow managed to haul his ancient bones up into the driver’s seat of the powerful yellow machine.
In his younger days Amarante had often run a backhoe, but now he had trouble holding the clutch down long enough to push the shifting lever into gear. In the end, though, cursing his old bones and grunting like a hungry pig, he succeeded; the backhoe lurched forward, and as it did Amarante’s floppy hat jolted off his head.
It was no picnic for a derelict that old to wrestle with the wheel, guiding the heavy machine, but the angels were on his side, saluting him, no doubt, with heavenly laughter as they gave strength to his feeble hands and as they gave the joyful determination of all legendary heroes from John Henry through Emiliano Zapata to his tenacious heart. Amarante cackled, hugging the wheel with all his might, aiming the backhoe westward. Fences snapped with melodious twangs as he plowed through, the strands sometimes whizzing past his ears. The machine jolted into gullies, lurched and coughed; Amarante bounced out of his seat, clinging for dear life; fence posts splintered. An adobe wall crumbled like stale cookies; the backhoe punched aside a wrecked car, then chewed mighty tracks through flat empty field after flat empty field, bursting at last through a final fence into the purple sage.
Bouncing, rocking, tipping, Amarante rode his mammoth mechanical bronco across the wide and lovely mesa—jackrabbits fled for their lives. The old man’s chin hit against the wheel, the blow almost knocking him out. Yet he had determined to do this thing; his ninety-three-year-old pride would not allow him to fail. His fingers felt broken, his ribs and shoulders were certainly smashe
d, his head ached from the beating and from the noonday summer sun also, but he refused to die. His father’s huge gun popped out of the holster, disappearing forever into the sage—Amarante did not notice. His final three teeth (though not—miraculously—his glasses) were jarred loose—he swallowed one and the other two fell to the ground … then he pissed in his britches. But he whooped also, croaking hoarsely, glutinous, joyful sounds, riding that bright yellow Ladd Devine backhoe westward, ever westward—
Toward the gorge.
And he could see it now, the break in the earth, faintly ahead, and then more clearly, and then he could make out a far sunny wall dropping sheerly; with the gorge in sight he stepped on the gas and all hell broke loose. What a way, he thought, his wrinkled lips flapping as he laughed and sputtered: What a glorious way to go!
The split in the earth widened, became immense. The ground sloped more, became smoother. Around here somewhere was a path down to the hot springs where Amarante had gone many years ago, courting, drinking, swimming, fishing sometimes, and he’d driven sheep up that path after taking them to graze on the rich bottomland beside the river.…
Betita’s death—he suddenly remembered, then just as suddenly forgot as the backhoe glanced off a boulder, and he was thrown from the yellow machine, crashing atop a sagebush and bouncing from it into a small cholla cactus, and with that, abruptly—incredibly—the violence and the noise, the jerking and the bolting and the chugging were gone, and Amarante, on his feet for this sensational and emotional good-bye, saw the backhoe nose out into space and then keel over, diving from sight. Summoning his last reserve of strength, the old man limped to the edge in order to watch it fall.
Sideways it skidded through the air, hit an outcropping and flipped; turning several somersaults and bursting into flame, the backhoe sailed down trailing a brilliant fantail of sparks. Then, hitting a slope, it continued to roll, or rather to lope toward the river, and the fireball struck sandy earth a few yards south of the largest hot spring, where, overturning five or six times, it then leaped ten feet over Snuffy Ledoux, who was still lounging in the bathtub-sized hot spring putting the finishing touches on his last tallboy, and with a stupendous sizzle splashed into the Rio Grande, sinking instantly, leaving a fat greasy smoke ball hovering like a concerned mother over the bubbling spot where it had disappeared.
Snuffy Ledoux splashed to his feet. Screaming, “You son of a bitch, I’ll get you!” he scrambled to his clothes, tugged them on in fifteen seconds, jammed his feet into the wrong boots, and hit the narrow path out bent on revenge.
Nobody in Milagro had ever made it up that gorge trail in even triple the time it took Snuffy Ledoux—who’d been at peace with the world for the first moment in ten years when that fireball thundered over his head—to make it. And nobody in Milagro had ever been even one-half as surprised as was Snuffy when he panted over the gorge rim to discover, not a sly, conniving villain with handlebar moustaches and shifty eyes who’d attempted to end his life, but rather the old man, Amarante Córdova, looking like a thing that had just gone sixty-three rounds with seven bald eagles, staggering in zigzagging circles, gasping and bubbling out ding-y sounds, with nobody else around.
Snuffy hobbled over to Amarante, waved hi, and collapsed. The old man sat down. They gaped at each other, unable to talk, huffing and puffing.
It was Amarante who spoke first. “I can’t walk back,” he croaked. “I’ll have a heart attack. I’ll drop dead. I’m an old man.”
Without thinking, Snuffy said, “I’ll carry you on my back.”
“Thanks,” Amarante gasped. “You’re a good boy. When did you return from the capital?”
“Just this morning. I saw you. What was that thing you tried to kill me with?”
“I wasn’t trying to kill you. Nobody told me you were there.”
Snuffy held his hands apart like a man describing a four-inch fish: “You missed me by that much.”
“I apologize.”
“What was that thing?” Snuffy insisted.
“A backhoe.”
“Ai, Chihuahua!”
They sat there a while, not speaking, awaiting heart attacks. But nothing happened. The sun traveled farther westward; sage and cholla shadows shifted slightly; some ants crawled up their pant legs.
“I guess we might as well begin,” Snuffy said, slowly unbending his aching limbs, arising. He pulled Amarante onto his feet, then turned around, squatting down, and hoisted the old man piggyback.
Lurching to the right, to the left, halting, leaning forward, taking a step, they began. Amarante held onto Snuffy Ledoux, smiling with a mouth that had no teeth now, and Snuffy’s head began throbbing. He bit his lower lip until the blood flowed, carrying the old man a hundred yards, then halting to rest for five minutes, then starting off again.
In this way they progressed across the mesa, through the pale lavender sageland. Amarante began to sing in a high hoarse voice, a song with no notes, really, it was more of an Indian-style chant, high and sing-song wonderful, with no words anyone could understand, his radiant face tilted to the blue sky, shining like the face of a little boy or of an old old being as powerful as God, and his eyes were fixed on the permanent rainbow he could still see arching delicately over his hometown. And although blisters formed on Snuffy’s feet, and although they began to bleed, he found himself marching farther between rests, the old man growing lighter with this triumphant outpouring of song; and by the time they reached the deserted west side beanfields the sun was hanging like a fiery orange in the west, and Snuffy Ledoux had also broken out into victorious song.
* * *
When Herbie Goldfarb, responding to a soft knock, had opened his door late the night before and found himself staring into the broadly grinning mouth and clenched, Viva Zapata! teeth of Joe Mondragón, he figured his life was about to come to an abrupt and, no doubt, gory end. But Joe just kept grinning, chuckled, “Hello, Goldy, how they hanging?” and stepped over the threshold to wait out the storm.
Now, next day, after tipping up the last beer in Herbie’s stack of six-packs, Joe said, “Herbert, we need some more cerveza.”
“If I go in for beer,” Herbie protested, “they’ll get suspicious.”
And he could picture it already: his miserable hovel surrounded by state cops and by the National Guard, a bullhorn blaring—“We know you’re in there, Joe!”—sirens wailing and red lights blipping, TV cameras whirring, and then Joe yelling back, “Come and get me, you pinche, pendejo-brained, yellow-bellied, motherfucking cabrones!” as he ripped off a shot through the high little window while Herbie cowered in a corner by the stove, and then all of them out there would open up at once, their high-powered rifle and machine gun bullets chewing the adobe walls to pieces, opening holes big enough to drive tanks through—
“Suspicious?” Joe asked incredulously. “Who, Tranky Jeantete? Shit, man, if he knew for sure I was with you he’d give us the beer free of charge!”
Herbie cringed. Then he thought: suppose I actually escape from this predicament alive (or at least only partially maimed, still breathing) and catch a plane for home. I’ll still have no peace. They’ll track me down, kicking open the door of my crummy railroad apartment just as me and some indescribably delectable woman are about to ball, and they’ll throw me in the Tombs for a week, and if I survive it down there—if I’m not beat up or gang-raped—they’ll extradite me back out here and nail me to the cross for harboring a felon, or for being an accessory to a murder, or for obstructing justice, or for conspiracy to commit a crime—
“And anyway,” Joe added, “who’s gonna look for me here? I mean, who even knows you exist?”
Thanks, Herbie thought grimly, I needed that.
Joe blinked away some beer fuzz that was making blue streaks across his eyeballs, and remarked, “You don’t even know what all this is about, do you?”
Talking through the walnut-sized knot in his throat, Herbie croaked, “You shot a person. You killed a man…”
/> “Oh for crissakes,” Joe muttered impatiently. “That old fart don’t even have anything to do with it.”
“With what?” Herbie asked timidly.
“Listen,” Joe said. “Lemme tell you about the way things been around here. Lemme tell you about my father—”
Herbie was in no position not to listen, so he just sat there, letting Joe talk.
“Most of his life my old man was a sheepherder,” Joe said. “He rented his borregas from the Zopilote, from old man Devine, he did his credit business at the Zopilote’s store…”
Yet naturally—because of coyotes, bears, bad weather, you name it—Esequiel Mondragón had never been able to return the lambs per rented ewes the company required, and then when the capital began to enforce the termination of west side water rights, which eliminated the garden that at least fed them, he almost collapsed. He was sixty-three years old then, as Joe remembered, and dying. Joe’s mother, Sylvia, had tuberculosis; suddenly she died, leaving the old man heartbroken on top of everything else. Pride made Esequiel hit the road for a while instead of taking welfare. He did seasonal work in the lettuce and potato fields up north for a few years; then he stayed home, with the family, trying to keep up the west side house. But the family soon broke up, moving to jobs in other towns and cities, to the army, and Esequiel was alone. Heavy rains washed the outside mud plaster off their house, and he was too feeble now to mix up fresh plaster. All his neighbors were leaving then, sadly pulling up stakes, moving on. But Esequiel stayed put. He refused to travel down to Chamisaville to fill out the government forms for welfare, for food stamps. The old man dry-farmed beans and some corn two years hand running, but during those two years the rains never came, or they came too late, and his crops failed. Often he fished in those parts of Indian Creek that ran near his home, but he was fined several times for doing so without a license, and eventually gave that up.