by John Nichols
His land was barren; the prairie dogs moved in. To most Milagro citizens prairie dogs were anathema to life, and they shot, killed, poisoned, drowned, bludgeoned, hexed, cursed, and, in general, vilified the pesky tunnel burrowers in about every way possible, because those varmints would ruin a field before you could say “Filiberto Mascarenas!” But Esequiel’s head had gone soft, and he let the critters into his front field; he damn near welcomed them with open arms, in fact. He liked to sit out front whittling on some rough little santo, watching the prairie dogs establish themselves.
Neighbors who had not yet gone took umbrage at this. Soon the Milagro prairie dog war began. Cars and trucks would stop in front of the field on the Milagro–García spur, a rifle would poke out the window, and blam! there’d be one less prairie dog. The third time this happened, the old man shot back with his .22. After that, concerned Milagro citizens commenced picking off the varmints from a distance, using high-powered guns and telescopic sights. Esequiel went a little crazy. He began to sit out there all day and part of the night, and finally he took a potshot at an innocent truck that was just passing by. At which point Bernabé Montoya drove over, arrested him, and hauled him kicking and cursing down to the Chamisa County Jail, where he stayed about a week before using a stolen cell key to walk out the front door; nobody stopped him because somehow nobody was on duty.
“My old man died one month later in the hot sun in the middle of a potato field outside Saguache, Colorado,” Joe finished quietly.
There was silence, an almost gentle quiet in Herbie’s gloomy hovel. Joe suddenly squashed his beer can and chucked it into the pile in the corner.
“So that’s how come,” he said morosely.
“That’s how come what?” Herbie had the audacity, or the stupidity, to ask.
“That’s how come all this,” Joe said. “That’s how come I’m sitting here drinking beer with a chickenshit, East Coast smarty-pants Jew bastard like you.”
“Oh,” Herbie said. Joe certainly had a way of making everything as clear as mud. As clear as Milagro mud, he added in afterthought, and, despite the tense situation, Herbie almost caught himself in a ridiculous smile.
* * *
At 1:00 P.M. the posse reached the lowest Little Baldy Bear Lake. Gasping, thoroughly pooped, the men trudged into the half-mile-wide grassy alpine bowl with the small circular lake in the center and collapsed.
Mel Willard had set the bubble copter down midway between some trees and the lake. Meliton Naranjo was sitting in the doorway of the chopper, desultorily hunched over, smoking a cigarette; the pilot had stretched out on the grass nearby. Most of the posse’s men collapsed closer to the tree line, on mossy ground, among large rocks. A few, having put down their guns and taken leaks, staggered over to the lake, where they knelt and drank. Kyril Montana propped his rifle against a tree, eased off his pack, and sat on a small boulder. He tried making a radio call to Doña Luz, but the static was so bad he couldn’t understand the answer, except just barely to decipher that nobody down there had run into Joe Mondragón, so they might as well keep searching into the afternoon, weather permitting, or else go home.
There were several packs filled with sandwiches. Now an old man distributed these and some tiny boxes of raisins to everyone. Quite a few men had brought their own tortillas and cold beans, or bean dip; in the helicopter there were large thermos jugs of coffee. While they ate, the men were subdued, talking quietly, all played out.
Bernabé Montoya slipped off his gun belt and lowered himself onto a rotting log near the agent. He bit into a burrito, cold beans and green chili wrapped in a tortilla, and chewed thoughtfully for a while, gazing up at the first gray threatening afternoon cloud.
“So what do you think?” he finally asked the agent.
“I think you’re right. This posse could have walked right over Joe Mondragón and never have known the difference.”
“If he was there, one of these men would have spotted him,” Bernabé said.
“You don’t think we missed him?”
The sheriff shrugged, smiled vaguely, gestured at the nearest mountain peak with his burrito. “He could be anywhere. But he’s not in shape; he didn’t go even this far.”
“What’s on the other side of that ridge between Little Baldy Mountain and Latir Peak?” the agent asked.
“There’s a trail goes down to Truchas Lake. If you follow it far enough it leads to Dixonburgh. When I was about twenty-five and he was fifteen or sixteen, me and José we used to come up here a lot on horseback. We hunted up here all year round before they made you buy a license and kill in a certain season. José’s father, he had some sheep, and sometimes we were up here with those sheep, too. We moved all around these mountains with those sheep. And you know something? I haven’t been up here for ten years. We even shot a wolf once…”
“Did you have a favorite place he might head for now?”
Bernabé smiled again. “These whole mountains, they were our favorite place. You don’t know how we used to roam around here. There was a rancher, a gabacho, used to own a big place down in Dixonburgh, had a permit to run his cattle up here, and we used to shoot those cows, two or three a year, and take them home and smoke them. We did things like that which were not nice, I guess you could say, but we were pretty poor, you understand…”
“Do you think he might go over the ridge to Dixonburgh?”
“I dunno. I don’t know his mind. We haven’t been together for a long time. Him and me, we always used to hate cops. José still does.”
Kyril Montana went over to the helicopter and got a paper cup of coffee for himself and one for the sheriff. When he returned, Bernabé was chuckling to himself. Accepting the coffee, he pointed to the lake:
“One time, José and me, we came up here in the springtime, you know? We had some dynamite and we set a charge off in that lake, and five minutes later there was five hundred cutthroat trout floating around on the surface. We waded out on the ledges and collected them into burlap feed sacks and packed them out on two burros we had brought along. Other times we used to come up with rods at night and build fires at the edge of these lakes, and you could catch eighty, a hundred fish in just a couple hours. We did that most often right after the Floresta stocked the lakes for the Dancing Trout tourists…”
Kyril Montana said, “It looks like rain.”
Bernabé studied the gathering clouds for a moment. “Looks more like hail to me.”
Mel Willard came over. “What’s the plan?” he asked.
The agent said, “I’m going to climb Little Baldy Peak and then hike north along the ridge there, overlooking Deerhair Canyon. I’ll probably go down the eastern slope of Grande Mountain up there, and circle around to where we began this morning. As far as I’m concerned the rest of you can go home; take the trail straight down the canyon. Whatever the weather, rain, hail, it’s probably going to get ugly. I think Bernie here’s right, I think we’ll just wait for Joe Mondragón to come home. He can’t last more than a couple days at most up here.”
Bernabé stood, buckling on his gun belt. “Sooner or later somebody will reach José and tell him it’s not as bad as he thinks. That will bring him in. And this will all be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.” He tipped his hat to Kyril Montana, then moved among the men, nodding, speaking a few words, slapping a back here, pointing to the northeast there, he rounded them up for the march home.
“What about me?” Mel Willard asked.
“Go home,” Kyril Montana said, almost gently. “This is the wrong way, the absolutely wrong way to go about it.”
“What about my partner, that gloomy S.O.B.?”
“Send him back with Montoya.”
“Okay—great!” Mel grinned. “Think I’ll lift off right now, if you don’t mind, to get out of this wind tunnel before some of the shit up in those clouds hits the fan.”
Kyril Montana watched the chopper start, lift jerkily off the meadowland, and rise at an awkward slant, then whizz do
wn the canyon, almost clipping treetops.
After that he talked briefly with Bernabé and Meliton Naranjo, discussing how to brief headquarters in Doña Luz, and what kind of line to send Trucho in the capital.
“In the end,” he told them, “the essential thing in this case is to keep a low profile. When you get back I want you to talk with his wife again. After that, make sure everyone in town understands that there were witnesses to the shooting who will testify it was in self-defense. I assume the grapevine will take it sooner or later to Joe Mondragón. Whatever the case, we don’t want him to come home shooting. One way or the other he’s got to understand he’s really not in that much hot water.”
“You’ll excuse me, but the people in this neck of the woods are mighty suspicious about that kind of declaration,” Bernabé said. “But we’ll put the word out and then see what happens.”
Kyril Montana and Bernabé shook hands, the sheriff rounded up his men, and suddenly they disappeared into trees; the agent was alone.
He had planned to start up immediately. But for a moment the intense loneliness and beauty of the open alpine setting held him. This was where he liked to be. It was in this country, in this kind of fluctuating weather, that the agent experienced his only real, deep feelings of awe and perhaps of humility. A marmot whistled, and he searched through gray boulders beyond the lake for the animal, but you could never see them in rocks like that. And as the somber clouds gathering from the east extended farther out over the peaks, threatening to cut off the sun, a tentative wind swept down the Caballo Peak slope, riffled across the lake, and a few seconds later streaked on by the agent. A few gray jays, so tame they would eat from his hand, landed nearby and started hunting for sandwich scraps in the flattened grassy area where the posse had been.
Suddenly the agent noticed all the refuse that had been left behind, pieces of waxed paper and tinfoil, discarded Baggies, a few aluminum bean dip cans, empty cigarette packages, and some crushed coffee cups. And it angered him, the way people mistreated wilderness. So before shoving off, cursing softly under his breath, he canvassed the area, collecting the garbage, which he crushed and buried in his pack. Then he pushed in the antenna on his radio and also stored that in the pack. Now he was outside communication, truly alone. A lightness entered into his body as more small cyclones of increasingly icy wind rippled across the lake and through the luxuriant summer grasses. He had an afternoon to himself, alone in this magnificent high country, on top of the wilderness world.
Kyril Montana opened the breech on his gun to make sure there was no bullet in the chamber, then to make doubly sure once he’d driven the bolt back he fixed the gun on safety, and, with the binoculars slung round his neck and bumping softly against his chest, he pushed off, walking up to the lake shore where, for a few more minutes, he watched the scores of lovely, slim cutthroats swimming slowly in the clear, shallow water, occasionally—laconically—surface-feeding … such lovely, dumb fish.
Kyril Montana walked swiftly through the damp meadow past several curious Herefords. Five minutes later, as he climbed through rocks and shale along a narrow sheep and pack mule trail, he noticed perhaps fifty sheep far to his left, high on the steep slopes of Little Baldy Mountain. Later, halfway up the ridge, he paused once more to take in the scene below. By now he could see two more azure, nearly circular lakes above the ninth Little Baldy Bear. There were some more cattle grazing near the shore of the fifth, and largest, lake. Two ravens skimmed deliberately along the distant treetops, floating into the open over the ninth lake and drifting down through the subsequent meadowland, heading into Deerhair Canyon, where the Milagro posse had retreated.
The agent climbed three-quarters of the way up the ridge and stopped again. The wind was blowing steadily; clouds obscured the sun. Perhaps two hundred yards across the small valley, Antelope Peak and Cabresto Mountain were still brightly lit and summery. Setting down his gun, the agent braced himself against a rock and began to scan the area with his binoculars. All nine Little Baldy Bear Lakes were visible now, and at the uppermost lake a pair of campers in a bright yellow rubber boat were fishing. The other lakes were quiet, unpeopled. Slowly, occasionally stopping at an area that his instincts told him was a likely exit from or entrance into the trees, he probed with the glasses along the pines bordering each lake. Once he paused for almost a minute at what appeared to be thin wisps of smoke rising from a recent campfire near the fifth lake’s shore—but he surmised, after lengthy inspection, that it was some curious configuration of mist rising, perhaps from a warm spring in the muddy ground.
It was while panning his field glasses on the horizontal along the tree line at the upper reaches of Deerhair Canyon that he came upon a man standing about two hundred yards directly opposite his position, and this man was aiming a rifle at Kyril Montana. At almost the exact instant the glasses touched on the man and the agent registered his enormous bulk, he also registered a slight white puff of smoke from the gun, and at that he automatically collapsed himself sideways as a small piece of the rock he’d been leaning against exploded with a pop that was followed by a ricochet whine. Hitting the rocky earth hard, he kept rolling three or four times, down over jagged terrain, and while he rolled he heard the report of the shot that could have killed him, and then, after he’d stopped, tucked up tight behind a small boulder, he heard two more gunshots from bullets that must have been fired at him while he was rolling.
* * *
Milagro’s old men liked to hang out on Rael’s porch. The men who most often, and for the longest times, frequented the porch were Amarante Córdova and the doomsayer Juan F. Mondragón, Onofre Martínez and the church custodian Panky Mondragón, Sparky Pacheco, and also Tranquilino Jeantete when he wasn’t catering to the local drunks inside the Frontier. These members of the Senile Brigade, who endlessly discussed the latest rumors, political skullduggery, adulteries, and other carnal shenanigans on Rael’s porch, were, of course, only the most constant nucleus that hung out there. For there was nobody in town, men and women alike, who did not spend some time on that porch during any given day, knocking off a soda and a peanut butter Nab or some piñon nuts or Slim Jims while the news got passed around and fondled affectionately, embellished when necessary, exaggerated where possible, and twisted if the occasion called for twisting.
People on the porch were also very adept at listening to each other with one ear, while the other ear stayed cocked on the radio Nick always had going inside the store, always tuned to KKCV in Chamisaville. And when, say, the “Barton Gas Birthday Club” came on the air, everybody shut up to see who was growing a little older today. Likewise, when the “Pet Parade” came on, some people hushed up so as to hear if there were any bargains on free puppies at the Chamisaville Animal Shelter, or whether or not any frustrated hippies were giving away their nubian milk goats. Just about nobody—unless Marvin LaBlue happened to be slouching around—listened to the country and western music on the “Platter Hoedown” show. Many people, however, perked up again for the shape of Edward Morgan’s opinion, and for the “Swap Shop”; and then a real lull occurred on the porch as literally everybody clammed up for the “Hello, America” man, Paul Harvey. After that the afternoons faded away into syrupy mariachi and taco pop music, which the people tolerated with friendly bemusement. The Mexican songs were constantly punctuated by irrelevant spotshots nobody listened to, such as the “German Press Review” and a show featuring a well-known beauty queen talking to teen-agers about their diets and their pimples.
People also stationed themselves on Rael’s porch because that was where the mail came in, and it was also where the various government checks that arrived by mail were cashed. The post office, an official-looking cage in back of the store, had about twenty-five combination boxes to one side of the grille. Nick was the postmaster. In the old days, Nick had had a nasty habit of shaking people down for their government checks, refusing to advance more credit until entire checks were signed over to him to settle up outstanding deb
ts. But about three years before, Onofre Martínez, with some help from Charley Bloom, had put a stop to this by threatening to take Nick, not only into court, but also to the cleaners.
So for one reason or another, Rael’s porch was Milagro’s social center; and it almost always supported a large and animated crowd.
Yet by one o’clock on the day after Joe Mondragón planted a single .30–06 bullet in Seferino Pacheco’s chest, not a single person was loafing on that porch. In fact, the heart of town was so deserted, and the air was so quiet, you could almost hear Mercedes Rael’s heart pumping as she waited behind a lilac bush (with her hands full of pebbles) for somebody she didn’t like to enter the plaza area.
Nick Rael was seated behind his counter trying to read an old issue of Field & Stream, and across the plaza area Harlan Betchel was seated at a back table in his empty Pilar Café trying to do the crossword puzzle in the day’s Capital City Reporter. Catty-corner to the Pilar, in Forest Service headquarters, Carl Abeyta was trying to review the most recent multiple use plan for his chunk of forest.
Suddenly a grasshopper crackling across the deserted plaza area made all three men and Nick’s mom jump as high as if they had just been bitten by a rattlesnake.
* * *
A knock on the door.
When Charley Bloom answered, two men in state police uniforms, both men wearing sunglasses, were standing on the front stoop.
“You Charley Bloom?” Granny Smith asked.
“Yes,” Bloom said, and, before he could catch himself, he had added a “sir.”