The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  Pretty soon men, women, and a few children—people with one-acre farms and barren ten-tree orchards and horses they never rode and ranchers with three-cow herds and no place to graze them—returned to their dilapidated vehicles, backed up, and pulled out, heading north toward home. In a moment only two state cars and Bernabé Montoya’s pickup remained in the parking lot.

  At which point the county sheriff, Ernie Maestas, accompanied by two deputies, arrived. And right behind them came Granny Smith, emergency signal flashing. And then Sal Bugbee and Buddy Namath showed up, each in separate cars.

  “What happened?” Ernie Maestas chortled. “How come you’re all still alive?”

  “Oh fuck off,” Bill Koontz said.

  Ernie slapped him on the back. “When you gonna at least learn to swear in Spanish, you tight-assed gabacho marrano, huh?”

  “When I’m dead, bury me in one of your lousy camposantos and I’ll learn it from all the skeletons of your people.”

  The phone rang. It was Trucho. “Look,” he shouted excitedly, “don’t do anything with Mondragón. Arrest him for something petty, release him on his own recognizance. Things could be a lot more ready to blow than we suspect.”

  “We already did all that,” Koontz said wearily.

  “Fine. Lemme talk with Montana.”

  “He ain’t back yet.”

  “He didn’t come in with the rest of the posse?”

  “Not so far as I know.”

  “Well, when that bastard comes in have him call me. And that don’t mean five or ten minutes after he checks in, either. I want him to call me the second he walks through that door. Who’s talking to him on the radio?”

  “Nobody. There’s a lot of weather disturbance up there. Nobody’s been able to get in touch with him since around noon, I guess.”

  “Keep trying, dammit. We got to talk.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Bill Koontz hung up the phone and wiped his brow. In an hour he would be off duty, thank Christ. He went back to the bathroom and flushed the goddam toilet.

  Part Six

  “We wouldn’t none of us have even been here tonight … if it wasn’t for the love of all them stupid Coyote Angels.”

  —Onofre Martínez

  “They’re scared,” Bloom said quietly. “Devine is scared; the cops are scared. Down in the capital they’re scared. They’re scared even more than we are.”

  Linda sat across from him at the kitchen table, a coffee cup in front of her. She wore one of his old lumberjack shirts, her hair was tied back in a pony tail. Her dark eyes were beautiful, her lips sad.

  “Nobody was killed,” Bloom continued. “That’s amazing, isn’t it? In that police station I thought it would all suddenly go haywire, but it didn’t. That’s the thing I don’t understand. I guess in the end they were just too scared so they backed off.”

  “Did you collect the eggs today?” Linda asked.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “We should collect the eggs,” she said.

  They went out back to the chicken shed. A goose, which never slept inside, preferring instead to sit under the stars, honked gently as they entered the pen. Linda unlatched the coop door, and the door tilted awkwardly, jammed.

  “I better put a new hinge on tomorrow,” Bloom said.

  They entered. The hay on the floor and in the egg boxes smelled dusty and sweet. The grubby yellow, big-balled, snake-eating reincarnation of Cleofes Apodaca was curled up in an egg box, purring. The chickens were roosting. Their two turkeys were sitting on the ground under the roosting chickens, getting shat upon as they snoozed.

  Both five-cubicle egg boxes were on the ground. Bloom sat down on one of them; Linda took a seat on the other across the shed. Bloom lit a cigarette and smoked slowly as they listened to the chickens ruffling their feathers, clucking sporadically. Bright moonlight reflected softly in the dusty window frames.

  “I love it here,” Bloom said gently. “You know, suddenly I think I honestly love it here. In Milagro.”

  “What will happen now?” Linda asked.

  “I don’t know. But they can’t do anything to Joe. They don’t dare. And I really believe that. I’m not even sure they’ll try to stop his irrigating. We may never go to court.”

  “What about Devine? What about the conservancy district and the dam?”

  “They’re going to get cold feet,” Bloom said simply. “We may never have a hearing on that. Or at least, not for a while. That’ll give us time and we need time to launch a fight, to forge out-of-town allies. Look at all the people who signed that petition today—”

  “Do you believe what you say, Charley?”

  “Yeah. At least I think I do. Listen, for three hundred years, in one way or another, they’ve been trying to drive the people out of this valley. But somehow some of them kept hanging on. And they can’t sell homesites up in the canyon or draw skiers or expand the dude ranch if a whole bunch of angry people are walking around down here with loaded guns looking hostile, now can they?”

  Linda said, “All my life I had dreams of peace.”

  Bloom fetched a couple of eggs, one from under the cat, and he held the warm eggs against his cheek.

  “All my life, everybody around me, it was always fighting,” Linda said. “Everybody was always angry, or always shouting or singing—I used to sit on my bed with my hands over my ears. Everybody was so noisy and tough and loudmouthed. And hysterical. Automobiles never had any mufflers, half the Friday night dances ended in brawls. I was always driving into town to the jail to bail out a brother, a cousin, my father. My mother never complained, not even when she was dying. She had cancer, she whispered Hail Marys nonstop to herself for a month, but she never complained. Guns, hunting, death, car crashes, frustration. The police were always hanging around. In town the air itself held a threat. There were always so many of us in such small rooms, and somebody was always banging a fist on the table, shouting out words of hate. All of us always hated so many people. We got so tired being so full of hate. I don’t know where my brothers and sisters and my father got all their energy. Always talking, shouting, laughing, crying, bitching. Somebody who could only play three stupid chords was always banging away like an insane idiot on some tinny guitar. The radio was always on, the TV always going—when it worked. Everybody was always talking about money, shrieking about it, hating who had it, sobbing in the arms of who didn’t have it. All the passion was so noisy. You’d go to the drive-in movie with somebody and all they did was joke and fart and drink beer and talk about the movie so much they never knew what was going on. And everything was a fight. And everybody always walked around armed. And when we came here I didn’t think it would be that way ever again.”

  Bloom said, “I’m sorry.”

  Linda was crying. “I don’t want to struggle like that anymore,” she said. “I wish I could melt.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Like snow…”

  She looked up. “When it snows, when there’s a fresh snow on the ground covering all the fields, flat and silent and white, with no marks on it—well, everybody I know wants to run across the white, make footprints, make marks, run, jump, thrash, create patterns, write their names, bust it up. But I never want to do that. I just want to stand at the edge of the field and look at the unbroken white. I don’t want to mark it up in any way. I want to just watch it, and breathe in its serenity. I want to let it melt slowly without ever having been disturbed, except maybe by tiny mice—they never really break the crust; or by rabbits, or by a magpie landing and taking off, so you can see where its tail touched and where the wingtips pushed off, but that’s all. There’s no tension in that kind of field. Everything is so lovely and untouched and serene. I’m so tired of tension, Charley. I’m only twenty-nine years old, but I feel worn out. I feel so fragile. I feel like a crystal glass that’s going to shatter if the noise and the tension, if the struggle and the fighting, if the loudness of it all rises even one
decibel more. I’m not even afraid, I don’t think—I’m just waiting.”

  Bloom said, “Amen. Funny. I’ve decided to go back to Rael’s tomorrow and buy a gun.”

  Linda did not respond.

  They sat across from each other in the feathery, hay-smelling chicken coop. One turkey released a contented trilling little cluck. An owl, off by the river hunting mice, uttered its muffled cry.

  Bloom stood up, walked outside. The air was thick and moist, freshly mown grass smelling nice. The ponies stirred in their corral, moonlight glinting off their shiny backs. The mountains hovered over everything like benevolent, serene elephants.

  The lawyer suddenly threw an egg, underhand, straight up into the air. It rose about twenty yards, fuzzily gleaming, then whizzed straight back to earth only a few feet away, hitting with a hard thud, but it didn’t break.

  Bloom couldn’t believe it. He stared at the egg. Then he went over and picked it up—it wasn’t even cracked. And for a long time he held the egg in his hand, both frightened and astonished and unable to move, his eyes fixed upon the moon.

  * * *

  Amarante Córdova sat on the stump beside his doorway; Snuffy Ledoux stood several feet away pensively smoking as darkness fell. For a moment the mountain peaks were crimson, then the sunlight blurred and ancient blue shadows drifted swiftly over the foothills, until only the mountaintops were bathed in rich warm rouge for seconds before suddenly it was night.

  “Well, I’m home,” Snuffy said tiredly, snapping his cigarette away. “And I ain’t ever gonna leave again.”

  “You came at a good time,” the old man said.

  “Yeah, maybe I did.” Snuffy sat down on the warm earth. “Or maybe I didn’t. Now I got to make plans, though, I got to figure out how to live. I got to carve a lot of santos and peddle them down in Chamisaville, do something like that, I guess, who knows? I’m broke.”

  “Do you own your parents’ house?” the old man asked.

  “You kidding?” Snuffy picked up a stone, chucking it aimlessly at the nearby pile of piñon. “When I left I sold it to Devine. I needed the dough.”

  “You can live here,” the old man said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can live here. In this house.” He paused. “We could fix the house.”

  Snuffy swiveled his head, giving the dilapidated house a skeptical once-over. “There’s a lot of work to be done,” he said unenthusiastically.

  “When I die you inherit the house and the land,” Amarante said. “Others will move into the houses over here and begin to irrigate the land. You’ll see. We’re going to buy all this land back one way or another.”

  “When you die—shit!” Snuffy exclaimed sarcastically. “I better chop some wood for that stove of yours,” he added, standing. Taking the ax in hand, he approached the piñon pile.

  Before he reached for a log, the silver sparkle off shiny bean leaves several fields away caught Snuffy’s attention. And although he was forty-five and kind of pooped out and lonely and wondering how in hell to turn a buck tomorrow, he suddenly smiled, allowing himself a vision he only half (maybe not even a quarter, to be honest) believed. It was not a vision of the future as totally unknown, but rather a vision of the future as composed, in part at least, of what had been okay about the past. He saw the west side houses whole again, their chimneys releasing pungent smoke, the houses inhabited by a new generation of men, women, and children whose fathers, aunts, and grandparents had been phased off the land and onto wandering migrant trails, whose roots had shriveled and died. If one beanfield, why not three? Or how about a dozen? And people would return from faraway places, and chilies and pumpkins would grow in the cornfields, and you would be able to smell bread baking—

  “Ah, shit…” Snuffy reached for a log. Who was kidding who with a dream like that? And what had been so great about the old days anyway? You couldn’t read or write and half the people died of TB. I’d like a car, Snuffy thought, I never wanted to spend my life on a horse. And what’s so much fun about hoeing a row of beans, or about sitting in the crapper with wind howling up your asshole on a night that’s thirty below?

  A coyote, out on the mesa, howled. It had been a long time since Snuffy had heard that sound. He turned with the small log in one hand: Amarante nodded and grinned.

  “Those damn coyotes,” the old man croaked. “You’re not even allowed to poison them anymore.”

  “There ain’t enough coyotes left to waste your poison on,” Snuffy said, abruptly dropping the log at his feet. And, with one savage, angry blow, which held in it a curse for every hour of every day of his life that he’d spent chopping wood, he busted the log neatly, downright exquisitely, in two.

  * * *

  His car was sitting there, exactly where he had left it, exactly as he had left it. Kyril Montana leaned on the hood panting heavily, big sweat droplets falling off his forehead onto the shiny metal. For possibly five minutes he was positioned that way trying to recover his breath, calming down, and then he began to feel chilled as the late-afternoon winds sweeping off the mountains hit him. Moving wearily, he swung behind the wheel and turned on the engine and the heater. Almost immediately, the police radio crackled inquisitively, asking his whereabouts. Taking a deep breath the agent lifted the mike, pressed the transmitting button, and, having dispassionately fed in his call number, he informed the dispatcher: “I’m okay; I just got back. I made no contact with Mondragón; the entire result of this search was negative.”

  “We got Mondragón,” the dispatcher said. “Can you hear me? Joe Mondragón has been here and gone. Everything is cool, man. But you better come in quick and get in touch with Trucho, he’s after your ass!”

  Kyril Montana said “Thanks” and hung up the mike. By the overhead light he checked his face in the mirror: it was moderately scratched, but otherwise not so flushed now, not that bad. The agent ran fingers through his hair, combing it as best he could. After that he got out and opened the trunk where he always kept a fresh sport coat and slacks, a white shirt and a tie, in case of emergency. Stripping quickly, he donned the fresh clothes and then drove out of there.

  Katie Gleason, who answered his knock grinning like a dervish, bounced off toward the kitchen shrieking, “Hey, it’s Ossifer Wyoming, I mean Ossifer Dakota, I mean Ossifer Montana!”

  From the den, where he was stretched out on a couch with a green eyeshade over his eyes listening to the evening symphony from a Capital City FM radio station, Bud called, “Ky, is that you? Is that you, Ky? Where the hell you been?”

  Bertha emerged from the kitchen just as Bud, in his stocking feet, staggered groggily from the den.

  “Where you been, at a cocktail party with a bunch of elk up there?” Bertha wanted to know. “Everybody else got back hours ago. Joe, he walked into the Doña Luz station just after noon and gave himself up, and they let him go an hour later when half the town showed up outside looking to burn the joint down. You missed all the fireworks, how about a cup of coffee? You look like you could use it.”

  Bud said, “They say Pacheco’s alright. He’s like his pig used to be, indestructible.”

  “That’s fine,” the agent said. “Can I use the phone?”

  “Be our guest—”

  The agent first dialed his wife. “I’m fine,” he told Marilyn. “I just got in. No, I just wanted to stay up in the mountains a little longer, to be sure. Right, I’ve heard a little about what happened; I’ll stop in Doña Luz for the details, and I’ll probably be home round eleven unless I’m needed up here. No, don’t wait up. And don’t worry about that either; I’ll grab a bite, probably here or on the way down. Right. Yes, everything is okay. I’ll see you soon.”

  He hung up, waited a moment to make sure his poise was the way he wanted it to be, then dialed Trucho.

  “He went home,” the state police switchboard informed him. So he dialed Trucho at home.

  “He’s still at the office,” Mrs. Trucho said.

  “They told
me there he went home.”

  “Well, if he did he didn’t arrive yet.”

  “You tell him I called, tell him I’ll check in at Doña Luz before I head south, he can leave a message for me there if he gets home. Otherwise we’ll talk in the morning.”

  “I’ll do that. But maybe you better call back in a little while, Mr. Montana, I heard he really wanted to talk to you—”

  Hanging up, the agent went back to the kitchen, sat down at the table across from Bud, and was very grateful for the coffee Bertha set before him.

  “Look,” he said, exhausted but struggling hard to keep his eyes open, alert, and to keep from slurring his words, “I’m all out of cigarettes.”

  “Katie,” Bud called, “go get me a pack of cigarettes from the silver box on the coffee table in the den.”

  “Get ’em yourself, I’m not your slave,” Katie screeched. “Besides, I’m watching TV.”

  “Listen, you obnoxious little shrimp, you do what your daddy tells you to do!” Bertha hollered, bending over to peer into her oven at a rib roast and some baked potatoes.

  “What is Daddy, a cripple? Is he a multiple paraplegic, huh? Is he, huh?”

  “Oh Christ Almighty,” Bud groaned, pushing himself up. “I’ll get the cigarettes myself.”

  “You always do that,” Bertha said. “How do you expect the kid to learn if you always give in like that?”

  “It’s just easier. I’m sorry.”

  “Well then don’t get mad at her if she never does what you ask her to do,” Bertha harped, stirring some flour into a gravy base in a frying pan on the stove.

  Kyril Montana sipped the hot coffee and his entire aching body tingled it tasted so incredibly good. Kitchen smells, of the roast, of baking cheese, of the gravy, a mixture of onion and garlic and strong seasoning, went to his head—he couldn’t wait to eat.

  Bud dropped an unopened pack of filter-tip cigarettes on the table. Kyril Montana took the pack and carefully tore off the wrapper.