by John Nichols
And Bernabé knew it was all hopeless.
And then as he calmed down a little he hoped that it wasn’t.
Maybe I should sign their petition, he thought.
“Why don’t you just shoot yourself in the head?” he whimpered out loud. “It would be simpler.”
Gradually his hysteria drained, he cooled off, his fear changed, becoming more governable, he began to think again, his stomach relaxed, he noticed that his drenched armpits stank … then he realized that for the moment he, they—his drunken compatriots in the bar—were out of danger. Jerry G. had left and once again nobody was dead.
As the relief flowed into him like a fast-rising tide, Bernabé began to tell himself that he had handled the situation pretty competently.
In fact, he had actually faced down a momentarily crazy man who intended to kill him.
Why, he had “stared death right in the face” and sent that lily-livered son of a bitch packing!
A mysterious silence flowed over the heart of town. In the Frontier, revelers’ voices receded, seemed almost to dissipate like a morning mist. And after a minute Bernabé had to smile in spite of it all. Because, bumbling or not, he felt a little like either a God damn babysitter … or somebody’s guardian angel.
* * *
They arrived home shortly after dark, worn out and groggy from guiding the horses down through the forest at dusk. Marvin LaBlue, who was sitting outside in the evening quiet listening to the radio and smoking reflectively, waved as they guided their tired horses into the moon-whitened corral area, then he waited patiently while they dismounted and unsaddled the horses, turning them into the corral. Eliu Archuleta drummed up some pliers to cut the wire on a hay bale, half of which he dumped in to the horses, while Claudio García entered the house, emerging with his arms full of cold beer. He gave them each a can, knocked off his first one in a single deep draught, and then opened another. Eliu and Ruby drank theirs about like that also, and pried seconds from Claudio’s arm. They smiled at each other. Marvin LaBlue said, “I took that petition with me when everybody went down to Doña Luz when Joe turned hisself in, and I figure damn near a hundred people signed, and about an hour later they turned him out again, free as a whistle.”
“Who turned him out?”
“You know. Billy Koontz, and Granny, and Bruno Martínez. They were all scared stiff, those cops. You would of got a chuckle out of it.”
Ruby said, “How did he get out so quickly?”
“They just suddenly come all together,” Marvin drawled. “They heard Joe was down there, you know, and everybody went, I guess, just to make sure the cops didn’t rough him up, and while they was there everybody signed your petition.” Marvin handed her the petition.
Ruby stood there, a beer and a cigarette in one hand, reading through the names on the petition. Eliu squatted with a fresh beer, gazing down the hillside at the Body Shop and Pipe Queen buildings; the wrecker parked in front gleamed like a magical apparatus. Claudio sat down heavily, hunched over, head hanging, staring at the ground, listening to the horses nosing apart the hay, listening also to the quiet country and western strains from Marvin LaBlue’s radio.
Every name. Ruby read every name on the petition, though as she did so no elation spread through her body; she was too tired for that. And anyway, it was only the first step. There would have to be another meeting soon, and she would have to talk with Bloom and convince him to work for them, and she would have to talk with José, and they would have to harvest his beans in a symbolic manner, every person who had signed the petition picking a handful of beans. They would harvest them the same way churches had been built in the old days, with every family contributing some adobe bricks and pitching in with labor so that it was a symbolic labor of all with a part of everyone’s earth in it. And they would have to decide about their demands and confront Ladd Devine, and they would have to notify the press sooner or later, which meant they would need reporters on their side, and they needed a leader, or, more importantly, they needed a group of leaders, and they needed to figure out how to raise more money for their association; they needed to set up a defense fund, and no doubt they would have to find another lawyer because Bloom would need help, if he stuck it out with them … Ruby worried about Bloom, he always seemed so on edge—
And then she wondered if everyone had signed her petition only in a moment of euphoria. Come tomorrow morning, would they all realize what they had done and come running, begging to erase their names? Or would they arrive in force in the morning, toting guns and shouting hallelujah, ordering her to carry that petition down to the capital and personally shove it up the governor’s ass?
Ruby dropped the petition onto the ground beside Marvin LaBlue’s radio, gulped her second beer and opened a third, then walked away from everybody, maybe fifteen yards, and hunkered down, gazing at the Body Shop and Pipe Queen, the wrecker, the shining broken white line on the highway beyond.
They all rested like that, absolutely quiet, drinking more slowly now that their thirsts had been quenched, eyes vaguely fixed on shadow-casting objects downhill. Eventually, Ruby crushed her third aluminum can and went into the house for a towel, saying, “I’m gonna take a bath.” Moments later she emerged, skirted around the house and entered the sagebrush, heading for the few silvery cottonwoods and willows growing along the Rio Lucero.
Bats fluttered through the moonlight sharply etched against soft fluorescent clouds high in the night. Ruby perched on a smoothly sculpted granite rock overlooking a foam-covered pool. Her muscles were tired, her bones ached, her mind was going to sleep like a cat. Once or twice she nodded, almost toppling into the water. She had never been this weary before.
She shed her boots, jeans, her cotton underwear, her shirt and bra, and slipped naked into the luxurious foam. Tipping her head back into the gentle froth, she gazed at the stars. Ruby sighed and held her breasts, laxly rubbing the nipples until they grew stiff, letting her body flow and twirl with the currents, her toes stepping lightly off rocks, pressing gently along patches of sand. She relaxed, allowing her body to be moved however the water chose to move it, turning over once or twice, loving the way her hair in lazy strands caressed her windburned face. The water was very cold, but long ago she had ceased to notice its iciness. Her skin tingled, and that was all. She drifted around the pool on her back, on her stomach, bent always at the waist with her feet lazily pushing off, puttering along the bottom, her limbs loose and almost disconnected, floating serenely in the dark.
Claudio appeared and undressed, slipping into the pool. His hand, like the powerful and barely restrained paw of a cougar, touched her belly, her breasts, her throat. His shaggy head blocked out the stars while they kissed. Then he sank underwater and drifted around in the purple flow, eyes wide open, trying to pierce the gloom, seeing only, finally, her white body with the tan hands and the tan neck and the head cut off. Breaking the surface, he left the pool, dried his hands on his shirt and then rolled a cigarette and squatted on a sandy patch between boulders, smoking, watching her drift aimlessly around the foamy pool, relaxing, slowing down, floating almost as if in sleep.
Five minutes later Ruby walked out of the water into his arms. “Make me a cigarette,” she murmured, staying nestled in his arms while he fashioned the cigarette, lit it, and transferred it to her lips. Then he lifted her easily, she curled her legs around his hips, sliding calmly onto his penis. They grinned, exhaling smoke into each other’s faces, making love. Claudio walked away from the stream, carrying her into the sagebrush until they could no longer hear water, until the land—the mountains, the mesa leading off to the gorge—was very quiet.
“Listen,” she said, and together they listened, smoking while Ruby moved almost imperceptibly on him. They could hear the celebration in Milagro, the Frontier’s jukebox, people singing. They were alone, though, and after a while Claudio began to walk quietly around on the windless mesa, lifting her a little by the buttocks now, and their weary white bodies were wrea
thed in cigarette smoke as, gently, they continued making love.
* * *
The governor himself poured the last two of them to arrive—Ladd Devine the Third and Jim Hirsshorn—a double Scotch on the rocks and a little brandy, respectively, and carried the glasses across the softly lit living room of the governor’s mansion to where the newest arrivals sat. Others gathered in the room for this late-night emergency meeting included Nelson Bookman and Rudy Noyes; the district head of the Bureau of Reclamation, Roland Kyburz; a young aide to the governor who specialized in Chicano relations, Keith Trujillo; a noted educator and sociologist at the state university, Professor E. Clarence Boonam (whose work included several lengthy articles on how southwestern conservancy districts had traditionally destroyed small subsistence farming cultures); the woman who headed the Health and Social Services Department, Ursula Bernal; and the governor’s wife, Peggy. A gloom, a peculiar sadness, an almost nostalgic heaviness clung to thick gold draperies that muffled a half-dozen French doors leading out of the room; it was manifested in the delicate cigarette haze that flowed almost sensually through two large yellow chandeliers.
After he had served these last two drinks, the governor sat down on a piano stool before a shiny black Steinway and plinked a single thoughtful note.
“I take it,” he began, getting right down to brass tacks, “things aren’t all that hunky-dory up in Milagro.”
“That’s a fairly correct analysis of the situation,” Ladd Devine said with what tried to be, but failed to pass as, a wry grin. Then: “I wonder how much of this is going to make the newspapers?”
“None of it,” the governor said. “Excepting whatever that lawyer writes, which probably won’t see the light of day unless they resurrect that little magazine.”
“And Pacheco’s going to be okay?” Jim Hirsshorn asked.
“So I’ve been told.”
“What the hell happened with the bulldozer?” Nelson Bookman asked.
“It was a backhoe,” Devine corrected. “There’s an old man, Amarante Córdova, who lives nearby—”
“A ninety-two, ninety-three-year-old old man,” Jim Hirsshorn said disgustedly.
“He had a gun, what could my man do?” Devine continued. “He doesn’t speak Spanish, my man doesn’t, but he got the drift. He told me he figured the slightest misstep and that old guy would have shot him. Then, after Jerry—my man, Jerry Grindstaff is his name, a Dancing Trout foreman—after he left, this old Córdova fellow drove the backhoe across the mesa and into the gorge. At least, that’s how the tracks read. We didn’t go down in the gorge because we couldn’t see anything from the rim. It must have fallen into the river.”
Keith Trujillo whistled softly: “A ninety-three-year-old bastard did that?”
“So far as we know. Jerry Grindstaff, he’d recognize Amarante Córdova. And there wasn’t anybody else around.”
Nelson Bookman, consulting a notebook, said, “So recent events summarize, not necessarily in order, a bit like this. They burned the sign. They turned Lavadie’s sheep into green alfalfa. They cleaned out those trout from the hatchery. They threatened your foreman with a gun, and destroyed one of your vehicles, a backhoe. When Joe Mondragón turned himself in this afternoon, at least thirty-five to forty persons with guns parked in a threatening manner outside the police station. A bullet was fired through Joe Mondragón’s window. And apparently there’s talk of other people moving back into and repairing the houses on the west side, in the ghost town area—”
“You’re forgetting a softball game a while ago that almost developed into a riot,” Jim Hirsshorn said. “It finally had to be suspended in the first inning.”
“Apparently the people have banded together and are not readily going to be intimidated,” Nelson Bookman said thoughtfully.
“There’s an understatement for you,” Jim Hirsshorn rasped miserably.
“Anybody who couldn’t see this coming had to be blind,” Ursula Bernal said. “Aside from Algodon County, Chamisa County is the poorest in the state. Fifteen, twenty, sometimes as high as thirty-five percent unemployment, sixty percent of the people on food stamps, a per capita income of a thousand, maybe even less than a thousand dollars a year. This is the 1970s” she added emotionally, “and the state has a per capita income of twenty-nine hundred, and nationwide it’s about thirty-seven hundred, and nationwide the median income for a family of four is ten thousand dollars a year—”
She stopped, embarrassed, flushing while her words rang out strangely in the ornate room. An overworked, frustrated, very decent woman, Ursula Bernal directed a handcuffed agency that erratically dribbled out pennies to men, women, and children who could have used hundred-dollar bills plus bushel baskets of health care, an entirely different school program, a lot of understanding and kindness, and so on, ad infinitum.
“Who here doesn’t know all those figures?” Keith Trujillo said somewhat testily.
“The thing is, they haven’t changed since I was born,” Ursula Bernal said tightly. “And that event happened to take place forty-eight years ago.”
“A-hem.” Roland Kyburz, the Bureau of Reclamation head, cleared his throat prior to changing the subject. “What I’m interested in discussing this evening is the future of the Indian Creek Conservancy District and that Indian Creek Dam.”
“If we want to put it in, legally there’s not that much problem, is there?” Jim Hirsshorn said.
“No problem,” according to Rudy Noyes. “You can’t lose.”
“Only somebody could dynamite the dam, sabotage the construction vehicles, terrorize tourists, and so forth,” Ladd Devine whimpered gloomily.
“That begins to look like a possibility.” Nelson Bookman drained his drink, and, even before he had it back on the coaster, the governor’s wife, smiling gaily, had vaulted with a professional swirl of skirts across the spongy beige rug and lifted the glass gently but firmly from his hand. He didn’t have to remind her what he was drinking—she knew; she had memorized the drinking habits of almost a thousand important people.
“We can’t stop now,” Jim Hirsshorn said. “We’ve already begun to develop the recreation plots up there; contractors are under contract; we’ve invested a hell of a lot in plans for the ski basin and preliminary excavation; it’s cost us I don’t know how much for the initial golf course designs. And we’ve already invested God knows how much—about how much would you say, Ladd?—in eastern and midwestern advertising for the Miracle Valley recreation homesites.”
“A lot,” Devine said. “In the hundreds of thousands.”
“Not to mention what the bureau has sunk into a dozen planning reports, hydrographical surveys, maps, cost-benefit analysis, and—you know,” Roland Kyburz added. “The state is entitled to that water, and if we pulled out, believe me, it wouldn’t be that easy to find another suitable area.”
“But it’s all a joke,” Ursula Bernal said grimly. “You pretend the water is for the people in that valley, who don’t want it, don’t need it, can’t use it, but will have to pay for it, while Mr. Hirsshorn and Mr. Devine here make a killing.”
“It depends on how you look at it,” Roland Kyburz said frostily.
Nelson Bookman said, “Everybody concerned will profit.”
“Bullshit.”
Bookman shot a swift bitter glance at the HSS head; the others in the room remained uncomfortably silent for a moment.
“If this gets held up for another six months I could lose the notes that have already been promised,” Ladd Devine said. “In the end, the way interest rates are fluctuating, a serious delay could cost a mint.”
“Suppose the dam were dropped altogether?” The governor plinked another note.
Devine turned gray. “Oh shit—excuse me. But, I mean, we’re not thinking in terms of something like that, are we?”
“I don’t know,” the governor said.
“See, if this thing caught fire in Milagro, it could spread across the other five northern counties and we’d be
in serious trouble,” Keith Trujillo said. “Those people up there are ornery. You got to handle them with kid gloves.”
“But this whole thing is good for them,” Devine almost whined. “Hell, if it hadn’t been for me and my grandfather, those farmers would have had to migrate out of there long ago.”
Nobody responded to that.
“The problem is, apparently we’ve handled it wrong,” Nelson Bookman said. “That’s my fault as much as anybody. I assessed the risks, called in Kyril Montana, and I’m willing to wager it wasn’t the correct thing to do, although I’m not sure how we could have proceeded in order to avoid what’s happened. We probably should have jumped on Joe and taken him to court right away, playing it up front and screw the publicity. I don’t know. The risk there was that we’d have challenged them, and they’d have met the challenge, and we’d have wound up arresting the entire town. We had hoped to sneak through the conservancy district, your dam, Ladd, without much hoopla. We underestimated the people’s ability to comprehend the complexities and to react against what none of them actually understands, other than instinctively, to this day. I think it would have gone smoothly if not for that beanfield, which was their stroke of luck, or apparently their rallying point, whatever. Call it our temporary Waterloo, if you will. Now we’ve got to make some hard decisions, change our tack, so to speak, without igniting the type of conflagration in which everybody would lose.”
“Those damn old-fashioned people are a real thorn,” Kyburz muttered.
“Thank God for that!” Ursula Bernal blurted, her dark eyes flashing.
“I just meant—” Kyburz stopped himself, shrugged.
“I think, no matter what, there’s going to be tension,” Devine said. “There always has been. You can’t escape it. You just have to go ahead and deal with the incidents one at a time. This whole thing has only been just that, a small incident. They have no real strength, and they never will have it. The people up there aren’t united.”