by John Nichols
Then Death, decked out in a sombrero, a serape, and shiny silver spurs, a spicy carnival apparition dancing over the little village, chuckled like a dove, winked in a joking, comradely fashion at Pacheco, and jitterbugged quietly on into the resplendent and remarkably spangled horizon.
Epilogue
“It’s an ill wind that blows no good.”
—Carolina Montoya
It was traditional in Milagro, at midnight every December thirty-first, for the people to congregate in their backyards or in their fields and spend a few minutes discharging various firearms at the stars in honor of the New Year.
Of course this particular summer night heralded no New Year, but all the same, around one o’clock on the morning after Joe Mondragón strutted out of the Doña Luz state police headquarters a free man, some shooting began, and it caught on, passing from house to house, from backyards to small fields, the people outside jaybird naked or in their pajamas or fully dressed and drunkenly weaving with open beer cans lodged in their back pockets, as, one after another, they happily fired bullets at the general cosmos, or aimed more carefully, trying to perforate the moon. And then as suddenly as it had started the barrage ended. Folks trundled inside and laid down their guns, and some began gently to make love, while others kept on drinking, and still others rehashed yesterday and wondered about tomorrow.
At the Chateau Martínez, the Staurolite Baron slumped onto his piano stool and played a walking boogie-woogie bass with his left hand and some jazzy treble runs with his nonexistent right hand, while the ghost of Pacheco’s pig, whose inessential form had finally managed to pass through the white picket fence surrounding the Martínez digs, started eating Onofre’s Astroturf lawn and his plastic garden flowers.
At the Joe Mondragón house not far away, Joe drowsily stroked Herbie Goldfarb’s guitar and hoarsely croaked out a Tiny Morrie song, while Nancy set free the sparrows that had been imprisoned in the ballot jar ever since Joe caught them to celebrate his release from the pendejo factory. And, hands on her hips, tipping drunkenly to starboard, Nancy watched the tiny, confused birds flutter off helter-skelter into the night.
On the other side of the highway Snuffy Ledoux was carving a little Smokey the Bear just for old time’s sake, and nearby Amarante Córdova sat on his bed drenched in tears, bemoaning the loss of his old-fashioned Colt Peacemaker.
Down the highway apiece Claudio García and Ruby Archuleta were asleep, but Marvin LaBlue had wandered into the body shop and was on his back now, tinkering with a transmission as he listened to country and western music on WBAP.
Bud Gleason sneezed. And Bertha, throwing a fat leg across his stomach and chucking him under the chin, teased: “Somebody is thinking about you.”
“Who?” Bud asked sleepily.
“Kyril Montana.”
“Thanks,” the real estate agent moaned, “I needed that.”
“I almost signed their petition,” Bernabé Montoya told his wife. “To tell the truth, I might still do it. Which would mean I’d lose the next election to Pancho Armijo by a landslide. In fact, I bet old Pancho already is in love with me for even thinking about signing that petition—”
“Of course he is,” Carolina replied, uncorking a gigantic yawn. “After all, it’s an ill wind that blows no good.”
“Ai, Chihuahua…”
And, now that it had devoured most of the town’s water snakes, that grubby yellow feline reincarnation of Cleofes Apodaca was pitter-pattering quietly along the irrigation ditches, hunting frogs. Thus does history turn in cycles.
At last, late late that night, or rather early in the morning, Onofre Martínez passed out over his piano; Joe Mondragón slumped insensate beside Herbie Goldfarb’s guitar; and Marvin LaBlue lost consciousness with two wrenches lying across his chest and a greasy smile on his hillbilly face.
A small brown bear waddled through the heart of town stirring up parking ticket flakes, but nothing else: the Doberman Brutus in the Pilar Café was much too tired to bark. A few minutes later the bear crossed through Herbie Goldfarb’s yard, but this time the high-minded pacifist, conscientious objector, and VISTA volunteer manqué didn’t notice because he was too busy dreaming about how to guillotine, garrote, gag, strangle, electrocute, bludgeon, and in general crucify Joe Mondragón for punching him in the mouth.
While over by Joe’s beanfield, almost hidden in dark shadows, smoking a cigarette and hacking uncomfortably from time to time, sat Amarante Córdova’s miserable Coyote Angel, trying to cop a weed and five minutes of tranquillity before the bell rang for the next round.
Roosters began to crow. “I’m so tired I could sleep for ten years,” Bernabé Montoya said, rolling onto his stomach. And with that he realized he was not going to wake up at 5:00 A.M.—not this morning. Nobody in Milagro was going to wake up at 5:00 A.M. In fact, they were all so drunk and exhausted and suffering from a release of tension that every last citizen would probably sleep until noon.
In light of this revelation, just before conking out, with one arm draped lovingly across Carolina’s chest, Bernabé murmured happily:
“Welcome, ball fans, to the World Series of Peace.”
The phone rang.
“Bernie?” Nick Rael gasped frantically. “My mom just escaped again, and I think she headed into the mountains. We got to form another posse right now!”
Afterword
Actually, I’ve sort of had it with The Milagro Beanfield War. I published this book when I was thirty-four; now I’m almost fifty-three. This was only my third effort to reach print. Since then, I have probably written at least twenty-five tomes, and published twelve of them. These include novels like The Magic Journey and American Blood and An Elegy for September, all of which certainly loom large in my personal legend. Yet every time anyone introduces me to anybody else, they usually say, “‘This is John Nichols; he wrote The Milagro Beanfield War.’”
I cringe. I want to grind my teeth and scream. Instead, of course, I always shake hands and smile politely and murmur banal gratitudes when people respond in a properly unctuous manner, telling me how much they enjoyed “my” movie.
Another thing that happens often: strangers come up to me and say, “‘You’re John Nichols? Hey, man, I really liked your book.’”
I used to respond, “Oh really? Which one of my books? Magic Journey? Sky’s the Limit? A Ghost in the Music?”
But this obnoxious retort inevitably turned out more embarrassing for me than it was for them. So finally I got in the habit of simply nodding and being grateful for their sincerely tendered kudos.
Back in 1974, people in publishing told me, “‘You can’t sell a book with a foreign word in the title.’” They meant milagro, the Spanish word for miracle. And mostly they were correct.
When Hollywood optioned the novel that same year, it too informed me that you couldn’t sell a movie with a “foreign” word in the title.
But nowadays the word milagro has been unceremoniously pizzafied and deified to a somewhat humiliating degree. In my hometown there’s a Milagro art gallery and a Milagro bed-and-breakfast. A Denver company running tourists down to New Mexico calls itself Milagro Tours. I have heard of stores featuring radio ad campaigns offering prizes in merchandise for astute listeners able to guess the number of Milagro beans in a jar. Currently, throughout much of the Southwest, whenever disparate elements in a community lock horns over land or water issues, the battle is likely to be described in newspaper editorials as “another Milagro Beanfield Wars [sic].” And not long ago a friend sent me an advertisement from a Santa Fe alternative rag offering “Milagro Fertilizer” for sale.
To boot, my agent just called (in late March 1993) to inform me there are plans afoot at Universal Pictures to develop a TV series based on this book.
My response to that bit of information is to discharge cold sweat, feel faint, and start looking for cheap real estate in North Dakota.
In short, Milagro, which in the beginning was a story that actually saved my life, has metamorph
osed into an albatross around my neck. Lest it seem that I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth, however, let me explain.
* * *
My habit has always been to move on as soon as a work is finished. I have never been able to read one of my novels or nonfiction pieces after it has appeared in print.
A reason for this is that usually I find countless errors, poor writing, asinine metaphors, and garbled syntax, all of which make me sick to my stomach.
Too, by the time of publication, I am bored silly and sick to death of my prose. I have scant interest in the subject matter. And naturally the book feels like a failure. I know I could have done better. In fact, I should have done better. More to the point, I would have done better if I hadn’t been such a lazy bum, or such a cavalier artist, or such a sloppy craftsperson.
It is a survival tactic with me, then, to face the future immediately once a book is completed. More important, for thirty years I have nourished a dream that one day I’m going to put it all together and write the perfect novel. Which will be referred to as a “small classic.” Or perhaps as a “major classic”—what do I know? But always, this masterpiece is yet to come. It’s my green light at the end of a pier across the water.
And it keeps me from wallowing in the despair of looking back.
Meanwhile, I love my craft and sullen art. And at basic emotional levels all the books I have written are dear to my heart. In fact, I think The Magic Journey is a more wonderful and complete novel than Milagro, so why can’t I be known for that? It’s no secret, either, that I feel American Blood is a more courageous book than Milagro, so how come no cult has grown up around it? And I’d like to believe An Elegy for September is a perfect little gem that’ll last forever, its lean clarity and simple message much more accessible than Milagro’s boisterous hyperboles.
Yet despite the other stuff I have written, I sometimes feel as if I’ve died and was frozen in an amber paperweight in 1974. The public has arrested my literary development in a Milagro time warp. I have been strapped to the rack of a single book like Ralph Ellison to Invisible Man, George Eliot to Middlemarch, Cervantes to Don Quixote, and Max Shulman to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.
Yes, the Milagro fictional gangbangers continue to mug my eclectic and always-evolving oeuvre. Relentlessly, José Mondragón and Herbie Goldfarb, Ruby Archuleta and Ladd Devine pitter-patter through my literary output like players in a sort of immortal morality play that never grows up, knocking aside Lorraine Waldrum and Bart Darling, punching Pookie Adams in the solar plexus, stealing Wendall Oler’s cantankerous thunder, and mocking Joe Miniver’s wishy-washy New Age shenanigans.
And now, horror of horrors, the whole lovable crew may wind up in a television series slotted for Wednesday nights, wedged between some gub-gub sitcom and a pro-wrestling moroniganza.
How will I be able to shop at the local supermarkets, I ask myself, if my pals, the checkers, are always analyzing the latest TV episode while I’m paying for my vodka, my Dos Equis, and my prazepam capsules?
Already I can hear Enrique or Angela or Maxine speaking like this:
“‘John, we hope you got a lot of money for selling out so big, so you can find a really isolated island to buy in the South Pacific, where the local Taos ranchers and irrigators cannot track you down and slit your throat for being such a total pendejo puto lambé vendido gabacho explotador.’”
And how can I answer that? “Hey, dudes, mellow out, it’s not my fault the book ran way from me. Blame it on the readers. Honest, I didn’t know the gun was loaded.
“And who could have predicted it, anyway?”
* * *
Certainly, not me.
When I sat down to write this epic I was thirty-two years old, nearly broke, and in the middle of a dissolving marriage. And I hadn’t sold a book since The Wizard of Loneliness in 1965.
Why this dearth of commercial action?
Well, you can blame it on Vietnam and on the sixties’ political education of John Nichols.
See, right after the Wizard sale, I became aware of the war in Vietnam. I was living in New York City. One thing led to another, and pretty soon I had become a rabid antiwar activist. Yet I was always torn between actually manning barricades, or staying at home to create a polemical art. This made me an erratic activist at best; my heart was always writing novels.
I wanted these novels to be powerful left-wing diatribes, but unfortunately I had no skill for the genre.
Nevertheless, between 1965 and 1972 I penned about six very bad “radical” novels that never saw the light of day. In fact, by 1967 I was so angry and disillusioned with my country that I could hardly think straight, let alone write well. And quite often I concluded it was useless anyway to be a serious writer in a capitalist system (ours) that ridiculed and ignored its cultural workers. I don’t know how many times I decided to chuck the typewriter for good and hit the streets chanting slogans and hassling the pigs.
Yet I avoided many demonstrations and kept on typing. I hoped my words, if ever published, would help stop the war. I also wanted to define the nature of class struggle, developing in my readers a Marxist point of view. I knew I was operating on shaky aesthetic ground, but I did not want to follow blindly the rules and regulations of bourgeois art.
Of course, neither could I accept being a social realist.
So I compromised between the two … and floundered.
* * *
In 1969, feeling almost insane from the tension of the war and urban stress, I left New York. Two days before Neil Armstrong reached the moon, my wife Ruby, son Luke, and I departed the Apple and headed for Taos, New Mexico.
Almost immediately, in Taos, I began writing for a muckraking journal, The New Mexico Review. The pay was minimal—I never received a cent. But the journalism gave me a sense of doing both my politics and my art.
My new hometown was in as much turmoil as New York City. There was a Moratorium committee and a Nuclear Freeze. I soon became most active in a group called the Tres Ríos Association, an alliance of irrigation ditch systems from across the valley. The association was challenging a proposed conservancy district and the building of a large dam—the Indian Camp Dam—a few miles south of town. The Tres Ríos leader was an elderly gentleman named Andrés Martínez, who soon became a good friend of mine.
In the conservancy struggle I functioned as a researcher and a publicist. Most small farmers opposed to the dam understood the project would drown them in new taxes and other socioeconomic problems. But they were up against the state and federal governments, the Bureau of Reclamation, the local business community, and a legal system geared to promote this sort of “progress.”
Andrés Martínez and company held firm in their anti-dam position. They knew the odds. Rarely had a major irrigation or conservancy plan along the Rio Grande watershed been defeated by local citizens. And all such projects usually disenfranchised local, financially marginal people in favor of development and agribusiness interests.
In Taos, however, the Tres Ríos Association put up a major fight. I chronicled this struggle in The New Mexico Review. For a spell, almost every issue featured an article about the controversy. Each week I attended meetings and listened to Taos farmers and ranchers talk about their lives, culture, and the history of the valley. Our community was under siege, torn between the old ways and “progress, American style.”
I learned a lot of Taos lore, culture, and personality in a very short time.
The conservancy battle lasted nearly a decade. Unfortunately, the Review, an all-volunteer operation, had a shorter life span. Born in 1968, it died on November 1, 1972, because we who ran it were broke and exhausted and needed to find paying jobs.
The board had wanted to kill it earlier, but I couldn’t bear to watch the paper die. Forget that I’d never earned a nickel—the Review had kept alive my identity as a writer. So I volunteered to save the Review, and was its editor for the final three issues. The friend who helped me put the paper together was a
woman named Rini Templeton.
To whom I owe more than I can ever say.
* * *
A graphic artist and a fine sculptor, Rini was also a political being who profoundly shaped my own beliefs. She lived in a rustic cabin without running water at a beautiful location south of Taos on Pilar Hill. Immediately outside her door a wide mesa dotted by juniper and piñon trees stretched to the horizon, pure and undefiled. About four miles due west extended a deep crack in the earth, the Rio Grande gorge. During breaks from the Review, Rini and I often walked over the mesa to the gorge rim. We gazed down at the river below. Sometimes we tramped across the snow-laden plain at night under a full moon and plentiful stars, while all about us coyotes yapped and cackled.
It was no easy task, that paper. But we both loved it. More than anyone I have known, Rini was a tireless worker. She drank coffee and smoked countless Mexican cigarettes. She was patient, humorous, and no-nonsense about theories of type style, structure, composition, design. We had endless discussions about content, editing, advertising and graphics, political ramifications, editorial policy. It was a lonely and exclusive task, and I wish it could have continued forever.
But we had no money, and we too reached the end of our resources, and so finally the Review became history.
Almost the day after Rini and I called it quits on the muckraking front, I began writing Milagro. By now I was a literary has-been, a forgotten writer. If this last gasp failed, I would have to get a job, any job.
Naturally, I was going to write yet another “political” novel. And I still hoped to elucidate the nature of class struggle, and also to speak about cultural genocide. I wanted my words to inspire people to organize for their human and cultural rights. But I also figured, This book had better be readable. And so, for the first time in years, I bent over backward to be humorous as well as politically correct.
I hadn’t planned out the novel; I just started typing. My friend Mike Kimmel scornfully (and affectionately) calls this the “blam method of writing.” It can be very sloppy, of course. The one great virtue for me, however, is that in fairly short order I accumulate pages. In this way, the book becomes “real.” Then I rewrite until the cows come home.