Coyote Ugly

by Pati Nagle

  Coyote Ugly

  and Other Tales

  Pati Nagle

  Evennight Books

  Cedar Crest, New Mexico

  in loving memory

  of

  Avery Leeming Nagle

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My past editors, especially those who took a chance on a new writer and encouraged me to continue, helped me immensely. My fellow writers in workshops, especially Plotbusters and the Oregon Writers Network, have given their support, encouragement, and honest critique. My colleauges including the wonderful cooperative Book View Café are a great support network. Patricia Rice in particular helped me bring this book together.

  My friends and family, especially my beloved spouse, have championed my work and nurtured my fragile writer’s ego. Without them I would have quit long ago.

  Heartfelt thanks to all of these folks, and most of all to my readers, without whom there would be no point to the exercise.

  Coyote Ugly

  and Other Tales

  Pati Nagle

  Table of Contents

  Mother Ditch

  Madre slept, dozing in the summer heat as her contras, like suckling children, drew her life-giving water out into the fields. To those who treated her with respect, the acequia madre was a kind and generous mother. The water coursed through her main channel and out into a network of silvery veins beneath the hot sun, feeding every field and pasture in El Pueblo. Where her waters ran the green grasses sprang up, and tender shoots of wild asparagus bloomed like little ferns, and children played until their own mothers scolded them away from the ditch.

  Madre heard them as she drowsed. The people of El Pueblo were her children from planting until harvest, and she rejoiced in bringing them prosperity and happiness. She gave life to their crops, and her power turned their mills to grind the chiles and grain they grew in the fields that she watered.

  The people of El Pueblo took their water from her except in late winter and early spring, when her course lay dry and cold. Just as the fields needed to lie fallow sometimes, she needed time to rest, to give the people access to her banks for the annual cleaning. If they did not cut away the weeds and brush each year she would choke and strangle, and their fields would dry to dust. Madre walked sometimes, at night when El Pueblo was sleeping. She grew herself a shape, a shadow, a whisper of her substance, and walked along her own banks. It amused her to feel how the women walked, or the men, or the children. To look at the world through eyes that were shadows of their own. She never strayed far from her banks, and never showed herself, though now and again someone glimpsed her and made up a story to account for it.

  One day, under the baking sun, a funeral was held that made her very sad. Old Juan Delgado, who had been Mayordomo in El Pueblo for years, had passed away. The village mourned, and Madre mourned with them, for the Mayordomo was her caretaker, and Juan had been good to her.

  He had seen her once, walking the ditch banks after midnight. Madre walked the banks to explore and to amuse herself, but Juan walked them to see that all was as it should be, that the compuertas were open and the water flowing freely, that every field received its rightful share. He had encountered Madre near the atarque where the water was taken from the river into the acequia, on a night when the air was calm and the sky glimmered with a thousand stars.

  Caught outside the shelter of her ditch banks, Madre had stopped short, watching Juan. The shape she had put on was hard to keep still, for by nature she was seldom still. Something like a dress draped around her, but it flowed and wavered softly in the night. Something like hair hung about her shadowed face, but it seemed more alive than hair.

  Juan gazed back at her for a very long time, then finally said, “Buenas noches, Madre,” and walked on.

  Now he was gone. Madre listened to the mass that was said in the little church, and heard the soft crying of the widow. She wept, too, her sadness flowing along in the water.

  Now El Pueblo must choose a new Mayordomo. Each year there was an election, though a good Mayordomo like Juan was often reelected every year without question. Now the Comisión who set the rules that the Mayordomo enforced summoned all the villagers to the church to cast their votes for Juan’s replacement.

  Madre listened to them come and go, heard their whispers of sadness and discontent. Soon she heard whispers of anger as well, and she wondered what was wrong.

  A day later, she knew. The man elected to be Mayordomo was Esteban de la Plata, a man who swaggered with his barrel chest pushed forward, as if he would like to bump intruders out of his way. He began at once to swagger up and down the acequia banks, puffed up with his own importance, carrying the Mayordomo’s tequío, the stick used to measure the length of ditch each landowner must clear in spring. It was foolish and small of him, but Madre was willing to overlook this if Esteban did a good job as Mayordomo. She watched him, and waited.

  He came to the field that belonged to the Benitez family, a long, narrow strip of land with one short end along the acequia, like all the other fields in El Pueblo. Generations of the Benitez family had worked that field. Their houses, three of them, stood on the high ground far at the back of their land, a little cluster standing watch over the crops.

  When Esteban reached the compuerta that gave water to the Benitez field, he shut it. Madre felt the sudden break in the flow. She was not finished feeding water to the field, she knew the young plants had not drunk enough. So did Manuel Benitez, who looked up from his work, then set aside his hoe and walked up to the ditch bank where Esteban stood.

  “Good morning, Esteban. Is there a problem?”

  “Yes, there is a problem.” Esteban tipped his head forward so that the shade of his hat hid his face as he looked at Manuel. “Your family did not clear all of your tarea this spring.”

  “The work was done.”

  “Yes, but not by you!”

  “The neighbors were glad to help me. My father’s foot was broken, and my brother had to take his wife to the city for an operation.”

  “Your son did not help.” Esteban used his tequío to point toward the field, where Tomás was bent over, pulling weeds.

  “He’s only fourteen. He’s not allowed.”

  Esteban puffed out his chest. “You still didn’t do your share of the work.”

  Manuel gazed at him. An angry swallow moved his throat.

  “What do you want?”

  “You don’t appreciate how hard I’m working! All day I walk these ditches looking out for your water!”

  “What do you want, Esteban?”

  “Maybe it would be easier if I had a woman to cook for me. Maybe your daughter could come—”

  “Angelina’s engaged.” Manuel’s eyes were flat and cold.

  “Ah, well. I don’t know, compadre. I guess I’ll have to buy my dinner at the café.”

  Manuel dug in his pocket and pulled out a handful of change. He looked at it, pushed the silver around with a fingertip, then held it out to Esteban.

  “Here. Six dollars and thirty cents. It’s all I have.”

  Esteban took the money, rattling it in his first. He grinned as he opened the compuerta, releasing the water. “Gracias, Manuel.”

  Madre watched Manuel walk away in silence and go back to working his field. Esteban stood watching, too, for a minute. Then he laughed softly and walked on down the ditch road.

  Esteban had never been popular. Madre was surprised the people had chosen him. Now the murmurs she had heard after the election grew and swelled. Each day the level of discontent rose like the river’s spring floods, threatening to overflow. There were whispers that the election had been fixed, that Benny Armijo, who counted the votes, was a friend of Esteban’s. Benny had been wearing a new hat around, with silver conchos on the ba
nd.

  “See?” the angry villagers told one another. “That proves it!”

  Madre began to pay close attention to everything Esteban did. She heard him threaten old man Sanchez, saying he would turn him in to the Sheriff for drunkenness. She saw him turn off the water to the Lovatos’ field when they couldn’t pay their cuota for the ditch repairs on time. And she watched him count over all the cuotas he collected, then put some of the money in a box under his bed before turning it over to the Comisión.

  Madre was angry. Esteban was a bad Mayordomo. Surely the people of El Pueblo saw that. Surely they wanted a change.

  But they were afraid of Esteban, with his swagger and his stick and his vicious tongue. And until the next election, there was not much to be done. The Comisión had the authority to remove him, but that would require a very serious situation indeed. Esteban had not committed any crime, or at least, none that anyone but Madre had seen.

  She began to fight back.

  One day Esteban turned off the Widow Chaves’s water because she refused to pay him a second cuota when he claimed she’d never paid the first. Madre had seen him take the money a week before. No one else had been there, and everyone knew Señora Chaves was old and getting forgetful.

  Madre broke the compuerta late at night and flooded the widow’s bean field.

  Another day Esteban discovered that a section of one of the contra ditches was about to collapse. Instead of hiring workers from El Pueblo to make the repairs, he brought in some friends of his from the city. They slung a few shovelfuls of mud around, then sat on the ditch banks drinking beer half the afternoon.

  Madre drew every tiny trickling sound and every watery gurgle in the acequias together, and wove a voice out of them. With it she whispered in the ears of the lazy workers.

  “You are a cheating sinner,” she said, and to each of them she sounded like his own mother. “Get to work before you loaf your way into Hell!”

  The city men jumped up and threw down their beers. Then, to prove they were not afraid, they talked loudly about how this was a job only for stupid idiots, and how Esteban had lied to them about the hours and the pay (which probably he had). Then they climbed into their cars and drove away. Esteban had to hire workers from the village to finish the repairs.

  About a week after that Madre noticed that Esteban had left the compuerta to his own field open too long. Now that she could make a voice she whispered to him to close the gate, but he just waved his hand by his ear as if to chase away a fly.

  Madre picked up an old sneaker that had fallen into her ditch, and some old rags, and a toy truck that was broken, and half a tire, and jumbled them all together in the compuerta to Esteban’s field, making a little dam that stopped the water. When Esteban found it he cursed long and loud, and fished everything out of the water and threw it back in the ditch.

  That night Madre made the dam again. This time she added a bunch of weeds that grew in the muddy banks, and an old china dinner plate that was chipped, and every rock and pebble she could roll along. The pile was so big it took Esteban half the next morning to clear it all away. This time he took everything out of the ditch and threw it on the bank.

  While he was working, José Mora, one of the men on the Comisión, came strolling along the ditch bank. José stopped to watch Esteban, who was up to his waist in water, pulling handfuls of rocks out of the compuerta.

  “Buenos dias, Esteban,” José said after watching a while.

  “That’s what you think,” said Esteban. He pulled the tennis shoe out of the mud and flung it onto a pile with the plate and the toy truck and the rags.

  “Cleaning out the ditch a bit? That’s good.”

  “Cleaning out the mess some bastard made of my gate.”

  Esteban scowled as he reached into the water again. Madre wanted to push something sharp up against his fingers, but he had already taken the chipped plate out of the water.

  “That’s just trash, Esteban. That just drifted there.”

  “Yeah? This is the second time in two days I had to clear it out. The same junk. You want to tell me it drifted there twice?”

  José raised his bushy gray eyebrows and shook his head, but it was more because he didn’t have an explanation. Esteban stared at him with narrowed eyes.

  “I know who done it, too,” Esteban said. “That lazy Benitez punk, Tomás.”

  “Eh, how do you know that?”

  “I just know.”

  “Tomás is a good boy.”

  Esteban didn’t say anything, just scooped another handful of pebbles out of the gate. All the rest of Madre’s little dam shifted, and it gave way and the water burbled down from the gate toward the field.

  Esteban slogged out of the ditch, the mud sucking at his boots. He rolled up onto the bank and lay gasping and frowning in his wet and muddy jeans. José squatted down beside him.

  “Listen, Esteban, there been some complaints.”

  Esteban glared at him. “Complaints?”

  Madre felt a wave of hope. She listened to José with all her being.

  “It’s nothing major,” José said. “I know this is your first year, and you don’t know all the customs yet. We like to cut people some slack, you know? Don’t have to be a hardass about the cuotas being on time. We know everybody’s going to pay. It’s all right if they’re a little late.”

  “Oh, it is, eh? All right with you, maybe. You don’t have to hire men to fix the ditch.”

  “There was enough money for that.”

  “This time.”

  “All I’m saying is you should have a little patience, Esteban. Have a little kindness. These are your neighbors, your friends. No one wants to cheat us.”

  “That’s what you think,” said Esteban.

  That’s what you think, thought Madre.

  After that, things just got worse. Esteban went right on bullying and lying, cheating the villagers out of their water and their money. Nobody in El Pueblo was rich, but that summer everyone felt more poor than they had ever felt before. People walked around the village with slow steps, unless they saw Esteban coming, when they ran and hid. No one smiled any more. Madre thought the village was dying of a broken heart.

  She kept on fighting, but her little tricks and taunts only made Esteban angry. One day after she had broken the latch on the compuerta above the Navarros’ field (she was getting good at that), Esteban went and found Tomás Benitez and took him into the trees where no one could see and beat him until the blood ran down his face.

  “That’s for messing with me,” Esteban said, breathing hard as he stood over the cringing boy. “Don’t you ever mess with me again. Don’t you tell nobody neither, or I’ll whip you again.”

  Madre wept for poor Tomás, but there was nothing she could do. He stumbled home, and he wouldn’t tell his family what had happened.

  That night Madre made a decision. She had to get the village to pay attention. She had to make them see that Esteban was no good. She could only think of one thing to do.

  She went up to the atarque that guided the river’s water into her ditch. It was late in summer and the river was low, so she didn’t have much trouble piling rocks up against the atarque to shift the flow of water back out to the river. It took her most of the night, tumbling one rock at a time from the riverbanks, but by the morning she was done.

  The sun came up over El Pueblo, and the people came out to their fields to work, but they didn’t work. They climbed up the ditch banks and stood staring down instead.

  The acequia madre was dry. Only a little mud in the bottom of the ditch.

  A cry went up for the Mayordomo. The villagers hurried to Esteban’s house and dragged him out of his bed.

  “The acequia’s dry!” they said to him.

  “What do you mean, dry?”

  “It’s dry! Go and see!”

  Esteban hauled on his clothes and his boots. He grabbed his tequío to remind everyone of his authority, and went up to the ditch bank.

&
nbsp; The roots that the trees had slipped into the water over the summer dangled out in the air, and the weeds drooped from thirst under the hot sun. An old, flat basketball lay in the middle of the ditch, the mud around its base dark with dampness. Around it the bottom of the ditch was dry and already cracking.

  “Sonofabitch!” Esteban said, and his face turned red with rage. “Which one of you pendejos did this?”

  “Hold on,” said José. “No one did this.”

  “You think it just happened, old man?” Esteban spat at the ground. The little wet spot darkened as it sank into the soil, then began to fade in the heat.

  “You got to go find out,” said José. “That’s your job, Esteban. Find out what happened. If you need help, come and get us.”

  “Stay away from me,” Esteban said, looking from José to Manuel Benitez to Carlos Lovato. “All of you. Stay the hell away!”

  Esteban stumbled away up the ditch bank, cussing as he went. The people of El Pueblo watched him go. They were quiet, because they each felt a little guilty. No one really wanted to help Esteban.

  It was his responsibility to keep the water flowing. They all hid their secret glee, and stood along the ditch bank talking very solemnly about what could have gone wrong and waiting to see what Esteban would do.

  Esteban ran along the bank, all the way up to the river. All the way he cussed. First it was “sonofabitch,” then it changed to just “bitch.”

  “You bitch,” he muttered as he ran along the acqeuia, limping a little from a stitch in his side, leaning on his tequío. “You stinking bitch.”

  Madre secretly smiled. At last Esteban was beginning to understand.

  He dropped to a walk, and she watched him hobble along the last few yards of the ditch bank. Up here by the river the ditch was deep, the sides steep and wide apart. Esteban stopped beside the atarque and stood staring at the pile of rocks filling the head of the acequia.