The Milagro Beanfield War (11 page)

“Hey Amarante. What are you going to do with that gun?” she asked.

He grinned, tipping his hat to her. “Hello,” he said. “How are you today, Mrs. Archuleta?”

She pointed. “How come the hardware, cousin? Who you gonna plug?”

“A Thanksgiving turkey,” the old man suddenly barked. “A big Thanksgiving turkey.”

Ruby arched her eyebrows, laughing again, ground the stickshift into first, and, with the admonition “Make sure it's pointed in the right direction before you squeeze the trigger!” she bolted her truck away.

Whereupon Amarante Córdova, shining in a triumphal light, pirouetted clumsily in the middle of the plaza area to acknowledge the attention and admiration of any other onlookers. But at this moment the heart of town, such as it was, was deserted. Disappointed, the old man toppled painfully into gear, bumping into Seferino Pacheco, who had tears in his eyes.

“My pig is gone again,” Pacheco moaned.

“Fuck your pig! Fie on your pig! Death to your voracious pig!” the old man spat, circling huffily around the stunned, slope-shouldered Pacheco.

“She was in her pen just this morning,” Pacheco called. But Amarante couldn't have cared less—he was heading home.

The old man reached the highway just as the sheriff was turning in. Bernabé Montoya's pickup coasted a little past him, and, without even looking around, Amarante could tell the truck had stopped. Guiltily, he waddled across the highway.

Bernabé negotiated a tight U-turn, paused to let a two-ton flatbed, piled high with hay bales from Colorado, zoom down the highway, then crossed the road and pulled over slightly ahead of Amarante.

The old man halted. For effect, Bernabé took his time slouching out of the cab.

“Uh, how come you're wearing that antique buffalo gun?” the sheriff wanted to know.

Unable to think of answers, Amarante just stood still, his hat off in the presence of the law, grinning and wheezing laboriously, playing the fool.

“Excuse me,” Bernabé said, gently lifting the pistol from its holster. When he'd ascertained that it was loaded he rolled his eyes wearily to the sky, moaning unhappily. “What's happening all of a sudden that this town is filling up with troublemakers? What kind of charge does a wrinkled little old prune like you, Mr. Córdova, get out of walking around with a two-thousand-year-old shooting iron on your hip and your pockets full of bullets? What do you want to do, incite this poor town into another Smokey the Bear santo riot or something? Take the bullets out of the gun, Mr. Córdova—” And here the sheriff actually removed the cartridges himself, plip-plopping them into the old man's palm.

“If it's loaded,” he explained sorrowfully, shoving the gun carefully back into its holster, “it can go off. Hang it back on the wall where it belongs, Mr. Córdova. Please, huh? Nobody wants violence.”

Amarante said, “I can go home now?”

“Yeah, sure. Whatever you want…” Bernabé backed up, hesitating momentarily at the door of his truck, disturbed by the old man who was grinning absurdly in his direction. But finally, with a shrug and a worried “Ai, Chihuahua,” he climbed behind the wheel and effected another U-turn.

Amarante waited until the sheriff was gone before moving on. Slowly he rattled along the dusty road to where he had to climb the Roybal ditch bank, and once he had accomplished that he teetered along the bank to the field.

Joe was gone. Amarante surveyed the damp earth, the glistening green bean plants, the faint yellow irrigation foam left around the stalks, the mud cracking softly in some freshly watered rows. A few robins, starlings, and blackbirds were still scavenging. The old man trundled off a ways into the shade afforded by dusty, silver-leafed cottonwoods and sat down on a log.

Spastically, dropping a half-dozen bullets, he reloaded the gun, placing it on the log beside him. Next he rolled a cigarette, and, quietly smoking, he listened woozily to faint meadowlark songs drifting melodically on the clear summer air.

From here on in, he thought, if anybody like Eusebio Lavadie or Zopi Devine tried to mess with José Mondragón's beanfield, they would have to reckon with Amarante Córdova first.

But he was sleepy, his head buzzed drowsily. Grasshoppers crackled, a locust buzzed, a woodpecker blammed against a faraway hollow tree. Somewhere, too, a chain saw was droning.

Amarante lowered himself so that his back pressed against the log on which he'd been sitting. The gun he laid carefully in his lap. His eyes flickered and were about to close when he noticed something odd hovering over town. For a moment the thing was so out of place that his mind could not translate what it saw. Then he realized that, even though no rain had fallen at all for the past few days, the arching vision, shining faintly but unmistakably over Milagro, was a rainbow.

Too tired to worry about such a sight, Amarante fell asleep. But no sooner had he begun to snore than that queer rainbow appeared in his dream, shimmering faintly in the hot dry air muffling Milagro, and a few minutes later an angel showed up to complicate the miracle.

No shining angel with a golden halo straight from Tiffany's, a French horn, and wings fabricated out of pristine Chinese swansdown arrived to bless Amarante's fertile imagination; rather, a half-toothless, one-eyed bum sort of coyote dressed in tattered blue jeans and sandals, and sporting a pair of drab moth-eaten wings that looked as if they had come off the remainder shelves of a disreputable cut-rate discount store during a fire-damage sale, appeared.

This grisly sight limped along the Milagro–García spur pausing every now and again to blow its bulbous gray nose onto a greasy unhallowed sleeve, after which it rumbled and choked for a while like an old crone dying of TB.

“Hey, Angel,” Amarante called out in his dream. “What's a rainbow doing over our town on a sunny day like today?”

The angel, startled by Amarante's voice, froze stiff with its ears lying back flat; and then, realizing there was no immediate danger, it turned to observe the puzzling natural phenomenon.

“Who knows, cousin,” the coyote apparition mumbled at last. “Maybe it's because for once in your lives you people are trying to do something right.”

Abruptly, then, the angel disappeared. And Amarante went on to dream he was on a horse, carrying a rifle across the pommel of his saddle, tracking a deer through snow in the high open country around the Little Baldy Bear Lakes.

*   *   *

Bernabé Montoya, his face screwed up with concern, lumbered into Rael's store. “Hey, Nick,” he almost whined. “How come the old geezer's wearing that prehistoric revolver?”

Nick shrugged. “It's that beanfield, Bernie. Somebody should go talk with José in no uncertain terms before it's too late.”

“The last time he wore that rig was during César Pacheco's trial over in Ojo Prieto, wasn't it?” the sheriff mumbled dejectedly, more to himself than to the storekeeper.

“He's out of his head,” Nick said. “He don't know what's going on. Of course, he puts that thing on when he votes, too. And for the Feast of San Isidro.”

“But there's no holidays this week, Nick.”

“He doesn't know that. Maybe he thinks it's time for next month's Chamisaville fiesta.”

“The goddam thing was
loaded.
” Bernabé stripped the paper off a Milky Way candy bar. “That gun was stuffed full of live ammunition, can you believe it?”

“I know. He bought shells from me earlier. With food stamps.”

“Food stamps?”

Dolefully, Nick shrugged. “It turned out to be easier,” he grumbled by way of explanation. “That old bastard's as stubborn as Pacheco's pig.”

Bernabé retrieved a Nehi orange from the soda bin. “Shit,” he observed. “Something is rotten in Chamisa County.”

“Oh, I don't think he'll hurt anybody,” Nick said. “He can't even pull the trigger.”

“Where there's a will, there's always, sooner or later, some kind of way,” Bernabé scowled, loudly scuffing his boot heels as he ambled mournfully out of the store. “I wish to Christ him and José would drop dead.”

*   *   *

As Bernabé Montoya propelled himself disconsolately off Rael's porch wishing that Joe Mondragón and Amarante Córdova would drop dead, a mottled-green, 1953 Chevy pickup, with a huge three-legged German shepherd perched arrogantly on the cab's roof, clanked to a stop on the other side of the dirt area that passed for the town plaza. And as this scruffy vehicle coasted noisily to a colorful exhaust-belching halt, it happened to obliterate from Bernabé's view the lone parking meter in town.

This meter had been the brainstorm of the mayor, Sammy Cantú, his two councilmen, Bud Gleason and Ricardo P. Córdova (a second cousin of Amarante Córdova's son, Ricardo A. Córdova, who was still being slowly dispatched by bone cancer), and the sheriff, Bernabé Montoya.

The parking meter's purpose was to earn funds for the sheriff so that law and order might prevail in Milagro. Supposedly, donations to the meter would buy gas for Bernabé's truck and provide dimes for the sheriff's on-the-job official phone calls, which he often made from the pay phone on Rael's front porch.

Since its installation two years before, however, the parking meter had rarely collected dimes. Most motorists simply parked elsewhere. One reason they usually parked elsewhere was because one-armed Onofre Martínez, the Staurolite Baron and father of Bruno Martínez the cop, always parked his mottled-green, 1953 Chevy pickup in front of the meter.

Although he never contributed a dime.

This had led to what might be called a feud between Onofre and the sheriff.

In fact, for two years hand-running, almost daily, and in spite of the three-legged shepherd's fang-baring snarls, Bernabé had been ticketing Onofre's perambulating junk heap. The tickets he wrote out were long and convoluted and very elaborate. They were printed on stiff, expensive paper, and each ticket pad cost the town two dollars and sixty cents. Hence, every time Bernabé wrote out a parking violation on that meter it cost him twenty cents in citation paper, ink, and his own valuable time to do so.

The fine for illegal parking in Milagro was fifty cents. But Onofre Martínez was not about to cough up four bits for the privilege of being ticketed in front of the Pilar Café, especially since his own son Bruno had developed into such a rotten apple by joining the state police. Thus, each time Bernabé affixed a citation to his windshield, Onofre plucked the ticket out from under the wiper with his left—and only—hand, bit down on one edge of the glossy cardboard, and commenced ripping it to shreds.

For two years now, in all seasons, these shreds had lain like a perpetual New Year's Eve confetti all across that hapless dusty area in the middle of the Rael's General Store–Frontier Bar–Pilar Café downtown commercial center of Milagro.

Onofre Martínez had as good a reason as any man for shredding parking tickets.

“Listen,” he enjoyed telling Bernabé Montoya every time the sheriff sighed, almost cried, and in a desultory halfhearted manner threatened Onofre with hellfire and damnation for his belligerent lawless attitude, “I'm seventy-nine years old, I got one arm, I had three wives, I got four brothers and a sister still living, six of both sexes already dead, I got six children—three girls and three boys, one a mental retard, and one who went to school and became a Communist, and another who shamed my name by becoming a state chota—but anyway, all my kids are living, and I got sixteen grandchildren and some great-grandchildren, too, and ever since I learned how to drive the same year they invented cars I been parking where I wanted to park and nobody ever tried to make me pay money to do it, especially not my own son (so why you?), and I'll be goddamned if I'll start now. You can't teach an old dog new tricks, so screw you, Bernabé, go put the bite on somebody else.”

In answer to this, Bernabé usually tried to reason with Onofre. The sheriff's reasoning went like so:

“Alright, you one-armed, bandy-legged pipsqueak, pubic hair, and maricón. If you keep violating the law like this, if you keep deliberately committing a crime in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of your long-suffering fellow citizens, I'll make sure they lock you in the Chamisa County Jail for a hundred years in a row, and I'll tell Ernie Maestas to personally see to it there are worms and fly larvae and things like that in every piece of food you eat!”

Onofre Martínez's reaction to Bernabé's reaction, first off, was the reaction of just about all the poor people in Milagro to just about any statement from a cop. But then, calming himself, Onofre would offer these philosophical comments about crime and punishment:

“If you try to arrest me, Bernabé, you know what's gonna happen? First of all I'm gonna plead innocent. Then I'm gonna get a lawyer; I'll get Bloom. Then we're gonna have a trial. Maybe in the end I'm guilty, but you know how much it's gonna cost Milagro to take me to trial? More money than that parking meter could shit at you in twenty years.”

Which was a true statement: Onofre Martínez knew his rights.

And anyway, how could Bernabé Montoya expect to reason with a man who had named all his three sons Onofre after himself: Onofre Carlos (called Bruno Martínez), the one who became a chota; Onofre Jesús (O. J. Martínez), the retarded one who delivered the Capital City
Reporter
to the people of Milagro; and Onofre Tranquilino (O. T. Martínez), the one who got educated and became a Communist.

“You keep giving him tickets, though,” Sammy Cantú growled morosely, “and one of these days we'll think of something. Maybe we can get an OEO loan from the government to prosecute that son of a bitch.”

By rough estimates, it had cost the town approximately two and a half to three dollars a week for over two years just to ticket Onofre Martínez. Nobody else, no citizen from Milagro, that is, parked in front of the meter because there was ample parking elsewhere. Even tourists seldom patronized the meter because the rest of the “plaza,” not to mention all the dusty side streets in town, were open to their monstrous automotive freakshows.