The Milagro Beanfield War (16 page)

“But it was an act of God,” he joked. “The chances were ten million to one that a thing like this could happen.”

*   *   *

Charley Bloom was a tall, affable, sincere, although somewhat wishy-washy and also quite tormented man. He spoke gently, had a soft smile and an outwardly relaxed, controlled, and sort of scruffy demeanor. But he was also a man torn between deeply conflicting ideals, who harbored a profound resentment against many things that had been embedded in him during the early years of a puritan New England upbringing. This resentment surfaced on those rare but awful occasions when he blew his cool, and then for brief, holocaustic moments he could be like a mad dog or a murderer; and for days afterward, afraid of himself and worried about his sanity, he would be contrite and terribly ashamed.

For six years, fresh out of law school and then not so fresh out of law school, employed by his father-in-law's successful Boston law firm, Bloom had struggled, not only to consolidate a kind of upper-class establishment “security,” but also to rationalize life with the beautiful woman who was his first wife and with whom he could neither relate nor communicate. Basically, both Bloom and Sherri Pope were talented, educated, sensitive people who, before their marriage, had been so completely versed as social beings that neither could muster the guts to face up to anything. Sherri's dream was to become an even better-known, more glamorous bigshot in Boston's social arena; and, depending on his mood, her desires either coincided with or were directly in opposition to what Bloom lusted after as opposed to what he felt was “useful” and “good.” They both resented the marriage because it exposed—to each other, if not to society at large—their own immaturity, moral weaknesses, and intellectual shortcomings. And, after only a year and a half together, even before Miranda's birth, Bloom's temper tantrums had suddenly exploded out of nowhere to become an almost monthly event. On several occasions he slugged his wife, hating Sherri for the way her presence constantly had him split down the middle. As soon as she recognized the nature of her husband's unhappiness, Sherri knew they were doomed and reacted accordingly by commencing one, and then several, affairs. How they kept up appearances for four more years until the disastrous divorce Bloom, for one, had never been able to ascertain.

When the lawyer deserted the East Coast after that divorce he was a stunned human being, a twenty-nine-year-old man on the block and ready to give up. He wished to sever all his roots into positions of privilege; and he never wanted to be intimately involved with another person again. He drifted here and there—Aspen, Colorado, was the town where he holed up the longest. Eventually some of the divorce's trauma wore off or at least receded enough so that the casual observer would not notice, and Bloom merged himself timidly again with the currents of his time. There was a strange epoch during which he indulged in much kinky sex with a number of transient Aspen girl friends, but after that he drifted back into paralegal work, and finally into a Legal Aid position in the southern rural valleys of Colorado. At first his job was simply a way to mark the days while his wounds healed or his life slowed down to a crawl, whichever; but after a time, during his travels—which took him to towns like Saguache and Monte Vista and Fort Garland—he timidly allowed honest attachments into his life again: first, for the poor people in general whose rights he was defending, and eventually for one of them specifically, a gentle skittish woman named Linda Romero.

Their romance progressed at less than a snail's pace. Bloom was still so touchy about intimacy that for a half year they hardly exchanged monosyllables over cups of instant coffee in the Romero kitchen when he came to talk with Linda's brother, Johnny, who was up once on burglary and then again on armed assault charges. Linda herself was a timid, mistrusting, yet also quite sensual woman who not long before he met her had been engaged to a childhood sweetheart; it was an affair that had ended bitterly and with a terribly traumatic abortion. Thinking themselves cynical about, and not a little afraid of, life, neither Bloom nor Linda wished to become involved again for a long time.

So, as is natural in these situations, they fell in love. And before either understood exactly what had transpired, a justice of the peace in Antonito, Colorado, was signing their marriage certificate; a few minutes later they exploded into violent lovemaking in the back seat of Bloom's VW bus parked on a deserted side road near La Jara. Their short, erotic honeymoon took place that same night in a white cottage across the street from the tiny Jack Dempsey Museum in Manassa, Colorado. In the morning, astonished with themselves and terrified for their futures, they drove back toward Alamosa; the roads were decorated with fat autumn pheasants and strikingly beautiful yellow-headed blackbirds. For both, their bodies aching from last night's almost brutal sexual assault on each other, that drive to Alamosa the morning after was a cherished, nearly sacred moment. Bloom especially thought it the best possible omen for the start of a new life. He sincerely believed that by marrying this good woman, the product both of a tough lower-class upbringing and of a rich communal culture very unlike his own, he was breaking with an establishment past, a liberal-conservative tradition that had always hung him up. Already he felt almost self-righteous about his new life because it was going to be Down to Earth, Humble, Unpretentious,
Real.

Yet Bloom and his wife had existed on tenterhooks with each other for years now. Within six months their physical attraction for each other suddenly waned; they lost a sexual rhythm together, becoming clumsy in bed, self-conscious, and then abruptly withdrawn. After that, as products of very different backgrounds they were continually scared stiff of hurting each other's feelings; hence they understood and tolerated their respective foibles almost to the point of obsequiousness. Neither ever lost his or her temper; and, terrified of blowing their lives again, each begging the other for some kind of emotional security, theirs became a kid-gloved marriage of major proportions.

To Bloom's private horror, he discovered almost immediately that far from being proud of, or even content with, her Chicano heritage, Linda almost hysterically wanted out of her poverty-stifled past. In order to serve his rural clients, most of whom spoke Spanish, Bloom had painstakingly learned to speak that language well—but Linda had what almost amounted to an aversion toward her mother tongue. She insisted on speaking English with him, so much so that when Bloom tried to speak Spanish she accused him of wanting to mock her, make her angry, upset her days. In point of fact, Linda aspired to certain illusions of security offered by those establishment traditions and values which had created an insupportable tension between the lawyer and his first wife. Thus, instead of a way out for Bloom, Linda threatened to reaffirm the roots he badly wanted to destroy. And their dilemma was instantly this: he desired what he thought she had been, whereas she desired what she thought he had been. Immediately both of them felt cheated and they began to resent each other, although they kept their mouths shut, praying for some kind of miracle to come along and straighten things out or at least fashion a workable compromise.

In spite of their different attitudes, hopes, and goals, they gradually—though neither could have explained how—reached a functioning détente. After thinking about it for a while, Bloom rationalized that he did feel some gratitude for not now being obliged to make the radical commitments he had always feared. And in the end, daring even to have children, their relationship evolved into a polite standoff. Bloom continued working for the poor, and, although far from poor himself, he was still able to feel at least as moral about his work as Linda felt about immersing herself totally in raising a middle-class American family. Understanding the inherent weaknesses of their arrangement, they remained aloof from others, cultivating few friends, keeping their own lives relatively simple—on an even keel, so to speak—by avoiding close ties both with themselves and with their neighbors.

In light of these survival tactics, after Bloom broke from the Legal Aid program and moved to Milagro to begin a more relaxed private practice, and, more importantly perhaps, to help Linda set up a home safely removed from her family connections, the lawyer's involvement in the César Pacheco case went completely against the methods by which they had learned to handle their marriage. It was one of those commitments that occurred because of Bloom's deep-seated dissatisfaction, which often made him profoundly uncomfortable with a lifestyle that seemed much too inherently selfish.

The Pacheco case, then, was a reaction against a life that had become too comfortable, too safe. Hence, even though terrified of political commitments, Bloom had gone out on a limb and it had cost them. During the course of that nerve-racking trial, Linda saw his temper for the first time. One evening shortly after Bloom had returned from court, some stray dogs attacked and killed several of their chickens. When the lawyer realized what was happening he grabbed an ax, lunged outside bellowing dementedly, trapped one attacking dog inside the chicken pen, and literally hacked the squealing mongrel to pieces.

So those were the tensions he had and might always have inside himself, and after the Pacheco trial and the dog incident, Linda had never trusted her husband again.

Pacheco's trial had been four years ago. Today the Joe Mondragón affair threatened once more to upset the tenuous stability of their lives. This time the client was a friend; the favor could not be refused. Despite Linda's cautious approach to people, she and Joe's wife had become more than just neighborly acquaintances. And although Bloom had always tended to shy away from Joe's hot head, he also admired Joe from a distance for the fighter he was, and he had done a number of routine legal favors for the Mondragóns—tax returns, mortgage and loan agreements, plus several trips to the Chamisa County Jail to bail Joe out. In return the Blooms had received bottles of homemade chokecherry wine, a leg of mutton, Halloween pumpkins, even hay bales for their two Shetland ponies, Orangutan and Sunflower.

Of course, Bloom thought on reflection, one of his worst blunders was the article on Joe's beanfield he'd done for the
Voice of the People.
In fact, all the articles he had written for the
Voice
added up—Bloom suddenly felt—to a mistake on his part. At the start he had agreed to write them because the paper's editor, a Capital City lawyer named Sean Carter, was a friend who often did law library research and other favors for Bloom; and too, Bloom assuaged the liberal side of his conscience by providing those informative, slightly renegade articles free of charge. By and large the Milagro lawyer's articles had been fairly innocuous—generalized summaries of welfare problems, advice on how to pay less income tax, on how to apply for and receive food stamps. Taken within this context, the beanfield article represented a departure from the lawyer's norm—so much so, in fact, that as soon as he saw it in print Bloom wished to Christ he could pull it back, erase it, disclaim ownership, forget about the whole thing. Because at heart he felt he did not have the guts, or maybe even the desire, to put his money where his mouth was. He had grown too accustomed to playing things safe, even if he did not enjoy playing them that way; and if he rocked the boat now, his home, his family life would be the first thing to collapse. In retrospect, all his writings had done were to make him that much more politically and professionally vulnerable. “En boca cerrada,” Nancy Mondragón had once told him with a wry wink, “no entran moscas.” Meaning: “If you keep your mouth shut, flies won't enter.”

But then, all during the time Bloom had known Joe he had understood that sooner or later the relationship was going to lead to trouble; and who knows, perhaps that is even why he had protected their friendship. When it happened, then, when Joe danced by after the fact to announce with pride what he had done, Bloom almost gratefully dropped an arm around his neighbor's shoulders, saying, “Don't worry, man, if they come down on you we'll fight them every inch of the way.” Though, of course, as soon as Joe left he reconsidered, wondering was he crazy to encourage such a hopeless and inflammatory act? Whereupon, afraid for his own hide, Bloom almost (but not quite, thank God!) called Joe up to tell him to quit playing childish games.

About the situation Linda understood two things: why her frightened husband had refused to cop out when for the health of them both he should have, and also what grave consequences might develop from the affair. And she deeply resented the fact that Bloom could jeopardize their fragile marriage in this way.

Thus immediately, two minutes after Joe dropped by with the news about his west side beanfield, Linda and Charley Bloom were very much on edge with each other, waiting for the sky to fall.

“Do you really want to do this?” Linda asked in a small, uneven voice. “Do you really want to become involved?”

“Of course. I mean actually of course not, I suppose. I mean … I don't know…”

Later that same afternoon Bloom walked out back to survey his small, secure kingdom. There was his garden and the Rototiller with which he'd turned it over. There were his irrigation boots and a spade for cutting water out of the Acequia del Monte into his back field, or into his apple and plum trees, or into his garden. There were the two beehives Onofre Martínez had built and which the one-armed man cared for, supplying the Blooms with honey as a kind of rent. And there was the chicken coop Linda and he had built together, and the chickens wandering in the yard.

Bloom sensed all of it was terribly tentative, doomed. A time bomb was ticking at the heart of their outwardly placid, inwardly unstable little family universe, and he was afraid.

Naturally, Linda's lack of support pissed him off.

And he could feel his temperature rising as with her eyes, but never again with her voice, she urged him to back out while the backing was good.