The Milagro Beanfield War (19 page)

Beyond Joe's field, and as the road curved north along the course of Milagro Creek, no land had been irrigated for years. Magpies drifted from cottonwoods across the deserted road, and bluebirds and swallows flitted in and out of abandoned adobe farmhouses. Rusting car hulks cast the only shadows across deserted yellow yards; in many places barbed wire had snapped between fence posts and now curled frozenly toward the sky. The timbers of small corrals were broken, well housings aslant, outhouses blown over and destroyed. When the road swung away from the stream course heading back toward the north–south highway, the ruins tailed away to the west. Still, you could make out the old irrigation ditches which had once fed the larger and still-fenced bean- and alfalfa fields, dry and dead now but for tumbleweed and numerous yellow bun-shaped snakeweed bushes and sparse tufts of gramma grass. The land here was flat, flowing into a sagebrush terrain as you approached the highway again, leading to piñon foothills and the high mountains in the east, to the gorge and a formation of delicate gray and beige mesas in the west.

Back on the highway, Kyril Montana drove a mile and a half south to the eastern turnoff into town where the surviving population of Milagro was settled. He cruised past the Pilar Café, the Frontier Bar, the Forest Service headquarters—and that was it. Some kids gathered along Rael's porch sucking on Dr. Peppers glanced at the car as it stirred up a small storm of parking ticket confetti; Mercedes Rael chucked a few pebbles that pinged off his hood; and a three-legged German shepherd, leaping off the roof of a rattletrap pickup, charged after the agent's vehicle for a few yards, barking furiously.

Then a huge pig was standing in the middle of the road. The agent braked, but the pig stood pat, challenging the automobile. Not wishing to call attention to himself, the agent gave the horn a brief beep, then drove right up to the pig, which snorted desultorily, refusing to move on. So Kyril Montana lurched his car forward and hit the animal; it toppled over with a surprised squeal, scrambled quickly to its feet, and lumbered bluntly off the road.

As the houses petered out, the agent nosed his car onto a dirt road that twisted up the side of Capulin Hill past a small deserted elementary school, continuing on up to the white Milagro water storage tank, which had numbers—'68, '70, '71—painted all over it by graduating Doña Luz Junior High School classes: students who went on to high school were bussed farther south to Chamisaville.

Parking in the tank's shadow, Kyril Montana sat behind the wheel of his car looking over the town. A compact, simple unit, Milagro was cut in two by the north–south highway, a curious division of green here and desert there—Entre verde y seco, the agent thought: Between what's lush and what's dry. And there was Joe Mondragón's beanfield, completely out of place to the west, an absurd green bauble in the otherwise desolate landscape slated to become a posh golf course. But on this side of the highway green fields led directly up to the road's eastern shoulder—an unnatural setup; obviously the result of a strange, possibly a bad, law.

The agent scrutinized the town, getting it down right in his mind, giving himself time for everything to register, the houses of people he didn't know and the houses of those in whom he was interested, the network of irrigation ditches and small dusty roads, the minuscule orchards and small herds of sheep and horses. He watched where a jeep, a pickup, an old Chrysler, a young man on a horse went; he followed, for a moment, the movements of a woman hanging wash on a line; and then he shifted his attention to two teen-age boys mixing mud and straw in a shallow pit for adobes.

Kyril Montana stayed beside the water storage tank only until comfortable with his
feel
of the place, then he started his car and swung around and down the hill to take care of business.

*   *   *

Except for Bud Gleason, all six men present were afraid of Kyril Montana, or at least unnaturally nervous in his presence. They were gathered in the real estate agent's living room, and among them were the sheriff, his deputy Meliton Naranjo, the mayor, Nick Rael, and Eusebio Lavadie. Kyril Montana sat on a comfortable couch with his clipboard on a low coffee table in front of him, and the other men were spread around in various chairs, each man nursing a beer, compliments of Bud Gleason, who had arranged the meeting.

“This is a simple matter,” the agent said quietly. “Or at least it should be a simple matter. And I'd like to go through it quickly because I don't want to take any more of your time than is necessary. You all know Joe Mondragón. At least I'm assuming you all know him—” he looked up and swiftly around.

“We all know him,” Lavadie said somberly, and the other men nodded yes, muttering agreement, some smiling, some looking grim.

“Alright.” The agent pressed open the spring on his clipboard, extracting six issues of the
Voice of the People,
which he gave to the man on his left, Sammy Cantú, with a nod to pass them around. “First of all, or rather after this meeting, all of you should read the article in this magazine, an article written by a Milagro resident, the lawyer Charley Bloom.”

“Sure,” Lavadie said. “Charley Bloom. He lives here.”

“You know him? Do all of you know him?”

“I do,” Lavadie said. And Bud Gleason nodded. “I sold him his house.” The others shrugged or shook their heads.

“Okay.” The agent paused dramatically for a second as the magazine went around, then he plunged into a brisk summary of the problem. “Joe Mondragón, as you may or may not know—though I'm assuming you all
do
know, and if you don't you will by the time you finish that article—Joe Mondragón has diverted some water from the creek on the west side of the highway, and for a while now he's been irrigating a small beanfield over there, which is strictly illegal, as Sheriff Montoya here knows, and as Mr. Naranjo knows too, and as the rest of you are probably aware also. There is in this case, however, a problem, a delicate sort of situation which exists—an extenuating circumstance. We know that some people here in Milagro support Joe Mondragón despite the possible grave consequences, and simply to arrest and jail Mr. Mondragón for his flagrant illegal actions would probably cause more trouble than it would cure. I'm sure all of you are aware of that—I mean, you know this town much better than I do—you're aware of what's going on. Yet what's going on, at least insofar as we see it down in the capital, is not something that most of you in this town fully understand. In fact, I think whatever support Mr. Mondragón has is coming from citizens who honestly do not question his motives—”

Kyril Montana paused to let that sink in.

“—who do not question his motives, who believe that all Mr. Mondragón wants to do is lodge a protest against, say, the 1935 water compact by growing a field of beans.”

Most of the men were waiting now, quietly, not so much with the attention of men waiting to learn something new, but rather with the guarded attention of men who understand exactly what is being driven at and where everyone stands, but are wondering how it's going to be worded and what their commitment to what must follow is going to have to be.

“Alright. As far as it goes maybe that's part of it. You men grew up with Mr. Mondragón; I did not. But I think you should know certain facts that we are aware of down in the capital, and I think that you should think very carefully about those facts and what they could do to your lovely town here. In the first place, after you've read that article, you'll understand a little more about Charley Bloom. Read the entire magazine and you'll understand even more. You'll understand, I think, that Mr. Mondragón isn't acting entirely on his own. In fact, we have reason to believe that this beanfield is not even Mr. Mondragón's idea, but a plot hatched up by the lawyer Charley Bloom.”

A few men nodded. Bud Gleason sneezed. The others sat quietly, waiting.

“Charley Bloom and his wife Linda have lived in this town how long?” Kyril Montana asked.

Bernabé Montoya shrugged, glancing up at Lavadie; Sammy Cantú frowned, guessing, “Four years? Five years? I don't remember…” Bud Gleason blew his nose and then recalled, “Summer of 1966. That's when I sold them the house.”

“Six years,” the agent said slowly, enunciating deliberately. “Six years only, but after six years he's writing articles like this. After six years a relative newcomer, an outsider, is in cahoots with Joe Mondragón; maybe—who knows?—against Joe Mondragón's wishes, or maybe Joe Mondragón is an unwitting victim, I don't know; but anyway, I think it'll become painfully obvious to all of you, as it has become painfully obvious to us, that Charley Bloom has a plan for stirring up trouble in this town, and unless you people take measures to see that he and Joe Mondragón are discouraged from persisting in this matter, there are going to be serious consequences for Milagro.”

The agent stopped, casting about, trying to measure his progress. Then he said: “Alright, I'm assuming everyone here remembers the Pacheco trial four years ago.”

“Pacheco,” Nick Rael muttered petulantly. “We got more Pachecos around here than we got fleas. Who Pacheco? Meliton? Leroy? Eloy? Teodoro? Jaime? Hippólito—?”

The men in the room laughed nervously; Kyril Montana smiled as he removed newspaper clippings and some Xeroxed sheets of those same clippings from his clipboard.

“César Pacheco, the militant,” he noted, passing out the original articles and the Xeroxes. There was a short silence as the men glanced over the stories, and then Sammy Cantú vigorously nodded his head.

“Sure. We all remember this. César, he's not from here. But he has cousins here. Adelita Trujillo, she's his cousin. And Mary Ann Roybal, too. And Seferino Pacheco and his brother Ben, they're all his cousins. They went over to that trial. Me, personally, I didn't go. I had really bad hemorrhoids back then, so I didn't drive around too much, I—”

“Bloom has been relatively quiet since then,” Kyril Montana interrupted. “Until now, that is. He's planning to defend Mondragón if a hearing is held on this matter—”

“Well, there's no way he can win,” Eusebio Lavadie said matter-of-factly. “He's crazy to even try.”

“Legally, of course, he—they—the two of them don't stand a chance,” the agent said. “But they're not worried about that. They just want to get it into court—”

“As a kind of propaganda trick, qué no?” Lavadie ventured.

“Absolutely. They figure if they can get it to the hearing stage—which gives them at least a few months more for organization, you understand—if they can do that they can recruit a lot of people to their side.”

“And if that happens,” Sammy Cantú said quietly, “I suppose we got trouble.”

“You're damn right. You'll have a lot of trouble.”

“So?…” Bud Gleason asked.

“I want you to know several things about this lawyer that perhaps you all are not aware of.” Kyril Montana removed two photographs and some Xeroxes of a one-page document from his clipboard. Passing out the first photograph, he informed the group, “Mr. Bloom was married before, when he lived back East, to the woman in that photograph, whose name—whose maiden name, anyway—was Sherri Pope. As you can see she was, I'm sure she still is, a very lovely woman.”

He handed out the other, smaller photograph.

“They had one daughter, and this is a picture of her. Her name is Miranda.”

The agent's photograph of Miranda Bloom had been taken when she was a nine-year-old kid complete with freckles and braces and her hair in beribboned pigtails.

“When they got divorced,” Kyril Montana said carefully, “and understand, please, I'm not telling you gentlemen these things to titillate you or because I like chisme, because I don't, I dislike it very much. But I want you to understand the people we're dealing with—or at least that
I
 … that we down in the capital are dealing with at this time. When they got divorced there were some nasty proceedings, namely a very savage battle for custody of this lovely child, which in the end Mr. Bloom lost quite suddenly when it was revealed that he had attempted on several occasions to sexually molest his own daughter—that's her photograph—Miranda Bloom.”

“Ai, Chihuahua,” Eusebio Lavadie, who was looking at the photograph, muttered.

The agent handed around a Xeroxed copy of the letter sent by Sherri Pope Bloom's lawyer to her husband, accusing Bloom of the act so described and threatening to make the accusation public if he did not give up his daughter.

Then Kyril Montana leaned back. “So that's the kind of person we're dealing with,” he said. “There may be others too, so perhaps I should say that's the kind of people who are using your neighbor, Mr. Mondragón, as a pawn in their lethal game—”

*   *   *

After the other men had left, Kyril Montana stayed around for a few minutes to shoot the breeze with Bud Gleason and his wife, Bertha. Before they could launch a conversation, however, the Gleasons' wiseacre eleven-year-old daughter, Katie, clumped down from her room and started banging away on the living room piano, until her mother screamed, “Alright, already, enough is enough, we got guests, go outside and kill frogs!”

The noise stopped. Bright-eyed Katie appeared in the doorway. “You do not have guest-
s,
” she said haughtily, really working over the final
s.
“You have a gues-
t.
”

“What, I didn't tell you to go outside?” her mother growled, setting two cups of coffee and half a fruitcake on the kitchen table where the men were seated.

“How come I couldn't be at the meeting?” Katie asked nastily.

“Because little pitchers have big ears,” Bertha sighed. “Now beat it.”

Katie flounced through the living room and out the front door, which slammed shut with a thunderous bang behind her. Then, before either Bud, Bertha, or Kyril Montana could open their mouths, the child screamed back in a high voice: