The Milagro Beanfield War (2 page)

Never for a moment did Pendejo quit barking and whining; so Cleofes kept digging. He unearthed bones and arrowheads and beautiful clay pots; he tossed out lovely silver goblets and mammoth gold coins, and stones that sparkled, full of stars. In fact, he discovered the treasure of the Seven Cities of Cibola which had drawn Coronado north from Mexico not so many years before. But the sheepherder merely chucked all these iridescent artifacts into a great gleaming pile and flailed away some more with his shovel. In due course he extended long ladders into the hole. Laboriously, step-by-feeble-step, he lugged earth-filled pails up the rungs and dumped them onto the huge mound rising beside his hole. The baby killdeer matured and migrated away. The rainy season came and went and golden aspen leaves skippety-hopped across the field into his hole. Then a frost glazed the ground—winter came; relentlessly, the dog pleaded to be set free; unflaggingly, Cleofes persevered. To survive, he ate worms and snails and other sluggish, deaf, and blind little creatures that inhabited the soft, mysterious soil.

All at once Cleofes struck a hot spring. In an instant the pit filled with steaming mineral water; the crazy sheepherder drowned; the treasure of the Seven Cities of Cibola disappeared;
“Que milagro!”
spectators cried; Pendejo stopped barking; it began to snow; and for days a chorus of joyful, almost-drunken frog chug-a-lugging drowned out the neighborhood magpies, roosters, dogs, and coyotes.

Yet for years afterward, according to the most imaginative storytellers, air bubbles kept rising to the surface of that hot spring, and a lone buzzard was said to have circled nonstop directly above the spot for a decade. Then the water evaporated and the earth rose, so that not even a small depression marked the terrain; and nowadays nobody knows in which field the befuddled sheepherder dug his fabled hole.

*   *   *

But Cleofes Apodaca was not the first Miracle Valleyite to go drilling into Mother Earth. The legends also tell of a Milagro pastor who went crazy tunneling toward a bell that was ringing underneath his church. This happened, a very long time ago, when bells were almost impossible to come by in the New World, and this particular priest, José González Sinkovich, who hailed from Sevilla (by way of Prague), went mad just from longing for a bell to sanctify his religious edifice.

That is: Padre Sinkovich had wanted a bell so badly for so long that one day he simply began to hear a joyful bronze tolling beneath the dirt floor of his humble mud church.

The padre grabbed a shovel and lit into the floor like a hound going after a rabbit. Immediately he started unearthing bones, as it had been the custom during the early days to bury the dead inside the House of God. Pretty soon Padre Sinkovich, who had unearthed enough skeletons to start a mail-order Halloween business, was staggering around with bloodshot delirious eyes, furiously booting innumerable bones every which way as the magnificent tintinnabulation somewhere down there literally drove him bananas. For a month his flock tried to worship among the foxholes and fibulas and tibias, but finally the pealing of the bell began to hurt everyone's ears and they all became temporary atheists; which suited Padre Sinkovich to a T, since he no longer had time to spare for his congregation. Hoping to speed up matters, he hired a dozen Chamisaville Pueblo Indians to help with the digging. Day and night they chipped and hacked, pickaxed and burrowed deeper, uncovering whitened bones by the ton while the deranged clergyman rambled about, frothing like a lunatic. Then all the Indians got spooked and quit, whereupon the padre locked the church from inside. And on he excavated, around the clock, babbling incoherently as he searched for his melodious bell that never for a moment stopped B
ONGING
! B
ONGING
! B
ONGING
!

Eventually, though, Padre Sinkovich undermined the very foundations of his church, which collapsed on top of him, writing finis to another droll chapter in Milagro's history.

There were many other strange doings and bizarre myths, legends, and fairy tales that, taken loosely together, had wound up giving the town and the Miracle Valley their names. For example, there were even the present-day accounts of how a man named Onofre Martínez lost his arm, and of how a tiny woman called Ruby Archuleta killed a deer with her bare hands.

But of even greater interest, and perhaps also much more germane to the pending story of the war brought about by Joe Mondragón's illegal actions, is the incredible saga of the immortal old codger Amarante Córdova, who had played seven-card stud poker with Death ever since 1880, winning every hand.

Part One

“You can't buy bullets with food stamps.”

—Nick Rael

 

 

 

Amarante Córdova had had thirteen children. That is, he and his wife, Elizabeth—known as Betita—had had thirteen children, who either still were or had been Nadia, Jorge, Pólito, María Ana, Berta, Roberto, Billy, Nazario, Gabriel, Ricardo, Sally, Patsy, and Cipriano. Betita, who had never been sick a day in her life, died in 1963, on November 22, on the same day as President Kennedy, but not from a bullet in the head. She had been outside chopping wood during a lovely serene snowstorm when suddenly she set down the ax and began to walk along the Milagro–García spur out onto the mesa. In recalling her death later Amarante would always tell his listeners, “You cannot imagine how beautiful it was that afternoon. The snow falling was as serene as the white feathers of a swan. When the ravens sailed through it they made no sound. You looked up and the big black birds were floating through the snowflakes like faint shadows of our forefathers, the first people who settled in the valley. The tall sagebrush was a lavender-green color because there had been a lot of rain in the autumn, and that was the only color on the otherwise black and white mesa, the pale lavender-green of the sage on which snow had settled. You remember, of course, that Betita's hair was as white as the snow, and she was wearing a black dress and a black woolen shawl that Sally, our daughter who was married to the plumber from Doña Luz, knitted for her on a birthday long ago.”

Slowly, taking her time, Betita walked across the mesa to the rim of the gorge. “And there she stood on the edge looking down,” Amarante said. “For a long time she was poised there like a wish afraid to be uttered. The walls of the gorge created a faded yellow glow to the flakes falling eight hundred feet down to the icy green river below. Ravens were in the air, circling, their wings whispering no louder than the snow falling. It was very peaceful. I was at the house, I never saw her leave. But when she didn't come in with the wood after a while, I saddled up that lame plow horse we used to have called Buster, and went after her, following her tracks in the snow. Just as I left the road to enter the chamisal an owl dropped out of the darkening sky, landing on a cedar post not ten yards away. An owl is a sure sign from the dead, you know, and it was right then I knew she had disappeared into the gorge. When I arrived at the rim an enormous raven was standing where she had last stood, and when he saw me he spread his wings, which were wider than my outstretched arms, and floated up like a good-bye kiss from my wife into the lazy storm. Next day we opened the church, only the second time that year it was used, not to say prayers for Betita, but to burn candles and shed our tears for the President who had died in Dallas. But I lit my candles for Betita, and nobody noticed. Three months later her body was discovered on the bank of the river two miles below Chamisaville.”

The Córdova sons and daughters had scattered, as the saying goes, to the four winds. Or actually, only to the three winds, eastward being anathema to the children of Milagro, whose Mississippi was the Midnight Mountains, that chain running north and south barely a mile or two from all their backyards.

Nadia, a waitress most of her life, first in Doña Luz, then Chamisaville, wound up in the Capital City barrio, dying violently (and recently) at the age of sixty-one in a lover's quarrel. Jorge emigrated to Australia where he tended sheep, same as at home. Pólito, who spent his life wandering around, getting married three or four times and taking care of sheep in Wyoming, Montana, and Utah, had died young of the flu. María Ana wanted to be a dancer, took the train to San Francisco, and after years of strenuous work, heartbreak, and small roles in the city ballet company, she hurt her back and wound up teaching in an Arthur Murray studio. Berta married an Anglo who raised lemons in California, and, curiously, they never had any children. Roberto, Billy, and Nazario became farm workers, mechanics, truck drivers, dishwashers, and short-order cooks in and around Los Angeles; they all raised large families, and although between them they'd had nine sons in Vietnam, only one of Billy's kids, Rosario, had been killed. Gabriel, who miraculously metamorphosed into a run-of-the-mill featherweight boxer in the army, turned pro after his discharge, was known as the Milagro Mauler during his short and undistinguished prime, and died in a plane crash in Venezuela. Ricardo had stayed on as a rancher in Milagro, although he spent half his life in the lettuce, sugar beet, or potato fields of southern Colorado, or else with the big sheep outfits up in Wyoming and Montana. Two of his sons, Elisardo and Juan, had died in Vietnam; another boy was stationed in Germany. Sally married a plumber in Doña Luz and had eleven kids herself, one of whom became a successful pop singer in Mexico City, but never sent any money home, not even after the plumber died when a black widow bit him while he was creeping around somebody's musty crawl space on a job. Patsy, the most beautiful and the sharpest in school, ran West to join a circus, became an Avon lady instead, and died with her husband and all their children except Peter (who was in a Japanese hospital at the time recovering from wounds received in Vietnam) in a head-on car crash in Petaluma. And little Cipriano, the baby of the family, born in 1925, who went farther than everyone else in his education, and, in fact, had just obtained a full scholarship to Harvard when he was drafted, was vivisected by a German machine gun during the first eighteen seconds of the Normandy D-day landings.

All his life Amarante had lived in the shadow of his own death. When he was two days old he caught pneumonia, they gave him up for dead, somehow he recovered. During his childhood he was always sick, he couldn't work like other boys his age. He had rheumatic fever, chicken pox, pneumonia three or four more times, started coughing blood when he was six, was anemic, drowsy all the time, constantly sniffling, weak and miserable, and—everybody thought—dying. At eight he had his tonsils out; at ten, his appendix burst. At twelve he was bitten by a rattlesnake, went into a coma, survived. Then a horse kicked him, breaking all the ribs on his left side. He contracted tuberculosis. He hacked and stumbled around, hollow-eyed, gaunt and sniffling, and folks crossed themselves, murmuring Hail Marys whenever he staggered into view. At twenty, when he was already an alcoholic, scarlet fever almost laid him in the grave; at twenty-three, malaria looked like it would do the job. Then came several years of amoebic dysentery. After that he was constipated for seventeen months. At thirty, a lung collapsed; at thirty-four, shortly after he became the first sheriff of Milagro, that old devil pneumonia returned for another whack at it, slowed his pulse to almost nothing, but like a classical and very pretty but fainthearted boxer, couldn't deliver the knockout punch. During the old man's forties a number of contending diseases dropped by Amarante's body for a shot at the title. The clap came and went, had a return bout, was counted out. The measles appeared, as did the mumps, but they did not even last a full round. For old time's sake pneumonia made a token appearance, beat its head against the brick wall that evidently lined Amarante's lungs, then waved a white flag and retreated. Blood poisoning blew all his lymph nodes up to the size of golf balls, stuck around for a month, and lost the battle.

Amarante limped, coughed, wheezed; his chest ached; he spat both blood and gruesome blue-black lungers, drank until his asshole hurt, his flat feet wailed; arthritis took sledgehammers to his knees; his stomach felt like it was bleeding; and all but three of his teeth turned brown and toppled out of his mouth like acorns. In Milagro, waiting for Amarante Córdova to drop dead became like waiting for one of those huge sneezes that just refuses to come. And there was a stretch during Amarante's sixties when people kept running away from him, cutting conversations short and like that, because everybody
knew
he was going to keel over in the very next ten seconds, and nobody likes to be present when somebody drops dead.

In his seventies Amarante's operations began. First they removed a lung. By that time the citizens of Milagro had gotten into the irate, sarcastic, and not a little awed frame of mind which had them saying: “Shit, even if they took out that old bastard's other lung he'd keep on breathing.”

A lump in his neck shaped like a miniature cow was removed. After that a piece of his small intestine had to go. There followed, of course, the usual gallbladder, spleen, and kidney operations. People in Milagro chuckled “Here comes the human zipper,” whenever Amarante turned a corner into sight. His friends regarded him with a measure of respect and hatred, beseeching him to put in a good word for them with the Angel of Death, or whoever it was with whom he held counsel, even as they capsized over backward into the adobe and caliche darkness of their own graves.