The Milagro Beanfield War (23 page)

Which was a hell of a spooky thing to happen to Joe, because about the only time he ever cried was when he chopped onions to sprinkle on Nancy's enchiladas, or when he ate a really hot jalapeño.

No getting around it, though: suddenly he held a profound tenderness for his people, that's what it was. His people. His gente. His bunch of inbred, toothless, tubercular, flea-bitten, illiterate vecinos, sobrinos, primos, cuates, cabrones, rancheros, and general all-around fregado'd jodidos.

Suddenly he loved the people he lived with, he cared about their lives. And this feeling, this
tenderness
oozing throughout his body, made him almost weak.

Then, while magpies jabbered like a bunch of excited monkeys in the branches overhead, and with two sparrowhawks quiet on the telephone lines across by the highway, Joe fell into a peculiar reverie. His childhood, something he had all but forgotten, drifted out of a dim, misty place, clouding his mind and his heart, working on that softness he felt within, prodding him gently, releasing frail human sensitivities Joe had always scorned.

He was with his father, Esequiel Mondragón, a small stoop-shouldered and very quiet person who had lonely pale-green eyes and silky gray hair. On horseback, they were driving their sheep home from summer pasture fifty miles west, far on the other side of the Rio Grande gorge. Three dogs circled around the sheep, barking, keeping the animals in order. His father didn't say much as they rode through the dust behind the slow-moving herd; he simply chewed tobacco and sat hunched over in his saddle, all his attention, in a vague sleepy-eyed way, on the sheep. Joe was riding bareback. On either side of them, in the Curandero Valley, aspen trees were a lovely buttery yellow, shivering in the Indian Summer breezes. Several times they spotted small bunches of mule deer moving along the upper meadow slopes near the tree line. For eight days they were together with the sheep, heading home. Slowly, they descended along a rocky trail into the gorge, the sheep moving single file, and, once in the gorge, they came across a rattlesnake, which his father killed so Joe could skin it. Later he tanned the skin and made a belt; he had worn it for years.

Today, that road in the Curandero Valley had been paved; there was a fancy new bridge over the gorge, and you were not allowed to drive your sheep along the road anymore. The state had also bulldozed some lakes in the valley and stocked them with rainbow and cutthroat trout, and there were half a dozen manicured campgrounds along the route.

Joe remembered summer nights with his father and the sheep in the high mountains, on the steeply sloping alpine ridges where the marmots with their bushy tails ran for cover in the rocks and small gray pikas stared at him while he sat unmoving in the grass. There was the summer his father shot a bear. And the coyotes howling, which had scared him as a kid until he got used to it and until he began to travel with a .22, killing the coyotes. But the bobcats had always scared him with their now-guttural, now-piercing and effeminate, bloodcurdling screams. And his father's scare gun firing at intervals throughout the lightning-ribbed night to scare away all predators … but you were not allowed to use those scare guns anymore.

He was four, maybe five years old, and he had never seen a rattlesnake. His dad stopped their old truck and pointed to a snake in the Conejos Junction road. It was dusk, the snake gleaming dustily in the yellow headlight beams. While Joe peered through the cracked windshield his father got out with a stick and poked at the snake to make it coil, then he tried to make the snake strike, but it wouldn't strike the cold stick. Finally, though, he goaded it into striking by tapping its nose, and only then did the snake give a warning buzz. His father explained to Joe what poison was and warned him to always stay away from this kind of snake. Then, as a strange dispassionate afterthought, he hit the snake with the stick, breaking the serpent in two or three places, and crushed its head under his boot heel. They drove over it and continued on. Later Esequiel gave his son a piece of oshá, warning him to carry it in his pocket at all times as protection against rattlers.

His father hunted as all men hunted. Joe remembered being on horseback with the old man, heading up through snowy hills, looking for elk and deer. And he remembered his father stripped to the waist and covered with blood, gutting an elk that was strung up on a homemade block-and-tackle rig in the backyard, and then later his father was almost hidden inside the huge animal, washing it out with the hose.

He remembered sitting in the back of the pickup on wild-strawberry summer evenings heading down to the fiesta in Chamisaville. Nighthawks dashed around in the darkening sky as the truck rattled southward. Joe was spit-polished and clean, wearing a chartreuse cowboy shirt and new boots, and as they chugged along he took potshots at roadside prairie dogs with his .22 and never hit a one, so far as he could determine—the truck bounced too much.

Esequiel Mondragón had been a strange man. A silent man who never got drunk at the fiesta, who herded sheep, who sometimes was gone all summer, following the sheep for outfits in Montana and Wyoming or doing seasonal farm labor up in Colorado, and then all winter he hung around doing odd jobs like Joe himself now did odd jobs, and somehow getting by.

In the autumn they went fishing together. The old man never taught his son how to fish. In the beginning, only he carried a rod and Joe tagged along, observing and learning. His father fished with flies that he tied himself at home. The streams were small and so narrow you could jump right across them, and his father crept up along the banks all hunched over, sometimes snapping out his line instead of casting, or else, wearing irrigation boots, he walked up the center of the stream in the shallow places. When the fish hit he jerked them out quickly so they wouldn't get tangled up in roots and dead branches. The fish were only seven or eight inches long, and when Joe was young they were all beautiful native cutthroats. But then when he had reached his teens about all they ever caught were German browns, because the big logging companies that cleared roads in the forest and clear-cut areas had dropped slash into the tiny streams, ruining the cutthroats' habitat.

Later, Joe learned how to fish those streams, and how to tie his own flies. Then he and the old man worked the streams together, in the late autumn mostly, when early snows speckled with yellow aspen leaves lay on the ground, and the water was icily cold, and little gray dipper birds flew up ahead, splashing through the water and disappearing in the deep places, walking along the bottom, and then popping up onto rocks again.

His father never carried a creel. He stashed the fish in his front shirt pockets, and then in his coat pockets, and in his pants pockets, if necessary. They came home with fish bulging out of their clothes.

After his father died Joe didn't fish much, and the times he did go, he went with friends and lots of beer and plenty of worms. Or he shot them with a .22. The streams were crawling with tourists by then, except for very high up where the bank underbrush was so thick you could hardly get to the water. But mostly Joe had quit fishing: there were too many other more important things to tend to, apropos earning a living.

Joe had gone every spring with his father to clean the irrigation ditches. The grass in the fields was still yellow, the trees naked, but the ground no longer frozen. Killdeer ran around in all the fields, screeching, whistling, trying to lead you away from their eggs. They chopped the edges of the ditches and dug mud out of the bottom to build up the sides. They unearthed frogs that were still in hibernation and so groggy they could hardly move. His father struck a kitchen match with his thumb and dropped it in the dry grass alongside the ditch and the grass flared quickly, smoke drifting across the fields, past the cattle and horses and placid sheep. They worked all day on a ditch, drinking beer, until they were bone tired and the ditch was clean, with its banks built up strong again.

Nowadays, Joe always paid a kid five bucks to work on the ditch that irrigated his backyard, and everybody else did the same, and the kids did a shitty job.

Joe pictured his father and mother on snowy mornings out in the yard, splitting wood. By the end of autumn they had stacks of piñon higher than the house, and that was the only heat they used. Now, he still heated part of his house with piñon, but they had a butane heater too.

And Joe recalled how his father would walk along the potholed driveway with him in the mornings to catch the school bus for the Doña Luz elementary after the Milagro elementary shut down for good. Joe would break the ice in all the puddles while his old man, smoking a cigarette, patiently waited. After a rain the driveway was crawling with worms, and Joe crushed every one of them under his heels. His father looked on and never commented on that, but now suddenly, Joe had the uneasy sensation that his father had disapproved of such wanton murder. Certainly Joe had never seen his father kill anything, except for meat, or unless it was poisonous—his father would swerve a truck almost unconsciously to squash a rattlesnake or a tarantula on the road.

Pigs. Esequiel Mondragón shooting them in the head. And then tying them up to bleed. And scalding the pigs in huge tubs of boiling water. These days Joe got a lot of his meat precut and packaged from the feedlot up in La Jara, Colorado.

During his father's last few years Joe had gone with him often up to Colorado, up to the auctions in Monte Vista and Alamosa and other towns in the San Luis Valley. Farmers were just starting to go out of business up there, and his father always attended those auctions. You could get everything from fence posts to lambing pens to refrigerators dirt cheap. Very vividly Joe could see his father and a hundred other intent men walking from pile of goods to pile of goods, hardly talking, their brows deeply furrowed, listening carefully to the auctioneers' wild, incomprehensible jabber, his father occasionally bidding on something by just barely tilting his head to let one auctioneer or the other know he was in.

Joe still traveled north to those auctions, and he usually drove back with his pickup full of junk. But it wasn't for his home, his animals, and such. Mostly it was stuff he sold to a couple of friends who had tourist-type antique and secondhand stores down in Chamisaville.

His father had not been a religious man; only once a year did he attend church, the one time each year that a service was held in the Milagro church. Otherwise, people went south on Sundays to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Doña Luz. But this one time each May, on the day of San Isidro, who was the patron saint of all farmers, they opened the small adobe church in town. The service was at night and there were little bonfires all along both sides of the road on the way to the church.

His father had had a couple of beehives in the back field too. And his father had loved to shoot baskets with him at the elementary school's outdoor court in the cool misty summer evenings after supper. And the family had often gone together into the hills to pick raspberries, and they would come home with big jars stuffed full of the red fruit. And his mother always heated green chilies on trays in the oven, and then they all sat at the table, peeling off the browned skins.…

Bernabé Montoya coasted his pickup to a stop in back of Joe's truck and got out. Joe waved, and then watched suspiciously as the sheriff walked along the Roybal ditch bank up to the borders of his beanfield.

“Morning,” Bernabé said, leaning nonchalantly against a cedar fence post.

“What are you up to, cousin?” Joe said guardedly.

“Oh, nothing much, nothing much. Just out and around, you know. Just out and around, checking on things.”

“Hmm,” Joe said, and they both watched water flow into the field for a while.

“Uh, there was a fellow up here the other day from the capital,” Bernabé said. “He talked with a group of, you know, people from around here.”

“That undercover son of a bitch with the photographs driving the unmarked Galaxie?” Joe said.

“Oh. You heard.”

Joe smiled. “Somebody mentioned it, but I had forgotten about it until now.”

“Hey, José,” Bernabé said gently. “Lots of people are worried about this little beanfield.”

“You don't say.”

“I suppose you're gonna keep on irrigating?”

“Yes, sir.”

The sheriff, hardly an hour into his day, was already tired and dispirited. He lit a cigarette, offering one to Joe, who said “No thanks, I got my own.” And, removing a pack from his front shirt pocket, Joe lit a weed.

At that moment a foot-long brown trout washed into the field and began floundering in the shallow water. Joe got up and grabbed it, bashing its head against a rock. Then, sitting back down, he took out his pocket knife and proceeded, quickly and deftly, to gut the fish.

“There's a whole bunch of important powerful people down south who are pretty nervous about this field, José,” Bernabé reiterated.

Silently, stoically, Joe thumbed up the guts, grabbing intestines and tearing them out, chucking the glop into the water.

“I'm kind of nervous about it too,” Bernabé said.

Joe swished the fish in the water a few times to clean it out, and sat back down again.

They smoked. Joe got up once more, and, with his hoe, diverted the water into a new row.

“This is just asking for trouble,” the sheriff said.

“This was my father's field, Bernabé, you know that.” Joe pointed to a ruin. “We used to live in that house.”

“That was before,” the sheriff said.

“It was before you became sheriff, too,” Joe said.

“I earn a living,” Bernabé said sadly.

They smoked some more. The sheriff flicked his butt into the water.

“So why did you come over here at 6:00
A.M
.?” Joe finally asked, grinning. “To help me irrigate?”

“I came over to ask you to stop this before it gets out of hand,” the sheriff said.