The Milagro Beanfield War (26 page)

       El Brazo Onofre is looking for you,

Mr. Zopilote Devine, and when it finds

you, you son of a bitch, it's gonna choke

you to death.

Devine walked out of his office and down the hall to Emerson Lapp's office and over to Emerson Lapp's desk. Settling the note dramatically in front of his startled secretary, he asked:

“What the hell is this?”

Lapp read the note, scanned it again, then wrinkled his upper lip, squinched his nose until the bridge was thoroughly grooved, and weighted down his entire prissy face with a formidable, puzzled frown.

“Christ, Mr. D., you sure got me. What's this El Brazo Onofre?”

“El Brazo means ‘The Arm,'” Devine said. “I don't know what Zopilote means.”

Emerson Lapp turned the piece of paper over, turned it back, reread it again, and shook his head. “It's stupid, Mr. D. It's silly. It's not serious. It's somebody's idea of a joke.”

Devine reread the note, observing: “I don't think it's very funny.”

Next, he showed the message to Jerry G., who also shook his head, looking very serious, and had nothing to say. Who or what the hell was El Brazo Onofre?

“Onofre's Arm,” Horsethief Shorty murmured, perplexed, biting his lips to keep from laughing, lacking an answer for once. “Maybe they mean Onofre Martínez's missing arm, that's the first thing pops into my mind. But what kind of significance they've given it sure beats me. Must be something private to them, and it must be pretty private if I never heard of it.”

“What does this word ‘Zopilote' mean?”

“Vulture. Buzzard.”

“Oh.”

The fifth person to read Ladd Devine's note was the sheriff, Bernabé Montoya. He was sitting on Rael's porch drinking a Dr. Pepper while keeping an eye on things, when the front tire of a Dancing Trout pickup almost clipped the tips off his feet, and Devine draped an arm out the window, allowing the threatening note to glide off his fingertips into Bernabé's lap.

“What kind of rotten joke is this, Bernie?” he asked angrily.

Bernabé read the note, and as he did so, unseen by Devine, an
Ai, Chihuahua!
about the size of a dinosaur quietly fumbled up the sheriff's queasy esophagus and mutely dissipated itself into the heavy summer air. For a second Bernabé thought he had better explain the myth of El Brazo Onofre; but on second thought, he wondered, Why begin, for crissakes?

Slowly, the sheriff shook his head, pretending to be very puzzled. “What's this, Mr. Devine? It sure is weird. Who's this Brazo Onofre?”

“You mean you never heard of El Brazo Onofre?” Devine asked suspiciously.

“Never in my life,” Bernabé swore, still ponderously shaking his head, trying to win an Oscar for his interpretation of a bewildered frown.

“Well, if this is somebody's idea of a joke, I don't think it's so God damn funny,” Devine said.

“Is this a note you received, sir?” Bernabé asked politely, handing it back to Devine.

“In the mail. This morning.” Lips pressed firmly together, Devine scanned the note again. “I wonder whose handwriting this is,” he said tightly.

Bernabé shrugged, trying to repress the intuition he had about what was coming next.

Devine said, “Wouldn't you classify this as some kind of peculiar death threat?”

“I wouldn't say that, sir. To me, it seems just like somebody's idea of a prank.”

“The writer called me a son of a bitch,” Devine said softly. “And the writer also threatened to choke me to death.”

Commiseratingly, Bernabé nodded, mentally booting himself in the ass for sitting on Rael's porch out in the open at 11:00
A.M
. in full view of all traffic heading to or from the Dancing Trout Dude Ranch.

After a pause, Devine asked, “What would you do about a note like this, Bernie?”

“I'd sit on it,” the sheriff said. “I mean, you know, not literally. I just wouldn't do nothing.”

“What would the state police do?” Devine asked frostily.

Bernabé released another gargantuan though inaudible
Ai, Chihuahua!,
and, fearing for his career, his voice almost a moan, he said, “They sure wouldn't come into town and go around asking people to write on pieces of paper and then compare those pieces of paper with your note, sir. If you wanted somebody to want to kill you, that would be a good way to get them to be that way.”

Devine said, “Alright, Bernie. Thanks for your valuable time.” He turned abruptly around in the plaza area and drove home.

The note which arrived next morning said:

Maybe some night El Brazo Onofre will creep through your window, Mr. Zopilote Devine, and tickle you under your armpits, and take all the money from your wallet, and then drive a big fat knife through your fucking heart.

Ladd Devine stapled the two notes and the two envelopes they had come in together, slipped them into a manila folder, and filed them under
E
for “El” in his personal correspondence file.

Notes arrived almost daily after that. Devine cursed silently to himself and filed them away. Maybe the fan letters were only a prank, but they upset him; each one jarred his day a little when it came, and he found it difficult to recover afterward. He did not tell Flossie about the notes, however, nor did he again mention them to Emerson Lapp, although the secretary knew of their existence since he always handled and sorted the mail before passing it on to his boss.

Late one afternoon at the height of the El Brazo Onofre deluge, Devine turned to his wife. “Let's go for a fly,” he said gently. “Would you like that?”

“Oh Ladd,” Flossie murmured happily. “Can we really?”

“Sure. Get your coat.”

“May I take this drink along?”

“As you wish, my dear.”

She fetched her coat, a fluffy white imitation-fur carcoat, and, bracelets jangling, her champagne glass in one hand, a bottle of bubbly in the other, followed him out to the main garage where he chose a Ford station wagon for the trip down to the airport. Their drive to Chamisaville was quiet, the radio turned on softly to music, neither speaking to the other. They parked at the small airport, and while Devine talked over weather conditions with the manager, Chet Premminger, Flossie sat in the car listening to the radio and sipping quietly from her glass, staring through the spotless windshield at the wide and glorious sagebrush expanse leading up to the green and white mountains.

Then she walked to the plane with her husband. There was little wind; in a moment they were airborne. Flossie saw it all through a peculiarly lazy alcoholic dream. She was not unhappy to be who she was, she thought, living with whom she lived. Yet ever since she had been a little girl she hadn't known what to do with herself. When her mother said go out and play, she merely drifted around the yard, or lay on the lawn, daydreaming about nothing in particular, wondering what to do. Everything had always been very rosy, very taffeta and vague, and only half-troubled. On horses she walked, simply forgetting to spur them into a trot, a canter, a gallop, having no desire to be thrilled. Somebody always put the saddle on and took it off, and somebody else had always curried the animals for her. And she had been drinking steadily, now, for a very long time.

Devine flew the plane without talking. Once over the mountains they saw a herd of about fifteen deer in a high open meadow. Later they caught sight of tiny circular lakes, the sun glaring bright silver off their still surfaces.

Flossie gazed, holding her glass carefully so that none of the champagne spilled. Her husband kept them very steady.

“This is nice,” she said. “Thank you, dear. This was a nice idea.”

“Yes,” Devine said, smiling as he patted her knee. “I thought you might like it.”

“Let's go see the ranch.”

Moments later they flew over the Dancing Trout, and over Milagro, and they circled over it all again.

“Honey,” Flossie said suddenly, her carefully penciled eyebrows descending, coming together in a little frown. “Is what we do wrong?”

“I don't understand.”

“Oh, you know. The ranch. The company. The Miracle Valley project. We own
every
thing, love.”

“Nonsense. We don't own everything. And what we do own, why, we worked pretty darn hard for it.”

“I guess I don't understand things,” Flossie said, sipping from her glass. “And of course you're right, we worked really hard for it…”

“So don't worry,” Devine said. “Let's drop the subject. Do you want to see the Little Baldy Lakes?”

She smiled. “That would be fun.”

They flew over the nine lakes, silver baubles in green alpine bowls. In spots the rocky sides of surrounding peaks still displayed some snow.

“Sometimes I'm afraid it's all wrong,” Flossie suddenly dared to whisper as they came off the mountains and over juniper and then sagebrush terrain again.

“Nonsense,” Devine said a little testily.

“It does make me sad, though, the way you men talk together about those things,” Flossie said. “Joe Mondragón is so
poor,
isn't he? Doesn't—well, doesn't,
don't,
I mean … don't things ever make you sad?”

“Everybody becomes upset from time to time. You know that.”

She smiled and reached over, affectionately touching his shoulder. “They're going to have a meeting—”

“I know all about it and I don't want to talk about it.”

“I wonder if they'll talk about us…”

“I said we won't talk about that.”

“I'm sorry.” She settled back, murmuring, “I don't know why, sometimes I get so silly. I'm so comfortable all the time. I'm always warm and I'm always comfortable. I thank you so much for all of that. Isn't it beautiful over there? Look, you can see our shadow. Let's fly down in the gorge.”

Devine steered the plane westward, dropping carefully down between the gorge walls. Sunlight was fast leaving, but they still had plenty of light to fly by. Swallows zipped away from the plane. Startled, several fishermen looked up, mouths agape; suddenly, giddily, they waved. There were sections where the river flowed slowly and serenely; in other areas it was a white foam crashing through a course of enormous boulders. They flew under the bridge spanning the gorge west of Doña Luz, the road that crossed it heading toward Ojo Prieto and points beyond.

When they pulled out of the gorge, Flossie poured a touch more into her glass. “That's one of my favorite places to fly,” she murmured.

Her husband turned the plane around and they flew back through the high plateau sunset, orange and powdery blue, brilliant and soft and different everywhere, the mountains crimson for a few seconds, then dark purple, suddenly black, nighthawks flying below them over the sage; and once they saw, or at least Flossie thought she saw, a coyote running. The plane skimmed in low, teetered just slightly, and bounced along the runway.

Flossie wandered back to the car and, while Devine spoke with Chet Premminger about servicing the plane, she leaned on the hood, staring at what was left of the sunset, a few crimson and orange ribbons in the west, with mesas and gentle mountains silhouetted black like on corny picture postcards.

It was dark by the time they headed away from the airport. The heating system purred loudly. Flossie clicked on the radio to soft dance music, then opened the glove compartment to find an emery board for filing down her nails. Instead, her hand landed on a gun. Startled, she removed it, a .38 police special; and loaded, too.

“What the heck is this?”

“I put it there,” Devine said. “Leave it alone.”

“But what for? You never carried a gun in the car…”

“Well, you never can tell,” her husband said in that special threatening tone of voice he used to indicate a discussion was over.

And so they drove home to Milagro. In silence. In the dark.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, as some people tiptoed around slipping loaded pistols into their glove compartments, and as other people anxiously awaited the meeting called by Ruby Archuleta, the VISTA volunteer Herbie Goldfarb was quietly heading toward a nervous breakdown.

And he was going crazy, not because of Joe Mondragón's beanfield, but first of all because of snakes, and secondly because of his next door neighbors' rabbits and chickens.

The snakes Herbie began to notice shortly after he had established himself in his pathetic redolent smokehouse. More specifically, he really noticed them when, upon sliding into his sleeping bag one night, his feet jammed up against a squirming pile of chilly coils. Squealing hysterically, he grappled clear of the sleeping bag, crashed blindly into the wall and bounced onto the floor, almost fainted, and started to cry. Eventually, though, Herbie had the presence of mind to drag his sleeping bag outside and shake it hard; he shuddered as four skinny little water snakes blinked puzzledly up into his flashlight beam.

Next morning, Herbie awoke to find two small snakes snoozing in the middle of his floor. Grabbing them by their tails, he dropped them almost instantly, blurting falsetto eeks because they had wriggled back up to nip him with their toothless little mouths. And then, trembling uncontrollably, the volunteer spent the next eight hours mixing mud in a wheelbarrow (borrowed from Joe Mondragón) and caulking up all the inside holes around the foundation of his “home.”

“I never saw so many snakes in my life,” he chattered nervously to Joe, who merely shrugged and loaned him a shovel, saying, “If they bother you, just chop the little motherfuckers into pieces with this.”

“Oh, I wouldn't want to kill them,” the pacifist said unhappily. “I mean, they're not poisonous or anything…”

Scornfully, Joe said, “Suit yourself.”

Three days later, with an anguished groan, Herbie chopped his first snake in two: it had been curled up on his sleeping bag, happily snoozing in the glow of his bodily warmth, when he awoke. After hacking it apart, though, he almost vomited as he watched the two halves wriggle frantically in the dust. Desperately, Herbie banged away at the serpent with his shovel until all the pieces were stilled. “Don't tread on me,” he remembered sickly. And: “United we stand…”