The Milagro Beanfield War (30 page)

Joe lit a cigarette and stepped onto the dirt court; Larry sat down and began building a road in the dirt. Sometimes a lot of kidding went on during these evening sessions; usually people felt noisy, obscene, or full of horseplay. But tonight they nodded, barely speaking to each other as they moved loosely around on the court, seldom breaking into anything more energetic than a brief trot, keeping the two balls floating lazily toward the basket, which had no net, only a bent rim. Joe entered automatically into the low-key rhythm, grunting occasionally, making the briefest of small talk, and taking care not to exert himself. It was a relief not to be in a competitive situation, not to be driving wildly, fighting, sweating torrents, sticky with dust. So he made baskets, and walked around getting out the kinks from an afternoon spent behind an acetylene torch, passed to the others and received passes from them, loped in for almost gentle lay-ups, or raised one knee lifting off his other toe for drowsy hook shots, and he felt okay, flipping his cigarette away only when it threatened to burn his lips and lighting another almost immediately.

It was a warm evening—the two boys had taken off their shirts, and after a while Joe stripped also. The sun departed altogether, leaving the mesaland black, but the mountains still glowed. A persistent flicker called; some nighthawks, flashing bright white spots on their narrow, knifelike wings, dipsy-doodled overhead. The moon was already up, round, white, and beautiful like a thin transparent wafer. Mosquitoes had been out in force for a while, but after the sun died they were chased into hiding by the suddenly crisp darkness. Then the night grew chilly and the players put their shirts back on.

The moon shone brightly and stars were scattered like luminous snowflakes in the pale cloudless sky. They were all used to shooting baskets in this kind of white night. There was no sound now in the early-night hush, except for their feet scraping laxly through the dust, their clothes rustling as they grunted softly and sent the ball toward the basket. Shadows to each other, they flowed gently through the velvet air, momentarily at peace, working together, in tune.

But then Joe noticed something. The others were deferring to him, allowing him the clean shot, giving him back the ball more often than they gave it back to each other. When Joe shot they held the other ball so as not to interrupt his effort. Small gestures, to be sure, but suddenly Joe recognized them for what they were, gestures of respect, and they bothered him a little. What was happening to his life? Was he turning into somebody special? This wasn't the first time he had noticed. Would they force him to become a leader? A president?—
Ai, Chihuahua!
He didn't want their respect; they could take their responsibility and shove it. After all, if he had made such a mess out of his own life so far, what was the point of implicating others?

Plus he was afraid. The whole thing had gotten out of hand. He would like to have punched his brother for making that fucking suggestion in the church, and Ruby Archuleta wanted to pass around a petition, and down in the capital the políticos and the chotas and who knew who else were trying to figure out how to brand his ass—

Not—of course—that Joe didn't sort of enjoy the attention. After all, wasn't it about time somebody aroused this apathetic community's penchant for fire and brimstone? But Joe still could not foresee what might happen, he had no idea how to handle a big crisis if one developed, and he wished somebody else would be the leader in this thing. Like Ruby Archuleta; or even Charley Bloom, what the hell—fight Anglos with Anglos. Anybody except himself, that is, because frankly, he was too scared and too stupid to handle it.

Fuck it, Joe thought. And he quit playing because their subtle deferential treatment made him nervous. Larry was sitting happily on a mound, staring at the sky, singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Joe seated himself on a metal crossbar to which a seesaw had once been attached, popped open a beer his cousin Floyd had brought, and smoked a cigarette while the others continued to pad quietly around, dreamily and contentedly shooting baskets in the vibrant, sweet-smelling dark.

What happened next none of the basketball players could later agree on. But a number of men (“There was only three,” Floyd said; “There must of been at least a dozen!” Joe insisted) suddenly burst from the darkness and beat the living daylights out of Joe and his cousin and the two teen-agers. Straight off, Joe caught a chain across his face and dropped like a sack of potatoes—for a second he blacked out. Both Benny Maestas and Jimmy Ortega were whacked with crude clubs, and Benny's nose was broken; Jimmy sustained a huge bruise on his arm trying to ward off the blows. Joe's cousin Floyd was banged once in the ass, then he took off like an antelope down the hill, and the men didn't bother to chase him. And that was all: in half a minute the rumble had ended, their attackers disappeared.

Little Larry was sitting in his sandpile crying, Joe was doubled over on the ground gasping, Jimmy Ortega was wailing about his arm, and Benny Maestas, his face covered with blood, his eyes staring at a damp switchblade knife in his hand that he thought maybe he had stuck into one of those bastards, was propped against a basket pole, snarling epithets.

“They were Chicanos,” Joe said bitterly fifteen minutes later, slumped in a kitchen chair while Nancy sponged off his face and rubbed salve into his ribs. “I heard those mothers say something in Spanish.”

“Screw you, they had Anglo accents,” Benny Maestas spat bitterly. “They smelled like hippies to me.”

Floyd Mondragón was still trembling. “What did they want to do that for?” he whined miserably, ashamed at having fled.

“They wanted José,” Jimmy Ortega groaned from the living room couch. “The Zopilote must of sent those sons of bitches to get José.”

Benny Maestas was still staring at his knife with the dried blood on the tip. And then—only then—did he notice the small hole and circle of caked blood around it in his Levi's. “Oh shit!” he exclaimed, whipping loose his belt and dropping his pants and staring at the deep puncture in his thigh: “I fucking stabbed
myself!
”

*   *   *

One-armed Onofre Martínez lived with his three-legged German shepherd in a three-room adobe house only three hundred yards from the center of town. The house was set on a half-acre landscaped like Shangri-la. No place in town had more gimcracks, doodads, and gewgaws crammed into less space in a more orderly fashion than Onofre's spread. He called it Chateau Martínez: at least, that's what the fancy wooden sign (sculptured years ago by the presently absent santo carver Snuffy Ledoux) over the front gate said. The gingerbread universe beyond the gate boasted a little Astroturf lawn, a dozen fruit trees, several aspens, some cottonwoods, a few Chinese elms, a horse corral, a half-dozen beehives and a shack for processing honey, a toolshed and a small lush garden growing corn, squash, beets, chilies, pumpkins, and strawberries, a picturesque well housing near the front door, a patch of raspberries so the bees could make raspberry honey, a chicken pen containing eight pullets, three turkeys, and a guinea hen … and there were also flower beds everywhere, not to mention birdhouses and hummingbird feeders and the dozen or so bats that were always snoozing behind the green wooden shutters flanking all the windows. To boot, Onofre's TV antenna was so tall, so elaborate, so pronged, and so replete with squiggling copper and aluminum tubing and boosters, that it looked like a DEW-line radar interceptor in Greenland. Onofre's half-acre also had room for seven of the widest and highest piles of piñon firewood in the county. All this was surrounded by a white picket fence built so sturdily that the Chateau Martínez was the only place in town which had
never
been desecrated by Pacheco's pig.

Inside the house Onofre had a large library of both Spanish and English detective novels, an upright piano, and the best reception on his mammoth color TV set of anyone in the county.

Day and night, Onofre's house usually buzzed with grandchildren and great-grandchildren: he gave the orders and they carried them out. For example, two great-grandchildren, Chemo and Chepa Martínez, aged seven and nine, always rode with Onofre in his truck when he collected honey from the twenty hives he had scattered around the Milagro area. Some older grandchildren helped him—for a small cut—to process the honey, which was later sold either in Rael's store or directly from the Chateau Martínez.

Onofre was also Chamisa County's chief dealer in staurolites, a big tourist business in Rael's store and in several trading posts and gift shops in Doña Luz and Chamisaville. Onofre's prominence in this trade had long ago earned him the title of the Staurolite Baron. Staurolites, also called Fairy Crosses, being a certain type of crystal (shaped like a perfect little cross and ranging in size from small pinkie to fat thumb) peculiar to the hills around Milagro and having a rather extensive folklore. Onofre couldn't have cared less about the folklore, however. At least twice a week, during dry spring, summer, and autumn days, Onofre loaded his truck with grandchildren and great-grandchildren and barreled up one canyon or another to hillsides positively reeking of pulverized rocks among which a diligent kid, given four or five hours and a dime per salable staurolite, could usually find at least a dozen of the lovely little curiosities. In turn, Onofre sold the crystals to Nick Rael and other commercial entrepreneurs for fifty cents, and the entrepreneurs unloaded them to tourists for a buck apiece, maybe even more.

Staurolites, then, were a lucrative deal to everyone concerned.

As was the piñon wood which Onofre collected, again aided by his great-grandchildren, who usually received a flat dollar per pickup load for their efforts. Onofre either dumped the wood in one of his mammoth piles (which were even advertised in the Chamisaville
News
), or else sold directly—often at twenty-five dollars a pickup load—to the Dancing Trout or to the middle-class artsy-craftsy and retired families down in Chamisaville. His own people could not buy from Onofre at those prices: they were used to paying five dollars, at the most a sawbuck, for a pickup load of piñon.

Onofre also knocked down a tidy dollar here and fifty cents there by helping Joe and Nancy Mondragón run their hamburger, Italian ice, and corn dog stand down at the Chamisaville Moto-Cross races one Sunday a month during the summer and autumn. In point of fact, Onofre was this operation's main bookkeeper, even though his left arm was illiterate: he spent hours telling Nancy what to write in the books, and how to write it, and how to cheat and disguise and rearrange for tax purposes, and so forth. Onofre's other duties included being the chief procurer of the stand's beef, which he bought mainly from the hippies at the Evening Star commune on Strawberry Mesa. Though bad ranchers, and even worse farmers, the hippies were rich—their commune was floated by a member's father, the chairman of a huge international corporation—and thus they indulged themselves by raising pathetically inadequate gardens and by growing cows. Although the Evening Star commune had only been around a few years, its college-educated freaks had nevertheless beaten the system out of cattle permits on some very rich terrain adjoining acreage controlled by Eusebio Lavadie. Hence, although they were badly overgrazing this land and losing most of their calves to colic or coyotes, their herd presently sported some real fat beef on the hoof, and Onofre, knowing exactly how to play on their white middle-class guilt, always managed to drive the price down until the hippies were practically selling Joe Mondragón his Moto-Cross hamburgers for nothing. Many townspeople treated the hippies in a similar fashion. looking upon them as a sort of manna from heaven, hiring them—for example—to make adobes, because the freaks learned fast and were willing—again out of middle-class guilt, and also because they were independently wealthy anyway—to labor eight or ten hours a day at what amounted to slave wages.

There was a saying that the Evening Star hippies were the only farmers in the Miracle Valley rich enough to turn over their gardens and cut their fields by hand.

Well, Onofre Martínez was a shrewd man; also an ornery S.O.B., as evinced by his attitude toward Milagro's lone parking meter. And, like all the other old men in town, Onofre was also a little bit gaga.

The Astroturf lawn in front of his house Onofre had won in a cereal boxtop jingle contest, but he had paid hard cash for all the plants in his elaborate and colorful flower gardens, and they were all plastic. “If I could afford it, I'd put in plastic fruit trees, too,” Onofre told anybody willing to listen. “I mean, when was the last time my trees bore fruit? I, for one, can't remember.”

A fair enough (and typical enough) reaction to the orchard situation in Milagro. For although every family in Milagro had fruit trees, virtually all of these fruit trees bore fruit about as often as the women of Milagro bore quintuplets. The Death of the Fruit Tree Blossoms, a ritual that took place every spring, had been known to drive some people more than a little ding-y. At best, the ritual set farmers to gnashing their teeth so hard and so often that almost all the people of Milagro who still had them owned teeth which were very irregular, chipped, and loosened by the gnashing that ran rampant during apple blossom time.

The ritual Death of the Fruit Tree Blossoms began toward the end of every March when, after a long hard winter, warm air coursed lovingly into the Miracle Valley, leading all the fruit trees to believe spring was just around the corner. And, believing this, their sap began running, their buds grew fat, their branches suddenly burst forth into flowers. The air became redolent from apple and pear and plum blossoms, and the locals started wandering around in shirt sleeves, made lazy and soporific and horny by the perfumed air. Farmers greased up their tractors; Nick Rael ordered garden seeds, summer hoses, irrigation boots; and cows groaned and fell down and bore their calves.