The Milagro Beanfield War (36 page)

Abruptly it was dark, and Herbie had no idea how to thread the intricate maze to home. To make matters worse, dogs started barking as he walked by. Some actually pranced savagely onto the road, raising an unbelievably raucous stink. One pack of jabbering mutts charged across a field, threatening first to deafen him, then to trample him to death, then to tear him slobberingly, teeth-clickingly from limb to limb. But they skidded to a stop at their owner's barbed wire boundary, and sat there, howling and gnashing their teeth until he turned a corner.

Next, two friendly simpering hounds crawled out of a ditch, and, limping badly from broken legs and crippled hips, from BB or real gunshot wounds, they cringed along—tails between their legs—at his heels, whining unctuously, half-creeping, half-slinking; looking up at him beggingly from out the sides of their whitened eyeballs, flinching whenever he just slightly stumbled or gave them an angry glance; starved for affection (not to mention for a bowl of Gaines Meal, for a rabbit, or for a can of Friskies). When Herbie finally snarled at these groveling outcasts, who reminded him too much of himself, ordering them to go home, they flattened onto their bellies and dragged themselves in the dirt, pleading for just a speck of human kindness, and—surprised by his reaction—the volunteer discovered that he wanted to kick them in their sly-eyed, obsequious guts; he wanted to bust some more of their ribs.

Later, Onofre Martínez's powerful three-legged German shepherd charged off its porch like an enraged water buffalo, jumped over the picket fence, and hung on the volunteer's heels. Practically on tiptoes, Herbie begged the dog to go away, to leave him alone. But the massive dog refused to heed his whimpering request until he crossed some invisible boundary beyond which the savage cur would not travel. As suddenly as it had attached itself, it quit dogging his heels and sat down, staring after him with eyes drowsily half-closed, contented and serene, maybe even purring.

Other dogs stayed on their porches, happy to mark his appearance and departure with passive earsplitting symphonies. Their barks set off a chain reaction, so that as Herbie limped fearfully by any given adobe, usually about fifteen or twenty insane animals were announcing his existence to the rest of the world at large.

Thinking that cutting across a field would lead closer to home, Herbie found himself suddenly surrounded by cows—which he took to be bulls—and by two of the biggest, shaggiest horses he had ever laid eyes upon. The cows gazed at him with a sort of threatening idiotic placidity; the horses peered down their long snouts like curious, intelligent gods.

Desperately, Herbie started to back up. The cows remained in place, but the two horses were interested; they lumbered toward him in a huge friendly manner. Ducking backward through a fence, Herbie caught a sleeve on a barb, tearing the shirt in his panic to reach safety. The horses stopped at the wire and rumbled a little, but apparently decided not to barge through the flimsy barbed strands and trample him to death.

Eventually, sighting on the small cluster of garish mercury vapor lamps in town, Herbie made it to Rael's store, and from there he knew the way home.

But the skunks were flirting or fighting or whatever underneath the floorboards, making sleep impossible; his eyes burned and his brain felt as if it had been wrapped in hot green chilies. Dogs barked and were silent and barked some more. At one awful point, every kind of canine voice imaginable cut loose, rejoicing, wailing in pain, some barks offering challenges, others announcing, with fear or ecstasy, the hectic gang-banging of females in heat. Toward midnight, coyotes on the western mesa sang their falsetto tunes and were answered. And so, how the hell could an Easterner, used to nothing more hysterical than police sirens and fire engines and cars honking and women screaming “Rape!” and muggers thudding their fists into gurgling victims, get any sleep?

Around 2:00
A.M
. a small brown bear wandered into town, and the security dog Harlan Betchel kept locked in the Pilar Café, a Doberman named Brutus, went wild. The bear stared at Brutus for a while, then clumped up the road leading to Herbie Goldfarb's redolent adobe shack. It so happened that at the time the bear strolled through, Herbie was camped in his open-air outhouse. But the bear padded silently across the dirt yard without giving him so much as a tumble, and kept right on going until it hit the juniper-piñon cover of the foothills.

When Herbie finally slept that night, Hieronymus Bosch never had such chilling nightmares.

*   *   *

Joe Mondragón owned four cows, three horses, and ten sheep. His personal earthen property, on which he might have grazed these animals, consisted of one irrigated acre around his house, five sageland acres in the Coyote Arroyo section of Milagro, one and seven-tenths acres of sageland and sparse gramma grass near the north–south highway, and the seven-tenths of an acre on the west side where his beans were growing.

The sum total of vegetation on this land was enough to keep one cow in food for approximately sixteen days out of every year.

Hence, in order to keep his other livestock functioning, Joe had to supplement their diets with hay bales bought locally or from outside or with hard-to-come-by grazing permits which allowed him to fatten them up on government grass, or by playing a frustrating, frantic, and never-ending game of musical pastures: that is, by switching his livestock from one small field to another small field to another small field in town, renting these fields from neighbors or borrowing them from friends. This was the most common way for animals to survive in Milagro, though also one of the most tenuous, since almost everyone else also owned animals of one sort or another that they were simultaneously and continually switching around, too. Thus, just about every small pasture was overgrazed and had been overgrazed ever since the government and the Ladd Devine Company appropriated most of the rest of the county some one hundred years ago.

Joe had a permit to graze two head of cattle in the National Forest from June through October. Only twenty-five years ago, Joe's father, Esequiel, had had a permit to graze one hundred sheep and sixty cows in the National Forest. Joe had inherited this permit from his father (promptly losing 10 percent of the animals allowed on each permit through an official attrition policy akin to inheritance taxes), and down through the last fifteen years he had seen the number of animals allowed on it steadily reduced through some kind of governmental bureaucratic black magic, until he had grazing rights for only two cows left from that rich heritage bequeathed to him by his father.

Joe's case was not unique: all Milagro was in more or less the same boat. Everybody could remember those days when, even though they had lost much communal land, they had still been allowed permits to run cattle and sheep and goats galore in the National Forest. And everybody was a little stunned by how these permits had been miraculously whittled away, until today almost nobody, except for Eusebio Lavadie and Ladd Devine, had the right to run much more than a token animal up there in the tourist and timbering country, which was so green and lush the odor coming off it into Milagro on the evening breezes could make a skinny horse just about scream.

One way the permits had been reduced was simply by annually upping their cost by about two cents per head. An even quicker and more popular way to shave permits was by impounding cattle that strayed out of their designated government areas (or off private land onto the unfenced National Forest), and fining people exorbitantly to get them back. Along with the fine (which was usually twenty dollars—the lifetime savings of most town residents), the head count on a rancher's permit was often cut as punishment; and in this way the small farmers' permits had been reduced to almost nothing over the past years in order to make room in the forest for the far more lucrative tourists and big-game hunters and timbering interests.

Joe's animals survived because Joe hustled twenty-eight hours a day to keep them alive. But also they survived because they were tough. No animal in Joe's herds, or in Milagro for that matter, except for the sheep, were ever allowed into any structure that resembled a shed or a barn. Hence, on a typical winter morning when the sun rose, any number of fuzzy white beasts could be seen moving stiffly around in the white fields, their fur frozen solid, snow piled high on their backs, their eyelashes looking like Christmas tree branches. Often it rained on a January evening and then froze an hour later, so that the horses and cows became ice sculptures that could not move until they were thawed out some fifteen hours later by the next day's sunshine. Other times, on chill winter mornings, cattle and horses might be seen standing very still in the boggy vegaland, having been frozen into place overnight, and—again—they were waiting for the sun to melt the icy ground so they could recommence pawing through the snow for food.

Like everyone else in town, Joe was also constantly engaged in the aforementioned game of musical pastures, begging friends and neighbors and even enemies for the right to rent or use their fields for one or more of his animals for one or more days, weeks, or what have you. Thus, at any given time he might have two cows on a permit up in the forest, one cow in Panky Mondragón's quarter-acre backyard, the other cow in with Bernabé Montoya's cows up on Bernabé's canyon land, one horse eating hay at home and another horse in a half-acre pasture belonging to Nick Rael, the third horse on a tether beside the highway eating the Right of Way grass for nothing, and his ten sheep spread into groups of three, three, and four each, grazing in overgrazed pastures belonging to Pete Apodaca, Ray Gusdorf, and Seferino Pacheco, respectively. Meanwhile, of course, Pete Apodaca had both his horses in a pasture rented from Eusebio Lavadie, and Ray Gusdorf had his seven cattle split up into groups that were on a Forest Service permit, in a Nick Rael field, in Joe Mondragón's backyard, and running loose (by “accident”) along the same lush highway Right of Way on which Joe's tethered horse was grazing.

Since Eusebio Lavadie had more pastureland than everyone else, people were always trying to work deals whereby their animals could graze on his grass for a nominal fee. Lavadie himself owned many animals, but he had permits to graze them on either Bureau of Land Management or National Forest land, so his own bottomland could be rented out to others, which he was only too glad to do. Naturally, he charged exorbitantly for the right to graze on his land, and was thus able to pay for his BLM and National Forest permits and turn a tidy profit to boot. Which was the unhappy way the ball had been bouncing in Milagro for quite some time, and which was just another reason Eusebio Lavadie was not a particularly well-liked person in the Miracle Valley.

Given the situation, much illegal grazing went on in the Milagro area. Joe Mondragón often cut a horse or two loose onto the BLM land controlled by Eusebio Lavadie, and Ray Gusdorf often cut his own fences so that his cows could wander by mistake into the Dancing Trout's verdant pastures. In fact, fences were constantly being snipped accidentally so that skinny cows, horses, or sheep might wander off their owner's mini-dustbowls into their neighbors' less parched fields. Quite often the irate neighbors responded by shooting the offensive intruders, but such shootings amounted to pyrrhic vengeance, because the law read a person had to fence animals “out,” not “in,” and thus if a rancher shot an animal that had wandered onto his property, the blame for it being on that property was always the rancher's, never his neighbor's, and the rancher always wound up shelling out in spades in court for destroying his neighbor's livelihood.

This law held true for private property owners only, however. For if a private cow happened to wander out of its barren pasture onto National Forest land, the cow's owner, and not the Forest Service, was to blame.

One day a cow belonging to Joe Mondragón walked through a rusty fence surrounding Seferino Pacheco's back field and wandered up the Milagro Canyon road past the Dancing Trout, turned left into a lush meadow owned by the United States of America, and was immediately impounded by Floyd Cowlie and Carl Abeyta, who lassoed the gaunt animal and led it back into the stock pen behind Forest Service headquarters in town, and then dutifully sent Joe a gleeful letter announcing that if he didn't pick up his cow and pay the twenty-dollar fine within five days, the cow would no longer be his. The letter also mentioned that since this was the third time a Mondragón cow had been discovered poaching on government greenery, the amount of cattle allowed on Joe's permit, number 37765, was being reduced from two to one.

The letter was posted in the Milagro Post Office at the back of Rael's store, and the postmaster, Nick Rael, threw it into the mail bag which would be picked up by Teddy Martínez and taken to Chamisaville for sorting and canceling, a process that might take two days, and then Teddy Martínez would bring the bag of Milagro mail back up to Rael's store, where it would sit for a day or so until Nick, or his kid, Jerry, got around to putting it out in the boxes.

Before all this could happen, however, Joe showed up at Pacheco's to drop a salt block into the field, and when he discovered his cow had flown the coop he started screaming at Seferino, who just glowered lopsidedly at him during the five-minute tirade. When Joe finally stopped for air, the big morose drunkard said, “José, I let you put that sick cow in my field for nothing, so I didn't have no obligation to mend no fences.”

“Sure, you let me put it in for nothing,” Joe snarled. “There wasn't no grass in that field you could charge me for anyway!”

“Well, why did you put it there in the first place, then?” Pacheco wanted to know.

Joe threw a fistful of dirt on the ground, unleashed a string of curses by way of an adios, and stomped off to search for his skinny animal.

It was on his way back into town after a fruitless search that he caught sight of the cow munching on a bale of mildewed government hay in the pen behind Forest Service headquarters. And when Joe saw his cow in that corral his heart almost stopped, because he knew straight off that, not only was the steer's freedom going to cost him twenty dollars he didn't have, but also a permit head as well.