The Milagro Beanfield War (41 page)

“I was trying to shoot the skunks under my house. But I think I sprained my thumb.”

*   *   *

About two hours after the gunfight at Herbie Goldfarb's, as Charley Bloom saw Ruby Archuleta's plumbing truck pull up outside his house, he wished to hell that he'd driven down to Chamisaville that afternoon to Xerox some deeds and other papers at the Legal Aid office there. Because if Ruby wanted something from him, it could only spell trouble, and after today he wanted no part in the kind of trouble her desires were certain to cause. Yet how to escape?—he let her knock before opening the door.

“Can I talk with you a moment, Mr. Bloom?”

“Sure, sure, come on in…” Bloom was all smiles, expansive, a good guy, a wonderful lawyer: Champion of the Poor.

Ruby scraped her feet carefully, flicked a cigarette butt away, and entered the kitchen, sat down at the table.

“You want coffee? Or a beer?”

“A beer is okay, thanks.” Ruby lit another cigarette, inhaling deeply. Bloom popped the top for her and sat down on the other side of the table.

Ruby said, “I need some help to write a petition. We're gonna pass around a petition, you know? Against the dam and the conservancy district. Also I want to know if we can hire you…”

“Who's ‘we'?”

“The Milagro Land and Water Protection Association.”

“Are you incorporated? In what ways do you exist?”

Ruby smiled toughly and leaned back, tapping her head. “Up here we exist, Mr. Bloom.”

“That's not enough.”

“It's a start.”

“How do you plan to grow?”

“I've talked with the commissioners and the mayordomos on all the ditch systems. They listen, they're talking with each other now. Nobody knows for sure. Some are very bitter, others are angry, everybody is afraid. To fight this thing takes money and we have no money and people are afraid of anything that calls for money. But they understand what's happening here. By talking at the meeting you helped. Still, they don't trust me, they don't trust you. If Snuffy Ledoux came back tomorrow they probably wouldn't trust him. They don't even trust themselves. Many think it's hopeless to oppose the Zopilote. But there is José's example that won't go away. People are watching him; they're watching you too, waiting to see how you will act when the chips are down. Maybe nobody will sign my petition, I don't know, we'll see. But it's a first step, you know? After the first step comes the second step. If we can scare those bastards up in the canyon and down in the capital, maybe we can get a boot in the door. Because of José—and because of your talk in the church—I think some people will sign this petition, and once they sign this petition it will be possible to form as a group, and once we're an organized legal group, then maybe we can tax ourselves enough to pay you to help us, if you will…”

Bloom lowered his eyes, a surge of hopelessness causing him almost to shiver. She was talking about maybe destroying his life. She was talking about engaging him to do a twenty-four-hour-a-day job for peanuts—no, not even for peanuts, probably for a couple of abrazos, some sacks filled with illegal deer meat, and a bag of beans. She had no idea what it would take to stall or defeat a conservancy district in the courts, the cost in dollars and time of the paper work alone, the cost of transcripts for the inevitable appeals. She had no concept of how emphatically the conservancy laws were stacked against her people. To put up even a half-decent fight they would need a billion dollars. She was crazy, foolhardy—she and Joe and anybody else in this town who thought the small farmers had (or even deserved) an outside shot at survival against Ladd Devine's conglomerate, the state, and the Government of the U.S.A.

“I dunno,” Bloom said, wondering where to begin, begging himself to muster the guts to refuse.

Ruby stubbed out her cigarette, saying “We will be like the Vietnamese.”

Bloom glanced at her sharply. She was smiling; for the first time he noticed her almost mystical loveliness, her beautiful wind-toughened face, the crow's-feet ranging out from the corners of her sharp green eyes, the strength glowing from her, clean and pure, copper-colored, indomitable. She made him feel incredibly weak and flabby.

The lawyer shook his head. “I don't think here could be like Vietnam.” His voice sounded ridiculous; but for God's sake, the
thought
was ridiculous. “Who have you really got?” he asked petulantly.

“Me. Claudio. My son Eliu. Marvin LaBlue. Amarante Córdova. Tranquilino Jeantete. There are others. A lot of people are thinking. And what about José? And Nancy? And Onofre Martínez? Sparky Pacheco?”

The lawyer said, “You can't make a revolution with a bunch of decrepit old men.”

“Bullshit. If the spirit is willing I can make a revolution with a bunch of three-legged burros, or a sackful of bullfrogs.”

Bloom smiled, sighed. “This petition you're going to circulate, what will it be basically, just against the conservancy district and the dam?”

“Sure. You know, that, and with a couple of reasons, like you mentioned in the church, written out. That we will be taxed too heavily to pay for Zopi Devine's lake; that we will lose our land—”

“And you plan on sending it where?”

“To the governor. To our representatives in the Congress.”

“You know that's a useless, almost a foolish gesture, a complete waste of energy and time?”

“The point isn't to change their minds,” Ruby said quietly. “The point is to have our people sign. The point is to make an action together. Signing a petition will draw us together. It's a kind of official beginning.”

Bloom said, “Okay, but I'll bet you something. We'll draw up the petition right now, and if you want I'll take a draft to Chamisaville later this afternoon and Xerox a lot of copies, no problem. But I'll bet you this: I'll bet you five dollars that if you take the petition over to Joe Mondragón this afternoon, he won't sign.”

“That's a bet,” Ruby said, smiling at him almost pityingly. “Now, let's begin…”

*   *   *

An hour later, crestfallen, Ruby returned; Bloom was out back with his children, helping them feed hay bale flakes to their Shetland ponies. She walked up to the corral and, without a word, handed over a five-dollar bill. Bloom laughed, pushing it back at her:

“Oh, come on, Mrs. Archuleta. It was a joke, you know, I wasn't that serious, I mean, you know—”

Ruby nodded, shrugged, and slipped the five spot into her blue jeans pocket. Then she offered him a clipboard holding a copy of the petition, saying, “What about you, Mr. Bloom? If you're defending José, if you're willing to work for us, you should sign—”

Bloom stared at the petition, at the two names on it, Ruby's and Claudio García's, and he thought: Oh my God, how do I get out of this? Then, absolutely not wanting to make the commitment, he took the cheap ball-point pen she offered and signed his name the way a prisoner, by confessing to some heinous crime, might sign his own death warrant.

Ruby grinned. “From now on,” she said, “I'm gonna call you Charley. Carlito. And you just call me Ruby, okay?”

The lawyer smiled sickly and nodded, thinking: Don't do me any favors.

“I'll tell the people they can trust you,” Ruby said.

Bloom wanted to say, No, don't tell them that, because they can't, but he couldn't say it; he laughed hollowly and could not really think of a proper way to react at all. Then of a sudden he truly hated her guts and Joe's guts for holding him up, for jamming him back into a corner from which there could apparently be no escape.

*   *   *

Whenever Joe Mondragón felt really nervous, he charged into his chicken shed and started madly catching the English sparrows that fed on the hen scratch Joe kept in a long aluminum hopper in there. The birds became so panicky at Joe's appearance they forgot where the door was and just kept battering from window to window until Joe had caught ten or fifteen of the obnoxious little fluffballs, which he stuffed into his front shirt pockets. Of late, the scruffy yellow, snake-eating reincarnation of Cleofes Apodaca had taken to accompanying Joe into the shed. And, while Joe raced around trapping sparrows against the window panes, the cat, like a great glove at third, repeatedly leaped up and snagged the frantic little birds in midair as they flew away in line drives from Joe's grabbing hands. Not one to stand on ceremony, the cat killed each bird with one crunch, ate it with two bites, digested it with three swallows, burped out four feathers, and leaped to catch another.

Now, even though he had been shot at by Harlan Betchel four hours before, and even though he had just refused to sign Ruby Archuleta's petition, when Joe staggered huffing and puffing from the shed with his pockets stuffed chock-full of English sparrows, he felt much better. So also did the cat, its stomach gorged with tiny crumpled wings. Joe tromped loudly into the house and transferred the twelve birdlets from his pockets into an old-fashioned, hexagonal glass-paneled ballot jar which he had bought for five bucks at a Monte Vista, Colorado, auction. This ballot jar Joe then set on the kitchen table, and, snapping open a beer, he ordered Nancy, who was in the living room reading a book, to fix him some lunch.

Nancy said, “Fix it yourself.”

Joe ignored that by remarking, “Look at all the birds I caught.”

“I think it's dumb to terrify those little birds like that. Now don't bother me, I'm reading.”

Okay. Joe got up. He browsed through the refrigerator, fashioned himself a peanut butter, mayonnaise, and green chili sandwich, drummed up a Baggie full of cracklings that he wished had come from Seferino Pacheco's ravenous thundering pig, turned on the radio to “Heartbreak Theater,” and settled himself regally at the table, munching on his sandwich and chugging swiftly through two beers while bemusedly regarding his fluttering centerpiece and listening to the lovesick deeds of one Big Bill Killeen and his small-town starstruck consort, Melody Applebaum, coming from the radio.

Nancy said, “How can I read with that crap on the radio?”

Joe felt perky, saucy, wicked, cool. Damned if he would pay her even an ounce of attention. So Nancy got up, stomped into the kitchen, and clicked off the radio. Smiling like Pancho Villa, Joe looked right through her; he didn't even arch his eyebrows; he said not a word.

“What's the matter with you?” Nancy cast a curious glance over the ballot jar at her husband. “You're acting goofy. And by the way, since when don't you take your hat off at the table?”

“Since when don't you turn your mouth off when I'm eating?” Joe said haughtily, laughing on the inside, suddenly in love with his wife and proving it by this kind of jeering banter.

Making a sort of squinched, twisted face, Nancy flopped back onto the couch in the living room area. The house was very quiet because the kids were four houses down the road, driving their grandparents crazy.

Joe brushed some crumbs from his fingers and, polishing off his second beer, decided to go make some hunting knives in his workshop. On the way out he lifted the lid off his centerpiece, liberating all the sparrows inside the house.

He was outside, laughing, running for his shop, when Nancy bellowed: “You son of a bitch!”

“Hah!”
Joe laughed. Suddenly, just like that—for only a moment, maybe, but for a good moment, at least—he was in love, on top of the world, and just about as tough as they come. The mood wouldn't last long; these moods never did with Joe. But still, he was grateful for them: they were one of those small miracles that somehow kept recurring to make his life worthwhile.

*   *   *

That same night, at 10:42
P.M
., a call came into the state police headquarters at Doña Luz to investigate vandalism at the state trout hatchery, which was located about midway between Doña Luz and Milagro, about a mile west of Ruby Archuleta's Strawberry Mesa Body Shop and Pipe Queen, on the Rio Lucero. Officer Bill Koontz and the Staurolite Baron's son, Bruno Martínez, were dispatched to the scene. On arrival they found the hatchery head, Glen Wesley Gore, standing beside the lunker pool with a hurt and extremely puzzled expression on his face. The lunker pool was the smallest of the fish “bins,” a circular structure about fifteen feet across, in which from thirty to forty-five enormous trout usually swam. On a pole beside the pool was a vending machine that, for a dime, dispensed small packets of fish food for tourists to feed the lunkers. The pool was the hatchery's main attraction.

“What's the problem, Glen?” Bruno Martínez asked. “Seems pretty quiet around here. Nobody on the road leading in, and nobody on the highway either.”

“Look at this frigging pool, will you?”

They looked. Bill Koontz whistled softly, “Where's all the fish?”

“That,” Glen moaned, “is for me not to know, and for you boys to find out.”

Removing his hat, Bruno scratched his head. “You mean somebody came in here tonight and stole all those fish?”

“You bet that's what I mean,” the director said bitterly. “We had one fish in there, old Yellow Belly, a cutthroat, that must have weighed fifteen pounds.”

“What in crissakes is somebody gonna do with all that fish?” Bill Koontz wondered aloud.

“They ain't gonna use them for fertilizer,” Glen said.

“When did this happen, Glen?”

“Just now. I had to run over from the house. I heard voices, somebody laughing, but by the time I got dressed they were heading out. I heard the vehicle, but when I came round the corner of the path leads up from the house, they'd already squealed around that bend in the road over there, so I got no idea what they were driving. Sounded like a truck to me…”

A few minutes later, as Koontz and Martínez drove off the hatchery spur onto the highway, where they could see for a number of miles north, Bruno said, “Hey, Bill, you tell me. Isn't that a fire up there, say just around the Milagro turnoff?”