The Milagro Beanfield War (46 page)

“Just shut up and do what I told you to do!” Bloom wailed.

Pauline flushed the toilet and thundered defiantly back into her room. “Okay,” Bloom said sweetly to the little waif sucking her thumb in the doorway, “it's okay now.”

“Well, who is gonna wipe me?” María wanted to know, stalling for time.

“I will, I will, you just holler when you're through,” Bloom said, pulling himself not quite all the way out of his wife.

María stood her ground in the doorway, insisting, “But I don't have to.”

“Of course you have to,” her father said tightly, smiling like a specter from the looney bin. “You always have to in the morning when you wake up, you know that.”

Obstinately, the child shook her head.

“Go!” Bloom suddenly bellowed, causing even Linda to jump. “If you don't go I'll spank you hard,
very very hard!
”

María burst into tears and turned around, and as she turned around Bloom drove himself viciously back into his wife with no warning, and she exclaimed “Oh
Jesus!
” as he came.

María stopped, turning back: “What's the matter, Mommy?” she asked through her own tears.

“Noth-nothing, honey—” Linda whispered, tears forming in her own eyes, while Bloom had his head buried in the thick hair behind her neck, wanting to bawl himself.

Then they all got up, wordlessly dressing, and congregated in the kitchen. In a hurry to meet Nancy, Linda had only a cup of coffee, pecked her children good-bye, and, avoiding Bloom's eyes, she hurried out the door.

Bloom knew he should fix them something nutritious, like orange juice, bacon, French toast; instead he poured out bowls of Cheerios, sprinkled on some milk and brown sugar, and sat down at the table with them to drink his own coffee, certain in the knowledge that it was going to be a very long day.

*   *   *

Later that same morning, with all five kids camped in front of the living room TV watching cartoons, Bloom sat at the kitchen table alone, quietly drinking coffee while penciling some notes on a legal pad before him. He just happened to glance up as a pink blimp floated nonchalantly around his woodpile and across the front yard, but for a moment this curious apparition did not even register. And then, after it had already sailed quietly out of sight, he realized that his yard was being invaded by Pacheco's pig.

Bloom got up so fast he splashed coffee on his legal pad, and he had started to scream “GET OUT YOU FUCKING PIG!” even before making it halfway to the door. Then, as he bolted headlong into the yard with his pants practically down around his knees because he'd forgotten to buckle his belt before leaping to the attack, he was greeted by the sight of that arrogant sow trotting briskly across the yard toward him with a small white pullet in its mouth. The pig's head was down; its little pink eyes hardly noticed the man in its path; it assumed that Bloom would move.

The lawyer's head went
pop!
however—his infamous temper exploding. Instead of stepping aside, he took a single step forward, and, as if punting a football, he kicked the sow squarely in her fat jowly chops so hard that she fumbled the chicken. In fact, the little white hen catapulted halfway across the yard, feathers flying like the sparks from a comet, before gaining control of its wildly flapping wings and coming to an upright halt: then, clucking terrifiedly, it ran away. Later Bloom would recall with some satisfaction that that particular chicken had gotten what it deserved, since it was the only hen that kept flying out of the pen in order to forage among the green bushes, grass, garden, and weeds; and it was always laying eggs where Bloom or Linda could never find them—months later Pauline or María would race inside breathlessly announcing that the Easter Bunny had left a few dozen rotten eggs in the tall grass near the crab apple tree, or in the middle of the dry ditch in the back field.

But right now Bloom was furious because his territorial imperative had been violated by this stubborn gluttonous beast, and if he'd had a gun he most certainly would have started shooting.

He did not have a gun, though; a fact which the pig instinctively understood. Bloom didn't have a thing. And so he just stood there for a moment facing three hundred pounds of mammoth porker, which in turn just stood where it was, blinking its albino eyelashes while staring rather blindly at the irate lawyer.

The impasse was broken by the pig, which decided, simply, to leave; choosing for its line of departure a path which passed directly between Bloom's legs. The lawyer stepped aside, to be sure, but as the arrogant sow went by he hauled off and gave it a kick in the gut which damn near broke his leg, and even made the animal expel air with a “Whoof!”

Unfortunately, this kick also enraged Pacheco's carnivorous sow, and, stopping on a dime, it twirled on two toes like a ballet dancer and ran right through the big, but flabby, lawyer, knocking him to the ground. Bloom was about halfway to his feet when the pig knocked him down and steamrolled right over him again. He was up and cursing at full scream while lunging toward the woodpile for his ax, when the pig neatly clipped through again, knocking him for another loop, and this time when Bloom got up he knew he was going to butcher not only that sow, but also maybe Seferino Pacheco, and possibly anybody else who came around his house during the next fifteen hours.

At this point, however, the devil himself, carrying a rope around one arm and shoulder, lumbered mournfully into the yard and cried, “Stop!”

The lawyer stopped; the pig skidded to a halt. Bloom was purple and panting loudly; the pig puffed a little; chicken feathers were scattered across the lawn.

“I wish I had a gun,” Bloom threatened savagely. “If I had a gun I'd shoot you both.”

Pacheco had heard this tune before: he shrugged. “Why kill a man just because his pig wandered into your yard? Help me catch that fucking marrana instead.”

“You don't understand,” the lawyer said. “That thing was trying to kill me. And before I stopped it it was going to eat one of my chickens.”

“My pig, she don't eat chickens,” Pacheco said firmly.

“What did she want to do, then,” Bloom asked bitterly, “take my pullet home for a pet?”

Pacheco grinned weirdly, shrugging again; suddenly the lawyer felt weak and dizzy. It was anger causing him to gasp for breath, so he sat down and gulped in air, feeling queasy.

Pacheco advanced toward the pig, which backed up one step, snorting in either a threatening or a loving manner (it was impossible to say which), and its snout seemed to wrinkle in a kinky smile. Then the big mournful drunk shrugged yet again and scuffed over to the woodpile; seating himself on a piñon stump, he wiped his brow. Twelve feet away Bloom was hunched over, coughing a little, hawking up phlegm, gasping, trying to calm down so that he wouldn't be sick.

The pig checked them both out for a second, then tiptoed almost daintily toward a fence draped with sweet peas, and amused itself for a while snapping at, and occasionally catching, the hawkmoths buzzing around the lush pink and white flowers.

Noting this, Pacheco began rambling at random. “Look at that,” he mused almost dreamily, “I never saw her do that before. My Melvin, when he was a kid he used to do that, catch those moths when they came to the sweet peas. He had an insect collection, he was always wandering around town catching different butterflies, just with his hands. He mounted them, too: he got a book about it from the school library, and then when they were dry he stuck the butterflies and moths on pins on his wall. He had half a wall covered once, but then the ants came down and ate them. Those fucking ants ate them so fast—hell, I remember my wife and me, she was playing the piano, and I was just sitting in a chair near his bed, he must of been, oh about six or seven years old, asleep, late at night, and she was playing maybe a Mozart, you know? Or a Chopin. And all of a sudden I noticed a whole colony of ants was eating the butterflies on the wall over his bed, and little pieces of those pretty wings were falling down onto my Melvin's sleeping face and onto his covers, it was like a snow of shredded butterfly wings—”

Bloom half-heard Pacheco's babble through his own gasps, his labored breathing; and then abruptly, realizing what this drunk lunatic was saying, the lawyer realized that he himself was almost on the verge of tears.

“Pues, who knows?” Pacheco asked rhetorically. “What can you do about ants? I got up and brushed those little wing pieces off his cheeks, that's all. It was a funny night. I reckon those ants must of eaten half his collection that night. Later, of course, he got killed in Korea…”

Bloom stopped wanting to cry, because he had heard before what was now coming: who hadn't heard about how Melvin got his in Korea? Nobody had ever heard about how Pacheco's wife died, though. She just disappeared one day— “She's in the hospital down at the capital,” Pacheco explained. And then she was dead, and he walked the little cardboard government canister with her ashes in it down to the gorge and dumped that human dust into a sharp windy gust that dissipated the fine gray gauze among the flickering cliff swallows long before the wind ever rippled across the green river far below.

“Oh, when he was a chaval, that Melvin, he sure collected things,” Pacheco reminisced, abruptly heaving to his feet and slouching over to the sweet peas, where the pig grunted and grudgingly moved over slightly to make room for its master. And as Bloom glanced up, Pacheco swiped at a hawkmoth, missing it by a fraction.

“Yeah,” he called back to Bloom. “That Melvin, he was like his mom, qué no? I guess if he'd grew up he would of been a faggot. Like me he liked poetry. Books. He collected bird feathers and butterflies and leaves—he knew all about leaves and different kinds of trees. And in one cardboard box he always had some of them little hoptoads, and in another cardboard box he always had some crickets—sometimes I wonder how that kid could sleep at night, with all that racket in his room. Shit, he was always pinching ants off the portal posts to feed to some frogs or salamander or other comosellama—”

The pig inched forward until its snout was almost touching the tip of a feeding moth's abdomen, and then suddenly, with a little
click!
it inhaled the insect, chewed once, and swallowed. Pacheco swung clumsily at another pretty moth sucking on a sweet pea nearby and stunned both himself and the lawyer by catching it. Turning, he stumbled back to the stump by the woodpile, plunked down, and for a moment, absorbed in the act of trying to pinch the moth dead without rubbing the colorful powdery scales off its wings, he was silent.

Then he displayed the moth—quivering, shimmering faintly—in his palm: Bloom nodded, not knowing what to say, how to react.

Pacheco smiled, giggled absurdly, and shook his head wonderingly. “Yessir,” he coughed sleepily, deep in the past. “There'd be little frogs peeping, and the grillos chirping, and you could practically hear those pinche ants chewing up the butterflies on his wall, and the little wing particles were falling onto his face like snow, and he just slept through all that—”

Bloom wanted to get up, go inside, lie down, be rid of this—this what? Doomsayer? Maudlin old drunk? And his ridiculous sow. He was too tired, though. He was weary already, even though it was hardly midmorning: last night had been nearly sleepless; the children up and down; and Linda so quiet—as she had been so quiet again this morning during their aborted lovemaking—awake in the darkness beside him, wanting to talk about amorphous, unmentionable feelings that somehow included everything important; both of them able to say nothing while roots of sadness spread into the dark. Their agony or despair or anguish, whatever it was—why did it have to be so quiet?

Pacheco, sensing that he would be allowed to stay for at least a while, settled into a groove, sing-songing on. “Maybe it was this morning, maybe a week ago—who keeps track of time anymore? I was sitting in the kitchen having a beer for breakfast, listening to the radio, to KKCV down in Chamisaville. They were giving the ski report, and I listened to that with interest until all at once it occurred to me, you know—I mean, what the hell was there a ski report for in the middle of summer? Hijo, Madre! And so then when I listened hard it wasn't there anymore, it was actually the fishing report. But after a minute the ski report came back on again so I turned off the radio. I guess I was scared—”

Lightly lunging forward, moving its gargantuan bulk with astounding delicacy and a deadly accuracy, the pig caught another hawkmoth.

And Bloom sighed.

And Pacheco talked.

*   *   *

Every now and then Horsethief Shorty liked to get off by himself, so early one evening shortly after Abigail Tedesky's sudden departure, he saddled up an old horse named Gingersnap that he had broken almost eleven years ago, stuck a .30–30 in the saddle scabbard, and rode down out of the canyon, through the village, and onto the western mesa beyond the ghost town. The moon was up and new, with its horns turned down, meaning rain, and even though it had been a dry, absolutely blue and sunny day, Shorty could smell rain on the evening, on the faint southern breezes, and that made him feel all right.

About a mile from where a foot trail led down to some hot springs in the Rio Grande gorge, Shorty dismounted and pulled the reins over Gingersnap's head, letting them dangle down so the animal wouldn't move. Then he squatted a little distance away and rolled and lit a joint, taking a couple of long lazy tokes. Shorty had been smoking marijuana ever since his adolescence, and he had his own private pot plot by the river north of the Dancing Trout. He never would have dealt with local growers or with the Evening Star pot farmers for his weed, because of late it had become too easy to get in trouble buying dope. In the old days around here, though, people had smoked grass much as they drank tea or chokecherry wine. Why, when Shorty first turned up in Milagro there had even been some old señoras dressed in black who would sit in rockers on their porches in the evening, smoking the
mota
in little pipes—