The Milagro Beanfield War (49 page)

When the Blooms' pony Sunflower made her first appearance, the crowd went ape. She leaped clear of the chute like a crazy grasshopper, rearing and twisting, wiggling and kicking high, revolving in dizzying circles and whinnying even louder than Ray's generator, and the rider catapulted off her back like a flopping rag doll. Benny Maestas hit the dirt in his first second, picked up a stone and furiously winged it at the pony, but missed and instead broke one of the headlights on the Body Shop and Pipe Queen truck. Later, Jimmy Ortega landed on his head and was kicked in the ass to boot. And after him Johnny Pacheco was knocked off when Sunflower bucked into the chute gate Nick Rael couldn't swing open fast enough; Johnny almost broke a leg.

Which left the way to first-prize kudos wide open for Joe Mondragón.

But he only lasted two seconds. Sunflower did a flip out of the chute, landing on her (and Joe's) back, and the crowd let out a shrill gasp because it looked as if Joe had been killed.

But he was up even before Sunflower, throwing handfuls of dirt and screaming obscenities at the pony. Then, dusting himself off, he shouted at the corral boys: “Get that fucking horse back in that goddam chute, I'm going again!”

Claudio García and Rafael Maestas galloped across the arena, shooing Sunflower back into the pen; Nick Rael and Onofre Martínez herded her up into the chute. And when the people saw Joe was going to ride again, they clapped heartily, whistled, and honked their horns and chucked a few dozen empty beer cans into the arena.

This time Sunflower emerged from the chute like a horse with a Pegasus complex, taking off and bumping the chute gate so hard it knocked Nick Rael over backward, and then dropping suddenly out from underneath Joe like the trap door in a gallows, so that for a second there was a sight to make the crowd “Ooohhh,” and “Aaaahhh”; Joe extended perfectly vertical with his feet high in the air, his head down, his right arm extended further downward and ending where his hand still grasped the loose rope which had come unraveled … and Sunflower was twenty yards away grazing on imaginary grass. Then the crowd shrieked as Joe plowed face first into the turf like an ass-backward rocket.

He knelt in the dirt a moment, tenderly feeling his mouth, while the hundred or so spectators cheered and honked some more and clapped and bammed their hands against their hoods and fenders. After a minute all their noise became rhythmic, the people chanting “Otra
vez!
Otra
vez!
” meaning they wanted to see Joe's skydiving act again and knew he possessed an ego that could be goaded into it.

Once more, Claudio García and Rafael Maestas herded the pony into the stock pen, and, calling the horse every swearword he could think of, Joe lowered himself onto her back for another try. After all, he was about the best rider in the county, and everybody out there knew it—hell, he'd even broken horses with Horsethief Shorty for the Dancing Trout! And so simply the idea, let alone the fact, of not being able to stay aboard a two-bit, slanty-eyed, pea-brained Shetland pony just about had Joe shitting cupcakes.

Nick Rael yanked open the gate; Ray Gusdorf's excited shouts couldn't be heard; and vehicle horns went berserk—as did the mighty little pony. On her first twisting leap Joe found himself riding sideways; on her second jarring heave he was upside down, clinging to her belly; and a split second later, the hooves chopping terrifyingly but harmlessly past his ears, Joe was flat on his back, lost to everyone's view in a miniature atomic bomb of dust.

Grabbing a beer can and screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs, Joe charged after Sunflower. The horse ran to a corner, whinnied and reared, then galloped past Joe, who furiously threw the can, hitting her in the butt.

More jeering, whistling, catcalls, and scattered boos accompanied this unsportsmanlike conduct. Then the horns commenced again, along with some rhythmic handclapping, and taunts of, “Come on, José, can't you ride that little teeny-weeny horse?” and “Oye, primo, don't eat all the dirt up, we got to use this place again next year—!”

“Get that bitch ready again,” Joe snarled. “I'm gonna kill that fucking horse!”

They got her ready again and he hopped on, adjusting the loose rope until it set just right in his gloved hand; then he yelled, “Open that fucking gate, Nick!” and Nick did, and all hell broke loose. For although the gate was open, Sunflower had decided to do her act in the chute. The crowd saw Joe's head bob up and down a few times, they heard a chilling splintering sound accompanied by some spine-tingling human bellows, and then suddenly Sunflower trotted calmly into the arena, minus Joe, who was lying on his back, not seriously hurt but out cold, in a pile of horseshit in the chute.

That evening, just before dark when nighthawks were flying over the meadows and robins were making a final run down freshly irrigated fields, Joe, sporting a noticeable limp and a sullen forehead bump, and toting a loose rope in one hand, knocked on the Blooms' door.

“I come to ride that pony,” he said tightly when Bloom answered.

“Are you crazy?”

“I come to ride that horse,” Joe reiterated. “Where is it?”

“Out back, in the corral.”

“Let's go,” Joe said, starting around the house. Bloom followed.

Joe let Bloom fit a rope around her neck and lead her into the back field. And, while Joe mounted and adjusted his rope, the lawyer held Sunflower tightly; she didn't move.

But when Bloom let go it was as if somebody across the field had pushed in a detonator's plunger, exploding a hundred dynamite sticks affixed to Sunflower's belly. Long before he knew what hit him, Joe was up to his elbows in alfalfa with a tingling, bone-jarred spine, and Bloom was laughing so hard he had dropped to all fours and commenced beating the earth with his fists.

“Oh shit, that was beautiful!” Bloom gasped. “If you only could have seen what you looked like, oh Christ, what a beautiful
beautiful
thing!”

Joe didn't think it was so diddly-fucking funny, though. Enraged, but this time outwardly calm, he wrenched painfully onto his feet and stood for a moment, rubbing his can, staring at the pony feasting deliriously on alfalfa ten yards away.

“I'll be back,” he threatened miserably, heading toward the house, toward his truck in the driveway beyond. “You just wait and see!”

A rage like nothing he had ever experienced burned throughout Joe's bruised and battered body. Maybe he was going off his rocker or something. Or maybe it was just that all this beanfield business was starting to get him down.

Back home Joe made sure his rifles and his pistols and his shotgun were loaded and within reach. Then he tumbled into bed beside Nancy. But how to sleep? He just lay there, all tensed up, waiting for a fusillade of bullets to come buzzing through his windows. In fact, he wished the real shooting
would
start so they could get this whole charade over with.

Joe was so nervous he had to get up every fifteen minutes to take a leak. And it wasn't until the town roosters had already begun to crow that he finally drifted uneasily into dreams.

*   *   *

When a copy of the so-called Milagro Land and Water Protection Association's petition, compliments of Bud Gleason (who had received it from Harlan Betchel, who had found it under a table in the Pilar where Claudio García had accidentally dropped it), arrived at Kyril Montana's desk, the agent pored over it for a spell.

Then he phoned the state engineer, Nelson Bookman, and a half-hour later the agent, Bookman, and Bookman's mouthpiece, Rudy Noyes, met in the state engineer's office. Bookman read over the one-paragraph complaint and then handed it to Noyes, who read it expressionlessly; then Bookman called in a secretary and gave her the petition with orders to have some Xeroxes made. He offered the agent a cigarette, but Kyril Montana only smoked the filtered kind, and so lit up one of his own.

Bookman said, “There're no signatures on this copy. How many signatures do you figure they've got overall?”

“I'm convinced the Milagro Land and Water Protection Association doesn't even exist,” the agent said. “At least, to date nothing has been filed with the State Corporation Commission. As to how many up there have signed—I think, and my sources inform me, practically nobody.”

“Whose idea was this petition?” Bookman wanted to know. “Our friend Joe Mondragón?”

“No. It's the brainstorm of a woman named Ruby Archuleta who runs a garage and a plumbing business south of town. Apparently the meeting they had in their church was her idea too.”

“Who is Ruby Archuleta?”

“I don't know for sure. Nobody up there really knows her that well either. She's been married three times, never stirred up any political trouble before. She's in her late forties, does the job of ten men, so I'm told; she's a midwife among other things, and some people up there think she's a witch.”

Nelson Bookman leaned back in his chair, straightened out the Xerox copies a different secretary dropped on his desk, and suddenly grinned.

“Let's burn her at the stake,” he said huskily, abruptly lurching forward to stub out his cigarette.

The agent smiled; Rudy Noyes did not drum up even the faintest wisp or flicker of amusement.

“Ah, fuck 'em,” Bookman growled. “They give me a royal pain in the ass, those people up there. For thirty-five years, in one capacity or another, I've been tiptoeing through their lives. I've got cramps in my calves. What do you think, Rudy, should we quit crapping around and just go in there and lower the boom on Joe Mondragón and screw the consequences?”

Now Rudy Noyes smiled. “Well, Nelson, we know the case is cut-and-dried, so that really isn't the problem, is it? My feeling is if we go to trial, though, they've got something concrete to hang their cause on, which we'd still like to avoid, if possible. If we hit Joe Mondragón with an order to show cause he's got a right to that water, they'll know exactly what to protest against, we may throw them all together, they'll fill up pages of these petitions, find themselves in a position to organize, and, of course, that won't queer the conservancy district and the Indian Creek Dam, but it'll sure make them that much more difficult and expensive to realize. So I would say at this juncture still, the less we give them the better.”

“Precisely the way I had it figured,” said Kyril Montana.

“Then what's to discuss?” Bookman asked. “It seems to me there's nothing to do except wait for the break that will nab Joe Mondragón outside the framework of irrigation rights and that damn beanfield.”

“Good.” Kyril Montana stood up, shaking hands with them both. “I just wanted to be sure you knew.”

“Anytime,” Bookman said. “Anytime at all. Thanks for keeping us posted—”

All the same, as he reached the street outside, Kyril Montana felt something uncomfortable nagging at the back of his mind. It was not, compared to many cases he had worked on, that big a deal. Yet he suspected there was something nobody had yet touched upon in this thing. Perhaps it was simply that all over the country people were changing, they were acting differently than they ever had before, so much so that it had become impossible to foretell how they might react in any given situation.

Or maybe it was simply that he was too far removed from the people and from whatever was going on up there in Milagro—

A car honked. The agent had almost stepped off the curb without looking both ways.

*   *   *

The day after the rodeo, Nancy Mondragón left her three kids with Linda Bloom because she had to drive her mother-in-law to the Doña Luz clinic, and Linda decided to ferry all the children to the Rio Lucero gorge for a swim. Herding them into the VW bus, she set off gaily enough, heading south on the highway and across Strawberry Mesa for a ways, and finally into the narrow, pretty gorge. At a point where the stream flowed about forty feet below the road she pulled over and guided the children down a fairly steep slope to the water. The stream was shallow here, perfect for youngsters, running slowly along a wide pebbly bed for a ways, then curling around moderate-sized volcanic boulders to form several foot-high waterfalls and a string of foamy, but still quite shallow and gentle, pools.

After Linda helped the kids undress or roll up their trousers, she settled herself on a large warm rock, cradling their clothes in her arms. She kept a sharp eye on her charges as they waded peacefully, gathering stones or stalking lizards along the shore. It was a peaceful, wonderfully sunny day. A hundred swallows darted between the gorge walls overhead, their shadows blipping across the shining water, across the children's bodies and happy glistening faces. Linda, watching over her brood, thought: This is how I'd like my life to be. This is why we live in Milagro.

An old van halted on the road above; two men tumbled out. At first, owing to the stream's noise, Linda didn't notice them. The men, who had perhaps been drinking, teetered on the brink of the cliff as they unzipped their flies and pissed down the embankment, an act neither Linda nor the children witnessed. In fact, nobody looked up until a splash occurred in midstream, a splash obviously too large to have been made by a child throwing a stone. Startled, Linda lifted her eye just as another fist-sized stone loudly smacked the water just below her observation post.

Although both men, one hefty and yet almost cherubic looking, and the other very tall and lanky, seemed vaguely familiar, Linda recognized neither. Afterward, she would remember that the skinny one had a moustache and that they both appeared to have reddish, bizarrely bloated faces, maybe from excessive boozing. But at first, thinking they were merely trying to attract attention in order to say hello, Linda smiled self-consciously and waved. Instead of waving back, however, both men stooped over to gather more rocks. And with that menacing gesture, Linda suddenly realized something was terribly wrong.