The Milagro Beanfield War (50 page)

Her mind struggled to deny what was about to happen; so she bestirred herself almost languidly, sitting up and staying immobile for a moment, gazing perplexedly at the men, the buttery lazifying sunshine still in control of her flesh. Then dreamily she rose to her feet. Each man had collected an armload of heavy rocks, any one of which, hitting a child or even Linda in the head, could have been fatal.

And now the scene, their slow and deliberate gathering actions, broke apart insanely as the two men began to pelt Linda and the five children in deadly earnest, aiming their rocks, trying to murder them.

Linda shouted, “Hey kids, they're throwing rocks!” But the children, even little María, had sensed what was up, they understood perfectly the danger represented by those two men above their heads, and they were already moving, starting to run, heading automatically downstream.

“Run!” Linda shouted.
“Run! Run! Run!”

Splashing into the shallow water, she pushed Larry Mondragón, his brother Billy, and his sister Luisa and her own Pauline ahead of her.

“They're trying to kill us!”
she blurted.
“Run fast!”

The kids stumbled through the water, over and around boulders, through sand and muck and thick bank grass and willow thickets. María toppled forward, Linda yanked her upright and practically flung her ahead into the other kids, who were in a loose bunch, running well. Later, Linda would be amazed by how quickly they all had reacted correctly to the situation, these silly little kids. She would remember how Larry Mondragón slipped and Pauline tugged him to his feet; she would remember how little Billy Mondragón, who was only four (and one of the clumsiest preschoolers she had ever seen), went over a series of black rocks in their path like a lizard or an agile mountain goat. And Linda herself: she sprinted among them with her head turned, always looking up, trying to keep track of the rocks coming down. Once she dropped to her knees to avoid a stone that nearly grazed her head; another time she shoved María sideways into a pool to avoid a rock. Above them the men staggered along the rim, firing rhythmically, if drunkenly, shouting words she never heard, stopping occasionally to stock up on ammunition, which they pitched rapidly at the woman and children, striking at their heels, missing the fleeing kids by inches.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the terrifying assault ended. The men quit, gestured obscenely, about-faced, swayed leisurely back to their van, started it up, and drove out of the gorge.

Linda kept the children moving for another twenty-five yards, then ordered them to stop. They gathered around her, gasping, wide-eyed, speechless; but nobody, not even the smallest child, was crying. Linda said, “I think it's alright now, I think those men left, I think they went away.”

And they had.

Cautiously, trembling now that there was time to think about what had happened and wanting very badly to generate a release through tears, Linda pushed them all ahead of her up the steep embankment to the road. Quickly, they trotted back to the bus. Linda slid open the side door, and, tossing in the bundle of clothes she'd hugged in one arm all during their flight, she was amazed to realize that somehow not even a sock had been lost.

There was another, more roundabout way out of the gorge, and Linda took it, afraid that if she headed back onto the mesa the way they had come the men might be waiting at an impromptu roadblock. Lined along the rear seat, bunched on the floor, the kids sat quietly; in fact, since it had all begun, not one of them had peeped. Finally, Linda called back to everybody: “Hey, you guys, let's sing a song!” And with that she leaped into “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” The children joined in, immediately animated, excited, starting to laugh again.

So they climbed out of the gorge and sped along the mesa in a dust cloud, singing fervently and almost joyously together, until suddenly the car hit a confused jackrabbit and Linda burst into tears.

*   *   *

“Who the hell did it?” Nancy demanded furiously of her friend. “What did those bastards look like? Were they Anglos? Or Chicanos? Didn't you get the license number? You tell me who did it and José and me, we'll kill them for you, for all of us! We'll tie them to trees and shoot off their toes and let them bleed to death! So help me God!”

“What good will that do?” Hopelessly, Linda swayed her head. “It's over,” she whimpered. “They were just drunk. They didn't know what they were doing. I don't think they were even from around here.”

“Tourists?”

“No. I don't know. I just don't want to talk about it anymore.”

“How can you let somebody attack your kids and not want revenge?” Nancy asked. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, goddammit! They were from the Dancing Trout, qué no? A pair of the Zopilote's pendejos. It's because of José's beanfield, and because Charley's gonna help, that this happened.”

“No.” Linda kept shaking her head. “I told you, I never saw them before. It's over. They were drunk. They didn't know what they were doing. One of them even had such a pleasant, little boy face…”

Nancy sat down across from her friend, regarding her critically for a short while.

“Next time they'll kill one of our kids, Linda.”

But again the exhausted woman shook her head. “Violence just makes more violence just makes even more violence,” she whispered through silent tears. “I don't want revenge.”

And then she sat there, never having felt this brittle before, waiting to calm down, waiting for the nightmare to end, slowly and desperately and like a little child shaking her head.

Suddenly it hit Nancy: Linda's statement about the “little boy face.” “
I
know who they were!” she exclaimed. “At least I know who one of them was. What's the name, José, of that guy out at the Evening Star, the huge one with the pretty, little kid face, the one who works for the chotas?”

“Lord Elephant—?”

“That's
who it was! That son of a bitch must be on the Zopilote's payroll too!
I'll cut off his balls!”

*   *   *

Lord Elephant's real name was Bobby Joe Tucker; his hometown was Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He lived in his hogan on Strawberry Mesa with a woman, Lady Elephant, whose real name was Christina Cupcoe, and whose hometown was Silvermine, Connecticut. Like Benny Maestas, Bobby Joe Tucker was a Vietnam vet; unlike Benny Maestas, he was also a junkie. In Vietnam, Bobby Joe spent many months on the line, during which time he became hooked on skag; later he was stationed at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airport, working in warehouses that gift-wrapped bodies of American soldiers in patriotic red, white, and blue for shipment back home. While thus occupied, Bobby Joe became part of a ring that sent drugs—heroin, opium, grass, cocaine—back to the States sewn up in the bodies of dead soldiers or stashed in their coffins or included with their personal belongings. In this way Bobby Joe built up some interesting and valuable connections and with their help, just before leaving Vietnam, he worked out a daring plan to send himself a “body.” The plan worked, he picked up his body immediately upon touching down on North American soil, and then he disappeared into the Yankee heartland with both an honorable discharge and ten pounds of uncut horse riding on his hip.

With luck, Bobby Joe could have become a rich man. But lacking an excess of smarts to begin with, he had pulled off this caper largely due to the efforts of some brainier military personnel who set the thing up for him in Saigon; to make matters worse, right off the bat he shot himself up too pure on three occasions, almost killing himself with each exaggerated fix, and by the time he had just barely survived his third OD, the gears in his brain had become pretty well stripped. Then, in Kansas City, he bumped into one of the former soldiers who had helped land him in the States with that fortune of uncut H, and this soldier wanted in on Bobby Joe's business, which at that point Bobby Joe still hadn't figured how to set up.

During the next three months, Bobby Joe traveled with his friend to New Orleans, Miami, Washington, D.C., and finally New York, trying to arrange a big score for all their junk, but playing it very tight to the vest for fear of running into a bunch of undercover narcs, or else getting ripped off or just offed by the people with whom they wished to bargain.

In the end, in New York, Bobby Joe's friend simply up and split with the smack, leaving Bobby Joe high, dry, and very strung out. After that, Bobby Joe wandered, doing odd jobs, stealing for his daily fixes, moving with one old lady and then another, always more or less in a fog or on the nod and desperate for smack and bread, until he landed in the Evening Star commune out on Milagro's Strawberry Mesa with Lady Elephant, née Christina Cupcoe, on his arm.

Lord and Lady Elephant set up housekeeping in that Evening Star hogan without an invitation from the other members of the tribe, who disliked them intensely, afraid that his hard-drug habit would bring the cops down on Strawberry Mesa like a ton of blue bricks. By the time Bobby Joe staggered into the commune, however, he didn't much care about the social amenities. In fact, despite his cherubic, blue-eyed baby face that always put people off their guard, he had developed, over the past few years, into one big, mean, son of a bitch. Anybody who did not see eye to eye with Bobby Joe was likely to regret it. Bobby Joe even carried a piece, a little .32-caliber, single-action revolver, which further petrified the peace-loving Strawberry Mesa crowd. So when the lord and his lady showed up one day looking for a place to crash, and Bobby Joe smiled innocently at everybody while nonchalantly inspecting the barrel of his gun with his blank blue eyes, the occupants of the lord's and lady's present hogan politely bowed their heads, gathered in their belongings and kids, and moved into another building nearby.

Bobby Joe had a persistent habit, though, and it eventually led him by the nose into the Chamisaville methadone program. Of course, as soon as he was enrolled in the methadone program the various police agencies in town were led by their noses to Bobby Joe Tucker, and—metaphorically speaking—the police tied Bobby Joe's hands behind his back, touched the barrel of a cocked revolver to his head, and advised him of his rights in the following manner:

“Bobby Joe Tucker, alias Lord Elephant, we're gonna let you stay in Chamisa County up there in the Evening Star commune on Strawberry Mesa with that cute little girl with the big titties you're screwing whose folks back in Connecticut have a runaway warrant out on her, and we're gonna let you continue getting your treatment from the methadone clinic, and we're even gonna look the other way during many of the dope-related activities you're involved in, just so long as you cooperate with us in certain ventures; just so long as you hearken to our beck and call every now and then when we need you to do a job or provide some information for us.”

Well, Bobby Joe was all played out by this time and tired of being hassled by the pigs; he even sort of
liked
Strawberry Mesa, and he was actually thinking vaguely about reforming himself enough to become more a part of the commune, helping out with animals and the garden and so forth, and he'd gotten used to Lady Elephant, too, who was a sexy lay, not too bright, but a rather tender person, maybe one of the most gentle souls Bobby Joe had ever traveled with. And so he told the cops, “Whatever you say, fellas.”

That is, he became what might be called a police informer, supplying a certain amount of drug information that enabled the various police agencies to meet the quota of busts they needed to make themselves look good: he delivered reports on transients, too, turning in, for example, a whole slew of runaways in return for being allowed to cohabit with his own particular runaway, Lady Elephant. And he occasionally carried out strong-arm tactics for the cops and their allies, who either paid him in hard cash for his trouble, or else sometimes in confiscated hard drugs.

Yet several days after rocks were thrown at Linda Bloom and those kids in the Lucero gorge, Bobby Joe Tucker's Chamisa County sojourn came to an abrupt end.

There wasn't much fanfare to the incident that put him back on the road again. Toward sunset five rattletrap pickups jounced along the final rocky slope to the Evening Star commune, and eight men carrying rifles descended from the trucks, which had coasted to a stop in a slight semicircle about fifteen yards from the front door of Lord and Lady Elephant's hogan. In a tight group these eight men walked up to the hogan and one man knocked on the door, which Lady Elephant answered. “Your husband, is he here?” the man who had done the knocking asked, and when Lady Elephant, smiling serenely, nodded yes, the man said, “Will you bring him to the door, please?” Lady Elephant, still smiling, backed into the darkness, and, naked from the waist up, Lord Elephant appeared in the doorway, his beautiful little boy face contorted into a harsh sneer as he said, “What do you people want?”

The man who had done the knocking said, “We're giving you and your wife about two minutes to gather up whatever you can carry, and then we're gonna take you for a ride up to the Colorado border, and if we ever find out that you came back to this county we'll kill you.”

Bobby Joe's pale eyes flickered, then swiftly assessed the faces of the men confronting him. They were old and weather-beaten local faces, lined and brown and composed harshly, tight-lipped, unforgiving, determined that he should do this thing. Bobby Joe could smell their skin and their old dusty clothes, and he could smell their guns. It was unequivocally evident that if Bobby Joe went for his little .32 they would kill him harder and faster and with less emotion than most men, marked for extinction, had the opportunity to get killed. Still, Bobby Joe dropped his jaw to begin a protest, to ask an outraged question, but some little movement, maybe just a slight alteration in the expression of one man's eyes, or the way another man's shoulders changed their set when Bobby Joe's jaw dropped, shut him up. There was nothing to argue about, his life in Chamisa County had ended; he was lucky they offered an opportunity to walk out alive.