The Milagro Beanfield War (53 page)

“Are you kidding?”

“No. Come on. When was the last time we made love in the car?”

For a minute they dangled across the narrow aisle between seats, kissing, toying awkwardly with each other, then Linda pulled out the emergency brake and together they grappled back to the rear seat where they sat, making out for a while longer, until Bloom skinned off her slacks while she unzipped his fly and pulled his pants down onto his hips and sat astride him. He penetrated past the elastic band of her panties and groaned. Her head over him, her arms around him as he chewed on her sweater-covered breasts, she whispered softly, desperately, “I love you, Charley, I really do…”

“I love you too.”

The VW began to move. It had been parked on a vague slope, and now it proceeded quietly down that slope, neither of them noticing, until suddenly there was a drop, a rock, and the bus bounced high throwing them off the seat and off each other onto the floor. And then, crashing into a bank, tipping half-over, Bloom's worst fears were confirmed as the branch on a dead pine tree shattered the front windshield.

“You forgot to pull the brake all the way out!”
Bloom shrieked, but then they were both giggling frantically and uncontrollably as they watched sperm bubble excitedly from the tip of his shining, stupefied, and unrequited penis.

*   *   *

Harlan Betchel in Banlon pants and a sport shirt, Bud Gleason in a drip-dry summer suit and bow tie, and Eusebio Lavadie in Levi's and a work shirt stained with sweat were sitting together over cups of coffee at the same table in the otherwise empty Pilar Café when Marvin LaBlue parked the Strawberry Mesa Body Shop and Pipe Queen wrecker in front of Milagro's lone parking meter and walked in. Marvin had a toothpick riding on his teeth and a holstered .38 revolver decorating his right hip.

First off, soon as he entered, Marvin paused with his head tilted back so he could survey the Pilar from under the low tilted brim of his cowboy hat as he dug in his pocket for a coin. Locating a quarter, he ambled over to the jukebox, thumbed his coin into the slot, and punched out three songs by Charlie Pride, Tammy Wynette, and Loretta Lynn. After that, as Marvin clomped up toward the counter, Eusebio Lavadie called, “Hey, Marvin, come on over here and set a spell with us,” so Marvin shrugged and reset his course. He turned the fourth chair at their table around and slumped down, straddling it with his arms folded over the top of the back, cowboy style.

“How about a cup of joe on the house, Marvin?” Harlan Betchel suggested chummily.

Marvin politely removed his hat, setting it down carefully on the floor, then he fished cigarette papers and a tobacco pouch from the right front pocket of his denim shirt, and, as he dribbled tobacco from the pouch into the cigarette paper cupped in his other hand, he grinned sort of slowly, shyly, and secretly to himself—Marvin never looked at who he was talking to—and said:

“How about a couple a rolled tacos, a bowl a chili, a Dr. Pepper,
and
a cup a coffee on the house, Mr. Betchel, huh?”

Harlan smiled. “Aw, come on, Marvin. A cup of coffee's one thing. If you want to use that gun to hold up the café, that's another thing—”

“You give an Anglo cowboy an inch, he'll sure as hell try to take you for a mile,” Eusebio Lavadie joshed in a friendly manner, nervously eyeing Marvin's gun belt.

Bud Gleason made a great show of looking at his watch: “Oh hey, excuse me, fellows,” he gasped in fake alarm. “I got a two o'clock appointment in Doña Luz.” And, like a grizzled extra scurrying out of the bar just before the climactic final shootout in a grade B Hollywood Western, Bud dropped a dollar onto the table and hurriedly split.

Marvin giggled to himself as he licked his homemade cigarette, then he spit out his toothpick, replacing it with the weed in a casual but studied motion, and, shaking off the lighted match Harlan Betchel offered, he chose instead to strike his own kitchen match with his own thumbnail, the motion so pleasing him that again he smiled and giggled to himself, and he snapped out the match with one wrist flick; then, for dramatic emphasis, he touched the hot tip to his tongue—it actually sizzled, going out—before breaking the match in two and dropping it in an ashtray. Finally, Marvin took a big puff from his cigarette with his eyes still trained shyly down at the table, and, as he exhaled from that first deep, satisfying puff, Marvin shifted his weight a little in order to reach down and pluck his shooting iron from the holster. The gun he set quietly on the table in front of him. With his left hand, then, he unsnapped his left front shirt pocket, latching onto the box of bullets he had in there, and, with the cigarette between his lips, and the smoke from it curling around his pale, small-eyed, southern face causing him to squint, Marvin untucked the flaps on his bullet carton, carefully selected six cartridges, closed the box and slipped it back in his pocket, and, while Harlan Betchel and Eusebio Lavadie watched in something akin to horror, he opened the cylinder on his gun and fed the bullets into their proper chambers before closing the cylinder with a click that might have been heard all the way up the canyon in Ladd Devine's office if it had not been for the country voice of Loretta Lynn wailing on the Pilar Café's jukebox.

Betty Apodaca appeared at the table, pad in hand, pencil poised, asking cheerfully, “What'll it be, Marvin?”

Harlan Betchel laughed a mite too loudly. “Hell, Betty, bring this starving young lad a couple of rolled tacos, a bowl of chili, a Dr. Pepper, and a cup of coffee, and don't worry about the check, this one is on the house, ain't that right, Marvin?”

And Marvin LaBlue, with the cigarette growing an ash a mile long at his lips, tilted his head back, nodding, and with his strange shifty eyes that never looked at anybody trained at the ceiling, he chuckled, “Yessir, Mr. Betchel, that's right.”

And this statement he abruptly followed with, “By gum, Mr. Lavadie, I sure have took me a lot of miles in my life!”

Then, when the food arrived, Marvin chortled: “Wow, I bet all this good grub is gonna bloat me up 'til I'm as fat as Pacheco's pig!”

*   *   *

And so then there was Seferino Pacheco.

One dusty hot morning as that morose lonely man was blundering awkwardly about town in search of his pig, he almost stepped on a baby robin crouched in the road, its eyes closed and its cavernous yellow beak wide open, plaintively chirping for worms. Not much bigger than a golf ball, and with feathers only beginning to sprout from its tiny pink body, the baby bird certainly had no tomorrow in the middle of the road, let alone in life, and so the sensible thing for Pacheco to do was step on it, putting it out much as he extinguished his cigarette butts. But for many years this hulking heartbroken man had been about as sensible as the fourth-floor “hopeless” ward at the state mental hospital down in the capital, and so instead of squashing what should have been squashed, he leaned over, gently plucking up the scrawny little robin, and dropped it in the front pocket of his Big Mac work shirt. Then he continued to search fruitlessly for his pig.

Toward noon Pacheco decided screw the pig, angrily gulped a beer in the Frontier with Tranquilino Jeantete, and—to kill a bad case of runs he had—bought some blackberry brandy in Rael's, then limped home. There, having settled the baby robin in a clay bowl padded with grass, he lumbered outside to dig up some food, returning a short while later with twelve worms, all of which the tiny naked bird downed voraciously; then it fell asleep in the bowl. For an extended pensive time, his shaggy head held sadly in his hands, Pacheco stared at this minuscule thing on which he had so omnipotently decided to bestow a future. “I'm so lonely,” he groused cynically, “that when it grows up I'll probably try to fuck it.”

They were destined to become great pals, and why not? With nothing much better to do when not out tracking down his pig, Pacheco had all the attention in the world to lavish on the robin. Awaking at dawn, he immediately tugged on irrigation boots and a sweater and plunged outside to dig worms from the rich damp earth along his irrigation ditch. Then, while his morning coffee perked, he dangled worms into the robin's open beak. For a while, that was the extent of their relationship: three, four, then five times a day Pacheco excavated for worms, and three, four, five times a day his little friend—gulping them the way an elephant gulps hay bales—put away whatever Pacheco offered, then either clunked asleep or cheeped for more. How something so tiny could be so bottomless was a mystery to Pacheco: it was like clowns getting out of, or rather into, a Volkswagen beetle.

At night Pacheco set the bowl under a light bulb so the robin would stay warm. And after a while, since he was a man who enjoyed literary and spiritual allusions as well as symbolism, Pacheco decided to call the robin “Joe's Beanfield.” Whereupon the air in his house, which for a long time had been so lonely it screamed, grew soft with the warmth of smiles that kept creeping out of nowhere to adorn Pacheco's craggy features as he cared for the infant bird.

Joe's Beanfield, who devoured worms as if they were about to be declared illegal, grew like a Walt Disney time-sequence movie of a desert flower unfolding after a rain. In no time at all, the stiff barbs of his minuscule feathers broke through their pale blue quillskins, and Pacheco found himself feeding a greedy, plump fluffball instead of a naked starveling.

In due course, Joe's Beanfield began learning how to feed himself. Pacheco filled up another bowl with earth, generously laced this earth with worms, and set the worm bowl beside the nest bowl, so that whenever Joe's Beanfield craved a snack between meals he could just hop onto the worm bowl's rim, cock his head—which still had some white baby tufts on it—and then jab down to spear a squirming goody.

Pretty soon, Joe's Beanfield quit spending all his time in the nest bowl and began to hop around the kitchen table, rummaging through a chaotic landscape formed by empty beer cans and old liquor bottles, by empty Spam and corned beef hash and chopped-green-chili tins. And eventually, of course, though he did so in fear and trembling, Pacheco had to take his pal outside. Tremulously, he set the robin down on a dandelioned patch of lawn, but Joe's Beanfield wasn't interested. He sat there for a few seconds alertly listening, quivering nervously, then he hopped into Pacheco's hand, deposited a friendly little turd in the palm, fluffed up, and contentedly went to sleep. Thereafter, Joe's Beanfield passed whatever time he had to spend outside either on Pacheco's knee, or in his front shirt pocket, or else sometimes perched on his head or on his shoulder.

All too soon Joe's Beanfield was almost grown. Though still snoozing at night in the bowl under the light bulb, during the day he gamboled all over the topsy-turvy house, busily inspecting the wreckage of Pacheco's life, the piles of garbage and dirty clothes and rotting memorabilia strewn about; he spent a lot of time pecking at flies and moths that got caught in the corner spider webs. That mangy, snake-eating reincarnation of Cleofes Apodaca showed up from time to time to share a tin of sardines with Pacheco, but he never went for Joe's Beanfield. Once, though, Pacheco caught the cat gazing sleepily but interestedly at the bird, and, without even raising his voice, the sentimental, illiterate lunatic quietly intoned: “Gato, if you ever touch that bird, I'll bake you in the oven over there like a Red McClure potato.” And, while Cleofes Apodaca the Second didn't nod, he did sleepily lower his lids a little more until his eyes were almost closed, and, as he started purring lazily, you could tell there existed between the three of them—the cat, the bird, and the man—a perfect understanding.

Outdoors, while Pacheco irrigated squash, Joe's Beanfield took baths in the icy water. Leaning on a hoe one day, observing his little pet while cottonwood seed fluff alighted without a ripple on the spreading silver pools that nourished his garden, Pacheco realized that, except for his pig, he had not felt this close to a living thing since his wife died. And with that he became unnaturally terrified of losing the bird.

Out in the garden next afternoon, Joe's Beanfield was startled by a black dung beetle fleeing the irrigation tidal wave with its butt aimed skyward in a threatening posture, and the bird flew onto his master's shoulder. This marked the first time Pacheco had seen him fly, and his heart twanged like a melodramatic soap opera chord. Immediately, the poor man felt more doomed than he had for ages; and the thought crossed his warped disintegrating mind, Maybe I should kill Joe's Beanfield and stuff him, and that way I'd never lose him.

Joe's Beanfield had no intention of taking a powder, however. The robin might fly up to the roof, or up into Pacheco's apple trees, but always he returned immediately to his master's head or shoulder, on which he usually shat just to prove to the huge dark man how much he loved him. And once, when by accident Pacheco entered his house without Joe's Beanfield, the bird battered so noisily against the screen door that the commotion could be heard all the way over at Joe Mondragón's house, two fields away.

But Pacheco knew the scoop on wild things. And because their imminent parting made him so sad, he went on a drinking binge to end all drinking binges. Lurching dazedly into town every day with the robin on his shoulder, he bought bottles of hundred-proof Old Grandad at Nick Rael's; and back home, seated at the kitchen table listening to mariachi music, soap operas, triple-A baseball games, and news on KKCV from Chamisaville, while Joe's Beanfield perched on his food bowl laconically sniping at worms, Pacheco tackled that Old Grandad like it too was about to be declared illegal.

The robin grew worm fat and night-crawler sleek. Pacheco's back ached from all that digging in the damp earth along the ditch. And after a while he had dug so many holes along the ditch bank that water began to leak into his field. Which was good for the field, but against ditch regulations. Thus, as soon as the mayordomo on that ditch, Sparky Pacheco, discovered Seferino Pacheco was flooding his front field around the clock, he came by positively reeking with dire threats.