The Milagro Beanfield War (57 page)

Each man stared at his hands on the table; you could have heard a mosquito crawling across the green baize.

“Tell anybody about this,” Bruno Martínez sighed ruefully, beginning even to smile a little, “and I swear to Christ you'll
all
wind up kissing worms.”

“This just never happened,” Granny Smith insisted. “Does everybody understand that?”

Bud Gleason sucked in a tortured gasp, shot up his eyebrows and lowered his eyelids, wrinkled his upper lip and twitched his nose, going “Ah … ah … aaah…”

But it didn't come.

Suddenly—at last—he couldn't sneeze.

“Wasn't that St. Valentine's Day massacre in Chicago?” Eusebio Lavadie asked.

*   *   *

Several days later an event probably unrelated to the Casino Pilar robbery occurred. A deposit of over two thousand dollars, in the name of the Milagro Land and Water Protection Association, was made in the Doña Luz branch of Jim Hirsshorn's and Ladd Devine's First State Bank.

*   *   *

Amarante Córdova, guarding Joe's beanfield again, may or may not have been dreaming when he encountered his second angelic apparition. Afterward he just could not recall if he'd fallen asleep. But anyway, there he was in his customary lookout beside a large dead cottonwood log, letting his eyes drift lazily from Joe's robust bean plants to the permanent rainbow that was still glimmering faintly but persistently in the dusty afternoon sunshine choking Milagro, when that same coyote angel reappeared, limping desultorily off the Milagro–García highway spur and along the Roybal ditch bank to Amarante's outpost. The one-eyed angel nodded a perfunctory “Hola” to Amarante, folded its beat-up wings—whose feathers rattled obscenely like those of a zopilote—and, like someone catering to hemorrhoids, eased painfully down nearby with an audible “Whew.” After mopping its brow with a filthy handkerchief, the angel lit a cigarette by clicking together two nails on its left paw, inhaled deeply, and immediately had a long drawn-out coughing jag. When this had somewhat abated, and the coyote angel was only wheezing and gasping a little, Amarante dared to speak.

“I see that rainbow is still there,” he murmured politely. “That's one tough rainbow if you ask me.”

The angel glowered at the rainbow for a second, then shifted its sullen, yellowy eye onto Amarante.

“Listen, cousin,” it said wearily, “the way things are supposed to work out, one day the struggles of all you little screwed-up underdogs will forge a permanent rainbow that'll encircle this entire earth, I should live so long.”

“I still don't understand exactly how come the rainbow,” Amarante said.

“It's like this, man,” the disgruntled coyote figure said, its lone jaundiced eye staring blankly at the sky. “You know how down in the Chamisaville Headstart at the end of a day those teachers paste a little gold or silver star on the forehead of any kid who did good that day—?”

“I don't,” Amarante said. “But I'll take your word for it.”

“Well, this rainbow is kind of like that.”

After which the exhausted angel suffered yet another smoker's hacking jag that lasted a full minute. When this fit had subsided, the ethereal being struggled wearily to its feet and snapped the butt into Joe's beanfield.

“Jesus Christ,” the angel whimpered, staring forlornly at the healthy bean plants. “Three hundred years, and just about all you old farts got to show for it is seven-tenths of an acre of frijoles. And I hadda draw the assignment. You people don't deserve a gold star, let alone a rainbow. I'll see you around—”

Whereupon, with a grotesque rattle of its vulture wings and a little pained, snuffling grunt, the angel disappeared.

*   *   *

At this point, the first manifestation of what developed into a singularly curious and imaginative terrorism campaign was noticed by Jerry Grindstaff on his way down to Rael's for some hot dogs and rolls, relish, mayonnaise, and mustard to be consumed by the Chamisaville Boy Scouts led by their scoutmaster, Jim Hirsshorn, who was taking them on a picnic using Dancing Trout horses and other paraphernalia that afternoon.

Having passed the dude ranch softball field, Jerry G. was just negotiating the curve around Ray Gusdorf's small spread when he noticed a freshly painted and inscribed wooden cross beside the road. In normal times Jerry G. probably wouldn't have given the cross a tumble; such roadside markers were a common occurrence. When people died in car accidents, for example, their relatives often erected similar humble monuments on the spots where they expired, and the victim's relatives usually kept the crosses brightly adorned with no-fade plastic flowers for years. Also, during some funerals, wherever—along the route to the camposanto—a cortege on foot halted to rest, the mourners erected a cross to sanctify that place, called a Descanso, and they often inscribed this cross with the following:
Passerby, pray for the soul of Onofre González
(or
Ricardo Tafoya,
or whoever inhabited the box they were lugging to the graveyard).

But something about this particular cross made the foreman do a double take about thirty yards below it, and he braked the Dancing Trout station wagon so hard the car fishtailed a little, causing Jerry G., who detested seatbelts, almost to catapult through the windshield. Hurriedly, in reverse, he sped back to the roadside marker, and, after the dust cloud had drifted away from his vehicle, gazed perplexedly for a full sixty seconds at the insolent inscription on the cross before angrily kicking open his door and circling around the car and ferociously tugging that hallowed symbol from the ground and chucking it irreligiously into the rear of the station wagon.

Then he backed over a cattleguard into a driveway, turned around, and sped home to the dude ranch where, puffing laboriously, he barged into Ladd Devine's office and dramatically displayed the cross's message to Devine and Emerson Lapp, who had been double-checking some figures.

“I don't understand,” Lapp said. “What does that mean?”

Devine let out a weighty sigh, asking quietly: “Where the hell did that thing come from?”

“Beside the road, sir. A short piece beyond Ray Gusdorf's place.”

“Just erected by the side of the road?” Devine asked.

“That's right. The ground was fresh. It must of been stuck in there only last night or early this morning.”

“What is it, somebody's idea of a joke?” Lapp asked bemusedly.

“Not a very funny joke, Em, if you'll pardon my saying so. Okay, Jerry G. Take that thing out to the incinerator and burn it for now.”

“You don't want to hold it as evidence? I'll show it to the state police. They could dust for fingerprints—”

“All I want is for you to take that thing over to the incinerator and burn it,” Devine ordered. “When I want mountains made out of molehills, when I want to legitimize their puerile actions by paying attention to them, I'll let you know.”

“Yessir.” Jerry G. carried the cross downstairs, heaved it back into the station wagon, and drove a half-mile south through sagebrush land to the dude ranch incinerator. There he bumped into Horsethief Shorty, who was lifting a similar cross from the bed of a Dancing Trout pickup.

“Good Christ! Where'd you find that one, Shorty?”

“Right across from the entrance to our beloved driveway. Where'd you get yours?”

“Just a little bit farther down the road.”

“Somebody's feeling their oats,” Shorty said. “But I figured, what the hell, if I showed it to the old man he'd probably drop a nut or lose a good night's sleep, so why bother?”

“I showed him this one,” Jerry G. said.

“Oh yeah? How'd he take it?”

“He told me to burn it.”

“You see?” Shorty chuckled. “The difference between you and me, Jerry G., is I got ESP.”

“I don't see what's so funny,” the foreman muttered.

“Nobody sees what's so funny, that's the trouble with this outfit. We're all a bunch of impotent, wrinkled-up prunes, if you ask me.”

“Shorty,” Jerry G. remarked in his most caustic drawl, “when are you going to grow up?”

“I dunno. I reckon maybe I'll grow up about the same time you manage to work that broom handle clear of your pinched asshole, cousin.”

Jerry G. retreated silently to the station wagon, fetched a gas can, and soaked the crosses. Shorty struck a match on his zipper and casually flipped it at the two markers, which exploded into flame. Within seconds the fire had devoured both identical inscriptions, to whit:

Passerby, pray for the soul of Zopilote Devine!

This petulant auto-da-fé did not herald the end of the roadside crosses however: quite the contrary.

It signaled the commencement of their almost delirious proliferation.

*   *   *

Come rain, come shine, come whatever, Bernabé Montoya had eyes that functioned just about like everybody else's eyes in Milagro: they popped open, wide awake, each morning at 5:00
A.M
. In summertime this event occurred around sunrise; in the winter, of course, it happened well before dawn. During the summer Bernabé had no special early-hour chores to do: he owned cattle, but they grazed on National Forest permits up in the hills; he also harbored a few ratty chickens in the backyard. But he was not irrigating fields, milking cows, or otherwise performing feats of agricultural masochism which might warrant such early rising. Nevertheless, at 5:00
A.M
. Bernabé's eyes snapped up like runaway window shades, and whether he wanted it to or not, his day began.

Usually the sheriff lay in bed, his skin flushed and silky from sleep, quietly regarding the ceiling while inwardly contemplating a number of subjects ranging from his soul to his navel, until finally he swung out from under the old-fashioned, home-sewn quilts, dressed slowly and luxuriously, and padded into the kitchen to fix breakfast for himself and for Carolina, a late riser who usually didn't make an appearance until after six.

Always, then, just before starting the coffee, Bernabé ambled into his backyard to check out the sun. Every morning he did this in unison with three-quarters of the other people in Milagro whose eyes had also snapped open (almost with the sharp, whip-crackling, wide-awake pops of little Chinese firecrackers) at 5:00
A.M
.

In fact, you might say that any longtime Milagro resident who did not wake up shortly before, or at least right
at,
dawn and hurry outside to check on the sun (just as he had checked on the moon the last thing before bed eight hours before) had probably died in his sleep sometime during the night.

But in any case, on the particular morning now in question, Bernabé's eyes boinged open as usual, and he stared at the ceiling for ten minutes cogitating about useless things; then, because early mornings were also his sexiest times, the sheriff prodded Carolina a little, and, still mostly asleep, she nevertheless responded ardently while he assaulted her with that mute desperate urgency of his, asking, always asking with his body, inarticulately pleading for impossible answers.

After that, humming “Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the morning,” Bernabé dressed, then trotted outside to make sure the sun was rising directly above Pancho Armijo's rabbit hutch a quarter-mile away. And sure enough it was not only there, but also—Bernabé having checked his watch with the time-of-day recording on the free long-distance line to Sierra Bell's castle in the capital—right on time.

Satisfied that neither Mother Nature (nor Sierra Bell, God forbid) had gone berserk overnight, Bernabé turned around, along with two hundred other people in Milagro, and walked back inside to start, along with two hundred other people in Milagro, a piñon fire in his kitchen's combination wood and gas stove. No matter that it was a relatively warm summer morning: if you had lived in Milagro all your life, you started a fire in your combination stove first thing after checking out the sun.

Just as Bernabé commenced feeding piñon logs and kerosene-soaked wood chips into the left-hand side of his stove, however, the phone rang. When it did, the sheriff felt his heart dive-bomb down to his toes. And sure enough, who should be on the other end but a frantic Nick Rael.

“Bernie? Last night some punks broke into the store and cleaned me out of rifles, half my handguns, and all the rest of my ammo!”

With an “Ai, Chihuahua,” Bernabé sat down.

Then he added, “Oh shit.”

After that he asked hopefully, “Did you call the state chotas?”

“Sure I called them. But nobody answered down there. So get your tail over here, will you please? I haven't disturbed a thing. I'm even calling from the pay phone on the porch.”

Hanging up, Bernabé poked a gun-shaped finger against his temple and made a wry face as he softly sputtered, “Bang.”

Swaddled in an old-fashioned robe, Carolina appeared in the doorway: “I heard the phone.”

“Yeah.” Bernabé dropped a match onto the kerosene-soaked wood chips. “I'll bet you did.”

“Trouble always comes in threes,” she said vaguely.

The sheriff nodded. “Somebody stole guns from Rael last night.”

“Oh dear.”

“You're not kidding, ‘Oh dear.' It's gonna be like World War III,” Bernabé sighed. “I bet old man Devine up there is already pouring concrete for pillboxes. Welcome, ball fans, to the World Series of Death.”

“It's an ill wind—” Carolina began.

“You're not kidding it's an ill wind.”

Strapping on his gun belt, Bernabé stopped in front of her, slipping one hand inside her robe to cup a heavy breast. Tits, her tits, Vera's tits, everybody's tits mystified him. Maybe he loved tits more than any other thing, piece of anatomy, or even person on this earth. When Bernabé's rough hand curled around or crept over or grabbed onto or crushed a breast, no matter what the size, shape, age, or weight, it was always as if for a moment, at least, he had plugged into The Crucial Connection, the one that supplied All the Answers. Afterward, the rest of their female bodies, all of womankind, either disappointed him or disturbed him like painted cattleguards. And no breast, even though he often found himself pressing hardened nipples into his ears, had ever whispered words to Bernabé, unveiling answers that could placate his insatiable curiosity about the souls of people, the conditions of the universe.