The Milagro Beanfield War (61 page)

“That bad, I'm afraid,” Bertha said sympathetically.

Nick poked a finger against his temple and pulled the trigger, mouthing a silent
pow!
As he did, Harlan's large shadow fell across the sawdusted floor.

“She isn't there,” Nick said in a monotone, staring blankly ahead.

“How did you know?”

“Bertha Gleason. She just called. I guess Stella was right…”

“Which way was she headed, did Bertha say?”

Nick flung out finger-spread hands: “Right now, apparently, it's up for grabs.”

“Oh Lord!” Harlan clapped a hand to his forehead. “It's all because I clocked her with that shoe, isn't it? Gaga or not, she's still got a memory.”

“Like an elephant.” And this was shaping up as such an all-encompassing disaster that Nick couldn't move.

“How did she stay on the road all the way to over there?” Harlan asked weakly.

“How can she climb trees, survive in the forest for a week, and eat all my daffodils without getting sick to her stomach?” Nick replied.

“You better call Bernie. We ought to let him know she's loose, right?”

“I guess so—”

“I know,” the sheriff muttered disconsolately. “I know, I know, I know. I wish I didn't know, but I do. Already Nancy Mondragón called—your mama, she almost ran over Larry. Four seconds later that VISTA kid, the Jewish hermit from New York, he called from Onofre's place; he was on his bicycle when a little old lady in the Betchels' car deliberately ran him off the road. Six seconds later Lavadie called, wanting to know could he shoot her or not, because she went through a fence on his property and zigzagged around a field, killed a couple of sheep, then left.”

“Heading which way, Bernie?”

“He couldn't say for sure. Maybe east or west; maybe north or south. It was hard to tell. He said mostly she was sort of spinning around like a dust devil.”

“Okay, Bernie, I guess we'll head out after her.”

“I dunno now what's the point, Nick. Me, I figure I might just as well sit tight and man the phones until the motor stalls or she collides head-on with a tree. About all more cars on these roads can do is just get in her way, that's how I see it.”

Nick banged down the phone. Immediately it rang.

“Nick? Nick? Is that you, Nick? Do you know what your mother is doing right now? Do you?
Do you?”

“Who is this?” Nick asked.

“Who the hell do you think it is?”
a hysterical voice on the other end screamed.

Nick hung up. Before he could release the apparatus, however, it rang again.

“Mr. Rael?” a woman's voice jabbered irately, “you ain't gonna believe this, but guess what?”

Whereupon Horsethief Shorty walked into the store laughing. “Relax everybody, relax,” he chortled. “It's all over.”

“She totaled my car,” Harlan groaned.

“She's dead,” Nick whispered.

“She just stopped,” Shorty chuckled.

“She didn't crash?”

“Not exactly.”

“She's alive?”

“More alive than a grasshopper on a hot skillet.”

“Where is she?”

“Up at the Dancing Trout.”

“Oh God help me—” Nick cringed in preparation for the answer to his next question: “Where, up there, Shorty, did she stop?”

“In the swimming pool,” Shorty sputtered. “But don't worry, man. For some reason that car of yours, Harlan—it floats.”

Slowly, Nick sank back into his chair:

“Que milagro!”
he squeaked hoarsely.

*   *   *

Supper was over, the children scrubbed and put to bed, Bloom in his study working. Linda sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and lit a cigarette. She was hot, tired from dealing with the children all day; the wind had been blowing, filling her hair with dust—but now everything was quiet. The house was straightened up and neat; the kitchen soft, bare, and shining. Everything was in order … except that her period was coming on. No big deal, but still she wanted to weep. It was too hard trying to keep life under control.

As the night thickened, dew forming, a grassy smell drifted in through the screen door. Already, small moths decorated the screen; they pinged deferentially against the windows and fell away.

Linda turned on the radio, locating a faraway California station that was playing quiet waltz music, and listened for a moment while sipping coffee, smoking; then she brought in some of the kids' clothes and set to work sewing on buttons. At first the music soothed; later it jarred, growing loud then fading to nothing; lightning from a storm located somewhere in that vast fifteen hundred miles separating the transmitter from the Blooms' radio kept intruding, causing bursts of jagged static. Finally Linda angrily turned off the radio and just sat at the table with her head resting in the fluff of clean kiddie togs, overcome by an almost pristine sadness, a feeling of hopelessness. She could not stand the idea that her husband was falling into the almost maudlin trap of defending something lost from the start; she knew it was lost because she had grown up among the losers; and Linda resented the fact that she still very much loved them, her people the losers, even while she was terrified of being nailed to the cross of her upbringing, her culture. All that could happen, with Bloom tilting at windmills, was the ruination of them both … of them all.

Little feet padded from the children's bedroom across the living room, into the kitchen; María cuddled up sleepily against her, whining softly, “Mommy, there is spiders all over the place. They are hopping on my bed.”

Linda draped an arm around her daughter, softly shook her head: “But they won't hurt you, honey. They don't bite—” The house was literally crawling with daddy longlegs.

“I'm afraid,” María whimpered, and so Linda put on a bright, sympathetic smile as she hoisted her daughter, and, heading for the bedroom, soothed, “Come on back to bed, love, and Mommy will sing you a song.”

In the darkness, with Pauline in the other twin bed gently whistling as she dreamed, Linda sat beside her youngest daughter and sang “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem,” the song—the lullaby—that for some reason she always sang to relax her children, calm their fears, make them drowsy—

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep

The silent stars go by …

And:

How silently, how silently

The wondrous gift is given …

But little María, tonight, was not immediately sleepy. She tucked a pudgy hand into her mother's warm crotch, saying “Tell me a story, Mommy, so I won't be afraid of the spiders.”

And Linda, seated on the bed in the soft blue summer night, snug within the cheerful, mute universe of dolls and bright clean clothes and Little Golden Books, thought for a moment, but could invent no story, until abruptly she heard herself talking about home, Colorado, the old days, childhood—

“Well … a long time ago, sweet, Mommy used to be a cheerleader, did I ever tell you that?”

And, incredulous that this could actually be herself speaking, that the moments she was describing had actually taken place during her early life, she added: “We used to practice on summer afternoons and evenings, all of us girls, there were maybe eight or ten of us in junior high school then who were cheerleaders. We would ride our bikes to the football field and park the bikes on the dirt track, and then walk out into the middle of the field. Sometimes the grass was wet because they had had the sprinklers on, watering the grass. And sometimes the field was almost yellow because of the dandelion blossoms, and then they all went to seed and the field was white, it fluffed when we walked in it, just as if we were walking in dreamy tufts of sheep's wool—”

“Was this when you were a little girl like me, Mommy?” María asked.

“No, I was a little older than you, sweetie. I was thirteen or fourteen, I think. And so we would sit out in the middle of the field in the evening and talk about our routines, and then sometimes we lined up in formation and worked on the cheers—”

And she stopped, able to see them all, pert and young, high-strutting in the dusty golden evenings. Sometimes cars would stop on the other side of the track, and high school boys would look on, whistling softly, making lazy comments; or other times it would just be older people, men, women, grandparents, who parked their rattletraps along the road running parallel to the field, peacefully looking on. The moon might be up in the pastel aqua blue overhead while the sun flamed orange in the west, and other kids, younger boys and girls on bikes, might also stop by. Yet everyone kept a respectful distance, as if that small corps of lively, pretty girls was something inviolate, almost sacred, bouncy, virginal, clean—and the peace and the sense of youth and of well-being, for those moments, had been like a cloud.

She had never qualified to cheer for the rites of autumn, however; in the end they didn't pick her, she was too clumsy; she was not lively enough; she was too somber, too severe, too gloomy, perhaps—she lacked vitality. Maybe she had been too self-conscious; maybe she had been too mature.

But the thing is, Linda had forgotten about that time, those glorious evenings, the solitude, camaraderie, and the green football field, the gentility and serenity of those times, the peppy, shining brown girls dressed in sweatshirts and baggy letter sweaters and short-shorts, chanting lazily while moving happily through their cute, sexy routines, unassailable for a moment, secure.

She checked the telling, afraid of tears. María struggled to keep her sticky eyes open; they closed, fluttered groggily open, closed again, the little hand still embedded warmly between her thighs. Daddy longlegs noiselessly crisscrossed the floor; innocence whispered around the walls creating eddies in the air that set Linda's heart to aching, because more than anything she wanted to give her children a feeling of security, even though she knew this was ultimately impossible. Nothing would ever exactly fit together and solidify; she would never grow calm, never feel at ease; life was a hell on earth of loose ends, uncertainty, violence. The Chicano roots she had rejected had refused to shrivel and die; the culture she had hoped to adopt had refused to compensate. Her true language kept twirling into her head unannounced, replete with an arrogant dazzling laughter, boisterous, obscene, illiterate, tickling her mind on twinkle-toes of murder.

Quietly, listening to the creak of her limbs, the crinkle of the cloth that clothed her, Linda roused herself, left the room, turned into the bathroom to draw a tub. At least a dozen daddy longlegs were arranged along the bottom of the cool porcelain tub, quiet, quivering when the light blared on and her shadow fell. She did not like to handle them, squashing the spiders the way Bloom squashed them—she usually opted for drowning. And so now she opened the spigots, shivering a little as the spiders scrambled, lost their footing, struggled momentarily in the hot water, and died, immediately bedraggled, soggy, long gone. Scooping them up in her hand, she shook them off into the wastebasket; when the water was high she shut it off and doused the lights.

In the dark, the bathroom door open, Bloom's typewriter faintly clicking in the distance, Linda undressed and, having gingerly sunk into the hot water, simply lay there, drowsy, the water murmuring around the islands of her breasts and her knees, relaxing.

Bloom's typewriter stopped, his door opened, she listened to him come.

“You in here?” he asked hesitantly from the doorway, trying to adjust his eyes, the smoke from his pipe smelling nice.

“Don't turn the light on—” she said hastily, fearing the harsh, knifing blast of fluorescence.

“Don't worry. I wasn't going to. I'm not that insensitive.”

“I didn't say you were insensitive.”

“Well, I guess it was what your voice implied then.”

“Charley,
please.”

“Can I sit here a while?”

“If you want.”

“But you don't want me to, do you?”

“Did I say that? Did you hear me say that?”

“Well, your voice sounded…”

Struggling for control, unhappy that he'd come, she said, “Honey, I would like it if you would sit here with me for a little while.”

Bloom eased the lid down on the toilet, seated himself, released a pungent comfortable puff from his pipe.

“Let's not talk,” Linda pleaded. “We ruin everything when we talk.”

“I'll wash your back if you want.”

“No, no, please.” Because he would soap her back, and then he would not stop, he would start to soap her thighs, her breasts, he would force it to become a sexual encounter, no matter if he promised not to, and right now she only wanted peace. She wanted peace, an absolute quietude; she wanted an interlude of darkness, warm water, the pipe tobacco smell, security.

They sat, both silent, trying to relax with each other, to have a good moment. Linda cupped her breasts loosely, steam eddied thoughtfully in the dark air. Her exhaustion flowed into the hot water; she drowsed. She wished that the experience would never end. She wished that right now she could gently die. Bloom shifted, rustled, tapped his pipe out into his palm; the ashes made a sprinkling noise going into the wastebasket. A rainy whiff came through the open window, a few large drops spattered against the dusty leaves of a pear tree just outside. It was so warm, so cool, so relaxing—

Light, like a bomb burst, exploded in the tiny bathroom; and in the doorway, squinting groggily, stood little María again, the quietest child on two feet since Baby Jesus in the manger. “Mommy,” she said, in that willful, winsome, half-whine of hers, triumphantly smiling at having caught her parents in an intimate pose, “the spiders are still crawling all around.”

“Hey,” Bloom blurted, immediately tense, angry, “turn off that light!” And then, looking down at his wife in the tub: “Oh Christ, what—”