The Milagro Beanfield War (62 page)

“It's only my period,” Linda said, shocked, not quite comprehending: the water was tinged with menstrual blood.

*   *   *

Joe Mondragón, off on a wood run, drove like a maniac over the mesa's potholed dirt roads, a beer in one hand, the radio blasting. Nancy sat morosely beside him holding a six-pack minus one tallboy in her lap. Crows flapped off an occasional jackrabbit carcass; a black-and-white shrike sat on a fence post with a dead kangaroo rat dangling from under its talons; cows lumbered moodily off the dirt path into the sagebrush. Joe bapped his horn angrily at the cows, shaving their asses with his front bumper as the truck careened by, and, because they were Eusebio Lavadie's cows, he wouldn't have minded plowing into a couple of them either; the only reason they were grazing out here on this Bureau of Land Management land was because Lavadie had gotten money from Ladd Devine to buy up the permits of a Colorado rancher who'd decided to give up his cattle business. Joe had wanted some permits to graze cattle here, but he hadn't been able to come up with the cash and wouldn't have been able to swing the deal anyway, because these cows were Lavadie's payment for putting the Chamisa County Rural Conservation and Development Corps directly behind the Miracle Valley Recreation Area development project.

Joe suddenly braked the truck, grabbed his .30–06 from the window rack, and banged open his door.

“What are you doing?” Nancy asked.

“I'm gonna shoot one of that bastard's cows!”

“You do, you'll get caught, and that's what they want, José, you'll see.”

Walking to within fifteen yards of a pregnant cow, Joe bolted a bullet into the chamber. The cow retreated a few steps and regarded him with watery, mooning eyes that indicated a massively substandard intelligence.

But Joe no more could have shot a cow he wasn't going to eat, much less one that was going to drop a calf, than he could have refused a free beer, or put more than a dollar's worth of gas at any given moment into his truck. At the same time, now that he was out here, having announced in no uncertain terms what it was he had planned to do, he couldn't just shrug and return to the truck.

So he compromised, opting to scare the shit out of the cow, which he promptly did, both figuratively and literally, pulling off three rapid shots that sprayed dirt and pebbles and bits of dead sage branches up into the cow's face and hide before it could turn and gallop lumberingly away, splatting a terrified patty onto its own heels as it fled.

Back in the truck, Joe felt better; Nancy stared noncommittally ahead. They had to slow up at the gorge, inching slowly down along the narrow, twisting road, pulling over twice before they hit bottom to allow other, wood-filled pickups on the way home to pass. They crossed the narrow wooden bridge over the Rio Grande, chugging through a swarm of olive green and russet-colored swallows that had mud nests under the bridge, and started the bumpy climb out. At the top, a wide, flat plain dotted with huge ant mounds stretched for a mile, and Joe left the dirt ruts to slalom between the mounds for a ways. Then they were in sagebrush again, barreling along with the windows rolled up against the adobe dust that enveloped their vehicle.

The sage became dotted with a few junipers in a landscape that seemed almost African. Then suddenly stumpy piñon pines surrounded them as they lurched onto an old railroad trestle road, banging along in well-worn ruts for another six miles, at which point they came to the territory of the Big Jack.

The Big Jack was a forest eater, a mammoth, three-story-high machine with three gargantuan steel-toothed wheels that not only knocked over piñon trees, but also crunched them up into bite-sized fireplace-perfect logs. For the past year, in this area of Chamisa County, the Big Jack had been pulverizing the scrubby pine forests in order to make more grazing land—“for the small farmers” insisted all the political brochures, although already most of the leveled acreage had been spoken for by two or three out-of-state cattle companies.

In the meantime, the local people were allowed to come in and lug away all the free wood they wanted, which saved the powers that be the considerable time and expense of carting their slash away themselves or else burning it, which was theoretically illegal.

All the same, Joe and Nancy couldn't help but feel a slight glow as they gunned through the dusty wasteland toward where pickings were best. Loading up on free wood was like gathering manna from heaven, and how could a person be completely cynical about that? For years in the north, part of the measure of a family's wealth had been its woodpile, and even though people like Joe and Nancy had propane heaters in their living rooms now, there would always be fireplaces in the other rooms and a combination gas-wood stove in the kitchen. And if, sometime in the future, not even the combination stoves and fireplaces survived, it's an even bet there would still be a woodpile outside, hanging on as a kind of vestigial, nostalgic heartbreaker, like those horses in Charley Bloom's
Voice of the People
article.

Then too, maybe someday—if Zopilote Devine had his way—all the subdivision houses he was planning would pay their respects to Milagro's cultural heritage by having realistic-looking plastic piñon piles in their backyards, adding just the correct dash of authenticity to make their flimsy split-level ranch houses indigenous to the area.

Totally unconcerned about getting stuck, Joe swerved off the beaten path at a good spot, bucking through loose dirt, sand, and muck to where busted trees lay all about. Without a word they both hopped out and set to work, Joe scavenging bigger logs that burned well in his shop's heater, Nancy gathering smaller branches that would fit easily into the kitchen stove. They each carried an ax, splitting with one or two easy blows what the Big Jack had not completely sectioned, and within an hour the pickup was stacked so high one more log probably would have snapped a spring or cracked the axle.

Joe fetched a cigarette from his shirt pocket, tossed one to Nancy, lit them both. Plunking tiredly down on an uprooted stump near the truck, he snapped open another tallboy; she leaned on the front hood, facing him, wearily letting the smoke drawl out between her lips. A strange but harmonious feeling infused the surrounding desolation. In a far tree line crows scrawked; there was no other animal noise. But here and there small purple flowers shone iridescently, and in the upturned earth and ragged dunes a few delicate asters grew; for some reason, hundreds of tiny fuzzy caterpillers were chewing on the asters. In its own way that barren area was beautiful, and, although the dust blowing and drifting and shifting in the erratic but constant breezes had dirtied their faces and colored the chinks between their teeth, they felt okay.

That is, Joe felt okay until Nancy, who had some things on her mind that wanted airing, asked, “How come you won't sign that petition Ruby Archuleta keeps bringing over?”

“Huh?”

“How come you won't sign that petition?”

“What, there's a law says I got to sign that petition?”

“I signed it.”

“Good for you. I didn't. So what?”

“How come you won't sign it?”

“Because every time we signed something we signed away our noses, our ears, even our testicles.”

“This is different.”

“Well, I dunno,” Joe grumbled defensively. “I just don't want to put my name on anything, that's all.”

“Who are you gonna scream to when the chotas pour honey all over you and start eating you like a sopaipilla?” she asked grimly.

“Well, I just haven't figured it out yet. It's too complicated. I ain't that smart. Plus you know that as soon as that petition goes to the governor, five seconds later it's gonna be in the hands of the state cops…”

“If there's only a few names on it they sure will have a hearty chuckle, too.”

“Well, fuck it.”

“I think we should stop on the way back so you can sign, José. You started all this. It's time to quit monkeying around.”

“Oh shuttup,” Joe whined petulantly, and for some odd reason that ended the conversation.

On the way back Joe drove slowly, stopping a couple of times to piss. Distant clouds, rich and dark and rumbling threateningly, were rolling slowly off the mountains. In the far south, from a high line of transparent golden clouds, yellow and pink rain wisps dangled. Directly behind them in the west everything was a deep and placid early-afternoon blue.

On the north–south highway, instead of turning north toward Milagro, Joe steered south, pulling off a mile down the road into the Strawberry Mesa Body Shop and Pipe Queen complex. Ruby and her son, Eliu, Marvin LaBlue, and Claudio García were at work in the body shop on Benny Maestas' 1948 Pontiac which had killed a horse the night before. Over in the Pipe Queen, Onofre Martínez and his retarded son, O. J., and his two great-grandchildren, Chemo and Chepa, were using Ruby's tools to cut and thread some pipe.

Brushing metal bits from her hair, Ruby walked over to the truck. “What's up?” she asked, releasing a warm smile.

“I guess I'll sign that petition,” Joe mumbled.

“It's up at the house. Follow me.”

In her kitchen, surrounded by a half-dozen curious yellow cats and threatened by a placidly snarling mutt lying in a basket under the table, Joe affixed his signature to a handwritten petition claiming that “We, the undersigned residents of Milagro, representing the Milagro Land and Water Protection Association…” were opposed to the formation of the Indian Creek Conservancy District and the Indian Creek Dam, essentially because they were costly projects designed to aid the few rich landholders in town, projects that the poor people could not afford.

There were only about ten or twelve names before his, and the whole thing made Joe terribly uncomfortable, as if somehow he had just signed up for a hitch in the army or in a jail cell. He was being robbed of a certain freedom he had enjoyed, despite his poverty, all his life. He was being trapped into going farther than he had ever intended to go. Now somebody else besides himself had a real stranglehold on his future. And maybe (Joe thought for the ten-thousandth time) I shouldn't have cut that water into that fucking beanfield after all.

“You don't have too many names on this thing, do you?” he mumbled nervously.

“People just haven't decided yet. Everybody understands though, qué no? They just don't know what we should do about it. But you'll see—”

In the truck, going home, Joe suddenly exploded:
“Shit!”

“What?” Nancy asked.

“Just shit,” Joe whined uncomfortably, gripping a tallboy between his thighs in order to pop the top more easily.

*   *   *

Early next morning Carl Abeyta arrived at the Forest Service headquarters to discover a weathered ten-year-old statuette of Smokey the Bear tied with red ribbon to the doorhandle of the office building. A long, thin adobe nail had been carefully hammered through its heart.

Carl was a local boy who knew a thing or two about hexes and about Milagro history, and so he reacted accordingly.

First he took the Smokey out back, splashed kerosene on it, and burned it up.

Next he turned around the desk in his office so that he was sitting at it with his back to the wall instead of to the window.

Then he sent an application off to regional headquarters, begging for a transfer.

*   *   *

That same afternoon, the real estate agent Bud Gleason awoke from a late-afternoon nap in dire need of taking a leak. Swinging his feet to the floor, he sat groggy and unmoving for a moment, lit a cigarette, then pushed his feet into some slippers and padded painfully into the bathroom. As usual his whole body ached. He unzipped his fly, prodding the old sad-sack penis into the clear, then stood there with one arm extended, his hand against the wall, his head propped desultorily against that arm's bicep, taking an occasional drag from the cigarette in his other hand while he waited for the pee to leave his throbbing bladder. Instead, just as a huge ash falling from his weed splashed against his penis, he sneezed. He hadn't closed the door, and so his wife, Bertha, who was downstairs stretched out on the living room divan reading last month's
Redbook
novel, heard the sneeze and called up to him:

“Somebody is thinking about you.”

“Bullshit,” Bud grumbled. “I'm catching a cold; maybe pneumonia; probably I'll die.”

“Don't try and wriggle out of it that way,” she said. “Somebody is thinking about you. I know you been horsing around on the sly, especially when I flew East in April to bury Grandpa.”

“Oh yeah, me with my one ball that screams Rape! every time I have half an orgasm, and my heart that goes into shock every morning when I wake up because it's so surprised to be alive. After three and a quarter coronaries I should wear a black suit or something. Just to save everybody some time when I keel over…”

“Well, maybe somebody else is thinking about you for some other reason,” she insisted.

“Like maybe God is thinking about my heart condition and wondering if it's time to pull the rug out from under, thanks a lot,” Bud complained, tugging his penis impatiently, eager to get this leak over with, wondering why he couldn't pee.

“God—
hah!
Listen to him brag, would you? Whatever happened to the Devil in this scheme of things, he lost our address? We're too rich for God.”

“I'm a condemned man,” Bud wailed, grimacing, “and my wife thinks it's funny.”

“What do you want me to do, cry?” she called. “You drop dead I'm a couple hundred thousand richer, plus I don't have to put up with you farting between my satin sheets anymore.”

“Don't feed me all that Mexican crap and I won't fart in bed anymore!”

“You farted in bed when we lived in Brooklyn and all I fed you were potato pancakes and knishes!”