The Milagro Beanfield War (66 page)

“Take it easy, take it easy,” Bernabé replied nervously. “Don't get so excited, dammit. Nobody's going off half-cocked, I assure you.”

“I just want to make sure you understand this is a ticklish situation that could have severe consequences,” Bloom said.

“You think I don't know that—?” Bernabé croaked desperately. “Jesus
Christ,
man!”

He hung up on the lawyer.

Bloom cradled the phone, and, bowing his head, pressing his palms against his eyes, he shed a few quiet tears.

Linda had just put the kids to bed. She sat down in a chair staring helplessly at him from across the room.

“I don't know how to handle it,” Bloom moaned, swaying a little. “I just don't know how to handle it. I feel so ambiguous. What kind of wishy-washy person am I anyway?”

“Handle exactly what?” Linda asked.

“This. That. Anything. Everything. I don't
want
to be involved in Joe's affairs. He
shot
a man, for God's sake. I'm like you, I never wanted to spend my life in the company of violent people. I don't want to be associated with a man who killed another person. I don't want to defend that kind of human being…”

Bloom's face looked shocked and unholy and drained. “I'm afraid,” he whispered tiredly. “I'm afraid of losing, afraid of winning, afraid of the fight. I've always been afraid. I want to be safe. Like you too, right? I spent my whole life looking around for the big rock-candy mountain. I can't stand the fact there isn't a Santa Claus. The people around here—” He stood up abruptly, waving one hand. “The people around here, if they ever saw Santa Claus in the neighborhood, they'd fall all over themselves scrambling for their .30–30s so they could put a little reindeer meat in their freezers! I hate their illiterate guts! I'm sick and tired of doing their dirty work. And of
not
doing their dirty work. Why don't you teach one of your own bloody people to be a lawyer? Why don't they learn to read and write? Every damn Friday when we come back from Chamisaville with the Sunday before's
New York Times
I feel guilty as sin. And I'm sick and tired of feeling guilty as sin!”

In pain he gripped his temples, ran fingers through his hair, turned away from her, toward her, paced across the room and back, stopped at a window, lowered his voice.

“We should get a gun,” he said. “Learn how to shoot it. A rifle. A pistol to keep in the glove compartment. This autumn I'll get a hunting license, I'll go out and kill a deer.”

Bloom sat down.

“I don't want a gun. I don't want to have to feel we need to protect ourselves like that. I came out West to escape that kind of shit. So what are we doing in a medieval little town where everybody and his brother practically sits around picking their teeth with bayonets all day? You know how kids around here get lead poisoning?—from eating .30–30 bullets, that's what from. And you know what I'm tired of? I'm tired of every time I pull up in back of a pickup truck there's a fucking gun on a fucking rack on the fucking rear window.”

Silence. This was her speech in his mouth, and Linda just sat there, staring at her hands in her lap, a sense of imminent disaster riding like ice through her bones.

“I don't know,” Bloom said, shaking his head. “I just don't know. Maybe I never should have left the East Coast. Maybe I shouldn't have been a lawyer. I don't have the temperament to be a lawyer. I'm not tough enough. I don't have the kind of compassion it would take to be good. I don't know what I have the temperament to be, you want to know the truth. Probably we shouldn't have gotten married. What's going to happen if everything falls apart again? Where will you go? Who gets the children? How will we support each other and the girls when everything is split apart—?”

Quietly, without moving, Linda started crying.

“Oh brother.” Bloom stood up, turned stupidly in circles, slumped down, picked up a pencil off the desk and aimlessly broke it in two. Then he selected another pencil from a leather cup, broke it, and set the pieces in a row on the wide green blotter, and selected another one to break. And another.

He broke them all, lined the pieces up carefully, and sat there, elbows on the desk, hands covering his face, breathing heavily.

“I don't get any exercise,” he murmured unhappily. “I'm fat, bloated, I jiggle when I walk. How much booze do I consume in a day? Two beers for lunch. Bourbon before dinner. Wine with the meal. I wake up in the morning, I start nibbling. I can't stop eating. I light a cigarette, smoke it, light another: I chain-drink coffee. My hands are always trembling; my nerves are shot. My veins bulge. My whole flabby body shakes from caffeine jitters, and I can't stop. What's the matter with me? Why don't you do something about it? Why don't you tell me to stop killing myself? What are you doing, counting the minutes until I die and you'll be free?”

Bitterly, the lawyer laughed. His veins bulged, his eyes were sore, his head ached: in the vernacular, he was strung—far fucking—out. Maybe he
was
killing himself; it was true he couldn't breathe right. Self-pity clogged all his pores.

“I used to think life was beautiful,” Bloom moaned. “Everybody in my family thought life was beautiful. We grinned at each other morning, noon, and night. We had real-life Pepsodent smiles. Nobody ever got angry at anybody else. Life was a bed of roses!”

He was shaking his head again, back and forth.

“All my life I been waiting to grow up,” he whispered. “Instead I only grow old. I hate growing old. I'm gonna go down to the capital tomorrow and buy a wig and some of that magic cream that hides liver spots and makes people look ten years younger. How come there isn't any Geritol in our medicine cabinet? When are we going to get a color TV?”

Linda sniffled and wiped her nose on the back of her hand.

“We don't have enough sex anymore,” Bloom blurted suddenly. “I beat off at least twice a week, how about that? And, except for when we went up in the mountains, we always make love in the dark now, and we always make love the same way, the same tired old positions. I want to
fuck.
I wish I was married to somebody who knew better what to do in bed. I wish something kinky would take place some night in our bed. We used to be so erotic. We used to laugh and joke in the hay. I don't think I can stand much more of this sugar-is-sweet bullshit, timid do-nothing hanky-panky anymore. Oh God.”

Bloom rose and wandered dazedly around the room touching things, avoiding Linda's chair, stopping once to cough. He went to the kitchen, located a toothpick, and began busily to pick his teeth. From the kitchen he could see her sitting there, in her hair—already—streaks of gray. She was a dark, once-sensual girl—he had never been able to call her a woman—who'd had two lovely daughters by cesarean, and he guessed he loved her, but she was nothing like his first wife, whom he had hated while also lusting after her sensual way in the hay.

Bloom dug into a clay jar, latched onto a chocolate chip cookie, ate it.

“Forget what I said,” he called softly into her. “I'm not a good person. I'm sorry.”

Linda didn't move, said nothing, he could not hear if she was crying—he hoped she was crying—but he couldn't reenter that room to find out.

“Let's forget about it,” he whispered, eating another cookie, gulping it almost hysterically. “I should keep my mouth shut. When you get this old you should keep your mouth shut.”

But he had to laugh ironically over that. “All my life I kept my Casper Milquetoast mouth shut. When they bury me they better gag me, because I'll probably start screaming from the grave, everything I never said.”

“Oh shut up,” she whispered unevenly. “Go away.”

“I don't want to go away. Where would I go? There's probably some violence freak outside waiting to plug me. And anyway, suddenly I really feel like hurting you.”

“Maybe there isn't somebody out there waiting to shoot you because you're not as important as you think,” Linda said.

“Oh screw you,” he spat sourly, and went outside.

In the moonlight, tears streaming down his face, he wandered around their place, their house but not a home. Since birth had he ever lived in a home? And what now for Charley Bloom? He sighed. The ponies whinnied quietly as they trotted over to see if he had sugar, a carrot, or anything else. He scratched Sunflower's forehead, gazing at the mountains, struck by their clear, ghostly peace. Once he had sworn never to leave the ocean, convinced that his soul craved sand and the green expanse stretching all the way to his ancestral home in Europe. But mountains did as much for a soul as the ocean, and they were more mystical and more alive, and more accessible, too.

Bloom journeyed into his back field. The grass was silvery, damp with dew. The valley all around him, what he could see of it, was dark and secretive, beautiful and serene.

Tomorrow he would leave. Good-bye, Linda: adios, my children: so long, Joe—roast in hell, kids.

No, he wouldn't leave.

He was exhausted.

His daughters dreamed the rainbow-colored Raggedy Ann dreams of contented children. And he loved them. And he loved his wife. And fuck it. His life was over. The adventures he had always dreamed of, also the serenity and the security, were already a part of the past, impossible fantasies. If he had ever been free, he didn't know when. Joe Mondragón was important right now, he needed a defense if he survived, and Bloom could probably do a decent job, so he would do a decent job.

What the hell.

He returned to the house. In her puffy blue robe, eyes red rimmed, Linda leaned against a kitchen counter waiting for coffee water to boil. He nodded hello; she nodded back, dropping her eyes. Bloom fetched a sweater from the bedroom and came back to the kitchen, buttoning it up. She put a teaspoon of instant coffee into two mugs and poured the water. They stood in the kitchen, Linda leaning against the counter, Charley leaning against the fridge, sipping the coffee. Dogs started to bark and howl, kept it up for a few minutes—the racket died down. Then the faint odor of a faraway skunk drifted into the kitchen.

“I apologize for my outburst,” Bloom said slowly.

She shrugged, making a small sound.

“I don't know,” he said. “I just don't know.”

“I don't either,” she whispered, staring at the floor.

“Everything will be alright in the morning,” Bloom said. “Or at least it will be better.”

And after a long silence he added: “I love you.”

*   *   *

Much later on that night, Bloom suddenly awoke out of a bad dream and discovered that she was up on one elbow staring at him.

“Oh shit,” Bloom whispered despairingly. “I just feel too … God … damn …
mortal.
”

*   *   *

“So,” Bernabé Montoya sighed wearily, “Pacheco's pig tried to eat José's beanfield, so José shot Pacheco's pig, so Pacheco tried to shoot José, so José shot Pacheco, and all because of that damn pig and that damn drunk
I
got to go up into the mountains and bring back José, only José ain't gonna want to come back, so somebody else will get shot, probably me.”

Carolina, who was seated in her chair by the open rear window, said vaguely, “Cheer up, querido, things could be worse.”

“Sure they could be worse,” Bernabé muttered morosely, applying shoe polish to one of his boots. “The bullet José put in the middle of Pacheco's chest could of ricocheted off a rib, traveled a half-mile across the highway, passed in one of Mercedes Rael's ears and out the other just as she was throwing a stone at Harlan Betchel, and then bounced off one of those tin gutters on the Frontier Bar, come through that window you're sitting at, and struck you right between the eyes. Sure, it could of been worse—”

“I didn't mean…” Carolina began defensively, startled by her husband's bitter tone. “I didn't think…”

“Oh yeah … heck … I'm sorry…” Bernabé fumbled with words, came up mute. And then abruptly released what he'd not admitted before: “I guess I'm a little scared, that's all.” He smiled weakly, shrugged self-effacingly.

It was a curious, lambent time then, in their house, in that room. A late-afternoon sprinkle had stirred up the dust, and now a slow breeze carried in an almost-radiant smell of dust and dry piñon pine and sage.

The room was growing dark; something had happened. They both felt raw, tender, exposed. A crack, a minute fissure had opened between them: Carolina, with her fingertips still touched against her child-carrying scars, held her breath; the evening's dusty pulse was almost too reminiscent, too saturated with a call to memory. Then Carolina, whispering, admitted, “I'm scared too.”

And they waited. And they had much to say. Because they loved each other. Because they had failed each other. Because they were embarrassed to try and be articulate. Because life was half-over. Because, because, because.…

Bernabé, the human piñata; Carolina, with her shiny stretch marks, her dreams about Benjamin, her all-day-every-days in the house among sacred murmurations.

Last night in the bathroom, while seated on the can, Bernabé had noticed a spider spinning its web in a corner several feet away. He watched it passively for a moment, until of a sudden he realized it was a female black widow doing her thing not three feet from his toes. When he had finished, drawing up his pants and buckling his belt, Bernabé knelt on the floor near the spider, watching it work. A hundred times he had confronted black widows, and—BLAM!—always, unthinkingly, he had smashed them with his hand the way most men and women in Milagro eradicated the pests. But last night, on his knees, curious, fascinated as this most beautiful of all spiders wove her web, he held back for a second, impressed by the delicate geometric designs that deadly little creature was making in order to survive.