The Milagro Beanfield War (69 page)

Now, as the Gurulés scurried about casting their haunted, hunting eyes busily through weeds and in and out of likely looking nooks and crannies, Snuffy Ledoux suddenly shouted, “Hey, everybody, I'm back! Miren! Miren! Miren! Estoy p'aca!”

Fructosa Gurulé straightened up and, with her hands on her hips, matter-of-factly asked, “How come you returned?”

“I got homesick.”

“Well,” Fructosa whined bitterly, “it's worse than when you left. Welcome back to nothing.”

“What's happening?” Snuffy asked eagerly. “Who's alive, who died since I been gone? How much money did the Zopilote make off my brothers and sisters since I went away?”

Esquipula said, “Seferino Pacheco is dying because José Mondragón shot him yesterday after he shot at José because José shot to death Seferino's sow who was eating the bean plants in José's old man's beanfield José is irrigating illegally over there on the western side of the highway.”

“Don't tell me, lemme guess,” Snuffy cackled. “They got José down there in the Chamisa V. cage hanging by fishhooks stuck in his ears and attached to the ceiling.”

“It's not funny,” Fructosa whined. “He ran away to the mountains, and there's a posse up there right now looking for him and when they find him they're going to kill him.”

“No, they're not going to kill him,” Esquipula contradicted. “They wouldn't do that. He's one of
us.
”

“Oh, they'll kill him, alright,” Fructosa declared. “Zopi Devine, they say he's gonna pay them to kill him. You'll see. You'll see what happens,” she threatened darkly, suddenly commencing to canvass again.

“Don't listen to her, they're not going to kill him,” Esquipula repeated apologetically. “But it's not a happy state of affairs no matter what happens. There's going to be a lot of trouble.”

“All I hope and pray for,” Fructosa groaned, “is that you stay out of it whatever happens.”

“There's going to be a war—?” Snuffy asked incredulously.

“A war? What is a war?” Fructosa complained. “Everyday life here is a war. Survival is a war. Look at us. Look what we are doing now for a living. Now that you're back, what will you do for a living? God forbid it should be to carve more Smokey the Bears.”

“I'm gonna carve santos and sell them to the tourists up in the canyon,” Snuffy laughed. “That's my suitcase over there, and it's full of beautiful carvings.”

“You have no shame,” Fructosa moaned.

“The queen of the beer cans tells the santo carver he has no shame?” Snuffy hooted, pitching over to the suitcase. “Wait till you see
this
!” Deftly he snapped open the blade on his pocket knife, cut the cords holding the suitcase together, and the two halves fell open. There were half a dozen newspaper-wrapped bundles inside. Snuffy unwrapped one, holding in his hand an awkward wooden carving of a hollow-eyed and gaunt virgin squeezing a bellowing fat kid against her breasts.

“Ai, Chihuahua!”
Fructosa sneered disdainfully. “That's too ugly. What's it supposed to mean? If it's a santo it's unreligious.”

Esquipula squinted his eyes, cocked his head, wrinkled his upper lip: “That's crazy,” he muttered at length. “Who'll buy something crazy like that? It's not nice at all. What happened to you down in the capital?”

“Okay,” Snuffy said. “I guess I'll go back to Smokey the Bears.”

“Oh God,” Fructosa wailed, rolling her eyes. “Things aren't bad enough, yourself arrived to make them worse!”

Amarante Córdova lurched into view, staggering—it appeared—from the weight of his archaic six-gun. Ignoring everybody, he loped through the scene without so much as an hola, veered into the bar door, banged it open, and plunged inside.

Snuffy rewrapped his carving and closed the suitcase. “Amarante Córdova is still alive,” he murmured incredulously. And then he shouted joyously:
“Amarante Córdova is still alive!”

“God works in strange ways,” Fructosa whined unhappily. “My brother Donald, he was a good worker, he never drank, he took care of his family, he never stayed out at night, he never had a car accident or an operation, not even for his tonsils, but he caught a chicken bone in his throat last New Year's Eve and choked to death. But
that
old brujo is still around, drunk morning, noon, and night, winter, summer, spring, and fall, scaring all the kids with his toothless mouth. I don't understand it, that's all.”

The Gurulés regrouped at their truck, swinging sacks over the tailgate, the kids scrambled into the back, and Esquipula and sulky Fructosa, bidding Snuffy a forlorn adios, hoisted themselves wearily into the cab. As the truck chugged toward the highway, Amarante Córdova emerged from the Frontier Bar hugging a six-pack to his chest.

“Hey, cuate, where you headed with that beer?” Snuffy called. “You gonna drink all that beer yourself?”

Pretending not to hear, Amarante hurried as fast as his bowed and decrepit legs would carry him toward home, scattering a slew of yellow and red grasshoppers in his wake.

“Hey, Mr. Amarante,
sir
!” Snuffy cried, but the old geezer refused to be deterred.

Snuffy went through a few complicated contortions to regain his feet, wavered unsteadily for a moment, then wove back into the store to sign up for another six-pack of tallboys, some Slim Jim sausages, and a package of roasted piñon nuts. Outside again, he spent a bungling five minutes sloppily tying the cords holding his suitcase together, and, when that was more or less accomplished, he hoisted the suitcase with a grunt and began walking west.

A few minutes later Snuffy stood on the ditch bank overlooking Joe Mondragón's beanfield.

“What do you know,” he laughed, fanning his sweaty face with his grubby hat. “Would you look at that, my friends!”

Squatting, he lit a cigarette, and for about five minutes did not take his eyes off the field. It was quiet here, the sun had grown sultry, and although magpies were gathered in the cottonwoods by Indian Creek, they made no noise now. To the south, a red-tailed hawk circled—suddenly it dove toward a prairie dog settlement, but came up empty-handed. The mountains, those immediately to the east and the far humps and flat mesas in the south, were not etched as sharply as Snuffy remembered: a low-lying, parchment-colored haze almost obscured them in some places; elsewhere a milkiness made their outlines vague. The view extended for perhaps fifty miles, but people said you would never again be able to see for a hundred miles. Most of the crap in the air, experts said, came from new coal-fired power plants a hundred and fifty miles west of Milagro. Someday, these same environmental pontificators who knew about such things were saying, the deserted mesaland and the small green villages like Milagro would lie under polluting clouds as thick as those now found in Los Angeles and New York City.

Snuffy didn't know pollution from a duckbilled platypus. So he stood up, unbuttoned his pants, and, letting his eyes riffle almost sensually across the green mountain slopes above town, he pissed into Joe's field. Tomorrow, Snuffy thought, or the next day, or whenever the chotas and the trigger-happy posse got out of there, he would head into the hills for a spell with his sleeping bag, a lid of Mary Jane, some fishline, and a dozen artificial flies. Years ago he had been a mountain boy like most other kids from Milagro, passing time up there with sheep and goats, spending summers in a tent looking after cattle or taking care of his uncle's scare gun, lying under the stars with the gun booming and the animals making their comfortable and stupid summer noises—

All at once Snuffy experienced almost crippling waves of sadness and remorse. He patted his slight paunch; he flexed his trembling, nicotine-stained hands. But damned if he was the sort of person who wallowed for very long in past glories or failures; Snuffy just couldn't get steamed up about lost opportunities, or about his present and its infinite insecurity. In fact, he didn't give much of a shit about the future either. Who cared about the opportunities he would never have? Life was life, and one day followed another, and Snuffy took those days one at a time.

With a last affectionate glance at the beanfield, the santo carver pushed on, walking, sometimes stumbling, erratically along the dusty road, leaving rattled grasshoppers and nervous little butterflies in his wake. He advanced past Amarante Córdova's decaying house to another crumbling building which had once belonged to the Ledouxs, most of whom were presently employed in the steel mills of Pueblo, Colorado.

The roof had caved in since the day Tommy Bascomb drove off with a hundred and ten Smokey statuettes; the windows were broken; the rooms were full of tumbleweeds; the outhouse had fallen apart; the well housing was menacingly aslant—so what else was new? A few outbuildings, a toolshed, a little barn had all sagged into piles of faded slabs and rusty nails. A cultivator, a stripped tractor, a horsetrailer with no side panels and no tires, and other inoperative farm machinery lay about. Old as the hills, Snuffy chuckled, and twice as worn out.

Depositing his suitcase in the kitchen beside a doorless icebox, he walked out back past the dead machinery and into the fields where you could still see traces of old ditches that used to carry water, veins and arteries of the land's life. He crossed one field, then another, climbing through barbed wire fences, his beer and Slim Jims in a bag cradled carefully in one arm, and, traversing a mile of fallow, though once irrigated, earth, he reached the sage.

Contentedly, almost joyously, Snuffy entered the waist-high sage, proceeding for another mile due west toward the gorge. In a likely spot in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but pungent lavender all around, he sat down and popped open a beer. Another mile west some buzzards circled over the gorge. A raven lumbered by. Then Snuffy was immersed in a downright religious, windless silence. He hadn't been so happy or so sad for almost a decade. The quiet was brilliant, stunning, miraculous. Snuffy drank a beer and rolled a joint and smoked the joint and drank another beer. He glowed, and the mesa hardly breathed—the day was suspended, as still as a frightened rabbit. A blue-tailed lizard skittered near his feet. And ants crawled around; they had built high sandy mountains everywhere in the sage.

After a peaceful sojourn Snuffy stood up and advanced farther, working his way slowly westward until eventually he arrived at the gorge rim. Eight hundred feet below ran the green river that extended all the way from the Colorado mountains to the Gulf of Mexico. Snuffy hurled a beer can into space, fascinated by its trajectory. Swallows darted on and off the cliffsides far below, their burnished green backs and white tailspots flashing. Pushing about a hundred yards north, Snuffy discovered the trail into the gorge he had known would be there, a narrow descent to the river bank where two small hot springs were located.

At times, descending, it appeared Snuffy would slip and fall, sailing out between silent echoing walls, floating like a romantic, suicidal dreamer toward the green ribbon far below. But he never completely lost his balance, not even a decade had taken that away, and in fifteen minutes he arrived at the Rio Grande.

A rattlesnake buzzed; Snuffy picked up a stick and lazily beat it into a pulp.

One hot pool, surrounded by large boulders, was about thirty yards from the river's edge, a shallow puddle twenty feet wide. The other pool, not much larger than a bathtub, had formed right at the bank of, and on a level with, the river. You could bask there in tingly bubbles, your nose on a level with the icy river and only inches away from its swift currents that pulsed just beyond a thin wall of lavic rocks.

Stripping naked, Snuffy settled with a tallboy and a joint in the bathtub-sized pool, his head resting against a smoothly sculpted rock, the chilly Rio Grande rolling by inches from his pigeon-toes. And, sipping on the beer, he remembered romantic days of yore when they'd had parties down here, the youth of Milagro, skinny dipping together and hustling nookie in the bushes, daring each other to leap into the nighttime river and swim through the ugly, murderous trolls and other aquatic banshees lurking within the strong black currents.

One day long ago Snuffy was fishing toward the hot springs from downriver when he heard voices at the bigger pool. Joe Mondragón was in there, grappling with a lovely girl named Nancy Quintana. Snuffy crept quietly into some bushes and saw that they were naked in the big shallow pool, Joe passionately munching on Nancy's plump flesh; chill autumn winds whistled down the river. And then, while Snuffy looked on, Joe and Nancy made love in that sandy bowl, their bodies steaming in the frosty dusk, their teeth chattering despite the heated water bubbling against their young bodies … and it started to snow. But the lovemaking continued until both were exhausted, then they lay on their backs in the pool, everything but their heads and Joe's persistent hard-on immersed in the warm water, watching the snow drift earthward out of the darkening October sky.

It was among the most beautiful sights Snuffy had ever seen. And right now remembering it made him cry, not because he felt sad, but because he was so delighted to be home again at last.

*   *   *

Mist lay low in the trees, but he figured the sun would soon burn it off. In the meantime the helicopter was useless, and so Mel Willard was holding off until later. The helicopter pilot did not know the area well, but he'd flown over it a few times before in light planes out of the Chamisaville airport, and the deputy sheriff with him, Meliton Naranjo, knew the area as well as anyone, having been born and brought up in Milagro. So the helicopter might be some use, Kyril Montana was thinking, as he climbed slowly through the trees. But only if Joe Mondragón had gone up toward more open country, which was hard to believe. Rather, the agent speculated that his man had probably stayed around the lower, heavily wooded canyons where his truck had been found last night and where you'd practically have to trip over him to find him. Stayed there, or doubled back to or toward the town. Possibly he was already hanging out in somebody's home, although they knew for sure it wasn't the home of either his wife or his lawyer. It was a cinch he hadn't gone far, up, down, or sideways, because it would have been impossible to advance through the dark pines at night. Hence, if Joe Mondragón was heading for the high country, he hadn't had but a half-hour start on them, and they could make that up quickly.