The Milagro Beanfield War (71 page)

And stopped.

Oh brother,
he thought miserably. Turning slightly in wonderful, thick grass almost as high as his waist, he confronted the mountains, pale green on their lower slopes where the piñon and juniper were, dark, rich green higher up where the ponderosa began, interspersed with lovely summer-green aspen, and then higher up bald and rocky gray, patched with snow. Today, last night's tomorrow, was not better as he'd promised Linda it would be, but rather a little worse.

He felt very bad. He was thirty-seven years old and it was all going to fall apart again. He would never know security or flow peacefully and rapturously into his wife or any other woman when he made love. His eldest daughter, Miranda, no longer wrote him the happy illustrated letters she'd regularly sent his way throughout her earlier girlhood. They hadn't met in eight years; no longer could he bear the thought of their reunion, but he loved her desperately, and loved her mother too, even yet, yearning for a final session in her bed before he died, knowing he would probably murder her if she ever granted him a last shot like that.

Bloom felt sorry for himself. He was supposed to be a professional, in control. Instead he was a child, perpetually on the verge of a breakdown. It was insane, pathetic, almost criminal for a man pushing forty to feel so inept, so ashamed of his body, his heart, his work ethics, his Tinkertoy soul. He wanted to drive the car a hundred miles to someplace where he was not known, shack up with a sexy lady and a lot of booze, and end it that way—with a bang (he chuckled miserably) instead of all these sackfuls of whimpers he carried around night and day.

He wanted to lie down in this redolent field, curl up in the green womb in the dazzling aura of these mountains, growing warm and drowsy under the sun, abdicating all responsibilities—and sleep. Instead he had to push on, face Nancy, console her, advise her, be strong.

Dogs, all happy, bent-leggèd cripples, barked and danced ferociously as he entered the yard: Nancy opened the door before he knocked.

“Hi, Charley,” she said cheerfully, backing up as he scraped mud off his feet on an iron half-moon sunk into the earth beside the door and entered the warm kitchen. “How you doing this morning?”

“Oh, so so, I guess, thanks. I don't suppose Joe is around, that I might talk to him?”

“He's up in the mountains.”

“Yeah, I know, I heard all about that. I've got a tendency not to believe all I hear around here, though,” Bloom said with what he hoped was a wry, at-ease smile.

Halfway to the living room he suddenly stopped. Ten old men, all wearing cowboy hats and faded jeans and work boots or western-style boots, each with a rifle held butt against the floor between his knees, were sitting around watching a giveaway program on TV. Nearby, the three Mondragón kids were stretched out on the threadbare carpet, intent on the tube.

Bloom nodded, “Hello, Sparky; hi, Panky; how are you, Onofre?” and the men nodded, mumbling hello back.

“What'll it be, Charley? Tea or coffee? Or would you like a beer?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing, Nancy, thanks. Can't stay too long, really. Just wanted to come over and see if there's any way I could get in touch with Joe.”

“Not so far as I know. He ran into those mountains like a beep-beep last night.”

“Like a what?”

“Like that roadrunner in the cartoons. Beep-beep.” She smiled. “The one Wiley Coyote is always chasing, but never catching. Don't you watch TV, Charley?” The silent men in her living room didn't smile, but they looked amused.

“I guess not that much.” Bloom laughed awkwardly. The guns, the quietude, the serenity of those old geezers, and the idiotic TV program, the enthralled children without a care in the world—it had upset him, he couldn't get his bearings straight. “But as Joe's lawyer,” he said, “I wanted to get word to him.”

“You could tell me. Then I could send him a telegram or something like that.”

“Or ‘something like that'?”

She nodded brightly. Several men chuckled audibly.

Bloom waved a hand carelessly, trying to seem nonchalant. “What have you got going here in this living room of yours, a reunion of the 101st Cavalry Unit of the Grenadine Fusiliers?”

“José just thought me and the kids should be protected in case anything funny developed.” She smiled again, a pretty little butterfly burst of sunshine.

“This isn't funny, Nancy. There's thirty or forty heavily armed men up in the forest looking for Joe. Half those men, I'd bet, if they see him, they'll shoot him. Whether he's got a gun, whether he shoots at them first or not, they'll kill him on sight, claim it was self-defense, and get away with it because everybody knows about Joe's temper—”

Nancy sat on a couch beside a hunched, watery-eyed old man named Tranky Apodaca, the uncle of Betty who worked in the Pilar.

“The thing is,” she said, flippantly lighting a cigarette, “they aren't going to find José. You can be assured of that.”

“He can't hide out forever.”

“You wanna bet?” This time Nancy's smile had no fun in it; it was hard, sailing frostily across the room. “If he doesn't want to be caught there's nobody gonna catch him. We've lived here all our lives.”

“The longer he's gone, I think the worse it's going to be. Maybe you're right, maybe you're not. Just remember, there's others who've lived here all their lives looking for Joe. In another ten hours, somebody—like Ladd Devine—is going to make an offer of one thousand dollars, or maybe more, for information leading to Joe's arrest. With that kind of price on his head you know there's going to be people digging up prairie dog holes and uncovering fresh graves in the camposanto looking for Joe. And those people, they know Joe won't be taken peacefully, so if they get a lead he's in this outbuilding or that shack, they're liable to shoot up the building backwards and forwards before they even knock on the door or give him a chance to walk out peacefully.”

“So what happens if he turns himself in?” Nancy asked angrily. “The chotas will kill him.”

“They won't be able to if he's with me.”

“Excuse me for laughing, but that's bullshit. The cops would spit in your face.”

“I'm his lawyer. I'm trying to help you both. Legally, so far, he's got all the grounds in the world to stand on. There's no doubt it was self-defense. But the longer he stays out, the more everybody gets on edge, the more likely we are to have a tragedy in this town.”

“The Zopilote already has a price on José's head.”

“He's got no such thing. But he's as scared as both of you. He can't be expected to act rationally much longer either. This has been building for a long time. Everybody is just too damn uptight.”

“Who said
we
were scared?” she shot back at him with a clipped little sneer.

“Nancy, what do you want me to do, get down on my knees and beg? I've been your lawyer. I think I know how to handle this case. I'm afraid of the violence that might develop. I don't want Joe or anybody else to get killed. Everybody, at this point, is afraid. Even Ladd Devine is probably looking for an honorable out. But if he or Joe, or I don't know who—the state cops, Bernie Montoya—if among them one or two people get pushed to the brink, or their nerves crack, well shit, we'll pass a point of no return.”

“Charley, this isn't putting you down, but for many years everybody around has been letting things get settled by the Mr. Devines and Jimmy Hirsshorns and Bill Koontzes and Bruno Martínezes, people like that. On their terms. Maybe now it's time to decide something for ourselves. On our terms. And in our own sweet time.”

“This could be suicide,” Bloom said.

“To fight for what you believe in isn't suicide,” Nancy said.

“Oh cut out that stupid patriotic bull.” Bloom felt like crying. It was hopeless. These people were bound and determined to slit their own throats.

Everybody stayed silent, all staring at the flickering screen.

“How do you know so much about everything anyway?” Nancy finally asked.

“Oh hell, I don't. You should know that. Mostly I'm just guessing. Look, so far a kind of miracle has happened. Namely, nobody is dead. Pacheco will probably survive; a couple dozen trout were beheaded; a sign was burned—”

Nancy stood up. “Come here, Charley.” She opened the kitchen door. “I want to show you something.” When Bloom was beside her, she pointed to the town's water tank on Capulin Hill. A Dancing Trout pickup and a Forest Service truck were parked under the tank, cigarette smoke drifting out the driver's window of the dude ranch vehicle.

“That's Horsethief Shorty up there, and both Carl Abeyta and the new guy, Floyd what's-his-name. They've got a radio, telescopes, binoculars, everything. They're just sitting up there waiting for José to show himself in case he doubles back into town, then they're going to radio the chotas and the chotas are going to come in and kill him. They've got two cars on the highway, and there's a bunch of them drinking champagne and telling jokes up at the Dancing Trucha, and another bunch of them at the Doña Luz pendejo factory. There's some in the Floresta too, looking for José. And you want me to tell José to just walk out into the open and say ‘Here I am everybody, kill me?' You're asking me to do that?”

“If I'm with him nobody would dare try anything,” Bloom said.

“You think so?” Nancy picked up a stone, throwing it at a magpie on a nearby fence post. “I've heard a lot of things lately, Charley, maybe I better tell you where it's at with you in their eyes. A man up from the capital not too long ago, an undercover police agent, he talked with some of our citizens here. And he talked about your first wife, you know? And about your divorce, and about what they said you did to your daughter back East. He said it was your fault that José was irrigating his father's beanfield. He said it was a plot. He told these citizens you were a radical because you defended César Pacheco—”

Bloom sagged back into the kitchen and leaned against a counter. “An undercover cop—?” Was it the FBI? How come he hadn't heard?

“I don't know what they know, or what's real and what isn't,” Nancy said. “I don't care either. I wouldn't believe anything those creeps said in the first place. And I pretty much trust you. But that's what this undercover man said, and he's the one who went into the mountains with the posse today. So it's not just José, Charley. It's not just him at all.”

Bloom actually felt faint. Turning, he poured a glass of water from the kitchen spigot, drank it slowly. Then, lowering onto a stool, he stared at the giveaway program without hearing or seeing it, without thinking, either. He was aware of his face being hot. And of a queasy sensation in his stomach. His ears, too, burned. His legs were weak. He sat there among the old men and the three kids and Nancy, more terrified than he'd ever been in his life, more terrified, even, than he'd been toward the end of his divorce when the whole thing had gotten so ugly that he had wanted to murder his wife.

Nancy settled nearby with coffee, sipping quietly from the cup, her alert eyes fixed on the tube.

“So we're waiting,” Nancy said without taking her eyes off the program. “We're waiting for them to make their moves and for them to finish making their moves and for them to go away. If we have to wait a year for them to leave, we'll wait a year. Who's in a hurry? Not us.”

She seemed astonishingly brave and strong. Bloom stood up. “I'm going home,” he said. “If you change your mind about Joe going in with me, give me a call.”

Outside in the pastoral quiet, Bloom felt threatened, exposed; he was a target. Up there they had glasses trained on him, on this house, probably on his house too. They had rifles with telescopic sights that could easily kill him from that distance—and he had nothing. He was a plump, not even middle-aged, man with a wide ass who'd never really wanted to become involved. He was a fainthearted, well-educated eastern white person you could push over with a semistiff turkey feather, a terrified human being who had always wanted to be decent, but had never been willing or able to pay the price. And now, in a town where he'd sought to get away from it all, he had somehow backed into a showdown. They'd have him disbarred; Bud Gleason would no doubt see that Hirsshorn foreclosed on his house.…

Bloom stood quietly in the warm summer sunshine, absorbed by the two trucks parked beneath the water tank. A man—not Horsethief Shorty—got out of one truck, circled behind it, took a leak.

In a trance, Bloom bent between barbed wire strands into the first field. He had always admired Horsethief Shorty from a distance. The man had character and spunk and Bloom had considered him an attractive original, had always known he was the real McCoy. He had heard a hundred stories about Shorty's feats, always told with admiration, much laughter, occasionally envy. No one, so far as Bloom could ascertain, bore a grudge against Shorty. Men and women who disliked Ladd Devine, who had nothing but scorn and riducule for Flossie and Jerry Grindstaff and Emerson Lapp, liked Shorty, maybe even loved him: his boisterous wild-card personality had carved for him a niche of welcome, or at least of respect, on both sides. Shorty had the stories, the personality, the deadeye with a rifle in deer season. Shorty spoke Spanish and understood the ways of white people and brown people and Indians. Shorty could mend anything, lay pipes, design houses, make adobes, read and write, talk crops and politics, and he'd parlayed his talents, some people felt, into a big piece of the Devine empire, but they didn't begrudge him what he had gotten, because he'd fought like a son of a bitch to get there; he hadn't been born into it; he had made it the hard way, and he'd never truly left the people.

But he was up there right now, with his glasses trained on the valley, on the town, a radio by his side, searching for Joe Mondragón.