The Milagro Beanfield War (82 page)

Bernabé nodded again and muttered incoherently.

“But you know something?” Onofre added abruptly, now reeking with sentiment. “We wouldn't none of us have even been here tonight like we are, celebrating like this, if it wasn't for the love of all them stupid Coyote Angels.”

And with that, Onofre aboutfaced, heaved over to his truck, daintily extricated the most recent parking ticket from under the driver's side windshield wiper, and RIPPED IT TO FUCKING SHREDS!

The shreds he let trickle gleefully off his hand onto the ground, then he smugly tipped his cowboy hat to Bernabé with his invisible arm and lurched jubilantly back into the bar.

To nobody in particular, Bernabé said, “Although we are a town of unbelievably shitty poets, we sure can rant and rave with feeling.”

Some parking ticket confetti, caught in a frail wind puff, tumbled across the dirt and settled around the sheriff's boots, which were on the wrong feet. Then a Dancing Trout pickup chugged erratically past Forest Service headquarters and stopped in the middle of the plaza area. Jerry Grindstaff, drunk for the first time in maybe fifteen years, lurched out of the cab, clumsily worked the lever to chamber a shell in the .30–30 he carried, and started to swing around the truck, heading for the Frontier Bar.

“Hey!” Bernabé shouted. “Where you going with that gun?”

Startled, Jerry G. turned so sharply he lost his balance and sat down. But before Bernabé could even think about going for his own sidearm, Jerry G. had the rifle pointed up directly at the sheriff. He blinked his eyes confusedly, trying to focus them.

“Who's that?”

“It's me, the sheriff. Bernabé Montoya.”

“The sheriff?” Jerry G.'s eyes rolled up and inward as he tried to grasp what “sheriff” meant.”

“Quit pointing that rifle at me,” Bernabé ordered.

With that the foreman's eyes clicked into a clearly focused and downright vicious glare. “I oughtta kill you if you're the sheriff. I oughtta kill the whole bunch of you. Maybe I will. You people think you won something today, well let me tell you something: you didn't win
shit.
”

“You're drunk,” Bernabé said, and then abruptly his body went almost woozy with terror, because Jerry G. had more hate and deep-down murder in his eyes than Bernabé had ever seen in a person. Immediately all his stomach muscles involuntarily bunched in as if preparing to take a bullet.

He added: “You kill me, Jerry G., and I'll beat your ass down to the Chamisa V. jail and have Ernie Maestas lock you up and—”

“You fucking Mexicans…” the foreman growled thickly. “You fucking Mexicans don't have a snowball's chance in hell.”

“We'll see.”

“Sure you'll see. You'll see us hang you up by the balls. You'll see us cut the tits off all your sluts and nail them to the barn door. You want a war, we'll show you about a war…”

“We'll see—” Bernabé choked out again, his ears literally ringing from fright and his stomach cramping it was so tensed.

“For starters I'm gonna kill you and that toothless old man wrecked the backhoe and Joe Mondragón,” Jerry G. snarled. “Then I'm gonna take a big crap in that beanfield, and afterward … and after that—”

With no warning his eyes unfocused and started rolling around again, and as they did he lowered the gun, looking befuddled for a moment, and then scared; and then his face took on the air of a queer, disconcerted drunk.

“You bet your ass you'll see…” he whined, starting to cry. And with movements as jerky as those of a windup toy, he struggled upright, wheeled around, plunged back into the truck, circled awkwardly around the plaza area, and drove back up to the ranch.

Bernabé sat there for a while unable to move, staring at the ground, stone-cold scared, and so tight and weak he thought he would vomit. There was inside his body a feeling of such inevitable danger and ultimate doom that it damn near took his breath away. Those people in the bar getting drunk, they didn't have enemies in the likes of Jerry G. and Ladd Devine and the politicos—they had executioners. Money, progress, numbers, and the American way of life were on the other side: Christ, those bastards even controlled the atom bomb—!

And Bernabé knew it was all hopeless.

And then as he calmed down a little he hoped that it wasn't.

Maybe I should sign their petition, he thought.

“Why don't you just shoot yourself in the head?” he whimpered out loud. “It would be simpler.”

Gradually his hysteria drained, he cooled off, his fear changed, becoming more governable, he began to think again, his stomach relaxed, he noticed that his drenched armpits stank … then he realized that for the moment he, they—his drunken compatriots in the bar—were out of danger. Jerry G. had left and once again nobody was dead.

As the relief flowed into him like a fast-rising tide, Bernabé began to tell himself that he had handled the situation pretty competently.

In fact, he had actually faced down a momentarily crazy man who intended to kill him.

Why, he had “stared death right in the face” and sent that lily-livered son of a bitch packing!

A mysterious silence flowed over the heart of town. In the Frontier, revelers' voices receded, seemed almost to dissipate like a morning mist. And after a minute Bernabé had to smile in spite of it all. Because, bumbling or not, he felt a little like either a God damn babysitter … or somebody's guardian angel.

*   *   *

They arrived home shortly after dark, worn out and groggy from guiding the horses down through the forest at dusk. Marvin LaBlue, who was sitting outside in the evening quiet listening to the radio and smoking reflectively, waved as they guided their tired horses into the moon-whitened corral area, then he waited patiently while they dismounted and unsaddled the horses, turning them into the corral. Eliu Archuleta drummed up some pliers to cut the wire on a hay bale, half of which he dumped in to the horses, while Claudio García entered the house, emerging with his arms full of cold beer. He gave them each a can, knocked off his first one in a single deep draught, and then opened another. Eliu and Ruby drank theirs about like that also, and pried seconds from Claudio's arm. They smiled at each other. Marvin LaBlue said, “I took that petition with me when everybody went down to Doña Luz when Joe turned hisself in, and I figure damn near a hundred people signed, and about an hour later they turned him out again, free as a whistle.”

“Who turned him out?”

“You know. Billy Koontz, and Granny, and Bruno Martínez. They were all scared stiff, those cops. You would of got a chuckle out of it.”

Ruby said, “How did he get out so quickly?”

“They just suddenly come all together,” Marvin drawled. “They heard Joe was down there, you know, and everybody went, I guess, just to make sure the cops didn't rough him up, and while they was there everybody signed your petition.” Marvin handed her the petition.

Ruby stood there, a beer and a cigarette in one hand, reading through the names on the petition. Eliu squatted with a fresh beer, gazing down the hillside at the Body Shop and Pipe Queen buildings; the wrecker parked in front gleamed like a magical apparatus. Claudio sat down heavily, hunched over, head hanging, staring at the ground, listening to the horses nosing apart the hay, listening also to the quiet country and western strains from Marvin LaBlue's radio.

Every name. Ruby read every name on the petition, though as she did so no elation spread through her body; she was too tired for that. And anyway, it was only the first step. There would have to be another meeting soon, and she would have to talk with Bloom and convince him to work for them, and she would have to talk with José, and they would have to harvest his beans in a symbolic manner, every person who had signed the petition picking a handful of beans. They would harvest them the same way churches had been built in the old days, with every family contributing some adobe bricks and pitching in with labor so that it was a symbolic labor of all with a part of everyone's earth in it. And they would have to decide about their demands and confront Ladd Devine, and they would have to notify the press sooner or later, which meant they would need reporters on their side, and they needed a leader, or, more importantly, they needed a group of leaders, and they needed to figure out how to raise more money for their association; they needed to set up a defense fund, and no doubt they would have to find another lawyer because Bloom would need help,
if
he stuck it out with them … Ruby worried about Bloom, he always seemed so on edge—

And then she wondered if everyone had signed her petition only in a moment of euphoria. Come tomorrow morning, would they all realize what they had done and come running, begging to erase their names? Or would they arrive in force in the morning, toting guns and shouting hallelujah, ordering her to carry that petition down to the capital and personally shove it up the governor's ass?

Ruby dropped the petition onto the ground beside Marvin LaBlue's radio, gulped her second beer and opened a third, then walked away from everybody, maybe fifteen yards, and hunkered down, gazing at the Body Shop and Pipe Queen, the wrecker, the shining broken white line on the highway beyond.

They all rested like that, absolutely quiet, drinking more slowly now that their thirsts had been quenched, eyes vaguely fixed on shadow-casting objects downhill. Eventually, Ruby crushed her third aluminum can and went into the house for a towel, saying, “I'm gonna take a bath.” Moments later she emerged, skirted around the house and entered the sagebrush, heading for the few silvery cottonwoods and willows growing along the Rio Lucero.

Bats fluttered through the moonlight sharply etched against soft fluorescent clouds high in the night. Ruby perched on a smoothly sculpted granite rock overlooking a foam-covered pool. Her muscles were tired, her bones ached, her mind was going to sleep like a cat. Once or twice she nodded, almost toppling into the water. She had never been this weary before.

She shed her boots, jeans, her cotton underwear, her shirt and bra, and slipped naked into the luxurious foam. Tipping her head back into the gentle froth, she gazed at the stars. Ruby sighed and held her breasts, laxly rubbing the nipples until they grew stiff, letting her body flow and twirl with the currents, her toes stepping lightly off rocks, pressing gently along patches of sand. She relaxed, allowing her body to be moved however the water chose to move it, turning over once or twice, loving the way her hair in lazy strands caressed her windburned face. The water was very cold, but long ago she had ceased to notice its iciness. Her skin tingled, and that was all. She drifted around the pool on her back, on her stomach, bent always at the waist with her feet lazily pushing off, puttering along the bottom, her limbs loose and almost disconnected, floating serenely in the dark.

Claudio appeared and undressed, slipping into the pool. His hand, like the powerful and barely restrained paw of a cougar, touched her belly, her breasts, her throat. His shaggy head blocked out the stars while they kissed. Then he sank underwater and drifted around in the purple flow, eyes wide open, trying to pierce the gloom, seeing only, finally, her white body with the tan hands and the tan neck and the head cut off. Breaking the surface, he left the pool, dried his hands on his shirt and then rolled a cigarette and squatted on a sandy patch between boulders, smoking, watching her drift aimlessly around the foamy pool, relaxing, slowing down, floating almost as if in sleep.

Five minutes later Ruby walked out of the water into his arms. “Make me a cigarette,” she murmured, staying nestled in his arms while he fashioned the cigarette, lit it, and transferred it to her lips. Then he lifted her easily, she curled her legs around his hips, sliding calmly onto his penis. They grinned, exhaling smoke into each other's faces, making love. Claudio walked away from the stream, carrying her into the sagebrush until they could no longer hear water, until the land—the mountains, the mesa leading off to the gorge—was very quiet.

“Listen,” she said, and together they listened, smoking while Ruby moved almost imperceptibly on him. They could hear the celebration in Milagro, the Frontier's jukebox, people singing. They were alone, though, and after a while Claudio began to walk quietly around on the windless mesa, lifting her a little by the buttocks now, and their weary white bodies were wreathed in cigarette smoke as, gently, they continued making love.

*   *   *

The governor himself poured the last two of them to arrive—Ladd Devine the Third and Jim Hirsshorn—a double Scotch on the rocks and a little brandy, respectively, and carried the glasses across the softly lit living room of the governor's mansion to where the newest arrivals sat. Others gathered in the room for this late-night emergency meeting included Nelson Bookman and Rudy Noyes; the district head of the Bureau of Reclamation, Roland Kyburz; a young aide to the governor who specialized in Chicano relations, Keith Trujillo; a noted educator and sociologist at the state university, Professor E. Clarence Boonam (whose work included several lengthy articles on how southwestern conservancy districts had traditionally destroyed small subsistence farming cultures); the woman who headed the Health and Social Services Department, Ursula Bernal; and the governor's wife, Peggy. A gloom, a peculiar sadness, an almost nostalgic heaviness clung to thick gold draperies that muffled a half-dozen French doors leading out of the room; it was manifested in the delicate cigarette haze that flowed almost sensually through two large yellow chandeliers.

After he had served these last two drinks, the governor sat down on a piano stool before a shiny black Steinway and plinked a single thoughtful note.

“I take it,” he began, getting right down to brass tacks, “things aren't all that hunky-dory up in Milagro.”

“That's a fairly correct analysis of the situation,” Ladd Devine said with what tried to be, but failed to pass as, a wry grin. Then: “I wonder how much of this is going to make the newspapers?”