The Milagro Beanfield War (83 page)

“None of it,” the governor said. “Excepting whatever that lawyer writes, which probably won't see the light of day unless they resurrect that little magazine.”

“And Pacheco's going to be okay?” Jim Hirsshorn asked.

“So I've been told.”

“What the hell happened with the bulldozer?” Nelson Bookman asked.

“It was a backhoe,” Devine corrected. “There's an old man, Amarante Córdova, who lives nearby—”

“A ninety-two, ninety-three-year-old old man,” Jim Hirsshorn said disgustedly.

“He had a gun, what could my man do?” Devine continued. “He doesn't speak Spanish, my man doesn't, but he got the drift. He told me he figured the slightest misstep and that old guy would have shot him. Then, after Jerry—my man, Jerry Grindstaff is his name, a Dancing Trout foreman—after he left, this old Córdova fellow drove the backhoe across the mesa and into the gorge. At least, that's how the tracks read. We didn't go down in the gorge because we couldn't see anything from the rim. It must have fallen into the river.”

Keith Trujillo whistled softly: “A ninety-three-year-old bastard did
that?”

“So far as we know. Jerry Grindstaff, he'd recognize Amarante Córdova. And there wasn't anybody else around.”

Nelson Bookman, consulting a notebook, said, “So recent events summarize, not necessarily in order, a bit like this. They burned the sign. They turned Lavadie's sheep into green alfalfa. They cleaned out those trout from the hatchery. They threatened your foreman with a gun, and destroyed one of your vehicles, a backhoe. When Joe Mondragón turned himself in this afternoon, at least thirty-five to forty persons with guns parked in a threatening manner outside the police station. A bullet was fired through Joe Mondragón's window. And apparently there's talk of other people moving back into and repairing the houses on the west side, in the ghost town area—”

“You're forgetting a softball game a while ago that almost developed into a riot,” Jim Hirsshorn said. “It finally had to be suspended in the first inning.”

“Apparently the people have banded together and are not readily going to be intimidated,” Nelson Bookman said thoughtfully.

“There's an understatement for you,” Jim Hirsshorn rasped miserably.

“Anybody who couldn't see this coming had to be blind,” Ursula Bernal said. “Aside from Algodon County, Chamisa County is the poorest in the state. Fifteen, twenty, sometimes as high as thirty-five percent unemployment, sixty percent of the people on food stamps, a per capita income of a thousand, maybe even less than a thousand dollars a year. This is the 1970s” she added emotionally, “and the state has a per capita income of twenty-nine hundred, and nationwide it's about thirty-seven hundred, and nationwide the median income for a family of four is ten thousand dollars a year—”

She stopped, embarrassed, flushing while her words rang out strangely in the ornate room. An overworked, frustrated, very decent woman, Ursula Bernal directed a handcuffed agency that erratically dribbled out pennies to men, women, and children who could have used hundred-dollar bills plus bushel baskets of health care, an entirely different school program, a lot of understanding and kindness, and so on, ad infinitum.

“Who here doesn't know all those figures?” Keith Trujillo said somewhat testily.

“The thing is, they haven't changed since I was born,” Ursula Bernal said tightly. “And that event happened to take place forty-eight years ago.”

“A-hem.” Roland Kyburz, the Bureau of Reclamation head, cleared his throat prior to changing the subject. “What I'm interested in discussing this evening is the future of the Indian Creek Conservancy District and that Indian Creek Dam.”

“If we want to put it in, legally there's not that much problem, is there?” Jim Hirsshorn said.

“No problem,” according to Rudy Noyes. “You can't lose.”

“Only somebody could dynamite the dam, sabotage the construction vehicles, terrorize tourists, and so forth,” Ladd Devine whimpered gloomily.

“That begins to look like a possibility.” Nelson Bookman drained his drink, and, even before he had it back on the coaster, the governor's wife, smiling gaily, had vaulted with a professional swirl of skirts across the spongy beige rug and lifted the glass gently but firmly from his hand. He didn't have to remind her what he was drinking—she knew; she had memorized the drinking habits of almost a thousand important people.

“We can't stop now,” Jim Hirsshorn said. “We've already begun to develop the recreation plots up there; contractors are under contract; we've invested a hell of a lot in plans for the ski basin and preliminary excavation; it's cost us I don't know how much for the initial golf course designs. And we've already invested God knows how much—about how much would you say, Ladd?—in eastern and midwestern advertising for the Miracle Valley recreation homesites.”

“A lot,” Devine said. “In the hundreds of thousands.”

“Not to mention what the bureau has sunk into a dozen planning reports, hydrographical surveys, maps, cost-benefit analysis, and—you know,” Roland Kyburz added. “The state is entitled to that water, and if we pulled out, believe me, it wouldn't be that easy to find another suitable area.”

“But it's all a joke,” Ursula Bernal said grimly. “You pretend the water is for the people in that valley, who don't want it, don't need it, can't use it, but will have to pay for it, while Mr. Hirsshorn and Mr. Devine here make a killing.”

“It depends on how you look at it,” Roland Kyburz said frostily.

Nelson Bookman said, “Everybody concerned will profit.”

“Bullshit.”

Bookman shot a swift bitter glance at the HSS head; the others in the room remained uncomfortably silent for a moment.

“If this gets held up for another six months I could lose the notes that have already been promised,” Ladd Devine said. “In the end, the way interest rates are fluctuating, a serious delay could cost a mint.”

“Suppose the dam were dropped altogether?” The governor plinked another note.

Devine turned gray. “Oh shit—excuse me. But, I mean, we're not thinking in terms of something like
that,
are we?”

“I don't know,” the governor said.

“See, if this thing caught fire in Milagro, it could spread across the other five northern counties and we'd be in serious trouble,” Keith Trujillo said. “Those people up there are ornery. You got to handle them with kid gloves.”

“But this whole thing is
good
for them,” Devine almost whined. “Hell, if it hadn't been for me and my grandfather, those farmers would have had to migrate out of there long ago.”

Nobody responded to that.

“The problem is, apparently we've handled it wrong,” Nelson Bookman said. “That's my fault as much as anybody. I assessed the risks, called in Kyril Montana, and I'm willing to wager it wasn't the correct thing to do, although I'm not sure how we could have proceeded in order to avoid what's happened. We probably should have jumped on Joe and taken him to court right away, playing it up front and screw the publicity. I don't know. The risk there was that we'd have challenged them, and they'd have met the challenge, and we'd have wound up arresting the entire town. We had hoped to sneak through the conservancy district, your dam, Ladd, without much hoopla. We underestimated the people's ability to comprehend the complexities and to react against what none of them actually understands, other than instinctively, to this day. I think it would have gone smoothly if not for that beanfield, which was their stroke of luck, or apparently their rallying point, whatever. Call it our temporary Waterloo, if you will. Now we've got to make some hard decisions, change our tack, so to speak, without igniting the type of conflagration in which everybody would lose.”

“Those damn old-fashioned people are a real thorn,” Kyburz muttered.

“Thank God for that!” Ursula Bernal blurted, her dark eyes flashing.

“I just meant—” Kyburz stopped himself, shrugged.

“I think, no matter what, there's going to be tension,” Devine said. “There always has been. You can't escape it. You just have to go ahead and deal with the incidents one at a time. This whole thing has only been just that, a small incident. They have no real strength, and they never will have it. The people up there aren't united.”

“They have strong roots,” Ursula Bernal said.

The governor's small eyes appeared to see nothing, to be gazing stupidly at the rug. But the governor understood some things. He was a Democrat and he had strength in the north. Milagro itself did not have enough votes to tickle a heifer's balls, but if some publicity worked its way into this and the thing developed into a scandal or a truly delicate political issue, he and those with him might find themselves in hot water come the next election. Pork barrel projects, as this one might be called, were getting exposed across the nation; dams for the sake of dams were being questioned; the Bureau of Reclamation or the Corps of Engineers could not move in anywhere anymore expecting to be met with open arms. On the other hand, development swung votes; “progress” was the most important political card a man could play, and Ladd Devine's Miracle Valley project was the kind of thing people considered progress; it would bring outside money into the state. And if little or none of that money filtered down to the destitute farmers of the Miracle Valley, well—when had it ever? The enterprising ones would skim off their share, and if they were smart and wished to enjoy their lives, they'd learn how to ski and play golf. The others did not deserve what they wouldn't work for.

But he kept returning to this: suppose somebody, or a couple of people, or maybe even a cop, was shot up there? Suppose those illiterate, backward assholes actually tried to launch a kind of disorganized rebellion? It had happened before, and it had cost a territorial governor his head a hundred years ago, and it had cost another governor his political career only twenty years ago.

And if something like that took place, and if the militants got wind of it—as of course they would—and headed up to Milagro from the south, or down to it from Denver, things might get very rough. The governor had already been forced to alert the National Guard once during his tenure in office, to deal with barrio disturbances in the capital. And he sure didn't want to do that again if there was any possible way to avoid it.

“When was the conservancy district supposed to come up for a hearing?” the governor asked.

“Well, the district judge, Nate Jaramillo, hasn't decided on that,” Bookman answered. “When he got in, the docket was so crowded—because of Mort Alexander's death and your delay in making the interim appointment—that he just hasn't, up until now, set any particular date. You could probably figure within the next three months, though.”

“My feeling is we'd best back off on this, for the moment anyway,” the governor said. “I'll speak to Nate about letting it ride indefinitely. I'll explain the situation.”

“Any more delays and I'm going to be up to my ass in lawsuits.” Ladd Devine had gone pale.

“Ladd, you jumped to some conclusions,” the governor said. “So did I. But from now on we're just going to have to progress a little more slowly in the north.”

“I didn't jump to any conclusions that your office and Nelson's office didn't lead me into.”

“
Mister
Devine,” the governor said, abruptly rising from the stool and commencing to pace deliberately up and down the center of the room. “You developed this project to where it is today because of certain arrangements that myself and my colleagues in state government were able to effectuate on your behalf. Now I can knock those arrangements apart like I can knock apart a castle made of toothpicks with my little pinkie if you start giving me a bad time. Right now I don't see this as a project that has to be killed indefinitely, but I'm God damn ready to see it delayed until either we can better assess the situation or the situation changes. In the meantime, if you crash-land it's not as if nobody is going to crash-land with you, or as if there'll be nobody to lend a helping hand. The complexities of the financial arrangements, the government and the private monies involved, I hope you understand, and I know I do. You may forget, but I have an investment in this thing, and I'm not the kind of man who throws an investment out the window. But at the same time I'm not the kind of man who cuts off his nose to spite his own face either. I fold when I'm not holding a winning hand and wait for better cards, do I make myself clear?”

Stopping, he looked down; his angry voice sagged. “We've done alright for a long time in this state, Ladd. Don't you try to cross me now.”

His speech over, the governor retreated to his piano stool, sat down, plinked another note.

And as a late afterthought, he appended: “This is not a particularly happy moment in
any
of our lives.”

It was then that the noted sociologist, E. Clarence Boonam, finally spoke. “Ursula,” he said cheerfully to the HSS head, “let's you and me go downtown and have a little drink to celebrate.”

*   *   *

Joe Mondragón squatted on the ditch bank overlooking his beanfield. Nancy sat against the trunk of a nearby cottonwood. Joe's eyes and his brain were so blurry he could barely see, let alone think, but he was
feeling
a lot of things. In fact, his feelings were all in a ball and twisting crazily in his stomach like those bunches of bait worms in cardboard canisters that Nick sold in his store. And among all the feelings, all the confusion inside, Joe—in spite of his muddled brain—could single out a couple for particular consideration: namely, the feeling of being triumphant and important; and another related feeling which translated into an emotion known as “being scared shitless.”