The Milagro Beanfield War (12 page)

In fact, since it was first installed at a cost of two hundred and thirty-six dollars to the Milagro exchequer, that parking meter had received only fourteen dimes, eight nickels, and eleven pennies.

Or exactly one dollar ($1) and ninety-one cents ($.91).

To date, the meter had cost the town as follows:

In private, Bernabé Montoya, Sammy Cantú, and the two council members, Bud Gleason and Ricardo P. Córdova, christened that parking meter “The Wart on the Asshole of Milagro.”

Publicly, however, the parking meter had to stay so long as the mayor, the council, and the police force were locked in a life-and-death struggle with Onofre Martínez. Admittedly, they did not know how to nab, stab, or otherwise stop that one-armed lunatic without throwing away a fortune in legal fees and court costs, but they kept hoping desperately that some kind of
deus ex machina
would intercede for them.

To all the stubborn parties obstinately concerned with this matter, it was The Principle of the Thing.

Still, Onofre Martínez was not a bad, vile, or vindictive hooligan. Rather, he was something of a poet, an inventor of on-the-spot ballads called corridos, and at one time he had been able to read and write in both English and Spanish. In the old days these peculiar talents had made him the official letter writer in the village, since until the latter stages of the first half of the twentieth century literacy had been a rare phenomenon in Milagro. Hence Onofre had written a thousand love letters for a thousand lovers, and he had also read those love letters to the persons who received them. For this service he had been paid both by the sender and by the recipient; and so Onofre had certainly garnered his share of whatever was passing for loot—chickens, hog cracklings, a bag of jerky—in his time.

Nobody, including Onofre himself, knew how he learned to read and write—certainly he had never attended school. But all at once, when still a child, Onofre had awakened able to read. His sudden skill was a miracle of sorts, on a par with the unexplained underground barking of Cleofes Apodaca's lost sheepdog Pendejo or the bell whose ringing caused Padre Sinkovich to undermine the foundations of his very own church.

Onofre Martínez could no longer write, however, because he had lost his literate arm, and he had no more been able to transfer literacy to his left arm than Bernabé Montoya had been able to wheedle a fine out of Onofre for all those parking meter violations.

Maybe not a miraculous, but certainly a rather curious, story lay behind Onofre's dearth of an appendage.

The normal way to lose an arm, leg, or whatever in Milagro was by having it mangled in tractor sickle bars or crushed beneath a horse. The deputy sheriff, Meliton Naranjo, had lost a finger when, as he was fussing with a fan belt in a truck, his kid had climbed behind the wheel and turned the motor over. Cristóbal Mondragón, Joe's third-youngest brother, had half his pinkie bitten off when he lost hold of the nose twitch on a horse he was worming. Tranquilino Jeantete had lost one ear tip to frostbite during the same long-ago winter that the Strawberry Mesa Body Shop and Pipe Queen operator, Ruby Archuleta, killed a deer with her bare hands. Marvin LaBlue donated half his left thumb to a scissors jack at the Body Shop and Pipe Queen, and Claudio García dedicated the first joint of his right hand's middle finger to that same beastly machine. Many arms, pieces of tongues, and parts of legs had been left by various Milagro residents in the rear seats of their head-on collisions with cows and horses on the north–south highway. And back in the late 1700s, so the story goes, an old man who had been courting a witch suddenly lost his penis, but not his life, to a lightning bolt that struck from a quiet winter snowstorm.

And each generation, of course, owned somebody who had lost an eye to a BB gun.

But Onofre Martínez claimed to have lost his arm to butterflies.

At least, that's the way Onofre himself liked to tell the story when he had an audience of children and other gullible creatures who believed in werewolves, flibbertigibbets, and miracles.

“On the day it happened, all morning I'm irrigating my fields, so by lunch time I felt real tired. I went and sat down under a tree and ate a burrito and an extra piece of cheese. Then, just as I'm dozing off, along comes a big orange butterfly and lands on my arm, on the part called the bicep, up here. I didn't move, and she sits there with her wings open, and after a minute I notice she's putting some sticky stuff on my skin, and in this sticky stuff there's a bunch of little white bumps, which after another minute it hits me are her eggs. Eventually she flutters away and I'm left with this little sticky circle on my arm full of teeny white huevos. I was curious so I didn't brush them off. I went home, and for the next few days I'm real careful not to move my arm, you know, so as not to disturb those eggs. Then one morning I woke up and the eggs had hatched into little gusanos and these little gusanos had already eaten a hole in my arm. They looked like maggots. It didn't hurt though, so I let them go ahead. They ate right into my arm and disappeared and not a drop of blood came out of the hole, I guess they sucked it all up along the way. It still didn't hurt, so I'm just waiting for something to happen, being careful not to move my arm too much, of course. After a while I notice they're eating up all the meat under the skin of my lower arm. But still, don't ask me why, it didn't hurt. And these little gusanos are growing and getting real fat, until pretty soon I didn't have any more meat in my arm down there, and then a couple of them gnawed through my bone up by the bicep, up here, and my arm fell on the ground. Which is when they started flying out of my arm like out of a cornucopia, all these beautiful crimson butterflies, flying all around me like hungry bats for a minute until the wind blew them up into a tree. And for just a minute, even though it was August, a little snow fell on the cottonwood trees and on those blood red butterflies. The snow was so cold it killed all the butterflies in a wink, and they fell from the tree onto the ground like autumn leaves. I picked up my arm, which only had the skin intact with the rest hollowed out, thinking maybe it would make a good wind sock at the Chamisa V. airport. But I tumbled into a ditch on the way home and lost it. This happened a long time ago before you were born. Maybe dogs ate what was left of my arm, or perhaps tecolotes used it to line their nests.…”

But anyway, on this particular summer day Bernabé Montoya walked out of Rael's just as Onofre's mottled-green, 1953 Chevy pickup with the three-legged dog on top hiccupped to a stop at the town's lone parking meter and, with a dispirited—call it a lonely—
“Ai, Chihuahua!”
the sheriff reached for his citation pad. Bitterly he began to write, thinking as he did so that if ever all the cantankerous streaks in people like Amarante Córdova, Joe Mondragón, and Onofre Martínez were united behind a common cause, there would be much more than all hell to pay.

Onofre's three-legged shepherd leaped to the ground as the Staurolite Baron slammed the door, and, with a triumphant grin riding on his face like a soaring hawk, Onofre pulled out the driver's side windshield wiper, making it that much easier for Bernabé to slide his ticket into place. After that, staggering swiftly forward like a man about to fall flat on his face, Onofre chugged toward the Pilar. On his way up the steps he encountered Bud Gleason, decked out in a madras sport coat and bow tie, coming down and Onofre tipped his cowboy hat good day with his invisible arm. At least, Onofre always insisted he used his nonexistent right hand to tip the hat, and it certainly
looked
that way, because his left and visible arm never swung up from his other side. Skeptics, though, said the hat tip was just a trick Onofre had learned to do by wiggling his scalp.

Yet at least one person in town, Joe Mondragón, claimed that he had once had his lip split in a Saturday night argument at the Frontier by the invisible fist residing at the end of Onofre's invisible arm.

*   *   *

For years many stories and quite a few unconfirmed rumors about the Strawberry Mesa Body Shop and Pipe Queen tycoon, Ruby Archuleta, had circulated between Milagro and Doña Luz. Some folks swore she was a witch; a few misguided harpies insinuated she had poisoned or otherwise murdered the three husbands who had died on her. Various highly impeachable sources suggested that Eliu Archuleta, her eighteen-year-old son, was actually the offspring of an affair between Ruby and the expatriot santo carver who had disappeared right after the Smokey the Bear statue riot, Snuffy Ledoux, a clandestine relationship that supposedly occurred while her second husband, Sufi Menopoulos, a Greek who had owned the Eagle Motel on Route 26 leading east from Chamisaville, lay dying of cancer at St. Claire's Hospital in the capital. Then again, for years a few hardcore gossips had whispered that Eliu was actually the product of a virgin birth.

Getting down to more verifiable facts, though, Ruby Archuleta was an uncertified midwife who had been safely delivering babies since 1940. She also qualified as one of the best fishermen in the area and was a deer hunter supreme. And whenever raspberries ripened in the local canyons a thousand jars of Ruby's raspberry jam appeared almost instantly on the shelves of Rael's store in Milagro, Benny's in Doña Luz, and the Flowering Wheat Health Food Store in Chamisaville, and she raked in the dinero hand over fist.

This dynamo measured five feet two inches tall, was forty-nine years old, and her misty red hair had mostly turned to gray. With her son Eliu, her gigantic lover, Claudio García, and a roly-poly hillbilly mechanic named Marvin LaBlue, she lived in a mud-plastered railroad tie house situated on a hill overlooking the Body Shop and Pipe Queen, an enterprise inherited from her first husband, a charismatic hustler named Ray Mingleback, who had drowned on Halloween night, 1958, when his Rolls Royce dove off the north–south highway into the Rio Grande about twenty miles below Chamisaville.

In the Archuleta house candles always flickered, and santos—some made from cornhusks, a number fashioned by Ruby herself, and still others carved by that disillusioned expatriot Snuffy Ledoux—lined the walls. Curious people from all over the state, running the gamut from well-known artists to shadowy hunted outlaws, continually stopped in transit to share a meal with Ruby and her crew; they puttered and chewed the fat, embraced Ruby affectionately, and pushed on at dawn. An aura of mystery and of knowledge surrounded Ruby Archuleta, and so of course the average Milagro citizen both envied and resented her, both loved her and hated her guts, thought she must be a Communist, refused to have his automotive or plumbing needs catered to by anyone else … and nobody knew Ruby very well although everyone had known her all their lives.

Actually, there was nothing that peculiar about the Body Shop and Pipe Queen (as some jokers occasionally called her). Awake each morning at five, Ruby dressed in a work shirt, weathered jeans, and cowboy boots, cooked breakfast for the men, tied her long hair up in a red-checkered bandanna, and marched outside to start overhauling cars or organizing plumbing jobs. She cut pipe and welded metal joints, installed shocks and stripped down engines—you name it. Whatever Claudio García, Marvin LaBlue, or her son could do, Ruby could do better. Hence, though a small-time operation, like everything else Ruby tackled, the Body Shop and Pipe Queen was the best operation of its kind in the county. And not because this tiny woman with dusty green eyes, a sharp nose, high cheekbones, and severe, beautiful lips possessed the sort of witchcraft that could produce giant beanstalks and golden eggs either—she just worked bloody hard. She shouted orders, made split-second decisions, helped to manhandle machinery, operated the wrecker in all kinds of weather, and when she needed parts or supplies she jumped in a truck and whizzed down to the capital and got them—and to hell with the U.S. Mail!

Men had trouble accepting Ruby's strength; they were flabbergasted by both her loveliness and her vitality. Many who did not peg Ruby for a witch called her The Ant because she was so busy all the time, and because it almost seemed that she could lift and manipulate objects ten times her weight and size.

There was one story about Ruby Archuleta everyone in Milagro took for the gospel truth. The incident occurred, so the self-appointed historians drawled, when Ruby was a young woman living alone close to the Rio Lucero at a point on the mesa where the stream ran in the open, unhidden by trees, for about two miles before plunging into a gorge that deepened abruptly as the water cascaded toward the Rio Grande.

It was the middle of a very bitter winter, so the story goes. A terrible winter for the sheep and for all other animals. Cattle far out on the mesa died when hay could not be trucked in. For weeks on end the windows of all the houses were patterned with elaborate jungles of ice. Although piñon fires burned in stoves day and night, dwellings stayed barely warm; outside, trucks would not start. People were snowed in for weeks, some nearly starved. And bear and deer wandered miserably down from the high country, seeking food.