The Milagro Beanfield War (14 page)

“You tie up the kid,” Joe said. “I forgot a knife.”

While he plodded back for the knife, Nancy caught a small brown billy, tying its left hind leg to its left front leg, then she fastened the right hind leg to a metal hook in the low ceiling of the dilapidated tool shack next to the goat pen. When Joe returned with the knife and a clean plastic bucket, he was trailed by the kids, all three of whom loved a good butchering. He gave Nancy the bucket and, without a word, clamped a hand around the dangling kid's muzzle; then with one stroke he laid open its throat and held the animal for a moment, with the blood gushing over his fingers and into the bucket Nancy held, until the body quit twitching. Nodding, then, he let go and went to the doorway. There he licked the hot blood off his fingers and watched as that ugly yellow cat calmly devoured a small water snake over by the irrigation ditch.

Joe felt more uncomfortable than he had in ages. Danger, maybe even evil, floated on the air, thick as the scent of fox. But, not knowing what to do about it, Joe just stood there, quietly licking his fingers clean and not thinking, because in the final analysis he understood no more about life and death and politics and love and the human soul than the next man.

*   *   *

Nick Rael's wife Dorothy had divorced him some years back; she currently lived in Chamisaville with three of their four children, Buddy, Sonny, and Lizzie Rael, and Nick lived in Milagro in a modest adobe house right next to the store with the fourth kid, Jerry, and his eighty-nine-year-old mother. Jerry was as normal as any other awkward fourteen-year-old adolescent, but Nick's mother, Mercedes, was another story altogether. “All her marbles are loose,” the locals were fond of saying, “and you can hear them rattling when she walks around town at night.”

Actually, Mercedes Rael wasn't much for walking around town at night, but occasionally she did manage to jump the picket fence surrounding Nick's house and yard and go for some protracted aimless strolls, either up into the mountains, in which case a posse usually had to be formed to hunt her down before she starved to death, or else sometimes she liked to wander down the middle of the north–south highway dressed in whatever she happened to be wearing at the time, which could run the gamut from elaborate floor-length lace nightgowns and puffy lounging robes, to nothing. More than once the various lawmakers and town officials had suggested to Nick that he should either lock his mother up in the house every day while he was next door in the store and every night while he was asleep, or, better yet, deposit her in the state funny farm down in the capital and make everybody involved rest that much easier.

But Nick wasn't about to commit his mom to the state bin, or even lock her up in the house all day. “If I lock her up,” Nick had explained more than once to more than one exhausted sheriff or state cop after a three-day search for Mercedes, “she gets clusterphobia. And when she gets clusterphobia she starts lighting matches. Once she set herself on fire, and another time she set her mattress on fire when I had her tied to the bedpost. If you take the matches away she starts to eat things, any things. Once she ate half the feathers in a pillow when I left her locked up all day. Another time she drank an entire bottle of tequila I had hidden way back in a corner cupboard. I'm telling you, boys, it's better if she can move around. She likes to be out in the yard—”

Mercedes did indeed enjoy being out in the yard. But she didn't just lie about on the grass or in a hammock or a rocking chair like your average eighty-nine-year-old woman. She took an active interest, for example, in Nick's flower garden, often eating the heads off the daffodils and hydrangeas, also off the lilacs and roses when those plants bloomed. If the class foliage had all gone to seed, she crawled around on her hands and knees eating dandelions when they bloomed; or else she spent hours blowing apart the seedlings on those she had—for one reason or another—missed. She was an abnormally spry little old lady, too, and thus was often spotted high up in the few Chinese elm and cottonwood trees Nick had growing around his tidy place; she would spend hours making faces at the hummingbirds and magpies that had nests up there.

But by far and away the quirk which had given wrinkled, half-bald, almost ninety-year-old Mercedes Rael her most far-reaching fame was her habit of throwing stones at people.

The old lady derived such pleasure from this activity that Nick indulged her to the point where he was constantly ordering high-priced white gravel bits to replace the gravel walk leading from his front gate to the front portal. This walk was the old woman's ammunition dump, and she used it so regularly that Nick had to lay down a new path about once every four or five months.

Mercedes never hurt anybody throwing these stones, although occasionally she annoyed the living daylights out of certain local individuals who were her constant targets. Harlan Betchel was one of these targets; Peter Hirsshorn another; Jerry Grindstaff a third. Whenever the Forest Service boys, Carl Abeyta and Floyd Cowlie, moseyed on over to the store for their midmorning Dr. Pepper and gossip break, she would stand behind the gate, or behind the low white picket fence on either side of it, pelting them with the expensive white pebbles. Mercedes was a refined little bat, though, and she never attacked by flinging handfuls of pebbles; that would have been unspeakably crude. Instead, she threw one pebble at a time, almost delicately, although over the years she had developed a rapid-fire accuracy that was something to marvel at, if you did not happen to be the object of her attention.

Others who drew her fire (you could hardly say they were drawing her wrath because she was always perfectly composed during these pebble flurries, smiling blandly and sweetly like a decrepit grandma serving up tea and ladyfingers) included anyone in a policeman's uniform; all the deliverymen who brought goods to the store, to the Frontier Bar, or to the Pilar Café; the Trailways bus and its driver and passengers; and anybody who worked for Ladd Devine. She never threw stones at Tranquilino Jeantete or at Amarante Córdova or at Onofre Martínez or at Panky Mondragón or at Seferino Pacheco. And although she usually threw stones at dogs or other animals that wandered past the Rael home into the plaza area, she never attacked Pacheco's pig, because the first time she had pelted the huge sow it charged her, broke down the gate, knocked her to the ground, and had her arm in its mouth up to the elbow before Nick came bounding out of the store with a crowbar in his hand to save the day.

Mercedes also never chucked pebbles at kids, because kids nowadays had no respect for their elders and were liable to return her fire.

There were always a few people gathered within range on the porch of Rael's store, chewing the fat, comparing government checks that had come out of Mercedes' son's post office in the back of the store, or else just sitting around drinking beer and pop and listening to Nick's radio, which he usually kept tuned loudly to KKCV in Chamisaville. So the old lady was always standing on the store side of the white picket fence picking her shots among those congregated on the porch, and this had been going on for such a long time that nobody really noticed Mercedes anymore, nor paid much attention to the white pebbles that bounced harmlessly among them like hailstones.

Harlan Betchel was probably the only person in town who'd never been able to acclimate himself to the pebbles of Mercedes Rael. Maybe it was because he'd been a huge, gawky, chubby, and highly disliked kid, and the old lady's pebbles reminded him all too much of the persecution that had dogged the heels of his unhappy childhood. Whatever the case, Harlan was the one person in town who genuinely hated Mercedes Rael; he was the one person in town who never volunteered to go out and scour the mountains whenever she got lost in them; he was the one person in town who kept sticking the needle into Bernabé Montoya and into the state cops to have them stick the needle into Nick to have him commit her to the state hospital down in the capital. Harlan had once even gone so far as to write an anonymous letter to the head of the state Health and Social Services Department, a woman named Ursula Bernal, asking her to force Nick to commit this ding-y octagenarian who was making life unbearable for everybody in Milagro, but the HSS head had never even sent an underling up north to check out the situation.

Almost every other time Harlan Betchel decided to cross the plaza area from the Pilar Café to Nick's store, he would veer out of range of the old lady standing expectantly behind the fence and shuffle nervously around by the Frontier Bar and Forest Service headquarters. But even then, as he swerved back up onto the porch, Mercedes usually managed to uncork a half-dozen infinitely annoying gravel bits that plinked around his feet before he attained her son's door.

When he did not see the crazy old bag standing by the gate or behind a section of fence, Harlan naturally strode straight across the plaza area. Sometimes, however, this lack of caution backfired, because Mercedes would be on all fours hiding behind a lilac bush or some tulips, and she would pop up with her pitching arm going like balls of fire as soon as Harlan entered the invisible but well-marked sphere of her range, and without fail her sudden appearance, plus the accuracy of her pellets, would give the big blubbery man such a start that on several occasions he actually fell down from surprise, and he almost always emerged from these sneak attacks with his heart thundering in a terribly unhealthy manner.

For years now, Nick Rael had been telling Harlan, “Throw something back at her, for crissakes, then she'll stop it.” But Harlan had always considered himself too much a gentleman to take up arms against a little old lady.

There came a day, however, when the café manager cracked. Preoccupied by uneasy thoughts stemming from the Joe's beanfield business, Harlan forgot—on his way across the plaza area to buy cigarettes at Rael's (where they were cheaper than in the café machine)—to swerve around by the Frontier Bar and the Forest Service headquarters, and one of Mercedes' tiny white pellets' drilling him in the ear took him so by surprise that he actually stumbled over sideways with a yelp. As soon as he realized what had happened, Harlan began to scramble about in the dust looking for a projectile big enough to wing at Mercedes, who merely regarded his curious antics with a blank, bemused expression. Harlan could locate nothing much larger than a pea, however, until suddenly he sat up, removed a loafer from his foot, and flung it wildly at the old lady, who forgot to duck, thus allowing the shoe to clock her squarely in the forehead. Of course Harlan, even in his rage, had never expected, or intended, to hit her, and the sickening B
LONK
! that resulted from this meeting between his loafer and her noggin resounded with a terrifying echo all around the plaza area, causing him to lurch up with a terrified squeal just as Mercedes gave a quizzical burp and keeled over, out cold.

“Nick!”
Harlan bleated, rushing toward the white picket fence.
“Nick, Nick, I just killed your mother! I just killed your mother!”

Nick hollered, “Just a sec, I gotta ring up this purchase!” and then after he had handed Horsethief Shorty Wilson his change, the storekeeper trotted into the Rael front yard, where Mercedes hadn't moved a muscle or twitched an eyelash for over two minutes, and where Harlan Betchel was holding onto his loafer as gingerly as if it had been Lizzie Borden's bloodstained ax.

Curiosity had led Horsethief Shorty to follow Nick, and now he asked, “What the hell did you do, you bully, you beaned the little old lady with your shoe?”

“You always told me, Nick,” Harlan stammered. “You always said—”

“Yeah, sure, Christ,” Nick responded, “I know, I know. I didn't think you'd clobber her with a boot, though.”

“It's not a boot, it's a loafer … I…”

“Wasn't there no little stones or anything handy?” Nick asked glumly, feeling for his mother's pulse, and—perhaps all too quickly—finding it, strong as the pulse of an ox.

“She ain't dead,” Shorty said.

“H-how can you tell?” Harlan blurted. “H-how do you know?”

Shorty, who had knelt on the other side of the body, thrust his recently purchased snuff tin under her nose and then held the tin up for Harlan to observe, saying, “See? She's breathing. There's a moist film on the tin. That's one way I can tell. The other way is I can see her chest heaving up and down like a bellows. The third way I can tell is there's funny little wrinkles all around her mouth from trying not to smile. You ask me, Nick, this deaf old bat is playing possum.”

Nick nodded, shouting, “Come on, Mom! We know you're awake! You can get up now!”

Harlan gaped. “You mean she's okay?”

“Well, she's gonna have a lump on her forehead for a few days,” Nick said. “But other than that I guess she'll be alright—”

And Mercedes was okay. But she never again chucked pebbles at Harlan Betchel. Harlan, however, never knew for certain that she wasn't going to throw
something
at him, for it seemed that she was always there whenever he crossed the plaza area, only now instead of throwing gravel bits at him with one of those sweet moronic smiles on her ancient features, she glowered sternly from under lowered eyebrows while letting the little stones run through her fingers from hand to hand, threatening him more by her abstention than she had before with her open attacks. In fact, the looks she gave him were so severe, Harlan began to fear she was planning how to cook his goose, say, with a gun, and he knew this was more than possible because Nick had weapons galore lying around his place; the old woman wouldn't even have to use ingenuity to get hold of one.

Harlan's trips to and from the store became a hundred times more nerve-racking than before. He soon found himself back skirting around by the Frontier Bar and the Forest Service headquarters, but now he felt uncomfortable in this approach too, because if, as her threatening monkeyish expression seemed to suggest, she was planning to murder him with one of Nick's myriad household pistols, no detour short of a mile was going to save him.