The Milagro Beanfield War (20 page)

“What are pennies made out of?”

And in a lower, bellowing voice, she answered herself:

“Dirty copper!”

“A sweet child,” Bertha said to Bud. “How come God blessed us with such a sweet child?” Then she said, “Listen, Kyril honey, I don't mean to pry, but what's the point of trying to put the fear of God into this town—we don't have enough trouble already?”

Bud answered for his friend: “The point is, Bertha, to stop things before they really get started.”

“By putting the evil eye on Charley Bloom? You'll pardon me, I know my place, I wasn't really listening to what you said, and I'd keep my mouth shut anyway, you know that, but by tomorrow morning the ditches are maybe gonna be lined with corpses because of this meeting.”

Bud, who was more than a little nervous (Just wait'll I get
you,
Katie, he was snarling to himself), looked at the agent, raising his eyebrows and lowering his eyelids in order to project a helpless and foolish
Oh-Jesus-look-what-I-have-to-put-up-with-all-the-time
grin, as he shrugged.

To Bertha, Bud said, “You don't know about these things, and I don't either; it's not our line of work.”

“I'll say it isn't.” A big Italian-looking Polish woman, Bertha stood by the stove eyeing both men over her cup of coffee.

“Listen,” she added, “don't get me wrong. Especially
you
don't get me wrong, Kyril honey, because I don't want you or any of your flat-footed compatriots hiding out in my closets with tape recorders and hand grenades, thanks anyway. But I mean, like, I'm married to one of the biggest horse thieves in the valley, I know which side my bread is buttered on, I'm with you 100 percent. It's just World War III shouldn't start in my backyard, know what I mean?”

Kyril Montana smiled. “Don't worry, it won't.”

“That's easy for you to say, you don't live here.”

Bud was irritated. “Oh cut the crap, Bertha. Forget it. Nothing's gonna happen. Jesus. You could turn an ant into a dinosaur.”

She rolled her eyes at the ceiling.

The agent started to say something, but was interrupted by Katie, who was running circles on the small lawn outside the kitchen window, shrieking “Oink! Oink!Oink! Oink!Oink!Oink!” at the top of her voice.

“Oh my God, that
kid!
” Bertha exclaimed, stifling a big grin as she did another eyeroll.

“Well, don't just stand there—” Bud fumed at her. “Honestly, Ky, I'm so sorry…”

“The kid is a kid,” Bertha said. “Kids are like that, why worry? Someday she'll grow up, someday our friendly local Gestapo will make her apologize—”

“We all should live so long,” Bud groaned. “Ky, I'm really sorry…”

The unflappable Kyril Montana smiled. “Don't worry, man. What the hell. Now listen, I gotta go. So just keep your phone open, okay? And lemme know if you hear anything—”

The two college friends shook hands. Bertha said good-bye, but for some reason she and the agent had never touched, not even to shake hands. “Say ‘Hi' to Marilyn,” Bertha said. “And don't run over any little Chicano farmers on the way out—”

Bud glared at her the way a priest might glare at a parishioner who had farted loudly during the Mass.

And the last thing Kyril Montana heard as he pulled away from the house was that annoying kid screaming, “What are pennies made out of?” And answering herself:
“Dirty copper!”

But his spirits were unruffled as he drove south, turned west onto Strawberry Mesa, and spent maybe twenty minutes in the Evening Star hippie commune hogan of a newly arrived freak called Lord Elephant. After that, the agent drove on to Doña Luz. There he pulled into Louie's roadside café, ordered some rolled tacos, an enchilada, and a cup of coffee, bought cigarettes from a vending machine, and then punched out fifty cents' worth of country and western tunes on the jukebox.

While smoking a filter cigarette and waiting for his order to arrive, in his mind he played over the faces of those men in Bud Gleason's house reacting to his information, and to his personal conclusions about that information, on the lawyer. The agent was quite certain of Eusebio Lavadie. Among the others he felt good about Bud Gleason, in spite of Bertha and the kid—after all, he and Bud were friends. He felt all right about the deputy sheriff and Nick Rael, too. The sheriff, Bernabé Montoya, disturbed him, but he did not know exactly why. And the mayor was a total loss, a scared jackrabbit, but one who at least would not talk. By and large, then, everything had worked out okay. He had made the plant, and soon all of Milagro would know about Charley Bloom. Then perhaps events would take their proper course with no more need of interference from him.

Several hours later, when Kyril Montana walked through the front door of his comfortable home in an all-white suburban section of the capital called Piñon Knoll, his wife Marilyn greeted him with a courteous hug. Their two kids, eleven-year-old Burt and thirteen-year-old Kelly, were gone; the former at Boy Scouts, the latter at their country club, working out in the Olympic-sized swimming pool. So the agent changed into his bathing suit and went out back for a swim. Having removed a frog from the pool with a long-handled net, he walked to the end of the diving board and stopped. Beyond his own redwood fence and a number of hard-plastered adobe or fake adobe houses, the sun was creating a vast and lovely panorama in the sky, a feast of gold and russet, daffodil and rouge. In the north, wispy and cottony streaks extended down from fiery clouds, a gorgeous pink rain falling.

Kyril Montana observed this for a moment, feeling good about things in general, about his own slim body, then he took a fine deep breath and dove beautifully into the cool water.

Soon Marilyn came out wearing a turquoise bikini, carrying a gin and tonic in each hand. Setting the drinks down on a white tin table, she joined her husband in the water. They swam together and kissed again and the agent made a leisurely pass at his wife, calmly giving a couple of pumps to her nice-sized breasts. She laughed and swam away on her back for a few feet, then circled around, breaststroking quietly to him. They kissed once more and flicked a little water at each other and rubbed noses, chuckling together, standing in about five feet of softly lapping water, enjoying the peaceful evening.

*   *   *

In Milagro, only the Dancing Trout, the Forest Service headquarters, and the Enchanted Land Motel had private telephones: all other town residents were on an archaic system of party lines installed so as to resemble a Tower of Babel built with electronic spaghetti. Often as many as seven families were on the same line, and somehow the phone company had never gotten around to providing a private signal system; hence, most phones in town were constantly ajangle with one set of coded rings or another. At any given moment at least a dozen phones in Milagro were off their hooks and out of their cradles, while perhaps another quarter to a third of the town's residents were listening clandestinely to the conversations of everyone else.

This made for a rumor mill and information network of substantial sophistication.

Naturally there were many people (like Bernabé Montoya) who could never remember their own signal codes and were thus constantly picking up the phone whenever it rang, a situation that had over the years ignited a great many long-standing and hotly contested feuds.

Other people—unused to telephones all their lives until immediately after World War II when the present system was installed—still, some twenty-odd years later, automatically answered anything that gave off an urgent blast.

And still others, unable to tolerate the continual ringing going on in their houses, often left their phones off the hook for hours, occasionally days, which was an open invitation to get murdered.

The present mayor, Sammy Cantú, had achieved his high office by promising to force the Sierra Bell Telephone Company to update the party line setup in Milagro. He defeated the previous incumbent, Eloy Martínez, who himself, by promising to straighten out the phone situation, had defeated the then-incumbent Orlando Mondragón, who had likewise, several years before that, ridden to victory on a platform of N
O
M
ORE
P
ARTY
L
INES
!

Much as the people complained, however, the tangled party line setup had become part and parcel of Milagro's communication and rumor systems, and as such, people had come to depend on it. For example, Bernabé Montoya often tuned into his own party line after some local atrocity (such as the stealing of a cow or the raiding of a corn patch) in order to find out who did what, and how, and to whom.

Hence, practically the moment Kyril Montana's unmarked Galaxie cruised unobtrusively into Milagro, it appeared on the town's telephonic radar screen, and its progress was tracked with interest by many of the town's inhabitants. Nick Rael inadvertently let the cat out of the bag when, somewhat flustered, he called Sammy Cantú to say he'd just seen a car with a chota-looking person in it go by, and was the meeting going to take place earlier than had been prearranged or what? Sammy Cantú assured him the meeting would take place at the preordained time, maybe the agent had simply arrived early in order to look the town over and get his bearings straight. This particular conversation was overheard by Stella Armijo and Sparky Pacheco, and also by Eusebio Lavadie's half-deaf wife, Fabiola, who mistakenly thought the phone had rung a short, two longs, a short and a long, instead of a long, one short, two longs, and a short, as it actually had. When she hung up, she mentioned casually to her husband that apparently some sort of police agent had arrived in Milagro for a meeting and she wondered vaguely why, and with whom. Lavadie immediately flew into a rage and called up Bernabé Montoya. “Bernie,” he shouted into the phone, “that stupid storekeeper and the mayor have been blabbing to each other over the phone about that agent's visit and the meeting at Bud's!” This enraged statement was overheard by Ray Gusdorf's wife, Jeanine, Onofre Martínez's retarded son, O. J., several Romeros, an Esquibel, and the mayor's oft-married sister, Isabel Cantú Martínez Mondragón Córdova. Within seconds, then, at least half the village was peeping curiously out from behind various curtains, half-opened doors, and trees, observing the police agent as he bumped into Pacheco's pig and later climbed up Capulin Hill, and still later as he drove back down to Bud Gleason's house for the meeting.

No covert military tribunal, Secret Service snoopers, or police group could have devised half as comprehensive or effective a Distant Early Warning System.

*   *   *

They were gathered in Joe Mondragón's yard: ten men and the two women, Ruby Archuleta and Joe's wife, Nancy. Nobody had called a meeting. Joe was working that morning on a tractor belonging to Ray Gusdorf who, though an Anglo, spoke fluent Spanish and had been failing at farming and failing at trying to run sheep (yet somehow surviving) just about as long as anyone else in the valley. At about 10:00
A.M
. Ray and his neighbors Tobías Arguello and Gomersindo Leyba, who had a stake in the tractor because Ray was going to cut and bale their alfalfa fields, had come over to see how Joe was progressing. Then Ruby Archuleta and her gang of Claudio García, her son Eliu, and Marvin LaBlue had stopped by to deliver some cut-rate tin roofing Joe was using to build a sunshade for tourists on the shore of Harlan Betchel's (Buck-A-Fish) Trout Pond; they had also come to discuss the plumbing needs for an A-frame taco joint Joe had contracted to help build with funds being skimmed off the top of the Custer Rural Electric Co-op down in Chamisaville. The other four present were Jimmy Ortega, a baby-faced kid who was always hanging around Joe's shop, helping out and learning a lot; his insolent, jiving friend, Benny Maestas, a Vietnam veteran on parole for throwing a beer bottle through the window of Bruno Martínez's state police car four months back; an elderly sad-sack bag of bones, Juan F. Mondragón, Joe's great-uncle, who just liked to hang around watching the work and spitting tobacco at the cats or chickens that wandered through the yard; and Johnny Pacheco, a handsome long-haired Milagro kid in his mid-twenties who played in a Chamisaville rock band called The Hotshots. Johnny had arrived two hours earlier with an amplifier almost as tall as himself that needed fixing.

The topic under discussion this morning, as Joe tinkered with the tractor's innards, was Kyril Montana's top secret visit to Milagro and his top secret meeting in Bud Gleason's living room.

“I guess they're kind of worried down there,” Ray Gusdorf said. “I guess somebody down there don't know whether to crap or get off the pot.”

Joe grinned. “They better be careful. Next time they send that chota up here he might fall in a well.”

The old men chuckled, the young men cackled, thinking that was a funny statement for Joe to make.

Ruby Archuleta asked, “What's Bud Gleason's stake in all of this? He ought to know better, it seems to me.”

“Oh, hell, that Bud Gleason,” Tobías Arguello said. “He'd sell the boots off his mother's corpse. If there wasn't but one piece of land left in the county, and that was his own, with his house on it and everything, he wouldn't think twice to put it on the block.”

“Somebody ought to leave a dead horse on his doorstep,” Joe said, grunting as he turned a wrench.

“He'd tie a pink ribbon around it and try and sell it to the vultures,” Benny Maestas laughed.

“All the same, he's got no right to let that cop in his living room,” Claudio García observed.

Gomersindo Leyba said, “Knowing Bud, he probably rented his living room out at six dollars an hour to that state cop.”

“What was the name of the chota again?” Ruby asked.

“Somebody said Montana.”

“Like the state of Montana? With a name like that, he's Chicano?”