The Milagro Beanfield War (24 page)

“That's what I thought. Fuck you.”

“I came over to warn you that some people in this town are gonna try and stop you from irrigating this field.”

“Other people are on my side,” Joe replied quietly.

“This town is uptight enough, José. Already we're too much set against each other. Why make it worse?”

“This is my land. Who made the laws that said I can't irrigate my land? I didn't put my Juan Hancock on any papers like that.”

“The man who was up here wasn't kidding around, José. He's a dangerous man.”

“If you go to any more meetings with that man tell him, for me, will you, to stick a finger up his ass and then suck it like a popsicle stick afterward.”

With a resigned sigh, Bernabé lit another cigarette. “Not too long ago we used to run together,” he said.

Joe shrugged. “Things change.”

“As a friend maybe you would do this thing for me.”

“What thing?”

“Quit irrigating this little no-account field.”

“Why talk about what isn't gonna happen?”

“I won't protect you, then,” Bernabé said testily. “You're gonna mess up my job, you know that? So I hope they beat you so hard your kidneys bleed.”

“I can take care of my kidneys.”

“I can't arrest you because that will only cause more trouble,” Bernabé said. “And anyway, I'm afraid of you. I mean, I can't arrest you for illegally irrigating this field, and you know that and I know that. We're not stupid. But if something happens to you or to this field, I don't have to arrest anybody else, either. I'm sorry, but I think that's the way things stand right now…”

“You're trespassing on my property,” Joe said.

Sadly, Bernabé backed up. “What do you want to go and cause this trouble for?” he asked unhappily. “We had a peaceful town here…”

Joe said nothing.

Bernabé snapped away his cigarette, and, after directing a halfhearted obscene gesture at Joe, turned and headed for his pickup.

Fifteen minutes later, when the field was almost entirely watered, a state fish and game truck driven by Carl Abeyta, with Floyd Cowlie in the passenger seat, parked directly behind Joe's pickup. The two men sauntered over; Carl Abeyta wore a gun.

“Heard you been fishing,” Carl said to Joe in English. “You got a license?”

“Check your own records and you'll learn the answer,” Joe replied in Spanish, picking up his hoe.

“Speak English,” Carl said. “Floyd here don't speak Spanish.”

“A la chingada con tu y tu amigo gabacho,” Joe said.

“You
don't
have a license,” Carl said in Spanish.

“So what?”

“We're gonna have to fine you then.”

“What for?”

“For that fish you got in your possession.”

“Fish?” Joe exclaimed incredulously. “Who's got a fish?”

“Tell him to speak English,” Floyd Cowlie said, swinging under the nearby fence. “Where's that fish, Joe?”

Joe shrugged and addressed Floyd in Spanish: “I don't know what you're talking about, you fucking goat.”

“Hey, I know that word,” Floyd growled angrily.

“We heard you had a fish,” Carl said quickly.

“Maybe what you need is a new hearing aid,” Joe said.

“We got it from a good source.”

“Hey, you,” Joe said to Floyd Cowlie in English. “You're trespassing on my property.” With the hoe, he advanced toward the man. “You got until I count three to haul your ass onto the other side of that fence with your pal. Did anybody give you a warrant to search my property?”

Floyd backed under the fence; Carl dropped his hand onto his gun. “Listen,” Floyd said, “we know you got a fish.” He snagged his shirt on the barbed wire, cursed softly, unsnagged himself, and straightened shakily beside his partner.

“You bastard,” Carl Abeyta hissed in Spanish. “We'll get you.”

“You and whose army?” Joe chuckled.

Without another word the two men walked back to their vehicle.

“What are you Florestistas looking for—” Joe shouted gleefully after them, “another Smokey the Bear santo riot?”

Then Joe cut the water back into the river and sat for a moment longer while the sun rose higher and water seeped into the ground around his bean plants. At the far corner of the field some blackbirds and three magpies were wading in the water and muck, hunting for choice tidbits. High overhead, aflame in the early-morning sunshine, a vulture quietly circled.

Joe felt saucy, in control, cool. On top of the world. Everybody else and his brother was either an idiot or a chicken compared to Joe Mondragón.

And for a moment he had wonderful delusions of grandeur.

But later, as he drove past the Miracle Valley sign, defiantly shaking an obscene finger at the announcement of Ladd Devine's dream, Milagro's nightmare, Joe suddenly felt scared stiff again. And a vision popped into his head: of the Zopilote and Jerry G. and Horsethief Shorty and that Carl Montana and the state engineer, Nelson Bookman, all sitting around a campfire up by the Little Baldy Bear Lakes, roasting miniature Joe Mondragóns skewered like hot dogs on aspen twigs over their campfire.

*   *   *

Billy Ray Gusdorf, known simply as Ray these days, was a lean, quiet man who, in a lean and quiet way, believed in God. He never prayed, so to speak, or went with his family to church, but he had a kind of awe for what was alive, a respect for everything from horses to chickadees that amounted to the sort of general all-around respect for the world and its creatures that others might take for a belief in God.

Ray hadn't always been thus. In fact, back during his youth, he had been a pretty cantankerous son of a bitch. He was born in the cattle country near Mexico, and raised by a family that had run beef and then gone into cotton when the big Bureau of Reclamation dams completely transformed the plains country. Eventually old man Gusdorf had gotten royally skinned when the bottom fell out of cotton, and he wound up relegated to a sharecropper's role forever after. Billy Ray's childhood, then, consisted of sorrowful years in tarpaper shacks, much ill health, and general all-around human disaster. Under these deteriorating conditions the child—early on—had developed into one ornery hellion.

Thirteen, fourteen years old, and he drank, he smoked, he swore, he ruined little girls and ran with ruined women, and by the time he was seventeen, his daddy fresh buried and his mom on the outs with TB, it looked for sure like Billy Ray was either going to rewrite the legend of Billy the Kid, or else die trying.

Then a few things happened which, when added up, turned the wild youngster into an entirely different person. First off, his entire family, along with nine other members of the Glen Mark Baptist Church, were wiped out by a single lightning bolt which hit the cottonwood they had sought shelter under during a storm that was washing out their church picnic. Billy Ray did not go to his justly deserved reward along with the rest of them because he was off in an abandoned shack with a lady parishioner shouting “Glory Hallelujah!” at the exact moment his family and neighbors got fried.

After that, for the first time in his life, Billy Ray started wondering about the Lord, whom he'd previously always considered a kind of stern Santa Claus. He was so shook up that he hit the road, and for some reason that road aimed due north five hundred miles, leading up out of flat plains and the desert country into high mountains, and—maybe a year after the death of his family—to a job at the Dancing Trout Dude Ranch, guiding tourists on horseback through the summertime Midnight Mountains. Ladd Devine Senior hired him on for the same reason he'd hired on Horsethief Shorty Wilson, namely, he liked and trusted hellraisers, blasphemers, whoremongers, and loudmouthed alcoholics, knowing exactly how to keep the edge off by paying them fair and feeding them well to boot.

All went okay at the ranch for a few months. Billy Ray continued his off-hours boozing, brawling, and other sundry endeavors. Then one morning he woke up with the first autumn snow alighting gently on the ground outside. Billy Ray threw on a shirt, some jeans, and his boots, walking outside into something he had never experienced before; and he just stood there, letting that first snowfall gather in his hair and on his shoulders. And after it stopped he still remained there, because he had never before even vaguely approximated such a wonderful and wonderstruck affinity for a horse, a mother, or a whore, let alone for an act of weather.

Subsequently, while going through lazy autumn chores, battening down the dude ranch's hatches for winter, Billy Ray, abstracted, moved almost in a reverie, pausing often to gaze mystifiedly into the mountains, where he could see the gray velvet smirches of early snow falling.

Came one morning, then, shortly before Christmas, when Billy Ray slipped on a dude ranch backpack, hung some snowshoes on the side of it, and walked into the mountains. He hit snow early, donned the snowshoes, and pushed on, meandering upward. The first night, still in thick timber, he instinctively made a little snow cave, wrapped himself in a blanket, and slept warmly in his icy cubbyhole. Next day around noon he reached the high open valleys around the Little Baldy Bear Lakes, which were invisible under ten to fifteen feet of snow.

The silence within the alpine bowl was unbelievable. Icy white, sunny, and mute, the expanse everywhere was almost entirely unmarked except for faint feather patterns where a little bird had pushed off; or for tiny mouse tracks trickling across the still, shimmering snow.

Billy Ray ate a few raisins, a tortilla, nothing else. Expressionless, directionless, more than awed, he moved about in the high country valleys, occasionally sucking on little snowballs, stopping often to listen to the inaudible hum, the fantastic and unhearable
crinkle
of that pristine frozen landscape. And again, he stopped often simply to absorb by osmosis the immense grandeur, loneliness, majesty, and both frail and cruel beauty of his surroundings.

For several days he plodded that way, aimlessly searching for nothing, in no hurry, a minuscule curious specter inching around in that peaceful winter country, absorbing something, taking it in—indelibly—for all time. Sometimes long fan-shaped snow sprays were spun off the mountaintops by high winds. Other times the mountains and valleys and forest were as still and as quiet as hawks in the air, a mile high, drifting. Occasionally, when caught in the exact eye of this bleached and motionless crystal expanse, Billy Ray's limbs went weak from sheer joy. And at one point during an impeccably white noon he closed his eyes and nearly fell asleep standing up in the middle of a sloping, unblemished snowfield; he almost died.

Practically no living things crossed his path during those days in that universe of gorgeous frozen light. A small bird here, a skittish mouse—nothing more. At night, huddled in his snow holes with the starry darkness absolutely dumb overhead, he slept like a puppy behind a warm stove, like a cat on a sunny windowsill, like a baby fresh from its mother's breast.

And it was during those nights that the Billy the Kid legend died.

Three days passed: after them, Ray Gusdorf quietly emerged from the Midnight Mountains a different human being—mature, introspective, curiously subdued. He quit work at the Dancing Trout, fell in love with and married Jeanine Juniors, started his own small spread as close to those mountains as he could, had one kid, and then a whole bunch of children in rapid succession, learned Spanish and became a respectable citizen, a silent man, but understood and well liked. Ray had arrived, as few people have the good luck to arrive, at home.

Since then, all through the subsequent years, Ray had carried those three days in his heart; they were constantly being pumped anew with his blood throughout his veins and arteries; and although he had never since returned to the winter country, it was as if he had somehow remained up there forever.

“For three hundred years, maybe longer,” Ray said to Joe Mondragón one evening while they were both sitting on Rael's porch, the one killing a Pepsi, the other working on a beer, “the people around here have starved to death, but somehow they always survived. Now comes a ski area, probably motorcycles, winter snowmobiles, a subdivision, and so forth, jobs for everybody say Bud Gleason and Ladd Devine, money in the bank … and in five years we'll all be gone.”

He paused thoughtfully, watching diners move about in the café across the plaza area. Then he turned his head sideways, focusing on the mountains that loomed over the town, the same mountains that were nestled in his heart.

“I figure I can live with hunger,” he said gently, “a hell of a lot better than I could ever live with fat.”

*   *   *

The phone rang; Charley Bloom answered. It was his lawyer friend and also the
Voice of the People
editor, Sean Carter, calling from the capital with some bad news.

“Christ, are we ever up shit creek without the old proverbial paddle,” Sean began.

Bloom prickled with a sudden chill: “How so?”

“Well, to begin with I think we have to suspend publication.”

Bloom's heart leaped back up from where it had fallen; he didn't dare speak, he just waited.

“The machines got stolen, you know all about that.”

“Sure.” And to make himself sound convincing, he added: “Those bastards.”

“I can't get 'em back unless I come up with that bread, but who am I, Jesus Christ tearing apart loaves and fishes and dollar bills—?”

“I'll type up some stuff,” Bloom offered unenthusiastically, cursing his hypocrisy. “There's other people with typewriters.”

“Of course, man. Thanks. But that isn't the half of it.”

“Give me the rest then.”

“You sitting down—?”

“Oh come on, Sean, cut the melodrama.”

“Mirbaum, the printer, he sends me a bill for six hundred and eighty fat ones today, with a little note attached, to the effect that either we cough up the bread or else he doesn't print the next issue.”