The Milagro Beanfield War (27 page)

Suddenly the snakes were everywhere. Short, skinny, and harmless, they were still snakes. They became a bona fide nightmare. They were the first creatures Herbie saw when he opened his door each morning, sunning themselves on his stoop or lethargically arranged in the dust beside his house with green webbed feet poking out of their mouths and their eyes popping out of misshapen heads as they tried to swallow frogs. Usually they slithered under his house or off toward the irrigation ditch whenever his shadow fell across their bodies. Occasionally, though, they coiled up like rattlesnakes and hissed, scaring the volunteer half to death. And these he chopped up with a fatalistic but raging vengeance.

The days grew warm, the snakes multiplied like guppies. They surged over the irrigation ditch banks like Mongol hordes of yore. Herbie walked on tiptoe, eyes trained on the ground, terrified. Abhorring the violence in his blood, he nevertheless allowed his shovel to become like a killing instrument from the French Revolution. And, dreaming that snakes were crawling in his eyes and out his nose and through his body like a hose, he woke up whimpering, hollow-eyed, his body and his spirit swiftly flagging.

Then, at the height of the snake plague around Herbie's stinking bungalow, a miracle occurred. A moth-eaten, dog-eared, sleepy-eyed, bowlegged, nausea-yellow cat beleaguered by angry noisy magpies appeared one morning and systematically started to butcher the snakes. The cat showed up early and sat in the dust beside the house, ignoring the magpies that kept pecking its tail as it waited for the snakes to emerge and start sunning themselves. When a reptile was drawn forth by the sun's warm rays, the cat quietly walked over, placed a paw slightly behind the snake's head, bit through its tiny skull with a nonchalant crunch, and passively chewed up the rest of its short squirming body as if chomping up a licorice stick.

Within a week this grubby yellow animal had committed genocide on the snakes, blitzing Herbie's digs. Whereupon, with an unperturbed flick of its flea-bitten tail, the cat—still hounded by a brace of black-and-white birds—disappeared.

Which is precisely when the chicken slaughter began.

Herbie's next door neighbors Pancho and Stella Armijo owned about thirty young chickens. Earlier in the springtime they had purchased unsexed mail-order chicks because the birds came cheaper unsexed. Naturally, about half the batch had grown up to be roosters, which would one day be killed and put into the freezer. But there was no point in killing them until they started crowing and nailing the pullets and fighting each other.

True to his run of luck this particular summer, Herbie just happened to settle in Milagro at about the same time the Armijos' fifteen roosters came of age. And so, abruptly, starting every morning about three, there began a racket—to which the Armijos were apparently inured—that sounded to Herbie (hollow-eyed, gaunt, and aching from night-long bouts with dog-bark and skunk-odor and snake-nightmare insomnia) as if a herd of raging, feathered monsters the size of buffaloes, uttering bloodcurdling war whoops, were about to stampede through his grim hovel, reducing everything to pulp and ashes. To combat the ruckus, Herbie first stuck fingers in his ears, then he tried some tiny cotton wads. But the cock-a-doodle-dos pierced both his thick adobe walls and the cotton wadding, and in short order the shrill cries had made his exhausted brain feel all foamy, like a vanilla milkshake.

As the sun rose each morning, the fifteen roosters quit heralding dawn and started their mortal combat. They scrawked, bleated, screamed, flapped, and fluttered, slashing at, and bashing into, each other's eyeballs and jugular veins. While the roosters shrieked, the hens scrambled helter-skelter, commenting shrilly on the action: they clucked hysterically; they cackled obscenely; sometimes their alarmed voices were like machine guns.

Finally, as—unable to stand the fowl cacophony any longer—Herbie crawled dazedly clear of his raunchy sleeping bag and opened his creaking door to launch a feeble protest into crisp early-morning breezes, the fucking began.

And that was a hullabaloo to end all hullabaloos!

As the volunteer swayed in his doorway, dust and feathers from the dawn combat clogged the air and, like as not, a piece of bloody plumage would drift into Herbie's nostril, condemning him to chest-wrenching sneezes for the next six hours. Be that as it may, red-eyed and dully cringing in his doorway, Herbie could only stare helplessly at the sexual holocaust taking place in his neighbors' pen. For the roosters, after months of peaceful childhood and adolescence, had suddenly become inhabited both by devils and by an insatiable appetite for feathered pussy, and this combination caused them to go positively gaga with lust. Some of the hens tried to escape, flapping and scrawking like puritanical virgins running amuck; others crouched and spread their wings, popeyed and gurgling as the roosters jumped them, grabbing the backs of their heads with cruel beaks, tearing shoulder feathers out with their claws, humping away like medieval stir crazy beings in an amoral time of plague. Chickens collided and shrieked; they catapulted sideways, rolling and tumbling and flopping in agony and in ecstasy; feathers exploded into the air as if shot from cannons, and droplets of blood—as if spewed by underground geysers—littered the air with crimson.

Stunned by the erotic Armageddon, Herbie teetered abjectly, miserably, totally befuddled. Before the first week was out, all the hens had bloody heads and bare, pimply backs. And it was then that the abattoir scene commenced.

With a hammer and two threepenny nails in hand, Stella Armijo emerged from her low adobe farmhouse one morning while Herbie reclined on his front stoop trying to read a book. Crossing her yard to a large rust-colored stump, she quickly drove the two nails side-by-side into the block, then sat down on a nearby sawhorse to sharpen her ax with a file. When Herbie first heard that melody of the file against axblade steel, he should have retreated to the gloomy insides of his stinking little house. Instead, a strange compulsion held him where he was and, already queasy, doomed to witness the crude brutal demise of his early-morning tormentors, he waited for the sword to fall.

Stella had shut the chickens inside their coop the night before. Now she entered the shack carrying an empty burlap feed sack. An outraged commotion followed. Blowing breast feathers off the bangs covering her forehead, Stella emerged moments later lugging a bulging sack, which she carted over to the rust-colored stump. There, forsaking all preliminary rituals, the woman withdrew a rooster, stepped onto the mouth of the sack so the other birds couldn't escape, fitted the rooster's head between the two nails and, holding the bird by its legs, she pulled the body out until the neck was taut; then raised the ax and with one crunchy blow—
shtok!
—she beheaded the chicken and chucked the body unceremoniously into a nearby pile of wood chips where the wings flapped crazily as blood—driven, no doubt, by the heart's last fervid memories of yesterday's torrid balling—spurted from the neck.

It was like that, one after another—
shtok! shtok! shtok!
—the blade repeatedly tunking neatly through feathers, flesh, and bone so quickly that even before Herbie could go into shock over the first execution, the last had been performed. A pair of bloody wings staccatoed out a final energetic protest and fell still, and only a pair of warty yellow legs still quivered … and kept quivering … and continued quivering endlessly, like appendages somehow related to tuning forks.

After perfunctorily wiping her hands on her apron, Stella trotted inside, returning shortly with a large cauldron of boiling water. She dipped each beheaded rooster in the water, then plucked it so savagely Herbie winced at each tear, at the sound of damp feathers popping from thick puckered skin. Then she drove a long knife into each carcass's ass, twisted the blade once, reached inside, and, with a single sharp jerk, yanked out the guts and tossed them to the Armijos' ugly, pug-faced, cocker-bodied dog, Esperanza, who greedily gobbled them up while Herbie's own guts did loop-the-loops.

The chicken yard was noticeably subdued the rest of that day. Hens, slouching around mooney-eyed and sad, pecked desultorily at little bugs; the surviving roosters lay in small craters of dust and curdled lust with their heads tucked back between their shoulder blades, the hothouse riots in their blood considerably cooled by chill presentiments of mortality, their doomed fertility dripping from once brightwild eyes like tears. Somehow, incredibly, they all suddenly looked almost senile, feeble beyond belief. And Herbie, who only yesterday had dreamed of wringing all their necks, dreamed today of kidnapping them so no more would die such cruel, degrading deaths.

Next morning, following the 3:00
A.M
. cock-a-doodle delirium and the 5:00
A.M
. civil war, there came a 7:00
A.M
. death orgy. This time Herbie stayed put in his pestilential sleeping bag. All the same, he shuddered, his body actually twitching spasmodically with each resonant
shtok!
as he learned that imagining a scene is often worse than being an actual spectator to it.

When finally the volunteer roused himself and staggered outside, there was nothing but blood on the ground and feathers scattered everywhere like apple blossoms. A dusty gloom hung over the chicken pen where the five remaining roosters uneasily preened their gorgeous feathers as they waited for the Angel of Death to chop, pluck, and disembowel their youthful, awakening bodies.

Right about then, Herbie realized that the large raised pen beyond the Armijos' chicken compound was a rabbit hutch. And as his eyes focused on all the gentle gray shapes slowly hopping around in that compartmentalized wire pen, his heart did another flip-flop. After all, if the roosters were dying like flies, could the bunnies be far behind?

His premonitions soon proved to be grounded in fact. Came a morning when—half in a doze, exhausted from lack of sleep—Herbie heard a curious thock-crunch sound, then a faint plop, followed by a nauseating scuffling noise. He sat up, immediately the thing happened again; thock-crunch … plop … scuffle-scuffle-scuffle.

Fearing the worst, Herbie tiptoed to his door and opened it a crack. There stood Stella Armijo, a two-foot piece of lead pipe gripped tightly in her brawny fist, over by the bunny bin, methodically annihilating the cute little critters.

One by one, and quite gently, she removed them from the hutch, set them on a thick wooden table, stroked them a few times to ease their dread, and then—
thock-crunch!
—busted their stupid little brains apart with a single curt blow of the pipe and dropped their quivering bodies onto the ground—
plop
—where their legs continued to kick and skid for a moment in the dust:
scuffle-scuffle-scuffle.

When she had a pile of seven, Stella gutted and skinned and cleaned the rabbits as unconcernedly as she had denuded and disemboweled the roosters. After that, drenched to the elbows in bunny gore, she sat down and smoked a cigarette with a placid, beautiful look on her broad face, a look so queer and detached it made Herbie's testicles whimper as they shrank up higher into his shriveled scrotum.

But after a certain number of rabbits had been pogrommed, an almost supernatural peace descended over the neighboring barnyard.

It was a peace that only lasted about eight minutes. Because as soon as all the rooster feathers and bunny fur had been blown from the chopping block dust into the tangled branches of the cottonwood vivisecting Herbie's outhouse, the Armijos' dog, Esperanza, went into heat. This meant that every one-legged, mangy, half-blind, oversexed, lice-infested, ferocious or whimpering, crippled or groveling or man-eating canine entity within fifteen miles, whose olfactory senses and/or penis were functioning, appeared and laid siege to the Armijo house in hopes of getting a shot at Esperanza.

To complicate matters, on the same day Esperanza went into heat, Pancho Armijo came home with a brown milk goat. This wasn't his idea—Pancho hated goats. But Stella wanted the milk for yogurt. So Pancho locked the goat in the shed next door to the henhouse, which was also surrounded by the chicken pen's wire fence. The goat walked around the shed once, then jumped through the glass panes in the upper half of the door. And, after circling the chicken wire pen once, it took two dainty steps backward and, with an effortless leap, sailed over the four-foot-high barrier. The goat then trotted into Herbie's yard and ate a copy of
Portnoy's Complaint,
which the volunteer had carelessly left on his front stoop during a foray into town for baloney, beer, and cheese.

Stella Armijo boarded up the shed door, caught and reimprisoned the goat, strung two barbed wire strands above the chicken wire, and released the goat again.

Meanwhile, about thirty of the world's most pathetic mongrels were slinking around the immediate neighborhood with hard-ons. Herbie had just bought a bicycle, which Joe Mondragón had resurrected from the town dump, and the dogs pissed over it so much it got rusty in a day and all the paint peeled off and the black rubber tires bleached out white. The dogs also peed on Herbie's shack, but the permanent skunk smell on the premises was so strong the volunteer hardly noticed.

Pancho Armijo had tied Esperanza to a rope in the front yard, and whenever he or Stella caught mutts creeping on their filthy bellies toward her, they stampeded out of the house shooting birdshot from a .410 shotgun. So for a while there was sporadic gunfire, followed by earsplitting yelps, and this went on both day and night. Herbie writhed and tossed in his sleep; he began to duck—asleep or awake—at the slightest noise. In fact, he hardly dared exit, even for food, lest a wayward shotgun pellet nip his delicate aesthetic life in the bud.

Despite this birdshot barrage, the male dogs kept sneaking around with their slanty bloodshot eyes dripping vile lusting mucus, and with their swollen testicles pulsating anxiously. They were jealous of each other also; hence, the general pandemonium was continually being garnished by one snarling dogfight or another, all taking place just outside the perimeter of shotgun range.