The Milagro Beanfield War (28 page)

At least four dogs made it to the Promised Land daily. At which point truly demented melees occurred. The first time he heard the sort of uproar these dogs made scoring, Herbie raced outside to discover that three sex-starved hounds were trying to hump Esperanza at once. She howled, maybe from pleasure, more likely from pain, as the males fought among themselves, going for each other's jugular veins while their hind ends pumped wildly, searching for a hole. One hand clasped to his head, Herbie had leaned weakly against his wall, overcome by such abandoned savagery, when Stella Armijo sailed through her portal with the shotgun, both barrels of which she emptied at the two fleeing curs. The third, which was the only one to have struck paydirt, had also somehow gotten stuck and could not withdraw. Wailing terrifiedly, he thrashed about in the dust, taking poor Esperanza with him, kicking his legs insanely, trying to dismount and run, while Esperanza, in pain now and squealing hysterically, snapped frenziedly at him with her sharp teeth.

Stella took her time reloading the gun, then ambled over to the mess and kicked the male so hard his penis tore loose from Esperanza, catapulting him end over end three times; and, before he could regain his feet, she blew his brains out.

Then, while Stella dragged the dead animal into the back field, heartless Esperanza just sat there in the dust, unconcernedly licking her cunt.

Later that same day, about the time Herbie had finally recovered enough from the morning's trauma to eat a can of beans, the new milk goat ate a hole in the chicken wire pen allowing eight prize egglayers to walk out into freedom where they were promptly drawn and quartered (in another shrieking, yelping, feather-flying extravaganza) by the same rabidly panting dogs gunning after Esperanza's tail.

Herbie's teeth chattered, and he wondered: Am I beginning to suffer from shellshock? Will they send me for R and R in Japan?

Next day, a skinny German shepherd that had been lured into the vicinity by Esperanza's scent caught a paw in the bear trap Pancho Armijo maintained under the rabbit hutch to catch any stray dogs that developed a taste for his cottontails. Esperanza was locked in the house, both Armijos were gone, and so the trapped dog wailed in pain all day, each of its woeful howls like an arrow piercing Herbie's sensitive breast. Several times he traipsed over to aid the dog, but even though he had good intentions and tried to convey this by talking soothingly and offering the animal hash to eat, the dog only bared its fangs, and Herbie couldn't get close.

Toward 3:00
P.M
., unable to stand the racket any longer, the volunteer stumbled over to the Mondragóns' house, where he blurted out the situation to Nancy, who fetched a pistol from a kitchen drawer and followed Herbie to the hutch.

When the dog saw her it quit yowling, its eyes grew heavy-lidded, almost sad. Although its neck hairs continued bristling, it looked almost friendly, almost gentle, damn near serene. Nancy cocked her gun, taking careful aim at the quiet shepherd, and when the gun went off the dog's legs splayed out in four directions dropping it onto its stomach dead as a doornail.

“That's what somebody should do to the Zopilote,” was Nancy's only comment as she nodded tersely to Herbie and jogged home to hang up her laundry.

Two days after that, just as Herbie was beginning to think a cease-fire had been declared, Stella Armijo, Joe Mondragón, and Onofre Martínez castrated the Armijos' three little pigs. The deballing occurred quite early one morning, shortly after Herbie had at last achieved a sort of painful, but at least semicomatose, state. The sound that jarred the volunteer from his reveries was a terrified bleating squeal such as movie vampire victims are wont to make as the fangs of cackling necrophiliacs puncture their breasts or jugular veins. Jolted upright, Herbie—from force of habit—released a petrified squeak himself, then staggered to the door and opened it a crack. He was in time to watch as Joe, straddling a hog-tied animal, made a second slit in the pig's scrotum, reached inside, and tugged out one testicle, cut a cord, and chucked the testicle to another hobbled pig nearby, who promptly ate it.

Herbie retreated; he huddled in a fetal position atop his sleeping bag. If I survive this, he thought, it will be a miracle; and he wondered if things would have been more peaceful in Vietnam.

*   *   *

The Milagro church stood on the west side, at the end of the original town square, fronting a wide open space lined on both sides by lovely old houses with wide portals, the town's long-ago heart, deserted now, dusty, dilapidated, and forlorn.

But on this day an old man named Pancracio “Panky” Mondragón, no relation to Joe (although he was the grandfather of one of Nancy's first cousins, Larry Mondragón), turned a large iron key in the massive rusted lock and pushed the door open, allowing a bright flood of eastern sunlight to dance in and start raising havoc with the dusty air. Once he had opened the door, Panky stood there, gazing fondly at the simple church. A Warm Morning Ben Franklin stove occupied the centermost floor space; a few rows of rickety wooden benches were aligned on either side of the stove. The altar was covered by a simple linen cloth; above it hung a plain wooden cross. Two arched, narrow, plain glass windows were set into the side walls. Between the windows some ancient wooden santos, and a couple of newer ones that had been carved and painted by the expatriate Snuffy Ledoux, were hanging.

Bluebirds fluttered high up in the beams where they had nests, and Panky spent a few minutes scraping up their droppings with a trowel. As he was finishing this job, the people began to arrive. First, old Amarante Córdova, wearing his mammoth pistol, limped between ghost houses and down the plaza to the steps of the small mud-plastered church.

“Hi, cuz,” Panky muttered, and, as the two shook hands, Amarante said, “This is a great day for the church. This is a great day for the people.”

“The people are just cutting their throats,” Panky pontificated sourly. “They are as crazy as Pacheco's pig.”

Amarante feigned astonishment.

“Well, so I came to cut my throat along with the rest of us idiots,” Panky cackled sardonically, slapping Amarante's shoulder, the force of his blow almost knocking them both over.

Next, Ruby Archuleta and the rest of the Body Shop and Pipe Queen bunch arrived, followed closely by Joe and Nancy Mondragón, Joe's brothers Cristóbal and Billy, and Joe's shop rats, Jimmy Ortega and Benny Maestas. Between them the two teen-agers supported the great-uncle, Juan F. Mondragón, who muttered dire warnings of doom every inch of the way from the pickup to the pew. Ray Gusdorf showed up with his neighbors Tobías Arguello and Gomersindo Leyba. Tranquilino Jeantete came, as did his nighttime barmaid at the Frontier, Teofila Chacón, who had seven of her thirteen children in tow. After her, the Staurolite Baron with the infamous missing arm, Onofre Martínez, appeared, gestured obscenely at his son Bruno Martínez, the state cop (who was parked nearby keeping an eye on things), and entered the church. Others who came early were Amarante Córdova's dying son, Ricardo; the man who cooked for Harlan Betchel in the Pilar Café and tied fishing flies on the side, Fred Quintana; the Pilar waitress, Betty Apodaca, and her husband, Pete; and a lot of old men with names like Sparky Pacheco, Eloy Mascarenas, Floyd Gabaldón, Felix Ruiz, Amadeo Valdéz, and Paul Romero.

By the time Charley Bloom arrived, perhaps fifty pickups and other vehicles in various terminal stages of decay were parked in front of the church between the empty crumbling houses; and at the eastern end of this improvised parking lot, Bruno Martínez and Granny Smith lounged sloppily against their state police car, indolently smoking cigarettes.

Bloom had to park close to the cops. With his arms full of rolled-up hydrographical survey maps, he got out and started for the church. Granny Smith moved toward Bloom and, nodding at the maps, asked, “What's all that crap for? What's this meeting about, anyway?”

“It's just some stuff,” Bloom mumbled, hurrying—almost sprinting—toward the church.

“Hey, wait a minute—” Bruno called, but Bloom refused to acknowledge that he had heard. By the time the lawyer reached the steps, however, he was trembling almost uncontrollably, although nothing else had happened.

Still, Bloom figured as he entered the church that he was now truly a marked man. And he wanted to throw his maps at all the shriveled old bastards waiting patiently with their crumpled sweat-stained hats in their laps for him to arrive; he wanted to do that and then run away.

Amarante Córdova was already talking to the approximately seventy-five people present, most of them either middle-aged or quite old men, interspersed by a few women, and maybe a dozen kids.

“We didn't ask for this problem,” Amarante croaked in his garbled Spanish. “It came and landed on us like an eagle lands on a prairie dog. But we aren't gonna be like no prairie dogs, we're not gonna dig a hole and hide our heads from the Zopilote and his Zopilotitos, Jerry Grindstaff and Harlan Betchel and Jimmy Hirsshorn and other people like that. We're gonna
fight!
”

He paused, coughed, and nobody stirred. It was hard to tell if they had heard—probably most of them, being so old, were pretty deaf, and even if they weren't deaf, it was six of one, half-dozen of the other as to what Amarante, with his three teeth and ungrammatical, butchered, ninety-three-year-old Spanish, was saying in the first place. But everyone had the air, at least, of listening respectfully.

“I'm not gonna faint in the middle of the road and wave a white handkerchief!”
Amarante suddenly hollered, but then he started to cough so dramatically he couldn't continue his flamboyant oration. In fact, the fit gathered so much steam so swiftly that he had to stagger over to the altar and grab hold of it to keep from falling. At which point everybody in the church leaned forward expectantly, no doubt thinking in unison: Ahah!
Now
is when the crafty old devil is finally going to perform for us the miracle of dropping dead!

But although Amarante could not recover, neither was he about to die. And finally Ruby Archuleta and Onofre Martínez ushered him to a seat in the first pew, where he sat hunched over with tears in his eyes, intermittently rumbling for the duration of the meeting.

Ruby Archuleta then took the floor. “Listen, friends,” she began. “You all know what's been happening in the valley. You remember when this church was the heart of a town that no longer truly exists. You remember the days when we were not rich, but when poverty was different, not a thing to be ashamed of, and we got along okay. You remember when we had a certain freedom, and you know we don't have it anymore, and you remember when our children grew up and stayed home and raised their children in Milagro. Well, look at us now. We're a congregation of old men and old women and where have all our children gone?”

She paused, pacing back and forth in front of them.

“Listen, my friends, my cousins,” Ruby continued quietly. “My little grandmothers and my little grandfathers. I love you. But when I wake up in the morning sometimes I want to cry. I think of recent history, and then I think of this Indian Creek Dam and the Indian Creek Conservancy District, and I know that if they come about it will be the end for most of us. And I cannot bear to let this happen without a fight. We are old, and many of us are tired, we have been on welfare too long, and food stamps have sapped our pride and dulled our fighting spirit. I know the conservancy district and the dam are difficult to understand, but our response to complexity can no longer be, ‘Well, that's just the way things are, what can we do about it?' I have spent too much of my life watching bad things happen to us, to my people. I know our problems. And at this point I think we have become a little like land that has been overgrazed, or like land that hasn't been planted correctly or fertilized for many years, and so it has lost its richness, becoming thin and weak and played out; there are no more vitamins in the soil, and all the crops growing out of it are poorer each year—”

Ruby stopped, losing the thread, confused in her own metaphor, aware of saying incorrectly what needed to be said. She was scared, too, because she had never really spoken to a group before, and because she was worried that a woman should not be saying these things, and that maybe because she was a woman with a mysterious history who lived outside the town proper they would refuse to listen.

Suddenly she changed her tack.

“Look, I'm not saying it right, I know that. I'm not our leader. I want to do what's good and I want to fight in whatever way the people want to fight, that's all. I'm speaking now because we haven't chosen a leader. But maybe there's somebody who can speak better than me, who would like to talk now about these things?”

They stared at her impassively, in absolute silence, for a good thirty seconds.

“Alright,” she said gently. “I had an idea before I came to the meeting. I was hoping maybe we could form ourselves into a group, and I thought we might call our group something like the Milagro Land and Water Protection Association, I don't know. We'll think about that, and maybe we can have an election at the end of the meeting or sometime soon. Maybe, too, we can elect the officers of our association, if we choose to make ourselves that, and we can discuss future meetings. But right now I asked somebody to talk to us, because he has written articles about this dam and he understands the conservancy district better than me, and perhaps he can help us all understand the technicalities, so we'll know what we're up against. As you know, he lives with us here in Milagro, and I consider that he is on our side—”

Charley Bloom went to the front; Ruby smiled and shook his hand and sat down—he faced the people. Their familiar faces were neither hard nor soft. Searching for glints of humor, for smiles, for compassion, he could not find any. Their faces seemed so old, so dark, calling forth overworked clichés about the earth and the sky and the wind. Old, wrinkled, simple, profound. Bloom was afraid of these neighbors, feeling simultaneously superior and less of a man. God help him not to sound either patronizing or defensive! He knew they were weary and frightened, too, but on no one face did this seem evident, and he was afraid that he broadcast it from his body as if someone had painted him a Day-Glo chickenshit yellow that shone in the dark. Although he knew many of them must lead confused and desperate lives (wasn't his own wife Linda an example?), he still could not help but feel they were confident men and women who believed in themselves, holding in their lives to truths that were self-evident and irrefutable. He sensed, too, that they were unafraid of danger and of dying, and this they held over him more than anything. A part of him knew he was wrong, knew that he did no credit to these friends and neighbors (as he had done no credit to his wife) by romanticizing them just as they probably romanticized him, but he couldn't help it. He envied them because they were different from him, and because, despite their poverty, their language and their culture seemed to offer a viable and dignified alternative. Looking at them, he translated their faces into a strength he had once hoped somehow to marry into.