The Milagro Beanfield War (31 page)

Whereupon, inevitably, as certain as death and taxes and the enlargement of Ladd Devine's empire, there ensued a final week of frost and frequently snow that turned into blizzards, and people who had not brought their cows in to calf had those calves frozen to death, and all the fruit tree blossoms were killed, and the subsequent summer came and went without so much as a boo! from a single pear, apple, or plum.

Herein lay another complaint the people had with the educated and tricky thugs who were trying to form a conservancy district in order to build the Zopilote's private swimming lake behind the Indian Creek Dam. “With more water you can grow fruit like crazy from your fruit trees,” the thugs' mellifluous voices crooned.

Which made any upright, true blue Milagro citizen, knowing the odds in favor of the early Death of the Fruit Tree Blossoms, just about vomit.

Still, for centuries, because of one masochistic spiritual or genetic flaw or another, Miracle Valley residents like Onofre Martínez had persisted in growing fruit trees, and even in hoping each year that this year a false spring would not set up the trees to be butchered by the little winter that always occurred after the false spring.

In a way, the Milagro fruit trees were related to the town's horses. And here too Onofre Martínez was a case in point. He owned a horse, which he kept in a little corral at the rear of his half-acre Shangri-la. This horse knocked off a bag of Staminoats every few weeks and two flakes of an eight-flake hay bale (costing a buck in a wet year, two bucks in a dry one) every day. On top of this the horse chewed up vitamin blocks as fast as Onofre could pitch them in, and of course the animal was always licking away at a salt block. Other than these activities, however, the horse did nothing, and, except for its shit, which Onofre's great-grandchildren Chemo and Chepa shoveled onto his vegetable garden, it was basically a worthless animal. Onofre had not ridden his horse in ten years, and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren only rode it a few times each summer. It was an old horse now, fat and half-blind, and it had spent most of its life in that little corral, just eating and moving its bowels. To be sure, Onofre talked to it each day, patted its nose, wormed it when it had to be wormed, trimmed its hooves when they needed trimming, dug mud out of the hooves when mud needed to be dug out, and curried the horse as well. But other than that the animal just paced around in the corral back there, sort of like an appendix, and just as useless, too.

For every inhabitant of Milagro, there existed a horse like the one belonging to Onofre Martínez. Charley Bloom had once put it this way in a
Voice of the People
article:

You walk along the narrow roads of Milagro in the spring and early summer sunshine. The small fields are green with alfalfa, timothy, and clover. At one house, a man with a wooden pallet called a “hawk” is scraping adobe mud off this hawk with a trowel and smoothing it against a wall. It is calm in Milagro; there is a feeling of uninterrupted history everywhere. In each of the half-acre and quarter-acre pastures one or two horses are grazing. For in Milagro, a man who is too old to ride, or his children who would rather speed in cars, still keep a horse or several horses. They switch them from small field to small field, and, no matter what, they will scrape together the dollars to buy hay bales for the winter months to feed their horses. There is something vestigial about the horses of Milagro. Occasionally, you see a man on a horse walking toward the Midnight Mountains; or two children riding bareback. But mostly the horses are just there, useless, parasitic, grazing in the overgrazed fields, because there have always been horses in Milagro. They can make you sad, these horses that nobody rides much anymore; or they can stand proudly and beautifully as a kind of symbol of a people who refuse to die.

But start throwing this kind of penny ante sociology around in front of Onofre Martínez, try to explain to him the significance of his old, fat, half-blind mare out back in that tidy corral, and he would listen politely for a while, until finally, catching you in a pedantic or scholarly pause, he would observe, “You're just farting words.” Then he would start a conversation about something else. A man who kept a horse, to Onofre's way of thinking, was as natural as a man who unbuttoned his fly and pried out his pecker before, instead of after, taking a leak.

Onofre called his horse Balena, a word that means “whale.”

Another thing about this one-armed man: Onofre Martínez was as close to Seferino Pacheco as anybody in town. Occasionally, Pacheco came over to the Chateau Martínez, not under the pretext of looking for his sow (because how could his sow transcend that airtight picket fence neatly surrounding Onofre's property?), but simply to stare at Onofre's color TV, or maybe to stare at his piano.

That piano had once belonged to Pacheco's wife, who could play it like a nightingale can sing. When she was still alive, that woman used to play for Pacheco every afternoon at five, and he would lie on a couch with his eyes closed, positively enraptured, his soul drifting around the room like a pink, helium-filled balloon. Sometimes she soothed him with classical music, sometimes she played popular songs, singing along in her husky melodic voice. In summer, the music would float out on the evening air, reaching the neighboring houses. Back in those days, Joe and Nancy Mondragón and Pancho and Stella Armijo and Sparky Pacheco and others who lived close to the Pacheco adobe used to stop whatever they were doing and listen to Pacheco's wife at the piano. And most of these people still counted those peaceful evening concerts among their most cherished memories.

But then Pacheco's wife died, and Pacheco sold the piano for a song to Onofre Martínez, who had planned to hustle it at a huge profit to a moneybags down in Chamisaville. But for some reason he kept putting off the sale. Maybe he remembered those musical evenings which had been so beautiful they had even lulled all the hummingbirds at his feeders—the tiny birds had lined up on branches and actually seemed to drift off into tiny buzzing dreams while Pacheco's wife caressed the ivories. And besides, Onofre fancied himself a bit of a whiz at the keyboard, too. In fact, it was Pacheco's wife who taught him for free back when she gave piano lessons to any kid in the valley eager to learn. Mostly, Onofre liked boogie-woogie, and so she taught him that. But then his right arm mysteriously disappeared, leaving him with nothing but a boogie-woogie walking bass. Nevertheless, Onofre still enjoyed playing his walking bass, and although he never gave concerts at 5:00
P.M
., his neighbors often heard that jive bass coming from the Chateau Martínez around dusk. Nobody stopped work to listen, though, because Onofre had always been a lousy piano player, even with two hands, and he still tunked out basically atonal numbers.

Of course, Joe Mondragón would swear on a stack of Bibles, if you asked him to, that he had awakened at least twenty times in the middle of the night these past five years and heard both the walking bass
and
the treble runs
at the same time
carrying across on the clear black air to his startled ears.

So that was another story to file with all the previous fables about Onofre's missing arm.

But anyway, Seferino Pacheco occasionally visited Onofre's house, not to hear him play the piano—God forbid!—but simply to stare at Onofre's miraculous boob tube, and also occasionally to listen to his friend read.

It was in this, the literary area, that their acquaintanceship really suffered, however. Namely, because Pacheco could not stand the way Onofre, reading aloud in Spanish, pronounced his
c
's and
z
's. He pronounced them with the Castilian
th
sound, that is, with a lisp, an affectation peculiar to many of the Miracle Valley's old-timers, whereas it could not be found farther south in Mexico. The reason for this being that Onofre's and Seferino Pacheco's ancestors had come from Spain four centuries before, traveled to this godforsaken place in the high Rockies, and then been cut off from civilization for three hundred years, thus maintaining many of the purities in their Spanish language and in their Spanish customs.

But Pacheco hated that fucking lisp. He could hold his tongue, listening to Onofre read, only for about ten minutes. Then he would explode; and the two men would engage in knockdown drag out verbal fisticuffs, which usually terminated when Pacheco called Onofre a
“screaming elitist fairy!”
waking up all the bats behind their custom-made bat shutters as he stormed out of the place. Pacheco usually did not stop there, either. Turning at the gate, he always added: “An Astroturf lawn! And plastic flowers!
That proves I'm right!
”

After a Pacheco visit, the hummingbirds were usually absent from the Chateau Martínez for several days, or until the atmosphere calmed down enough so that they could zip here and there without striking air pockets caused by Pacheco's epithets.

“Someday he'll kill me for lisping,” Onofre said to Joe Mondragón one afternoon while they were selling hamburgers and cotton candy at the Chamisaville Moto-Cross race, which was, as usual, taking place on a nonvisible track fifteen feet from Joe's trailer; the cyclists lost, as always, in a dust storm.

“If he does, why don't you will me your piano?” Joe said. “I want my kids to learn more culture than they can get on Herbie Goldfarb's guitar.”

“I'm not gonna die, I don't think,” Onofre said, “until I've played taps, on that piano, for Zopilote Devine.”

*   *   *

Two nights after the basketball court rumble, while Joe and Nancy Mondragón were making love, a bullet crashed through their living room window and thudded into the other side of the bedroom wall, causing the plastic crucifix above the bed to fall on Joe's head.

Jumping out of bed, Joe grabbed a rifle from the corner and charged through the front door. A car, trying to get away, was spinning its tires, stuck in the mud. Joe aimed his rifle and fired—but nothing happened because he had failed to load up. Forgetting that the car's occupants were armed, and brandishing his own gun by the barrel, Joe galloped toward the vehicle, planning to beat them all to a bloody pulp with the stock of his weapon. As he raced across the yard, however, their tires caught and, jolting clear of the gooey rut, the car plunged down the road.

“You bastards!” Joe yelled, flinging his gun after them: it landed with a splash in a puddle.

*   *   *

Bernabé Montoya sat up in bed and tapped Carolina's shoulder. “Hey,” he muttered groggily, “did you hear a rifle shot?”

His wife rolled onto her back and spent a befuddled ten seconds stretching open her sleep-caked eyes. “What?” she mumbled. “What did you say?”

“I thought I heard a rifle shot.”

Carolina sat up. “I didn't hear anything. I was sound asleep.”

Bernabé laid one hand gently against his head. “I got a lousy headache,” he moaned. “This town is giving me whatta you call them?—migraines. Joe's beanfield is gonna give me an ulcer.”

“I'll fix something,” Carolina said, climbing dutifully out of bed and slipping her feet into some fluffy pink slippers.

“Just gimme a couple aspirin,” Bernabé said. “No fancy remedies, huh?”

“Don't worry, I'll fix you something better than aspirins,” she insisted quietly, shuffling determinedly out of the room. “Remember: an ounce of prevention…”

“Ai, Chihuahua…” Bernabé whimpered, settling back.
Oh Jesus Christ Almighty,
he wailed silently, terrified of the old-fashioned remedy she was sure to turn up with, and he was certain to drink, in about ten minutes.

Occasionally—in fact, better make that often—her old-fashioned ways touched him. For example, he usually carried a little piece of oshá in his pants pocket. Not because he put it there himself, understand, but because she always slipped it in when he wasn't looking. In the old days, people had carried around these little chunks of wild parsnip root to protect themselves from poisonous snakes, and so what if rattlesnakes had always been as rare as money in Milagro? Bernabé was forever throwing away the oshá that turned up almost daily in his pockets, and Carolina was forever replenishing the supply, and neither of them ever mentioned the matter to the other.

But what really drove Bernabé out of his skull was Carolina's way of talking. Actually, Carolina didn't talk much at all, but when she did open her mouth it seemed sentences never emerged, only aphorisms, called “dichos.”

Hence, when Bernabé remarked, “You know, Carolina, I really wonder about Horsethief Shorty Wilson sometimes,” she would respond with: “Hay lobos con piel de oveja.” Which meant: “There are wolves who parade about in sheep's clothing.”

Or if he said, “I wonder, sometimes, if I'm really handling José's beanfield correctly,” she assured him, without even looking up from her colcha embroidery: “El que hace lo que puede no está obligado a más.” Meaning: “He who does what he can isn't obligated to do any more.”

Again, if Bernabé happened to mention, over a plate of carne adobada, that Joe Mondragón was a pig-headed son of a bitch who wouldn't listen to reason, Carolina was certain to chirp: “El que no agarra consejo no llega a viejo.” That is: “He who can't take advice, won't live to a ripe old age.”

Then if Bernabé continued to attack Joe's recalcitrance, she would probably add, “You can lead an ass to water but you can't make him drink.”

The few times Bernabé had tried to break down the political and social situation in town, talking about how little land and money the farmers really had, Carolina had rather consistently observed, “Quien poco tiene poco teme,” which means, “He who has little has little to fear.”

And on those days when the sheriff was sick and tired of the whole thing and just came home early and put his feet up and proceeded to get drunk on a six-pack, she moaned at regular intervals: “Tiempo perdido los santos lo lloran,” but at least he had the guts to pay no attention. Let the damned saints cry over all the time he was wasting.