The Milagro Beanfield War (32 page)

That was another thing, of course. Their house, a kind of southwestern religious Smithsonian Institution, was crammed full of bultos and retablos, carved saints and painted saints, bleeding saints and saints wearing little cloth capes on which roses and moons and stars were embroidered, and saints carrying silk shoulder pouches, and saints with angels driving their plows through the earth behind them, and saints with gourds full of sacred water and baskets overbrimming with sacred bread—they had santos in their household like most of Milagro's dogs had fleas!

Yet among all these pious wooden dolls there was one Bernabé liked. It had been carved by that alcoholic expatriate responsible for the Smokey the Bear santo riot, Snuffy Ledoux. It was a plain wooden santo with no name, and, contrary to the other carved or plastic saints, it was grotesque. The eyes bulged like mad frog's eyes; the huge ugly nose was bent all out of shape; the lips were fat and twisted into a half-gurgle, half-scream; the big awkward hands gripped the figure's chest arthritically, in terror. Bernabé had bought it off the distinguished sculptor for a bottle of cheap tokay twelve years ago. But he liked it a lot; maybe he even loved that santo. Because it looked to the sheriff like a man who was full of a million questions he would never dare ask, a million opinions he would never dare offer; that ugly wooden carving looked to Bernabé Montoya like another human being with a kindred soul.

The one real fight Bernabé and Carolina had had in their life together occurred because of the saints. It had been an abnormally dry year (every other year in Milagro was an abnormally dry year, alternating with all those abnormally wet years), and so one day, during the Death of the Fruit Tree Blossoms time, Carolina carried their San Isidro out into the back field asking him to encourage it to rain on their cucumbers. Well, sure enough, it rained all right, then the rain turned to snow, and the snow turned into a blizzard, so Carolina ran outside with their Santo Niño de Atocha, begging him to queer the blizzard before the cucumbers and the fruit trees were destroyed, and so the blizzard stopped and it began to rain again and the rain froze and tree branches fell down onto everything, and some cows Bernabé had up in the canyon froze to death. Whereupon suddenly, gnashing his teeth so hard little pieces of porcelain literally spewed from his mouth, the sheriff jumped up and grabbed an armload of her saints and threw them into the holocaust. Carolina shrieked, plunged into the storm, retrieved her precious little statues, and cried for three days.

But God forbid they should ever yell at each other.

Bernabé dreamed of that, though. He dreamed of leaping suddenly out of an armchair and throwing his clenched fists over his head as he bellowed, “Carolina, shuttup!” Or: “Carolina, you piss me off!” Or again: “Carolina, go to hell and take the saints and the dichos with you!”

Except that underneath he loved her very much, loved her plump gentle flesh, her quiet way of sewing, cooking … of being true. He was grateful, too, for the way she had of never really reproaching him for anything. Despite Vera Gonzáles down in Chamisaville and a hundred others before her, Bernabé felt loyal to Carolina. Their children were grown up and gone, they were both entering middle age, and yet their sex wasn't all that bad either. In fact, Bernabé periodically lusted after her way of making love with him whenever and however he wanted, in a slow, sensual, gratifying way, or else allowing him his “perversions” when he wanted them, doing things to or with him in a quiet, mystical, almost unbearably religious and sexy manner, if that's what he needed. Bernabé did not even mind it too badly when, after a really good tumble during which neither of them had thought about contraception, Carolina rolled heavily out of bed, and, as she tiptoed in her lethargic yet sexy way toward the bathroom to douche herself, said to him: “A stitch in time saves nine, you know…”

Bernabé knew.

Right now, Carolina returned to the bedroom and handed over a glass. What was in it—?

“Just some whiskey and a little ground-up oshá,” she explained tenderly, adding of course: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Bernabé closed his eyes, steeled himself, and drank. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't pretend her phony potion had cured him. In fact, his headache was straightaway multiplied by three. But how could he tell her the stuff she gave him didn't work?

And, caught in his eternal dilemma, Bernabé started thinking about how people always tried to kid each other. This led to thoughts—as he lay there tensed, waiting for another gunshot—about the ways people tried to fool animals. And painted cattleguards came to mind.

For some strange reason, Bernabé had never been able to accept the fact that painted cattleguards actually worked. A real cattleguard, consisting of ten or fifteen steel rails or two-by-fours set six to eight inches apart and laid across a dug-out section of road, kept cows, afraid of plunging a hoof between the rails and maybe breaking a leg, from crossing. A painted cattleguard, however, was just that: nothing more subtle or elaborate than a group of evenly spaced white stripes painted across a macadam road. They were also about five hundred dollars cheaper to build than real cattleguards.

One such ersatz cattleguard adorned the north–south highway a few hundred yards below Ladd Devine's Miracle Valley development sign. And every time Bernabé drove over those twelve white stripes, he flinched and, shaking his head, muttered to himself: “It beats me how a handful of white stripes can fool cows like that.”

Bernabé likened the painted cattleguard to the sort of stickers—“Protected by Acme Burglar Alarm System”—store owners who could not afford burglar alarm systems put on prominent display in their business windows.

Or to those signs—“Beware of the Dog”—that suburban folks too cheap to invest in a ferocious mutt, but nevertheless terrified of burglars, displayed on their lawns.

Or then again, Bernabé figured a painted cattleguard might be said to share a common soul with a shapely woman who wore falsies.

And Bernabé wondered: Did the painted cattleguard concept have some relationship to artificial insemination, also?

Or how about its relationship to the plastic flowers in Onofre Martínez's garden that so confused his myriad hummingbirds? Too, how about its relationship to Onofre's invisible arm?

Of course, ultimately, painted cattleguards were like Bernabé Montoya himself, pretending to be a sheriff, when actually the title Bumbling Misfit might have suited him better than did his badge.

I oughtta take a week's vacation, Bernabé thought, and use it to teach Lavadie's cows how to cross that cattleguard.

The sheriff couldn't stand to see cows fooled by that phony cattleguard. In fact, it just about broke his heart to see any thing or any person tricked into believing in something that wasn't real.

Once Bernabé had mentioned his uneasiness about the painted cattleguard to Nick Rael.

“Listen,” Nick said. “A bandido walks into a bank, he's got a gun in his right hand, he asks for the teller's money or her life. Maybe the gun in his hand is carved out of soap, maybe it's just one of those clever replicas you send away for, maybe it's nothing but a lousy cap pistol. On the other hand, who knows for sure it ain't a real gun? And who wants to be the chump to find out, is it the real McCoy or isn't it the real McCoy?”

“I see what you mean,” Bernabé said.

“Well, that's the way it is with Lavadie's cows and that painted cattleguard,” Nick said.

Still, the whole thing unsettled Bernabé. He sensed an inherent unfairness residing in that painted cattleguard. How come, if you couldn't fool a horse or a man or a goat with such a simplistic phony design, you could nevertheless twist the tail, udder if it had one, and both horns off a cow with it?

Bernabé rolled the concept of painted cattleguards around in his brain the way a lapidary rolls a rough stone around in a rock tumbler to make it smooth. Bernabé never could take the rough edges off that concept, though, the way a lapidary's tumbler could take the rough edges off his rock, making almost any mineral chunk shine like a jewel.

So Bernabé never truly understood the deep-down discomfort caused in himself by that painted cattleguard.

Nobody else understood his discomfort, either.

One day Bernabé decided that the painted cattleguard just south of the Zopilote's Miracle Valley sign had a lot in common with Joe Mondragón's beanfield.

Or should that be vice versa?

Bernabé, for one, didn't know.

But he tormented himself like this over useless questions all the time.

People said because of this nonsensical bent, the sheriff was driving himself bananas. Why worry, they reasoned, about something so irrelevant? If a thing worked, it worked. And painted cattleguards had always worked just like a little piece of oshá in the pocket had always kept away poisonous snakes. Start questioning why a thing that worked worked, people warned, and you were asking that thing to stop working. The time to start worrying about how things worked was when they broke down or fell apart, and not before.

Seferino Pacheco understood, though. Several years back he had told Bernabé: “Six hundred years ago maybe you could have grown up to be somebody like Michelangelo.”

“Who was Michelangelo?” the sheriff asked.

Disgusted by such philistine ignorance, Pacheco reconsidered. “On second thought, maybe you wouldn't of grown up to be somebody like Michelangelo. Maybe even six hundred years ago you just would of grown up to be somebody in the tradition of our own Cleofes Apodaca or Padre Sinkovich. Maybe you just would of grown up to be somebody like yourself, all the time tripping over the hem of your own toga.”

Bernabé had asked Nick Rael: “Who was Michelangelo?”

“He was an ancient philosopher,” Nick teased, “who believed that men's souls were round like apples, the color of pearls, and had little white wings.”

Well, on the night a bullet went through Joe Mondragón's window, Bernabé studied Joe's beanfield, and he studied the painted cattleguard, and he wondered about the relationship between them, but he never really got anywhere with either.

His headache only grew worse.

The sheriff would have liked a mind that could deal with abstract thoughts and ideas. Instead, he possessed a mind capable of tinkering with things just enough to make them impossibly confusing and himself so dissatisfied with his own intellectual inadequacies that he would never be happy.

As a teen-ager, Bernabé had taken apart a 1939 Plymouth, but he had never been able to get it back together again.

“A fool and his reason are soon parted,” Carolina once said reproachfully.

“Ai, Chihuahua,” the sheriff had grumbled.

Finally, on the night a bullet knocked the crucifix off the bedroom wall onto Joe Mondragón's head, Bernabé drifted back into an uneasy sleep. He dreamed about the piñata Bernabé, and about all the naked women he had ever loved hitting him with sticks. They flailed away, giggling and prancing, their breasts bouncing like happy puppies, while Bernabé twisted and twirled, reversing direction with every blow, eyes closed, hugging his knees, spinning this way and that way, getting all black and blue, and unable to burst no matter how hard he tried.

*   *   *

Ladd Devine sat on the edge of a mahogany table; Jerry Grindstaff stood over by a window; Emerson Lapp was seated at an antique rolltop desk with a pen in his hand and a pad of legal-sized yellow paper in front of him; two state cops, William Koontz and Onofre Martínez's shameful offspring, Bruno Martínez, were perched uncomfortably side by side on a delicate brocaded couch; located across from them on a stiff divan were the two Forest Service personnel, Carl Abeyta and Floyd Cowlie; and Horsethief Shorty was lounging in a wing-back chair with one leg dangling over an arm, smoking a cigar. Emerson Lapp had a headache because of Shorty's cigar. He always got headaches from Shorty's cigars. In fact, Shorty himself often gave Lapp a monumental headache. It had something to do with Shorty's overall smell, sloppy bearing, and arrogance, and the way Ladd Devine tolerated all this. Lapp himself would not have tolerated Shorty for a minute. Neither of the two cops nor the Forest Service people nor Jerry G. would have tolerated Shorty either. And as for Shorty?—he just sat there languidly chewing on his cigar, basking—as he always had—in their hostility.

Devine said, “Jesus H. Christ.”

There was silence in the room, everybody except Shorty—who was grinning almost imbecilically—wearing their longest faces.

Devine continued: “I'd like to know who was the dumb jerk took a shot at Joe Mondragón's house, I really would.”

Again there was a profound, maybe guilty, silence in the room.

Eventually Shorty said, “You don't suppose, do you, that it might have something to do with that Secret Service baboon your friends in the capital sent up here, do you?”

“I don't know and I don't give a shit,” Devine said. “But when people start throwing hot lead around this town like that—well, Christ. What do they think I'm sinking my money into this Miracle Valley project for, for kicks? Is that what they think? Do they think I'm sticking my neck out just so the bottom can fall out because a lot of trigger-happy hoodlums have turned the valley into a shooting gallery?”

“We're gonna try and find out who did it, sir,” Bruno Martínez said, practically choking on that “sir,” because he happened to dislike Ladd Devine as much as the next man and besides, he thought he knew who had fired that bullet.

“Well boys I sure hope so,” Devine said. “Because that's all we need right now is a lot, or even just a little, slaphappy stuff like that. As it is, if this gets out to some of my backers—” With a handkerchief he wiped his forehead. “And I mean it, too. I want you fellows—” he nodded at the two cops “—to put the word out, understand? Shorty, you too. You know how things stack up around here.”