The Milagro Beanfield War (33 page)

“What
did
happen at that meeting with the undercover flatfoot?” Shorty asked. “How come I wasn't invited?”

“We weren't there either,” Bill Koontz said.

“I don't know who sent him,” Bruno Martínez added. “You ask me, downstate should keep their noses out of this.”

“Looks to me like a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing,” Shorty drawled.

Emerson Lapp said, “This whole affair has become rather unbelievably sticky.”

All heads turned toward Lapp, all eyes except Shorty's assessing him with the dull disdain of macho eyes confronting a little Lord Fauntleroy.

Irritated by the distraction, Devine broke in, “Explain to me, Shorty, will you? just what you know about the meeting they had.”

Shorty shrugged. “They called a meeting; I wasn't invited to that one either. The lawyer Bloom, he got up and explained the dam, the conservancy district, and your role in this town.”

Devine blurted, “Who the hell does Bloom think he is?”

“He thinks he's so scared he almost fainted in front of all those people,” Shorty said with a wide grin.

“You know, Shorty, this really isn't that amusing,” Devine observed.

“Amusing?” Shorty arched his eyebrows. “Excuse me, Ladd—” Both Jerry G. and Emerson Lapp flinched, as they always flinched when Shorty used their boss's first name. “Excuse me, Ladd, but this whole situation is pretty fucking funny, if you ask me. Downstate doesn't know what upstate is doing; everybody in the valley is totally confused and disorganized; we're trying to get it together and they're trying to get it together, and nobody knows what to do, including the state's most influential song-and-dance team of Bookman and Noyes. In fact, nothing has happened but everybody's hysterical, and all because an uneducated half-wit Mexican decided to grow a half-acre field of beans.”

“Shorty,” Devine remarked patiently, “what do you suggest we might have done about that meeting?”

“We could of set up a .50-caliber machine gun and shot the old geezers as they tottered out,” Shorty grinned, touching a match—arrogantly lit on his fly zipper—to the end of his cigar.

In the ensuing quiet, Emerson Lapp expelled a long exasperated sigh.

At length, Jerry G. said, “If we let them get away with stuff like this meeting, they'll just get worse.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they'll just get more confident.”

“And if we attempt to sabotage their next meeting—?”

“They might burn down the Dancing Trout,” Shorty said glibly.

“So what do we do?” Devine asked.

“Ignore them,” Shorty proposed. “What's that phrase I heard an educated man once use about this country—the ‘Tyranny of Tolerance'?”

“Oh God, Shorty,” Emerson Lapp muttered under his breath. “You're so erudite.”

“There must be a way to control this thing.” Devine looked to the cops, then to Floyd Cowlie and Carl Abeyta.

“Maybe there's some way we could forbid them to open the church again, because it's unsafe or a health menace or something,” Bruno Martínez suggested unconvincingly.

“They'd come up here and hold their meetings on the Dancing Trout baseball diamond,” Shorty asserted gleefully.

“Shorty,” Devine said, “I think I'd like a little more out of you than sarcasm.”

“Ladd, you know I've always given you 110 percent.”

Emerson Lapp rolled his eyes to the ceiling and banged his pencil down against the legal pad. Jerry G. shifted uncomfortably, moving his eyes nervously from Devine to the cops to Shorty.

“I think maybe the lawyer is one of their really weak links,” Devine said.

“Maybe you're right. He's a chickenshit, so far as I know, from the word go.”

“Just how far do you know, Shorty?”

“Not very. I see him around. We never officially met.”

Ladd Devine stood up and paced over toward the rolltop desk, turned, and walked back to the table. “I could talk with him,” he said. “I'm not sure what I'd say, though.”

“You could offer to buy him off, or threaten to cut him up into little pieces and feed him to the loan sharks.”

“Very funny,” Devine murmured, glumly eyeballing Shorty.

“As I see it, there's an inherent problem in all this.” Shorty suddenly swung himself up so that he was seated on the arm of the chair. “You want to pull the rug out once and for all from under the people in this valley, Ladd, and you don't really give a shit how you do it, with guns or with money, with state cops or with hired hoodlums—speaking of which, what's the name of that police strong-arm junkie out at the Evening Star, anyway—Lord Rhino? You might ask him about who fired the shot at Joe's place. But anyway: if you can just wipe 'em out with pieces of paper covered with legalese, so much the better. The problem is: how to do it without pulling the rug out from under yourself, right? That's all. That's what's under discussion here. Very simple.”

Wearily, Devine looked at Shorty. Then he looked at Jerry G., whose gaze fell to the floor. Then he looked at Emerson Lapp, whose eyes also dropped to the floor. After that he looked at the two cops, who became very interested in the hands in their laps. The Forest Service men also abruptly commenced scrutinizing their thighs. So he looked back at Shorty, who was looking fearlessly back at him, and Devine realized that if he was going to make it safely through this mess he would have to put a lot of his eggs in Shorty's basket.

With that, Shorty said, “Say, Ladd, why don't you have Floyd and Carl here set a forest fire?”

“Hey, just a minute!” Carl Abeyta stiffened self-righteously and stifled an urge to lunge across the room at Shorty. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Setting a fire,” Shorty said calmly. “Christ, that's one of the few ways those men down there have earned a living around here. I know of a dozen guys from town, the past twenty years, who've gone up and set the trees on fire. For crissakes, man, it's—what is the pay now? Two-fifty an hour around the clock? Three dollars? And the Forest Service—God bless Smokey the Bear!—packs in potatoes and all the fresh-killed beef you can eat. You want to get this town's mind off that beanfield, light the forest and hire all the heavies to put it out. And keep lighting little fires here and there—”

“Oh, hey, Shorty,” Carl Abeyta whined. “Don't you have any idea of how much money we get for trees when we sell them to timber companies?”

Shorty said, “Okay, then. Ladd, why don't you build maybe four more cottages down there beyond the tennis courts?”

“Why should I? We don't need them.”

“You could hire maybe fifteen people from town to work on them, building the frames, laying foundations, making adobes—”

“I'm not sure I follow.”

“If you're paying them they aren't gonna slit your throat, are they?” Shorty was suddenly angry at his boss, at the dude ranch, at himself. “I'll go down there myself and offer Joe Mondragón two months of work he can't possibly refuse. Buy your toilets, all your plumbing materials from Ruby Archuleta's Pipe Queen and there's another few leaders of this thing on your side. It's time to throw the peasants a bone, Ladd.”

“It doesn't make sense to construct houses I don't need. That would just be money down the drain.”

“Why not call it insurance?” Shorty said, nodding to the cops, and then to Emerson Lapp, as he walked out.

The room stayed silent while Devine lit a small cigar.

“What's eating Shorty?” Carl Abeyta finally asked.

“What's eating all of us,” Bruno Martínez noted sourly. “I can't even visit home for a meal these days; my old man throws me out of the house.”

“With just one arm?”

Bruno nodded and shrugged. “He sics that fucking three-legged mastiff on me even before I get out of the police car.”

“Ah, what the hell,” Devine sighed. “Let's break it up for now, my friends…”

After they had gone, Devine and Emerson Lapp remained alone in the room.

“It's a bitch,” Lapp said reflectively, tapping his front teeth with the eraser tip of his pencil.

“Yeah.” Devine loosened his belt, unlaced his shoes, and set his stocking feet up on a glass coffee table. “You're right, it sure is a bitch.”

The boss let his guard down now, as he did but rarely, and then usually only when alone, or occasionally—as now—with his longtime secretary.

“Yessir,” Devine repeated, “it sure is a bitch.” And he added, “Em, do you think it can be done?”

“Oh for God's sake, Mr. D., of course it can be done.”

Devine smoked his cigar quietly for a while. Then he chuckled: “Hey, let's you and me ride on up into the hills and set that forest on fire, Em.”

“Why don't we go ahead and burn down the Dancing Trout while we're at it, Mr. D.”

Devine guffawed, sputtered a little, giggled once or twice. “Better yet, Em, let's just burn down the town and pave it over for a parking lot.”

The secretary shrugged, smiling painfully; they lapsed into silence for a minute.

“Now you take my grandaddy,” Devine began again abruptly. “There was a remarkable man. He never flew in an airplane. You know why? He said to me, he said: ‘Always go on the ground, Laddy'—that's when I was a kid he said that. He said, ‘Always go on the ground, Laddy, otherwise you'll lose contact with everything important.' And I think people down there, around here, I think they actually liked the crusty old son of a bitch.”

“Things were different then, Mr. D. People were different.”

“Oh, my grandaddy sucked blood,” Devine said. “You can bet he sucked blood. He hurt people in a big way. He had a cruel and brutal style.”

Again the secretary shrugged. “I guess it's the nature of the beast.”

“Yes, I suppose so…” A great fatigue suddenly swept over Devine. “Oh shit,” he mumbled. “I loved that old bastard, Em, I really did. He had class, you know? I don't have any class. Or not much, anyway. Sometimes I wonder if I have any class at all—I don't think so. I don't think people like me much, but I don't even think they hate me, Em, do they? I think I'm just neutral. I'm a neutral S.O.B. An anonymous tycoon. And you know how that feels—?”

Lapp, surprised by his employer's sudden dive into a maudlin mood, did not reply.

Devine grinned: “It just feels neutral,” he chuckled. “Not good, really. Not bad, either…”

But, incredibly, there was a tear in one eye. And Emerson Lapp—horrified—quickly left the room.

“My old grandaddy,” Devine called after him. “My old grandaddy, he would have set the forest on fire! Did you know, Em, that
he once slit the throat of a Mexican whore who tried to rob him and then he let her have it while she bled to death on the floor!”

*   *   *

Kyril Montana and Bud Gleason met in the Conquistador Lounge of the La Fonda Hotel in the capital for lunch.

“Listen, Ky,” Bud began nervously as soon as they had ordered drinks, “things are beginning to get awfully uptight back home.”

“In exactly what way?” the agent asked, leaning forward slightly.

“Well, for starters it looks as if a kind of informal Chicano organization is starting up, I don't know for sure. There's rumors galore, but it's hard to pinpoint anything. They had a meeting, though—you probably already know about that. On your side they're organizing, too. Somebody fired a shot at Joe Mondragón's house a few nights ago. Also, Joe and some friends were beaten up at the old elementary school basketball court about a week ago.”

“I knew about the meeting,” Kyril Montana said, noting that Bud had said “on
your
side,” instead of “on
our
side,” and he told himself he had better keep a sharp eye on his old college pal. Bud owed him a loyalty beyond old school ties, however, because several times in the past the agent had fed him information about certain land and real estate deals around the capital that had allowed Bud to buy into, and capitalize on, some fairly lucrative developments. Kyril Montana had also helped Bud out of one ticklish situation involving federally controlled interstate land sales in which Bud had become embroiled during his earlier days when he was based in the capital.

“Who fired that shot, Bud? Who beat up Joe and his friends?”

Bud shrugged, eyes bobbing unhappily. The waitress arrived with a martini and a bloody mary. The undercover agent took a quick sip of his drink and handed it back to the waitress. “I'm sorry,” he said politely, “but you tell the bartender to mix this thing the way I asked for it, easy on the salt and Worcestershire, and with a single, not a double shot of vodka, okay?”

The waitress, a pretty girl who flustered easily, apologized, “Oh, I'm so sorry, sir,” and “Of course, sir,” and hurried away.

Kyril Montana said, “So do you know, or don't you know, who attacked Joe?”

“Well, not for sure,” Bud mumbled, toying nervously with a fork. “You know … not me, of course. What?—I got a heart could take that? Shit no. But maybe Eusebio Lavadie did it, or one of Devine's foremen, the quiet weird one named Jerry Grindstaff. Maybe Harlan Betchel was involved, maybe not. Nick Rael, too, he could of been in on it, him and an off-duty cop, say Bill Koontz or Granny Smith—I dunno. There's a lot of talk, you understand, but nobody really knows. A name I've heard a couple of times is this Lord Crocodile or Lord Lion or something who lives out at the Evening Star commune, but then you'd know more about that than me. They had a meeting, though, Joe's people, Ruby Archuleta, and they're bound to retaliate, and you wanna know the truth, I'm a little scared. Things have never been tense in quite this way before.”

“If they retaliate and get caught, and Joe Mondragón is with them, which is likely, then it will be over.”