The Milagro Beanfield War (60 page)

On occasion it was not so much a sound that she seemed to have heard, but rather a smell that was in the air; and this smell, although never quite caught and confirmed, was an autumn aroma, an unsettling wisp of yellow aspen, smoking grass, apples, and frost. On the evening of a hot July day it would suddenly be there; or rather, she would think that it had just been there, over her shoulder, or on a puff of air carried through the open window as she sat lovingly touching her child-bearing scars. Autumn, crisp, and smelling of piñon and cold ditch water and tangerine clouds and hay; and the sound of the dry brown and twisty sweet pea shells suddenly splitting open, spitting out their seeds, while crickets crackled in dry grass—was
that
the sound she heard? It was suddenly there, that's all—the essence of those things … yet always gone before she could decide if it had been there or not. And how was she to explain why it gave her such a start, that far call or near whisper that was never quite there, that sudden whiff of autumn that always disappeared into the lazy hot July dust and sunshine and summer rain smell before she could decide if it had actually been on the air.

One day, with her hands pressed gently against her stomach, Carolina fell asleep in her chair by the window. And asleep, she dreamed. It was early autumn, years ago, during a rare year when a late frost in the springtime had not killed the orchards, and the trees were almost overburdened with glistening fruit. The air was jubilant with meadowlark songs. But then it started to snow, a gentle October snow, and the birds stopped singing. There was no wind, and this snow fell quietly; perched on a thousand fence posts, the meadowlarks waited for it to be over. It snowed all morning and part of the afternoon, and then it ceased. The air was not very cold; the mountains were lost in varying shades of gray mist; the sky was overcast, quiet—everything was immersed in lull. A few inches of snow lay on the ground; every apple on their trees bore an icy white cap. After a while the meadowlarks began to sing again, but their melodious calls were out of place, foreign in this gray, snowy landscape.

Then Carolina saw her child Benjamin, the boy who had died of leukemia, in a strange lonely pose under an apple tree. He had soft brown hair and small frightened eyes and a strained smile on his tight thin lips. He reached up and touched an apple, tipping it slightly, causing the snow to fall off in a little powdery swoop that brushed past his face, leaving a vague white fan across his dark jersey—

Carolina awoke, her skin prickling all over, tears in her eyes; and she didn't understand.

On another day, too, she fell asleep in that chair at the window after her work was done, with her fingertips pressed lightly like a blind person's against those stomach scars, and again she dreamed about her dead son, the only child who had stayed home.

This time she was out in a field with the boy, holding his hand, and it was raining, not hard, but steadily, although almost everywhere around them on the horizon sunshine gleamed.

Benjamin said, “Mama, is the rain alive?” And she answered him, “I think so, isn't everything alive and infused with the spirit of God?”

And he said, “Then does the rain have dreams too, like us?”

“‘Dreams?' Does the rain have dreams—?”

He pointed, smiling, toward the mountains, some of whose slopes were spangled with sunlight. “Rainbows are the rain's dreams,” he said. “Look at that one over there.”

She looked. “But where?” she asked; she could see nothing.

“Right over there, Mama. Right in front of us. Right there.”

But it wasn't there: she couldn't see—

Carolina awoke afraid, goose-pimpled, and again crying. She took her hands off her belly and pressed them for several minutes against her face, saying Hail Marys until the fear imparted by the dream faded.

For too long this house, her home, had been silent.

*   *   *

Early on a Wednesday morning, the Trailways bus made its regular stop outside Nick Rael's store, and the driver, Bill Thorpe, told his lone passenger he could have a five-minute rest stop in order to stretch, buy refreshments, or whatever. The passenger, a grizzled old fart reeking of booze (later, Bill Thorpe found eight empty beer cans in the bus restroom), staggered out, clumsily negotiated the warped wooden steps leading up to the store, and entered the freshly sawdusted interior just as Nick was bending under the counter to hunt up a package containing legal papers Charley Bloom was sending north to a Colorado client.

Exactly what happened next, or why it happened, nobody—least of all Nick Rael—ever managed to figure out. “All I know,” a trembling, almost-hysterical Nick told Bill Koontz, Granny Smith, Bernabé Montoya, and Bruno Martínez fifteen minutes later, “is I'm just starting to raise my head when this ax blade comes down, blam! right into the counter there where you can see the chop mark, about six inches from my nose. And that crazy-eyed old son of a bitch—” Nick added, pointing to where Bill Thorpe's lone passenger lay on his back, still clutching the ax, with blood from the hole made by a soft-nosed .38-caliber bullet Nick had fired into the center of his concave chest running out into the damp sawdust, “is on the other end of it. Shit, I almost dropped a ripe tomato into my pants right then and there!”

“Okay, Nick, okay,” Granny Smith said. “Easy on the graphics, huh? Just the story. Just give us the story like it happened.”

“Well, I dropped the freight package but fast, and he pulled out the blade and swung again. Only this time he hit the cash register, the motherfucker. Look at the cash register! What am I gonna do about the cash register?”

“Don't you got insurance?” Bruno Martínez asked.

“Sure I got insurance. Who doesn't? But Christ Almighty, man. I'm gonna need a whole new cash register. You know how long it could take to order another one like this? And in the meantime what am I supposed to use, an abacus?”

“So he swung,” Granny Smith said, “and hit the abacus.”

“The cash register.”

“Yeah, the cash register.”

“Where'd he get the ax?” Bill Koontz asked.

“I dunno, I guess from over there in the rack. Does it look like one's missing? Sure, that's our brand he's got. Count 'em. I oughtta have eight axes in that rack.”

“Nope, there's only seven there now,” Bruno Martínez confirmed.

“Well then, so that's where he got it from,” Nick said.

“Okay, okay.” Granny Smith let his eyes flick nervously over the dead man. “Then with the next swing he hit the cash register.”

“That's when I started for the gun,” Nick said. “What, I'm supposed to let this stark raving lunatic chop off my head? I'm supposed to ask him politely why he's going berserk? Jesus! I keep the gun under the counter, on the second shelf, you know, within easy reach. But I hadda reach up for it this time, see, because I'm on the floor, and I just got it in my hand and pulled the hammer back when he comes running around the counter, grunting and babbling, with the ax raised over his head, so Christ, man, I wasn't gonna ask him about his problem, I just pulled the trigger.”

“You fired once?”

“Once my
ass.
I fired six times!”

“Ai, Chihuahua.”

“Well what did you expect? At the first shot he stops, but he didn't fall over or anything. He just stopped and stared at me, babbling and frothing at the mouth with his eyes rolling all around the place like sheep's eyes in a hot skillet, so fuck it, I emptied the gun at him, and he still didn't fall over right away. Christ, I was even reaching up for a box of shells when all of a sudden, slowly like, he just tipped over backward with a thump.”

“It looks to me like you only hit him once,” Bernabé Montoya said. The sheriff, the only person standing over by the dead man, was staring down at his froth-flecked, unshaven, bulbous, and starey-eyed frog face. Perhaps Bernabé was waiting to see if an apple-shaped, pearl-colored, white wingèd soul was going to blurt out of the corpse's gaping mouth.

“He had a ticket for Denver,” Bill Thorpe said. “He was my only passenger.”

“He must of been crazy,” Bruno Martínez said. “This world is filling up with crazies.”

“No wallet?” Bill Koontz asked Granny Smith.

“No wallet. No money. No nothing.”

“What do you think, Bernie?” Nick asked.

“Oh, I dunno,” the sheriff said slowly, still not taking his eyes off the dead man's face. “Who knows? Maybe he was lonely.”

Everybody else in the store harrumphed sarcastically. At which point, Herbie Goldfarb, on whom all the cop cars outside somehow hadn't registered, tripped gaily through a pebble barrage and into the store to buy a candy bar.

“You see that son of a bitch?”
Nick screamed at Herbie, pointing to the dead man.
“That's why you should carry a gun!”

*   *   *

Four days later, about three in the afternoon, the storekeeper was standing at the counter reading the sports page of the Capital City
Reporter,
and although he didn't hear anybody enter the store, suddenly something made Nick look up, “and here was this big, wavy-haired, bearded, supersmiley, Jesus freak–looking creep standing in front of me,” Nick told Bill Koontz. “I never seen him before in my life. I figured, though, at first, he was probably from over at the Evening Star commune, qué no? One of them. So I asked him what did he want, and he points to all the staurolites I got in the pan to the left of the register, you know, and he asked me what were those. So I told him. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I guess it was the usual spiel. I bullshitted about how they were called fairy crosses, and about how this is one of the few places in the world you can find little cross-shaped crystals like that, and then you know what he did? He took out his wallet which was bulging with cash—like maybe I never saw so much loot in a single wallet all at once—and he said ‘I want to buy them all.' Well, shit, porqué no? I got a whole bunch more in a cardboard box in back that Onofre Martínez sold me, so I said sure, go ahead, and after counting them the freak hands me thirty-eight dollars and just scoops all those staurolites off the tray, stuffs them into his pockets, and makes the sign of the cross or something … and smiles at me and walks out.”

“Well, the reason I asked, see,” Bill Koontz said, carefully tucking the man's photograph back into his wallet, “is we found this same guy pulled off the highway in a little MG convertible last night down by Doña Luz, dead as a doornail.”

“Hijo, Madre,” Nick said, closing his eyes, “not another one.”

“Yeah. And this one's just as weird. Like we thought at first it was dope, probably he OD'd. So we sent him down to Shroeder in the capital for an autopsy, and guess what Shroeder found in this guy's stomach—”

“Thirty-eight staurolites?”

“Thirty-five.”

Nick let out a slow, lamenting sigh, at the end of which he asked: “I wonder what happened to the other three?”

“There's something in the air,” Koontz said, starting to leave. “I don't know exactly what, but I wish to Christ that all of a sudden winter would come.”

*   *   *

Stella Armijo called up Harlan Betchel's wife, Greta, with some disquieting news.

“Hey Mrs. Betchel,” Stella fairly shouted to Greta and the two other anonymous party-liners listening in, “I just saw Mercedes Rael drive past our place behind the wheel of your car!”

“Oh nonsense,” Greta Betchel, a petite woman who fancied herself both a nineteenth-century graveyard poet and the world's last jardinière suprême à la Louis XIV, replied. “First of all, Stella dear, you know Mercedes Rael is
much
too old to drive. And second of all—”

Then she stopped.

And she called to her son Albie, who was out back in the palace gardens shooting butterflies with a BB gun: “Albie, darling, be a dear sweet thing, would you, honey, and toddle around front to see if the car's still there?”

“Nope, it isn't,” Albie said, squeezing the trigger on a bright orange monarch; “Dad just drove off a minute ago; I heard him leave.”

“Excuse me, Stella, I've got to call Harlan.” Greta hung up suddenly, lifted the receiver immediately, and dialed her husband, all in one smooth, only quasi-hysterical, motion.

“Why would I take the car?” Harlan wanted to know. “It's maybe fifty yards to the café, maybe less. When did I ever take the car?”

“Stella Armijo just called to say that she saw Mercedes Rael drive past her house in our car.”

Harlan frowned: “Well, just a sec, honey, lemme check.”

“Bad news?” Nick queried uneasily as Harlan lumbered through the door.

“Where's your mother, Nick? Stella Armijo just called Greta, said she saw Mercedes driving past her house in our car.”

“You gotta be kidding,” Nick laughed. “My mom hasn't had a license for fifteen years, not since she totaled that brand new '51 Ford pickup I had up in the canyon by rolling forty feet into Little Baldy Creek with one of Eusebio Lavadie's cows in the back. C'mon, Harlan, don't make bad jokes.”

“Where is she, Nick?”

“In the front yard, in the backyard, in the bedroom taking a nap.”

“You mind if I have a look-see?”

“Suit yourself.”

As Harlan left, Nick's phone rang. “Hey, Nick?”

“Yeah. Who's this?”

“Bertha Gleason here. Now maybe you aren't going to believe this, and I don't think I would if I were you, but you better trot on over next door and check if your mother's at home, because if she isn't I think I just saw her drive by here in that pink and white Dodge belongs to Harlan and Greta Betchel.”

Nick sat down. “Which way was she headed?”

“I'm not sure.”

“That bad—?”