The Milagro Beanfield War (78 page)

“Right here, in this little box, you got it I'm white. I ain't white, I'm brown.”

“You're either white, or you're black, or you're oriental,” Bill Koontz said.

“I'm brown, you son of a bitch.”

“I think that about raps it up, qué no?” Bernabé Montoya said uneasily, edging between them and giving Joe a dark hairy eyeball. “I think Mr. Bloom and Mr. Mondragón ought to leave, now. So long, boys, you be careful on that road going back. And José—?”

Joe turned around at the door. “Yeah?”

“Stick around home, okay? This isn't quite over yet.”

“Sure.” Joe grinned obnoxiously. “I lived here all my life, didn't I?”

When they were outside, Koontz said, “I wonder if that wasn't a dumb thing to do. I should of just put him in the car and took him down to Chamisaville.”

“He's not going anyplace,” Bernabé said.

“I can't help feeling he shouldn't be out there with them—”

“This place was gonna explode,” Bernabé said. “You dumbbells were sitting on a stick of dynamite.”

“Suppose they don't leave—?”

“They'll leave. They're not crazy. And anyway, they won.”

The policemen watched as Joe talked with a group of about ten people. Others just sat in their trucks, half-obscured behind dusty and cracked windshields, placidly looking on. One of Ruby Archuleta's Milagro Land and Water Protection Association petitions was making the rounds, and, laughing triumphantly, people were signing like mad. Bloom hung back while Joe bragged about what he would have done to Koontz and the rest of the chotas if they had tried to work him over, but the lawyer also kept glancing nervously at the headquarters, waiting for somebody to rescind his noisy little client's freedom; finally he got so nervous that he interrupted Joe's animated obscene oration, suggesting it was about time everybody split.

“That lawyer,” Bruno Martínez growled. “I'd like to cut his balls off.”

“Leave him alone,” Bernabé said. “It's not gonna work out the way you wanted it to work out. But you can still salvage it, maybe. And that's about all. Try for anything more and we're all in a lot of hot water.”

Koontz sat down, lighting a cigarette. “You really think those people out there mean business?”

Bernabé said, “I know it. Did anybody here call the DA?”

“I talked with him yesterday,” Bruno said. “He and Trucho had talked. They were batting around an open charge of murder, but, you know how it is, that Pacheco won't die.”

“The way I'd play it, if anybody asks me,” the sheriff said, despite the fact that nobody had asked, or was going to ask, “is I'd fine him for destruction of property, making a disturbance, and discharging a weapon within the town limits. The assault you got him on now won't stick, not with those two witnesses.”

“Period—?” Koontz said glumly.

Bernabé stubbed out his cigarette and sucked in a deep breath, which he expelled very slowly, never having felt quite this heady before. “Listen,” he said quietly. “I sat in a room while that man of yours, that Montana fellow, outlined the plan he had. Now, I know somebody didn't just make up those plans for fun and games, but I do know they didn't work. And although personally I've kicked José Mondragón's ass from here to breakfast and back again, I also realize times are changing and there isn't room for the same type of people up here that there used to be when I was growing up. But that agent don't understand the situation, and I don't think any of you do either, and you're in deep trouble if you let that boss of yours, that Trucho, shoot off his theories half-cocked. I know the Zopilote can win in Milagro, but after these couple of days I know he can't win without a war, and wherever those orders on José came from, I know they came with the express intention of avoiding a war. Or a little revolution. Or whatever the hell it's fashionable to call it these days—”

With that Bernabé suddenly walked outside and almost stunned everybody by signing Ruby Archuleta's petition. But just as he was about to put his name on the wrinkled page, his steady salary as sheriff clobbered him like a stroke, and instead of signing, he read over the petition, nodded a sort of noncommittal approval, and, with an audible sigh, passed it on.

Pretty soon men, women, and a few children—people with one-acre farms and barren ten-tree orchards and horses they never rode and ranchers with three-cow herds and no place to graze them—returned to their dilapidated vehicles, backed up, and pulled out, heading north toward home. In a moment only two state cars and Bernabé Montoya's pickup remained in the parking lot.

At which point the county sheriff, Ernie Maestas, accompanied by two deputies, arrived. And right behind them came Granny Smith, emergency signal flashing. And then Sal Bugbee and Buddy Namath showed up, each in separate cars.

“What happened?” Ernie Maestas chortled. “How come you're all still alive?”

“Oh fuck off,” Bill Koontz said.

Ernie slapped him on the back. “When you gonna at least learn to swear in Spanish, you tight-assed gabacho marrano, huh?”

“When I'm dead, bury me in one of your lousy camposantos and I'll learn it from all the skeletons of your people.”

The phone rang. It was Trucho. “Look,” he shouted excitedly, “don't do anything with Mondragón. Arrest him for something petty, release him on his own recognizance. Things could be a lot more ready to blow than we suspect.”

“We already did all that,” Koontz said wearily.

“Fine. Lemme talk with Montana.”

“He ain't back yet.”

“He didn't come in with the rest of the posse?”

“Not so far as I know.”

“Well, when that bastard comes in have him call me. And that don't mean five or ten minutes after he checks in, either. I want him to call me the second he walks through that door. Who's talking to him on the radio?”

“Nobody. There's a lot of weather disturbance up there. Nobody's been able to get in touch with him since around noon, I guess.”

“Keep trying, dammit. We got to talk.”

“Yes sir.”

Bill Koontz hung up the phone and wiped his brow. In an hour he would be off duty, thank Christ. He went back to the bathroom and flushed the goddam toilet.

Part Six

“We wouldn't none of us have even been here tonight … if it wasn't for the love of all them stupid Coyote Angels.”

—Onofre Martínez

 

 

 

“They're scared,” Bloom said quietly. “Devine is scared; the cops are scared. Down in the capital they're scared. They're scared even more than we are.”

Linda sat across from him at the kitchen table, a coffee cup in front of her. She wore one of his old lumberjack shirts, her hair was tied back in a pony tail. Her dark eyes were beautiful, her lips sad.

“Nobody was killed,” Bloom continued. “That's amazing, isn't it? In that police station I thought it would all suddenly go haywire, but it didn't. That's the thing I don't understand. I guess in the end they were just too scared so they backed off.”

“Did you collect the eggs today?” Linda asked.

“Are you kidding?”

“We should collect the eggs,” she said.

They went out back to the chicken shed. A goose, which never slept inside, preferring instead to sit under the stars, honked gently as they entered the pen. Linda unlatched the coop door, and the door tilted awkwardly, jammed.

“I better put a new hinge on tomorrow,” Bloom said.

They entered. The hay on the floor and in the egg boxes smelled dusty and sweet. The grubby yellow, big-balled, snake-eating reincarnation of Cleofes Apodaca was curled up in an egg box, purring. The chickens were roosting. Their two turkeys were sitting on the ground under the roosting chickens, getting shat upon as they snoozed.

Both five-cubicle egg boxes were on the ground. Bloom sat down on one of them; Linda took a seat on the other across the shed. Bloom lit a cigarette and smoked slowly as they listened to the chickens ruffling their feathers, clucking sporadically. Bright moonlight reflected softly in the dusty window frames.

“I love it here,” Bloom said gently. “You know, suddenly I think I honestly love it here. In Milagro.”

“What will happen now?” Linda asked.

“I don't know. But they can't do anything to Joe. They don't dare. And I really believe that. I'm not even sure they'll try to stop his irrigating. We may never go to court.”

“What about Devine? What about the conservancy district and the dam?”

“They're going to get cold feet,” Bloom said simply. “We may never have a hearing on that. Or at least, not for a while. That'll give us time and we need time to launch a fight, to forge out-of-town allies. Look at all the people who signed that petition today—”

“Do you believe what you say, Charley?”

“Yeah. At least I think I do. Listen, for three hundred years, in one way or another, they've been trying to drive the people out of this valley. But somehow some of them kept hanging on. And they can't sell homesites up in the canyon or draw skiers or expand the dude ranch if a whole bunch of angry people are walking around down here with loaded guns looking hostile, now can they?”

Linda said, “All my life I had dreams of peace.”

Bloom fetched a couple of eggs, one from under the cat, and he held the warm eggs against his cheek.

“All my life, everybody around me, it was always fighting,” Linda said. “Everybody was always angry, or always shouting or singing—I used to sit on my bed with my hands over my ears. Everybody was so noisy and tough and loudmouthed. And hysterical. Automobiles never had any mufflers, half the Friday night dances ended in brawls. I was always driving into town to the jail to bail out a brother, a cousin, my father. My mother never complained, not even when she was dying. She had cancer, she whispered Hail Marys nonstop to herself for a month, but she never complained. Guns, hunting, death, car crashes, frustration. The police were always hanging around. In town the air itself held a threat. There were always so many of us in such small rooms, and somebody was always banging a fist on the table, shouting out words of hate. All of us always hated so many people. We got so tired being so full of hate. I don't know where my brothers and sisters and my father got all their energy. Always talking, shouting, laughing, crying, bitching. Somebody who could only play three stupid chords was always banging away like an insane idiot on some tinny guitar. The radio was always on, the TV always going—when it worked. Everybody was always talking about money, shrieking about it, hating who had it, sobbing in the arms of who didn't have it. All the passion was so noisy. You'd go to the drive-in movie with somebody and all they did was joke and fart and drink beer and talk about the movie so much they never knew what was going on. And everything was a fight. And everybody always walked around armed. And when we came here I didn't think it would be that way ever again.”

Bloom said, “I'm sorry.”

Linda was crying. “I don't want to struggle like that anymore,” she said. “I wish I could melt.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know. Like snow…”

She looked up. “When it snows, when there's a fresh snow on the ground covering all the fields, flat and silent and white, with no marks on it—well, everybody I know wants to run across the white, make footprints, make marks, run, jump, thrash, create patterns, write their names, bust it up. But I never want to do that. I just want to stand at the edge of the field and look at the unbroken white. I don't want to mark it up in any way. I want to just watch it, and breathe in its serenity. I want to let it melt slowly without ever having been disturbed, except maybe by tiny mice—they never really break the crust; or by rabbits, or by a magpie landing and taking off, so you can see where its tail touched and where the wingtips pushed off, but that's all. There's no tension in that kind of field. Everything is so lovely and untouched and serene. I'm so tired of tension, Charley. I'm only twenty-nine years old, but I feel worn out. I feel so fragile. I feel like a crystal glass that's going to shatter if the noise and the tension, if the struggle and the fighting, if the
loudness
of it all rises even one decibel more. I'm not even afraid, I don't think—I'm just waiting.”

Bloom said, “Amen. Funny. I've decided to go back to Rael's tomorrow and buy a gun.”

Linda did not respond.

They sat across from each other in the feathery, hay-smelling chicken coop. One turkey released a contented trilling little cluck. An owl, off by the river hunting mice, uttered its muffled cry.

Bloom stood up, walked outside. The air was thick and moist, freshly mown grass smelling nice. The ponies stirred in their corral, moonlight glinting off their shiny backs. The mountains hovered over everything like benevolent, serene elephants.