The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  Facing Koontz and Emilio Cisneros again, he said, “The thing is, irrigating that field is symbolic, the way I see it. People are bitter over how they lost their land and their water rights. And this sort of act, small as it may seem, could touch off something bigger.”

  Koontz said, “What do you want us to do?”

  “I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t know what to do about it. It’s not like you can just go in and arrest him or fuck up the beanfield or something. I mean, this is too close to everybody—”

  Koontz frowned. “I’m not sure I understand, Bernie.”

  “Why don’t you talk with somebody else,” the sheriff suggested. “Talk with Bruno Martínez when he comes in. Better yet, get in touch with Trucho down in the capital. This is his sector, isn’t it? Tell him to call me.”

  “For what? For a little loudmouthed troublemaker who’s trickling a couple gallons of water into a crummy beanfield?”

  Bernabé mumbled, “Ah, screw it then, I guess I’ll handle it myself,” and walked out to his truck.

  Emilio Cisneros said, “If I was you, Bill, I’d call Trucho.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think he’d want to know. I don’t think you really understand what Joe Mondragón is doing.”

  “You honest to God think I oughtta call Trucho?” Koontz asked uncertainly.

  “Sure. The least he might do is talk with the state engineer. You let Bernie Montoya go back up there and handle something as sensitive as this on his own and he’s sure to blow it badly. That sheriff is so stupid his boots were on the wrong feet, did you notice?”

  “Okay. So maybe I’ll call Trucho, then…”

  Xavier Trucho, the third highest ranking cop in the state, in charge of the entire northern sector, said, “Repeat the whole thing to me again, Bill. Slowly. I want everything you can remember that honky-tonk Cisco Kid told you.”

  “It ain’t much,” Koontz said, suddenly nervous about the beanfield. “There’s just this little guy, Joe Mondragón, who’s cutting water into some deserted field isn’t supposed to have water rights on the west side of the highway, in that ghost town part of Milagro, that’s all.”

  “I think what I’ll do,” Trucho said, “is talk with the state engineer. Seems to me his office ought to handle it. I’ll get back to you—”

  And when he got back Trucho said, “Listen, Bill, this thing could be a little antsy, but for the time being we’re gonna steer clear of it. Bookman’s—the state engineer’s—office will handle it, or at least try to. So why don’t you drive up to Milagro and tell that Montoya ape to keep his boots from getting muddy over there on the west side, okay? You might also stop up at the Devine place and let them know we’re aware of the problem. And Bill—?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The key word is tact, alright? The key thing right now is to play this cozy. I mean, lay off Joe Mondragón, and let’s keep our uniforms as inconspicuous as possible up there. Be nice to Bernie Montoya. People start getting the bright idea something is cooking, Bookman feels, it’ll only aggravate the situation, and we’re liable to find ourselves up to our ass in Mexican hornets. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Bill Koontz said, puzzled by the respect people seemed to be developing for Joe Mondragón and his puny beanfield. He turned, asking Emilio Cisneros:

  “What does a little jerk like that want to cause this kind of trouble for?”

  “I dunno,” the dispatcher said, smiling faintly, curiously. “Let’s just wait and see what happens.”

  * * *

  The Dancing Trout Dude Ranch was a thirty-eight-room adobe palace set in a cluster of cottonwood, Russian olive, weeping willow, ceαar, and aspen trees on the banks of Indian Creek and surrounded by lush green meadows and apple, pear, apricot, and plum orchards that extended for miles back up into the Milagro Canyon.

  Ladd Devine the Third was not so opulent.

  Standing five foot nine in his cowboy boots, tipping the scales at one-forty-five, he had a bland, regular, and slightly good ol’ boy face and a bland, regular, slightly good ol’ boy way of speaking. He was the kind of man who worked hard, enjoyed circumventing risks, and avoided the limelight. He drove a pickup truck and kept a sharp authoritative eye on pretty much everything that went on at his spread. He also often spent up to twelve hours a day in his third-floor office constantly telephoning various parts of the town, county, state, and nation. At all times this sawed-off, unflamboyant man knew exactly where his affairs were at.

  The Ladd Devine empire had been established by his grandfather, a boisterous whoremongering outdoors man who drank his bourbon straight from the bottle and cursed a lot. But once the corporate conglomerate was established, Ladd Devine the Third had been the perfect man to tone down the operation and keep it barging along smoothly; and also, incidentally, to build it into something really powerful.

  This is not to say that Ladd Devine the Third hadn’t inherited a couple of his grandfather’s quirks. One was the airplane he often piloted himself out of the Chamisaville airport. The other was his wife, Flossie, a six-foot-tall “honeydear” woman from an Odessa, Texas, oil family, who wore Neiman-Marcus skintight, flare-cuffed, gold lamé, western cowgirl pants and stacked her peroxide-blond hair in a three-story bouffant. She had a body to match her garish looks, and with the ton of makeup she swabbed on daily, Flossie Devine looked to be on loan from the Lido, or else some kind of rent-a-tart from Las Vegas, Nevada. But Flossie was actually a placid, gentle soul. Her time she whiled away riding plump thoroughbred horses, playing bridge and solitaire and Scrabble, and drinking too much champagne or beer or whatever else happened to be around and open at the time. Flossie was a quiet lush, though, usually going to sleep right after dinner, and she had never done her husband dirty.

  After an avocado salad lunch on the day Joe Mondragón first began to irrigate his beanfield, Ladd Devine’s starched and prissified personal secretary, Emerson Lapp, scuttled like a nervous crayfish into the Devines’ private den.

  “Bad news downtown,” he said. “Something funny is happening, Mr. D. It looks like trouble to me.”

  “Calm down, Em,” Devine urged quietly. “You want a bit of Irish coffee? Flossie and I were just having a cup, weren’t we, Flossie?”

  “Maybe you better hear about this right away,” Lapp wheezed. “You know this guy downtown, his name is Joe Mondragón? He worked up here once, maybe four, five summers ago. He was on that cesspool crew you hired and during the time they worked we kept missing things, remember? A couple of aluminum siding panels, a few tools, some of that roughcut lumber we were using on the stables extension. After maybe three weeks you narrowed the thefts down to Joe and fired him.”

  “Oh yes.” Devine nodded. “He was a real wise guy.”

  “Well, he’s cutting irrigation water into his father’s piece of property over there on the west side.”

  “What was his father’s first name? A lot of Mondragóns lived over there.”

  “I don’t remember. But you don’t own it, Mr. D. This Mondragón was one who wouldn’t sell, remember? The old man—Joe’s father—he went around raising a big stink back then, telling people not to sell. His son is a troublemaker, first class.”

  “Then what you’re saying, Em, is that this Joe Mondragón is illegally irrigating his father’s land, or his own land as the case may be, over there on the west side.”

  “Exactly. And I don’t like it. He could stir up something nasty. Those people down there, they’re tense enough as it is over this dam proposition—you know, and the conservancy district. If you ask me, and you’ll pardon my French I’m sure, Flossie, he could start a fucking war if this isn’t handled correctly and disposed of quickly and efficiently.”

  Devine pursed his lips, thinking for a moment. Then he picked up the telephone at his elbow and called the sheriff.

  “Hello, Bernie? Ladd Devine. Say, listen, my friend, my secretary Mr. Lapp just came in with a story about this character, what’s his name? this Joe Mond
ragón fellow he says is diverting irrigation water into one of those fields on the west side.”

  “He speaks the truth,” Bernabé said, covering the mouthpiece as he whispered to his wife, “Carolina, get me a couple aspirins, will you? This is getting worse.”

  “Well, tell me then, Bernie. Do you think there’s any possibility an apparently random action like this could have serious consequences?”

  “Maybe. I dunno, Mr. Devine. But that’s been on my mind, I can promise you.”

  “Did you go have a talk with Joe?”

  “Well, it’s this way, sir. Joe would have told me to jump in a lake before I opened my mouth.”

  “You could arrest him, couldn’t you?”

  “I figure until I understand better how the people here feel, Mr. Devine, and whether there’s more than just one person involved, it might be foolish to start driving folks down to the Chamisa V. cooler. You know, some fanatics in town are just a little bit tense about your dam, sir—”

  “It isn’t my dam, Bernie. It would be controlled and operated by the people.”

  “Sure, sure. But of course you’re aware of some of the sentiments floating around down here anyway.” Masochistically, the sheriff chewed up the aspirin in his mouth, making a horrible face that startled his wife.

  “I see.” Devine thought for a moment. At length he said, “Bernie, I suppose you’re right. At least for now.”

  “Basically, there’s not much to do now, the way I see it, sir. Just lay low and see what develops, is my motto.”

  “Right. I’ll keep in touch, Bernie. Good-bye.”

  “That guy—” Emerson Lapp cast his eyes to the ceiling. “It walks, it talks, it carries a real gun, so it calls itself a sheriff,” he groaned sarcastically. “What did he have to say: ‘Let’s just lay low for the time being and see what happens,’ I’ll bet.”

  “Don’t be nasty, Em.” And, as Devine dialed another number, he told his secretary, “See if you can’t drum up Horsethief Shorty and Jerry G., okay? I think Jerry G.’s down in the pony corral with some kids. Shorty might be over in the bunkhouse, it’s his afternoon off. Tell them to come up for a short talk. And Jim Quintana, too—is Jim around? Hello, Harlan—?”

  Emerson Lapp started to say, “Jim Quintana’s out with that Kildare party from Lubbock—” but cut it short on a brief hand signal from his boss, who was talking to Harlan Betchel, manager of both the Pilar Café and the Harlan Betchel (Buck-A-Fish) Trout Pond behind the café.

  Glumly, the secretary nodded so long to Flossie and left the room.

  “Look, Harlan, a matter’s come up that I think we should discuss. Do you think you could drive up here in, say, about ten minutes, for a short meeting at the ranch? You can leave Betty in charge. It won’t take long.”

  “Sure, Mr. Devine. I could do that except the missus has the car, and she’s down in Chamisaville doing the weekly shopping at Safeway.”

  “You can go over to the Forest Service office and hitch a ride with either Carl, or—what’s that new man’s name?”

  “You must be talking about Floyd Cowlie, sir.”

  “Right, Floyd Cowlie. Tell me, is their truck outside the office, can you see?”

  “Yup. Just sitting out there, Mr. Devine. In fact, only ten minutes ago they pulled in from having it serviced at Jake’s Enco in Doña Luz. It had a leak in the oil pan they picked up on the Little Baldy road yest—”

  “Then you can ride up with them, Harlan. I’m going to call them right now, so why don’t you hustle over there pronto?”

  “Sure thing. Right away.”

  Devine dialed the Forest Service office. Carl Abeyta answered.

  “Carl, this is Ladd Devine. Right—thanks. Look, I’d like both you and Floyd to come up to my place right away for a short meeting. It’s about that Joe Mondragón beanfield on the west side. Harlan Betchel’s going to catch a ride with you boys because Greta is down in Chamisaville with the car. I’ll expect to see you soon—”

  “Whatever you say, sir. We’ll be right over.”

  After that, while his wife pensively sucked on a sour lemon, Devine called the Enchanted Land Motel manager, Peter Hirsshorn, who promised to come right up, and then he dialed long distance to his lawyer and partner in crime, Peter’s brother Jim. Briefly he outlined to the lawyer the situation insofar as he understood it, and asked Hirsshorn what his initial and instinctive gut reaction was.

  “I dunno, Ladd. I’m not worried, if that’s what you’re after. Both of us have lived here all our lives, you know. We understand these people. You can probably smoke out the situation as well, if not better, than anyone else around there. My initial, gut-level response would be to keep close tabs on the situation, on Joe Mondragón, but for the time being stay cool, don’t push the panic button. I’m assuming what he wants is to have his action legitimized by some kind of nervous or hysterical or authoritarian attention. So don’t play his hand, Ladd, and I kind of feel the whole thing will die down.”

  “Thanks, Jim. Got to sign off now, here come Shorty and Jerry G.”

  Jerry Grindstaff, a foreman of the Dancing Trout, was a tall, lanky, fifty year old with a weather-beaten Oklahoma face and an air of the old-time rodeo cowboy about him. Horsethief Shorty Wilson, the other foreman, was a short, bowlegged, foxy-looking, white-haired man from Plainfield, New Jersey, who’d come out West forty years ago to be a cowboy, had traveled the rodeo circuit for about three years as a clown, and then been signed on one wild drunken night by Ladd Devine Senior, and he had been with the Devines ever since. Where Jerry G. was no-nonsense, taciturn, practically zombielike, Horsethief Shorty was a boozing, tall-story upstart with a propensity for never making the same mistake twice. Of the three men in the room, only Horsethief Shorty spoke Spanish.

  “Don’t tell me, Ladd, lemme guess,” Shorty said cheerfully. “That sawed-off ex-pachuco José Mondragón has went and cut water into a beanfield he owns on the west side of town, and you called us together right now because you got an uncomfortable inkling that that man irrigating that field at this particular time spells Trouble with a capital T—am I right?”

  “You’re right, Shorty,” Devine said, although his words did not come out altogether friendly; with Shorty they never did. He had grown up and grown middle-aged with Shorty, but he had never really liked or absolutely trusted the man. Shorty’s brass balls didn’t disturb him as much as the man’s uncanny familiarity with the entire workings of the Devine empire. And while Shorty usually ate with the help (whereas Jerry G. often dined with Devine, Flossie, Emerson Lapp, and other Devine functionaries), it was his habit right after lunch to amble obnoxiously into the boss’s den and spend fifteen or twenty minutes with the Wall Street Journal. Over the years he had invested in stocks and bonds, and Devine suspected Shorty was currently worth a nice piece of change. Devine also suspected that if he himself had not shown an interest in the Devine enterprises, old Ladd Senior would have bequeathed the operation to Shorty—lock, stock, and barrel.

  Most probably because his grandfather and Shorty had been alike as two peas in a pod, Devine was also somewhat awed by Shorty. And he harbored a feeling, which had been riding shotgun with him all his grown-up life, that if Shorty were ever removed, for one reason or another, from the Devine Company, the whole empire would come tumbling down.

  Hence, he tolerated Horsethief Shorty and, while wincing at his uncouth cowboy appearance and his loud and sometimes lewd mouth, Devine nevertheless dealt Shorty into all high-level conferences; to a very great extent, he counted on his Spanish and his way with the local people to keep a finger on the pulse of the Miracle Valley.

  The Forest Service truck jolted up the white gravel drive, and Flossie excused herself to greet the new arrivals at the door and usher them in. The men exchanged hellos and then Devine briefly reviewed the situation, asking each man what he had heard on the grapevine, what he thought Joe Mondragón’s act might portend, and what he, Ladd Devine, ought to do about it.

  “
It’s illegal,” Floyd Cowlie said. “Why doesn’t Bernie arrest him? I mean, forgetting for the moment that probably the only thing Bernie ever arrested was his own development.”

  “Well, people are nervous,” Devine said, refusing to snigger along with the rest of them. “This dam, this conservancy district has the farmers down there on pins and needles. Arresting Joe Mondragón for a symbolic act like this could start something nasty.”

  Carl Abeyta laughed. “Who you trying to kid, Mr. D.? The people in this town—they’re my people, qué no?—I know these people. They’re not gonna go off half-cocked just because José Mondragón gets arrested. Shoot, I can’t think of anybody who wouldn’t send three cheers your way for cutting that punk down a little. Things aren’t as tense as you think, Mr. D. I know. They’re my people, qué no?”

  “Excuse me, but what are you gonna learn from your so-called fucking people, seeing as how you work for the Floresta?” Horsethief Shorty chuckled, an obnoxious light twinkling in his dark eyes. “Shit, man, half the farmers who go to bed at night in this town dream of hanging you up by the balls for becoming one of Uncle Sam’s Mexican honchos. Don’t you remember what happened back in Buddy Galbaldon’s time during the Smokey the Bear statue riot? I’m surprised that fat green truck of yours doesn’t blow up every morning when you step on the accelerator. These people wouldn’t confide in you, in that uniform, Carl, if you was César Chávez, Pedro Infante, Cantinflas, and Lee Trevino all rolled into one.”

  “Uh, Harlan—?” Devine asked, moving uncomfortably on.

  “Mr. D., the people in this town like you. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you found out someday they really love you. I mean, you put this place on the map, didn’t you? And now with this Miracle Valley project, why, they’re gonna owe to you everything they got—”