The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  Mercedes did indeed enjoy being out in the yard. But she didn’t just lie about on the grass or in a hammock or a rocking chair like your average eighty-nine-year-old woman. She took an active interest, for example, in Nick’s flower garden, often eating the heads off the daffodils and hydrangeas, also off the lilacs and roses when those plants bloomed. If the class foliage had all gone to seed, she crawled around on her hands and knees eating dandelions when they bloomed; or else she spent hours blowing apart the seedlings on those she had—for one reason or another—missed. She was an abnormally spry little old lady, too, and thus was often spotted high up in the few Chinese elm and cottonwood trees Nick had growing around his tidy place; she would spend hours making faces at the hummingbirds and magpies that had nests up there.

  But by far and away the quirk which had given wrinkled, half-bald, almost ninety-year-old Mercedes Rael her most far-reaching fame was her habit of throwing stones at people.

  The old lady derived such pleasure from this activity that Nick indulged her to the point where he was constantly ordering high-priced white gravel bits to replace the gravel walk leading from his front gate to the front portal. This walk was the old woman’s ammunition dump, and she used it so regularly that Nick had to lay down a new path about once every four or five months.

  Mercedes never hurt anybody throwing these stones, although occasionally she annoyed the living daylights out of certain local individuals who were her constant targets. Harlan Betchel was one of these targets; Peter Hirsshorn another; Jerry Grindstaff a third. Whenever the Forest Service boys, Carl Abeyta and Floyd Cowlie, moseyed on over to the store for their midmorning Dr. Pepper and gossip break, she would stand behind the gate, or behind the low white picket fence on either side of it, pelting them with the expensive white pebbles. Mercedes was a refined little bat, though, and she never attacked by flinging handfuls of pebbles; that would have been unspeakably crude. Instead, she threw one pebble at a time, almost delicately, although over the years she had developed a rapid-fire accuracy that was something to marvel at, if you did not happen to be the object of her attention.

  Others who drew her fire (you could hardly say they were drawing her wrath because she was always perfectly composed during these pebble flurries, smiling blandly and sweetly like a decrepit grandma serving up tea and ladyfingers) included anyone in a policeman’s uniform; all the deliverymen who brought goods to the store, to the Frontier Bar, or to the Pilar Café; the Trailways bus and its driver and passengers; and anybody who worked for Ladd Devine. She never threw stones at Tranquilino Jeantete or at Amarante Córdova or at Onofre Martínez or at Panky Mondragón or at Seferino Pacheco. And although she usually threw stones at dogs or other animals that wandered past the Rael home into the plaza area, she never attacked Pacheco’s pig, because the first time she had pelted the huge sow it charged her, broke down the gate, knocked her to the ground, and had her arm in its mouth up to the elbow before Nick came bounding out of the store with a crowbar in his hand to save the day.

  Mercedes also never chucked pebbles at kids, because kids nowadays had no respect for their elders and were liable to return her fire.

  There were always a few people gathered within range on the porch of Rael’s store, chewing the fat, comparing government checks that had come out of Mercedes’ son’s post office in the back of the store, or else just sitting around drinking beer and pop and listening to Nick’s radio, which he usually kept tuned loudly to KKCV in Chamisaville. So the old lady was always standing on the store side of the white picket fence picking her shots among those congregated on the porch, and this had been going on for such a long time that nobody really noticed Mercedes anymore, nor paid much attention to the white pebbles that bounced harmlessly among them like hailstones.

  Harlan Betchel was probably the only person in town who’d never been able to acclimate himself to the pebbles of Mercedes Rael. Maybe it was because he’d been a huge, gawky, chubby, and highly disliked kid, and the old lady’s pebbles reminded him all too much of the persecution that had dogged the heels of his unhappy childhood. Whatever the case, Harlan was the one person in town who genuinely hated Mercedes Rael; he was the one person in town who never volunteered to go out and scour the mountains whenever she got lost in them; he was the one person in town who kept sticking the needle into Bernabé Montoya and into the state cops to have them stick the needle into Nick to have him commit her to the state hospital down in the capital. Harlan had once even gone so far as to write an anonymous letter to the head of the state Health and Social Services Department, a woman named Ursula Bernal, asking her to force Nick to commit this ding-y octagenarian who was making life unbearable for everybody in Milagro, but the HSS head had never even sent an underling up north to check out the situation.

  Almost every other time Harlan Betchel decided to cross the plaza area from the Pilar Café to Nick’s store, he would veer out of range of the old lady standing expectantly behind the fence and shuffle nervously around by the Frontier Bar and Forest Service headquarters. But even then, as he swerved back up onto the porch, Mercedes usually managed to uncork a half-dozen infinitely annoying gravel bits that plinked around his feet before he attained her son’s door.

  When he did not see the crazy old bag standing by the gate or behind a section of fence, Harlan naturally strode straight across the plaza area. Sometimes, however, this lack of caution backfired, because Mercedes would be on all fours hiding behind a lilac bush or some tulips, and she would pop up with her pitching arm going like balls of fire as soon as Harlan entered the invisible but well-marked sphere of her range, and without fail her sudden appearance, plus the accuracy of her pellets, would give the big blubbery man such a start that on several occasions he actually fell down from surprise, and he almost always emerged from these sneak attacks with his heart thundering in a terribly unhealthy manner.

  For years now, Nick Rael had been telling Harlan, “Throw something back at her, for crissakes, then she’ll stop it.” But Harlan had always considered himself too much a gentleman to take up arms against a little old lady.

  There came a day, however, when the café manager cracked. Preoccupied by uneasy thoughts stemming from the Joe’s beanfield business, Harlan forgot—on his way across the plaza area to buy cigarettes at Rael’s (where they were cheaper than in the café machine)—to swerve around by the Frontier Bar and the Forest Service headquarters, and one of Mercedes’ tiny white pellets’ drilling him in the ear took him so by surprise that he actually stumbled over sideways with a yelp. As soon as he realized what had happened, Harlan began to scramble about in the dust looking for a projectile big enough to wing at Mercedes, who merely regarded his curious antics with a blank, bemused expression. Harlan could locate nothing much larger than a pea, however, until suddenly he sat up, removed a loafer from his foot, and flung it wildly at the old lady, who forgot to duck, thus allowing the shoe to clock her squarely in the forehead. Of course Harlan, even in his rage, had never expected, or intended, to hit her, and the sickening BLONK! that resulted from this meeting between his loafer and her noggin resounded with a terrifying echo all around the plaza area, causing him to lurch up with a terrified squeal just as Mercedes gave a quizzical burp and keeled over, out cold.

  “Nick!” Harlan bleated, rushing toward the white picket fence. “Nick, Nick, I just killed your mother! I just killed your mother!”

  Nick hollered, “Just a sec, I gotta ring up this purchase!” and then after he had handed Horsethief Shorty Wilson his change, the storekeeper trotted into the Rael front yard, where Mercedes hadn’t moved a muscle or twitched an eyelash for over two minutes, and where Harlan Betchel was holding onto his loafer as gingerly as if it had been Lizzie Borden’s bloodstained ax.

  Curiosity had led Horsethief Shorty to follow Nick, and now he asked, “What the hell did you do, you bully, you beaned the little old lady with your shoe?”

  “You always told me, Nick,” Harlan stammered. “You always said—” />
  “Yeah, sure, Christ,” Nick responded, “I know, I know. I didn’t think you’d clobber her with a boot, though.”

  “It’s not a boot, it’s a loafer … I…”

  “Wasn’t there no little stones or anything handy?” Nick asked glumly, feeling for his mother’s pulse, and—perhaps all too quickly—finding it, strong as the pulse of an ox.

  “She ain’t dead,” Shorty said.

  “H-how can you tell?” Harlan blurted. “H-how do you know?”

  Shorty, who had knelt on the other side of the body, thrust his recently purchased snuff tin under her nose and then held the tin up for Harlan to observe, saying, “See? She’s breathing. There’s a moist film on the tin. That’s one way I can tell. The other way is I can see her chest heaving up and down like a bellows. The third way I can tell is there’s funny little wrinkles all around her mouth from trying not to smile. You ask me, Nick, this deaf old bat is playing possum.”

  Nick nodded, shouting, “Come on, Mom! We know you’re awake! You can get up now!”

  Harlan gaped. “You mean she’s okay?”

  “Well, she’s gonna have a lump on her forehead for a few days,” Nick said. “But other than that I guess she’ll be alright—”

  And Mercedes was okay. But she never again chucked pebbles at Harlan Betchel. Harlan, however, never knew for certain that she wasn’t going to throw something at him, for it seemed that she was always there whenever he crossed the plaza area, only now instead of throwing gravel bits at him with one of those sweet moronic smiles on her ancient features, she glowered sternly from under lowered eyebrows while letting the little stones run through her fingers from hand to hand, threatening him more by her abstention than she had before with her open attacks. In fact, the looks she gave him were so severe, Harlan began to fear she was planning how to cook his goose, say, with a gun, and he knew this was more than possible because Nick had weapons galore lying around his place; the old woman wouldn’t even have to use ingenuity to get hold of one.

  Harlan’s trips to and from the store became a hundred times more nerve-racking than before. He soon found himself back skirting around by the Frontier Bar and the Forest Service headquarters, but now he felt uncomfortable in this approach too, because if, as her threatening monkeyish expression seemed to suggest, she was planning to murder him with one of Nick’s myriad household pistols, no detour short of a mile was going to save him.

  Harlan wished Mercedes would go back to chucking stones at him. In fact, he often caught himself silently begging her to revert to her old form of harmless torture.

  But maybe Mercedes’ feeble mind still knew a thing or two about psyching out her opponent. In any case, she stuck to her guns, and come rain or come shine, whenever Harlan Betchel was crossing the plaza area she was out there, silently frowning and glowering and running the white pebbles through her fingers, mercilessly driving the café manager toward an early grave.

  And somehow it all connected up to—in fact Mercedes’ cruelty and cunning were savagely focused by—the existence of Joe Mondragón’s pathetic little beanfield.

  * * *

  After the meeting in the governor’s conference room, Kyril Montana went to work. First, he requisitioned the Bloom file. There wasn’t much on the lawyer. A native of Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a graduate of Harvard Law, Bloom had been married once before, to a rich young Bostonian named Sherri Pope, a Radcliffe graduate with a master’s in education. Divorced nine years ago, they had one child, Miranda, who lived with her mother and stepfather in the suburban Boston area. The divorce had apparently been a drawn-out, sticky affair, but the file contained few details.

  Bloom had been in the state five years and was presently married to a young Chicano woman, Linda, maiden name of Romero, whose hometown was in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. Their children, both girls, were six and two and a half years old, respectively—Pauline and María. The file had been started on Bloom at the time he defended a vocal land-grant heir, one César Pacheco, a part-time plumber from Ojo Prieto, sixteen miles west of Milagro. Pacheco, considered a militant activist by police agencies in the north, had been arrested on a drunk-driving charge, possibly authentic but probably not, and during the course of the arrest he had stabbed a county police officer—Pete Sandoval—once in the chest, inflicting a minor wound.

  Bloom had created an imaginative and effective defense, something few lawyers would have dared, considering the political overtones of Pacheco’s involvements, not to mention the fact that he had stabbed a cop. Starting with the assumption that Pacheco had attacked Sandoval in self-defense, Bloom put together a string of witnesses, testimony, and circumstantial evidence which had so incriminated Sandoval that the trial almost became a forum for protests against police brutality in the north. In the end, of course, Pacheco was convicted of resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon, using obscene and abusive language, being drunk and disorderly, and so forth, and he was presently serving a five-year term in the state penitentiary.

  The cursory check on Bloom’s character and background that had been run during and after the Pacheco trial produced several memoranda covering two discussions the undercover arm of the state police had had with state bar officials concerning Bloom’s qualifications and credentials, all of which were in order. At the time, pending further development of Bloom’s career—which up until the Pacheco trial had been orderly and quiet—it was decided that nothing should be done, no pressures brought to bear on Bloom or on his practice, such as it was, by the Bar Association. In general, the various people in the capital, in Milagro, in Colorado, and in the East who’d been contacted about Bloom had opined that he was no crusader and that he would not follow up the Pacheco case with more of the same fire and brimstone. This turned out to be an accurate appraisal of the lawyer’s then immediate future, now his receding past. After the Pacheco case and up until this Joe Mondragón thing, Bloom had once again comfortably immersed himself in the endless petty squabbles, divorces, and mundane litigations of the poor people of Chamisa County.

  After going through the file Kyril Montana picked up the telephone, and the first calls he placed were to Boston and Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Once he had defined what he was looking for to his contacts in the East, he put on his sport coat and left the office, walking twelve blocks across town to the Voice of the People office, which was on a quiet tree-lined street not far from the veteran’s cemetery.

  Curiously, although there was nobody in the four-room building, the front door was open, and so the agent walked inside. In each room he found a desk, an electric typewriter, a telephone, and a mess. Mounds of paper were scattered around, ashtrays and wastebaskets were filled to overflowing, and, where visible, the flat olive carpeting was freckled with cigarette burns. Back issues of the Voice in cardboard boxes lined the hallway leading to a bathroom in the rear. Beside the bathroom, in a large closet-type area, was a lot of darkroom equipment, including a valuable photo enlarger. Across one wide desk that apparently belonged to the business manager were scattered a half-dozen open envelopes: among them were notices from the phone company, from an office-supply rental firm, from the landlord, from a printer, and from the Library of Congress Copyright Division. Skimming the contents of each envelope, Kyril Montana learned that the Voice owed the Sierra Bell Telephone Company $197.53, and that their phones would be turned off if they didn’t make arrangements to fork over the cash immediately; the office-supply firm was threatening suit to obtain $503.00 for back rent on three electric typewriters; the landlord wanted last month’s rent; the printer was demanding $670.40 for the past two issues; and the Library of Congress Copyright Division wanted $108.00 for failure to pay the $6.00 filing fee for the last eighteen issues of the magazine.

  Kyril Montana jotted this information down. Then he went from cardboard box to cardboard box selecting back issues, and within minutes he left the office carting twenty old issues of the magazine under one arm. Stopping for coffee an
d two burritos with green chili in a café near the central plaza, he leafed swiftly through all twenty magazines, marking the stories that carried a Charley Bloom by-line. Back in his office he skimmed through each Bloom article, underlining paragraphs here and there, and after that he composed a short profile of the lawyer’s largely innocuous subject matter which he typed up on his own machine.

  This done, the agent read through the Xerox of the typewritten article on Joe Mondragón’s beanfield that Rudy Noyes had given him at the meeting in the governor’s conference room; he made a few notes on this, had another Xerox of it run off and placed in the Bloom file, then contacted both the local FBI office and the Treasury Department’s Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Division to see if anyone had a photograph of the lawyer, but there he struck out: until this moment, apparently, nobody had ever seriously considered Charley Bloom a dangerous person.

  Toward the tail end of the following afternoon phone calls came in from both Massachusetts towns, and the scoop on Charley Bloom was everything the agent could have hoped for. During one seven-year period the lawyer’s tax returns had been audited, challenged, and taken to court annually. He had paid fines galore, and the whole business was not yet straightened out. He had messed up regularly on his alimony payments, too, and there was still a great deal of confusion in the matter of who in the family could declare the daughter, Miranda, whom both Bloom and his first wife had named as a dependent on their returns for six years.