by John Nichols
Later, Joe learned how to fish those streams, and how to tie his own flies. Then he and the old man worked the streams together, in the late autumn mostly, when early snows speckled with yellow aspen leaves lay on the ground, and the water was icily cold, and little gray dipper birds flew up ahead, splashing through the water and disappearing in the deep places, walking along the bottom, and then popping up onto rocks again.
His father never carried a creel. He stashed the fish in his front shirt pockets, and then in his coat pockets, and in his pants pockets, if necessary. They came home with fish bulging out of their clothes.
After his father died Joe didn’t fish much, and the times he did go, he went with friends and lots of beer and plenty of worms. Or he shot them with a .22. The streams were crawling with tourists by then, except for very high up where the bank underbrush was so thick you could hardly get to the water. But mostly Joe had quit fishing: there were too many other more important things to tend to, apropos earning a living.
Joe had gone every spring with his father to clean the irrigation ditches. The grass in the fields was still yellow, the trees naked, but the ground no longer frozen. Killdeer ran around in all the fields, screeching, whistling, trying to lead you away from their eggs. They chopped the edges of the ditches and dug mud out of the bottom to build up the sides. They unearthed frogs that were still in hibernation and so groggy they could hardly move. His father struck a kitchen match with his thumb and dropped it in the dry grass alongside the ditch and the grass flared quickly, smoke drifting across the fields, past the cattle and horses and placid sheep. They worked all day on a ditch, drinking beer, until they were bone tired and the ditch was clean, with its banks built up strong again.
Nowadays, Joe always paid a kid five bucks to work on the ditch that irrigated his backyard, and everybody else did the same, and the kids did a shitty job.
Joe pictured his father and mother on snowy mornings out in the yard, splitting wood. By the end of autumn they had stacks of piñon higher than the house, and that was the only heat they used. Now, he still heated part of his house with piñon, but they had a butane heater too.
And Joe recalled how his father would walk along the potholed driveway with him in the mornings to catch the school bus for the Doña Luz elementary after the Milagro elementary shut down for good. Joe would break the ice in all the puddles while his old man, smoking a cigarette, patiently waited. After a rain the driveway was crawling with worms, and Joe crushed every one of them under his heels. His father looked on and never commented on that, but now suddenly, Joe had the uneasy sensation that his father had disapproved of such wanton murder. Certainly Joe had never seen his father kill anything, except for meat, or unless it was poisonous—his father would swerve a truck almost unconsciously to squash a rattlesnake or a tarantula on the road.
Pigs. Esequiel Mondragón shooting them in the head. And then tying them up to bleed. And scalding the pigs in huge tubs of boiling water. These days Joe got a lot of his meat precut and packaged from the feedlot up in La Jara, Colorado.
During his father’s last few years Joe had gone with him often up to Colorado, up to the auctions in Monte Vista and Alamosa and other towns in the San Luis Valley. Farmers were just starting to go out of business up there, and his father always attended those auctions. You could get everything from fence posts to lambing pens to refrigerators dirt cheap. Very vividly Joe could see his father and a hundred other intent men walking from pile of goods to pile of goods, hardly talking, their brows deeply furrowed, listening carefully to the auctioneers’ wild, incomprehensible jabber, his father occasionally bidding on something by just barely tilting his head to let one auctioneer or the other know he was in.
Joe still traveled north to those auctions, and he usually drove back with his pickup full of junk. But it wasn’t for his home, his animals, and such. Mostly it was stuff he sold to a couple of friends who had tourist-type antique and secondhand stores down in Chamisaville.
His father had not been a religious man; only once a year did he attend church, the one time each year that a service was held in the Milagro church. Otherwise, people went south on Sundays to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Doña Luz. But this one time each May, on the day of San Isidro, who was the patron saint of all farmers, they opened the small adobe church in town. The service was at night and there were little bonfires all along both sides of the road on the way to the church.
His father had had a couple of beehives in the back field too. And his father had loved to shoot baskets with him at the elementary school’s outdoor court in the cool misty summer evenings after supper. And the family had often gone together into the hills to pick raspberries, and they would come home with big jars stuffed full of the red fruit. And his mother always heated green chilies on trays in the oven, and then they all sat at the table, peeling off the browned skins.…
Bernabé Montoya coasted his pickup to a stop in back of Joe’s truck and got out. Joe waved, and then watched suspiciously as the sheriff walked along the Roybal ditch bank up to the borders of his beanfield.
“Morning,” Bernabé said, leaning nonchalantly against a cedar fence post.
“What are you up to, cousin?” Joe said guardedly.
“Oh, nothing much, nothing much. Just out and around, you know. Just out and around, checking on things.”
“Hmm,” Joe said, and they both watched water flow into the field for a while.
“Uh, there was a fellow up here the other day from the capital,” Bernabé said. “He talked with a group of, you know, people from around here.”
“That undercover son of a bitch with the photographs driving the unmarked Galaxie?” Joe said.
“Oh. You heard.”
Joe smiled. “Somebody mentioned it, but I had forgotten about it until now.”
“Hey, José,” Bernabé said gently. “Lots of people are worried about this little beanfield.”
“You don’t say.”
“I suppose you’re gonna keep on irrigating?”
“Yes, sir.”
The sheriff, hardly an hour into his day, was already tired and dispirited. He lit a cigarette, offering one to Joe, who said “No thanks, I got my own.” And, removing a pack from his front shirt pocket, Joe lit a weed.
At that moment a foot-long brown trout washed into the field and began floundering in the shallow water. Joe got up and grabbed it, bashing its head against a rock. Then, sitting back down, he took out his pocket knife and proceeded, quickly and deftly, to gut the fish.
“There’s a whole bunch of important powerful people down south who are pretty nervous about this field, José,” Bernabé reiterated.
Silently, stoically, Joe thumbed up the guts, grabbing intestines and tearing them out, chucking the glop into the water.
“I’m kind of nervous about it too,” Bernabé said.
Joe swished the fish in the water a few times to clean it out, and sat back down again.
They smoked. Joe got up once more, and, with his hoe, diverted the water into a new row.
“This is just asking for trouble,” the sheriff said.
“This was my father’s field, Bernabé, you know that.” Joe pointed to a ruin. “We used to live in that house.”
“That was before,” the sheriff said.
“It was before you became sheriff, too,” Joe said.
“I earn a living,” Bernabé said sadly.
They smoked some more. The sheriff flicked his butt into the water.
“So why did you come over here at 6:00 A.M.?” Joe finally asked, grinning. “To help me irrigate?”
“I came over to ask you to stop this before it gets out of hand,” the sheriff said.
“That’s what I thought. Fuck you.”
“I came over to warn you that some people in this town are gonna try and stop you from irrigating this field.”
“Other people are on my side,” Joe replied quietly.
“This town is uptight enough, José. Alread
y we’re too much set against each other. Why make it worse?”
“This is my land. Who made the laws that said I can’t irrigate my land? I didn’t put my Juan Hancock on any papers like that.”
“The man who was up here wasn’t kidding around, José. He’s a dangerous man.”
“If you go to any more meetings with that man tell him, for me, will you, to stick a finger up his ass and then suck it like a popsicle stick afterward.”
With a resigned sigh, Bernabé lit another cigarette. “Not too long ago we used to run together,” he said.
Joe shrugged. “Things change.”
“As a friend maybe you would do this thing for me.”
“What thing?”
“Quit irrigating this little no-account field.”
“Why talk about what isn’t gonna happen?”
“I won’t protect you, then,” Bernabé said testily. “You’re gonna mess up my job, you know that? So I hope they beat you so hard your kidneys bleed.”
“I can take care of my kidneys.”
“I can’t arrest you because that will only cause more trouble,” Bernabé said. “And anyway, I’m afraid of you. I mean, I can’t arrest you for illegally irrigating this field, and you know that and I know that. We’re not stupid. But if something happens to you or to this field, I don’t have to arrest anybody else, either. I’m sorry, but I think that’s the way things stand right now…”
“You’re trespassing on my property,” Joe said.
Sadly, Bernabé backed up. “What do you want to go and cause this trouble for?” he asked unhappily. “We had a peaceful town here…”
Joe said nothing.
Bernabé snapped away his cigarette, and, after directing a halfhearted obscene gesture at Joe, turned and headed for his pickup.
Fifteen minutes later, when the field was almost entirely watered, a state fish and game truck driven by Carl Abeyta, with Floyd Cowlie in the passenger seat, parked directly behind Joe’s pickup. The two men sauntered over; Carl Abeyta wore a gun.
“Heard you been fishing,” Carl said to Joe in English. “You got a license?”
“Check your own records and you’ll learn the answer,” Joe replied in Spanish, picking up his hoe.
“Speak English,” Carl said. “Floyd here don’t speak Spanish.”
“A la chingada con tu y tu amigo gabacho,” Joe said.
“You don’t have a license,” Carl said in Spanish.
“So what?”
“We’re gonna have to fine you then.”
“What for?”
“For that fish you got in your possession.”
“Fish?” Joe exclaimed incredulously. “Who’s got a fish?”
“Tell him to speak English,” Floyd Cowlie said, swinging under the nearby fence. “Where’s that fish, Joe?”
Joe shrugged and addressed Floyd in Spanish: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, you fucking goat.”
“Hey, I know that word,” Floyd growled angrily.
“We heard you had a fish,” Carl said quickly.
“Maybe what you need is a new hearing aid,” Joe said.
“We got it from a good source.”
“Hey, you,” Joe said to Floyd Cowlie in English. “You’re trespassing on my property.” With the hoe, he advanced toward the man. “You got until I count three to haul your ass onto the other side of that fence with your pal. Did anybody give you a warrant to search my property?”
Floyd backed under the fence; Carl dropped his hand onto his gun. “Listen,” Floyd said, “we know you got a fish.” He snagged his shirt on the barbed wire, cursed softly, unsnagged himself, and straightened shakily beside his partner.
“You bastard,” Carl Abeyta hissed in Spanish. “We’ll get you.”
“You and whose army?” Joe chuckled.
Without another word the two men walked back to their vehicle.
“What are you Florestistas looking for—” Joe shouted gleefully after them, “another Smokey the Bear santo riot?”
Then Joe cut the water back into the river and sat for a moment longer while the sun rose higher and water seeped into the ground around his bean plants. At the far corner of the field some blackbirds and three magpies were wading in the water and muck, hunting for choice tidbits. High overhead, aflame in the early-morning sunshine, a vulture quietly circled.
Joe felt saucy, in control, cool. On top of the world. Everybody else and his brother was either an idiot or a chicken compared to Joe Mondragón.
And for a moment he had wonderful delusions of grandeur.
But later, as he drove past the Miracle Valley sign, defiantly shaking an obscene finger at the announcement of Ladd Devine’s dream, Milagro’s nightmare, Joe suddenly felt scared stiff again. And a vision popped into his head: of the Zopilote and Jerry G. and Horsethief Shorty and that Carl Montana and the state engineer, Nelson Bookman, all sitting around a campfire up by the Little Baldy Bear Lakes, roasting miniature Joe Mondragóns skewered like hot dogs on aspen twigs over their campfire.
* * *
Billy Ray Gusdorf, known simply as Ray these days, was a lean, quiet man who, in a lean and quiet way, believed in God. He never prayed, so to speak, or went with his family to church, but he had a kind of awe for what was alive, a respect for everything from horses to chickadees that amounted to the sort of general all-around respect for the world and its creatures that others might take for a belief in God.
Ray hadn’t always been thus. In fact, back during his youth, he had been a pretty cantankerous son of a bitch. He was born in the cattle country near Mexico, and raised by a family that had run beef and then gone into cotton when the big Bureau of Reclamation dams completely transformed the plains country. Eventually old man Gusdorf had gotten royally skinned when the bottom fell out of cotton, and he wound up relegated to a sharecropper’s role forever after. Billy Ray’s childhood, then, consisted of sorrowful years in tarpaper shacks, much ill health, and general all-around human disaster. Under these deteriorating conditions the child—early on—had developed into one ornery hellion.
Thirteen, fourteen years old, and he drank, he smoked, he swore, he ruined little girls and ran with ruined women, and by the time he was seventeen, his daddy fresh buried and his mom on the outs with TB, it looked for sure like Billy Ray was either going to rewrite the legend of Billy the Kid, or else die trying.
Then a few things happened which, when added up, turned the wild youngster into an entirely different person. First off, his entire family, along with nine other members of the Glen Mark Baptist Church, were wiped out by a single lightning bolt which hit the cottonwood they had sought shelter under during a storm that was washing out their church picnic. Billy Ray did not go to his justly deserved reward along with the rest of them because he was off in an abandoned shack with a lady parishioner shouting “Glory Hallelujah!” at the exact moment his family and neighbors got fried.
After that, for the first time in his life, Billy Ray started wondering about the Lord, whom he’d previously always considered a kind of stern Santa Claus. He was so shook up that he hit the road, and for some reason that road aimed due north five hundred miles, leading up out of flat plains and the desert country into high mountains, and—maybe a year after the death of his family—to a job at the Dancing Trout Dude Ranch, guiding tourists on horseback through the summertime Midnight Mountains. Ladd Devine Senior hired him on for the same reason he’d hired on Horsethief Shorty Wilson, namely, he liked and trusted hellraisers, blasphemers, whoremongers, and loudmouthed alcoholics, knowing exactly how to keep the edge off by paying them fair and feeding them well to boot.
All went okay at the ranch for a few months. Billy Ray continued his off-hours boozing, brawling, and other sundry endeavors. Then one morning he woke up with the first autumn snow alighting gently on the ground outside. Billy Ray threw on a shirt, some jeans, and his boots, walking outside into something he had never experienced before; and he just stood there, letting that f
irst snowfall gather in his hair and on his shoulders. And after it stopped he still remained there, because he had never before even vaguely approximated such a wonderful and wonderstruck affinity for a horse, a mother, or a whore, let alone for an act of weather.
Subsequently, while going through lazy autumn chores, battening down the dude ranch’s hatches for winter, Billy Ray, abstracted, moved almost in a reverie, pausing often to gaze mystifiedly into the mountains, where he could see the gray velvet smirches of early snow falling.
Came one morning, then, shortly before Christmas, when Billy Ray slipped on a dude ranch backpack, hung some snowshoes on the side of it, and walked into the mountains. He hit snow early, donned the snowshoes, and pushed on, meandering upward. The first night, still in thick timber, he instinctively made a little snow cave, wrapped himself in a blanket, and slept warmly in his icy cubbyhole. Next day around noon he reached the high open valleys around the Little Baldy Bear Lakes, which were invisible under ten to fifteen feet of snow.
The silence within the alpine bowl was unbelievable. Icy white, sunny, and mute, the expanse everywhere was almost entirely unmarked except for faint feather patterns where a little bird had pushed off; or for tiny mouse tracks trickling across the still, shimmering snow.
Billy Ray ate a few raisins, a tortilla, nothing else. Expressionless, directionless, more than awed, he moved about in the high country valleys, occasionally sucking on little snowballs, stopping often to listen to the inaudible hum, the fantastic and unhearable crinkle of that pristine frozen landscape. And again, he stopped often simply to absorb by osmosis the immense grandeur, loneliness, majesty, and both frail and cruel beauty of his surroundings.
For several days he plodded that way, aimlessly searching for nothing, in no hurry, a minuscule curious specter inching around in that peaceful winter country, absorbing something, taking it in—indelibly—for all time. Sometimes long fan-shaped snow sprays were spun off the mountaintops by high winds. Other times the mountains and valleys and forest were as still and as quiet as hawks in the air, a mile high, drifting. Occasionally, when caught in the exact eye of this bleached and motionless crystal expanse, Billy Ray’s limbs went weak from sheer joy. And at one point during an impeccably white noon he closed his eyes and nearly fell asleep standing up in the middle of a sloping, unblemished snowfield; he almost died.
