by John Nichols
Emerson Lapp turned the piece of paper over, turned it back, reread it again, and shook his head. “It’s stupid, Mr. D. It’s silly. It’s not serious. It’s somebody’s idea of a joke.”
Devine reread the note, observing: “I don’t think it’s very funny.”
Next, he showed the message to Jerry G., who also shook his head, looking very serious, and had nothing to say. Who or what the hell was El Brazo Onofre?
“Onofre’s Arm,” Horsethief Shorty murmured, perplexed, biting his lips to keep from laughing, lacking an answer for once. “Maybe they mean Onofre Martínez’s missing arm, that’s the first thing pops into my mind. But what kind of significance they’ve given it sure beats me. Must be something private to them, and it must be pretty private if I never heard of it.”
“What does this word ‘Zopilote’ mean?”
“Vulture. Buzzard.”
“Oh.”
The fifth person to read Ladd Devine’s note was the sheriff, Bernabé Montoya. He was sitting on Rael’s porch drinking a Dr. Pepper while keeping an eye on things, when the front tire of a Dancing Trout pickup almost clipped the tips off his feet, and Devine draped an arm out the window, allowing the threatening note to glide off his fingertips into Bernabé’s lap.
“What kind of rotten joke is this, Bernie?” he asked angrily.
Bernabé read the note, and as he did so, unseen by Devine, an Ai, Chihuahua! about the size of a dinosaur quietly fumbled up the sheriff’s queasy esophagus and mutely dissipated itself into the heavy summer air. For a second Bernabé thought he had better explain the myth of El Brazo Onofre; but on second thought, he wondered, Why begin, for crissakes?
Slowly, the sheriff shook his head, pretending to be very puzzled. “What’s this, Mr. Devine? It sure is weird. Who’s this Brazo Onofre?”
“You mean you never heard of El Brazo Onofre?” Devine asked suspiciously.
“Never in my life,” Bernabé swore, still ponderously shaking his head, trying to win an Oscar for his interpretation of a bewildered frown.
“Well, if this is somebody’s idea of a joke, I don’t think it’s so God damn funny,” Devine said.
“Is this a note you received, sir?” Bernabé asked politely, handing it back to Devine.
“In the mail. This morning.” Lips pressed firmly together, Devine scanned the note again. “I wonder whose handwriting this is,” he said tightly.
Bernabé shrugged, trying to repress the intuition he had about what was coming next.
Devine said, “Wouldn’t you classify this as some kind of peculiar death threat?”
“I wouldn’t say that, sir. To me, it seems just like somebody’s idea of a prank.”
“The writer called me a son of a bitch,” Devine said softly. “And the writer also threatened to choke me to death.”
Commiseratingly, Bernabé nodded, mentally booting himself in the ass for sitting on Rael’s porch out in the open at 11:00 A.M. in full view of all traffic heading to or from the Dancing Trout Dude Ranch.
After a pause, Devine asked, “What would you do about a note like this, Bernie?”
“I’d sit on it,” the sheriff said. “I mean, you know, not literally. I just wouldn’t do nothing.”
“What would the state police do?” Devine asked frostily.
Bernabé released another gargantuan though inaudible Ai, Chihuahua!, and, fearing for his career, his voice almost a moan, he said, “They sure wouldn’t come into town and go around asking people to write on pieces of paper and then compare those pieces of paper with your note, sir. If you wanted somebody to want to kill you, that would be a good way to get them to be that way.”
Devine said, “Alright, Bernie. Thanks for your valuable time.” He turned abruptly around in the plaza area and drove home.
The note which arrived next morning said:
Maybe some night El Brazo Onofre will creep through your window, Mr. Zopilote Devine, and tickle you under your armpits, and take all the money from your wallet, and then drive a big fat knife through your fucking heart.
Ladd Devine stapled the two notes and the two envelopes they had come in together, slipped them into a manila folder, and filed them under E for “El” in his personal correspondence file.
Notes arrived almost daily after that. Devine cursed silently to himself and filed them away. Maybe the fan letters were only a prank, but they upset him; each one jarred his day a little when it came, and he found it difficult to recover afterward. He did not tell Flossie about the notes, however, nor did he again mention them to Emerson Lapp, although the secretary knew of their existence since he always handled and sorted the mail before passing it on to his boss.
Late one afternoon at the height of the El Brazo Onofre deluge, Devine turned to his wife. “Let’s go for a fly,” he said gently. “Would you like that?”
“Oh Ladd,” Flossie murmured happily. “Can we really?”
“Sure. Get your coat.”
“May I take this drink along?”
“As you wish, my dear.”
She fetched her coat, a fluffy white imitation-fur carcoat, and, bracelets jangling, her champagne glass in one hand, a bottle of bubbly in the other, followed him out to the main garage where he chose a Ford station wagon for the trip down to the airport. Their drive to Chamisaville was quiet, the radio turned on softly to music, neither speaking to the other. They parked at the small airport, and while Devine talked over weather conditions with the manager, Chet Premminger, Flossie sat in the car listening to the radio and sipping quietly from her glass, staring through the spotless windshield at the wide and glorious sagebrush expanse leading up to the green and white mountains.
Then she walked to the plane with her husband. There was little wind; in a moment they were airborne. Flossie saw it all through a peculiarly lazy alcoholic dream. She was not unhappy to be who she was, she thought, living with whom she lived. Yet ever since she had been a little girl she hadn’t known what to do with herself. When her mother said go out and play, she merely drifted around the yard, or lay on the lawn, daydreaming about nothing in particular, wondering what to do. Everything had always been very rosy, very taffeta and vague, and only half-troubled. On horses she walked, simply forgetting to spur them into a trot, a canter, a gallop, having no desire to be thrilled. Somebody always put the saddle on and took it off, and somebody else had always curried the animals for her. And she had been drinking steadily, now, for a very long time.
Devine flew the plane without talking. Once over the mountains they saw a herd of about fifteen deer in a high open meadow. Later they caught sight of tiny circular lakes, the sun glaring bright silver off their still surfaces.
Flossie gazed, holding her glass carefully so that none of the champagne spilled. Her husband kept them very steady.
“This is nice,” she said. “Thank you, dear. This was a nice idea.”
“Yes,” Devine said, smiling as he patted her knee. “I thought you might like it.”
“Let’s go see the ranch.”
Moments later they flew over the Dancing Trout, and over Milagro, and they circled over it all again.
“Honey,” Flossie said suddenly, her carefully penciled eyebrows descending, coming together in a little frown. “Is what we do wrong?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh, you know. The ranch. The company. The Miracle Valley project. We own everything, love.”
“Nonsense. We don’t own everything. And what we do own, why, we worked pretty darn hard for it.”
“I guess I don’t understand things,” Flossie said, sipping from her glass. “And of course you’re right, we worked really hard for it…”
“So don’t worry,” Devine said. “Let’s drop the subject. Do you want to see the Little Baldy Lakes?”
She smiled. “That would be fun.”
They flew over the nine lakes, silver baubles in green alpine bowls. In spots the rocky sides of surrounding peaks still displayed some snow.
> “Sometimes I’m afraid it’s all wrong,” Flossie suddenly dared to whisper as they came off the mountains and over juniper and then sagebrush terrain again.
“Nonsense,” Devine said a little testily.
“It does make me sad, though, the way you men talk together about those things,” Flossie said. “Joe Mondragón is so poor, isn’t he? Doesn’t—well, doesn’t, don’t, I mean … don’t things ever make you sad?”
“Everybody becomes upset from time to time. You know that.”
She smiled and reached over, affectionately touching his shoulder. “They’re going to have a meeting—”
“I know all about it and I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I wonder if they’ll talk about us…”
“I said we won’t talk about that.”
“I’m sorry.” She settled back, murmuring, “I don’t know why, sometimes I get so silly. I’m so comfortable all the time. I’m always warm and I’m always comfortable. I thank you so much for all of that. Isn’t it beautiful over there? Look, you can see our shadow. Let’s fly down in the gorge.”
Devine steered the plane westward, dropping carefully down between the gorge walls. Sunlight was fast leaving, but they still had plenty of light to fly by. Swallows zipped away from the plane. Startled, several fishermen looked up, mouths agape; suddenly, giddily, they waved. There were sections where the river flowed slowly and serenely; in other areas it was a white foam crashing through a course of enormous boulders. They flew under the bridge spanning the gorge west of Doña Luz, the road that crossed it heading toward Ojo Prieto and points beyond.
When they pulled out of the gorge, Flossie poured a touch more into her glass. “That’s one of my favorite places to fly,” she murmured.
Her husband turned the plane around and they flew back through the high plateau sunset, orange and powdery blue, brilliant and soft and different everywhere, the mountains crimson for a few seconds, then dark purple, suddenly black, nighthawks flying below them over the sage; and once they saw, or at least Flossie thought she saw, a coyote running. The plane skimmed in low, teetered just slightly, and bounced along the runway.
Flossie wandered back to the car and, while Devine spoke with Chet Premminger about servicing the plane, she leaned on the hood, staring at what was left of the sunset, a few crimson and orange ribbons in the west, with mesas and gentle mountains silhouetted black like on corny picture postcards.
It was dark by the time they headed away from the airport. The heating system purred loudly. Flossie clicked on the radio to soft dance music, then opened the glove compartment to find an emery board for filing down her nails. Instead, her hand landed on a gun. Startled, she removed it, a .38 police special; and loaded, too.
“What the heck is this?”
“I put it there,” Devine said. “Leave it alone.”
“But what for? You never carried a gun in the car…”
“Well, you never can tell,” her husband said in that special threatening tone of voice he used to indicate a discussion was over.
And so they drove home to Milagro. In silence. In the dark.
* * *
Meanwhile, as some people tiptoed around slipping loaded pistols into their glove compartments, and as other people anxiously awaited the meeting called by Ruby Archuleta, the VISTA volunteer Herbie Goldfarb was quietly heading toward a nervous breakdown.
And he was going crazy, not because of Joe Mondragón’s beanfield, but first of all because of snakes, and secondly because of his next door neighbors’ rabbits and chickens.
The snakes Herbie began to notice shortly after he had established himself in his pathetic redolent smokehouse. More specifically, he really noticed them when, upon sliding into his sleeping bag one night, his feet jammed up against a squirming pile of chilly coils. Squealing hysterically, he grappled clear of the sleeping bag, crashed blindly into the wall and bounced onto the floor, almost fainted, and started to cry. Eventually, though, Herbie had the presence of mind to drag his sleeping bag outside and shake it hard; he shuddered as four skinny little water snakes blinked puzzledly up into his flashlight beam.
Next morning, Herbie awoke to find two small snakes snoozing in the middle of his floor. Grabbing them by their tails, he dropped them almost instantly, blurting falsetto eeks because they had wriggled back up to nip him with their toothless little mouths. And then, trembling uncontrollably, the volunteer spent the next eight hours mixing mud in a wheelbarrow (borrowed from Joe Mondragón) and caulking up all the inside holes around the foundation of his “home.”
“I never saw so many snakes in my life,” he chattered nervously to Joe, who merely shrugged and loaned him a shovel, saying, “If they bother you, just chop the little motherfuckers into pieces with this.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to kill them,” the pacifist said unhappily. “I mean, they’re not poisonous or anything…”
Scornfully, Joe said, “Suit yourself.”
Three days later, with an anguished groan, Herbie chopped his first snake in two: it had been curled up on his sleeping bag, happily snoozing in the glow of his bodily warmth, when he awoke. After hacking it apart, though, he almost vomited as he watched the two halves wriggle frantically in the dust. Desperately, Herbie banged away at the serpent with his shovel until all the pieces were stilled. “Don’t tread on me,” he remembered sickly. And: “United we stand…”
Suddenly the snakes were everywhere. Short, skinny, and harmless, they were still snakes. They became a bona fide nightmare. They were the first creatures Herbie saw when he opened his door each morning, sunning themselves on his stoop or lethargically arranged in the dust beside his house with green webbed feet poking out of their mouths and their eyes popping out of misshapen heads as they tried to swallow frogs. Usually they slithered under his house or off toward the irrigation ditch whenever his shadow fell across their bodies. Occasionally, though, they coiled up like rattlesnakes and hissed, scaring the volunteer half to death. And these he chopped up with a fatalistic but raging vengeance.
The days grew warm, the snakes multiplied like guppies. They surged over the irrigation ditch banks like Mongol hordes of yore. Herbie walked on tiptoe, eyes trained on the ground, terrified. Abhorring the violence in his blood, he nevertheless allowed his shovel to become like a killing instrument from the French Revolution. And, dreaming that snakes were crawling in his eyes and out his nose and through his body like a hose, he woke up whimpering, hollow-eyed, his body and his spirit swiftly flagging.
Then, at the height of the snake plague around Herbie’s stinking bungalow, a miracle occurred. A moth-eaten, dog-eared, sleepy-eyed, bowlegged, nausea-yellow cat beleaguered by angry noisy magpies appeared one morning and systematically started to butcher the snakes. The cat showed up early and sat in the dust beside the house, ignoring the magpies that kept pecking its tail as it waited for the snakes to emerge and start sunning themselves. When a reptile was drawn forth by the sun’s warm rays, the cat quietly walked over, placed a paw slightly behind the snake’s head, bit through its tiny skull with a nonchalant crunch, and passively chewed up the rest of its short squirming body as if chomping up a licorice stick.
Within a week this grubby yellow animal had committed genocide on the snakes, blitzing Herbie’s digs. Whereupon, with an unperturbed flick of its flea-bitten tail, the cat—still hounded by a brace of black-and-white birds—disappeared.
Which is precisely when the chicken slaughter began.
Herbie’s next door neighbors Pancho and Stella Armijo owned about thirty young chickens. Earlier in the springtime they had purchased unsexed mail-order chicks because the birds came cheaper unsexed. Naturally, about half the batch had grown up to be roosters, which would one day be killed and put into the freezer. But there was no point in killing them until they started crowing and nailing the pullets and fighting each other.
True to his run of luck this particular summer, Herbie just happened to settle in Milagro at about the sa
me time the Armijos’ fifteen roosters came of age. And so, abruptly, starting every morning about three, there began a racket—to which the Armijos were apparently inured—that sounded to Herbie (hollow-eyed, gaunt, and aching from night-long bouts with dog-bark and skunk-odor and snake-nightmare insomnia) as if a herd of raging, feathered monsters the size of buffaloes, uttering bloodcurdling war whoops, were about to stampede through his grim hovel, reducing everything to pulp and ashes. To combat the ruckus, Herbie first stuck fingers in his ears, then he tried some tiny cotton wads. But the cock-a-doodle-dos pierced both his thick adobe walls and the cotton wadding, and in short order the shrill cries had made his exhausted brain feel all foamy, like a vanilla milkshake.
As the sun rose each morning, the fifteen roosters quit heralding dawn and started their mortal combat. They scrawked, bleated, screamed, flapped, and fluttered, slashing at, and bashing into, each other’s eyeballs and jugular veins. While the roosters shrieked, the hens scrambled helter-skelter, commenting shrilly on the action: they clucked hysterically; they cackled obscenely; sometimes their alarmed voices were like machine guns.
Finally, as—unable to stand the fowl cacophony any longer—Herbie crawled dazedly clear of his raunchy sleeping bag and opened his creaking door to launch a feeble protest into crisp early-morning breezes, the fucking began.
And that was a hullabaloo to end all hullabaloos!
As the volunteer swayed in his doorway, dust and feathers from the dawn combat clogged the air and, like as not, a piece of bloody plumage would drift into Herbie’s nostril, condemning him to chest-wrenching sneezes for the next six hours. Be that as it may, red-eyed and dully cringing in his doorway, Herbie could only stare helplessly at the sexual holocaust taking place in his neighbors’ pen. For the roosters, after months of peaceful childhood and adolescence, had suddenly become inhabited both by devils and by an insatiable appetite for feathered pussy, and this combination caused them to go positively gaga with lust. Some of the hens tried to escape, flapping and scrawking like puritanical virgins running amuck; others crouched and spread their wings, popeyed and gurgling as the roosters jumped them, grabbing the backs of their heads with cruel beaks, tearing shoulder feathers out with their claws, humping away like medieval stir crazy beings in an amoral time of plague. Chickens collided and shrieked; they catapulted sideways, rolling and tumbling and flopping in agony and in ecstasy; feathers exploded into the air as if shot from cannons, and droplets of blood—as if spewed by underground geysers—littered the air with crimson.
