The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  * * *

  Kyril Montana and Bud Gleason met in the Conquistador Lounge of the La Fonda Hotel in the capital for lunch.

  “Listen, Ky,” Bud began nervously as soon as they had ordered drinks, “things are beginning to get awfully uptight back home.”

  “In exactly what way?” the agent asked, leaning forward slightly.

  “Well, for starters it looks as if a kind of informal Chicano organization is starting up, I don’t know for sure. There’s rumors galore, but it’s hard to pinpoint anything. They had a meeting, though—you probably already know about that. On your side they’re organizing, too. Somebody fired a shot at Joe Mondragón’s house a few nights ago. Also, Joe and some friends were beaten up at the old elementary school basketball court about a week ago.”

  “I knew about the meeting,” Kyril Montana said, noting that Bud had said “on your side,” instead of “on our side,” and he told himself he had better keep a sharp eye on his old college pal. Bud owed him a loyalty beyond old school ties, however, because several times in the past the agent had fed him information about certain land and real estate deals around the capital that had allowed Bud to buy into, and capitalize on, some fairly lucrative developments. Kyril Montana had also helped Bud out of one ticklish situation involving federally controlled interstate land sales in which Bud had become embroiled during his earlier days when he was based in the capital.

  “Who fired that shot, Bud? Who beat up Joe and his friends?”

  Bud shrugged, eyes bobbing unhappily. The waitress arrived with a martini and a bloody mary. The undercover agent took a quick sip of his drink and handed it back to the waitress. “I’m sorry,” he said politely, “but you tell the bartender to mix this thing the way I asked for it, easy on the salt and Worcestershire, and with a single, not a double shot of vodka, okay?”

  The waitress, a pretty girl who flustered easily, apologized, “Oh, I’m so sorry, sir,” and “Of course, sir,” and hurried away.

  Kyril Montana said, “So do you know, or don’t you know, who attacked Joe?”

  “Well, not for sure,” Bud mumbled, toying nervously with a fork. “You know … not me, of course. What?—I got a heart could take that? Shit no. But maybe Eusebio Lavadie did it, or one of Devine’s foremen, the quiet weird one named Jerry Grindstaff. Maybe Harlan Betchel was involved, maybe not. Nick Rael, too, he could of been in on it, him and an off-duty cop, say Bill Koontz or Granny Smith—I dunno. There’s a lot of talk, you understand, but nobody really knows. A name I’ve heard a couple of times is this Lord Crocodile or Lord Lion or something who lives out at the Evening Star commune, but then you’d know more about that than me. They had a meeting, though, Joe’s people, Ruby Archuleta, and they’re bound to retaliate, and you wanna know the truth, I’m a little scared. Things have never been tense in quite this way before.”

  “If they retaliate and get caught, and Joe Mondragón is with them, which is likely, then it will be over.”

  “I’m not sure people are reacting the way you think they ought to react,” Bud cautioned.

  “Those people are conservative, they’re also scared and confused, so much so that I doubt they could ever really join forces together. The few renegades, like Joe, they’re going to flush themselves into the open, and we’ll hog-tie them, we’ll have them put away in no time. I think 90 percent of the people in Milagro are begging us to nail them and end that irrigating and restore things to an even keel.”

  “What good is an even keel,” Bud complained, “if I’m in a grave?”

  The waitress returned with a new bloody mary, and the police agent took a sip, nodding to her that it was all right as he said: “Aren’t you getting a little het up over nothing, Bud?”

  Bud knocked off the martini and called the waitress over to order another. “Yeah, maybe I am, I dunno.” He handed her the glass, then abruptly sneezed and pulled out a handkerchief, fumbling with it around his nose. “But I’m just not sure you know those people up there, Ky. I live in that town, remember. Okay, so I live behind a six-foot-high wall in an adobe mansion surrounded by spruce trees, and I got more land than twenty of those poor bastards put together, but I been dealing with them for years, I been selling and buying their land, and right now I’m tied heavily into Ladd Devine’s Miracle Valley project, which I stand to come out of sitting very pretty, unless the whole ball of wax gets blown to smithereens by a bunch of trigger-happy Chicanos or cops or whatever. I mean, tourists are finicky people, Ky. They got a tendency to keep away from wherever there’s a war going on.”

  “When we have Joe Mondragón it will be over,” the agent said. “And in the meantime, if people are as confused and uncomfortable about things as yourself, well, they aren’t going to organize in any viable way, believe me.”

  “All I can say is you better nail Joe pretty fast, then,” Bud said bitterly, tying into his second martini the instant it alighted on the table, “before he’s got half that fucking town stuck to him and his beanfield like flies to flypaper.”

  “How’s Katie?” the agent asked.

  “Oh Christ!” Bud’s chubby face lit up with a rueful grin. “Listen, I’m sorry about that when you came up, I really am…”

  Kyril Montana smiled gently as he fitted a filter-tip cigarette between his lips and, snapping on a lighter that invariably worked on the first try, lit it. “That was no problem. Really. Now, tell me about this woman, the one who runs that Body Shop place—Ruby Archuleta. You say she’s talking about a petition?…”

  * * *

  At home that evening, though, Kyril Montana felt a little out of sorts. He understood what to expect from Bud Gleason and what not to expect; and he had gotten not only what Bud had to give, but also what he owed. The fact that a shot had been fired at Joe Mondragón’s house did not particularly upset him either; if those primitive bastards started shooting at each other for real, it might create a publicity problem, true, but at the same time it could not fail to bring things to a head that much sooner.

  The agent’s family was gathered around the pool on this dusty peaceful evening. All his life Kyril Montana had cultivated the habit of leaving his job at the office: once home, he relaxed; he became a family man. Tonight, however, Bud Gleason—his shifty eyes, his shot nerves, the way he belted down martinis against a heart specialist’s orders—nagged at the back of his brain. No matter, though. He was home. So he changed into a swimsuit and sat for a moment in a metal chair beside the pool, watching his healthy kids perform. While his thirteen-year-old daughter Kelly, an exceptional young athlete, swam measured laps, his eleven-year-old son Burt kept flipping gracefully off the diving board. The agent had taught each child how to swim, and how to swim well; now he was teaching his son to dive. In college, the agent had been a first-string diver on the swimming team; he had almost qualified for the Olympics.

  Watching Burt perform a relatively simple forward one-and-a-half, the agent criticized: “Son, that was a sloppy tuck; you didn’t go into it tight enough.”

  “Aw, sir, I’m kinda tired—” Burt grinned infectiously.

  “If you’re tired, take a rest. When you’re tired, that’s when accidents happen. Also it’s a bad habit to do a thing sloppily.”

  His wife asked if he wanted a drink, the agent replied, “No thanks, I had one at lunch with Bud Gleason, and I think in a minute I’d like to do a little diving myself.”

  Marilyn smiled, “Suit yourself,” and settled in a nearby chair with her drink. Burt dried himself off and went inside, returning in a moment dragging a TV on a butler’s cart onto the patio. He turned to a program he enjoyed, and lay on an air mattress on his stomach, watching the show. Kelly was still doing laps at a steady pace, and watching her, both Marilyn Montana and her husband shared the hope that their daughter might one day soon be Olympic material: her swimming coach felt she was that good.

  The agent roused himself and strolled over to the diving board. He went out to the end, then strode back three steps, measuring his
approach distance. Turning, he stood very still, concentrating on the upcoming dive, and then he walked out to the end, lifted his right foot in a pump and pumped his arms once as he came down and lifted off the board, letting the spring in it catapult him almost straight up, and when he was at the apex of his rise he snapped into a tuck position and was around one-and-a-half times in an instant with his eyes alertly wide open directly above the end of the board; he came out of it swiftly, but not so fast that there would be an abrupt ungainly snap or jerk in his dive, and glided down, missing the end of the board by inches, entering the water with hardly a splash.

  All her life Marilyn had been awed by that precision and beauty in her husband, in his body. She had rarely, if ever, seen him make a mistake off the diving board. He never clowned around. “Occasionally, you might get off too directly over the board,” he had once told her. “But if your eyes are open, you can always push off and avoid an injury. I never had an injury.”

  Kyril Montana broke the surface smiling, and he directed that smile at his wife. Kelly had halted at the shallow end in order to watch her father’s dive.

  “You were beautiful, Daddy,” she called out. “You were like a bird and a fish all rolled into one.” Her voice positively sparkled.

  “Yeah, sir,” Burt echoed from his mattress. “That really looked good.”

  They had a lovely quiet time at the pool. When his program ended, Burt turned off the TV and rolled it back inside, disappearing into his room. Some robins landed on the small lawn beyond the shallow end, hunting for evening worms. The bell of an ice cream truck tinkled over the wall, fluttering in the cooling evening air almost like a butterfly. Kelly returned to her laps, gliding tirelessly through the water. The agent did a few more dives, a backward twisting one-and-a-half, a half-gainer, and a beautiful soaring swan dive, all of them executed in what appeared to be an effortless manner. Each dive gave Marilyn a surge of joy, a warm feeling of pride in her man who never made a mistake.

  There was peace and tranquillity here; a sense of goodness and security; an almost exciting atmosphere of togetherness and love.

  * * *

  Up north on that same evening, things were not so calm. The sky was overcast, threatening rain, when Joe Mondragón’s rattletrap pickup skidded to a halt on the Strawberry Mesa Body Shop and Pipe Queen grounds and Joe hopped out and strode swiftly up the slope to where Claudio García and Marvin LaBlue and Ruby Archuleta were seated on various stumps outside the house, quietly smoking. Marvin LaBlue had a big battery-powered shortwave radio beside him, tuned softly to WBAP, a country and western station in Fort Worth–Dallas. Joe nodded hellos to Marvin and Claudio, and addressed Ruby.

  “I just had a talk with Horsethief Shorty, who says they’re gonna build four more cottages up there at the Dancing Trout, and the Zopilote wants to hire me and maybe fifteen other people. Shorty said I might even head the crew, and what plumbing they use and like that, they’re gonna buy from here.”

  “Why did you come to me?” Ruby asked quietly.

  Joe hesitated. “Well … I guess mostly because Nancy thought I’d better.”

  Ruby laughed. “So what do you think?”

  “I think that son of a bitch is going to pay three, four dollars an hour to maybe fifteen, twenty people, including me, for a couple months, maybe longer,” Joe said unhappily.

  “And that would be a lot of money.”

  Joe nodded, feeling more uncomfortable than he had in ages. And though he had not articulated to himself what was coming, he’d felt it in his bones ever since Horsethief Shorty had squatted down near Joe’s shop, using a stick to scribble the facts and figures in the dirt while Joe listened, practically drooling.

  Defensively, Joe protested, “If I don’t do it, he’ll just get somebody else.”

  “If you don’t do it, and I don’t supply the plumbing, and if it isn’t you or us that does the hiring, he’s not gonna build those cottages,” Ruby said adamantly, knowing she spoke tripe, because Devine could just go hire himself a crew from Doña Luz or Chamisaville if he wanted.

  “How do you know?” Joe said angrily, not angry at her as much as he was angry at himself for being so confused about the whole fucking thing.

  “I can feel it,” Ruby said. “I can see it plain enough.”

  “We could take the work and just not let it make a difference.”

  “I think if fifteen people in this town were earning three dollars an hour for eight or ten or twelve hours a day, it would make a difference,” Ruby said. “José, for a long time you and me and the people of this village, we have—or rather we should have—been at war with that man.”

  Joe faced away from her, knowing she spoke the truth, and hating her guts for being right. He had a very strong desire to say, Well, tough titty, Missus Archuleta, I’m heading up there first thing in the morning to sign myself on anyway. You see, me and my wife and kids, we’re tired of eating stewed tennis shoes instead of meat.

  Ruby said gently, “José, they shot a bullet through your window. It could have killed somebody.”

  For a moment they all just listened to the lonely strains of a hillbilly guitar a thousand miles to the east, and the sound of that guitar mixing in with the songs of the local crickets made it a terribly peaceful, terribly quiet time.

  “You want some coffee?” Ruby asked. “Or a beer?”

  “No, thanks.” Joe squatted, automatically picking up a twig and beginning to scratch in the dirt.

  “It’s just a bribe, José.”

  “Well, how many years have we been complaining among ourselves that that bastard won’t hire locals for his construction and shit, and now he’s doing it,” Joe blurted, “and why should we refuse?”

  “Because of the situation. Because in this context it’s a bribe. He’s hiring us to work only because he doesn’t want us to fight him. He’s hiring us to work to protect his interests, not ours. He’s hiring us to work so he can get his conservancy district and his dam and his Miracle Valley Golf Course that will put all of us out of work for good.”

  Joe wrote Fuck You in the dirt, crossed it out, and said, “Three dollars an hour.”

  “I suppose if we don’t take his offer,” Ruby said thoughtfully, “he’ll try to hire others. And of course our most desperate people will grab at the chance, why shouldn’t they? Who isn’t so poor he doesn’t need that loot? If nothing else, just the question of should we work on those houses or shouldn’t we will set us further against each other; it will create resentments in those who finally work and in those who refuse.… So it’s a very clever offer,” she concluded, her voice suddenly tired, reduced to a despondent whisper. “That foxy son of a bitch.”

  They were quiet again, smoking: the radio announcer dedicated a song to Chuck, a Consolidated Freightways driver zooming along the highway somewhere east of Ponca City.

  “So,” Ruby said.

  “So … I dunno,” Joe said. “Chihuahua.”

  “We should decide, José. You and me. We should decide right now.”

  Joe looked up, startled at the tone of voice she had used saying “we.”

  “Oh hell…” he said.

  They waited.

  “Fuck it,” Joe mumbled uncomfortably. “Turn off that music, will you Marvin? Christ, goddam hillbillys. Get Juárez or Mazatlán or someplace decent.”

  Marvin, who loved country and western music, took no offense. He fiddled with the dial a moment, landing on some mariachi music that was as equally redneck and sappy in its own way as were the cowboy songs. Joe grumped, “That’s better. Jesus.”

  Claudio García shifted, rolling a smoke. A cat moved through the darkness carrying a live mouse it would kill in a minute. Down below a wind fluff stirred up some greasy newspaper pages; you could smell fresh oil on the air.

  Joe said, “What happens if I refuse to work for that bastard?”

  “Two things. Wait and see if Shorty approaches anybody else. Maybe he won’t, it’s hard to tell. We keep our mouths
shut about it, though, just in case—for whatever reasons—they only wanted to plant that seed in you. If they’ll take anybody because they’re really serious about those cottages, then we’ll have to try and explain to people why they shouldn’t go, why they should boycott the Dancing Trout.”

  Joe bit his lip and wrote a few more obscenities in the dirt. “I don’t know,” he murmured fitfully. “I just don’t know.” He felt miserable. He actually had a pain in his gut from the tension. He couldn’t believe that somehow he would not be working on those cottages earning three dollars an hour. Christ, maybe if he got back in Devine’s good graces he could actually tie into some kind of steady livelihood for once—

  “None of us really knows,” Ruby said. “Things just have to become different, that’s all. And those cottages wouldn’t make the right kind of difference. The whole plan is as destructive as Pacheco’s pig.”

  Softly, Joe said “Chihuahua” again.

  Claudio García picked his nose.

  The honky-tonk mariachi music was getting on Joe’s nerves. “Why don’t you just turn off the radio,” he ordered.

  Marvin complied.

  They listened to the crickets.

  And then something happened. A tiny sparkling light no bigger than a child’s pinkie fingernail floated through the troubled air between them like a miniature star. Joe gasped; so did Claudio García and Ruby. It was a sign, an omen, an incredible, mystical thing. They gaped at it the way they might have gaped at a sudden apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe spreading roses around the Body Shop and Pipe Queen buildings.

  “What … the … hell … was … that?” Joe whispered, awed, a little afraid.

  Marvin LaBlue, the only Easterner among them, drawled, “Don’t panic, folks, that was just a little bug. Back home we call ’em fireflies. That little critter must be a thousand miles off course.”

  A thoughtful silence followed this information. Then Joe finally spoke again. “Alright,” he said, abruptly standing and throwing his stick away. “I guess you’re right … maybe.”