The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  In one way, fishing these creeks required finesse; in another way there was nothing even remotely connected to the fine art of trout fishing about this angling process. For example, despite the small-sized fish, Bloom always used a ten- or a twelve-pound leader, simply because he had to have something that could withstand endless yanking as he tried to get the fly out of grasping branches. Even so, the toll on flies was terrific, frustration the inevitable state of affairs from the moment he entered the creek until the end. Yet there was triumph, too, for after he’d learned to fish the tunnels, Bloom always returned home not only exhausted and with his snapping thumb bloody and swollen from accidentally releasing the hook into it a few dozen times, but also with at least five or six delicious pan-sized native fish jammed in his denim work shirt’s two front pockets. Which gave him among the most glorious feelings of accomplishment he’d ever known.

  Then there were the Little Baldy Bear Lakes, hovering almost like aqua clouds in an exquisite Shangri-la at the end of a four-mile drive up the canyon, then a four-mile hike almost straight up: nine small, nearly round, amethyst and turquoise lakes, some lying in open meadows, others hidden among tall pines, the highest ones almost above the tree line and surrounded by scrub oak stubble and majestic boulders, reflecting a dozen twelve- and thirteen-thousand-foot high peaks.

  In these lakes you could tie a ten-foot-long, carefully tapered leader with a one-pound tippet on the end attached to a size 18 mosquito, and, using a three-hundred-dollar bamboo pole, lay that mosquito out on the water without creating a single ripple, and you couldn’t catch fish any better than anybody else. A multiple paraplegic, using a marshmallow fork with twine tied to it and a monstrous size 6 green and yellow woolly bear with artificial teeth that clacked like castanets and eight-inch-long Day-Glo, lemon-colored wings attached, could haul cutthroat trout out of the Little Baldy Bears hand over fist. In fact, the only requirement for fishing those lakes was a fast unhooking technique and a pitching arm in topnotch shape for throwing the trout back in the water.

  The first time Bloom traveled up to the Little Baldys he couldn’t believe the fishing. He and the young Capital City lawyer Sean Carter had left home at a predawn 4:00 A.M., arriving at the ninth and lowest lake just before eight, when it was thoroughly light out, but the sun had not yet risen over the mountains to shine down into the alpine bowl. The beauty was breathtaking, the lake absolutely still. Some deer wandered off the meadow, disappearing into the trees when he and Sean appeared. Fine blurs of mist were sifting gently across the still, lavender surface.

  “The fish around here are probably incredibly spooky,” Bloom warned his friend. “We’d better approach on our hands and knees, and cast from a kneeling position, pretty far back, I would think.”

  “Whatever you say…”

  They crept, crawled, got their knees soaked and muddy, their hands frozen. Painfully, they arranged themselves at separate points along the shoreline, made sure their flies were tied on securely, and then both, with their breaths held, cast out onto the lake—

  Afterward, Sean claimed that his first fish had hit while the fly was about two feet above the water and still descending. Bloom surmised his fish had at first struck the shadow of his descending fly, and the only reason he hadn’t then hooked a trout when his fly alighted on the water was that three fish had collided head-on trying to grab the lure.

  Subsequently they each tried two more casts from a kneeling position, and both hauled in trout. By 8:01, after seven casts apiece, they had caught six nine-to eleven-inch trout. By 8:13 both men had twelve fish, their daily bag. And so, slightly stunned, they stopped, built a campfire, and cooked trout for breakfast. While they ate, and the sun topped the mountains, bathing the water in gold, fish began jumping, and pretty soon so many were breaking the surface so often it looked as if rain were falling on the water.

  After breakfast they stood on shore, in arrogant full view of the fish, yanking one out with every cast. They had contests to see who could catch the most fish in ten minutes, and the younger lawyer won with an average of 2.1 fish a minute. They tried whipping the fly full speed across the water, and hooked a trout every time. Sean took off his fly, tied on a plain hook, picked a buttercup and stuck it on the hook, cast, and caught a fish. Then he tried a blade of grass, a pine cone chip; there was no way to throw something—anything—into that water and not catch a trout.

  So they went swimming. Or tried to anyway, tiptoeing out on shallow rocky ledges, ducking under the icy water for a second, then stampeding noisily toward shore. And while Bloom lay in the grass in the sunlight, the other lawyer stood naked on the shore, smoking his pipe and laconically pulling in a few dozen more fish just for the hell of it.

  That was the Little Baldy Bear Lakes.

  And, as the tension in Milagro grew, that was where Bloom wanted to go for a couple of days with Linda. So they turned the kids over to Joe and Nancy Mondragón and took off.

  They parked their VW bus in a meadow where the road ended, helped each other into their packs, and started up the trail. It was a lax sunny day, warm and with the scent of pines heavy on the air. The path was here rocky, there carpeted with pine needles, occasionally damp and mucky where tiny springs trickled across. Birds flitted quietly into the trees; tiny white moths sprayed off from under their feet; the trail led sharply upward in shadow.

  It always startled Bloom that his feminine, self-effacing wife not only liked to be in front on a hike, but also could maintain a strong, even pace. Behind her now, Bloom let his thoughts drift; mindlessly he stared at her legs, her butt. And, as the Milagro tension quietly oozed away, leaving him almost woozy with relief, Bloom began to anticipate sex, increasingly looking forward to it as they rose higher and the way became steeper, slowing them down. After a few miles, he was climbing with a hard-on.

  They took five in a grassy spot among aspens alongside the Little Baldy River. While Linda peeled an orange and the smell of that prickled his nostrils, Bloom lay on his back, head resting on his pack, facing up into the airy green aspen foliage. Not for several years had they been off alone together like this, minus the kids. Bloom’s body was infused with good feeling, compassion, love, and as Linda gently stroked his forehead, singing a song in Spanish, he fell asleep.

  Back on the trail an hour later the Blooms felt renewed. Uptight, frightened adversaries only a few hours before, now there was almost a mystical closeness and sense of companionship between them. The lawyer’s desire returned, and by the time they pulled into the meadow surrounding the ninth Little Baldy Bear Lake, he had metamorphosed into a sex maniac, grabbing for her breasts even before he had his pack off, begging her, “Let’s make love, come on, sweetheart, let’s do it—”

  Linda cupped his crotch, feigning surprise, but shook her head playfully. “Climb that mountain with me,” she said, pointing to Little Baldy Peak, “and we’ll make love on the top of it.”

  “Oh shit, how corny and perverted at the same time can you get?”

  “Well, if you don’t want to that’s okay by me.”

  “I want you right here, now, this minute,” he whined happily, thrusting his hands up under her sweater, but she wrenched loose, trotting a few yards away like a cocky pony.

  “On top of the mountain,” Linda said. “It’s that or nothing.”

  So they dumped their packs, pitched the tent, and resumed climbing. At first there was a grassy slope, then a thin sheep trail that zigzagged up a shale slide and through some mammoth gray boulders; after that they carefully crossed several snow fingers maybe thirty yards wide, reached the ridge, and walked up through flowing brown grass that seemed to be crushed flat against the mountainside by invisible snow.

  At the top some mottled-red boulders provided shelter from wind, and between the rocks grew more thick brown grass. Below them, to the west, they could see the nine Little Baldy Bear Lakes, tiny and almost unbelievably beautiful, each lake pocked with hundreds of silver circles from the feeding fish. To the south and
east the brown grass sloped gently into forested mountains, and they could see far down along the mountains, way beyond the snowcapped Hija Negrita peak that overlooked Chamisaville forty miles south. To the west lay the mesa and Doña Luz and Milagro; and about twenty miles beyond the mesa and the Rio Grande gorge was the small timbering town of Ojo Prieto, almost lost in a low-lying milky band of pollution that had probably drifted over from the power plants a hundred and twenty miles away.

  They were each reminded of that morning after their honeymoon night, when the pheasants and the yellow-headed blackbirds had adorned the road back to Alamosa.

  Bloom reached for Linda again, and this time she offered no resistance. Laughing, she attacked him, tugging off his shoes and his jeans and underwear while he worked on her boots and slacks and underpants, and then, up among the boulders in the flattened brown grass, still wearing their undershirts, shirts, sweatshirts, sweaters, and jackets to keep warm, their bare asses speckled with blue goosebumps, they began to make love.

  Later, all tension gone, Bloom fished and Linda read in the sun beside the lake. They cooked the trout, toasted a few marshmallows, turned in early, and had another long delicious screw, after which they both floated into a relaxed, deep slumber while rain pattered softly against the tent.

  Next day they hiked to all the lakes, fished a little more, lazed about in the warm misty weather, and, strangely, encountered not another soul. They had no adventures, talked but little to each other, and everything was unabashedly beautiful and peaceful. They felt momentarily young and untroubled, almost like teen-age lovers, and they instinctively shied away from talking much for fear of upsetting this fragile miracle, a gift they had never expected to receive.

  After another good night, during which they hardly slept, choosing instead to have one of those endless lovemaking sessions that had so characterized their first six months together ages ago, it was time to go home.

  And in the morning when Linda mentioned casually “I wonder how the kids are doing? I hope they’re okay—” Bloom could feel himself suddenly grow tight again. Silently fighting off an onslaught of tension and hostility, they broke camp. Later, as they treaded rhythmically down the trail, Bloom began to feel afraid; he knew something would go wrong to wreck their mini-vacation. In fact, he could picture exactly what it would be. As they came within sight of the VW, and Linda gasped, letting out a small cry, his worst fears would be confirmed. Somebody would have thrown a large rock through the front windshield, and soaped across the rear window would be:

  KEEP YOUR LEGAL NOSE OUT OF MILAGRO’S BUSINESS!

  But the bus was all right when they got there; nothing had happened. Still, Bloom had worked himself into such a state that the relief was overwhelming. And as Linda started the engine, he reached for her, saying unhappily, “Hey, one more time…”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No. Come on. When was the last time we made love in the car?”

  For a minute they dangled across the narrow aisle between seats, kissing, toying awkwardly with each other, then Linda pulled out the emergency brake and together they grappled back to the rear seat where they sat, making out for a while longer, until Bloom skinned off her slacks while she unzipped his fly and pulled his pants down onto his hips and sat astride him. He penetrated past the elastic band of her panties and groaned. Her head over him, her arms around him as he chewed on her sweater-covered breasts, she whispered softly, desperately, “I love you, Charley, I really do…”

  “I love you too.”

  The VW began to move. It had been parked on a vague slope, and now it proceeded quietly down that slope, neither of them noticing, until suddenly there was a drop, a rock, and the bus bounced high throwing them off the seat and off each other onto the floor. And then, crashing into a bank, tipping half-over, Bloom’s worst fears were confirmed as the branch on a dead pine tree shattered the front windshield.

  “You forgot to pull the brake all the way out!” Bloom shrieked, but then they were both giggling frantically and uncontrollably as they watched sperm bubble excitedly from the tip of his shining, stupefied, and unrequited penis.

  * * *

  Harlan Betchel in Banlon pants and a sport shirt, Bud Gleason in a drip-dry summer suit and bow tie, and Eusebio Lavadie in Levi’s and a work shirt stained with sweat were sitting together over cups of coffee at the same table in the otherwise empty Pilar Café when Marvin LaBlue parked the Strawberry Mesa Body Shop and Pipe Queen wrecker in front of Milagro’s lone parking meter and walked in. Marvin had a toothpick riding on his teeth and a holstered .38 revolver decorating his right hip.

  First off, soon as he entered, Marvin paused with his head tilted back so he could survey the Pilar from under the low tilted brim of his cowboy hat as he dug in his pocket for a coin. Locating a quarter, he ambled over to the jukebox, thumbed his coin into the slot, and punched out three songs by Charlie Pride, Tammy Wynette, and Loretta Lynn. After that, as Marvin clomped up toward the counter, Eusebio Lavadie called, “Hey, Marvin, come on over here and set a spell with us,” so Marvin shrugged and reset his course. He turned the fourth chair at their table around and slumped down, straddling it with his arms folded over the top of the back, cowboy style.

  “How about a cup of joe on the house, Marvin?” Harlan Betchel suggested chummily.

  Marvin politely removed his hat, setting it down carefully on the floor, then he fished cigarette papers and a tobacco pouch from the right front pocket of his denim shirt, and, as he dribbled tobacco from the pouch into the cigarette paper cupped in his other hand, he grinned sort of slowly, shyly, and secretly to himself—Marvin never looked at who he was talking to—and said:

  “How about a couple a rolled tacos, a bowl a chili, a Dr. Pepper, and a cup a coffee on the house, Mr. Betchel, huh?”

  Harlan smiled. “Aw, come on, Marvin. A cup of coffee’s one thing. If you want to use that gun to hold up the café, that’s another thing—”

  “You give an Anglo cowboy an inch, he’ll sure as hell try to take you for a mile,” Eusebio Lavadie joshed in a friendly manner, nervously eyeing Marvin’s gun belt.

  Bud Gleason made a great show of looking at his watch: “Oh hey, excuse me, fellows,” he gasped in fake alarm. “I got a two o’clock appointment in Doña Luz.” And, like a grizzled extra scurrying out of the bar just before the climactic final shootout in a grade B Hollywood Western, Bud dropped a dollar onto the table and hurriedly split.

  Marvin giggled to himself as he licked his homemade cigarette, then he spit out his toothpick, replacing it with the weed in a casual but studied motion, and, shaking off the lighted match Harlan Betchel offered, he chose instead to strike his own kitchen match with his own thumbnail, the motion so pleasing him that again he smiled and giggled to himself, and he snapped out the match with one wrist flick; then, for dramatic emphasis, he touched the hot tip to his tongue—it actually sizzled, going out—before breaking the match in two and dropping it in an ashtray. Finally, Marvin took a big puff from his cigarette with his eyes still trained shyly down at the table, and, as he exhaled from that first deep, satisfying puff, Marvin shifted his weight a little in order to reach down and pluck his shooting iron from the holster. The gun he set quietly on the table in front of him. With his left hand, then, he unsnapped his left front shirt pocket, latching onto the box of bullets he had in there, and, with the cigarette between his lips, and the smoke from it curling around his pale, small-eyed, southern face causing him to squint, Marvin untucked the flaps on his bullet carton, carefully selected six cartridges, closed the box and slipped it back in his pocket, and, while Harlan Betchel and Eusebio Lavadie watched in something akin to horror, he opened the cylinder on his gun and fed the bullets into their proper chambers before closing the cylinder with a click that might have been heard all the way up the canyon in Ladd Devine’s office if it had not been for the country voice of Loretta Lynn wailing on the Pilar Café’s jukebox.

  Betty Apodaca appeared at the table, p
ad in hand, pencil poised, asking cheerfully, “What’ll it be, Marvin?”

  Harlan Betchel laughed a mite too loudly. “Hell, Betty, bring this starving young lad a couple of rolled tacos, a bowl of chili, a Dr. Pepper, and a cup of coffee, and don’t worry about the check, this one is on the house, ain’t that right, Marvin?”

  And Marvin LaBlue, with the cigarette growing an ash a mile long at his lips, tilted his head back, nodding, and with his strange shifty eyes that never looked at anybody trained at the ceiling, he chuckled, “Yessir, Mr. Betchel, that’s right.”

  And this statement he abruptly followed with, “By gum, Mr. Lavadie, I sure have took me a lot of miles in my life!”

  Then, when the food arrived, Marvin chortled: “Wow, I bet all this good grub is gonna bloat me up ’til I’m as fat as Pacheco’s pig!”

  * * *

  And so then there was Seferino Pacheco.

  One dusty hot morning as that morose lonely man was blundering awkwardly about town in search of his pig, he almost stepped on a baby robin crouched in the road, its eyes closed and its cavernous yellow beak wide open, plaintively chirping for worms. Not much bigger than a golf ball, and with feathers only beginning to sprout from its tiny pink body, the baby bird certainly had no tomorrow in the middle of the road, let alone in life, and so the sensible thing for Pacheco to do was step on it, putting it out much as he extinguished his cigarette butts. But for many years this hulking heartbroken man had been about as sensible as the fourth-floor “hopeless” ward at the state mental hospital down in the capital, and so instead of squashing what should have been squashed, he leaned over, gently plucking up the scrawny little robin, and dropped it in the front pocket of his Big Mac work shirt. Then he continued to search fruitlessly for his pig.