by John Nichols
Toward noon Pacheco decided screw the pig, angrily gulped a beer in the Frontier with Tranquilino Jeantete, and—to kill a bad case of runs he had—bought some blackberry brandy in Rael’s, then limped home. There, having settled the baby robin in a clay bowl padded with grass, he lumbered outside to dig up some food, returning a short while later with twelve worms, all of which the tiny naked bird downed voraciously; then it fell asleep in the bowl. For an extended pensive time, his shaggy head held sadly in his hands, Pacheco stared at this minuscule thing on which he had so omnipotently decided to bestow a future. “I’m so lonely,” he groused cynically, “that when it grows up I’ll probably try to fuck it.”
They were destined to become great pals, and why not? With nothing much better to do when not out tracking down his pig, Pacheco had all the attention in the world to lavish on the robin. Awaking at dawn, he immediately tugged on irrigation boots and a sweater and plunged outside to dig worms from the rich damp earth along his irrigation ditch. Then, while his morning coffee perked, he dangled worms into the robin’s open beak. For a while, that was the extent of their relationship: three, four, then five times a day Pacheco excavated for worms, and three, four, five times a day his little friend—gulping them the way an elephant gulps hay bales—put away whatever Pacheco offered, then either clunked asleep or cheeped for more. How something so tiny could be so bottomless was a mystery to Pacheco: it was like clowns getting out of, or rather into, a Volkswagen beetle.
At night Pacheco set the bowl under a light bulb so the robin would stay warm. And after a while, since he was a man who enjoyed literary and spiritual allusions as well as symbolism, Pacheco decided to call the robin “Joe’s Beanfield.” Whereupon the air in his house, which for a long time had been so lonely it screamed, grew soft with the warmth of smiles that kept creeping out of nowhere to adorn Pacheco’s craggy features as he cared for the infant bird.
Joe’s Beanfield, who devoured worms as if they were about to be declared illegal, grew like a Walt Disney time-sequence movie of a desert flower unfolding after a rain. In no time at all, the stiff barbs of his minuscule feathers broke through their pale blue quillskins, and Pacheco found himself feeding a greedy, plump fluffball instead of a naked starveling.
In due course, Joe’s Beanfield began learning how to feed himself. Pacheco filled up another bowl with earth, generously laced this earth with worms, and set the worm bowl beside the nest bowl, so that whenever Joe’s Beanfield craved a snack between meals he could just hop onto the worm bowl’s rim, cock his head—which still had some white baby tufts on it—and then jab down to spear a squirming goody.
Pretty soon, Joe’s Beanfield quit spending all his time in the nest bowl and began to hop around the kitchen table, rummaging through a chaotic landscape formed by empty beer cans and old liquor bottles, by empty Spam and corned beef hash and chopped-green-chili tins. And eventually, of course, though he did so in fear and trembling, Pacheco had to take his pal outside. Tremulously, he set the robin down on a dandelioned patch of lawn, but Joe’s Beanfield wasn’t interested. He sat there for a few seconds alertly listening, quivering nervously, then he hopped into Pacheco’s hand, deposited a friendly little turd in the palm, fluffed up, and contentedly went to sleep. Thereafter, Joe’s Beanfield passed whatever time he had to spend outside either on Pacheco’s knee, or in his front shirt pocket, or else sometimes perched on his head or on his shoulder.
All too soon Joe’s Beanfield was almost grown. Though still snoozing at night in the bowl under the light bulb, during the day he gamboled all over the topsy-turvy house, busily inspecting the wreckage of Pacheco’s life, the piles of garbage and dirty clothes and rotting memorabilia strewn about; he spent a lot of time pecking at flies and moths that got caught in the corner spider webs. That mangy, snake-eating reincarnation of Cleofes Apodaca showed up from time to time to share a tin of sardines with Pacheco, but he never went for Joe’s Beanfield. Once, though, Pacheco caught the cat gazing sleepily but interestedly at the bird, and, without even raising his voice, the sentimental, illiterate lunatic quietly intoned: “Gato, if you ever touch that bird, I’ll bake you in the oven over there like a Red McClure potato.” And, while Cleofes Apodaca the Second didn’t nod, he did sleepily lower his lids a little more until his eyes were almost closed, and, as he started purring lazily, you could tell there existed between the three of them—the cat, the bird, and the man—a perfect understanding.
Outdoors, while Pacheco irrigated squash, Joe’s Beanfield took baths in the icy water. Leaning on a hoe one day, observing his little pet while cottonwood seed fluff alighted without a ripple on the spreading silver pools that nourished his garden, Pacheco realized that, except for his pig, he had not felt this close to a living thing since his wife died. And with that he became unnaturally terrified of losing the bird.
Out in the garden next afternoon, Joe’s Beanfield was startled by a black dung beetle fleeing the irrigation tidal wave with its butt aimed skyward in a threatening posture, and the bird flew onto his master’s shoulder. This marked the first time Pacheco had seen him fly, and his heart twanged like a melodramatic soap opera chord. Immediately, the poor man felt more doomed than he had for ages; and the thought crossed his warped disintegrating mind, Maybe I should kill Joe’s Beanfield and stuff him, and that way I’d never lose him.
Joe’s Beanfield had no intention of taking a powder, however. The robin might fly up to the roof, or up into Pacheco’s apple trees, but always he returned immediately to his master’s head or shoulder, on which he usually shat just to prove to the huge dark man how much he loved him. And once, when by accident Pacheco entered his house without Joe’s Beanfield, the bird battered so noisily against the screen door that the commotion could be heard all the way over at Joe Mondragón’s house, two fields away.
But Pacheco knew the scoop on wild things. And because their imminent parting made him so sad, he went on a drinking binge to end all drinking binges. Lurching dazedly into town every day with the robin on his shoulder, he bought bottles of hundred-proof Old Grandad at Nick Rael’s; and back home, seated at the kitchen table listening to mariachi music, soap operas, triple-A baseball games, and news on KKCV from Chamisaville, while Joe’s Beanfield perched on his food bowl laconically sniping at worms, Pacheco tackled that Old Grandad like it too was about to be declared illegal.
The robin grew worm fat and night-crawler sleek. Pacheco’s back ached from all that digging in the damp earth along the ditch. And after a while he had dug so many holes along the ditch bank that water began to leak into his field. Which was good for the field, but against ditch regulations. Thus, as soon as the mayordomo on that ditch, Sparky Pacheco, discovered Seferino Pacheco was flooding his front field around the clock, he came by positively reeking with dire threats.
“Hey, you can’t steal the water like this, my friend,” Sparky complained excitedly. “You have to wait your turn!”
Wavering unsteadily on the ditch bank with Joe’s Beanfield nailed to his shoulder, Pacheco growled, “Go fuck yourself, Sparky. And besides, the muskrats made all those holes, not me.”
(In Milagro, whenever you got caught illegally trying to irrigate your fields, you always blamed it on the muskrats. And blessed was the man whose ditch bank actually was infested by the tunneling little animals.)
Sparky Pacheco returned next day with three shovels, one boy, Jimmy Ortega, and a man, Ricardo L. Córdova, and between them they patched Pacheco’s ditch wall. Then they left, warning him to be more careful in the future about how he dug for worms.
Pacheco lunged inside, stuck the mouth of a half-full Old Grandad bottle in his lips, tipped his head back, and let the contents glug down his throat. Then, blundering about and bellowing like a wounded rhino, he staggered out front and shoveled a big sluiceway in the recently patched ditch bank, allowing almost the entire acequia flow to cascade into his already soggy front vega. After that he wove along the bank a ways, stabbing nastily with his shovel at little gr
ay water snakes slithering hastily into the ditch, and he dug up a big shovelful of soggy dirt teeming with worms for Joe’s Beanfield. The robin dropped off Pacheco’s shoulder and began to inhale worms as fast as the man could gently prod apart the clods with his spade.
Having exhausted the first clump, Pacheco moved to stab up another shovelful, but as he did so his foot thrust into some soft earth, and, losing his balance, he sat down abruptly, directly on top of Joe’s Beanfield.
Horrified, Pacheco flung himself drunkenly sideways, but the bird had been flattened: Joe’s Beanfield squeaked once, fluttered his wings, and expired.
Whimpering desperately, already starting to cry, Pacheco snatched up his friend, lunged to his feet, and flung the bird far out into the soaked field, letting out an anguished wail that was prolonged almost a full minute, after which he fumbled inside to seek solace in booze.
When Sparky Pacheco and Ricardo L. Córdova again arrived to cut off the water flooding the front field, they found Pacheco, tears clotting his nearly blind eyes, seated on his porch, a loaded .22 pistol lying ominously beside a bottle of Old Grandad on the cement at his feet, knocking off the last of Joe’s Beanfield’s food bowl worms.
“What do you think you are, cousin,” Sparky teased gently, “a robin?”
But Pacheco just glared at them out of baleful, exhausted eyes. He was resigned, already, to what had happened. It served him right for messing around with a wild thing and for giving it such an ill-fated name to boot.
All the same, though, Pacheco felt mean enough to kill the first son of a bitch who dared to step on his shadow.
* * *
About this time, a very popular movie came to the General Custer Drive-In in Chamisaville, and by curious coincidence about half the citizens of Milagro, who wanted a break from the tension building up in their town, attended the show on the same night.
Horsethief Shorty Wilson, Jerry Grindstaff, Emerson Lapp, and Flossie Devine drove down in a Dancing Trout station wagon, and, while Shorty sat contentedly behind the wheel guzzling a six-pack held in his lap, and teetotaler Jerry G., seated in the front passenger seat beside him, stared stonily ahead, Flossie and Lapp bounced around in back like a couple of starstruck adolescents, munching on popcorn and loudly sipping on a bottle of Southern Comfort as they giggled nonstop over private—usually risqué—jokes. Which provoked Jerry G., who was constantly having to turn half-around and bark “Shhh!” or order them, in his puritanical Okie voice, to “please pipe down back there, will you?”
Joe and Nancy Mondragón hit the road in their pickup with all the kids and Benny Maestas—still limping slightly from his self-inflicted knife wound—in back. On the way down Joe stopped once to fix a flat, twice to let various kids pee, a third time to buy two cold six-packs from Crown Liquors in Chamisaville, and once again to stock up on buckets of Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried drumsticks. They arrived late, but in high spirits.
Joe parked in front of Bernabé Montoya, who was sharing a pint of bourbon and their mutual flesh with his girl friend, Vera Gonzáles.
Not too far away, in Onofre Martínez’s mottled-green, 1953 Chevy pickup, the toothless Senile Brigade, featuring Onofre, Amarante Córdova, and Tranquilino Jeantete, were dividing their attention between two six-packs, a pint of blackberry brandy, and a paper bag full of A & W rolled tacos, while on the roof Onofre’s three-legged German shepherd snarled happily at the big screen.
Nearby, the Strawberry Mesa Body Shop and Pipe Queen crowd was located, Ruby Archuleta behind the wheel of the wrecker, with Claudio García beside her. Marvin LaBlue and Ruby’s kid, Eliu, stood behind the cab drinking beer along with everyone else.
Charley and Linda Bloom and their two kids were the only Milagro representatives at the movie not boozing. Bloom was in a foul mood; Linda was angry at him because of the mood. Bloom was pissed because he had to keep leaving the VW to go buy goodies at the snack bar for the girls—here a hot dog and an Almond Joy and a Coke; there a hamburger, barbecue chips, and a Dr. Pepper—and he deeply resented having to bribe the kids, who weren’t interested in the movie, to keep quiet. As their demands increased, upping the ante, so to speak, Bloom’s temper threatened to flare. He couldn’t concentrate on the film, he kept missing dialogue; finally, he thought he would explode.
By contrast, when Joe Mondragón’s eldest kid, Larry, attempted to put the bite on his daddy for a candy bar, Joe merely leaned out the driver’s side window and told his number one son, “Larry, you bug me again and I’m gonna take off my belt,” and all the kids cooled it, silently watching the show like a trio of well-behaved angels.
Lightning flickered over the Midnight Mountains to the east; stars twinkled over the gorge in the west. Suddenly it began to rain. Joe Mondragón turned on his windshield wipers; Bernabé Montoya didn’t bother to turn on his wipers because he and Vera weren’t watching the movie anyway; Onofre Martínez flicked on his windshield wipers; as did Horsethief Shorty, and Ruby Archuleta did likewise. But when Bloom twisted his wiper knob, nothing happened. Angrily growling, “I don’t know why we came—” Bloom tumbled out with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers to fix the wipers.
“It was your idea to come,” Linda accused.
“I’m never bringing those goddam kids to another movie,” Bloom vowed.
“Don’t talk like that in front of them,” Linda barked.
In the Dancing Trout vehicle, Jerry Grindstaff turned around and, very frostily, said, “Em and Flossie, would you mind keeping it down to a dull roar? Some of us are trying to watch the show.”
Horsethief Shorty belched and farted, exclaiming, “Ai, Chihuahua, excuse me!”
But that made Flossie and Lapp giggle. Lapp said, “Gerald G., accept our humble apologies, also our lack of couth; we will kibbutz, I mean kibitz, on the action no longer, we promise to keep it down to your dull roar.”
Rain drummed against the roofs, it splashed violently against windshields, and Bloom who had further fucked up, instead of fixing, the wipers, sat there fuming with his hands tightly gripping the wheel, wishing he had never come. Beside him, arms folded tightly, Linda couldn’t concentrate on the film either, and she wanted to cry. Behind them the kids crunched on Frito Lays and noisily sucked pop up through peppermint straws. Then there was a gasp in the back seat.
“María spilled her Dr. Pepper on my sleeping bag,” Pauline wailed.
“I don’t give a shit…” Bloom hissed between clenched teeth.
In Onofre Martínez’s mottled-green, 1953 Chevy pickup, the three old men laughed and nudged each other and tugged on their beers, having a wonderful time, while on the roof Onofre’s three-legged German shepherd stoically waited out the storm.
With the rain, Marvin LaBlue and Eliu Archuleta had ambled over to shelter under the snack bar awning. Benny Maestas joined them with little Larry Mondragón, who immediately hit up the soft-hearted hillbilly for a quarter. The other two Mondragón kids moved into the pickup cab with Joe and Nancy, who were halfway high on beer and finger lickin chicken.
The windows in Bernabé Montoya’s truck steamed up, becoming so opaque that you couldn’t see what was happening inside. You could make an educated guess, though.
Next door, Jerry G. finally became so disgusted by the back seat’s muffled guffaws and raucous whisperings, not to mention Horsethief Shorty’s noisy and highly redolent anal explosions, that he decided to seek a moment of relief by going to take a leak in the men’s room behind the snack bar.
No sooner had Jerry G. left, though, than Shorty got the urge, too. Pleasantly aiming a “Hold down the fort, kids,” at the back seat, he headed for the bathroom on Jerry G.’s heels.
At approximately this same moment, Bloom’s youngest daughter, María, Joe Mondragón, Benny Maestas, Marvin LaBlue, and all three members of the Senile Brigade also felt the call, and they tumbled from their vehicles into the rain, scurrying toward the john.
Then Flossie Devine said, “Em, honey, you’ll excuse me for a moment if I g
o to the little girls’ room,” and, imitating her accent, Em drawled, “You be mah guest, hear?” In unison with this exchange, down the row a bit, Nancy Mondragón was saying, “You kids sit tight, I gotta take a leak. You do anything wrong while I’m gone and I’ll tell José to take off his belt.”
And, as Nancy opened her door, Vera Gonzáles squirmed out from under Bernabé Montoya, gasping, “Wait a sec, amor, I better put on the diaphragm, I didn’t know you wanted to here…” And, snatching her purse off the floor, she ran through the rain, almost colliding with Flossie Devine.
Jerry Grindstaff entered an empty men’s room, and, positioning himself at the center one of three urinals, unzipped his fly. On this cue, Joe Mondragón bounced in loudly but happily cursing the downpour, and on his heels came Amarante Córdova, Onofre Martínez, and Tranquilino Jeantete, rain dribbling in gay rivulets off their cowboy hats. Laughing, these archaic human beings slapped each other’s backs and engaged in some cackling all-Spanish bathroom humor having to do with the size and potency of their eighty- to ninety-year-old pissing instruments.
Joe Mondragón crowed, “Hello there, Jerry G.,” to the taciturn Dancing Trout foreman, then he shouted, “Hola, primo!” to Amarante Córdova, who lumbered bowleggedly over to Jerry G.’s other side and with much grunting, giggling, and groaning, commenced unbuttoning his fly while at the same time attempting to peer across Jerry G.’s chest at the grinning Joe, who was peering past Jerry G.’s chest at Amarante. Somehow, in the midst of such confusion and noise, while fumbling to free his shriveled pecker, Amarante dislodged his Colt Peacemaker instead, which fell into the urinal with a clang, announcing the arrival of Horsethief Shorty, followed closely by Marvin LaBlue, and then Charley Bloom with his daughter, María, who immediately freaked at the sight of all these old and middle-aged men laughing and chattering in Spanish and smoking cigarettes, completely and cacophonously cluttering up the tiny room.
