The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  One day, with her hands pressed gently against her stomach, Carolina fell asleep in her chair by the window. And asleep, she dreamed. It was early autumn, years ago, during a rare year when a late frost in the springtime had not killed the orchards, and the trees were almost overburdened with glistening fruit. The air was jubilant with meadowlark songs. But then it started to snow, a gentle October snow, and the birds stopped singing. There was no wind, and this snow fell quietly; perched on a thousand fence posts, the meadowlarks waited for it to be over. It snowed all morning and part of the afternoon, and then it ceased. The air was not very cold; the mountains were lost in varying shades of gray mist; the sky was overcast, quiet—everything was immersed in lull. A few inches of snow lay on the ground; every apple on their trees bore an icy white cap. After a while the meadowlarks began to sing again, but their melodious calls were out of place, foreign in this gray, snowy landscape.

  Then Carolina saw her child Benjamin, the boy who had died of leukemia, in a strange lonely pose under an apple tree. He had soft brown hair and small frightened eyes and a strained smile on his tight thin lips. He reached up and touched an apple, tipping it slightly, causing the snow to fall off in a little powdery swoop that brushed past his face, leaving a vague white fan across his dark jersey—

  Carolina awoke, her skin prickling all over, tears in her eyes; and she didn’t understand.

  On another day, too, she fell asleep in that chair at the window after her work was done, with her fingertips pressed lightly like a blind person’s against those stomach scars, and again she dreamed about her dead son, the only child who had stayed home.

  This time she was out in a field with the boy, holding his hand, and it was raining, not hard, but steadily, although almost everywhere around them on the horizon sunshine gleamed.

  Benjamin said, “Mama, is the rain alive?” And she answered him, “I think so, isn’t everything alive and infused with the spirit of God?”

  And he said, “Then does the rain have dreams too, like us?”

  “‘Dreams?’ Does the rain have dreams—?”

  He pointed, smiling, toward the mountains, some of whose slopes were spangled with sunlight. “Rainbows are the rain’s dreams,” he said. “Look at that one over there.”

  She looked. “But where?” she asked; she could see nothing.

  “Right over there, Mama. Right in front of us. Right there.”

  But it wasn’t there: she couldn’t see—

  Carolina awoke afraid, goose-pimpled, and again crying. She took her hands off her belly and pressed them for several minutes against her face, saying Hail Marys until the fear imparted by the dream faded.

  For too long this house, her home, had been silent.

  * * *

  Early on a Wednesday morning, the Trailways bus made its regular stop outside Nick Rael’s store, and the driver, Bill Thorpe, told his lone passenger he could have a five-minute rest stop in order to stretch, buy refreshments, or whatever. The passenger, a grizzled old fart reeking of booze (later, Bill Thorpe found eight empty beer cans in the bus restroom), staggered out, clumsily negotiated the warped wooden steps leading up to the store, and entered the freshly sawdusted interior just as Nick was bending under the counter to hunt up a package containing legal papers Charley Bloom was sending north to a Colorado client.

  Exactly what happened next, or why it happened, nobody—least of all Nick Rael—ever managed to figure out. “All I know,” a trembling, almost-hysterical Nick told Bill Koontz, Granny Smith, Bernabé Montoya, and Bruno Martínez fifteen minutes later, “is I’m just starting to raise my head when this ax blade comes down, blam! right into the counter there where you can see the chop mark, about six inches from my nose. And that crazy-eyed old son of a bitch—” Nick added, pointing to where Bill Thorpe’s lone passenger lay on his back, still clutching the ax, with blood from the hole made by a soft-nosed .38-caliber bullet Nick had fired into the center of his concave chest running out into the damp sawdust, “is on the other end of it. Shit, I almost dropped a ripe tomato into my pants right then and there!”

  “Okay, Nick, okay,” Granny Smith said. “Easy on the graphics, huh? Just the story. Just give us the story like it happened.”

  “Well, I dropped the freight package but fast, and he pulled out the blade and swung again. Only this time he hit the cash register, the motherfucker. Look at the cash register! What am I gonna do about the cash register?”

  “Don’t you got insurance?” Bruno Martínez asked.

  “Sure I got insurance. Who doesn’t? But Christ Almighty, man. I’m gonna need a whole new cash register. You know how long it could take to order another one like this? And in the meantime what am I supposed to use, an abacus?”

  “So he swung,” Granny Smith said, “and hit the abacus.”

  “The cash register.”

  “Yeah, the cash register.”

  “Where’d he get the ax?” Bill Koontz asked.

  “I dunno, I guess from over there in the rack. Does it look like one’s missing? Sure, that’s our brand he’s got. Count ’em. I oughtta have eight axes in that rack.”

  “Nope, there’s only seven there now,” Bruno Martínez confirmed.

  “Well then, so that’s where he got it from,” Nick said.

  “Okay, okay.” Granny Smith let his eyes flick nervously over the dead man. “Then with the next swing he hit the cash register.”

  “That’s when I started for the gun,” Nick said. “What, I’m supposed to let this stark raving lunatic chop off my head? I’m supposed to ask him politely why he’s going berserk? Jesus! I keep the gun under the counter, on the second shelf, you know, within easy reach. But I hadda reach up for it this time, see, because I’m on the floor, and I just got it in my hand and pulled the hammer back when he comes running around the counter, grunting and babbling, with the ax raised over his head, so Christ, man, I wasn’t gonna ask him about his problem, I just pulled the trigger.”

  “You fired once?”

  “Once my ass. I fired six times!”

  “Ai, Chihuahua.”

  “Well what did you expect? At the first shot he stops, but he didn’t fall over or anything. He just stopped and stared at me, babbling and frothing at the mouth with his eyes rolling all around the place like sheep’s eyes in a hot skillet, so fuck it, I emptied the gun at him, and he still didn’t fall over right away. Christ, I was even reaching up for a box of shells when all of a sudden, slowly like, he just tipped over backward with a thump.”

  “It looks to me like you only hit him once,” Bernabé Montoya said. The sheriff, the only person standing over by the dead man, was staring down at his froth-flecked, unshaven, bulbous, and starey-eyed frog face. Perhaps Bernabé was waiting to see if an apple-shaped, pearl-colored, white wingèd soul was going to blurt out of the corpse’s gaping mouth.

  “He had a ticket for Denver,” Bill Thorpe said. “He was my only passenger.”

  “He must of been crazy,” Bruno Martínez said. “This world is filling up with crazies.”

  “No wallet?” Bill Koontz asked Granny Smith.

  “No wallet. No money. No nothing.”

  “What do you think, Bernie?” Nick asked.

  “Oh, I dunno,” the sheriff said slowly, still not taking his eyes off the dead man’s face. “Who knows? Maybe he was lonely.”

  Everybody else in the store harrumphed sarcastically. At which point, Herbie Goldfarb, on whom all the cop cars outside somehow hadn’t registered, tripped gaily through a pebble barrage and into the store to buy a candy bar.

  “You see that son of a bitch?” Nick screamed at Herbie, pointing to the dead man. “That’s why you should carry a gun!”

  * * *

  Four days later, about three in the afternoon, the storekeeper was standing at the counter reading the sports page of the Capital City Reporter, and although he didn’t hear anybody enter the store, suddenly something made Nick look up, “and here was this big, wavy-haired, bearded,
supersmiley, Jesus freak–looking creep standing in front of me,” Nick told Bill Koontz. “I never seen him before in my life. I figured, though, at first, he was probably from over at the Evening Star commune, qué no? One of them. So I asked him what did he want, and he points to all the staurolites I got in the pan to the left of the register, you know, and he asked me what were those. So I told him. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I guess it was the usual spiel. I bullshitted about how they were called fairy crosses, and about how this is one of the few places in the world you can find little cross-shaped crystals like that, and then you know what he did? He took out his wallet which was bulging with cash—like maybe I never saw so much loot in a single wallet all at once—and he said ‘I want to buy them all.’ Well, shit, porqué no? I got a whole bunch more in a cardboard box in back that Onofre Martínez sold me, so I said sure, go ahead, and after counting them the freak hands me thirty-eight dollars and just scoops all those staurolites off the tray, stuffs them into his pockets, and makes the sign of the cross or something … and smiles at me and walks out.”

  “Well, the reason I asked, see,” Bill Koontz said, carefully tucking the man’s photograph back into his wallet, “is we found this same guy pulled off the highway in a little MG convertible last night down by Doña Luz, dead as a doornail.”

  “Hijo, Madre,” Nick said, closing his eyes, “not another one.”

  “Yeah. And this one’s just as weird. Like we thought at first it was dope, probably he OD’d. So we sent him down to Shroeder in the capital for an autopsy, and guess what Shroeder found in this guy’s stomach—”

  “Thirty-eight staurolites?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  Nick let out a slow, lamenting sigh, at the end of which he asked: “I wonder what happened to the other three?”

  “There’s something in the air,” Koontz said, starting to leave. “I don’t know exactly what, but I wish to Christ that all of a sudden winter would come.”

  * * *

  Stella Armijo called up Harlan Betchel’s wife, Greta, with some disquieting news.

  “Hey Mrs. Betchel,” Stella fairly shouted to Greta and the two other anonymous party-liners listening in, “I just saw Mercedes Rael drive past our place behind the wheel of your car!”

  “Oh nonsense,” Greta Betchel, a petite woman who fancied herself both a nineteenth-century graveyard poet and the world’s last jardinière suprême à la Louis XIV, replied. “First of all, Stella dear, you know Mercedes Rael is much too old to drive. And second of all—”

  Then she stopped.

  And she called to her son Albie, who was out back in the palace gardens shooting butterflies with a BB gun: “Albie, darling, be a dear sweet thing, would you, honey, and toddle around front to see if the car’s still there?”

  “Nope, it isn’t,” Albie said, squeezing the trigger on a bright orange monarch; “Dad just drove off a minute ago; I heard him leave.”

  “Excuse me, Stella, I’ve got to call Harlan.” Greta hung up suddenly, lifted the receiver immediately, and dialed her husband, all in one smooth, only quasi-hysterical, motion.

  “Why would I take the car?” Harlan wanted to know. “It’s maybe fifty yards to the café, maybe less. When did I ever take the car?”

  “Stella Armijo just called to say that she saw Mercedes Rael drive past her house in our car.”

  Harlan frowned: “Well, just a sec, honey, lemme check.”

  “Bad news?” Nick queried uneasily as Harlan lumbered through the door.

  “Where’s your mother, Nick? Stella Armijo just called Greta, said she saw Mercedes driving past her house in our car.”

  “You gotta be kidding,” Nick laughed. “My mom hasn’t had a license for fifteen years, not since she totaled that brand new ’51 Ford pickup I had up in the canyon by rolling forty feet into Little Baldy Creek with one of Eusebio Lavadie’s cows in the back. C’mon, Harlan, don’t make bad jokes.”

  “Where is she, Nick?”

  “In the front yard, in the backyard, in the bedroom taking a nap.”

  “You mind if I have a look-see?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  As Harlan left, Nick’s phone rang. “Hey, Nick?”

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “Bertha Gleason here. Now maybe you aren’t going to believe this, and I don’t think I would if I were you, but you better trot on over next door and check if your mother’s at home, because if she isn’t I think I just saw her drive by here in that pink and white Dodge belongs to Harlan and Greta Betchel.”

  Nick sat down. “Which way was she headed?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “That bad—?”

  “That bad, I’m afraid,” Bertha said sympathetically.

  Nick poked a finger against his temple and pulled the trigger, mouthing a silent pow! As he did, Harlan’s large shadow fell across the sawdusted floor.

  “She isn’t there,” Nick said in a monotone, staring blankly ahead.

  “How did you know?”

  “Bertha Gleason. She just called. I guess Stella was right…”

  “Which way was she headed, did Bertha say?”

  Nick flung out finger-spread hands: “Right now, apparently, it’s up for grabs.”

  “Oh Lord!” Harlan clapped a hand to his forehead. “It’s all because I clocked her with that shoe, isn’t it? Gaga or not, she’s still got a memory.”

  “Like an elephant.” And this was shaping up as such an all-encompassing disaster that Nick couldn’t move.

  “How did she stay on the road all the way to over there?” Harlan asked weakly.

  “How can she climb trees, survive in the forest for a week, and eat all my daffodils without getting sick to her stomach?” Nick replied.

  “You better call Bernie. We ought to let him know she’s loose, right?”

  “I guess so—”

  “I know,” the sheriff muttered disconsolately. “I know, I know, I know. I wish I didn’t know, but I do. Already Nancy Mondragón called—your mama, she almost ran over Larry. Four seconds later that VISTA kid, the Jewish hermit from New York, he called from Onofre’s place; he was on his bicycle when a little old lady in the Betchels’ car deliberately ran him off the road. Six seconds later Lavadie called, wanting to know could he shoot her or not, because she went through a fence on his property and zigzagged around a field, killed a couple of sheep, then left.”

  “Heading which way, Bernie?”

  “He couldn’t say for sure. Maybe east or west; maybe north or south. It was hard to tell. He said mostly she was sort of spinning around like a dust devil.”

  “Okay, Bernie, I guess we’ll head out after her.”

  “I dunno now what’s the point, Nick. Me, I figure I might just as well sit tight and man the phones until the motor stalls or she collides head-on with a tree. About all more cars on these roads can do is just get in her way, that’s how I see it.”

  Nick banged down the phone. Immediately it rang.

  “Nick? Nick? Is that you, Nick? Do you know what your mother is doing right now? Do you? Do you?”

  “Who is this?” Nick asked.

  “Who the hell do you think it is?” a hysterical voice on the other end screamed.

  Nick hung up. Before he could release the apparatus, however, it rang again.

  “Mr. Rael?” a woman’s voice jabbered irately, “you ain’t gonna believe this, but guess what?”

  Whereupon Horsethief Shorty walked into the store laughing. “Relax everybody, relax,” he chortled. “It’s all over.”

  “She totaled my car,” Harlan groaned.

  “She’s dead,” Nick whispered.

  “She just stopped,” Shorty chuckled.

  “She didn’t crash?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “She’s alive?”

  “More alive than a grasshopper on a hot skillet.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Up at the Dancing Trout.”

 
“Oh God help me—” Nick cringed in preparation for the answer to his next question: “Where, up there, Shorty, did she stop?”

  “In the swimming pool,” Shorty sputtered. “But don’t worry, man. For some reason that car of yours, Harlan—it floats.”

  Slowly, Nick sank back into his chair:

  “Que milagro!” he squeaked hoarsely.

  * * *

  Supper was over, the children scrubbed and put to bed, Bloom in his study working. Linda sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and lit a cigarette. She was hot, tired from dealing with the children all day; the wind had been blowing, filling her hair with dust—but now everything was quiet. The house was straightened up and neat; the kitchen soft, bare, and shining. Everything was in order … except that her period was coming on. No big deal, but still she wanted to weep. It was too hard trying to keep life under control.

  As the night thickened, dew forming, a grassy smell drifted in through the screen door. Already, small moths decorated the screen; they pinged deferentially against the windows and fell away.

  Linda turned on the radio, locating a faraway California station that was playing quiet waltz music, and listened for a moment while sipping coffee, smoking; then she brought in some of the kids’ clothes and set to work sewing on buttons. At first the music soothed; later it jarred, growing loud then fading to nothing; lightning from a storm located somewhere in that vast fifteen hundred miles separating the transmitter from the Blooms’ radio kept intruding, causing bursts of jagged static. Finally Linda angrily turned off the radio and just sat at the table with her head resting in the fluff of clean kiddie togs, overcome by an almost pristine sadness, a feeling of hopelessness. She could not stand the idea that her husband was falling into the almost maudlin trap of defending something lost from the start; she knew it was lost because she had grown up among the losers; and Linda resented the fact that she still very much loved them, her people the losers, even while she was terrified of being nailed to the cross of her upbringing, her culture. All that could happen, with Bloom tilting at windmills, was the ruination of them both … of them all.