by John Nichols
There were only about ten or twelve names before his, and the whole thing made Joe terribly uncomfortable, as if somehow he had just signed up for a hitch in the army or in a jail cell. He was being robbed of a certain freedom he had enjoyed, despite his poverty, all his life. He was being trapped into going farther than he had ever intended to go. Now somebody else besides himself had a real stranglehold on his future. And maybe (Joe thought for the ten-thousandth time) I shouldn’t have cut that water into that fucking beanfield after all.
“You don’t have too many names on this thing, do you?” he mumbled nervously.
“People just haven’t decided yet. Everybody understands though, qué no? They just don’t know what we should do about it. But you’ll see—”
In the truck, going home, Joe suddenly exploded: “Shit!”
“What?” Nancy asked.
“Just shit,” Joe whined uncomfortably, gripping a tallboy between his thighs in order to pop the top more easily.
* * *
Early next morning Carl Abeyta arrived at the Forest Service headquarters to discover a weathered ten-year-old statuette of Smokey the Bear tied with red ribbon to the doorhandle of the office building. A long, thin adobe nail had been carefully hammered through its heart.
Carl was a local boy who knew a thing or two about hexes and about Milagro history, and so he reacted accordingly.
First he took the Smokey out back, splashed kerosene on it, and burned it up.
Next he turned around the desk in his office so that he was sitting at it with his back to the wall instead of to the window.
Then he sent an application off to regional headquarters, begging for a transfer.
* * *
That same afternoon, the real estate agent Bud Gleason awoke from a late-afternoon nap in dire need of taking a leak. Swinging his feet to the floor, he sat groggy and unmoving for a moment, lit a cigarette, then pushed his feet into some slippers and padded painfully into the bathroom. As usual his whole body ached. He unzipped his fly, prodding the old sad-sack penis into the clear, then stood there with one arm extended, his hand against the wall, his head propped desultorily against that arm’s bicep, taking an occasional drag from the cigarette in his other hand while he waited for the pee to leave his throbbing bladder. Instead, just as a huge ash falling from his weed splashed against his penis, he sneezed. He hadn’t closed the door, and so his wife, Bertha, who was downstairs stretched out on the living room divan reading last month’s Redbook novel, heard the sneeze and called up to him:
“Somebody is thinking about you.”
“Bullshit,” Bud grumbled. “I’m catching a cold; maybe pneumonia; probably I’ll die.”
“Don’t try and wriggle out of it that way,” she said. “Somebody is thinking about you. I know you been horsing around on the sly, especially when I flew East in April to bury Grandpa.”
“Oh yeah, me with my one ball that screams Rape! every time I have half an orgasm, and my heart that goes into shock every morning when I wake up because it’s so surprised to be alive. After three and a quarter coronaries I should wear a black suit or something. Just to save everybody some time when I keel over…”
“Well, maybe somebody else is thinking about you for some other reason,” she insisted.
“Like maybe God is thinking about my heart condition and wondering if it’s time to pull the rug out from under, thanks a lot,” Bud complained, tugging his penis impatiently, eager to get this leak over with, wondering why he couldn’t pee.
“God—hah! Listen to him brag, would you? Whatever happened to the Devil in this scheme of things, he lost our address? We’re too rich for God.”
“I’m a condemned man,” Bud wailed, grimacing, “and my wife thinks it’s funny.”
“What do you want me to do, cry?” she called. “You drop dead I’m a couple hundred thousand richer, plus I don’t have to put up with you farting between my satin sheets anymore.”
“Don’t feed me all that Mexican crap and I won’t fart in bed anymore!”
“You farted in bed when we lived in Brooklyn and all I fed you were potato pancakes and knishes!”
“Ai—” Bud doubled over, sneezing like a whale clearing its blowhole, and some urine finally popped out willy-nilly in the process.
“How about would you believe maybe it’s somebody thinking about you for different than a loving reason? Like how about if Joe Mondragón is thinking about you?” she teased.
Their precocious eleven-year-old daughter, Katie, appeared in the doorway, staring inquisitively at his penis. “Why would Joe Mondragón be thinking about you, Daddy?” she asked, giggling when he sneezed again and some more urine squirted painfully out, most of it missing the bowl.
“Close the door, will you please?” Bud groaned. “What is this anyway, I’m not entitled to a little privacy? The whole family’s gotta kibitz while I’m trying to void myself?”
“Well, if you wanted privacy why didn’t you close the door and lock it?” his daughter asked.
“When I woke up the coast was clear. Now I look back on it my head must be getting soft not to lock and barricade the door when I’m in here.”
“You peed all over the floor,” Katie observed.
“Bertha!” Bud howled. “Will you tell this kid of yours to bug off and leave her father alone?”
“Your daughter she isn’t? What happened to your voice?”
“Oh Lord—!” Bud couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t move, his bladder was going to burst, he couldn’t stop sneezing … he sneezed again.
“Maybe Joe Mondragón made a little voodoo doll of you and is sticking pins into it,” Bertha laughed. “Like during the Smokey the Bear santo riot.”
“Funny—” He blasted another sneeze. “Get out of here, Katie, or when I’m finished, if I’m still alive, I’ll spank you.”
“You couldn’t catch me,” snotnosed Katie said, flouncing away and galumphing loudly down the carpeted stairs.
“You think it’s so damn funny!” Bud screamed in frustration at Bertha, whom he could hear laughing.
“Funny? Getting the air let out of three tires on my Mustang yesterday afternoon is funny? No, I don’t think it’s funny. But what the hell did you expect after you let Ky Montana use our living room for his CIA headquarters—a dozen roses from the local poor people?”
Bud sneezed, and sneezed again, his whole body convulsing violently, and as it did so urine suddenly burst forth, describing the sort of dancing arcing patterns in the air kids make waving Fourth of July sparklers. Bud gasped and grabbed, getting his hands all wet and dousing his cigarette; his ass bumped against the sink and he yelped.
“Oh my gosh!” Bertha hooted from downstairs. “You alright? Take some digitalis!”
“No,” Bud whined miserably, emptying the last portion of his bladder with some semblance of order, “I’m okay.” Then, after washing his hands and blowing his nose, he groped behind the toilet for the scented pink sponge. Maybe after all she was right; maybe Joe Mondragón had been thinking about him, causing those sneezes. Who else in this town could have conjured up such a torture?
“Daddy peed all over the bathroom,” he heard Katie tell her mom. And “That’s alright,” her mom replied loudly, “if he wants to write his name on the wall, more power to him. You only live once.”
Bud plopped the sponge in the sink and sank tiredly onto the tub rim. He was terrified, of course. Terrified that somehow Joe Mondragón was going to halt all the Miracle Valley projects, and if he did that Bud’s fortune, which could be frosted with caviar and Cadillacs if Ladd Devine pulled off everything that was planned, would take a precipitous nosedive. Already he’d borrowed heavily to redo their house, to buy into the west side subdivision and golf course, and to wheedle a position on the proposed ski valley’s board of directors. And if those deals fell through he was dead, figuratively and probably literally, too. He had a heart inside—after three major attacks in the past ten years—that must look lik
e the aftermath of a head-on collision.
Bud sneezed again, so hard his chest felt as if an innertube in it had suffered a blowout. “Oh Christ,” he sniffled.
“I just saw it!” Bertha screamed from downstairs. “Bud? Can you hear me? I tell you, I just saw it!”
“Alright,” he called sarcastically. “I’m a shlemiel or I’m a shlamozzle or whatever it is you people call them, I’ll bite—what did you just see?”
“The angel that flew over the house.”
“I saw it too, Daddy!” Katie bellowed. “I saw it too!”
“Oh shit,” Bud groaned to himself. “A bunch of comedians I live with. Laughs from sunup to suppertime. Very funny. A bunch of hooligans I live with is more like it. Go away!” he shrieked vehemently. “Go out back and stick your heads in the mud! You—Bertha—it might improve your looks!”
Suddenly his chest constricted, pain clobbered a shoulder, he almost toppled backward into the tub. For a moment, staying absolutely still in an almost iridescently humming moment that reeked of mortality, he waited, not even feeling sad or particularly cheated; he merely waited for Death to drive a stake through the center of his chest. But nothing happened. So after a moment he whispered, “God, I’m only forty-nine, please let me live until I’m fifty.” Then, gingerly, he roused himself, took a pill, blew his nose again, and went back to the bedroom to put on fresh clean clothes. After all, it was late in the day and he had to drive down to Chamisaville to have dinner with a man interested in some land.
Ten minutes later, as he was about to slip behind the wheel of his late-model General Motors womb, Bud heard one, two, three, four, five, six tiny gunshot pops from over on the west side, and directly on the heels of the sixth pop he heard a high-powered rifle explosion that echoed across town and ran right up Milagro Canyon into the Midnight Mountains … and he didn’t need anybody to draw him a picture in order to understand that all of a sudden—and finally—the chickens that had been fluttering around Milagro for the past few months (for the past one hundred and fifty years) had come home to roost.
Part Five
“Welcome, ball fans, to the World Series of Darkness.”
—Bernabé Montoya
Herbie Goldfarb had never owned a car. But after a while he became convinced that if he was ever going to do anything in Milagro besides vegetate and play the fool, he needed mobility. So he begged his father for bread, received two hundred dollars by return mail, and, early one morning, he clambered joyfully aboard a Trailways bus bound for the capital. Once in the big city Herbie headed directly for Joe Feeny’s Conquistador Used Car Lot, and, following an hour of indecision, fear, cold sweat, and haggling, Herbie drove onto the capital’s main thoroughfare behind the wheel of a 1956, two-door Chevy convertible with a cracked engine block and a leaky radiator. About fifteen seconds after his first left turn in this vehicle, Herbie was stopped by a cop who ticketed him for a nonfunctioning blinker signal system, an incident which took the edge off his glow. Still, once he had made it onto the north–south highway, that glow, that utter pride in ownership returned, and Herbie clicked on the radio—it worked!
It was a gorgeous sunny dry day. Locusts wailed in occasional cottonwoods; ravens, magpies, and buzzards drifted indolently through the clean air; and grasshoppers and butterflies smashed against the windshield in lovely patterns, while warm winds engulfed Herbie like an athletic whirlpool bath, making his skin feel tender and good. The top was down and the volunteer’s heart was buoyed up; he sang along with the rock ’n’ roll on the radio.
Ten miles into the trip home a red light on the dash suddenly glared. Pulling over into a gas station, Herbie discovered that his engine was out—out!—of oil, and he fed in two and a half quarts. It was then he noticed the drip-drop exiting from the block, and when the garage attendant took a gander at that he muttered “Ai, Chi-hua-hua!” rolled his eyes, and sold Herbie three extra quarts of oil for the remainder of his trip north.
A little farther on, while climbing a steep hill, the radiator overheated, and Herbie had to coast back down on the shoulder several hundred yards to the only gas station within five miles, where the radiator exploded and boiled over. Eventually, the slightly frazzled volunteer calmed it down and filled it up with cool, fresh water, and he was able to hit the road again.
The steep, winding curves in the gorge he conquered like a combination Mario Andretti–Juan Fangio–Steve McQueen. On this, the most difficult stretch, his new car performed like a dream. Atop the gorge, however, with Chamisaville and Hija Negrita Mountain visible eleven miles ahead, the red oil warning light blinked again, and Herbie had to feed his voracious automobile another two quarts. Then, just as he started to pull back onto the highway, six small black clouds scudded off the nearby foothills and proceeded to attack him with rain.
Unfazed, still feeling gay about his—his!—car, Herbie veered onto the shoulder, unsnapped the straps holding down his folding canvas roof, and punched the button that raised the roof into place. A grinding whirr sounded under his hood, but nothing else happened. Already soaked by the rain, Herbie tried to tug the roof into place by hand, but the folding stays and struts were permanently rusted together—his roof wouldn’t budge.
The volunteer stared at his car for a moment, then slipped behind the wheel into a puddle of water, pushed soaking wet hair from his eyes, and clicked on his windshield wipers, which did not function.
At that, Herbie’s glow faded perceptibly, and he putted about five miles in the rain, his teeth chattering, planning to revisit Joe Feeny’s Conquistador Used Car Lot with his .38 pistol and do a Texas Tower massacre number on Joe Feeny and all his unctuous, hand-rubbing, oily-tongued, sycophantic henchmen.
Herbie’s spirits improved, however, when the anti-Semitic clouds retreated just the other side of Chamisaville; in no time the hot sun and warm mesa-country air had dried out both himself and his car, and also his spirits. In fact, the volunteer had to admit it was funny: he’d been had, but what else was new? His car was still running, and when the oil alarm light became hysterical again it was almost joyfully that Herbie tended to the motor’s gluttonous needs.
Two miles farther on he stopped again to pick up a hitchhiker, a hefty young woman with a broad and sensual face—such blue eyes—and dirty blond hair in pigtails. Flinging her pack and guitar in back, she announced, “Hi, I’m the Butterfly of Love—you wanna turn on? I’ve got a whole lid of Columbia two-toke, no shit. This guy I met down south laid it on me because I had a cute nose. Can you dig that? Me with a cute nose? Boy, he was sure a weird heavy dude. This state is crawling with heavy weird dudes—thanks for picking me up. You do wanna turn on, don’t you?”
Herbie said, “Well, I guess I wouldn’t mind—”
“Goody!” Leaning over the seat, she fiddled with her pack. The girl wore a peasant blouse and a nondescript ankle-length skirt; her calloused and dirty feet were bare. Herbie’s spirits, and also his carnal lust, soared.
They chugged along at fifty miles an hour with the radio blasting and the late-afternoon wind whipping their hair, getting high on her Columbia two-toke. After his third drag Herbie looked at his passenger and grinned and she grinned back at him, and Herbie let his right hand float over and settle against one of her huge peasant breasts as he asked, “Where you headed?”
The Butterfly of Love giggled, flinging her head back gaily as she said, “Oh, you know, just wherever the roll of the dice takes me,” and they laughed heartily together. Herbie suggested, “You can crash with me, if you want,” and she answered, “Far out! That’d be groovy!” And she actually took his right hand back off the wheel, placing it on one breast, then she dropped her hand into his lap, and Herbie thought: Oh Jesus Christ, everything I always dreamed about is finally happening to me!
“Listen,” he giggled, as they halted at Rael’s store in Milagro, “do you wanna go for a picnic up in the Milagro Canyon?”
“Anything you say,” his nubile, effervescent maiden sputtered happily. �
�This is so incredibly beautiful around here. This is really outtasight! This is gorgeous!”
Oblivious to Mercedes Rael’s pebble onslaught, Herbie flapped into the store, and, while he selected bread and a Spam tin, some mustard and mayonnaise and beer, the Butterfly of Love played her guitar, singing so mellifluously that Amarante Córdova and Tranquilino Jeantete appeared in the Frontier Bar doorway with silly grins plastered across their faces and waved to her, she stopped the song just long enough to wave back.
The bottom fell out of Herbie’s sack on the porch, but so what? Laughing out loud, he fumbled around for a moment gathering in the picnic goodies; then they were off, jolting through town and up past the Dancing Trout, singing together now, Beatles songs and Simon and Garfunkle, the Beach Boys, and even Chuck Berry; and the air, evening-cooled and foamy from their own dust, washed over them like fluffy, diaphanous whipped cream.
“Oy vey,” Herbie murmured ecstatically, “for the first time this summer everything is beautiful!”
Following the road for about three miles, they pulled off into a lush grassy area beside a stream. Herbie killed the motor, and they both remained immobile for a moment, grinning stupidly through the windshield at the lovely stream and at the golden sunglow on pine tree tips rising along the slope beyond.
“Oh God, I feel good,” Herbie murmured reverently.
“Oh Jesus, I feel good too,” she whispered dreamily.
They faced each other. Herbie tugged the décolletage of that peasant blouse down over her breasts, which were enormous, unbelievable, like albino watermelons with huge organically grown strawberries in the center—for a second he could only ogle them in gluttonous awe. When had he ever been offered anything more luscious to devour? He would slake an entire summer’s thirst at this golden slattern’s overwhelming font!
