The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  Snuffy rewrapped his carving and closed the suitcase. “Amarante Córdova is still alive,” he murmured incredulously. And then he shouted joyously: “Amarante Córdova is still alive!”

  “God works in strange ways,” Fructosa whined unhappily. “My brother Donald, he was a good worker, he never drank, he took care of his family, he never stayed out at night, he never had a car accident or an operation, not even for his tonsils, but he caught a chicken bone in his throat last New Year’s Eve and choked to death. But that old brujo is still around, drunk morning, noon, and night, winter, summer, spring, and fall, scaring all the kids with his toothless mouth. I don’t understand it, that’s all.”

  The Gurulés regrouped at their truck, swinging sacks over the tailgate, the kids scrambled into the back, and Esquipula and sulky Fructosa, bidding Snuffy a forlorn adios, hoisted themselves wearily into the cab. As the truck chugged toward the highway, Amarante Córdova emerged from the Frontier Bar hugging a six-pack to his chest.

  “Hey, cuate, where you headed with that beer?” Snuffy called. “You gonna drink all that beer yourself?”

  Pretending not to hear, Amarante hurried as fast as his bowed and decrepit legs would carry him toward home, scattering a slew of yellow and red grasshoppers in his wake.

  “Hey, Mr. Amarante, sir!” Snuffy cried, but the old geezer refused to be deterred.

  Snuffy went through a few complicated contortions to regain his feet, wavered unsteadily for a moment, then wove back into the store to sign up for another six-pack of tallboys, some Slim Jim sausages, and a package of roasted piñon nuts. Outside again, he spent a bungling five minutes sloppily tying the cords holding his suitcase together, and, when that was more or less accomplished, he hoisted the suitcase with a grunt and began walking west.

  A few minutes later Snuffy stood on the ditch bank overlooking Joe Mondragón’s beanfield.

  “What do you know,” he laughed, fanning his sweaty face with his grubby hat. “Would you look at that, my friends!”

  Squatting, he lit a cigarette, and for about five minutes did not take his eyes off the field. It was quiet here, the sun had grown sultry, and although magpies were gathered in the cottonwoods by Indian Creek, they made no noise now. To the south, a red-tailed hawk circled—suddenly it dove toward a prairie dog settlement, but came up empty-handed. The mountains, those immediately to the east and the far humps and flat mesas in the south, were not etched as sharply as Snuffy remembered: a low-lying, parchment-colored haze almost obscured them in some places; elsewhere a milkiness made their outlines vague. The view extended for perhaps fifty miles, but people said you would never again be able to see for a hundred miles. Most of the crap in the air, experts said, came from new coal-fired power plants a hundred and fifty miles west of Milagro. Someday, these same environmental pontificators who knew about such things were saying, the deserted mesaland and the small green villages like Milagro would lie under polluting clouds as thick as those now found in Los Angeles and New York City.

  Snuffy didn’t know pollution from a duckbilled platypus. So he stood up, unbuttoned his pants, and, letting his eyes riffle almost sensually across the green mountain slopes above town, he pissed into Joe’s field. Tomorrow, Snuffy thought, or the next day, or whenever the chotas and the trigger-happy posse got out of there, he would head into the hills for a spell with his sleeping bag, a lid of Mary Jane, some fishline, and a dozen artificial flies. Years ago he had been a mountain boy like most other kids from Milagro, passing time up there with sheep and goats, spending summers in a tent looking after cattle or taking care of his uncle’s scare gun, lying under the stars with the gun booming and the animals making their comfortable and stupid summer noises—

  All at once Snuffy experienced almost crippling waves of sadness and remorse. He patted his slight paunch; he flexed his trembling, nicotine-stained hands. But damned if he was the sort of person who wallowed for very long in past glories or failures; Snuffy just couldn’t get steamed up about lost opportunities, or about his present and its infinite insecurity. In fact, he didn’t give much of a shit about the future either. Who cared about the opportunities he would never have? Life was life, and one day followed another, and Snuffy took those days one at a time.

  With a last affectionate glance at the beanfield, the santo carver pushed on, walking, sometimes stumbling, erratically along the dusty road, leaving rattled grasshoppers and nervous little butterflies in his wake. He advanced past Amarante Córdova’s decaying house to another crumbling building which had once belonged to the Ledouxs, most of whom were presently employed in the steel mills of Pueblo, Colorado.

  The roof had caved in since the day Tommy Bascomb drove off with a hundred and ten Smokey statuettes; the windows were broken; the rooms were full of tumbleweeds; the outhouse had fallen apart; the well housing was menacingly aslant—so what else was new? A few outbuildings, a toolshed, a little barn had all sagged into piles of faded slabs and rusty nails. A cultivator, a stripped tractor, a horsetrailer with no side panels and no tires, and other inoperative farm machinery lay about. Old as the hills, Snuffy chuckled, and twice as worn out.

  Depositing his suitcase in the kitchen beside a doorless icebox, he walked out back past the dead machinery and into the fields where you could still see traces of old ditches that used to carry water, veins and arteries of the land’s life. He crossed one field, then another, climbing through barbed wire fences, his beer and Slim Jims in a bag cradled carefully in one arm, and, traversing a mile of fallow, though once irrigated, earth, he reached the sage.

  Contentedly, almost joyously, Snuffy entered the waist-high sage, proceeding for another mile due west toward the gorge. In a likely spot in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but pungent lavender all around, he sat down and popped open a beer. Another mile west some buzzards circled over the gorge. A raven lumbered by. Then Snuffy was immersed in a downright religious, windless silence. He hadn’t been so happy or so sad for almost a decade. The quiet was brilliant, stunning, miraculous. Snuffy drank a beer and rolled a joint and smoked the joint and drank another beer. He glowed, and the mesa hardly breathed—the day was suspended, as still as a frightened rabbit. A blue-tailed lizard skittered near his feet. And ants crawled around; they had built high sandy mountains everywhere in the sage.

  After a peaceful sojourn Snuffy stood up and advanced farther, working his way slowly westward until eventually he arrived at the gorge rim. Eight hundred feet below ran the green river that extended all the way from the Colorado mountains to the Gulf of Mexico. Snuffy hurled a beer can into space, fascinated by its trajectory. Swallows darted on and off the cliffsides far below, their burnished green backs and white tailspots flashing. Pushing about a hundred yards north, Snuffy discovered the trail into the gorge he had known would be there, a narrow descent to the river bank where two small hot springs were located.

  At times, descending, it appeared Snuffy would slip and fall, sailing out between silent echoing walls, floating like a romantic, suicidal dreamer toward the green ribbon far below. But he never completely lost his balance, not even a decade had taken that away, and in fifteen minutes he arrived at the Rio Grande.

  A rattlesnake buzzed; Snuffy picked up a stick and lazily beat it into a pulp.

  One hot pool, surrounded by large boulders, was about thirty yards from the river’s edge, a shallow puddle twenty feet wide. The other pool, not much larger than a bathtub, had formed right at the bank of, and on a level with, the river. You could bask there in tingly bubbles, your nose on a level with the icy river and only inches away from its swift currents that pulsed just beyond a thin wall of lavic rocks.

  Stripping naked, Snuffy settled with a tallboy and a joint in the bathtub-sized pool, his head resting against a smoothly sculpted rock, the chilly Rio Grande rolling by inches from his pigeon-toes. And, sipping on the beer, he remembered romantic days of yore when they’d had parties down here, the youth of Milagro, skinny dipping together and hustling nookie in the bushes
, daring each other to leap into the nighttime river and swim through the ugly, murderous trolls and other aquatic banshees lurking within the strong black currents.

  One day long ago Snuffy was fishing toward the hot springs from downriver when he heard voices at the bigger pool. Joe Mondragón was in there, grappling with a lovely girl named Nancy Quintana. Snuffy crept quietly into some bushes and saw that they were naked in the big shallow pool, Joe passionately munching on Nancy’s plump flesh; chill autumn winds whistled down the river. And then, while Snuffy looked on, Joe and Nancy made love in that sandy bowl, their bodies steaming in the frosty dusk, their teeth chattering despite the heated water bubbling against their young bodies … and it started to snow. But the lovemaking continued until both were exhausted, then they lay on their backs in the pool, everything but their heads and Joe’s persistent hard-on immersed in the warm water, watching the snow drift earthward out of the darkening October sky.

  It was among the most beautiful sights Snuffy had ever seen. And right now remembering it made him cry, not because he felt sad, but because he was so delighted to be home again at last.

  * * *

  Mist lay low in the trees, but he figured the sun would soon burn it off. In the meantime the helicopter was useless, and so Mel Willard was holding off until later. The helicopter pilot did not know the area well, but he’d flown over it a few times before in light planes out of the Chamisaville airport, and the deputy sheriff with him, Meliton Naranjo, knew the area as well as anyone, having been born and brought up in Milagro. So the helicopter might be some use, Kyril Montana was thinking, as he climbed slowly through the trees. But only if Joe Mondragón had gone up toward more open country, which was hard to believe. Rather, the agent speculated that his man had probably stayed around the lower, heavily wooded canyons where his truck had been found last night and where you’d practically have to trip over him to find him. Stayed there, or doubled back to or toward the town. Possibly he was already hanging out in somebody’s home, although they knew for sure it wasn’t the home of either his wife or his lawyer. It was a cinch he hadn’t gone far, up, down, or sideways, because it would have been impossible to advance through the dark pines at night. Hence, if Joe Mondragón was heading for the high country, he hadn’t had but a half-hour start on them, and they could make that up quickly.

  At the edge of a small moss-lined streamlet he paused, listening. Other men on either side, mostly out of sight but within easy hearing, moved noisily through the trees, calling out to each other, mostly in Spanish. They were laughing, lighthearted, excited. Several had walkie-talkies, as did the agent. He also had a radio for communicating with the state team back in Milagro or down at Doña Luz, and with the helicopter once it was up and flying.

  Kyril Montana did not like working with other men. He mistrusted most men and he believed (and had often had his beliefs confirmed) that very few were as dedicated as himself to whatever job was at hand. Most men, including (and maybe especially) policemen, were erratic, sometimes good at what they did, often bad, always unpredictable. When you were teamed up with them it meant you were in part responsible for, or at least affected by, their mistakes. And the agent could not stand to have something he was doing get derailed by someone with whom he’d been forced to work. There had been nobody, down through his years as a policeman, that the agent had ever trusted entirely. And today he felt especially uncomfortable in these woods with a bunch of northern Chicanos speaking a language he did not understand, hunting down a man who had a gun and just might use it, in a situation that could become extremely volatile if only one little thing went wrong.

  And so as he climbed quietly up the steep, wooded hillsides expertly canvassing the forest in front of him and to all sides, Kyril Montana wished that he were somehow alone in this vast and peaceful wilderness, searching for Joe Mondragón. For alone, he felt—one on one the way all good hunting should be—his chances of coming upon the quarry would have been infinitely improved. These noisy, slaphappy, and, no doubt, trigger-happy people were probably either in cahoots with Joe Mondragón anyway, or else by their blundering, foolhardy attitude they’d telegraph all their movements to him well in advance, entirely blowing the search.

  Dark indigo steller’s jays flickered briefly out of black shadows, disappearing into the mist. There followed silence for a few yards, then shouts off to the left, laughter on his right. A man wearing a cowboy hat and a sheepskin jacket plunged into sight a short way ahead and waved, then veered out of sight again speaking rapid-fire Spanish into his walkie-talkie. The agent wondered if he was drunk.

  It was slow, frustrating going. Proceeding cautiously, Kyril Montana advanced through underbrush and dead leaves, automatically avoiding twigs and small branches that cracked underfoot. But sometimes off to either side the dry limbs breaking sounded like gunshots, causing him to cringe and swear softly to himself. It occurred to him that the operation was hopeless, that Trucho had set it up all wrong, but there was nothing he could do about it. Barring a miracle, they’d be like this today, and maybe tomorrow, and then it would be called off. And then perhaps Kyril Montana could take over and do it his way, the quiet way, stalking Joe Mondragón one on one the way he should be stalked, or maybe just waiting for him like a man waits for a deer, on the crest of a hill, overlooking a trail, or else back in town, waiting patiently for him to blow his cover. That’s the way Kyril Montana would have done it, and if he had needed help it would only have been to station a man on Mondragón’s house, on the lawyer’s perhaps—though he was beginning to feel the lawyer didn’t know diddlysquat—and on that beanfield.

  Which somebody, not Joe Mondragón, had irrigated last night, and which someone (or two or three—how many?) would be irrigating indefinitely unless this thing were quickly resolved.

  Kyril Montana was uneasy. He had long since admitted to himself that although he understood the generalities of this case, and although he was more than passing familiar with the north and the northern people, there was much to this particular situation he did not understand, or at least that he did not really know how to deal with. It had seemed to him back in the beginning, back during that first conference with the governor and Bookman and Noyes, that probably the most logical way to handle the situation was the legal way: take Joe Mondragón to court, find against him, make him stop irrigating, or—if he refused to quit—throw him in jail and be prepared to take the consequences. It had been obvious, however, that none of the men present in that room, men intimately concerned with land and water squabbles these past fifteen or twenty years (and familiar, also, with Ladd Devine’s Miracle Valley project), had favored that solution. If Joe Mondragón were to be prosecuted, it had to be for something not directly connected to the symbolic use of irrigation water in that particular field, and the agent had seen the logic in that, because the last thing you wanted to do in this type of situation was hand the people a martyr on a silver platter. The only problem being, of course, that whenever you ran an operation that was not aboveboard there was a certain risk of it backfiring into a worse situation than it had been before. But right now, theoretically, they had Joe Mondragón more or less where they wanted him. Of course, according to the two witnesses, Joe had fired at Pacheco in self-defense; hence there was no way to bring a serious charge against him unless the witnesses were coerced into changing their testimony, which probably wouldn’t be a difficult thing to accomplish, if necessary. Essentially, though, Joe was in the clear. Legally, right now, there was no way to hang him, although prior to a trial or a hearing he could probably be kept under wraps. Whether this would be a wise move or not, especially if others in Milagro were willing to irrigate that beanfield, was another question. The fact of the matter was, if you thoroughly reviewed all the alternatives, there really was no solution to the problem, no way to play it safe or to take chances yet be assured of success.

  Then Kyril Montana started thinking another way. If Joe Mondragón failed to walk out of the Midnight Mountains aliv
e, the whole thing might be over. Say if Joe took a potshot at one of his own trigger-happy compatriots and they blew him ass-backward down the canyon into eternity, scream as the liberals and the Charley Blooms might, they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Too, death was a lesson these poor people would understand: when the killing started, and maybe only if the killing started, the irrigation of that field would abruptly end.

  Still, this question remained: Could they—could his side, the police side—weather the storm that might result if Joe Mondragón were killed? In what ways would the Milagro people, downstate militant Chicano groups, or even out-of-state political groups pick up on his death? Suppose that lawyer Bloom latched onto and publicized Kyril Montana’s previous trip to Milagro; suppose a leak developed in the capital—

  The helicopter was up and about, approaching from the west. The mist was dissipating quickly, allowing the sun—in streaks and dazzling, abrupt splashes—to shine through. The agent made contact with Mel Willard, told him where they were, and went over the bubble copter’s suggested search area. Basically, the copter was useless over these deep woods. So Willard had orders to fly up Deerhair Canyon toward the wide open meadows and rocky, treeless slopes around the Little Baldy Bear Lakes. Hence, in a very short time they’d have a pretty complete aerial report on what amounted to about a three-square-mile area.

  Kyril Montana, a patient, methodical, unemotional man, searched through the luminous morning for Joe Mondragón. Although occasionally aware of, and slightly disturbed by, the action around him, the boisterous excitement and stupid techniques (or lack of techniques) of inexperienced men on a hunt, the agent was for the most part tuned in to only his own well-trained and modulated senses. He made doubly sure that nothing receded behind him without his inspection; he kept his eyes weaving through upper branches, determined not to miss a trick. When tiny ground squirrels popped up in front and zipped through the brush, he didn’t flinch, nor did he ever raise his gun as if to shoot the tiny animals. When Bernabé Montoya’s doleful voice crackled over the walkie-talkie, the agent replied succinctly, thoroughly, and then absorbed the information, or rather, lack of information, from the sheriff with equal automatic aplomb. And although he did not for a minute believe this herd of thundering clowns was going to flush Joe Mondragón, he never let that belief disturb his concentration on the job at hand.