by John Nichols
Bernabé Montoya, with his pants tugged up over his pajamas and his gun shoved backward into his holster, plodded wearily out of the shadows accompanied by Harlan Betchel, who wore a raincoat over his pajamas and carried a 16-gauge shotgun.
Bernabé dropped his cigarette in the dirt and ground it out. Then, after sucking in and sadly letting out a deep breath, he bawled:
“Okay, everybody: CUT IT OUT!”
They stopped and turned their heads and backed sheepishly away from the window, giggling at the sheriff and at Harlan Betchel and at Harlan’s quivering shotgun.
“Now,” Bernabé muttered grimly. “Would somebody mind telling me just what is going on?”
Nobody spoke; several burped. The revelers lurched a few feet sideways and back.
Bernabé started to walk over for a closer look through the Pilar window, but as he took a step his gun fell from the holster, plopping loudly to earth. While he bent to pick it up, the drunks unleashed a chorus of sniggers.
“Shuttup,” Bernabé growled. Then he peered through the window. Brutus lay in the rubble gingerly licking his bloody paw.
Facing the culprits, Bernabé sighed, “Ai, Chihuahua,” and removed a pad from his back pocket. “Okay, okay, okay,” he groaned. “Lemme get your names. You’re gonna have to pay for this.”
“Oh, hey Bernie, wait a sec,” Harlan stammered. “It doesn’t look like that much damage to me. They were just kidding around. I don’t want to press any charges.”
“Quit pointing that gun at us,” an angry tipsy voice snarled, and Harlan quickly lowered the weapon, discharging a minute of profuse apologies in the direction it had been aimed.
“That’s better,” the same gruff voice allowed. Somebody else tee-heed derisively.
Bernabé asked, “Are you kidding me, Harlan—?”
“No sir. I’m absolutely serious. It’s nothing, really. You can’t hurt that furniture. And anyway, it was the dog did it. There’s no problem. None at all.”
“Are you okay upstairs?” Bernabé gave Harlan a screwy look, refusing to believe he could get off the hook this easily.
“Absolutely,” Harlan insisted. He smiled at the revelers. “It was all just in fun, right everybody?”
“Right, all in fun, that’s right, Harlan, it was just all in fun, you bet.” They sputtered and chuckled, loving their power, the way it reflected off the fear in Harlan Betchel’s face. You could practically see the imprint of Joe Mondragón’s bean plants across his ashen countenance.
“Okay, then. If you say so.” Bernabé shrugged, replacing the pad in his pocket. “You people go back in the bar, though, okay?”
“Sure—” Everybody except Joe and Nancy tilted forward, and, in one manner or another, plunged, sashayed, tiptoed, or soft-shoe-shuffled into the Frontier Bar.
“Come on, José,” Bernabé said warily. “Life is tough enough. Let’s not have any more trouble.”
“No trouble,” Joe grinned. “We just decided to take a walk. What, there’s a law in this town against taking a walk?”
“No law,” the sheriff said. “Just laws against getting in trouble.”
“Well, you know me,” Joe laughed. “I’d walk a mile outta my way to steer clear of just one single tiny itty-bitty ounce of trouble.”
Bernabé nodded, smiling in a joyless, on-guard manner.
Joe tucked his arm around Nancy’s waist, swinging her roughly around, facing west—they began walking toward the highway.
“See?” Joe called back. “We’re just a couple of turtledoves taking a little moonlight stroll.”
Bernabé fished for a handkerchief in his pocket and blew his nose. Then, while Harlan opened the café to check on his dog, the sheriff ticketed Onofre Martínez’s mottled-green, 1953 Chevy pickup which was parked in its usual place, and after that he crossed the street and settled heavily onto the edge of Rael’s porch. Laughter, and the raucous tinny jukebox music tripped out of the Frontier into the peaceful night. The sheriff muttered, “Welcome, ball fans, to the World Series of Borracheras.” Then he drew his revolver, opened the cylinder, and, doing what he had forgotten to do when Harlan sounded the alarm, he slowly and quite sheepishly loaded the gun.
A night like this, after recent events, could lead a man to reflect on life in general, and so that is what Bernabé did while things were momentarily peaceful. And what he reflected on could be summed up thusly: It was all going to change now, the life in the valley, the way people looked at themselves and at each other, and the way they looked at the Ladd Devines and at the Jim Hirsshorns, at the Harlan Betchels, and even at the himselves. To be sure, life wouldn’t return to what it was yesterday, but neither could it continue to be what it was today. The people had been apart for a long time, and now he sensed a small coming together—although who knew what those who had survived could do with a future nobody had defined? Bernabé knew the valley, he understood the people, and in the end he liked his life here, maybe he even had an embarrassing love for it all. But he was cynical and gruff, too, and sometimes he wished all the Joe Mondragóns would become cripples or at least eat poisonous mushrooms that would impair their vocal cords so he wouldn’t have to listen to their stupid, abusive rantings all the time. But Bernabé understood roots and he understood the fractured culture, loving what was good in the past while refusing to romanticize it, at the same time that he admired all his stubborn neighbors who had survived on a wing and a prayer, on bootleg liquor, on a half-dozen illegal deer a year, and on a handful of overgrazed alfalfa fields. And any man or woman or half-grown kid who, come hell or high water or Ladd Devine, had hung onto a piece of land, a ragtag goat, a rifle, and the Spanish language, was okay in Bernabé’s book. In fact, he sometimes envied his neighbors whatever it was some of them still possessed—call it cultural integrity—that he had mostly turned his back on by accepting the sheriff’s job.
But what the hell. Bernabé was sad, sitting there on the porch tapping his heels lightly against the baseboards. He got up once and bought a Coke from the pop machine beside the door, sat down again, and stared at the cheery elongated shadows dancing in the yellow rectangle cast through the open Frontier door.
Bernabé saw no leaders; he had no idea how folks might get themselves together and forge viable new lives. If he had seen a way, or if he had believed a little more in his gente’s ability to overcome their own confusion and internal disorders, he would have turned in his star tomorrow, grabbed a shovel, put on his irrigation boots, forsaken the security of his salary, and dived like a hungry muskrat into the heart of his own background in hopes of creating a better compromise for the unfathomable future.
But how could it be done? Friends tonight at the Frontier, these clowns would leap at each other’s throats tomorrow. In the morning, hung over and nasty, bitching at the wives and kiddies and throwing stones at their sheep or at their useless horses, they would realize that a victory hardly lasted much longer than did a climax when they made love. They would realize that yesterday’s triumph had ended when the moon rose, and that today new battle lines would be drawn, and that the fighting never stops.
Fuck it, the sheriff thought. He was tired. Getting up again, he crossed the street, took out his keys, and opened the lone parking meter which—Que milagro!—contained a single dime. Bernabé lugged this rare coin back across the street and dropped it into the pay phone beside the soda dispenser, dialing home.
“Carolina? Everything’s okay, no problem. They were just yelling at Betchel’s dog that guards the Pilar. I’m gonna stick around a while, though, just sit on Rael’s porch while they’re drinking themselves into a stupor in there, make sure nothing else happens.”
As an afterthought, he added, “It’s a nice night out. You can really hear the frogs.”
Whereupon Onofre Martínez—once the town’s most noted bard—stumbled from the Frontier, and, teetering in the middle of the plaza area, with his one arm upraised shaking a fist at the heavens, he launched immediately (and very loudly) i
nto an epic corrido hailing the afternoon’s triumph:
In the century of nineteen hundred
In August of this year,
A neighbor in our village,
Made a chota’s milk turn clear.
Don José of Milagro,
Last name of Mondragón,
Led us into a battle—
And the battle we have won.
When Seferino Pacheco,
That man with the awful pig,
Invaded the blessed beanfield,
Don José made him dance a jig.
Pacheco was first to fire,
Six shots at José’s head—
With one bullet Mondragón answered,
Que milagro Pacheco ain’t dead!
The police came up from the capital,
The woods were crawling with coppers,
But Don José was invisible,
Even to the noisy choppers.
Swift as a deer he outraced them,
Quiet as a fox he ran,
He thumbed his nose as they blundered,
He laughed to beat the band.
When the time was ripe, he entered
Their headquarters in Doña Luz,
And laughed in the face of the chota
Whose name was William Koontz.
The cops were eager to beat him,
And shut him up behind bars,
But then the Angels of Milagro
Arrived in their jalopy cars.
William Koontz turned pale,
He crapped in his pants that day,
He groaned and dropped to his knees,
And loudly started to pray.
For his heart was heavily beating,
His heart was pounding hard,
And his ugly chota features,
Were colored the color of lard.
“Spare me,” he cried, “I’m sorry—”
But José only sneered,
To see such a frightened copper,
So full of pathetic fear.
José marched out of the station,
He greeted us with a clenched fist,
And while everyone applauded,
His pretty wife he kissed.
So we’ll sing this song of José,
Whose beanfield started a war,
That the people of Milagro,
Have won forever more!
Onofre stopped, blinking at the sheriff, his eyes lopsided and terribly fierce. Then he staggered over to within two feet of the lawman and, swaying like an aspen in a stiff wind, he gurgled, “You know what, Bernabé, you know who’s looking over us people in this town?”
Bernabé frowned, sensing more trouble, and tried to glower in both a no-nonsense and also semifriendly way: “No, what?”
“You mean ‘No, who?’”
“Okay: No, who?”
“The Angel of Mud, that’s who,” Onofre blurted, tipping back and almost over. “And the Angel of Skinny Cows. And the Angel of Eighty-nine Cents a Six-pack Cerveza. And the Angel of Dysentery. And the cross-eyed, greasy Angel of Broken Trucks. And the Angel of Bad Luck—”
Onofre paused, blinking as he tried to focus on Bernabé.
“Oh brother, you never saw such a bunch of motley angels as we got hovering over this town,” he crowed. “In fact, you know what? If Jesus Christ himself was up there he’d have thistle burrs stuck in his beard and scars from an old bullet wound in his belly and only three and a half fingers on his right hand and no more than four teeth in his mouth.”
Bernabé felt like laughing, yet instead he set his face in a glower, hoping to drive this one-armed poet back into the heart of the revelry where he belonged.
But Onofre was only just getting started. Flinging his visible arm starward he babbled on: “We got the Angel of Leaky Outhouses up there, and we got the Angel of Overgrazed Pastures and the Angel of Always Being Broke up there—why, we got so many offbeat, grizzled angels floating around over this little town that sometimes I get claustrophobia from all their wing rustling—from them that has any feathers left in their wings, that is. And from their stink, too. Why, I bet there ain’t another town on earth with so many sweaty angels hanging around on top of it. There’s the Angel of Going Crazy up there, and the Angel of All the World’s Cripples. You ask me, this town is like a pile of horseshit attracting every kind of ugly fly and wingèd insect in the neighborhood, only what we got is every kind of deformed, outcast, feathered ghoul from heaven looking after our people and their earthly affairs. Lame, half-blind, one-armed like me, retarded—you name it. This place just reeks of crippled glory!”
“Well, yeah. I guess so. Uh-huh,” Bernabé replied, shifting uneasily.
“There’s a whole chorus of cojo, manco, and tuerto angels up there!” Onofre shouted at him.
Bernabé nodded, silently praying as he did so: Mother of God, please return this blotto lunatic to the bar.
“And as of today,” Onofre rattled on, “we got a new one just joined the crowd up there.”
“Oh yeah?” Bernabé sighed warily. “And which one is that?”
“The Half-pint Beanfield Angel,” Onofre hooted insanely, tattooing the earth with his boots.
“Maybe you better head on back into the celebration, cousin,” Bernabé suggested unhappily.
The one-armed man ignored him. “Hijo Madre!” he shrieked. “They’re all just a bunch of limping, chewed-up, noisy, useless, blind drunk, flea-bitten, tail-dragging, shifty-eyed Coyote Angels!”
Bernabé nodded again and muttered incoherently.
“But you know something?” Onofre added abruptly, now reeking with sentiment. “We wouldn’t none of us have even been here tonight like we are, celebrating like this, if it wasn’t for the love of all them stupid Coyote Angels.”
And with that, Onofre aboutfaced, heaved over to his truck, daintily extricated the most recent parking ticket from under the driver’s side windshield wiper, and RIPPED IT TO FUCKING SHREDS!
The shreds he let trickle gleefully off his hand onto the ground, then he smugly tipped his cowboy hat to Bernabé with his invisible arm and lurched jubilantly back into the bar.
To nobody in particular, Bernabé said, “Although we are a town of unbelievably shitty poets, we sure can rant and rave with feeling.”
Some parking ticket confetti, caught in a frail wind puff, tumbled across the dirt and settled around the sheriff’s boots, which were on the wrong feet. Then a Dancing Trout pickup chugged erratically past Forest Service headquarters and stopped in the middle of the plaza area. Jerry Grindstaff, drunk for the first time in maybe fifteen years, lurched out of the cab, clumsily worked the lever to chamber a shell in the .30–30 he carried, and started to swing around the truck, heading for the Frontier Bar.
“Hey!” Bernabé shouted. “Where you going with that gun?”
Startled, Jerry G. turned so sharply he lost his balance and sat down. But before Bernabé could even think about going for his own sidearm, Jerry G. had the rifle pointed up directly at the sheriff. He blinked his eyes confusedly, trying to focus them.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s me, the sheriff. Bernabé Montoya.”
“The sheriff?” Jerry G.’s eyes rolled up and inward as he tried to grasp what “sheriff” meant.”
“Quit pointing that rifle at me,” Bernabé ordered.
With that the foreman’s eyes clicked into a clearly focused and downright vicious glare. “I oughtta kill you if you’re the sheriff. I oughtta kill the whole bunch of you. Maybe I will. You people think you won something today, well let me tell you something: you didn’t win shit.”
“You’re drunk,” Bernabé said, and then abruptly his body went almost woozy with terror, because Jerry G. had more hate and deep-down murder in his eyes than Bernabé had ever seen in a person. Immediately all his stomach muscles involuntarily bunched in as if preparing to take a bullet.
He added: “You kill me, Jerry G., and I’ll beat your ass down to the Chamisa V. jail and have Ernie Maest
as lock you up and—”
“You fucking Mexicans…” the foreman growled thickly. “You fucking Mexicans don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.”
“We’ll see.”
“Sure you’ll see. You’ll see us hang you up by the balls. You’ll see us cut the tits off all your sluts and nail them to the barn door. You want a war, we’ll show you about a war…”
“We’ll see—” Bernabé choked out again, his ears literally ringing from fright and his stomach cramping it was so tensed.
“For starters I’m gonna kill you and that toothless old man wrecked the backhoe and Joe Mondragón,” Jerry G. snarled. “Then I’m gonna take a big crap in that beanfield, and afterward … and after that—”
With no warning his eyes unfocused and started rolling around again, and as they did he lowered the gun, looking befuddled for a moment, and then scared; and then his face took on the air of a queer, disconcerted drunk.
“You bet your ass you’ll see…” he whined, starting to cry. And with movements as jerky as those of a windup toy, he struggled upright, wheeled around, plunged back into the truck, circled awkwardly around the plaza area, and drove back up to the ranch.
Bernabé sat there for a while unable to move, staring at the ground, stone-cold scared, and so tight and weak he thought he would vomit. There was inside his body a feeling of such inevitable danger and ultimate doom that it damn near took his breath away. Those people in the bar getting drunk, they didn’t have enemies in the likes of Jerry G. and Ladd Devine and the politicos—they had executioners. Money, progress, numbers, and the American way of life were on the other side: Christ, those bastards even controlled the atom bomb—!
