The Milagro Beanfield War (5 page)

In the end, after much talk and many heated arguments, the people shrugged, laughing uneasily and a little ashamedly. “That conservancy district and that dam,” they philosophized, “will be as hard to live with as Pacheco's pig.”

Pacheco being an enormous, shifty-eyed, hysterically lonely man who—in the time-honored tradition of Cleofes Apodaca and Padre Sinkovich—had been losing his marbles at a vertiginous rate ever since his wife died six years ago, and who owned one of the world's most ornery sows, an animal he could never keep penned. For years it had been a regular thing in Milagro to see unsteady, mammoth Seferino Pacheco staggering across fields or splashing through puddles in the dirt roadways, searching for his recalcitrant porker, which was usually inhaling a neighbor's garden or devouring somebody's chickens. Pacheco was forever knocking on front doors and back doors and outhouse doors, asking after his sow. And people were forever shouting at, and shooting at, and throwing rocks at Pacheco's gargantuan, voracious animal. Yet for a long time the pig had led a charmed life, nonchalantly absorbing high-powered lead lumps in its thick haunches, or else—it being also a rather swift pig—escaping on the run unscathed. “Maybe that marrana carries a chunk of oshá in her cunt that protects her from poisonous people,” Onofre Martínez once giggled. And because the pig, with Pacheco gimping crazily after it, had become such a familiar sight all over town, sayings had grown out of the situation. Such as: “He's more trouble than Pacheco's pig.” Or: “She's got an appetite like Pacheco's pig.” And again: “It's as indestructible as Pacheco's pig.”

And of course: “That conservancy district and that dam will be as hard to live with as Pacheco's pig.”

Which is about where things stood when Joe Mondragón suddenly tugged on his irrigation boots, flung a shovel into his pickup, and drove over to his parents' crumbling farmhouse and small dead front field in the west side ghost town. Joe spent about an hour chopping weeds in the long unused Roybal ditch, and then, after digging a small feeder trench from Indian Creek into the ditch, he opened the Roybal ditch headgate at the other end so water could flow onto that fallow land.

After that Joe stood on the ditch bank smoking a cigarette. It was a soft and misty early spring morning; trees had only just begun to leaf out. Fields across the highway were still brown, and snow lay hip deep in the Midnight Mountains. Milagro itself was almost hidden in a lax bluish gauze of piñon smoke coming from all the fireplaces and cook stoves of its old adobe houses.

Last night, Joe recalled, the first moths had begun bapping their powdery wings against his kitchen windows; today water skeeters floated on the surface into his field, frantically skittering their legs.

The Trailways bus, with its lights still on, pulled off the highway to discharge and pick up a passenger. And the water just kept gurgling into that field, sending ants scurrying for their lives, while Joe puffed a cigarette, on one of the quietest lavender mornings of this particular spring.

*   *   *

About fifteen and a half minutes after Joe Mondragón first diverted water from Indian Creek into his parents' old beanfield, most of Milagro knew what he had done. Fifteen and a half minutes being as long as it took immortal, ninety-three-year-old Amarante Córdova to travel from a point on the Milagro–García highway spur next to Joe's outlaw beanfield to the Frontier Bar across the highway, catty-corner to Rael's General Store.

Back in 1914 Amarante had been Milagro's first sheriff. And he still wore the star from that time pinned to the lapel of the three-piece woolen suit he had been wearing, summer and winter, for the last thirty years. The only person still inhabiting the west side ghost town, Amarante lived there on various welfare allotments (and occasional doles from Sally, the letter-writing Doña Luz daughter) in an eight-room adobe farmhouse whose roof had caved into seven of the eight rooms. Until the year before Jorge from Australia keeled over with his mouth full of candied sweet potato, Amarante had gotten around in a 1946 Dodge pickup. But one summer day he steered it off the gorge road on a return trip from a wood run to Conejos Junction, was somehow thrown clear onto a ledge, and from that spectacular vantage point he watched his rattletrap do a swan dive into the Rio Grande eight hundred feet below. Since that day Amarante had been on foot, and also since that day, come rain or come shine, he'd walked the mile from his crumbling adobe to town and back again, babbling to himself all the way and occasionally lubricating his tongue with a shot of rotgut from the half-pint bottle that was a permanent fixture in his right-hand baggy suit pocket.

On this particular day, as soon as Amarante had safely landed his crippled frame on a stool in the huge empty Frontier Bar and fixed a baleful bloodshot eye on the owner, eighty-eight-year-old Tranquilino Jeantete, he said in Spanish (he did not speak English, or read or write in either language):

“José Mondragón is irrigating his old man's beanfield over there on the west side.”

Tranquilino turned up his hearing aid, and, after fumbling in his pockets for a pair of glasses, he perched the cracked lenses on his nose, muttering, “Eh?”

“José Mondragón is irrigating his old man's beanfield over there on the west side.”

Tranquilino still couldn't hear too well, so he muttered “Eh?” again. Neither man's pronunciation was very good: they had six teeth between them.

Ambrosio Romero, a burly carpenter who worked at the Doña Luz mine, sauntered through the door for his morning constitutional just as Amarante repeated: “José Mondragón is irrigating his old man's beanfield over there on the west side.”

Ambrosio said, “Come again? When are you gonna learn how to talk, cousin? Why don't you go down to the capital and buy some wooden teeth? Say that once more.”

With a sigh, Amarante lisped, “José Mondragón is irrigating his old man's beanfield over there on the west side.”

“Ai, Chihuahua!”
Ambrosio made his usual morning gesture to Tranquilino Jeantete, who slid a glass across the shiny bar, selected a bottle, and poured to where Ambrosio indicated stop with his finger.

In silence the miner belted down the liquor, then belched, his eyes starting to water, and as he left he remarked: “What does that little jerk want to do, cause a lot of trouble?”

Ambrosio went directly from the bar to Rael's store where he bought some Hostess Twinkies for a midmorning snack at the mine, and also casually mentioned to Nick Rael, “I hear José Mondragón is irrigating over on the other side of the highway.”

Nick's instinctive reaction to this news was, “What's that little son of a bitch looking for, a kick in the head?”

Four men and two women in Rael's store heard this exchange. They were Gomersindo Leyba, an ancient ex-sheepman who would, for a dollar, chauffeur anybody without wheels down to the Doña Luz Piggly-Wiggly to do their shopping; Tobías Arguello, a onetime bean farmer who had sold all his land to Ladd Devine the Third in order to send his two sons to the state university (one had dropped out to become a career army man, the other had been drafted and killed in Vietnam); Teofila Chacón, the mother of thirteen kids, all living, and at present the evening barmaid at the Frontier; Onofre Martínez, a one-armed ex-sheepman who was known as the Staurolite Baron and also as the father of Bruno Martínez, a state cop; and Ruby Archuleta, a lovely middle-aged woman who owned and operated a body shop and plumbing business just off the north–south highway between Milagro and Doña Luz in the Strawberry Mesa area.

These six people scattered like quail hit by buckshot. And by noon, many citizens engaged in various local enterprises were talking excitedly to each other about how feisty little Joe Mondragón had gone and diverted the water illegally into his parents' no-account beanfield.

And by and large, the townspeople had three immediate reactions to the news.

The first:
“Ai, Chihuahua!”

The second: “What does that obnoxious little runt want to cause trouble for?”

And the third: “I'm not saying it's good or bad, smart or stupid, I'm not saying if I'm for or against. Let's just wait and see what develops.”

At two that afternoon an informal meeting convened in Rael's General Store. Attending this meeting were the Milagro sheriff; an asthmatic real estate agent named Bud Gleason; Eusebio Lavadie, the great-great-great-grandnephew of Carlos the ringside-seat millionaire, and the town's only rich Chicano rancher; the storekeeper, Nick Rael; two commissioners and a mayordomo of the Acequia Madre del Sur—Meliton Mondragón, Filiberto Vigil, and Vincent Torres; and the town's mayor, Sammy Cantú.

The sheriff, forty-three-year-old Bernabé Montoya, had held his job now for nine and a half years. All four of his election victories had come by three votes—27 to 24—over the Republican candidate, Pancho Armijo. Bernabé was an absentminded, rarely nasty, always bumbling, also occasionally very sensitive man who dealt mostly with drunks, with some animal rustling, with about five fatal car accidents a year, and with approximately seven knifings and shootings per annum. He also reluctantly assisted the state police, once in the spring and again in the fall, during their raids on the Strawberry Mesa Evening Star hippie commune, during which raids they confiscated maybe five hundred marijuana plants that later mysteriously turned up in the pockets of Chamisaville Junior High School kids. Bernabé had arrested Joe Mondragón a dozen times, and had personally driven him down to the Chamisa County Jail twice. In earlier times Joe and Bernabé had run together, and the sheriff still admired his former pal's spunk, even though Joe was a constant hassle to the lawman's job—a troublemaker, a fuse that was always, unpredictably, burning.

Bernabé had gloomily called this meeting because he sensed a serious threat in Joe's beanfield. He had understood, as soon as he heard about the illegal irrigation, that you could not just waltz over and kick out Joe's headgate or post a sign ordering him to cease and desist. Because that fucking beanfield was an instant and potentially explosive symbol which no doubt had already captured the imaginations of a few disgruntled fanatics, and the only surprise about the whole affair, as Bernabé saw it, was, how come nobody had thought of it sooner?

“So I don't really know what to do,” he told the gathering. “That's how come I called this meeting.”

Eusebio Lavadie said, “What he's doing is illegal, isn't it illegal? Arrest him. Put him in jail. Throw away the key. Who's the mayordomo on that ditch?”

Vincent Torres, a meek, self-effacing old man, raised his hand.

“Well, you go talk to him,” Lavadie huffed. “Tell him to cut out the crap or some of us will get together and break his fingers. Or shoot his horses. I don't see what all the fuss is about.”

A commissioner for the Acequia Madre, Filiberto Vigil, said, “Don't be a pendejo, Mr. Lavadie.”

The other commissioner, Meliton Mondragón, added, “What kind of harm does anybody think this really might do, anyway?”

“It's a bad precedent,” Lavadie said. “This could steamroll into something as unmanageable as Pacheco's pig. Any fool can see that.”

“Are you calling
me
a pendejo?” Meliton Mondragón asked.

“Not you personally, no. Of course not. But it's obvious the question isn't whether to let this go on or not. The only question is, how do we stop it?”

There was silence. Nobody had a suggestion.

At length, Bernabé Montoya said, “If I go over and tell him to stop he'll tell me to shove a chili or something you know where. If I go over to arrest him he'll try to kick me in the balls. And anyway, I don't know what the water law is, I don't even know what to arrest him for or charge him with or how long I could hold him. I know as soon as we fined him, or he got out of the Chamisa V. jail, he'd go back to irrigating that field again. It seems to me it's more up to the water users, to the ditch commissioners and the ditch bosses here, to stop him.”

“Well, have them talk to him, then,” Bud Gleason said. “How's that sound to you boys?”

It didn't sound that good to the boys. The two commissioners and the mayordomo shrugged, remaining self-consciously silent.

“For crissakes!” Lavadie suddenly exploded. “What a bunch of gutless wonders we got in this room! If you all are too chicken to do it, I'll go talk to that little bastard myself. There's no room in a town like ours for this kind of outrageous lawlessness—”

Five minutes later Lavadie's four-wheel-drive pickup lurched into Joe Mondragón's yard, scattering chickens and a few flea-bitten hounds.

A cigarette lodged toughly between his lips, Joe emerged from his shop tinkering busily with a crowbar.

“Howdy, cousin,” Lavadie said.

Joe nodded, eyes crinkled against the cigarette smoke. Nancy opened the front door and stood there, flanked by two big-eyed kids.

“I came over to talk to you about that field you're irrigating on the other side of the highway,” Lavadie said.

“What interest you got in that beanfield?” Joe asked.

“I figure what's bad for this town, whatever stirs up unnecessary trouble, is bad for all of us, qué no?”

Joe shrugged, inhaled, exhaled, and replaced the cigarette Bogey-like between his lips.

“I just came from a meeting we had over in Nick's store,” Lavadie said. “We decided that since it's illegal to irrigate those west side fields, we ought to tell you to quit fucking around over there.”

Joe delicately flicked the head off a small sunflower with the crowbar.

“Well—?” Lavadie said.

“Well, what?”

“What's your answer to that?”

Joe shrugged again. “Who says it's me irrigating over there?”

“I guess a little birdie told somebody,” Lavadie grunted sarcastically.