The Milagro Beanfield War (6 page)

“Hmm,” Joe commented.

“So what's your answer?” Lavadie demanded.

Joe spit the cigarette butt from his lips and, swinging the crowbar like a baseball bat, expertly caught the butt, lining it across the yard at his antagonist, missing him only by inches. “Maybe you better quit fucking around over
here.
”

Lavadie flushed, but kept his cool. “Are you or are you not going to stop irrigating that field?” he asked.

Joe smiled blandly. “The real question is, are you or are you not gonna get off my property, Mr. Lavadie?” He advanced a few steps flexing the crowbar.

Lavadie hastily backed up to his truck. “What are you doing … are you threatening me?”

“This is my property,” Joe explained matter-of-factly.

“Well, goddamn you…”

Lavadie slid behind the wheel of his truck and started it up. “I'll go over there myself and see that not another drop goes into that field,” he threatened.

“You do and won't nobody show up for work at your place tomorrow, Mr. Lavadie,” Joe said quietly. “Your hay and your corrals might get burned by accident, too.”

Lavadie fumed silently for a full ten seconds before jamming the gearshift into reverse and bouncing backward out of the yard.

“And—?” Bernabé Montoya politely inquired several minutes later.

Lavadie, pacing around the sheriff's living room, shook his head nervously. “What do you think, Bernie? Could he really get people to stop working at my place? Would he have the guts to burn my hay?”

“Sure. Maybe. Who knows?”

“I'd be up the creek without a paddle if that happened.” Lavadie picked his nose. “This is more complicated than I thought. That little shithead's got no respect, does he?”

“Nope.”

Following an awkward pause, Lavadie said, “I think maybe I better back out of this, Bernie. I think maybe the best thing right now is I shouldn't get involved, qué no?”

“Suit yourself, Mr. Lavadie.”

“It's just I didn't realize—I had no idea…”

After Lavadie had slunk off, Bernabé slouched out to his pickup, tuned the radio to mariachi music coming from KKCV in Chamisaville, and steered onto the highway, turning south. Like everyone else in town, he automatically fired an obscene gesture (known as a “birdie”) at Ladd Devine's Miracle Valley Recreation Area sign. Almost immediately after that he shuddered going over a painted cattleguard on the road, muttering to himself, “It sure beats me how a handful of white stripes can fool cows like that.” Then, smoking thoughtfully, he listened to the radio and allowed his eyes to drift half-assedly around the landscape as he drove the fifteen or so miles to Doña Luz. In a field some kids were flying kites. Magpies hunkered atop flattened prairie dog carcasses along the shoulder. A few miles farther, the sheriff had to stop for some cows stupidly milling around on the highway. After that he tried to think about Joe's beanfield, but quit because already it made him uncomfortable to confront this thing; he had no idea how to deal with it. It was a situation like this, in fact, that could cost him his job. If he blew it, which was more than likely, that three-vote margin over Pancho Armijo every two years could dissolve into a landslide victory for his opponent.

So he had decided to try and pass the buck.

Two men occupied the tiny cinderblock state police headquarters at Doña Luz: a crew-cut good ol' boy state cop, Bill Koontz, and a young good-looking radio dispatcher, Emilio Cisneros.

Bernabé leaned against the counter behind which the two men sat—Koontz reading a comic book, and Cisneros typing up some forms—and he lit another cigarette.

“What's new up in the boondocks?” Koontz asked lazily. “Who shot whose cow last night?”

Bernabé smiled tiredly. He disliked the state police; he was also slightly awed by them. They were well-equipped men with an organization to back up their actions, and he himself was a loner with one stupid deputy. Any difficult crime he always referred to the state police: in fact, they wound up processing most of his arrests. Accident victims always awaited state cars to take them to the medical facilities in the south. All the same, he disliked going to cops like Bill Koontz for help or advice because that usually meant he wound up siccing them on his own people. And although nothing much ever really came of that, it made him uncomfortable all the same.

Now he said thoughtfully, “I came down here because I got a problem.”

Koontz smiled. “So what else is new?”

“This one is kind of funny.”

“Shoot,” Koontz said.

“Well, there's a guy up in my town, maybe you know him—Joe Mondragón—”

“Sure, I know that S.O.B. What's he up to now?”

“He's irrigating his old man's beanfield on the western side of the highway.”

“So—?”

“None of the land over there that used to have irrigation rights has irrigation rights anymore. I don't know the whole complicated story of how it happened, but it's got to do with the 1935 water compact.”

“Sounds to me like the ditch boss, the one you people call the major domo, ought to handle this kind of thing,” Koontz said. “What could we do about it?”

“Maybe you don't understand.” Bernabé scratched behind one ear. “It's not like he's just irrigating this little beanfield. There's a lot of people in Milagro, you know, who aren't too happy with the way things are changing there, or down in Chamisaville, or all around the north. Up in Milagro—you've been along the Milagro–García spur, haven't you? You've seen the houses people used to live in out there, the old farmhouses, and all those fields?”

“That's a ghost town, man. Only that crazy old fart—what's his name—the little waffle with the badge and the suit, lives in those ruins—”

“Amarante Córdova.”

“Yeah. He's the only one lives over there.”

Bernabé drifted away from the counter over to the door, where he stood, hands behind his back, staring at the highway. The thought crossed his mind that he ought to handle this thing himself, because after all he more or less understood and had sympathy for the situation. On the other hand, if he handled the situation himself, suppose he butchered the job (a likely supposition), what then? At least if he gave it to the state cops he was off the hook.

Facing Koontz and Emilio Cisneros again, he said, “The thing is, irrigating that field is symbolic, the way I see it. People are bitter over how they lost their land and their water rights. And this sort of act, small as it may seem, could touch off something bigger.”

Koontz said, “What do you want us to do?”

“I don't know. Frankly, I don't know what to do about it. It's not like you can just go in and arrest him or fuck up the beanfield or something. I mean, this is too
close
to everybody—”

Koontz frowned. “I'm not sure I understand, Bernie.”

“Why don't you talk with somebody else,” the sheriff suggested. “Talk with Bruno Martínez when he comes in. Better yet, get in touch with Trucho down in the capital. This is his sector, isn't it? Tell him to call me.”

“For what? For a little loudmouthed troublemaker who's trickling a couple gallons of water into a crummy beanfield?”

Bernabé mumbled, “Ah, screw it then, I guess I'll handle it myself,” and walked out to his truck.

Emilio Cisneros said, “If I was you, Bill, I'd call Trucho.”

“Why?”

“Because I think he'd want to know. I don't think you really understand what Joe Mondragón is doing.”

“You honest to God think I oughtta call Trucho?” Koontz asked uncertainly.

“Sure. The least he might do is talk with the state engineer. You let Bernie Montoya go back up there and handle something as sensitive as this on his own and he's sure to blow it badly. That sheriff is so stupid his boots were on the wrong feet, did you notice?”

“Okay. So maybe I'll call Trucho, then…”

Xavier Trucho, the third highest ranking cop in the state, in charge of the entire northern sector, said, “Repeat the whole thing to me again, Bill. Slowly. I want everything you can remember that honky-tonk Cisco Kid told you.”

“It ain't much,” Koontz said, suddenly nervous about the beanfield. “There's just this little guy, Joe Mondragón, who's cutting water into some deserted field isn't supposed to have water rights on the west side of the highway, in that ghost town part of Milagro, that's all.”

“I think what I'll do,” Trucho said, “is talk with the state engineer. Seems to me his office ought to handle it. I'll get back to you—”

And when he got back Trucho said, “Listen, Bill, this thing could be a little antsy, but for the time being we're gonna steer clear of it. Bookman's—the state engineer's—office will handle it, or at least try to. So why don't you drive up to Milagro and tell that Montoya ape to keep his boots from getting muddy over there on the west side, okay? You might also stop up at the Devine place and let them know we're aware of the problem. And Bill—?”

“Yeah?”

“The key word is tact, alright? The key thing right now is to play this cozy. I mean, lay off Joe Mondragón, and let's keep our uniforms as inconspicuous as possible up there. Be nice to Bernie Montoya. People start getting the bright idea something is cooking, Bookman feels, it'll only aggravate the situation, and we're liable to find ourselves up to our ass in Mexican hornets. Okay?”

“Okay,” Bill Koontz said, puzzled by the respect people seemed to be developing for Joe Mondragón and his puny beanfield. He turned, asking Emilio Cisneros:

“What does a little jerk like that want to cause this kind of trouble for?”

“I dunno,” the dispatcher said, smiling faintly, curiously. “Let's just wait and see what happens.”

*   *   *

The Dancing Trout Dude Ranch was a thirty-eight-room adobe palace set in a cluster of cottonwood, Russian olive, weeping willow, ceαar, and aspen trees on the banks of Indian Creek and surrounded by lush green meadows and apple, pear, apricot, and plum orchards that extended for miles back up into the Milagro Canyon.

Ladd Devine the Third was not so opulent.

Standing five foot nine in his cowboy boots, tipping the scales at one-forty-five, he had a bland, regular, and slightly good ol' boy face and a bland, regular, slightly good ol' boy way of speaking. He was the kind of man who worked hard, enjoyed circumventing risks, and avoided the limelight. He drove a pickup truck and kept a sharp authoritative eye on pretty much everything that went on at his spread. He also often spent up to twelve hours a day in his third-floor office constantly telephoning various parts of the town, county, state, and nation. At all times this sawed-off, unflamboyant man knew exactly where his affairs were at.

The Ladd Devine empire had been established by his grandfather, a boisterous whoremongering outdoors man who drank his bourbon straight from the bottle and cursed a lot. But once the corporate conglomerate was established, Ladd Devine the Third had been the perfect man to tone down the operation and keep it barging along smoothly; and also, incidentally, to build it into something really powerful.

This is not to say that Ladd Devine the Third hadn't inherited a couple of his grandfather's quirks. One was the airplane he often piloted himself out of the Chamisaville airport. The other was his wife, Flossie, a six-foot-tall “honeydear” woman from an Odessa, Texas, oil family, who wore Neiman-Marcus skintight, flare-cuffed, gold lamé, western cowgirl pants and stacked her peroxide-blond hair in a three-story bouffant. She had a body to match her garish looks, and with the ton of makeup she swabbed on daily, Flossie Devine looked to be on loan from the Lido, or else some kind of rent-a-tart from Las Vegas, Nevada. But Flossie was actually a placid, gentle soul. Her time she whiled away riding plump thoroughbred horses, playing bridge and solitaire and Scrabble, and drinking too much champagne or beer or whatever else happened to be around and open at the time. Flossie was a quiet lush, though, usually going to sleep right after dinner, and she had never done her husband dirty.

After an avocado salad lunch on the day Joe Mondragón first began to irrigate his beanfield, Ladd Devine's starched and prissified personal secretary, Emerson Lapp, scuttled like a nervous crayfish into the Devines' private den.

“Bad news downtown,” he said. “Something funny is happening, Mr. D. It looks like trouble to me.”

“Calm down, Em,” Devine urged quietly. “You want a bit of Irish coffee? Flossie and I were just having a cup, weren't we, Flossie?”

“Maybe you better hear about this right away,” Lapp wheezed. “You know this guy downtown, his name is Joe Mondragón? He worked up here once, maybe four, five summers ago. He was on that cesspool crew you hired and during the time they worked we kept missing things, remember? A couple of aluminum siding panels, a few tools, some of that roughcut lumber we were using on the stables extension. After maybe three weeks you narrowed the thefts down to Joe and fired him.”

“Oh yes.” Devine nodded. “He was a real wise guy.”

“Well, he's cutting irrigation water into his father's piece of property over there on the west side.”

“What was his father's first name? A lot of Mondragóns lived over there.”

“I don't remember. But you don't own it, Mr. D. This Mondragón was one who wouldn't sell, remember? The old man—Joe's father—he went around raising a big stink back then, telling people not to sell. His son is a troublemaker, first class.”

“Then what you're saying, Em, is that this Joe Mondragón is illegally irrigating his father's land, or his own land as the case may be, over there on the west side.”

“Exactly. And I don't like it. He could stir up something nasty. Those people down there, they're tense enough as it is over this dam proposition—you know, and the conservancy district. If you ask me, and you'll pardon my French I'm sure, Flossie, he could start a fucking war if this isn't handled correctly and disposed of quickly and efficiently.”