The Milagro Beanfield War (48 page)

“Oh shit,” Shorty groaned unhappily. “I'm sorry about your teeth.”

But Sabrina smiled bravely through her tears and the blood as she lisped: “It ain't as bad as it looks, Shorty—they were all of them false.”

Then, even though the sky directly above was clear and sprinkled with the glittering souls of infant children who had died, a wind sprang up and rippled across the grass, carrying rain.

*   *   *

It rained, all right. For four days and four nights the water came down, and the people in town agreed they had never seen anything like it before, leastways not during summertime when the most anyone could hope for were hour-long showers in the midafternoons of otherwise brilliantly turquoise days. But rain it did, nonstop for all that time. Immediately rivers rose, spreading out into the bottomlands; irrigation ditches overflowed; fields that were already pretty soggy became dyed-in-the-wool Okefenokees; and all the roads, which had been skillfully constructed by master craftsmen so as to have absolutely no drainage, turned into quagmires.

In short, everything that had been dust in Milagro turned into mud.

Milagro mud, called zoquete by the people, was not just run-of-the-mill mud, however. A mixture of sand and fine brown adobe clays and gray caliche, it had the texture, viscosity, and crippling powers of a tar pit. It sucked off boots and shoes and ruined the brake linings on cars and trucks; it built up crippling deposits under horse and cattle hooves. It became as everpresent as a plague bacteria; it was like a mold or fungus gone berserk. The very air people breathed was somehow permeated with mud—nostrils grew clogged; ranchers hawked out great brown globs from their throats. The mud in the roads actually seemed to flow with currents, as in the rivers and streams, but when it hardened it would be worse than cement. People awoke in the mornings to find their eyebrows caked with mud, and somehow brown crud deposits turned up on toothbrushes and in refrigerator ice cubes. Nobody and nothing escaped the mud. It stuck to people, animals, and inanimate objects like peanut butter. Tree leaves, coated with mud shells, fell off their branches, landing with audible thuds. Sheep became bumpily sheathed with the stuff so that they looked like big ambulating wasp nests; birds, having absorbed the zoquete in their feathers, labored erratically through the air, almost unable to fly. Chickens laid eggs that had two shells, the outer one of mud. Dogs, lambs, and little pigs suddenly disappeared under waves of heavy goo, and some storytellers said you could actually hear the landscape burp contentedly after such a meal.

Only Onofre Martínez's three-legged German shepherd avoided the mud by refusing to stray from the Chateau Martínez's Astroturf lawn.

Pacheco's sow, on the other hand, reveled in the glop; she floated blissfully around town with her eyes half-closed, looking like a queer sensual dirigible, happy as a pig in shit. And people, trying to scrape the goo off their boots and shoes, were often heard to complain angrily: “This crap is as hard to get rid of as Pacheco's pig!”

The floors of Rael's and the Pilar Café became coated with mud. To clean his place, Nick chipped away with an adobe hoe. Harlan Betchel, on the other hand, just sat in a corner staring at the buildup on his floor, wondering if he should drill holes and plant dynamite or what.

Finally, all movement and motion in town broke down; the roads became blocked by stuck vehicles. Worms squiggled frantically from a billion holes in the ground and drowned, their pale bleached bodies floating everywhere. Milagro metamorphosed into one great gloppy bog, overrun with muskrats and water snakes. The grass alongside irrigation ditches bolted toward the sky like some jungle weed shot full of hormones. Trout, which became lost in the muddy streams, suddenly found themselves being plucked from the water by curious horses in alfalfa fields. A million short-tailed field mice, forced to flee from their pastureland homes, got bogged down in mud; within minutes their crusted bodies lined the roadsides like the bodies of Christians put to death in Roman times. And prairie dogs, attempting to make the higher ground of the Milagro foothills, became so heavily coated with mud that they soon grew exhausted, and when the mud hardened they died, looking like plump little fritters, croquettes, or corn dogs.

“I think I'm starting to shit mud,” Joe Mondragón complained to Nancy one morning.

And, although Herbie Goldfarb didn't know it, he might have been glad to hear that approximately thirteen billion ants suffocated to death in the Milagro mud.

Bernabé Montoya, seated on his bed beside Carolina and peering curiously into the barrel of his service revolver one night, discovered that the barrel was permanently clogged with a brown, hardened, cementlike substance. He groaned, “Now I'll probably have to buy another gun!”

But men like Onofre Martínez and Sparky Pacheco, Tranquilino Jeantete and Amarante Córdova smiled, remembering how in the old days they had deliberately flooded the north–south highway with irrigation water and then waited nearby with teams of horses to pull out—for a small fee—all the northbound or southbound travelers whose horse-drawn rigs or Model Ts became mired in the tenacious ooze. That had been almost as lucrative a racket as setting fires up in the Midnight Mountains and then hiring on with the Forest Service to fight them.

All motion ceased, except, that is, for Ruby Archuleta, who gunned her plumbing truck around town until she could no longer navigate through the brown glop; then she switched to a horse, until that became impossible; and then she proceeded on foot going from farmhouse to farmhouse, always with some petitions under one arm, talking to the people, asking them to sign, explaining a thousand times over the situation in the valley, pushing her concept of the Milagro Land and Water Protection Association. Some people listened courteously, drank coffee with Ruby, asked questions. Others argued, bitched, and shouted—both with her and at her. Almost every man and woman agreed with Ruby's assessment of the situation in the Miracle Valley; “Yessir, that Zopilote has got to go,” they cried emphatically. But they were also afraid of Ladd Devine; they did not sign; they didn't want trouble, or not any more, anyway, “because we already got Trouble with a capital T, qué no?” They wondered, too: Could Ruby Archuleta really be trusted? And although admiring Joe Mondragón, they also thought he was a jerk—you had to be loco to ask for a kick in the ass like that. And again: they were as leery of taxing themselves to fight the conservancy district as they were of the conservancy taxes themselves.

Persuading somebody to sign the petition was hell. Ruby tried to explain it all, and then she tried to explain it again. When, for the umpteenth time, the same people asked the same stupid questions, the dauntless woman gave the same patient replies. Everyone was very friendly and understanding and polite and suspicious and afraid, and almost nobody signed, although many began to wonder if Ruby wasn't perhaps a saint. But all the same, Ruby, drenched, covered with mud, exhausted from plodding through the molasses muck, persevered. Ranchers got used to her coming around with the petitions: some folks even looked forward eagerly to her visits. Children cried, “Here comes The Ant again!” Women said, “Can you beat it, the bruja is knocking on our door once more.” Seferino Pacheco, who was in favor of the petition, refused to sign it because he liked Ruby's visits so much. And, spurred on by a relentless and unflagging determination, Ruby kept dropping by. Their talk ran the gamut from the conservancy district to the death of Betita Córdova, who fell in the gorge in the snow on the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

Suddenly it stopped raining and a wind began to blow. Day and night the wind roared across the valley, knocking over old cottonwood trees and driving people crazy. By the third day the air was brown with dust that got between people's teeth and stung their eyes and ruined their sweaty lovemaking. In no time the roads dried hard as cement; trout were left baking in dry pasturelands. Like sea things retreating with the ocean's tide, water snakes and muskrats went back to the green areas along ditches and in the dampest vegas. At first people said, “Thank God, this will dry things out”; and then they began to curse the wind; and finally they tried to get their cars, trucks, and horses unstuck. They went at the hardened zoquete with pickaxes, hatchets, even acetylene torches. Men and women had to flood the areas around their cars and pickups in order to get them unstuck; they pulled them free with Ray Gusdorf's tractor. But then Ray's tractor broke down and wound up back in Joe Mondragón's shop and from then on Jerry Grindstaff, perched frostily behind the wheel of Ladd Devine's backhoe, had a monopoly on the towing business—at ten dollars a throw. People cursed, but what could they do? The wind died down for a minute, allowing dust to settle over everything and everybody, then it started blowing again. On his daily junket to town, Amarante Córdova had to climb over a dozen dead cottonwood trees that lay in his way like king-sized hurdles. A cottonwood landed atop a Forest Service pickup being driven by Carl Abeyta, who received a broken nose and a mild concussion from the incident, but, unfortunately, nothing worse. Another accident occurred when Flossie Devine, in a Dancing Trout station wagon late at night on her way back from a Capital City dentist, swerved to avoid a mammoth tumbleweed loping across the highway and wound up in a ditch with her new bridgework in her lap. And men irrigated, but the wind sucked up the water almost before it could seep into the ground.

“What the hell is this?” Joe Mondragón asked Nancy one day. “After the flood are we gonna have a drought?”

For a week the wind dried everything out. It even began to dry the people out. Skin shriveled; lips became chapped; hair grew stiff, caked with dust. Hundreds of little birds were blown into windows and adobe walls and killed, and, trailed by the everpresent scrawking magpies pecking at its mangy tail, the ugly yellow, snake-eating cat, that both Seferino Pacheco and Joe Mondragón had begun calling Cleofes after the legendary Cleofes Apodaca, had a field day trotting from house to house, feasting on all the little dead birds with broken necks.

Then, abruptly, the wind ceased; dust settled over the town almost gently, like a fine lace handkerchief. People stumbled outside, into their fields, slightly stunned by the peaceful silence. Birds ruffled their feathers, shaking out the dust. Horses that had been standing perfectly still for days with their asses just sweetly touching against barbed wire strands casually moved on stiffened legs back into their pastures, grazing again. A light rain fell; the sun shone; a light rain fell once more.

Dew turned up on grass tips again, compliments of the night; dogs dared to bark; flocks of hummingbirds returned to Onofre Martínez's gingerbread kingdom; life returned to normal. Ruby Archuleta started making her petition rounds in the Pipe Queen truck once more, and an army of men, led by Horsethief Shorty, Joe Mondragón, Claudio García, and Harlan Betchel, moved around town with chain saws, cutting up the trees blocking roads or crushing houses. And although cottonwood logs didn't burn that hot and made too much ash, it was free wood nevertheless, so it was distributed to many houses, which led Carolina Montoya to observe to her husband, the sheriff:

“You see, it's an ill wind that blows no good.”

And by then it was time for the rodeo.

*   *   *

Every year, and this year was no different from any other year, Milagro had a rodeo of sorts. The town owned a rodeo grounds, enclosed by a low link fence that had a few stock pens down at one end, and there was a megaphone system that went on top of Ray Gusdorf's pickup, Ray being the rodeo announcer. There were no grandstands; people drove their cars and trucks up to the edge of the fence and sat in their front seats or on the front fenders, drinking beer and looking on. Nick Rael's son Jerry sold pop, candy bars, Hostess Twinkies, and gum from an impromptu concession stand, and that was about how things stacked up.

The stock for the Milagro rodeo came from local ranchers. There were no Brahma bulls, only a couple of bucking Herefords. And there were no lean, mean, powerful broncos, only a half-dozen pint-sized Shetland ponies, two of which, Orangutan and Sunflower, belonged to Charley and Linda Bloom.

There were four events in the rodeo: bareback bucking Hereford riding, bareback bucking pony riding, team roping of the same sad-sack cow by six entrants, and pony racing for kids.

Rodeo day dawned hot, simmering, dusty. Joe Mondragón and Jimmy Ortega drove over to Bloom's house early, loaded Orangutan and Sunflower into a trailer, and dropped them off in a pen at the rodeo grounds. Then they went and retrieved the placid little brown pony Pete and Betty Apodaca kept in their backyard. After that they fetched a milk cow, belonging to Rafael Maestas, that had bucked like hell last year if you zapped her in the udder—just before the chute gate opened—with a cattle prod.

By the time Claudio García, Onofre Martínez (accompanied by his two great-grandchildren, Chemo and Chepa), and the sheriff's deputy, Meliton Naranjo, had chased down and brought in the team-roping cow, which was the entire herd of a rancher named Cleofes Mondragón (Joe's second cousin), the rodeo grounds were surrounded by various vehicles and men and women and children, and they were ready to begin.

Carrying some American flags, the state flag, and a sheriff's posse flag, Joe, Claudio García, Eliu Archuleta, Sparky Pacheco, Nick Rael, Eusebio Lavadie, and a few others rode their horses into the arena and lined up for the National Anthem. Ray Gusdorf dropped the needle onto the record, but his megaphones weren't working so hot, and it was pretty difficult to hear the song over the noise of the gas generator powering the announcing system anyway. In fact, the generator sputtered and whined so loudly nobody could hear a word Ray said during the entire proceedings, but that didn't seem to matter.

The action took place in a sunny, lackadaisical way, with long lags between riders. As often as not, when a pony or a cow came out of a chute, it would just lope harmlessly around the arena while the spectators laughed and clapped, and the rider furiously kicked, thrashed, and beat his animal about the head, neck, and rump to make it do something. The rides were also hard to time because Ray Gusdorf's eight-second buzzer either didn't work (thanks to a loose connection), or else couldn't be heard (because of the noisy generator) when it did work. No matter, though. There was no money to win in this rodeo, and nothing to lose, either, since a contestant paid no entry fee.