The Milagro Beanfield War Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Part Six

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Books by John Nichols

  Copyright

  WITH MUCH LOVE, FOR RUBY. AND FOR OUR CHILDREN, LUKE AND TANIA.

  Also for: Andrés A. Martínez, and every member of the Tres Ríos Association, fighters all.

  Too, this book carries a shot and a beer for Mike, in memory of the first night under Heart Lake, suicidal cutthroats, the wrong side of the mountain, and those five up-and-down miles to the Latirs.

  And with thanks and love to Rini.

  If I am not for myself, who will be for me? Yet if I am for myself only, what am I?

  —Hillel

  Prologue

  “What’s that little half-pint son of a bitch want to cause so much trouble for?”

  —Some people of Milagro

  Many people in the Miracle Valley had theories about why Joe Mondragón did it. At first, the somewhat addlebrained but sympathetic sheriff, Bernabé Montoya, figured it was just one more irrational manifestation of an ornery temperament, of a kid, now almost middle-aged, with a king-sized chip on his shoulder, going slightly amuck. The Frontier Bar owner, Tranquilino Jeantete, said (with a sardonic wink) that Joe did it because he was hungry for an enchilada made from honest-to-God Milagro frijoles, with some Devine Company cojones mixed in. Nick Rael, the storekeeper, figured Joe might have done it because he could not pay the ninety-odd dollars he owed the store; or else maybe he did it just out of sheer renegade inbred spite, hoping to drive up ammo sales at the same time he put Nick out of business. The chief perpetrator of the Indian Creek Dam, Ladd Devine the Third, who held Milagro’s fate in his hand like a fragile egg, considered what Joe did a personal assault on his empire, on the Indian Creek Dam, and on that egg. And the immortal old man, Amarante Córdova, who lived on the west side of the highway in the ghost town neighborhood, believed Joe did it because God had ordered him to start the Revolution without any further delay.

  Whatever the case, if there were mixed opinions on the matter, there were also mixed ideas about what the consequences might be. “What’s that little half-pint son of a bitch want to cause so much trouble for?” some said. Others quietly intoned: “I’m not saying it’s good, I’m not saying it’s bad. Let’s just wait and see what happens.” Still others on both sides of the Indian Creek Dam question armed themselves and prepared for war, while the governor and the state engineer down in the capital chewed their fingernails, wondering how to maintain their own untenable positions.

  Of course the final consensus of opinion, arrived at by both those who were for Joe Mondragón and those who were against him, was that in order for him to do what he did and thus precipitate the war that was bound to follow, Joe had to be crazy. People also figured only a miracle could save Joe from his foolhardy suicidal gesture.

  Yet Milagro was a town whose citizens had a penchant not only for going crazy, but also for precipitating miracles.

  Take, for example, an early nineteenth-century sheepherder named Cleofes Apodaca and the scruffy sheepdog he irreverently called Pendejo, which, translated loosely, means “idiot” or “fool”—or, translated more literally, means “pubic hair.”

  Today, Cleofes Apodaca might qualify to be called the Patron Saint Crazy of Milagro.

  Almost from the start, when Cleofes was but a child, everybody had predicted a bad end for him. In those bygone days a bishop visited the Milagro parish about once every five years, and when the bishop came he confirmed all the small fry in town. It was the bishop’s habit, right after confirming a child, to deliver the kid a cuff on the cheek, thus reminding him or her that he or she must always be prepared to suffer for religion. When the bishop laid a soft right to the plump cheek of little Cleofes Apodaca, however, the future sheepherder uncorked a retaliatory haymaker to the holy man’s chin, causing the prelate to tumble over backward, striking his bald pate against the baptismal font. And from that day forth people figured Cleofes was in trouble up to his eyeballs.

  For a long while, however, Cleofes led a fairly normal, if somewhat lonely, life. His neighbors kept their distance, claiming he had El Ojo, the “evil eye.” People especially steered their babies away from Cleofes, afraid that if he admired the kids or tickled them under their fat chins, the children would sicken and grow humps. If the plants in somebody’s garden suddenly withered or became infested with mites and aphids, the owner of that garden had a tendency to blame Cleofes Apodaca’s evil eye. Pregnant women walked a mile out of their way just to avoid Cleofes and thus ensure that their offspring would not be born missing a nose or a finger or some other priceless appendage.

  Folks also came to believe that at night this loner, who had slugged the bishop and named his dog Pendejo, turned himself into a black mongrel that waded along the irrigation ditches committing genocide on frogs. For this reason, during the first half of the nineteenth century, you seldom heard frogs at night in Milagro. In fact, for over a decade, when Cleofes Apodaca was in his prime, frogs were as scarce in that town as camels and gold bullion.

  One farmer insisted Cleofes was responsible for the birth in his flock of six two-headed lambs in one springtime. But the most unusual anomaly accredited to this solitary rogue’s evil eye was the job done on one of Timoteo Mondragón’s goats, which was born with both a vagina and a penis, but no testicles. For years this schizoid beast pranced around the goat pen eagerly mounting any female in sight while at the same time it was being mounted by the billys. This made for a very unstable and confusing situation in the herd. In fact, pretty soon all the females became infertile, the billys impotent, and Timoteo’s huge flock dwindled away to nothing—all because Cleofes Apodaca’s evil eye had caused the hermaphrodite to be born.

  Cleofes was also a stickler for eating the first slice of everything, even though evil spells always resided in the first slice; and he had a nasty habit of letting white geraniums bloom on his windowsill, even though white geraniums were a surefire invitation to death. Adding insult to injury, the arrogant aloof sheepherder never carried a little chunk of oshá in his pants pocket to ward off poisonous snakes.

  “Sooner or later Cleofes is gonna get it,” his superstitious peers whispered fearfully. And sure enough, they were right.

  The downfall began when one day Pendejo disappeared. And Cleofes, who had never married, was heartbroken. He searched high and low for the dog, up in the Midnight Mountains, out on Strawberry Mesa, down in the Rio Grande gorge. But Pendejo had vanished from the face of this earth. Cleofes prayed to the saints for his dog’s safe return. He begged the Santo Niño de Atocha to find his dog. And, because traditionally the Santo Niño wore out many shoes walking around the countryside performing miracles and errands of mercy, Cleofes began to sew little shoes for the small carving of this saint which occupied a niche in the church. In fact, it soon got so that every other day the balmy sheepherder showed up at the church with another pair of tiny shoes for the saint. This ritual continued for months, until the shoes formed a huge pile surrounding the santo, and trickles of miniature footwear were spreading out underneath the pews. But the Santo Niño refus
ed to give Cleofes Apodaca back his beloved Pendejo.

  In the process of becoming such an industrious cobbler, the sheepherder neglected his animals, his fields, his house—everything had fallen into disrepair. Seeing this, the townspeople rubbed their hands, smirking as they cackled smugly: “Okay, now Cleofes is getting it back in spades for clobbering the bishop.” At about this same time too, frogs reappeared in the irrigation ditches, and folks once more heard them singing at night, obviously because the old sheepherder had become so busy stitching miniature clodhoppers for the Sainted Child and otherwise trying to bring back Pendejo that he no longer had time for his nocturnal canine patrol of the waterways.

  Following his shoemaking phase, Cleofes began to traipse around the county carrying a little statue of Santa Inéz del Campo, who was supposed to find missing animals. But with her he struck out as badly as with the Santo Niño de Atocha. To boot, he wore out his own shoes and blistered his feet until they bled. Then he tramped around barefoot, weeping and sobbing and beating his breast and tearing his hair, while microscopic parasites crawled out of horseshit piles and penetrated up into his bare feet and entered his bloodstream, lodging eventually in his guts, in his stomach, and in his liver. Some enterprising filarial worms, having worked their way up into his eyeballs, started making him blind, and he grew very gaunt and miserable. Confused, the sheepherder invoked Saint Anthony’s aid, even though that saint possessed nowhere near Santa Inéz’s power when it came to locating lost pets.

  Then suddenly, one stormy summer day, Cleofes heard Pendejo barking. Which gave him great joy except for one minor consideration: the barking came from underneath the ground in an alfalfa field where a thousand graceful, noisy birds called killdeer were nesting. No matter, though, the sheepherder grabbed a shovel and set to, vehemently attacking the earth under which his dog apparently was trapped.

  For countless mornings and afternoons, through new moons and full moons and old moons, through rainstorms and starry evenings and windy days, Cleofes wielded his spade, digging deeper and deeper toward his beloved friend who never for a moment ceased barking, whining, growling, yipping, and whimpering, as dogs will when eagerly awaiting the arrival of their masters. At first the nesting killdeer screeched and whistled in alarm, flying frantically in all directions and repeatedly dive-bombing the mad sheepherder dressed in rags, who paid them no mind. But after a while the birds got used to the digging, resettled upon their freckled eggs, and hatched out ten thousand little killdeer that scurried around Cleofes Apodaca’s pit peeping hysterically. Meanwhile, curious townspeople gathered along the edges of the field, fascinated by the absurd scene, eagerly awaiting Pendejo’s arrival. When they realized his appearance was not to be immediately forthcoming, men and women brought buckets which they turned upside down to sit on, or they rode horses to the site and sat astride their mounts bemusedly looking on. Pretty soon an enterprising fellow named Carlos Lavadie (the great-great-granduncle of the present-day bastard Eusebio Lavadie) lugged over two dozen wooden chairs, which he rented out for a duro each. By the time the Pendejo affair was resolved, Carlos had become a very rich man, who subsequently sired a line of the town’s most hated patróns.

  Never for a moment did Pendejo quit barking and whining; so Cleofes kept digging. He unearthed bones and arrowheads and beautiful clay pots; he tossed out lovely silver goblets and mammoth gold coins, and stones that sparkled, full of stars. In fact, he discovered the treasure of the Seven Cities of Cibola which had drawn Coronado north from Mexico not so many years before. But the sheepherder merely chucked all these iridescent artifacts into a great gleaming pile and flailed away some more with his shovel. In due course he extended long ladders into the hole. Laboriously, step-by-feeble-step, he lugged earth-filled pails up the rungs and dumped them onto the huge mound rising beside his hole. The baby killdeer matured and migrated away. The rainy season came and went and golden aspen leaves skippety-hopped across the field into his hole. Then a frost glazed the ground—winter came; relentlessly, the dog pleaded to be set free; unflaggingly, Cleofes persevered. To survive, he ate worms and snails and other sluggish, deaf, and blind little creatures that inhabited the soft, mysterious soil.

  All at once Cleofes struck a hot spring. In an instant the pit filled with steaming mineral water; the crazy sheepherder drowned; the treasure of the Seven Cities of Cibola disappeared; “Que milagro!” spectators cried; Pendejo stopped barking; it began to snow; and for days a chorus of joyful, almost-drunken frog chug-a-lugging drowned out the neighborhood magpies, roosters, dogs, and coyotes.

  Yet for years afterward, according to the most imaginative storytellers, air bubbles kept rising to the surface of that hot spring, and a lone buzzard was said to have circled nonstop directly above the spot for a decade. Then the water evaporated and the earth rose, so that not even a small depression marked the terrain; and nowadays nobody knows in which field the befuddled sheepherder dug his fabled hole.

  * * *

  But Cleofes Apodaca was not the first Miracle Valleyite to go drilling into Mother Earth. The legends also tell of a Milagro pastor who went crazy tunneling toward a bell that was ringing underneath his church. This happened, a very long time ago, when bells were almost impossible to come by in the New World, and this particular priest, José González Sinkovich, who hailed from Sevilla (by way of Prague), went mad just from longing for a bell to sanctify his religious edifice.

  That is: Padre Sinkovich had wanted a bell so badly for so long that one day he simply began to hear a joyful bronze tolling beneath the dirt floor of his humble mud church.

  The padre grabbed a shovel and lit into the floor like a hound going after a rabbit. Immediately he started unearthing bones, as it had been the custom during the early days to bury the dead inside the House of God. Pretty soon Padre Sinkovich, who had unearthed enough skeletons to start a mail-order Halloween business, was staggering around with bloodshot delirious eyes, furiously booting innumerable bones every which way as the magnificent tintinnabulation somewhere down there literally drove him bananas. For a month his flock tried to worship among the foxholes and fibulas and tibias, but finally the pealing of the bell began to hurt everyone’s ears and they all became temporary atheists; which suited Padre Sinkovich to a T, since he no longer had time to spare for his congregation. Hoping to speed up matters, he hired a dozen Chamisaville Pueblo Indians to help with the digging. Day and night they chipped and hacked, pickaxed and burrowed deeper, uncovering whitened bones by the ton while the deranged clergyman rambled about, frothing like a lunatic. Then all the Indians got spooked and quit, whereupon the padre locked the church from inside. And on he excavated, around the clock, babbling incoherently as he searched for his melodious bell that never for a moment stopped BONGING! BONGING! BONGING!

  Eventually, though, Padre Sinkovich undermined the very foundations of his church, which collapsed on top of him, writing finis to another droll chapter in Milagro’s history.

  There were many other strange doings and bizarre myths, legends, and fairy tales that, taken loosely together, had wound up giving the town and the Miracle Valley their names. For example, there were even the present-day accounts of how a man named Onofre Martínez lost his arm, and of how a tiny woman called Ruby Archuleta killed a deer with her bare hands.

  But of even greater interest, and perhaps also much more germane to the pending story of the war brought about by Joe Mondragón’s illegal actions, is the incredible saga of the immortal old codger Amarante Córdova, who had played seven-card stud poker with Death ever since 1880, winning every hand.

  Part One

  “You can’t buy bullets with food stamps.”

  —Nick Rael

  Amarante Córdova had had thirteen children. That is, he and his wife, Elizabeth—known as Betita—had had thirteen children, who either still were or had been Nadia, Jorge, Pólito, María Ana, Berta, Roberto, Billy, Nazario, Gabriel, Ricardo, Sally, Patsy, and Cipriano. Betita, who had never been sick a day in her life, d
ied in 1963, on November 22, on the same day as President Kennedy, but not from a bullet in the head. She had been outside chopping wood during a lovely serene snowstorm when suddenly she set down the ax and began to walk along the Milagro–García spur out onto the mesa. In recalling her death later Amarante would always tell his listeners, “You cannot imagine how beautiful it was that afternoon. The snow falling was as serene as the white feathers of a swan. When the ravens sailed through it they made no sound. You looked up and the big black birds were floating through the snowflakes like faint shadows of our forefathers, the first people who settled in the valley. The tall sagebrush was a lavender-green color because there had been a lot of rain in the autumn, and that was the only color on the otherwise black and white mesa, the pale lavender-green of the sage on which snow had settled. You remember, of course, that Betita’s hair was as white as the snow, and she was wearing a black dress and a black woolen shawl that Sally, our daughter who was married to the plumber from Doña Luz, knitted for her on a birthday long ago.”

  Slowly, taking her time, Betita walked across the mesa to the rim of the gorge. “And there she stood on the edge looking down,” Amarante said. “For a long time she was poised there like a wish afraid to be uttered. The walls of the gorge created a faded yellow glow to the flakes falling eight hundred feet down to the icy green river below. Ravens were in the air, circling, their wings whispering no louder than the snow falling. It was very peaceful. I was at the house, I never saw her leave. But when she didn’t come in with the wood after a while, I saddled up that lame plow horse we used to have called Buster, and went after her, following her tracks in the snow. Just as I left the road to enter the chamisal an owl dropped out of the darkening sky, landing on a cedar post not ten yards away. An owl is a sure sign from the dead, you know, and it was right then I knew she had disappeared into the gorge. When I arrived at the rim an enormous raven was standing where she had last stood, and when he saw me he spread his wings, which were wider than my outstretched arms, and floated up like a good-bye kiss from my wife into the lazy storm. Next day we opened the church, only the second time that year it was used, not to say prayers for Betita, but to burn candles and shed our tears for the President who had died in Dallas. But I lit my candles for Betita, and nobody noticed. Three months later her body was discovered on the bank of the river two miles below Chamisaville.”