"Nichols, John - New Mexico Trilogy 01 - The Milagro Beanfield War 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nichol John)

When, five years later, Jorge received the next letter from Sally, he wrote back furiously:
NO! I just came for Mama's funeral!
On perfumed pink Safeway stationery she pleaded with him to reconsider, she begged him to come. For them all she outlined their father's pathetic condition. He'd had a heart attack after Betita's death. He had high blood pressure. His veins were clotted with cholesterol. His kidneys were hardly functioning. He had fallen. A tumor the size of an avocado had been removed from beside his other lung, and it was such a rare tumor they didn't know if it was malignant or benign. They thought, also, that he had diabetes. Then, most recently, a mild attack of pneumonia had laid him out for a couple of weeks. As an afterthought she mentioned that some lymph hands and reminisced about the old days and about the ones who were dead, about what all the grandchildren were doing, and about who was pregnant and who had run away, who was making a lot of money and who was broke and a disgrace, who was stationed in Korea and who was stationed in Germany . . . and they joined hands, singing Christmas carols in Spanish, they played guitars and an accordion, they wept and cavorted joyously some more, and finally, tearfully, emotionally, tragically, they all kissed his shrunken cheeks and bid him a fond and loving adios, told their mama Betita to be strong, and scattered to the three winds.
Three years later when Jorge in Australia received a letter from Sally in Dona Luz, he replied:
What do you mean he wants us all to meet again for Christmas so he can say good-bye? What am I made out of, gold and silver? I said good-bye two winters ago, it cost me a fortune! I can't come back right now!
Nevertheless, when Sally a little hysterically wrote that this time was really it, he came, though minus the wife and kiddies. So also did all the other children come, a few minus some wives or husbands or children, too. At first the gaiety was a little strained, particularly when Nazario made a passing remark straight off the bat to Berta that he thought the old man looked a hell of a lot better than he had three years ago, and Berta and everyone else within hearing distance couldn't argue with that. But then they realized they were all home again, and Milagro was white and very beautiful, its jumper and pinon branches laden with a fresh snowfall, and the smell of pinon smoke on the air was almost like a drug making them high. The men rolled up their sleeves and passed around the ax, splitting wood, until Nazario sank the ax into his foot, whereupon they all drove laughing and drinking beer down to the Chamisaville Holy Cross Hospital where the doctor on call proclaimed the shoe a total loss, but only had to take two stitches between Nazario's toes. Later that same afternoon there was a pinata for the few little kids--some grandchildren, a pocketful of great-grandchildren--who had come, and, blindfolded, they pranced in circles swinging a wooden bat until the papier-mache donkey burst, and everyone cheered and clapped as the youngsters trampled each other scrambling for the glittering goodies. Then the kids stepped up one after another to give Grandpa sticky candy kisses, and he embraced them all with tears in his eyes. Later the adults kissed Grandpa, giving him gentle abrazos so as not to cave in his eggshell chest. "God bless you" they whispered, and Amarante grinned, flashing his three teeth in woozy good-byes. "This was in place of coming to the funeral," he rasped to them in a quavering voice. "Nobody has to come to the funeral." Betita started to cry.
Out of the old man's earshot and eyesight his sons and daughters embraced each other, crossed themselves, crossed their fingers, and, casting their eyes toward heaven in supplication, murmured, not in a mean or nasty way, but with gentleness and much love for their father:
"Here's hoping . . ."
When, five years later, Jorge received the next letter from Sally, he wrote back furiously:
NO! I just came for Mama's funeral!
On perfumed pink Safeway stationery she pleaded with him to reconsider, she begged him to come. For them all she outlined their father's pathetic condition. He'd had a heart attack after Betita's death. He had high blood pressure. His veins were clotted with cholesterol. His kidneys were hardly functioning. He had fallen and broken his hip. A tumor the size of an avocado had been removed from beside his other lung, and it was such a rare tumor they didn't know if it was malignant or benign. They thought, also, that he had diabetes. Then, most recently, a mild attack of pneumonia had laid him out for a couple of weeks. As an afterthought she mentioned that some lymph nodes had been cut from his neck for biopsies because they thought he had leukemia, but it turned out he'd had an infection behind his ears where the stems of his glasses were rubbing too hard. Jorge wrote back:
What is Papa trying to do to us all? I'm no spring chicken, Sally. I got a heart condition. I'm blind in one eye. I got bursitis so bad in one shoulder I can't lift my hand above my waist. And I've got diabetes!
He returned, though. He loved his father, he loved Milagro. Since the last time, Nadia had also died. The other surviving children came, but none of the grandchildren or great-grandchildren showed up. Times were a little tough, money hard to come by. And although maybe the old man was dying, he looked better than ever, better even than some of them. His cheeks seemed to have fleshed out a little, they were even a tiny bit rosy. Could it be their imagination, or was he walking less stooped over now? And his mind seemed sharper than before. When Jorge drove up the God damn old man was outside chopping wood!
They shared a quiet, subdued celebration. Most of them had arrived late and would leave early. And after they had all kissed their father good-bye again, and perhaps squeezed him a little harder than usual in their abrazos (hoping, maybe, to dislodge irrevocably something vital inside his body), the sons and daughters went for a walk on the mesa.
"I thought he said he was dying," Jorge complained, leaning heavily on a cane, popping glycerin tablets from time to time.
"I wrote you all what has happened," Sally sighed. "I told you what Papa said."
"How old is he now?" asked Berta.
"He was born hi 1880, que no?" Ricardo said.
"That makes him eighty-four," Billy said glumly. "And already I'm fifty."
"He's going to die," Sally said sadly. "I can feel it hi my bones."
And those that didn't look at her with a mixture of hysteria and disgust solemnly crossed themselves. . . .
For the Christmas of 1970 only Jorge came. He bitched, ranted, and raved at Sally in a number of three-, four-, and five-page letters, intimating hi no uncertain terms that he couldn't care less if his father had lost all the toes on one foot plus something related to his bladder, he wasn't flying across any more oceans for any more Christmases to say good-bye to the immortal son of a bitch.
But he came.
The airplane set down in the capital; he took the Trailways bus up. Ricardo, who was recovering from stomach surgery but slowly dying of bone cancer anyway, met him at Rael's store. Sally came up later. Jorge had one blind askew eye and poor vision in the other, he was bald, limping noticeably, haggard and frail and crotchety. He felt that for sure this trip was going to kill him, and did not understand why he kept making it against his will.
Then, when Jorge saw Amarante, his suspicions were confirmed. His father wasn't growing old: he had reached some kind of nadir ten or twelve years ago and now he was growing backward, aiming toward middle age, maybe youth. To be sure, when Amarante lifted his shirt to display the scars he looked like a banana that had been hacked at by a rampaging machete-wielding maniac, but the light in his twinkling old eyes, magnified by those glasses, seemed like something stolen from the younger generation.
The next day, Christmas Day, hi the middle of Christmas dinner, Jorge suffered a heart attack, flipped over in his chair, his mouth full of candied sweet potato, and died.
Bunny Ortega, Bruce Mais, and the new man replacing Bernardo Medina (who had also died), Gilbert Otero, smiled sadly but with much sympathy when Sally and Ricardo accompanied the body to the Ortega Funeral Home hi Chamisaville.
"Well, well," Bunny said solicitously. "So the old man finally passed away."
"No-no-no," Sally sobbed. "This is my brother . . . his son! . . ."
"Ai, Chihuahua"
And here it was, two years later more or less, and Joe Mondragon had precipitated a crisis, and Amarante Cdrdova had never been so excited in his, life.
One day, during his Dona Luz daughter's weekly visit, Amarante told her, "Hija, you got to write me a letter to all the family."
Sally burst into tears. "I can't. I won't. No. You can't make me."
"But we have to tell everyone about what Jose" has done. They must see this thing and take part in it before they die. Tell them the shooting is about to start--"
So Sally dutifully advised her surviving siblings about what Joe Mondragon had done; she informed them that the shooting was about to start.
Maybe they read her letters, maybe they only looked at the postmark, but to a man jack they all replied: "Send us your next letter after Papa is dead!"
"That's the trouble with this younger generation," Amarante whined petulantly. "They don't give a damn about anything important anymore."
Joe Mondragon was thirty-six years old and for a long time he had held no steady job. He had a wife, Nancy, and three children, and his own house, which he had built with his own hands, a small tight adobe that required mudding every two or three autumns.
Joe was always hard up, always hustling to make a buck. Over the years he had learned how to do almost any job. He knew everything about building houses, he knew how to mix mud and straw just right to make strong adobes that would not crumble. Though unlicensed, he could steal and lay his own plumbing, do all the electric fixtures in a house, and hire five peons at slave wages to install a septic tank that would not overflow until the day after Joe died or left town.I Given half the necessary equipment, he could dig a' well, and he understood everything there was to understand about pumps. He could tear down a useless tractor and piece it together again so niftily it would plow like balls of fire for at least a week before blowing up and maiming its driver; and he could disk and seed a field well and irrigate it properly. "Hell," Joe liked to brag, "I can grow sweet corn just by using my own spit and a little ant piss!" He could raise (or rustle) sheep and cattle and hogs, too, and slaughter and butcher them all. And if you asked him to, he could geld a pony or castrate a pig with the same kind of delicate authoritative finesse Michelangelo must have used carving his Pietd.
Joe had his own workshop crammed full of tools he had begged, borrowed, stolen or bought from various friends, enemies, and employers down through the years. In that shop he sometimes made skinning knives out of cracked buzz saw blades and sold them to hunters in the fall for five or six bucks. At the drop of a five-dollar bill he could also fashion an ornate Persian wine goblet from an old quart pop bottle. Then again, if the need arose and the money to pay for it was resting lightly on his main workbench like an open-winged butterfly taking five, Joe probably could have invented the world's tiniest dart gun, to be used by scientists for crippling, but not killing, mosquitoes. Just to survive there had to be almost nothing Joe couldn't or would not at least try to do.
The Mondragon house was surrounded by junk, by old engines, by parts of motors, by automobile guts, refrigerator wiring, tractor innards. One shed was filled with wringer washing machines, and when Joe had the time he puttered over them until they were "running" again; then he tried--and often managed-- to sell them . . . with pumps that went on the fritz (or wringer gears that neatly stripped themselves) ten minutes after Joe's three-month warranty (in writing) expired. This presented no problem, however, because for a very small consideration Joe was more than willing to fix whatever broke in whatever he had sold you.
In a sense, Joe was kept perpetually busy performing minor miracles for what usually amounted to a less-than-peanuts remuneration. Still, when something, when anything was wrong hi town, when a pump was frozen or a cow was sick or the outhouse had blown down, the call went out for Joe Mondragon, who would defy ram, hail, blizzards, tornadoes, and earthquakes hi order to skid his pickup with the four bald retreads and no spare to a stop hi your front yard and have the thing or the animal or whatever it was temporarily patched up and functioning again. Reeking of energy like an oversexed tomcat, Joe was always charging hell-bent for election around town in his old yellow pickup, like as not with a beer clutched tightly hi one fist--arrogant little Joe Mondragon, come to fix your trouble and claim your two bits, who didn't take no shit from no body.
But he was tired, Joe had to admit that. He was tired, like most of his neighbors were tired, from trying to earn a living oft the land hi a country where the government systematically gathered up the souls of little ranchers and used them to light its cigars. Joe was tired of spending twenty-eight hours a day like a chicken-thieving mongrel backed up against the barn wall, neck hairs bristling, teeth bared, knowing that hi the end he was probably going to get his head blown off anyway. He was tired of meeting each spring with the prospect of having to become a migrant and head north to the lettuce and potato fields hi Colorado where a man groveled under the blazing sun ten hours a day for one fucking dollar an hour. He was tired, too, of each year somehow losing a few cows off the permits he had to graze them on the government's National Forest land, and he was tired of the way permit fees were always being hiked, driving himself and his kind not only batty, but also out of business. And he was damn fed up with having to buy a license to hunt deer on land that had belonged to Grandfather Mondragon and his cronies, but which now resided hi the hip pockets of either Smokey the Bear, the state, or the local malevolent despot, Ladd Devine the Third.
Usually, hi fact, Joe did not buy a license to hunt deer in the mountains surrounding his hometown. Along with most everybody else in Milagro, he figured the dates of a hunting season were so much bullshit. If he hankered for meat, Joe simply greased up his .30-06, hopped into the pickup, and went looking for it. Once a Forest Service vendido, Carl Abeyta, had caught Joe with a dead deer, a huge electric lamp, no license, and out of season to boot, and it cost Joe a hundred dollars plus a week hi the Chamisa County Jail. In jail he half-starved to death and was pistol-whipped almost unconscious by a county jailer, Todd McNunn, for trying to escape by battering a hole hi the cheap cinderblock wall with his head.
Joe had been hi jail numerous tunes, usually just for a few hours, for being drunk, for fighting, for borrowing (and consuming) Devine Company sheep, and each tune it had cost him fifteen or twenty-five dollars, and usually he had been manhandled, too. The corrections personnel laughed when they clobbered Joe because he was funny, being so small and ferocious, weighing only about a hundred and twenty-five pounds, kicking and hitting, trying to murder them when he was drunk, and when he was sober, too. Sometimes they tried to hold him off a little for sport, but Joe was too dangerous, being the kind of person --like the heralded Cleofes Apodaca of yore--who would have slugged a bishop. So they tended to belt him hard right off the bat and then let him he. Joe had lost a few teeth in that jail, and his nose had been operated on by police fists, clubs, and pistol butts so as to conform to the prevalent local profile. Outside the jail Joe had broken fingers on both his hands hitting people or horses or doors or other such things. "I ain't afraid of nothing," he bragged, and thought he could prove it, although when he said that his wife Nancy hooted derisively: "Oh no, that's right, you're not afraid of anything."
But Joe was tired of the fighting. Tired of it because in the end he never surfaced holding anything more potent than a pair of treys. In the end he just had his ass kicked from the corral to next Sunday, and nothing ever changed. In the end half his gardens and half his fields shriveled in a drought, even though Indian Creek practically formed a swimming pool in his living room. In fact, Milagro itself was half a ghost town, and all the old west side beanfields were barren, because over thirty-five years ago, during some complicated legal and political maneuverings known as the 1935 Interstate Water Compact, much of Mi-lagro's Indian Creek water had been reallocated to big-time farmers down in the southeast portion of the state or in Texas, leaving folks like Joe Mondragon high and much too dry.
This situation had caused a deep, long-smoldering, and fairly universal resentment, but nobody,лleast of all Joe Mondragon, had ever been able to figure out how to bring water back to that deserted west side land, most of which, by now, belonged to Ladd De-vine the Third and his motley assortment of dyspeptic vultures, who (not surprisingly, now that they owned it) had figured out a way to make the west side green again.
But then one day Joe suddenly decided to irrigate the little field in front of his dead parents' decaying west side home (which Joe still owned--in itself a miracle) and grow himself some beans. It was that simple. And yet irrigating that field was an act as irrevocable as Hitler's invasion of Poland, Castro's voyage on the Grannta, or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, because it was certain to catalyze tensions which had been building for years, certain to precipitate a war.
And like any war, this one also had roots that traveled deeply into the past.
For several hundred years, and until quite recently, Milagro had been a sheep town. Nearly all the fathers of Joe Mondragon's generation had been sheepmen. There was no man, however, and there had been no men for more than a hundred years, perhaps, who had truly made a living off sheep, the basic reason for this being that Milagro was a company town, and almost every herder, simply in order to survive as a sheepman, had been connected to the Ladd De- vine Sheep Company. And being a sheepman connected to the Devine Company was like trying to raise mutton in a tank full of sharks, barracudas, and piranha fish.