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

For this, the people of the Miracle Valley had the U.S. Government to thank. Because almost from the moment it was drawn up and signed in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which not only ended the war between the United States and Mexico, but also supposedly guaranteed to the Spanish-surnamed southwestern peoples their communal grazing lands, was repeatedly broken. Shortly after the war, in fact, the U.S. Congress effectively outlawed then- communal property, passing vast acreages into the public domain, tracts which then suddenly wound up in the hands of large American ranching enterprises like the Devine Company. Later, during Teddy Roosevelt's era, much remaining communal territory was designated National Forest in which a rancher could only run his animals providing he had the money and political pull to obtain grazing permits.
Hence, soon after the 1848 war, most local ranchers found themselves up to their elbows in sheep with no place to graze them. In due course the small operators were wiped out either from lack of access to grazing land or from trying to compete with the large companies that now dominated the public domain and Forest Service preserves. The sheepmen who survived did so only by becoming indentured servants to the large companies that controlled the range and the grazing permit system.
In Milagro, this meant that since the last quarter of the nineteenth century most sheep ranchers had been serfs of the Devine Company, which, during the seventies and eighties, in one of those democratic and manifestly destined sleights of Horatio Alger's hand (involving a genteel and self-righteous sort of grand larceny, bribery, nepotism, murder, mayhem, and general all-around and all-American nefarious skulduggery), had managed to own outright, or secure the grazing rights to, all the property on the Jorge San-doval Land Grant in Chamisa County.
At the end of each year since this takeover, every sheepman, woman, and child in Milagro had discovered themselves heavily in debt to the Devine Company. In fact, after an average.of ten years under the sheep company's tutelage, just about every man, including men like Joe Mondragon's father, Esequiel, had owed the rest of whatever resources he might accumulate hi his lifetime to whichever Ladd Devine happened to be sitting on the family nest egg at that particular moment.
Of course, the Ladd Devine Company had not only been interested hi land and sheep and its company (now Nick Rael's) store. It owned controlling interests in both the First National Bank of Chamisaville and its Dona Luz branch. The Dancing Trout Dude Ranch and Health Spa had been operating on the Devine estate up in Milagro Canyon ever since the early twenties. When the Pilar Cafe was constructed across from the company store in 1949, it was a Devine operation. And when, more recently, the Enchanted Land Motel was built on the north-south highway to handle the new breed of pudgy tourists who simpered by hi their baroque apartment houses on wheels, it was a Devine-financed and Devine-con-trolled operation.
To be truthful, the Devine Company, which had gotten fat on sheep, was not dealing in wool anymore. The company had much more interest in a project called the Indian Creek Dam, a structure--to be located hi Milagro Canyon--that was considered the essential cornerstone of a Devine development endeavor known as the Miracle Valley Recreation Area.
A dam hi Milagro Canyon had been the dream of both Ladd Devine Senior and the present caudillo, Ladd Devine the Third, who took over the Devine operation when his grandfather (who was eighty-nine at the time) was caught alone and on horseback up beyond the Little Baldy Bear Lakes in an early autumn snowstorm back in 1958. Ladd Devine the Second, a profligate and playboy who married five times, put a bullet in one ear and out the other on the Italian Riviera at the age of thirty-nine, thus accounting for
Ladd Devine the Third's early ascendancy to the throne.
The Ladd Devine Company had started drawing up plans for the recreation development about the same tune people were losing their water rights and beginning a wholesale exodus from the hapless west side. The original Ladd Devine had not objected much to the unfair 1935 water compact shenanigans, which somewhat damaged his sheep operations by driving many of his herders elsewhere, because he was too busy buying up those herders' momentarily worthless land at bargain-basement prices. In this way, during the years immediately following World War H, when the water compact really began to be enforced, almost all the abandoned and apparently worthless land on the west side passed into Devine hands.
And now--Que milagrol--the Indian Creek Dam was conveniently going to restore water rights to the west side so Ladd Devine the Third could bless the few surviving small farmers of Milagro with a ritzy subdivision molded around an exotic and very green golf course.
The dam would be built across Indian Creek at the mouth of Milagro Canyon, establishing a mile-and-a-half-long lake whose easternmost shore would extend up to within hailing distance of the Dancing Trout's maui lodge. And the dam--or paying for it, that is-- would be made possible by creating a conservancy district whose boundaries, for taxation purposes, would incorporate almost all the town's largely destitute citizens.
Wherein lay a rather profound rub.
At least one person understood this rub. Hence, right after Ladd Devine the Third announced plans for the Miracle Valley Recreation Area (which would include the Indian Creek Reservoir, the Miracle Valley Estates and Golf Course, and the Miracle Mountain Ski Valley) by erecting an elaborate wooden sign on the north-south highway just below town, the old bartender at the Frontier, Tranquilino Jeantete, began telling anybody who would listen:
"You watch. The conservancy district and the dam is a dirty trick. Like the 1935 water compact, it's one more way to steal our houses and our land. We'll be paying the taxes for Ladd Devine's lake. And when we can't pay our conservancy assessments, they'll take our land and give it to Devine. And that fucking Zopi-lote will sit up there on his throne in his fucking castle putting pennies on our eyes as they carry us to the camposanto, one by one."
But most farmers, completely baffled by the complexity of a conservancy district, did not know what to do. Should they hire a lawyer and fight the vulture? Or should they just sit tight and let this terrible thing happen the way terrible things had been happening now ever since the 1848 war, trusting that, like Ama-rante Cordova, they could somehow, miraculously, survive?
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 tune 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 osha in her cunt that protects her from poisonous people," Onofre Martfnez once giggled. And because the pig, with Pacheco gimp-ing 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 Mon-dragon 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 head-gate 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 hi a lax bluish gauze of pinon 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 Mon-dragon 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 Cordova to travel from a point on the Milagro-Garcia highway spur next to Joe's outlaw beanfield to the Frontier Bar across the highway, catty-corner to Rael's General Store.
Back hi 1914 Amarante had been Milagro's first sheriff. And he still wore the star from that tune 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 Dona Luz daughter) hi 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 Jean-tete, he said in Spanish (he did not speak English, or read or write in either language):
"Jose Mondragon is irrigating his old man's bean-field 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?"
"Jose Mondragon is irrigating his old man's bean-field 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 Dona Luz mine, sauntered through the door for his morning constitutional just as Amarante repeated: "Jose Mondragon 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, "Jose Mondragon 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 Twinkles for a mid-morning snack at the mine, and also casually mentioned to Nick Rael, "I hear Jose Mondragon 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 hi the head?"
Four men and two women hi 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 Dona Luz Piggly-Wiggly to do their shopping; Tobias Arguello, a one-time bean farmer who had sold all his land to Ladd Devine the Third hi 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 Chacon, the mother of thirteen kids, all living, and at present the evening barmaid at the Frontier; Onofre Martinez, a one-armed ex-sheepman who was known as the Staurolite Baron and also as the father of Bruno Martinez, 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 Dona 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 Mondragon had gone and diverted the water illegally into bis 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 Mondragon, Filiberto Vigil, and Vincent Torres; and the town's mayor, Sammy Cantu.
The sheriff, forty-three-year-old Bernabe 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. Bernabe 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. Bernabe had arrested Joe Mondragon a dozen times, and had personally driven him down to the Chamisa County Jail twice. In earlier times Joe and Bernabe 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.
Bernabe 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 Bernabe 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."