The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols

Author:John Nichols
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

Part Four

“I wish to Christ that all of a sudden winter would come.”

—Bill Koontz

What might be called the deadly game of “Waiting for the War to Start” was beginning to get a few people down, and one Milagro citizen suffering more than most was the sheriff, Bernabé Montoya.

It was the kind of day when mundane tasks were needed to reduce the building tension. Bernabé carried the ash drawer from his kitchen stove out to the chicken pen and dumped the ashes over the fence so the chickens could fluff it into their feathers and kill mites. Then he spooned a few dozen cat turds from the blue plastic boat serving as their kitty’s catbox into a trash can, loaded four metal trash cans into his pickup, and headed down the north–south highway for the official Milagro dump.

There were, of course, a good many unofficial town dumps, starting with just about every citizen’s backyard crammed full of useful “useless” junk, and moving on to all the oil drums people owned in which they still burned their paper refuse in defiance of state and county antipollution laws strictly forbidding this practice. And then there were spots in various arroyos—for example, the east side Arroyo del Marrano and the south side Arroyo de la Urraca—where people dumped all their empty cans and jars and dead dogs and chickens that had died from encephalitis and old washing machines and cars, because the official dump was too far—three miles!—away. And finally, there was the favorite—what might be called the “official unofficial”—dump, which was located in a gravel pit on west side mesaland belonging to Eusebio Lavadie, who had posted signs (to no avail) at the gravel pit, threatening, in both English and Spanish, to keelhaul, garrote, draw and quarter, fine, jail, and, in general, “prosecute to the full extent of the law” all trespassers, garbage dumpers, deadbeats, lewd lovers, and so forth. About once a month Lavadie had to tack up a fresh sign because the old one, perforated by bullet holes, became illegible—Lavadie’s gravel pit also happening to be the place to sight in one’s rifle during the several months preceding deer season, during which time Lavadie didn’t even bother to replace his sign lest somebody decide to adjust his crosshairs against the bridge of Lavadie’s nose, or across the third brass button from the top of his vest, which was situated more or less directly over his heart.

Lavadie’s gravel pit was also where those people engaged in construction activities who did not rip off their earthen or mineral materials from State Highway Department pits alongside the major north–south route stole the sand and gravel necessary to their various enterprises.

But Bernabé Montoya, being the staunch upholder of law and order that he was, had to travel three miles south to the official dump, and when he got there this particular morning, in spite of state and local ordinances to the contrary, the dump was burning, and about a hundred ravens were stalking around in the foul-smelling smog, eating breakfast.

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