Stunned by the erotic Armageddon, Herbie teetered abjectly, miserably, totally befuddled. Before the first week was out, all the hens had bloody heads and bare, pimply backs. And it was then that the abattoir scene commenced.
With a hammer and two threepenny nails in hand, Stella Armijo emerged from her low adobe farmhouse one morning while Herbie reclined on his front stoop trying to read a book. Crossing her yard to a large rust-colored stump, she quickly drove the two nails side-by-side into the block, then sat down on a nearby sawhorse to sharpen her ax with a file. When Herbie first heard that melody of the file against axblade steel, he should have retreated to the gloomy insides of his stinking little house. Instead, a strange compulsion held him where he was and, already queasy, doomed to witness the crude brutal demise of his early-morning tormentors, he waited for the sword to fall.
Stella had shut the chickens inside their coop the night before. Now she entered the shack carrying an empty burlap feed sack. An outraged commotion followed. Blowing breast feathers off the bangs covering her forehead, Stella emerged moments later lugging a bulging sack, which she carted over to the rust-colored stump. There, forsaking all preliminary rituals, the woman withdrew a rooster, stepped onto the mouth of the sack so the other birds couldn’t escape, fitted the rooster’s head between the two nails and, holding the bird by its legs, she pulled the body out until the neck was taut; then raised the ax and with one crunchy blow—shtok!—she beheaded the chicken and chucked the body unceremoniously into a nearby pile of wood chips where the wings flapped crazily as blood—driven, no doubt, by the heart’s last fervid memories of yesterday’s torrid balling—spurted from the neck.
It was like that, one after another—shtok! shtok! shtok!—the blade repeatedly tunking neatly through feathers, flesh, and bone so quickly that even before Herbie could go into shock over the first execution, the last had been performed. A pair of bloody wings staccatoed out a final energetic protest and fell still, and only a pair of warty yellow legs still quivered … and kept quivering … and continued quivering endlessly, like appendages somehow related to tuning forks.
After perfunctorily wiping her hands on her apron, Stella trotted inside, returning shortly with a large cauldron of boiling water. She dipped each beheaded rooster in the water, then plucked it so savagely Herbie winced at each tear, at the sound of damp feathers popping from thick puckered skin. Then she drove a long knife into each carcass’s ass, twisted the blade once, reached inside, and, with a single sharp jerk, yanked out the guts and tossed them to the Armijos’ ugly, pug-faced, cocker-bodied dog, Esperanza, who greedily gobbled them up while Herbie’s own guts did loop-the-loops.
The chicken yard was noticeably subdued the rest of that day. Hens, slouching around mooney-eyed and sad, pecked desultorily at little bugs; the surviving roosters lay in small craters of dust and curdled lust with their heads tucked back between their shoulder blades, the hothouse riots in their blood considerably cooled by chill presentiments of mortality, their doomed fertility dripping from once brightwild eyes like tears. Somehow, incredibly, they all suddenly looked almost senile, feeble beyond belief. And Herbie, who only yesterday had dreamed of wringing all their necks, dreamed today of kidnapping them so no more would die such cruel, degrading deaths.
Next morning, following the 3:00 A.M. cock-a-doodle delirium and the 5:00 A.M. civil war, there came a 7:00 A.M. death orgy. This time Herbie stayed put in his pestilential sleeping bag. All the same, he shuddered, his body actually twitching spasmodically with each resonant shtok! as he learned that imagining a scene is often worse than being an actual spectator to it.
When finally the volunteer roused himself and staggered outside, there was nothing but blood on the ground and feathers scattered everywhere like apple blossoms. A dusty gloom hung over the chicken pen where the five remaining roosters uneasily preened their gorgeous feathers as they waited for the Angel of Death to chop, pluck, and disembowel their youthful, awakening bodies.
Right about then, Herbie realized that the large raised pen beyond the Armijos’ chicken compound was a rabbit hutch. And as his eyes focused on all the gentle gray shapes slowly hopping around in that compartmentalized wire pen, his heart did another flip-flop. After all, if the roosters were dying like flies, could the bunnies be far behind?
His premonitions soon proved to be grounded in fact. Came a morning when—half in a doze, exhausted from lack of sleep—Herbie heard a curious thock-crunch sound, then a faint plop, followed by a nauseating scuffling noise. He sat up, immediately the thing happened again; thock-crunch … plop … scuffle-scuffle-scuffle.
Fearing the worst, Herbie tiptoed to his door and opened it a crack. There stood Stella Armijo, a two-foot piece of lead pipe gripped tightly in her brawny fist, over by the bunny bin, methodically annihilating the cute little critters.
One by one, and quite gently, she removed them from the hutch, set them on a thick wooden table, stroked them a few times to ease their dread, and then—thock-crunch!—busted their stupid little brains apart with a single curt blow of the pipe and dropped their quivering bodies onto the ground—plop—where their legs continued to kick and skid for a moment in the dust: scuffle-scuffle-scuffle.
When she had a pile of seven, Stella gutted and skinned and cleaned the rabbits as unconcernedly as she had denuded and disemboweled the roosters. After that, drenched to the elbows in bunny gore, she sat down and smoked a cigarette with a placid, beautiful look on her broad face, a look so queer and detached it made Herbie’s testicles whimper as they shrank up higher into his shriveled scrotum.
But after a certain number of rabbits had been pogrommed, an almost supernatural peace descended over the neighboring barnyard.
It was a peace that only lasted about eight minutes. Because as soon as all the rooster feathers and bunny fur had been blown from the chopping block dust into the tangled branches of the cottonwood vivisecting Herbie’s outhouse, the Armijos’ dog, Esperanza, went into heat. This meant that every one-legged, mangy, half-blind, oversexed, lice-infested, ferocious or whimpering, crippled or groveling or man-eating canine entity within fifteen miles, whose olfactory senses and/or penis were functioning, appeared and laid siege to the Armijo house in hopes of getting a shot at Esperanza.
To complicate matters, on the same day Esperanza went into heat, Pancho Armijo came home with a brown milk goat. This wasn’t his idea—Pancho hated goats. But Stella wanted the milk for yogurt. So Pancho locked the goat in the shed next door to the henhouse, which was also surrounded by the chicken pen’s wire fence. The goat walked around the shed once, then jumped through the glass panes in the upper half of the door. And, after circling the chicken wire pen once, it took two dainty steps backward and, with an effortless leap, sailed over the four-foot-high barrier. The goat then trotted into Herbie’s yard and ate a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint, which the volunteer had carelessly left on his front stoop during a foray into town for baloney, beer, and cheese.
Stella Armijo boarded up the shed door, caught and reimprisoned the goat, strung two barbed wire strands above the chicken wire, and released the goat again.
Meanwhile, about thirty of the world’s most pathetic mongrels were slinking around the immediate neighborhood with hard-ons. Herbie had just bought a bicycle, which Joe Mondragón had resurrected from the town dump, and the dogs pissed over it so much it got rusty in a day and all the paint peeled off and the black rubber tires bleached out white. The dogs also peed on Herbie’s shack, but the permanent skunk smell on the premises was so strong the volunteer hardly noticed.
Pancho Armijo had tied Esperanza to a rope in the front yard, and whenever he or Stella caught mutts creeping on their filthy bellies toward her, they stampeded out of the house shooting birdshot from a .410 shotgun. So for a while there was sporadic gunfire, followed by earsplitting yelps, and this went on both day and night. Herbie writhed and tossed in his sleep; he began to duck—asleep or awake—at the slightest noise. In fact, he hardly dared exit, eve
n for food, lest a wayward shotgun pellet nip his delicate aesthetic life in the bud.
Despite this birdshot barrage, the male dogs kept sneaking around with their slanty bloodshot eyes dripping vile lusting mucus, and with their swollen testicles pulsating anxiously. They were jealous of each other also; hence, the general pandemonium was continually being garnished by one snarling dogfight or another, all taking place just outside the perimeter of shotgun range.
At least four dogs made it to the Promised Land daily. At which point truly demented melees occurred. The first time he heard the sort of uproar these dogs made scoring, Herbie raced outside to discover that three sex-starved hounds were trying to hump Esperanza at once. She howled, maybe from pleasure, more likely from pain, as the males fought among themselves, going for each other’s jugular veins while their hind ends pumped wildly, searching for a hole. One hand clasped to his head, Herbie had leaned weakly against his wall, overcome by such abandoned savagery, when Stella Armijo sailed through her portal with the shotgun, both barrels of which she emptied at the two fleeing curs. The third, which was the only one to have struck paydirt, had also somehow gotten stuck and could not withdraw. Wailing terrifiedly, he thrashed about in the dust, taking poor Esperanza with him, kicking his legs insanely, trying to dismount and run, while Esperanza, in pain now and squealing hysterically, snapped frenziedly at him with her sharp teeth.
Stella took her time reloading the gun, then ambled over to the mess and kicked the male so hard his penis tore loose from Esperanza, catapulting him end over end three times; and, before he could regain his feet, she blew his brains out.
Then, while Stella dragged the dead animal into the back field, heartless Esperanza just sat there in the dust, unconcernedly licking her cunt.
Later that same day, about the time Herbie had finally recovered enough from the morning’s trauma to eat a can of beans, the new milk goat ate a hole in the chicken wire pen allowing eight prize egglayers to walk out into freedom where they were promptly drawn and quartered (in another shrieking, yelping, feather-flying extravaganza) by the same rabidly panting dogs gunning after Esperanza’s tail.
Herbie’s teeth chattered, and he wondered: Am I beginning to suffer from shellshock? Will they send me for R and R in Japan?
Next day, a skinny German shepherd that had been lured into the vicinity by Esperanza’s scent caught a paw in the bear trap Pancho Armijo maintained under the rabbit hutch to catch any stray dogs that developed a taste for his cottontails. Esperanza was locked in the house, both Armijos were gone, and so the trapped dog wailed in pain all day, each of its woeful howls like an arrow piercing Herbie’s sensitive breast. Several times he traipsed over to aid the dog, but even though he had good intentions and tried to convey this by talking soothingly and offering the animal hash to eat, the dog only bared its fangs, and Herbie couldn’t get close.
Toward 3:00 P.M., unable to stand the racket any longer, the volunteer stumbled over to the Mondragóns’ house, where he blurted out the situation to Nancy, who fetched a pistol from a kitchen drawer and followed Herbie to the hutch.
When the dog saw her it quit yowling, its eyes grew heavy-lidded, almost sad. Although its neck hairs continued bristling, it looked almost friendly, almost gentle, damn near serene. Nancy cocked her gun, taking careful aim at the quiet shepherd, and when the gun went off the dog’s legs splayed out in four directions dropping it onto its stomach dead as a doornail.
“That’s what somebody should do to the Zopilote,” was Nancy’s only comment as she nodded tersely to Herbie and jogged home to hang up her laundry.
Two days after that, just as Herbie was beginning to think a cease-fire had been declared, Stella Armijo, Joe Mondragón, and Onofre Martínez castrated the Armijos’ three little pigs. The deballing occurred quite early one morning, shortly after Herbie had at last achieved a sort of painful, but at least semicomatose, state. The sound that jarred the volunteer from his reveries was a terrified bleating squeal such as movie vampire victims are wont to make as the fangs of cackling necrophiliacs puncture their breasts or jugular veins. Jolted upright, Herbie—from force of habit—released a petrified squeak himself, then staggered to the door and opened it a crack. He was in time to watch as Joe, straddling a hog-tied animal, made a second slit in the pig’s scrotum, reached inside, and tugged out one testicle, cut a cord, and chucked the testicle to another hobbled pig nearby, who promptly ate it.
Herbie retreated; he huddled in a fetal position atop his sleeping bag. If I survive this, he thought, it will be a miracle; and he wondered if things would have been more peaceful in Vietnam.
* * *
The Milagro church stood on the west side, at the end of the original town square, fronting a wide open space lined on both sides by lovely old houses with wide portals, the town’s long-ago heart, deserted now, dusty, dilapidated, and forlorn.
But on this day an old man named Pancracio “Panky” Mondragón, no relation to Joe (although he was the grandfather of one of Nancy’s first cousins, Larry Mondragón), turned a large iron key in the massive rusted lock and pushed the door open, allowing a bright flood of eastern sunlight to dance in and start raising havoc with the dusty air. Once he had opened the door, Panky stood there, gazing fondly at the simple church. A Warm Morning Ben Franklin stove occupied the centermost floor space; a few rows of rickety wooden benches were aligned on either side of the stove. The altar was covered by a simple linen cloth; above it hung a plain wooden cross. Two arched, narrow, plain glass windows were set into the side walls. Between the windows some ancient wooden santos, and a couple of newer ones that had been carved and painted by the expatriate Snuffy Ledoux, were hanging.
Bluebirds fluttered high up in the beams where they had nests, and Panky spent a few minutes scraping up their droppings with a trowel. As he was finishing this job, the people began to arrive. First, old Amarante Córdova, wearing his mammoth pistol, limped between ghost houses and down the plaza to the steps of the small mud-plastered church.
“Hi, cuz,” Panky muttered, and, as the two shook hands, Amarante said, “This is a great day for the church. This is a great day for the people.”
“The people are just cutting their throats,” Panky pontificated sourly. “They are as crazy as Pacheco’s pig.”
Amarante feigned astonishment.
“Well, so I came to cut my throat along with the rest of us idiots,” Panky cackled sardonically, slapping Amarante’s shoulder, the force of his blow almost knocking them both over.
Next, Ruby Archuleta and the rest of the Body Shop and Pipe Queen bunch arrived, followed closely by Joe and Nancy Mondragón, Joe’s brothers Cristóbal and Billy, and Joe’s shop rats, Jimmy Ortega and Benny Maestas. Between them the two teen-agers supported the great-uncle, Juan F. Mondragón, who muttered dire warnings of doom every inch of the way from the pickup to the pew. Ray Gusdorf showed up with his neighbors Tobías Arguello and Gomersindo Leyba. Tranquilino Jeantete came, as did his nighttime barmaid at the Frontier, Teofila Chacón, who had seven of her thirteen children in tow. After her, the Staurolite Baron with the infamous missing arm, Onofre Martínez, appeared, gestured obscenely at his son Bruno Martínez, the state cop (who was parked nearby keeping an eye on things), and entered the church. Others who came early were Amarante Córdova’s dying son, Ricardo; the man who cooked for Harlan Betchel in the Pilar Café and tied fishing flies on the side, Fred Quintana; the Pilar waitress, Betty Apodaca, and her husband, Pete; and a lot of old men with names like Sparky Pacheco, Eloy Mascarenas, Floyd Gabaldón, Felix Ruiz, Amadeo Valdéz, and Paul Romero.
By the time Charley Bloom arrived, perhaps fifty pickups and other vehicles in various terminal stages of decay were parked in front of the church between the empty crumbling houses; and at the eastern end of this improvised parking lot, Bruno Martínez and Granny Smith lounged sloppily against their state police car, indolently smoking cigarettes.
Bloom had to park close to the cops. With his arms full of rolled-up hyd
rographical survey maps, he got out and started for the church. Granny Smith moved toward Bloom and, nodding at the maps, asked, “What’s all that crap for? What’s this meeting about, anyway?”
“It’s just some stuff,” Bloom mumbled, hurrying—almost sprinting—toward the church.
“Hey, wait a minute—” Bruno called, but Bloom refused to acknowledge that he had heard. By the time the lawyer reached the steps, however, he was trembling almost uncontrollably, although nothing else had happened.
Still, Bloom figured as he entered the church that he was now truly a marked man. And he wanted to throw his maps at all the shriveled old bastards waiting patiently with their crumpled sweat-stained hats in their laps for him to arrive; he wanted to do that and then run away.
Amarante Córdova was already talking to the approximately seventy-five people present, most of them either middle-aged or quite old men, interspersed by a few women, and maybe a dozen kids.
“We didn’t ask for this problem,” Amarante croaked in his garbled Spanish. “It came and landed on us like an eagle lands on a prairie dog. But we aren’t gonna be like no prairie dogs, we’re not gonna dig a hole and hide our heads from the Zopilote and his Zopilotitos, Jerry Grindstaff and Harlan Betchel and Jimmy Hirsshorn and other people like that. We’re gonna fight!”
He paused, coughed, and nobody stirred. It was hard to tell if they had heard—probably most of them, being so old, were pretty deaf, and even if they weren’t deaf, it was six of one, half-dozen of the other as to what Amarante, with his three teeth and ungrammatical, butchered, ninety-three-year-old Spanish, was saying in the first place. But everyone had the air, at least, of listening respectfully.