“I’m not gonna faint in the middle of the road and wave a white handkerchief!” Amarante suddenly hollered, but then he started to cough so dramatically he couldn’t continue his flamboyant oration. In fact, the fit gathered so much steam so swiftly that he had to stagger over to the altar and grab hold of it to keep from falling. At which point everybody in the church leaned forward expectantly, no doubt thinking in unison: Ahah! Now is when the crafty old devil is finally going to perform for us the miracle of dropping dead!
But although Amarante could not recover, neither was he about to die. And finally Ruby Archuleta and Onofre Martínez ushered him to a seat in the first pew, where he sat hunched over with tears in his eyes, intermittently rumbling for the duration of the meeting.
Ruby Archuleta then took the floor. “Listen, friends,” she began. “You all know what’s been happening in the valley. You remember when this church was the heart of a town that no longer truly exists. You remember the days when we were not rich, but when poverty was different, not a thing to be ashamed of, and we got along okay. You remember when we had a certain freedom, and you know we don’t have it anymore, and you remember when our children grew up and stayed home and raised their children in Milagro. Well, look at us now. We’re a congregation of old men and old women and where have all our children gone?”
She paused, pacing back and forth in front of them.
“Listen, my friends, my cousins,” Ruby continued quietly. “My little grandmothers and my little grandfathers. I love you. But when I wake up in the morning sometimes I want to cry. I think of recent history, and then I think of this Indian Creek Dam and the Indian Creek Conservancy District, and I know that if they come about it will be the end for most of us. And I cannot bear to let this happen without a fight. We are old, and many of us are tired, we have been on welfare too long, and food stamps have sapped our pride and dulled our fighting spirit. I know the conservancy district and the dam are difficult to understand, but our response to complexity can no longer be, ‘Well, that’s just the way things are, what can we do about it?’ I have spent too much of my life watching bad things happen to us, to my people. I know our problems. And at this point I think we have become a little like land that has been overgrazed, or like land that hasn’t been planted correctly or fertilized for many years, and so it has lost its richness, becoming thin and weak and played out; there are no more vitamins in the soil, and all the crops growing out of it are poorer each year—”
Ruby stopped, losing the thread, confused in her own metaphor, aware of saying incorrectly what needed to be said. She was scared, too, because she had never really spoken to a group before, and because she was worried that a woman should not be saying these things, and that maybe because she was a woman with a mysterious history who lived outside the town proper they would refuse to listen.
Suddenly she changed her tack.
“Look, I’m not saying it right, I know that. I’m not our leader. I want to do what’s good and I want to fight in whatever way the people want to fight, that’s all. I’m speaking now because we haven’t chosen a leader. But maybe there’s somebody who can speak better than me, who would like to talk now about these things?”
They stared at her impassively, in absolute silence, for a good thirty seconds.
“Alright,” she said gently. “I had an idea before I came to the meeting. I was hoping maybe we could form ourselves into a group, and I thought we might call our group something like the Milagro Land and Water Protection Association, I don’t know. We’ll think about that, and maybe we can have an election at the end of the meeting or sometime soon. Maybe, too, we can elect the officers of our association, if we choose to make ourselves that, and we can discuss future meetings. But right now I asked somebody to talk to us, because he has written articles about this dam and he understands the conservancy district better than me, and perhaps he can help us all understand the technicalities, so we’ll know what we’re up against. As you know, he lives with us here in Milagro, and I consider that he is on our side—”
Charley Bloom went to the front; Ruby smiled and shook his hand and sat down—he faced the people. Their familiar faces were neither hard nor soft. Searching for glints of humor, for smiles, for compassion, he could not find any. Their faces seemed so old, so dark, calling forth overworked clichés about the earth and the sky and the wind. Old, wrinkled, simple, profound. Bloom was afraid of these neighbors, feeling simultaneously superior and less of a man. God help him not to sound either patronizing or defensive! He knew they were weary and frightened, too, but on no one face did this seem evident, and he was afraid that he broadcast it from his body as if someone had painted him a Day-Glo chickenshit yellow that shone in the dark. Although he knew many of them must lead confused and desperate lives (wasn’t his own wife Linda an example?), he still could not help but feel they were confident men and women who believed in themselves, holding in their lives to truths that were self-evident and irrefutable. He sensed, too, that they were unafraid of danger and of dying, and this they held over him more than anything. A part of him knew he was wrong, knew that he did no credit to these friends and neighbors (as he had done no credit to his wife) by romanticizing them just as they probably romanticized him, but he couldn’t help it. He envied them because they were different from him, and because, despite their poverty, their language and their culture seemed to offer a viable and dignified alternative. Looking at them, he translated their faces into a strength he had once hoped somehow to marry into.
But then, too, there was this thing in Bloom: at heart, and especially today after that tête-à-tête with Bruno Martínez, the lawyer did not want to commit himself to these hostile, impervious old people; he had no desire to carve some kind of niche for himself on the state police shit list because of their dead houses and their pathetic abandoned beanfields.
But he was willing to do it anyway, and he really did not understand why. He was simply caught, trapped, wishy-washy, doomed.
Apologizing for his bad grammar, Bloom began to speak in Spanish, knowing even as he did so that his Spanish was much more formal and correct and classical than their own; knowing also that he could read books and newspapers in Spanish, and write letters in that language, whereas most of them could not; they were illiterate in Spanish as well as in English; very few had progressed as far as the fifth or sixth grade.
Ruby Archuleta and her son Eliu, Ricardo Córdova, and Tranquilino Jeantete held up the maps while he spoke. Tracing the conservancy district boundaries, the lawyer showed where the dam would be constructed, and then ran down who owned each piece of land within the district. He repeated himself, talking slowly, trying to make a very confusing thing simple and clear. He tried to make them understand technically what they all knew instinctively, that they were going to be taxed heavily for water which would be used mostly by a very few people, and those people would by and large be connected with the Devine empire.
Leaving the maps, then, Bloom talked about the history of the north, about land grants and how they had been lost, strayed, or stolen, divvied up. He named thieves and quoted statistics, working hard to relate what he knew of the far past and the near past to the present. He spoke of sociological trends in Chamisa County, in the entire United States. He ran down for them a history of other conservancy districts in the state which had effectively destroyed subsistence farmers by forcing them into cash economies where they could not compete. He did everything possible to probe and expose the hypocritical rhetoric surrounding the Indian Creek Dam—the state engineer’s pronouncement, for example, that it was “the only way to save a dying culture.” He tried to demonstrate how the conservancy district and the dam was just one more component of the economic and sociological machinery which for a long time had been driving local small farmers off their land and out of Chamisa County. He quoted figures about per capita income and median incomes; he outlined what the real costs of the dam could balloon into, and broke those costs down to an amou
nt per acre, per year, per person, regardless of that person’s wealth. He explained how the proposed Ladd Devine Miracle Valley project would drive their land values sky high, and what that would do to their taxes. He told them that when middle-class or wealthy people from other states bought expensive vacation homes up in the canyon or around the golf course on the subdivided west side, they would want a school for their children, sewage systems, a cleaner water supply, and for that all the people of Milagro would have to pay. And once the ski valley was completed there would be pressure to raise taxes for a better road up to it. And Bloom did his best to question the myth that this development would bring wealth to every inhabitant, and jobs and security for all. For forty years, in Chamisa County, there had been a tourist boom: and yet most of the profits went into a few pockets at the top. Skilled construction workers and technicians were always brought in from outside. For the poor and the rural people little had changed, except that in taking service jobs for low wages they no longer had the time to work their land, and so had often wound up selling it, only to discover themselves poorer than before, with not even the security of their own land and a home on it to take the sting out of a poverty as bitter as Chamisa tea.
“In 1950 this county was 85 percent Spanish-surnamed people,” Bloom said quietly. “Now it’s only 60 percent Spanish-surnamed and declining fast. In 1950 the per capita income was eight hundred and seventy dollars a year; now it’s one thousand two hundred and eighty dollars, but that increase isn’t because people are making more money, it’s largely because of inflation. Actually, everyone, all the rural people, are a little poorer than before in spite of the tourist boom these past fifteen or twenty years…”
In the end he petered out. Their faces, perhaps paying close attention, perhaps not, never seemed to change. He couldn’t tell if he was making a point, helping to explain the specific workings of what they already understood all too well in general, or if he was talking to seventy-five or a hundred walls. Judging from their expressions it occasionally seemed as if they heartily mistrusted him and hardly believed a word he was saying. Then he picked up on hostility: they were thinking, he thought, What right does this smart aleck have to come in and tell us what is happening, and what is going to happen, to our lives?
He stopped.
“Hay preguntas? Yo puedo tratar a explicarles qualquiera cosa que tal vez no entienden.”
There were no questions. Incredibly, after an hour of talking, there were no questions. People shifted, coughed, did not take their eyes off him, but still seemed not to respond. He hadn’t even made a dent. Embarrassed, hating them, and hating himself for getting into this thing, for butting into their affairs, for daring to think he had any answers (let alone the courage of his convictions) after only a few years in their town, Bloom sat down, thoroughly ashamed.
After thanking him, Ruby Archuleta asked, “Who wants to speak?”
Tobías Arguello creaked erect. “We are a peaceful people,” he said, his voice trembling. “We don’t play the Anglos in their own game because they are possessed by the devil. I have a gun, but I use it only to hunt for food. I detest violence. I don’t want no more Smokey the Bear santo riots. I’m also a good American. I fought for my country in the First World War. I love being an American, and I am proud. I think maybe if we are violent, we are un-American. I am a man of peace. So we should be peaceful. If we don’t watch out, Snuffy Ledoux will come back and start another riot. Thank you.”
Sparky Pacheco stood up and, hat in hand, nervously croaked, “These goddamn Anglo bastards like the Zopilote will steal our land and everything else, our babies, and our tractors, and even—please excuse me—our testicles if we don’t say ‘Stop!’ I for one hope Snuffy Ledoux comes back to start another Smokey the Bear santo riot!”
A smattering of voices croaked feebly: “Que viva Snuffy!”
Another old man said, “The gabachos, and especially their lawyers, are always deceiving us. They are full of lies.”
And, a little stronger this time: “Que viva Snuffy!”
Panky Mondragón growled ferociously: “We deceive ourselves. We’re full of our own hypocrisy and lies. For years we have stolen our land from each other and from the Indians. Men are men and women are women, to hell with the colors and languages. Charity begins at home.”
A woman, Lilian Chávez, said shyly: “I am ashamed of Nick Rael and Eusebio Lavadie, and all the others who work with the Zopilote. They have betrayed my race. All the same, though, God forbid we should have another Smokey the Bear santo riot in this town.”
“Que viva Snuffy!”
“Wait a minute!” Onofre Martínez stammered excitedly, emotionally placing his only hand on Ray Gusdorf’s shoulder. “This is my neighbor, and he is a gringo, not even a little bit coyote. But he’s been in the valley as long as I remember, and I consider him to be of my people. And that white man over there who told us these things about the dam and the conservancy and showed us the maps, I consider him to be of my people, too, even though he is a lawyer, and even though he speaks a funny Anglo Spanish you can hardly understand. But I believe he at least tries to speak the truth, and a lawyer who does that should get a big gold medal to hang around his neck. I don’t consider Nick Rael to be of my people, though, because he works against my interests, I think. He’s too busy counting money to care about the people. So I don’t believe this is a brown against white question. This is only one kind of people against another kind of people with different ideas. There are brown and white people on both sides. Remember, too, there are brown chotas as well as white chotas, and brown políticos as well as white políticos. People are people. My own son will roast in hell, I hope, for becoming a chota. The brown and white people on our side are better people because they are on the correct side, that’s all. And if I am ashamed of Nick Rael it’s only in the same way I am ashamed of Jimmy Hirsshorn and the Zopilote. If there was no Zopilote or Jimmy Hirsshorn, in their places would be a Mr. González and a Jimmy Pacheco, I think. And if I love my brother Tobías, it’s only in the same manner I love my brother Ray, here, who is a good neighbor and a good human being, even if he isn’t even part coyote. Let that be understood by everybody, please. And another thing: if Snuffy Ledoux comes back to start another Smokey the Bear statue riot, I’m gonna be the first to shake his hand. Que viva Snuffy!”
“Que viva Snuffy!”
And when he sat down, Onofre stared fixedly ahead, lips trembling—for he had spoken.
“Who else wants to speak?” Ruby asked.
“I wanna speak,” Joe’s brother Cristóbal said. “I nominate my brother José to be president of the Milagro Land and Water Protection Association.”
Joe leaped up: “Oh no you don’t, not me! I ain’t no president!”
“You’re the one with the beanfield!” Cristóbal shouted. “You started all this! If the state chotas stick a bullet in my ear, it’s because of your pinche beanfield!”
“Bullshit! I didn’t start nothing! I didn’t call for this meeting! I didn’t ask for nobody’s help with my beanfield! What am I, crazy to ask for help from mental retards like you?”
“It’s because he won’t ask nobody to help him that he endangers us all!” Fred Quintana said.
Joe spluttered: “Oh Jesus Christ. If that’s the way it’s gonna be, as soon as this meeting is over I’m going to start up my tractor and drive it to the west side and plow up that beanfield and get all you people off my back!”
“You do, José,” his wife Nancy threatened, “and I’ll shoot you! I’ll put ant poison in your enchiladas!”
“Wait a minute!” Ruby cried. “Wait just a minute, please—”
“We should tie José up and throw him in a closet before he wrecks everything!” Seferino Pacheco bawled.
“That’s my beanfield!” Joe howled. “That’s my private property! Nobody here’s got a right to tell me what to do with my property!”
“Well, we’ll kill you if you plow under those beans!” Spar
ky Pacheco fairly screamed.
There ensued a sudden silence as these words echoed in the church. By now, half the congregation was standing.
“Well…” Joe pouted, “I still ain’t gonna be no president.”
“There wasn’t even a motion on the floor to make ourselves an association,” Ruby soothed. “This is no time to vote for a president when there’s nothing to be president of.”
“Why are we shouting at each other?” Tobías Arguello asked softly. “We should be peaceful.”
Panky Mondragón explained, “We’re not shouting at each other anymore, so siddown.”
Tobías held his ground. “I got a right to speak. This is an open meeting—”
“But we’re not shouting anymore,” Panky snarled. “So you can siddown. And besides, you’re blocking my view.”
“When I’m ready to sit down, I’ll sit down—”
“You siddown!” Panky shouted, waving a fist. “We’re not shouting anymore, dammit!”
Lilian Chávez asked, “How can we steal eggs from the Zopilote’s nest when you idiots are fighting about who’s shouting or not?”
And Onofre Martínez stood up again. “Outside, my evil son, the state chota, is having a good laugh because we’re all growing donkey ears in here. Now you take me personally, I get sick to my stomach whenever that chota son of mine has a chuckle at my expense. So I’m sorry to say that if everybody doesn’t shut up pretty soon and sit down, I’m gonna barf.”
For some reason, Onofre’s attitude, tone of voice, words, or all three taken together did the trick. Muttering unhappily, everyone sat down, folded their hands in their laps, and returned their quiet, sullen (though pious) attention to the front.
“Alright,” Ruby Archuleta said calmly. “Does anyone wish to talk quietly and in turn, first about this Milagro Land and Water Protection Association, and second about electing leaders?”