For every inhabitant of Milagro, there existed a horse like the one belonging to Onofre Martínez. Charley Bloom had once put it this way in a Voice of the People article:
You walk along the narrow roads of Milagro in the spring and early summer sunshine. The small fields are green with alfalfa, timothy, and clover. At one house, a man with a wooden pallet called a “hawk” is scraping adobe mud off this hawk with a trowel and smoothing it against a wall. It is calm in Milagro; there is a feeling of uninterrupted history everywhere. In each of the half-acre and quarter-acre pastures one or two horses are grazing. For in Milagro, a man who is too old to ride, or his children who would rather speed in cars, still keep a horse or several horses. They switch them from small field to small field, and, no matter what, they will scrape together the dollars to buy hay bales for the winter months to feed their horses. There is something vestigial about the horses of Milagro. Occasionally, you see a man on a horse walking toward the Midnight Mountains; or two children riding bareback. But mostly the horses are just there, useless, parasitic, grazing in the overgrazed fields, because there have always been horses in Milagro. They can make you sad, these horses that nobody rides much anymore; or they can stand proudly and beautifully as a kind of symbol of a people who refuse to die.
But start throwing this kind of penny ante sociology around in front of Onofre Martínez, try to explain to him the significance of his old, fat, half-blind mare out back in that tidy corral, and he would listen politely for a while, until finally, catching you in a pedantic or scholarly pause, he would observe, “You’re just farting words.” Then he would start a conversation about something else. A man who kept a horse, to Onofre’s way of thinking, was as natural as a man who unbuttoned his fly and pried out his pecker before, instead of after, taking a leak.
Onofre called his horse Balena, a word that means “whale.”
Another thing about this one-armed man: Onofre Martínez was as close to Seferino Pacheco as anybody in town. Occasionally, Pacheco came over to the Chateau Martínez, not under the pretext of looking for his sow (because how could his sow transcend that airtight picket fence neatly surrounding Onofre’s property?), but simply to stare at Onofre’s color TV, or maybe to stare at his piano.
That piano had once belonged to Pacheco’s wife, who could play it like a nightingale can sing. When she was still alive, that woman used to play for Pacheco every afternoon at five, and he would lie on a couch with his eyes closed, positively enraptured, his soul drifting around the room like a pink, helium-filled balloon. Sometimes she soothed him with classical music, sometimes she played popular songs, singing along in her husky melodic voice. In summer, the music would float out on the evening air, reaching the neighboring houses. Back in those days, Joe and Nancy Mondragón and Pancho and Stella Armijo and Sparky Pacheco and others who lived close to the Pacheco adobe used to stop whatever they were doing and listen to Pacheco’s wife at the piano. And most of these people still counted those peaceful evening concerts among their most cherished memories.
But then Pacheco’s wife died, and Pacheco sold the piano for a song to Onofre Martínez, who had planned to hustle it at a huge profit to a moneybags down in Chamisaville. But for some reason he kept putting off the sale. Maybe he remembered those musical evenings which had been so beautiful they had even lulled all the hummingbirds at his feeders—the tiny birds had lined up on branches and actually seemed to drift off into tiny buzzing dreams while Pacheco’s wife caressed the ivories. And besides, Onofre fancied himself a bit of a whiz at the keyboard, too. In fact, it was Pacheco’s wife who taught him for free back when she gave piano lessons to any kid in the valley eager to learn. Mostly, Onofre liked boogie-woogie, and so she taught him that. But then his right arm mysteriously disappeared, leaving him with nothing but a boogie-woogie walking bass. Nevertheless, Onofre still enjoyed playing his walking bass, and although he never gave concerts at 5:00 P.M., his neighbors often heard that jive bass coming from the Chateau Martínez around dusk. Nobody stopped work to listen, though, because Onofre had always been a lousy piano player, even with two hands, and he still tunked out basically atonal numbers.
Of course, Joe Mondragón would swear on a stack of Bibles, if you asked him to, that he had awakened at least twenty times in the middle of the night these past five years and heard both the walking bass and the treble runs at the same time carrying across on the clear black air to his startled ears.
So that was another story to file with all the previous fables about Onofre’s missing arm.
But anyway, Seferino Pacheco occasionally visited Onofre’s house, not to hear him play the piano—God forbid!—but simply to stare at Onofre’s miraculous boob tube, and also occasionally to listen to his friend read.
It was in this, the literary area, that their acquaintanceship really suffered, however. Namely, because Pacheco could not stand the way Onofre, reading aloud in Spanish, pronounced his c’s and z’s. He pronounced them with the Castilian th sound, that is, with a lisp, an affectation peculiar to many of the Miracle Valley’s old-timers, whereas it could not be found farther south in Mexico. The reason for this being that Onofre’s and Seferino Pacheco’s ancestors had come from Spain four centuries before, traveled to this godforsaken place in the high Rockies, and then been cut off from civilization for three hundred years, thus maintaining many of the purities in their Spanish language and in their Spanish customs.
But Pacheco hated that fucking lisp. He could hold his tongue, listening to Onofre read, only for about ten minutes. Then he would explode; and the two men would engage in knockdown drag out verbal fisticuffs, which usually terminated when Pacheco called Onofre a “screaming elitist fairy!” waking up all the bats behind their custom-made bat shutters as he stormed out of the place. Pacheco usually did not stop there, either. Turning at the gate, he always added: “An Astroturf lawn! And plastic flowers! That proves I’m right!”
After a Pacheco visit, the hummingbirds were usually absent from the Chateau Martínez for several days, or until the atmosphere calmed down enough so that they could zip here and there without striking air pockets caused by Pacheco’s epithets.
“Someday he’ll kill me for lisping,” Onofre said to Joe Mondragón one afternoon while they were selling hamburgers and cotton candy at the Chamisaville Moto-Cross race, which was, as usual, taking place on a nonvisible track fifteen feet from Joe’s trailer; the cyclists lost, as always, in a dust storm.
“If he does, why don’t you will me your piano?” Joe said. “I want my kids to learn more culture than they can get on Herbie Goldfarb’s guitar.”
“I’m not gonna die, I don’t think,” Onofre said, “until I’ve played taps, on that piano, for Zopilote Devine.”
* * *
Two nights after the basketball court rumble, while Joe and Nancy Mondragón were making love, a bullet crashed through their living room window and thudded into the other side of the bedroom wall, causing the plastic crucifix above the bed to fall on Joe’s head.
Jumping out of bed, Joe grabbed a rifle from the corner and charged through the front door. A car, trying to get away, was spinning its tires, stuck in the mud. Joe aimed his rifle and fired—but nothing happened because he had failed to load up. Forgetting that the car’s occupants were armed, and brandishing his own gun by the barrel, Joe galloped toward the vehicle, planning to beat them all to a bloody pulp with the stock of his weapon. As he raced across the yard, however, their tires caught and, jolting clear of the gooey rut, the car plunged down the road.
“You bastards!” Joe yelled, flinging his gun after them: it landed with a splash in a puddle.
* * *
Bernabé Montoya sat up in bed and tapped Carolina’s shoulder. “Hey,” he muttered groggily, “did you hear a rifle shot?”
His wife rolled onto her back and spent a befuddled ten seconds stretching open her sleep-caked eyes. “What?” she mumbled. “What did you say?”
“I thought I heard a rifle shot.”
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Carolina sat up. “I didn’t hear anything. I was sound asleep.”
Bernabé laid one hand gently against his head. “I got a lousy headache,” he moaned. “This town is giving me whatta you call them?—migraines. Joe’s beanfield is gonna give me an ulcer.”
“I’ll fix something,” Carolina said, climbing dutifully out of bed and slipping her feet into some fluffy pink slippers.
“Just gimme a couple aspirin,” Bernabé said. “No fancy remedies, huh?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll fix you something better than aspirins,” she insisted quietly, shuffling determinedly out of the room. “Remember: an ounce of prevention…”
“Ai, Chihuahua…” Bernabé whimpered, settling back. Oh Jesus Christ Almighty, he wailed silently, terrified of the old-fashioned remedy she was sure to turn up with, and he was certain to drink, in about ten minutes.
Occasionally—in fact, better make that often—her old-fashioned ways touched him. For example, he usually carried a little piece of oshá in his pants pocket. Not because he put it there himself, understand, but because she always slipped it in when he wasn’t looking. In the old days, people had carried around these little chunks of wild parsnip root to protect themselves from poisonous snakes, and so what if rattlesnakes had always been as rare as money in Milagro? Bernabé was forever throwing away the oshá that turned up almost daily in his pockets, and Carolina was forever replenishing the supply, and neither of them ever mentioned the matter to the other.
But what really drove Bernabé out of his skull was Carolina’s way of talking. Actually, Carolina didn’t talk much at all, but when she did open her mouth it seemed sentences never emerged, only aphorisms, called “dichos.”
Hence, when Bernabé remarked, “You know, Carolina, I really wonder about Horsethief Shorty Wilson sometimes,” she would respond with: “Hay lobos con piel de oveja.” Which meant: “There are wolves who parade about in sheep’s clothing.”
Or if he said, “I wonder, sometimes, if I’m really handling José’s beanfield correctly,” she assured him, without even looking up from her colcha embroidery: “El que hace lo que puede no está obligado a más.” Meaning: “He who does what he can isn’t obligated to do any more.”
Again, if Bernabé happened to mention, over a plate of carne adobada, that Joe Mondragón was a pig-headed son of a bitch who wouldn’t listen to reason, Carolina was certain to chirp: “El que no agarra consejo no llega a viejo.” That is: “He who can’t take advice, won’t live to a ripe old age.”
Then if Bernabé continued to attack Joe’s recalcitrance, she would probably add, “You can lead an ass to water but you can’t make him drink.”
The few times Bernabé had tried to break down the political and social situation in town, talking about how little land and money the farmers really had, Carolina had rather consistently observed, “Quien poco tiene poco teme,” which means, “He who has little has little to fear.”
And on those days when the sheriff was sick and tired of the whole thing and just came home early and put his feet up and proceeded to get drunk on a six-pack, she moaned at regular intervals: “Tiempo perdido los santos lo lloran,” but at least he had the guts to pay no attention. Let the damned saints cry over all the time he was wasting.
That was another thing, of course. Their house, a kind of southwestern religious Smithsonian Institution, was crammed full of bultos and retablos, carved saints and painted saints, bleeding saints and saints wearing little cloth capes on which roses and moons and stars were embroidered, and saints carrying silk shoulder pouches, and saints with angels driving their plows through the earth behind them, and saints with gourds full of sacred water and baskets overbrimming with sacred bread—they had santos in their household like most of Milagro’s dogs had fleas!
Yet among all these pious wooden dolls there was one Bernabé liked. It had been carved by that alcoholic expatriate responsible for the Smokey the Bear santo riot, Snuffy Ledoux. It was a plain wooden santo with no name, and, contrary to the other carved or plastic saints, it was grotesque. The eyes bulged like mad frog’s eyes; the huge ugly nose was bent all out of shape; the lips were fat and twisted into a half-gurgle, half-scream; the big awkward hands gripped the figure’s chest arthritically, in terror. Bernabé had bought it off the distinguished sculptor for a bottle of cheap tokay twelve years ago. But he liked it a lot; maybe he even loved that santo. Because it looked to the sheriff like a man who was full of a million questions he would never dare ask, a million opinions he would never dare offer; that ugly wooden carving looked to Bernabé Montoya like another human being with a kindred soul.
The one real fight Bernabé and Carolina had had in their life together occurred because of the saints. It had been an abnormally dry year (every other year in Milagro was an abnormally dry year, alternating with all those abnormally wet years), and so one day, during the Death of the Fruit Tree Blossoms time, Carolina carried their San Isidro out into the back field asking him to encourage it to rain on their cucumbers. Well, sure enough, it rained all right, then the rain turned to snow, and the snow turned into a blizzard, so Carolina ran outside with their Santo Niño de Atocha, begging him to queer the blizzard before the cucumbers and the fruit trees were destroyed, and so the blizzard stopped and it began to rain again and the rain froze and tree branches fell down onto everything, and some cows Bernabé had up in the canyon froze to death. Whereupon suddenly, gnashing his teeth so hard little pieces of porcelain literally spewed from his mouth, the sheriff jumped up and grabbed an armload of her saints and threw them into the holocaust. Carolina shrieked, plunged into the storm, retrieved her precious little statues, and cried for three days.
But God forbid they should ever yell at each other.
Bernabé dreamed of that, though. He dreamed of leaping suddenly out of an armchair and throwing his clenched fists over his head as he bellowed, “Carolina, shuttup!” Or: “Carolina, you piss me off!” Or again: “Carolina, go to hell and take the saints and the dichos with you!”
Except that underneath he loved her very much, loved her plump gentle flesh, her quiet way of sewing, cooking … of being true. He was grateful, too, for the way she had of never really reproaching him for anything. Despite Vera Gonzáles down in Chamisaville and a hundred others before her, Bernabé felt loyal to Carolina. Their children were grown up and gone, they were both entering middle age, and yet their sex wasn’t all that bad either. In fact, Bernabé periodically lusted after her way of making love with him whenever and however he wanted, in a slow, sensual, gratifying way, or else allowing him his “perversions” when he wanted them, doing things to or with him in a quiet, mystical, almost unbearably religious and sexy manner, if that’s what he needed. Bernabé did not even mind it too badly when, after a really good tumble during which neither of them had thought about contraception, Carolina rolled heavily out of bed, and, as she tiptoed in her lethargic yet sexy way toward the bathroom to douche herself, said to him: “A stitch in time saves nine, you know…”
Bernabé knew.
Right now, Carolina returned to the bedroom and handed over a glass. What was in it—?
“Just some whiskey and a little ground-up oshá,” she explained tenderly, adding of course: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Bernabé closed his eyes, steeled himself, and drank. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t pretend her phony potion had cured him. In fact, his headache was straightaway multiplied by three. But how could he tell her the stuff she gave him didn’t work?
And, caught in his eternal dilemma, Bernabé started thinking about how people always tried to kid each other. This led to thoughts—as he lay there tensed, waiting for another gunshot—about the ways people tried to fool animals. And painted cattleguards came to mind.
For some strange reason, Bernabé had never been able to accept the fact that painted cattleguards actually worked. A real cattleguard, consisting of ten or fifteen steel rails or two-by-four
s set six to eight inches apart and laid across a dug-out section of road, kept cows, afraid of plunging a hoof between the rails and maybe breaking a leg, from crossing. A painted cattleguard, however, was just that: nothing more subtle or elaborate than a group of evenly spaced white stripes painted across a macadam road. They were also about five hundred dollars cheaper to build than real cattleguards.
One such ersatz cattleguard adorned the north–south highway a few hundred yards below Ladd Devine’s Miracle Valley development sign. And every time Bernabé drove over those twelve white stripes, he flinched and, shaking his head, muttered to himself: “It beats me how a handful of white stripes can fool cows like that.”
Bernabé likened the painted cattleguard to the sort of stickers—“Protected by Acme Burglar Alarm System”—store owners who could not afford burglar alarm systems put on prominent display in their business windows.
Or to those signs—“Beware of the Dog”—that suburban folks too cheap to invest in a ferocious mutt, but nevertheless terrified of burglars, displayed on their lawns.
Or then again, Bernabé figured a painted cattleguard might be said to share a common soul with a shapely woman who wore falsies.
And Bernabé wondered: Did the painted cattleguard concept have some relationship to artificial insemination, also?
Or how about its relationship to the plastic flowers in Onofre Martínez’s garden that so confused his myriad hummingbirds? Too, how about its relationship to Onofre’s invisible arm?
Of course, ultimately, painted cattleguards were like Bernabé Montoya himself, pretending to be a sheriff, when actually the title Bumbling Misfit might have suited him better than did his badge.
I oughtta take a week’s vacation, Bernabé thought, and use it to teach Lavadie’s cows how to cross that cattleguard.
The sheriff couldn’t stand to see cows fooled by that phony cattleguard. In fact, it just about broke his heart to see any thing or any person tricked into believing in something that wasn’t real.