Little feet padded from the children’s bedroom across the living room, into the kitchen; María cuddled up sleepily against her, whining softly, “Mommy, there is spiders all over the place. They are hopping on my bed.”
Linda draped an arm around her daughter, softly shook her head: “But they won’t hurt you, honey. They don’t bite—” The house was literally crawling with daddy longlegs.
“I’m afraid,” María whimpered, and so Linda put on a bright, sympathetic smile as she hoisted her daughter, and, heading for the bedroom, soothed, “Come on back to bed, love, and Mommy will sing you a song.”
In the darkness, with Pauline in the other twin bed gently whistling as she dreamed, Linda sat beside her youngest daughter and sang “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem,” the song—the lullaby—that for some reason she always sang to relax her children, calm their fears, make them drowsy—
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by …
And:
How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given …
But little María, tonight, was not immediately sleepy. She tucked a pudgy hand into her mother’s warm crotch, saying “Tell me a story, Mommy, so I won’t be afraid of the spiders.”
And Linda, seated on the bed in the soft blue summer night, snug within the cheerful, mute universe of dolls and bright clean clothes and Little Golden Books, thought for a moment, but could invent no story, until abruptly she heard herself talking about home, Colorado, the old days, childhood—
“Well … a long time ago, sweet, Mommy used to be a cheerleader, did I ever tell you that?”
And, incredulous that this could actually be herself speaking, that the moments she was describing had actually taken place during her early life, she added: “We used to practice on summer afternoons and evenings, all of us girls, there were maybe eight or ten of us in junior high school then who were cheerleaders. We would ride our bikes to the football field and park the bikes on the dirt track, and then walk out into the middle of the field. Sometimes the grass was wet because they had had the sprinklers on, watering the grass. And sometimes the field was almost yellow because of the dandelion blossoms, and then they all went to seed and the field was white, it fluffed when we walked in it, just as if we were walking in dreamy tufts of sheep’s wool—”
“Was this when you were a little girl like me, Mommy?” María asked.
“No, I was a little older than you, sweetie. I was thirteen or fourteen, I think. And so we would sit out in the middle of the field in the evening and talk about our routines, and then sometimes we lined up in formation and worked on the cheers—”
And she stopped, able to see them all, pert and young, high-strutting in the dusty golden evenings. Sometimes cars would stop on the other side of the track, and high school boys would look on, whistling softly, making lazy comments; or other times it would just be older people, men, women, grandparents, who parked their rattletraps along the road running parallel to the field, peacefully looking on. The moon might be up in the pastel aqua blue overhead while the sun flamed orange in the west, and other kids, younger boys and girls on bikes, might also stop by. Yet everyone kept a respectful distance, as if that small corps of lively, pretty girls was something inviolate, almost sacred, bouncy, virginal, clean—and the peace and the sense of youth and of well-being, for those moments, had been like a cloud.
She had never qualified to cheer for the rites of autumn, however; in the end they didn’t pick her, she was too clumsy; she was not lively enough; she was too somber, too severe, too gloomy, perhaps—she lacked vitality. Maybe she had been too self-conscious; maybe she had been too mature.
But the thing is, Linda had forgotten about that time, those glorious evenings, the solitude, camaraderie, and the green football field, the gentility and serenity of those times, the peppy, shining brown girls dressed in sweatshirts and baggy letter sweaters and short-shorts, chanting lazily while moving happily through their cute, sexy routines, unassailable for a moment, secure.
She checked the telling, afraid of tears. María struggled to keep her sticky eyes open; they closed, fluttered groggily open, closed again, the little hand still embedded warmly between her thighs. Daddy longlegs noiselessly crisscrossed the floor; innocence whispered around the walls creating eddies in the air that set Linda’s heart to aching, because more than anything she wanted to give her children a feeling of security, even though she knew this was ultimately impossible. Nothing would ever exactly fit together and solidify; she would never grow calm, never feel at ease; life was a hell on earth of loose ends, uncertainty, violence. The Chicano roots she had rejected had refused to shrivel and die; the culture she had hoped to adopt had refused to compensate. Her true language kept twirling into her head unannounced, replete with an arrogant dazzling laughter, boisterous, obscene, illiterate, tickling her mind on twinkle-toes of murder.
Quietly, listening to the creak of her limbs, the crinkle of the cloth that clothed her, Linda roused herself, left the room, turned into the bathroom to draw a tub. At least a dozen daddy longlegs were arranged along the bottom of the cool porcelain tub, quiet, quivering when the light blared on and her shadow fell. She did not like to handle them, squashing the spiders the way Bloom squashed them—she usually opted for drowning. And so now she opened the spigots, shivering a little as the spiders scrambled, lost their footing, struggled momentarily in the hot water, and died, immediately bedraggled, soggy, long gone. Scooping them up in her hand, she shook them off into the wastebasket; when the water was high she shut it off and doused the lights.
In the dark, the bathroom door open, Bloom’s typewriter faintly clicking in the distance, Linda undressed and, having gingerly sunk into the hot water, simply lay there, drowsy, the water murmuring around the islands of her breasts and her knees, relaxing.
Bloom’s typewriter stopped, his door opened, she listened to him come.
“You in here?” he asked hesitantly from the doorway, trying to adjust his eyes, the smoke from his pipe smelling nice.
“Don’t turn the light on—” she said hastily, fearing the harsh, knifing blast of fluorescence.
“Don’t worry. I wasn’t going to. I’m not that insensitive.”
“I didn’t say you were insensitive.”
“Well, I guess it was what your voice implied then.”
“Charley, please.”
“Can I sit here a while?”
“If you want.”
“But you don’t want me to, do you?”
“Did I say that? Did you hear me say that?”
“Well, your voice sounded…”
Struggling for control, unhappy that he’d come, she said, “Honey, I would like it if you would sit here with me for a little while.”
Bloom eased the lid down on the toilet, seated himself, released a pungent comfortable puff from his pipe.
“Let’s not talk,” Linda pleaded. “We ruin everything when we talk.”
“I’ll wash your back if you want.”
“No, no, please.” Because he would soap her back, and then he would not stop, he would start to soap her thighs, her breasts, he would force it to become a sexual encounter, no matter if he promised not to, and right now she only wanted peace. She wanted peace, an absolute quietude; she wanted an interlude of darkness, warm water, the pipe tobacco smell, security.
They sat, both silent, trying to relax with each other, to have a good moment. Linda cupped her breasts loosely, steam eddied thoughtfully in the dark air. Her exhaustion flowed into the hot water; she drowsed. She wished that the experience would never end. She wished that right now she could gently die. Bloom shifted, rustled, tapped his pipe out into his palm; the ashes made a sprinkling noise going into the wastebasket. A rainy whiff came through the open window, a few large drops spattered against the dusty leaves of a pear tree just outside. It was so warm, so cool, so relaxing—
Light, like a bomb burst, exploded in the t
iny bathroom; and in the doorway, squinting groggily, stood little María again, the quietest child on two feet since Baby Jesus in the manger. “Mommy,” she said, in that willful, winsome, half-whine of hers, triumphantly smiling at having caught her parents in an intimate pose, “the spiders are still crawling all around.”
“Hey,” Bloom blurted, immediately tense, angry, “turn off that light!” And then, looking down at his wife in the tub: “Oh Christ, what—”
“It’s only my period,” Linda said, shocked, not quite comprehending: the water was tinged with menstrual blood.
* * *
Joe Mondragón, off on a wood run, drove like a maniac over the mesa’s potholed dirt roads, a beer in one hand, the radio blasting. Nancy sat morosely beside him holding a six-pack minus one tallboy in her lap. Crows flapped off an occasional jackrabbit carcass; a black-and-white shrike sat on a fence post with a dead kangaroo rat dangling from under its talons; cows lumbered moodily off the dirt path into the sagebrush. Joe bapped his horn angrily at the cows, shaving their asses with his front bumper as the truck careened by, and, because they were Eusebio Lavadie’s cows, he wouldn’t have minded plowing into a couple of them either; the only reason they were grazing out here on this Bureau of Land Management land was because Lavadie had gotten money from Ladd Devine to buy up the permits of a Colorado rancher who’d decided to give up his cattle business. Joe had wanted some permits to graze cattle here, but he hadn’t been able to come up with the cash and wouldn’t have been able to swing the deal anyway, because these cows were Lavadie’s payment for putting the Chamisa County Rural Conservation and Development Corps directly behind the Miracle Valley Recreation Area development project.
Joe suddenly braked the truck, grabbed his .30–06 from the window rack, and banged open his door.
“What are you doing?” Nancy asked.
“I’m gonna shoot one of that bastard’s cows!”
“You do, you’ll get caught, and that’s what they want, José, you’ll see.”
Walking to within fifteen yards of a pregnant cow, Joe bolted a bullet into the chamber. The cow retreated a few steps and regarded him with watery, mooning eyes that indicated a massively substandard intelligence.
But Joe no more could have shot a cow he wasn’t going to eat, much less one that was going to drop a calf, than he could have refused a free beer, or put more than a dollar’s worth of gas at any given moment into his truck. At the same time, now that he was out here, having announced in no uncertain terms what it was he had planned to do, he couldn’t just shrug and return to the truck.
So he compromised, opting to scare the shit out of the cow, which he promptly did, both figuratively and literally, pulling off three rapid shots that sprayed dirt and pebbles and bits of dead sage branches up into the cow’s face and hide before it could turn and gallop lumberingly away, splatting a terrified patty onto its own heels as it fled.
Back in the truck, Joe felt better; Nancy stared noncommittally ahead. They had to slow up at the gorge, inching slowly down along the narrow, twisting road, pulling over twice before they hit bottom to allow other, wood-filled pickups on the way home to pass. They crossed the narrow wooden bridge over the Rio Grande, chugging through a swarm of olive green and russet-colored swallows that had mud nests under the bridge, and started the bumpy climb out. At the top, a wide, flat plain dotted with huge ant mounds stretched for a mile, and Joe left the dirt ruts to slalom between the mounds for a ways. Then they were in sagebrush again, barreling along with the windows rolled up against the adobe dust that enveloped their vehicle.
The sage became dotted with a few junipers in a landscape that seemed almost African. Then suddenly stumpy piñon pines surrounded them as they lurched onto an old railroad trestle road, banging along in well-worn ruts for another six miles, at which point they came to the territory of the Big Jack.
The Big Jack was a forest eater, a mammoth, three-story-high machine with three gargantuan steel-toothed wheels that not only knocked over piñon trees, but also crunched them up into bite-sized fireplace-perfect logs. For the past year, in this area of Chamisa County, the Big Jack had been pulverizing the scrubby pine forests in order to make more grazing land—“for the small farmers” insisted all the political brochures, although already most of the leveled acreage had been spoken for by two or three out-of-state cattle companies.
In the meantime, the local people were allowed to come in and lug away all the free wood they wanted, which saved the powers that be the considerable time and expense of carting their slash away themselves or else burning it, which was theoretically illegal.
All the same, Joe and Nancy couldn’t help but feel a slight glow as they gunned through the dusty wasteland toward where pickings were best. Loading up on free wood was like gathering manna from heaven, and how could a person be completely cynical about that? For years in the north, part of the measure of a family’s wealth had been its woodpile, and even though people like Joe and Nancy had propane heaters in their living rooms now, there would always be fireplaces in the other rooms and a combination gas-wood stove in the kitchen. And if, sometime in the future, not even the combination stoves and fireplaces survived, it’s an even bet there would still be a woodpile outside, hanging on as a kind of vestigial, nostalgic heartbreaker, like those horses in Charley Bloom’s Voice of the People article.
Then too, maybe someday—if Zopilote Devine had his way—all the subdivision houses he was planning would pay their respects to Milagro’s cultural heritage by having realistic-looking plastic piñon piles in their backyards, adding just the correct dash of authenticity to make their flimsy split-level ranch houses indigenous to the area.
Totally unconcerned about getting stuck, Joe swerved off the beaten path at a good spot, bucking through loose dirt, sand, and muck to where busted trees lay all about. Without a word they both hopped out and set to work, Joe scavenging bigger logs that burned well in his shop’s heater, Nancy gathering smaller branches that would fit easily into the kitchen stove. They each carried an ax, splitting with one or two easy blows what the Big Jack had not completely sectioned, and within an hour the pickup was stacked so high one more log probably would have snapped a spring or cracked the axle.
Joe fetched a cigarette from his shirt pocket, tossed one to Nancy, lit them both. Plunking tiredly down on an uprooted stump near the truck, he snapped open another tallboy; she leaned on the front hood, facing him, wearily letting the smoke drawl out between her lips. A strange but harmonious feeling infused the surrounding desolation. In a far tree line crows scrawked; there was no other animal noise. But here and there small purple flowers shone iridescently, and in the upturned earth and ragged dunes a few delicate asters grew; for some reason, hundreds of tiny fuzzy caterpillers were chewing on the asters. In its own way that barren area was beautiful, and, although the dust blowing and drifting and shifting in the erratic but constant breezes had dirtied their faces and colored the chinks between their teeth, they felt okay.
That is, Joe felt okay until Nancy, who had some things on her mind that wanted airing, asked, “How come you won’t sign that petition Ruby Archuleta keeps bringing over?”
“Huh?”
“How come you won’t sign that petition?”
“What, there’s a law says I got to sign that petition?”
“I signed it.”
“Good for you. I didn’t. So what?”
“How come you won’t sign it?”
“Because every time we signed something we signed away our noses, our ears, even our testicles.”
“This is different.”
“Well, I dunno,” Joe grumbled defensively. “I just don’t want to put my name on anything, that’s all.”
“Who are you gonna scream to when the chotas pour honey all over you and start eating you like a sopaipilla?” she asked grimly.
“Well, I just haven’t figured it out yet. It’s too complicated. I ain’t that smart. Plus you know that as soon as that pe
tition goes to the governor, five seconds later it’s gonna be in the hands of the state cops…”
“If there’s only a few names on it they sure will have a hearty chuckle, too.”
“Well, fuck it.”
“I think we should stop on the way back so you can sign, José. You started all this. It’s time to quit monkeying around.”
“Oh shuttup,” Joe whined petulantly, and for some odd reason that ended the conversation.
On the way back Joe drove slowly, stopping a couple of times to piss. Distant clouds, rich and dark and rumbling threateningly, were rolling slowly off the mountains. In the far south, from a high line of transparent golden clouds, yellow and pink rain wisps dangled. Directly behind them in the west everything was a deep and placid early-afternoon blue.
On the north–south highway, instead of turning north toward Milagro, Joe steered south, pulling off a mile down the road into the Strawberry Mesa Body Shop and Pipe Queen complex. Ruby and her son, Eliu, Marvin LaBlue, and Claudio García were at work in the body shop on Benny Maestas’ 1948 Pontiac which had killed a horse the night before. Over in the Pipe Queen, Onofre Martínez and his retarded son, O. J., and his two great-grandchildren, Chemo and Chepa, were using Ruby’s tools to cut and thread some pipe.
Brushing metal bits from her hair, Ruby walked over to the truck. “What’s up?” she asked, releasing a warm smile.
“I guess I’ll sign that petition,” Joe mumbled.
“It’s up at the house. Follow me.”
In her kitchen, surrounded by a half-dozen curious yellow cats and threatened by a placidly snarling mutt lying in a basket under the table, Joe affixed his signature to a handwritten petition claiming that “We, the undersigned residents of Milagro, representing the Milagro Land and Water Protection Association…” were opposed to the formation of the Indian Creek Conservancy District and the Indian Creek Dam, essentially because they were costly projects designed to aid the few rich landholders in town, projects that the poor people could not afford.