The Milagro Beanfield War Read Online Free PDF Page A

plumbing, do all the electric fixtures in a house, and hire five peons at slave wages to install a septic tank that would not overflow until the day after Joe died or left town. Given half the necessary equipment, he could dig a well, and he understood everything there was to understand about pumps. He could tear down a useless tractor and piece it together again so niftily it would plow like balls of fire for at least a week before blowing up and maiming its driver; and he could disk and seed a field well and irrigate it properly. “Hell,” Joe liked to brag, “I can grow sweet corn just by using my own spit and a little ant piss!” He could raise (or rustle) sheep and cattle and hogs, too, and slaughter and butcher them all. And if you asked him to, he could geld a pony or castrate a pig with the same kind of delicate authoritative finesse Michelangelo must have used carving his Pietà.
    Joe had his own workshop crammed full of tools he had begged, borrowed, stolen, or bought from various friends, enemies, and employers down through the years. In that shop he sometimes made skinning knives out of cracked buzz saw blades and sold them to hunters in the fall for five or six bucks. At the drop of a five-dollar bill he could also fashion an ornate Persian wine goblet from an old quart pop bottle. Then again, if the need arose and the money to pay for it was resting lightly on his main workbench like an open-wingèd butterfly taking five, Joe probably could have invented the world’s tiniest dart gun, to be used by scientists for crippling, but not killing, mosquitoes. Just to survive there had to be almost nothing Joe couldn’t or would not at least try to do.
    The Mondragón house was surrounded by junk, by old engines, by parts of motors, by automobile guts, refrigerator wiring, tractor innards. One shed was filled with wringer washing machines, and when Joe had the time he puttered over them until they were “running” again; then he tried—and often managed—to sell them … with pumps that went on the fritz (or wringer gears that neatly stripped themselves) ten minutes after Joe’s three-month warranty (in writing) expired. This presented no problem, however, because for a very small consideration Joe was more than willing to fix whatever broke in whatever he had sold you.
    In a sense, Joe was kept perpetually busy performing minor miracles for what usually amounted to a less-than-peanuts remuneration. Still, when something, when any thing was wrong in town, when a pump was frozen or a cow was sick or the outhouse had blown down, the call went out for Joe Mondragón, who would defy rain, hail, blizzards, tornadoes, and earthquakes in order to skid his pickup with the four bald retreads and no spare to a stop in your front yard and have the thing or the animal or whatever it was temporarily patched up and functioning again. Reeking of energy like an oversexed tomcat, Joe was always charging hell-bent for election around town in his old yellow pickup, like as not with a beer clutched tightly in one fist—arrogant little Joe Mondragón, come to fix your trouble and claim your two bits, who didn’t take no shit from no body.
    But he was tired, Joe had to admit that. He was tired, like most of his neighbors were tired, from trying to earn a living off the land in a country where the government systematically gathered up the souls of little ranchers and used them to light its cigars. Joe was tired of spending twenty-eight hours a day like a chicken-thieving mongrel backed up against the barn wall, neck hairs bristling, teeth bared, knowing that in the end he was probably going to get his head blown off anyway. He was tired of meeting each spring with the prospect of having to become a migrant and head north to the lettuce and potato fields in Colorado where a man groveled under the blazing sun ten hours a day for one fucking dollar an hour. He was tired, too, of