The Milagro Beanfield War Read Online Free PDF

each year somehow losing a few cows off the permits he had to graze them on the government’s National Forest land, and he was tired of the way permit fees were always being hiked, driving himself and his kind not only batty, but also out of business. And he was damn fed up with having to buy a license to hunt deer on land that had belonged to Grandfather Mondragón and his cronies, but which now resided in the hip pockets of either Smokey the Bear, the state, or the local malevolent despot, Ladd Devine the Third.
    Usually, in fact, Joe did not buy a license to hunt deer in the mountains surrounding his hometown. Along with most everybody else in Milagro, he figured the dates of a hunting season were so much bullshit. If he hankered for meat, Joe simply greased up his .30–06, hopped into the pickup, and went looking for it. Once a Forest Service vendido, Carl Abeyta, had caught Joe with a dead deer, a huge electric lamp, no license, and out of season to boot, and it cost Joe a hundred dollars plus a week in the Chamisa County Jail. In jail he half-starved to death and was pistol-whipped almost unconscious by a county jailer, Todd McNunn, for trying to escape by battering a hole in the cheap cinderblock wall with his head.
    Joe had been in jail numerous times, usually just for a few hours, for being drunk, for fighting, for borrowing (and consuming) Devine Company sheep, and each time it had cost him fifteen or twenty-five dollars, and usually he had been manhandled, too. The corrections personnel laughed when they clobbered Joe because he was funny, being so small and ferocious, weighing only about a hundred and twenty-five pounds, kicking and hitting, trying to murder them when he was drunk, and when he was sober, too. Sometimes they tried to hold him off a little for sport, but Joe was too dangerous, being the kind of person—like the heralded Cleofes Apodaca of yore—who would have slugged a bishop. So they tended to belt him hard right off the bat and then let him lie. Joe had lost a few teeth in that jail, and his nose had been operated on by police fists, clubs, and pistol butts so as to conform to the prevalent local profile. Outside the jail Joe had broken fingers on both his hands hitting people or horses or doors or other such things. “I ain’t afraid of nothing,” he bragged, and thought he could prove it, although when he said that his wife Nancy hooted derisively: “Oh no, that’s right, you’re not afraid of any thing.”
    But Joe was tired of the fighting. Tired of it because in the end he never surfaced holding anything more potent than a pair of treys. In the end he just had his ass kicked from the corral to next Sunday, and nothing ever changed. In the end half his gardens and half his fields shriveled in a drought, even though Indian Creek practically formed a swimming pool in his living room. In fact, Milagro itself was half a ghost town, and all the old west side beanfields were barren, because over thirty-five years ago, during some complicated legal and political maneuverings known as the 1935 Interstate Water Compact, much of Milagro’s Indian Creek water had been reallocated to big-time farmers down in the southeast portion of the state or in Texas, leaving folks like Joe Mondragón high and much too dry.
    This situation had caused a deep, long-smoldering, and fairly universal resentment, but nobody, least of all Joe Mondragón, had ever been able to figure out how to bring water back to that deserted west side land, most of which, by now, belonged to Ladd Devine the Third and his motley assortment of dyspeptic vultures, who (not surprisingly, now that they owned it) had figured out a way to make the west side green again.
    But then one day Joe suddenly decided to irrigate the little field in front of his dead parents’ decaying west side home (which Joe still owned—in itself a miracle) and grow himself some beans. It was that simple. And