The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols Page A

Milagro, that’s all.”
    â€œI think what I’ll do,” Trucho said, “is talk with the state engineer. Seems to me his office ought to handle it. I’ll get back to you—”
    And when he got back Trucho said, “Listen, Bill, this thing could be a little antsy, but for the time being we’re gonna steer clear of it. Bookman’s—the state engineer’s—office will handle it, or at least try to. So why don’t you drive up to Milagro and tell that Montoya ape to keep his boots from getting muddy over there on the west side, okay? You might also stop up at the Devine place and let them know we’re aware of the problem. And Bill—?”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œThe key word is tact, alright? The key thing right now is to play this cozy. I mean, lay off Joe Mondragón, and let’s keep our uniforms as inconspicuous as possible up there. Be nice to Bernie Montoya. People start getting the bright idea something is cooking, Bookman feels, it’ll only aggravate the situation, and we’re liable to find ourselves up to our ass in Mexican hornets. Okay?”
    â€œOkay,” Bill Koontz said, puzzled by the respect people seemed to be developing for Joe Mondragón and his puny beanfield. He turned, asking Emilio Cisneros:
    â€œWhat does a little jerk like that want to cause this kind of trouble for?”
    â€œI dunno,” the dispatcher said, smiling faintly, curiously. “Let’s just wait and see what happens.”
    *   *   *
    The Dancing Trout Dude Ranch was a thirty-eight-room adobe palace set in a cluster of cottonwood, Russian olive, weeping willow, ceαar, and aspen trees on the banks of Indian Creek and surrounded by lush green meadows and apple, pear, apricot, and plum orchards that extended for miles back up into the Milagro Canyon.
    Ladd Devine the Third was not so opulent.
    Standing five foot nine in his cowboy boots, tipping the scales at one-forty-five, he had a bland, regular, and slightly good ol’ boy face and a bland, regular, slightly good ol’ boy way of speaking. He was the kind of man who worked hard, enjoyed circumventing risks, and avoided the limelight. He drove a pickup truck and kept a sharp authoritative eye on pretty much everything that went on at his spread. He also often spent up to twelve hours a day in his third-floor office constantly telephoning various parts of the town, county, state, and nation. At all times this sawed-off, unflamboyant man knew exactly where his affairs were at.
    The Ladd Devine empire had been established by his grandfather, a boisterous whoremongering outdoors man who drank his bourbon straight from the bottle and cursed a lot. But once the corporate conglomerate was established, Ladd Devine the Third had been the perfect man to tone down the operation and keep it barging along smoothly; and also, incidentally, to build it into something really powerful.
    This is not to say that Ladd Devine the Third hadn’t inherited a couple of his grandfather’s quirks. One was the airplane he often piloted himself out of the Chamisaville airport. The other was his wife, Flossie, a six-foot-tall “honeydear” woman from an Odessa, Texas, oil family, who wore Neiman-Marcus skintight, flare-cuffed, gold lamé, western cowgirl pants and stacked her peroxide-blond hair in a three-story bouffant. She had a body to match her garish looks, and with the ton of makeup she swabbed on daily, Flossie Devine looked to be on loan from the Lido, or else some kind of rent-a-tart from Las Vegas, Nevada. But Flossie was actually a placid, gentle soul. Her time she whiled away riding plump thoroughbred horses, playing bridge and solitaire and Scrabble, and drinking too much champagne or beer or whatever else happened to be around and open at the time. Flossie was a quiet lush, though, usually going to sleep right after dinner, and she had never done her husband