THE MILAGRO BEANFIELD WAR

More alive than a grasshopper on a hot skillet""--a scrappy shaggy story, down the road a long ways from The Sterile Cuckoo, full of good humor and even better intentions about a small brushfire war in a Chicano community. Milagro by name, a ghost town, mostly old folk since the children have all left and dry as a bone ever since the development interests (a golf course, for one) have appropriated the irrigation rights. Jose Mondragon, tired of doing odd jobs for less than nothing and having ""his ass kicked from the corral to next Sunday,"" finally diverts some water from the creek to convert an old beanfield into ""an absurd green bauble"" and thus begins the war which spreads like crabgrass and ends with the shooting of someone called Pacheco whose pig has strayed into the beanpatch. By no means as together as Richard Bradford's So Far From Heaven (1973) staged in just this part of the world but Nichols writes with more comic drive than he has ever shown before and lots of pulque under his belt.