Shaman Winter
I can! Sonny replied. I will!
You’ve been dreaming revenge, Sonny, and that’s no good. Maybe he’s already gotten to you.
Bullshit, Sonny scoffed. My mind’s clear. He paused and thought awhile. And suppose he has. Don’t we all have a shadow inside? Doesn’t that part of the mind always make trouble? Isn’t half the world troubled? Time to get rid of him, once and for all.
The old man shook his head. He knew even a shaman can be confused by spirit voices, and Sonny heard voices. In fact, it was often the dream shaman who suffered most from disruptive voices. Even the saints and holy men heard the devil’s temptations. The struggle raging within the soul was a battle to still the voices.
“Maybe I am—” Sonny whispered.
He creates illusions, the old man said. Be careful. Don’t look up in the sky for answers. Look inside. Shadow and light, it’s all inside.
“Sonny.”
He looked up into Rita’s eyes, eyes of love, and the ship he had to sail that day rocked in the water of her eyes, water of life.
“Don Eliseo?” she said softly.
“Yeah … he’s quite a philosopher.”
“You two make a good pair,” she said, placing a bag with chicken tacos and a thermos of coffee on the table.
“You heard him?” Sonny asked, for the first time seeking confirmation.
“No. He belongs to you. Your helper.”
“I have to go,” he said.
“I know.”
He stood and kissed her. “I’ll go by the cabin.”
Years ago, before real estate prices went out of sight, he had bought a cabin by the river in Jemez Springs. He and Rita had spent Sundays there, fixing it up. Then came the summer of the Zia medallion, the large gold amulet that would belong to Sonny or Raven, whoever won the contest. Raven tried to blow up a WIPP truck loaded with toxic plutonium waste; Sonny stopped him. In October he reappeared during the Alburquerque Balloon Fiesta, and again on the winter solstice.
Raven was a predictable threat. Always lurking in the shadows, he especially picked the solstices and equinoxes to do his dirty work, days of great ancient power, days when the sun was most related to the earth. Today the sun crossed the plane of the earth’s equator. The vernal equinox. The world could fall one way or the other.
No doubt about it, he was making trouble on the mountain.
“Maybe you’ll have time to take a mineral bath.”
Since Christmas Sonny had been driving up to the Jemez Springs Bath House to sit in a tub of the hot, healing water that flowed from a nearby spring.
Now the governor was lying dead in one of the tubs Sonny had used.
“If I have time.”
Rita touched his cheek. “Did I tell you you’re looking great? Stay that way.” She paused then whispered. “I’m ready for one of those hot baths.”
That surprised Sonny. It’s what he had been waiting for. For her to say the word. “They have a tub for two.”
“Maybe Sunday.”
Sonny felt a gentle knotting in his stomach, a welcome tightening in his throat. She was coming back from the trauma. The time of the spring equinox would be a time of love. Buds, flowers, and sprigs of grass were being pushed up from the dark earth by the spirit within.
From the jukebox Little Richard continued to shout. Diego shook the box and the arm of the old record player lifted, a new record falling into place. Fats Domino.
Sonny smiled. “Sunday sounds great. Weather’s clearing—”
“And you?”
“I’m strong as ever, really. The numbness is gone.”
There was nothing she could say that would keep him home that day. If Raven appeared she knew Sonny had to go. She didn’t know the depth of his need for vengeance, but she knew he had been waiting to make a stand. After all, who really knows what drives a man? Destiny? Fate? The daimon within?
“Cuídate,” she said. “I love you. I’ll wait—”
She hugged him and quickly returned to the cash register.
Sonny looked after her. There were tears in her eyes. Did she know what he had planned for the day? Did she sense he had to get Raven? The voices he had been hearing were shadows from his dreams, and don Eliseo had said a man fears voices when he cannot see the person who is speaking.
“Hey, Sonny, adonde la tiras?” Diego asked, bussing the table.
“Jemez.”
“Cuidao con las Inditas.”
“I already got one,” Sonny replied.
Like Cleofes Vigil used to say, when the Españoles came they found all these beautiful Inditas de los Pueblos, Navajosas, y Comanches, and the lust of men who would never see the ocean again being what it was, ipso facto, the mestizo was born. Expanding the gene pool, something nature loves. We are los manitos de las naciones de la Sangre de Cristo, Cleofes used to say. The citizens of the city states del Rio Grande del norte. Each village a polis.
The Chicano mestizo. A man on whose body was written a history of suffering. A future of great beauty. A woman throwing off the shackles of a long oppression.
Sonny walked out to his truck and opened the beat-up ice chest. It was empty except for three cans of warm Diet Dr. Pepper rolling around the bottom. Sonny tossed the tacos and thermos into the cooler.
The bed of the truck held a shovel, some rope, an old sleeping bag and a tattered tarp, a very old pair of muddy boots, a collection of empty diet-soda cans, a frayed battery cable, and an odd assortment of wrenches, pliers, duct tape, and a coil of baling wire. With duct tape and baling wire he could fix anything. Chicano welds.
He and don Eliseo had gone fishing up in the Pecos a couple of years ago and the old man swore the sleeping bag and tarp were all a king needed to sleep well. If it rains you pretend you’re a rock, he said, until the rain passes. A rock with eyes.
Got everything a PI needs, Sonny thought, satisfied.
Today’s the day, he thought as he and Chica headed north on 4th Street toward Bernalillo, tuning the radio to KANW. The news was leaking out: an Al Qaeda terrorist had been apprehended. But no mention of the governor.
So the governor was dead. It was rumored that he visited the Jemez Valley because he was seeing a woman at the pueblo. A very nice-looking Jemez woman, a sculptor whose pottery was known and collected internationally.
So the governor had a liaison. He claimed he went for the baths to get rid of stress, but did he really go to visit a woman?
None of my business, Sonny thought.
I don’t like this, the old man said. He had been quiet, perhaps mulling over Sonny’s motive. Now he spoke of caution.
Raven’s threatening to blow up the mountain, Sonny replied. You want me to stay home and do nothing. Raven’s up there, waiting. That’s what Fox meant with his allusion to the Bible. Fox knows.
The old man said nothing. Sonny was lying to himself.
Look, Sonny continued. We know even a small explosion can change the course of the underground water. That hot mineral water worked magic for me. I can’t turn my back on the mountain.
He’ll be waiting.
So what! He’s always waiting. Let’s end it today.
That’s what you really want, isn’t it?
Yes!
It’s not that easy.
It’s him or me.
And you think I can help?
You’re my trump.
You’re wrong, Sonny. You’re not thinking straight. There’s not a thing I can do.
Buy Jemez Spring Now!
A Biography of Rudolfo Anaya
An acclaimed Chicano writer, Rudolfo Anaya (b. 1937) has become best known for his award-winning novels, such as Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Tortuga (1979), and Alburquerque (1992). Anaya, who taught at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque for nineteen years before retiring in 1993, has also published epic poems, short stories, nonfiction, plays, and children’s books. He has been credited as a leader in the Latino literary community for his groundbreaking style and his success in writi
ng stories that capture the essence of the Chicano experience.
He was born Rudolfo Alfonso Anaya on October 30, 1937, in the small town of Pastura, New Mexico, to Martín and Rafaelita (Mares) Anaya. Anaya’s father, who came from a family of cattle workers and shepherds, was a vaquero, a horseman who worked on the ranches surrounding Pastura, and his mother came from a family of poor farmers, who were devoted Catholics. Anaya, who was the fifth of seven children, saw his parents as the two halves of his life—the wildness and uncertainty of the windswept plains of east-central New Mexico and the stable domesticity of farm life. Soon after he was born, Anaya’s family moved to Santa Rosa, New Mexico, where he spent the next fourteen years. Later, his writings would be filled with images and memories of the people who affected his childhood. His fiction draws heavily on the superstitions and myths of the Mexican American culture that comingled with the traditions of the Roman Catholic faith. In the community’s rich storytelling tradition, legend and history blended together to create stories filled with mystery and revelation.
Anaya spent his childhood on the llano, the plains, roaming the countryside with his friends, hunting, fishing, and swimming in the Pecos River. He was taught the catechism in Spanish, often asking the priest and his older sisters difficult questions about their faith. His family spoke Spanish at home, and Anaya was not introduced to English until he went to school. Despite the shock of changing languages, Anaya’s mother, who held education in high regard, encouraged him to excel in his studies. For Anaya, life was filled with unanswered questions, but he knew that he had a place within the very mystery that escaped his understanding.
Life in the small, close-knit community of Santa Rosa gave Anaya a sense of security and belonging that was torn from him when his family moved to Albuquerque in 1952. In Albuquerque, Anaya was introduced to a cultural and ethnic diversity he had not previously experienced, as well as the harsh reality of racism and prejudice aimed at Latinos. Nonetheless, Anaya’s teenage years were in many ways typical. He played football and baseball and spent a significant amount of time with his friends discussing cars, girls, and music. In school, he maintained good grades and avoided the troubles and dangers of gang life.
When he was sixteen, while swimming in an irrigation ditch with friends, Anaya suffered a diving accident that changed the course of his adolescence. Diving into the ditch, Anaya broke two vertebrae in his neck and nearly died. His convalescence was long and painful, but after spending the summer in the hospital, Anaya, fiercely determined to return to his active lifestyle, eventually recovered from his injuries. The experience produced in the teenage boy a passion for life and an appreciation for the ability of adversity to either destroy or reshape one’s existence.
After graduating from Albuquerque High School in 1956, Anaya attended a business school, intending to become an accountant. When his studies proved unfulfilling, he enrolled in the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. If the move to Albuquerque as a young teenager had rocked Anaya’s world, university life sent him into a full-fledged identity crisis. He was a Mexican American in a social and academic setting dominated by a culture that was not his own. He found his classes devoid of relevance to his history or identity. Also, English was still his second language, and he often used speech patterns that were considered wrong by his English-speaking classmates and professors. He felt different, isolated, and alienated, with no mentors to guide or support him.
Anaya’s own questions of his place in the world as a Latino, coupled with the traditional angst of moving into adulthood and the emotional pain caused by a recently failed romantic relationship, pushed him to write as a cathartic exercise. Many of these early writings he later destroyed. Also, a freshman English class sparked his interest in literature, and he began to read poetry and novels. Despite his growing love of reading, Anaya continued to lament the absence of any authors who could serve as mentors for his unique Mexican American experience.
In 1963 he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in English. He took a teaching position in a small New Mexico town and continued to practice his writing every day. In 1966 he married Patricia Lawless, who supported her husband’s desire to write and served as his editor.
In the 1960s, Anaya taught junior high and high school during the day and worked on his writing in the evenings, struggling to find his literary voice. Although he conjured up images of his past, he found that he was writing in a style foreign to that past. The words and the characters would not mix. Then Anaya had something of a mystical experience that pushed him toward the development of his own unique Mexican American style. As he labored over his writing one night, he turned to see an elderly woman dressed in black standing in his room. This vision spurred the writer into action, and a story began to flow from his pen, inspiring his first novel, Bless Me, Ultima. The old woman in black became Ultima, a healer who helps the story’s main character find his way as he comes of age.
Bless Me, Ultima tells the story of Antonio Juan Márez y Luna, a six-year-old boy growing up in rural New Mexico during World War II. Antonio is befriended by Ultima, a kindly curandera, healer, who has come to stay with his family. Through Ultima, Antonio discovers the mysteries of the plains surrounding him and learns how to use plants for medicinal purposes. But when Ultima heals Antonio’s uncle after a family of witches place curses on him, Tenorio Trementina, the witches’ father, declares war against Ultima. Much of the drama of the novel grows from the conflict between Ultima and Trementina, which plays out as a clash between good and evil.
Another theme of the book is Antonio’s struggle to understand his place in the world. Like Anaya, the boy is pulled between his father’s wandering life of a vaquero and his mother’s harmonic, grounded existence with the earth itself. He also contemplates his future—as a priest, as his mother desires, or as a scholar, as Ultima predicts. And he questions the validity of his Catholic faith, which seems powerless against pain and suffering, while Ultima’s magic heals. His struggles are exemplified in his discovery of a golden carp in the river, which as told in local folklore is a god. To simply suppose the carp may share divinity with God becomes a question of meaning that feels to Antonio like a betrayal of his mother’s faith, yet it is a question he cannot help but ask.
Although Bless Me, Ultima would receive wide acclaim upon its publication, Anaya faced serious struggles in finding a publisher who would accept his manuscript, which incorporated both English and Spanish words. After sending inquiries out to numerous publishers, he received rejections from all of them, most often because his writing was too Latino in style and language. “It was extremely hard,” Anaya told Publishers Weekly. “I sent the book to dozens of trade publishers over a couple of years and found no interest at all. The mainstream publishers weren’t taking anything Chicano and we had nowhere to go. For us, living in a bilingual world, it was very normal to allow Spanish into a story written in English—it’s a process that reflects our spoken language—but [in approaching mainstream publishers] I was always called on it. Without the small academic, ethnic, and university presses, we’d never have gotten our work published.”
Finally, Anaya happened on an advertisement from Quinto Sol Publications, a small press in California, inviting authors to submit manuscripts. He sent in Bless Me, Ultima and Quinto Sol quickly agreed to publish it. Bless Me, Ultima became a reality in 1972, seven years after Anaya had first begun writing the novel. Critics responded enthusiastically to the book, noting that it provided a new, refreshing offering to Chicano literature, and it was awarded the Premio Quinto Sol for the best Chicano novel of 1972. The new author would soon find fame among Chicano readers and scholars.
With his newfound acclaim, Anaya secured a faculty position at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, where he remained as teacher and adviser until he retired in 1993. He published his second novel, Heart of Aztlan, in 1976. The book tells the story of the Chavez family, forced to move from their farm to the barrios of Albuquerque. Heart of Aztla
n is a political novel that focuses on the struggles of a displaced family. While the father attempts to fight the oppressive forces that surround him, his children succumb to the temptations of sex, drugs, and alcohol, and the family is torn apart. Tortuga, Anaya’s third novel, published in 1979, completed a loosely tied trilogy that focused on the Chicano experience over several generations. Tortuga is set in a sanitarium for terminally ill teenagers. The main character is a boy who lies in the hospital in a full-body cast, partially paralyzed and unable to move. He is nicknamed Tortuga, which means turtle in Spanish, because of his cast. In despair, he tries to kill himself, but through the wisdom of another boy who is terminally ill, Tortuga learns to accept and appreciate his life. The winner of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, Tortuga was well received and was considered by some critics to be Anaya’s most complete and accomplished work.
Following the completion of Tortuga, Anaya branched out, experimenting with writing plays, short stories, poems, documentaries and travel journals, and children’s stories. His short stories were collected as The Silence of the Llano (1982). A Chicano in China (1986) was a nonfiction account of Anaya’s travels to China. The Legend of La Llorona (1984) and Lord of the Dawn: The Legend of Quetzalcóatl (1987) were both retellings of traditional Mexican folk stories, and The Farolitos of Christmas: A New Mexico Christmas Story (1985) was Anaya’s first children’s story. In 1985 he published an epic poem, The Adventures of Juan Chicaspatas. Anaya also served as an editor for numerous publications, as well as a translator and contributor to other Chicano works.
In 1992 Anaya published Alburquerque (the original spelling of the city’s name), the first in a new series of linked novels. The second novel, the highly praised murder mystery Zia Summer, followed in 1995. Rio Grande Fall was released in 1996, and the final installment of the loosely linked quartet was Shaman Winter, published in 1999.
Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert, published in 1996, was yet another departure in style for Anaya. The book employed an allegory to tell a mythical story. In 2000 he wrote another epic poem, this time aimed at middle and high school students. Elegy on the Death of César Chávez celebrated the life and struggles of the famed Chicano labor leader. The dust jacket and author notes provided factual details, and the poem moved the reader between grief and hope with a rallying cry for action.