It ain’t in books, mijo, it’s in front of your face.
A glisten of scales on the side of the road caught Sonny’s vision. He pulled over and slowly backed up. Most of the traffic on 550 was flowing south, into Burque.
He got out and stood looking at the large rattler that lay crushed, writhing as it died, scales shining in the morning light.
“Damn,” Sonny muttered. He looked around, sniffing the air. The sharp metallic smell of death touched his nostrils. There was another scent, a feral scent.
A crow perched on a juniper called. Not good, Sonny thought. The snake had come out of hibernation to lie on the warmth of the asphalt and had been run over. Or it had been rushed out of its damp, underground home by someone’s need. Whose?
There were no marks from scavengers on its body, but he knew he couldn’t leave the snake on the side of the road. The crows would tear it apart; the snake spirit would become a burden.
Gotta take Señor Vívora so he gets a proper burial, he thought. He took his leather gloves from the truck, carefully picked up the snake with the shovel, and placed it on the bed of the pickup.
A coyote trotted up the wide, sandy arroyo. It stopped to glance at Sonny, as if approving, then disappeared. Sonny got back in the truck and drove on.
At White Mesa the road curved, and he slowed down to enter San Ysidro. The village budget depended on ticketing speeders, and Sonny wasn’t in a contributing mood. He turned north toward the pueblo, past the P.O., the village offices, the church.
San Ysidro had fallen on hard times. Every time Sonny and Rita drove through he caught sight of one fixer-upper or another, crumbling adobe homes or double-wides that needed repair.
Fixer-upper heaven. Yeah.
He slowed down as he approached the pueblo, matching his rhythm to a faraway drum beat. The old adobe houses seemed to melt into the earth. Sooner or later everyone and everything had to melt back into the arms of mother earth. That’s why the new frame/stucco houses going up on the outskirts of the pueblo looked so incongruous. How do you dissolve wood frame, propanel roof, steel window frames?
The pueblo kept the seasons, each one distinct. Spring was for plowing, the cleaning of the ditches, the running of irrigation water, planting. The cycle of the seed corn described the cycle of man’s life, the cycle of sun and moon. In summer the greening, the corn’s male tassels drooped with male pollen, and the old men went about collecting the sanctifying dust.
In autumn ristras of red chile hung on the walls, the ears of corn were dried or made into chicos, the blue corn ground to make atole. Time of the hunt. And in winter, rest. Time for storytelling.
Wrapped within the seasons were the ceremonies. The outside world knew little of the ceremonial cycle; the Jemez Pueblo kept to its traditional past. Outsiders stopped at the stalls to buy oven bread or visited the homes that sold pottery and jewelry. Outsiders came to the pueblo feast-day dances, and to the Matachines dances on Día de La Virgen Guadalupe in December. These dances were shared with the outside world, with the vecinos from the small villages that dotted the mountain.
Sonny and Rita attended the dances, felt the dance energizing the earth, the call of the spirit world, and there had been a few times when he had felt the epiphany of the dance, time becoming space. Those times the spirit entered the earth and its people. Perhaps it was the Indian blood he inherited from his mother. She was the daughter of the genízaro pueblos south of Alburquerque, the villages where both Pueblo and Plains Indians had become hispanicized, where the children came in all colors, some blonde and blue-eyed as some of the original Españoles and some brown as the river earth.
The pueblo fiestas were a time to visit, a time to hear the native languages spoken. Navajos from Gallup, folks from all the other pueblos, all uttering the few words they knew of Towa. Those without the language could only watch. The ceremonies of the ancestors belonged to the people, and were kept by the people.
From the road Sonny waved at a group of men at the acequia. Something was going on at the pueblo.
Did they know about the governor? Probably. Did they know about Raven’s bomb?
On the bare cottonwood branches, the crows spoke volumes.
Only one booth at the Red Rocks rest area was doing business. He and Rita had bought oven bread from Mrs. Cota for years. There she was, tending the fire with fragrant pieces of piñon, the coffee boiling. Lard bubbled in the cast iron pot, ready for the fry bread.
Sonny pulled over and got out of the truck; Chica followed. The late model Subaru parked near the ramada didn’t belong to old lady Cota, but there was no one nearby. A sharp breeze stirred, blowing across from the Walatowa store. The dust rose then fell, carrying strange sounds, a wailing from the mesa. Definitely something going on.
He looked up at the red rocks where spots of snow contrasted with the crimson of the cliff, all framed by an overarching blue sky. A striking, mesmerizing sight, he thought, an eighth wonder of the world. In the summer tourists flocked here, to eat fry bread with honey or the tasty tacos the women sold. March, which could still turn cold and blustery, was not yet tourist season. It was worth a trip to sit in the silence and feel the spirit of the place.
“Ti-wa-sho-beh,” Sonny greeted Mrs. Cota.
“Ti-wa-sho-beh, Yang,” the old lady replied.
“You have soom-bela?”
“Yang always hungry.”
“Yes, coyote always hungry,” Sonny said, laughing and rubbing his stomach.
“Where’s your woman?”
“Like you, she cooks for people. I came with my cannu.”
“Too early for fry bread.”
“Coffee.”
She poured him a cup. Sonny sat on a tree stump to enjoy the strongest brew east of Window Rock.
“The car?” he asked.
“Naomi.” The old lady nodded toward the red rocks and turned to tend the fire.
Sonny watched Chica scouring the ground, back and forth, picking up scents.
Naomi, Sonny remembered. So, she was back. But what was she doing in the Red Rocks?
Where is she? he was going ask, but put the thought away. None of his business. A person came into the world of the pueblo and a lot of things were not his business.
He enjoyed the coffee and the warmth of the sun. Sun the father, the old abuelo. Don Eliseo had taught him to say his morning prayers facing the east as the sun rose over Sandia Crest. Then the Lords and Ladies of the Light chased away the dark mists that hung over the river.
Life was movement, the cycle of the sun entering the world, creating a dance, the clarity the living sought, the soul’s food. Dark was a place. Dream place. Nightmare place.
Here in the Jemez Valley the light was a living substance, and it could tear apart the many layers of ego, the stress, the false identities, the veils of illusion some called reality. As the light entered the soul, it became soul.
We never are, we are always becoming, don Eliseo said. Painters paint light on canvas, we use light to paint our spirits. Light has will, the particles make choices, choose direction, how to go. It’s not constant, Sonny. It is alive.
Yes, Sonny smiled. That was true. In New Mexico the light was alive, entering the mountain peaks, mesas, arroyos, chamisa, and every living organism—even the rocks, for light made the boulders and rocks come alive and share their song with the day.
“Ti-way-peh, Mrs. Cota,” he said when he finished his coffee.
“Ti-way-peh,” she replied.
He was putting Chica in the truck when a long, yelping cry rang from the cliff.
Some doings, Sonny thought, and started to get in the truck. Then a woman cried out.
“A woman,” Sonny said, looking toward the red rocks.
He glanced at Mrs. Cota, but she looked away. None of your business, her demeanor said.
The cry came again, a cry for help. He had heard a cry like that before, and he couldn’t just pretend it wasn’t his business. He slammed the door shut and ran toward the
red cliff.
5
As Sonny rounded the huge boulder, two hundred pounds of painted flesh slammed into him. He caught his balance, only to feel another painted man push him into the arms of a third.
“Ora, muchachos!” cried the fat man, pushing Sonny into the middle of the small clearing. There were six men from the pueblo in a circle, painted as if going to war, and standing near a juniper tree, Naomi dressed in white buckskin.
“Hey!” they shouted as they cuffed Sonny, pushing him back and forth from one man to the next.
“Hey! Sonny Baca!” the fat man called out. Sonny recognized Bear and a couple of the other men.
They were playing a game, the way hunters might strike the young initiate with the first jackrabbit he kills, smearing him with Brr-da-eh blood. The way a child might be frightened by a man masquerading as a bear, so that he loses his fear of bears.
Sonny didn’t fight back. He knew the game. The homeboys in the barrio played it once in a while to test a vato, push him around to see how much kidding he would take before striking back.
Bear pushed him hard and Sonny fell face down. One fell on his back and pinned him to the ground.
They were talking in Towa. Sonny recognized Yang. Coyote. No use protesting; he had interrupted their ritual. Out of the corner of one eye Naomi came into focus, as regal and beautiful as he remembered her.
They passed something over him, and Sonny was sure he detected the odor of the dead snake, the snake with no charm.
Bear leaned down and whispered, “Don’t play with snakes. Not your medicine.”
“Yang might get bitten,” another said.
“Or get blown up by the white man’s bomb.”
They laughed then moved away, out of the arbor, their bells jingling and turtle shells rattling. Like a sudden thunderstorm they had struck, leaving behind a dazed Sonny spitting sand.
He felt bruised. The primos play rough, he thought. What the hell did I stumble into? The fleshy smell of the dead snake hung in the air.
He knew Bear. La plebe in Ponderosa called him Gordo. He liked to drink beer and dance on Friday nights at the Ponderosa Bar and Grill.
Sonny turned and looked at the crimson cliffside. He blinked, not believing what he saw. The image of a quincunx appeared on the stone. He held his breath. Above him the sound of the wind moaned as it scraped against the red rocks.
Before his eyes the Zia glyph glistened like a mirage in the heat of summer. Four quadrants, and in the middle the blazing Zia sun, sun of movement traveling across the four quadrants, now moving into the spring equinox. Four seasons, four spaces, four dimensions, four times in the year the earth circled the sun, and the movement through space became a sacred journey.
On a flat surface the quincunx would represent the Garden of Eden, earth itself, home. The pueblo. The vertical axis pointed up to the spirit world and down into the world of emergence.
Sonny blinked again and the image dissolved. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and groaned. His left eye felt bruised, but otherwise he was okay.
The Egyptians had carved their esoteric knowledge on the walls of their temples, hieroglyphs that told stories of their gods. Masked gods. Cerebus, Isis, and Horus, the falcon god who delivered whispered messages. The gods, in colorful dress, crossed the river Nile in the sacred raft. The walls of the tombs of the pharaohs were decorated in fantastic murals, images that spoke volumes to a learned acolyte.
In the land of the Zia Sun, in New Mexico, in the desert land the Aztecs called Aztlán, land the Americanos called the Southwest, land where the bones of the ancient ones were buried, where the wind whispered and crested desert sand into waves, there where the acolyte might follow the zigzag pattern of the rattlesnake, in this land the ancestors had walked, crisscrossing the land that would one day be called America, the earth whose name they kept sacred in their stories and parables, a name with so much power that it could not even be carved into the sand stones of the desert.
Long ago migrations had spread across the towering breasts and fat belly of the mother, treading with care, taking sustenance from the earth as a baby would suckle at her mother’s breast. Those ancient people had carved the glyph of power on the Zia Stone, thus describing their relationship to a higher, creative power.
Older civilizations had done the same in their earliest writings. Sumerians, Israelites, and Egyptians, by whatever name in whatever place, the people had described the geography of the sacred. They felt the vibrations of a greater power infusing the earth, and they etched that relationship on wet clay tablets and sandstone pillars.
The word became the center, a new awareness of the sacred.
In the deserts and mountains of the Anasazi, the Zia glyph was cut into the face of a rock, a sign etched so deep that it became the center of the universe, the point around which the Earth rotated, the mother spinning in a dance of joy, dressing herself in various hues, a colorful costume for each season, but always swirling to a dance that could be measured by the movement of the stars at night, the moon, planets, the sun.
It was like this in medieval pictures Sonny had seen of the Garden of Eden. In the center was the sacred spring, with four rivers flowing from the garden in the sacred directions. The garden was the mandala of primal imagination.
Sonny had heard the story from don Eliseo, and he from the old people of the pueblos, they who kept the ancient knowledge.
There is a secret, they said, a glyph carved on a huge boulder that fell from the sky. Long ago it fell to earth. The sign on the stone will tell how time begin, how it will end, the story of earth, the story of man and woman. We came from the belly of the mother, we walked on the skin of our mother, always nurtured by her seed and animals, the fish, the deer. If you find this stone that fell from the sky, you will know how one time moves into the next, to give birth, to create the spirit of life.
The Zia Stone. The secret we sought.
What is the secret? he asked the old man.
The secret is that there is a secret, the old man said. We need that hidden knowledge to keep us searching. We don’t know everything there is to know of the creation. There is one eternal question: Whence came we? Why? Even if we rose from the mud of ancient lakes, the ooze, the hidden waters, the question remains. What spirit penetrated the mud to create the first cells, a throbbing of life that millennia later would raise its arms to the sun, praising the light of creation? That is our human history, the seeking after the light.
Sonny turned and looked at Naomi. She smiled, glided toward him like a snake, making no sound on the sand.
“Thanks for saving me, Sonny.”
“I didn’t save you,” he replied. Something in the way she walked or the way she said “thanks for saving me” angered him. How in the hell was he to know she was here?
“Yeah, well you never know what those guys would have done to an innocent girl like me.”
Sonny stood and wiped sand from his pants. He looked at Naomi. Innocent? Not by a long shot. But good looking? Lordy, yes. She smiled. Her pearl teeth had been cared for by a very good dentist, a very expensive one.
“You did save me. I’m all yours.”
“Look, I don’t know what games you’re playing, but I didn’t save you. The guys were just having a little fun.”
“They play rough. But don’t listen to them. They carry on all that old-fashioned stuff, painting up like they’re going to war. I told them I didn’t want any part of it.”
“So why are you here?”
“Because of you,” she said, reaching out and brushing sand from his cheek. “You’re part of the game.”
Her voice was husky, her dark eyes shining. He could smell her body perfume, sage and a sweet cologne magnified by the excitement of what had just happened, sand and sweat and the pungent green of junipers whose spring juices were already rising.
“Remember me?” she said. “Did you forget me?”
No, he hadn’t forgotten her. A man doesn’t forget a woman like N
aomi, even if the liaison was only one night filled with the impulse of youth.
“We made love.”
But that was long ago, ten years ago, he was still at the university, had beers on Friday nights with a couple of guys from the pueblo. In the fall they invited him to go hunting, and that October full-moon night they got some good pot and peyote buds, and some of the pretty girls from the pueblo showed up, high up where the aspen exulted in their brilliant yellows, transparent in the light of the moon, and the girls were as transparent as flesh can get when you’re young and horny.
Yes, he remembered, he could hear the drumming now. They sang into the night by the light of the campfire, serenaded by coyotes and the screeching call of a cougar that hunted in the mesa. It was a night he would never forget. The intensity that flesh can share with earth bonded him to the mountain and the night sky and the secrets revealed by the peyote as it entered the bloodstream.
A night of hallucinations. A huge black bear walked into the camp, growling and kicking up dust, then cougar, screeching and clawing at them, teaching them a lesson that perhaps in the last dream on their deathbeds they might understand. Finally, the owl, calling the stars down in a cascade of silver, the wisdom of Sophia, a man from another culture might say, but here it was a dance orchestrated by Señor Peyote. A song of the forest, night an indigo liquid in which they swam, the time of blue lights, deep purples, vivid strobes of green and orange notes of the drum floating into the night sky, joining the campfire embers and piñon smoke, rising into the galaxy-full sky.
It didn’t end until the early morning frost fell over the exhausted campers, and Naomi slithered into his bedroll as he lay watching the play of stars as they tumbled and turned into colorful musical notes that fell to earth like burning confetti, pyrotechnic displays of living color that carried the song of the night, a symphony of owls calling, witches of the night roaming the mountain, the coyotes howling for joy, and the cry of a cougar in the hills. The night’s aria circled the drum, then entered the drum, a dazzling gathering of Star People who rained from the night sky to dance around the campfire.