Sonny stood up. “He sure as hell’s looking for a fight,” he said.
9
The following morning Sonny slept late. The bourbon with beer chasers from the night before, which normally made him sleep peacefully, hadn’t. By the looks of the light glowing in the blinds, it was nearly midday. He pulled the pillow over his head.
The scuffle with the big cowboy hadn’t helped anything. He had gone looking for a fight, and when he pushed, the big man pushed him back, right into the arms of Leroy Quintana, the bouncer.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Leroy whispered as he drew Sonny away. Leroy was an old friend of Sonny’s. “Go home,” he ordered as he helped Sonny out the door. “You know better than to pick a fight!”
Troubled dreams filled Sonny’s night, images that didn’t make sense when he awoke. In one he saw an infant being born, the umbilical cord tied around the child’s neck, the baby hanging and gasping for breath. Then a female figure, large and dark, a fat mamasota with huge breasts. Her gleaming eyes bore into Sonny just before she cut the cord with a sharp instrument. A flint knife. Sonny cried out.
He slipped from one nightmare to another, garbled images of distress. A dark chamber, his muscles taut with pain. He tried to move, but dark hands held him still. He was strapped faceup over a hard stone bench that cut into his back. It was steaming hot, the stench was overwhelming, flies buzzed around him. Above him Aztec priests chanted in Nahuatl, an offertory. The door of the temple was outlined in light; beyond, he could see the valley of Mexico. Around him moved the dark figures of the priests. Eyes bored into his, a woman. The smell of blood clung to her body as she leaned over Sonny. She was squatting on him? Pissing on him? He felt the warmth of his crotch as she used him. He felt his own release, the slow flow of semen from his spent body, a brief, orgiastic bliss, then the woman held up the obsidian knife, pressed it across his stomach, opening his chest cavity around the rib cage. She reached in and ripped his heart out.
Sonny cried out, but there was no sound in the dark, stifling temple, only the woman holding the beating heart.
She held the heart aloft, offering the hot, steaming blood to the sun. A loud cry rose from the people at the foot of the temple, then men and women dressed as coyotes rushed forward to take the heart. Clan of Coyote. They took Sonny’s heart to eat. He was becoming coyote.
The flint knife in the woman’s hand dissolved into a steel blade dripping with blood. The coyotes devoured the heart, the blood drained into the earth, then Sonny sprouted wings and flew into the sky.
“Weird,” Sonny mumbled as he tossed aside the pillow and blinked. “Where in the hell do those things come from?”
It wasn’t good, he thought, analyzing his dreams. He was the baby? Birth meant facing the knife. The first event of life was being severed, torn away from the mother, then the cord was cut away and life became an acid in which to swim. But there were two cuts. The second was the foreskin of the tip of the penis. Most male children got two cuts, the female only one.
“Not fair,” he said.
No wonder we’re marked for life. We’ve just been delivered to the world, and the doctor cuts off the foreskin. What do they do with the little piece of skin? Do we go around looking for it the rest of our lives? Is that part of our restlessness?
But I wasn’t circumcised! Why wasn’t I? Did la jefita spare me the pain? Told the doctor, leave it alone! You’re not cutting anything from my Elfego!
Some of the women he had slept with thought it was a curiosity. Isabela, a young woman from San Antonio who had come to the Santuario de Chimayó on a religious pilgrimage, had run into Sonny right after his divorce. One drink led to another, so she interrupted her pilgrimage. Or she found the holy grail she was seeking. “Que bonito,” she whispered as she pulled back the skin. “I’ve never seen one like this,” she said. Her longing look made Sonny shiver.
Sonny blinked, shook his head, and slowly rolled out of bed. He stood up and walked to the phone to check with his mother.
“Hi, jefa, how are you? How’s Delfina?”
“Sonny, I’m so glad you called. I stayed with Delfina last night. It’s hard for her, but she’s strong, very strong. I just got in. I still can’t reach Mr. Dominic. We have no idea what the arrangements will be. What can Delfina do?”
“Frank will take care of it—”
“Yes, but when I couldn’t reach him, I called the church, and the priest said there is no rosary planned. The same at the mortuary. I don’t understand. It’s sad. Sonny, I still don’t believe it. Max came by to help—”
“Max?” Sonny searched his mind for the right face.
“You remember Max. Anyway, I’m going back to Delfina’s. I want to be with her. Ay, Dios, if we could only plan a rosary, call her friends. I can’t get your brother, Mando. Have you spoken to him?”
“No, not yet.” He hadn’t talked to his brother in weeks.
“Hay que muchacho. I think he’s out of town. What about Turco?”
“What about him?”
“Delfina won’t call him, but he is familia. Rotten as he is. Shouldn’t he be told? Will you talk to him? Gloria is his sister. Max is going to call, so I have to go. If I’m not home, I’m with her.… Dios te bendiga.”
“I’ll be over later.”
He hung up the phone and felt his left foot tingle. He looked down at his bare feet on the linoleum. Did the tingle mean it was finally going to rain? Would the thin cirrus clouds that swept over the valley in the afternoons finally become the fat cumulus that brought rain?
Images of the nightmare returned. Rita would know what it meant, he thought as he headed for the kitchen. He needed coffee badly. He started the coffeepot and flipped on the radio. KBAD had the best Saturday-morning Mexican music. But not even the lively music helped dispel the images in the nightmare. Was the earth mother who cut out his heart related to the chain-saw vamp? She had cut the umbilical cord and carved the Zia sign on the baby’s forehead. Like the old pachucos used to carve small crosses on their foreheads, pricking the skin with a pin and rubbing India ink into the cut; the homemade tattoo remained for life.
His father, Polito, had such a cross on his hand, in the soft cleft between the thumb and the first finger. “After the war there were pachuco gangs in every barrio,” he had told Sonny. “What the hell, I was twenty, very macho. I belonged to the Five Points gang. We fought Old Town, Barelas, Martineztown. Those were good days. Good dances and women. Hijo, the most beautiful women in the world are right here in ’Burque. Don’t you forget that. They were coming from all the small towns in those days, looking for work. That’s how I found your madre.”
Diana. From La Joya. La Joya was a small village at the end of a dirt road south of Belén. Diana Jaramillo de La Joya was a beautiful name. A beautiful woman.
Don Eliseo’s friend don Toto also had the cross tattoo on his forehead, faded by the years and wrinkles, but there nevertheless. If don Eliseo was a living symbol of the farmer of the valley, don Toto was the urban guerrillero, an old fighter of the streets whose sign on the forehead meant resistance.
The forties were tough, Sonny thought as he headed for the shower. Usually he sang, but today he couldn’t sing. He thought of don Eliseo and the old man’s friends. The Second World War had brought change into the Mexicano communities. In LA the pachucos fought the racist navy sailors on the streets. Then and now, life was still not easy for Chicanos. But we learn a lot from the old ones, Sonny thought, we learn to fight back. Like my Bisabuelo, who took no caca from the Texan bullies.
But why these thoughts when he should be concentrating on Gloria’s murder?
Nothing is wasted, Rita would say. Every dream is connected to your life and what will become of it. Ah well, he knew he couldn’t order his dreams, but Rita was his dream interpreter. She would know.
He dressed and called Rita; her answering machine said, “Sonny, I’m going shopping. Coronado. Don’t forget, the symphony pachanga is tonigh
t. I guess it’s not canceled, and I guess we’re going. I know how you feel, so if you want to cancel, it’s fine with me. Cuidate, amor.”
He left a message for Rita saying he would pick her up at eight, then stepped out of his house into the dry, hot June heat. In the field of corn he spotted don Eliseo and don Toto. They were hoeing. Concha stood by the ditch, hoe in hand, turning the water from the acequia down each row of corn. A swinging bag lady who hadn’t forgotten how to use the hoe. The viejitos could drink wine all night and still get up with the sun to work.
Damn, Sonny thought, let me grow old like them.
“Buenos días les de Dios,” he called a greeting.
“Hey, Sonny! Buenos días! Come and have coffee! Que coffee! Come and hoe!”
They laughed. They liked to tease him. Sonny was one of the few young people who paid attention to them. He sat with them at night and listened to their stories. He sometimes took them to watch the Dukes play and he’d often drive them to their doctor appointments.
“Can’t—I’m on a case!” he called. He got in his truck and drove to Barelas to have breakfast at Jimmy’s Place on South Fourth. When Rita wasn’t at Rita’s Cocina, he liked to drive to Jimmy’s, and today it was on the way to his mother’s home.
The restaurant served Mexican food, and its specialty was menudo, sheep tripe thoroughly cleaned, cut in small pieces, and cooked overnight with posole corn. Served in large, steaming bowls with lots of hot red chile and oregano, the dish was a delicacy. It was the best food for those who woke up crudos, and Sonny still felt the effects of the prior night’s bout of drinking.
He recognized the two men sitting at a table by the window. Ben Chavez and Frank McCulloch. Ben was a writer, Frank a well-known artist. They had a club called Hostile Elders, and since their retirement from teaching, they often met at Jimmy’s to eat and talk about art, books, and movies. And women.
Sonny had taken a class in writing fiction from Ben Chavez when he was at the university. He stopped to say hello.
“Ah, Sonny.” Ben smiled, stood, and shook hands. “Sorry about Gloria. She was a wonderful woman.”
“Gracias,” Sonny said, accepting the condolences.
“You know Frank.”
Sonny said buenos días and shook Frank’s hand.
“You taking up writing again yet?” Ben continued. “Took a class with me. About eight years ago, right?”
Sonny nodded. It made him feel good that Chavez would remember.
“You still doing investigation?”
“Yes.”
“A writer is like a good detective, always looking for motives.” Ben looked at McCulloch, who smiled but appeared unsatisfied with the comparison.
“Writers are picaros,” he replied. “The hell with motives, just write about what smells bad.” And with that they launched into an argument about the role of the artist.
“Anyway, good to see you,” Sonny said, excusing himself.
“Cuidao,” Ben Chavez called in parting.
Sonny sat at a table near the window and ordered a bowl of menudo, which he spiced with diced onions, oregano, and red chile. The message in the dreams haunted him, and so he ate in silence.
As he ate, he glanced out the window at the slow-moving traffic. It was going to be in the nineties today. Hot. Heat rose from the sidewalk and the pavement.
Eating slowly and looking at the bright light, Sonny thought of the leads he had to follow. His “visit” to Dominic had raised more questions than it answered. And Morino? If the man had been seeing Gloria, then he might know something. And then there were the gardener and the housekeeper Garcia mentioned.
But first he had to pay a visit to his mother, find out what was being planned for Gloria.
He sipped the last of his café con crema y azúcar, wrapped the tortilla left on the plate in a napkin and stuck it in his pocket. It was an old habit. Sometimes on the run there was no time to stop even at a 7-Eleven for a sandwich and drink; then even a hard tortilla came in handy.
He paid his check, drove across the Barelas Bridge, and turned south on Isleta Boulevard. Isleta was the highway of the South Valley, the road that connected the Indian Pueblo with the Hispano and Mexicano land grants that dotted the valley. Los Padillas, Pajarito, La Merced de Atrisco, home of the farmers from Spain and Mexico who had carved out their way of life in the earth of the Río Grande del Norte centuries ago. This was home, his stomping grounds as a youth.
There was a note on his mother’s front door: Sonny, I’ve gone with Max to see Delfina. Please wait.
Who in the hell is Max? he wondered again as he let himself into the house. Without his mother the house was silent. The front room was dark, cool. Hand-crocheted doilies sat as ornamental pieces on her chairs and sofa. The large doily that covered the dining room table was her pride. After his father died, Sonny’s mother had gone through a long withdrawal. Being attached to the man was hard on the Mexican woman. When the center fell away, the family hurt, and the woman especially.
Had he been of any help to her during that time? I was too young, Sonny thought. Sixteen. Struggling through high school and all that meant. But, Lord, the death of his father had left a vacuum. I never really helped Mom, he thought, and felt guilty as he walked slowly around the room, touching the things that belonged to his mother, feeling in each object a part of her. The Virgen de Guadalupe statue sat over the television set, a votive candle burning. The doilies. Pictures of the family hung on one wall, the kitchen arranged in her pattern, aromas that were hers.
But hell, his father had died fourteen years ago. Had she, too, grown restless? What about this Max? And a year ago she had taken up word processing at T-VI. What for? he had asked her.
I want to do something, she answered. She had enough Social Security to live on, but she wanted something to do.
The kitchen glistened spic and span. He opened the refrigerator, peered in, but took nothing. He rubbed his stomach, feeling the itch that wouldn’t leave him.
Something drew him down the hall to his mother’s bedroom. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been in her bedroom. On her dresser rested bottles of perfume, lipsticks, her hairbrush and hand mirror, a photograph of her wedding day. Diana and Polito, a smiling bride and bridegroom. Other pictures of the family. He and Armando in Little League uniforms. One showing them with their first trout, caught in the Jemez when he was ten. Memories. His mother’s fragrance filled the room.
The shades were drawn, the room was cool. He felt a sadness, something caught in his throat. I should see her more often, see Armando. Gotta stay together as family he thought, and turned to flee the room and the tide of emotion.
As he stepped out the front door, a car drove up, a late-model Honda. A stocky medium-size man with salt-and-pepper mustache and hair quickly stepped out and hurried to open the door for Sonny’s mother. “Permítame, comadre.”
Max, Sonny thought, a gallant Max. He hadn’t seen a man open the car door for a woman in ages.
Sonny’s mother stepped out, smiling. “Hijo,” she called and waved, but paused to acknowledge Max’s courtesy. “Gracias.”
“Hi,” Sonny said and kissed his mother, and she embraced him hard. He heard her sob and looked helplessly at Max, who looked back at Sonny and shuffled his feet. She clung to him for a moment, her abrazo of grief for Gloria, for her sister, but glad her son was in her arms. She still had him.
He smelled the shampoo in her hair. She had dyed her hair a light auburn, covering the gray. When? Had he missed it? She looked younger.
“Ay, hijo,” she said when she could pull away and look at him, “I’m glad you’re here.”
“I was just about to leave.”
“We’ve been with Delfina. Max, you remember mi hijo.…”
“Seguro que sí,” the man said, smiled, held out his hand.
“Quíhubole,” Sonny replied.
Of course, Sonny thought, Maximiliano Contreras, a man who had worked with his father. From time t
o time Max and his wife had visited his parents. Max’s wife had died a few years ago. Sonny had taken his mother to the funeral. When had this happened? Max had called his mother “comadre,” a close friend, and the smile on his face when he looked at Sonny’s mother gave things away.
“Come in, I’ll fix coffee,” his mother said. “Mi pobre hermana, it’s been a shock. There is no pain for a parent like that of losing a son or daughter. Come in, come in.”
“I can’t,” Sonny replied. “I got a lot of things to do. I just wanted to know if there was anything I could help with. The funeral—”
“I guess Mr. Dominic is taking care of everything,” his mother answered. “I tried to call, but I got only a secretary. Everything’s taken care of, she said. But there’s no rosary, nothing. It’s not right, Sonny. Poor Delfina.”
She looked at him with a pained expression. She wanted to help her sister, and things weren’t moving according to custom.
“Did you ever get Turco?” Sonny asked.
“Yes, but don’t mention his name. What kind of son is he? He doesn’t see his mother. Do you think he cares? No. And you know what he’s saying?” She looked at Max.
“He’s accusing Frank Dominic of murdering Gloria,” Max said.
“Delfina believes it. But it’s not possible,” Sonny’s mother said. “Is it?” She looked at him, and he saw lines of worry around her eyes.
“No,” Sonny replied.
How can things get so fucked up, he thought. He wanted to help his mother, offer consolation, be a man. Instead, he found himself looking helplessly from her to Max.
Sonny said nothing about Delfina hiring him. “I gotta go,” he said and kissed his mother. “I’ll see what I can find out. I’ll call you.… Good to see you, Max.” He nodded and stepped toward his truck.
“No rosary,” his mother called, “can you imagine? No rosary.”
“You want me to come for you?” Sonny asked.
“No, Max will take us. It’s a shame,” she said, “a terrible thing.”
Sonny started his truck and backed out of the driveway As he drove away he saw his mother wave, and Max standing next to her put his arm around her shoulder in consolation.