Zia Summer, Rio Grande Fall, Shaman Winter, and Jemez Spring

  He looked closely and saw an image forming.

  “God!” he whispered. “Oh God!”

  He dropped the glass on the floor. It splintered, the water wetting his boots.

  The squirming egg grew still as Sonny hurried out of the house, banging shut the door behind him.

  10

  Spring is not a time to be alone.

  It helps to have a good partner, the old man said in agreement.

  Someone who understands our dreams.

  I used to tell my viejita, que decanse en paz, my dreams. She was a good listener. She would be making tortillas for breakfast, serve me a cup of coffee and say, Bueno, dime tus sueños. I think los sicologisticos—

  Psychologists.

  Sí. They should have their office in a kitchen. Ah, with tortillas cooking on the comal, coffee perking, huevos rancheros with red chile. You know, food and sex and dreams all go together.

  You had a good wife.

  Yeah, she was a good cook. Sometimes my dreams got too strange. Then she gave me a dose of castor oil. This will clean up everything, she would say. The old man laughed. Yeah, right.

  She knew you could walk in dreams?

  Yes, she knew. But she worried. I married a brujo, she would say. Pero, what about you? You got Rita.

  Yeah, but—

  But what?

  I’ve been thinking. I thought she was the one who had to get over losing the child. She does, but it hit me too.

  You’ve been thinking revenge.

  Yes. Then Naomi shows up. Someone stole your heart. I can read faces, she said.

  She knows things, the old man interjected. If she places your soul in one of her pots, you’ll never get out. Maybe that’s what happened to the man in the tub.

  What do you mean?

  A woman who can shape clay can shape the man, this way or that. If she puts the soul of the man in the pot, goodbye Charlie.

  What about this reading of faces?

  Some people have the gift, the old man said. But it doesn’t do any good. You tell a person what you see and they don’t believe you.

  So that’s Naomi’s curse, Sonny thought. Still, she had started something unraveling.

  He glanced at a descanso on the side of the road, a large cross adorned with colorful plastic flowers. La raza still kept the custom of placing a cross where an accident claimed a life, where the flesh was pierced and died, setting free the anguished soul. A cross, flowers, tokens of the deceased. Flesh died, but the soul wandered on, yearning to return whence it came.

  In Tibet they prayed over the soul of the departed for ten days. The soul had to be prepared for its journey, prepared to be born again in flesh, in some newly fertilized egg.

  Born a dog if you had led a very good life.

  He smiled and rubbed the sleeping Chica. If a dog’s spirit comes from a prior life, it must bring the dreams of that life with it. Dreams from many lives. The whole enchilada, the unconscious consciousness of the dreamer. If one believed in reincarnation, who knew how many deaths and rebirths Chica had been through? Transmigration of the soul, for the soul never died, it was forever an alien, wandering from person to person, or from dog to dog, until the karma was cleansed. Who knows how many dreams Chica brought from those distant past lives?

  Did the Tibetan custom underlie the New Mexican custom? Nah, that was too far-fetched. But the soul’s journey was the essence of the spiritual life of the Nuevomexicanos, coloring their ceremonies, customs, daily life.

  Was it synchronicity? Buddhist teachings from the mountains of Tibet resonating to a brand of Catholicism practiced in the villages of the Sangre de Cristo mountains?

  Perhaps, as don Eliseo said, the mountains of the world spoke to each other, across geographic and geopolitical space the spirits of the mountains spoke, in the wind that encircled the earth they spoke. Mountain talk. And like a person, a mountain could be murdered. It happened if it was over-logged and the slopes left bare. The mountain dissolved, rolled back into dust, died.

  Yes, there were prayers to prepare the soul for its journey. Rosaries. Alabados. Doña Concha and don Toto had watched over don Eliseo the day he died. They sang and prayed that his soul would find peace. Heaven. The arms of God. Or reincarnation. What did those old people know?

  The stream of thoughts bothered Sonny.

  How did you get here?

  I told you, Sonny, I never went away.

  But you are going away?

  Yes.

  Sometime soon?

  Yes.

  That’s all you know?

  I was an old man, old men have old souls. Who knows the mystery? Maybe it’s not a mystery at all. What you believe is in you. Here I am.

  So what’s the answer?

  Living a good life is enough. Help your neighbors. What’s bothering you?

  I feel empty.

  Seeing the images in the glass of water caused a thick, gooey depression to work its way into every thread of Sonny’s fiber, spreading its endemic dullness along his nervous system, presenting itself as hopelessness in the heart, even spreading out from his soul into the landscape, making the land he loved with a farmer’s passion look dull and dying.

  Deep inside his Druid heart he felt the electric energy of life waiting to burst out of the dormant shells, the spirits of the earth yearning to push their green fingers through the dry, cold ground. Soon green men and women would appear to dress the fields, clusters of flowers would clothe the apple trees, and honey bees buzzing with wet proboscises would seek the nectar and pollen. Time for dandelions to sprout yellow, and even in this dry springtime the hummingbirds would return from Mexico to the canyon. An inner compulsion drove the feathered friends as it did all fish, fowl, flesh, and rock. The tiny birds returned because there were flowers to kiss, nectar and pollen to gather, eggs to be laid. The drive of birds and flowers to propagate would not be quenched, even if Sonny felt it dying.

  Green and blooming it would come, but right then something about spring dragging her feet out of winter’s compost made him shiver. Was it some errant emotion of loss? Was it the image the egg had formed in the water? What he had seen scared the hell out of him.

  According to the Mayan prophecy the end of the world won’t come till 2012. You have a few more years, the old man said, joking, trying to lighten the load he felt Sonny carrying.

  Will the Zia Stone show us how to live? How to deal with all the caca life throws at us? War in Iraq. Hunger in Afghanistan. AIDS in Africa. Poverty everywhere. Terrorist killing terrorist. The greedy screwing the poor. Will it explain feelings we can’t control?

  It’s just a sign on the path, the old man said. But do we pay attention? Our time has grown perverse. A few give a damn, the rest just want to live longer. On TV they cry out, I want to live forever. No wrinkles, no balding, no heart disease. Zero cholesterol. Clone me. I am beautiful. Let me be forever young in my clone. Que tontería!

  Sonny listened.

  You can pass on genes, but not the soul. The soul has its own song. Now we live in the time of Mr. Me and Mrs. Me. But the Me doesn’t have a soul. The time of the soul is dying, and maybe that’s why the Mayan people predicted the end of time. The spirit would no longer be coming into the earth, into us. Are we really more civilized than our ancestors?

  Then why look for the Zia Stone? Why trouble?

  Because, the old man said, feeling a tickle in his ribs, the worm of his karma turning, it will reveal the true nature of the world and our place in it. This is what we yearn to know.

  Yes, Sonny nodded, there was always one more sign to be revealed in the tree of life that was his evolution. But the old man couldn’t teach him everything. It was Sonny’s search. Being led to the governor’s murder scene was just a diversion. After all, governors and politicians had been murdered since time immemorial, but none of those homicides opened heaven’s gate to a true understanding of humanity’s role in the cosmos.

  Whether he found the governor’s killer or not was
beside the point. And nearly ending his life on the helicopter was just one more warning. What really mattered was meeting Naomi. A shaman in her own right, she had confirmed the gnawing thoughts that had consumed him these past three months. Rita’s children were alive. Or their spirits were alive. Now he didn’t want to kill Raven, but corner him and make him give up the secret. Where were the souls whose flesh had been aborted by miscarriage?

  There’s always something waiting to be revealed, the old man said. Like the hieroglyphs of Copan. Those in the Valley of the Kings. The scrolls of Nag Hamaddi. The Rosetta stone. The sign on the Zia Stone.

  Do those signs make us any more civilized? Sonny interjected. Terrorism rules; we’re killing the children, bringing them up on terror and dope. Half the world is hungry, and Raven has his way.

  The old man sighed, truly regretting he couldn’t ease Sonny’s mood. But he knew that one man does not give another man knowledge. Instead he mused, as an old man is wont to do, about what life has meant.

  The universe has to make room for its continuing creation, he said. It starts in a dream not spoken. A dark dream. Finally the Spirit enters its own body, the spirit of the universe wakes up one day and enters itself, like the serpent swallowing its own tail, like a virgin birth, the universe gives life to itself. What a glorious morning that must have been, eh? The sleeping universe waking from the dream. The Hindus have beautiful stories about dreamers. Someday I’ll tell you some.

  Sonny nodded. He liked to hear the old man. It lightened the load, but it did not erase the image of the egg in the water.

  They sped along the winding canyon road, curves revealing a time past on the imposing cliffs.

  The strata told how the ancient earth had spent eons of time growing out of its own dark heart. Groaning and thundering it had come, once upon a time, buckling, cracking, rising and falling, writhing in pain like a woman giving birth, the bloody red strata of oxidized minerals, the earth’s placenta splattered on the side of the mesa, the scarred thighs of the mesa testimony to the time of birth, the wrinkled belly, each line of mineral deposit imbued with the breath of spirit, born of that deep dark dream that don Eliseo spoke of.

  The massive tectonic plates of the earth crashed against each other, mountains rose and fell, a seed of fire rested in the womb of the Jemez Mountain. When the womb contracted it spilled forth a child, a fire child that came out kicking and screaming, its cry rolling like thunder across the gaseous sea, even to the shores of China. The earth gave birth to itself, repeating the process of the universe. Mountains were born, buckling and cracking the earth groaned and the mountain rose, the liquid magma poured forth as hot blood and an afterbirth that now glowed with spring light, an aura of crimson emanating from the gigantic boulders and palisades, the same fire glowing in the grains of sand in the arroyos.

  The universe in each grain of sand—more than a mad poet’s muttering, a truth. Everything was contained in everything else, and it continually gave birth to itself. From nothing came something. The heart of the cosmos was a song, a vibration, the music of the spheres, a symphony in a key humans could not yet hear, a mathematician’s dream.

  Sacred geography, the old man said. Sonny could barely hear him. It’s been around for as long as man first sensed the spirit touch the earth. There are fissures where a hot wind rises from the belly of the earth. Springs whose sweet water can cure the sick. Olive groves where the Greek oracles spoke. Mountaintops where eagles converse with the gods. Monoliths of Stonehenge. Dolmens of Machu Picchu. Pyramids of Egypt and Copan. Gothic cathedrals. Sacred rivers. Too much for one man to understand, he said, his voice fading. Sheer earth, fecund topsoil or hellish brimstone, water sweet or brackish, devil’s wind or bountiful rain clouds, all is touched by the energy constantly moving through the yoni of the universe.

  “I have to kill Raven,” Sonny blurted out.

  The old man shivered.

  “The dreamcatcher didn’t work! Sure, he went through it, like an Oklahoma tornado, I felt the wind blasting me, then he was gone. Taking with him what belonged to me and Rita!”

  Damn, Sonny, you gotta stop that kind of talk. What’s really bothering you?

  “I saw something in the glass of water! The egg split in two. It turned and turned and took the shape of two innocent souls. My unborn children have stolen my heart!”

  The old man groaned.

  “I can bring them back!”

  No, Sonny, you can’t. They’re dead. Leave things—

  You came back! You won’t tell me how you came back, but you did! You won’t tell me, but I know I can go back into Raven’s nightmare and bring back my children!

  A tremor shook the old man. Sonny’s wish was devastating. It could kill him.

  Not even Christ—

  Could come back! He did! That’s the story! And he raised the dead! And you came back. You won’t tell me how to go there, I’ll go myself!

  The old man heard a voice calling him, a force far greater than the tremendous aura of the mountain was calling him, whispering in the gurgling waters of the river. Return.

  Where do the dead reside, and why can’t we bring them back?

  The wind, which in the Jemez canyon had been a gentle breeze easing itself down the side of the mesa, now grew violent as they drove past San Ysidro, a gusting wind sweeping down from White Mesa, a white cloud of gypsum dusting the flat, arid land.

  The dry Wind of Spring raised its thunderous voice: I am the Lord thy God! I bend trees before your path!

  Tumbleweeds rolled across the road, tormented specters in the whirling dust, and clouds of gypsum ponderous as white whales, crying mournfully. Lloronas of the Road weeping for lost children. Furiously, the dust clouds gathered their dusty skirts and swept down the highway toward the Rio Grande Valley.

  Just past San Ysidro, the death cart of Doña Sebastiana suddenly appeared, the penitentes’ skeleton dressed in a wedding gown, virgin white, cracking her whip, La Muerte, la Peluda, la Ciriaca, la Huesuda, la Comadre to all New Mexicans, stringing her bow with a deadly arrow, aiming at Sonny’s heart.

  She cried in a harsh voice: I am the lover who stole your heart, you cringing sonofabitch! Her hot spittle fell as drops of acid on the windshield.

  Just in time Sonny pulled hard on the steering wheel and swerved to miss by one split second the Yellow Freight semi that hurtled out of the dust cloud. He fought the wheel to regain control of the truck as it skidded onto the shoulder of the road, tipping precariously on the gravel embankment until it grabbed the asphalt and straightened out.

  Damn! Sonny cursed, realizing how close he had come to a head-on crash.

  The eighteen wheeler swept past them, its horn blasting like a foghorn in the shroud of dust.

  No use cursing, the gods have fled the land. Not even the prayers of the shaman can entice them back, whined the wind as it whipped around the mesas, driving the inhabitants of Zia and Santa Ana pueblos indoors.

  Sonny breathed deep, saw the huge truck disappear in his rearview mirror, the shape of death a plume of smoke. On the eastern horizon Sandia Mountain, in a haze of dust, reared its head in anguish.

  Thinking about death drew forth death. He knew that. Thus was the Lenten season of New Mexico described. The winds of spring mourned the land, the tinieblas of the penitentes cried for penance. The winds would blow during Holy Week, the saddest of weeks.

  Thin, washboard cirrus clouds lay like a skeleton across the sky, the white-bone ribcage stretching from San Ysidro east, the shape of the skull sneering, its hollow eyes entrances into the vacant heart of the sky. These were the clouds of the dry season, clouds of drought, dry as dust, not a drop of water festered in the ribcage of the skeleton cloud, not a drop to drink in its massive hip bones, no juice of life in the sealed womb. The land was dying of thirst, and summer would bring a fire season that could be devastating. The river would slow to a trickle. The acequias would go dry, and farmers would watch alfalfa and cornfields wither.

  A few ste
ers huddled along the barbed-wire fence, cattle thin as the clouds, browsing on clumps of winter-sere grass.

  A long time ago foreigners arrived and fenced the land, the first cattle ranchers, those who bought the land from the Mexicanos who had run sheep for generations from Cabezon Peak to the Rio Puerco. The barbed wire lay like a skeleton on the land; private-property signs appeared on the llanos of New Mexico and on the mountain pastures that the old Hispanos had used for centuries. The land grants vanished, pocketed by greedy lawyers and politicians who spoke English and made the old Spanish laws conform to the new laws of the American Occupation. The year 1848 was a bell tolling for the Nuevomexicanos. No need to ask for whom the bell tolled; it tolled for every sheep-herding paisano who now lay buried in the weed-infested cemeteries of the small villages.

  A stranger had fallen drunkenly over the land, a tall, dark stranger called Dry Dust, Hot Wind, No Rain, Desert Man. The stranger called Spring Without Rain had come upon the land and dug his spurs into the flesh of the earth, his breath hot with turmoil.

  Perhaps the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had already come upon the land, and the people did not recognize them.

  And in Sonny’s heart boiled the same turmoil that lay over the land. Why not? he kept asking, defying the old man, peering over the steering wheel at the skeleton in the sky.

  It’s not right, Sonny. To everything there is a season, as La Biblia tells us. Let the souls rest in peace.

  Sonny shook his head. He wasn’t going to listen to the old man. The souls weren’t resting in peace, they were out there moving around. They were crying for vengeance.

  Sonny would not be comforted. Tell Rita about the egg in the glass of water, he thought. He scrolled Rita’s number on his cell phone and pushed “call.” All he got was static. The airways were dead. He pulled over at the Zia Pueblo gas station and used the phone.