“Sonny, where are you?”
“Zia Pueblo gas station. My cell phone isn’t working—”
“Sonny, it’s in the news!” Her voice trembled. “Cell phones aren’t working. Everyone is without service. It’s Raven, isn’t it?”
Raven screwing up the cell phones? Yeah, he had figured out a way to get into the wireless phone system’s software. Hacker Raven. How far could he reach out? Was it regional or could he bring down the entire country? Could he shoot down the communication satellites, create international panic?
“They just reported an Al Qaeda terrorist was loose in Jemez. What’s happening? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. And you?”
“It’s crazy. The place is full. People aren’t going to work. I tried to call your mom, but her phone’s not working. Lorenza called.”
“From where?”
“Algodones. She hurried back from Cruces. They’re waiting for you.”
“I might make it,” he said. But what he really needed to do was find Raven. “I have an idea—” he said, and stopped short. No, no sense in telling Rita that I know how to bring back her children. What if I can’t find Raven? What if I can’t get into his circle? What if don Eliseo was right? Doubt clouded Sonny’s thoughts.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’ll head for Algodones.”
“Call me when you see Lorenza. Have you eaten?”
Sonny thought of the tacos in the ice chest. “No, not yet. But I will.”
“Sonny, cuídate. I love you.”
“And I love you,” he said, looking up at the big Pueblo man who stood by the counter. He had been listening, now he grinned.
“Hurry home.”
“I’m on my way.”
He hung up the phone and went outside. The wind was still howling, so he quickly opened the ice chest and reached for the bag of tacos. When he looked up he stared into the eyes of the Pueblo man.
“Hey, bro, you going to Algodones? I need a ride.”
The man had overheard him. First Naomi, now this. He studied the man. Was he one of Bear’s boys? One of those at the Red Rocks or on the truck on the mountain? Sonny hadn’t gotten a good look at the men, so he couldn’t be sure.
“You overheard me.”
“Hey, a lot of people know what’s coming down in Algodones. Big powwow. Might miss it if we don’t hurry.”
One of the so-called Green Indians, Sonny guessed. But he had never met the man.
“Get in,” he said, and the big man got in. Chica growled.
“You got a one-eyed dog.”
“You want a ride or don’t you?” Sonny snapped.
“Yeah, sure.”
Sonny handed the man one of the tacos and a cup of coffee from the thermos.
“Thanks, bro. I had nothin’ to eat all day. Taking care of a dead snake is important business.” He smiled. “But not as important as what’s happenin’ in Algodones.”
11
Sonny unwrapped his taco, and the two ate in silence.
Across the open window the wind made a whistling sound, a long and plaintive sheeeee, the mournful cry it might make blowing across the Llano Estacado. Or was it the sound of an old woman whistling through missing teeth, a black-shrouded curandera who pulled her tápalo around her face so only her dark piercing eyes shone in a sea of wrinkled webs as she peered into the dusty, blistering wind on the sandy road from Pastura, miles from the Gonzales ranch? She had stopped to whistle for the boy, Alfonso, her companion, he of the sorrows of young Alfonso, a story yet to be told.
She whistled because the child had disappeared, perhaps around a bend in the road where he had stopped to pick ripe mesquite pods that glowed reddish in the dim sunlight. The mesquite fruit was a favorite treat in a land where there were few treats for a child his age. Or perhaps a coyote had snapped him up, carried him away to feed her pups, those not yet old enough to hunt for a meal. She whistled again, long and mournfully into the wind, shheeeee. But the child did not answer and she would have to move on to her appointed task, to lift a curse set by Satan himself.
A young woman in a deserted ranch on the road to Platero writhed in agony on her soiled bed, tore the sheets into shreds as orgasm after orgasm came surfacing from deep in her sex, convulsing her emaciated body, orgasms caused by a dark demon that spurred her flanks, an incubus from the darkest recesses of her psyche in the fearful form of the young vaquero who had kissed her and felt her breasts behind the dance hall a year ago. Then the image would change, take on the garb of the village priest to whom she had confessed, frightening her all the more because the priest should not be envisioned thus. Not as a goat-man displaying a huge organ that tore into her until she moaned for death to quiet her frenzy, while near the bed, sitting on an old, well-worn wooden bench, the concerned and puzzled father and mother, exhausted from days and nights of watching over their daughter’s agony, sat in brooding silence, wondering from what depths came the evil spirits possessing their daughter’s flesh.
These were the stories Sonny heard as the wind whipped past the partially open window. The winds of New Mexico carried many stories.
Sonny listened to the mournful sound and looked at the dust rising and falling in the heat of midday. Dry bone weather. Georgia O’Keeffe, if she were alive, would be haunting the dry arroyos of Abiquiu, looking for the ash-white pelvic bones of dead steers to paint, or the many-pointed phallic antlers of an elk dragged by coyotes to that place where she walked. Old Bone Woman walking the arroyos of Abiquiu, herself suffocating from impulses repressed long ago, painting dry hip bones that had never held a fetus, never parted wet with the blood of birth to cough up a child. Maybe that is why she brushed on sterile canvases the white-shaven bones of dead cows and the erogenous pistils of flowers, crimson and swollen, about to burst, thus hoping to understand—or make amends with—what dark memory?
Or were the paintings visions of a world denied to her? Paintings from her womb, a birth nevertheless, for all the world to view.
Lordy, Lordy, Sonny thought, if it weren’t for the full delicacy of Rita’s carne adovada taco, the marinated meat picante with the red chile, a specialty of Rita’s Cocina, a taste awakening memories of her kisses, the wind and the time of day would consume him right then and there in the stories they whispered, for the day gathered many stories on its journey, and it gave way to no man, beast, or rock.
He could be blown away with the dust and tumbleweeds, like the old man was already blowing away, hardly a murmur of his soul left under the tarp in the bed of the truck.
Sonny worried about the old man. He had a secret he wasn’t revealing. He needed to get him home. Maybe there in the earth of the valley he loved he would renew his energy, he would speak and reveal how he had come from the other world and would point the way.
And I need to get home, he thought, and yet he knew it wasn’t going to be soon. Not with this guy sitting in his truck, a guide to Algodones where, hopefully, Lorenza waited.
He shared his taco with Chica, who swallowed it in one bite and wagged her tail. Nobody but Sonny let her have carne adovada tacos. They brought good dreams, and sometimes indigestion.
Sonny finished and got out to place the wrappings and the thermos in the ice chest. He guessed the primo was a Santo Domingo man. He had that sturdy look, and he wore a regal Santo Domingo heishi necklace. Maybe a cacique, or a holy man.
When Sonny got back in the truck the man spoke. “You got a big pistol,” he said. “Saw one of those in Nam. A lieutenant used to wear it. Cowboy type.”
The man had looked in the glove compartment where Sonny carried the truck’s registration and his Bisabuelo’s Colt .45. And loaded in the pistol the one bullet made by a brujo. The bullet that could kill Raven.
“You must be a mind reader,” Sonny said sarcastically.
The Santo Domingo man smiled. “You walk with spirits,” he said with a slight nod of his head, meaning he had sensed the old man.
“And you?” Sonn
y asked.
“I’m José Calabasa,” he said, reaching out to touch Sonny’s hand. “Yeah, I pray to the holy people.” He looked at Chica. “Dream dog?”
Sonny started the truck and headed down the road. So what do you want, José? he felt like asking; instead he said, “Nam.”
“Yeah,” José said softly. “Seems so long ago. Now it’s Iraq and the terrorists. Shit, what did we expect? We brag about being number-one super power. We forgot, nobody likes number one, especially when we’re consuming the wealth of the world.”
“And the governor?”
“He had it coming.”
“Why?”
“God, you should know.”
“Pretend I don’t.”
“The governor had plans to be a Senator, so he joined up with Dominic. A scheme to get water rights. When he smelled the pile of caca Dominic was cooking up, he got cold feet.”
“So they killed him. Had him killed.”
“Yeah. You heard about Santa Fe Woman?”
Sonny nodded. A year ago while digging into the Santa Fe Mesa for a multi-million-dollar development they found the skull of a woman. Anthropologists declared the skull was Caucasian, not Native American, and the carbon dating showed it predated all Pueblo Indian settlements in the area, including Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. The find became the most explosive discovery since Sandia Man. Every anchor man or woman from the national television stations had done a story on Santa Fe Woman.
The discovery had ramifications far beyond the anthropological arguments; it raised all sorts of social and political issues. If Santa Fe Woman, a Caucasian, was a resident in the area long before the Pueblo Indians moved into the Rio Grande Valley, then the Pueblos were not “first in place,” and if they weren’t there first then their claim to water rights went out the window.
And sovereignty was an issue. If the ancestors of the pueblos weren’t the first on the land then they might not have special nation status. Centuries-old rights were being assailed by Dominic’s group.
“Frank Dominic planted it. Salted the site, as they say.”
“Yeah,” Sonny agreed, “but you have some anthropologists confirming the dates of the skull.”
That bothered a lot of people. If science said the skull was pre—Pueblo culture, then it must be so.
“Bullshit. They were hired by Dominic. Where did she come from? How did she die? Why only one skull? How did she get here? And who is she?”
All the same questions being asked in public. The old men who met daily in the Santa Fe Plaza to gossip had named her Santa Fe Woman. They smelled a scam. Where did she come from? Well, they surmised, she is from one of the lost tribes of Israel who wandered across the continent. Her people continued on, and she, left behind, died of loneliness.
Some began to call her the Eve of the Desert. This was the first mother, and if they dug deep enough they would find the bones of Adam. Kick the developers out, preserve the holy site—except, they argued, the chamber of commerce would butt in and make it a tourist attraction. Tourism was Santa Fe’s name.
Others, New Age historians, argued that this land was once Atlantis, and the skull belonged to an original inhabitant of the fabled lost continent. This immediately led some to suggest the skull belonged to an alien from a foreign planet whose spaceship had crashed. Where was the spaceship? Don’t bother with the details, they said. Roswell’s chamber of commerce doesn’t. And look how lucrative the aliens have been for them.
But at noon, when the old timers heard their stomachs churn and smelled the beans cooking in their viejas’ kitchens, all agreed: “Es el pinche Dominic. He wants to get hold of all the water in New Mexico. He stole a skull from some museum, put some old dirt around it, and buried it where it could be found.”
At the end of the day the viejitos weren’t dumb. They concluded it was all a sham, but their voices were no obstacle to the weight of scientific evidence being developed to prove Santa Fe Woman had stood on the slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains long before the First Americans, and, gazing west toward the Jemez Mountains, she dreamed that someday the land would be settled by her progeny.
“She had no family” José said. “But they want to prove she’s Caucasian so they can take our water. And you Hispanics who still farm are not far behind. You have trees in the Jemez, don’t you?”
“Apple. I plant a little corn.”
“Did you hear about the Santa Fe gallery that borrowed the skull? They put it on a mannequin, with a wide-brimmed blue felt hat with a silver and turquoise hat band, and those long skirts the California and Texas women wear when they visit the plaza. Loaded her with squash-blossom necklaces, thick silver bracelets with big turquoise stones, the whole shebang. Santa Fe style. She’s on display. Looks like la muerte staring at us.”
Sonny waited for the story to end. Right then he was more interested in Raven’s path.
“You were up on the mountain with Bear.”
José nodded. “You almost got yourself killed,” he said.
“So you know about Raven.”
“We’ve known about him for a long time. First he comes around saying he’s on our side. Wants to stop radioactive waste shipments from crossing Indian land. Then he ties in with Dominic. They want our water. Then the land. If they get their Supreme Court justices in, they will start questioning Indian sovereignty. It’s all about water. Without water our fields die, we die. We become the West Bank Palestinians.”
“And in ten years we pay through the nose,” Sonny said.
“Right. This country’s falling apart, Sonny. Crooks in every corner. Corporation CEOs making millions while the poor go down the drain. How can a government allow them to milk the corporations and let the retirement accounts of the workers disappear? No morality. First sign of collapse if you ask me.”
Sonny nodded. Yeah, the ship was overrun with rats, rats with power. The selfish instincts of men would sooner or later consume everyone in chaos.
“Where’s Raven?”
“He was up on the mountain. We got off a few shots. You know, it’s harder than hell to kill a Raven. Have you ever seen them fly up on the mountain meadows? They dance like ballerinas. People think they’re awkward, but these birds can fly and swirl and dive like modern dancers. No wonder this guy picked the raven to imitate. The women like him. Anyway, we almost had the sonofabitch, but the police helicopter spotted us. Bet now they blame us for placing the bomb. I caught a ride out of Ponderosa. Did Bear pick up Naomi?”
Sonny nodded. “Raven turns on his partners,” he said.
“You better believe it. Now he’s courting the politicians.”
“Did he kill the governor?”
“Probably. Or hired someone to do it. It’s a big plot, Sonny, with a lot of money behind it. They bought the governor, and when he wouldn’t play ball with them they got rid of him. All we want to do is protect our way of life.”
A blast of wind made the truck shudder.
“What Raven really wants is you,” José said. “He suckered you into going up the mountain.”
“I trusted Augie—”
“You can’t trust anyone. Raven will use them to get at you. Get the Zia medallion you wear. The elders are telling the story of how you got it. I’m surprised you’re not a dead coyote on the road to Los Alamos. Raven’s here, all right. He’s following us right now.”
Sonny touched the Zia medallion sitting warmly on his chest. Yes, no matter how complicated the plot, it boiled down to Raven coming back for the amulet and its power.
“He gets you, then he goes after the Sun Stone. It’s all tied together. You, the Zia medallion, the Sun Stone. The old people say the stone marks the boundaries of our world, the sacred mountains. As long as we know our universe, we’re okay. But if you destroy the boundaries then everything becomes fluid, we slip away into the white man’s world. Santa Fe Woman is going to kill us.”
He laughed. “Get it? Killed by an old skull a dog dug up. Hey, you got any more tac
os?”
“No.”
“Let’s stop at the Sonic in Bernalillo. I haven’t eaten in two days.”
Again Sonny fingered the Zia medallion. Like an ancient astrolabe, a navigational instrument like that used by Odysseus on his way from Troy, it kept Sonny on the Path of Light. A personal compass.
“Is the Zia Stone only for the pueblos?” he asked.
“Should be for everyone, don’t you think?” José answered. “There’s a lot of pain in the world. Cultures falling apart. People need something or someone to believe in.”
Sonny agreed. Truth and its revelations had to be for more than a chosen group.
“Maybe it’s already happening,” José continued. “Our kids are losing touch. Don’t want to farm, don’t want to dance.”
Sonny tried his cell phone again. “Nada.”
“Yeah. Bear couldn’t get through to Burque. It’s Raven. He probably hired a bunch of hackers. Scrambled the software.”
He’s right, Sonny thought. Hackers love anarchy, they would work for Raven. For the sheer feeling of power they spread viruses. They could hit anything. They had already scrambled banks, the Pentagon, AT&T. Now Raven’s sicced them on the cell phones. How many regions of the country could they take down?
“If he can keep the cell phones dead for a few days, western civilization will collapse,” José said. “The powers that be will come to him on their knees. Serves the greedy bastards right.”
Sonny nodded. “So what now?”
“Check in at Algodones. Then I have to get back to the pueblo. One of the local stations broadcast pictures of the bomb. Won’t be long before the national news media starts dropping in. Dan Rather and those guys. They love publicity. God, I bet Los Alamos is an armed camp. That crazy Bin Laden played right into their hands. They blame everything on Al Qaeda. Everybody needs points, even the president. Saving the national labs from being blown to smithereens would win any election. No slippery chads, just good police work. Shit.”
“What do you think?”
“It’s all smoke and mirrors.”
“Raven might hire out, but in the end they can’t control him. He does his own thing.”