“I’m sorry,” was all Sonny could say.
Sorry for the killing going on in the world. Sorry for Naomi. She was Snake Woman, one whose earth energy was aligned with a deep wisdom, for as has been told in many stories, wisdom did not rain from the sky but came from the earth. The snake did not tempt Eve; it came to deliver her and the man from the bondage of ignorance, a whispered message that they should disobey the lesser god.
Hadn’t Moses lifted up the healing serpent? And wasn’t the wisdom of the serpent written in all the ophidian mysteries, imaged even onto the cross?
“Oh God, she’s dead … never told her story.”
“She said to tell you she loved you.”
Bear nodded. Tears filled his eyes. “We grew up in the pueblo. I was in love with her from the time we were kids. But she had to find her way.”
“Take Naomi home. Leave Raven to me.”
Bear pulled away. “You do it your way, I’ll do it mine,” he said, turning and disappearing into the crowd, which booed and jeered him for not killing Sonny.
A young woman stepped up and placed her tepid fingers on the spot of blood on Sonny’s shirt.
“You’re real,” she gasped, drawing back.
“Yes.”
“We thought it was part of the movie. He could have killed you.”
Sonny nodded. A slight push and the hunting knife would have pierced heart or liver. In seconds Sonny’s blood would have run in the gutters of the Alburquerque streets, mixing with the beer and trash of the boisterous crowd.
Private investigators dying in the streets was for the movies, not for Sonny. I want to die at home, he thought, comfortable in my old age, on a soft bed surrounded by images of the saints, my father and mother’s pictures, candles lit and copal incense burning, with Rita holding my hand as I totter off into a heaven where I will have many books to read, and wise people with whom to discuss the meaning of life. Not on the street.
“I’m sorry,” the young woman said, wiping her finger on her midriff where hung a ring, gold emblazoned with the Zia sign. She went back to the waiting line.
The sylph, Sonny thought, come to the movies.
He pushed through the crowd, holding his left side, punctured by the knife, tired now, limping from the pain in his ankle, which Raven had kicked. He didn’t look like much of a hero as he hurried up Central, rushing because the sun had already started on its downward spiral and in three hours it would be behind Mount Taylor, the western sacred mountain.
And there was a lot still to be done if Sonny was to find the daughters he had seen in Raven’s movie.
Aren’t you convinced by now, it was an illusion? the old man said, hurrying after Sonny.
Because the medallion disappeared?
Yes! the old man said forcefully, trying to get through to Sonny’s coyote spirit, where he might understand survival, and the truth of survival.
How can I deny I saw my daughters? Sonny spat out.
People turned to look at him, thinking perhaps he was one of the homeless who roamed the downtown by day, asking for this or that gift, living out internal fantasies that sprang from bottles of cheap wine hidden in paper sacks.
Sonny, the mind can conjure up anything it desires! When it fixes on one thing, that’s obsession. The paranoid hear voices. The psychotic act on those voices. Schizophrenics hear God!
You think I’m losing it?
If you go meet Raven, unprepared as you are.… He didn’t finish.
They had crossed the railroad underpass. Here the crowd was thin, mostly small groups of homeless men and women waiting for the dinner the Baptist church served.
In front of him, on the corner of Broadway and Central, loomed the three-story Lofts, the old Alburquerque High renovated into an apartment building. His parents had attended AHS, and they remained loyal alumni. His dad used to go to all the games, wear his green Bulldog jacket proudly.
Sonny glanced up at a window and saw the shadow of a lovely woman behind the sheer curtain that turned in the breeze.
Tamara beckoned.
21
Anybody who was anybody in the City Future knew Tamara Dubronsky’s history. It was scattered all over the internet, la Red in Spanish, the World Wide Web spun not by Arachne, but by a business world as infected as a hangnail in Adam’s toe, the new digital reality served up with loads of spam and enough games to drive the kids into schizophrenia. Or pornography.
But Tamara certainly was not spam. She was one of the best-looking women in Burque. A svelte, vampish, émigré type with a Russian accent, who, as one story told it, had cavorted with the leaders of the Soviet Union when they tore down the walls and declared democracies. She had smacked her lips on caviar from the Black Sea in parties that lasted all night as the up-and-coming Russian mafia bargained for a position of power in the new capitalistic empire. So what if Marx and Lenin were turning over in their graves? Any revolution is heady, and Tamara had, purportedly, been there.
The CIA and FBI files contained fat dossiers on her. A few had been released to a university professor under the Freedom of Information Act, including photos. In one picture she is standing next to Boris Yeltsin on top of a tank, defending the new democracy. Well, there is a thin young woman in a beret next to him, and CIA operatives in Moscow claim it’s Tamara. Who can believe photos in the digital age? They can be doctored to produce any image one desires. Therein lies the problem: so many of the images are make-believe.
Was Tamara Russian? No one knew. Sometimes her accent changed to Polish, then German. Whatever the accent, she could charm a snake, or a wily coyote. She read tarot cards and claimed a psychic personality. Was she one more personality of the sylphs of the world?
One story on the Internet reported that Frank Dominic had found her in La Fonda in Santa Fe reading palms for a hundred dollars a throw, relating destiny to unsuspecting California tourists who thought part of the Santa Fe style included finding a psychic guide who would take them to an “energy place” in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo where they could Oooooommm and Ahhhhhhh and get in touch with the spirits of the Native Americans long gone to the happy hunting grounds. The same Indians pierced with cannon shrapnel during ancient battles with the same tourists’ Anglo ancestors.
The Chicanos in the city, those workers who lived in the mobile-home parks where they could afford the rent, those same workers who often appeared as “quaint” background fodder in videos taken by the tourists, paid no attention to the psychic-phenomena ladies, whores of the New Age, whom nobody blamed for making a living because usually they had four or five snotty kids to feed, were behind on the rent, and the ex was not paying the alimony.
There was a strange relationship between being psychic and the number of kids those ladies produced, some said, because it followed that some went all the way when they got into the past lives of disturbed men. The digital age had also perfected psychic masturbation.
Santa Fe Chicanos, who had been displaced by newcomers with money who could afford million-dollar homes with their accompanying taxes, knew about survival, so they tolerated the women who could read your fortune and who could for a hundred extra bucks take you to a “place of power.”
“You want a place of power,” the workers joked, “cut firewood for the winter.”
“Hoe the chile plot.”
“Try making beds and cleaning dirty toilets all day. That’s virtual reality. Muy pronto.”
“Try raising a family on six bucks an hour.”
“Time for huelga!”
The truth is, it wasn’t Frank Dominic who found Tamara, it was Raven. Raven could read beauty, especially beauty with money. He courted Tamara and led her into his cult, the cult of chaos, which in their twisted way they called the Zia Cult, convincing her that the world needed to be shaken out of its misery. A nuclear accident would do, or an attack on a major city with anthrax or smallpox.
Tamara fell for Raven’s line; she gave him her fortune and lost her big home in L
os Ranchos. Why? That was the big question. Was it because she was a child of postwar chaos? Or was it just something to do in a city she considered dull and dreary? Whatever, she wound up in a Santa Fe sanatorium to escape prosecution for the murder of Frank Dominic’s wife. Tamara was somehow involved in the chaotic evildoings of Raven and his gang, but she hadn’t even been indicted. Now she was living in a modest apartment in the Alburquerque High Lofts, looking down on the heart of the city from her window, and waiting for Sonny.
He didn’t need to knock. When he held up his fist, the door opened and there stood Tamara in all her glory, breathtaking in a vaporous chiffon gown so thin and sheer it would excite any healthy male. Titillating. That was Tamara’s way. The ophidian seduction always began with subtlety. Enticement with the slightest movement of her finely shaped body. Food for the weary warrior. And so Tamara swayed, as a charmed snake might sway in front of the bird it’s about to strike.
When she spoke there was a song in her speech, vowels intimating intimacies, consonants that created images of sweating bodies curved in lovemaking. Just so a spider weaves a web, and only when the fly is immobile in the gossamer thread does she descend to suck out the sweet juices.
Tamara smiled, the curves of her body in a classic pose, becoming for the tired and wounded Sonny Baca a port where he could rest from the tossing sea, a sea no longer pristine but awash with the tragedy of the afternoon.
“Sawwww-ny,” her soft, syrupy voice greeted him. “I am so glad to see you. Come in.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss first one cheek, then the other.
Her small breasts brushed against him, her lilac cologne, a touch of hoped-for spring, reminding Sonny of the summer morning when he stepped into his cousin Gloria’s bedroom and found her lying on the bed, peaceful in her death, that lilac fragrance permeating the room.
“You do not need this beauty spot to adorn your handsome face,” she said, and peeled off the false mole Sophie had left pasted on his cheek when she kissed him.
“And we need to take care of this wound,” she added, placing her hand where Bear’s knife had pierced the skin. “Come in.” She closed the door behind them, revealing a modest one-bedroom condo, a gold-embroidered divan facing the window, Egyptian reproductions on the walls. One showed Isis mending the torn body of Osiris.
Tamara believed she was the reincarnation of the goddess Isis, and since Osiris had been cut up into many pieces her obsession was to sew the pieces together. Compose the man. Not a Frankenstein, but a man worthy of her orgiastic pleasures. New Mexico and its Rio Grande were far from Egypt and its Nile, but she had read the poem of a well-known poet who wrote that somehow the penis of Osiris washed from the Nile across the sea into the Rio Grande. Obsessed, Tamara was determined to find the organ. But that’s another story.
The room felt stifling, the lilac perfume oozing from a vase full of deep purple flowers.
“It’s nothing,” Sonny protested.
“A knife carries the memory of blood it has shed. The wound must be cleaned.”
She led him toward the bathroom.
Sonny stopped. “Raven was here.”
“Don’t mind him, Saw-ny. He’s crazy, as you well know. He’s everywhere, first the silly bomb, then the phones, next—”
Sonny squeezed her hand.
“Where?”
Her green gypsy eyes looked into Sonny’s, wet with tears, her cat-and-mouse mood suddenly aroused by the erotic pleasure of his firm grip.
“Who knows? Yes. Moments ago he was here. He’s jealous, Sonny. He knows I would rather make love to you than any man on earth. But you’re safe here. You’re safe with me.”
“Is he—”
“Androgynous? Hermaphrodite? Transvestite? Yes and no, he’s all of the above and much more. At his worst moments his energy is pure libido. Do you understand? Sometimes he loses control.”
Sonny nodded. He knew.
“He’s dangerous, Sonny. He has acquired a tremendous power. And what does he do with it? Play games. Unchecked libido impulse. He has forsaken ritual. But I haven’t, my dear Sonny. That’s what I can give you.”
She touched his cheek. Her perfume was a desert scent, sweet and intoxicating.
“Raven wants to end it,” he said. “Is he for real?”
A frown crossed her forehead. “Let’s not talk about Raven. He’s a votary of the cults of the bull. He has an energy any man would die for. But it’s uncontrolled. He comes on strong, like the toro, full of fury, demanding, like the male child who has his first erection and seeks immediate satisfaction.”
What in the hell am I doing here? Sonny thought. What she knows she won’t reveal. Am I now making deals? What’s the payoff?
“You’re not like that,” she continued, putting her arms around him, pressing close to feel the pounding of his heart, the same rhythm that she could, by the slightest movements of her body, move to his pelvic region and create the stirring of a sea responding to the moon, a midnight tide that could turn into a storm.
But she was too studied in the art of love to rush. As quickly as she began to play she backed away and opened the door of the bathroom.
“You know, I wait for you. You and your dream dog. Oh, Sonny, that was perfect. The dream dog.”
“Did Raven have my dog?”
“A small red dachshund. Yes. Showing the bitch off like it was his prize, and the poor thing kept growling at him.”
She unsnapped the pearl buttons of his cowboy shirt, and breathed deep his aroma, softly running her hands over his chest, creating a tingle Sonny felt to his toes.
She smiled. “As always, you are the prude.” She laughed softly. “How many women dream of having you, and you have a one-track mind for your Penelope.”
“Look, I’m going after him. That’s a done deal. But he was coming here first. That means he was going to give you a clue, anything that might help me.”
Tamara smiled. She had Sonny where she wanted him. He had come to her, not she to him. “Let’s take care of this, then we talk.”
She dabbed a cotton ball in Betadine, cleaned the wound, then taped it.
“If I were a spider I would sew it, but this will have to do. Put on this robe.”
The robe hanging on the door was a prize, Chinese silk from some forgotten dynasty, colorful enough to make a man yearn for a languorous afternoon in the Forbidden City. Movida time!
“I don’t have time. You know nothing—”
“Oh, don’t bet on that! Come now, don’t protest! Put it on.”
She stepped out, shutting the door behind her. Sonny took off his shirt. He looked at himself in the mirror, hardly recognizing the man he had met there earlier that day. Had Prajna’s wisdom rubbed off on him? The tragedy of Naomi’s death? The violent need he felt to get to Raven?
A strange frenzy had settled over the city. Tamara would say it was the sex drive of spring. Raven had picked the perfect time to strike. All of the northern hemisphere was groaning and coming alive with the return of the sun, and its promise was also its confusion. Could it be its downfall?
He splashed water on his face and felt the miracle of its caress. Without water man was nothing. Without water the tides in the woman would not respond to the moon, blood would not flow, the future would not unfold.
He dried himself, put on the robe, walked out to meet the Russian gypsy who fancied herself a Nefertiti of the desert, secluded now, not in a tent, but reduced to a simple apartment in the heart of the city.
She sat on the divan, her fine legs outstretched, a smile on her face, waiting for him with drink in hand, a special concoction that could make a man forget his past.
“Ah, darling, now you are my prize again,” she crooned. “I know you have had a difficult day. Come sit by my side and rest.”
“I need to know about Raven.”
“First drink.”
She handed him the delicate kantharos, so intricately carved that Sonny felt pleasure as his fingers wrapped around the dancing Greek mai
dens decorating the sides of the cup. He drank, knowing he could not rush Tamara, she would give up what she knew in her own time. She needed to play a game, as always. His coyote sense told him to play back. Be wily.
The ambrosia flowed like a honey liquor the gods might drink, awakening his senses as it was absorbed quickly into the bloodstream, racing to the brain where it mushroomed, as a lotus blossom might open, a thousand colorful blossoms. A drink obviously outlawed in Red China.
“What is it?”
“Datura and hibiscus flowers in a secret blend.”
Sonny smiled. “I feel exalted,” he said, the kind of words Tamara loved to hear.
Exalted? His buddies at Sal’s Bar would hassle him for months if they heard him say he felt exalted. Especially since he had started drinking only soft drinks. Dr. Pepper? Damn, no self-respecting Chicano drank Dr. Pepper with his amigos. A soda couldn’t really wet your whistle, and it sure as hell couldn’t make you feel exalted.
“I mean good …” he muttered.
“You have the gift of dream,” she said, taking the empty cup from his hand. “Seek Raven there.”
“We’ve moved onto a new plane,” Sonny replied, nearly adding it was a new plane of illusion. Raven was playing new tricks, far more powerful and dangerous tricks than practiced before.
“I understand,” Tamara murmured. “You two have been at this struggle since long before the first stone was laid for the pyramid of Giza. Neither can gain the upper hand, and yet in the struggle is the evolution of the psyche. Our evolution. You know this, and he knows it, two snakes clinging to the same tree, the yin and yang. The masses I watch from my window know nothing. They are trapped in cycles of unredeeming work. They are not conscious of their work. Millions and millions of our species who do not understand they could make quantum leaps in the ladder of evolution, if only they understood the psyche’s role. If only they could harness the energy and make whole again the dualities that tear each person apart.”
She paused, and they both looked out the window down Central Avenue, where the wild fiesta continued, a rending apart of the human spirit, which sought its wholeness behind the mask of the fiesta, under the influence of booze, cocaine, ecstasy, and lust, only to find the following morning, after a night of riotous revelry, that each had to return to the wheel of unredeeming work.