“Illusion,” Raven said.
“Screw your illusion,” Sonny answered. “I see my face in the mirror!” he shouted, confronting Raven. “I know who I am!”
He tossed the cup in the fire, where it melted to a sizzle.
“Damn you!” an angry Raven retorted. “I claim the Zia Stone!”
“I claim my daughters!” Sonny countered.
“Your obsession!”
“Yes!”
“You’ve been misled!” Raven cried. “Look!”
He unfurled his cloak and the two girls appeared in the light of the dancing flames, glorious in their Communion white and as lovely as the first roses of spring. Smiling, they threw their flower bouquets at Sonny’s feet.
Sonny picked up the flowers and smelled their sweetness, aroma therapy that broke his heart. He reached out to touch the smiling girls, daughters of his and Rita’s dream.
“Don’t you know by now? They’re illusions!” Raven chortled.
Sonny hesitated. Ah, yes, he knew the truth. But why do men who know the truth refuse to acknowledge it? Be virtuous and truthful, his parents had told him, and you will be a good man. But even good men deny the truth when their need is great.
“Mine,” Sonny whispered, tears in his eyes, not from the smoke that rose from the dying embers of the cottonwood logs, but from a deep emotion he felt. He could not take his gaze from the terrible lightness of beauty, the auras of the daughters he had dreamed into existence.
“Yes!” Raven cried. “They are yours! You gave them life in your dream. They are images created by your obsession! The blood that flowed from your woman’s womb was their flesh, blood aborted. But you retained the image of your daughters—Wait. Let’s speak frankly. You created the images. You dreamt these two angels into existence.”
There it was, the truth! A man creates, in flesh or dream, what he needs to struggle through life.
“You took them from me!” Sonny cried, an anguished cry.
“Sonny, Sonny, Sonny. You know so little of the workings of the soul. If it weren’t for your desire to have daughters by your side, I wouldn’t have them. You see, the innocent images in the soul may be plundered by the psyche’s ancient powers.”
Was Raven angry? Deceiving? No, he was speaking the truth. As everyone knows, obsession and desire create the image, the object of need, and once created the image is subject to the will of both the angels and the demons of the psyche. The soul can lift itself to the highest empyrean and commune with the gods, or it can create the despair of hell.
“You can have them back!” Raven said, and pushed the two innocent forms forward. “You can have the images of your two sweet daughters.… But that’s all you can have, the images. Not the flesh.”
Sonny reached for the spirits that once had inhabited the womb of his beloved. He understood now that he could take the two spirits with him, for the soul was a constellation of images. The mind could hold memories of experiences and ideas, the workings of the brain, but it was the psyche that held the images of mankind’s history, or one man’s loss.
“Yes,” Raven said. “Every man is haunted by his dreams. Some hear the voices of ghosts and commit murder in their name, some write great symphonies. The psychotic and schizophrenic run in the streets of our cities, shouting the names of the images that haunt and speak to them. You cannot erase the image. It is with you always.”
The old man had warned him, as Raven warned him, that his obsession was unnatural, an illusion of his psyche’s pain, but it was unnatural only because he desired the blood of the daughters growing again in Rita’s womb, yearned to be part of the evolution of their flesh. This was his god-awful sin, his obsession to bring them back from the dead, back from a land whose landscape was the uncharted geography of his own soul.
Perhaps he needed to come to this point, to learn for himself what for others was common sense: you can’t bring back the departed. They have their own journey to continue, their own stories to tell in other dimensions, but insofar as the dreamer keeps the image of the dead, then those he loved in ordinary time may still keep him company. Yes, Sonny could keep the images of his daughters with him forever.
“Oh, God,” he moaned and fell to his knees. The painful revelation spilled out in bitter tears, the tears a man sheds when he realizes he has deluded himself.
Exactly where Raven wanted him, groveling in pain on the wet earth of the river. The evolution of two brothers, as it were, come to speak to each other as eternal reflections of one soul, all this under the looming presence of the Barelas Bridge.
Raven raised his sword over Sonny’s head. The soul of Sonny Baca would soon wash away in the muddy current, beginning a completely new chapter, for souls are like books that can be read over and over through the centuries until they crumble into the dust of their own nirvana.
The beak-like sword shimmered with life, reflecting history, analogous to the curved blade that once cut the Gordian knot, the dagger Abraham held over his son, the sword King Arthur withdrew from the stone, the switchblade of the old pachucos. Now the awful instrument that could cut the ribbon of a man’s fate was Raven’s beak, sharp and polished to a sheen, like the tongue of a snake, two-edged.
It was all Sonny could do to raise his arm and ward off the blow, and as he did he reached out and tore the Zia medallion from Raven’s neck.
The eerie sound of a bullroarer rumbled across the turbulent waters of the river, like the buzz of a million bees instinctively wrapping themselves around their queen as she flew into the blue sky to receive that one, fertilizing seed.
“Damn you!” Raven cursed.
Some of his power was diminished now that Sonny held the Zia medal, but in reaching out for the medallion Sonny had fallen flat on his face, and as he looked up he saw a death mask, a revenge of ages that Raven could end with the raised scimitar.
The deafening bellow of the bullroarer became a crashing of trees as Bear, crying like a wounded animal, plowed through the brush like an ancient spirit, scattering the coals of the dying fire. The cry for the woman he had loved ripping from his throat, he charged at Raven, and the force of the attack sent them both tumbling into the river.
Raven cried out, a curse, an explosion of breath as he went flying through the air into the water, the sharp sword still in his hand, his last glance plaintively cast at Sonny, whom, in one more split second, he would have beheaded.
The splash of the two bodies hitting the water was like the closing of a tomb, a heavy stone door slamming shut, encasing the mummies inside in eternal rest, not in a sarcophagus in a dry, desert tomb, but in the waters of the holy river.
Sonny jumped up and rushed to the spot where the two had disappeared. Wading into the dark water he reached out, hoping to hook the two floundering men, who bobbed up and down in the swift current, disappearing then rising to the surface until the watery fingers of the icy stream sucked them under and they were seen no more.
Gasping for breath, clutching at tree roots, Sonny pulled himself back onto the bank, wet and muddied, shivering from the cold, which now was near freezing. He had not wanted it to end this way, but Bear would not be denied his revenge. He loved Naomi, and knowing only revenge could cure his broken heart he took the law into his own hands. He drowned Raven in the river, washed all his sins away, as any river can do, call it the Rio Grande, the Ganges, the Nile, the Yangtze. A river by any name is an instrument of God. It’s all the same: from water we come and to water we return. The cleansing was done, the shadow god baptized again, for the moment, for it is not the night that casts shadows, but the light of the sun, and at the end of the spring-equinox night the sun was destined to rise again.
“Yeah,” Sonny said to himself, his voice that of a man cutting through the sound of lapping water. The river was not the arm of an angry god, but a presence accustomed to carrying away the souls of the departed. There was no boat with ready helmsman nearby, no skiff of Charon nor bark of Isis, for this was the land where sailing with
the tide meant the tides of the heart. The sloshing of water was the moving blood of a land loved dearly by the old paisanos, the cry of the wind its soul.
Raven baptized again. He would return.
But from where? The current was swift, the night dark, submerged brambles and branches of rotting trees reached out, old steel jetties with barbed-wire fingers lay ahead, hungry fish would nibble at flesh, and in the end the bodies would not be found. But where was the spirit, Sonny’s shadow? Was he gone forever, or for a moment? And how does a man lose his shadow?
Those involved in the story know that as Sonny was baptized in the blood of the sow, Raven would be renewed in Rio Grande water. Water is blood, say the old farmers; nothing disappears but makes it way back in the cycle of life and death. There is no death, triumphant prophets far wiser than any of the characters in the story have said. Go out and make up your own mind whether the world is real or illusion, whether men are good or troubled, whether or not the soul can be broken down. Even broken souls return home. This much the old prophets knew.
It was time to go home. Sonny peered into the dark waters one last time, then he turned and sloshed out of the mud up to the sandy bank where he picked up a shivering Chica.
The burning logs sputtered, dying down to red embers as he made his way back through the brush to the Center and his truck.
Over the Barelas Bridge moved a slow trickle of traffic, the lights of cars, honest-to-goodness live people going into town or going home, as a normal evening returned to the city.
In the dark Raven’s crows shook their feathers and fell into a troubled sleep. Coyotes cried. No need to return and bury the sow, Sonny thought, the coyotes would feast tonight. Nothing is lost. Even the bones would eventually compost, food for trees and grass.
Nothing ever ends, does it?
You got that right, the old man said, putting his arm around his young friend and walking with him in the dark.
25
Sonny was shivering by the time he got to his truck. The Center was closed, the dozens of cars and television crews gone. Traffic flowed on Cesar Chavez Boulevard and on Fourth Street, coming from or going to the South Valley. If an alien from the sea, the progeny of the ancient Atlantians, happened to be observing the City Future, it would report a quiet, normal spring night. The frenzy of the bomb threat had settled into the slower pace Alburquerqueans loved so well.
Every TV set in the city and the state would be tuned to the news of the governor’s death, and as they ate their suppers the New Mexicans would wonder what it meant. Enough theories would erupt to feed la plática and mitote for months to come.
Sonny wrapped Chica in the seat cover, an old serape from Juárez. He started the truck, and turned on the heater. Chica opened her eyes, looked up at her master, and licked his hand.
“Let’s go home. I know Rita has a chicken taco waiting for you. How’s that?”
That’s fine with me, she wagged her tail, and laid her head on the seat in contentment. The induced Raven-dream had tired her. She had seen things never imagined, foreign places and animals, screams of pain, a primeval dream time where survival was the order of the night, Raven’s shadow following her every step, goading her to reveal Sonny’s weakness, his tragic flaw. But she refused to give in to his desire and in a fit, quite unknown for peaceful dachshunds, she snarled and cried, “He is a good and virtuous man. Get thee behind me, Raven!”
Raven had hit her with a stick for that. He did not like being associated with anything that smacked of the devil. He did his best to keep away from that Middle Ages stuff, the witch trials of Salem spoofery, Inquisition tortures, and old religious doctrines that denied belief in the possibility of metempsychosis.
The newest psychoanalytic theories hardly covered Raven’s thick shadow. He had read the true alchemical formulas, which he understood were all about transforming the soul, not gross metal. For Raven, transformation meant turning light into darkness. This was Raven’s New Age goal, as it had been from the beginning of human time.
A while longer in Raven’s nightmare would have done Chica in, she would have completely entered the world of dream, but her master appeared in time and saved her from that final step into Raven’s whirlpool from which there is scarce return. Now it was home to a chicken taco spiced with just a dab of Rita’s salsa.
What about me? the old man asked.
You hungry?
It’s been a long day.
Yeah. So, where do we go from here?
We? Reminds me of a Lone Ranger and Tonto joke. When surrounded by enemies Tonto says, What do you mean we, paleface?
Skip the joke; are you going to stick around?
I don’t know.
Shivering and with a note of sadness, Sonny said, You mean you don’t know how much longer you’ll be here.
I’ll be around as long as you’re around. The old man chuckled.
Sonny smiled. He felt drained emotionally. After all, he had just acknowledged that his daughters were figments of his need. Could they exist without him, or were they on their own journey? Were they young souls destined for a place in heaven, like Limbo, but much more beautiful, where they could play with other like souls, enjoying the contemplation of a Universal Spirit and the music of the spheres, the same harmonic vibrations that force-field physicists pondered and admired? Did they not deserve celestial bliss?
Sonny had to give them up. Well, not exactly, because he could still dream about them, that is, image them in his mind and run with them in those blissful gardens where the grass was always green and the flowers always in bloom, where the lion frolicked with the lamb. And he could dream of doing all the things a father would do for his daughters, raising them to be fine young women. All of this was still available to him, if not in the flesh.
In prior times, before her miscarriage, Rita had talked about the life growing in her womb. They sat in her garden where the perfume of earth and flowers was as close to heaven as a man can get. They drank Rita’s blend of herbal tea and watched the sun set in the west. The desert breeze whispered of possibilities. On such an afternoon he would tell her what he had seen.
Don’t forget the dead, the elders said. Ancestor worship? Call it what you want, it’s part of our heritage. Say masses, light candles, erect shrines by the side of the road, descansos to be visited because the soul was eternal and oftentimes restless, as everyone who had ever lived in the culture or read its cuentos knew. Some scoffed at this. Bah! Prayers for the dead! That’s for the Chinese, the Koreans, the old Aztecs and Mayas. But get a life, this was the twenty-first century, the Digital Age. Ghosts? Spirits? Wasn’t that for Hollywood? After all, this was the age of quantum psychology. Forget Freud!
No, replied the old Hispanos in the wisdom of their mestizo heritage. They’re here. We can feel them. Leave a glass of water under your bed at night, for the dead feel thirst. This way they don’t wake you up. Pray for them, they are on a journey. And just who do you think the santos are? The saints are our old people who have died. Our ancestors! We pray to them to help us. Santa mamá. Santo papá. Santo Abuelito. Santa Abuelita. Santo Tío, Santa Tía. Those you loved and who loved you in life became santos. So there! Period!
Yes, we let them go, and yet they remain. What is memory but the psyche’s library where everything is stored? Sometimes it’s like a tomb for quiet, contemplative times. Sometimes it’s like a wild party. A fiesta! Let’s drink and dance as they loved to drink and dance! We remember! We remember! As long as we remember, they live. So don’t act like you know it all, Mr. Smarty Pants!
That’s the way it is, Sonny thought. The tenses of time blended into each other, not only in the dream time, but also in that time known as ordinary time. The creative mind was always at work, blending its thoughts into the soul’s growth. That’s why so many people were attracted to the land of the Pueblos, because here the geography was still sacred, and one could watch the clouds on summer days and let time dissolve into its purer essence. The earth and sky we
re the true alchemists. So always remember to watch the clouds.
The old man saying that he would be around as long as Sonny was around was the promise of a real friend, compromiso de fé, and such a commitment elevated Sonny and made him feel he had bonded with don Eliseo during his stay on earth, made him understand a loving relationship is the miracle of life. The bell tolled for the departed as well as for those left on this side, as the poet said, and it rang at odd times when the heart swayed and trembled and remembered those now gone.
The old man’s promise reminded him of his responsibility to all of life, flesh or spirit, for if a friend so loved his companion that even after death he would be there to lend a hand, one had to live a good life.
Go home to Rita, the old man said. Get rid of those pesky suitors who are hanging around the cafe. They’re making goo-goo eyes at Rita like lovesick calves. Philanderers! Don’t worry about me, I’m going to hang around for a while. There are a lot of interesting spirits in this city, like the old timers we met on Central. On Saturday afternoons when they promenade downtown I’ll join them. Think of it, mihito, me sauntering down Central Avenue with Clyde Tingley and Ernie Pyle. Cool, huh?
Sonny laughed. “Yeah, cool.”
He drove north on Fourth Street, funky Fourth, an avenue he loved, into the heart of downtown where the revelry of the afternoon had died down. Those workers who had partied hard had been called on their cell phones to get home to supper, the kids’ homework, family affairs, late payment of the rent or alimony, plugged toilets, all the diurnal necessities of the cotidal day.
Now, those walking the gaily lighted streets were mostly yuppies who came downtown to enjoy the Spring Arts Crawl evening. They went from gallery to gallery, exclaiming, “yes,” and “ah” and “well done.” They strolled hand in hand in the friendly evening air and entered to taste the offered wine, small chalices they quaffed as they spoke of Michelangelo. These art lovers were joined by university students who were feeling the pressure of the semester winding down and exams coming, and so, many a kantharos of beer was quaffed in the hoot and hollering night.