“Good-bye,” Sonny said, turned, and walked out. A current of hot air met him and made him shiver.
He got into his truck and headed for the freeway. The time had come to meet Raven. But personal questions haunted him: Why in the hell did he reject Tamara? And the woman in blue at Garcia’s? Was he getting old? Or was it Rita? It was definitely getting serious. A few years ago, right after his divorce from Angie, he would have made love to any woman who offered. He loved women and he enjoyed making love to them. He prided himself on being a ladies’ man. Then he met Rita one Saturday night at the Fourth Street Cantina, about two years ago. They hit it off right away. She had helped him find his house to rent, and between Rita and his new neighbor, don Eliseo, he began to learn North Valley ways, the deeper way of life they practiced.
He drove east on I-40 to Moriarty. Images of Tamara’s bedroom appeared, mixing with the curves of her body. Her Sun Room, the room of love. From the round bed at the center radiated four lines of different-colored tiles, stretching out in four directions. Gold, blue, white, black.
The yellow tiles led to the fireplace. The opposite line led to a small, dry piñon tree with polished branches. The branches of the piñon were decorated with little ojos de Dios, simple adornments of colored wool woven in a diamond pattern on two dry branches in the form of a cross. The center of the diamond was said to be the eye of God.
Sonny had read that the ojo de Dios that the New Mexicans used were originally of Huichol origin. Prayer sticks. A way to enter visions. Now the ojos de Dios adorned every New Mexican home. The ojo de Dios also resembled a mandala, Sonny thought. It represented the four directions. From the center, God’s eye looked out at the world. The eye of God could also be a center of contemplation, a place where the soul focused. The diagonal design of the ojo was a labyrinth that led to the center. And at the center, illumination.
The third line of tiles from the bed radiated to a stained-glass window on the southern wall. The thick, stained pieces of glass were another mandala. In the center of the four-leafed design lay the round, golden sun. The fourth line had led to the open bathroom, the large sunken tub, the erotic bath where the flesh was prepared for its flight.
Four lines, one center. The Zia sun.
“Damn.” Sonny groaned and turned on the radio and sang to the tune of the Mexican corrido to get the thoughts out of his mind. He turned south toward Estancia. The foothills of the mountains and the flat llano of the Estancia Valley were dry and withering under the summer heat. The tawny grass stretched as far as the eye could see. On his left a huge, dusty whirlwind swept across the hot landscape, picking up dust and tumbleweeds as it moved across the parched land.
We need rain bad, Sonny thought. The land of the Estancia Valley was a land of contrasts. The eastern foothills of the Manzano Mountains were ridged with arroyos and dark mesas. The pines of the heights gave way to scrub oak, thick green junipers, piñon, and that gave way to yucca and llano grass as the hills flattened into grazing land. It was ranch land, and barely good for that.
The old Nuevo Mexicano families of the villages along the slope, Chilili, Tajique, and Torreón, clung tenaciously to the land. Some rancheros still ran a few head of cattle, a few sheep. Before them the land had belonged to the nomadic Indians of the eastern plain, and maybe that was the truth of the land, that it had been molded for the nomad, not for the settled farmer or rancher.
Along the road grew clumps of sunflowers, snakeweed, the hardy Mexican hat, and the ever-present purple-blooming thistle. Cardo santo, the natives called it, good for back pain. All the cures in the world were right there, in nature’s garden, hidden among the grama grasses. If one knew, as the old curanderas knew, how to use their secrets. They were gifts from nature, full of potency and magic.
In the old days the curanderas gathered the herbs and roots and used them in their medicine. Prayers to God and the healing herbs of the earth, that’s what they used. He remembered the woman who had cured his susto after he was attacked by the dog. After his father died, the same woman had helped his mother. She came to the house and prayed over her, giving her an egg to hold in her hands. When the ceremony was done his mother cracked the egg and let it drop into a glass of water. There swimming in the white mucus and splattered in the blood veins of the yolk appeared the visible sign of her problem. After that she got better. Her energy returned.
Sonny glanced out the window. The wildflowers had gotten some spring moisture, enough to get them started, enough for the green fuse to hurtle its force into the bloom to create the seed.
But now the flowers and grasses of the llano lay shriveling under the June heat. Alive, but just barely. The flowers were like the people, they withstood the blows of nature; they would survive.
Long ago the Spanish Franciscans had set up the missions of Quarai and Abo in these lonely hills—to christianize the nomadic Indians, they said, but also to protect the salt beds that were so valuable for curing meat. Salt was like gold.
Then in the twenties and thirties the Okies fleeing the dust storms of Oklahoma homesteaded in the valley and tried to raise beans, like in the John Steinbeck novel. The corrido ended and Sonny slipped the Juan Arriaga tape into his player. The harsh earth of the Estancia Valley lent itself to epic drama, the stories of the people who came to conquer the land and were either beaten by it or adapted and learned to live in harmony. Still the people clung to the land, the sons and daughters of the old Mexicanos and the Okies and the new Anglo immigrants who set up lonely mobile homes on the open and indifferent land.
Looking for a place to call one’s own, Sonny thought as the strains of the symphony lifted his soul into the clear blue sky. The rushing of the wind past his open window was a symphony he understood, something he felt in his blood. Viento. Wind. The llaneros had as many ways to describe wind as did the Eskimos for describing snow. The winds that came from the four directions were each unique, each brought its own type of weather. Wind was the constant companion on the open land.
There were dry winds and wet winds, male winds and female winds, winds for every mood, tormenting winds that drove people crazy, soft breezes that dried the sweat on the working man’s neck, winds that brought no good, but always the wind was constant. Yes, a constant companion, sometimes friendly, a kiss of coolness, sometimes deadly and raging as it swept across the land, swirling and raising sandstorms, driving giant hordes of tumbleweeds before it, pelting cattle and sheep, and dancing like a dervish devil around the ranch house, clawing at the tin roofs and threatening damnation as it banged loose, flapping tin on the roof.
When the winds came, the women shut doors and windows tight, and the people of the llano huddled inside, in silence, a pot of beans cooking slowly on the cast-iron stove, filling the enclosed space with their aroma. Then everyone spoke in hushed whispers; the men nervously waited for the wind to grow calm so they could walk outside and get on with their work. The women prayed that the devils riding the whirlwinds not enter their home, not stay, go away before madness came. Praying silently through pursed lips, waiting, listening to the cry and howl in the wind as if one of their daughters or sisters cried outside.
La Llorona rode the wind, the weeping woman rode the llano wind, she was sister to the wind, her keening cry was like the cry of the wind.
Sonny thought of José Escobar and his people, hanging on to the land on the eastern foothills. The land was all they knew, all they had, but the big ranches ate away at the small land grants, and the land developers for the past twenty years had been buying and dividing the land into one-acre plots and selling them to people from the city who came looking for country living. A cheap piece of land to call one’s own was the dream of the new homesteaders, those who set up trailers on the barren land. A land dotted with trailers. They wouldn’t last. The adults would get lonely, the children would grow up and leave, then the haunting, lonely sound of the wind and the emptiness would drive them all back to the city.
A clean, sultry smell filled t
he bright air. Thin clouds moved in from the southwest, high thin clouds that carried no rain but were the harbingers of the monsoon season. Cattle stayed close to the windmill water tanks. Overhead, two large turkey vultures circled. The constant wind swept mournfully across the dry grass. The land was quiet and empty.
Sonny squinted into the distance and wondered about the women who had survived the land and weather. First the Indian women, the nomadic Comanches, then the Mexican women of the Quarai and Abo missions, finally the gaunt-faced Okies. So many either went crazy or died dreaming of water. Water was the element of survival. Without water there was no life on the burning land. Life gathered around the oasis of the windmill tanks. Each new tribe added its bit of technology to the land and thus changed the landscape. Human life could exist only within the radius of the small oasis that men created.
They drilled wells and irrigated sparse fields of corn, pumpkins, alfalfa, just like over in the eastern part of the state and west Texas, where they were sucking the Ogallala Aquifer dry. They were sucking the aquifer dry and now, ghost farms dotted west Texas, and so they would dot the ranches around Clovis and Portales and eventually the Estancia Valley. The wind would blow away the trailer castles.
That’s why Dominic is so damn dangerous, Sonny thought. He wants to use the water of the Río Grande for his outrageous development, create a Disneyland for tourists, but he doesn’t understand the balance the river and the underground water play in the scheme of things of the Río Grande basin. He wants to build an oasis out of Alburquerque. Canals, green beltways, flower gardens, the flow of fountains, canal boats carrying passengers from one casino to the next. Maybe Dominic had visited the Alhambra and the gardens of the Generalife, and he was bitten by the Moorish love of water.
What the hell, Nuevo Mexicanos who carried Moorish blood in their veins were idolators when it came to water. Water was the lifeline. Only by using the Indian acequia systems had the first Europeans and Mexicans survived in the northern villages of the state. People prayed for rain, implored the goddess of fertility. The Pueblo Indians danced for rain, prayed to the kachinas. People dreamed of rain, the life-giving rain. In the high, arid plateaus of New Mexico, rain, as well as the sun, was sacred.
It was so with desert people. They dreamed of what they did not have: bubbling fountains, running brooks, exquisite gardens, cool temples, rooms where the gurgle of water sounded just outside the window, rooms where one could make love, read books, enjoy a respite from the heat. From every room the lover of beauty wanted to hear the sound of running water.
The Nuevo Mexicanos understood Dominic’s dream, because people of the high New Mexican desert didn’t love heat and sand, they loved the oasis. A man of the desert could rest in the oasis and enjoy the beauty of women and the arabesques of Islamic art as his ancestors had enjoyed them in Spain, enjoyed the wisdom in books, the unending arguments of Jewish scholars, the whispered revolt of the Catholics, the love sounds of the warrior Arabs, but all this only if he could rest in a cool, refreshing place. The Arabic influence ran deep and brooding in the blood of the Nuevo Mexicano; it was the survival instinct that gathered the people to the pleasant gurgle of flowing water.
Or maybe Dominic had visited the gardens of Xochimilco in Mexico City. Imagined their grandeur before the Spaniards came. An entire civilization existing on gardens of flowers and corn, chile and squash, beans. Boats softly plying the canals as trade moved up and down Lake Texcoco. Alburquerque was to be the new Xochimilco.
I would like to see the Alhambra, Sonny thought. He had seen pictures of the buildings and the rose gardens. He wanted to explore Spain. Maybe to know more about that past. Moors, Jews, Islamic art. Things he yearned to know. In the library he browsed through a book of Goya’s paintings, and he kept going back to it. There was something waiting to be revealed in Goya’s often-tortured faces of his dark period.
Here, the truck stop is the oasis, he thought, and we have truck stop art. Rattlesnakes Ahead. See the Jackalope! Last Gas before Tucumcari. See Gopher Country. Stop at Clines Corners. Indian Jewelry, Cheap. And one old, barely visible Burma Shave.
What a poor excuse for culture! Still, the gas stations and cafés of small towns were where the traveler could fill his stomach and car, and for a brief time share a fleeting moment with other desert travelers. That was New Mexico, a land of watering holes. The wide horizons and the huge emptiness of the land wasted the spirit of the traveler. Families had to stop and rest.
Sonny drove into Estancia. It meant Stopping Place. Oasis. A dry, dusty dump of a town. Now Raven was cooling his heels in its jail. Sonny drove in and pulled up in front of the local bar, The Oasis. He smiled. The main street was almost deserted. A Jeep packed with hunting rifles sat outside the bar. Hunting rifles with high-powered scopes. In this country the ranchers usually carried .22 rifles to shoot coyotes, but these guys were armed to the teeth. A barely visible decal beneath the dust on the Jeep’s bumper made him pause. It was the Zia sign.
Oasis also meant cold beer, and he decided to have a couple before heading over to the jail. Maybe he could pick up a little information from the bartender, he thought as he entered the cool, dimly lit cantina.
Two weathered rancheros sat at the bar, enjoying their beers. At the pool table a couple of mean-looking, stringy-haired Anglo men shot pool. Sonny guessed the Jeep outside belonged to them.
One wore a dusty creased cowboy hat, the other a sweatband. It was obvious they weren’t natives. What surprised Sonny was that one of the women from Raven’s compound, Dorothy, was with them. She was standing by the table, smoking a cigarette and sipping from a bottle of beer. She turned to look at Sonny and smiled, a thin, ugly smile.
“If it isn’t Sonny Baca,” she said, and the two men playing pool stopped to look at Sonny.
Sonny ordered a beer. “Quívole. Qué hay de nuevo?” he asked the bartender.
“No, nada,” the man replied as he set the cold, frosted beer on the bar. “Hotter ’n hell. Need rain.”
The two rancheros turned to take Sonny’s measure.
“What brings you to Estancia?” the bartender asked.
Sonny decided to test the pool players. He had a gut feeling. It looked to him like the four women and their children weren’t the only ones tangled in Raven’s web.
“I’m looking for a guy named Raven,” he said loud enough for them to hear.
The two men at the pool table looked at the young woman, then at Sonny. There was a long, cold silence.
The bartender leaned over the counter. “You looking for trouble?” he asked.
“No.” Sonny grinned, a friendly smile.
“Those are his compañeros. Cuídate,” the bartender warned him, then shook his head and moved away to whisper to the two rancheros at the bar.
Sonny nodded his thanks and took a long drink from the beer.
The two men moved around the pool table. Sonny turned to face them. They were both bearded and mean looking, with close-set pale eyes. The big burly one had a scar over his left eye, and the smaller one wore a grimy red headband. Both wore Zia earrings. Were they the sons-of-bitches who took shots at him?
“This is the guy that came looking for Raven at the compound,” Dorothy said to the two men without taking her eyes off Sonny. By the sound of her voice, Sonny knew she’d had more than one beer to drink. Then addressing Sonny: “He’s gettin’ out this afternoon. You better watch out.” She laughed.
“Shut up, Sister!” Scarface growled. “What the hell do you want with Raven?” he asked Sonny.
“I think he’s FBI,” Dorothy said. She wasn’t the whimpering woman Sonny remembered.
“FBI,” Scarface spit out, “fucking creeps are thick around here.” He glared at the bartender. “You ought to keep them out of your bar, or you’ll get a bad reputation.”
“You have no business with Raven,” the thin, weaselly man with the dirty sweatband said. Both goons stood in front of Sonny with cue sticks in their hands.
&nbs
p; “Get the fuck out or we’ll throw you out!” Scarface spit.
“It’s a free country,” Sonny answered, “last I heard.” His adrenaline rose. He was sure he’d found the shitheads that had fired on him, and he was glad he had. He was ready for Scarface to attack first, and he guessed right.
“Smart-assed Mexican!” Scarface cursed and swung his cue stick. Sonny ducked and heard the woosh of the stick inches from his skull. He came up swinging, driving his fist into Scarface’s stomach and following with an uppercut to the man’s Adam’s apple. Scarface groaned and reached for his throat, gasping for air. Sonny drove his knee into the man’s groin and in the same motion pushed him into his partner.
Sweatband held his swing for a moment, Sonny grabbed the cue stick out of his hand and drove it into his stomach, and in the same motion up into the man’s chin. Blood poured from Sweatband’s mouth as he toppled against the pool table.
Scarface staggered up, holding his throat, gasping. He was in no shape to move on Sonny and the bartender’s shout stopped the action anyway.
“That’s enough!” He pointed a cut-off shotgun at the men. “You make a move and I’ll blow you into Guadalupe County! Back off!”
Scarface and his partner backed off, nursing their wounds. They had underestimated Sonny, and they were not inclined to get blown to bits in a backwater bar.
“I’ll get you, you sonofabitch,” Scarface warned, grimacing. “I’m not going to forget this.” They backed out of the bar, the door slamming in the wind. Dorothy hesitated.
“Thought you wanted out,” Sonny said.
“It’s too late,” she said. “Raven gets out this afternoon. It’s gonna blow.” She looked into Sonny’s eyes. Her bravado of moments ago was gone. “It’s gonna blow,” she repeated and slipped out the door.
“You handle yourself pretty good,” the bartender said as he uncocked the shotgun. The rancheros at the bar nodded in agreement.
“I’m not FBI,” Sonny said.