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

  Then he closed his eyes. Maybe he was imagining the coyote in the smoke, just as he had imagined them during the trance. Lord, he had smoked marijuana before, but the mota only made him groggy and sleepy, so he never became an aficionado. Grass brought no visions.

  A year ago he had done the peyote ceremony with don Eliseo and a handful of his Indian neighbors up in the Sandias. A beautiful vision quest. The forest had come alive, the trees danced to music, tiny animals scurried along the forest floor, a king bear appeared, spoke to Sonny. But not even that extrasensory perception induced by the peyote compared to the vision today.

  He opened his eyes. The curling smoke of the candle had turned white, wisps rising around the statue of the virgin, the smoke cleansing away Gloria’s ghost.

  The images of his journey to the world of spirits returned, and one in particular didn’t make sense—at least it didn’t relate to the coyotes. He had seen someone falling from the sky.

  “Death,” Lorenza had whispered.

  He rose, took the gold Zia medallion from where he had hung it on the altar, and put it around his neck. It was the gold chain and medallion he had taken from Raven only months ago.

  He thought for a moment of Tamara Dubronsky’s words: “Now you are the new Raven.”

  He shook his head, put on his shirt, and went out of the room and into the kitchen. Rita and Lorenza sat sipping tea on the ledge of a small beehive fireplace. The adobe walls were soft, feminine, tranquil. For centuries the Indians and Mexicanos of the valley had been building the earth houses, using clay to make the mud bricks. There was something about an adobe home that made one feel connected to the earth.

  Rita rose, took Sonny’s hands, and looked into his eyes. She saw that for the first time in months there was a spark in his eyes, a smile on his lips.

  “How are you, amor?”

  “Bien,” he answered, and looked at Lorenza. “I feel like I’ve been in another world.”

  “I told you Lorenza could work magic,” Rita said.

  She had tried to doctor him with herbal teas all summer, but she knew the source of his illness was deeper than her herbs could reach. She knew Gloria’s spirit had invaded Sonny’s soul.

  “I believe you now,” he said as he took the cup of tea Lorenza offered. “Gracias.”

  “De nada,” Lorenza replied.

  He looked at the two women, both daughters of the Alburquerque Río Grande valley. Daughters of the old Hispanos, Mexicanos, and Indians of the valley, a blend of genes that over the centuries had produced what Sonny thought were the most beautiful women on earth. The full-bodied, brown-skinned Nueva Mexicana woman, a mestiza with the beauty of the earth and sky in her soul.

  Rita’s hair, black like Lorenza’s, curled around her shoulders and glistened in the morning sunlight pouring through the window. Her brown eyes sparkled.

  He saw how alike they were. Hermanas. They could be sisters. Rita was his age, Lorenza maybe five years older. A ripe age. Sonny wondered if men came to have their souls cleansed just to be near her, to smell the sweetness of her body and to watch the way she moved as she worked.

  He smiled. Both women smiled back, for the moment allowing themselves to bathe in his obvious admiration.

  Rita glanced at Lorenza. She knew Sonny admired women, liked the way they moved, danced, and talked. He admired their physical beauty, but he also respected and trusted the unique instincts of las mujeres. That is why he could learn from them, as he had learned today from Lorenza.

  Rita knew Sonny had led a dissolute life after his divorce a few years ago. He was young and trying to understand why his marriage to Angie failed, and so many a weekend had been full of drinking and dancing along the Fourth Street bars, especially at the Fiesta Lounge.

  That’s where they met, danced, and fell in love. He began to show up at her restaurant, they dated, and for two years they had been happy. They fitted each other, kindred lovers who plumbed each other’s sensuality, kindred souls who shared their most intimate secrets.

  She had proposed marriage; he was the first man who ever came up to her expectations, she liked to be with him, and she had fallen for him. Besides, he was thirty and he had sown enough of his wild oats. Now he needed a home, she thought, a family, a place to work, a garden. He needed children. He needed a wife, and she intended to be that woman.

  At first he joked about getting married, but the more he was with Rita, the more he realized she was the right woman for him. It was time for him to settle down. Then came the Zia summer with its evil, and Sonny took a slide into lethargy. Gloria’s spirit haunted him, and the thought of Raven wouldn’t let him rest.

  “What did you see?” Rita asked.

  “I saw Gloria,” he said. “Or her ghost. Then I saw four coyotes. They were at a place near the river, a place I had forgotten. It was my abuelo’s farm near Socorro. My parents used to send Armando and me there when we were kids.”

  “It was a beginning,” Lorenza said, glancing at Rita. “Most people don’t usually meet their guardian spirits during the first limpieza. But our compañero is gifted.”

  She looked at Sonny and he returned her smile. “Hey, all I did was follow your instructions.”

  “The coyote spirits came to you, so that is one way to the world of spirits. You can go deeper.”

  “Another session?” Sonny asked.

  “If you want to truly learn to use the power in your vision,” Lorenza replied.

  During the cleansing ceremony Sonny had entered the underworld, what Lorenza called the world of spirits. There he found the coyotes by the river, and running with the coyotes did bring a sense of power, but what did it all mean?

  Lorenza sensed his questioning. “We’re losing the spiritual knowledge of the old people,” she said. “I studied with curanderas in Río Arriba, learned their prayers and ceremonies. I also listened to their cuentos, the stories they told about men and women who could turn into animals. Some could turn into owls and fly at night. Those brujos, some good and some evil, knew the world of the nagual.”

  “The nagual,” Sonny repeated. The animal spirit of a person. An Aztec word, like copal, which she burned. In the old folk tales brujos or sorcerers were said to use these supernatural animals. A brujo could actually turn into his nagual. Rita had told him Lorenza had studied with brujos in Mexico, and in this case brujo didn’t just mean witch. It meant something more powerful; it meant men and women who could enter the world of spirits.

  “Our cuentos are full of stories that taught us about people who could take the form of animals,” Lorenza said. “The stories are full of brujas and the spiritual tricks they played. That world exists. It is the world of spirits, what the New Age people call energy.”

  “And there’s a way to enter that world, like I did. To get rid of Gloria’s spirit.”

  “It has always been so,” Lorenza answered. “But most of our people are losing touch with that world.”

  “Why?” Sonny asked.

  “The young no longer pay attention to the spiritual values of our ancestors.”

  “Too busy watching TV or listening to rap,” Sonny suggested. “Maybe that’s one reason why I quit teaching. The kids are into the pop world, videos, whatever.” He shook his head.

  “What will happen to us if we let our spiritual traditions die?” Rita wondered.

  “We can’t,” Lorenza said. “To lose them now would be to give in to evil. So we pay attention to the messages of the ancestors.”

  She glanced at Sonny.

  “Learn to fight Raven,” he said.

  She nodded. “Even in the smallest ways. Like the artists who are going to burn the Kookoóee this week. Federico Armijo and his friends. They resurrected el Coco, the bogeyman our parents warned us would get us if we were bad boys and girls, and they gave him life again. They’re getting our kids interested in their folklore. So it’s up to us to keep the way of our ancestors alive.”

  “El Coco is from the world of spirits,” Sonny sai
d.

  “We all move back and forth from that world to this.” Lorenza smiled. She knew Sonny was open to learning. He had gone on his first vision quest and come back stronger.

  Sonny thought of don Eliseo. The old man had said that when he died, the old culture of the Nuevo Mexicanos of the Río Grande valley would disappear. The young people just weren’t keeping up the traditions. Don Eliseo, a man in his eighties who knew the old ways, was a link to history, as was Lorenza Villa, who lived and practiced the old ways of curing the soul.

  Sonny sipped the tea, a mixture of herbs with a hint of mint. The aroma was soothing and pleasant. The ripeness of autumn was in the air. In the stillness of the morning he heard a gas saw. Someone was cutting wood for winter, and far away the whinny of a horse. Here in Corrales a lot of people kept horses.

  Down the road the Wagner Farms fruit stalls were full of homegrown apples, and ristras of red chile hung drying in the warm October sun. In the fields huge orange pumpkins were ripening for Halloween. Autumn was his favorite time. It was also the season of his birth. In late October he would turn thirty-one.

  “Qué piensas?” Rita asked.

  “How good all this is,” he answered.

  Another sound interrupted them. The blast of a burner, a whooshing sound, then another.

  Lorenza glanced out the kitchen window. “The balloons are coming over the river. Want to watch?”

  “Yes,” Rita said, and Lorenza led them out onto the small patio extending from the kitchen.

  As they stepped out, they were greeted by the sight of hundreds of brightly colored hot-air balloons floating in the clear air. It was the first week of October and the first day of the Alburquerque balloon fiesta. The morning’s mass ascension filled the air with the bright globes. They had been launched from a large field near Journal Center on Alameda Boulevard, and those that caught the easterly breeze were floating across the river, colorful blossoms in the quiet morning air, brilliant in the morning sun.

  The balloons moved across their view, punctuating the morning stillness with the occasional blasts of fire from the propane burners.

  Around them the towering cottonwoods of the valley were touched with the first hint of autumn gold. Across the valley the Sandia Mountains—blue, granite-faced peaks born of a fault in the earth long ago—rose as a backdrop for the balloon show. On many a summer evening the mountain blushed, the color of a ripe watermelon.

  “Qué maravilla,” Rita said, enraptured by the sight of balloons as they floated peacefully overhead.

  “Quite a sight,” Lorenza said.

  “Bucks for the city,” Sonny mused.

  The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, as it was billed, had grown into an international event, drawing people from all over the world and bringing millions of dollars into the city’s coffers. It had become the biggest moneymaker for the city, surpassing even the state fair in September.

  But the people floating in the balloons know nothing of the traditional world of Lorenza, Sonny thought as he looked up.

  “I’ve always wanted to take a ride,” Rita said.

  “Hey, why don’t the three of us go up?” Sonny asked.

  Sonny loved to fly. He had spent a year learning to hang glide off the ten-thousand-foot-high Sandia Crest, and he had taken helicopter lessons. Flying was part of the release he had sought, perhaps part of the danger, when he was going through his divorce.

  Lorenza laughed. “No, gracias. I’m too bound to the earth to get in one of those things.”

  Nearby, the neighbor’s dogs set up a howl as the balloons floated over, and his horses raced across the field, raising clouds of dust and whinnying nervously.

  Susto, Sonny thought. Animals also fear the unknown.

  He turned to Lorenza. “I haven’t felt this good in months. Your medicine works. We should celebrate.”

  “We will,” she said, nodding, “when the time is right.”

  Her reticence told Sonny there was something left to be done. Something was still affecting Sonny, and finding the coyotes in his vision was only a first step.

  The phone rang and Lorenza went in to answer it. “Howard Powdrell,” she said to Sonny when she returned.

  Sonny glanced at Rita and went in. Why would Howard call?

  “Howard?”

  “Hey, compadre, hate to bother you, but I thought you’d want to know.” Howard’s voice was subdued.

  “What’s up?”

  “Veronica Worthy’s dead. Just now.”

  “How?”

  “She fell from a balloon. I’m here now, Montaño and Coors, near the river.”

  “Fell out of a balloon?” Sonny questioned. “Accident?”

  “No. Can you come?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  2

  Veronica was the state’s witness against Tamara Dubronsky. Sonny knew Veronica had murdered Gloria, but she could also implicate Tamara Dubronsky. Now she was dead.

  Raven, he thought immediately. Raven’s back! With Veronica dead, there would be no case against Tamara, and that meant she was free!

  “Sorry, but we gotta go,” he said to Rita.

  “Qué pasa?”

  “That was Howard. Veronica, the witness in the Dubronsky case, has just been killed.”

  “Oh, no,” Rita cried. “How?”

  “Fell from a balloon.” Sonny told them what Howard had told him and looked at Lorenza Villa. His vision: someone falling from the sky.

  “You don’t have to—” Rita said.

  No, he didn’t have to go. It was a city police case, not his, but she knew Sonny had been troubled all summer not only by Gloria’s spirit, but by the disappearance of Raven.

  “Raven,” she whispered. His body had never been found.

  Sonny nodded. “She was the prime witness in the Dubronsky trial. Without her, Tamara goes free. Maybe it’s better if you stay.”

  “No,” Rita said, and turned to hug Lorenza. “Thanks, Lorenza, thanks for everything. I only hope …” She didn’t finish.

  “Gracias,” Sonny said to Lorenza, embracing her.

  “Cuidado,” she whispered.

  “I will,” he said, and took Rita’s arm. Lorenza walked them to the front door and watched them drive off. A body falling from the sky could mean many things, she thought as Sonny’s truck roared up the dirt road. A man being born. A man dying. Icarus flying to the sun, then falling from the sky. Sonny.

  Brujos, the old men and women of power, could fly. The stories of the Indians and the Mexicanos were full of incidents that revealed this power.

  Raven could fly.

  Sonny knows this, she thought as she turned to look at the thick river bosque that lay beyond her home. There in the shadows she spotted a movement: a pair of coyotes. They stopped, looked in her direction. The coyotes of his vision, his nagual, she thought. They’ve been watching.

  The coyotes moved into the brush and disappeared, and Lorenza hurried back into her house. I should have realized the falling body meant an actual death, she chided herself. How much more danger lies in store for Sonny?

  She hurried into the consultation room. She gasped when she saw the candle wasn’t burning. Quickly she took a match and lit it. Perhaps it wasn’t too late. Black smoke rose to form an ominous cloud, a dark mushroom cloud, no, the shape of a black balloon. There was death in the sky.

  Rita felt the same disquietude as she and Sonny drove out of Corrales and south on Coors. She looked at Sonny, sensed his concern.

  Above them, many of the balloons floated west toward Petroglyph Park on the volcanic escarpment of the West Mesa. They would land in the empty spaces of the mesa, coming to soft and safe landings in the wild grass and sage. But for Sonny and Rita the peace and beauty of the flight had been shattered.

  “I saw a body falling in my vision,” he said, “then a few minutes later Howard calls.”

  “You saw Veronica’s death during the limpieza,” she said. “Do you think Raven would return to kill
her?”

  “Yes. Now I know why Lorenza said to keep my feet on the ground.”

  And, he thought, so did don Eliseo. “Keep your feet on la tierra,” the old man had said. “Leave the flying to the astronauts. They are flying up there because they want to escape from our madre tierra. We must stay and take care of her. There is no other mother.”

  Ahead of them he saw the flashing lights of the police cars. Traffic on Coors had slowed to a crawl, and the dirt road to the river bosque was blocked off. Sonny turned onto it and stopped at the roadblock. One of the cops there recognized Sonny.

  Jerry Candelaria usually worked narcotics at the airport and the train depot, but today, in plainclothes, he was standing next to the uniformed officer diverting the television vans and other reporters off to the side.

  “Hey, Sonny, out for a drive?” Jerry asked, looking into Sonny’s truck, also greeting Rita.

  “Qué tal,” Sonny replied. “What happened?”

  “We have a very dead woman. I haven’t seen the body, but I heard it’s gruesome.”

  What the hell was a plainclothes narc doing at the scene of an accident? Sonny wondered. “You smell drugs?” he asked.

  “Nah, I was just driving by. I live nearby,” Jerry replied. “Just thought I’d help out.”

  “Qué pasó?” Sonny asked. He wasn’t in the mood for chatter, but he knew cops. One needed to go around, not straight to the point, to get anything from them.

  “The DA’s witness fell from a balloon. She’s dead, and Schwartz is pissed. That’s all I know. Were you invited?”

  “Howard called me,” Sonny said, nodding. Jerry looked at the cop in uniform, who stepped aside.

  “Take care, bro,” Jerry said, then stepped back and waved them through.

  Police cars were parked along the shoulder of the dirt road. Sonny pulled over near the tree line, and he and Rita followed the sandy path into the bosque. The path continued under a canopy of trees, then opened up into a large, clear area. A brush fire had burned this area clear a few years ago, and the trees hadn’t yet reclaimed it. The place where the body of Veronica Worthy lay was cordoned off.