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

  “Deeper?”

  “The curanderas were reluctant to talk about witchcraft.”

  “Por qué?”

  “What they knew they only shared with each other. In other words, those beliefs and teachings had gone underground. The old people were afraid outsiders would find out and some reporter would come poking around and write half-baked stories. In the pueblos the Indians stop them at the gate. Anthropologists and reporters have written terrible things about the subject. Crazy articles. Some wrote books. They knew nothing of curanderismo, but publishers were paying for their junk.”

  “So they went underground,” Sonny said.

  “Yes. One of the curanderas, I think her name was doña Agapita, advised Lorenza to go to Mexico. She went to Tlaxcala, and that’s where—”

  She paused.

  “Go on.”

  “She found the brujos, men who could fly.”

  Sonny’s eyebrows knit. “You believe it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So she learned to—”

  “Yes. They recognized her power. I guess you’re born with the power of the witch or not. They knew she had it, so they took her into their confidence. She lived in the village at the foot of the mountain with rainmakers, conjurers who can affect the weather, weathermakers who could bring rain or stop hailstorms, men who prayed to and believed in la Malintzi—”

  “La Malinche?” Sonny interrupted. “The consort of Cortes?”

  “No, not Malinche. Malintzi, the spirit of the mountain. Lorenza learned from hechiceros, the powerful brujos who worked white and black sorcery, those born with the gift of inner vision. They could cast spells; they could kill.”

  Raven casting spells, Sonny thought, the body falling from the sky. He had seen it. Lorenza had led him to see what Raven was up to. How could he doubt?

  “She learned from the people who could transform themselves into animals,” Rita finished.

  Was that Lorenza’s magic? She’d taken him into the world of the naguales.

  “Transform into animals? You sure that’s what she said?”

  “Yes. Those sorcerers are the most powerful people in the world of brujeria. They’re dangerous, because in their animal form they acquire tremendous power.”

  “She found her animal spirit.”

  “It nearly killed her,” Rita said. “I saw her when she returned from Mexico. She was nearly dead, a bag of bones, thin and brown as a salt cedar. Her eyes were glazed. She had looked into another world. She touched me and I felt the electricity, and even as near death as she was, she felt my stomach, pinched hard, and drew something out. I hadn’t told her I had been having real bad stomach pains, and my doctor said he needed to operate, but whatever it was, she pulled it out, just like that. Like you would pick a rock from a stream, dripping wet. But I was cured. Then she fell into a deep sleep. It took months for her to come back.”

  “Back from where?” Sonny asked.

  “That other world. The world of the nagual …” Her words were barely perceptible.

  “Sounds like that guy Don Juan. Yaquí magic.” He chuckled.

  “Don’t laugh,” Rita cautioned. “Lorenza’s for real. And we don’t have to go to the desert of Sonora for our beliefs. They’re right here in the valley, all around us.”

  Sonny looked at her and a slight shiver went down his back. He knew when Rita was serious. And much of what she said about the place were things don Eliseo told him. The Río Grande valley was a sacred place, full of ancient spirits. Full of knowledge.

  “Yes, here,” he mused.

  “You know the stories people used to tell. About witches who took the form of owls or coyotes. Witches transformed into large balls of fire and seen dancing in evil places.”

  Sonny nodded. “I heard plenty of cuentos from my abuelos, and from my parents.”

  He thought of a story his father used to tell. Two men were on their way home from selling their cattle. Late at night they found themselves on a deserted llano, and then they came to a lighted hut. The hut belonged to two old women, so the men asked permission to spend the night. The men were suspicious of the two women, so they pretended to sleep. Late in the night they watched as the two women put unguents on their bodies, danced, sang, washed themselves in a tub. They turned themselves into owls and flew up the chimney. The two men wanted to know if what they saw was witchcraft or a dream, so they rose, covered themselves with the witches’ unguents, repeated the dance they had seen, and turned into owls. They flew up the chimney to the rooftop. From there they saw a gathering of owls in the dark night, presumably a gathering of witches.

  A large, black cat suddenly appeared and attacked the owls, snarling and scratching. The two men watched, and realizing they might be attacked by the cat, they flew back down the chimney and washed away the unguents in the large tub of water. They turned back to their human form. Just as they got in bed, the two women returned, blood covering their feathers. They, too, bathed in the tub. The two men watched, terrified, as the two women returned to their human forms and likewise went to bed.

  As a boy, Sonny was awed by this story. He thought his father told the story to entertain him and his brother, Armando, but as he grew older, he thought more and more about it. Did his father tell the story to Sonny and his brother to teach them something?

  Sonny remembered his father lowering his voice when he finished the story. “In the morning when the two women invited the men to stay for breakfast, their hands and faces bore the fresh scratch marks of a cat.”

  Was the story a warning about women? Puberty had come, and like the other boys, Sonny and Armando were looking at girlie magazines some of their friends sneaked from their older brothers and wondering about the mysterious world of sex.

  “Always wear your scapular,” he remembered his mother adding at the end of the story. “It will keep you safe.”

  He had made his first holy communion when he was seven. The scapular became frayed, worn, and dark with body sweat. Finally, he lost it, one summer day when he went swimming in the river. He and the gang of friends had stripped and thrown their clothes on the river willows. Sonny had hung the scapular with care on the limb of an old dead cottonwood tree branch. The tree was white, like bone, its bark long ago peeled away. Perhaps it had been hit by lightning, and now it lay on the sandy bank of the river. When they came out of the water, the scapular was gone. Sonny and his friends searched, but it was gone.

  Now as Sonny remembered losing the scapular, he felt chilled. He had believed that the scapular protected him, and without it he was vulnerable. The protection of the church and its saints was gone. But he had shrugged it off. What the hell, it was only a piece of string with the image of St. Christopher on one side, the Virgen de Guadalupe on the other. He had worn it a year, longer than most of the other kids in his gang, and then it was gone. So what?

  “The two men?” Sonny had asked his father. “Did they have protection?”

  “A pistol,” his father answered. That was the night he told Sonny that when he died Sonny would inherit the .45-caliber Colt of the Bisabuelo, Elfego Baca, their great-grandfather and one of the most famous lawmen of the turn of the century in wild New Mexico.

  He showed the pistol to Sonny and Armando. “This will keep you safe,” he said.

  “Why Sonny?” Armando asked, jealous.

  “He’s the oldest,” the father replied.

  “But we’re twins,” Armando insisted.

  “He was born first,” his father said.

  Firstborn, inheritor of the pistol of Elfego Baca!

  Sonny’s jaw dropped. It was a moment of magic—to touch the pistol of Elfego Baca, his great-grandfather, the man known in stories as el Bisabuelo. The pistol had been in the family for years, and now their father said it would be passed down to Sonny.

  “Having a gun in the house is dangerous,” Sonny’s mother protested.

  “All power is dangerous,” his father answered. “This is how my grandfather kept law
and order. This is how he kept the abusive Tejanos from mistreating the Mexicanos.”

  His mother shook her head. “I don’t like it.”

  “The world is violent,” his father said to Sonny and Armando. “You have to protect yourselves. But never, never aim the pistol unless you are going to use it. We are not here to take anyone’s life. But you have to protect yourselves.”

  “A bullet cannot stop evil,” his mother said resolutely.

  “It can if it has a cross scratched on it,” his father had responded.

  Why am I remembering these stories? Sonny thought. Did it have something to do with the limpieza? In spite of viewing Veronica’s body, he felt incredibly light and free of the dark thoughts that had been oppressing him. The thoughts of that scene with his father rose so clear, like a vivid dream.

  Today, when Lorenza first ran the eagle feather across his stomach, he felt the same sensation as he had in June when Veronica cut a Zia sign around his navel. The cut, even though it was just skin deep, had left a scar. The round sun and the four radiating lines of the scar remained a constant irritant.

  For Rita the scar was an outward sign of the ghost within. Raven and his cult had cursed him. That’s why he had finally agreed to see Lorenza.

  She had put the eagle feather aside and pressed at his navel. Sonny felt an urge. He groaned, “Ahhh.”

  “There is a dark bird pecking at your soul—”

  A dark bird? Raven, he thought. Sonofabitching Raven was still hanging around with his hocus-pocus.

  “You need to go on a journey,” she whispered.

  Where? He wondered, then said, “Vamos.”

  He had loved Gloria. She was more than his cousin, she was the first woman he had ever made love to. Did her spirit cling to Sonny because she wanted revenge for her murder? Or was Raven capable of manipulating Gloria’s ghost to harm Sonny?

  “Tell me what you see,” Lorenza said.

  Two persons in the curandera. Lorenza and someone else. Was that other entity he sensed the nagual Rita alluded to? He saw the eye of a bird. An owl from the Nile of Egypt. Which eye will heal me? Sonny wondered.

  He told Lorenza his story. It happened one early June morning. He remembered the date clearly. The Dukes were playing that night, and he had planned to go to the baseball game. It was the same day don Eliseo, his octogenarian neighbor, had picked to cut down the old cottonwood in his front yard. Then the phone call came that Gloria Dominic had been murdered. Gloria’s mother, his tía Delfina, had called and he had driven her to Gloria’s house.

  Everyone was there: Gloria’s husband, Frank Dominic, who was running for mayor, intent on being the political power in the city, in the state; police chief Garcia, an old friend of Dominic’s and a constant thorn in the side of the private investigators in town; Howard Powdrell, número uno forensics man with the city police crime lab, and Sonny’s compadre. Without Howard’s help Sonny couldn’t have solved the crime.

  “Find my daughter’s murderer,” Tía Delfina had cried, stuffing a few crumpled dollar bills into Sonny’s hands.

  But he didn’t solve the murder just for his aunt, he solved it for himself. Gloria was his cousin, a beautiful and talented woman, and once, only once, she had given herself to him.

  That was it, but the memory lingered. Years later she married Frank Dominic, and together they set out to rule the city. She didn’t love Frank, but there they were, on the surface the perfect couple, wealthy, planning the great downtown renewal that would bring a canal water system to the area, making the city a Venice on the Río Grande.

  But Gloria wasn’t happy, and she wasn’t well. She fell under the spell of Tamara Dubronsky, a forty-year-old widow of enticing charm, a cosmopolitan beauty who intrigued the natives. The mystical Tamara was psychic. She told people their fortunes, raised money for the city symphony, and as Sonny found out, she was the sun queen, leader of the Zia cult, the group that murdered Gloria.

  4

  “Qué piensas?” Rita asked, drawing Sonny from his thoughts.

  “Raven.”

  “He’s dangerous.” She shivered.

  Raven had been Tamara’s lover. Had he come to rescue her? The FBI was still looking for him for trying to bomb a truck carrying high-level plutonium waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant site in Carlsbad. The WIPP mines were huge caverns dug into the salt beds of the area, a billion-dollar industry for the region.

  Small towns without any industry to support the economy were turning their land over to the feds to store radioactive waste, and now even the Mescalero Indians were plotting a private dump for the poison. Storing nuclear waste had become big business.

  “Do you think Tamara’s still with him?” Rita asked.

  “I don’t think so. Tamara’s too smart to have anything to do with anyone in trouble with the law. Raven used her to get the money to buy explosives and equipment. When they found out Gloria was carrying half a million she had extorted from Akira Morino, they killed her.”

  But who gave the orders to kill Gloria? Raven or Tamara?

  Sonny figured Tamara wouldn’t dirty her hands in blood, so Veronica killed Gloria. They drained her blood, mixed it with earth in a vase, and offered it to the sun so Raven would succeed in blowing up the WIPP truck.

  Sonny had stopped him. On the small bridge that crossed the rain-swollen Arroyo del Sol on the east side of the Sandia Mountains, Sonny, Rita, and Jose Escobar had come upon Raven in time to stop the dynamiting of the WIPP truck.

  In the struggle that ensued, Raven fell into the arroyo. The flood carried his body away. Buried in the tons of sand somewhere, the state cops theorized, after their search didn’t come up with a body.

  Now Sonny knew better. Raven had survived. Somehow he had survived the flood and was alive. He was out there now. Maybe it was Raven’s dark powers Lorenza had to cleanse away. That’s why he needed to go deeper, to get past Gloria’s spirit and get to Raven.

  Sonny remembered visiting Raven’s compound on the east side of the Sandia Mountains near La Cueva. Raven’s women were four enslaved souls who constituted the Zia cult. And how did the handsome and quite charismatic Raven keep the four women to do his bidding? He offered them sex. Sex with the sun king, Raven, keeper of the medallion of the sun, the same Zia medallion Sonny had ripped from his neck before Raven fell into the arroyo.

  Tamara had joined Raven’s crazy plan because she feared a nuclear holocaust; she feared the cold winter that would envelop the earth after a nuclear war. Unfounded fears? The Cold War was over. Not for a woman like Tamara who had lived through cruel deprivations as a child. She had once told Sonny her Gypsy mother had to sell her body to keep the young Tamara alive.

  The DA made a deal for Veronica to turn state’s evidence. The DA wanted to bust Tamara Dubronsky. Veronica was a small-fry, and Tamara a shark, and implicating her in the murder meant good press coverage, headlines that helped political careers down the line. If Tamara Dubronsky went up on murder one charges, the trial could turn into one of the most spectacular the state had ever witnessed.

  “Tell me about Gloria,” Lorenza Villa had asked.

  He told her what he had seen. The pale, naked body of Gloria Dominic on the bed. When he saw it, he felt something in the room.

  “Something cold,” he said. He didn’t know how to explain it.

  “Were you afraid?” Lorenza asked.

  Sonny hated to admit it, but he nodded. Yes, he had been afraid.

  “You felt the soul of the dead woman,” Lorenza said. Sonny didn’t believe in ghosts. He had seen Lorenza in June, a short visit, and that’s what she said then, but his cynicism, something he felt he had acquired during his university education, kept him from going through the cleansing ceremony she had proposed then.

  But three months of bad dreams and disorientation had persuaded him to try the cure, to try the old way of dealing with the dark energies eating away at him.

  “It’s susto,” Lorenza
said. “You were shocked by her death.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve seen dead people before,” Sonny said.

  “But you were very close to Gloria.”

  Sonny nodded.

  “She had just died,” Lorenza said. “Her soul was in the room. This is the way it happens. The body dies but the soul lingers. It has unfinished business. A powerful woman possesses a powerful soul.”

  And Sonny, she knew, for all his bravado and machismo, was a sensitive soul. He was a man who drew souls to him. Gloria’s spirit had invaded his, and it was still drawing on his energy.

  “Why so deep in thought?” Rita asked.

  “Sorry, I was just thinking. Lorenza asked me if I was psychic.”

  “You are,” Rita said.

  “No, I’m not. She asked if I had had a past-life experience or caught a glimpse of the future.”

  Rita waited.

  “I told her maybe. Maybe when I was a kid.”

  “Go on.” Rita encouraged him softly.

  “I used to hear voices. Or I thought I heard voices when I was a kid. My parents used to take me and Armando to visit my abuelos down in Socorro. Armando went off to smoke cigarettes at the pool hall. I wandered alone into the river bosque. I thought it was a scary place to be, but something pulled me down there. I would walk, sit, listen to the trees, the river, the animals …”

  “What animals?” she asked.

  “Coyotes,” he replied. “The river coyotes.”

  “Did the coyotes run from you?”

  “No. That was strange. My abuelo said the coyote doesn’t trust anyone. He’s been hunted too long, so he doesn’t trust man. They had a den there by the river. There was a spring flowing into the river, a grassy open area, and a huge, fallen cottonwood tree. Under the alamo they had their den. When I found the place, I thought they would run, but they didn’t. I would spend hours watching them play with their young. I told my abuelo about the coyotes, and he looked at me kind of strange and said I was blessed. I guess he meant the animals trusted me.”