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

  Sonny cocked his ear and sniffed the air to catch the scents of the dark bosque. Decay was in the air. A few gold and brown leaves had already fallen to the ground. In the next few weeks the cold nights and shorter days would turn the entire bosque yellow.

  Wait! There was another scent in the air. Food. Somewhere a pot of beans was simmering. He smelled fresh coffee. Yes, he had been right.

  He stood still, heard someone breathing, out there, just beyond the beam of the flashlight. His flesh crawled with goose bumps. The shadow ran and Sonny stumbled after it, entering a narrow path.

  Branches whipped at his face, cut at his arms, and still he pursued the sound ahead of him. How strange, he thought, that he should be pursuing the creature in the dark instead of the other way around. If the shadow was the legendary Llorona, she should be chasing him.

  The weak beam of his flashlight didn’t reveal the trip wire on the path, and when Sonny hit it, a giant creature came swinging at him from a tree branch, knocking him over. Sonny cried out and struck back at the huge shape. The grotesque face of the creature that dangled from the tree groaned, then swung back. The long thin arms of the creature whipped at Sonny, flopping crazily.

  Sonny leaped to his feet, his heart pounding. “Pinche mono,” he cursed.

  He leaned against a tree and pointed the light at the figure swinging from the tree. The misshapen head was white, its eyes a bright orange, its hair the bark of withered branches. It swung back and forth, toward Sonny then away.

  Sonny pointed his light at the hanging effigy. Someone had placed the trip wire to release the large puppet guarding the path. Someone didn’t want visitors, he thought as he wiped sweat from his forehead.

  It had almost worked. When the dangling puppet jumped out at him, he had been thinking of la Llorona, and for a moment she had come alive. Whoever had planted the swinging figure had done a good job. The expression “scared shitless” came to mind.

  “Admit it, Baca, you almost ran.” He smiled. He poked the face of the giant puppet with his light. “Buenas noches, don Coco. What are you doing out so late at night? You’re ugly enough to terrorize the weakhearted.”

  He wondered if he should forge ahead. Maybe the next trap would be a swinging sword, something to lop off the head of those who didn’t pay attention to Mr. Coco. He wasn’t welcome; no one was welcome in this dark part of the bosque.

  The silence was eerie.

  He heard a rustle behind him, turned, and flashed the light at the shadow he had been chasing.

  “Come out,” Sonny said. “I’m not a cop.”

  There was a wait, then a voice said, “Go back, hermano. You’re not welcome here.”

  “I want to talk,” Sonny answered, aiming the light slowly from tree to tree.

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” the voice replied, this time farther to the right. Sonny turned but could see nothing.

  “A woman was killed near here today, that’s something to talk about,” Sonny insisted.

  There was a silence, and then the voice again. “What difference does it make?”

  Yeah, Sonny thought, what difference does it make? Veronica was a murderer, and justice had been served.

  “It matters,” Sonny answered.

  Another long silence, then the voice said, “Turn off the light.”

  Sonny turned off his flashlight. The dark under the cottonwood branches was almost complete. Somewhere down the path, in the darkness, he thought he saw the glow of a fire. He waited. Whoever it was moved, circling Sonny, moving closer, until he stood before Sonny.

  “Why does it matter?” the man asked.

  Sonny peered into the dark. He realized the man he was talking to must be one of the homeless people who lived along the river bottom. Up and down the river bosque, they constructed huts of old boards, tin scraps, and cardboard. They went into the city only for food, returning to live all summer in the brush, away from the society that shunned them. It was October, and most had already moved to the shelters downtown. Some had begun to move to Arizona and southern California for the winter. A few stayed put, making the cottonwood forest their home even through the winter.

  “Anyone dies, we should care,” Sonny answered.

  “The poor die every day, hermano, and no one cares,” the man replied.

  He was right. More and more homeless were pushed to the edges of society, stripped of their dignity, made refugees. They became shadows in the streets of the city, the living dead everyone pretended not to see. The homeless died every day, and nobody gave a damn.

  “Who are you?” Sonny asked, anxious to turn on the light and see the face of the man, but knowing that would spook him.

  “Diego,” the man answered. “Y tú?”

  “Sonny Baca,” Sonny answered, and held out his hand in the darkness. He felt Diego take his hand. His eyes were getting accustomed to the darkness; he could see the man.

  “Sonny Baca,” Diego pondered. “Not the vato who was in the news?”

  “I’m a private investigator,” Sonny answered.

  “Chingao. I should have known, carnal. Only someone like you would come in here.”

  There was a pause. Sonny felt the man’s uneasiness. They didn’t want to be found out, and he had found them.

  “Bueno,” he finally said. “Come meet my familia.”

  Sonny followed him down the winding path of the bosque until they came to a clearing where a small, protected campfire glowed. They didn’t want it spotted by the cops; they didn’t want to be harassed. Around the campfire the figures of three men and one woman waited.

  “We heard you shout,” one of the men said, and stepped forward.

  “I found a man not afraid of el Coco,” Diego replied as they walked into the light of the fire.

  The men looked searchingly at Sonny. Someone coming this late into the camp usually meant no good.

  “This is Sonny Baca,” Diego said. “The detective who was in the paper this summer.” Diego introduced him. “We keep up with the news, hermano. This is my wife, Marta. Our daughter Cristina is sleeping in the tent.”

  Marta shyly held out her hand. “We have coffee,” she said.

  Sonny shook her hand and thanked her.

  “Here’s the other compas,” Diego said. “Peewee. He used to be big in computers in the Silicon Valley. He’s a Reagan trickle-down statistic. Got laid off and found it’s hard to get a new job at fifty. He didn’t have any CDs to cash in, so to make a long story short, he’s homeless.”

  Peewee greeted Sonny. “Sonny Baca, gee, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Diego read the news stories on the case you were involved in this summer. Wouldn’t let us rest until he read every last news item. And I do have a home,” he corrected Diego.

  Diego slapped him on the back. “Yes. This is home. This is Busboy,” Diego introduced the young man of the group. “High school dropout, no skills, so he washes dishes when he can.”

  Busboy smiled and shook Sonny’s hand.

  “And this is Peter,” Diego said of the older, dignified man who stood by the fire. “He’s a news addict. Listens to the evening news, then tells us what’s going on in the world. We have to listen, we’re his disciples.”

  Peter took Sonny’s hand warmly. “Any friend of Diego’s is a friend of ours. Sit, please. We have only an old box to offer you, but among friends it is a chair fit for a king. And Marta’s coffee is fit for the gods.”

  He drew a box for Sonny, and Marta handed him the cup she had poured from the coffeepot on the coals.

  “What brings you to our humble abode?” Peter asked.

  “He wants to know about the woman,” Diego said, and the others looked at each other nervously.

  “How did you know about us?” Peter asked.

  “I followed a hunch,” Sonny replied, not explaining he had sensed them in the bosque. He knew the homeless had camps along the bosque, and when he saw the shadows in the brush, he guessed one of the groups had reported Veronica’s death.
br />   “We don’t want anything to do with the cops,” Diego said. “They find out and they’ll come down and kick us out. Then we have no place to go. We’re settled here; we just don’t want anything to do with the cops.”

  The others nodded.

  “I know,” Sonny said, “but there’s been a murder. If you saw it, you are involved.”

  He sat and told them about the woman who had been killed that morning and about her role in Gloria Dominic’s murder.

  “We’re sorry about that,” Peter spoke when Sonny was done, “but we just don’t want to be involved. We were once. I worked in television in southern California. I had a good career. But—” He paused. “Let’s just say that those with power over me didn’t like what I was digging into. I planned a show on the murder of Rubén Salazar.”

  “The Chicano reporter killed at the Silver Dollar Cafe twenty-five years ago,” Diego said. “During the Vietnam Moratorium march in East Los. They murdered him.”

  Peter nodded. “It appears so. He was covering the Chicano movimiento for the LA Times. Anyway, those in power don’t want Chicanos to realize they have muscle in numbers. Salazar was being followed by LA County sheriff’s deputies. They knew he was in the Silver Dollar. He was fingered by a Cuban agent. Or a Colombian.”

  “Drugs involved?” Sonny asked. He knew the Salazar story, how the murder had been swept under. He had a friend, Ricardo, in LA, who had produced a play around the tragic events of Salazar’s death. He had dug up a lot of dirt, and for that the county sheriff had made life tough on him.

  “From Colombia to LA, a direct line. Salazar was about to crack the story. They killed him. I was about to expose what I had learned when I got fired and blacklisted.”

  He paused. All grew silent.

  Sonny sighed and sipped his coffee. That’s how it was. The organizations dealing in dope could silence anyone.

  He looked at the group huddled around the fire. Anyone could be silenced, and he didn’t want to bring danger into their lives.

  He also knew whatever he said wouldn’t make the reality of their lives vanish. Living in the cardboard boxes, scrounging food, working odd jobs, and like Diego and Marta, raising a child to whom they could promise no future—it wasn’t easy.

  “You don’t have to tell the cops, tell me,” Sonny said.

  “And you won’t tell the cops?” Diego asked. He stared at Sonny across the bright glow of the campfire.

  Sonny shook his head. “I can’t promise.” He knew that somewhere along the line he might have to tell Garcia.

  “Pues, hay ’stá,” Diego slapped his knee. “What we say tonight can be in the papers tomorrow.” He looked at Busboy. “What do you say, hijo?”

  Busboy squirmed. A young man of nineteen or twenty, he scratched the stubble on his cheek and spoke.

  “I don’t know. I wish I had never seen the black balloon. I knew it wasn’t good. But I got in trouble with gangs at school for saying what I knew was true. The worst thing to be is a snitch.”

  “What school did you attend?” Sonny asked.

  “Río Grande.”

  “I graduated from Rio,” Sonny said.

  “Yeah?” Busboy said. He was impressed. Here was someone who did something exciting for a living, and they had gone to the same school. “I dropped out,” he said sadly. “Had to help my family, and I never was good at reading. I could get jobs in fast-food places, but I could never work my way out of those.”

  Yeah, Sonny knew.

  “But we know the truth shall make us free,” Peter said, and stood. “There are some events we don’t create in life. They come to us and force us to confront ourselves.” He looked around at his friends. “I think we have to tell Sonny what we know.”

  Diego turned to his wife. She had remained silent. Perhaps of the group, she suffered most. She was a woman who could not offer her child the security of a real home. She could not buy her dolls, or a piece of candy, or a notebook and crayons on the first day of school. The men struggled against the world, and she against the future and the deep pain within. It weighed on her every breathing moment.

  She looked at her husband. “Always you tell me, Diego, that we must not be afraid. We are free people. We have so little, but we are free. Others may be afraid of losing what they have, but we have only our dignity to lose. We must not be afraid.”

  Diego smiled at her. He looked at his friends and nodded. “Okay, Sonny, we’ll tell you what we know.” He looked at the others and they nodded.

  Diego poured himself a cup of coffee and sat on a crate across from Sonny. The light from the glowing embers cast serious shadows on his face.

  “We were on our way to the Christian home near the church. Going for winter coats. We saw the balloons on the other side of the river and stopped to watch. But one black balloon came directly over the trees on this side. It seemed to come up from the river. It was low enough for us to see the man and woman in it. When it cleared the trees, we saw the man strike the woman. Then he pushed her over.”

  “It was murder, plain and cold,” Peter added.

  “The woman fell and we ran to her. She was dead. You saw how she died.”

  Sonny nodded. “Did you get a look at the man?”

  “He looked over the edge of the gondola, so we got a good look. He was young, maybe your age. Dark hair.”

  “Long hair, like in a ponytail,” Busboy said.

  “One side of his face looked like it was burned,” Diego said.

  “Burned?”

  “Yeah, like one side was deformed.”

  “Did he see you?” Sonny asked.

  “That’s why we’re afraid,” Peter said. “He saw us run toward the woman.”

  Yes, Sonny thought, they had reason to be afraid. They were witnesses, and Raven didn’t like to leave witnesses. The effigy figure with which they blocked the path would not keep him away.

  8

  When Sonny returned home, it was after midnight. He had told his new friends Raven’s story. They had to know what they might be getting into. Raven had murdered Veronica, and Diego’s family had witnessed it. Sonny realized they were in danger.

  But why would Raven try to save Tamara from her day in court? Didn’t he realize Tamara wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole after the aborted WIPP fiasco in June? She was a survivor, and she would do anything to save herself. Maybe Tamara had Gloria’s money. Raven needed the money to get out of the country, or maybe, just maybe, he was crazy enough to plan a second attack on WIPP.

  Had Tamara arranged for Raven to bail out Veronica and waste her? Ah, Sonny thought, as much as I dread it, sooner or later I have to talk to her.

  As he opened the door to his house, Sonny felt the strain of the day’s tension in his shoulders. The ceremony with Lorenza Villa had created an inner peace he had not felt in a long time. The journey through Gloria’s body, the tunnel to the underworld, had been frightening, but the meadow and the coyotes had been uplifting, filling him with energy. But all that had dissipated.

  Maybe in a world of violence it was impossible to retain an inner harmony. He learned from don Eliseo and Rita, and now from Lorenza, that keeping the soul in harmony was a constant struggle. The soul was fragile, it could be fragmented, any trauma or shock could weaken it. Other souls could invade or cling to it, as Gloria’s soul had invaded his.

  The curandera cleansed away those spirits or energies that became attached to the soul; the shaman could fly in search of the lost soul.

  “Damn, how did I get mixed up in this again?” Sonny mumbled, then hesitated as he put his key to the doorknob. He slowly drew back. His sixth sense warned him someone was in the house or had just been here.

  Don Eliseo, he thought. The old man came to check on me. No, it was someone else. Sonny thought back to the night in June when he and Rita arrived at her home to find the goat’s testicles nailed to Rita’s porch. It was the first warning from the Zia cult. Now a sensation along the back of his neck felt as it had that ni
ght.

  He turned, checked the dirt road for strange vehicles, but no, only the neighbors’ cars and trucks rested under the cold October moonlight. All was quiet on La Paz Lane. Across the street even don Eliseo’s house was dark. The old man was already asleep.

  Sonny shivered in the cool night air, then whistling softly “Hey, Baby, qué pasó,” he returned to his truck and took his pistol from the glove compartment. The old single-action Colt. Tonight he was going to be armed.

  He entered the front room slowly and flipped on the lights. Everything was in place, but he was sure he felt someone’s presence. He walked into the kitchen, turned on the light, and again found everything in place, but he still felt the tingling sensation that danger was near.

  He thought of checking his bedroom, then shrugged. “Chingao, I’m getting paranoid. Too much talk about ghosts.”

  He placed the pistol on the kitchen counter and reached into the cabinet where he kept a bottle. As he poured himself a shot of bourbon, he felt the gold medallion beneath his shirt. He felt a strange power from it, a feeling of invincibility. As long as he wore the medallion, he felt safe. He had worn it all summer.

  It was a valuable and unique piece of gold, he rationalized, and he had to keep it safe. Besides, it really wasn’t his. It was state’s evidence—or it used to be state’s evidence. Now there would be no trial. Maybe, as Tamara had said, it really did belong to him.

  “Pues, here’s to Raven.” He chuckled, and downed the drink. He winced at the burning, coughed, remembered the afternoon Tamara invited him to her bedroom, the sanctuary of the goddess of love, the Zia cult queen. She served wine spiked with peyote buttons so the journey into her past lives would be heightened. Señor Peyote, that brujo who lived in the plant, would help transport her into her past lives. So would sex. The orgasm, she had told Sonny, was her channel into past lives, and therefore a twisted sort of immortality.

  But Sonny said no. He got as far as the door to her bedroom and turned back.

  “You are so old-fashioned,” she teased him. “Keep your woman, I don’t mind. Come and see me when you want. We are old souls, darling, we belong together. You do not understand how deep my love is for you. Go for now, darling. We will meet again. Our love cannot be denied. I am always near you.”