“Brujos can fly,” don Eliseo said.
I am a brujo, Sonny thought. For my spirit to fly is nothing new. I fly in dreams, I fly in love, I fly in the morning when the light of the Señores y Señoras de la Luz fills my soul with clarity. I fly in beauty, the beauty of the land I love, the people, the sounds, sights, and smell of all that I am. I am beginning to find my power.
He had found it when he faced Raven; he could find it again.
“The medicine,” Lorenza called again.
He reached for his leather pouch that contained the coyote hairs, and for the Zia medallion. His medicine was intact, it was with him.
He looked down and saw the medics working over his frozen, naked body. Garcia. Diego. Someone was leading Madge out of the room. Head bowed. He smiled in relief. Garcia had come in time, just like a good cop should. Like old Elfego Baca had always done.
Sonny’s soul was in the room, looking down at his body from this distance, with a clarity of light he knew don Eliseo would appreciate.
No more worries, only the transcendent bubble of light he had become. He was watching his death and he was smiling. Images. Good thoughts. A buoyant feeling, like a bright yellow hot-air balloon, a sunflower caught in the breeze of October, a bright marigold, everything suddenly not separated but together. Thank you, don Eliseo, for bringing me along this path of light. Thank you, Lorenza, for leading me into the world of my guardian spirits, the world alive with talking trees, river murmurs, mountain advice, butterfly souls, bluebird songs of wisdom, seeds of grass, words of the poet, cry of child, sound of door banging.… He had become a ghost, and the ghost was overcome by the beauty of colors and sounds all around him. Death, if that’s what had crawled into his body, was not fearful. Death was a light that released the soul, death was a wind mourning around the corners of the earth, singing around the four cosmic corners of the universe. Far beyond the sun the wind blew and carried the souls. Somewhere in the soft breeze he saw the image of his father. He wanted to reach out and embrace his father, but the spirit of the man drew back.
Sonny’s soul rose like a gold balloon into the light of the sun.… And there, coming toward him, also smiling, was Rita. She was dressed in white, the flowing silk of a bridal gown, the lace on her head flowing in the wind as she ran to meet him. She was shining bright, her lips as red as the succulent prickly pears of the New Mexican cactus. Her eyes full of light, honey light, her hair dark as a summer night, glistening with moonlight, the drone of cicadas her music. He opened his arms to greet her. Yes, it was time to marry her, time to settle down. He had come home. She stood in front of him, smiling, asking how she looked, looking at him shyly, and he told her she looked beautiful as a summer morning in the Jemez Mountains, and the wedding party laughed, called him a poet, needling him. Sonny Baca, the great all-time bachelor, lover of the North Valley women, he who had lived hard, loved hard, and danced hard, was finally getting married. Even his ex-girlfriends were there, standing like good losers in the background, for after all, they respected Rita. She had won, fair and square, or maybe not so square because they suspected she had used some of Lorenza’s love potions to land him. But they stood quietly, remembering perhaps a long-ago night they had shared with Sonny.
“You look beautiful, too,” Rita said, and Sonny looked down at his pants, his tuxedo jacket, the white silk shirt, his favorite turquoise bolo tie, the tie his father had given him long ago.
“I should be wearing my black hat,” he joked.
“I brought your hat,” she said.
“You think of everything,” he said, putting on his hat.
“Now you look like one of those cowboys in the movies,” she teased.
“The only dogie I want to rope is you,” he teased back. Lordy, Lordy, he was happy.
He looked from her to the people. Everybody was there. Everybody he knew and loved. Howard and Marie and their daughter. Diego and his family, the chief, all the old compañeros. Even los vatos locos from the South Valley, the old veteranos who had taught him that life was to be lived hard.
Now the party turned solemn. Don Eliseo, dressed in a dark suit, stepped forward, cleared his throat, uttered, “We are gathered to join Elfego Francisco Baca and Rita Lopez.” He paused. “If there is anyone present who thinks these souls should not be joined, let such a pendejo step forward,” don Eliseo intoned.
“His soul belongs to me,” la Muerte said. Don Eliseo and the wedding party turned to see the figure of Death, radiant in white, far more luminous than Rita. She held out her hand for Sonny to take. “We will walk this path.” She smiled, a smile so lovely that any man would have gladly followed. She was the spirit who launched a thousand ships, souls sailing the universal waters.
She pointed at the path of souls.
Better to die, Sonny remembered Tamara’s words, and reached for la Muerte.
“No!” Rita shouted. “I won’t let you have him! He’s mine! I worked hard for him! You have no claim to him! He belongs to me! I want to marry him, to grow old with him, to have his children! He will get well! I promise God and all the saints. His is the path of the sun, not the path of death!”
She pulled, and don Eliseo pulled, and Lorenza, and his mother, and Diego and his family, and old friends, all pulled, all formed a wall of protection around Sonny until la Muerte backed away and laughed. “You win! You win!” she cried. “It’s not his time to die!”
And Death turned and disappeared down the path of souls.
“Don’t die! Don’t die!” Rita cried. “I won’t let you die,” she whispered in his ear, her tears wetting his face, her arms cradling him. “Wake up, Sonny! Open your eyes! Don’t die!”
“Sonny! Return to this place you know!” don Eliseo commanded.
“The coyote spirits can help,” Lorenza whispered in his ear.
They were pointing the way. It was time to gather his soul and return to earth, this place, this love, this spirit living in the flesh.
In the dark whirlwind the coyotes appeared, dancing around his body, filling his soul with the energy it needed to return to the world. No, it was not time for him to die. Sonny entered the tunnel, returning from the underworld like a shower of golden light.
His eyelids fluttered.
“He’s opening his eyes!”
“Gracias a Dios.”
“Call the doctor!”
“Sonny?”
Sonny smiled. The icy cold in his muscles was gone, and in its place a fever. The coyotes cried in the distance.
He could hear Rita.
His eyes twitched again, blinked open. The tunnel was behind him; he was returning to the world he knew, the world of people. He was falling back to earth, back into his body.
“Sonny, oh, Sonny.” Rita soothed his forehead.
For a moment there was no pain, then the pain returned, like fragments of broken glass, glittering spears deep in his head. A headache. His eyelids fluttered, shut, desiring to turn off the exploding pain. The glare of light was intense. Returning to the body on the bed was to return to the world of pain. Even the light was painful.
“Better to die,” Tamara whispered.
“I won’t let you die,” Rita replied.
Not time to die, he tried to say, moving his lips. She touched a wet cloth to them. Dry, cracked, stiff, immobile like the rest of his body. He sucked, she touched a plastic straw to his lips. He gulped. Air and water. He was back on earth. His toes twitched, then his fingers.
“Oh, thank God, thank God!”
He couldn’t stop his eyelids from fluttering, blinking. The glass cut through his eyes.
“Ri—”
“Yes.”
“Wah—”
She gave him more water, and he sucked deep, emptying the large plastic cup, spilling it down his chin onto his chest. Cool. He gasped for air, farted, felt pee wetting the bed. God, I peed, he thought, smiling.
“Oh, Sonny, you’re back, you’re back,” she cried, and pressed her lips to his, warming him, w
etting him with warm tears.
Earth could be so good. Painful, but good.
Figures appeared behind her. Ah, yes, the wedding party. Did we get married, he tried to ask, but no words came.
The doctor who entered the room pulled Sonny’s eyelids back one at a time and shone a light in.
Hijo de tu chingada! Sonny tried screaming—but it came out a growl. He struck out with his right arm; instead, he felt the toe in his left foot wiggle. He cursed again and heard only a grunt. Damn! Nothing was connected! Nothing!
The doctor put a cold stethoscope to his chest, felt his pulse, poked. “Squeeze my finger.”
“Nagggh—”
“He spoke!” someone cried.
“He said something!”
“What?”
“Good sign, good sign.” The doctor patted him. “Now remember”—he was speaking to Rita and the others—“it’s going to take time. We don’t know what he can coordinate. His brain received a hell of a shock. It’s like a power surge hitting your computer, everything gets jumbled up. Understand? I’m not making any predictions, but with therapy and time …” He shook his head and walked out.
That’s where he was. In a hospital room. Alive. An image of Stammer applying the paddles to his head flashed through his mind. Madge. The baboon. Images flashed, jumbled, but a memory nevertheless. Tamara had saved him.
“Sonny,” don Eliseo whispered, “you’re alive, hijo. No te tocaba.” The old man kissed his forehead.
His mother was at his side, crying, leaning over him to touch him, to be close. “Gracias a Dios …”
Lorenza, the curandera who had been his guide into the world of the guardian spirits, stood by Rita.
“Who-ooooo,” he said.
“He’s trying to talk!”
I am talking, he tried to answer. His eyelids had quit their trembling, but the rest of his body was alive with twitches, hot pin pricks that made his nerves spasm, muscles jump.
“Sonny, can you hear me?”
“Yaaa.”
Don Eliseo looked from Rita to Lorenza and bent close to Sonny’s ear. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Agggh,” Sonny replied, the sound wrapped around his thick, dry tongue. But there was another sound, a clearer, more distinct sound. In his heart. In his soul. He had to reach for that. He had to try hard, concentrate all his energy, reach to join the sound in his soul with the stiff flesh of tongue, lips, throat.
“Saw—” he said with all his might. “Saw-ny.”
“Yes!”
“He said it!”
“Where do you live?” don Eliseo asked.
Sonny smiled. God, that was so easy. Everybody knew he lived in the North Valley, in Alburquerque, in New Mexico. Oh, the old man was playing games, testing him. Don Eliseo, after all, was a trickster. Okay. I’ll tell him where I live. He gathered the sounds in his thoughts and forced them to his tongue.
“Novo Mexic,” he said, and they cheered and kissed and hugged him.
“Yes!” Rita cried. “Novo Mexic! You live in Novo Mexic!”
He was returning to them.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Sonny Baca Novels
1
Sonny awakened with a cry tearing from his throat. “Aaaowl W’oooman!”
He reached for her, feeling she was within his reach, just beyond the luminous light of the doorway, but the dream was already fading.
“Híjola,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes and struggling to sit up. A dream, but it seemed so real.
He shivered. His bedroom was cold.
He looked around, half expecting to see the desert scene of the dream; instead, he was enveloped in the soft aura of a December dawn flooding through his window. He had startled Chica. She peered from the blankets where she lay snuggled, looking at him with an understanding expression.
“Qué pasa?” her seal-like eyes seemed to ask.
“It’s okay, Chica, just a dream,” he said, petted her, and lay back into his pillow.
Chica was the red dachshund that had appeared in the neighborhood. Don Eliseo, Sonny’s neighbor, took her in and fed her, but she insisted on making her home with Sonny.
“She’s lost,” the old man said. “I fed her, but she keeps coming to your door.”
“Let her stay,” Sonny said. Don Eliseo had set up a box for her to sleep in, but every night she jumped on the bed and burrowed beneath the blankets.
Sonny reached for the notebook on the bed stand. During the past few months his dreams had been very real, and don Eliseo had suggested that he record them. The old man was teaching Sonny how to construct his dreams.
“A person can actually be in charge of their dreams,” the old man said.
Sonny doubted him at first. Dreams were supposed to be incoherent, random images that came out of nowhere. Symbols that needed to be interpreted. How could one order one’s dreams?
“When you enter the dream, you leave this world,” don Eliseo replied. “The two worlds are connected by a luminous door. You are the master of your life in this world, so you can be the master of your dreams.”
Sonny followed his instructions, and he had become adept at it. Dreams that used to come as jumbled images now came as stories that somehow Sonny began to manipulate even as he dreamed.
“Let’s see,” he whispered, wetting the tip of the pencil with his tongue, and then began to record the dream.
In the dream I was a Spanish soldier named Andres Vaca. I was with Oñate on the banks of the Río Grande just before he started his march into New Mexico in 1598 …
He paused and saw himself again, standing on the sandy banks of the river, staring across the slow-moving, muddy waters. To the north lay the unknown province, that huge expanse of land the earlier Spanish explorers referred to as La Nueva México.
Oñate’s expedition had come north from Mexico to the banks of the Río Bravo, as it was called on some of the early maps, near a place called El Paso del Norte. From the valley of San Bartolomé in Nueva Viscaya, they had traveled, journeying north to the promised land, la tierra adentro, the land of Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, and the other earlier Spanish explorers. Behind them lay the desert of Chihuahua.
Andres stood looking north, Sonny wrote, wearing a white shirt and black pantaloons and the helmet and breastplate of a soldier. For the soldiers and families who had come with don Juan, this was more than a new adventure, it was a chance for a new life. They realized there were many more dangers to be faced as they crossed the desert called la Jornada del Muerto, but the explorers were eager and expectant.
The vision of what La Nueva México promised was a constant inducement for the weary members of the expedition. For the men the possibility of finding gold meant they could be hidalgos, hijos de algo. They could acquire land and a proper title, something they could never hope for in Spain or México. Yes, the life of a landed gentleman was worth risking one’s life for. Even the adelantado Oñate dreamed of finding rich mines to rival those of Zacatecas.
On the other hand, the goal of the Franciscan friars who accompanied the expedition was to save pagan souls, the souls of the many Indian tribes described by Cabeza de Vaca, Fray Niza, and Coronado. Already the friars had been busy preparing the natives of the region for baptism.
Andres sniffed the clean desert air and smiled. Let the friars do their work—he had other things on his mind. Behind him, in the camp, he heard the sounds of the men preparing for the wedding ceremony. A smile lingered on his lips and lit his brown eyes. This evening he would marry a young woman, the one the tribe called Owl Woman. The friars would baptize her, give her a Christian name, and she and Andres would be married. He felt rejuvenated in his purpose for going north. Now he would have a wife by his side, and he would raise a family in those unknown lands.
Sons and daughters to populate the land. Sons and daughters to build villages and make peace with the Pueblo Indians of the north. He had had enough of the gold-induced carnage that had swept over México li
ke a plague. He was a soldier, and he had done his share of murdering, but an apparition had come to him one day on the field of battle. A woman dressed in blue appeared and told him to go north to meet his destiny. He was to put away the sword and become a farmer. Andres resisted the apparition’s words, and the next day he was wounded in battle. Near death’s door he again saw the woman, and she repeated her message: Go north into the new land, put away your sword, and turn to the earth for your sustenance.
He had heard the stories of the great Coronado, and he knew that in the northern mountains lay meadows where cattle and sheep would thrive. Fields of corn and vineyards would fill the valleys. The woman’s voice induced these images, and Andres Vaca said, Yes, I will follow this path. It is meant to be.
The horses in the remuda whinnied. Perhaps they sensed a desert coyote moving in the sandhills. A cool breeze drifted across the river, and on the branches of a cottonwood tree a large raven landed.
“In the dream I was Andres Vaca,” Sonny said to Chica.
Don Eliseo had said, “Dreams are a journey into the world of spirits. Since it is your journey, you must construct the dream. Do not be at the mercy of other forces that come to tamper with your dream. With practice, it may be that someday you may become master of your dream. Many are masters of this material world and learn to manipulate it to their desire. But few become masters of their dreams.”
The old man knows about dreams, Sonny thought and returned to his notes.
Someone approached Andres Vaca.
Buenas tardes, Capitán Vaca, the man called.
Buenas tardes, General, Andres Vaca replied, turning to greet Juan Pérez de Oñate, the newly appointed governor of New Mexico.
Forgive me for interrupting your reverie, Andres, Oñate said, addressing the young man informally.
Not at all, Andres Vaca replied. In my contemplation I was merely enjoying these last moments as a single man.
Oñate smiled. You are marrying an exceptional woman. With her at your side, I am sure destiny will treat you kindly.
I was looking to the north and imagining the great adventure that awaits us, Andres replied.