A born-again shaman, Sonny thought. “Why is this place so important?” he asked the old man.
“Because you need to center your soul,” don Eliseo explained. “The shock has scattered your soul. This valley is the place of your ancestors. They are here to help bring your soul together.”
“My ancestors are here?”
“All around you.”
Sonny listened. Voices spoke to him.
For don Eliseo the spirits of the ancestors hovered in the breezes that swept over the valley, the wind of the universe. He honored them with prayer, and they lent strength and guidance. All was alive; nothing was lost.
Sonny had nearly given up hope those first few days he was paralyzed. When he realized he couldn’t move, he entered the underworld, a helpless bag of flesh, and for a while he gave up on returning.
But those who loved him wouldn’t let him remain in the darkness that engulfed him. They pulled at him, cared for him, spoke to him. They wouldn’t let him give up. They fanned the lone ember that was his soul.
His mother helped bring him back from the world of the dead. Rita forced him to eat to regain his strength, whispering her love in the frozen nights. Lorenza the curandera massaged his limbs, made muscle and nerves spring back into action, worked to make the scattered energy harmonious.
I owe them so much, he thought as he entered the shower, clutching the towel rack for support.
“I am here, now. I’m not dead,” he said as he turned on the hot water and scrubbed. He had to shower quickly. Even leaning against the shower wall, his legs would support him for only a few minutes.
Living with a jumbled brain these past months was hardly what he’d call being alive. For weeks his speech was slurred. Something in the circuitry of the brain had been screwed up. He couldn’t grip anything with his fingers, and when he told his right arm to move, his left one did, but slowly the shorted circuits returned to normal. The strength in the arms returned, and the leg muscles were beginning to respond.
At first, when he realized how bad off he was, he wanted to die. Better dead than a cripple, he thought. The first few weeks had been especially tough. Rita bought him a computer with a board he could hold on his lap to spell out messages.
“Where is Tamara?” he had asked Rita when he could punch the letters on the laptop.
“No one knows.”
“And Raven?”
“Disappeared.”
“Madge?”
“In jail.”
Don Eliseo appeared. The old man sat by his side during the long, empty days of November. The old man told stories, long involved stories that wove the history of New Mexico into his personal life. He interpreted his dreams, told him of the seven paths into the dreamworld. Sometimes the old man brought a book and read from it. He was especially fond of the Frank Waters novels.
Sonny listened, slept, and the adventures in the books filtered into his dreams. Sometimes he awakened to find don Eliseo had fallen asleep in the chair, and then Sonny wondered if he was awake or dreaming, or simply a character in the novel lying on the old man’s lap.
With the recovery also came depression; memory returned and he realized how bad off he was. Would he remain a cripple? No one knew. The young neurologist who checked him weekly couldn’t promise anything. “It’s a matter of time,” he kept saying.
“I can’t do it,” Sonny had confessed one night to Rita. “Better to die.”
“No!” Rita replied. “I’m not letting you go!”
She slipped under the covers with him and lay next to him, saying nothing, caressing his chest, then slowly down to his stomach, his thighs, fondling him. He sniffed the dark air and smelled the fragrance of her body, the spice of her flesh and sweat. “Ah,” he responded, his desire for her breaking through the dead weight he felt in his soul.
She made love to him and the soul-sickness lifted, a springlike night filled the valley, and the sense of wonder returned to Sonny’s heart.
“I can finally smell you, taste you,” he whispered, and she laughed. They lay together in the aromas their bodies gave to the November night.
Rita talked about the future, what she needed to do to fix up her restaurant, how he could help, and they could be married on Christmas day, and how many children she wanted to have, talking into the night as if nothing had ever happened.
“How can you be so sure?” He asked.
“I am.”
Her love and direction, which he always knew was strong as a hundred-year-old cottonwood, surprised even Sonny. She was planning marriage and family. The future. So the darkness lifted, memories and patterns returned, his strength returned. Rita’s love brought hope. He figured he would have to learn something of patience.
The neurologist was pleased with Sonny’s steady improvement. Each time Rita drove Sonny in for an office visit the young doctor poked pins into Sonny’s arms, legs, hands, feet, then nodded and said, “He’s coming along, he’s coming along. Whatever you’re doing, keep it up. Don’t need to see you but once a week. Keep up with the therapy. Good day.”
Lorenza came often. As she massaged him, she reminded him of his guardian animal spirits, the coyotes. Survivors. He was a coyote; he would survive.
“Become coyote,” she whispered.
He turned himself into a rough, gruff coyote, using the strength of the coyote spirit, and a new energy filled him. He opened the door and howled at the moon, and down the dirt road that was La Paz Lane dogs answered his cry.
Thank God for good friends, Sonny thought as he finished his shower and dried himself quickly. His legs were trembling, ready to collapse. Sitting on the toilet seat, he pulled on a pair of jeans and a black turtleneck, then lifted himself into his wheelchair. He turned to look into a hand mirror and comb his long, thick hair.
“Ah, if I could just walk,” he said to the image in the mirror. “Go dancing again.”
Brown, intense eyes stared back at him, eyes he didn’t remember. Was this the Sonny Baca he once knew, or was this another man?
He ran his fingers through his black beard. Rita had asked him if he wanted a shave weeks after the incident, and he said no. “Let it grow.”
Now he had almost three months’ growth. “Like the bearded Andres Vaca in the dream,” he whispered. “The spitting image.”
Pushing a lever, he quickly maneuvered the electric wheelchair back into the bedroom. Hanging on the mirror over the chest was the Zia medallion. Gold engraved with the sign of the Zia sun.
The medallion had belonged to Raven. Sonny had first seen it on him in June, the summer the people of Alburquerque now called Zia Summer. Raven and his cult had murdered Gloria Dominic and tried to blow up a DOE truck carrying high-level nuclear waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project site near Carlsbad.
Sonny looked closely at the medallion. The round sun had four radiating lines projecting in the four sacred directions of the universe. Simple in its execution, but the artist who engraved it had carved the energy of the sun into the medallion, a mystical flow that connected Sonny to the world of spirits.
Raven used the medallion to create chaos. For a few days in October he had held Rita and Diego’s daughter captive, until one dark night in the Sandia Mountains Sonny found them. They met, Sonny as the coyote and Raven as the dark bird of the forest. Using Sonny’s pistol, Lorenza saved Sonny by shooting at Raven. The bullet hit the medallion, and now as Sonny felt the indentation the bullet had made, he saw again the images of the struggle that had taken place in Raven’s circle of evil.
Had it not been for Lorenza he would be dead. And Rita would have become Raven’s cohort through an initiation that would have dragged her into his world of evil.
That’s the last time he had seen Raven. After that Sonny ran into Dr. Stammer.
But now Raven had returned in the dream. The four feathers Andres Vaca saw were Raven’s calling card. Raven was the Bringer of Curses.
What was it the shaman told Andres? That he had been fighting the
evil power for a long time. Was Vaca a prior reincarnation of Sonny? Had he fought Raven in that small village in Spain only to discover that Raven had followed him to the banks of the Río Grande? Followed him to steal away Owl Woman and continue the chaos and disruption on which he thrived.
“You and Raven are old souls,” Tamara Dubronsky had told Sonny. “You are like brothers, and there is no peace between you. You have been enemies in prior lifetimes. The Zia medallion changes hands. You use it for good, Raven uses it for destruction.”
Where did the medallion originate? Sonny wondered.
He rubbed the gold with his fingers. Egypt, Lorenza had suggested. Probably cast by priests of the sun. For those ancient dynasties, the Zia sun was the god Ra, the shining power in the medallion.
“How would they know?” Sonny had asked her.
“They could see into the future,” she replied.
There in the Nile Valley the priests had looked into the future and had seen a river like theirs, not as big and powerful as the Nile, but a river that formed a sacred corridor in the desert: an oasis of power, a green serpent winding from northern mountains, through desert, to the sea. The Río Grande. There the people would pray to the sun, pray for its blessing and that its cycles and seasons be preserved, pray for rain to nurture their crops. In an Egyptian temple, millennia ago, they had cast the sign of the Zia sun into the gold of the medallion.
Sonny shook his head. Lorenza knew. He put the medallion around his neck, then wheeled into the kitchen to make coffee. Chica came bounding in through the little door, seeking the heat of the furnace vent.
“Cold out there, isn’t it?” Sonny smiled. The thermometer outside his window read twenty degrees.
“Maybe I am cursed,” Sonny said to Chica as he filled the coffeepot. “Like the captain in the dream.”
That’s what Andres Vaca had said. A curse had followed him all his life.
He looked out the kitchen window across the dirt road to don Eliseo’s house. The old man had come out of the front door, shuffling toward the withered cornfield. There he would pray to the rising sun.
Outside Sonny’s window the water in the coffee can he kept for the birds was frozen solid. A couple of sparrows pecked at the edges. Along the sides of the dirt road, puddles of water left from last week’s winter rain wore laces of ice.
The sun came over the southern crest of the Sandia Mountains, and in the frozen field of corn don Eliseo raised his arms in prayer, greeting the light. Sonny knew the days of the winter solstice were upon them. In three days the sun would rest at the most precarious point of its yearly journey. In the religion of the indigenous people, this was the most important day of the year, for if the prayers were not strong enough, the sun would not return, it would sink into the southern horizon forever.
Exceedingly holy days. Days of preparation, ceremony, attentiveness, prayer, expectation. Don Eliseo’s prayers must be strong and good.
The old man believed every cell in the universe was connected, all was energy and light, and that clarity of light filled one’s soul if only one was attentive, receptive. But as sure as there was clarity, there was darkness. Evil in the universe. Hidden in the very germ of creation was the inherent chaos.
“The Bringer of Curses is Raven,” Sonny said to Chica. He wanted to tell the old man his dream, but as he was about to open the door to call out, the phone rang. He reached for it.
“Are you Sonny Baca?” the woman’s tremulous voice asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you the detective?”
Sonny smiled. I used to be, he thought. Now I’m in a wheelchair, learning to walk, trying to learn to live again.
“Yes, but—”
“Our daughter disappeared last night,” the woman said. “Please help us. She’s gone. We don’t know—”
“Wait, wait,” Sonny cut in. “Did you call the police?”
“Yes. The police came. They were just here. Oh, Mr. Baca, you have to help us. We read about you in the paper. You’re our last hope.”
“I can’t get around very well,” Sonny tried to explain. “I’m sure the police will do everything they can.”
“They don’t understand this.”
Understand? Sonny wondered. Missing teenagers were common. The cops usually tracked them down, or they got hungry and came home. That is, those that didn’t get sucked into drugs, the pornography business, or prostitution. They might be found if their rebellion didn’t propel them out of their neighborhood into the mean streets of distant cities.
“Did your daughter leave a note?”
“No, she just disappeared.”
“Last night?”
“Yes.”
“How old is she?”
“Sixteen.”
“Has she ever left home before? Have you checked with her friends?”
“Mr. Baca, she was here, in her bedroom. She just disappeared.”
Nobody just disappears, Sonny thought. But he had chased enough teenagers to know they got into all sorts of emotional tangles: boyfriends, girlfriends, gangs, parental restrictions. They just flew, and tracking them was not his favorite job. Once the kid came home, the parents usually forgot to pay the investigator they hired.
“What’s your name?” Sonny asked. He reached for a notepad and a pencil.
“Eloisa Romero. My husband is Arturo. Our daughter’s name is Consuelo. We have only one daughter, Mr. Baca. Now this. We don’t know what to do. Who to turn to.”
The woman’s voice was near breaking.
“Did the police search the house, her room?”
“Yes.”
“Did they find anything?”
“On her bed, four feathers …”
“Oh, no.” Sonny groaned. Raven. But why? Who were Eloisa and Arturo Romero?
“They asked us if the feathers came from one of her toys,” Eloisa continued. “She still keeps all her toys in her room. But no, there are no black-feathered toys. It’s something evil, Mr. Baca, that’s what I think. But why us? Oh, God, why us?”
“Has anyone called you, saying they have information, or they want money?”
“No. The police said this was possible—”
Ah, Sonny’s memory bank clicked. Arturo Romero was the mayor of Santa Fé. He had made a fortune in the recent real estate boom and by selling cheap santero art to tourists. All along he paid his dues to the party machine. It sounded like a classic kidnap/ransom case. But why Raven?
First the dream and the kidnapped Owl Woman, now the missing Consuelo. Unrelated? No. On both empty beds lay Raven’s black feathers.
“Let me have your address and phone number,” Sonny said, and scribbled down the information. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try.”
The woman thanked him tearfully. Sonny hung up the phone and called Rita. There was a message for him on her machine. “Sonny, buenos días. I didn’t want to call and wake you, but if you call, we’re on our way to see you. With breakfast, so don’t eat anything. Un beso, mi amor.”
He thought of calling Diego, the compañero who had helped him in October, but he knew Diego was very busy working on the house he was building. The Hot Air Balloon Fiesta board had given Sonny enough money to get a house going for the homeless Diego and his family.
He dialed his brother Armando, a used-car dealer.
A very seductive, gravelly voice greeted him. “Mornin’, y’all. This is Marlene. How can I help you?”
Marlene? I thought it was Jeanine? Ah, my bro has a new woman, Sonny thought. Women slipped through Armando’s fingers as fast as used cars.
“Hi, Marlene, this is Sonny. Mando’s brother.”
“Oh, hi, Sonny. How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m so glad. I think that’s marvelous. Simply marvelous,” she said in a syrupy West Texas drawl. “But why are you calling so early?” she asked in a sleepy voice. “Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing wrong. I need to talk to Mando.?
??
Sonny smiled when he heard her trying to rouse Mando from sleep. Mando had been trying to set up a used-car business for the past few years. He bought one, sold it, went on to the next, just keeping his head above water.
“Hey, bro, how you doing?” Mando’s sleepy voice came on line.
“Great, you?” Sonny greeted him.
“Fine as wine, hermano. What’s up? You okay?”
“Yeah, fine. I need a van.”
“Wheels? Hey, the only car sitting in Mando’s Used Cars is a fifty-seven Chevy. Cherry, but the generator’s out.”
“I need a van with a lift for my wheelchair. Can you lease one for me?”
“No problem, if you got the credit. I’m so short—”
“Call Sheila García. Here’s my MasterCard number.” He read his card number to Armando.
“Ten-four. Anything else?”
“I need a mobile phone in the van. That should do it.”
“No sweat. How soon?”
“Right away.”
“Hey, bro, it’s midnight.”
“It’s not midnight, the sun’s up. I need it now.”
“Hey, only for you would I get up this early, leave this warm bed and the loveliest Texas bluebonnet.”
Sonny heard Marlene squeal, then a purr and whispering: “You are so good …”
“Ay te watcho, bro!” Mando cried, disappearing, Sonny guessed, under the warm sheets with Marlene.
“Gracias,” Sonny said, and hung the phone.
His brother Armando was as reliable as wind in spring, always there with a smile, always broke, always with a big, nice-looking mamasota hanging on his arm. A lovable guy intent on making it big in the used-car business, but he, too, seemed cursed. He just couldn’t seem to get beyond a couple of bombed-out heaps that he called Mando’s Used Cars.
“If I get the van by Christmas, I’ll be thankful,” Sonny said.
A knock at the front door meant Rita and Lorenza had arrived. Sonny guided his motorized chair to the door, followed by a barking Chica. Rita, Lorenza, and don Eliseo were already letting themselves in. Santa’s elves were delivering a hot breakfast. Sonny smelled the aroma of the food Lorenza carried.
“Amor,” Rita greeted him, and leaned to kiss him. “Cómo ’stás? Why up so early? I thought we’d find you snoozing. Look who we found in the cornfield.”