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.”

Rita nodded.

“I remember, once, I was about twelve, and we were playing baseball. Me and the kids I ran around with. Suddenly I felt I wasn’t in my body. I was flying overhead, and the game became clear to me. I could see the kids in their exact place, and I knew ahead of time if the batter would get a hit. I knew who would win the game. It was a strange feeling, but it was real.”

He looked at Rita. “It’s nothing.” He shrugged.

“It’s important,” Rita said.

Maybe he could sense things, but when he told his friends about the things he saw, they said he was weird, so he began to shut out the visions when they occurred. Even now it felt strange to talk about those moments when he felt he was flying, but the clarity of his visions had grown since he came into possession of Raven’s medallion.

“Go on,” Rita said.

“Once there was an accident. We had played late, it grew dark. We left the park and were walking home. I had a vision. I saw the accident before it happened. I knew Robert Martinez was going to get hit by a car. The scene was clear in my mind. I looked up and saw Robert and Nick Pino horsing around as they walked. Before I could say anything, Robert stepped out into the street, and a car came out of nowhere and hit him. It ran over his leg and broke it. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t shout or move. But I knew it was going to happen.”

Sonny was recalling many images, times when the power of vision had come upon him.

“During the limpieza, Lorenza instructed me to go back to the room and see Gloria’s dead body. I saw her as clear as if she was right in front of me now. So white and pale. I felt like reaching out and touching her.”

“Did you?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“She was dead.”

“Yes. But in the back of my mind, deep inside, I thought I could bring her back to life. Crazy, huh?”

Rita shook her head. “Not crazy.”

“You two think alike.” Sonny smiled. “Don Eliseo told me the story of el hombre dorado. The man who came seeking the fountain of youth. Some bad people got hold of him and took his soul, and they painted him with gold. Now he can live forever, but he has no soul.”

“But you have a very sensitive soul,” Rita said. “By not touching Gloria you opened your soul to fear. That shock is what we call susto. Gloria’s spirit attached itself to yours.”

“That’s what Lorenza said.”

He thought of Tamara Dubronsky. He had faced her the following morning, told her Raven was dead, and she replied that Raven couldn’t die. Raven’s soul was born again in Sonny, she said, with a perturbing smile that told Sonny she believed what she said. So it was fitting that Sonny wear the Zia medallion, Raven’s symbol for the Zia cult.

“Maybe Raven’s also in me,” he whispered.

Rita sighed. Yes, he would have to go deeper into the world of spirits. This is what Lorenza was preparing him for.

“Shock affects the soul,” Rita said softly. “Any shock can create susto in the nervous system, but the really bad susto is when another soul frightens you, enters you. It can lead to depression. The other soul is taking your energy.”

“Like this summer,” Sonny said. He had felt so low and distracted he couldn’t even make love to Rita. Some nights when he lay beside Rita, he didn’t feel the urge. The worry compounded itself.

“I loved Gloria,” he admitted. “Once, when I was in high school, I felt I was the only guy on the high school team that wasn’t messing around. The other guys bragged all the time about the girls they were screwing. I was supposed to remain pure; you know all that Catholic stuff. I could talk to Gloria about it. She understood. She was—what?—ten years older, she knew about life. I used to go by her place, visit, and even then I guess I sensed she was as lonely as me. The week I graduated, she let me make love to her.”

He paused, thinking back to the evening she had been waiting for him, the presents she had bought him, the wine and candlelight. She made the move, and suddenly the years of friendship, the years of desire kept in check, all dissolved into a night of intense passion. It was his initiation.

“So when I saw her dead … I don’t know. It did something to me. Anger, grief, I wanted revenge. Maybe I did let her soul in.”

“Maybe,” Rita said. “But now her spirit has to move on, release the living. That’s the rule of life and death.”

He looked at her. Her brown eyes smiled. She understood him. Lord, she seemed to know what swirled in his thoughts.

“How do I get involved in these things?”

“Somebody has to fight Raven.”

“And I’m elected. I told Lorenza about the Zia sign that Veronica cut around my navel. When she had me hung up like a goat, ready to kill me. Before you and don Eliseo rescued me.”

“The Pueblo people use the Zia as a symbol for the sun,” Rita said, “but Raven and his pack have taken it as their symbol. We have to take it back. The Zia sun is good and life-giving, not negative.”

Yeah, Sonny thought. Take back the good power. Take it back from the bad brujos, the sorcerers who do evil.

“Lorenza believes Raven has the power of a brujo. He lives in the world of spirits. That’s why he’s so strong. I had to find the coyotes, my guardian spirits. For now, it’s the only way to fight him. The first part of the cleansing was the burning of incense, the sweeping away with eagle and owl feathers, the bird of day and the bird of night. She was preparing me for my journey. She played a tape. A soft and distant drum. I closed my eyes. The drumming was like the beating of my heart … ‘Imagine a lake’, she said, ‘or a cave, a spring. A hole that goes into the earth. It must be a place you know.’ And she told me to sing a song. Make one up. So I began to sing to the beat of the drum.”

He paused and looked at Rita. “The words just came to me: ‘To Grandfather Sun I send my prayers. To Tata Dios y los santos I pray. To the four directions I send my prayers. I pray to the kachina spirits of the mountains. May the power of my ancestors fill my soul. Guide me on the path of the sun. Fill me with clarity and goodness.’”

“A beautiful song,” Rita whispered.

“Something happened as I sang. I lost consciousness. I was drifting …”

He was a cloud, a shadow flying over the llano of eastern New Mexico, and he saw Santa Rosa, a town he had visited as a child with his parents. He hovered over a lake, Hidden Lake, a hidden jewel of a lake on the wide expanse of llano.

In the vision his father was on one side, his mother on the other, Armando played nearby. His father wanted them to know the state, so often he took Sonny and Armando on trips—fishing up in the Taos mountains; to see the maples turn red in October in the Manzanos; driving up to the Jemez to lie in the hot mineral springs that bubbled up from the depths of the ancient volcano; exploring the Bosque del Apache, to see the arrival of the snow geese and the whooping cranes in the fall; watching the Navajo fair and rodeo in Gallup in August.

“I want you to know your land,” his father had said. It was part of their education.

One summer evening they found themselves in Santa Rosa. They stood by the edge of a lake with Ron Chávez, a friend of his father’s, and as the sun set on the small, blue lake surrounded by ocher sandstone cliffs, Sonny looked upon what he thought must be the most enchanting place he had ever seen. Hidden Lake. He remembered it clearly and when Lorenza instructed him to find a lake or a pond, he thought of the jewel of a lake in the red sunset he had seen long ago.

“A lake,” he whispered to Rita. “I was to enter the lake. Begin the journey to the underworld, that place where I would find my troubled soul. I had to meet the animals. ‘Dive in,’ she said. ‘It is a passageway. Don’t be afraid. Dive in. Dive to the bottom. Don’t touch anything along the way.’”

He stopped. What had happened after that was weird. He looked at Rita.

“Damn.” He shook his head. “Just as I was about to dive, the image of the lake faded, and I saw Gloria!”

“Gloria became the passage,” Rita said.

He nodded.

“What did Lorenza say?” Rita asked.

“Entering Gloria was a journey into Mother Earth, the world of spirits, a place so deep in my mind I’d never been there. Gloria haunted me; she also wanted to help me. I entered her, fell, saw growths like poisoned mushrooms. Those, Lorenza explained afterward, are signs of the sexual abuse she suffered in life. Some who fall through a spring or lake describe similar growths. Anyway, now I have some power to fight Raven.”

“You found the coyotes.”

“The coyote is my nagual. They came to give me power.”

Sonny felt strong, stronger than he had felt all summer. Finding the coyotes, the run with them, it had all filled him with energy.

Lorenza had passed the eagle feather over his body, brushing away the dark energies. In its place he felt a lightness, like the Señores y Señoras de la Luz who filled don Eliseo’s universe. They came over his body, filling him with light from head to feet.

He had resisted when Rita first proposed they visit the healer, but now he sensed the power of the woman. She was driving away the susto in his soul and replacing it with the power of the coyotes. The trip he had just been through was making a believer out of him.

She prayed and chanted over him, in Spanish and in the old Nahuatl language of the Aztecs. She burned more copal and prayed to the Virgen de Guadalupe, the sacred mother of the Americas.

When the ritual was concluded, she passed the candle Sonny had brought over his body, then she lit it. The images of the coyotes he had seen in his vision appeared in the smoke.

“The coyote is a loner, like me,” he said to Rita. “He runs across the range and snips a sheep here or there, feeds his family. He’s shot at and hunted by the ranchers, but he survives. He’s a survivor.”

“The Indian legends say Coyote is a trickster,” Rita reminded him. “Always getting in trouble, but teaching the people through his antics.”

“You know, Lorenza could’ve helped Gloria.”

“Yes. She died a horrible death, with all that pain inside. She turned to the wrong persons for help. Raven used her, took her money, then had her killed.”

She looked at Sonny. “You feel good about the limpieza.”

“Yeah. Lots of energy. I even feel like—” He winked.

Rita smiled. “You want to come by tonight?”

“Sure. I feel better. I feel great!”

She kissed him and stepped out of the truck.

“Cuidao, amor,” she said, and walked into the restaurant.