13

Sonny got in his truck and felt a new mood wash over him. He was feeling stronger. Gloria’s dread was lifted from him, and her soul, which so desired revenge, was winging its way to heaven.

Or wherever souls went after their life on earth. Back to the cosmic wind, the light of the universe, as don Eliseo said. Gloria’s soul was now following its natural evolution, and Sonny was free.

The guardian spirits helped, he thought as he peered at the edge of the river bosque, where shadows shifted in the afternoon light. The coyotes were close by.

A blanket of light lay across the valley. The slanting rays of October sun suffused the land with the glow of golden pollen. The Sandias were mauve.

Ah, to be able to enjoy the light falling across the land is a good sign.

Before he picked up Peter at the television station, he stopped by the library. Ruth had a few notes on the people he was tracking.

“Not much,” she apologized, “but I’ll keep digging.”

“This is a great start,” Sonny said, and thanked her. At TV 7 he found Peter talking to Francine Hunter in the parking lot. She had just wrapped up her report for the evening news and was also on her way home.

“Tough luck,” Peter greeted him.

“Hi, Sonny. Anything new?” Francine asked.

Sonny shook his head.

“It’s a black eye for the fiesta.” She walked to her car. “Are you working for the fiesta board?”

“Yes,” Sonny replied.

For a moment her newswoman instincts almost caused her to ask the next questions: Who do you think murdered Mario Secco? And why? But she didn’t. “Well, good luck on it,” she said. “It’s a terrible thing. See you in the morning, Peter. Thanks.”

“Be here eight o’clock sharp.” Peter waved as she drove away.

“Did you shoot the Secco murder?” Sonny asked as they drove home.

“Yes. Francine is like a bulldog. Worse than that guy Barker. Once she starts on a story, she doesn’t let go.”

“Did you see anything?”

“No. We were outside the police cordon. They said the killer was in a black balloon. Like the one we saw, I’m sure. So this evil man who haunts your tracks has killed again.”

“Yes,” Sonny replied.

At Rita’s Sonny dropped Peter off in the backyard, where Peewee and Busboy were resting and talking about the day’s work.

Inside, Sonny found Cristina trying on the new clothes Rita had bought for her. She was showing them to her father.

“Quíhubole, bro,” Diego greeted him.

“Amor.” Rita kissed him. “I’m so glad to see you.”

“And I’m glad to see you,” he said, holding her for a moment and looking in her eyes. He wanted to tell her about his visit to Lorenza, but it could wait. “What’s this?” he asked, turning to Cristina.

“My tía Rita bought me these clothes,” Cristina said, embracing Rita.

“Beautiful.” Sonny smiled, picked her up, and whirled her around.

“And my hair,” she said, showing it off. Her glossy black hair was tied in two braids accented with ribbons. “For school,” she said.

“School?” Diego looked at his wife.

“Los Ranchos Elementary is close,” Marta answered.

“She should be in school,” Rita explained. “It might as well be here. I know the principal. A wonderful woman. She’ll make sure Cristina will be welcome.”

“I want to go, Papá,” Cristina said. “I miss school.”

Diego looked at his daughter, his wife, and shrugged. “You need money to go to school,” he said, “and I don’t have a job—” He paused. “I’ll check on the boys,” he said, turning and walking hurriedly outside.

Sonny started to follow, but Marta touched his arm. “It’s not easy for him. We tried to leave the river before, and it never worked out. We always have to return. If he could find a real job, he could make it.”

“We’ll work on it,” Sonny said. “Cristina should be in school.” He kneeled and looked in her eyes. “You like school?”

“Oh, yes,” she replied.

“Good. Now go get your papa and the others. Tell them we’re going to celebrate by having the best meal in town.”

Cristina ran outside, calling her father.

Sonny looked out the back window, where the men were sitting. They were laughing and joking, as men will do after a hard but satisfying day’s work. It was only part-time work, but it was a beginning. Still, he knew he couldn’t assure Diego and his family that in a few weeks, when the part-time jobs were over, they wouldn’t have to return to the river.

“I heard the news on the radio,” Rita said when Cristina was out of the room. “It was Raven?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I wish I knew,” Sonny replied.

“What now?”

“Maybe just forget about him,” Sonny said.

He didn’t tell her about the flight scheduled for tomorrow.

“Vamos, let’s eat,” he said to change the subject.

Rita had insisted it was her treat at her restaurant, and so they packed the women in her car and the men in Sonny’s truck and drove to Rita’s Cocina.

“First time I ever came into a restaurant to eat and not to wash dishes,” Busboy said when they entered.

“First time we’ve come in the front door of any place in a long time,” Diego added.

The story of Mario Secco’s death had scared people away; many balloonists were leaving town. The consequences already showed in Rita’s place. Last night it had been packed; now it was half full.

Sonny sat across from Diego; they ordered cold Coronas.

“How did you get along with don Eliseo?” Sonny asked Diego.

“Bien,” Diego answered. “The old man reminds me of my grandfather. I grew up in a little ranchito like his. Don Eliseo’s place needs a lot of repair.”

“He needs help,” Sonny agreed. “He has a couple of boys, but they live in the Heights. They’ve got their families, and little time to help the old man. One’s a high school teacher—music, I think. The other’s an engineer at Sandia. They come around once in a while, try to help, but they only stay an hour. Then they leave. Farming the old ranchito is not their thing.”

“Families change, they scatter,” Diego said. He understood. “When I came back from Nam, it was like that.”

Sonny wanted to know more about the man he had befriended, but he was cautious and did not question him further.

“Nam. Seems like a generation ago,” he mused.

“I guess people have forgotten it, but those of us who were there won’t. I never saw action. Hell, compared to some of my brothers in the field, I had it made. But when I got back, my sister had sold the house, and after my mother died, I had nothing to come back to. I have brothers. Three. One here, two in California. They sold Grandpa’s place.”

“Did you get anything from it?”

“I didn’t want anything. I was burned out. In Nam I was on a Graves Registry detail, picking up and bagging body parts. The guy I worked for was a mortician, not regular army. He turned me on to dope. It was the only way to do the job …”

He sipped his beer.

“All of us should be dead by now. We did things in a crazy way. Charlie would wire the bodies, and we were always so toked up we just ripped in. A couple of the guys bought the farm that way. I was busted for doing drugs, but that didn’t mean nada. They needed us. You know, some of the guys were so hooked, they signed on for Graves again. For the dope. I got out when my mother died, started drinking. I lost track of the years. I mean, I was so deep into booze and crap, nothing mattered. I spent five years on the streets of ’Burque, drinking, living by the river. Then I met Marta. She saved me. Helped me get clean. Then we had Cristina. I tried to climb out of the hole, but it’s hard. I have no education, no skills. Part-time jobs came and went. We sank, hermano, we sank. The worst curse is to have no home for your kid. You know God is really punishing you when that happens.”

Diego fell silent. Peter filled the silence by telling them about his day with Francine Hunter and the Mario Secco murder scene, but Diego’s gaze was elsewhere, out the window floating over the North Fourth Street traffic, and beyond. He knew the city, but the city didn’t know him. His family had lived for generations in the state, but when the ranchito was sold, he was left hanging, and no one gave a damn how long the family had lived in the valley or how many centuries ago their ancestors had colonized the area.

For Sonny, the night also ended in a somber mood. Rita took Marta and Cristina home with her, and Sonny dropped the men off at don Eliseo’s. Don Eliseo’s large rambling house had plenty of rooms where the men could sleep, but Sonny’s place had only one small bedroom.

“Hasta mañana,” they called. “Thanks for the dinner. Thanks for everything.”

“I appreciate what you’ve done,” Diego said, and took Sonny’s hand. “Buenas noches, hermano.”

Diego’s parting words reminded Sonny of his brother, Armando. Mando wasn’t homeless, but he was buffeted by fate. He kept trying to start his own car business, and small glitches kept ruining his enterprises.

Qué cosa es el destino, Sonny thought as he dropped wearily into bed. One man succeeds, the other doesn’t. One fails, the other thrives. Diego calls me hermano, and I haven’t been a very good brother to my own.

He read through Ruth’s notes from the library. Hidden in the names, he hoped, was part of the reason the skies over the city had erupted with death. Raven needed money to get his cult back in business. He needed a car, arms, dynamite, if he was going to strike again. There were other disturbing things in the files he read. Many people had converged on Alburquerque for the balloon fiesta, and each had an interesting background.

“Everyone has a motive,” he remembered his mentor Manuel Lopez telling him. “That’s what makes our work so damn interesting.”

Sonny dozed but slept little. The night was full of disturbing images, faces of people who peered from the shadows. He was in a hospital looking for a group of Nam veterans. He searched everywhere, until a blonde nurse pointed the way. He found the group, hulks of men without legs and arms. Their torsos were buried in the ground in a circle. He drew close. Diego welcomed him in a strange language. The men in the circle were autistic; only grunts came from their throats.

He conversed with Diego, in metaphors, witty wordplay, and each time he outdid Diego, Diego laughed. The dark masses around him didn’t seem to care. Finally he was accepted into the circle, he had passed the test. Sit, Diego said, and he pointed to an empty chair next to a young woman. She held many papers. Sophia, he thought. Her face radiated beauty. She smiled and welcomed him.

Some of her papers were on the low chair next to her, and when he sat, he apologized. I’m going to sit on your papers, he said, and she smiled again. Sit on wisdom.

He looked around the circle at the misshapen bodies. That’s it, he thought. I am talking to them, but not with words! It’s some kind of mental telepathy! I can communicate with them. Not with words, with thought.

He wanted to speak more with those earth shapes, to make amends or apologize for their suffering. Maybe his words, if he could only speak, would allow the bodies half-buried in the mud some rest. They were the bodies Diego had collected in the killing fields. Those soldiers in the field had been killed in the most horrendous ways, instant separation of soul and body. And there was no family to place a descanso cross where they died.

With sadness in his heart, he picked up two pieces of bamboo. Tying the two pieces together with a bootlace, he fashioned a cross and stuck it by the side of the path. There, just like the crosses that dotted the roads of the state where someone had died in a car wreck, the place where all those grunts had died was now marked. Descanso meant “to rest.” A resting place. The men could rest.

He smiled and rolled over. How reassuring the strange dream seemed.

Rita appeared, rising in a colorful balloon. She was laughing, she waved. Around her dozens of colorful balloons rose like the flowers of her garden. Sonny wanted to be in the balloon with her, but there was no way to climb up. A rope appeared, he climbed, and suddenly a dark shadow blocked the kaleidoscope of colors, and Sonny was falling through darkness.

He awoke with a start to the knock on the door.

Madge. He stumbled out of bed and opened the front door. It was dark outside. He rubbed his eyes. “Come in, come in.”

“Brr, it is cold outside.” She entered and closed the door behind her.

“You’re early. I’ll make coffee—”

“There’s time,” she said, and put her arms around him.

“Raven won’t wait,” he said, disengaging himself tactfully. “I’ll turn on the heater.”

She laughed and turned to look around. “As I understand it, we might get blown out of the sky today, and you want to go chaste.”

“Yeah, for today.” He smiled. “I’ll get dressed. Coffee’s in the kitchen.” He pointed her to the kitchen and hurried to shower.

Damn! he thought as the cold water awakened him. She’s about the best-looking blonde in the city, comes hot-to-trot to my door, and I turn her away. Que pendejo! I just hope she realizes what she’s getting into. I hope she didn’t agree to this because she thought we would get together. Her life could be in danger.

Ah, well, he tried to make the best of it as he toweled and dressed, singing, “Para bailar la bamba, se necesita unas pocas de ganas, por ti seré, por ti seré.”

He walked into the kitchen whistling. Madge poured him coffee.

“A beautiful madrugada. Looks great for ballooning,” he said, sipping and looking out the window at the gray morning light. It was still an hour before the sun came over the Sandia Mountains. Santo día, the old people used to say, and Sonny wondered if that got abbreviated to Sandia.

“Great coffee.”

“It gets the pump going,” Madge replied.

“Sorry if I was too brusque.”

She shrugged. “If it doesn’t work, it just doesn’t work. I’m a big girl, I understand. So let’s go do the job.”

“Got the balloon ready?”

“Just as you ordered. It’s the first armor-plated balloon I’ve ever seen. Will he take the bait?”

“There’s a reason for Raven to be disrupting the fiesta. He’s taking chances he normally wouldn’t take. What is it about this fiesta, Madge?”

She shook her head. “Nothing, as far as I can tell.”

“Had Mario Secco flown here before?”

“No. It was his first time.”

“And John Gilroy. The ex-CIA man?”

Her brow knitted. “Ex-CIA?”

Sonny nodded. “Was all over the papers when he came to town.”

“We don’t check backgrounds. He’s been flying four, five years. Everybody knows him. What’s the connection?”

“I thought you might tell me.”

She finished her coffee. “I don’t know these people, so I don’t know if they’re connected. Look, they apply to fly and the applications are processed. They pay their fee, they fly. I don’t get involved on a personal level. Not good for business. Come on, let’s go get Raven. Maybe he can answer your questions.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

He took his deer-hunting rifle from the closet, checked it, and filled his army jacket pockets with shells.

As the sun was ready to burst over the crest of the Sandias, they drove into the balloon launching field. Madge’s balloon was already inflated and swaying softly in the cold breeze; it had been filled by her assistant, a man Sonny remembered as Tony. Tony was a “zebra,” one of those in charge of launching the balloons.

Jerry Stammer also waited near the balloon, shivering in the early morning cold.

“You’re late,” he greeted them gruffly, plumes of frozen breath spewing out.

“We’re okay,” Madge shot back, turning away. “Ready, Tony?”

“All set,” the assistant called back, handing her a backpack. “There’s a good easterly aloft. Exactly like yesterday. You should be over the path you marked at eight hundred feet.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t go through with it,” Stammer complained. “Too dangerous. Maybe we should call it off.”

Why so upset? Sonny wondered. Did he have something for Madge?

“You sure this is the only way?” Stammer asked.

Sonny looked at Madge; she nodded. “Sonny thinks so. And I’m the pilot. Unless you want to fly today?”

“You’re crazy,” Stammer shot back.

Sonny looked around the huge, empty field. At the far end of it sat an unmarked police car. Garcia. Sonny hoped he wouldn’t scare Raven away. If he sensed it was a trap, he might not show himself. But Garcia was playing it cool, laying back in the shadows. He was giving Sonny enough room to hang himself.

“Looks great,” Madge said. “The easterly will take us over the river.”

“Then let’s fly,” Sonny said, and they climbed into the basket.

He checked the steel plate on the floor of the basket. Enough to deflect even a bullet from a high-powered weapon and give him time to fire back. Today Raven was not going to meet unarmed people in the sky, he was going to meet a flying coyote with a .30—06.

“Cast off,” Madge said, and Tony untied the line that had kept the balloon anchored to iron posts in the ground. Madge pulled the burner lever, and a blast of propane, burning blue, rose into the mouth of the towering balloon. They climbed swiftly.

“Toward the river,” she said, pointing as they climbed into the prevailing easterly breeze.

Sonny had kept his rifle wrapped in his parka. Now he slipped it out, put on the parka, and slipped shells into the chamber.

Yes, toward the river, where both Secco and Veronica had been murdered.

The sun came over the mountain, a blinding ball of light. Rita would be waking up about now. He should have told her. Rita was patient and understanding, but when he told her what he was up to after the fact, it bothered her. She had the right to know; after all, they were planning marriage. Yes, he would marry her, settle down, get out of the adventure business.

“Time for home and children,” he whispered.

“What?” Madge asked.

“Just thinking,” he answered. “It’s cold up here.”

His words spewed out in icy vapor.

“It’s freezing,” Madge said, smiling, “and it gets colder the higher we go. I love it!”

Yeah, Sonny thought, she clearly gets a thrill out of it. He pulled the zipper on his parka and looked over the side of the basket.

The balloon rose over the field and drifted west. Garcia’s car followed well behind the chase truck Tony drove. Both would keep as discreetly far away as possible.

“Remember when you went up with me?” Madge asked.

Sonny nodded. “Yeah. Too bad flying never got in my blood. It is spectacular.”

Now as he looked down on the checkered fields of the valley, the roads where tiny antlike cars began to move in the early morning, he felt an exhilaration. The earth was beautiful from this height, at this time of day. A feeling of calm came over him; he was no longer earthbound. He had cut the umbilical cord to the earth, and the rush of freedom coursed through him.

“You haven’t lived till you’ve made love up here,” Madge teased.

“Doesn’t it get cold?”

“It’s like having ice cream in your coffee, hot and cold.”

Her eyes were gleaming in the morning cold. She was in her element, and she was offering to share it. She smiled and turned to the task of flying the balloon.

Sonny looked west, returning his gaze to her from time to time. She was a woman who enjoyed the quick rush of sex, the more exciting the better. And why not, life was short. Soar as high as you can, rush in and take what you can get, fly in all the hot-air balloon fiestas of the world, because nothing lasts. Todo se acaba, he remembered his father saying. Everything ends.

Looking down at the land from this height made him turn philosophical. Maybe that was the mystery of ballooning, it put earth and space in context. One felt exhilaration up here, but one also felt very small.

They floated slowly westward, over the tinge of gold that graced the river cottonwoods below, keeping just the right altitude. Early on, Madge had struggled to compensate for the added weight in the balloon, but once she had that under control, she relaxed. She took a bottle of champagne from the pack her assistant had given her.

“Will you do the honors?” she asked, and handed the bottle to Sonny.

Holy tacos, he thought, we’re flying toward Raven’s nest and she wants champagne. Ah, what the hell, maybe she had the right attitude—drink champagne and let the chips fall where they may. Or let the balloons fly where they will. He plied the plastic cap off the bottle; it popped, and he filled two plastic cups.

They touched cups. It might be the last sip of bubbly he would taste if he had made a mistake about Raven.

“To us,” she said, and drank. “Isn’t this lovely.”

“It’s great,” he agreed, and turned to look west toward Mount Taylor, the old volcano that rose like the breast of a woman into the bright, clear sky. North lay the blue Jemez and the Sangre de Cristo. The tops of the peaks were dusted with snow, the remnants of one early storm.

Around them the sky was like an inverted bowl, a fragile porcelain decorated with wisps of cirrus clouds; below, the earth was a patterned colcha, a quilt like Sonny’s mother used to stitch.

From up here he could see the earth as the large hawks that climb on thermals to hunt saw it. Or a hang glider who has just jumped off Sandia Crest and is floating, also catching the thermals. Or someone parachuting down.

They swept gently toward the river, the lazy, meandering Río Grande. The great river flowed toward Los Lunas, Belén, and down past Socorro, land of Sonny’s ancestors, where his grandfather had farmed, where the Bisabuelo Elfego Baca was born.

He looked east. The Sandias and the Manzano Mountains rose like giant reptiles in the blue haze. The mountains guarded the eastern entrance to the valley. Beyond them lay the land of the eagle and the serpent, the great plains of the eastern Llano Estacado. Ben Chávez country. The writer had warned Sonny, told him Raven’s spirit was all around. Embodying the evil in the Coco, he tried to burn it away.

But that didn’t work. Raven had to be met head on. Sonny knew that.

“We’re floating directly toward where Secco went down,” Madge said.

Sonny held his rifle ready.

He was hunting Raven, and that required ready instincts. He wished he was on the ground, where he could smell the odors, hear the crack of twigs on the path, hear the rustle of wings as birds flew overhead. Up here he felt disconnected.

A sound startled him. He could hear the sounds from the valley floor. Dogs barking, a horse neighing in a field below, someone shouting, then they were over the river bosque, and his mood changed from contemplative to attentive.

He felt the hair rise along the back of his neck.

“Get ready,” he said to Madge, and snapped a shell into the rifle’s chamber.

As he had anticipated, when they approached the east side of the river, Raven’s balloon rose to meet them.