Sometimes Sonny would see the old man with his ear pressed against the tree, like a doctor listening to the heartbeat of a patient.
He stuck his head out the window and shouted, “Hey! Don’t you know it’s Sunday? A day of rest!”
Don Eliseo turned and waved. “Buenos días te de Dios, Sonny. It’s not Sunday, it’s Friday. Come and have some coffee.”
Don Eliseo kept chairs and a small barbecue grill under the tree. He made coffee early in the morning, and in the summer he cooked breakfast and supper there.
“Be right over,” Sonny called. “Soon as I shower.”
The tough bark of the tree had kicked the chain off the bar of the saw, and don Eliseo’s grandson was now taking the saw apart to fix it. No way was the young man going to make a dent in the tree, Sonny thought.
He groaned and stumbled toward his small kitchen, then paused in front of his hallway mirror. He smiled at his image and bared his teeth. He had a handsome set of teeth, even, made hard and white by the calcium-rich South Valley water. Good Mexican teeth, his mother said. He had been in his share of fights in South Valley bars after he graduated from high school, but he never lost a tooth, and his aquiline nose hadn’t been broken. His eyes were dark chestnut in the light. Women liked his long eyelashes.
“You’re tan all over,” a gringa once exclaimed in surprise.
“What did you expect?” he answered.
The Nuevo Mexicanos had been in the Río Grande for centuries, so Indian blood flowed in their veins.
And lots of other genes, Sonny thought. Not only the history of Spain but the history of the Nile was his inheritance. In the summer when he tanned dark from swimming, some of his friends said he looked Arabic. Maybe he had a drop of Jewish blood, too, the legacy of the crypto Jews who came to New Mexico with the Oñate expedition centuries before. The Marranos, the Catholics called them. He probably also carried French-Canadian trapper blood, German merchant blood, Navajo, Apache, you name it, the Río Grande was the center of a trading route. Here a grand mestizo mixture took place. The Nile of the desert Southwest. All bloods ran as one in the coyotes of Nuevo Mexico.
The gabachitas loved his color, the Chicanas didn’t find it unusual. He touched the dimple on his square chin. His mother said he had the square, no-nonsense chin of the Bacas. She was a Jaramillo from La Joya, Diana Jaramillo, a proud woman.
“You are a handsome devil,” he said, smiling at himself. He also got the dark, curly hair from his father’s side of the family. His father, Apolonio Baca, Polito everybody called him, was from the Baca family of Socorro County, the grandson of Elfego Baca.
The Chicanos of New Mexico knew the stories of Elfego Baca’s escapades, and the story most remembered was when he stood up to a bunch of abusive Texas cowboys in the little village of Middle San Francisco Plaza, or Frisco, in southwestern New Mexico in 1884.
That was Elfego’s first gunfight high up in the Tularosa Mountains. He put on a badge when nobody else would, and in a scene straight out of High Noon, he arrested Charlie McCarty. When Charlie’s friends came to threaten Baca, he shot William Hurn and forced the wild gang of cowboys to back down.
El Bisabuelo had carried a .45-caliber single-action Colt, the same pistol that had been passed down to Sonny’s father and that now belonged to Sonny. He had a license to carry the pistol, and since he’d started working as a private investigator he kept it in an old leather holster in the glove compartment of his truck. Unlike El Bisabuelo, Sonny had never had the occasion to use it.
In the bathroom Sonny glanced into the mirror again. Women told him he was handsome. Six feet, trim and muscular, he kept himself in shape by running as often as he could on the dirt trails along the acequia. Once a week he did weights at the gym. But thirty was nagging at him. He pounded his stomach, still flat, but he knew when he ate too much junk food it grew round and soft. Also when he partied too much or drank too much beer.
Got to watch the beer, he thought as he headed for the shower. Maybe it was time to settle down.
He showered and shaved, then slipped into an old black T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a comfortable pair of work boots. Three years ago he had taken up rodeoing on weekends to kill time while the divorce was settled. The boots were a prize he won for steer wrestling. That was the sport that challenged him. He relished the excitement of slipping off the horse, grabbing the horns of the steer, and wrestling it to the ground. He liked to test his strength and agility.
One Sunday afternoon on the Bernalillo County sheriff’s rodeo grounds, an ornery steer with a twisted horn had broken Sonny’s hold, then turned and gored him. The horn ripped into Sonny’s left ankle, broke bones and severed tendons. It had taken almost a year for the wound to heal. Sonny still limped slightly, and even now when he pulled on his boots he favored the foot.
When a storm system came over the valley or on cold winter days he felt the pain hidden deep in the bones of his left foot, a weather thermometer he tried not to notice. Aching bones were for old people, he scoffed, but there it was, reminding him he could not run as fast as he used to when he was scoring touchdowns at Rio Grande High.
“But I can still dance up a storm,” he said to himself.
And he loved women, which is why his marriage to Angela never worked. He blamed himself for the divorce. He knew he had turned to Angie after his first true love left him. He had sought to repeat the lost passion in Angie and discovered not all women are alike.
He had partied a lot after he broke up with Angie. From the South Valley bars where he drank with his old high school friends to the North Valley, from the few bars up in West Central to the fancy places up in the Northeast Heights. It was all the same: young singles, and some married, looking for action. Looking for themselves.
After Angie, bulldogging had obsessed him. There was something about bringing down the animal that satisfied him. He thought that if he had been born in Spain or Mexico he would have been a matador, facing the bull on foot with only a cape.
But this was Nuevo México, land of no-bullshit vaqueros, and so he learned to slide off his horse, drop down to grab the steer’s horns and twist the head until the six hundred pounds came down. He loved the sweet smell of horse sweat, saddle leather, his own smell after an afternoon’s ride. The arena, the cowboys, and the horse shit were real.
“A lot of bulldoggers have had the steer come down on them,” he thought aloud. “Many a cowboy walks with a limp.”
Maybe that was another reason why his first marriage hadn’t worked. He liked the extra challenges too much. He spent all his free time doing something physical, tuning his body, keeping it in shape, and drinking with the boys. Maybe that’s why teaching didn’t satisfy him. He had gotten his degree from UNM and taught a few years at Valley High, but he found the classroom too confining. So he had quit to learn what he could about being a private investigator from Manuel Lopez.
He had gotten into a few tight scrapes, but he had never felt the sting of mortality until the steer gored him. Then something new and strange crept into his thoughts. The pain at night reminded him that he was vulnerable.
Before that, he played baseball in the summer and basketball in the winter. He took up skiing, tried hang gliding off the Sandia Crest, volunteered to help kids through the Police Athletic League, and finally realized he was into too many things because the marriage just wasn’t working.
He wandered into the kitchen and flipped through the day-old newspaper. The spring had been so dry that bears looking for food were wandering down from the Sandias into the Northeast Heights. They poached garbage in backyard trash cans.
He glanced out the kitchen window. He had heard noises last night, strange noises. Bears didn’t come this far into the valley, they were usually caught up in the Heights and taken back up in the mountains. Maybe hungry raccoons from the river.
The hot weather was upsetting the balance of things. The anti-WIPP groups were threatening action if the Department of Energy went ahead with the
proposed Waste Isolation Pilot Plant test: transporting waste material laced with plutonium from Los Alamos Labs down to the WIPP site near Carlsbad. The editorial supported the test.
A picture of the mayor adorned the city section. Marisa Martinez, the incumbent, was still ahead of Frank Dominic, his cousin Gloria’s husband, in the mayoral polls, but the race was heating up.
He flipped to the sports page. José Valencia was pitching tonight. The Dukes were leading the league. He had promised to take don Eliseo and his friends to a game before the summer was over.
He thought again of the images in the nightmare. He would have to tell Rita about it. Somebody had tried to kill him in his dream. That wasn’t good. Rita would know what it meant; she could interpret dreams. A woman wants to kill you, which means to get power over you, she would say. She went for your pingo. You better watch out, Sonny Baca.
“Coffee.” Sonny heard his stomach growl. “I need some of don Eliseo’s coffee.”
He was just about to step outside when the phone rang.
“Sonny, I need you to come quickly!” a woman’s voice said.
Sonny recognized his tía Delfina’s voice. She never called.
“Qué pasa?” he asked.
“Gloria’s dead. Somebody murdered her.”
“Gloria—” He felt a tremor in his gut. No, it can’t be. “Tía—” he began again, but she cut in.
“She’s dead, Sonny, Frank just called me. They found her this morning. She was murdered last night. I want you to take me there.”
“Murdered?” Sonny shook his head. What the hell was going on? “Did you call—”
“Yes, I called your mother. There’s nothing she can do. I have to see my daughter. I want you to take me there.”
“Yes, yes,” he replied, still not believing the words he was hearing, but feeling the shock spreading through his body. His cousin Gloria dead? It wasn’t possible.
“I’ll be waiting,” his aunt said, and the phone went dead.
2
“Gloria,” Sonny whispered and slowly dropped the phone on its cradle. No, she couldn’t be dead. He saw her face, her smile, then a shudder went through him. “God, no,” he cried. He didn’t want to believe what he had just heard.
He flipped on the police band on his CB. The police radio was buzzing with the sketchy details. Gloria Dominic’s body had just been discovered.
“No,” he kept repeating, his mind still not accepting the message. It was a mistake.
He flipped on the small black-and-white television on his kitchen table. Images of Frank Dominic’s elegant home on North Río Grande appeared, police blockades, news reporters. Bedlam.
He slumped down on a chair. The last time he had seen Gloria was at the mayoral announcement party that Frank had thrown in April. He had danced with her, and for a moment recaptured the time he had spent with her when he was in high school. During high school he had often turned to Gloria with his problems.
His father had died when Sonny entered high school, and he never felt he could talk to his mother, so cousin Gloria became his confidante. When he needed to talk he would call her. He was always welcome at her apartment.
He was as involved in his sexuality as everybody else at school, but he didn’t seem to be able to go all the way. Everybody in school was getting laid, the girls were as aggressive as the boys, and Sonny had offers, but he was holding back and he didn’t know why. By his senior year he still hadn’t made it with a girl.
“Being raised Catholic, I guess,” he confided in Gloria.
“Sin and guilt,” she replied, going to the core of his concern.
“Yeah. The way I was brought up. It just ain’t right. I want to—Hell, I don’t even know if I can.”
“You have time.” She touched him, held him to her.
He believed her, allowed himself to be held, felt the warmth and security she provided, and something else. A startling flow of need to really hold her, make love to her.
He drew away. He was eighteen, she was twenty-eight, they were cousins, friends, that was all. It was the first time he had felt the way a man would feel for a woman he wanted to make love to. She was beautiful. She could have any man she wanted.
“And you?” he asked, studying the serene beauty of her oval face, the arched eyebrows, the light green eyes.
“You’re the handsomest guy I know,” she replied. “You could have any of the girls. Maybe you need someone special.”
The last week of school she invited him to her apartment. “Your graduation party,” she said. He had spent many an evening with her, talking, sharing ideas of life. That night she taught him about love. She gave herself to him; she was the someone special he had been looking for.
Then she left for Los Angeles. She left a note, explaining a job offer had come up. She wrote Sonny a couple of times, telling him things she was doing, but she never gave an address. She had landed a job, she was modeling, and she was making money, a lot of money, and she was meeting men who made film offers. Finally it dawned on Sonny that she had become a call girl.
He had fallen in love with her; he wanted to go to her, help her. In his thoughts he rushed to her, took her away from the movie moguls who lusted only after her body, brought her back to New Mexico where she belonged, where they could be happy. Daydreams that didn’t stop even after he married Angie.
He knew he had married more or less on the rebound from Gloria. He tried to find in Angie the joy of passion Gloria had given him, but it wasn’t there.
Gloria returned three years later, and she and Sonny ran into each other. They met at Epi’s Bar and talked about old times. The men in the bar paid attention to the nice-looking, well-dressed woman, and she flirted with them, acknowledging their stares with smiles. Sonny felt self-conscious.
She had changed. The love they had shared was gone. Gloria guarded herself closely. During the years in LA, she had encircled herself with a protective shell not even Sonny could penetrate.
Then she starting dating Frank Dominic, the most influential man in the city. Within months they were married.
Why? Sonny had wondered at her wedding as he sat in the back of a packed St. Mary’s Church. It wasn’t love. It had to do with Dominic’s political aspirations. Of course Dominic was drawn to Gloria’s beauty, but there was more. Gloria fitted his plans. Dominic was a man driven to be not only the mayor of the city, he also wanted to be the new duke of Alburquerque. He yearned to be connected to royalty, anything that had to do with the Spanish blue blood of the first conquistadores. The names of de Vargas and Oñate were heroic in his mind, they were the Españoles who led the colonization of New Mexico, northern New Spain.
Gloria had grown up in poverty. The family had once owned valuable land in Old Town, though it had been lost long ago. But their father’s family tree went way back. The Dominguez family had been in the Río Grande valley since the first conquest of New Mexico, and they had returned with de Vargas after the 1680 Indian Pueblo revolt to resettle in the Alburquerque area.
Sonny’s mother had told him the story. “The Dominguez family used to be ricos. They went from here in Atrisco to la Plaza Vieja. They owned a lot of land, and when the railroad came they sold some, but lost most of it to crooked lawyers. Their family name is mentioned in the old records. You know my sister Delfina is so proud she married into such a family.”
Yes, tía Delfina was a proud woman, like Gloria, and that’s what Dominic wanted. A young and proud and beautiful woman at his side, one with a bloodline, one that was related to the original duke of Alburquerque’s mystique. Spanish blue blood. Royalty! That was the trump Dominic would play as he furthered his ambitions.
Now Gloria was dead.
“Damn!” Sonny cursed and dialed Frank Dominic’s number.
A voice answered. Al Romero, Dominic’s attorney. “I need to talk to Frank,” said Sonny, explaining who he was. There was a wait, then Dominic’s voice.
“Yeah?”
“I just hear
d about Gloria.”
“She’s dead,” Dominic replied. “Murdered.”
“I have to see her.”
There was a pause. Dominic was talking to someone else in the room, perhaps Romero or the field officer in charge of the investigation. “No. It’s impossible.”
“I’m bringing Delfina,” Sonny said.
“No!” Dominic objected, but Sonny just hung up the phone. He grabbed a shirt on his way out.
“Hey, Sonny!” don Eliseo called from across the street as Sonny stepped out. “Come and help these pendejos!”
“No puedo, don Eliseo,” Sonny called back, “just got an emergency call.”
“Qué pasa?”
“I’ll explain later!” Sonny waved as he jumped into his truck. The old man shook his head and made the sign of the cross. “Cuidao,” he called as the old Ford roared to life.
Sonny gunned it down the dirt road to Fourth Street, south across the downtown area into the Barelas barrio. His tía lived in a small house on Pacific. She was waiting at the front door, dressed in black, already in mourning, standing stiff and straight. She wouldn’t call Turco, her renegade son, even to take her to her daughter’s death. In time of trouble she had turned to her nephew.
Sonny jumped out and opened the door for her. “I’m sorry—”
Tía Delfina looked at him, her eyes dry, coffee-brown and penetrating, but dry. She took her seat.
“We should only be sorry,” she replied, “if we never know the murderer of my daughter.” She stiffened and stared ahead.
Sonny looked at her. His tía was a handsome woman, the source of Gloria’s beauty. The high Mexican cheekbones, the oval face, the dark eyes with carefully arched eyebrows. But Gloria’s green eyes had come from her father, as did the full lips, the arrogant pout.
His tía was distant, not warm like his mother; they were not like sisters at all. Today she was even colder and more distant, but who could blame her for being withdrawn?
Zia Summer, Rio Grande Fall, Shaman Winter, and Jemez Spring Page 2