Don Eliseo put another piece of dry cow dung on the coals of the fire.
“They scratched a Zia sign around her ombligo,” Sonny said, “the sign of the sun.”
“Dios mío,” don Eliseo said. “They defile everything. The sign of the sun is sacred. The sun gives us life, not death. Only brujos would put that sign of life on a dead woman’s stomach.”
Sonny shrugged.
“Concha and Toto found the place where we saw the light a week ago. We went to look at it and found feathers around the burn. Four black feathers. Like the feathers of the crows that come in the winter to roost in the alamos along the river. There’s bad things happening, Sonny. Evil people doing these ceremonies. They don’t use the feathers of the eagle to send prayers to the sun, they use the black feathers of death. Be careful with those feathers, Sonny. They can bring death. These people don’t want their evil known, so they will leave things for you to find, false signs to lead you astray, warnings to frighten you away.”
“They know about me?”
“Oh, yes.”
“How?”
“Because every generation repeats the struggle between good and evil. You are a good man, Sonny. What gathers around you is destined to be. The time is changing, new ways come to the world, and those who do evil multiply.”
Sonny shrugged. Sometimes he didn’t understand the old man.
“In the old days,” don Eliseo continued, “we called them brujas. Men and women who did black magic, fornicated with goats, prayed the Black Mass. Ah, that’s what the people said. They are really people who have destruction in their hearts. Things don’t change. Now maybe they drive to work in fancy cars, wear nice clothes. They work all over the city. The surface changes, Sonny, underneath the evil intent remains.”
He paused. He was looking in the flickering tongues of the fire, into the embers, as if reading Sonny’s fortune. He was so still Sonny thought the old man had fallen asleep.
“I’d better get some sleep,” Sonny said.
“Yes. Get some rest. Cuidao.”
“Gracias.” Sonny turned and placed his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “I’ll be careful.”
He walked across the street to his little house. A couple of night crickets had crawled through the torn screen of his kitchen window; now they chirped shrilly at each other. A song of love in the dark. Sonny smiled. It was good luck to have grillos in the house, his father used to say. A house that has grillos singing doesn’t have black widow spiders lurking in dark corners. When he turned on the light, the grillos grew still.
The house was stifling hot. He had forgotten to turn on the swamp cooler. He opened all the windows and doors, then went into the kitchen to listen to the messages on his answering machine. Rita had called three times. She must have started calling as soon as the news flashed on TV. An old rodeo friend from Mountainair had called to tell him he was on his way to Vegas, he had two women with him and a tankful of gas in a 1980 Cadillac he just bought: would Sonny like to go?
His mother’s message was also engraved on the squeaky tape. “Sonny,” she cried. “Oh, mi hijo.…” She sobbed. “Delfina just called. Gloria’s dead.” Then a moment of sobs. Sonny felt the shock again, as if just hearing the news for the first time. “I can’t believe it. Who? Who would do such a thing? I tried to call you … I called Armando. I tried to call Mr. Dominic, but I couldn’t get through. Ay, hijo, cuídate. I love you. Call me.”
She must have called right as I was picking up tía, Sonny thought.
The next message was a muffled voice he didn’t recognize. “Stay away or you will die! Stay away!”
Who? Sonny wondered.
At the end of the tape, Howard. “Found something. Give me a call.”
He dialed Howard’s number.
“Sonny, glad you called. Just got the autopsy report. She wasn’t raped.”
“Yeah, I talked to Garcia.”
“I smell something fishy.”
“Qué?”
“The autopsy report,” Howard answered, smacked his lips. “Excuse my chewing, but my cousin just dropped off a bucket of his famous barbecued ribs. You called just as I was getting started.”
“What about the autopsy?”
“I’ll know more on Monday, but an intern did it. My hunch is Dominic called the MI and asked for a specific doctor to do the autopsy—”
“You still think that she was pregnant?”
“Maybe.”
“Come on, Howard, why would they rig the autopsy?”
“Just a hunch.”
“Why think so wild?”
“What if Gloria was pregnant, and what if there was a way to tell it wasn’t Dominic’s.…”
“Damn,” Sonny groaned.
“Anyway, enough theory. We found some tire tracks in the ditch road behind the house. Something else. I found an earring. A little handmade earring made of copper. It’s in the form of the Zia sign. And there’s a feather dangling from it—”
“A black feather like from a crow,” Sonny interjected.
It was Howard’s turn to pause. “Yeah.”
Sonny scratched his stomach. The crickets in the kitchen were chirping again.
“It bothers me,” Howard continued. “These people were too careful; they couldn’t have overlooked something like this. It had to be planted, but why? Off the record, maybe it was even the cops who put it there, maybe it gives them some way to close this case quickly.”
They will leave clues to mislead you, don Eliseo had said. Sonny pushed the kitchen window curtains aside. The old man was sitting by the tree. He would sit there late into the night, perhaps his friends doña Concha and don Toto would drop by to visit, and they would sip wine and tell stories. They would talk about the murder of Gloria Dominic and the bad things that were coming to their valley.
“Someone’s trying to lead us along a false path,” Sonny said.
“Yeah.”
“Thanks, Howard. Good night.”
“Buenas noches.”
7
Sonny flipped on his tape player and poured himself another cup of tea. He opened the cupboard where he kept a bottle of bourbon and poured a shot into the tea. Then he sat back and listened to the romantic strains of the Juan Arriaga symphony. The melody floated out the window into the summer night. He had been listening to the Spanish composer all week.
Glancing out the window, Sonny saw don Eliseo still sitting under the protective branches of the tree. He felt happy the tree would stay. A few weeks ago a young constable had tagged the tree and declared it a public nuisance. The tree was dead, it was going to fall, he said, and it might hurt someone. A windstorm could bring down the dry branches and endanger passersby. Don Eliseo insisted the tree was alive, it was just resting. The dry, dark buds, which clung like brittle cockroaches on the branches, would bloom, leaves would come, the old man said. Just wait.
“You cut it or we cut it,” the young deputy threatened, “and if we cut it, we send you the bill.”
Don Eliseo, who had lived in the valley all his eighty years, chased the young man out of his yard.
“Qué sabes tú?” he shouted. “Nada! The roots are alive! You don’t bury somebody just because they got a weak heart, do you? Pendejo! It’s going to get green, you watch!”
“It’s June!” the deputy shouted as he drove away. “Look!” He pointed around to the other cottonwoods along the irrigation ditch. They were green and glistening, the tetóne pods were ripe. The grapelike clusters were already bursting, letting loose the cotton that would drift for weeks on the summer breeze, catching on the bushes, powdering patios, roads, everything. Cotton from the female cottonwoods, the alamos of the river, the unofficial tree of the city.
“Maybe the pendejo was right,” don Eliseo later told Sonny. “The tree is like me, bien seco. Time to cut it down and let it rest. You get old, the juices stop flowing. El Coco lives in the tree, Sonny, but even El Coco gets tired of living.”
“El Coco?”
“Sure, the Cucúi. A tree spirit. Lives in the bosque of the river. Each tree has a spirit, mi hijo.…”
For the old man everything had a spirit. Tree, corn, stone, rain, clay. Everything was alive.
Since he had moved into the small rental across the street from don Eliseo’s house, Sonny had watched as more and more of the old cotton-woods of the North Valley were cut down for new housing developments. Now don Eliseo’s old tree had decided to die. Maybe it was sadness killing the tree, sadness as huge expensive homes covered the once fertile fields of Ranchitos.
“I grew up under this tree.” Don Eliseo sighed. “It’s been in the family since my family settled here in Ranchitos. Sanamagon, there’s been Romeros here since before the Indians kicked out all the Españoles in 1680. Before Alburquerque was made a villa in 1706, the Romeros were already raising corn here. There were trees, an alameda of alamos. The raices, Sonny, beneath the earth the roots of all these trees stretch far, connecting to other trees, until the entire valley is connected. You can’t kill a tree and not kill the past. The trees are like the gente of the valley, sooner or later we’re all related. Primos, Sonny, primos from the first people who came to the valley. Our raices stretch into the past. Our seeds are like the cotton of the trees, carried by the wind.…”
The old man grew passionate as he told his story. “The Indians from Sandia used to live here. Under this earth lie the adobes and stones of their old pueblos, the bones of their ancestors, the Tiguex. My father, and my grandfather before him, found bones when they plowed. Bones we took to our vecinos in the pueblo to bury again. Not put in the goddamned museum like the gringo antro-poligies. Our ancestors were real people, and they sat here and talked about their familias and planting corn and about the acequias. This tree was giving shade when the railroad first came to Alburquerque. How can I cut down my history?”
Sonny had been happy earlier in the spring when don Eliseo had pointed at one of the topmost branches where a few buds appeared ready to burst into leaf. “It’s still got juice!” he’d said, smiling. “Give it time.”
But there had been only a few spring rains in May and now the relentless heat of early June scorched the valley. The buds seemed to wither; there were no leaves. Don Eliseo grew despondent. Then a spring windstorm knocked down a large branch on the north side, proving the village constable right.
Don Eliseo was one of the few old-timers who still planted an acre of corn on his land. Mixed in the corn were calabacitas, beans, watermelon, pumpkins. By July the entire neighborhood would be eating elotes, the fresh ears of green corn on the cob, and tender squash. Don Eliseo would set up a small stand in front of his house: Organic Vegetables. The new Anglos of the North Valley flocked to buy them.
“It’s in my blood,” the old man said. “The seeds I plant have been in this valley since before the Españoles came. It’s Indian corn, Sonny, and it’s going to be around long after all the new hybrids are gone.”
Sonny looked out the window across the field of young plants that glistened in the moonlight. Don Eliseo was now standing in the middle of the field, listening to the heartbeat of the earth.
“My ancestors and then my father farmed this land,” don Eliseo liked to say as he pointed proudly at his field of corn. “Beans, corn, calabacitas, and chile, that’s all we need to survive,” he said, then added, “but the old people are nearly gone, sold their farms to the ricos.”
His voice was always sad when he spoke of the large estates that had taken the farming land of the valley.
“Matanzas were held under this tree, and the blood of the slaughtered animals fed the roots. That’s why it grew so big and fat, and why it has lasted so long. They hanged a man here, from that branch.” He pointed up. “In my grandfather’s time a man murdered an Indian from Sandia Pueblo, and the sheriff got a posse together and found the man. They hanged him from that branch. My wife, que descanse en paz, and I would sit here in the summers and visit with our neighbors. In the fall we made the ristras de chile. We peeled and sliced apples, dried them on the roof, that’s how we did it.”
“Ah, la vida,” Sonny whispered and sipped the spiked tea. The combination helped calm his stomach. He thought of Gloria, how her life had been ended so suddenly, and he wondered if he was wasting his own life.
After he finished college, he had taught at Valley High School a couple of years, but he found the work confining and a lot of the kids not interested in learning. Then he hooked up with Manuel Lopez, a private investigator whose specialty was in finding missing persons. Manuel worked out of his home in the North Valley, doing mostly insurance cases, but that same summer Manuel took Sonny into Chihuahua on a ransom case.
Two Mexicanos had kidnapped the young wife of a big car dealer in town, and the local cops had no leads. Manuel’s lead came from the Mexicanos in the barrio. They whispered they had known the two desperate men who kidnapped the woman, and, following the leads, Manuel took Sonny with him into Mexico. Like a hound dog, Manuel Lopez followed the men into the Chihuahua mountains, found the place where they were hiding the woman, and rescued her in the middle of the night.
There was a brief exchange of gunfire. The kidnappers, thinking they were tangling with Mexican federales, fled. The only person who had fired at them was Manuel.
The media had made a big deal out of the incident. Manuel’s picture was splashed all over Mexican and New Mexican newspapers. Right behind him appeared Sonny and the car dealer’s wife. The Mexican government had protested. He and Sonny had grabbed the woman and spirited her back across the border at Juarez. Her husband had paid them enough for Sonny to live a year, which he stretched to two.
Even after Manuel died a couple of years ago, Sonny’s fantasies of future cases continued, but the recent work hadn’t turned out to be as exciting. He didn’t especially like looking for those who skipped out on banks or credit card companies, and even missing persons could be dull. Husbands escaping from the responsibilities of marriage; wives cutting loose like Thelma and Louise. Sometimes he hated to bring them back. People were looking for freedom, a breath of fresh air.
He wasn’t the only one less than thrilled with his occupation. “You’re not getting any younger,” his mother, like Rita, reminded him. “What are you going to do? Look for missing persons all your life? You have a college degree. Go back to teaching. At least you get a regular salary.”
“Not much,” Sonny replied.
“You’ve got your Bisabuelo’s blood,” she concluded, sighing.
Yes, he admitted, he was haunted by the stories of his great-grandfather, haunted by the pistol he carried in his truck. In 1910, when he was in his early thirties, Elfego Baca had moved to Alburquerque to practice law and hire himself out as a private detective. The old-timers said he went around town dressed in a flowing cape, a mean-looking bodyguard at his side.
There was something of the showman in el Bisabuelo. He handed out business cards that read “Elfego Baca, Attorney at Law, Fees Moderate” on one side, and on the flip side “Private Detective: Divorce Investigations Our Specialty, Discreet Shadowing Done.” Sonny had printed similar cards and kept them in his wallet just for fun.
He had read the history of Elfego Baca, the exciting days of the 1880s when the gringos were building New Town around the railroad station. The Mexicanos still lived over in Old Town, la Plaza Vieja, or along the north and south valley where they farmed. It was a time of great change, great adventure.
“Damn city ought to build a statue to him,” Sonny mused. Damn city didn’t know its own heroes.
Ah, those were the days. Fighting it out with outlaws was more interesting than taking pictures of indiscreet husbands running around. Or indiscreet wives.
He looked out his kitchen window again. Don Eliseo had returned to put a piece of wood in the fire. He was waiting for his friends.
Don Eliseo is like one of the old, gnarled alamos of the river, Sonny thought. Rita is like the purple budding tamarisk, the salt cedar th
at grows along the river arroyos. Passionate, a lovely mauve in flower, with straight, burnt-red branches.
I need to be more like a tree, less like a tumbleweed, Sonny thought. But what tree?
Sonny sipped the last of Rita’s tea and stared out the open window. Across the way he saw a customized ’57 Chevrolet cruise to a stop in front of don Eliseo’s place. Two shadows disembarked, two figures of the night who had crossed the River Styx to come to visit don Eliseo. Sonny felt his heart quicken; he leaned forward.
“Eliseo? ’Stas ahí?” a hoarse voice called.
“Dónde a d’estar?” don Eliseo called from beside the glowing embers of his fire. The figures approached him. It was don Toto and doña Concha, don Eliseo’s North Valley compadre and comadre. Sonny smiled and relaxed.
The old-timers on North Fourth called don Toto “El Chuco,” because even though he was eighty he still dressed like an old pachuco from the forties. He kept his double-soled shoes spit-shined, he wore his pants tapered at the ankles and slung low around his thin waist. He drank and danced in the North Fourth bars every Saturday night.
“La movida chueca,” he said with a grin. He was once the terror of the gray-haired bingo ladies who gathered to play bingo on Tuesday afternoons at Our Lady of Sorrows, until Father Joe, who was no angel himself, had ruled the bingo game off limits to don Toto.
“Until you learn to behave yourself,” Father Joe had pronounced the day he kicked don Toto out.
Don Toto had propositioned one of the younger ladies, seventy-year-old la Suzie, who powdered her face and added a spot of bright rouge and lipstick. She wore a blond beehive wig, which contrasted with her very dark complexion. She liked to swing her hips when she paraded up and down the aisles selling bingo cards. Don Toto had pinched her rear.
Zia Summer, Rio Grande Fall, Shaman Winter, and Jemez Spring Page 8