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 p
ilot. 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.
14
“There!” Sonny motioned, and Madge turned to see the black balloon rise quickly from the river, the white raven emblem clearly visible. Raven had been waiting; he had launched his balloon from a small clearing somewhere in the bosque. That’s how he had escaped detection, he hid in the river forest. Now his balloon rose quickly to meet them.
“That’s him!” Madge shouted.
Sonofabitch has balls, Sonny thought. He has to know Garcia’s nearby. Does he want me that bad to take the chance?
A sixth sense nudged at Sonny. No, Raven would not take those kinds of chances. Keep to your plan … Keep to your plan …
The figure of Raven crouching low in the basket as the balloon rose to meet them had distracted Sonny for a moment. The figure in the basket held a rifle, there was a flash of fire, and the report of a rifle followed. Sonny heard the whining sound of the bullet ricocheting off the steel plate.
“He’s shooting!” Madge cried.
“Yeah,” Sonny acknowledged, and peered over the edge of the basket. “Take it down!” he shouted. “Take it down quickly!”
“Down?”
“Yes, down! Land it anywhere!”
&nb
sp; Another shot sounded from Raven’s balloon, then another, but Sonny knew it was a decoy. The thud he felt on the steel plate told him the real shot had been fired from the ground. The plate had deflected the bullet.
Sonny spotted a figure in a clearing near the edge of the river. He took aim and fired. The startled figure jumped back as the bullet spat dirt at his feet. Sonny fired again. The bullet exploded a dry branch right above the man who had shot at them. Sonny saw him disappear into the bosque.
“What are you shooting at?” Madge shouted when she saw Sonny wasn’t aiming at the black balloon, but down at the river.
“Look!” Sonny shouted, and pointed at Raven’s balloon.
It came up fast, and as it drifted alongside them, they could see the figure in the balloon. It was a dummy, a mannequin holding a broomstick. The blast of gunshots that sounded were firecrackers tied to the tip of a broom. Raven wouldn’t take a chance on getting caught in a balloon. He had killed Mario Secco from the ground! The black balloon was a decoy.
“It’s a dummy!” Madge cried as the black balloon floated alongside them for a while, then began to drop.
“Yeah.” Sonny nodded. He was looking down into the bosque where Raven had disappeared. Caught off guard by their response, Raven wouldn’t fire on them again.
Raven had anchored his balloon and inflated it. When Sonny and Madge’s balloon approached, he cut the line and the balloon rose to greet them, a distraction so he could get a clear shot at Sonny.
Sonny peered over the edge again. Raven was nowhere in sight. His ruse had been found out, and he didn’t want to risk a gun battle with Sonny. Maybe it was safe, but up in the air they were sitting ducks. Best to continue down and get on terra firma.
Madge pointed to a sandbar in the riverbed. “Is that okay?”
“Fine,” Sonny replied. Without a fresh burst of hot air, the black balloon floated down, toward the same sandbar Madge was aiming for. Sonny wanted to take a look at it.
“He was on the ground, wasn’t he?” Madge said.
Sonny nodded. He knew the gun battle had frightened her, and seeing Sonny shooting down instead of at the black balloon had confused her for a moment.
Zia Summer, Rio Grande Fall, Shaman Winter, and Jemez Spring Page 54