Jemez Spring

by Rudolfo Anaya

  José looked at the pistol, then placed it back in the glove compartment. “Has quite a kick,” he said. The demons of Nam awakened by the smell of cordite lay heavy on his heart. Memories locked in his brain cells announced once again that he could never forget the war and its atrocities. He fell silent.

  Sonny drove down the long thigh of the hill that spread languorously toward the valley and Bernalillo, the air pleasant after the last gasps of wind whooshed up the face of the Sandias and fell like a spent lover over the Estancia Valley.

  A deep quiet fell over the Rio Grande, silent and peaceful. The storm had passed, leaving the last of its caresses playing on the stems of chamisa and dry grass that dotted the mesa. In New Mexico the wind never died. It whimpered to a gentle breeze that cooled the foreheads of those who worked outdoors. Like earth, sky, and clouds, the breeze was a constant friend, a compañero, vigilant over the land. Its strength rose and fell, carrying the whimper of a woman betrayed, or the rage of La Llorona.

  The valley actually looked inviting. It was not yet in bloom, but the ochre sheen of spring buds rested on dry branches, on the russet buds on the river alamos, and here and there a globe willow ballooned in bright lime green. Flowering apricot trees graced a few front yards, as did purple plum and redbud trees.

  Across the way the turtle hump of the Sandias rose, a faint outline etched against the eastern sky, a turtle on its way to some meeting of mountains, its granite feet leathery, bound to the foothills. In the light of the garish sun the turtle seemed to move. The pattern of light and shadow, deep ravines and outcropping of granite boulders, and the shawl of white limestone along the crest reflected the light, and it was the light that was the breath of the mountain. Deep below the granite exterior, the pounding heart.

  “Old turtle,” Sonny whispered.

  “Alive,” José answered.

  Sonny’s tension dissipated when he made contact with the mountain. For the people of the valley, the Sandias were a force of positive energy. As a lightning rod collects the ever-present energies of thunderstorms, the mountain collected the chi energy of the solar system, gathered it into its bosom and spread it outward, throughout the land. Those whose feet were made of mud could feel the chi rising from the earth to comfort the seven chakras, until even old men’s curved spines felt renewed, and women suffering from osteoporosis felt like dancing. Chi for crooked backs and arthritic hands, water for the tree of life, the twisted serpentine spine, the energy of the mountain massaged fibers and flesh, and renewed the soul.

  “You don’t have to live on the mountain to benefit,” José said. “We Pueblo people need the land and water of the valley for our crops. But we honor the mountain. It provides deer, green trees, a spirit. Up there you feel you’re close to the Creator.”

  The true Creator who still imbues the earth with its power, it soul fire, its light.

  Yes, Sonny agreed. But he could not enjoy the raw beauty of the land as he used to. The image of the fetus in the jar of water haunted him. Why had he seen two? In the winter-solstice dream, he had seen a light, the soul of Rita’s child, blinding Raven for that crucial instant that allowed Sonny to strike with the dreamcatcher. When he recalled the image of the dream he saw it split in two. Twins? It was possible. There was a history of twins in his mother’s family. She had a twin sister, and he and Armando were twins.

  Raven had killed Rita’s twins. No, not killed, was holding them captive. Sonny was sure he could go there, and bring back to life what Raven had taken from him.

  12

  He pulled into the Sonic Drive-In to phone Rita.

  “Sonny, where are you? Have you seen Lorenza?”

  “I’m on my way—”

  “Are you all right? The cell phones still aren’t working. The place is going crazy.”

  “I’m okay. In Bernalillo.”

  “There’s an important call for you. Augememnon from the state police. He wants you to call him. He left a number—”

  She read the number and he penned it on the wall of the phone cubicle.

  “I’ll call him. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. I kept the restaurant open. Brought out the TV set. Everyone is glued to it.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Guys. The place is packed. No one’s going to work. They’re sitting here drinking coffee and watching the news on TV.”

  Guys, Sonny thought. Working stiffs from the North Valley. They loved Rita’s home-cooked breakfasts, the best red and green chile in the city, and, he knew, they liked to linger and enjoy her presence.

  “You’re not the jealous type,” she said once.

  He was, but he said nothing. She was a beautiful woman.

  He knew if he was gone all day, by closing time one of the young studs might be tempted to ask to take her home after work. Not that Rita would accept, they all knew that, but they liked to push the envelope. Yeah, he knew his raza, every Chicano a suitor in the heart, always on la movida. It was bred in the bone from day one. Mama Nature had laid one of her hot chile genes in the pants.

  He smiled. Yeah, hot chile genes, a hormone gene not yet traced on the DNA molecule, but it was there, waiting to be roasted, peeled, and sandwiched. All’s fair in love and war, and the bachelors hanging around Rita’s place would just love to score.

  Gotta get home before I’m dead, Sonny thought.

  “What about the bomb on the mountain?” Rita asked. “Most don’t believe it’s real. Is it?”

  “Nothing to worry about. They have the lab boys out there. I’m sure they will take care of things.”

  “I hope so. Did you eat?”

  “Yes, Chica and I had a great lunch. The tacos were great.”

  “You didn’t give her carne adovada, did you? I put a chicken taco in for her.”

  Chicken taco sin salsa. The taco he gave José.

  “Ah … no, she’s fine.”

  “And don Eliseo?” She was hesitant, but she asked anyway.

  Sonny turned and looked at the truck.

  “Everything’s cool. I’ll be home in no time.”

  “I know you, Sonny Baca. You get tied up with Raven and you’re a bulldog. He’s dangerous, especially if—”

  Especially if he messes with my mind, Sonny thought.

  “I’m okay. Really.”

  “Bueno. Just don’t go chasing wild horses. I love you.”

  Wild horses, he thought. The white, the red, the black, and the pale horses of the Bible, and the pale horse carried death, the penitentes said it pulled Doña Sebastiana’s cart, la comadre, la muerte. Why was it that every word became an image? Sound moved into picture, as light moved into time, forming symbols from the world of vibrations. And symbols became story, playing like a concert in his mind.

  Today’s story had started with the snake. Yes, the snake was a sign on the road. So was running into Bear and Naomi at Red Rocks. The dead governor floating in the tub. The bomb, the helicopter ride. He could see the signs, but he couldn’t change their consequences as their ripples moved out in the pond that was the day.

  It had always been like this. Waking or dreaming, an idea, a thing, a person, or a word announced itself, became an image in neural fluids, but always the image stood for something else, and the something else it stood for was as nebulous as the original germ. Could even the Logos be trusted to remain static? To mean something? Or had its progeny become just more images floating in a sea of images?

  Was the shaman’s world a world of symbols? Was this part of the training received from don Eliseo? Something stood for something else, and so it went to the last syllable of recorded time, and there was no way to get at the reality of things, the truth, the essence. Was the world nothing but Vishnu’s dream? A world of illusion.

  “I love you, querida. Just keep those guys at arm’s length.”

  She laughed. “Maybe if I make you jealous you’ll come quicker.”

  Come quicker. Her words were always playful and suggestive, teasing. Just last week they
had driven to the Sandia Casino to a mariachi concert. On the way she heard “Las Mañanitas” on the radio and she turned and told him when she heard the song it made her want to make love to him. The more he bonded to her the more he felt that in the depth of her soul there resided the light of her spirit and the sex of her flesh. It was one.

  “I’ll be there anyway and kick them all out. And—”

  “And what?”

  “You know.”

  “Sonny, we can’t make love while someone is blowing up half the state.”

  “Think of the blast.”

  She laughed again. “Okay. Just hurry.”

  “Un beso.” She blew a kiss into the phone, and he blew one back. He hung up the phone and lingered there, trying to feel his way through the phone wires to touch her, to make sure things were all right with her. Her laughter swirled in the small booth, an apple-blossom fragrance. Yes, she was okay.

  He dialed Augie’s number.

  “Augie. Sonny.”

  “Sonny, damn glad you got back to me. Where are you?”

  “Bernalillo. And you?”

  “Never mind. I need to see you, Sonny.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Have you found Raven?”

  “No.”

  “Is Naomi with you?”

  “No.”

  “She disappeared with a gang of Indians. She’s the one who led the governor to the Bath House. She’s in with Raven.”

  Sonny shook his head. The medallion on his chest felt warm. Raven was near. Sonny looked at the truck. Something stirred under the tarp.

  “Either way, I’m in deep caca. The chief has called out every officer available. He thinks I’m involved. Imagine, me, a suspect! I’m supposed to be guarding the governor and he’s dead.”

  “What about the Al Qaeda suspect?”

  “Gone.”

  “What do you mean ‘gone’?”

  “The FBI took him. He’s gone.”

  “Where?”

  “Sonny, Sonny, Sonny. He’s gone. Don’t you get it? Gone!”

  “And the professors?”

  “I let them go. What do they do? Read books! For crying out loud, nobody reads books anymore! They’ll be deported. I don’t give a holy hill of beans about them, I’m talking about getting Raven! I need to clear myself.”

  “Where are you?”

  Crisply, as if a knife had sliced through the air and cut the wire, Augie hung up.

  Sonny cradled the old black phone, a relic of a prior time, almost a museum piece in a world headed toward complete wireless transmission. A few short years ago everyone depended on the telephone, and telephone booths were part of growing up, where you went to call your girlfriend, or call home if you were going to be late. The booth in the movies where someone always made a desperate call. An entire culture had grown up around telephone booths, and now the men in black used cell phones, so did Tom Cruise and Jennifer Lopez, and all the brokers in the world, generals calling in bomb strikes, on and on. Gone wireless and at the mercy of cell towers dotted around the country, satellites circling the earth. In your car with your cell phone you could reach everyone in the world, and still remain isolated.

  Sonny looked at the phone cubicle, intimate, with enough room to hold the phone and a tattered phone book, the walls scratched with the graffiti of all the lost souls who in time of need had come to this shrine, to call out, to reach out, to talk to someone. Littered with phone numbers and names, gang signs, modern glyphs, cousins to the petroglyphs the Anasazi had etched on desert boulders. These glyphs were penciled on the walls of the booth, on the tattered phone book, the rock of ages.

  He looked closely at the dozens of numbers and messages written on the walls of the cubicle. Maybe this is the Zia Stone of our time, he thought, for here are encoded the encrypted messages of the community. If I could just read the meaning, not the individual messages, but the gestalt, the pattern, find meaning in the scribbles, decipher the names, the lines that lead from one sacred direction to the next, pagan, plaintive cries of crisis, of hope and of sadness, for there, handsomely penciled next to a sad tree, the message, Christmas day, she left me, estoy en el rincon de una cantina …

  The graffiti resounded with a forlorn cry, a canto hondo from deep in the soul. Cries of unrequited love, lust seeking its fulfillment. A crude drawing of a full-bosomed, big-hipped woman holding a very large penis.

  The old and smelly phone booth became the cave of Lascaux. There, prehistoric man had painted the mastodon to gain power over the hairy mammoth and be able to kill it. Here, the drawing of the naked woman represented a mad, hopeless desire.

  Perhaps the hurried scrawls of body parts that adorned the walls of sleazy bar bathrooms also had a purpose. Neanderthal on the make had to draw the object of his desire. Sex and its need, sometimes a true longing, sometimes perverse.

  Sonny studied the names, cryptic messages, lipstick red, Sharpie black, knife scratches, hearts pledging love, fuck-you’s, numbers to call for help. For good dope call. Terry loves Flaco. Chuy rules. Darwin. A fish with four legs. And the strangest one, written in seraphim script, at the bottom of the cubicle: Come to Macedonia and help us.

  Was there a town called Macedonia in New Mexico? A place in desperate need? Sonny scratched his head. Riffing through his memory bank he found the image of the book a Professor Pearce had written long ago, a listing of all the towns and places in New Mexico, a work of love, but then it was teachers like him and George Arms and Dame Edith who had taught a generation of students long before Sonny got to UNM. Professors whose names still rang in the halls of the English Department where he had matriculated. But no, he couldn’t recall a Macedonia.

  The war in Croatia? Ethnic cleansing? Was the plea for help a call to those who would sit on the fence while entire populations were massacred simply because of their ethnicity? What did ethnic mean? Cultural patterns? Or the fear of a different kind of blood? Fear of mestizos? How could one blood be different from another? If a blood transfusion would save your life, you weren’t going to ask its ethnicity. The color.

  As the center of the world fell apart the guilty would also be those who did not go to help, and their names would be called when Armageddon fell on the fertile fields of Macedonia. The Third World War had already begun, in Iraq, Croatia, in Palestine, Ireland, North Korea, the jeweled Persia of old, Kashmir, Tibet where the Chinese overran ancient monasteries, wherever neighbor turned against neighbor the world shattered. 9-11 was the tolling bell of the new millennium. And who would send to ask for whom it tolled?

  The center of the world fell apart when the center of each individual cracked, Sonny thought. It’s the soul that must be kept intact. The center of the world rests in each person. We have to go to Macedonia before it’s too late!

  All the messages begged to be heard, for that was the essence of the phone booth, a Web page before Web pages, the internet of prior generations.

  For a good time call Krystal caught his eye. In every phone booth in the world, on every bar bathroom wall, always the name of a woman to call, written not by her but by her avenger.

  Testosterone punishes, Sonny thought. A gathering of male hormones creates a violent chi, an angry energy that disrupts the harmonious flow of the psyche.

  When he sat with Rita in her garden he felt whole. The fragrance of her flowers and herbs uplifted the spirit, settled the flow of lust into a love that did not need to thrust itself violently into the other to attain completion.

  He shrugged, as Atlas must have shrugged upon taking the world on his shoulders, one last deep breath, knowing thereafter he was slave to the gross, material world, bent under its weight so he could never again look up to the heavens, never converse with Zeus or Athena, enslaved as Sisyphus, the poor dope chained to the boulder he had to push up the mountain. The original rolling stone. Atlas and Sisyphus caught in the world of matter, heroes who could not help others, hardly help themselves. Beyond the help of the goddess.

  As the
old world collapsed the dispossessed looked for heroes, created new legends. Some were false myths totally unconnected to the primal tales of gods and goddesses. Some were fantasies created by Hollywood, rituals splattered on the big screens, composed with gain in sight, not the ordering of a new universe.

  Krystal? Was this the sylph in his dream? The anima who protected him?

  He dropped his coins into the phone slot and dialed Krystal’s number. A long, soft “Hiiiii” answered. “We’re open, come on over,” said the sweet voice of a siren.

  The sirens’ house somewhere along the river bosque was open, had always been open, pleasures waited in every room, even as the spring-equinox sun stood poised over the town of Bernalillo, even as the slot machines of the Pueblo casinos kept ringing, enticing the poor with their clink-clanging song; such were the promises of the age that denied dog dreams. The new deal was to offer pleasure or riches, or both, dark illusions of a new illusive mythology.

  “I … I was just checking the phone—”

  “What do you mean checking the phone?”

  “It’s working.”

  “Of course it’s working. It’s the cell phones that are screwed up. Come on, Sonny, quit fucking around. Just come over. You know I’m good.”

  The words attacked him like a yellow jacket’s sting, deep into his flesh, burning down the seven chakras, and he jerked back, hung up the phone, and backed out of the booth. Just what in the hell was happening? The rest of the world wasn’t receiving messages, and he was getting more than he bargained for. But what sense did they make? How did Krystal, whoever she was, know it was he? Coincidence? Synchronicity? Yeah, syn-Chronos, the god of Time calling. Yeah, time was turning around the earth, the cotidal sun was in its heaven, and measured time was bearing down on the valley, on him.

  In the end this is how it will be, time will touch the soul, become the light within, it will seek its sacred geography, which is after all the inner heart of man and woman, and for an instant everything will make sense. Complete sense.