Jemez Spring (20 page)

“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.

“I'm not dying,” Sonny insisted. It's a coincidence.

He turned and heard the old man. Damn you, Sonny, how many times have I told you, there are no coincidences! It's all part of a beautiful plan. Everything revolves in the Light, and so one name is like another. Crystal simply refracts the light. You call her and you hear the whore next door, or an angel in heaven. What difference does it make?

“I'm not sure,” Sonny mumbled. The terrible tension that had been building since he dropped the egg in the glass of water was now a buzz. A headache.

He was irritated at himself and at the old man. Sweat broke out on his forehead, under his arms, pasted his shirt to his back.

“Hey, Sonny!” José called. “Let's go.”

He pointed at a half-dozen low-rider cars that were pulling into the drive-in like crows circling roadkill, the customized cars, shining like the chariots of God's angels, decals offering the proof of life, glistening images of la Virgen de Guadalupe on one hood, the Baby Doll with luxurious breasts on the other, bouncing up and down to the rhythm of blaring boom boxes, the thunder of dharma bums, rapping in black and brown, the dark faces of the vatos hidden behind black sunglasses, and at their side lovely, nubile jainas, brown-skinned teenies, faces radiant with paint, a war party into whose arms any opponent would gladly fall, to rest on not-so-virgin breasts.

“Ese vato,” one of the locos hissed.

Why aren't they in school? thought Sonny.

José waved. Come on, let's get the hell out of here!

Sonny made his way through the line of cars.

“Ese!” The hiss again. “Forget your past, they're going to bomb you anyway.”

They called to him, but he paid no heed, walked through the line of fire, the boom boxes blaring a rap he did not recognize, unless it was an ancient song from Macedonia. He neither acknowledged nor denied the presence of the homeboys, whoever they were.

“Órale! Cuídate.”

“El Coco will get you!”

“La Llorona.”

Laughter.

Maybe this is Macedonia, he thought, as he got in the truck, started it, and slowly edged out of the lot onto the street.

“Who?”

“I don't know, but they look like crows circling roadkill.”

A chill ran up Sonny's spine. Raven was everywhere.

13

José pointed, and following a narrow, sandy road they entered the river bosque and drove until José signaled. Sonny stopped the truck, and José got out and looked at the ground.

I've been here before, Sonny thought. But he couldn't remember when or why.

“The house is just down the path, but we're late. All the tracks lead out. The elders are going back to the pueblos to declare war on Dominic.”

“What now?”

José got back in the truck. “Your call. Maybe Lorenza's still around. Sure as hell Raven's here.”

Sonny followed his gaze, staring into the ominous silence of the brush. Chica whined. Yes, Raven was here.

The bare, gnarled branches of the cottonwoods reached toward the eye of heaven, begging for rain from a sky now glazed with the lingering smoke of distant forest fires.

Sonny shivered. He felt he had come unprepared to Raven's lair. He started to reach for the pistol and remembered José had used the bullet he had prepared for Raven. What weapon did he have left? The dreamcatcher.

He looked up at the towering alamos. The trees were pregnant with thick, dark buds, crust-like chrysalises guarding the seeds within. The leaves and pods would sprout in a month.

His troubled mind retrieved images of elementary school days when he and his friends gathered tetones, the clusters of green pods birthed by the female cottonwood trees. Ammunition. Each pea-sized teton became a stinging missile when shot from the end of a popsicle stick. They pestered the girls and drove teachers mad. Those same green pods ripened and exploded in late May, parachuting the seed-bearing cotton to the earth below. The spring winds drove the cotton like snow. Each cotton fluff carried a seed even to the shores of lands unknown. All of life revolved around the mystery in the seed.

Isn't my soul also like a seed? Seed of mind, seed of body. The body rises up the spinal column, destined to be straight or crooked. And the seven seals of life were locked in the spine. The seals determined the person.