Jemez Spring (34 page)

“That's the easy part,” Raven continued, the joy of a dark dream reverberating in his voice. “All of you know the terrorists planted a bomb on the Valles caldera, that mountain that I love as a mother …” He paused and touched a black silk handkerchief to his eyes, glancing sideways to make sure he was being observed.

Again, Sonny resisted pulling out the pistol. An ordinary bullet couldn't kill Raven, and the bullet molded by the magician had been used by José on the whirlwind.

“In the past you have trusted Sonny Baca. He would have you believe I planted the bomb,” Raven whispered, gazing at Sonny and fixing him with a stare. “But you know better. You know terrorists have infiltrated our national labs. They wish to destroy our capability for waging war. They are intent on raining down a nuclear fire on our unique capital, Byzantium, our City Different. They want to destroy the work of our alchemists, our scientists who can turn plutonium into fire. I will not let that happen!”

His voice rose in oratorical flourish, as any war-mongering dictator, or president, might rouse the masses, with one hand crossed over his heart, staring at the American flag on the wall.

A smattering of applause broke out in the audience.

“Fire,” he continued, “the transforming element, the element we most fear, can be controlled. We know the earth can perish in water as it did during the flood of Noah, or it can end in fire. Armageddon! And no phoenix will rise from those ashes! The terrorists who planted the bomb want to create a nuclear holocaust! I fought those terrorists! I nearly lost my life taking the code from them! Now I will defuse the bomb! Our children and our children's children will once again romp in the verdant forests of the Jemez Mountain!”

Nearby, in the dark, the old man groaned. He couldn't take the bullshit any longer. I'm outta here, he said.

Where? Sonny asked.

Anywhere to save my sanity. You listen to that caca for too long and it can kill you. With that he exited.

“I'm calling Mr. Sturluson, the chief scientist on the mountain,” Raven explained to the audience.

He punched his cell phone, which was attached to the sound system. Everyone in the theater heard the beeps, then a sleepy voice answered. “This is Sturluson.”

“Are you ready?” Raven asked.

“We've been waiting for your call,” Sturluson answered.

“Have you been able to defuse the bomb?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Too complicated. The experts we need are flying in as we speak. But they may be too late.”

“Why?”

“There's a clock. Clearly marked six o'clock.”

“The bomb will go off at six?”

“That's the only reason a timer would be wired to the detonators. The thing is ticking.”

A gasp of fear filled the auditorium. All faces turned to the clock on the wall. Minutes before six.

“Punch in 1776,” Raven said coolly.

There was a pause, then Sturluson said, “I can't.”

“Why?”

“If it's the wrong number.… Well, whoever wired this knew what he was doing. There are several circuits … if the wrong number is entered it could set off the explosives.”

More gasps.

Raven smiled. “You have no choice, do you? Use my code, or wait a few minutes to be vaporized along with the entire top of the mountain.”

There ensued a long pause, voices and garbled static on the sound system, the audience waiting with bated breath, then finally, after what seemed a thousand heartbeats, Sturluson's shout, “It stopped! The ticking stopped! All clear!”

A sinusoidal vibration ebbed through the crowd, the release of tension, a harmonics of vibrating strings, and all at once the audience rose to its feet, cheering Raven. The skeptics became believers as the emotional tension lifted. The bomb no longer a threat!

Some pressed forward to thank Raven, but in an instant he was gone, evaporated as the laser projectors on the stage went dark, leaving a warp in the ionized time-space Raven had just occupied. He was out the back door. As was Sonny, who fought the crowd to get outside and head for the river bosque, which was now engulfed in shadows and the terrifying wail of the Crying Woman, La Llorona.

The people of Barelas believed the cry was not that of a river sylph, but the spirit of a young girl from the barrio. During the First World War she fell in love with a doughboy, a young man from la merced de Atrisco, who left her pregnant before he shipped overseas. Two years later he was gassed in the front-line trenches, and lungs burning, crying for air, he died. When the girl received the news she went to the Barelas Bridge. The churning muddy waters below sounded like the call of her lover, her daughter's father, and in that hypnotic state she jumped and drowned herself and the baby.

A corrido, a ballad, had been composed for the young woman whose cry was heard on many a summer evening. The people of the barrio said that when the full moon reflected on the sheen of river water it was the girl's face that appeared, not the face of Mother Moon.

This is the cry that greeted Raven as he hopped and jumped over dead limbs, branches of trees that stuck up from the mud like the bleached bones of La Llorona's child, the same cry that Sonny heard as he crashed through the burnt, winter-dry trees after his shadow.

Overhead the drone of a jet that had just taken off from the Sunport, Southwest to Phoenix on time, momentarily drowned out the cry of the river spirits; and when the gleaming plane had disappeared in the last glare of the one-eyed Sun, the silence returned. The presence of the river felt complete in the heavy dusk, a curtain falling to envelope the witching hour; time when all good men should be home with their families, attending to dinner in lighted kitchens, small dots of warmth and safety where the stories of the day's activities would be told.

In the river bosque the Crying Woman gathered her muddied skirts and moved south, away from the evil she sensed in the grunting of the pigs and Raven's fire. Even El Kookoóee deserted the place of dank humors, preferring to go north, past the Oxbow, maybe to the Alameda Bridge where he might frighten young lovers parked in cars along the conservancy road, those guys drinking whiskey and rye, singing corridos of forsaken love.

In the dark, the eyes of the six-hundred-pound sow glowed with a desire for life, her mangy ears twitched as she heard Sonny's rush, and she turned with a low grunt and barreled down the narrow trail, fast as a pig can run when on a mission, because something about gods who die and are reborn buzzed in her small pig brain and told her that before rebirth can occur there must be death, and so the man hurrying toward her must die. For a man to accept the truth of his life he must die first.

Sonny heard the squeal of the sow, but he could not see the animal in the dark; he did not know her origins. Was she, perhaps, one of the herd Naomi had driven toward the river? Or was she part of a memory hidden in myths already forgotten?

She trampled the brush in her mad rush, bared her teeth, exposing tusks as mean as those of a sabre-tooth tiger, tusks that could cut through human flesh.

Her eyes of fire shone in the dark. Her warrior cry filled the air, and Sonny had only a split second to draw his pistol and fire. There was no time to run or climb a tree, and as pigs were killed long ago by both Christians and Sephardic Hispanos de la Nueva Mexico when they prepared lard and chicharrones for the winter, the bullet entered the pig's skull between the eyes, in the forehead's third eye where the light, however dim in the pig's brain, suddenly went out and the entire weight of the sow charged into Sonny and sent him crashing to the moldy earth.

Sonny's last instinct was to gather the sow in his arms as he fell back, somehow comforting the black mother he had not wanted, nor meant, to kill.

Not the Blood of the Lamb, but the blood of the marrano spurted on his face, baptizing him anew in the name of those forgotten gods who long ago had their images engraved with boars on temple walls, in the name of all those who for centuries in New Mexico had eaten sangre, the blood of a just-butchered pig fried with onions and flavored with red chile de ristra and scooped up with tortillas during the ceremony of la matanza, and finally, in the name of the blood of all creatures who die and give sustenance to the living.

The weight of the sow rested on an unconscious Sonny, as a woman might rest on her lover after the energy of love is spent and both rest entwined in sleep, dreaming of the immortality the brief climax offers, the impartiality that sleep, and dream, and death offer.

The sow slamming against him and falling on top of him had knocked him out, but he was alive and breathing, and with his primeval senses he could smell the pig, feel the thick bristles prick his skin, hear the last breath of the sow, which by law should now be bled, her throat cut and the blood saved, but this wasn't a matanza with family and vecinos helping, this was Sonny lying in the dark forest of the river where the spring flood released from Cochiti Dam played the eternal song of spring, water surging down the riverbed, a flood covering winter's sandbars, entering the mother ditches for farmers to use.

This was the song of the river: the cry of La Llorona withdrawing, frightened by the violence of the killing, El Kookoóee rushing away madly, the algae green of winter covering his face and arms so any malcriado running into him would see a terrified green man, and that bad boy was sure to shit in his pants at the sight, and, if Catholic, make his last Act of Contrition. The memory of meeting El Coco would keep until years later when in study for the priesthood, or in a monk's cell in the Mosque at Abiquiu, he might meditate the rest of his life on the green man's appearance.

The birds roosting in the tree branches were startled by the report of the pistol, and flapping dry wings they rose in a screeching flutter, then settled down again into a waiting stillness.

In the dark there were other sounds. River coyotes began to yip-yap and call to each other, and they came cautiously down the trail to gather around Sonny. Also, deep in the bosque the sound of a crackling fire could be heard, Raven's circle. And Chica's faint bark.

Sonny heard it all as if in a dream. Then he felt the sow being pushed aside and images from the unconscious dragged him toward the looming presence of the Barelas Bridge, the concrete arms that connected Alburquerque to the South Valley, the span linking the city's urban barrios to the old agricultural valley, not exactly the Brooklyn Bridge or the Golden Gate but a bridge for the people nevertheless.

The road crossing the bridge was the old Camino Real and so its path resonated with the sounds of history, the creaking of carretas that in prior centuries lumbered up from Old Mexico carrying iron goods to exchange for New Mexican wool, buffalo hides, and tons of nuts from the stately piñon trees before those forests lay in ruins; carretas crossing the river at this ford long before the concrete bridge was raised; a century later, horse-drawn wagons carrying produce from the South Valley to sell in the City Future as it grew and expanded. The bridge connected the city to the people of Isleta Pueblo long before 1-25 circled the valley.

In the middle of Raven's circle Chica slept, probably an induced, restless sleep, for she whimpered and her small body trembled. The images she saw were worthy of Dante's
Inferno
, and just as terrifying, a spiraling staircase down to hellish doom, epicycles of the psyche, each circle sealed with cast-iron doors. Around her appeared grotesque gargoyles, demon bats, blood-sucking vampires, neurotic fantasies, psychotic dramas, and noises as horrifying to the ear as the street sounds of any city, blasts of hot air, and everywhere a transforming fire roaring and sizzling, a feverish pitch.

Sonny stirred, felt every part of his body sore from the sow's blow, his bruised eye barely open, his ankle throbbing, all signs of death and rebirth.

The March night had suddenly grown cold in the depression of the river, flowing as it was with the flood of winter water, gurgling and sucking and twisting with restless energy, the holy water as tormented as Chica's dream.

An icy breeze whispered in the tree branches, a wind that embraced the dark buds like killing frost. Sounds from the city were like distant cries, the torture of the spring night settling over the city. The homeless hurried to the shelters to get away from the cold night's temperatures descending on the valley. Those with families ate their meals in silence and watched TV. The bomb had been defused, but there were other ominous signs in the air. Hints of the demise of an empire committed to war, leaders committed to greed.

But at the river, what was the sound that coasted across the wide waters? It was like the bellowing shophar announcing the Jewish New Year. It is well known that centuries ago Sephardic families came to settle in la Nueva Mexico; escaping the Inquisition in Mexico they fled north and the Rio Grande became their Edenic stream. Or was it the ram's horn announcing a coming battle? Perhaps the sound was the essence of a thousand didgeridoos mourning the death of winter, as if a lost tribe of Maori were blowing into their ancestral instruments, awakening the new season from its winter sleep. There can be no resurrection without death.

In the warmth of Rita's Cafe the young bachelors who lusted after Rita's body as she moved back and forth pouring coffee for them stood ready to claim her, or at least one of them would make the move because the clock on the wall said it was already after six and the bomb on the mountain had been defused and Sonny wasn't home, so, maybe he didn't make it. Maybe he was one of the bodies that would freeze to death that night up on the mountain.

Don't believe them, Diego had whispered to her as he locked up the kitchen and prepared to leave. I saw him. He was wearing that nice jacket you bought him. He's coming. He's coming.

Rita's constant thoughts were with Sonny, and shortly after six she suddenly saw him fall to the ground. Then, as lovers' minds and hearts are connected with a telepathic energy that allows them to see each other across time and space, a flash of insight, a shower of light illuminated Sonny sitting with Raven by a campfire, and she felt like running out, getting in the car, and going to him. But where was she to search?