Shaman Winter (47 page)

“You look beautiful, amor,” he whispered to her, gazing into her eyes. The clear brown eyes brimming with love for him.

“Gracias, señor. The nurse is wonderful. She came in before her shift was over, gave me a sponge bath, helped me with my makeup.”

“You look like a Rosa de Castilla on a bright summer morning.”

“Oh, listen to the poetry.” Rita smiled. “I like it, I like it.”

She was being brave, he could tell. But the pain and loss of her ordeal still showed in her eyes, and he knew that would be with her for some time.

“Good news,” Sonny said.

“You found the girls!”

“They're safe.”

“Ay, gracias a Dios. I've been so worried, prayed for them. But I knew you'd find them.”

Her eyes sparkled with admiration when she looked at Sonny.

“What about Raven?”

“He won't be hurting anyone for a while. It's a long story. I'll tell it to you as soon as we get you home. Can we take you today?”

A shadow crossed Rita's face. She shook her head.

“Qué pasa?”

Rita bit her lower lip. “The doctor wants to keep me another day.”

“Why?” Sonny asked, holding her hands. The inflection in her voice told him all wasn't well.

“She wants me to rest, do some lab work.” Her voice broke, tears filled her eyes, he handed her the tissue box. “I just wanted to go home—”

“It's all right,” Sonny reassured her. “Don't worry. She probably wants to make sure you're strong enough to leave.”

“I hope so.”

“I'm sure that's it. I'll talk to her. I want you home where I can take care of you. I'm going to get you good and strong. Feed you.”

“I like that.”

“You just concentrate on getting well.”

“I will.”

“As soon as you're well enough, we're going to get married.”

“Get married?”

“Yes. Just like we planned.”

Rita shook her head. “We planned, but that was before this—you don't have to.”

Sonny smiled. “Have to? Hey, this is no shotgun wedding. We made plans, remember? This thing with Raven slowed me down, but that's over. I'm walking, I'm well, and as soon as you feel better, we do it. I want to marry you.”

“It's not right, Sonny, it's not right. What if I can't have children!” Her voice broke with emotion.

“I don't care about that. I love you; I want to live with you. That's what matters.”

“You need children, Sonny. A man needs a family. It wouldn't be fair—”

“A man needs the woman he loves.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm positive. You're the woman in my life. Children? Hell, if we want children, we can adopt half a dozen. We'll have as many as you want. I just want to make you happy the rest of your life.”

“And I want to be good for you.” Rita smiled.

“You are.”

He took Rita's hands and held them to his lips.

“Qué piensas?”

“I've been thinking about quitting this business.”

“No more chasing bad guys?”

“Maybe go back to teaching.”

“You're an excellent teacher, you have so much to share with the kids.”

“That's what mamá tells me.” Sonny smiled. “Lord, I have to call her. I have to call a lot of people. Mando, Diego, friends. I need to buy you a present for Christmas, buy everybody presents.”

“You're a good man, Sonny.”

“Ah, I'm not getting younger. Gotta settle down.”

“Only if it's good for you, Sonny.”

“It's good for me. I've learned a lot. I want to take time to digest it. Talk to people who understand the world of dreams, the world of our ancestors. Maybe understand how Raven comes to a new reincarnation.”

“New reincarnation?”

“It's nothing,” Sonny said.

“He's not dead?”

“Let's not talk about Raven. Let's just concentrate on you getting well. I want to sit still for a while, enjoy life. Have time to go for walks, read books, maybe go to the pueblo and listen to the old men, don Eliseo's friends. And spend a lot of time with you.”

“That sounds lovely.”

“You are lovely, amor.”

“There's hope.”

“Amor y esperanza. And a new dream.”

He looked into her eyes, and she saw the wisdom that had settled into his soul.

She drew him to her and whispered, “Yes, a new dream.”

Turn the page to continue reading from the Sonny Baca Novels

1

Do dogs dream?

Sonny awakened slowly, opening his right eye first, then the left. He stretched like a rubber band until every nerve and muscle twanged. His vertebrae cracked and he relaxed back into the warm blankets.

Beside him, Chica stirred.

Do dogs dream?

That's the question, Sonny thought. He yawned and looked at the light filtering through the window.

The denizens of the City Future weren't discussing the depressed economy, terrorism, Iraq, tapping the Rio Grande for water, the silvery minnow, drought and fires, or politics. For weeks now the regulars at Rita's Cocina had tossed the dog question back and forth. The discussions had grown heated, some arguing yes and others adamantly denying it.

Sonny rubbed his eyes and looked at his watch. Dead battery.

I dream therefore I am, he thought. In last night's dream he had only one eye, like Cyclops. A one-eyed man lived in ordinary time, like Polyphemus. Odysseus had blinded the giant and the poor Cyclops ran out of his cave, crying I am blinded! Noman has blinded me! Chingao! Noman has blinded me!

Sonny had taught the Greek myths to his literature classes at Valley High. That seemed ages ago. He always acted out the part, working like hell to get their interest. But the ancient Greek stories were far removed from the memory of the land-locked Chicanos of the valley where the phrase
we sail with the tide
had never been heard. So he told them the cuentos his grandfather had taught him, incorporating them into New Mexico history. The history of la gente was embedded in the oral tradition, but it had to be mined if one was to know the ways of the ancestors.

The teachers were alchemists, turning raw material into gold, but they had to compete with teenage interests: cars, video games, rap music, after-school jobs, family troubles. And hormones.

“I was a good teacher,” he said to Chica, rubbing the head of his one-eyed dachshund. Raven's demons had scratched out her left eye. So much loss in that winter-solstice nightmare where Raven killed don Eliseo.

For the past three months Sonny had been reading don Eliseo's books. He couldn't sleep, so he read till two or three in the morning, and the more he read the more he understood that ordinary people go through life thinking they see, but what they're seeing is only the surface of things. The trick was to see beneath observed reality, and for that one needed to develop a new kind of sight.

“The Egyptians painted the all-seeing eye on their temple walls,” he said to Chica. “Horus had one eye cut out by his uncle Seth. Seth had killed Osiris, the Ruler of Eternity, as the ancient Egyptians called him. It was the eye of Horus that restored Osiris to life. A lot of powerful magic there.”

Seth cut Osiris into pieces and threw him in the Nile. Isis and her sister had brought Osiris back to life; that is, they gathered the dismembered body and sewed it together. The first mummy. One thing was missing. His penis. The organ had been thrown into the Nile where a goldfish ate it. Centuries later, a poet Sonny knew wrote that the missing organ had washed up on the banks of the Rio Grande. History belonged to those who wrote its poetry.

So many allusions to sight in the old stories, he thought, and still, most of us go through life half asleep, one-eyed men, tuertos searching for the truth, a purpose, the meaning of life. Somnambulant, we stumble down the road, unto the burning sheets of the malpais. Unconscious. Why?

If you are unconscious you feel less pain, he thought.

Yeah, that's it, we don't want to feel the pain. A man can get along with one good eye, lead the ordinary life of Polyphemus, until along comes Odysseus and drives a stake through it.

Bile rose in his mouth. Raven had driven a stake through his heart.

“Maybe I opened a few eyes,” Sonny whispered, thinking nostalgically of his teaching days at Valley High.

But the classroom was confining, so he quit and learned PI work from Manuel López. He liked the independence.

All seemed normal until he moved to La Paz Lane and met don Eliseo. The old man became a mentor. The bond between them grew strong as the old man taught Sonny how to walk in the dream world. The world of the shaman.

Chica shook off her covers, stretched, and yawned.

“You know, don't you Chica?”

The small dachshund had followed him into that fateful winter-solstice nightmare where she lost her eye.

Did his dream become hers?

I dream therefore I am. People in deep comas continued to dream. Death came when one could no longer dream. But what if, as the Bard asked, the dead also dream? There's the rub. La vida es un sueño y los sueños sueño son. Life is a dream and on the other side waits another dream. Maybe?

Do dogs dream?

Several weeks ago Sonny was having a drink at Sal's Bar—actually he was sipping on a Pepsi—and taking a ribbing from some of his North Valley amigos, weekend cowboys who once a month gathered at Sondra's Magic Acres stable to ride along the river bosque on borrowed horses. Reliving the Old West. Pretending to trail ride. They spent more time downing beers than riding. Chicano male bonding.

Quite innocently, Sonny had said, “My dog dreams.”

The amigos knew Sonny had been depressed lately, but claiming his dog dreamed was too much. An argument ensued, the staunch Catholics in the group protesting against dreaming dogs. After all, a dog cannot recite the Nicene Creed.

“It's, ‘I believe in God,' not ‘dog'!” Mike challenged.

Sonny shrugged. What did Mike know? He was from Tucumcari.

“Yeah, d-o-g is not g-o-d,” Vivián, the attorney in the group, added.

Anagram madness. A shouting match broke out between those who agreed that dogs could dream and those who said no. Two off-duty Bernalillo County sheriffs hustled them all out of the bar. The “dogs don't dream” amigos hadn't spoken to Sonny since. The innocent comment had taken on serious proportions.

The story was then spread by the barmaid, a woman of philosophical bent who used to teach Shakespeare at the university, an aficionada of Lone Star beer. She told the story to her customers and it spread along the valley like an unchecked virus. Suddenly conversations erupted into arguments, shouting into fisticuffs, and friendships ended.

The debate, which soon became known as the Great Dog Dream Debate, spread into the neighborhoods, into the restaurants, into city hall, into the schools.

An Alameda Elementary School teacher invited Sonny to her class. The students fell in love with Chica, the dreaming dog. The dachshund became the poster dog of the Dogs Dream camp. The following day a group of Dogs Don't Dream parents boycotted the school, pulling their children from classes. Sonny became persona non grata to a small camp of anti-dog-dream neoconservatives.

In the meantime, scientists at Sandia Laboratories recorded a rise in the decibel rate over the city. A long mantra-like hum had settled over Alburquerque.
Zaaaaaaaaaaa uuuuuuuummmm
, something akin to a Buddhist chant. In some of the barrios the hum became
aaaaala, alaaaatuya, daaaaale chingasoooos
.

The hum seeped into homes, inciting family arguments. The city libraries reported a run on dog books, people trying to figure out which came first: the dream or the dog. The police department reported a surge of fender benders. DWI's rose; so did divorces.

The metaphysical argument invaded classes at the University of New Mexico, where just before spring break the philosophy department sponsored a symposium. If it were proven that dogs did indeed dream then the entire history of western civilization might have to be rewritten.

It didn't get that far. Baptist students on campus boycotted the lectures, claiming that, like the Harry Potter books, dogs dreaming were the work of the devil. But what if the dog is baptized, fully submerged? an innocent voice had asked, a sylph sitting at the back of the room, and the debate took on a Reformation frenzy.

Dogs were like women, the fundamentalists argued, meant to serve the master. On this we agree with the Taliban: the man is the head of the household. Then the feminists on campus boycotted the boycott, shoving and pushing broke out at the picket lines, and the university cops had to break up the confrontation.

Recalling the events, Sonny slipped back into that sleep of the just-barely-awake, until a hullabaloo of crows, raucously cawing and crying as they ripped through his garbage can, roused Chica. She tossed off her blanket and, barking furiously, ran through the kitchen and out her dog door to challenge the birds.