Jemez Spring (10 page)

“Yeah,” Sonny said and gunned the truck onto the highway.

6

The first breath of spring, and a crackling bright sun came roaring over the Red Rocks, glowing on the mesa to the west, awakening black bears from winter's sleep. Thin cirrus clouds glared down on God's earth, a swirling of the Cloud People who had spilled their meager, water-laden pitchers on the mountain. Now they gathered their skirts to move on, away from the magnetic energy of the mountain.

Too much beauty for one man, Sonny thought, studying the windswept formation of clouds and slipping on his sunglasses. Last night's dusting of snow was already disappearing, except in shaded patches. The Cloud People were racing east, over the Sangre de Cristos and the Sandias, toward Clines Corner, Santa Rosa, Tucumcari, and the Texas Panhandle, where the cold wind of March could still chill the bones of the toughest vaquero. With luck, the equinox front would drop more of its moisture as it moved into the llano.

But weather came with its mixed blessing. It was shearing time on the llano. The winter wool of the sheep had to come off before lambing. If a winter storm kept the Texas Mexicano shearing crews from doing their work, things got complicated. The old timers prayed for snow and rain for the llano grasses, but the storms had to come at the right time. And who could order the weather?

As a boy Sonny had visited the Hindi ranch in Duran. The llano and the people had made a lasting impression. But he found no books that recorded the lives of the llano people. Now the last of the large sheep ranches that had once made New Mexico the center of the industry were dying out.

Beside him, Chica slept, dreaming that in the Garden at the Beginning of Time it was a dog, one of her primal ancestors, who barked joyfully, daring Eve to take the apple! Take a bite and let's be off on an adventure, the dog had called to the bare-breasted mother of men.

If in the Beginning of Time dogs could talk, why could they not dream?

Naomi huddled against the door, staring at the cliff.

“I traveled in China,” she said. “Studied some of their pottery techniques. The Chinese say chi is a universal energy. It's the same here. The canyon acts like a giant TV dish. It gathers the energy and funnels it into the earth.”

Sonny nodded. Interesting. He had always felt comforted by the feminine energy of the mountain. The mountain grew from the piedmont, los pies de la sierra, soft sandy toes that rose into giant, gnarled knees, thick, voluptuous legs that parted to reveal the many openings into the Jemez, the honeycombed vulvas of the mountain, fuzzy with fragrant piñon, juniper, and pine. There was something dark and mystical about the canyons and wide arroyos that slashed their way down from the rounded breasts of the mountain, across the pillowed belly. It was the smell of blood, earth-blood, the waters of the mountain that fertilized the spongy nooks and crannies of the arroyos.

“I read Frank Waters when I was at the university,” Sonny said. “He understood that energy.”

“Yes,” she replied. “But the old people also know about the spirit of the mountain. They just don't write books.”

“Why are you going to Jemez Springs?”

“I could say I'm here to meet you.”

“You were there last night?”

She nodded.

“Then you know about the governor—”

“Yeah, I know. Somebody killed him.”

Sonny dared to ask, “Who?”

“You're the private investigator. You find out,” she said, flippantly.

“I wasn't there.”

“So why are you going? Don't tell me, it's Raven you want, isn't it?”

How in the hell does she know so much? Sonny wondered. I haven't seen her in ten years, I run into her by chance while she's playing around with Bear and his boys, and she knows about Raven.

“Yes,” he answered.

He looked up at the canyon walls. Entering the canyon meant becoming part of the chronology kept by the cliffs, a time recorded since the mountain erupted eons ago. The strata of granite, red clay, and volcanic ash recorded time.

“You hear voices,” she said.

Yes, there were voices up in the old deserted pueblo on the mesa. Voices that seeped down the canyon walls. The trees stirring in the breeze and the gurgling of the river carried the voices.

But in the present age everyone had been led to believe that only the neurotic heard voices. Psychiatrists tried to record their messages, hoping to learn the secrets of the deep and dark unconscious.

“Maybe I'm crazy,” he said.

“No, it's a gift,” she replied. “The voices are like dreams. I think in a way they lead us along the path we take. It's like we're not completely in charge of our lives. Somebody out there is always watching out for us, always helping.”

Sonny nodded. It wasn't just don Eliseo he heard. In the maelstrom of his depression and anger a voice had told him exactly where to find an old gunsmith, a man who knew the workings of the Colt .45 Sonny carried in his truck. The man had cast a special bullet, one that could kill Raven.

The voice in the dream led Sonny to the gunsmith, a man left over from an earlier time. His dark, deserted hut near Algodones smelled of cordite, sulfur, and melted lead. I make bullets for every occasion, the gunsmith told Sonny, but to kill a shadow you need lead melted from the bowels of hell, and powder mixed with ash from where atomic bombs were exploded. This is the way the world is ending.

And so the alchemist of lead and heat cast a bullet for Sonny.

In the morning, there on his kitchen table sat the glistening bullet. On the lead was scratched an indentation, the form of a cross. The mandala of death, or the original quincunx from the beginning of time. With trembling hands Sonny had loaded it in his pistol where it rested, waiting for Raven.

“What about the governor?” he asked.

“He's what's called a meat-and-potatoes man. Typical politician. They get into office and start making deals.”

“Water rights,” Sonny offered.

“Yeah. We used to be able to get along. There was enough water. Now there's just too many people for too little water. So if you're a businessman you buy up water rights. Dominic wants to empty the reservoirs and store the water underground. He puts a spigot in the aquifer and sells you water that used to belong to everyone. The market will pay what he demands.”

“Quite a scheme,” Sonny said. So Naomi knew the score. Bear was a leader of the young Indians fighting Dominic, and she was running around with Bear. Yes, she knew the score.

She smiled at Sonny. “I learned about the market selling pottery. The world rotates around what the market gives and what it takes. Now I'm back. And what do our people want? They just want to go on holding their dances, doing their thing. Old ceremonies for the kachinas. It's been like that for hundreds of years. Now everything is market driven. I hate it.”

“Myth and ritual are dying,” Sonny said. “Except in the pueblos.”

“Yes. It's a shitty little place. But it's home. The world out there chews you up and spits you out. Here, I feel a tranquility I haven't felt in ages. I feel committed.”

Sonny had learned that myth was empty without ritual, and so the pueblos performed the ceremonies, the dances. Without enacting the myth, life was empty, the children would forget. Along the Rio Grande corridor, in all the pueblos surrounding the Jemez caldera, it was the old people who kept the cycle of ceremonies intact, prodding the young to remember.

“Were you involved with the governor?”

“None of your business,” she snapped back. “Look, I've made mistakes.” After a long pause she said, “Maybe I can't change. I'm cursed. I keep telling people what's going to happen and no one believes me. Maybe I'm just one of those voices that left the center, and now I'm just floating around. Bear listens. Bear is what I need. He's big and loud and crazy, but he's real.”

She reached out and touched his shoulder. “Of course, I never got over you, Sonny.”

He smiled at her and she laughed.

He looked out the window, thinking that if he concentrated on the road and the landscape he wouldn't remember what she had tasted like ten years ago.

Outside the truck the morning light fell like a mellow mist into the valley, imbuing the place with its sacred touch. The light was absorbed by the land and became the spirit of the place.

Light becomes time, the old man said. It penetrates and becomes the red rock, pine tree, dry earth, the deer and the maggot, crustaceans and humans. Light becomes a dance. The stars that sweep through the night sky dance, and the atoms that reflect the stars also dance. All is dance and music. The full moon sails over the mesa and fills the valley with a light that whispers, the waters of the river whisper back, soon the entire mountain is humming and drumming, the light of love, nights of passion, the energy gathers in lust, giving birth again in spring.

“What do you know about Raven?” he asked.

“He's got a bomb. He wants to blow you up.”

“Just me?”

“Probably the whole fucking place.”

“Where do you fit in?”

“Augie thinks—”

Sonny waited. “What?”

“That I was screwing the governor.” She paused, then continued. “I guess that makes me a suspect. You know, I love this place, I really do. But, God, there's just too many bad things happening. What used to be fun and joyful is now called sinning. Screwing around used to be part of life. You know, real. Maybe if all the preachers went away we might just be better off.”

Sonny smiled. He remembered the story of a preacher who came to preach against the sinners who lived in the valley. He claimed the sins were washing into the river. Sin in the river water was irrigating the corn, chile, calabacitas, and apples, and the people eating the fruits of the valley became sinners. One old man stood up and said, preacher man, water is our life, our soul. It does not sin. The preacher left and never returned. The people went on irrigating their fields and eating calabacitas con mais and chile verde in summer, and the women went on baking sweet, fat, juicy apple pies. All the great aphrodisiac fruits of the valley continued to be eaten with great gusto.

Near the pueblo the valley spread out gently. The river gave up its turbulent soul, becoming placid, flowing softly, allowing itself to be diverted into the acequias that fed the fields. The nurturing earth received the liquid gold. The river breathed a sigh of relief, slowed its rush and gurgle and continued sluggishly down past Zia and Santa Ana, finally emptying its last ejaculation into the Rio Grande at Bernalillo. Like one life ebbing into the greater stream of time, the river disappeared, took on a new name, and the waters of the Jemez Mountain Cloud People joined the Rio Grande, and all was as it might have been ordained at the beginning of time.

The river carved its own path, and at each turn the river put on a different face, just as a woman will make over her face for each of the four seasons of her life, for each day, for different lovers, even on the day she dies and whispers to those nearby, “My lipstick. I want my Maker to see me made up.”

So the river had a persona for each season. El río, the Spanish said, but the river was a woman whose waters came pouring from the hot springs that dotted the caldera, a woman whose eyes bubbled with the water of life, a touch of mint in her breath, an apricot-blossom blush to her cheeks.

The mountain was female, its rounded caldera soft breasts—not like the male peaks of the Sangre de Cristos. The crater itself—a womb opening, the cleft of a distant ecological birth that spewed forth its hot magma, the birth stuff. The caldera reflected the sipapu of the kiva, the hole of emergence. The mountain had been born in the boiling belly of mother earth, and the birthing was not yet done. The magma and boiling water still slithered like giant serpents in the dark womb of the mountain, the dark womb of the mother.

The mountain watched impassively the works of men and women. Its waters ran deep; its fiery magma burned white. The old volcano would long outlast the scientists whose formulas created nuclear fire in the Los Alamos labs. The mountain was patient, the mountain could wait, and eons after man's tracks were erased from its slopes and hidden paths, its fire would still be burning deep, its waters rushing from dark, deep springs.

The Jemez River by all comparisons was a small mountain stream that petered out by the time it reached the Rio Grande. Nevertheless, it was one of those sacred places where time entered the earth and the spirit became song. It was Alph, a sacred river feeding the people of the valley.

Even after the desecrations of man, the river's magic was still intact. From the sage hills up to the flat mesa tops of piñon, juniper, and ponderosa pine, into the blue haze of the peaks, the subterranean waters could be felt but not seen, and from sheer granite cliffs small springs gurgled, sliding and tumbling downward, pulled by a force stronger than the mountain itself, the gravity of time.

On the walls of the canyon the intruder—he who was the visitor to the mountain, a pilgrim, a lost lover—could read the ages, and if he fell under the spell of the mountain, he stayed. He became a lover of the mountain and could confess, like all others who in their moments of joy said, This is our holy book, this we praise and protect, this river and mountain.

The lips of the canyon opened, red with iron ore, a bloody greeting, an entrance into the earth itself. No one could escape the feeling of entering, the shock of returning to the source, the first thrust as one entered at the Red Rocks, then moving farther into the wide Cañada, with furry mesas on either side cramping down as the passage narrowed, and the lost lover wondered if to enter meant to stay forever, as time had once penetrated the canyon and stayed forever.

But the virginity of the earth was no longer intact. Every traveler entering the canyon was an intruder, a pilgrim lost according to the ages written on the walls, a lover lost, always returning, never quite achieving the burst of clarity that would relieve the tired flesh. And every lover knew the entrance into such dark, mysterious space quickened the breath, formed some knot of fear or incertitude deep in the belly. Those that did not thrust deep enough would never know the ecstasy the mountain offered.