Jemez Spring (35 page)

She turned to the nicho on the wall that held La Virgen de Guadalupe, and she said a silent prayer.
Virgencita, return him to me. Keep him safe from Raven's claws
.

What did Raven say? The sonofabitch said, “It's been a tough day, Sonny.” He sat on an old cottonwood stump, stirring the fire, his dark cloak gathered around his shoulders to ward off the chill.

24

Sonny looked up, understood it was his shadow that had led him to this night camp at the river's edge, a river whose seasons he knew well, for he had spent his childhood summers exploring its bosque, in the time when the river was a fuse sparkling with summer-green currents, and huge carp plowed the muddy waters.

He and childhood friends ran along the sandbars they called playas, swimming and fishing in the holes the floods created, lairs of big, fat catfish, which he caught and gutted, casting the vital organs back into the river and taking the string of fish home for his mother to cover with cornmeal and fry.

And he knew late summer when the vatos, mostly young men from the Barelas, Martineztown, and Sanjo barrios, and also some locos and veteranos, parked their low-rider ranflas on the conservancy road at the river's edge, drank beer, smoked, played the lira, sang, and swore they would die for their turf and their baby dolls. Summer rolled by on the wings of mota smoke, swirls of laughter, and sometimes explosions as rival gangs fought each other.

In late summer the water slowed to a trickle and Sonny and his compas could walk across the river, “like Christ on water,” his friend Chelo used to say.

Sonny felt haunted by the waters of the river, yesterday's voices, which even now played on the trees. The voices of the river were never silent.

But that was in another time. Now he looked at Chica. He wanted to pick her up and comfort her, but he knew he had to watch Raven carefully. A misstep with Raven tonight could lead him into Raven's vortex, where the voices claiming to be from the mouths of false gods spoke.

“She's dreaming,” Raven said in a goading voice.

“In a nightmare,” Sonny corrected.

“Whatever.” Raven shrugged.

“What did you give her?” Sonny asked and knelt to rub Chica's soft fur. She whimpered softly, recognizing her master.

“A little Raven medicine,” Raven replied, tossing a log into the roaring fire. “Datura and hibiscus in a special blend. Dream medicine. But she resisted, wouldn't fall asleep, a loyal dog trying to protect her master, but finally the Lethe drink knocked her out. I followed her dream back to—and by the way Sonny, we can now let the public know, dogs do dream, but their dreams are ancestral dreams, dreams of forest freedoms before they came to beg at our doors—Where was I? Ah, she led me to a dark Germanic forest in a time when her progenitors were as large as wolves and as ferocious, before man bred her down to size. But in the end she revealed your fatal flaw. After all, Sonny, you are a tragic hero.”

A tragic hero, Sonny mused. He's trying to draw me out, perhaps put a mask on me I do not need. The mask of an ancient Greek king, or a fool.

“Dogs sense things about us we don't even know,” Sonny said, feeling Chica's heartbeat. She would recover from the drug.

“Ah, yes,” Raven agreed. “So do coyotes.”

“She's innocent,” Sonny said, shading his eyes from the fire's dancing light, glancing around, sensing Raven's demon birds guarding the circle, those same vampires who often came at midnight to drag him to their master's nightmarish circle. Where was Lady Anima when he needed her?

He dared not pick up Chica and make a run for it. Where was there to run? Can a man escape his own creation?

Everyone knows, it's easier to fall into the clutches of the shadow than it is to break free. Besides, he had come to claim his daughters, the two souls he had seen by Raven's side at the theater. They were here, in the circle, he could sense them.

“Why do you haunt the innocent?” Sonny asked.

“So they learn they don't live alone in this world,” Raven answered, and laughed. “Isn't that a great answer? Don't you see, the lonely at least have me, the spirit voice they often mistake for God's. I've been around a long time. Some say haunting mankind, I say delivering them. But let's talk about you, and your tragic flaw.”

There he goes again, Sonny thought. Okay, let's play the game to the end. “Which is?”

“Obsession. You are an obsessed man, Mr. Sonny Baca. Like Agamemnon, Oedipus, Othello, King Lear, Don Quixote, or the weak and floundering Hamlet. And the worst of the lot, Captain Ahab! All obsessed with the bride of their dreams, a need that drives them to—you know, you once taught literature—drives them to tragic ends.”

“Bullshit,” Sonny said. “Coming to claim what's mine is real, not obsession.”

“That's just it! Precisely! Claiming what's yours is your mistake! You've been dreaming all day, wandering in a world of illusions, warned by sylphs, oracles, and fortune tellers—and you paid no heed! You saw how I can threaten the world with nuclear fire, and you still believe in yourself!”

“I dream, therefore I am,” Sonny answered, his coyote sense awakening to his surroundings, casing the joint like a coyote around the hen house, planning how to move liquid-like in and out of Raven's mandala, the fluid circle of yin and yang.

He spied the old man standing outside the circle, a dappled shadow in the brush, the light of the flickering fire illuminating him as a tree, crusty with wrinkled bark, his arms dangling like useless tree branches. He didn't have the strength to enter the circle, he couldn't help.

“Your dream is my dream!” Raven insisted. “I'm in control here! Not you! You can't even take care of your waking consciousness! You've floundered all day and what have you got for your troubles? Nothing! Nada! Zero! And I have grown in power. I hold your fate in my hands. Kneel before your Lord of Night!”

“Lord of dead pigs,” Sonny scoffed.

Raven stood, ruffling his cape furiously. “Don't you dare call me—” He stopped short, grinned, and nodded, looking through pale yellow eyes at Sonny.

“You always try to get me mad. Get my goat.”

“Mad is as mad does.”

“You're a fool, Sonny.”

“So is the Buddha a great fool.”

“Then kill the Buddha.”

“Yes.” Sonny smiled. “Kill the Buddha.”

Raven hesitated. “To kill the fool is to bring out his greater Buddha nature. In you that means your shaman nature. No, you can't have it that easy.”

“Then you remain the trickster and I the fool. That's what I've been today,” Sonny said, “a surviving fool.”

“Okay. I agree. There's madness in both of us. Just as insanity feeds a government that believes it can rule the world. The doom of your kind is just around the corner, and it's brought to you courtesy of some of your so-called rational minds.”

He laughed, a dry laugh that made the cold tree branches shudder.

“Look, Raven, we're in this together. Why split ourselves in two? Why continue the old duality?” Sonny said, knowing peace with Raven had not proven true since man's ancestors crawled from the ooze of the sea.

“An offer of peace?” Raven cocked his head.

“Why not?”

“Its too late. I'm tired of sharing space and time with you. Don't you know, it's time for the final Apocalypse, the end of the world, the dream of Vishnu, God's experiment, call it what you want, this is my time. It's written, Sonny, written in the Bible, written on the Zia Stone you seek, I'm sure. This story of obsession has to end! I shall call my book
Mankind Obsessed
. The end of the world! A doxology of chaos!”

“It's not your world to end!” Sonny retorted, knowing he shouldn't show fear in front of Raven.

“Yes, mine!” Raven cackled. “My need to return to chaos, the formless ocean before God spoke, a swirling mist that can be dream or nightmare, the cosmic sea before the planets were born. And I will take all human perception with me. I will take Lady Virtue with me. I will take your Sofia! End it in a glorious bang! Not a whimper but a bang! An orgasm! End of so-called civilization! Climax! Total enlightenment! It's what every god has experienced at the end of time.”

“You alone?” asked Sonny.

“Yes! Me!”

“And Tamara.”

Raven paused, catching his breath. “She believes in the body, the flesh, hot blood, getting you there with her kama sutra tricks, but she's harmless. I believe in an orgasm that leads to nothingness. What every philosopher dreams of but dares not utter. The alchemist's final trick.”

“That kind of bang only lasts a few seconds,” Sonny reminded him.

“I could say
who cares?
The terrorist who murders thousands of human souls with his final act feels, during those precious seconds, like a god. Complete power. The most potent aphrodisiac. But there's method to my madness. Here's the rub. One beautiful self will be left after the holocaust. Me! That's my secret! I will be Lord of Chaos! King of Chaos! I cannot be destroyed! I plan to rule in that unspeakable world
we
create.”

“
We?
”

“Why, Sonny, you surprise me. Don't you remember? I live in the heart of every man. Ah, I know what you're thinking. Only those who run stark, raving mad down the street are possessed. No, Sonny, every man is my host, my brother. Sometimes my work is so easy I sit back and laugh. Man is his own worst enemy. But you know that. Come now.” He held out a silver kantharos. “Have a drink before you die.”

Go ahead, the old man said from beyond the circle. Play his game until you get to a good psychiatrist.

I don't need a head shrinker! Sonny replied, angry the old man could joke at a time like this. I know what I'm doing.

But the story was not yet finished, and the psyche knows little of predestination, or if the fate of every creature is simply a dream in the Big God's mind, if it's anything.

“There's just one problem,” Sonny said, a smirk on his face, his lips curled just enough to get Raven's goat.

“What?”

“There can be no king in chaos. No Lord of Chaos.”

“What are you getting at?”

“You've tripped yourself, Raven. You know that chaos is formless. Nothingness. It's the primordial sea before the Word. There exists no
being
in chaos, no reality, no center on which to stand. You take a dive into chaos and you become the mist before time and space existed.”

“You're wrong!” Raven cried, deep furrows appearing on his godlike forehead.

Sonny smiled. Nothing like getting Raven mad. Nothing like reminding him that the primordial sea that beckoned him was an ocean of formlessness. There existed no reality on the face of that ancient and brooding mother.

“You know I'm right,” Sonny said softly. “I may be an obsessed man, but so are you. The desire to return to chaos is your death wish—”

“Don't give me that Freudian crap! Death wish, sloosh wish! What did the old man teach you? That people want to die because they're sick or old or crazy? My desire is deeper than that! It hasn't been named by those so-called psychologists!'”

“Let there be light,” Sonny said, teasing the very agitated Raven. “You dissolve into that chaos and I'm not going to pull you out.”

Pull him out. Ah, it suddenly dawned on Raven. Sonny, as disoriented as he seemed that day, still had the power to pull his shadow into the light. This was his secret. In his gut, within the root of his soul, Sonny knew the yin was as strong as the yang. Complementary, my dear Watson, a former PI might say.

“Damn you, Sonny Baca! You knew this all along!”

“Of course. Everyone intuits there was a formless mist before God spoke. Read the Bible. It's in Genesis. It's in the stories of many cultures. The gods speak and the creation comes into being. The sperm, some say the word, of Father Sky fell on Mother Ocean, and there you are. A universe. Expanding. A miracle, no doubt. Imagine the universe as a mere particle, and from its explosion everything came into being. Was that atom the Word, or a Seed?”

“What are you getting at?” a frustrated Raven cried, his voice a pained echo across the river's churning waters.

“The point is, your obsession is to return to that godless sea, to non-being. An Oedipal desire to return to the womb of the mother. Go on, be my guest.”

Raven trembled, at first in rage and then in fear. When the shaking fit subsided he grew sad. Sonny had called his bluff. What would Sonny do now? Tell the world. Let everyone know there was a part of the psyche pulling them down to chaos, that ocean without a port. Chaos, where space-time did not exist. Nothingness.

Would he also tell the
real
secret, that the strongest part of the soul was a light stronger than darkness? At the end of day even the most distressed could find help. Man's soul, composed of chaos, was also composed of light. There were those, call them the saints or good people or helpers, who could help the sick and tortured unto a Path of Light, a Path of Hope. With the help of good and honest people mankind could resist the ancient call that threatened to overwhelm the world's soul.

“Here's to you,” Sonny said, taking the goblet and drinking down its dark contents, remembering as the bitter liquid touched his lips that he owed Diego twenty bucks to pay for a rooster, one he had saved from certain death at a corrida de gallos in Bernalillo last summer.

The world was emptying of blood, and those who stood quietly on the sidelines would never wash themselves in the blood of the lamb, or the pig.

“Illusion,” Raven said.

“Screw your illusion,” Sonny answered. “I see my face in the mirror!” he shouted, confronting Raven. “I know who I am!”

He tossed the cup in the fire, where it melted to a sizzle.

“Damn you!” an angry Raven retorted. “I claim the Zia Stone!”