The Second Ring of Power (21 page)

"Wait, wait! " I shouted.

She did not let me speak. She gently put her hand over my mouth. I felt
a pang of terror in the
pit of my stomach. I had been
confronted in the past with some inexplicable phenomena which
don
Juan and don Genaro had called their allies. There were four of them and they
were entities,
as real as anything in the world. Their presence
was so outlandish that it would create an
unparalleled
state of fear in me every time I perceived them. The first one I had
encountered was
don Juan's; it was a dark, rectangular mass, eight
or nine feet high and four or five feet across. It
moved with the
crushing weight of a giant boulder and breathed so heavily that it reminded me
of
the sound of bellows. I had always encountered it at
night, in the darkness. I had fancied it to be
like a door
that walked by pivoting on one corner and then on the other.

The second ally I came across was don Genaro's. It was a long-faced,
bald-headed,
extraordinarily tall, glowing man, with thick lips and
enormous, droopy eyes. He always wore
pants that were too short for
his long, skinny legs.

I had seen those two allies a great many times while in the company of
don Juan and don
Genaro. The sight of them would invariably cause
an irreconcilable separation between my
reason and my
perception. On the one hand, I had no rational ground whatsoever to believe that
what was happening to me was actually taking place, and on the other
hand, there was no possible
way of discarding the truthfulness of
my perception.

Since they had always appeared while don Juan and don Genaro were
around, I had filed them
away as products of the powerful
influence that those two men had had on my suggestible
personality.
In my understanding it was either that, or that don Juan and don Genaro had in
their
possession forces they called their allies, forces which
were capable of manifesting themselves to
me as those
horrendous entities.

A feature of the allies was that they never allowed me to scrutinize
them thoroughly. I had
tried various times to focus my
undivided attention on them, but every time I would get dizzy and
disassociated.

The other two allies were more elusive. I had seen them only once, a
gigantic black jaguar
with yellow glowing eyes, and a
ravenous, enormous coyote. The two beasts were ultimately
aggressive
and overpowering. The jaguar was don Genaro's and the coyote was don Juan's.

La Gorda crawled out of the cave. I followed her. She led the way. We
walked out of the gully
and reached a long, rocky plain. She
stopped and let me step ahead. I told her that if she was
going
to let me lead us I was going to try to get to the car. She shook her head
affirmatively and clung to me. I could feel her clammy skin. She seemed to be
in a state of great agitation. It was
perhaps a mile to where we had
left the car, and to reach it we had to cross the deserted, rocky
plain.
Don Juan had shown me a hidden trail among some big boulders, almost on the
side of the
mountain that flanked the plain toward the east. I
headed for that trail. Some unknown urge was
guiding me; otherwise I would have
taken the same trail we had taken before when we had
crossed the plain on the level ground.

La Gorda seemed to be anticipating something awesome. She grabbed onto
me. Her eyes were
wild.

"Are we going the right way?" I asked.

She did not answer. She pulled her shawl and twisted it until it looked
like a long, thick rope.
She encircled my waist with it, crossed
over the ends and encircled herself. She tied a knot and thus had us bound
together in a band that looked like a figure eight.

"What did you do this for?" I asked.

She shook her head. Her teeth chattered but she could not say a word.
Her fright seemed to be
extreme. She pushed me to keep on
walking. I could not help wondering why I was not scared out
of
my wits myself.

As we reached the high trail the physical exertion began to take its
toll on me. I was wheezing
and had to breathe through my mouth. I
could see the shape of the big boulders. There was no
moon but the
sky was so clear that there was enough light to distinguish shapes. I could
hear la Gorda also wheezing.

I tried to stop to catch my breath but she pushed me gently as she shook
her head negatively. I
wanted to make a joke to break the
tension when I heard a strange thumping noise. My head
moved
involuntarily to my right to allow my left ear to scan the area. I stopped
breathing for an instant and then I clearly heard that someone else besides la
Gorda and myself was breathing
heavily. I checked again to make sure
before I told her. There was no doubt that that massive
shape
was there among the boulders. I put my hand on la Gorda's mouth as we kept on
moving and signaled her to hold her breath. I could tell that the massive shape
was very close. It seemed to be sliding as quietly as it could. It was wheezing
softly.

La Gorda was startled. She squatted and pulled me down with her by the
shawl tied around my
waist. She put her hands under her
skirt for a moment and then stood up; her hands were clasped and when she
snapped her fingers open a volley of sparks flew from them.

"Piss in your hands," la Gorda whispered through clenched
teeth.

"Hub?" I said, unable to comprehend what she wanted me to do.

She whispered her order three or four times with increasing urgency. She
must have realized I did not know what she wanted, for she squatted again and
showed that she was urinating in her hands. I stared at her dumbfounded as she
made her urine fly like reddish sparks.

My mind went blank. I did not know which was more absorbing, the sight
la Gorda was
creating with her urine, or the wheezing of the
approaching entity. I could not decide on which of the two stimuli to focus my
attention; both were enthralling.

"Quickly! Do it in your hands!" la Gorda grumbled between her
teeth.

I heard her, but my attention was dislocated. With an imploring voice la
Gorda added that my
sparks would make the approaching creature,
whatever it was, retreat. She began to whine and I
began to feel
desperate. I could not only hear but I could sense with my whole body the
approaching
entity. I tried to urinate in my hands; my effort was useless. I was too
self-conscious
and nervous. I became possessed by la Gorda's
agitation and struggled desperately to urinate. I finally did it. I snapped my
fingers three or four times, but nothing flew out of them.

"Do it again," la Gorda said. "It takes a while to make
sparks."

I told her that I had used up all the urine I had. There was the most
intense look of despair in
her eyes.

At that instant I saw the massive, rectangular shape moving toward us.
Somehow it did not
seem menacing to me, although la Gorda was about to
faint out of fear.

Suddenly she untied her shawl and leaped onto a small rock that was
behind me and hugged
me from behind, putting her chin on my
head. She had practically climbed on my shoulders. The
instant that
we adopted that position the shape ceased moving. It kept on wheezing, perhaps
twenty
feet away from us.

I felt a giant tension that seemed to be focused in my midsection. After
a while I knew without
the shadow of a doubt that if we
remained in that position we would have drained our energy and
fallen
prey to whatever was stalking us.

I told her that we were going to run for our lives. She shook her head
negatively. She seemed
to have regained her strength and
confidence. She said then that we had to bury our heads in our
arms
and lie down with our thighs against our stomachs. I remembered then that years
before don Juan had made me do the same thing one night when I was caught in a
deserted field in northern
Mexico
by something
equally unknown and yet equally real to my senses. At that time don Juan
had
said that fleeing was useless and the only thing one could do was to remain on
the spot in the
position la Gorda had just prescribed.

I was about to kneel down when I had the unexpected feeling that we had
made a terrible
mistake in leaving the cave. We had to go back to
it at any cost.

I looped la Gorda's shawl over my shoulders and under my arms. I asked
her to hold the tips
above my head, climb to my shoulders and stand on them, bracing herself by
pulling up the ends
of the shawl and fastening it like a harness. Years before don Juan had told me
that one should
meet strange events, such as the rectangular shape in front of us, with
unexpected actions. He said
that once he himself stumbled upon a deer that "talked" to him, and
he stood on his head for the
duration of that event, as a means of
assuring his survival and to ease the strain of such an
encounter.

My idea was to try to walk around the rectangular shape, back to the
cave, with la Gorda
standing on my shoulders.

She whispered that the cave was out of the question. The Nagual had
told her not to remain there at all. I argued, as I fixed the shawl for her,
that my body had the certainty that in the cave we would be all right. She
replied that that was true, and it would work except that we had no
means
whatever to control those forces. We needed a special container, a gourd of
some sort, like
those I had seen dangling from don Juan's and don
Genaro's belts.

She took off her shoes and climbed on my shoulders and stood there. I
held her by her calves. As she pulled on the ends of the shawl I felt the
tension of the band under my armpits. I waited
until she had gained her balance. To
walk in the darkness carrying one hundred and fifteen
pounds on my shoulders was no mean feat. I went very slowly. I counted
twenty-three paces and I had to put her down. The pain on my shoulder blades
was unbearable. I told her that although she
was very slender, her weight was crushing my collarbone.

The interesting part, however, was that the rectangular shape was no
longer in sight. Our
strategy had worked. La Gorda
suggested that she carry me on her shoulders for a stretch. I found
the
idea ludicrous; my weight was more than what her small frame could stand. We
decided to
walk for a while and see what happened.

There was a dead silence around us. We walked slowly, bracing each
other. We had moved no
more than a few yards when I again
began to hear strange breathing noises, a soft, prolonged
hissing
like the hissing of a feline. I hurriedly helped her to get back on my
shoulders and walked
another ten paces.

I knew we had to maintain the unexpected as a tactic if we wanted to
get out of that place. I
was trying to figure out another set of
unexpected actions we could use instead of la Gorda
standing on my
shoulders, when she took off her long dress. In one single movement she was
naked.
She scrambled on the ground looking for something. I heard a cracking sound and
she
stood up holding a branch from a low bush. She manoeuvred
her shawl around my shoulders and
neck and made a sort of riding
support where she could sit with her legs wrapped around my
waist,
like a child riding piggyback. She then put the branch inside her dress and
held it above her head. She began to twirl the branch, giving the dress a
strange bounce. To that effect she added a
whistle,
imitating the peculiar cry of a night owl.

After a hundred yards or so I heard the same sounds coming from behind
us and from the
sides. She changed to another birdcall, a piercing
sound similar to that made by a peacock. A few
minutes later
the same birdcalls were echoing all around us.

I had witnessed a similar phenomenon of birdcalls being answered, years
before with don
Juan. I had thought at the time that perhaps the
sounds were being produced by don Juan who was
hiding nearby
in the darkness, or even by someone closely associated with him, such as don
Genaro,
who was aiding him in creating an insurmountable fear in me, a fear that made
me run in
total darkness without even stumbling. Don Juan had
called that particular action of running in darkness the gait of power.

I asked la Gorda if she knew how to do the gait of power. She said yes.
I told her that we were
going to try it, even though I was not
at all sure I could do it. She said that it was neither the time
nor
the place for that and pointed in front of us. My heart, which had been beating
fast all along,
began to pound wildly inside my chest. Right ahead
of us, perhaps ten feet away, and smack in
the middle of
the trail was one of don Genaro's allies, the strange glowing man, with the
long face
and the bald head. I froze on the spot. I heard la
Gorda's shriek as though it were coming from far
away. She
frantically pounded on my sides with her fists. Her action broke my fixation on
the
man. She turned my head to the left and then to the
right. On my left side, almost touching my
leg, was the
black mass of a giant feline with glaring yellow eyes. To my right I saw an
enormous
phosphorescent coyote. Behind us, almost touching la
Gorda's back, was the dark rectangular
shape.