Let Their Spirits Dance

by Stella Pope Duarte

  “You’re Priscilla’s sister. I see the resemblance.” Everyone said so, and behind Priscilla’s back they always said I was the prettiest. After Jesse’s death, the dot-to-dot pictures that connected us got split up. If I moved right, Priscilla moved left, if I visited Mom, Priscilla stayed away. If I stayed away, Priscilla went to see her. We were always passing each other by, and I didn’t know why. “Why can’t you get closer?” Mom asked. “She’s your only sister.” Then I’d try, because I still remembered combing Priscilla’s hair and letting little strands of hair at the end of her ponytail tickle my lips. I remembered evenings we’d sleep with Mom in her bed, one on each arm, watching the pattern of light from veladoras flicker overhead, making rings like halos for saints we named after our dolls. Sometimes we’d tangle our arms around Mom’s neck, pinching each other to try to make one of us lose our grip. We kept it up until my mother said we would end up choking her to death, then she would push both our arms away.

  There were times Mom insisted I call Priscilla, and finally I would. One of her boyfriends would answer. There was always someone new, and it started a knot growing in my throat. I wanted to yell at her to get some sense into her head and make her stop searching for love. I knew if I yelled at Priscilla over the phone, she would hang up on me like Mom hung up on Tía Katia when they got mad at each other. By that time, Priscilla had her son Angelo and had lost her baby Annette. Losing Annette almost cost Priscilla her mind. The baby was six months old when she died, apparently without cause—crib death, the doctor said. Everything Priscilla had gone through with Jesse’s death came back to her when Annette died. It was as if time had not passed for her, and Jesse had never gone to the war. We buried Annette next to Nana Esther and Jesse. When Priscilla saw Jesse’s grave, she knelt down and hugged the headstone and lay her head on it, as she had laid her head on Jesse’s shoulder at the airport.

  Paul, the youngest of our family, doesn’t have much of an opinion about Mom’s health. He figures we women will take care of everything. A few years ago, he spent time in prison for possession of drugs. Before Jesse died, Paul was this normal kid, loving life, playing pranks on Priscilla and me, growing up safe, Jesse’s little brother, thinking about being like Jesse. When we lost Jesse, it was as if Paul had been thrust into a cage. That’s the way I saw him in my mind, locked in a cage of chicken wire, looking out, his eyes mournful, the dark lashes stuck together with tears. He turned into a disturbed kid at school, one that had to see the school counselor. After a while, teachers lost patience with him, his naughtiness turned into all-out rebellion, and his pranks became criminal acts: vandalizing the school, riding around in stolen cars with his friends, and buying liquor when he was still a minor. Paul’s life was a turbulent storm, thundering and out of control.

  Ironically, Paul’s son, Michael, is gifted. He was tested at school and came out with an IQ of over 120. Summertimes, Michael spends his time studying in a special program for brainy kids in Scottsdale. Michael’s got big, gray eyes and a bottom lip that protrudes over his top lip when he’s thinking hard about something. His hair is short and spiky at the top. Recently, Michael had braces removed from his teeth. His dental work was donated free of charge, by a dentist who suffered with crooked teeth all his life and wanted to help kids in a similar situation. I have to credit Priscilla for taking Michael to all his dental appointments, and there were many. When Michael graduates from the eighth grade next year, he’ll be sent to a summer program at the University of Arizona to study science and math. Michael’s mother was someone Paul knew in high school. Neither one of them graduated. Paul eventually got his GED in a prison program. The two met years later and struck up a relationship. By that time, Tina was living on her own. She had been a foster child for years, a hard life for her. After she had Michael, she turned him over to Mom and Paul, saying she needed to move on, and she’d be back. To this day, we’ve never heard from her. I wonder about Michael, the product of an ex-con and a foster child. Where did all his intelligence come from? Life is uncanny. Appearances are only an illusion. Intelligence is not a birthright after all, but a gift. Michael talks like a university professor, and I have to keep reminding myself he’s a kid and my nephew besides. Another one of life’s unanswered questions: How did Michael get so smart when his dad’s been in and out of trouble with the police all his life? The relationship is hit-and-miss, with Paul gloating over his son’s brains, and at the same time frustrated at not being able to deal with a child so bright that family members consider him a genius. When Paul was in prison, Michael lived with Priscilla and was like a brother to his eight-year-old cousin, Angelo. Now he refuses to live with Paul and treats Priscilla as if she is his Mom and her boyfriends are his uncles.

  Paul’s lived with Donna for the past four years. She’s an ex-addict my mother nicknamed “la gringita.” Donna surprised Paul the last time he was picked up for parole violations by joining the First Assembly Church of God and giving her life over to Jesus Christ. Now Paul is preached to every day, and it’s hard for him to go on using drugs. He threw her out twice, saying she reads the Bible too much and prays in weird languages. Then he went looking for her at church because he felt guilty for throwing her out just because she was trying to be holy. “Ay, la gringita,” Mom always says. “She’s so white she looks like a ghost.”

  “Except for her tattoos,” I remind her. Donna adores Mom, and no matter how many times she splits with Paul, she’s at the house checking up on Mom. The pastor from her church set her up with doctor’s appointments to start the process to remove her tattoos. Donna says she wants to be clean inside and out. I’ve gotten used to Donna’s tattoos, especially the tiny unicorn on her left shoulder that seems to spread its wings when she moves her arms up and down. I’m making plans to call Donna and have her help me take care of Mom.

  Tía Katia was helping Mom before she had a stroke that paralyzed her and eventually took her life. Mom sat with her, helpless, sometimes with Irene at her side, chanting the rosary, watching her only sister die, wishing out loud that she could take her place. Tía Katia suffered months on end, and there was nothing her brood of kids could do except spray her mouth with water, because she couldn’t swallow whole drops. Her kids argued over who was doing what for her until finally she wouldn’t accept water from any of them. Her tongue got flat like the wooden stick a doctor uses to check your throat, and the whites of her eyes turned yellow.

  Jesse and I always considered Tía Katia’s husband, Bernardo, our favorite uncle. He died two years before Tía Katia did. The bones on his back formed a mound of cartilage that made it hard for him to breathe. Then one day he had a seizure that threw him flat on his back. The shock of the fall made Tío Bernardo spit up phlegm that he couldn’t clear from his throat. This stopped his breathing entirely, and Tío Bernardo died as he always said he would, with his shoes on. I still remembered Tío’s half-smile, lopsided, gentle, his fingers long and tapered, the hands of a musician, only his deformed back never allowed him to play an instrument. His fingers, warm and comforting, slipped through mine at Jesse’s funeral and steadied me as I walked back to the white limousine that whisked us away to the funeral home.

  • THE SAME PICTURES look down at me every day from the walls at Mom’s house, brown faces, with black pits for eyes, haunting me. Jesse in his uniform, Priscilla, Paul, Mom and Dad, an assortment of wedding pictures. And there are religious pictures too, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Guardian Angel walking the children over the bridge, St. Rita, La Virgen de Guadalupe, El Santo Niño de Atocha, St. Michael the Archangel. Sometimes the faces seem to feel sorry for me, other times they seem to be mad at me or laugh at me, mocking me for what happened with Sandra. Ray’s betrayal—didn’t I see it coming? Couldn’t I smell it like the mothballs stuck in Mom’s closet? Who was I really fighting that night—Sandra or the ghost of Consuelo? I think now I was fighting myself, punching myself awake, making the pain surface, letting the explosion I saw in my dream go off like dynamite in my
head.

  We were a family back then, the pictures show it—even though we lived under the shadow of Dad and his lover, still we were together. The storms were something we lived through together. It all ended after Jesse was killed. Jesse was the fiber that welded our family together. We were rudderless without him, drifting on separate rafts. Sometimes we drifted so far from each other we became miniature islands. We lost sight of each other, gliding into dark waters and a sullen, empty sky like the one Jesse flew into when he left for Vietnam.

  The last thing we did as a family was wait for Jesse’s body to come back from Vietnam. The stillness of Mom’s house at night reminds me of how we waited. We waited so long, we almost lost hope. The Army had sent his body to the wrong address. It was Lent at our house back then. The statute of Our Lady of Sorrows with the dagger piercing her heart and the big cross of Christ were in procession through every room. I understood her pain now, the pain of Our Lady of Sorrows. In my mind’s eye, I still see the candle I lit for Jesse at St. Anthony’s—the candle he asked me for in his letters. The candle’s thin flame flickered so small in the huge dark church, I was afraid it would die out, and I’d never see Jesse again.

  I don’t remember if we ate anything while we waited for Jesse’s body to come home. I know Dad drank coffee and tequila and smoked. I know Nana rocked back and forth in her rocking chair and wrung her hands in despair. I know Mom sank into her bed, draped the windows with blankets and didn’t light the veladoras. She was getting ready for the worst migraine of her life, the first after she had been healed at Brother Jakes’s revival when Jesse and I were kids, and the last she would ever have. After that, Mom kept the pain of Jesse’s death deep inside her breastbone, until the day she died. Priscilla, Paul, and I didn’t have the strength to talk on the phone to friends. Dad told them we were asleep. My voice was gone. Where? How did it disappear? The hole that appeared when my mother was sick with her migraines came back again. It yawned dark and menacing in the kitchen. I put my hands over it and felt its vibrations, icy cold. I went around it, and my dad asked me if I was crazy.

  El Ganso ·

  At Mom’s, I walk into Jesse’s old room. There are boxes stacked up against the walls, old towels, kitchen supplies, plastic bowls and plates, a pair of metal tongs sticking up from one box, picture albums in another, a box of old Life magazines, bathroom rugs, mismatched toilet seat covers, shower curtains with color-coordinated plastic rings, kids’ books from the Lowell School Library, and textbooks from Palo Verde. In a plastic bag are Jesse’s letters, bound together with rubber bands.

  Some of Dad’s clothes are hanging in the closet. The smell of mothballs assaults me when I slide the closet door open. Mom’s still taking care of Dad’s clothes. Jesse’s clothes are gone, Mom gave them all away after a year of holding on to them. She kept his school letter sweater with patches of baseball insignias sewn into the front, RAMIREZ 1965 under the left pocket. She kept the sweater and hung it in her closet behind all her clothes. The floor is bare, dusty, beige vinyl tile squares. Drapes hang at the window, the design is diagonal lines, brown and yellow. Mom thought they looked like curtains for a boy’s room. I always thought the design looked like lightning bolts, all the wrong color. I lift a corner of the drapes and stare at the chinaberry tree in Mom’s backyard. The tree is a fixed part of the scenery. It outlived Jesse and Dad.

  I lock the door and read Jesse’s letters as if I’m doing something forbidden. Opening the past all over again.

  January 20, 1968

  Dear Sis,

  It’s not what it looks like on TV. It’s worse. The place is filthy, nowhere to go to the bathroom out in the bush, ants crawling all over the place, mosquitoes at night. I’m trying to write as much as I can but it’s so hot, I’m sweating all the time and thirsty. Sorry about the letters. I know they look like I dropped them in puddles. I can’t tell you how thirsty you get out here, it’s like you’ve been walking in the desert. Walking with no place to go. Hills have a number out here. Sometimes the big shots get mixed up and don’t know which hill we’re on. Most of the guys out here are OK, but there’s some assholes, like Major Cunningham, a gabacho who likes to volunteer for all kinds of action. I told him, stop volunteering our platoon, pendejo, what do you want, to see us all dead? We got enough to do. The vato wants to be a celebrated hero. He makes the rules in the rear and you know us, los Chicanos we’re out there, front lines. I tell the guys shoot, cover yourselves, but it’s hard when you look at the Vietnamese in the face. They’re farm people, they look like a bunch of migrants bending over the rice paddies. They look so pathetic. Gabachos who have been here for a while say it’s all a cover. They punch them around, beat them up, even the women. I can’t, sis, it would be like hitting my nana or tata. I’m watching for Charlie but they all look the same.

  I’m sending you a picture of the Mekong Delta. It’s gray water all over the place. The jungle is so thick you could be a few feet away from somebody and still they couldn’t see you. They count on that, the VC. I’ll be damned if I didn’t think of El Ganso the other night. Remember his long neck and how he swam with you back to shore when you almost drowned in the Salt River? He looked like a big old goose, que no? I was shaking back then, thinking Dad was gonna haul ass on me, even after I saw you were OK. Here I was walking in water up to my elbows. I laughed out loud and one of the guys pushed my head under the water cause he thought I had gone nuts and forgot Charlie was watching us from everywhere. I would have given everything I had to see you and El Ganso all over again.

  Check out the red fingerprint. The dirt is red here. It’s like the red rocks of Sedona. Remember when we went to Slide Rock? We counted stars from the back of Tía Katia’s station wagon on our way back to Phoenix. Phoenix. I tell guys I’m from Phoenix, Arizona and it sounds like I’m saying I’m from Mars. Then I say El Cielito and they get the idea, cause los Chicanos always come from a barrio—Sierra Vista, El Watche, Los Molinos, lots of others. I can’t believe I was ever a kid playing in the dirt in El Cielito.

  I’ll be writing as much as I can. Don’t tell Mom what I tell you. I don’t want her to worry, you know her. Light a candle for me at St. Anthony’s. You can’t ever be wrong lighting a candle. And don’t think about that stuff I told you at the airport. There’s no way I want to end up a statistic, and if I do, I know I can count on you to take care of Mom. Don’t take it hard, sis, I don’t know how to say things, I’ve never been in a war before. You’re the best sister, ever.

  SWAK,

  Jesse

  P.S. Chris says to write. He’s got a girl in Albuquerque, so my advice is to write if you want, but don’t let the vato fool you, sis. Tell Espi to write to me.

  I got to know my brother through his letters, the inmost parts Jesse hid so well in the States. I got to know SWAK meant “Sealed With A Kiss.” I knew he was lonely, even though there were guys all around him. He told me later it was better for him not to make too many friends, as they could be dead tomorrow. His idea of what it meant to go to war wasn’t anything like what they taught him in training. He was fighting people who looked like people we knew. He was visiting villages with makeshift hootches that didn’t look like enemy headquarters. There were cameras and reporters all around. The VC were blowing the hell out of them. The Tet offensive was raging and guys were still posing, talking to their Moms from the jungles. They were so young. No surprise, that America was making a Hollywood movie out of a tragedy.

  Jesse remembered El Ganso in his first letter, but he forgot to mention Inez.

  • I ALMOST DROWNED in the Salt River the time we went on a picnic with Tía Katia, her hunchbacked husband Bernardo, and their five kids. I was seven, Jesse was nine, and Priscilla was three. Mom was pregnant but not with Paul. Her belly was rising like a small ball of masa under her blouse that stayed too small, then went away. It was the only baby we never got to see. “Something’s wrong,” Doña Carolina told her. “The baby won’t hold on.”

  Doña Carolina was
El Cielito’s curandera, and midwife, an expert in anything that pertained to giving birth. Her fingers were short and flat, and the tips felt warm on our skin when she gave us her own version of a physical. “Fingers have a mind of their own,” she told me one day, “it’s like being plugged into ten electrical wires.” Doña Carolina’s ten electrical wires sent her the right message about Mom, because she lost the baby I had named Inez. I knew she had to be a girl because Doña Carolina had tested my mom to find out what the baby was by swinging a needle on a string over her belly button. If the needle went clockwise the baby was a boy. If the needle went counterclockwise the baby was a girl. The needle spun around from left to right, so I felt good about naming the baby Inez.

  Maybe Mom lost Inez because she suffered un miedo, a fear that gripped her when she heard that I had almost drowned in the Salt River. Fear, as Doña Carolina said, could claim a life by freezing it into place. Maybe that’s why she prescribed a drink of water right after experiencing a fear to keep things moving. For once, water wouldn’t have worked for me. I had already swallowed too much of the Salt River, and the only thing left to do was to spit it back up.

  I had waded into the shallow part of the river with no problem until my legs got tangled in reeds that grew close to the bank. The reeds gripped my skinny legs like ropes, pulling me into deep water, and I started swallowing buckets full of the Salt River before anyone noticed. My cousin, Alfonso, nicknamed El Ganso for his long, goose-like neck, dove in after he saw me disappear behind a clump of reeds. It was the only time El Ganso’s neck came in handy for me. I hung onto his neck for dear life and actually rode on his back as we made our way to shore.