Let Their Spirits Dance

  “You were all wila, wila,” he said. “So skinny you weren’t bigger than one of the reeds. I saw you go down, down and when I didn’t see you come back up, I figured I’d go in after you. Si, si, that’s what I did.” El Ganso talked like he was singing. Everybody said he was from a part of Mexico back in the mountains where everybody sang instead of talked.

  El Ganso made it sound like everything just happened to be happening, and he never took credit for saving my life. He just yawned and went on playing cards with the rest of the men. He didn’t care that he was a hero. El Ganso died two years later, when he was only twenty-five, in an accident at Jones’s Granary. They said he fell into a reservoir full of grain and suffocated before anyone could help him. I thought about that and how unfair it was after he had saved me from drowning. Already death was crowding into my life, snuffing out Inez and suffocating El Ganso.

  Jesse was waiting for me on the bank with a towel after the rescue. He threw the towel over me and tried to wrap me up like a cocoon. Maybe he thought he could squeeze the Salt River out of me. He never left my side the whole time. Tía Katia compressed the area under my ribs with the palms of her hands to make me cough up all the muddy water. “Ay Dios mio! Help me!” Tía Katia was shouting and calling on God, His Mother, angels, saints, and anyone else in Heaven she could think of to help me. I could feel Tío Bernardo’s hands on the back of my head. I looked up at his face and saw tears running down his cheeks. It hurt to force up the water, and I could hear the Salt River rushing in my ears long after I was pulled out.

  There were tears in Jesse’s eyes as he held me close, patting my hair dry with another towel. “It’s OK, Teresa. You’re all better now. Don’t cry anymore. Look, El Ganso’s over there laughing and playing cards. It wasn’t that bad.” He was dripping wet, shaking, partly from being scared I would die and partly from thinking how he would explain it all to my mom and dad.

  Mom and Dad didn’t take it lightly when we told them. “We used to play there as kids,” my dad said, “and nobody ever fell in.” They were ready to jump on anyone who hadn’t watched me close enough and yelled at Jesse for being the oldest and not preventing me from falling in the first place. My dad was already fingering the buckle on his belt, and Jesse was putting on his macho face. Once my dad’s anger was flying there were few rules. I stood close to Jesse, knowing that if blows started I would be pushed away. Still, if I could have taken even one of his blows, I would have done it. My mother’s light complexion turned a deathly white. She stood between Jesse and Dad, holding Priscilla in her arms.

  “It’s Katia’s fault! Will you beat your son because my sister is crazy?”

  The next thing Mom did was call Tía Katia on the phone. She yelled at her so loud Tía Katia hung up on her. No more than two weeks after my mother suffered this miedo, she lost Inez. Night after night, I dreamed about the Salt River and felt El Ganso’s long neck encircled in my hands. More than once a plastic baby rode with me on El Ganso’s back and I was sure it was Inez. Two blue, glassy eyes, like my doll’s eyes, looked at me. “I’m sorry, Inez. I didn’t mean it.” There was no answer. I held on tighter to El Ganso’s neck, hiding from Inez. Each time I woke up from the dream with a jump before El Ganso reached the riverbank. That was the first of many dreams I would have about the Salt River and El Ganso, except in my dreams I called the river El Río Salado.

  • BY 1968, WE WERE all drowning. La raza was submerged by mainstream America, a submarine drifting under a sea of politics, prejudice, and racism. Barrios like El Cielito, ignored by the U.S. government, suddenly appeared on Uncle Sam’s map. Chicanos who had never been thought about before were on the list of draftees. Uncle Sam’s finger was pointing at them, ordering them across the ocean to war, a war that the President kept saying was a “conflict.” Minorities always attract attention when there’s a war, and Chicanos, descendants of Aztec warriors, have always made it to the top of the list. This was more than la jura, the police, picking up our boys on Saturday nights and pumping up charges against them to “teach them Mexicans a lesson.” This was a game that said, We’re gonna pay you for being over there, and if you don’t want to go, we’ll draft you anyway. So why don’t you join up and avoid all the trouble? You know you don’t want to stay in school, anyway. And lots of guys didn’t. They had families to support, they had buddies over there. They couldn’t pack up and run.

  Everybody was on the move in the sixties. The Chicanos, the Blacks, Native Americans, flower children, drug addicts, demonstrators, everybody had something to say. Hearts in El Cielito were being plundered. La Llorona quit haunting El Cielito at night looking for her children. She flew over the Pacific to Vietnam and finally quenched her thirst for the children she had drowned so long ago. She wrapped her ghostly shroud around Chicanos and other Latinos who were being ripped apart from their bodies every day in the war and was satisfied at last.

  We had depended on the smoke of candles lit before sacred images to reach God’s nostrils, to touch the heart of Justo Juez, the Just Judge, and end the war. Instead, the twirling smoke turned into an obnoxious vapor that cast stagnant shadows everywhere. It wasn’t anything formal or planned, it was haphazard evil, playing with our lives. El Cielito was a hearse, black, smooth, and silent. We saw skulls staring at us from the windows, grimacing. President Kennedy’s death had not been enough, there had to be more. More deaths that we saw as blows against the poor, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death and Robert Kennedy’s, Che Guevara, and there were more.

  Coffins kept coming home from Vietnam wrapped in American flags. We could have tolled death bells from one end of South Phoenix to the other. Our guys didn’t stand a chance. Most of them didn’t have money to go on to college. They were sitting ducks for the draft.

  The Tet offensive raged on in Vietnam, making my mother quieter and more helpless than she had ever been before. She never stopped thinking about Faustino Lara, Irene’s son, killed in ’67. She had stood with Irene at her son’s open grave, and now she stood alone waiting, keeping her thoughts to herself. Irene was no help because every time she saw my mother she burst into tears. “Ay, Alicia, may God spare you what I’ve been through! I pray every day for Jesse, mi hijado, si todos los dias, for God to stand by his side. May God listen to me. I’m his godmother! But why did God take my son? Why, Alicia, why?” She pounded her fist in the air, and my mother looked away. Mom never answered Irene’s question.

  Ray Alvarez, Espi’s older brother, came home from the war in ’67, the same year Faustino was killed. I met him when I was still a kid in grammar school and he was starting his freshman year at Palo Verde. He looked so tall and sophisticated to me, I never thought for a second I’d marry him. He was always hanging around when I spent the night at Espi’s house. I talked to him about Jesse, and he described the way things looked in Vietnam. He didn’t see much action because he stayed at base camp most of the time working as a mechanic. Ray wasn’t crazy like Ricky Navarro. Every time I talked to him, I felt like Jesse would really come home. “I made it, Teresa,” he said. “Jesse’s no fool. He knows how to watch his back.”

  Ray played guitar and sang in nightclubs. Espi said he had women watching him all the time, women with false eyelashes, rhinestone earrings, and strapless dresses who wanted to go to bed with him. Espi told me Ray never showed much interest in women until he met me. At first I couldn’t believe Ray was interested in me. He was suave, experienced, a man who smelled of English Leather and tobacco. On stage, he sometimes wore a white panama hat, which made him look like a Latin movie star. I could see myself hugging Ray, but I couldn’t imagine kissing him, until later. There were so many times I wanted to be close to Ray, because he was somebody who had made it. Maybe I could learn something from him that would bring Jesse back home. Espi was the only person who knew what Jesse had said to me before he left—that he wouldn’t be back. After Ray and I got serious, Ray was the second person to know. I told myself Jesse’s words were only a warning, something he said ju
st in case. Still, the secret gnawed at me from the inside, festered in me. I was seeing Paul again falling from the mulberry tree in the backyard after Mom told me to watch him and make sure he didn’t fall. Paul went too far, climbing out on a bare, brittle limb. I saw the fall coming and froze with fear. El susto took over my body, and I knew I’d never be able to save him. By the time I got there, Paul was lying face down in the dirt, his lip a bloody mess. If I told Mom Jesse wasn’t coming back home, I worried she might experience a susto so great, she would die like Baby Inez did.

  To make matters worse, Ricky Navarro from next door started sleeping outside on a cot almost every night. This worried Mom, and she wondered if Jesse would come back just as crazy as Ricky. There wasn’t enough room in his house, Ricky said. For some reason space was real important to him after he came back from Vietnam, and he didn’t like feeling crowded. “The world’s crazy, Teresa,” he told me one day. “La vida loca is everywhere. It’s not any different here than in Vietnam. Those sons-of-bitches tried to kill me at the airport! Our own U.S. citizens, protesting the good, old American way! If I had known those fuckers were so ungrateful, I would have never gone!”

  I hated the demonstrators. They were totally ungrateful. Didn’t they know my brother was over there doing battle for their asses? President Johnson with his Southern drawl nauseated me. “Our boys are holding their own in Kee Sung.” He couldn’t even pronounce the names right. I wondered if any of his relatives had served in Vietnam.

  There were times I watched the news on TV and looked for Jesse’s face to show up with all the other boys running into trenches, walking through ditches and jungles. I wanted to see him to know he was alive, a movie star fighting for right when everything was all wrong, defending people who ran back to their villages every chance they got and played both sides to stay alive. If we were right, then that meant the Vietnamese were wrong. The twisted power of war dictated that those in the wrong had no right to obstruct those in the right, there could be no rules, right must always win.

  • CHICANOS, HALF AZTEC, half European, hearts pounding, warriors from the past, sacrificed to Huitzilopochtli, god of war, were writing their names in blood so the sun could be fed and move over into tomorrow. That was Vietnam for us, for the Mexicas of Aztlán, la gente de razon, as Don Florencío would say.

  Jimenez Elementary ·

  We’re starting a unit on Vietnam, boys and girls. Does anyone know anything about Vietnam? Let’s brainstorm.” Questioning faces look up at me. A few hands go up, the Vietnam War, the Vietnam Wall, rice paddies, cone hats, China, war, Li Ann’s family is from there, they sleep when we get up. “I saw Born on the Fourth of July,” says Andy. “Were your parents with you?” I ask. Andy shakes his head. The second grade has brainstormed itself out. My assistant Lorena Padilla and I arrange the children into small groups to research facts about the country. We agree that late January is the best time of the year to do a unit on Vietnam. We can go over information on Tet, the Vietnamese New Year’s holiday celebrated in late January. Lorena doesn’t know that living at Mom’s has brought Vietnam back to life for me. Jesse’s letters are telling the story all over again. Vietnam, so far away, sinister yet beautiful, sealed my brother’s fate in its red earth. I trace over red smudges on Jesse’s letters carefully with my fingertips. Having Li Ann Nguyen in class will help make things real for the kids. She was born in the U.S., but her mother was born in Vietnam.

  I watch Lorena sifting through our picture files for any pictures related to New Year’s celebrations in Vietnam and China. Lorena looks like she’s twenty, though she’s actually in her thirties. Most days she wears a ponytail, blouses tucked into jeans, and tennis shoes. I owe Lorena big time these days. She helped an assortment of substitute teachers the first two weeks of January while my face was healing. She likes to tease me about what she had to put up with: people who looked homeless, she said; one who brought in a trained parrot perched on his shoulder, a woman who everybody swears is the bag lady they see on their way to work, and a huge man, a dead ringer for a serial murderer advertised at the post office who ended up being the favorite of the class. All these people paraded through my classroom while my face returned to normal. There are still faint lines someone might notice if they tried, but I keep them concealed with Cover Girl make-up.

  The assault charges are still pending. I’ve talked to an attorney named Sam Diamond. He was recommended to me by a friend at school who said that he defended her brother when he got into a bar fight. She said his nickname is Slick Sam, and I’m hoping his reputation will work in my favor. Slick Sam assures me that besides the embarrassment of it all, what else can happen? For sure, they won’t give you time, he assures me. A beautiful woman like you, he says, an upstanding citizen, a schoolteacher for God’s sake, a role model for the community who lost her cool in a fit of rage, a crime of passion. Yes, everybody understands passion, look at President Clinton! “Let me look at your face,” he says, then gets so close I can smell his toothpaste. “Marvelous skin,” he says. “Have you ever done any modeling?”

  Outside the classroom windows, I see Orlando Gomez heading for recess with his first-grade class. They must be doing their “Snowman Project,” as Orlando calls it. I notice some of the kids are still drying their hands on their clothes, always a sign that they’re working with paint or glue. After the Snowman Project, the kids will make valentines to hang around the room and blow up red and white balloons. After that, they’ll get ready for windy March by constructing paper kites with tails made of yarn. It’s like clockwork in Orlando’s class, the Snowman Project, the valentines, the balloons, the kites, and finally a huge caterpillar they build for the book Inchworm, which leads them into spring. Everybody says Orlando should have been a watchmaker because everything he does runs like hands on a clock, which doesn’t say much for days when Fireman Bob and his famous Dalmatian, Spotty, visit the school for their fire drill presentations. On those days, Orlando holes up in the teacher’s lounge and sends his assistant Millie to the auditorium with the kids. Today, obviously, he’s happy, there are no interruptions, only routine duties.

  The weather is still cold, although I know it will turn hot very quickly. For now, it matches my heart, cold, hard. I’ve filed for divorce. Ray was served papers at the All Pro Auto Parts Shop where he’s a store manager. I knew it would make him mad to get the papers in front of his employees, a taste of Sandra’s subpoena at Mom’s. Besides, I couldn’t find an officer who would take the papers into the Riverside while Ray was performing. That would have been the best revenge. So cruel, he would say, what are you trying to do, ruin my career? And I’d tell him he deserved it for everything my dad did to Mom, for Consuelo the cobweb who never disappeared from our house, for Sandra, the Latin Blast groupie who clung too long, clung too strong.

  Maps of Vietnam go up all over the classroom, with tagboard sentence strips, labeling important information in Spanish and English. Crayon drawings of Vietnam scenes are posted here and there. The children find out that waving good-bye to a Vietnamese really means “Come here.” Last names are first in Vietnamese, and calling someone with your finger is an insult because that’s the way animals are called. Lorena helps the children construct Vietnamese hats suitable for working in imaginary rice paddies. The children have plans to make mudholes out on the playground to try out their new hats, but I talk them out of it and promise I’ll talk to their parents to get permission for them to make mudholes at home.

  I tell the children about my big brother, Jesse. Real name, Jésus Antonio Ramirez. He always went by Jesse. He was killed in the middle of a battle right outside Saigon. I point to Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, on the map. It was when all the crazy fighting was going on in 1968 after Tet, Vietnam’s New Year’s holiday.

  “Wow! That was almost thirty years ago, Mrs. Alvarez.”

  “Yes, Brandon, but it seems like yesterday. When you lose someone you love as much as I loved Jesse, the years are nothing. Nothing.” The last word l
eaves me shaking my head. I look around the classroom at the pictures of Vietnam, a setting sun against palm trees on one, a house on stilts on another, jungle and more jungle on the rest. He was there. The pictures hit home. No deserts, no Río Salado, no El Cielito, a world he never dreamed he’d live in. I can’t imagine Jesse drinking from a coconut, sleeping in the pouring rain, much less aiming to kill. My brother a killer? I wonder if he ever did it. Really killed somebody. I’ll never know, although I would if he were alive. Jesse told me everything.

  Word gets around to Mr. H., our principal, that I told my class about Jesse. Mr. H.’s name is William Horowitz. His last name sounds so much like the word “horror” to the children that he has asked to be called Mr. H. Some of the kids and teachers say the H stands for Hell.

  “Telling the children about your brother might be too much for them and even for you, Teresa. A bit too personal,” he says as we talk in his office one morning. He runs his fingers through strands of unruly hair on the top of his head. He has aged visibly in the three years since he has taken over the job as head of Jimenez Elementary. His face is thin, his nose sticking out of it, sniffing the air for danger. His clothes are one size too big. What used to be fat is now flab.

  The “ousting committee” at the school, headed by a teacher nicknamed Annie Get Your Guns, is partly to blame for Mr. H.’s pitiful appearance. The committee is a group of teachers who run the school no matter who’s principal. Some of them have been in the district so long they can walk through the school blindfolded and never bump into anything. Because of the committee’s success with the school board and parents, Mr. H.’s chances of staying in his position are getting slimmer by the day. Members of the committee are faithful to their commitment when working on a campaign and meet daily at someone’s house or keep in touch by phone. Each day they build momentum in the push to free themselves of a “tyrant who will soon grovel,” as they put it. He didn’t look very tyrannical to me standing in his office, balancing a coffee cup, with a pencil stuck over one ear.