Let Their Spirits Dance

  “He was lucky. My brother wasn’t so lucky. He was killed in 1968.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s sad,” the woman says. “All the boys killed over there.” She looks at me and I know she wants to cry. “Is that your mother over there?” She points to Mom, sitting with Irene at a picnic table.

  “Yes, it is. That’s why we’re on the road. Mom made a promise to touch my brother’s name on the Vietnam Wall.”

  “And all these other people?”

  “Family and friends,” Manuel says.

  She looks around at everyone. “This is wonderful. Have a safe trip.” She leans close to her husband, and her action reminds me of the time Dad picked up Mom in his arms at the airport after Jesse’s plane took off.

  “She’s been ill,” he says. “But she’s a trouper, aren’t you, sweetheart?”

  She nods. “We’ll be in touch with you. Barry will take down the web address.”

  “Barry and Eleanor Kinney. We’ll be in touch,” her husband says, and they walk away.

  “Hey, Manuel, we’re getting famous.”

  “Michael was right. A little publicity is good for us.”

  I stand still and close my eyes. “Breathe in the air, Manuel.” I’m taking in deep, piny breaths. “Jesse would have loved this!” I look up. Manuel is staring up at the trees.

  “There’s lots of space between them. It doesn’t look that way from the road.”

  “What?”

  “The spaces between the trees. Some of the trees are burned.”

  “Who cares? Just smell the woods. Can’t you feel the energy? Everything’s alive!”

  Manuel’s staring at me. “You’re so beautiful, Teresa. You look like a forest nymph.”

  “A Chicana forest nymph? Never heard of one!” We both start laughing.

  Priscilla walks up to us. “Something I should know about?”

  “We’re laughing about forest nymphs,” says Manuel.

  “Getting into the spirit of things, are you? And I do mean spirit. All these voices calling Mom. What is this, a moving seance? What did the voices tell Mom? She doesn’t know and neither do you, Teresa. I don’t believe the dead talk to us.”

  “Who knows what the dead do?” I tell her. “The real question is, are they really dead, or just out of their bodies, and living somewhere else?”

  “This is getting real spooky. Has it hit you that we’re going across the country to prove Mom right?”

  “Mom doesn’t need anybody to prove her right. She believes anyway.”

  “Yeah, and now that I remember, you’re a little weird yourself, chasing that old man over by La Cueva del Diablo.”

  Priscilla’s wearing sunglasses. I see myself reflected in one lens, a distorted shadowy image.

  “You wouldn’t be saying that if you knew Don Florencío like Jesse and I did.”

  “People said he was a drunk! Smoked stuff he grew in his own backyard. He was nothing but an old Indian hippie. He should have set up shop in San Francisco, with your little boyfriend from next door, what was his name? Ricky Navarro. Don’t you remember? Ricky joined a hippie commune.”

  “I never saw Don Florencío drunk. And if you’re talking about peyote, you’re crazy, I never saw anything but tobacco. He respected what nature gave him. And as far as Ricky’s concerned…”

  “Don’t get so touchy. Touchy, isn’t she, Manuel?”

  “She can get a little testy sometimes.”

  “Whose side are you on?”

  Manuel raises his hands, shrugs his shoulders. “Can’t win between sisters, I better keep my mouth shut.”

  “How do you know Ricky Navarro turned into a hippie? He left town, that’s all we know.”

  “Ricky was a pothead, an LSD freak, a total washout! Don’t you remember all the rumors?” Priscilla starts to walk away.

  “Just like you to say things, throw daggers, then walk away! Don’t even start me on your men!”

  My heart is pounding. I see the Guadalupanas sitting at a picnic table with the twins. Gates is smoking a cigarette, standing under a pine tree with Willy and Susie. I lower my voice. “Talk to me about your latest, Priscilla. He looks seedy to me. Isn’t his picture over at the post office?”

  Priscilla yanks her sunglasses off. She glares at me, her body stiffening. “You can’t touch him, Teresa, and that’s what bothers you! You always think you have power over men, all men—my men!”

  “Que pasa?” my mother is standing, leaning on her cane.

  “They’re fighting, Nana,” Lisa says.

  “No, mija,” she tells me. “Don’t fight!”

  “Don’t think I’m on this trip because I want to be!” Priscilla yells over her shoulder. “If Mom doesn’t make it, neither will you, I swear it!”

  I look at Manuel. “Did you hear her? Threatening my life. There’s a law against that! Blaming me for all this!”

  Priscilla’s already in the van. Paul and Donna show up with the boys. Cisco is wrestling with Michael, holding both hands behind his back. After traveling only a few hours, they’re acting like brothers.

  “Look Mom, chicken wings!” he yells.

  “Leave him alone!” Priscilla shouts. She jumps out of the van and races toward Cisco, grabbing his arm.

  “It’s a wrestling move, Tía,” Cisco says. “I’m gonna make him a tough guy.”

  “Not in my lifetime!”

  “We’re playing,” Michael says.

  Angelo grabs Cisco around the waist. “He’s teaching us how to wrestle, Mom.”

  “Both of you shut up and get into the van!”

  “Don’t push my kid around, Priscilla,” Paul says. “I can stand up for my own.”

  “You stay out of this, you loser! Where were you when Michael was a baby and needed you? Where were you when I hauled him around to all his dental appointments? Now you’re back, and you want everything your way—well, it’s not that easy!”

  “It’s OK, Tía,” Michael says. “Dad just broke his own record. He’s never defended me before.”

  Mom and Irene shuffle up to me, leaning on each other for support.

  “Ya, behave yourselves, all of you! Look, everybody is watching us,” says Irene.

  “They’ll say we’re a bunch of Mexicans who can’t do anything right,” Mom adds.

  “They probably think we’re a delegation from the United Nations,” Paul says.

  My mother is distraught, her arm trembling from the effort of holding herself up on her cane.

  “It’s OK, Mom, don’t get so upset. Priscilla has a big mouth, she doesn’t really mean what she says.”

  “Ay, why can’t you love each other? If Jesse was here he would know what to do.”

  “There you go again with Jesse!” Paul says. “Jesse this, Jesse that. Nobody can control these two, much less somebody who died thirty years ago!”

  “Que nervio!” Irene says. “How dare you talk that way to your mother!”

  Paul opens his mouth. “Don’t say another word,” I tell him. He turns away. I watch his back. One shoulder is slumped at an angle like Dad’s. He’s rummaging through his pocket for the car keys.

  Donna wraps her arm around Mom. “Let me help you to the van, Alicia. Don’t even think about all this. We’ll be in Albuquerque soon.”

  “You ain’t seen nothing, Mrs. Ramirez,” Gates says, trying to soothe Mom. “My sisters used to run after each other with scissors and hatchets. And I don’t even want to tell you about Erica, my ex-wife, you saw her today in the car. That big lady? She can crack somebody’s head in two.”

  “Ay, Dios mio!”

  “Sisters always fight,” says Willy. “I have four and they almost started a fire in the back of the store. Remember the house we used to live in behind the store? None of them wanted to get up and turn off the stove.”

  “Your poor father. I know how much he loved his store.”

  “I never fought with my sisters,” Susie says proudly.

&nbs
p; “You’re an exception!” says Willy. He takes his wife’s picture, to record the “exception” for posterity.

  Everybody is trying to make things right for Mom. I look at my watch and see it’s time for her medications, Lipitor that helps circulate blood through her arteries, prescription ibuprofen for the pain, and another pill to regulate her blood pressure. Suddenly, I feel cooped up, as if the forest is turning in on me. The Wall seems a million miles away. How will we survive all this, and what if Mom dies before she gets there?

  Manuel walks up to me. “Medication time?”

  “Yeah, I gotta keep all these medications in order.” I start counting out the pills.

  “You’re doing a good job.” He pauses. “But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “You were pretty rough on Priscilla.”

  “I can’t believe you just said that! Didn’t you hear her threaten me?”

  “She didn’t mean it. She talks tough, but it’s just because she’s afraid.”

  “So what are you, Manuel? Her therapist? Priscilla doesn’t let anybody get close to her.”

  “That’s why—because she’s afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Of losing, of not being what people expect her to be.”

  “And you know about that, do you?”

  “I’m an expert on it.”

  “Gee, didn’t know the two of you had so much in common.”

  Manuel and I get into the van and avoid looking at each other. Priscilla decides to ride with Willy and Susie to avoid Paul. Lisa pours water for Mom in a paper cup so she can take her pills. The cars start up again, and we begin climbing higher into alpine country. My mother is gasping for breath. The atmosphere is too thin. I’m looking nervously at my watch, to see how much longer before we get into New Mexico, closer to Chris’s house.

  “She’ll be all right. We’re almost out of the mountains,” Manuel says. “How you feeling, Doña?”

  “Never better, mijo, even though my children don’t respect each other. No, they would rather fight. They forgot how to be a family. What is life without la familia?”

  Manuel smiles, uncertainly. He understands better than all of us. He’s Casper disappearing over the horizon in boxcars that never took him where he wanted to go, which was home, a real home, to a real family.

  The blue-green of the forest is so rich I see spots of green when I’m not looking at the trees. Everyone’s quiet. We pass by Montezuma Castle, old Indian ruins pressed into the side of a mountain, an ancient high-rise. Arizona is amazing. Huge saguaros grow next to spiny ocotillo and palo verde trees not too many miles from giant pine trees, maple, and aspen, and mountains capped with snow in winter. We have exited the heat of Phoenix, with temperatures that rise so high in the summertime you can fry an egg on the sidewalk. The sky is a perfect blue dome, cloudless, the day bright with sunshine, yet everything inside me has turned black. My mind is racing with things I’d like to say to Priscilla, hard things I’ve held inside me for a long time. I’m afraid when I look back and see my mother’s ashen face, afraid of Priscilla’s words. I want the trip to be over, and my mother headed safely back home. We’re journeying to the Wall to touch Jesse’s name. Does it matter anymore? Yet my fingers ache, anticipating the letters of his name. I’ve smoothed them down a hundred times in my mind, smoothed down his face in my memory, too, made everything fit into my thoughts, a flesh-and-blood jigsaw puzzle, but the pieces keep shifting and changing shapes the closer we get to the Wall.

  • IT’S ASSUMED THAT when people travel together they will love and hate each other, be amused, be resistant, be irritable, show their bad sides, make excuses for not answering when spoken to, get drowsy and carsick and want to go back home. How much of this can we bear? Irene rests one leg on Mom’s lap, and Mom rubs the painful varicose veins gently. Mom dozes on Irene’s shoulder part of the way, while Lisa and Lilly fight over CDs. The other two cars are still following us, so I guess nobody has decided to go back home. Manuel surprised me by sticking up for Priscilla. Really, I didn’t think he had it in him. Maybe I am like Priscilla says, wanting power over men, needing them to seem weak and limp, wanting to keep them home where my father should have been.

  I look at Mom and wonder what it takes to keep a man home. She couldn’t keep my dad. He was restless, beset with a wandering eye, looking for a new landscape to inhabit. Landscapes are changing in front of my eyes as we move from mountains to plateaus to flatland. In the distance, clouds hang low over purple, misty mountain peaks as we make our way to Gallup, New Mexico. Maybe I’m more like my dad. I need to have a landscape that’s changing or changeable, moving, if nothing else.

  La manda, my mother’s promise, is changing our landscapes forever. It’s suffering in motion. We’re carrying our burdens on our backs as our Indian ancestors did, adjusting the weight every once in a while to make ourselves feel better. Suffering is our map, it’s why we’re on the road. Men and women in pain stand close to Christ, the man of sorrows; every procession at St. Anthony’s taught us that. We wouldn’t be on the road if it weren’t for war and suffering. We’re part of some unearthly plan to balance the scales of suffering, to release a spring in our souls that will free us from the fear of suffering.

  We’re moving back in time to ’68, before it all started. Michael says every living thing in the universe creates a sound, the sun, moon, planets, the earth, trees, plants, animals, humans, everything emits invisible sound waves that ring, buzz, sputter and produce frequencies we can only pick up with radar instruments and some only with our spirits. My mother picked up Jesse’s voice, vibrations that started in her ears, and traveled to her mind and heart. We’re paying him a visit now where his memory lives in cold granite, behind the letters of his name. Each name is a story on the Wall, each story is a cry of despair, ringing, buzzing and sputtering pain throughout America. War is real! War is death! My mother listens to such things even when I wish she wouldn’t.

  Brown Berets ·

  By 1968, rage against the Vietnam War exploded onto the streets of America’s cities. Protesters, throats rubbed raw with shouting, feet blistered with marching, eyes blurred from not sleeping, took up the battle cry to end the war in Vietnam. War had come to America, and it wasn’t bombs exploding, it was balled fists raised in signs of power, drug communes, and kids burning their draft cards. Sounds of grief for our dead boys rose like the mad cries of an animal caught in a hunter’s trap. All over the world, the shouting was heard—students caught in dreams of building a perfect society were living out a nightmare. In Mexico, France, Italy, Russia, Germany, all around the globe students rioted and were beaten down by police, their lives crushed by heavy artillery, corrupt governments, the FBI, and the CIA. Finally, war was something we could hold in our hands, and it defied the American dream.

  • THE BROWN BERETS came to Phoenix in late 1968, two years before Ray and I got married. Actually, Ray and I didn’t get serious about each other until August of ’69 on Little Lally’s wedding day. Little Lally was one of Tío Ernie’s daughters. Little Lally was so happy on her wedding day, nobody could have dreamed she would one day be divorced from Demetrio. Ray’s band played for the couple’s wedding dance at the American Legion. That night was the first time I felt Ray loved me, although the idea surfaced after we fought in the parking lot and I tore up a pair of Jose Feliciano tickets in his face. In those days, I believed jealousy was proof of love. I saw it in Mom’s face when she watched Dad walk out the door on his way to Consuelo’s. This time the tables were turned. Ray was jealous of me, the suave, experienced man jealous of the girl still in high school who might run off with the star athlete. That was probably why we argued in the parking lot, but my memory is dim on this. It was torture for him to play on stage and watch me dance with other men. There wasn’t much I cared about in those days. I was still wrapped up in Jesse’s death, in the awful reality that I would never see him again.

  By the time the Brown Berets came to P
hoenix, I had decided to join in the protest against the war. My rage against the Army was so great I couldn’t even see images of generals and politicians on TV without wanting to spit in their faces. Ray took me to the Brown Beret rally the night before Thanksgiving Day. The rally was held in one of the ramadas at South Mountain Park.

  I remember the night was cold, starless, with a misty quarter moon dangling in the sky. Tall saguaros held up their arms in the gloomy night, like hands held up in prayer, or, as one guy said, looking like fingers, flipping off the world. The Brown Berets would have nothing to do with Thanksgiving Day, a gabacho holiday, they said—the story of the white man and his supposed conquest of America. What kind of picture did the white supremacists paint of the Indian Nation anyway? Not a pretty one—a servile people at best, aiding them, feeding them. Una mentira! The group said the story of Thanksgiving was all wrong and that los gringos wanted to prove they had befriended the Indians, when the truth was they were plotting to murder them all and take over their land, which is what happened in history.

  We got there late. By that time, the group had built bonfires with dry brush to protect themselves from the chilly air. The flickering firelight reminded me of Don Florencío and the campfires Jesse and I danced around when the old man told us stories. As a child, I pretended I saw faces close to Don Florencío’s fire, flesh-and-blood embers, grotesque forms, impish-looking fairy folk who hid in dark forests, chanting magic spells and unleashing dark powers to do their bidding.

  Someone was talking over a bullhorn. I later found out it was Antonio Fuentes, the leader of the group. Antonio was dark like Jesse, but wide around the shoulders. He was slow-moving and sure of himself. He kept fingering the brim of his beret as he spoke. I could see why he was the leader. He emanated passion like a hard, unyielding fist ready to swing. I was caught up in the aura he cast, eager to listen to every word he said, uncertain what I would do if I was ever alone with him.

  In the dim light of bare bulbs dangling on an electrical line and the twinkling lights of Phoenix in the distant valley, I could see the rest of the group. Their uniforms were creased and pressed and they wore their infamous brown berets at a tilt. Men with dark mustaches, some with long sideburns, stood unsmiling, feet apart in a military stance. They had women with them, too, not much older than me. Some looked like Mayan Indian maidens, long hair, bold stares. They shouted slogans: Viva La Raza! Justicia! Somos La Gente de Bronce! Chicano Power! They clapped their hands and stomped their feet.