Let Their Spirits Dance

by Stella Pope Duarte

  “Who’s the man?” I ask him.

  “I don’t know, but he says we’ll find out pretty soon.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Michael passes me by, racing with Angelo to get back to the van and the laptop.

  Déjà Vu ·

  We pass red, jagged mountains in Colorado. Some have tops that look like mesas. Chris tells me the Garden of the Gods is close by. A sacred place, he says. The red rocks of Colorado converge in the spot to form a place of astounding power, so real it makes the air thick. Maybe it’s like walking on Jupiter, Chris says. The earth’s gravity weighs you down, tugs at your feet, and you get stronger because you have to work harder to lift your feet off the ground so you can walk.

  Chris and I don’t talk about what happened last night. I can’t tell if Chris regrets not making love. I don’t. I didn’t realize he was still in love with Margie. Just the thought that I could be anything close to somebody’s Consuelo is enough to stop me from anything romantic with Chris. Is he ashamed of the tears he shed? I can’t tell that either. Chris is so easygoing this morning, it makes me suspect it’s just an act. There’s something we have to say to each other, but neither one of us knows how to start. There are tiny pockets of space between us. Some of it is Margie, some of it might be Ray, but most of it is Jesse.

  At Denver we pick up Highway 24 for a short distance as we cross the state line into Kansas, then pick up I-70 that leads us into Topeka. We’re heading for the middle of America, and things are looking foreign to us. All we’ve known is the Southwest. Every once in a while a motorist or a truck driver will honk at us. Sometimes they wave, or stick their hands out of open car windows and give us a thumbs-up. Maybe they’ve seen us on TV or visited the web site, or read about us in newspapers. I haven’t seen the news people out here. They like the excitement of the big cities.

  There are flashes of lightning in the sky. We hear thunder. Rain starts, pattering on our windows at first, then it turns into hail. The hail is as big as golf balls. Chris tells me it must be cold somewhere in the higher elevations and the hail has traveled down to us by way of wind currents. My mother and Irene pull out their lace veils and wear them as scarves. It’s a protection against lightning, they say. I explain that the rubber of the tires protects us from the electrical currents, but they pretend they’re not listening. I’m glad the flags waving on the vans are plastic. Mom tells me to block off the rearview mirror, because lightning might hit it and bounce back to them. Irene says her grandmother was afraid of lightning, too. She worked out in the fields all her life and ran from bolts of lightning to hide under tents made of cardboard and canvas. This was the suffering la raza bore before Cesar Chavez won rights for the poor and forced rich landowners to provide decent housing. “Before that they were treated worse than animals,” Irene says. “My grandfather’s appendix burst, pobrecito el viejito, and there was no doctor around for miles. My family was too poor to pay a hospital, so he died right there under a tree.”

  The landscape has changed to Kansas flatlands I’ve only seen in pictures. Grassy plains spread out on either side of the highway, disappearing into the distant horizon. There is no farmhouse or building to obstruct the view of miles and miles of green, rolling hills. The smell of rich, wet earth is everywhere. We’re in Dorothy’s land, straight out of The Wizard of Oz. I’m expecting her house to whiz by any minute with the Wicked Witch of the West flying after it on her broom.

  Chris tells me the landscape of Vietnam was like no other he had ever seen.

  “We were on the asphalt streets of the U.S. one day, and out in the jungles the next. There was no middle point. Nowhere to catch your breath. The jungles were so green, so beautiful. Then you’d run into a place where the U.S. Air Force had bombed or sprayed with Agent Orange and the place looked like a landscape from the moon. When we first got there we were the FNGs, Fucking New Guys.” He looks back to make sure the Guadalupanas aren’t going to ask him to redefine FNGs. His voice is almost a whisper. He wants to keep what he says to me private. “And the guys were so young! Kids out of high school. Me and Jesse were the older ones at twenty. Can you imagine?” He looks out over everything as if he’s looking beyond the edge of the horizon.

  “The heat, I can’t explain the heat over there. It suffocates you, then squeezes every drop of water out of you, until you swear you’d shoot your own foot just to get the hell out of there. And the smells, people doing the bathroom outside in the open…the stench. The people so poor you get sick to your stomach.” He stops himself like a recording someone clicked off. My mother’s listening.

  “They were very poor?”

  “Yes, Doña, very poor, except some of the people in the big cities.”

  “And Jesse, what did he do?”

  “He felt sorry for them, Doña. He wanted to help them, not fight them. He made friends with some of the families over there. They brought him little gifts, mostly fruit, good fruit. They brought him dragon fruit and lichee nuts, and lots of others. I can’t remember the names.”

  I see Jesse in my mind with his teeth colored red from the pomegranates we ate in the summertime. Summers when he played the part of King David, and we shot rocks at targets in the backyard, Goliaths we wanted to get even with.

  “The fruits in Vietnam…were there any pomegranates?”

  “I never saw any, but there could have been.”

  “Jesse had friends there?”

  “Yes, a few families he got to know in Bien Hoa, actually a little suburb right outside the city of Bien Hoa.”

  “Is that close to Saigon?”

  “Very close.”

  “Tell him, mija, about the call I got after Jesse was killed.”

  “Someone called my mom from Saigon two years after Jesse was killed. Do you know who it might have been?”

  “No, but it could have been one of the people he knew. They’re very friendly, and when they like you, it’s usually for life.”

  “Whoever it was hung up on Mom. Why would somebody do that?”

  “Everything’s controlled by the communists over there. Maybe they were forced to do it.”

  “My mom suffered a lot over that call. She thought Jesse was still alive, or captured by the Vietcong. We even thought maybe he went after Salt and Pepper, and joined the Vietcong. It still haunts us. And now, there’s a Vietnamese man sending messages to Michael on the web site.”

  “That could be someone who knew Jesse during the war, and somehow made it to the U.S.”

  Chris squeezes my hand and looks at me, lifting his eyebrows. I understand there’s more he wants to say but can’t in front of Mom.

  “Tell him, mija, how they sent my poor son to the wrong address.” Mom starts to cry.

  “Take it easy, Mom.” I reach over and put my hand on her knee. “It’s true, Chris, the Army sent Jesse’s body to the wrong address! Can you believe such a thing? That’s why they owed us all the money, because of the mistake they made on the address.”

  “That’s what they do,” Mom says, “to us, los pobres. Our sons weren’t the gringos’ sons. They didn’t care about us!”

  “All I have of my son is an American flag,” Irene says. She’s crying, too.

  “Jesse was very brave, Doña Ramirez. I know. I was there when he died,” Chris says. “He wasn’t afraid.” His voice sounds hollow as if he’s talking from a great distance. He shifts in his seat and grips the steering wheel with two hands instead of one.

  “Don’t cry, Nana,” Lisa says. She reaches over the seat and gives my mother a hug. “Tío Jesse doesn’t want you to be sad.”

  “Si, you’re right, mijita. I should stop, but I can’t.”

  “Don’t cry, Mom,” I tell her, “you’ll start coughing again.” She starts coughing as soon as I say the words. I reach into my purse and find a cough drop for her.

  The flatlands seem endless. Panic hits me. There’s no place to take Mom if something happens out here. I look out the back window of the van and catch a gl
impse of Yellowhair’s van with Paul at the wheel. Behind him is Willy’s car. I can’t see Manuel and Priscilla, but I figure they’re last. I want to tell Chris I’m afraid, but can’t. We’re passing small towns that don’t look like they even have a hospital, much less an airport to get us to civilization. I’ll have to depend on La Virgen and El Santo Niño out here. What other hope do we have? A tornado that would whisk us away to Oz?

  “Ay, how much more can we bear?” Mom asks.

  “Con fe, Alicia,” Irene says. “Our faith is what will get us to the Wall.”

  Pain starts in my forehead and travels to my eyes. I reach with my fingers under the lenses of my sunglasses and try to press the pain away. The pain spreads to my cheekbones. I keep my eyes closed for a few seconds. I open them, and the landscape is still wide, grassy plains, with hardly any cars in view. Dark clouds are floating away, and spots of blue sky are beginning to show.

  The old women stop crying and begin to doze off. Suffering has exhausted them. I remember the sign we saw pulling out of Albuquerque—PARE DE SUFRIR. I wish the old women would sleep all the way to D.C., so they wouldn’t keep fanning to life the pain of Jesse’s death, old suffering still so fresh. It’s bad enough I’ll have to help them at the Wall when we get there. I take off my sunglasses and put my face in my hands.

  “It’ll be OK, Teresa,” Chris says. “I’ll tell you more about it tonight.”

  We pass Bunker Hill and see a sign advertising the largest prairie dog in the world and a cow with five legs. Lisa and Lilly want to stop and see the creatures, and I know probably the other kids want to do the same. “No time,” I tell them. “They’re probably fake anyway.” Abilene, Kansas. It sounds familiar to me for some reason. Chris tells me President Eisenhower was born there. Maybe I saw the town’s name in a history book.

  At Salina, we stop at a gas station with a convenience store to buy sandwiches and gas up. There are only a few people around. An old man sitting at the entrance of the store asks Gates for a cigarette. Gates gives him one, and they start talking about the Vietnam Wall. The old man tells Gates that he served in World War II. He says when they came back to the States from the war, they had parades and parties, and it was too bad that the Vietnam veterans got nothing. It’s all because of those longhaired hippies, he says, who protested and made the military look like fools. Nobody could control them, the old man says, they were running around smoking pot in Central Park and burning the American flag and their draft cards. “Cowards,” the old man says, “that’s the word for them. And Nixon watching them, threatening them, then all he does is end the war just like that, and everybody pulls out.”

  “We were lucky we finally pulled out,” Gates says.

  “Lucky? We shoulda bombed the hell out of ’em and gotten it over with! What the hell’s an army for if it don’t do what it should?”

  “Have a nice day,” Gates says and walks away. I can tell he’s angry by the way he starts washing the windows of the van, scrubbing them with all his might.

  “Take it easy, “I tell him. “People don’t understand what was going on over there.”

  “Then they shouldn’t talk.”

  Paul and Donna walk out of the convenience store holding hands. I guess they made up. I look at the tattoo on Paul’s arm with the A made into an O and almost laugh. A woman talking at a public phone stares at them. Maybe she’s never seen a Chicano guy holding a white woman’s hand.

  Paul’s driving the gray Toyota van with the Zuñi feathered wands. Donna’s with him, Yellowhair, and his mother Sarah. Paul’s in the lead as we leave Salina, which I found out is pronounced with a long syllable sound of the letter i. Our van is behind Paul’s. Manuel, Priscilla, and the boys are behind us, and last is Willy and Susie in the Nissan Maxima. We’re traveling over a desolate stretch of Kansas highway. Monotony takes over as we drive over a road that stretches bare and lifeless before us. Once in a while, we spot the faint mound of a hill in the distance. Chris looks in the rearview mirror several times.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask him.

  “Kansas Highway Patrol behind us, that’s what’s wrong.”

  “They won’t do anything. I’m sure they’ve heard of us.”

  “You never know. This is bush country compared to the cities. Some of these cops are rednecks, they don’t know anything about who we are, and some of them don’t care.”

  “Mom, there’s lights blinking behind us,” Lilly says.

  “Where?”

  “Behind us, it’s a police car.”

  “Trouble,” Chris says. “Here comes trouble!”

  “Déjà vu! I haven’t had trouble like this since the moratorium march in East L.A.”

  Chris looks at me in surprise. “I didn’t know you had gone there.”

  “Oh, I can tell you some stories about that!”

  The police car passes us by, and presses close to Paul’s van. It’s obvious they want Paul to stop, but Paul keeps moving.

  “What’s Paul doing?” Chris asks me. “He better stop before these rednecks get pissed off.”

  “Who knows what’s going on in Paul’s mind? Our luck they picked on the only one of us with a prison record!”

  Paul’s van continues to move for at least two minutes that seem like an eternity to me. The siren on the police car goes on. It makes me jump.

  “Stop, you idiot! What does he think he’s doing?” I roll down the window to yell at Paul to make him stop. He finally moves over to the side of the road with the police car glued to his bumper. Chris eases our van in behind the police car. The lights on the police car are flashing red and blue against the green prairie grass. In the distance, the sky has suddenly turned black just over the ridge of mountains where the sun disappeared.

  The officer driving the police car gets out first. His belly hangs over his belt. His pant legs barely cover the top of his black boots. The officer who stays in the car looks like a rookie. He’s talking on the radio. The first officer struts up to the van like he’s king of the prairie. He motions impatiently for Paul to roll down the window. After Paul rolls it down, he yells into Paul’s face.

  “Where’s your green card, homeboy?”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Oh, shit!” I open the door and start to get out. The rookie is out of the police car, shouting at me.

  “Ma’am, stay in the vehicle!” The rookie’s a tall redhead, with pale skin. He’s wearing sunglasses that have blue lenses in them. He plants himself between our car and theirs.

  The first officer throws the van door open and yanks Paul out. “Lean on it, homeboy, lean on it!” He shoves Paul up against the van. “Spread ’em,” he shouts, taking out a billy club and hitting Paul’s legs.

  “Que pasa, mija, what’s happening?” My mother is on the edge of her seat.

  “It’s OK, Mom, Paul knows what to do.”

  “The police, Alicia. The police are arresting Paul!” Irene is almost in tears.

  “No, Irene,” I tell her. “They’re only asking him questions.”

  “When have the police asked Mexicans questions? They throw us in jail, that’s what they do.” Mom puts her hand on the handle of the car door as if she’s going to open it.

  “Mom, stay in the car. Didn’t you hear what the officer said?”

  “Mom, they’re gonna take Tío Paul away!” Lisa is shouting.

  “Be quiet! You’re making everything worse,” I tell her.

  The rookie starts radioing for backup.

  “Where’d you get your tats?” the first officer asks Paul.

  “Where your momma got hers,” Paul says.

  “A smartass! Hey, Harry, we got us a smartass!” Donna says something to the officer I can’t hear. “Stay out of this, or you’ll join your boyfriend!” yells the officer. He twists one of Paul’s arms behind his back, up to his shoulder.

  “How you like that, huh, talkin’ shit about my momma!” He slaps on a pair of handcuffs.

  “Wait a minute. Ease up on h
im,” says the rookie. “I just got the word. This is the Ramirez family. They’re on their way to the Vietnam Wall. Look over there.” He points to Priscilla’s van and the signs Michael put up on the windows.

  “They’re a bunch of fucking illegals, and you know it! Vietnam Memorial Wall! Shit, these people don’t know nothin’ about that.”

  “I’m telling you, there’ll be hell to pay,” says the rookie.

  Chris opens the car door and is ready to get out when the first officer reaches for his gun. “STAY THE FUCK IN THE CAR!” he shouts at the top of his lungs.

  “Chris…what are you doing? The guy’s crazy!” I tell him.

  “He’s a psycho, the son-of-a-bitch!”

  Mom opens the back door and is out before I can stop her.

  “Mom, stop! Mom, no…get back in the car! Look at her! Where’s her cane?”

  My mother doesn’t answer. “I’m warning you, ma’am,” says the first officer, “get back in the car or I’ll…”

  “You won’t do anything to me,” my mom says in a voice so calm, the officer doesn’t say another word. “This country already took one of my boys, Mr. Policeman. You can’t have the other one.”

  “Mom, go back!” Paul shouts. The rookie steps aside and lets her walk by.

  “No, mijo.” She walks up next to Paul and leans on the van, her arms raised over her head. “Take us both,” she says.

  “What is she, a Chicana Rosa Parks?” My mother holds her head so high, the curve in her spine disappears. I’m out of the van, rushing to get next to her. I hear sirens approaching and the two-way radio is turned on full blast.

  “I’m fine, mija. No es nada. I’ve seen this all my life. We have to teach these gringos something.”

  Two more police cars rush to the scene. Traffic is slowing down in both directions and three cars have stopped on the opposite side of the street.

  “We got a mob resisting arrest!” yells the first officer.

  “We got nothing!” shouts the rookie. “They’re people traveling to the Vietnam Wall. I already told you. My kid looked them up on the Internet. Don’t you see the address on the windows?”