Let Their Spirits Dance

  “Where’s Willy?”

  “They’re down at the Highlander Lounge.” I don’t tell Susie anything about the Bronco Brothers, Pamela, and the blonde on Gates’s lap.

  “Boys’ night out! This shit isn’t gonna work with me.”

  “He’ll be right back.”

  “He better be!” Headlights turn into the parking lot, and it’s Willy.

  “It’s about time!” Susie yells at him. “What the hell are you thinking? You’re not in the Marines anymore, buddy.”

  “Sorry, babe, I just got a little carried away.”

  “Where’s everybody else?” I ask him.

  “Oh, they’re still going strong.” Susie and Willy start arguing as they walk to their room.

  I check up on Mom before I go up to my room. She’s sitting up in bed, propped up on pillows. She’s draped one of her flowered shawls around her shoulders. Irene is on another bed sound asleep.

  “What time is it?” she asks me.

  “One in the morning.”

  “And why are you up?”

  “Why are you?”

  “You’re not fighting in bars again, are you?”

  “No, I’m not fighting in bars! What do you think I am?”

  “Don’t talk so loud, you’ll wake up Irene. Ay, that woman snores!”

  “I don’t hear her snoring.”

  “She’ll start any minute. Now, there, you hear that?” Irene starts making a noise that sounds like she’s gurgling water in her throat.

  “Don’t listen to her. Lie down, Mom. Try to sleep.”

  “I have too much to think about.” She looks at Jesse’s photograph on the dresser. “I don’t know what Jesse wants to tell me. There’s something he wants to say, I know it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How does any mother know about her child? A mother just knows. Words aren’t the only way we talk. How many more days, mija?”

  “Three, if nothing goes wrong. We should be there by Friday. Why? Are you feeling bad?”

  “I’m always feeling bad. What does it matter? I wonder if El Santo Niño walks around these places.”

  “Mom, how, can you believe in that?”

  “Don’t talk so loud. If Irene wakes up, she’ll never shut up. God is everywhere.”

  “Walking around as a child, in little shoes? Mom, that’s a joke.”

  “You don’t understand, Teresa. El Niño is a symbol. Everything is a symbol of something else. Un símbolo. El Niño teaches us the humility of God, a God who would walk through all kinds of danger to find His people. A God who would wear out His shoes, searching for those He loves. He teaches us. Learn, Teresa, learn, to see more than what you see.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Listen, that’s all you have to do. Your soul will do the rest.” Mom takes a drink of water from a glass on the nightstand. “Sleep now, mija. We have to leave here in the morning.”

  “Mom, do you think you’re strong enough to—” She doesn’t let me finish.

  “Who cares who’s strong or weak? What does it matter?”

  Irene wakes up and rolls over. “Who’s weak?”

  “Never mind, Irene. Everybody’s weak. Go back to sleep.”

  Walking to my room, I notice the moon over Topeka is silver-gray. There’s a halo around it. The night is warm. I hear crickets in a thicket of hedges nearby. The rush of cars whizzing across the freeway is constant. A loud honk sounds from one of the diesels.

  I notice Chris standing by the motel office.

  “Hey,” he says. “Don’t they sell any coffee around here?”

  “They’re closed. What are you trying to do, sober up?”

  “Still mad at me, huh?” He walks up to me and puts his hands on my shoulders.

  “Where’s Pamela?” I ask him.

  “How should I know?”

  “You smell like a brewery.”

  “Let’s talk. Your room or mine?”

  “Mine.”

  We walk into my room. I close the door and darkness takes over us.

  “Don’t turn the lights on,” Chris says.

  “I wasn’t planning to.” Chris sits on a couch. I take off my boots and sit on the edge of the bed. There’s a sliver of light shining in through a crack between the drapes. I can make out the white oval of Chris’s face and the outline of his body.

  “Why did you run away?”

  “I’m here.”

  “But you ran before you got here.”

  “You don’t understand. You people who didn’t go, just don’t understand! You were back here in the world taking it easy!”

  “And you people who went just don’t understand how we felt either!”

  “OK…where…do…you want me to start?”

  “The beginning would make sense.”

  “I feel like I’m in a confessional. Fond memories for the son of a penitente, I can tell you!” Chris says. He shifts around in his seat. I can’t see him in the dark, but I figure he’s crossing his legs and leaning heavily on the back of the couch. He pauses, then begins. “Anyway, here goes. There was this one night in Saigon just before Jesse was killed. I want to tell you about it, because the guy Jesse fought with that night was the same guy he saved before he died. Can you imagine the kind of man your brother was?

  “We were in this hole in the ground. It was a dive. It didn’t even look like a real bar, it looked like somebody’s house with tables and chairs in it. All kinds of guys were there, mostly Army. We were together, a bunch of Chicanos from all over the States. Frankie from Denver, Pete from Long Beach, and a bunch of others. Most of the Chicanos weren’t bookworms like your brother. They couldn’t get no deferment for going to school. We hung out together, you know, ’cause we were all los vatos, los camaradas trying to get through the war, looking at los pinches gringos, knowing they had it made. The whites covered up for each other all the time. Lots of them were freaks, stoners, right down to the officers, y los negros, the Blacks, they were in the same boat with us. But you know, when we were out on the hills, nobody cared what color you were. Some of the Chicanos were marijuanos, I admit that, but we didn’t go out of our way to beat up on the Vietnamese. How could we? Some of us came from migrant familias. We saw them out on their little plots of land, and so help me God, they looked like our nanas and tatas. Some of us had come from the cotton fields to the foxholes of Nam, there was nothing in between. I got to hate some of the Vietnamese after a while, just because we lost so many men. Some of them were sneaky. We couldn’t tell nothin’ in their faces. They could have a bomb down their pants and be smiling and bowing. I hated like hell to hurt them, though, especially when there were kids around.

  “That night, we were boozing it up, playing cards and our whole thing was, a la chingada con todo, you know, fuck this shit. Jesse was with us, but you know him, he was always a cut above us. He didn’t lose control like we did, even if he was high. There was this whole table of gabachos in the place, and this girl, a real pretty Vietnamese girl Jesse knew, was waiting on them. Her name was Thom. She showed me and Jesse her name on a piece of paper once, and she spelled it with an h but she pronounced it Tom. She said it meant beautiful smell. She wasn’t one of the whores, just a girl who cleaned the place up and helped out when it got busy. Well, this big ol’ white guy, we called him Tennessee, ’cause that’s where he was from…anyway, he starts grabbing Thom, and she starts screaming and telling him to let her go. Jesse’s watching the whole thing. All of a sudden Jesse throws his cards down on the table and yells at the guy, ‘Leave her alone!’ He yelled real loud, like he was roaring at the guy, you know in his sergeant’s voice. The guy grabs Thom one more time, and Jesse stands up. ‘I said, leave her alone!’ By this time the guy’s pushed Thom away and is standing up. He must have been over six feet two, and you know Jesse, he was short. ‘Did somebody say something?’ he asks, playing all dumb. He shakes his head like there’s a bug flying around. ‘I thought I heard a fly buzz.’ All the white guys
start laughing like they’re gonna piss in their pants. Tennessee looks at Thom again, and Jesse says, ‘Don’t touch her, fucker.’ Then Tennessee says, ‘Who’s gonna stop me?’ And your brother says ‘I am.’ I tell him, ‘Calmate, Jesse, we don’t want no trouble with these jodidos, they’ll call in the MPs, you know they’re a bunch of fuckin’ crybabies.’

  “Tennessee walked over to Jesse, and Jesse looked so short next to him, I thought the guy was just gonna hammer him on the head. By now everybody’s standing up, all the Chicanos and the white guys. ‘A la madre,’ Pete says, ‘get ready to kick ass, vatos.’ And that’s what we were gonna do, back Jesse up, protect his back, no matter what happened. One thing los vatos didn’t know was that Jesse was El Gato. I told them…hey watchale, you’re looking at El Gato. They didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Everything came down in a couple of seconds. Before Tennessee could blink, Jesse swung a right-left combination to his body and landed him flat on his back. El pendejo gabacho just lay there with all the air beat out of him. Jesse jumped on a chair like Superman and yelled, ‘COME ON, FUCKERS! COME ON! WHO’S NEXT? WE’RE IN THEIR COUNTRY, FUCKERS, AIN’T YOU GOT NO RESPECT?’ The white guys just looked at him like they were in the twilight zone. We were ready to wipe them out, now that their main man was down. We were all pumped up, and it was gonna be a scramble when we heard this whistle and the MPs showed up with Lieutenant Hopkins. The MPs were ready to rumble too, they had their billy clubs out. They lived on shit like this. But the lieutenant was cool, a todo dar, he didn’t give a damn what color you were as long as you were doing what you were supposed to do. He looks at your brother on the chair and yells at the top of his lungs ‘RAMIREZ!’…the whole place freezes, then he yells, ‘Sit on it!’ and Jesse says, ‘Yes, sir,’ and sits on the chair like he was innocent as a lamb. Lieutenant Hopkins looks at all of us, then he looks at Tennessee on the floor and gives him a dirty look and all he says is ‘Gentlemen, as you were.’ Then he walks out, like he didn’t give a shit if we burned the place down. When the white guys saw we had back up from him, they sat down and left Tennessee rolling around on the floor.”

  “The overhand right-left hook was Jesse’s best combination. I wish I could have seen him do it on that guy! El Gato…the winner!”

  “Well, he used his combination that night. And that was the night I found out Thom was Jesse’s girlfriend. Her family lived just outside Bien Hoa on this little farm. They were Catholic and Buddhists mixed, but mostly Catholic, because I remember Jesse and Thom went to church one Sunday. Her father was with the South Vietnamese Army, and that’s what got the whole family in big trouble when Saigon fell.”

  “She’s the same one Jesse mentioned in his letters, but he never told me her name. He told me she was teaching him Vietnamese.”

  “What could he say about her anyway? That he fell in love with a Vietnamese girl, not the kind of girl he could bring back home to Mom? Not that Thom was a whore, or any of that, just that it took guts to get married to one of their women and to bring her back to the States. If he had lived, I think Jesse would have brought her back. That’s all he talked about before he was killed, about Thom, and he told me to take care of her if something happened to him. But you know me, I never did anything for anybody. I just lost track of her, even when I went back the second time, I couldn’t find her.”

  “Remember, Jesse always wanted a girlfriend. He loved Neil Diamond’s ‘Solitary Man,’ cause he was always looking for the right woman, and never found her. Do you think this woman…Thom, was the one who called Mom?”

  “Could have been.”

  “What happened the day my brother was killed?”

  “The day Jesse was killed. I wish I could forget that day forever!”

  “Tell me how he died. Did he say anything?”

  “No, nothing. There was no time. I was walking point the day Jesse was killed, and the guys were depending on me to lead us over this hill, but it wasn’t a hill, it was more like a big mound. I later found out it was a place where people buried their garbage.

  Can you imagine what we fought for? The officers would always say ‘Pack up, we got some humping to do!’ We were the grunts, doing all the shitty work. We were made of flesh and bone, but the officers back at headquarters only saw us as pins on their maps. They never told us where we were going, how far we’d come, nada. We were running in circles, chasing our own tails.

  “I stood for a minute thinking what the bad smell was, and looking at maggots crawling through the dirt, when Jesse was hit, right through the neck. I didn’t even know, ’til Pete screamed like he was half-crazy, ‘Jesse’s down! Jesse’s down! Call the medics.’

  “Tennessee was in the middle of it again. I heard Jesse was hauling him over to a trench ’cause he was hit in the stomach. That’s when Jesse was hit, right there, after he rolled Tennessee’s body into the trench.

  “Man, it made me sick just to think about it! Me? I would have said let his buddies roll his white ass into the trench! I didn’t give a shit about him. That’s what I would have done after what happened at the bar. But you know Jesse, he wasn’t like that. The medics came in a Huey, but it was too late, Jesse died before I got to him. All I did was take off my shirt and cover his face. I couldn’t stand to see him for the last time like that. I remember somebody was yelling. Later, the guys told me it was me…I was yelling. I can’t even remember what I was saying.”

  I think of Jesse with Chris’s shirt over his face. “Oh, God, I wish I had been there to touch him one last time!”

  The silence between Chris and me is greater than the darkness. I think of Li Ann in my second-grade class and her mother Huong and wonder if Thom looked like Huong, delicate, fragile, almost a child. The women exchange profiles, hands, feet, until Huong’s face becomes Thom’s. I wish Jesse had told me more about Thom. Is it jealousy I’m feeling or anger that Jesse left me out of this part of his life? Having a girlfriend was one of his dreams. The stuck-up American kind didn’t attract him, and I could see how a gentle woman like Thom could have won his heart.

  We hear voices singing outside our door. Chris opens the door, and it’s Yellowhair and Gates singing and doing the stroll. They’re dancing through an imaginary line, then back again.

  “Hey, you two, hold it down! Don’t you have any respect? Everybody’s asleep.”

  Yellowhair notices me standing at the door. “Hey, Teresa, you and Chris come on out here and do the stroll with us! Come on, don’t you remember how to do it?”

  Chris closes the door, and reaches for my hands in the dark. He’s holding my hands so tight my fingers ache. “OK, that’s all I know, Teresa. I lost track of your brother that day. Then to make it worse, I didn’t ride with him on the plane back to the base. I’ve been kicking myself for it all these years! Forgive me! Will you?”

  Chris wipes the tears off my face, and I do the same for him. “You lost track of my brother! Then you just let him go off by himself. In a body bag? I don’t even want to think about it!”

  “You don’t want to think about it? How do you think I felt? I’m asking you to forgive me.”

  “I’m not blaming you. There’s nothing to forgive you for, Chris. You were a kid yourself. You didn’t know what to do. You didn’t do anything wrong.” I press my forehead into Chris’s shoulder. He holds me in his arms.

  “Say it again,” he says.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong.” Chris cups my face in his hands, then with one finger he traces over my lips. He presses his finger up to his own lips.

  “Your tears taste sweet.”

  “Liar.” We both laugh.

  The singing outside gets louder. Chris opens the door. Security lights have gone on in the parking lot.

  “You guys are gonna get us thrown out—shut up!” Chris turns around and kisses me. “Wanna stroll, Teresa?”

  “Yeah, been waiting thirty years.” I brush away new tears, and slip into my shoes.

  Yellowhair and Gates make a line
and Chris and me do the stroll through the center. We’re all singing and clapping. The guy from the office comes out.

  “I know you’re the Ramirez family,” he says. “But so help me, if you guys don’t get into your rooms, I’m calling the cops.”

  “We’ve already met them,” Gates says sarcastically.

  Priscilla comes out of her room, “What are you, crazy? Teresa, have you flipped?”

  “Come on, Priscilla,” I tell her. “You and Manuel. Let’s stroll.”

  “Hell, no!”

  I hear Manuel’s voice from a distance. “You guys better settle down. This guy’s serious. He will call the cops.”

  “All right, everybody,” Chris says. “Let’s go to bed.” He walks off with Gates and Yellowhair. I see lights here and there in the motel windows. One man yells, “Shut up out there! Can’t a person get some sleep around here?”

  “It’s over,” I tell Priscilla and Manuel. “They didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Priscilla’s got her hands on her hips. “What’s that got to do with this mess?”

  “Everything,” I tell her.

  • WE’VE GOT MORE COMPANY as we drive out of Topeka on Wednesday, June 4. Pepe and his brother Gonzalo are tagging along in their Dodge pick-up. They’re two men Chris and the others met at the Highlander. Their long-bed is packed with cases of beer. I didn’t even know there were Chicanos in Topeka, but they assure me there are plenty. Some of them work on farms like they do. Both men are short and stocky, their skin tanned dark brown from hours of labor in the sun. They tell us their mother died of a broken heart one year after their brother’s death. She never got to go to the Wall, and now they want to go pay their respects to their brother.

  I’m proud that the boundaries of Aztlán are getting wider and wider. Don Florencío would be glad to know just how far we’ve come from the seven caves our ancestors lived in. The Indian huehues would have applauded, saying la raza was right to return north, to Aztlán, the place of their origin.

  Manuel refused to rent another vehicle for Pepe and Gonzalo and told them if they wanted to join us to use their own car. Mom told Manuel to let them come. They’re poor boys, she says, who lost their older brother, Gustavo, in Vietnam. And then, to make everything worse, their mother died, too. Can you imagine such suffering?