Spirit Run

by Noe Alvarez

  During nights, he slipped into empty burlap bags of pig feed that he laid for bedding, and slept among the pigs.

  “There were rats everywhere. Big ones,” he said. Fat from all the feed. “They fought all night,” scampering over him and causing him restless sleep.

  I gather what little courage I can, inhale the power of my father, and lunge forward despite the lion’s presence hidden behind a boulder not far from me. I sprint onward in honor of my parents, and maybe that saves me, because the lion does not appear again.

  At camp, Pacquiao makes an announcement that only the strongest runners will be allowed to continue into Mexico, due to the limited resources. He informs the runners that in order to cover more tribal ground, the run will be split several times into inland and coastal routes. The first split will occur on Hoopa Indian Reservation and will reunite in Santa Paula, California. The run will then proceed as one unit into East L.A. before splitting a second time and reuniting once and for all in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.

  Nervously, we turn over this information in our minds, and busy ourselves with chores. Some of us begin to clean the vans, where mold and history are growing.

  We are all worried about getting kicked off the run.

  Who goes and who stays will be difficult. We all have wounds to carry and heal.

  17

  City-Slicker Natives

  July 3. East Oakland. Roughly 2,140 miles. Cheeto, Tlaloc, Andrec, Trigger, and Chula Pepper are happy to be in their home state of California.

  Inside the van is a constellation of quotes, layered on with marker by many who have passed through this vessel. Thoughts and emotions materialized into words passed on by people connecting with the run. A collaboration of many months. Quotes such as: “If you live as you always did, you’ll receive what you’ve always got. Live life with respect,” “They may have cut down the tree, but the roots are still there,” and “I am nothing and at the same time something.” Amalgamations of quotes collected from different sources on the run, I imagine. “You have plenty of time to suffer.”

  We arrive at our destination at a cultural center and our team gathers in ceremony with the community. Kirby, a male in a tank top, jean shorts, and long socks that come up to just below his knees, comes forward as a representative of his community. I can’t make out his tattoos. His mind is focused on the smudge of sage swaying all around us as usual. His people bathe him with encouragement. It’s as if he’s preparing for a boxing bout.

  “Today our brother Kirby has volunteered to lead the run,” a woman in ceremonial linen clothing announces. “He’s strong, fast, eager to bring healing to his community. He’ll be taking you through tough places, through tough streets.” Areas that need strong prayer. Strong runners.

  Kirby is a former gangster who was marked for death by rival gangs. Still, he wishes to run with PDJ through these rival territories, as his gesture of peace.

  “Too many of us are dying on the streets,” someone exclaims. “It’s up to us to change.”

  My legs are tired, very tired, but eager to step the steps of brave men and women.

  “We’ll begin our run from here,” we’re directed. The vans will meet everyone at our destination. “Stay close and good luck.”

  We form behind Kirby on the street, where a large crowd has gathered. Cars honk in support. Our collective heart pumps in our chests and over these streets. Refugio, Cheeto, Zyanya Lonewolf, Andrec, and I gather up front and shake off our legs in preparation.

  Kirby is handed the Father Staff. He kisses it, caresses it, and speaks to it.

  Suddenly, he bolts off. The runners scramble and are stretched like gum into a string formation behind Kirby. Refugio, Andrec, Cheeto, and Zyanya Lonewolf are close behind, but it isn’t long before the space between us increases and the chain and line of sight is broken. There’s no looking back for Kirby. He maintains his sprint, concerned only with what’s ahead.

  The run is real.

  Kirby flies down streets, dodges cars and pedestrians. Traces sectors of his past.

  Meanwhile, this is not our first run of the day, and I begin to lose steam. Still, we run for all the Kirbys. We are his backup prayer, a gang of spirit. We run for him and people like him, because, in many ways, we are him. The despair, the universal graffiti, broken glass, and youth huddled on street corners in search of family. The group stretches even thinner. Refugio, Cheeto, and Andrec have long dispersed or have fallen back.

  Kirby cuts corners, detours through parks and alleyways, and zigzags like he’s trying to lose us. Still, we proceed, catching only glimpses of feathered staffs that aid us through this barrio. The sky darkens, late evening approaches, and then night does. Dim street lighting provides little visiblity or comfort.

  I stop, realizing I’ve lost them.

  I’ve no idea where to go. I can’t retrace my steps. No name of the place we’re supposed to meet even. I look around, hoping to catch a glimpse of something familiar. A landmark, runner, anything, but I see nothing. If there’s one thing I know about growing up in a tough neighborhood, it’s to always act and walk like you know where you’re going. Look like an outsider and you might attract unwanted attention. So I keep running, falsely confident. I remember the joke: when in doubt, turn left. I keep myself to a pace, circle around a couple of bars and taverns where men shout indiscernible things at me. I ask a woman for direction, but she backs me into the street with curses and territorial hand gestures. I keep moving—aware that I might look like a crazy guy with a stick and feathers in his hand. No sign of anyone. Fuck.

  Confused, lost, even a bit frightened, I recall my run-ins with gang members in Yakima who bullied and beat me up.

  Then, my heart drops at the sight of a fellow runner. I spot another staff with those comforting feathers, and I bolt toward them until I am once again part of the current of runners. Family.

  We meet for closing Circle at the Intertribal Friendship House, where Cheeto maintains a big smile, having run through his hometown and now being feted by his community. This is ground zero for him. Where it all began.

  “It was here that I learned that many runners were, like me, Purépecha,” he tells me. Mexican Indigenous people from Michoacán, like my own ancestors.

  Food and massages are dished out to everyone’s content. After we have retreated to our corners on the floor, under bright murals and inspirational quotes, Cheeto tells me about sleeping here the night before he joined the run.

  “I remember going into the kitchen and making food for anyone who needed it. Someone made enchiladas and fry bread in the kitchen. I ate some beans, thinking I didn’t know if I would get to eat this in Alaska.”

  “So many things were on my mind,” he continues. “I was preparing for something I didn’t know too much about. But I knew it was time for me to prepare my body for pain: like the discomfort of having to wake up very early before sunrise, as part of the rules of the run.”

  “Centers like these,” Cheeto says, admiring the mural above us, “are what’s true to the history of this city. I was raised in San Francisco, and like many of us, we were pushed out into the Oakland area.”

  The mural is of the Miwok and Ohlone Tribes, he explains—families weaving baskets under the sun. “This is a good place where people of this community come to learn. Especially for people who are recovering from addiction.”

  Before zipping ourselves into our sleeping bags, Cheeto concludes his reverie about wishing to live in a world that includes other worlds. “There’s this Mayan word, lak’ech,” he says. “Meaning, ‘You are my other me.’”

  18

  Tlaloc in L.A.

  East Los Angeles, California. Roughly 2,600 miles.

  Today the run gathers around the crosshairs of an East L.A. street where Tlaloc’s little sister Sylvia was killed by a hit-and-run driver years ago. He was five years old then, and she was four. The story went that his mother had gone shopping one morning while the two siblings slept. When Tlaloc woke
to find the house empty, concerned, he took his sister by the hand to go searching for their mother. Tlaloc sometimes shared that he remembers feeling the pressure of his sister’s hand as it separated from his and that he carries a guilt that his family would say has plagued him all of his life.

  Tlaloc hands the Father Staff to someone and kneels over his sister’s spirit outlined with his tears. He puts his hand to the hot concrete. One pulse. Trigger kneels beside his close friend, positions his drum, and they sing in the Nahuatl and Spanish languages, a song I first heard in Covelo, California, titled, “Cuatro Ágilas”—four eagles:

  “Tlasocamat, tlasocamat, tlasocamate. Teyeye ometeyeyo. Tlasocamat, tlasocamate, ometeyo. Heyanayeneyowe. Cuatro ágilas, cuatro ágilas, cuatro ágilas volaron en Aztlán . . .”

  Today I am reminded of the tenderness of both these men, warriors with seemingly impenetrable skins. They sing of flying eagles and call on them for support. Two beautiful men mending the hurt within them, unafraid to let their love wash over this street. We are invited into this pain. I had been wrong about them, and I realize that it is in the heartbreak and frailty of others where we heal and see ourselves as we really are. I had cast upon them my own mistaken notions and let that cloud my relationship with them. I had trouble recalling that maybe what drove them to be hardened people sometimes was the lesson of a troubled upbringing, as it has done harm to me. I look upon these men with admiration, as examples of the kind of man I would like to become, had people like me not been so side-swiped by trauma. My heart breaks for them. I make my peace knowing that they will never accept me into their circle.

  Before long, tension between Andrec and Pacquiao rises over the coordination of the run. They have a conflict over how to split the runners for a second time in order to cover even more sacred tribal ground (between northern Arizona and southern Arizona). Because Andrec would be leading runners who are outright rebelling against him—Tlaloc, Trigger, Marx, and others—he threatens to quit the run if made to lead them through the northern Arizona route.

  Pacquiao storms off in his vehicle in frustration. Splitting the runners was a tough decision. Communities across North America are pressuring PDJ to visit them. Andrec had established deep networks with Native communities across the West Coast, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. For Andrec, it has been a way of life to build a fire rapport with these communities and link with them again on the run. So it hits him hard to surrender a territory that he has spent years organizing for PDJ due to the rising internal divisions and conflicts on the run. People were expecting to receive him but there were differences between the philosophy of Sun Dance and the more pain-oriented members of the run (Tlaloc, Trigger, Marx, etc.)—people who were a breath away from breaking or usurping the run under the wave of the Warrior Flag.

  A lot of the ceremonies are land-based and land-specific, Pacquiao would say, and traditional territories expected runners to comply with these ceremonies. But Sun Dance and danza are more international and many other communities don’t have that. They have very specific and different traditions and the run has to adapt to that. PDJ could not be a monolithic group, Pacquiao argued, because Indigenous people are far from monolithic.

  “Sun Dance is a commitment of prayer,” Andrec had said. “It is about understanding that, yes, you will be fasting and praying with very little comfort but that the goal is to seek inner self-awareness and respect. The pain of Sun Dance cannot be inflicted on people nor can you teach others by enacting harsh discipline on them.” This ran in direct opposition to Trigger’s worldview.

  Andrec has a heart-to-heart with Pacquiao about his role to lead Tlaloc, Marx, Trigger, and the others into Navajo country—a land he greatly respected. “Let them go on their own,” he concludes. “It’s what they want. It will either make them stronger and more unified. Or it will break them.” Tlaloc and the others had become their own band of brothers and sisters, more in the fashion of a gang and violent toward outside runners.

  Pacquiao thinks about the proposed restructuring. “You know. You’re right. We’ll let them go then.”

  “It’s better to lose them for a while,” Andrec says. “They’re gonna scare away the good runners.” Tlaloc doesn’t want to split from Crow, and takes her with him. Andrec gives up his chance to run through his sacred Apache land. A heavy blow to his heart and to the people who were expecting to see him.

  Pacquiao returns the following morning with his final decision: The inland route will consist of Tlaloc, Crow, and others who will run to Phoenix, Texas, then into central Mexico, into the state of Chihuahua. Chula Pepper will stay back in San Diego to help with van maintenance. A group of local East L.A. runners have volunteered to run to Phoenix and Texas for support. The coastal route will consist of myself, Pacquiao, Andrec, Cheeto, Chenoa, Kara, Zyanya Lonewolf, Refugio, and, to Andrec’s surprise, Trigger who had become romantic with Kara. Andrec is happy with the decision and stays on the run.

  In anticipation of crossing into Mexico, I find a phone and call my parents. I lie to them and tell them I’m living in luxury and am the happiest I’ve ever been.

  In the morning I take to my usual responsibility of loading up the vans and stacking people’s gear onto the roof. Andrec assists me. We knee things into place and envelop them in a tarp like a tamale. Refugio’s duffle bag rolls to the ground, and we hear what sounds like pills hidden inside. Refugio recovers his bag, zips it up, and hands it to me. Vitamins, he says.

  19

  Southern Fire

  There are moments in a boy’s life when he thinks a single action can turn him into a man and solve all his problems. I thought that moment arrived when I was twelve:

  It’s that time of day again when strange music flows from the old white house across the street on Jefferson Avenue, our neighbor Dallas’s house, and into the small carpeted living room, where I sit watching through the curtains my brother Tito launch himself from a skateboard. He’s eight. I’m twelve. It’s midday, summer, in eastern Washington State in a poor neighborhood that keeps its doors ajar for cooling.

  Our kitchen is fragrant with our mother’s cooking.

  “Noé, acaba tus quehacéres,” my mother says. Her hair is in a ponytail. One hand rests on her hip, while with the other she toasts red chili peppers as if to clear the house. I run outside to play with Tito, coughing, leaving our mother to stew in thought until our father arrives.

  In the late evening after work, my father rests in the dining room, in his usual chair, beside steel-toe work boots that are crusted with dirt. An orchard laborer and carpenter grappling with a language he doesn’t always understand, he pores over a stack of mail. “Noé, tradúceme esto,” he asks me to translate something and shows me a paper in English.

  I look it over. Numbers, words. “I don’t know what that word is,” I tell him. I am too terrified to translate the words “bill overdue” for him.

  At bedtime, I lie awake listening to the muffled voices of my parents fighting in their bedroom at the far end of the house. I remain quiet, brooding and bothered. Tito is on the top bunk. Soundless. An indication that he’s not sleeping. In the distance, Dallas’s keyboard soothes me to sleep. The quicker we become men the easier things will be.

  At breakfast the following day, I quietly pick at my food. My parents make little conversation. A screen door slams across the street and a woman yells and curses. We turn to the window and watch Dallas toss the woman’s clothes onto the front lawn while she collects them one by one. The screen door slams again and again, Dallas going in and out, each time coming out with a new bundle of clothes to hurl at her. I run to the window for a closer look but my father calls me back to the table. “Ignore them,” he says, and gets back to mulling over more pressing matters. When the screaming and yelling finally stop, I stuff the rest of my food in my mouth, and Tito and I walk to school together.

  When we come home from school later in the day we are surprised to see black trash bags filled with clothes piled in the living
room. My father is home early, sitting at the dining-room table.

  Without looking at us, he tells us, “Take those to your mother next door.”

  We remain motionless. We are told that our mother has gone to stay with a neighbor.

  “And tell her never to come back. Go.”

  One by one we carry the bags to the neighbor’s house next door. We knock on the door.

  “Here are my mom’s things,” I say to the woman, and place them inside her door. I hear our mom sniffling in another room. I want to call out to her, tell her that I was sorry if I did anything to hurt her. Sorry that I wasn’t brave enough to stop this. “Tell her . . .” My chest tightens. “Tell my mom to never come back.” Those last words really choke me. My father’s words had become mine and I became a perpetrator in the destruction of my relationship with my mother.

  Our neighbor cautions us, “Be careful what you say. You’ll end up regretting it your whole life.” I immediately do.

  Again, later that evening, the block becomes heavy with the wails of a Dallas man who sways over an electric keyboard. Deep-bellied, measured, his voice braided in torment. The man crouches over his instrument and sings strange words of sorrow. His music grips me, notes that seem to punch him and me in the ribcage. He rocks his head back and around, blowing out soft cigarette smoke as if absorbed in his own church. These are the sounds of Southern fire, ignited by the hands of a man speaking in a language he calls the Texas Blues. A language that resonates with me.

  Dallas goes by that nickname to avoid the law, or so he says, and is somewhat of a surrogate father to us. In a warped yellow house half the size of his, tucked in the same yellow grass, lives his neighbor and sidekick, Randy. Two Vietnam War veterans now living a life of sex, drugs, and music. We witness the parties, the brawls, inebriated bikers bathing with topless women in kiddie pools in the backyard, and the passing out on Dallas’s front lawn.