Let Their Spirits Dance (16 page)

My mother's voice rose again for the chorus…

The last word punched the air like a fist that never stopped being a fist. My mother didn't finish the last syllable. Yolanda struck the keys with more power, looking over her shoulder at my mother, her brows gathering into a frown. We trailed unsteadily into the huge space my mother's voice had vacated, limping our way through the song, word by word. I looked at Espi, and all I thought about was Ray telling me Jesse would come home. “Jesse knows how to watch his back, Teresa.” And I smiled like one of the women who watched him at the bars, open-mouthed. Espi poked me in the ribs. Her eyes said, “What's wrong…what's wrong with your mom?” I looked at my mother as though I had never seen her before. Everything about her had stopped. She had turned to stone. She was a ceramic statue. My mother's mouth was open, but there was no sound. I saw her lean over the balcony rail. The sheets of music slipped out of her hand and fell over, fluttering down to the empty pews below. I followed her eyes. The side door was open and sunshine was pouring in. Outlined in the light stood Father Ramon with a military man dressed in Army green. Messenger from hell. My mother's eyes were fixed on the military man. Yolanda's hands froze over the keys.

“What is it?” she shouted. She spun around on the bench, jumping off like an athlete.

My mother's voice ripped the silence apart. “MIJO! NO! NOT MY SON! NOT MY SON! PLEASE GOD, NOT MY SON!” Once, twice, many times…so many times, “NOT MY SON! PLEASE GOD, NOT MY SON!” I put my hands over my ears. I thought I saw the saints on the stained glass windows do the same. My mother's voice made me cringe. “JESSE'S GONE! YOU TOOK MY SON! GOD, WHY DID YOU TAKE MY SON?” I arched my back to hold in the pain. Her cries bounced off everything at the same time, making one loud echoing shout. Yolanda grabbed my mother and held her up to her huge breasts
like she was a baby. The pigeons on the rooftop cooed wildly. Who can stand to hear the sound of a mother who knows her son is no more?

In one leap I was at the balcony rail. Manuel was right beside me. I saw the whites of Manuel's eyes gleaming, huge and empty behind his glasses. He held me in a big bear hug, pulling me away, afraid I'd jump. I grabbed a book of hymns and flung it with all my might over the rail, missing the military man by inches.

I shake out the remains of a fragile rice stalk into my hand. The gold of Asia weighs next to nothing.

 

• T
HERE ARE PLACES
in El Cielito I've avoided all my life. Bars for instance, that attract vagabonds, drunks, and ordinary people who want to sit around and listen to music or do some dancing. Places I wouldn't be caught dead in, with pool tables in back rooms, green fabric seared by cue sticks and filthy lamps hanging overhead. I've glimpsed these things in passing, running, actually. As a child, I peered into these hovels of disrepute where people fought, howled, whooped, and issued out sometimes in couples to make love under the bushes in the alley next to our house. The bars fascinated and repelled me at the same time. Now I had to put all my feelings aside to hunt down Gates Williams in one of them. There was no other way to reach him to tell him my mother wanted him to go with us to the Wall.

“He hang over by Penny's Pool Hall,” Blanche tells me. Her daughter, Betty, is standing next to her with two kids. She's dark like Franklin, taller than her mother by two heads at least. Blanche looks the same except her hair is white, and she's put on weight, not as much as Hanny, but still enough to make her move slower. I wonder if she still has the hat with the red pin. I open my mouth to ask and decide it wouldn't matter.

“Where's Cindy?” I ask her.

“She moved to Seattle with her husband and is miserable over there, because she says the sun don't shine much.”

Betty's watching me. “Heard about all that money your mother got back. Saw it on TV. Now that's something! I tell you, when the government messes up, they mess up good. I wish they'd mess up on my child support money.” I hear another child cry inside the house, and Betty disappears.

“I'm so tired of these kids,” Blanche says. “I'd rather stay out here on the porch all day, Teresa. If it weren't so dangerous, I'd sleep out here. Why, I remember when…” She gazes off into the past, her eyes staring at nothing in particular.

“Well, I better go, Blanche. My mom is real excited about this trip.”

“Your po' Mom ain't been the same since Jesse was kilt. Never come out of it. You go on now and tell her she be doing the right thing, that ol' Blanche sends her a big hug and kiss. Lord have mercy on the bunch of you…ain't she sick, Teresa?”

“Yes, she is. I've tried to talk her out of it, but she's made a promise to get to the Wall and won't let it go. Mom's stubborn. Remember when
she went to see Brother Jakes and got healed of her migraines. There was no stopping her then either. I'm glad she went, because look what happened.”

“Oh, I've never forgotten that night, Teresa. Nothin' like the power of the Lord to zap a sickness away! His son be preaching now, Pastor Rufus, but everybody call him Bear. He's 'bout as big as Gates and strong! That's the way he got Two Doors Gospel filled up. If he can't convince a man to turn to God by preachin' the gospel, he strong-arms him.”

“Strong-arms him?”

“Oh, yeah, honey, he arm wrestles them! Bets a lot of money, 'cause he know he be winning. Men are greedy, you know, Teresa, they never say no. If they lose they have to come to church for a month! I tell you, that church is filled with men every Sunday. All the sisters are goin' crazy with so many men.”

“I heard he plays a mean guitar, too.”

“That too!”

We're both laughing. I can just see all the men who lost at arm wrestling, sweating and jumping around whether they like it or not.

“Well, now, you'll be fine, Teresa, baby. I'm prayin' for all of yous. If you find Gates tell him Erica's on his trail, that's his latest ex-wife. I can't tell you how I've lived with all the worry Gates has caused me. Franklin never gave me a bit of trouble. He lives in Mesa now, working as a probation officer.”

It's hard to imagine that one of Blanche's sons bought into the system and the other one is doing all he can to stomp on it. Blanche opens her arms to me, and I curl up in her round, black arms. She feels warm, soothing.

“I miss Hanny,” I tell her.

“Oh, so do I, and all that cookin', 'member?”

The name
Hanny
races across my mind. I imagine it on a headstone like a neon sign flashing. “I loved her ostrich hat.”

“Hmm…you too?” There are tears in Blanche's eyes. “Everything's changed now, Teresa. You're so skinny, I'm getting s'cred. I'll send you some peach cobbler. How's that?”

“Like the one we ate when Brother Jakes was in town?”

“Yes, like that one.” She kisses my forehead.

 

• I
DECIDE TO VISIT
Penny's Pool Hall before the sun sets, right before things get loud and wild. It's not far from Mom's house, located in a string of taverns, grocery stores, two barber shops, and a tortilla factory bordering Buckeye Road. Before I know it, I'm in the parking lot at Penny's getting out of my Honda and walking on gravel, loose rocks that get caught in the heels of my shoes.
PENNY'S POOL HALL
is painted in yellow letters and is punctuated by huge brown pennies that look like flying saucers. Some of the pennies are painted with their sides showing the bust of President Lincoln, others show the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. I've always wondered why the place was called Penny's but now, up close, I can see a connection between Abraham Lincoln on the pennies and the freeing of the slaves. They should have added a five-dollar bill or two.

This is an all-Black bar, and I'm definitely not Black. I walk into the place dressed in an all-white pantsuit. The doors are the push kind, worn out in the middle where most people push or fall through, whichever the case may be. I'm cursing Paul under my breath for not doing this himself. “I'll never get out alive,” was his excuse. It was all I could do to stop my mother from running over to Penny's herself to invite Gates once she started thinking about how Gates and Jesse went to school together and boxed at the Golden Gate Gym with Trini.

“Help you?” asks a chunky man at the entrance. He's standing behind the bar setting up some bottles of beer. My eyes are still adjusting to the dim light, after the harsh sunlight of early June. There's music blaring from the jukebox, Janet Jackson. His eyes roam over my body and he smiles. “You'll need some help around here!”

“Yeah, I think you can.” I offer him my hand. “I'm Teresa Ramirez, you remember my brothers, Paul and Jesse Ramirez?”

“Oh, hey, yeah! I'm Scotty. We lived over on the other side of Wong's. Sure do remember y'all! Your brother Paul out of prison?”

“Yeah, he's out. Trying to straighten up his life. I hope he does it this time.”

“I seen him in there, over at Florence. Miserable in there, that's what he was. Me, I jest take it one day at a time. Say, you the ones who got all that money from the government? Didn't your mom get back a million or something?”

“No, not a million! A lot, though…about ninety thousand.”

“Honey, throw some my way! How come you ain't dressed in diamonds? Lord knows you look like a movie star!”

“It's my mom's money, besides, you know how it is with money, it
slips through your fingers, but listen, Scotty, maybe you can help me. Have you, by any chance, seen Gates around here? You know, Blanche's son?”

“That who you look'n for?” He throws back his head and roars with laughter. “You come at the right time, Teresa. Any later and that man be wasted. He's out back by the pool table.”

I walk by a few men sitting at small, round tables looking at a baseball game on a TV monitor. They stare at me, turning their heads, measuring my steps. “Aren't you the daughter of that millionaire what got all that money?”

“I'm the daughter, but we're not millionaires.” One of them smiles and winks. I smile at all of them. My heart is pounding, and I'm wondering what else will happen, as I see two other men walk into the place with a woman. She's dressed in a tight-fitting dress, fluorescent blue. She stares at me, then swishes her head to look at Scotty.

“Didn't know we were gettin' multicultural in here. I would have worn my sombrero.”

“Shut up, Bea!”

The back room isn't as dark as the front, or maybe my eyes are adjusting. Everything I've ever heard about pool rooms is in front of me. A greasy orange lamp hangs over the center of the pool table. The room reeks with the odor of stale beer, cigarettes, and old wood. A smoky haze floats up over the lamp and trails toward the half-open back door. I catch a whiff of Pine-Sol from the bathroom nearby.

“Gates?” I haven't seen him in years and wonder if the man I'm looking at is Gates. He's sitting close to a young woman who has one of her legs curled around one of his. She's pretty, her hair pulled back, huge black eyes and a body that looks like it belongs to a model on the cover of
Vogue
. I watch as they both stand up, curious to see what they look like. She's wearing a midriff blouse and a pair of shorts so short they almost look like underwear. Her legs are shapely, the calves sheathed almost to the knees in sandaled leather straps. Gates is tall and stocky, hair graying at the temples, probably six-four. He lives up to his name, always has. He towers over her in a pair of worn-out black Levi's and a blue Chicago Bulls T-shirt. His light skin contrasts with her darker skin. Still handsome, he's lost weight, his face sags around his jaw and chin. His eyes are bloodshot.

“Hey, look what we have here! Is that you, Teresa? What you doing here?” He walks toward me unsteadily. “I knew you'd come lookin' for me someday, baby. Didn't I tell you, Kamika, I said, Teresa Ramirez is
gonna come lookin' for a Black brother someday and there I'll be, good ol' Gates!” He gives me a big hug and Kamika glares at me.

“It's not really that way!” I say to her, “he's only kidding.”

“Yeah, he's a big kidder all right!”

“Gates, did you hear about the money my mom got?”

“Yeah, my mom told me something about it. Man you guys hit the jackpot!” He motions me to sit down at one of the tables with him. “Kamika, go get us something to drink, darling. What you want, Teresa?”