Let Their Spirits Dance (22 page)

“We've already got the rooms,” Manuel says. “What are we supposed to do, cancel out now?”

“Yep, exactly,” says Chris. “There's no way my mom will let these ladies go. It would be totally disrespectful to her.”

My mom looks so tired, I'm glad for Doña Hermina's offer. I don't think she can climb back into the van for the trip to the motel. We're all tired, except the kids. They're already making plans to go back to Old Town to listen to music in the park and go through the souvenir shops.

“What do you think, Mom? Should we stay?” Mom looks at Doña Hermina and sighs.

“You're lucky, Hermina,” she tells her. “Lucky that your husband was so religious and never went out with other women. Mine? Well, you remember Pablo Jesús!”

“How could I forget?” The three old women exchange glances. Doña Hermina holds onto the edge of the table and stands up. “But he loved you, Alicia. He always loved you.”

Mom surprises everybody by laughing out loud. Laughter explodes from her stomach, and makes her gasp for breath. “Love? What does any man know about love?” Irene and Doña Hermina start laughing, too.

“Well said, Alicia,” Doña Hermina says. “I never thought they understood a thing.”

Mom holds one hand over her chest. “Ay, but we outlived them all, didn't we?”

“And we got the last laugh, too,” Irene adds.

“We'll stay, Teresa,” Mom says. “It will be good for my health.”

After dinner, Chris tells me he'll take the kids over to Old Town if I go with him. I'm rushing again, but this time it's to get my mother and Irene settled for the night so I can dress up and go with Chris.

A
lbuquerque is a spin-off of an ancient world still under exploration. I see the Spaniards in my mind, soldiers in crested headdresses, searching for the Seven Cities of Gold in a land of stark beauty, pushing the borders of Aztlán for Chicanos like me who would come after them centuries later. I could have told them that the light bouncing off the sheer cliffs of the Manzano and Sandia Mountains is far more precious than gold. They could never capture the splendor of that light and take it back to Spain in a box. Maybe that's why they stayed. They saw how futile it was to want gold when beauty was priceless. I want to think that, even though I know they were greedy and wanted to own everything, like the white men from Pittsburgh. The Indians had their own wars, one village against another, but they never wanted to own everything. There's a difference in arguing over a blanket, and in thinking the sheep who grew the wool for the blanket, and the pastures and streams they live in all belong to you. Ownership, deeds, land titles, old names, lots of things in Albuquerque belong to somebody who died a long time ago, and now nobody's sure what belongs to whom. Family members fought each other for land, and the enemies of one generation became family in the next. Everything moves in cycles and seasons like Indian tom-toms beating slow and deliberate, making things happen whether we want to or not.

Chris tells me his family has owned the plot of land in Los Griegos
for over a century. “El Camino Real used to go through here,” he says, “right through Old Town. There were old families all over the Southwest Valley, we call it El Watche, big familias with a hundred kids who traced their bloodline all the way back to the Spanish crown. There was respeto, forced respeto for the Spaniards, los patrones who made the poor their servants. We had so much respeto, we didn't know we should have slit their throats. Los patrones ruled back then, then los gringos came, and you know them, they thought they owned the world.”

We walk through the campus at the University of New Mexico in the moonlight. The buildings slope into each other, blending into a perfect Southwest symmetry. Chris's hand curves over mine, smoothly, his fingers lock into mine. We're replicas of the '60s, a movie that's been on pause for thirty years. God forgot us and now He's remembering us again. It's hard to find the words to say to each other when the only script we knew was buried with Jesse. There's a volume between us,
The History of the Vietnam War
. We're casualties. Our photos should be in the book with captions, “Survivors of the Chicano Bloodbath in Nam,” words that would tell people we had our own holocaust in Vietnam. The volume is open between Chris and me, not by our own hands, but by la manda, my mother's magic.

“Remember el cochito, Teresa?”

“How could I forget. We stalled the plane to Vietnam.”

“All the guys were looking out the windows trying to figure out what was happening. Nobody was saying a thing. It was like we were at a funeral. Any one of us could come back as a corpse. Then the stewardess came in and called out Jesse's name. ‘I've got a little pig for you, Sergeant,' she said. Jesse looked at her like she was speaking Chinese. ‘A what?' he said. ‘A pig, from your mother.' All the guys were looking at him, then he opened the napkin. He saw the cookie and said, ‘Hijola, I can't believe my mom!' It was funny, everybody started laughing, and that's the way we took off for Nam with the whole damn plane laughing their heads off over el cochito. I think they were really laughing off their fear. It was 1968, we were getting the shit beat out of us over there. Nobody knew if they would ever see their mothers again. We were happy in those few minutes. It was like your mom had touched us all.”

“I wondered what was happening in there. I was the one who gave the stewardess el cochito. My mom was ready to faint. She did faint after the plane took off. It's been hard for her all these years. She blames herself for Jesse leaving, because my dad and him were always fighting. You remember my dad's lover, Consuelo? Jesse hated her, hated her son
Ignacio, too. Jesse stuck up for Mom all the time, but she never divorced my dad.”

“That's the way it was in the old days, people didn't divorce each other, not like now. I'm a three-time loser myself, never thought I would be. Margie was my first wife. I don't know if you remember when we sent you a wedding invitation. We had two daughters, my girls Elizabeth and Lucia. Now they're married and on their own. Man, my head was messed up back then! But I loved Margie. You know how that goes. Loved her, and hurt her, loved her, and hurt her. I sure didn't take after my dad, he was a penitente.”

“What's a penitente?”

“The penitentes are a religious cult. They're people who take religion to the extreme. They build moradas in small villages, like churches, except priests don't say mass in them. They can be masochists about some of their practices, sometimes wearing wreaths made of cactus thorns. They tap the wreaths with a stick to cause more pain, and according to them, no blood appears. They wear hoods on their heads right before Easter during La Semana Santa and carry real wooden crosses with splinters sticking out of them on their backs. Some of them tow la carretera de la muerte around. That's a real wooden cart with a figure of a skeleton representing death sitting in it, San Sebastina herself. Death has an arrow, ready to shoot the man should the purpose of his heart not be true. My dad's morada didn't haul la carretera de la muerte around, but they did all kinds of other weird things, like blacken all the windows of the morada during tiñeblas and carry on long hours of prayer. Who knows what else they did.”

“What's tiñeblas?”

“Darkness. That's what it means. I guess the penitentes figure they're the ones who do penance for the darkness and sins of the world. Can you imagine my dad was a penitente and my mom was an alcoholic? Talk about opposites attracting! Sometimes they'd bring Nuestro Compadre Jesús for a visit at our house. I'm talking about a real wooden statue of Christ with movable hands and arms who was put up in people's homes like He was actually visiting. I can tell you we were real good when Nuestro Compadre Jesús was visiting us!”

“Unbelievable. I guess maybe everything combined helps us keep God in our minds…what do you think?”

“I don't know, but it kept us on the straight and narrow. And when we went off the trail, we knew it right away.” Chris smiles and kisses my cheek.

“I've thought about you so much all these years, Teresa. I mean
really
thought about you…like wanting to kidnap you and bring you to Albuquerque.”

“What stopped you?”

“It's a long story. After Jesse died, I didn't think I was worthy of you.”

“I can't believe you said that!”

We stop and sit on the stony ridge of a flower bed. I rest my chin on Chris's shoulder. He clasps his hands in his lap.

“Jesse died, I didn't,” he says. “Sometimes I wish I had.”

“That's what Gates said.”

“It's more than that with me, Teresa. I was there when your brother died. I saw the whole thing.”

“What's that supposed to mean, Chris? Don't tell me you think it was your fault.”

“I'm not saying that…it's just real complicated. I've never been able to clear my head.”

“Do you want to?”

“I'm not sure…maybe I do…let's not talk about it.”

He reaches in his pocket. “Forgot I quit smoking.” He wraps his arms around me and holds me tight.

“Don't be a penitente, Chris. You don't have to do penance for Jesse's death.”

We stand up together, and Chris kisses me, not like he did at the airport when he left for Vietnam, but with a fierce energy, a hunger that makes me believe he's really been waiting for me all these years. His energy ignites the part of me that watched him leave for Vietnam, watched the back of his uniform disappear into a sea of green. There's warmth slipping into a forgotten part of me that took off on the plane for Vietnam, finally it's throbbing, almost as if Chris never left at all.

 

• T
HE
G
UADALUPANAS
huddle together in Doña Hermina's bed. The bed's their cradle, the moon shining in through the window is their candlelight. Maybe Jesse's spirit is burrowed in the atoms of moonlight filtering in through the window. I no longer expect to account for life in other dimensions. On Doña Hermina's dresser, veladoras flicker away in front of images of La Virgen and a collection of saints. I notice Mom and Irene propped up Jesse and Faustino's photos next to the pictures.

The old ladies fit together in the bed, as if they've been sleeping together for a hundred years. Mom sleeps in the middle, Doña Hermina
and Irene on either side. The moon in New Mexico isn't the same as the one in Arizona. It's cunning, lighting up places here and there where Spanish gold was buried. Arizona's moon shines broadly and brightly over huge expanses of land.

My mother and her friends, so many old bones together in one spot, shriveled bodies outlined by a white sheet that looks like a shroud. I'm not one to visit nursing homes. They're too depressing. Where did the old ladies put their false teeth? Mom's are in a plastic container, a blue one that looks like the one Cisco used for his retainer when he wore braces.

Queta set up cots for the men out back in el cuartito. I wonder if Gates is with the other men or with Queta in her room. I can't imagine Manuel and Chris sleeping in the same room, but then again la manda's in control. Words that have stirred up the past and kicked up old memories are not as important as la manda. The boys are on blankets on the floor, the twins are sleeping with Priscilla in the next room. I sit in the dark for a few minutes and watch the old women sleep, listening to their uneven breathing, their light, trumpeting snores.

“Where's Chris?” My mother asks suddenly. Her eyes reflect specks of moonlight, small beams shining into mine.

“Asleep,” I tell her. “He's asleep.”

“I don't think so, mija. He's awake, thinking of you.” Mom's words jar the darkness, tag it, make it impossible for me to say no. She turns on her side and moans in pain, curling one arm over Irene and turning her back on Doña Hermina. Is she still holding a grudge on Doña Hermina for going after my dad when they were young? I open my mouth to ask her, then decide not to, instead I walk into the living room and rummage through my suitcase until I find the plastic bag with Jesse's letters.

I had forgotten about the woman who taught Jesse Vietnamese and about Trini, the one-eyed trainer who ended up shadow boxing at an old folks' home.