Let Their Spirits Dance (26 page)

I go over Jesse's letter in my room before the girls get up. I didn't know blue was the color of hope in Vietnam. I make a plan to paint our front door blue when we get back to Phoenix.

W
e gather at the Denny's for breakfast on Tuesday morning, June 3. Chris isn't with us.

“What did you do to him, Teresa?” Priscilla asks.

“Wouldn't you like to know.”

“I knew it! All these years talking about me…making it sound like I'm—”

Mom stops her. “Priscilla, don't let the boys order food they won't eat, mija. They waste everything.”

“Are you listening to me, Mom? Your little angel isn't so holy after all!”

“They're fighting again,” Lisa says.

“We're not fighting,” I tell her.

“Look, all the people are staring at us again,” Irene says. “You two girls stop all this, y ustedes, you boys,” she says, pointing to Michael and Angelo, “stop arguing about what you want to eat. If you were at my house, you'd eat chorizo and beans, y ya, cree lo!”

A waitress comes over. “You've got to be the Ramirezes. Are you?”

“Yes, that we are,” I tell her.

“Is that your mother?” She looks at Mom. I nod. “Señora, you are a hero,” she says. “Would you give me your autograph?” The girl pulls out her order pad and cuts out a page. “I'll keep this as a memory of you.”

My mother looks at her. “What do you want me to do?”

“Sign your name, please,” says the girl. I look at Mom to see if she's really gonna do it.

“Teresa, do you have a pen?” I fumble through my purse and find a pen. Mom takes it and signs her name with a flourish. “There,” she says, “pobrecita, what a beautiful girl!” A second waitress comes over, and Mom signs a page of her order pad, too. People from all over the restaurant are watching.

“Oh, man,” Priscilla says. “I hope there's no media in here.”

I notice a woman walking toward us. “You must be Teresa.”

“Yes. And this is my mother, Alicia Ramirez.”

“Of course, we've been hearing all about you. I'm Corina Ybarra. My husband served in Vietnam.” She sighs as she says the words. “I'm proud of it, no matter what people said about the war. He's gone now. He died of skin cancer. There were tumors that showed up on his skin. The doctors would remove them, then others would show up. I know it had something to do with Agent Orange. You know, the chemical they used during the war. We tried to sue the government, but nothing ever came of it…nothing. He was young, only fifty-three, and over there is our son and his wife. See that baby?” She points to a child sitting with the couple. “My husband won't ever see him grow up. There are so many casualties of the Vietnam War, and lots of them aren't on the Wall.” She turns to Mom. “Te acompaño en tu sentimiento,” she says, I accompany you in your grief. She says the same thing to Irene. Mom and Irene respond with the same words, ancient words used to comfort the bereaved. She walks back to her family, and they all wave at us.

“I had never thought about guys who died here in the States from what they went through in Vietnam,” I tell Priscilla.

“It never occurred to me either.”

“What about those who died of alcoholism and drugs?” Manuel says. “There must be plenty.”

The two waitresses are back again, taking our orders, smiling, telling us what the best deals on the menu are. I sense new energy in the air. The sun is shining, the light is white, warm. My mother just gave someone her autograph. She's a hero, for God's sake. Two men have joined Willy, Gates, and Yellowhair at their table. They may be Vietnam veterans, or the brothers, cousins, and friends of somebody who served there. Willy told me the Vietnam War was the longest war in the history of America. Thirty years long, he said, and $500 billion spent. I reach for my coffee cup and tell the kids they shouldn't order more than they can eat. My voice is too loud. “I heard you,” Lilly says, “you don't have to shout.”
She edges close to Priscilla and whispers something in her ear. Priscilla smiles. Are they talking about me and Chris?

Another thing is happening. Priscilla and Manuel are suddenly close friends. I've never seen them talk so much in all my life. I don't know if they're talking to avoid me or if they're really interested in what they have to say to each other. Manuel is teaching Michael how to keep accounts on the computer. People stare at Michael when they see him pounding away on the computer. They think he's a poor Mexican kid who doesn't speak English and wonder what he's doing on a computer.

Donna is sitting next to the Guadalupanas. Paul's outside in the van, chain-smoking. My mother tells Donna to ignore him. He's mad about Manuel handling all the money and says he's being treated like a child. He's sick of Donna preaching to him and is ready to hitchhike back to Phoenix, except I know he won't because he'd never forgive himself if something happened to Mom. He's like Jesse that way. There's a part of Paul that wants nothing to do with Jesse, and another part that still has Jesse on a pedestal. It must be crazy to be the kid brother of a man who's perfect in the eyes of his mother.

My mother is coughing this morning. None of her prescribed medications are for cough, and I'm wondering if I should stop at a local fire station to have her blood pressure checked and her lungs listened to. Paramedics will tell us if she needs to be hospitalized. She's stubborn, just as Irene says. Palmira gave me the cure, she says. She cleaned out my system, starting with my soul. I'll be all right. And why bother the firemen anyway with another old lady's problems? Irene wants to go to the fire station because all the firemen are handsome, she says, and she needs somebody to help her with her legs.

“They're not sobadores,” I tell her, “all they'll do is tell you to go see your doctor.” She's disappointed and still wants to go.

I listen to snatches of the men's conversation talking about their war days, R&R, the food in Vietnam, the flight over and back, the marijuano officers who got stoned, the kids who swarmed them on the streets. Nothing about battles, blood. They're keeping everybody at bay. Willy says the Vietnamese kept speaking their language to him, they figured he understood. He had to keep reminding them he was Chinese American. Gates tells them there was a whole street in one of the cities where Black men lived with Vietnamese women, and they were treated like gods. The people were good, he says. What were we doing there anyway? Yellowhair remembers that his brother left for Vietnam when he got shipped back to the States. They didn't want two brothers from the same
family serving at the same time. “It should have been the other way around,” he says. “I should have gone, and he should have come back.”

My mother's listening to the men talk, tilting her head this way and that like a bird listening to flight instructions. She'd wear wings if that would get her to the Wall faster, feathered wings she could flap and not annoy God by defying gravity on a Boeing 747.

I see Chris motioning to me through one of the windows. He's pretending he's holding on to a car wheel, spinning around in the air, showing me he's ready to move on. I smile and wave back. It feels so good to see him clowning around. I didn't know what to expect from him this morning.

“There's Chris,” I tell Priscilla. She doesn't say anything.

By the time we're ready to leave, we have attracted more attention. People are watching us board our vehicles. “The Vietnam Wall or bust!” one man shouts. My mother's walking, swaying on her cane. I hold on to her elbow. Priscilla walks close behind us. People are wishing us well. The two waitresses and the men who joined Willy, Gates, and Yellowhair all join us in the parking lot.

Michael catches up to me and tells me he's got a Vietnamese man who got on the web site this morning. “He's from Little Saigon in Orange County, Ca—lifornia,” Michael says. Michael holds the first syllable in the word
California
, and it sounds like he's announcing the word over a loudspeaker.

“I didn't know we had a Saigon in the U.S.,” I tell him.

“Little Saigon,” he says, “the biggest Saigon besides the one in Vietnam.”

“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.

W
e 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 glimpse 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.