Let Their Spirits Dance (30 page)

T
here's something about getting closer to a place that makes you want to turn around and start all over again. It's unexplainable. I don't want the journey to end, even though that's all I've thought about for weeks. Endings start new things and I don't know what this one will start. We've touched Jesse in so many ways already I wonder if we still need to touch his name on the Wall. Nothing can convince my mother we don't.

We pass the Mad River as we loop into Ohio on Thursday, June 5. So far I've counted two Springfields, one in Illinois and one in Indiana. I'm wondering if there are more. We stare at places that look like German villages. Everything is so green I imagine we're in a giant greenhouse. People at a gas station tell us the land has been reclaimed and replanted where it was overused by industry. Miles of forests bordering the highway are covered with wildflowers. We spot farmhouses built so close to trees, I wonder if the family has enough room to park their cars and open their doors.

At a rest stop, we meet a couple of truck drivers headed for California. “Ohio's nice country,” they say, “but the snow gets too high for us. We hate driving in winter.” It's hard to imagine that snow piles up so high people can get lost in it. The truckers have picked up a hitchhiker, a guy who claims he was in the DMZ as a Marine in 1969. “Saw so much action up in Hue, it was hard to come back to sanity,” he says.

Donna tells me the guy still looks pretty insane, and both of us are hoping he won't want to go to the Wall with us. It's too late. By the time we leave the rest stop, Pepe and Gonzalo have convinced the guy to travel with us to the Wall, telling him he'll never get another chance. Of course, my mother says it's OK, and Manuel throws a fit because he says the guy's a crackpot. “We might get in trouble taking him, Doña,” he explains to my mom. Mom doesn't even respond. We know no matter what we say, the answer for Fritz, that's what he calls himself, will be “yes.” Fritz says his grandparents settled in Ohio in the late 1800s. They were German, Scottish, hard workers, he says, the kind who lived by the sweat of their brows. His parents were the same way. Fritz says he didn't like to sweat, so he left home at age fifteen and broke his parents' hearts. “Then look what happened,” he tells me. “God got even. He sent me to Vietnam, and I sweated so much over there, half the time I thought I was standing in puddles of water.”

We've got mainstream America traveling with us now, and he's taking a good look at Donna. Donna's already preached to him, telling him if he hasn't found the Lord yet, it's still not too late. Paul puts on his red headband, which means he wants to look dangerous. He's mad-dogging Fritz, and I guess Fritz thinks Donna's not worth a fight, especially after he hears her preach. Paul teases Fritz. “Hey, I met your cousin Fratz the other day,” he says. Fritz just smiles and doesn't seem to mind.

Irene gets into an argument in Ohio over hand cream. She says she has some lotion made from aloe vera that causes skin to get soft and white. Mom says that's not true, because aloe vera is better for your hair and not that good for your skin. She says she bought vitamin E cream from a drugstore once and that it is proven to seep in through the skin and restore moisture. I never even knew Mom cared about her skin. I turn around and notice her skin is clear, smooth, almost wrinkle-free. I try to imagine her as a young woman, her skin supple, her breasts fully formed, the creamy skin held taut around the nipples. It surprises me to think that way about my mother. I've always seen her as sexless, someone who couldn't make my dad stay home. She catches me looking at her.

“Don't be so hardheaded, Irene,” Mom says. “What would you know about creams, your family worked out in the fields most of your life.”

“Forgive me for saying this,” Irene answers, “but I lived around herbs all my life and I learned from the very best, my abuelita, who was a curandera straight from the mountains of Jalisco.”

“Don't start on curanderas!” Mom says. “My mother held the degree
on that one!” She grabs her purse like she's gonna fly out the van door while the car's still moving.

“Ay, both of you, stop!” I tell them.

“You're right, Teresa,” Mom says. “Who cares who uses what? Our skin is as dry as a snake's back, nothing could make it look good.”

“Speak for yourself,” Irene says. “My skin is soft because I use aloe vera cream. Here, touch my arm.” She moves her arm up against Mom.

“Esta mujer! You are unbelievable. I don't want to touch your arm! I told you, I don't care about skin anymore.”

Lilly's sitting in the seat directly behind Mom. “Touch
my
skin, Nana,” she says, putting her face next to Mom's.

“See, now here's beautiful skin, mijita has perfect skin!” Then Mom's eyes fill with tears. “I remember when I saw Jesse after he was born, ay, I thought I was looking at an angel. His face was so soft, I couldn't stop kissing him, and now look, all I have left to touch is his name! The war has never ended for me!” Irene takes out a Kleenex and admits the war's never ended for her either. The fight over hand cream is over.

We pass through Columbus, and the land is resplendent with acres of trees in full bloom, ash, white pine, oak.

“Let's live in Ohio, Mom!” Lisa says. “The forests, they're so beautiful!”

“What do you think, Chris?”

“If you can take the winters,” Chris says.

“She can't even stand the winter in Arizona,” Lilly says.

“Look who's talking.”

“Come on, girls,” I tell them. “We're not moving to Ohio, unless you want to come here on your own, someday.”

We stop at Newark to eat at a busy family restaurant. Newark news people descend on the place. They talk with Gates, Yellowhair, and Willy. They ask Priscilla and me about Mom, and start counting how many people are with us. “We keep growing,” I tell them. “No telling who will join us next.” One woman hands Mom a St. Christopher medal.

“To go with your other medallion,” she says. “To protect you all the way to the Wall.” Tears start in her eyes. “My boyfriend was killed there,” she says. “We were high school sweethearts. Look.” She shows Mom a picture of a handsome young man in a Marine uniform. “Good-looking, huh?”

“Very handsome!” Mom says. She shows the woman a photo of Jesse.

“Very handsome too!” the woman says.

Michael tells me to come look at all the messages he's getting on the laptop. I ask him about the Vietnamese man from Little Saigon, but Michael says he's not sending any more messages.

Paul's helping Michael answer e-mails, and is making up messages like a whiz. “Like son, like father,” I tell him, “or is it the other way around?” I am stunned when I see lists and lists of names sending messages to our web site: Adams, Acosta, Lane, McMillan, Shubert, Tan, Redding, Alarcon, Yusef, Vital, Stein, Ortiz, Johnson, Williams, about thirty Smiths, lots of Garcias and Hernandezes, Hendrix, Jordan, the list goes on and on. I see one from Barry and Eleanor Kinney, the elderly couple we met in the Coconino Forest in Flagstaff who had a son who served in Vietnam. The messages are pleas, good wishes, prayers, heart-breaking stories, blessings, and many requests:
Touch his name, my son, my husband, my brother, my cousin, my uncle…touch his name, touch his name
. There's a message from Holly Stevens, the reporter from Phoenix.
Get ready for Frederick
, she says.

“What does that mean?” I ask Michael.

“How should I know?” Michael says. He looks flustered, irritated because he doesn't have time to answer all the messages.

“Don't worry, mijo,” Paul says. “Just do what you can.”

We head up to Wheeling, Ohio. Pepe and Gonzalo weave past us with Fritz sitting in the back of the truck. I'm worried they're doing more than drinking.

“If we all make it in one piece it'll be a miracle,” Chris says.

“Don't say it too loud,” I tell him, “there's people here who believe in miracles.”

Wheeling is old brick buildings with white-trimmed windowpanes. Two-story houses face the street. We've passed Livingston, Lancaster, strong British names, then drive by Egypt Valley. I wonder if people from Egypt settled there. I can barely imagine the descendants of the pyramid builders living in the magical green forests of Ohio. I can only see them in deserts. Wheeling is the last city we drive through to get to West Virginia.

“We're almost there, Mom,” I tell her. “We're crossing into West Virginia.” My mother sighs and makes the sign of the cross over herself. I look back at her. She's thinner than she was in Arizona. Making her eat is a lost cause. She always puts it off for later, then I forget if she ate or not. It's all I can do to keep track of her medications. One by one the pills have disappeared, and my mother looks the same.

There are days I don't want to give medications to her because nothing seems to work. Priscilla thinks I should stop at a hospital and have Mom checked in an emergency room. She's threatened twice to take her there herself. Mom won't hear of it and keeps saying La Virgen will protect her. She says la manda is her whole life.

We travel through the tip of West Virginia and cross over into Pennsylvania. The country is lush green with banks of green grass that look almost blue growing up the sides of the highway. We pass Jessop Place, and it reminds me of Jesse. We drive through a tunnel built right through the Allegheny Mountains. The mountains are bluish-green, tall, mystical. Don Florencío would have loved to explore those mountains, maybe even live there in a cave. In Pennsylvania we see the first sign advertising D.C.; 127
MILES TO D.C.
Chris starts honking, and all the others echo the same. It reminds me of Erica when she dropped off Gates at the freeway right before we climbed up the ramp. Other motorists honk, too. I look back through the rear window, and everyone is still trailing behind us. I glimpse the Zuñi feathered wands, and the flags of the U.S., Mexico, China, and South Africa flapping in the wind.

“Wow, what a trip,” I tell Chris. “Can you imagine the beauty of this country? I never knew how beautiful it really is. America was just a word before, and now it's something I can feel—I can hold it, and I don't know where I'm holding it. My mind? My heart? My spirit? I don't know, maybe it's all three.”

“Yeah, the guys in Nam felt the same sometimes. We'd think of the world back here, and we'd get homesick, just wanting to come back and watch a baseball game or eat a hot dog. Me? I wanted to climb up the Sandias. You know, the mountains you saw in Albuquerque. I used to take my daughters there on Sundays. We'd watch the sun set, and the mountains would turn dark purple, then darker and darker, until they disappeared, and all I could see were shadows. Huge mountains, and they disappeared.”

“Jesse must have felt the same way. He wrote to me about the Salt River. We used to call it El Río Salado. I almost drowned there when I was a kid, but it was still a special place. Jesse remembered it when he was walking through the Mekong Delta.”

We pass the Mason-Dixon Line, and the history I read in high school classes takes on a new form. These were places where the American Revolution and the Civil War were fought, places with great meaning for millions whose children would one day travel through the U.S., eventually meeting up with us, the children of Aztlán.

It's dark as we drive into Frederick, Maryland, but I can still make out wildflowers growing along the roadside, white, violet, yellow. Surprisingly, the evening is cool. My mother wants to stay at Frederick for the night to wash clothes and pray. She says she can't go see her mijito with her clothes all dirty and no clean socks to wear. I want to move through the night and get into D.C., but I also want to turn around and wish this all away, like a dream after I wake up in the morning.

 

• I
N
F
REDERICK
we meet a girl who's washing clothes at a laundromat. She helps Sarah load up a washing machine. Sarah tells her that when she was a girl on the Indian reservation, they used to go to the river and beat their clothes on wet rocks to get them clean. “For soap, we used Borax,” Sarah says. “That's all the missionaries had to give us. Then my mom got a washing machine with a wringer for rolling clothes through. She hated that machine. She used it three times, then filled it with rainwater for our horses. After that, we went back to beating our clothes on the wet rocks.”

The girl tells Priscilla and me that her name is Bridget. Thank God she's not a Vietnam vet, she's too young. I don't think anybody will be tempted to invite her to go with us to the Wall. She only remembers the war in schoolbooks. She tells us which machine to use, because she goes there every week. She just got married, she says, and is happy with her new husband. I tell her she's the first happily married person I've seen in a long time. “It's easy,” she says, “we treat each other like we're boyfriend and girlfriend. It makes us do special things for each other all the time.” I think about that and wonder how long they'll be able to do this. I feel like a pessimist and only smile at her and congratulate her for such a lovely way to live. Privately, I think she's living in a bubble that will burst some day and drop her to the ground.

The Guadalupanas are back in the motel getting ready for their big day tomorrow. They have an upstairs room this time and have to use the elevator. Mom says the upstairs room is better than the ones on the bottom where you have to put up with cars parking at your front door. They've decorated a coffee table with white linen and added a couple of vases with silk roses. They light candles and set up the image of La Virgen and a small statue of El Santo Niño. They prop up Jesse and Faustino's pictures in front of the images. Pepe and Gonzalo have given Mom a picture of their brother, Gustavo. It shows how much they love their brother, Mom says. Irene says she almost died like Gustavo's mother after her son's
death. Maybe it would have happened, Irene says, except she had so many problems with her other kids, she had to stay. Gustavo's picture is unframed, and leans up against Jesse and Faustino's framed photos. His photo shows a young man in a shirt and tie, dressed for a wedding or a party.