Let Their Spirits Dance (5 page)

When Don Florencío died, the Murphys were on a campaign to win back their business. The whole family smiled together at his services. They were like a string of flashing Christmas lights. When one was winking, the other was blinking. They dressed in black as a rule, and only broke the color code by wearing navy blue on occasions when people died during the holiday season. That was their most festive attire. Their daughter, Marie, was a scandal. She had wild red hair that was shocking to the other family members. At funerals, in broad daylight, it looked like it had been set on fire. Finally, Marie hid her hair under huge hats, and that comforted the family.

The Murphys buried Don Florencío in an old pioneer cemetery for only fifty dollars as a service to the community. The cemetery was overgrown with weeds and short, stumpy trees with misshapen limbs. They marked his grave with a wooden cross, and eventually the cross was blown away by the wind. It was fitting. Don Florencío wasn't in his grave anyway. Neither was Jesse.
A new form
…I had forgotten Don Florencío's prophecy.

 

• I
THINK BACK
, now, at what Don Florencío said, the words of an old man steeped in legend and magic. Jesse, a warrior? Perhaps. I don't believe warriors are made in the womb, no matter what the old man saw. There are plans, evil plans that take over the minds of men and search the deepest recesses of where hatred lurks, ready to spring. The beginning of a war may take place in an office building with windows overlooking the White House, or in the meanest hovel deep in the jungle. Soft, manicured hands can sign decrees of death and war, as can dirty, blood-crusted hands in villages where people no longer expect the sun to rise. War is the battleground of the human heart where avarice, hatred, greed for power, for money, for land, are allowed to thrive. The Godless man begins to sense that in the entire universe his right to live in the manner he chooses is the only way to live. The disorder in his soul is the beginning of war.

M
orning comes and goes with no word from El Santo Niño. My old bedroom has warmed up enough to make me want to stay under the covers. If my face didn't hurt so much, I probably would. The adrenaline that ran through me last night is gone, leaving in my body a tender, open wound. I have plans to search the house in broad daylight and convince my mother that the voices she heard were only a dream. I'm wondering if it's me I'm trying to convince. I find out by way of a weather report that the mist hanging in the air the night of the voices was a low pressure point, a cloud that dangled too close to earth. So that explains the hazy air—but what about the rest?

My mother's always been a dreamer, dreaming dreams for everybody, why not this time? Mom's good at seeing the insides of things. Maybe she's like Jesse, seeing with an Ixpetz, a polished eye that looks through flesh as easily as seeing through glass. She could see my father's weakness, the darkness in him that led him away from her to find his match in his lover, Consuelo. He could never be Mom's equal. He was earth, flinty rock. She was wind, an invisible stream he could never hope to touch. She knew us, too—her children—stole glances into our souls. If she knew Jesse would never come back, she didn't say it. That was one line of truth my mother never crossed.

Mom's got a good memory, too. She didn't forget anything Jesse told
us at the airport. I've tried to forget what he said for the last thirty years. I never understood why he told me he'd never come back. His words got caught in the chambers of my heart and flowed out to every cell in my body. My head, eyes, feet, skin, every part of me knew. My mind battled the truth and a war began inside me. There's nothing worse than a private war going on inside you every day. I should have climbed on the plane with Jesse, I would have been better off in Vietnam, at close range, waiting for the words to come true. I was in my own Vietnam anyway, whether anyone knew it or not.

What do you want from me now, Jesse? I couldn't do anything to help you in '68. But I'm here taking care of Mom. Isn't that what you wanted me to do? That sounds like I'm mad. Maybe I should have been here a long time ago, should have put my life on hold and come back to this freezer of a house—cold in the winter, hot in the summer. Dad had the gall to die before he got proper heating in the house, just like him to miss something so obvious. So now I'm talking to spirits! Already this house is taking me over, and I'm acting like a kid.

Jesse's voice is no clearer than the voices already in my head, not to me anyway. Maybe to Mom. She's the one who believes in Houdini, in handcuffs breaking off just before Houdini starts to drown in the sea. Out pops Houdini, alive and well. The Great Escape Artist Numero Uno; but not in death, the Great Houdini couldn't escape death. He sent his wife a message from the beyond, something that had to be deciphered by a medium. Is that what Jesse's doing, sending us a message?

My mother is patient like Houdini's wife. She wasn't always that way. She was a meek mouse when I was a kid, to keep peace in the house. Still, I knew she could be as fiery as Nana Esther and her sister, my Tía Katia. Jesse's death changed all that. There was a part of her that got on the plane with Jesse and never came back. After Jesse was killed, she didn't care anymore if my dad came home or not. She never sang songs anymore, Mexican ballads when she cleaned the house, soft songs when she held me in her arms, and loud Spanish hymns at church. Her voice was a warm hand in a soft leather glove when she sang. It fit perfectly into my soul. According to her, she could shush my worst colic attack as an infant with a simple lullaby. That's how I know I heard my mother sing before I was born. Jesse wasn't there—nothing mattered to her. Slowly she came back to life, months and months, two years, a mummy uncoiling. When it was over her eyes were two blank holes the Egyptians forgot to seal.

She didn't talk to anyone in particular the whole time, mostly she
sighed. Eventually she learned to shout again, like she did at Jesse when he fought with Ignacio just before he left for Vietnam. Ignacio, Consuelo's oldest, drove down the alley every other day in one of the cars he had resurrected from the pile of junk in his mother's front yard. He was a hungry wolf, lean and bony like his mother. He drove down the alley next to our house to whistle at me. Ignacio wore a small black hat cocked to one side and a perpetual smile that said, “Hey, what can I say, your old man is sleeping at my house!”

Jesse was on leave from Fort Benning when he saw Ignacio's brown '55 Chevy with the missing hood creep down the alley. The next time the car went by, Jesse was at the end of the alley, hiding in a tree. He jumped out from the tree onto the car's roof and dented it right over Ignacio's head, knocking off his hat. When Jesse's temper unraveled, every muscle had its own name. His boxer instincts took over and his energy screwed this way and that like a jackal darting bullets. He was El Gato again. I was glad I was his sister and not his enemy.

Before Ignacio knew what was happening, Jesse had jumped off the roof of the car and slugged him right through the open window, making Ignacio miss the turn into the street and run into Irene's chicken-wire fence.

My mother yelled at Jesse at the top of her lungs. “You want to get yourself killed? There's three of them for every one of you!”

“He's the one over here! I'm sick of my dad's shit! Tired of letting him run all over you!”

“Your father's not worth it! Do you see me crying? It doesn't matter. Your father will pay someday. God isn't blind!”

It took a long time for my mother's words to come true, that God wasn't blind. Years later, my father got cancer on the same hip the U.S. Air Force had operated on after World War II. My dad said they didn't know what they were doing, pushing pins into his hip like he was a slab of meat hanging in a freezer. It got so painful for him as the years went by that in his old age he couldn't get himself to Consuelo's house unless he crawled there. Consuelo went to see him in the hospital when we weren't there.

“Let her,” my mother said. “She's dying, too. What can they do except hold hands and pray that God will forgive them?”

I want to fold up into a fetal position in my old bed and shut all the memories out of my head but can't, because my face hurts if I lie on my side. I want to hear my mother sing again, now! It's been so long since she sang solos at St. Anthony's. It was a hot, humid day in June when we
were told Jesse was gone. The electric fan in the choir loft barely moved the air around us. Then everything turned icy cold, death rose before us, bigger than the cross of Christ, jeering at our stubborn faith. My mother's voice froze in her throat, and she never sang again.

The morning is cold today, brutal. Invisible fingers point my way, accusing me of losing at the game of life. I vow to put a restraining order on Ray so he won't show up at Mom's. In the next instant, I vow to go to Sandra's house and tell her what a whore she is. Then my thoughts cross paths, and I vow to leave Sandra and Ray alone so they'll die like Dad and Consuelo did. I make a pledge to call Priscilla and tell her she's a hell of a daughter, coming over once a week to look in on Mom. I vow to yell at Paul and tell him the next time he breaks his probation he'll get nothing from me. I vow to stop thinking about sleeping with Ray. Hail Mary, Holy Mary, Virgen de Guadalupe, pray for me that I won't freeze in this house so Ray won't have the pleasure of burying a blue corpse with Sandra standing by my coffin laughing. The bitch would have the laugh of her life! God forgive me for thinking this way. I really want to be good. I never wanted to get my Holy Communion dress dirty. Where did that memory come from? Never! It wasn't my fault I dropped a cup of punch on it and stained the silk material under the layer of lace. What a pity, my mother said, now Priscilla won't be able to wear it. Maybe that's why I did it. Forgive me God, I really want to be good!

I feel the top of my head with my hand. My hair is cold from the draft seeping in under the drapes. My chest is aching. I've learned how to hold pain in my breastbone like Mom does. Mom's good at letting the invisible creep in and crawl into her lap. I watch the invisible from afar, marking its movements with caution, afraid to let it move in too close. Thoughts spin circles in my head, long tails lashing, collecting fragments of other thoughts, unfinished sentences that refuse to become whole. The impossible is frightening to me. I don't want to struggle with things I don't understand. Yet I can't deny there was an energy in the house last night, something tangible in the air, not powerful like a bolt of lightning but steady and absorbing space like raindrops that never fell to earth. I didn't hear voices as Mom did, but I wanted to. For a few seconds, I was able to suspend logic in me and quiet the part of me that doubted my sanity. I scanned the air with my left ear, the one washed clean in my dream. I was afraid I'd hear something and disappointed when I didn't.

The memory of my brother fighting Ignacio was only the beginning of an avalanche of memories that would assail me at Mom's. Memories
would elbow in, demanding my attention, making all the secret places where I hid my brother's death rise and erupt in me like the watery explosion I saw in my dream.

 

• T
HE NEXT MORNING
I call Lisa and Lilly, my fourteen-year-old twins. They're just getting up and don't know their Dad and I split up.

“I'm over at Nana's. Start packing your stuff. We'll talk about it later.”

“Why?” Lilly asks.

“I'll tell you later.”

“Tell me now.” She's as stubborn as Mom.

“Let me talk to Lisa.” The girls are fraternal twins, alike in so many ways, except personality. Lisa is easier to talk to, more open to reason.

“Hold on. I've got a call on the other line.”

Finally, I talk to Lisa and halfway explain they'll be staying with me at Mom's.

“There's lots of reasons. Nana's sick, too.”

“You and Dad are splitting. We've known it all along. Is Cisco coming, too?”

“There's no room. He can stay with Dad until I get us a place.”

“Elsa's gonna get mad.”

“Elsa doesn't control me. She'll have to get over it.”

Lisa sighs. “Are you all right?”

“No, but I'll get better. Don't be surprised when you see me either. You might say I've been in a little accident.”

Two days after Christmas, a deputy sheriff dropped by to serve a subpoena on me for assault charges.

“I should be charging her! Look at my face, does this look like I fought by myself?”

“I don't know anything about it, ma'am,” he said, uninterested. “All I do is serve subpoenas.”

“I'm a schoolteacher. I've never had any trouble with the law.”

“Nobody's a criminal until proven guilty, if that's any comfort. If I were you, I'd get pictures…of your face…you know, before and after. You got any witnesses?”

“I can't think of any.”

“If it's your word against hers, it'll be hard to prove,” he said, handing me the papers.

M
y mother doesn't hear the voices again, unless she does but doesn't tell me. She tells Priscilla and Paul about it and Irene, who believes in everything, including rumors of sightings of La Llorona. Who knows if her son, Faustino, wasn't one of the men talking to Jesse that night, Irene says. My mother agrees, yes, of course, Faustino and Aurelio Dominguez, the boy who lived two streets from us. His folks moved back to Mexico after his death. Actually it could have been more, Mom says, there were so many! My mother's mind is closed to anything Paul, Priscilla, or I tell her that doesn't fit in with what she has decided to believe.

There's no way I can hide my face from anybody. Paul says I've joined his ranks…the ranks of street fighters who aren't afraid to take on an enemy in public. I look at my face in the mirror and apply the cream the doctor prescribed, three times a day. The welts are now purple scabs. I feel powerful and ashamed at the same time. What am I teaching my children? What example am I setting for my daughters, especially Elsa, her husband Julio, and my three-year-old granddaughter, Marisol? Elsa will be mad, Lisa says. Of course she'll be mad, she's daddy's girl. Now I'm wondering if I would have gotten mad at Mom if she had ever left Dad, and I wasn't even daddy's girl, maybe Priscilla was. It must hurt to see your parents separated, no matter how hard life is between them.

Paul says I was right to jump Sandra, but I'm not so sure. Is there ever
a time when violence is the
only
way to deal with a situation? Then again, isn't that what war is about? Nations forget common sense, common interests, and make public enemies of each other.

 

• I
RENE CHECKS UP ON
Mom daily by phone and walks over at least every other day, but she's got her own health problems, varicose veins that run like purple cords down each leg. She wears thick, flesh-colored stockings, even in summer when the temperature goes over a hundred.

Priscilla says Mom needs a full-time nurse to take care of her. I tell her Mom would never allow anybody to take care of her who isn't family, but she insists. If I had told her I was getting Mom a nurse, Priscilla would have argued that only family could do the job.

Priscilla, three years younger than me, is short and slim, with tight knots of muscles up and down her calves. When we were kids, nobody ever looked for us in the same place at the same time. In high school her hair was short and shiny, coiling into two curlicues at her cheeks; mine was down to the middle of my back, with waves of hair I soaked with hairspray so they wouldn't bunch up at the top of my head. Atoms of space between Priscilla and me were dot-to-dot outlines that connected us with identical profiles, foreheads, and eyebrows that looped over each eye with uneven scatterings of hair we plucked away with tweezers. I always thought Priscilla's eyes were closer together than mine. We ended up measuring the space between our eyes with a ruler, and the measurements were always the same. Priscilla criticized my height and I laughed at her short legs, telling her models were tall with slim, slick bodies men drooled over. I made the cheerleading squad at Palo Verde in my sopho-more year, and she played varsity tennis, badminton, and softball.

“You're Priscilla's sister. I see the resemblance.” Everyone said so, and behind Priscilla's back they always said I was the prettiest. After Jesse's death, the dot-to-dot pictures that connected us got split up. If I moved right, Priscilla moved left, if I visited Mom, Priscilla stayed away. If I stayed away, Priscilla went to see her. We were always passing each other by, and I didn't know why. “Why can't you get closer?” Mom asked. “She's your only sister.” Then I'd try, because I still remembered combing Priscilla's hair and letting little strands of hair at the end of her ponytail tickle my lips. I remembered evenings we'd sleep with Mom in her bed, one on each arm, watching the pattern of light from veladoras flicker overhead, making rings like halos for saints we named after our
dolls. Sometimes we'd tangle our arms around Mom's neck, pinching each other to try to make one of us lose our grip. We kept it up until my mother said we would end up choking her to death, then she would push both our arms away.

There were times Mom insisted I call Priscilla, and finally I would. One of her boyfriends would answer. There was always someone new, and it started a knot growing in my throat. I wanted to yell at her to get some sense into her head and make her stop searching for love. I knew if I yelled at Priscilla over the phone, she would hang up on me like Mom hung up on Tía Katia when they got mad at each other. By that time, Priscilla had her son Angelo and had lost her baby Annette. Losing Annette almost cost Priscilla her mind. The baby was six months old when she died, apparently without cause—crib death, the doctor said. Everything Priscilla had gone through with Jesse's death came back to her when Annette died. It was as if time had not passed for her, and Jesse had never gone to the war. We buried Annette next to Nana Esther and Jesse. When Priscilla saw Jesse's grave, she knelt down and hugged the headstone and lay her head on it, as she had laid her head on Jesse's shoulder at the airport.

Paul, the youngest of our family, doesn't have much of an opinion about Mom's health. He figures we women will take care of everything. A few years ago, he spent time in prison for possession of drugs. Before Jesse died, Paul was this normal kid, loving life, playing pranks on Priscilla and me, growing up safe, Jesse's little brother, thinking about being like Jesse. When we lost Jesse, it was as if Paul had been thrust into a cage. That's the way I saw him in my mind, locked in a cage of chicken wire, looking out, his eyes mournful, the dark lashes stuck together with tears. He turned into a disturbed kid at school, one that had to see the school counselor. After a while, teachers lost patience with him, his naughtiness turned into all-out rebellion, and his pranks became criminal acts: vandalizing the school, riding around in stolen cars with his friends, and buying liquor when he was still a minor. Paul's life was a turbulent storm, thundering and out of control.

Ironically, Paul's son, Michael, is gifted. He was tested at school and came out with an IQ of over 120. Summertimes, Michael spends his time studying in a special program for brainy kids in Scottsdale. Michael's got big, gray eyes and a bottom lip that protrudes over his top lip when he's thinking hard about something. His hair is short and spiky at the top. Recently, Michael had braces removed from his teeth. His dental work was donated free of charge, by a dentist who suffered with crooked teeth
all his life and wanted to help kids in a similar situation. I have to credit Priscilla for taking Michael to all his dental appointments, and there were many. When Michael graduates from the eighth grade next year, he'll be sent to a summer program at the University of Arizona to study science and math. Michael's mother was someone Paul knew in high school. Neither one of them graduated. Paul eventually got his GED in a prison program. The two met years later and struck up a relationship. By that time, Tina was living on her own. She had been a foster child for years, a hard life for her. After she had Michael, she turned him over to Mom and Paul, saying she needed to move on, and she'd be back. To this day, we've never heard from her. I wonder about Michael, the product of an ex-con and a foster child. Where did all his intelligence come from? Life is uncanny. Appearances are only an illusion. Intelligence is not a birthright after all, but a gift. Michael talks like a university professor, and I have to keep reminding myself he's a kid and my nephew besides. Another one of life's unanswered questions: How did Michael get so smart when his dad's been in and out of trouble with the police all his life? The relationship is hit-and-miss, with Paul gloating over his son's brains, and at the same time frustrated at not being able to deal with a child so bright that family members consider him a genius. When Paul was in prison, Michael lived with Priscilla and was like a brother to his eight-year-old cousin, Angelo. Now he refuses to live with Paul and treats Priscilla as if she is his Mom and her boyfriends are his uncles.

Paul's lived with Donna for the past four years. She's an ex-addict my mother nicknamed “la gringita.” Donna surprised Paul the last time he was picked up for parole violations by joining the First Assembly Church of God and giving her life over to Jesus Christ. Now Paul is preached to every day, and it's hard for him to go on using drugs. He threw her out twice, saying she reads the Bible too much and prays in weird languages. Then he went looking for her at church because he felt guilty for throwing her out just because she was trying to be holy. “Ay, la gringita,” Mom always says. “She's so white she looks like a ghost.”

“Except for her tattoos,” I remind her. Donna adores Mom, and no matter how many times she splits with Paul, she's at the house checking up on Mom. The pastor from her church set her up with doctor's appointments to start the process to remove her tattoos. Donna says she wants to be clean inside and out. I've gotten used to Donna's tattoos, especially the tiny unicorn on her left shoulder that seems to spread its wings when she moves her arms up and down. I'm making plans to call Donna and have her help me take care of Mom.

Tía Katia was helping Mom before she had a stroke that paralyzed her and eventually took her life. Mom sat with her, helpless, sometimes with Irene at her side, chanting the rosary, watching her only sister die, wishing out loud that she could take her place. Tía Katia suffered months on end, and there was nothing her brood of kids could do except spray her mouth with water, because she couldn't swallow whole drops. Her kids argued over who was doing what for her until finally she wouldn't accept water from any of them. Her tongue got flat like the wooden stick a doctor uses to check your throat, and the whites of her eyes turned yellow.

Jesse and I always considered Tía Katia's husband, Bernardo, our favorite uncle. He died two years before Tía Katia did. The bones on his back formed a mound of cartilage that made it hard for him to breathe. Then one day he had a seizure that threw him flat on his back. The shock of the fall made Tío Bernardo spit up phlegm that he couldn't clear from his throat. This stopped his breathing entirely, and Tío Bernardo died as he always said he would, with his shoes on. I still remembered Tío's half-smile, lopsided, gentle, his fingers long and tapered, the hands of a musician, only his deformed back never allowed him to play an instrument. His fingers, warm and comforting, slipped through mine at Jesse's funeral and steadied me as I walked back to the white limousine that whisked us away to the funeral home.

 

• T
HE SAME PICTURES
look down at me every day from the walls at Mom's house, brown faces, with black pits for eyes, haunting me. Jesse in his uniform, Priscilla, Paul, Mom and Dad, an assortment of wedding pictures. And there are religious pictures too, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Guardian Angel walking the children over the bridge, St. Rita, La Virgen de Guadalupe, El Santo Niño de Atocha, St. Michael the Archangel. Sometimes the faces seem to feel sorry for me, other times they seem to be mad at me or laugh at me, mocking me for what happened with Sandra. Ray's betrayal—didn't I see it coming? Couldn't I smell it like the mothballs stuck in Mom's closet? Who was I really fighting that night—Sandra or the ghost of Consuelo? I think now I was fighting myself, punching myself awake, making the pain surface, letting the explosion I saw in my dream go off like dynamite in my head.

We were a family back then, the pictures show it—even though we lived under the shadow of Dad and his lover, still we were together. The
storms were something we lived through together. It all ended after Jesse was killed. Jesse was the fiber that welded our family together. We were rudderless without him, drifting on separate rafts. Sometimes we drifted so far from each other we became miniature islands. We lost sight of each other, gliding into dark waters and a sullen, empty sky like the one Jesse flew into when he left for Vietnam.

The last thing we did as a family was wait for Jesse's body to come back from Vietnam. The stillness of Mom's house at night reminds me of how we waited. We waited so long, we almost lost hope. The Army had sent his body to the wrong address. It was Lent at our house back then. The statute of Our Lady of Sorrows with the dagger piercing her heart and the big cross of Christ were in procession through every room. I understood her pain now, the pain of Our Lady of Sorrows. In my mind's eye, I still see the candle I lit for Jesse at St. Anthony's—the candle he asked me for in his letters. The candle's thin flame flickered so small in the huge dark church, I was afraid it would die out, and I'd never see Jesse again.

I don't remember if we ate anything while we waited for Jesse's body to come home. I know Dad drank coffee and tequila and smoked. I know Nana rocked back and forth in her rocking chair and wrung her hands in despair. I know Mom sank into her bed, draped the windows with blankets and didn't light the veladoras. She was getting ready for the worst migraine of her life, the first after she had been healed at Brother Jakes's revival when Jesse and I were kids, and the last she would ever have. After that, Mom kept the pain of Jesse's death deep inside her breastbone, until the day she died. Priscilla, Paul, and I didn't have the strength to talk on the phone to friends. Dad told them we were asleep. My voice was gone. Where? How did it disappear? The hole that appeared when my mother was sick with her migraines came back again. It yawned dark and menacing in the kitchen. I put my hands over it and felt its vibrations, icy cold. I went around it, and my dad asked me if I was crazy.