Let Their Spirits Dance (6 page)

A
t Mom's, I walk into Jesse's old room. There are boxes stacked up against the walls, old towels, kitchen supplies, plastic bowls and plates, a pair of metal tongs sticking up from one box, picture albums in another, a box of old
Life
magazines, bathroom rugs, mismatched toilet seat covers, shower curtains with color-coordinated plastic rings, kids' books from the Lowell School Library, and textbooks from Palo Verde. In a plastic bag are Jesse's letters, bound together with rubber bands.

Some of Dad's clothes are hanging in the closet. The smell of mothballs assaults me when I slide the closet door open. Mom's still taking care of Dad's clothes. Jesse's clothes are gone, Mom gave them all away after a year of holding on to them. She kept his school letter sweater with patches of baseball insignias sewn into the front,
RAMIREZ
1965 under the left pocket. She kept the sweater and hung it in her closet behind all her clothes. The floor is bare, dusty, beige vinyl tile squares. Drapes hang at the window, the design is diagonal lines, brown and yellow. Mom thought they looked like curtains for a boy's room. I always thought the design looked like lightning bolts, all the wrong color. I lift a corner of the drapes and stare at the chinaberry tree in Mom's backyard. The tree is a fixed part of the scenery. It outlived Jesse and Dad.

I lock the door and read Jesse's letters as if I'm doing something forbidden. Opening the past all over again.

I got to know my brother through his letters, the inmost parts Jesse hid so well in the States. I got to know SWAK meant “Sealed With A Kiss.” I knew he was lonely, even though there were guys all around him. He told me later it was better for him not to make too many friends, as they could be dead tomorrow. His idea of what it meant to go to war wasn't anything like what they taught him in training. He was fighting people who looked like people we knew. He was visiting villages with makeshift hootches that didn't look like enemy headquarters. There were cameras and reporters all around. The VC were blowing the hell out of them. The Tet offensive was raging and guys were still posing, talking to their Moms from the jungles. They were so young. No surprise, that America was making a Hollywood movie out of a tragedy.

Jesse remembered El Ganso in his first letter, but he forgot to mention Inez.

 

• I
ALMOST DROWNED
in the Salt River the time we went on a picnic with Tía Katia, her hunchbacked husband Bernardo, and their five kids. I was seven, Jesse was nine, and Priscilla was three. Mom was pregnant but not with Paul. Her belly was rising like a small ball of masa under her blouse that stayed too small, then went away. It was the only baby we never got to see. “Something's wrong,” Doña Carolina told her. “The baby won't hold on.”

Doña Carolina was El Cielito's curandera, and midwife, an expert in anything that pertained to giving birth. Her fingers were short and flat, and the tips felt warm on our skin when she gave us her own version of a physical. “Fingers have a mind of their own,” she told me one day, “it's like being plugged into ten electrical wires.” Doña Carolina's ten electrical wires sent her the right message about Mom, because she lost the baby I had named Inez. I knew she had to be a girl because Doña Carolina had tested my mom to find out what the baby was by swinging a needle on a string over her belly button. If the needle went clockwise the baby was a boy. If the needle went counterclockwise the baby was a girl. The needle spun around from left to right, so I felt good about naming the baby Inez.

Maybe Mom lost Inez because she suffered un miedo, a fear that gripped her when she heard that I had almost drowned in the Salt River. Fear, as Doña Carolina said, could claim a life by freezing it into place. Maybe that's why she prescribed a drink of water right after experiencing a fear to keep things moving. For once, water wouldn't have worked for me. I had already swallowed too much of the Salt River, and the only thing left to do was to spit it back up.

I had waded into the shallow part of the river with no problem until my legs got tangled in reeds that grew close to the bank. The reeds gripped my skinny legs like ropes, pulling me into deep water, and I started swallowing buckets full of the Salt River before anyone noticed. My cousin, Alfonso, nicknamed El Ganso for his long, goose-like neck, dove in after he saw me disappear behind a clump of reeds. It was the only time El Ganso's neck came in handy for me. I hung onto his neck for dear life and actually rode on his back as we made our way to shore.

“You were all wila, wila,” he said. “So skinny you weren't bigger than one of the reeds. I saw you go down, down and when I didn't see you come back up, I figured I'd go in after you. Si, si, that's what I did.” El Ganso talked like he was singing. Everybody said he was from a part of Mexico back in the mountains where everybody sang instead of talked.

El Ganso made it sound like everything just happened to be happening, and he never took credit for saving my life. He just yawned and went on playing cards with the rest of the men. He didn't care that he was a hero. El Ganso died two years later, when he was only twenty-five, in an accident at Jones's Granary. They said he fell into a reservoir full of grain and suffocated before anyone could help him. I thought about that and how unfair it was after he had saved me from drowning. Already death was crowding into my life, snuffing out Inez and suffocating El Ganso.

Jesse was waiting for me on the bank with a towel after the rescue. He threw the towel over me and tried to wrap me up like a cocoon. Maybe he thought he could squeeze the Salt River out of me. He never left my side the whole time. Tía Katia compressed the area under my ribs with the palms of her hands to make me cough up all the muddy water. “Ay Dios mio! Help me!” Tía Katia was shouting and calling on God, His Mother, angels, saints, and anyone else in Heaven she could think of to help me. I could feel Tío Bernardo's hands on the back of my head. I looked up at his face and saw tears running down his cheeks. It hurt to force up the water, and I could hear the Salt River rushing in my ears long after I was pulled out.

There were tears in Jesse's eyes as he held me close, patting my hair dry with another towel. “It's OK, Teresa. You're all better now. Don't cry anymore. Look, El Ganso's over there laughing and playing cards. It wasn't that bad.” He was dripping wet, shaking, partly from being scared I would die and partly from thinking how he would explain it all to my mom and dad.

Mom and Dad didn't take it lightly when we told them. “We used to play there as kids,” my dad said, “and nobody ever fell in.” They were ready to jump on anyone who hadn't watched me close enough and yelled at Jesse for being the oldest and not preventing me from falling in the first place. My dad was already fingering the buckle on his belt, and Jesse was putting on his macho face. Once my dad's anger was flying there were few rules. I stood close to Jesse, knowing that if blows started I would be pushed away. Still, if I could have taken even one of his blows, I would have done it. My mother's light complexion turned a deathly white. She stood between Jesse and Dad, holding Priscilla in her arms.

“It's Katia's fault! Will you beat your son because my sister is crazy?”

The next thing Mom did was call Tía Katia on the phone. She yelled at her so loud Tía Katia hung up on her. No more than two weeks after my mother suffered this miedo, she lost Inez. Night after night, I dreamed about the Salt River and felt El Ganso's long neck encircled in my hands. More than once a plastic baby rode with me on El Ganso's back and I was sure it was Inez. Two blue, glassy eyes, like my doll's eyes, looked at me. “I'm sorry, Inez. I didn't mean it.” There was no answer. I held on tighter to El Ganso's neck, hiding from Inez. Each time I woke up from the dream with a jump before El Ganso reached the riverbank. That was the first of many dreams I would have about the Salt River and El Ganso, except in my dreams I called the river El Río Salado.

 

• B
Y
1968,
WE WERE
all drowning. La raza was submerged by mainstream America, a submarine drifting under a sea of politics, prejudice, and racism. Barrios like El Cielito, ignored by the U.S. government, suddenly appeared on Uncle Sam's map. Chicanos who had never been thought about before were on the list of draftees. Uncle Sam's finger was pointing at them, ordering them across the ocean to war, a war that the President kept saying was a “conflict.” Minorities always attract attention when there's a war, and Chicanos, descendants of Aztec warriors, have always made it to the top of the list. This was more than la jura, the police, picking up our boys on Saturday nights and pumping up charges against them to “teach them Mexicans a lesson.” This was a game that said, We're gonna pay you for being over there, and if you don't want to go, we'll draft you anyway. So why don't you join up and avoid all the trouble? You know you don't want to stay in school, anyway. And lots of guys didn't. They had families to support, they had buddies over there. They couldn't pack up and run.

Everybody was on the move in the sixties. The Chicanos, the Blacks, Native Americans, flower children, drug addicts, demonstrators, everybody had something to say. Hearts in El Cielito were being plundered. La Llorona quit haunting El Cielito at night looking for her children. She flew over the Pacific to Vietnam and finally quenched her thirst for the children she had drowned so long ago. She wrapped her ghostly shroud around Chicanos and other Latinos who were being ripped apart from their bodies every day in the war and was satisfied at last.

We had depended on the smoke of candles lit before sacred images to reach God's nostrils, to touch the heart of Justo Juez, the Just Judge, and end the war. Instead, the twirling smoke turned into an obnoxious vapor that cast stagnant shadows everywhere. It wasn't anything formal or planned, it was haphazard evil, playing with our lives. El Cielito was a hearse, black, smooth, and silent. We saw skulls staring at us from the windows, grimacing. President Kennedy's death had not been enough, there had to be more. More deaths that we saw as blows against the poor, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death and Robert Kennedy's, Che Guevara, and there were more.

Coffins kept coming home from Vietnam wrapped in American flags. We could have tolled death bells from one end of South Phoenix
to the other. Our guys didn't stand a chance. Most of them didn't have money to go on to college. They were sitting ducks for the draft.