Let Their Spirits Dance by Stella Pope Duarte Page B

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 shesighed. 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!”
    â€œHe’s the one over here! I’m sick of my dad’s shit! Tired of letting him run all over you!”
    â€œYour 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