Let Their Spirits Dance by Stella Pope Duarte

could be a few feet away from somebody and still they couldn’t see you. They count on that, the VC. I’ll be damned if I didn’t think of El Ganso the other night. Remember his long neck and how he swam with you back to shore when you almost drowned in the Salt River? He looked like a big old goose, que no? I was shaking back then, thinking Dad was gonna haul ass on me, even after I saw you were OK. Here I was walking in water up to my elbows. I laughed out loud and one of the guys pushed my head under the water cause he thought I had gone nuts and forgot Charlie was watching us from everywhere. I would have given everything I had to see you and El Ganso all over again .
    Check out the red fingerprint. The dirt is red here. It’s like the red rocks of Sedona. Remember when we went to Slide Rock? We counted stars from the back of Tía Katia’s station wagon on our way back to Phoenix. Phoenix. I tell guys I’m from Phoenix, Arizona and it sounds like I’m saying I’m from Mars. Then I say El Cielito and they get the idea, cause los Chicanos always come from a barrio—Sierra Vista, ElWatche, Los Molinos, lots of others. I can’t believe I was ever a kid playing in the dirt in El Cielito .
    I’ll be writing as much as I can. Don’t tell Mom what I tell you. I don’t want her to worry, you know her. Light a candle for me at St. Anthony’s. You can’t ever be wrong lighting a candle. And don’t think about that stuff I told you at the airport. There’s no way I want to end up a statistic, and if I do, I know I can count on you to take care of Mom. Don’t take it hard, sis, I don’t know how to say things, I’ve never been in a war before. You’re the best sister, ever .
    SWAK ,
    Jesse

    P.S. Chris says to write. He’s got a girl in Albuquerque, so my advice is to write if you want, but don’t let the vato fool you, sis. Tell Espi to write to me .
    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.
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    â€¢ 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