Let Their Spirits Dance by Stella Pope Duarte Read Free Book Online

because Jesse stalled the plane to Vietnam. If we had known any better, we would have kidnapped the pilot and turned him into a real pig. Instead, we went home and turned on the evening news that told us the war was escalating with no end in sight. I bit off my fingernails. I was trapped between a raging war and Jesse’s words. I put his words away and told myself it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. He was just saying that just in case. I couldn’t see the end of Jesse. I had watched him from my cradle, tracing his features in my mind before I learned to talk.
    â€œTurn it off!” Dad yelled, “Turn the damn thing off!” Priscilla and I stayed in our room the rest of the night listening to “Solitary Man,” Jesse’s favorite song.

Tlachisqui ·
    T he night Jesse’s plane soared into Vietnam, Don Florencío, El Cielito’s old seer, said he saw a flock of bats fly out of La Cueva del Diablo. They were in a frenzy, screeching, darting across the sky, and circling the face of the moon four times. The bats were seeking the four directions, Don Florencío said, north, south, east, west, black, blue, red, and white, searching for blood.
    â€œI shouted at them, mija, with all my might! Go, you bloodsuckers, chupones de sangre! Go, go, fly to Vietnam…ALL! ESTA MI RAZA! And they flew, mija, and there was nothing I could do but chase them screaming like a madman with my arms flapping in the air. And I cried, big tears, an old man’s tears to make God look at me. If he looks at me, it will break His heart, I reasoned, and He will stop the war.”
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    â€¢ D ON F LORENCÍO WAS the only visionary Jesse and I ever knew. He lived along the banks of El Río Salado, and nobody ever visited him unless they were sick, and needed relief from one of his ancient remedies, or had bumped into his shack in the dark in a drunken stupor. The old man was dark-skinned, small-boned, his body hardened by miles of walking, climbing, living by his wits. His long black hair smelled like ashymesquite wood. His legs were bowed a little and he always wore boots. He said his legs were living proof of all the burdens his people had been forced to carry for the Spanish patrones. Don Florencío could speak Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, which used to be called mejicano, the same language Malinche taught Cortés when he landed in the new world. Don Florencío claimed to be a direct descendant of the Aztec people, declaring himself a tlachisqui of the Mexicas, la gente de razon, the people of reason, as they were known. He told Jesse and me stories of magic, visions, men who could turn themselves into animals, and the power of invisible forces both good and evil.
    The old man’s shack faced east on the rocky banks of El Río Salado. La Cueva del Diablo, a huge, hollowed-out hole at the base of a rocky hill, faced north. La Cueva del Diablo was boarded up many years later, condemned and dynamited out of existence, but when we were kids, it was a black, yawning gap spewing out the stench of bat droppings.
    La Cueva del Diablo produced nothing but dark, flinty rocks and peals of laughter from scoffers who mocked the men who had gone through the trouble of taking pick and shovel and laboring for days in the hot sun, searching for gold. Pan for gold by the banks of El Río Salado, why don’t you, the scoffers said, and some people did. Don Florencío said they were all fools like Cortés’s men. There were no Seven Cities of Cibola, cities of gold as the Indians had related. The dead were the last to laugh after all. The land was the gold, but the Spaniards couldn’t see it.
    Everyone said La Cueva del Diablo was occupied by a ghost who slept by un entierro, a stash of gold someone buried and forgot about, or was murdered before he could return to claim it. Why a ghost needed money was a mystery to me. Yet, for years the ghost had taken possession of the land