My Ghosts Like to Travel

My Ghosts Like to Travel

Peter Gabriel bounced through my speakers, and the girls groaned. We were on our way back from a volleyball game across town, and they wanted their own music. Because we lost to a weaker team, they were listening to mine. My Honda Civic has seatbelts enough for five passengers, and all seven members of my team were crammed into the car. Sofia, the smallest girl and our only setter, lay across three girls in the back. Karissa, who served like she was smiting demons, was in the hatchback area with her neck crooked. I had two girls in my passenger seat, but at least they were restrained. Everyone watched for cops as we made our careful, below-the-limit way to the road that goes by a circuitous route back to the east side. No freeway or Main Street for us. It would mean my credential and maybe even a lost driver’s license if I was caught. But leaving any girl at the opponents’ school was out of the question, and their parents were all at work.
It was dusk when we turned onto Old Stage Road, and the girls’ excited chatter, tickling, and giggles all stopped. Their eyes were glued to the windows on either side of the car, and Karissa scrunched down in the back so that she could see out. Noemi, the girl on the passenger side who was actually sitting on the seat, told me to put on my headlights.
“If you put them on before it gets dark, she can’t mess with them.”
I knew who “she” was. She was the woman who haunted this road. The girls all claimed to have seen her – at dusk. They all said you will never meet someone who’s seen her after dark because those people don’t live to tell the tale. They all said their cars were found abandoned by the side of the road. They all said they knew someone who had disappeared because they had the bad sense to drive this road at night. But none of them wanted to be left at the middle school across town. Even the most firmly held belief in the supernatural was nothing compared to the certainty of a beating at the hands of gang members from the other side of town.
It was getting dark and we were only about halfway to the east side. The girls were talking in low murmurs in Spanish now. I was not sure, but I thought Karissa, six-one, hard-core sureña Karissa, was actually crying a little bit. I switched my Peter Gabriel CD to their favorite radio station and cranked it, but Noemi reached over and turned it off.
“Just speed it up a little, maestra. Not even cops drive on this road at night.”
I increased my speed by ten miles per hour. I was over the limit now, but I felt less worried about losing licenses now. Maybe it was the girls’ mood, maybe it was just the exhaustion of another full work week, but I wanted to get back to the east side as much as they did.
We drove past lettuce fields that glowed faintly pink in the dying light when we heard a loud bang and the car began to fishtail. In trying to get the car under control, I elbowed Veronica, who sat on Noemi’s lap, in the face. She grabbed her nose and cussed me out in Spanish, but my attention was on the car and not sending us into an irrigation ditch with two unrestrained passengers.
The car came to rest in thick gravel by the side of the road. I did a roll call to make sure everyone was okay. They all answered, very softly, and I turned and saw pale, frightened faces.
My cell phone had been stolen the week before, and none of the girls had one with them, out of fear that their gear would be messed with. We were not terribly far from where the houses and businesses began, but if I wasn’t going to leave my girls at a crowded middle school, I was certainly not going to leave them in a car out in the boondocks. They could all walk with me, but the easier alternative was for me to be steady and adult and not girly and change the tire. I also needed to get my first aid kit so that I could give an ice pack to Veronica.
I reached for the door handle, and all the girls yelled at me.
“Maestra! You can’t go out there! That’s how she gets you,” Noemi said.
“You mean to tell me one little headless lady ghost is a match for seven girls from the east side? You guys got my back, right?”
The girls laughed a little, and Karissa started to climb over the rear seat back.
“Karissa, I’m coming around to open that up. Just chill.”
I got out and went around to the back of the car. I opened the hatchback, and Karissa climbed out. She stretched her neck and back, then reached into the cargo area and took out a flashlight.
“I was wondering what I was sitting on.”
“Hold onto that. I have to get my jack and the spare. Oh, and grab that first aid kit, will you? Veronica needs an ice pack.”
Karissa got the red bag and walked around to the passenger door.
I got out the jack and leaned it against the side of the car. When I lifted the carpet to look for the spare, I remembered three things. One, this wasn’t my first flat tire. Two, I bought a full-size spare for the car. And three, I never replaced that full-size spare after I used it to replace the flat. So the tire that I was now looking at under the carpet was another flat.
It was now full dark. The pink light was gone from the lettuce and a quarter-moon was rising. Karissa had come back with the first aid kit and was looking at my flat spare.
Even though she had been crying earlier, I thought now it must have been stress from the game because she didn’t react. She looked at the spare then at me.
“Now what, maestra? We all walk?”
“Like they’ll do that.”
“What else we gonna do? We ain’t stayin’ here overnight.”
I nodded and looked out into the darkened fields and then down the road, towards the tiny lights of houses, bodegas, and gas stations.
I went to the rear, driver’s side door and opened it.
“Okay, everybody out.”
I waited without looking or listening to their reactions. Karissa played the beam of the flashlight over rocks and garbage in the ditch. After what seemed like several minutes, the other girls began to pile out. They all checked their bags for all of their stuff, and Noemi pulled something out of hers and put it in her back pocket. She saw me see her do it and looked away. I didn’t comment.
“It’s like a ten-minute walk, ladies. You’re athletes; we can do this.”
I started walking and didn’t look back. Karissa jogged up beside me and shined the flashlight ahead of us. No one said anything.
The night was mostly silent at first. I could hear every kicked pebble and the tick of someone’s untied shoelace smacking the pavement. Sofia stepped on the shoelace and Noemi went flying.
“Puta!” she yelled.
“Hey, learn to tie your laces, mensa!”
Sofia said this, but she still gave Noemi her hand and Noemi took it. My heart didn’t jump into my mouth at these things any more. In the beginning, when I first taught gang kids, I thought every little thing was cause for a brawl. I knew now, in a lot of cases, they were a lot harder to rile than “regular” kids. They knew about fighting and they knew how their fights had to end.
“Maestra,” Karissa said. “Since we got nothing to do but walk, tell us a story from when you were a young bad-ass.”
The girls liked it when I told them about fights I used to get into when I was their age. They didn’t realize I was doing it to show them that fights can end when they end, that they can end when one person is down on the ground, that they don’t have to involve the rest of the family or anyone else. That no one has to die.
“You’ve heard all my stories.”
“So tell us the best one again,” Veronica said through the ice pack.
“Yeah, that one where you beat up five girls at once.”
“I didn’t beat up five girls at once,” I said and paused. “I beat up five girls in a series.”
I was in elementary school in a mythical land far away from Salinas called Laguna Beach. I was in fourth grade and yet I was 5’ 7”. I was quiet, bookish, a bit of a teacher’s pet, and the target of the playground bullies. These girls, who ranged in height from a full foot shorter than I was to about six inches, would approach me wherever I was on the playground at recess and start taunting me. They’d call me names, make fun of me for being too tall or Jewish or the child of a single, widowed dad. And when the taunts didn’t work, they would start throwing things at me until I stood up, at which point they would surround me and start hitting me, pulling my hair, and scratching me. At least once a week, my homeroom teacher would come out and see me -- scratched, dirty, and crying -- outside her classroom door. And after seeing this scene once too often, she asked me why I let them do this to me. Apparently she didn’t need to ask who the “them” was.
My only twinge of remorse from the incident comes because I pretty much entrapped them. I went to a bench close to where they were hanging out on the play structure, and I took out a book to read. It was maybe fifteen seconds before they were on me.
I stood up straight, probably for the first time, and clenched my fists.
“Who do you think you are?” I bellowed.
They shrunk back at that, but the biggest, strongest girl recovered quickly.
“We’re the people who are going to kick your Jew ass,” she said and moved toward me.
I had never fought back before but it struck me that the advantage of height was that I had pretty easy access to people’s heads. I grabbed the hair on the top of hers and I swung her around hard. She fell down, and then the next one was on me. Most of the other four girls I pushed or swung by their clothes. I pushed them into each other, kicked out at them, and generally tried to only be fighting one at any one time. By the end of the fight, I was sitting on the biggest girl and the others had fled.
This time, when our teacher came out, it was the five other girls who were sitting outside her door. She never said a word.
When I finished my story, everyone was quiet and the absolute silence of the night was broken only by the girls’ footfalls. Beatriz, one of the girls who had sat in the back seat, began to whistle – a cumbia song – and Sofia shushed her.
“You want some reggae maybe?”
“No, Bea. Just callate, okay? It’s not always about who you’re down with.”
We walked along with no one talking. Karissa, who was in the rear, kept looking behind her. She picked up her pace until she was even with Marisol, the other girl who had been sitting in the back seat. Every now and then one of the girls would startle, for no apparent reason. After another fifty feet, we were all walking side by side on the road.
“You can still kick ass, huh, Ms. H?” Noemi said, trying to distract the others.
“Yeah, remember when Dolores asked her to fight and she said yes?” Sofia replied.
“Girls, I wouldn’t have fought her,” I said.
“She didn’t know that. She didn’t show and her clica gave her shit for weeks.”
All the girls were laughing at that, but it had probably been the dumbest move of my career. I used an Exit Pass during the class before lunch to make sure the kids did their work. If they didn’t finish their assignment, I held them until they did. Dolores spent the period checking her make-up, playing with her hair, making faces at other kids – anything but her schoolwork. She hadn’t been in the class long and she thought she could “get over” on the white teacher. And I didn’t understand gang kids yet, especially not the girls. So when the bell rang, I released the kids whose names were on the Exit List, and, when Dolores stood to go, I said no.
“¿Que dijiste? What do you mean, no? You can’t tell me I can’t go to lunch.”
“You’re not on the list.”
“The hell with your list, bitch. I’m going.”
I moved to stand in the doorway. The other four kids whose names were also not on the list but who were dutifully completing the last few questions in their workbooks became very focused on what they were doing.
“You want to start something with me, white girl? I’ll see you tomorrow at lunch. You don’t, you move out of my way now.”
I moved out of the way, but as Dolores was walking past, I whispered in her ear, “See you tomorrow – at lunch.”
She looked up at me and her face was unreadable. I only figured out what I had done when I got home, and I started looking for my resume.
The next day I didn’t have Dolores’ class, but the periods before lunch flew by. All the kids seemed to know what I had done, and every student, down to the rowdiest, was perfectly behaved.
The lunch bell finally rang and I walked out to the athletic field. There were kids of both gangs standing in a cluster, and when they saw me, they came over. No one said anything. One of my colleagues came out of his classroom that looked out on the field when he saw the crowd, but upon seeing me, a teacher, already on scene, he went back in.
We waited, that crowd and I, for a half hour. The silence lasted about twenty-five minutes of that, and then the sureños started yelling insults at the norteños about how they ran from fights.
“What fight are you guys talking about?” I yelled and, for good measure, repeated in Spanish.
“You were supposed to fight Dolores Peña,” one guy said.
“A teacher fight a student? Are you loco? That would be my job. Nah, I just thought Dolores wanted to talk to me and she’d feel more comfortable out here than in my stuffy portable.
“Nobody ran from any fight, mijos, but maybe it would be good if you did every now and then. There’d be more of you around, fewer funerals.”
And with that little “gem,” I went back to my portable. As soon as I had closed the door, I sat at my desk and let myself fall apart. By the time the kids arrived, I had it together, but they could see my puffy red face and eyes. To their credit, not one said anything.
“You cried, maestra?” asked little Sofia, whose older brother had been there.
“I would have thrown up if I’d eaten anything that day.”
“Seriously?” said Estella, the third back-seat girl.
“It was a stupid thing, girls.”
They looked at each other. “Stupid,” from me, was worse than a cuss word.
We kept walking, and I thought about the power of this legend. These were tough girls but middle schoolers all the same. At any other time, they’d be skipping, running off into the fields to poke around with sticks, singing loud songs. I knew; we’d driven around enough and had enough practices for me to see their kid side. And they were also down pandilleras, every one of them jumped in and committed to that life. Now, even though about a third of the girls claimed norte and the others sur, they saw the team as neutral. I had worked hard to make it that way, and anyone who couldn’t buy into that idea didn’t make it past tryouts. As a matter of fact, that was the only requirement to be on the team. I took neophytes, just plain bad players, the entirely uncoordinated, and the gravitationally challenged – a group I counted myself in due to my utter inability to clear an inch when I jumped. Over time, the girls who couldn’t improve quit the team, and those who were left were purely there because they wanted to be.
And yet these tough girls, these playful children, were marching in this line, eyes straight ahead because of a legend. I started laughing.
“What?” asked Noemi, sounding annoyed.
“You guys are just funny,” I said.
“Funny? Funny, how? Do we amuse you?” said Karissa, in almost perfect mimicry of Joe Pesci from GoodFellas.
“You are way too young to have seen that movie,” I said.
“Yeah, right. Like Blockbuster in Salinas even checks.”
“Anyway, in answer to your query, yes, you do amuse me. You guys and your ‘ghost lady.’”
“Don’t make fun of her, maestra. She’s real. One time, my cousin—“
“Beatriz, don’t talk about her while we’re out here. That’s the best way to make her come,” said Sofia.
“Oh, come on. You guys get the living crap beaten out of you – by your own choice – and you’re afraid of a story!” I suppose I had grown a little heated. I had never spoken to the girls about their jumping in, never really confronted them with my knowing that they were members of a criminal group.
They were all silent. Then Karissa slowed her pace.
“I was ten,” she said.
The other girls glanced at me and then back at her.
“I was ten, but already tall. My hermano said it would be better if I was younger, that they’d maybe take it a little easy on me.”
She didn’t say anything else, but everyone had seen the scar on the back of her neck where one of her home girls had taken a chunk out of her with a ring designed just for that purpose.
“Did you—“ Marisol began.
“Did I cry? Hell no. My brother would have kicked my ass if I had made a sound.”
“I cried, but later,” said Sofia. Sofia, who had grabbed my hand in terror when we rode a rollercoaster at Great America, was known for being one of the most hardcore gangsters in the school. Fifteen other girls had taken part in her jumping in. They had broken her collarbone and cracked three ribs, but she wouldn’t react. The teachers got out to the field and found her curled up on the ground, her scalp bleeding in five places, her earlobe torn, her face a mass of scratches and abrasions. When the dean leaned down and told her an ambulance was on the way, her only response was to laugh. And here she was admitting to have cried.
I swallowed hard and tried to blink back the tears that filled my eyes.
After a long moment, I asked, “And were you guys scared when you got jumped in?”
They all looked around again and, almost as one, they nodded.
“But you did it anyway?”
Now there were shrugs.
“It isn’t a choice, Ms. H. Either your family is in it or your barrio is. Either way, you join or bad stuff happens,” Veronica said, sniffling a bit from her sore nose.
“Every street around the school is territory for either norte or sur. If you don’t belong to their gang, they think you belong to the other one and they beat you up just the same. But if you’re down, then you got your homeys to back you up,” Marisol said.
“And if you’re not?”
“Then you got nobody but you.”
We were quiet again, and the loud cry of a bird came out of the night. The girls all jumped and clutched onto each other, but it wasn’t the exhilarating terror of the roller coaster or scary movie. Three of the girls started to cry, and I felt a little nervous myself. Suddenly I noticed that Noemi was holding an unfolded navaja, and I moved in front of her.
“Put it away, sweetie. A knife won’t stop a ghost.”
She looked around her, and then folded it up and put it in her pocket.
We had actually made decent progress and the lights of town were closer. The girls who had been crying almost immediately realized that the sound had been a bird, and we were back to walking in silence again.
Noemi walked looking at the ground for a while.
“How do you know it wouldn’t stop a ghost?” she finally asked. “You ever fought a ghost, white girl?”
We all started laughing at that and when Marisol started loudly singing “Row Your Boat,” the others all joined in. Apparently there were Spanish cusswords that I had never known were part of the song.
Noemi made her way next to me and whispered in my ear.
“Why didn’t you take my blade, maestra?”
I looked at her and hesitated before responding. “Would you have given it to me?”
“Only to you, teacher. Only to you.”

We made it back to the east side without further incident. We called parents, cousins, uncles, brothers and sisters to come and pick up the girls. When they were all gone, I called a cab for myself.
When I think back to that night, I can picture the girls as they each got into their various modes of transportation. No one was taken by the ghost, but life has many greater risks than just women who haunt country roads, and kids from the barrio have more than the usual number.
Karissa’s cousin picked her up in a blue low-rider that he bounced a few times for my benefit before he peeled out. Karissa would get into a lot of fights in high school and be expelled her sophomore year for almost killing a norteña with an ice pick. Pregnant by the time she reached sixteen, she would go from boyfriend to boyfriend trying to find someone who would take care of her and the babies they fathered and who would be able to hold his own in a conversation with her. She would end up in prison for dealing meth in order to support herself and her five kids.
Veronica’s mother picked her up and yelled at her for five minutes about her nose. When I apologized, the mother wouldn’t hear of it. I said they should probably go to the hospital, but she waved it away. Too expensive, her mother said, and I said the school’s insurance could pay. She fled at the mention of insurance because she thought the hospital would report her undocumented status. Her protectiveness wouldn’t help Veronica the following year when she would be arrested for holding a 9 mm handgun that had been used in a drive by and then sent back to Mexico.
Sofia, little Sofia, decided to walk home when her father hung up on her. “He’s tired,” she said, but the girls and I knew she meant passed out drunk. Sofia would be the victim of a drive by herself the summer between middle school and high school, retaliation for the stabbing death of a sureño she had never even seen.
The other girls – Marisol, Beatriz, and Estela – got into the back of Marisol’s uncle’s truck. Marisol would graduate from high school and work at her uncle’s farm, but she would start using meth with some boys from her clica and eventually overdose. Beatriz would fall asleep at the wheel after the third of her four jobs ended one night and be killed instantly. Estela would move back to Mexico after a fellow norteña caught her with her boyfriend. When Estela would make an unscheduled trip back to Salinas at Christmas, a friend of the other girl would walk up to Estela while she rode back to her house from the bodega and shoot her in the face.
Finally, Noemi was picked up by her father, a small man with a weathered face and kind eyes. He drove an ancient El Camino that was polished within an inch of its life. Noemi would be the only one of my girls to make it. She and her family would move to Washington state the summer after that year. She never told me what she was planning, but I received a package in the mail the first day back at school. It held a short note and the knife.
“No one to fight in Olympia,” the note said, “and this won’t work on ghosts.”
“Nothing does,” I murmured to myself and held the note to my heart and wept.