by Mary Morris
Arriving in In’chon, Rafael stared at the men carrying back-breaking loads and oxen pulling carts of wood and stone. As they disembarked, twenty-five hundred other soldiers heading home shouted, “If the gooks don’t get you, the stink will.” Days later Private First Class Rafael Torres found himself in a cargo plane with the Seventh Infantry, heading up to the 38th parallel where he would live in the mountains that were not so different from his native New Mexico and dedicate himself to assisting a dentist in the polishing, filling, and extraction of teeth.
In his nineteen years he had rarely left Entrada de Luna except to go to Albuquerque for supplies or Santa Fe for drop-offs for his father at local grocery stores. He’d never met anyone who wasn’t Hispanic or Anglo or Indian. It wasn’t until he landed in the DMZ that he’d spoken to a black man, let alone a Jew. Rafael had no idea how or why he ended up in the DMZ. It was a couple of years after the shooting ended, but soldiers were still stationed here. He assumed he’d work on some army base back home, but instead he found himself in Asia, assisting a Jewish dentist. It wasn’t unpleasant work though it was odd to see stalwart soldiers, who at a moment’s notice could be asked to risk their lives, sit trembling in the dental chair. How their eyes bulged as the drill made its way into their mouth. Many pleaded for more painkillers or gas. After they left, he and Art Rubin always had a good laugh.
Rafael leans way back in the dental chair. So far this morning no one has come in asking for emergency dental work. He has read a chapter or two about David Copperfield and now is plunging into self-reliance. Rafael enjoys Emerson’s theories, but he prefers made-up stories. He has even read a novel by Jane Austen that someone has left behind. Some of the boys in the barracks call him a sissy, but Rafael doesn’t care. He enjoys a good story. There are days he sits for hours with the light shining above him, just reading. Art Rubin doesn’t seem to mind. He is busy writing letters home to a girl named Esther whom he plans to marry when his service is done.
Rafael is dozing when Art arrives. Opening his eyes, he finds Art arranging his instruments.
“Sorry, were you asleep?” Art is a short, stocky man with a broad face. He has dark skin and dark, kind eyes. Rafael hopes that his girl will wait for him. Rafael shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“You were mumbling,” Art says. They are an odd couple, everyone says, but they get along and to his surprise Rafael finds that he enjoys dentistry. He likes watching as Art cleans teeth, then pokes around. The little pockets of decay fascinate him. The way the gums turn red and soft if you don’t floss.
Their first patient of the morning is a KATTUSA, as they referred to the Koreans attached to the U.S. Army. This KATTUSA, named Peter (for all the KATTUSA are named Peter, Paul, or John for the purposes of the U.S. Army), shares Rafael’s tent along with six GIs and another KATTUSA named John. Peter speaks no English, though Rafael has a sense that he understands more than he lets on. Peter has a toothache, and he doesn’t look very good. Rafael motions for him to sit in the chair where Art examines the tooth. Art pokes around, and then shows Rafael. The tooth has a deep cavity that they have to fill.
The generator that operates the drill is slow and irregular, but Rafael gets it going as Art prepares the shot. As soon as Peter sees the needle, he begins to shake, then faints. Rafael is used to this. He’s tried to tell Art not to show them the needle but just tell them to close their eyes and insert it, but Art insists on holding it up for them to see and asking if they have any allergies to Novocain or are frightened by needles, at which point at least once a week someone faints.
Afterward as Rafael cleans up, Art turns to him.
“I’m going out for sandwiches. We don’t have another patient until two. Can I get you one?” Rafael sits up. “Yeah, sure. Not baloney, okay?”
“Sure, no baloney.”
Rafael is finishing “Self-Reliance” when Art comes back with a couple of sandwiches, two apples, and a bottle of soda from the mess. He hands the sandwich to Rafael who looks at it askance. “What is this?” Rafael asks.
“I think it’s ham and cheese or salami. Why?”
“I don’t eat ham,” Rafael says.
“I thought it’s baloney you won’t eat.”
Rafael pushes the sandwich away. “I don’t eat pork.”
Art looks at him oddly. “But aren’t you Mexican or something?”
Rafael shrugs. “I’m Hispanic from New Mexico, but we don’t eat pork.” Rafael opens his sandwich and stares. Soon his look turns to revulsion. “I can’t eat it.”
Art looks at his own sandwich. “What do you mean? Why can’t you eat it?”
Rafael never can answer this question very well. How can he explain the place where he comes from? All the strange customs that people hold on to there? On the gravestones Rafael can trace his ancestry back hundreds of years. How many Americans can do that? How many can claim that their family has traversed the oceans with Coronado, that they had seen the actual halls of Montezuma, walked on the streets paved with gold. And yet they will not eat pork. He knows no one who does—at least he didn’t until he came to Korea. Eating a pig is like eating the dirt itself. It is eating the worst possible filth. He stares at the ham sandwich that his friend has brought him and puts his book down. “I can’t eat this,” he says again.
Art is surprised. “Well, here. Take mine. It’s turkey and cheese.”
Again Rafael makes a face. “I don’t eat dairy with meat.”
“What’s your deal?” Art looks at his assistant. “And I suppose you light candles on Friday night?”
“My mother does.”
Stunned, Art shakes his head. “Are you a Jew?”
“Of course not.” Rafael is offended by the question. “I’m a Catholic—born and raised,” he says with the slight Spanish accent that he’s never gotten rid of.
“So why do you do these things?” Art takes the cheese out and gives the turkey sandwich to Rafael, then sits down across from him. “Who are you?”
Rafael shakes his head of thick dark hair. “I’m nobody,” he says. “I’m just me.”
At night he writes letters to Rosa back in Entrada. He tells her about the weird dentist he works for and how he’s developed a love of reading. They plan to marry when he returns. Rafael wants a family, children. He wonders what it would be like to go back to school, perhaps even study medicine. But that won’t happen because Rosa will get pregnant and Rafael will open an auto-repair shop. She sends him packages. Warm sweaters she knits herself and tomato and beet preserves that arrive in cracked jars he has to pick the glass out of so he can eat them. In summer she sent him caps and suntan lotion for when the mountains at the 38th parallel are sweltering.
Sometimes she sneaks a bottle of whiskey into his package. She wraps it carefully in shirts. He hides the bottle under his bunk, sipping from it at night, trying to make it last. She thinks she is doing him a favor, but she isn’t. He starts to resent the packages that don’t have a bottle hidden inside. Soon it will be the only thing he looks for.
* * *
In the spring when the weather grows warmer, the soldiers begin building a stage. They don’t know for whom or what. They are just told to build a platform. They are promised that it is for something special. All the men, except for Rafael, are glad for the distraction. It gives them something to do. Normally they just go on their patrols, waiting to see if anyone breaks the cease-fire. But for Rafael it interrupts his reading. He has just begun Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. On the other hand, it does keep him busy. It gives them all something to do.
When the platform is finally built they are told to expect visitors soon, and then a few days later they are ordered to bring chairs and set them up in front of the stage. While they wait, beers are served. Good cold Korean beer. The men consume it by the six-pack. In the end beer will be Rafael’s drug of choice. He will drink it until years later when he drives his car into a canyon on the road to Taos. After what seems like an endle
ss wait, as the day grows darker, some music is played from a Victrola and the most beautiful woman any of them has ever seen appears. She has flowing rich brown hair and a lithe thin body, tiny waist. It is as if she were a spirit more than an actual woman.
For an hour Rita Moreno sings and dances while the men shout. Rafael sits next to Art as they drink beer after beer, ignoring the fact that they both have to take a leak because neither wants to miss a minute of the show. They want to watch every moment. Rafael knows she will be famous. A few years later, when she gets the part of Anita in West Side Story, he’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that he knew she’d make it big. How could this Puerto Rican girl, the daughter of a seamstress and a farmer, be singing and dancing on the stage in the DMZ? As she finishes her show with “Bésame Mucho,” sending kisses into the crowd, Rafael knows that anything is possible.
Afterward Rita agrees to take a picture with each man. All the soldiers line up. When Rafael’s turn comes, he slips his arm around her slender waist and she seems to fold her body into his. He is holding an angel. Nothing will ever feel this good to him again. Nothing will ever satisfy him quite the way this moment does. He could spend the rest of his life carrying her in the crook of his elbow.
And then she has to leave. She waves goodbye, blowing kisses. It is late and all the men grow silent and moody. Most return to their bunks, but Rafael and Art go into the dentist’s hut and drink a few more beers. Art sits in the dental chair and Rafael on the stool from which Art does his work.
“That was something, wasn’t it?” Art says, leaning back.
“It sure was.” Rafael nods as he feels Rita slipping away. Suddenly Rafael thinks he’s going to explode. In a drunken stupor he lurches outside. He’ll never make it to the urinals. In the light of the moon he pisses like a horse against a tree. Art is beside him, pissing a steady stream of his own. Suddenly Rafael can feel Art’s eyes staring down at his penis. This has happened once before, but this time Rafael feels he has to say something. Or else punch this guy in the jaw.
“Excuse me,” Rafael says.
“I don’t mean to be staring,” Art says, “but…”
Rafael feels his muscles contract. His nerves tingle. What does this guy want, looking at him in that way?
“But you’re circumcised.”
Rafael glares at Art.
“I’m not that way it’s just that, well, it is unusual…”
Rafael zips up, not bothering to shake himself dry. He turns his back on his friend. “Not where I come from it isn’t.” Now suddenly sober, Rafael staggers back to his barracks and passes out on his bunk without even taking off his clothes.
After this Rafael will try to get a transfer out of the dental unit, but he fails. He will spend the rest of his deployment avoiding Art Rubin’s eyes. He will never speak about this to anyone. But when the photo of him with Rita Moreno arrives he will guard it like a promise he must keep. Years later his daughter, Elena, will carry this portrait of her father with her when she leaves Entrada. It will remind her of another Spanish dancer who went to find her future in New York.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
VISION QUEST—1992
Elena knows the road north. She drove it a hundred times as a girl. She’d come back from performances or classes or competitions or auditions in Albuquerque. Sometimes driving herself. Sometimes her father driving her. Elena loved it when her father drove. It was the only time she recalls him being sober. She doesn’t want to remember, but what choice does she have? She is driving home for her brother’s funeral. No matter how angry she is, how her life has been changed, he was her brother.
When Elena got the call, she was just coming back from teaching a class. She had poured her first glass of wine. She was surprised to hear MG’s voice leaving a message on the answering machine. Elena doesn’t think that MG has ever called her before. Not in all these years. Elena wasn’t going to answer it, but she panicked. What if something has happened to Miguel? Normally she would never think that, but something has been happening inside of her. Like pack ice breaking up. Feelings she didn’t know she had are seeping through. When did it begin? When she walked into the planetarium or when she sent him the telescope? Or was it before that, in Morocco in the souk where she tasted her grandmother’s stew?
What if he was in trouble? What if he got a DUI the way Roberto always did and she had to bail him out? Or worse. What if there’d been an accident? Elena was never the kind of person to ask herself what if, but now suddenly she was. She picked up in the middle of MG’s message. “MG,” Elena said, “I’m here.”
“There’s been an accident,” MG told her, stifling a sob.
Elena’s hand went to her lips. No, she pleaded, please don’t let him be dead. Not before she can tell him the truth.
“It’s Roberto,” MG said.
She assumed he was drunk. And driving at night on those roads that cut through the hills between Entrada and Española. The road so lined with crosses that they call it the Via Dolorosa. But then MG explained. He’d stopped drinking weeks ago. He was crushed beneath the car he was working on for Miguel.
Elena hadn’t wanted to come. It was her brother, it’s true, but that’s not why she has flown halfway across the country.
It’s for Miguel. That’s really why she’s coming home, isn’t it? To be there for him. Something she’s never been able to do or wanted to do before. She has no idea what she’ll tell him or even if she will. How do you tell a boy that his father is his uncle and his aunt is his mother? How will he make sense of any of that? And of course there is his schooling. His college. Because all the money she has saved is going to him. At some point he will have to know.
A light snow is falling. A thin layer covers the highway. The wind is strong as it blows across the plain. This highway has always been a wind tunnel. Now she drives quickly, her foot on the pedal, almost seventy-five, and then eighty miles an hour. She isn’t aware of how fast she is driving.
From out of the corner of her eye she sees something coming across the snowy embankment. Where the traffic is heading south. It looks like a big yellow dog. It comes up on the ridge and hesitates. Then it steps into the road. Traffic speeds behind her and ahead of her. It is a four-lane highway and she is in the passing lane and she knows she can’t stop. She can barely slow down. Elena looks at the traffic around her. As the creature walks into the road, perhaps five hundred yards ahead of her, she knows it is going to be killed. She is doing at least eighty. She takes her foot off the gas, trying to slow down. She begins to brake, but there are lines of fast-moving cars behind her. Elena still has her New Mexico driving instincts. She puts on her hazards and slows as much as she can, but she is on a crash course with that dog. Except now Elena sees that it isn’t a dog. It is a coyote. A golden coyote.
The coyote makes it through the first lane of traffic, and then the second. Horns honk. There is a screech of brakes, but the creature doesn’t stop. And just as she is about to strike it, the animal darts in front of her, leaping across her lane until it is on the median strip. And then, as she speeds by, it leaps through the next two lanes until it is safely on the opposite side of the road. It moves so swiftly that Elena wonders if she hasn’t driven right through it. Or if it was even there at all.
* * *
As she pulls up in front of the trailer, it is difficult for Elena to imagine that she grew up here. It seems smaller as if it has shrunk over the years. How was it possible that four people once lived in this narrow, cramped space? The garage door is open, and the truck that crushed her brother is still in the driveway. She makes a mental note to have it towed away. But the garage gives her pause. Elena takes a deep breath. No one is left. Her father, drunk one night, drove himself into a canyon. Her mother dead five years ago of a weak heart, and now Roberto. Only she is left. And Miguel.
Elena gets out of the car, grabs her bag, and heads into the house. She climbs the three steps, the second one shaky, and kicks the door open as she always ha
s. The door still sticks. You’d think Roberto would have fixed it by now. Inside is a mess. Dirty dishes, soiled towels. The bed is unmade and the sheets are filthy. On the floor are the T-shirts and trousers and underwear her brother hadn’t gotten around to washing. She looks under the sink where she finds bleach, Comet, dish soap, detergent. Supplies she is certain her mother bought years ago and her brother has never used.
She begins in the kitchen. She washes all the dishes, scrubs the sink and countertops with bleach. Then she gathers the sheets and towels, her brother’s T-shirts and underwear. She goes into the garage that is filled with her brother’s airbrush paraphernalia. On the concrete floor in the middle of the room sits an aquarium that appears to be empty. Elena walks around the aquarium to the old washer and dryer her mother bought with the money Elena sent her when she was a ballerina. Her mother called her, crying, to tell her that she could now wash her clothes at home.
She throws in a load of whites. She lets the cycle begin, then adds more bleach. While the load is washing, she goes into the bathroom. The toilet has a rim of black mold and so does the sink. She cannot bring herself to even look at the shower. Elena finds a scrub brush and goes to work. The shower, the sink, the toilet. She scrubs and scrubs until the porcelain shines. Then she tosses the brush away. The whites are done and she puts them into the dryer, then she does a load of colors, including all the curtains.
She sweeps and vacuums, moving furniture aside, revealing the dust that has accumulated under the sofa and bed. She cleans the stove. She takes everything out of the fridge and tosses it into the trash. She washes the fridge and leaves the door open so it can air out. Then she gets in the car and drives down to Roybal’s store.