Names on a Map

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  remembers yelling at them. He remembers telling them to shut

  up. He is sorry for the yelling. They were boys, smaller than him, younger. He chastises himself for being a bad brother. He shuts out the memory. He doesn’t want to think of home. And yet, that is all he thinks of.

  32 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e He listens to the rain. Who ever said a fucking poncho kept

  you dry?

  A cup of coffee. He would like a cup of coffee to go with the

  rain. A cup of coffee to go with the morning. And a newspaper.

  He loves newspapers—especially the photographs. Sometimes

  he does this, begins making a list of things he wants and doesn’t have, the things he misses. But the list always stops after one or two items. It’s too sad to continue the list. It’s useless to be sad.

  He didn’t sleep long, three hours. No more than that. He re-

  members last night’s explosion. Another fucking antipersonnel

  mine. They fucking shattered you as if you were a piece of glass.

  Bill had been hit. They’d rushed to him. A missing leg. Fuck. But he’d lived. Yeah. Fuck. He’d lived.

  Arizona Territory. Wonders where the fuck it got its name.

  Fuck you, Route 4. Fuckin’ road to An Hoa. Might as well pave

  the whole fuckin’ area with grunts. Might as well make them all lie down and let the fuckin’ convoy run their asses over.

  We’re lucky. Down south they got to deal with fuckin’ Charlie and he’s fuckin’ everywhere. In every village. Up here we get to fight a real army.

  Yeah, we’re all lucky as shit.

  Bill didn’t fucking die. Didn’t make a fuss. A lifer. Almost

  thirty. Knows what he’s doing. Careful. The squad, all of them like the way he has about him. Keeps them together. More like a coach. Calls some of them “son.” No one minds.

  And we got Patsy, Patsy who dropped out of medical school,

  but knows everything there is to know about wounds, teaches us things. Bill, he’ll be all right. If Patsy says he’ll be all right, he’ll be all right.

  Blood. You’ll get used to it. Blood don’t mean you’ll die.

  Blood and rain. And mines and fucking bouncing Betties.

  Theater in the round, baby. That’s what Salvi said. We’re just these fucking bit players and just when we turn north, they’re all around

  adam l 33

  us, watching us. Salvi. Gone back to San Antonio. Didn’t take his legs with him.

  And whoever told you that you were going on a fucking picnic?

  Two others wounded last night. Wounds didn’t look too

  bad—not according to Patsy. “Not bad enough to go home.”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, fuck it then.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “fuck it.” Though sometimes he found him-

  self repeating everything everybody else said.

  They’d radioed for help.

  The wounded were safe now.

  Shit.

  Two more days. Then back to Da Nang. A day at the beach.

  And a joint. Pot makes it okay. Fuck no, nothing makes it okay. It makes it better. Well, fuck,yes, it makes it better.

  “This area was supposed to be fucking cleaned. Convoy’s

  coming through tomorrow.”

  “Dammit, we cleared it.”

  “Well, I sure as fucking hope you clean your ass better than

  you cleared this area.”

  He thinks of his brothers. They’re home. They’re complain-

  ing about what a stupid place El Paso, Texas, is. Can’t even buy a rubber without the whole town knowing.

  He feels the rain on his skin. He will never again be dry.

  He feels himself rising, standing. He takes a few steps, then

  takes a leak.

  He puts on his helmet and smiles at his fellow soldiers. He

  keeps himself from shivering.

  “What are you fucking smiling at?”

  “I’m not dead.”

  They all laugh. And it has been raining for days.

  charl ie

  No one believed the war would come. Not my mother, who’d

  lost her only brother in Korea; not my father, who spent the last days of his youth burying the dead in the Italian countryside; not my sister, Xochil, who almost broke, shouting and cursing and

  throwing her perfect mind against its inevitability; not my brother, Gustavo, who became its reluctant, defiant lover. And not me, especially not me, Charlie Espejo. Charlie, the most un-Mexican member of the family, the youngest son, who had a disturbing

  lack of appreciation for tragedy.

  We lived in El Paso—which was as close to nowhere as you

  could get. Take a step or two, then spit—and find your DNA

  in Juárez, Mexico. Isn’t that nowhere? Isn’t it? If you asked any gringo, he’d tell you. If you asked any artist, writer, business-man from Mexico City, he’d tell you. Juárez, Mexico, is nowhere.

  That’s what they’d all say about El Paso too. So how could the war come to nowhere? How could it enter our house? How could

  charl ie l 35

  it take over everything we had, the air we breathed, the fragment-ed, senseless thoughts that entered into our heads, the inadequate words that stumbled out of our quivering lips? I sometimes still wonder in awe and in dumb disbelief—like Adam and Eve discovering their own nakedness, not knowing where to hide, what

  to do. Isn’t it strange, how you can live on a piece of ground that is very nearly invisible and still be destroyed by America’s large and devastating dreams?

  You can’t hide from America even when you’re not really a

  part of it.

  I didn’t know that, not in 1967.

  There’re a lot of things I didn’t know in 1967.

  I think all of us go over those last few days. It was less than a week. I think we keep those few days locked up in our heads.

  And, sometimes, we unlock our brains and search the contents—

  me and Xochil and my mom and dad and Gus. We all do that. I

  think all of us repeat to ourselves, How could this have happened?

  How could this have happened? All of us, we are like Adam and Eve being thrown out of the Garden. Stunned.

  I remember everything about that Saturday—that Saturday

  when the war arrived at our house on Prospect Street. I remem-

  ber the soft light of the sun, the shadows on the run-down Victorian houses, my mother’s oleander bursting with red blossoms, the reflection of the light on Gus’s eyes. Gus. God, I remember Gus, my older brother, who was harder than the bricks the

  houses were made of, harder than anything I’ve ever touched or loved and softer too—which makes no sense at all except that it happens to be true.

  Gus. When I was a boy, he was the largest figure in my life.

  My brother, my brother, my heart.

  Gus and me and my sister and Mom and Dad, we lived in

  Sunset Heights. Sunset Heights, the place of my grandfather’s

  exile when he fled the revolution, the Mexican one, the one ev-

  36 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e eryone on the border is addicted to talking about. Names like

  Washington and Jefferson and Franklin rarely passed our lips.

  Villa, Zapata, Madero, Porfirio Díaz—these are names we pro-

  nounced and argued about. “People were like confetti back then,”

  my grandfather used to say. “Generals grabbed us in their fists and threw us up in the air like we were little pieces of paper. And, me, I landed here, in El Paso. I floated across the border with the help of a few pesos and a sad and steady wind.” And then he’d

  wink at me, take a sip of brandy, shake his head, and laugh, his fists making like he was throwing confetti in the air. My grandfather made life seem as though it were a story that was supposed to be told as you sipped your favorite wine.
The problem was

  that I believed him. I thought that we would all end up as happy and sweet as my grandfather. The man died smiling. He had just taken a shower and put on a freshly pressed shirt. He had just combed his hair. He had just walked into the backyard and sat

  down in the morning sun. And then he died. Yeah, I thought we

  would all be like him.

  All these years later, I laugh to myself. And if you want to

  know the truth, it’s a sad, almost broken kind of laugh. It’s so obvious to me now that all we’ve ever done in our house is talk about war and how it has given and taken away everything we

  possess. So how was it possible that we were all so stunned when the war arrived? How was that possible? The house we lived in

  was invented by that word. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with the

  Espejo family—every road we took led us to this destination. All the signs were legible and we were literate (in two languages!).

  And yet we were profoundly ill prepared for the journey. Only

  the dead have a right to be that unconscious.

  I remember everything about that afternoon.

  When the war came.

  The war, the sad, damned war.

  g us t avo

  He woke to the shrill sounds of birds at war. They liked to fight, birds did. He’d studied them since he was a boy and had been

  surprised to discover they could be so mean. A thing can be beautiful and mean at the same time. For example, birds. He’d written that in one of his notebooks.

  He listened intently to the screeching birds, focusing, trying to picture the scene, the birds wrapped around each other, becoming almost one, then separating, then attacking each other

  again, twisting, pecking, then flying away only to come back for another round. It was the mockingbird, he thought, fighting off the other birds from coming close to the nest. They did that,

  when they were protecting a nest, got aggressive, attacked. He’d seen mockingbirds swoop down and peck at dogs—even people.

  He listened to the small battle, the chirps and squawks. Then it was silent again. He waited. Nothing. A surrender. Or a truce.

  He sat up on his bed and shook his head like a wet dog try-

  38 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e ing to shake off water. He stretched out his arms and decided to take a run. He looked at the clock, almost six, didn’t have to be at the body shop until eight. He smiled. Saturday, only had to work until noon. Maybe Xochil would take him so he wouldn’t have to catch the bus. Not that he minded the bus.

  He looked over at his little brother and almost smiled. He

  still looked like a boy—especially when he was asleep. Some-

  times, he felt more like a father than an older brother. He liked that feeling—like he could take care of somebody, like there was someone who mattered more than the things he carried around

  in his head, someone who needed caring for. He remembered

  when Charlie was a baby, how he and Xochil liked to play with

  him. They begged their mother to let them change his diapers.

  It had all been a game. A serious one. Xochil and he had been

  let’s-pretend parents.

  He reached under his bed and felt for his tennis shoes. He

  grabbed them, then tossed one across the room at his brother.

  It hit him with a soft thud. Charlie opened his eyes. He smiled.

  God, he smiled at everything. At everyone. Always. “Hi,” he said through his yawn.

  “You planning on sleeping the day away?”

  “You pretending to be Dad?”

  “Don’t compare me to that guy.”

  “He’s not that bad.”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “Is that why you woke me—to tell me to go back to sleep?”

  “Yes.”

  They both laughed, and in a second, his little brother was

  asleep again. He could do that—wake up and have a conversa-

  tion—then fall back asleep. Gustavo shook his head, then fished his shoe out of Charlie’s blankets. He stood over him for a moment, just watching him. Did he only seem to be perfect? He

  had the urge to hug him, hold him, but he checked the urge. He

  g us t avo l 39

  remembered when Charlie had first moved into his room—he’d

  just turned two. Every morning he’d crawl into bed with him.

  “Gus,” he’d say—and then he’d pat his chest. “Go get Mom,” he’d tell him. “No,” Charlie’d say. “Gus.” Gus, Gus, Gus. He shook his head and finished changing into his running clothes.

  On his way out of the house, he saw his father sitting on the

  front porch, drinking a cup of coffee.

  Gustavo waved.

  His father nodded.

  He bounced down the steps, and as his feet hit the sidewalk,

  he heard his father’s voice. “Working today?”

  “Every Saturday till noon, Dad.”

  His father nodded, that look of disapproval washing over his

  face. Working at Benny’s Body Shop, the way his father always

  said that when he talked to his uncles—like he had just eaten

  something bitter and the taste was attacking the lining of his mouth.

  He ran down the street, trying to forget that look of disap-

  proval. But other thoughts entered his head, random thoughts,

  most of them accusations, a whole litany of them, his father’s words or looks, the way the officer had looked at him when he

  showed up for his physical as if everything about him made the soldier sick, You proud of that hair, son? His civics teacher’s remarks on his essays, You are either confused or un-American. . . .

  Lydia’s words to him on the last day of school, You think you’re God’s gift to the universe. . . . Monsignor La Pieta’s warning, Your youth is a very small weapon with which to fight the fires of hell. . . .

  He heard each voice as he ran, each accusation, and each vowel made him run faster, faster, until finally his breathing made the voices disappear.

  He looked up. Two birds were fighting on a telephone wire.

  a b e

  E nlist.

  I had that word in my head for a long time. It was like a song I listened to every day. A tune in my head.

  My father fought in World War II. He didn’t talk very much

  about what went on in the war. Sometimes he’d mention some-

  thing, but then it always seemed like he was sorry he’d brought up the subject. Not that he wasn’t proud of what we’d done over there. That’s how he always put it. “We.”

  My mom said he was just a boy when he went into the army.

  My dad said my mom had it all wrong.

  He spent the last year of the war in France, my dad. He said

  he didn’t much like the French, but they were a step up from

  Hitler. My dad, hell, he earned the right to think whatever he wanted to think. And freedom was the most important word in his vocabulary. That’s a beautiful thing. Not that he gave me

  a b e l 41

  much freedom. He gave me a lot of another important word in

  his vocabulary: discipline.

  You know, he loved me. He loved me like a man is supposed

  to love his son. He gave me and my mom and my sisters and my

  little brother a good life. I guess I loved him right back. I guess you could say that enlisting was a kind of payback to him but also a kind of freedom.

  Freedom was a chance to understand my father’s words from

  the inside. Freedom was a uniform and the chance to prove that you were worthy of your country. “Not every man is worthy,” he said. I wanted to be worthy.

  A lot of people think that freedom is doing whatever the fuck

  you want to do. But that’s not at all how I saw it back then. I was very serious. I knew what I was doing. I was focused. />
  I thought a lot about the war and about being a Marine and

  about things my father said. I thought a lot about my place in the world and my duties. Duty. That was another one of my father’s words. The day came that I’d had enough about thinking about

  all these things. I remember the day.

  It was a Friday and we didn’t have school because of some

  kind of teacher training. Something like that. I was playing basketball with a group of guys—Jack Evans and Gustavo and Jorge

  and Conrad and Steve and Marcos. They were just guys I went

  to high school with. They weren’t my friends. I didn’t really hang around with them. But I knew them. They knew me. You know,

  high school friends—and we all lived in the same neighborhood.

  I don’t know how we wound up playing ball together that day. I don’t think we planned it. Maybe we were all just out looking for something. And, hell, we found one another.

  So there we were playing basketball on a school-yard black-

  top. Somewhere between the playing and the talking and the

  normal shoving that went along with playing ball, Jack Evans

  42 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e and Gustavo almost came to blows. It was over the war (but I

  think it also had something to do with Gustavo’s sister, Xochil).

  You know, Jack was gung ho and Gustavo, hell, he just didn’t

  get it. Just like we didn’t get him. And Jack Evans, he was mad as hell, kept telling Gustavo he didn’t know two cents about the price people had to pay for freedom. Gustavo had no respect for that word. No, sir. And he just looked at Jack and told him he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. They looked

  like they really wanted to hurt each other. I mean, those guys used to be tight. But, the way I see it, their friendship was bound to explode. Those guys were different as day and night. Jack

  Evans was straight and steady and decent. Gustavo Espejo was

  nothing but a rebel who was always looking for trouble. Argued with teachers at school. You know, a friendship between those

  two guys just wasn’t in the cards.

  The only reason there wasn’t blood on the basketball court

  that day was because of Conrad García. He patted Gustavo on

  the back and said, “C’mon, let’s play ball.” Just like that Gustavo took the ball, tossed it toward the net, and hit a swisher. Jack Evans laughed. Then we all laughed. And we just played ball.