You remember what Whit tells you: “I’m gettin’ short. Two
months, fourteen days. I’m getting’ short, buddy. I’m going back to fuckin’ Chi-town and I’m gonna get me a shirt that doesn’t
smell like buffalo shit and a bottle of Jack and I’m gonna fuck for five days straight and then I’m gonna sleep and then I’m fuckin’
gonna move to Tucson, Arizona. And I’m gonna stop off in El
Paso fucking Texas and give your momma a big kiss.”
You see Whit giving your mother a kiss on the cheek. And
you smile at the thought. Mom. Home. Shit. You have been here
only five months. Eight more months. You have your short-tim-
er’s calendar. But you are not yet a short-timer. “Not by a few months, baby.” You smile. Whit. He says things that make you
laugh. You wonder what you will do when he leaves.
Someone else will make you laugh.
You picture the streets of El Paso and you list some of the
names of the streets: Oregon, Santa Fe, Campbell, Kansas. You try to hold the map of the city that you love in your head. A map.
The city that you love. You did not know you loved your home.
But now you know. The members of your squad and your pla-
toon. They say El Paso and laugh. What the fuck is there? Heaven.
adam l 179
That’s what you want to say. Heaven is there. Heaven and four
brothers. And your mom.
And a girl. A girl. You forgot to tell that girl you loved her.
Or maybe you only fell in love with her sometime after you left.
Xochil.
g us t avo
Gustavo walked south on Santa Fe Street. He kept thinking
about the doctor who’d examined him. He’d had a way about him.
He knew how to touch people as if they mattered and his breath had smelled of mint. The doctor, he was clean and relaxed and he seemed almost kind—except that he’d made him feel like some
kind of prized animal who’d been readied strong as an ox . . . good reflexes, good teeth . . . be a good soldier . . . good eyes . . . be a good shot.
His friend Joaquin said they were just part of a fucking war machine. But Joaquin was dead now, playing Russian roulette with his friends, all of them stoned out of their minds, their bodies and brains swimming in booze and heroin and pot, and no goddamned war machine had made him play that game except him-
self and the substances he’d given himself over to. Joaquin, shit.
Dead. He’d loved the high. The high had been the only god he’d come to love. Shit, Joaquin, shit. He looked up and tried to focus
g us t avo l 181
on the sky. His brother, his brother could do things like that. His brother could focus. His brother could hold the entire sky in his head. His brother could study a cloud and watch it hover in the sky for as long as the cloud was there. If he could just hold the color of the sky in his head for a few seconds, just for a few seconds, if he could be like his younger brother for just a moment, then maybe whatever was trembling inside him would leave his
body and he could be free.
He stopped walking, stood still for a moment, then took a
deep breath. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, maybe
he would find himself somewhere else: in a park when he was
eight, on a seesaw with Xochil, or walking down Stanton Street holding his mother’s hand when he was four, or holding his new-born baby brother and smelling him, the cleanest smell he’d ever held in his lungs. He opened his eyes. Still here, still here. The problem with living was that you were always here.
He found himself standing at the doorway to an alley be-
tween two abandoned brick buildings. He squinted into the light of the setting sun cutting between the two buildings. He thought he saw a figure leaning against one of the buildings. It was a man, he could see him, a man who seemed old and bent, crooked and
made more of bone than flesh. He moved toward the man, who
seemed to be catching his breath, as if he had been running. The sun lit up his face as if he were a candle burning inside a glass, like the ones in church, as if he were something sacred—and Gustavo couldn’t help but stand and stare as the man stood motionless in the bright and fading light. Sometimes things appeared to him as still photographs, unmoving, inanimate.
And then everything was moving again.
He suddenly felt caught in this stranger’s black eyes, alive,
frightening, and he was surprised and startled by the moment,
by the man. He wanted to look away but couldn’t, so he focused
182 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e on the man’s face, dark, indigenous, glistening, sweat pouring out of him, and he could hear his heavy breathing. And then the sun disappeared behind a building, the stream of light gone.
“I’m fucking tired.” he said, his voice as unsteady as his legs.
“Were you running?”
The man nodded.
“Is someone after you?”
“The fucking cops. Who the fuck else?”
Gustavo nodded. “Who the fuck else?” he repeated.
“I’m fucking thirsty and I’m fucking hungry and I’m fucking
tired.” He was rough, an unpaved alley, a piece of broken glass that didn’t know how to do anything except cut whoever handled him.
Gustavo nodded. He took two dollars out of his pocket and
handed them to him.
The man’s hands trembled as he clutched the bills and stuffed
them in his dirty jeans. “What the fuck is this gonna buy me?”
Not that Gustavo had expected gratitude. He winced, grit-
ting his teeth, almost as if he were filtering his possible responses through his mouth before answering. “Buy a bowl of menudo at
the Hollywood Café. You’ll even get change.” That’s when he
noticed that the man wasn’t old. Not old at all. Maybe thirty.
Maybe younger than that. Yes, younger. But old, too.
“I’m not hungry for fucking food.”
“What then?”
The man took his trembling right hand and made a motion as
if to inject something into his arm.
Gustavo nodded. “Nothing I can do about that one, bro.”
“Fuck you then.”
“Man, listen to me. You’ll die if you keep doing that shit.”
“Motherfucker. What the fuck do you know? Heroin’s not
half as mean as God. You know, the one you pray to in the fucking Catholic Church.”
g us t avo l 183
“Not gonna argue with that one.”
“You got a pair of balls don’t you?”
Gustavo shrugged. “Sure.”
The man laughed. “You don’t know shit about having balls.”
“Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t.”
“Maybe, maybe. Fuck you. I’m telling you that you don’t know
one damn thing about having balls. You know what having balls
is?”
Gustavo shook his head. “You fucking win. I don’t know
shit.”
“I killed someone,” he whispered. “All I do is remember. I
remember and remember and remember. That’s all I fucking do,
is remember. If you were me, you’d want to fucking die. And then you’d know balls, motherfucker.”
Gustavo shrugged. “Maybe.” He took out his pack of ciga-
rettes, lit two of them at the same time, then handed one to the man.
“Maybe, maybe.” The man laughed, then took the cigarette
and sucked on it like it might save his life. He almost smiled.
“What’s your name?” Gustavo had no idea why he’d asked.
The man stared at the air as if he were confused by Gustavo’s
question. He took another drag from the cigarette, then
another, then another. “Angel—that’s my fucking name.”
Gustavo nodded. “You should get some help, Angel.”
“Is that why you stopped—to give me fucking advice? I got
my mother for that.”
“Maybe your mother’s not wrong.”
“You don’t know shit about my mother. She’s a goddamned
whore who still works the fuckin’ streets.”
The light was disappearing and Gustavo cursed himself for
stopping in an alley to talk to a screwed-up junkie who was pissed off at the world. He took out a five-dollar bill from his wallet.
“It’s the best I can do.”
184 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e The man took the bill, then sat himself on the ground. “Go
fuck yourself,” he said.
“Well, if I could do that, then maybe I really would have balls.”
Gustavo tossed him the pack of cigarettes and turned away.
“One of these fucking days, you’re gonna know what it’s like
to fight a fucking war every day of your good-for-nothing life.
You’re gonna wish you’d never been fucking born.”
Gustavo shrugged.
“You think I’m nothing.”
“You don’t know shit about what I’m thinking.”
“You fuckin’ do. I can see that.”
“I don’t think you can see anything, bro.”
“I’m not from your pinche barrio. I’m not your fucking bro.”
His hands trembled as he reached for the pack of cigarettes Gustavo had tossed at him. He lit another cigarette. “Look at me! I killed someone. Got that, motherfucker. Fucking look at me, goddamn it!”
“I’m looking,” Gustavo said, a calmness in his voice—though
now all he wanted was to leave, be on his way, turn his eyes from this poor, beat-up man who wasn’t even a man anymore, this sad, sad man who made him feel bad, bad about living, bad about
breathing, bad about the fact that he was clean and had a house and a normal life—even if that normal life was something he’d
never thought very much about or even valued because it had
been too ordered and too clean and too safe, but seeing this man made him want to be in that place. Safe.
“The world fucking threw me away.”
“Maybe you did that on your own, bro.”
“You don’t shit from piss. You don’t know.”
“You’re right on that count, ése.”
“Don’t call me ése, you fucking sellout. Bet you call yourself a Chicano. Bet you think you can take the world by its balls and make it plead for fucking mercy. Guys like you are fucking cheap
g us t avo l 185
as bubblegum. I used to be just like you. Take a good look motherfucker—I’m the future. Got that, Chicano, I’m the fucking future they didn’t tell you about.”
Gustavo grimaced. He was losing patience, but something,
else too; he was afraid damn it, damn it he hated that. He knew that feeling, familiar, that thing inside him that made him tremble and feel sick, like the first time he’d had to hit a dog with the baseball bat he was carrying because the dog was attacking him and already had him on the ground or the time he made another
guy bleed with his bare fists, a guy who swore he’d kill him, that ache in his chest, that swelling in his throat that made it hard to breathe, that awful kind of fear, that untamable animal that lived inside him and twisted him like a rag—and this man named Angel was making him feel small and grotesque and helpless and mean, and he hated this man, he did, and he found himself making a fist. He wished to God he hadn’t given away his pack of
cigarettes. “It’s getting late,” he said. Then turned away.
“Motherfucker, come back here! Culero, hijo de la chingada, mamón, Chicano, my fucking ass. Motherfucker . . . ” As Gustavo walked away, the man’s voice grew more distant until he couldn’t hear his words cutting into him.
As he neared the Santa Fe Bridge, he shook his head and
grimaced.
Angel. Yeah. Sure.
par t t wo
A N D T H E WORL D DI D NOT S TOP
The endless corridors of memory, the doors
that open into an empty room
where all the summers have come to rot.
—Octavio Paz
adam
Da Nang, Viet Nam, September 17, 1967, 5:00 a.m.
You were having yourself one bad motherfuckin’ dream.”
“Guess I was.”
“You kept calling for Salvi.”
“Don’t remember.”
“Wish I could do that.”
“What?”
“Keep myself from remembering my fucking dreams.”
“Don’t matter.”
“Fuck. Mine follow me all day long. Don’t know which is
worse, this fuckin’ war or the one I take to sleep with me. Fuckin’
A, man, I hate to fuckin’ sleep anymore.”
Whit was hungry for talk. His voice was good, loud, but soft
too, that deep voice that was always on the edge of laughter. He’d always liked the sound of it. Let him talk.
“Camera? You listening?”
“Man, I hear you. But you know what, you’re a lying sack of
190 l a n d t h e w o r l d d i d n o t s t o p shit. You can sleep standing up. So don’t give me that shit about not wanting to sleep, when I fucking know that’s all you want to do.”
“You want to give me a fucking lecture or you wanna hear my
fucking dream?”
“I’m listening. I’m always fucking listening.”
“Don’t give me that shit.”
“We gonna argue or are you gonna tell me about your god-
damned badass dreams?”
“See, there’s this one dream. I see all these soldiers. And they’re us. Well, they look like us. Me, you, Salvi, Ellis, that asshole Pete, they looked like all of us. And the whole place looks like a fuckin’
cemetery. And there’s a thousand dead soldiers sitting side by side. I mean, a fuckin’ thousand soldiers, and their heads are all together, like they’re listening to one another talk. They’re dead but it’s as if they’re alive. And the whole goddamned earth feels like its all torn up. And when I wake up, all I keep thinking is that all those dead soldiers, hell they’re still dreaming. And you know what they’re dreaming? They’re dreaming war. They’re dreaming
fuckin’ war. And they’ll dream it for fuckin’ ever. Tell you what, it scared the holy shit out of me.”
lourde s . o c t avio.
She’s gone, amor.”
Octavio looked up from the book he was reading. Always
a blank stare before focusing in on his interloper. That was the problem with Octavio, everything was an interruption.
Except today.
Today the blank expression was replaced by another kind of
look—sad, startled, almost afraid, the veneer of his control gone, and in its place a dark and sober expression that resembled the stare of a beggar on the street, hunger everywhere on his face, desperate. He started to say something, then stumbled, unable
to find the words. He shut the book. He stood and looked at
Lourdes, her eyes red, her hair half combed. “I’m sorry.” He was almost surprised by his own words, by their softness, by his own pathetic hurt. I’m sorry. The two words seemed large and heavy, larger than Lourdes, larger than any words he’d ever heard or
spoken. For an instant he felt as paralyzed and silent as a corpse
192 l a n d t h e w o r l d d i d n o t s t o p being shoveled over with dirt. And then his wife’s face reappeared again.
“What are you sorry about, amor?”
He focused on her face. “I have a list—of the things I’m sorry about.” He was whispering, a dryness in his throat, and she knew he was working at beating the tears back, as if he could turn his eyes into a
dam made of steel and concrete.
“A list, amor? Throw it away.”
“I can’t.”
“You don’t need it.”
“Because you know what’s on the list?”
“I’ve always known.”
He placed his hand on her cheek. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.
“That look on your face—” He shrugged. Just like a boy would
shrug. At once graceful and awkward. They stared at each other, their eyes searching in the same way they’d searched in that time when they were young, curious, hungry—and full of want.
“Are you—will you, I mean—”
“I’ll be fine, but you—”
“Me? I’m fine. I’m—”
“You’re lost, amor.”
“Lost?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how, I mean, I don’t—”
He shrugged again, but now his shrug made him look like an old man. “There are things, Lourdes—” He stopped. “I sell insurance. That’s what I’m good at. But I wasn’t good at being a son.
Too formal. Too distant. I’m like that. I wasn’t any different with her than I am with my children.”
“You don’t have to do this, Octavio.”
“It’s true.”
She could hardly bear to hear the grief in his voice, the regret, the rebukes, the recriminations that bordered on self-hate. She
lourde s . o c t avio. l 193
sometimes hated his distance, his coolness, his aloof demeanor, his emotional complacency. But she was more pained by those
rare moments when he took his fists out and turned them on
himself. She kissed him softly. “We can’t help how we love.”
“Is that true, Lourdes?”
“Yes. I think that’s true.”
“You forgave her.”
“Of course I did.”
“Where did you learn to do that?”
“It wasn’t so difficult.”
“She wasn’t good to you—”
“Shh, Octavio.”
“She said—”
“Shhh, Octavio. It doesn’t matter what she said. Things don’t
always end the way they begin.”
“She loved you because you made her love you.”
“Love is work, amor. It’s not something that just happens.”
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