Conrad had professed to be that, a pacifist, had talked endlessly
92 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e to him about how he’d arrived at his position. But don’t you just want to hit somebody sometimes? Conrad had just looked at him.
Well, screw it, he wasn’t a pacifist and wouldn’t pretend to be one. So why was he reading Augustine’s City of God ? Why was he looking for what he had to say about a just war? A country who wages war has to be moral and legitimate. . . . Conrad’s voice in his head—Conrad, who was so sure, Conrad, who was
a good Catholic, Conrad, who was gentle and smart and good
and decent. He would never hurt anybody. He was like Charlie.
They didn’t even know how to make a fist. They knew some-
thing about the city of God, how to build it. Well, at least they dreamed it.
He shut the book. He’d go home and put it back on his fa-
ther’s shelf.
a b e
I kept running my hand over my buzz.
Look, the truth is that I missed my hair. But I was also free
of it. You’ll look at the world differently, son. That’s what my father said. And already it was happening. I was fucking free. But it was weird.
The drill instructor took an instant dislike to me. I didn’t take it personally. He took an instant dislike to all of us. It was part of the whole deal. And the other thing was that I lost my first name. My name wasn’t Abe anymore. My name was Williams.
Williams and “maggot.” I shared that name with everyone else.
We lost our names along with our hair.
I was tired as hell.
Apart from the fact that hangovers made you feel like crap,
they also made you dog tired. My hangover was written all over my face and my DI made the most of the opportunity. My DI, he
never lost a chance to make you feel like scum.
94 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e
“All that booze make you a man, maggot?”
“No, sir.”
“You smell like shit.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re lower than whale shit.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know why you’re lower than whale shit, maggot?”
“No, sir.”
“Why don’t you know, maggot?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You don’t know? You don’t know? I’ll tell you why, maggot.
Whale shit, it sits at the bottom of the ocean.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’re even lower than that. And that’s low, maggot.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s low, maggot. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Repeat after me, maggot.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I am lower than whale shit.”
“I am lower than while shit, sir.”
I thought I’d yes-sir my way into hell. After all the yes-sirring, I was on the ground. I’d never done so many fucking push-ups
and squat thrusts in my goddamned life. I thought my lungs were gonna fucking bust. I swear.
I tried to imagine my father as a young Marine. I tried to
imagine everyone I’d ever known as a Marine. Even Gustavo.
Hell, the guy didn’t know it, but he had all the makings of a
great Marine. Him and his anger and all those smarts. A great
fucking Marine. Our DI would have kicked his ass into shape.
But you had to want this. Otherwise, you were fucking dead,
and Gustavo, something inside him was all wrong. He wasn’t put together like me or Jack Evans. He would never let himself give
a b e l 95
in to the idea. Marine was not a word in his fucking dictionary. I just didn’t get that. Maybe I got Conrad a little more. I mean, he wasn’t angry about anything. I don’t know. There was something about Conrad that kind of followed me around. Nah, Conrad
and Gustavo and Marine—those things just didn’t go.
So there I was that night, thinking about all these things that I didn’t want to think about and guys I didn’t even like. Why
wasn’t I thinking about my dad? Why wasn’t I thinking about my mom? Shit.
When I got woken up the next day, it felt like I’d slept for a couple minutes. It was dark and I stumbled out of bed, confused.
That first night was the last time I stayed up thinking. After that, my body was so tired that all it wanted to do was sleep.
For the rest of my time at basic training, I would be hungry
for sleep.
lourde s
He’d just blown up at me. I went to my room. And I was
thinking: Thank God he didn’t hit me this time. Thank God
he didn’t hit me? That’s what my life had become? That was my life? And then I heard a strange sound in the living room.
I don’t know. I was hiding in my room. That’s what I was doing. But something made me go out into the living room. And there he was, in convulsions, clutching at his chest.
He was dead by the time the ambulance came.
Lourdes sat in the car and listened to Sylvia’s voice in her head.
Her life had been one thing and now it was another. That’s what my life had become? Become? Was it as passive as all that? Were we as stationary as trees in the wind? Did we just let life take us along as if human beings were no more sentient than the water
a river swept to the sea? She wondered if Sylvia would have really left her husband. She was talking a good line now. What
lourde s l 97
had prevented her from leaving him? When was she going to
begin living her life instead of hiding in her room? And her?
Her— Lourdes Espejo—what prevented her from—from what?
From doing what?
She thought of Rosario, whose life had become a waiting
to die. Like Sylvia, she did nothing but wait. Just like a million women in the world, waiting for something to happen, something, anything. Is that what her marriage had become? A wait-
ing? Sylvia had done nothing to change her life. Were it not for her husband’s bad heart, she would still be waiting. So was life reduced to the something in between the waiting?
What did it mean then, to live? To live one’s life?
Gustavo and Xochil, they were impatient with their inheri-
tance. The lives they had been given—they weren’t enough for
them. Greedy children, they wanted more. More than to walk
on familiar streets. More than to buy and sell and die. They did not want their lives merely to become. She thought of Gustavo, remembered his refusal to go hunting. She remembered the day
he faced his father and said, “I won’t go to Mass. I don’t believe.”
A boy holding firm, trying to have integrity and dignity without even knowing the words. A boy whose mind and heart flew in the face of all their conventions and habits and rituals—conventions and habits and rituals that they all loved more than they loved the children they gave life to. Gustavo. Trying to live his life. And Xochil too. Such brave and beautiful children.
She found herself angry at Octavio. She chastised her-
self. Then chastised herself again—for chastising herself. Why shouldn’t she be angry? Why shouldn’t she be? Such a careful
man, her husband.
But so careless with his children. She forgave him every-
thing—but not that.
charl ie . g us t avo.
Gustavo sat on the front steps, tired and lazy as the desert breeze.
“Sometimes I think I’m just gonna fuckin’ die.” He scanned the street, his black eyes calm, steady, almost inanimate, a camera taking a photograph. Except that he wasn’t taking in the scene, not really, not the scene directly in front of his black, steady eyes: the old brick Victorians that littered the neighborhood, the trees that looked as old and w
eathered as the generation that planted them, the adolescent boys who rode up and down the sidewalks
wishing their hand-me-down bikes would miraculously turn into
motorcycles haloed with chrome, wishing a girl was hanging on
to them, wishing they could will themselves into becoming men
instead of the bony, inarticulate boys they were. But Gustavo
took in nothing of the sincere, pedestrian dramas unfolding before him. Perhaps he was looking past the scene, a sage, a seer, a shaman. Perhaps, like most young men, he was afflicted with
blindness, incapable of comprehending the beauty of the facts
charl ie . g us t avo. l 99
before him. It was as if his immutable gaze dispensed with the physical world.
Charlie looked over at his older brother and smiled to him-
self—Gustavo was practicing being hard again. He was so afraid of being soft, as if soft was something bad, unacceptable, repug-nant. And so he was always trying to make himself into some-
thing unbreakable. But he was more flesh than stone, and noth-
ing he said or did could ever change that.
Sometimes, when he spoke, his words always had an edge,
like a knife, like he meant each word to hurt, to stab, to cut. Like he didn’t care who the violence touched or wounded or scarred, like he was letting loose the thoughtless, sharpened knife that he kept inside and he didn’t care who it would wound or hurt or slice, as if blood was nothing, not his own blood, not anybody’s blood, nothing. Blood. He could be mean and ugly like that when he spoke. But when he was still and quiet, his face and eyes were kind, as kind and good as anything, as kind and soft as an orange poppy in bloom, as kind and tender as the leaves of a mesquite, as kind and sweet as his sister’s voice when she sang to her sleeping grandmother. A kind face, absolutely—unless he was angry, and
in those moments he was frightening, his expression turning as wild as his hair, a gale blowing through him, a moment of chaos so pure that it was not only startling but very nearly beautiful, like lightning reflecting off the surface of the desert.
Gustavo unlaced his boots, pushed them down the steps and
watched them fall. “Just fuckin’ gonna die.”
“Of what, Gus?” Only Charlie was allowed to call him Gus.
“Of fuckin’ afternoons like this.”
Charlie laughed. He wanted to reach over and hug his older
brother. He hated that urge, that reflex or whatever it was, hated, hated it. That kind of thing wasn’t allowed, a rule, strict; he knew the rules, wrote them down in his head and his heart, all of them.
Boys were exempt from the rules, and he’d loved those years of
100 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e exemption, but they were gone now—not a boy anymore—of age
now. He knew that a part of him would always be uncomfortable
in this place, this residence, this harsh address. He did not want to live there. But there was nothing he could do about it. He
remembered he had overheard his uncle telling his father, “Ése chico, he’ll always be a little tender, manzito. ” He knew the remark was not intended as a compliment. Manzito. Tame. A toothless animal. Still, he knew there were other rules that would help him survive. He could still hug Xochil. That was good. Sweet as rain-drops on the tongue. Sweet as Mexican candy. Almost like going to communion.
“Fuckin’ die of afternoons like this,” Gustavo repeated.
“What’s wrong with afternoons like this?”
“There’s nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“You’ll never get it, Charlie. All you know how to be is con-
tent.”
Content. The way he said it. An insult. Charlie opened his
mouth, then shut it.
“Charlie, you can sit on the front porch all frickin’ day long and never get tired. You look out and daydream or read a book or even read the pinche clouds. I’ve watched you sit still for hours.
You’re like a fuckin’ statue. Like one of those angels in church.
Even Xochil says you are.”
“Leave Xochil out of this. Look, I’m not made of stone.”
“What’s wrong with statues?”
“They’re not people.”
“Well, sometimes you’re so still you are more like a stone.
More like a stone than a human being. Hate to break it to you, Charlie.”
“Not true, Gus.” Charlie pinched his arms, the best argument
he could think of to refute his brother’s awful claims. “See. Look.
I’m not.”
charl ie . g us t avo. l 101
“All right—maybe you’re not a statue. Maybe you’re just a
frickin’ angel.”
He pinched himself again. “Angels don’t have skin. Look.
Look.”
Gustavo held back a smile, but the grin was there, in his eyes.
“All right, but I never met a guy could read so many damned
frickin’ books. You’re so fuckin’ content it makes me want to
spit.”
“You read more books than me, Gus.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes. And what’s so bad about staying calm? Isn’t that what
you’re saying—I’m too calm? What’s so bad about that?”
“Shit, bro, look around you. We’re fucked. And you’re sittin’
there like a goddamned cow eatin’ alfalfa.”
“Knock it off. You’re making me mad. You always do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make me mad—that’s what you do. And put me down.”
Gustavo reached across and slapped his brother lightly several times. “I’m not putting you down, bro, I’m just trying to describe you. Trying to get at what you’re like, bro.”
“Bro, bro, bro, what’s that?”
“It means brother. It means we’re cool.”
“Cool? You don’t know shit, Gus.”
“I’m not a fucking idiot, Joe.”
“Don’t call me Joe—I hate that.”
Gustavo let loose a smile. Straightest, whitest teeth in all of Sunset Heights. “I’m just telling you that you don’t know shit about being bored—that’s all I’m saying. Look, some people don’t have it in them. Some people are just, well, you know, they’re just kind of peaceful. You know, just, you know, peaceful. That would be you.” He pressed his finger into Charlie’s heart. He
102 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and looked at it as if it were something astonishing, something he’d never seen, not ever.
He tapped his cigarette on his wrist, took a matchbook from his shirt pocket, tore out a match, struck it. Jesus, it was good, his cigarette. He sucked the smoke into his lungs, held it for a long second, then let it out into the clear, September day, his smoke the only blemish in the pure and spotless sky. Charlie watched the cigarette smoke float into the clear blue of the afternoon. He could sit on this porch forever and watch his brother smoke and talk. And talk. And talk. And smoke and talk. About anything.
All day. All night. His voice. Sometimes deep. Sometimes higher, softer, a tenor about to break into song.
“What year is it?”
It was a game they played. Something Gustavo made up. For
the longest time, it was something between Gustavo and Xochil.
And that was okay, because they were twins and twins had some-
thing between them. That was another rule, a rule everyone knew about. The twin rule was the most unbreakable rule of all. But as he grew older, they let him in. First, they let him watch. And then one day they let him play. The game. Charlie clapped his hands and smiled. “It’s 1967.”
“And what’s the most important thing that’s happened in
1967?”
They both looked at each other and laughed.
&n
bsp; “Dad bought a car!”
Gustavo stuck out his right thumb. “Yup. Dad bought a car. A
brand-new Chevy Impala—blue as the pinche sky.”
Charlie broke out singing, “See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet . . . ”
Gustavo shook his head. Sometimes, his little brother, some-
times—hell, he couldn’t help but smile. “Okay, that was impor-
tant. But it wasn’t the most important thing. Nope, not by a long shot.” He winced, then blew the smoke out of his nose. He looked old right then, older than eighteen. Like he’d been a man for a
charl ie . g us t avo. l 103
long time. Xochil, she had that look too, that look that reminded people that she was strong and untouchable, that warned people not to come too close because she knew something that could
break you.
But Charlie wasn’t afraid. Not of Xochil. Not of Gus. They’d
never hurt him. He nodded. “Okay, I got it. Mom yelled at Dad
in front of his poker-playing pals.”
“That was a moment, wasn’t it? One for the record books,
I’d say. Xochil really got off on the look on Dad’s face. That was good—tough stuff. Bitchin’ as all fucking get out—but it wasn’t the most important.”
“Okay. I got it. You graduated from high school.”
Gustavo stuck the cigarette in his mouth and locked his
hands in the back of his head. He mumbled through the ciga-
rette. “Think, Charlie. How important could that be, ése?”
He smiled at the word ése. He liked that word. His father hated it, said it wasn’t a word worthy of them. “Well, ése,” he said, trying to keep from laughing. “Dad said it was a miracle from
God.”
“Dad always thinks the worst things about everything. He’s
the original pessimist.” He raised his arms and stretched.
“He’s proud of you.”
“He’s not proud of me, Charlie. He’s not proud of anyone.”
“Yes, he is, Gus. You know he is.”
“Look, Charlie, I’m not gonna fight with you, not on this
one. He’s proud, okay, proud. Yeah, fuckin’ sure. It’s a diploma, Charlie. Any idiot can graduate from high school. It just means I can read and I can write and that I can put up with teachers who don’t get paid enough to love me. The thing is, Charlie,