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The third soldier was different.
He was a boxer; that was where she saw him first. Fighting in the ring in the town square on the third Saturday against a young townsman named Ricky Canton. Carmen should have been rooting for the local challenger, the underdog; everyone did. Instead, her gaze was fixed on the soldier.
He was a big Minnesota farmboy with a nice, easy smile and a lazy, looping left hook that looked much slower than it was. He used it to pummel Ricky Canton up and down the ring.
“Go on!” Inez nudged her cousin.
In between the fourth and fifth rounds, Carmen Garron slipped through the crowd, made her way to the outside of the soldier’s corner. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her.
“Hi there. ” He slid one muscled, sweaty arm through the ropes, touched her hand with his gloved fist.
The bird in her heart warbled.
“Hi,” Carmen whispered.
It took three more rounds for Ricky Canton to go down for good, but he did. The Minnesota farmboy stood in the center of the ring, tilting his head modestly as the referee raised his hand in victory. And then he went back to his corner, leaning on the ropes, lowering his head toward Carmen’s.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked. “At Salamanca’s?”
She flushed. “Of course. ”
She was twenty years old, still in the first flush of youth, and he was her first love—her first true love. His name was Tom Almquist, and on nights when she was alone, Carmen whispered his name to herself like a prayer. Like her first lover, he was earnest; like her second, he was funny, although it was humor of a slow, careful kind. But he was different.
“I’ll marry you,” he whispered the time the condom broke, his lips pressed to her temple. “Don’t worry. Either way, I will. ”
“You can’t!” Carmen whispered back.
His massive shoulders rose and fell. “Don’t care. I will. ” He gave her a reassuring smile. “I bet we catch El Segundo in six months’ time and all this will be over. ”
It didn’t happen that way.
He would have kept his word if it had, because Tom Almquist was a determined young man, and when he found out that Carmen was pregnant for sure, it only made him more determined. He even talked to his commanding officer about Carmen. But two weeks after they knew for certain, Tom Almquist was killed when his squadron was sent to investigate a report that El Segundo’s men had breached the southern wall some twenty miles away. There was a breach, but it was a small one. And there was a booby trap and a bomb.
The bird in Carmen Garron’s heart went silent for a long time.
TWO
She named the boy Tom. He was a good baby, strong and sturdy, seldom fussy. By the time he was six months old, it was obvious he took after his father: blond-haired and blue-eyed, likely to be strapping.
There were no more soldiers paying an allowance, but there was still the diner, and the church helped with its widows and orphans fund, eked out from its meager coffer of tithes.
“I’m not a widow,” Carmen murmured to Sister Martha Stearns. “And I’m too old to be an orphan. ”
Sister Martha gave her a pitying look. “Honey, we’re all God’s orphans and Christ’s motherfucking widows. Take the money. ”
The tear-stained face of Our Lady of Sorrows seemed to nod in agreement. In the alcove nearby, the little effigy of Santa Olivia watched with wide, dark eyes, her basket over her arm.
“Okay,” Carmen said.
The grief never went away, but after a while it faded. They got by. When her cousin Inez asked her to move out—the presence of a baby in a small apartment didn’t exactly inspire the soldiers Inez dated—Carmen took a room above the diner. The owner’s wife was a good-hearted woman named Sonia, crippled by severe arthritis, and she offered to watch Tom while Carmen worked.
So they got by, and Tom grew bigger, turning into a cheerful toddler with his father’s sweet smile. After two years, Carmen began dating—but no soldiers. Only local boys. Danny Garza, the mayor-for-life’s swaggering eldest son, took a fancy to her. He was a good-looking young tough who could be charming when he wanted to be, and for a while, he did. But he got angry when she wouldn’t go to the fights with him. She hadn’t been to the fights since a Minnesota farmboy beat Ricky Canton.
“No,” Carmen said. “Never. ”
“I wasn’t asking,” Danny Garza said ominously.
Carmen shrugged. “No. ”
In Danny Garza’s experience, women didn’t say no. When Carmen wouldn’t stop saying it, he hit her hard enough to blacken one eye and make the left side of her face swell, though not hard enough to break bones. Carmen wept, and her boy howled with confused horror.
“Serves you right,” Danny spat. “Anyway, I’ve had better. ”
The swelling went away and the bruises faded. Danny Garza never came back, and Carmen Garron stopped dating. Years passed, one by one. In the cracked mirror above the dingy sink in her tiny bathroom, she watched her youth ebb away slowly. Her cousin Inez chided her.
“You should date,” Inez said. “Find a man. ”
“I don’t want a man,” Carmen said.
“So find a woman. ” Inez shrugged. “Whatever. You’ll wither up and die. ”
“I have a man. A little man all my own. ” Carmen gathered Tom in her arms and bounced him on her knee. At six years old, he was almost too heavy for it. He thrust his fists into the air and crowed like a victorious boxer.
Inez eyed her. “You’re crazy, mija. ”
“No,” Carmen said. “Just sad. ”
What she didn’t say was, why bother? Who will protect us? Who will be strong enough to stand against the forces that have overturned our lives? Who can fight the killing sickness that comes in waves? Who can fight the menace to the south that slips through the wall and sets bombs and ambushes? Who can fight the government to the north that decided we were no longer its citizens? It was like the fights. The odds were insurmountable. She thought about her first lover, the clever brown-haired boy from somewhere out East, with a pang of distant regret.
No one will ever win.
“Whatever,” Inez said diffidently. “We gotta survive. ”
Two weeks later, Carmen Garron met a man.
He was waiting in the street when she unlocked the door to open the diner, a dim figure in the early dawn. A soldier like any other, this one a black man in desert fatigues wearing his cap with the brim pulled low to shadow his face. There wasn’t anything different about him, except that there was. He waited politely for her to finish turning the sign from Closed to Open, and his motionlessness was more motionless than it should be. She watched from the corner of one eye as he followed her into the diner and slid into a cracked booth. When he moved, he moved with a peculiar economy of movement.
“Morning,” he said without looking up. “What do you have?”
Carmen pointed at the chalkboard. “On the wall. ”
She could have told him what they served—it usually paid to be polite—but she had an odd urge to see his face. He cocked his head and glanced up at her beneath the brim of his cap with a profoundly tired and utterly fearless gaze. No bird warbled, but her heartbeat quickened unaccountably.
“Eggs and chorizo,” he said, looking past her. “A lot of both. ”
She brought a heaping plate and watched him eat steadily and methodically. No one else entered the diner.
“Hungry, huh?” she asked at length. “Long patrol?”
He looked up briefly. “Yes. ”
It was… what? Something about the eyes. Dark and unblinking as the statue of Santa Olivia, the fearless child-saint who’d ventured onto a battlefield with a basket of lunch for her soldier-papa and brought a war to a standstill over a hundred years ago.
At least that was the story.
“Yeah,” Carmen said. “I’ve heard the guys complaining af
ter they been out chasing the ghost. Powdered eggs on the base don’t cut it. Ours are real, honest-to-God eggs. Laid by real hens. ”
Jesus, she was babbling. A flicker of amusement crossed his face—or at least she thought so. It was hard to tell. “Chasing the ghost?”
“Santa Anna,” she said. “El Segundo. Isn’t that what you call it?”
“Ah. ” A flicker of something else. “Yes. ” He held out his empty plate. “May I have another order?”
“Sure. ” Their fingers brushed as she took the plate. A touch, the merest touch, but Carmen shivered. “You really are hungry. ”
“Yes. ”
Grady, the owner and cook, scrambled another mess of eggs and chorizo, grumbling. She watched the soldier. When a couple more patrons from the base trickled in, jocular and still half-drunk from a night’s carousing, he ducked his head unobtrusively. Carmen slid the second plate before him.
“Here. ”
“Thank you. ” He ate mechanically, quicker now, fork to mouth, never spilling a crumb. She thought about how unspeakably tired his eyes had looked, and about how he didn’t know that everyone in Outpost called patrolling in response to rumors of El Segundo’s forces chasing the ghost. About how his uniform didn’t seem to fit quite right, come to think of it. When his plate was empty, she paused beside his booth and laid a casual hand on his shoulder.
Jesus!
Muscle twitched beneath her hand, somehow denser and heavier and more fluid than muscle had a right to be. For the first time since Tom Almquist’s death, desire flooded between her legs, startling and unexpected. Carmen’s face grew hot and her fingers tightened involuntarily, craving more. The soldier’s chin rose with a surprised jerk, his eyes suddenly wide and filled with wonder.
“Do you…” Acting on pure instinct, she lowered her voice until it was barely audible. “Do you have a place to stay?”
He shook his head imperceptibly.
Carmen nodded. “Come back at five. ”
He did. She wasn’t sure he would, but he did. The bell jingled and there he was, leaning in the doorway, head lowered to shade his face, somehow more solid and present in the space he occupied than seemed natural. Carmen untied her apron and went to him, clearing her throat. Grady shot them an incurious glance, then went back to tending his grill.