Always Faithful

by Patrick Jones

  “What’s going on?”

  He seems in a hurry.

  “I got a call from my man Freddie. He needs me down at Mission Beach ASAP.”

  “Is there a . . . fight or something?” I ask. I can’t think of the right word for gang war.

  “He said he needs my help.” He’s walking in front of me. “Bunch of Marines there.”

  “Tino, you don’t want to fight with Marines.” Dad punching out Tino comes to mind.

  He laughs. “Fight? He needs help moving product. Those jarheads are great customers.”

  24

  JUNE 26 / FRIDAY LATE AFTERNOON

  “Your parents are outside,” the burly white CO says. He motions for me to stand. I’ve already changed out of the stuff they made me wear when they kept me in a holding cell.

  I got myself arrested, more or less on purpose, since I’m out of other ideas. I went back to the same store I’d been in with Tino and got popped for shoplifting. It seemed like something bad enough to get me hauled in here, but not so bad that it would cause me real problems. I bet there are more girls at school who boost their clothes than buy them. I never thought I’d be one, but then again, I never thought my dad would re-enlist in the Marines and leave me again.

  The loud clank of the door startles me, but more surprising is that it’s Mom there to pick me up, not Dad. She’s crying like somebody died. “Rosalita, Rosalita,” she keeps saying.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” She offers a hug and I take it. It’s only a thousand times better than Tino having his hands on me. “I’m sorry I’m putting you and Daddy through all this.”

  “Dad talked to the store. They won’t be pressing charges, so you—”

  I break away. “Why would he do that?”

  “He’s trying to protect you, Rosie.” She says it like I should know.

  “Then why isn’t he staying home!” A skinny white woman in the waiting room gives me a dirty look. “Then why is he leaving us again?”

  She pulls me back toward her. I don’t resist. “Rosie, he told you all that. I don’t want him to go either, but he’s decided it’s what’s best for him and he thinks it’s best for us, too.”

  “You tell him that if he goes, I’m going to join him.”

  “What are you talking about, Rosie? You’re too—”

  “I’ll do something worse than shoplift. I’ll get a blue uniform, I’ll get to stand in line, follow orders, and risk getting killed. If he goes back into the Marines,” I say, pointing at the door, “I go back in there.”

  25

  JUNE 28 / SUNDAY EARLY MORNING

  “It’s time,” Mom says as I emerge from my room. It has to be her, since Dad’s still not talking to me. His yelling is bad; his silent treatment is worse. He’s got two more days at home.

  I’m all dressed in churchgoing clothes, just like I’ll be dressed again for school. All that acting out got me nothing; all it did was cause me to lose respect, for myself and from my family.

  “You look nice, Rosie,” Lucinda says. She’s shining like the sun. She got her room back on Friday. Victor decided to spend his last few days with another family: the Tecates, I guess.

  The ride to church is funeral silent between me and Dad. Everybody else is talking like it’s just another day. Don’t they know that the next time we’re with Dad in church, he won’t sit in the pew with us because he’ll be in a casket in the front? Marines die; it’s what they do.

  I sit through the endless rituals of church, where people say amen rather than oorah, but it’s all the same. Somebody far away is calling the shots and everybody else is supposed to follow. I take communion as my opportunity. I go last in my family but keep walking past the pew. Not wanting to create a scene, or maybe they just are tired of me, nobody chases after me.

  The blessed-are-the-poor homeless act like human shields when I arrive on the bus to Mission Beach. There are fewer of them than I’ve seen in the past: these must be the hard-core cases. No shelters, no swapping prayers for food. First in, last out. The Marines of street people.

  “Change?” A shirtless bum with one leg says. I move past him on my way west. Tino’s my last shot to change Dad’s mind. Six weeks ago Tino’s ROTC cousin trembled as he kissed me on prom night. The world changes in six weeks, six days, six minutes, six seconds. I feel a tap on my back. The homeless guy. “You got nothing for me after I gave myself for you?”

  I turn. I don’t want to stare at where his leg used to be. “I don’t have any . . .” I start to say but stop when I notice not his missing leg, but the tattoo on his right arm: Semper Fi.

  I turn around and head back toward the bus. “What you are running from?” the guy shouts after me. “Must be nice! I can’t run any more.”

  I don’t respond because I don’t have a good answer. I’m not running away, I want to tell him, I’m running in circles, faster and faster, getting dizzier and dizzier, except seeing him missing a leg was like a kick in the head. I see stars, and stripes, as I jump on the first bus that stops. The bus to go home. Nothing is going to bring that guy’s leg back, nothing’s going to change Dad’s mind. Always means forever, and how can I change forever?

  26

  JUNE 29 / MONDAY MORNING

  “I told Miguel about you hooking up with Tino,” is Brooke’s greeting to me on my return to summer school.

  “I’m not hooking up—” I begin.

  “I heard Miguel cried like a baby when Tino told him,” Brooke says.

  “It’s not like that.” I take my seat, sadly next to Brooke. Mrs. Jackson clears her throat, trying to get people’s attention, but it’s not working. Classroom chaos.

  Brooke laughs, way too loud. “Been there, done him, so don’t tell me that.”

  “Brooke Aaron?” Mrs. Jackson says. Brooke ignores her, focuses on me.

  “He’s gonna cheat on you like he did with me,” she hisses. Her eyes narrow to slits.

  “Rosalita Alvirde?” Mrs. Jackson calls. I give her a grunt response. She doesn’t welcome me back or acknowledge I went AWOL. Nobody missed me. I’m used to it.

  “Matter of fact, it makes me think that maybe you were the skank he was—”

  “Brooke, shut up.”

  Her right arm reaches across the valley between our desks. “Make me, skank.” I push back in my chair. It screeches. Mrs. Jackson’s reaction is to call the next name and the next.

  “Brooke, I don’t want any trouble. I—”

  “Too bad, Rosie, because I do!” She’s on me in seconds, pulling my hair with her left hand and throwing punches with her right. I defend myself, trying to scratch her accusing eyes.

  The already chaotic classroom explodes into a riot of cheers and jeers. Brooke knocks me to the floor and she’s on top of me like some wild animal. “Nobody takes what’s mine!”

  I want to punch the Marine Corps for the same reason, but since they’re not available, I aim for Brooke’s always stuck-up nose. Crack. My knuckle. Her nose. Maybe both.

  27

  JUNE 29 / MONDAY AFTERNOON

  “It was self-defense,” I told the school security officer. Since he’s the one I had a problem with earlier, I knew he didn’t believe me. He thinks I’m just all bad attitude.

  “Doesn’t matter, fighting is fighting,” Mr. Blue Shirt in a black and white world said. They took me to the nurse’s office and bandaged my hand, but they took Brooke to the hospital. After that, I got escorted to the office of the summer school principal, Mrs. Logan, but she didn’t say a word, just told me to wait. And that’s what I’ve been doing for about three hours. Waiting.

  “Come with me,” Mrs. Logan said as she emerged from her office. During the school year she teaches drama. Teaching drama to high schoolers: the most needless job in the world.

  I do as I’m told, something I used to be good at, and follow her from her office. She says nothing, so maybe like Dad, she thinks the silent treatment is punishment enough. We take a short walk into the counseling suite, which is odd
because counselors take the summer off.

  “She’s here,” Mrs. Logan says as she opens the door. There, dressed for summer, not for school, are both Mr. Torrez and Mr. Richards. She drops me, I hope, not behind enemy lines.

  Mr. Torrez motions for me to sit at the table with the two of them. The grim looks on their faces clue me that somebody’s told them about summer school troublemaker Rosalita Alvirde. They look at each other—the slouchy science teacher and the former Marine turned school counselor—like two members of the firing squad wondering which of them fires the kill shot.

  Finally, it’s Mr. Richards. “Why?” Three letters. One word. World of hurt.

  I tell them, since nobody else wants to know. Mom and Dad listen, but they don’t hear.

  They don’t say much. Richards asks a question every now and then, while Torrez keeps nodding, repeating what I say, and if he’s not actually concerned, he’s Oscar material. I manage to tell them just about everything, except details about Tino, until I can’t talk through the tears.

  28

  JUNE 29 / MONDAY LATE AFTERNOON

  “You seen Tino?” I ask Freddie, one of Tino’s west end crew. He shrugs.

  As I walk Mission Beach, the words of Mr. Torrez and Mr. Richards ring in my head, or rather the lack of words. They didn’t tell me what to do, as I talked. They let me recount how stupid I’d been. They let me say for myself that the smart thing to do was be like a Marine: always faithful to my best self.

  I’m torn about Tino. Part of me wants to thank him for protecting me—my time as a runaway could have been much worse. But part of me wants to slap him for taking advantage of me when I was vulnerable, pressuring me for sex when all I wanted was a friend. When I find him, my heart will tell me which part wins.

  I’m not as torn about Brooke, but I should apologize even though she started it. It was making me fight for my honor that set the wheels in motion for me to wake up finally and fly right.

  I know now I’m not changing Dad’s mind, so I’m just hurting myself. Dad is leaving no matter what, so I might as well make things right before he leaves. And I’m hurting Mom, too, at a time when she needs me. I know she feels like I do about Dad leaving.

  But I still feel a rock in my stomach when I think about all that Dad’s already missed and all he’ll miss when he’s gone again. And I still can’t push away the fear that he’ll miss out on everything permanently. Will he be here when I get married? When I have kids? To see Chavo graduate?

  But do we want an angry drunk dad for all those things? Why does it have to be a choice between depression or risking death?

  After making a circle around the west end, I tell Freddie I’ll catch up with Tino later. I’m on my way back to the bus stop and home for dinner, one of my last with Dad, when I see him.

  Not Tino, but the one-legged homeless Marine. He asks for money. I empty my pockets. “Thanks,” he mumbles through a mouth hidden under a jungle of dirty facial hair.

  “What happened?” I ask, keeping my distance.

  He looks at the space that used to be occupied by a leg. “I was in Fallujah,” he begins. He’s pretty messed up so he repeats lots of the story, but I get the gist. It’s like the stories I’ve heard Victor and Dad tell many times. Wrong place. Wrong time. I’d add wrong war.

  “Then what?”

  He starts to tell the story again from the beginning, but that’s not what I need to know.

  “No, I meant what happened after. Why are you here? I know the VA has—”

  His response is mostly four letter words, cursing the VA, the government, but mostly the Marines for letting him down. “Always faithful, my ass. Worst decision I ever made.”

  “Joining the Marines?”

  “No, leaving. There I was somebody. Here, I’m nothing.”

  29

  JULY 1 / WEDNESDAY MORNING

  “Double time, Rosie,” Dad yells over the noise of the alarm on my phone. I’ve been dressed for hours since I never really slept last night, haunted by the fear of nightmares about Dad dying if I closed my eyes.

  “I’m ready,” I shout back. If I shout the lie, does that mean it is true?

  The knob turns easily since Dad removed the lock. He walks into my room slowly, without a word. He shuts the door behind him and pulls up a chair next to my bed. I sit up.

  “You look nice,” Dad says.

  “So do you.” He’s in the blue dress uniform for the flight to South Carolina. Since I rejoined my family, I’ve learned some of the details about how long he’ll be back in basic (six weeks) and where he’ll head after that (back to San Diego) until he’s deployed, most likely—because of his experience—to a unit overseas.

  “I’m sorry about everything,” I tell him for the hundredth time it seems, certainly a hundred more times this summer than I’d ever said it before in my life. “Things just got out of control.”

  He puts his hand on my shoulder. Even though he’s strong, the hand lies softly. “Rosie, I should’ve talked this over with all of you before announcing my decision, so I’m to blame as well. But I know where I need to be. I know who I am. I’m not a Home Depot manager, I’m not a McDonald’s shift leader, and I’m not even a stay-at-home dad. I’m a warrior. I fight to defend my country. I’m a Marine always.”

  “And always faithful.”

  “I know you won’t believe this,” he says, which means he expects me to. “But I’m doing this for you, for Lucinda, and especially for Chavo. I’d rather have you growing up without me here, but knowing I did something more important than hanging around until I become a person I don’t want to be. Until I turn into Victor or somebody like that. You understand?”

  I think about the homeless guy on the beach. Did he have a family?

  “Yeah, actually, I do.”

  30

  JULY 4 / SATURDAY LATE MORNING

  “I can’t see!” Chavo shouts. Lucinda and I hoist him up for a moment as another high school ROTC unit marches by. I’ve yet to see the one from my school; I’ve yet to see Miguel.

  “Do you remember that parade where it rained?” Lucinda asked. “Dad was in it.”

  “I remember them all,” I say, almost having to shout over the noise from the crowd and the marching bands. The ones I remember most are the ones where Dad was home.

  Chavo’s heavy and I let him slide to the ground to rest my arms.

  “I still can’t see!” Chavo shouts. Too bad because he’s missing quite the show, but he’s got plenty of them in his future. If Dad gets what he wants, Chavo will march in one himself.

  “Let me have him,” Mom says. She takes him from us and puts him on her shoulders. Mom’s not much taller, but she sure is stronger. She’s had to be, and I guess it’s my turn now. Those were the last words Dad said just before he headed for his flight. “Rosalita, stay strong.”

  I didn’t have time to ask him what he meant by that, but I got a pretty good idea. Go to school. Study. Stop acting out. Be a good sister. Be a good daughter. In short, be who I was before.

  “Is that your school’s unit?” Lucinda points toward the parade.

  I step forward and see the familiar banner. Behind the flag bearers come the officers. Miguel and the other captains lead the other cadets as they march one two oorah down the street.

  “Miguel!” I call out. He doesn’t acknowledge me, or maybe he didn’t hear me. “Miguel!” I call again, but he’s focused on his leadership role, like I should be.

  The parade continues, but I’ve lost interest, like I assume Miguel’s lost interest in me. We stay for another hour until Crown Prince Chavo’s whining hits a fever pitch that even Mom can’t tolerate, so she tells us we’re leaving. And Dad said he’d try to Facetime with us this afternoon. Lucinda and I breathe a sigh of relief.

  But my relief turns to caution when I see Freddie and Tino standing near the corner, laughing at something. I crane my neck. It’s the two of them and a guy with one leg.

  “Meet you at the car,” I tell
my family.

  31

  JULY 4 / SATURDAY EARLY AFTERNOON

  “Look who’s here, ese,” Tino cracks to Freddie when they see me. They pull the homeless guy with them into an alley.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask Tino, following. Freddie, as always, just shrugs. About the only time he talks is when he’s making a sale. Tino doesn’t answer me either. He owes me nothing. I get it.

  “You okay?” I ask the homeless guy. He slides down against the wall of the alley, landing on a ground covered with garbage. Good citizens crowd the sidewalk today so the back alleys belong to the Tino types.

  “He’s fine, or about to be.” Tino hands the guy a packet of white powder. In return, the homeless guy hands Tino not loose change but a crisp bill.

  Something kicks in. “You don’t need that,” I tell the guy. “Stay strong.”

  This cracks Tino and Freddie. “He’s strong. He’s a Marine,” Tino says. “So you think this is how your old man is going to end up, Rosie? High as a kite yet still on the ground.”

  I reach for the packet, but the vet buries it in the pocket of his torn jeans.

  “Stay out of my business,” Tino says. “You had a chance. You just needed to—”

  “I don’t need anything from you, Tino.”

  “That’s right, you got it all,” Tino says and then starts mocking me, telling Freddie and the vet all the stuff I told him when I was high. I don’t remember saying most of it, although they were things I felt when I was at my lowest. “All those Marine guys are so stupid.”

  “Shut up, Tino,” I hiss.

  “I mean marching off to some war, getting killed for no reason, just—”

  “What do you think the NCA is? How is that different?”

  Tino stares at me. “We die for family, not for country. Family Forever!”

  I stare back at Tino. His look is so hard for someone so young. The vet looks older than his years as well. Wars on the streets and overseas age a person too fast. Like them, like me.