They grew up in towns with names like Rifle, El Toro, Dover,
Albany, Holly, Pittsburgh, Portland, New York, Kylertown, Bir-
mingham, Milwaukee, Frederick, Philadelphia, De Soto, Kettle-
man City, Tacoma, Soldotna, Barnesville.
They were Marines.
They were in the army.
One was in the navy.
They died in places with names like Quang Tri, Quang Nam,
vietnam l 151
Dinh Tuong. Places with names like Thua Thien, Bihn Dihn,
Gia Dinh.
Two of the soldiers were nineteen.
Two were twenty.
Five were twenty-one.
Two were twenty-two.
Two were twenty-three.
Four were twenty-five.
Two of the men were thirty.
One of them was eighteen. A man barely an hour.
Some were drafted.
Some enlisted.
You’ll get used to it. Blood don’t mean you’ll die.
a f am i ly
Mr. Rede is late in delivering the mail. On Saturdays, he likes to start early, get back home at a decent hour. But today, he feels as if his life is running in slow motion. He is tired, not feeling well, and his arm keeps going numb. He feels as if he is carrying the weight of a dead body. He looks at his watch. It is five o’clock, and he finds himself standing in front of the Espejo house. 1910
Prospect. Gustavo and Charlie are sitting on the steps. They
are talking and laughing. He has known them all their lives. He thinks it is a strange thing to watch the children in the neighborhood grow up. He thinks it is an even stranger thing to be an old man.
Lourdes Espejo smiles to herself as tears run down her face.
She notices the time. She almost laughs. She remembers the
Lorca poem she used to read to Rosario, about the death of
Mejía, the bullfighter. She repeats the last lines of the poem to herself. . .
a f am i ly l 153
¡Ay que terribles cinco de la tarde!
¡Eran las cinco en todos los relojes!
¡Eran las cinco en sombra de la tarde!
She looks at Rosario’s face, half expecting her to nod and say what she always says at the end of the poem. Lorca, how could they have killed him? Such a beautiful man. How could they have killed him? Franco will pay for this in hell. Lourdes breaks down and cries and tells herself, Finish! Finish with these tears! At five o’clock in the afternoon, a las cinco en punto de la tarde, her mother-in-law is dead. She looks back at the difficult road she has traveled. But there is no one there. The travelers are gone.
Xochil is walking home. Her heart is climbing up her throat. She wants to vomit. She wants to renounce her body. What is this
surge of feeling in this strange and savage heart? And what of her mind? Her mind—that too is beautiful and strange and savage. And this boy, this pretend man? He wants only her loyalty?
She will not give him what he does not deserve, what he has not earned, what he has no right to ask. She will not. She stops and sits on the sidewalk. She breathes in and out, and in and out—
then she continues down the street. She wants to tell her mother.
She will not tell her. I will not, will not tell her.
Gustavo and Charlie are quiet, their game over, though there are a hundred songs running through Charlie’s mind. He is happy.
He has spent the afternoon with Gus. It has been a perfect day—
that is what he is thinking. Gustavo sees Mr. Rede. His heart
skips a beat. Perhaps today. He thinks about that notice every day. When he sands down the body of a car, when he smokes a
cigarette, when he wakes in the middle of a dream. A part of him hopes the notice will come. Everything will be official. Another part of him hopes he will get another day’s reprieve. But there
154 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e is no peace in that kind of waiting. He hears himself having a conversation with Mr. Rede as he pretends not to notice or care about the contents of the envelopes.
In Vietnam, it is already September 17. It is seven o’clock in the morning. Camera is sleeping fitfully. He is dreaming he is in a car. He is driving to Canada. He is going to find Stacy. As he drives, the highway turns into a jungle and then he understands he is driving a jeep and there is no more road but he keeps driving through the jungle and suddenly Salvi is sitting next to him.
He notices Salvi is dripping blood like a candle dripping wax, his legs missing. He looks up and sees Salvi’s legs dangling from a tree. Whit shakes him awake. It’s a dream, man. That’s all it is. It’s just a fucking dream.
Octavio is sitting in his leather chair. He is reading an article in Time about the war. . . . Something has happened to the psyche of the American people over the summer. Call it ambivalence, call it confusion, call it impatience, but certainly it is a disease that is quickly overtaking the populace like a bad epidemic. There is, at the root of this sickness, a growing consensus that U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia is aimless, undisciplined, and lacks a cohesive plan. Such direc-tionless is not sitting well with the American people. Added to that, the Vietnam conflict is becoming too costly both in terms of human lives and budgetary resources. Though opposition to the war is growing, there is still no organized . . . He puts the magazine down. He does not have the stomach for this today. He looks up, and suddenly he sees that young man. Trembling. That young man in
Italy—at the end of the war—that look on his face, no pride left, no fear, nothing, just a vacant look, as vacant as the landscape, dreamless, a look that almost begged, Go ahead and kill me. He sees the man, not a man, a boy, not seventeen, a ragged uniform, trembling. He sees his captain offer the man a cigarette, and the
a f am i ly l 155
solider boy taking the cigarette, lighting it, taking the smoke into his lungs, tears falling down his face as he falls to his knees and weeps. He sees his captain lift the boy to his feet. He hears his captain whispering, “It’s okay, son, it’s over now.”
It is five o’clock in the afternoon.
xo ch i l
The sight of the two of them almost made her smile, her broth-
ers, more beautiful than the shadows on the sands of the desert that appeared like embers, burning and haloed; her brothers,
more beautiful than lightning in a night sky, more beautiful even than a boy named Jack Evans. They are more beautiful. Funny that she wasn’t in a hurry to reach them. Hurry had left her
and she felt she had become incapable of moving. She saw Mr.
Rede walk up the steps to their house. She saw Mr. Rede and
Gustavo exchanging small words of greeting, could almost hear
what they were saying: Fine, fine, Mr. Rede, my parents? They’re doing real good. Mr. Rede, he liked asking questions—some of them more innocent than others. She closed her eyes, opened
them, closed them, opened them—the gesture almost mechani-
cal. As she reached the front of her house, Mr. Rede stopped in front of her and smiled. “You’re almost a woman now, Xochil.”
She nodded. “Yes. Almost.”
xo ch i l l 157
“I have a son, you know.”
She nodded. “Yes, I know.”
“You should come over and see him. He’s shy.”
Yes, she thought, shy and nice to look at and cruel and full of himself and carrying too many secrets. She had long ago decided to keep away from him. “I’m shy too,” she said, though they both knew it was something of a lie.
He nodded. She nodded back.
They had the same conversation every time they ran into each
other. That’s what happened when you had the same mailman for
fifteen years, a mailman who lived in the same neighborhood and knew everything about everybody, including what bills they owed and from what catalog they ordered their clothes from. She knew what he would say next. She smi
led to herself and waited for him to say the words.
“I’ve known you and Gustavo since you were three.”
“Yes,” she said, taking away his next line. “I could talk—and
Gustavo couldn’t. Took him a long time to say Mama.”
She noticed he was offended, yes that, offended in that small
and pedestrian kind of way, offended by the fact she’d ruined the ritual that he’d established. She’d transgressed against the order of his universe. “Well,” he said, trying to be graceful, “he certainly knows how to talk now, doesn’t he?”
“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes he even talks to the people he
lives with.” She smiled at him, and it seemed to her that he was a small and pathetic figure of a man. But she thought mean things when she was sad or angry or hurt. She was sorry for the thought.
She didn’t want to think anything bad about Mr. Rede. He was a kind old man and he had always been good to her and she hated
herself for being so mean. She felt a strange pain in her gut and she knew she was going to start crying again—shit, crying, no.
No, no, no and just when she thought the red was beginning to
disappear from the corners of her eyes, the tears were coming
158 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e back. No, not again, what was that, these tears, and why did she just want to say, Jack, Jack, Jack?
He handed her an envelope. “Something for your cuate, ” he said.
She looked up at him. Cuate. What a strange equivalent for twin. But she liked the slang word in Spanish. It sounded almost like cuete. Firecracker. Also a word for drunk. She laughed to herself.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine,” she said. She stared at the envelope in her hand.
He smiled. “I guess that letter just got stuck in my hand. Give it to him, will you?”
Xochil stared at the letter, then shoved it back into his hand.
“Not my job,” she said quietly. She turned up the sidewalk and headed toward the house. I’m mean, I’m mean. Today, I’m just plain mean.
She didn’t hear what he said as she walked away. All she could hear was Charlie’s voice, his laughter, but it was far and it felt as though she were losing her hearing or perhaps her mind, no, not her mind, not that, just her control, and that made her heart skip a beat, she was good at that, control, and it made
her afraid when she lost it, control, a word, a thing, a gene, a way of living she’d inherited from her mother and she half
wondered why she’d been named Xochil instead of Lourdes,
and then the thought occurred to her that her mother had at-
tempted to free her from the old religion and it was odd that
she should be thinking such a strange thing when really she
wanted to be empty, hollow, heartless, empty of love, empty of hate, empty of words, empty of tears, just empty. A car with
no gas. A church with no believers. No, no, no, no, no. All she wanted to feel was Jack’s hands, his hands, God, anywhere, feel them anywhere on her body, her face, her waist, anywhere, and
then the tears were hotter than anything she’d ever felt—like a
xo ch i l l 159
brand on a calf, like a cigarette being put out on her skin, and she noticed the look on Gustavo’s face as she walked past him
and into the house.
She heard his voice as she shut the door: “Xochil?”
g us t avo. charl ie .
Mr. Rede walked back up the walkway to the Espejo house. He
squinted his eyes and shook his head. “Something wrong with
your sister?”
“She’s a girl.” Gustavo smiled, his teeth almost glowing.
Mr. Rede smiled back. “Must be losing my touch. Last week
I delivered Mrs. Navarro’s social security check to Mrs. Casillas.
Not good—they don’t get along. Haven’t heard the end of it. If I do it again, Mrs. Navarro swears she’ll have my job.” He shook his head. “Here’s one more for you, got it mixed up with another batch.” He glanced at the letter as he handed it over.
Gustavo took it casually and tossed it alongside the rest of
the mail.
Mr. Rede stared at the pile and almost winced—as if treating
the U.S. mail so matter-of-factly translated into disrespect for his profession. “It looks important,” he said.
Gustavo looked up at Mr. Rede from the place where he was
g us t avo. charl ie . l 161
sitting on the steps. He was looking tired, but his eyes were full of questions. “We’re the Espejos,” Gustavo said, something firm in his voice, something playful too. “We don’t get important mail in this house.”
“It’s from the government.”
“We don’t know anyone in the government.”
“It’s addressed to you, Gustavo.”
Gustavo was impervious to Mr. Rede’s probing. “I probably
forgot to pay my taxes. Or maybe it’s from the president. Maybe he wants to ask my advice about something.”
Mr. Rede shook his head. “Young people. I don’t know. You
and your sister, sometimes I think—well, what are you going to do? You should have more respect.”
Gustavo nodded. “Yes, sir, I think you’re right.” That’s what
he always told his father, I think you’re right, sir, I think you may be right, sir, I think you may be . . .
Mr. Rede kept himself from frowning. “Well, you have your-
self a nice afternoon young man.”
Gustavo gestured with his chin and watched Mr. Rede walk
toward the next house. “He’s getting old.”
“He’s all right.” Charlie looked over at his brother. “He’s nice.”
“Everyone’s nice.”
“Knock it off, Gus.”
“Don’t you just want to hit someone sometimes, Charlie?”
“Just you.”
They smiled at each other.
“Mr. Rede thinks you’re disrespectful.”
“I am disrespectful.”
“Not really.”
“Yes, really.”
Charlie stretched his chin to take a look at Gustavo’s let-
ter—the one that was from the government. “Are you going to
open it?”
162 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e
“Later,” he said. He took the letter, then hopped down the
stairs. He pulled on his leather boots. “Think I’ll take a walk.” He lit a cigarette and flashed his brother the peace sign.
Charlie watched him as he walked down the street. It seemed
like his brother was always moving away just when he thought
he was getting close to him. Moving away and never never never coming back. He wanted to run after him, Come home come home, an illogical panic sweeping over him like a sudden gust moving over a still desert. He wondered where and why all these things came from, these fears he had inside him as if someone had scattered weeds everywhere inside his body and they grew big some-
times and grabbed and clawed at him, grabbing and choking him
until he felt like he would suffocate. He took a deep breath and then another. He’s only walking down the street.
xo ch i l
Where’s Mom?”
“She’s tending to your grandmother.”
Xochil nodded.
Her father studied her for an instant. “You were with that
boy.” It was neither a question nor an accusation. Her father liked that boy.
“Yes.”
“Next time invite him to come over. There’s no need to meet
in alleys.”
“Parks,” she said. “I don’t like alleys.”
“Yes, I remember. Okay, parks. You have a home.”
She nodded.
“He’s a good boy.”
Her father loved good boys. “Yes. He like
s guns.”
“What?”
“I said he likes guns.”
164 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e
“That’s a strange thing to say.”
“He’s a strange boy.”
“You don’t like him?”
“Sure. Everyone likes him.”
“Well, he seems easy enough to like.”
“If you like guns.”
“What is this thing about guns?”
“I don’t like them.”
“Well, he’s a boy, not a gun.” He laughed to himself. “Just like your mother.”
She wanted to laugh. Her conversations with her father were
often like this. Not conversations at all. “Next time I’ll ask him to come over.”
He nodded and turned back to his book.
She was glad he didn’t notice that she’d been crying. It wasn’t always bad that he didn’t notice things.
She went looking for her mother.
Her mother noticed everything.
a b e
Shit birds. That’s what they call the guys who can’t cut it. I see a couple of them. I watch them, study them. I don’t really feel anything for them. I don’t. I can’t. Already, I see two shit birds.
Barely hanging on. Maybe they’ll last a week. Maybe. Maybe
ten days. And then they’ll start them over at day one. They’ll start them over and over until they’re strong. Whatever it fucking takes. That’s how it is.
Today, a guy named Gonzalez, DI stepped all over him. Gon-
zalez, he has to learn. Likes to talk. Likes to joke around. Made fun of the DI in the shower, said he was born with very little between his fucking legs and he’s been pissed off ever since. That was Gonzalez’s explanation. Gonzalez’s explanation for everything boiled down to sex. He was Freud from the fucking barrio.
We laughed. We all laughed. It was our little moment.
But Gonzalez didn’t know when to quit. He laughed. In front
of the DI. That was his fucking sin. He fell over laughing. The
166 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e son of a bitch made us all laugh. “You think that’s fucking funny, maggots? You’re nothing but stink on shit. All of you.”
We all paid. Goddamn it, we paid for the rest of the day. And
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