He was a child of American suburbia, who never knew hunger or fear, never lacked shoes, never slept on the floor or the ground, never had to suffer the cold for longer than a short walk, and never knew anyone who did. His family and all his friends’ families had washers and dryers, running water and indoor plumbing, kitchens with ovens and microwaves and refrigerators and freezers and sinks and disposals, air conditioning and central heating, radio and TV.
What little work was done at home—vacuuming floors, cleaning bathrooms, mowing lawns, and so forth—was generally superfluous and unrelated to basic needs. He had never worked hard in his life, nor worked for pay. Adults he knew spent time in offices daily, but their jobs seemed to have little to do with basic needs that he could understand.
There was a taboo, among the middle-class people he grew up among, about talking about how much anyone earned. There was a taboo, too, about talking about religion, since that was a subject about which people disagreed. Since most really important topics have some connection either to money or to religion, most of the conversations were shallow and not very interesting.
Comfort was suffocating his soul, though he could not name his malady. Art—popular music, films, books, the Bible—taught him about other worlds, worlds of want and danger. For example, he learned that there were such people as peasants or farmers, whose labors satisfied man’s most basic needs, yet these people had often struggled to get enough to eat themselves. He heard, too, about soldiers, or the knights of olden days, risking their lives, fighting to protect their countries from the evil ambitions of the proud. These other worlds seemed easier to understand than the one he saw around him. In them, he saw life. In his own surroundings, he saw artificiality.
He blamed himself for his lack of gratitude. But he could not help it. He lived amidst an all-provident machine, called America, that gave him everything, and had no use for the strength that was growing up in him. And this riddle haunted his youth: How had a world once weighed down by grief and pain and want become so weightless, so insubstantial?
Then, like a revelation, came that day of blood and fire. 9/11. He had thought America invulnerable, but she was not. She needed to be defended; his strength had a use. For the first time in his life, he felt that responsibility had been laid upon his shoulders.
He enlisted with the Marines.
He spent thirteen weeks at Parris Island, then was sent to Camp Pendleton, then to Kuwait. The Marines broke them first, then made them tight. Sometimes he wanted to get bitter, but he didn’t. Finally he saw action. He was with the Marine Expeditionary Force that rode into Baghdad, and later in the Second Battle of Fallujah, but most days were nervously quiet. The country made a deep impression on him: the mosques, the call to prayer, the mud and the dust, the feeling that six millennia of history were under his feet, the harsh consonants of the Arabic language, and everywhere the shadow of the old tyranny. He felt glory that they had amazed the world and made history. But he also saw death for the first time, again and again.
He had many comrades in the Marines, and one friend. He met Arturo Reyes at Parris Island, and lost him in the fighting at Fallujah. Four Arabs had come round a corner shooting, and he and Arturo fell to the ground and shot back, and then more Marines behind them shot too, and two of the enemy had fallen, and two fled.
“I’m hit, Luke,” groaned Arturo. “Hit bad.”
“Let me see it.”
“I can’t,” he said in a voice that seemed to bleed. “I can’t turn over.”
And then Luke saw the pool of blood forming beneath his friend’s middle. He saw the speed with which it was growing and became dizzy with alarm. “Arturo… here, let me…” and he tried to turn him over.
“STOP!” It was not Arturo but Arturo’s pain that screamed. Luke let go, but Arturo said, “No, you’re right, it will help. Do it.” And this time he did not scream, and Luke saw the agony of endurance on his face. Arturo’s stomach was riddled with bullet holes. Luke radioed for a med evac that never came.
Time seemed to stand still as he watched his friend’s spirit fight against the pain written on his face. Luke could not have said if it was a minute or an hour, and despite the thunderous rattle of the fighting around them, it seemed in memory as if a solemn silence had hung over that scene. There was a moment when he sensed that a surrender had taken peace, and a new, otherworldly peace had begun to come over his friend, but his desire to hope made him keep doubting his senses. Finally, Arturo smiled at him. The smile was as soft and light as the cotton candy clouds on a summer day.
“Now’s the testing time,” said Arturo. He was struggling still, not against death, but with something else.
Luke did not understand him. That was unusual, for in three years they had talked so much that their conversations would have sounded cryptic to an outsider, yet were understood perfectly by them. But not this. “What do you mean?” Luke asked.
After a long pause Arturo said:
“Now’s the time when I find out whether all that stuff I said I believed is true. Now’s the time when I find out whether I really believed it.”
“You know you believe it.”
Again Arturo was silent for a long time. He was looking, not at Luke, but at the sky. Probably he could not shift the position of his head.
“Do I? Sometimes I think it was all my imagination. Just a castle in the clouds.” And after another long silence he added, “why would they need me there anyway?” Slowly, an expression of trouble settled over Arturo’s face, like snow covering the ground.
It was the first time that Luke, who had turned from an atheist to an agnostic in the Marines, had heard Arturo intimate any doubts about his Christian faith.
The light seemed to grow brighter around them, and Luke said, “God is light. Your soul is light. The world is a cloud, it passes away, but the light stays. ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.’ You remember?”
At this, Arturo turned his face towards Luke, with a wince of pain. He looked at him strangely, and finally said, “You’re right. I’m sorry, I just went crazy for a moment, it’s the pain. ‘The light shines in the darkness…’ Yes, that’s it.” After a little thought, he said, “Write to my mother.”
“Yes, of course, I’ll write to Father Herrera,” said Luke. Arturo’s family didn’t have papers or a permanent address, so Arturo sent his letters to Father Herrera, a little old priest in Piedad, California who knew the migrant families in those parts.
“Tell her I love her, and tell her what a good friend you were to me,” said Arturo.
“I’ll tell her what a good friend you were to me.”
“Tell her about our conversations… I feel like a veil is being stripped away. It’s like when the guns start. I’m afraid, but I feel the glory… The light. I wish I could see my sister one more time. Send my love to her, too. And thank you.” Luke thought Arturo was saying that not to him but to God.
As long as there was still life in it, Luke knelt by Arturo’s body, and his fingers and his face and every hair on his head was precious, and the minutes, and the seconds, had the weight of gold. Then desolation fell on him. Of course he wrote to Esperanza Reyes through Father Herrera, in English and bad Spanish, but he felt he wrote badly. He had a year left to serve with the Marines before he could go to the Central Valley of California to fulfill his promise in person.
Luke’s battalion flew into Los Angeles, and he stayed there three days looking for a used car, then drove north, over the Coastal Mountains, through the desert, through Bakersfield, north on 99, then east on a small road that ran between peach orchards. Just before the foothills of the Sierras, he rolled into Piedad.
The town had about four streets. The people who walked along them, or looked out on them from porches, seemed to be all Mexican. It was late afternoon, hot, bright, and silent. He easily found the little white church. It was unlocked. A short priest, dressed in black, was praying within. Luke sat in a pew and waited.
“Father Herrera?” asked Luke.
“Yes?” His voice was kind, but his eyes were suspicious.
“I wrote to you,” Luke said. “I’m Luke Jevons. Arturo Reyes’ friend, from the Marines.”
Father Herrera struggled to remember, and still seemed suspicious. “You knew Arturo Reyes?” His head reached only the middle of Luke’s chest, and he had a Spanish accent.
“Yes, very well,” said Luke. “We were best friends. I wrote to his mother when he died, only he didn’t have an address for her. Did she get the letter?”
Father Herrera was silent a long time, and wore an expression of inner torment. “It’s hard for me to know who to trust,” he said. “A priest has to know how to keep secrets—things said in the confessional, you know. Only now we have to keep more secrets. It’s hard for me. I’m an old man. I don’t want to be unfair to you, but you see, I can’t take risks when people’s lives are at stake. They separate families. I don’t know what they’ll do next. People have started to fear a knock on the door in the night. I’m afraid that they’re smarter than me, that they’ll make me give someone away… I’m sorry, I don’t want to be unfair to you…”
“Father, don’t apologize. I know you have to be careful about outsiders. Arturo told me all about it. It’s horrible. It was the same thing over there: most of the people are good, but there are a few who are spiteful as spiders, who loved to tattle and torment people. I swear to you, I would never, never betray anyone’s secret, I would never even touch the bastards who do that stuff—“
When Father Herrera heard the word “bastards” he jumped with pious alarm, put an urgent finger to his mouth, and looked around at the walls, as if to see if they had heard the unholy word. Then he looked at his visitor again. “Yes, she got the letter.”
“You can trust me, Father. I want to meet her. I have something else to give her.”
Father Herrera gave Luke an address, and explained to him how to find it.
“Is it… a house?”
“Yes, a small house.”
“Arturo said they didn’t have a house. He said they just… traveled. They lived in migrant worker camps. Sometimes they lived in barns. Sometimes under freeway bridges.”
“It’s true, they did live like that before. But they’ve bought a house. They didn’t tell him, apparently. I think I know why.”
“They’re doing well then?”
“Well, no, not exactly. They bought it for him. They wanted to surprise him when he came home. I don’t know how they managed it. And now…” For a moment Father Herrera’s eyes became a window on a sea of grief that Luke could tell his whole life had been filling. The priest involuntarily murmured a prayer in Spanish that Luke had often heard Arturo say. The words meant How long, O Lord, how long…?
“You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned to joy,” said Luke.
The priest looked at him in surprise.
“It was something Arturo used to say.”
Luke’s car sprayed dust onto the cornfields that faced the Reyes home across a gravel road. He was impressed. It was a small house, but with a well-mown, green lawn, two large shade trees, and roses along the front fence. “Arturo,” he said to the air, “I wish you could have been here.” He walked up the path and knocked. He heard urgent whispers inside before the door opened slowly. A TV was on inside.
“Sir?” asked Esperanza Reyes, whom Luke recognized immediately, though he was surprised by her shortness. Her hair was greyer than in the pictures Luke had seen. Too much greyer. Grief had taken its toll. A year had passed, yet her eyes seemed desperate.
“Señora, mi nombre es Luke Jevons, yo soy el amigo de tu hijo,” said Luke. “Ma’am, my name is Luke Jevons, I was a friend of your son, of Arturo.” And Luke tried to tell her in Spanish, but often stumbled and used English phrases instead, that he had been with Arturo three years, and that he would have come sooner but he could not leave the Marines, and that he had told Luke to send his love to his family. Luke heard a boy laugh at the TV in the next room.
“He was the bravest man I ever knew, the bravest man that any of us ever knew—el fue el hombre mas valiente—but he was always merciful—con mucha… misericordia—and his mind was completely pure—el era puro. He never had dirty thoughts like I did, or told dirty jokes like other Marines did.” Luke felt free to open his heart, knowing that his English would not be understood. “It was the strangest thing at first, I couldn’t understand it, and yet it seemed so natural, too… He had worked so much, I think it was the work that made him pure—el trabajo lo hace puro—in the army, some men are worth two men, and some are worth ten. It’s partly a matter of good shooting and quick thinking. But it’s partly this… this aura of unshakable courage, and it’s contagious. Well, he was worth a hundred men. El vale cien hombres. And everyone knew it. He saved my life twice. Me salvo la vida dos veces. I was nothing next to him, and I tried to be like him so I would be something. I tried to be pure like him, and brave like him, and I couldn’t, but he made me purer and braver than I was. He had a kind of joy too. It seemed to get more intense, the worse things got. El tuvo alegria… And there was a kind of peace about him. He wasn’t restless like I’ve always been… that was probably the work too. He was a hero. Un heroe. And he prayed every day. El oro todos los dias. Dos veces.” He held up two fingers emphatically to show how many times Arturo had prayed, and they both laughed. Luke’s face, and Esperanza’s, were both moist with tears.
She looked at him for a long time, her face radiant with a gratitude and joy that Luke felt as if she were looking at Arturo himself and not at him. She moved towards him and embraced him, seeming hardly to notice what she was doing. Then she spoke.
“Me dicen… que la Guerra no vale la pena, que ella es mala, es ‘imperialismo’…” she began, and Luke did not understand everything but he knew she was speak about the news, and how the war was bad, was imperialism. He realized that she had never dared to write that in her letters to Arturo, but that it had troubled her spirit all this time.
“No, no, forget all that,” he said. “The people who say that are…” he struggled for words even in English. “They are too serious to be honest,” he attempted, and then tried to translate: “Ellos son demasiado seriosos para ser honesto.” But he was not satisfied. “No piensan que querian, si ellos fueron… en el pais de Saddam Hussein. They don’t think what they would want if they lived there themselves… The truth is simpler. El verdad es mas simple. Saddam murdered millions of people. Saddam mato a millones de gente. All the country lived in terror. El pais vivia en el terror. And they are glad he’s gone. They wanted freedom as much as Americans do—or Mexicans. Quieren la libertad, como Americanos y mexicanos. Arturo knew that. Arturo sabia eso.”
“Gracias a Dios!” she said, and it seemed to Luke, though he doubted, that the desperation he had seen in her eyes when he came in had been erased.
Luke took a photograph from the pocket of his shirt. There were three people in it: Arturo, Esperanza, and a girl with long black hair in a blue dress with white stars on it, who was Arturo’s sister, Luisa. “I came to give you this,” he said in Spanish, fluently now because he had prepared these words long before. “I should have sent it with the letter, perhaps, only I was not sure if the letter would reach you, and also, I wanted to keep it with me for a while. It was very dear to me because it reminded me of him. He carried this photograph with him everywhere. It was with him on patrol, and in battles… it was with him when he died…”
Esperanza took the picture, and gazed at it with love. Just then Luke looked up. He had been so absorbed in his conversation with Esperanza that he had not looked about him since just after entering the room. Now he saw her, the girl from the photograph, Luisa, with long black hair that hung down to touch her breasts, a solemn face, piercing eyes, and a light summer dress that hung to the knee.
“He said to send his love to you, too,” said Luke. “El dijo que yo debe enviar su amor…”
“I understood,” she said. And he wondered how long she had been listening, and searched her eyes for an answer.
The Reyes family asked Luke to stay for dinner, and he agreed. Afterwards, as he was driving out of Piedad, he saw a HELP WANTED sign at a gas station. Why not? he thought. He stepped inside to inquire about it. He took the job and managed to rent a basement in the town. Winter came on, and the leaves fell, though the palms stayed green. Sometimes the land was enveloped in fog. And then spring came, and the orchards glistened with fresh yellow-green leaves.
It was late March, and already beginning to be hot, when a red Camaro pulled in between the yellow lines outside the gas station. The driver was stylishly dressed and tall. As he pushed through the glass door of the store, Luke recognized him first.
“Danny!”
“Luke!”
Danny was Luke’s older brother.
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