By Ignasi del Mont
The beads of sweat had just begun to roll down the sides of the glass of oj and vodka. Untouched, the drink sat on the counter in front of Beto.
About 25, Chicano. His hair cut high and tight on Pendleton that afternoon. Bushy unibrow.
Luke knew the look. He had seen it a hundred times. The tired look of lonesomeness and boredom waiting to be somewhere else. Luke had gone to the bar near the pier in Oceanside, expecting to meet a former classmate. The worn carpet smelt of spilt rum and cheap tequila. The classmate never showed. Muffled conversation drifted through the room. Ice clinked in highball glasses and a Seinfeld rerun played on TV. Even here, Luke knew to listen.
He took a seat beside the Marine.
“You coming or going?” Luke asked, already knowing the answer.
The Marine hesitated, not sure he wanted company.
“Both. Back from Afghanistan, headed to Brownsville. Combat to the recruiting desk.”
They sat without a word. Long enough for the silence to become comfortable again.
“Looks like you left something back in Kabul.”
Luke waited.
“You lose somebody?”
He sat silently long enough so that he was about to apologize for probing when the Marine exhaled, “I walked away.” Barely muttered. A long pause, then declared, “He was never mine.” There it was. Unredacted now. Exposed to sunlight.
Beto mumbled, “I swore to myself I’d never tell a soul.”
Luke didn’t realize it then in Oceanside, but something shifted that night not only in Beto but inside himself. Beto needed a witness to his pain and Luke listened. He listened as he had learned to listen as a child. Knowing God’s voice spoke in unexpected places.
Two decades passed. The postings changed. The countries and the wars changed. The young men who witnessed unspeakable horrors and uncelebrated courage returned home to mothers and wives who would never understand. Luke concealed Beto’s story inside himself, a piece of beautiful shrapnel. Every so often Luke met someone who reminded him of Beto, someone with honor and the same understanding that the bonds forged in war are not always meant to survive in peace.
Brownsville. It sprawls right up to the border. The Rio Bravo then contains it there. From the time he was seven Beto grew up in his grandfather’s house. Not really a home, but it was more than the motel room Family Services removed him from after he showed up at Mrs. Ruby’s door one day after school carrying his two year old half brother and asking if she had any milk.
Their mother had been gone from the motel room when Beto walked to school that morning. And she was gone when he came home that afternoon. Jason was hungry and his diaper needed changing. There was no food in the room, let alone a fresh diaper. Mrs. Ruby fed the two boys, cleaned them up and called Family Services. The clip-board carrying social worker asked Beto if he was worried about where his mother was. Beto disarmed her. Just said, “No, I worry about my little brother when I’m at school.”
Beto’s mom not being around was not at all unusual. In fact, her being gone wasn’t such a bad thing. When she was in the room, a string of expressionless men came and went. When he heard the knock on the flimsy motel room door Beto knew to grab a stuffed bear, crackers for Jason and a flashlight. They waited in the locked bathroom, lights out till the men left and Pilar’s rustilings quieted as she fell into a stupor.
The social worker smelled clean, like his teacher at school. She knelt down to talk and gave him Coke and pretzels in her office. He was going to spend the night with his grandfather. He knew he had a grandfather but had never met him. They called him Peca; short for El Pecador. He had managed a corner bar in El Paso by that name till ten years ago when he came back to Brownsville. Peca spoke only when angry. Love, if it was there, showed up in long-ago-learned Pentecostal Bible verses, a thick vaquero belt and backhand discipline across the face. A slam against the wall when a simple “don’t do that” would have been enough. Beto learned to keep his head low and protect Jason. What he learned more than anything though was that flinching rewarded Peca’s cruelty.
Luke thought of his own son, Stan. A week earlier, he had held his hand as they walked to his first day of kindergarten. A shudder tried to pass through him, but Luke ignored it. He inhaled, filling his chest, and turned his head to look at Beto as he spoke. Two decades later Stan would be the one to convince Luke that Beto’s story needed to be told.
At least there was food and there was no hiding with Jason in the bathroom anymore.
His cousin, Luis, was 14 when he moved into Peca’s. Beto was 8. The domination and abuse started the first day Peca got drunk. Peca should have seen it. If he did, he looked the other way. Luis punched and over-powered Beto… then closed the door behind him after taking Beto into his bedroom. Every afternoon. Until Luis lost interest when Beto showed signs of becoming a man. The day Luis’s eyes turned to Jason, Beto took Peca’s Remington down from the rack in the living room, loaded it with buckshot, pointed it straight at Luis’s head and promised. “If you ever touch him, I won’t call the police.”
Luis moved out before Peca got home that evening.
Jason later went to live in a loving home with one of his paternal aunts in Austin. Beto felt the emptiness but knew what was best for Jason.
As soon as Beto could get a Certificate of Age from the State, he started bussing tables and washing dishes on the night shift at the Red Lobster near Rivera High. Before he could drive, he scraped together the 300 bucks to buy the ‘89 Buick Apollo sitting in the neighbor’s yard. Rusting and missing a passenger door handle, it ran, barely. He parked it beside the loading dock in back of the restaurant and slept in the backseat with a buck knife under his pillow. Showered at the school gym, lived off tips and ate the left-overs from customers’ plates.
It was now September of what should have been Beto’s junior year at Rivera when he walked up to the front register and asked Marco if he could work some day shifts. Marco, now in his thirties, kind and tired with a wife and two toddlers, had come from Zocoalco to live with his grandmother when he was twelve. He was no stranger to finding a path without bootstraps. He had started as a busboy like Beto and was now a regional manager.
Marco stopped stacking the booster chairs in the foyer and looked at Beto. He was thinking how to respond. “You want day shifts?”
“Yeah.” Beto repeated.
After a pause Marco looked at Beto and asked “Mijo, what about school?”
Beto looked down, ashamed, “Nobody to sign me in.”
The next pause was longer. Marco betrayed a flash of anger in his face as the unfairness of his own struggles broke through. He quickly suppressed his wrath knowing this wasn’t the time and realizing long ago that fairness was make-believe.
“OK buddy, here’s the deal. I’m going to school with you Monday and signing you in. If anyone asks, I’m your dad. You go to school, you can work doubles on weekends if you want ‘em, and you have three weeknights.”
At 7 o’clock , Marco buttoned up the yellow linen guayabera his wife, Gladys, had just ironed. She reminded him that he last wore the shirt to his son’s bautizo one year ago. And fastened the last button he’d missed. Marco walked into the school office, his index finger tracing the sharp edges of Beto’s birth certificate in his hand and introduced himself as Martin Pedrosa. He kept a straight face. No questions were asked.
From that day till graduation Beto split his days between the Red Lobster and the classroom at Rivera High, and his nights in the Apollo. Beto kept his agreement with Marco and his living arrangements to himself. It was May. Beto was seventeen when he walked into the Rivera High courtyard the morning he realized he had some say in his future.
That! Beto knew.
The Marine recruiter in dress blues. Beto had seen those guys before on posters, but never in real life. And the posters were always of a good looking blond White guy or a black dude. This guy standing, breathing in front of him was Tejano. Like him. About ten years older. Brown skin. Dark eyes. Broad shoulders. Clean shaven, pressed blue trousers with a blood stripe where an ordinary seam should have been. Regulation tight haircut with his white conver placed just right. Beto stopped.
“That…that’s what I want to be. Nobody’s gonna mess with him.”
Seeing the look on Beto’s face, Corporal Maldonado knew. Beto needed to graduate. Maldonado invited him to the recruiting office.
Only Marco showed up at his high school graduation. Beto shook his hand and told him “You’re a good man.” That was enough.
The day after graduation Beto headed to MCRD San Diego for boot. While the other recruits broke, Beto thrived, never cracked. Not when the drill sergeants were screaming two inches from his face with the smell of Egg McMuffin and coffee still on their breath. Not during watch when his buddy dozed off. He didn’t snitch either. Just gave him a discreet nudge with his elbow and told him it was his turn to walk the line. Not when he belly-crawled on gravel till his knees and elbows bled, nor on the day after he crawled through poison oak in his silkies. The doc wanted him to go to the ER, but Beto wouldn’t make anyone else cover his watch. The other Marines noticed, the drill instructors noticed. “Pedrosa. He don’t flinch.” “He don’t even blink. Do you even feel anything?”
“I’m used to worse,” Beto shrugged. “This is cake.”
It wasn’t a boast and it wasn’t a lie. With Peca and Luis it was personal. Here it had meaning. “Bird ain’t shitting on me. It’s just shitting.”
While the other Marines wrote to girlfriends, wives or their moms, Beto looked forward to the next day’s training: breaking down his rifle and putting it back together in record time, drilling till his arms went numb, range, getting awakened at 0300, sleeping in a standing position, chowing in five minutes then PT till he puked. He sometimes woke in the middle of the night startling at a sound only to feel comfort that he was finally in the safest place he had ever known.
Luke didn’t decide overnight. And it wasn’t a decision so much as a realization. It was how Beto had suffered through so much yet lived without bitterness. How even in the inferno he grew up in, he lived with grace and dignity. Luke’s life’s work as a physician dealt in diagnosing and treating suffering, analyzing, and relieving it. Beto’s story wasn’t a clinical case Luke could just file away after dictation. Beto’s story had its own sinew; its own sighs.
When Beto had spoken in that Oceanside bar Luke had listened. Luke listened the way his uncle had taught him to listen forty years before. He listened for that small voice, not the practiced eloquence, not the refined orator, but the quiet one from unexpected mouths. Few heard it. Luke had learned how.
In the years that followed, Beto resurfaced in Luke’s thoughts. On long drives. While he waited for a sick child’s fever to break. Not quite haunting. But Beto returned more often than Luke would have liked. There was something unsettling in it. Luke thought about why Beto had told him. A stranger. Because he was a stranger? What did that mean? He wondered how Caleb must have felt. Luke had never met him, but Caleb was the thread with which Beto’s own story was woven.
Who was this Caleb to have awakened such feelings in a man like Beto?
Nearly two decades after first hearing Beto’s story, Luke sat down at the desk at his uncle’s farmhouse near Metcalf, a place where time had stopped six decades earlier. He started to write. As he formed the words on the paper Beto came to life for him again. The tears that welled in Luke’s eyes startled him. These were tears that never fell when Beto chose to let go of what he loved most.
“How did I first meet him?”
A smile came to Beto’s face. Not the crooked one Luke had seen when Beto was joking around.
“I was already in Afghanistan by then. I kept hearing my unit was getting a new sniper. Snipers. They’re the baddest of badass Marines. And this guy, rumor was, when he enlisted, didn’t even need sniper school. They said he was that good right out of boot. ‘Course he did it anyway. He was twenty-two, one rank under me. Even though I was the guy in charge of the unit I still never found out when somebody was coming till they showed up in the morning in formation.
“I was jogging along the left flank of the formation halfway to the front, calling cadence. I still remember it. My mind… wanders off to this bat I once saw flapping around a cottonwood in broad daylight at the Red Lobster parking lot back in Brownsville. Like ink splattered on blue sky… I’m still wondering what the hell it was doing there. With the sun out.
“Then somebody called out.
‘Oorah, Sarge.’ Surprised me.
“I slowed up and turned around, jogging backwards now, trying to catch who it was. Didn’t recognize the voice. Then there he was. Caleb. The new sniper.
And, oh man….
Cornfed.
Iowa.
Farm boy.
Blond hair.
Blond teeth.
“But his eyes. So fucking blue! Like they didn’t belong there in the desert. Looked like he just walked out of a barn or something.” Beto looked at Luke now. “Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Blue eyes? Big deal..for you, maybe! I’d never seen blue eyes till I went to boot!
“I remember what it felt like. Still feel it now. My cadence probably dropped too long. I don’t know. Felt like everything froze. When I caught my breath, I called back, ‘You forget your damn tractor somewhere, Corporal? What is it?’ He laughed then called back just casual as hell, ‘Just sayin’ Hey.’
“We started hanging out all the time. I mean it’s fucking Afghanistan and there’s not a whole helluva lot to do unless you’re on duty. We went to the gym together. We started sharing meals together. Every meal. Everyday. I’d go to the chow line and they’d hand me two MRE’s. Didn’t even have to ask. ‘One for Brownsville and one for Iowa,’ they’d say. He started racking in my tent. Eventually it was just our tent. We were on different duties so we didn’t usually see each other during the day.
“I never in my life ever went to church or anything. Not even once. Never even prayed. Never. But when he’d go on a mission.” Beto stopped like he was realizing the meaning of what he was about to say for the first time.
“I started praying for him… To make it back… Safe.
“It was a coupla weeks of sharing the tent. October, I think. I walked in after duty. It was real hot that afternoon. Caleb was sitting in the tent, shirt off. He usually stayed in full uniform even in the tent. But his shirt was off that day. He’d gone into Kabul that morning. Came back with new ink. On his chest. He said he got it from the Turk next to the embassy. A hawk. Diving. About to strike. Actually looked hella good.
“‘Dam, bro! You get hit?’
He always laughed at my jokes.”
Beto paused and smiled. That genuine one.
“‘Very funny. How you like it?’
“It looks real. Like it’s gonna fly away.”
“‘Feels weird.’ He was kind of, like, kneading it with his fingertips. Then he goes, ‘You can feel the ink in it.’
“I walked closer to see.
“‘Here, touch it.’ He goes. And moved his hand away so I could. ‘Feel the ink.’
“I reached out. Man! I wanted to touch him so bad. And I did, real light. Cause I felt scared to.
“God! As soon as my fingertips touched his skin. It was like electricity! Like something lit up. I jerked my hand away. My mouth went dry. I didn’t know what was happening… But he grabbed my wrist. Just pulled my hand back. Like he knew… like he felt it too. Pressed my palm against his chest.
He just said, ‘No.’
“My hand was on his chest now and I could feel his heart pounding just like mine was. Then he looked up. Straight into my eyes. Damn! Nobody ever looked into me like that before. Like he could just see everything inside me. I couldn’t close my eyes and I couldn’t look away.
“Just said, ‘Really feel it.’ It seemed like forever.
“Then his hand reached behind my neck, pulled me to him. Kissed me. And I kissed him back. He unbuttoned my blouse. And I eased down. Onto the rack where he was sitting.”
The war kept going. It wouldn’t stop for fifteen more years. But every night in Caleb’s arms Beto felt a safety he never thought possible in this world. In those moments everything was right.
“Hell, I knew it wasn’t gonna last forever. I knew that. That’s why every day counted.
“Afghanistan. Guys younger than me were getting hit. You never knew if you were gonna wake up tomorrow anyway. At night he’d pull his rack right up next to mine. Said my snoring put him to sleep.
“Yeah, the other jars started talking about us. It wasn’t that bad, and I handled it pretty good.
This one smart ass from Kansas goes, “Are y’all Corps-issued soulmates?”
I just walked up to his face. “Yeah, Brazelton, in fact, we are and if you ever make your first friend, let me know what that’s like for you.”
I was better at it than most of the guys and what they really wanted was just to hear my comeback. Like they’d get a ribbon or something for getting owned by me.
“It all settled out though. It was December, you could see your breath. There was Tango activity near Tagab. Delta was out there in this canyon. We got fresh intel that afternoon that they were walkin’ into a kill zone… And their comms were down.
“Caleb was ‘copterin’ out at 2300. BOG 0100. I asked to go, too.
“Caleb, he knew the field. He could just feel it: the maps were off. Like he could always just look and see ridge lines in his head. Just lookin’ at the terrain with nothin’ but the moon.
“We were goin’ anyway. Not a word. Caleb, he just looked at me and we both knew which ridge to take. Six mooj neutralized before 0400. Delta took only one minor hit.
“After that the other jars started saying we shared brainwaves. Like in a good way. Like we were Warrior Legend or something.
“Yeah, everything changed after that. A few guys though didn’t get the memo that we were legit…
This lanky dude comes up and he goes, ‘Are y’all getting married yet?’
“An E2 standing in back heard it. Walks over. Just a boot. Can’t forget him. Never missed a beat, just deadpans, ‘Lacks wit. Overused. Zero impact.’ Shut the lanky dude down, cold. God damn, love that kid. He just turned and got back in line.
“There was this Corporal visiting base once, PA guy from Ohio. Called himself ‘just a hillbilly’. But whip-smart. I told him he oughta be president one day. I heard he’s at Yale now. Law. He just said, ‘I don’t give a damn where they secure their sidearms when they’re on liberty. If I’m in an ambush I want those two Marines in my platoon.’
“Caleb and me. Yeah—We got four months.
“Hell, yeah. I wanted more. But Four. Four months and three days. That’s what we got. Tell you this: Every single one of them mattered.”
Beto stopped. He took the first sip of his drink then set it back down on the counter, looked up at Luke and said he had to go.
Beto didn’t walk away out of shame. He didn’t leave because he was afraid, or because Caleb didn’t love back. He left Caleb for the same reason he loved him.
On the night before he left, their last night together, Beto said it.
“If you asked me to stay, if you left them for us… you wouldn’t be Caleb.”
As Luke finished writing the story in Thomasville he realized how few words Caleb had spoken, at least the ones Beto repeated to him. No “I love you.” No “Don’t leave.” Just “Oorah, Sarge” and “Really feel it.”
When Beto told Luke the story in Oceanside he thought Caleb meant to feel the ink. That’s how Beto told it. Writing in Sonny’s farmhouse Luke finally understood.
He hoped Beto had figured it out too.
There are things Beto shared that I haven’t told here—not out of shame but out of reverence. Those things are his. They’re ours.
Luke’s tears had dried now. Beto’s story was written. Luke felt his absence like the echo of the final note of a song he had grown to love. He knelt and said a prayer for Beto.
I’ve looked for him many times but there’s no trace.
Ignasi del Mont never wanted to be a writer. He was always better at listening. Del Mont has lived in the Deep South, Spain and Puerto Rico and now practices medicine in Southern California. It was his 16 year-old son, Stan, who finally convinced him to sit still long enough to write. Del Mont’s first fiction publication, “Jesús”, appeared in Latinelit earlier this year.