Mexico Read online

  This morning it is Memorial Day, and a full year has passed since I left Mexico. I told the other men in my unit, after the battle where Charlie died, what the colonel had ordered me to do. None of the men would believe me, or they chose not to hear. The army wrote up a report about the “incident,” as they called it, and they said that after a case of accidental “friendly fire”—as they call such shots from us when we hit our own—the soldier, Charlie Reynolds, was lightly wounded and then taken out by the members of the Sosa Cartel. The description is completely accurate as to what happened, physically, and yet it is completely false. The colonel had me removed from the unit. He said I had done great service to my country but that I was getting tired and needed a rest. The army gave me a Silver Star Medal for the many kills I had made as a sharpshooter, and sent me home.

  Back home in Wichita, I got to thinking about truth and lies. I thought about My Country ’Tis of Thee Sweet Land of Liberty and shooting and taking out those thirty-nine people in Mexico, by my hand, by my own will, by my own following of commands and orders, by my own volition, by my own feelings of honor and duty, and so on and so forth, and what all that meant. How, exactly, did killing some drug dealers help to raise the American flag high? Where was one drug user who was using drugs less because of any one of those men I had killed? The drugs would come as long as the people wanted them. Remove one drug dealer and another will mushroom up. And another. And another. Every person smoking a joint, every person snorting coke or injecting or snorting heroin, knows what they are doing, knows they are tied into the drug trade, and yet they are not going to stop doing what they are doing. The feeling of getting high is too powerful, too good. The liquid train of drugs will forever come into the country as long as people want to party, as long as people are sad, as long as people feel they have nowhere to turn in their hour of need, when God and Jesus and nothing above will seem to quiet the pain within.

  I began to deeply question what I had been a part of. I began to ride down the wide avenues of my city of Wichita, so neat and clean, each road wide enough to have a military parade, the roads paved and graded, and the box stores of Walmart and Best Buy and one soulless mall after another spreading out in an infinite plain of vapid consumption, while there was no money, I had been told, to send me to college without me joining the ROTC. I was not complaining. I was not whining. I was not saying the government should give me a handout. I was not saying that I had never wanted to be an Eagle Scout or a Boy Scout. But what kind of country, I began to wonder, makes it easier for you to get an education if you are willing to kill than if you want to talk about peace?

  After Mexico, I couldn’t stand living with my father. That was no longer an option. I took an apartment for myself. I lay in bed reading, thinking, and recalling the faces of all thirty-nine of the men that I took out with single bullets. I began to drink hard. I drank Jack Daniel’s first, and then moved on to cheaper schnapps. For the better part of six months I drank. And then I saw a homeless vet walking down the street, carrying all his possessions in a shopping cart, wandering from here to nowhere, as I’m sure you’ve seen so many times before. Before I had gone down to Mexico, I had looked at those homeless vets as failures, as aberrations, guys without discipline who just couldn’t hold it together. Not like me. I was a real solider. A kick-ass soldier. I was America’s finest. I was bred to be the best. Yada, yada. Just like on the army recruitment billboard that I saw every day in my neighborhood that towered above the street, and over the vets who wandered to the vet thrift store to get some clothes. I saw that homeless vet, and I was tempted to give him my alcohol. I no longer judged him. I went home and poured out all the booze into the toilet. Who dares to judge a homeless vet like that on the street, or to even feel pity for him, until he has been in battle?

  This morning, I saw the front page of the newspaper. There was a glowing, patriotic photo of a soldier at Dover Air Force Base prepping an empty dress-uniform to be placed inside the casket of a fallen soldier. The message of the photo was that America takes care of its own. We make sure we treat our soldiers right.

  I hopped in the truck my father had said he didn’t need anymore. It was an old, beat-up Chevy pickup, with dents on the back from being used on a farm outside of Wichita, moving equipment. I didn’t know where I was going to go, at first. I drove around the endless desert of strip malls, along the flat, wide avenues of the city, passing an International House of Pancakes then a Staples, a McDonald’s, a Target, a Hog Wild BBQ, a pawn shop and then another pawn shop and then another. I got out of the car at the A-OK Pawn Shop holding my medal for my tour of duty in Mexico in my hand, and walked into the shop and put it on the counter and asked, “How much for this?”

  “This? You sure you want to sell this?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. How much?”

  “Truth be told,” the man at the counter said, “the value is more in what it means than in what you can sell it for. I can’t really get all that much money for a medal. You’d be better off going to a specialty collector than trying to sell it in a pawn shop.”

  I looked around at the interior of the store, old electric guitars from dreams of making it big in a band, old tools from mechanics who couldn’t find jobs anymore in construction during the recession, or who had been laid off from the airplane factories because of Chinese competition. I saw weed whackers that looked like they may or may not be able to run anymore, things discarded from garages stuffed with too much junk. I saw merchandise that looked like it had been sold by small-time drug dealers—high-end speakers way too scuffed-up to have ever been owned by someone who had real money from a legal job. I saw videos and DVDs, row upon row of movies no longer wanted, that had been seen, digested, and found not worthy of holding on to. I saw people overweight at the checkout counter buying things on credit cards. I saw a man with a dark tan, with a long mustache falling from side to side and a part down the middle, who looked like the peak of his life had been serving in the military and now he was smoking two packs a day and trying to hold down a job to feed his family. I saw all this as I looked around the A-OK Pawn Shop, with wedding rings that were being sold after marriages had gone sour, diamonds that no longer shined.

  A young, disillusioned man could look at this forever, bitter, seeing things he wanted to see reflected back at him, seeing his own reflection in objects. And then it was that I saw my own true reflection, in a mirror between the section of the store devoted to tools and the section devoted to jewelry. I looked up behind the man working at the jewelry section, who had told me my medal might not be worth as much as everyone thought, and I caught the reflection of myself. There was a young man looking too tired, too dejected for his age, his short hair no longer looking buzzed, no longer neat and orderly, no longer standing on the drill field at attention. I saw the bags of sleeplessness around the lower edges of his eyes, and the brown pupils that seemed so dark they swallowed into the iris. What was I doing in this pawn shop? How did I get here? I picked up the medal from the counter where I had left it while I wandered around the store. It was time for me to find that core of humanity inside me, again. It was time to erase the image I had seen of myself in the mirror. I picked up an old acoustic guitar, hidden beneath the electric guitars. It was old and used, but there was still life in it. I strummed on the guitar. I didn’t know how to strum well, but I kept picking at the guitar for a while, until the man in the store came over and said to me, “You seem to play pretty well.”

  I went up to the counter and bought the guitar and went outside and put it carefully in the back of the pickup. I drove out to Charlie’s grave, on the edge of town, at the small plot where he had been buried a little over a year ago. There was his tombstone, with plastic flowers still fresh. The military wouldn’t give him a burial. They had simply sent the body home.

  “Charlie, you fucked up,” I said, “you wanted too much, you got greedy. But they did you wrong.” I looked down at the grave. “I did you wrong.” I left the guitar on his g
rave, and I went home knowing I was going to go back to school. There were other ways to “Be All That You Can Be.” If I had made it as far as winning a medal as a soldier, I was going to be far more as a civilian.

  THE PAINTING PROFESSOR

  In Puebla, the professor was losing his mind. After the bullets of the night before had quieted down, he went outside of his compound to inspect the walls of the fortress of his studio. The studio had been a factory, once. Fifteen feet high, thick walls bordered the compound, and there were small watchtowers on each corner where the guards who had once protected the factory could take aim and fire, if necessary. More likely, they hadn’t been protecting the factory from theft, but rather keeping out unionized workers in the old days, the professor had thought, when he’d first bought the place.

  He was a professor of painting in Mexico City, and he had bought the studio in the city of Puebla, an hour and a half away, in the late ’70s, when traffic was less bad and it didn’t take so long to get out of town to his private painting retreat. The factory had been a sock production facility. The interior of the compound had three buildings. One still had the old, rusted metal molds, like upside-down Christmas socks, which threads were wrapped around. It was a bit of a mystery what the metal figures were for, but they looked like a garden of statues to the professor, like pinwheels floating in the air in the first building. He had left the space alone as a monument to what the compound had originally been. In the second building, he had stored his paintings for thirty-five years and used the wide, industrial open space as a studio. Old fiberglass patched the tin of the roof here and there, letting in a tired light. It was like his brain, he thought, fragments of light coming in and bending, diffused. His thoughts were this way, no longer clear and focused the way they once had been. He was in his mid-sixties. For a man who had been so alert only three years ago, the increasing dullness of his mind, the feeling he was no longer who he had only just been, came to him regularly—and more than usual now, as he looked up at the bullet holes in the front wall of his compound. He would have to do something about the holes. He would have to climb up a ladder and patch them up and paint them over with the creamy, pink adobe he had selected for the outside of his home. He had chosen the color because it was innocuous, keeping the world at bay, he’d hoped, shutting out the world enough so he could be left alone inside his artistic compound, but now, it seemed, the gang warfare in the neighborhood wasn’t going to leave him alone.

  Where had his mind gone? he wondered, looking up at the wall where the chunk of plaster was missing, high up, just where a stray bullet had wandered, divotting a piece of the old adobe. Stephen Hawking, the physicist, said there were infinite black holes in the universe. But the holes were supposed to be out there, somewhere up in the heavens. He pointed up at the sky, moving his finger up from where he had picked at the wall, cursing the empty space of plaster. So many holes. They were supposed to be affecting the minds of others, and now he couldn’t deny the accumulation of the last three years, the feeling in the morning that he couldn’t grasp the newspaper firmly, the feeling he would begin an article and then his mind would wander and he would put the paper down and find he was just staring into space, lost in reverie, but with no beauty to the reverie, just a focus of the mind on things that were too small, like dust motes floating in the air.

  His second wife was inside. His first wife had been more than dutiful to him. His first wife had given him two beautiful daughters, even if the younger one found it difficult to find work, after being laid off as a flight attendant. His first wife had watched him rise in the painting world, evolving from a young, modern painter who painted with bright, bold colors, with patterns that had made him a figure in the Mexican art scene of the early ’70s, into a painter that had moved on to scenes with abstract backgrounds with shades and folds so subtle they felt as detailed in their brushstrokes as the fabric in a painting by Caravaggio. Most abstract painters relied on quick, violent brushstrokes, but he’d moved the compositions forward with the elaborate shadings of light and dark, integrating the techniques of Old World masters he had found in Italy, into modern fantasy spaces as wide and open as the skies of the universe. That technique wasn’t the part his first wife had to be tolerant of. Those were the things that had made him somewhat famous—a painter’s painter. It was his drinking. He was a brooder. He looked for the shadow under every rock. He delighted in pointing out the darkness of the sky to the audiences of Mexico, rendered in such precision and with so much powerful energy that even those who thought he should be painting political art—which he despised—had to admit his brilliance. The students had loved him and clamored to be in his small painting studio, where he let in only six students every year. But there were times when he wouldn’t show up in class for weeks, when the demons in his mind would take over, when he would simply sit in his room and drink. And then there had been the multiple affairs he had had with his students.

  Which is how he had arrived at his second wife, a very mediocre painter, one he would normally never have taken into his own studio, but whom he was so attracted to he couldn’t say no. He had slept with at least a dozen of his former students by the time he met her. His second wife was good to him, she took care of him, and especially now that his mind was less reliable.

  A shopkeeper from next door came out to look at the professor looking up at the bullet holes in the wall. “It’s getting worse,” the shopkeeper said. “Last night there were eight of them. I watched them from the window of the store. I had the lights off and I could see them, spraying gunfire one at the other. Didn’t you see them?”

  “Oh yes, I saw them,” Professor Mauricio Sanchez said. When the gunshots had started, at first he had thought it was more of the nightmares, which seemed to echo through his mind too frequently, these days. But then he’d realized it wasn’t the case. He’d told his wife, Ana, to stay in bed, to close her eyes and pretend not to hear. Then he’d climbed up the strange, twisting staircase of the third building of the compound, which he had renovated, where he’d created a house of lofts and spaces that felt like the winding layout of a medieval Spanish town.

  From the rooftop patio he’d peeked over the rim of the wall, the mercury lights in the distance barely giving much sense of the shooters below. The gang members crouched behind cars on both sides of the road that went out of town. He had bought the factory because it was cheap, and it was far from the beautiful, Colonial center of Puebla. The men shot in rapid bursts. He could barely see the car just below him, in front of the compound wall of his studio, but he had a clear view of the cars across the way, where bullets blew through the glass of an old white Ford station wagon. The glass popped and fell within. At least one man was killed. The bullets went past the car into the front of a local hardware store, blowing holes in the glass behind the security bars that were meant to keep out criminals. After the spraying of bullets back and forth, like the roar of infected lions screaming at each other, one of the cars suddenly drove off, tires tearing against the wet pavement, where water had collected from the summer rains. The cancer was gone, for the moment. It was like one of the increasingly frequent headaches that came and went inside Mauricio’s brain. They came and rattled. They banged at his temple. And just like the psychiatrists that couldn’t give him any medicine that would completely control the headaches, there was no law and order, no police that came—or that would come—to solve the growing violence in his neighborhood.

  Last night, in front of that fucking professor’s house, that was one fuck of a gun battle I was in, man. That old man, he’s been in the neighborhood forever. He’s been here since before I was born. This neighborhood is a nothing place, man. This neighborhood is just on the road out of town. I don’t know why the fuck he would ever have wanted to come here. I saw the professor last night, looking down at us while we was shooting, and I thought, Why does that guy get to sit up there so nice and comfortable-looking? He was pretending we couldn’t see him. He kept peeking over th
e edge of the roof of his building. I mean what the fuck does he think, that we’re just a bunch of cattle down here that can’t see nothing? I could have shot that motherfucker to kingdom come last night. I thought about it, too, just to put him in his place. That’s why I shot a few bullets up high on the wall, to let him know we can take him out anytime. But I got so much more important things going on than that old cabrón, you know what I mean?