Names on a Map
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
n ame s
o n a ma p
a n ovel
BENJAMIN ALIRE SÁENZ
for Ruben García,
whose name is holy on my lips,
and (again) for Patricia,
who brought me out of exile
I still want to believe we will cure the human heart.
—C. K. Williams
Contents
Epigraph
Part One: The Day the War Came 1
A Family
3
Abe 7
Gustavo 11
Xochil 23
Adam 30
Charlie 34
Gustavo 37
Abe 40
Adam 45
Gustavo 47
Xochil. Gustavo.
51
Gustavo 55
Xochil 57
Abe 60
Gustavo 63
Adam 67
Charlie 72
Lourdes 79
Adam 84
Octavio 86
Gustavo 89
Abe 93
Lourdes 96
Charlie. Gustavo.
98
Lourdes. Octavio.
107
Adam 119
Octavio 124
Abe 129
Xochil 132
Lourdes 142
Rosario 145
Lourdes. Rosario.
148
Vietnam 150
A Family
152
Xochil 156
Gustavo. Charlie.
160
Xochil 163
Abe 165
Gustavo 167
Lourdes. Rosario. Xochil.
171
Adam 176
Gustavo 180
Part Two: And the World Did not Stop
187
Adam 189
Lourdes. Octavio.
191
Xochil 194
Charlie 197
Lourdes 200
Abe 202
Charlie 205
Adam 211
Xochil 213
Gustavo 215
Xochil. Lourdes.
218
Abe 222
Charlie 225
Octavio 228
Gustavo 231
Adam 238
Xochil. Charlie.
240
Gustavo 243
Xochil. Charlie.
246
Octavio. Gustavo. Lourdes.
248
Lourdes. Octavio.
252
Gustavo 255
Xochil. Gustavo. Charlie.
258
Adam 264
Lourdes 267
Octavio. Lourdes.
269
Gustavo 272
Abe 275
Gustavo 278
Lourdes 287
Xochil 289
Gustavo 295
Gustavo 299
Lourdes. Gustavo.
303
Adam. The Dead.
307
Lourdes 309
Xochil. Jack. Gustavo.
311
Xochil. Gustavo.
320
Abe 324
Charlie 326
A Family
330
Adam 337
Xochil 339
A Family
341
Charlie. Gustavo.
343
Gustavo 345
Octavio. Charlie. Lourdes.
347
Gustavo. Xochil.
349
Gustavo 355
Abe 357
Xochil 361
Gustavo. Octavio.
366
Charlie 368
Gustavo 371
Lourdes 373
Gustavo 374
Lourdes 379
Gustavo. Xochil. Charlie.
381
Adam 387
Lourdes 389
Xochil 392
Lourdes 394
Epilogue Silence
397
Charlie 399
Xochil 403
Adam 409
Lourdes 410
Abe 414
Octavio 418
Gustavo 420
Acknowledgments 425
About the Author
Other Books by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
par t one
T H E DAY T H E WAR C A M E
Let me tell you, brothers, what fear is:
a beast you’ve got to kill before you kill.
—Elie Wiesel
a f am i ly
El Paso, Texas, Saturday, September 16, 1967
An unsettling calmness in the predawn breeze.
A hint of a storm.
The faint smell of rain.
A coolness in the air.
Summer has lasted and lasted. And lasted.
Four o’clock in the morning.
The house is dark. The members of the Espejo family are in
bed. Some are asleep. Some are restless, awake, disturbed. Each of them alone, listening to their own interior breezes.
Octavio—husband, father, son—is asleep. He is lost in an
unwelcome dream, a gust of wind kicking up the loose frag-
ments of memory, grains of sand in the eye. He is struggling to see. He is struggling to understand what his father is saying to him, his father who has been dead for more than three years.
He has had this dream before. His father is trying to tell him something, give him words of wisdom or a piece of advice or
4 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e some essential bit of information he needs to survive. Maybe his father is speaking in Spanish. Maybe his father is speaking in English. It is impossible to tell. His father’s lips are moving. But the words? Where are the words? His father is young and he,
Octavio, is a boy—small—and he understands that they still live in Mexico. All his dreams take place in Mexico. Mexico before
the fall. They do not yet live in exile. When he wakes, Octavio will not remember the dream.
Lourdes is awake. Sleep is not something she needs—it is
something she endures. She is listening to her husband’s mum-
blings. She is accustomed to his dreams. He has never been a
calm sleeper. Whatever disturbs him by day will hunt him down
as he sleeps. She shakes him gently, comforts him. “Shhhh, amor.”
His mumblings recede. She smiles. When he wakes, she will ask
him about the dream. He will say he does not remember. You do not want to remember, that is what she will think, but she will say nothing and smile and ask him if he wants to know what he was
mumbling. He will say it does not matter.
She looks at the time on the alarm clock and wonders if Rosa-
rio will make it through the day. “Maybe today I will die. Oh, today let me die.” Rosario repeats her refrain every day. She recites the lines as if she is in a play and she waits for Lourdes to answer, a one-woman Greek chorus: “Today, I will die. Oh, today, I will die.” And then they will pause, look into each other’s eyes—and laugh. It has become a joke between them—a joke and a ritual.
Lourdes does not want to think about what she will do when
the old woman dies. She has become addicted to caring for her
mother-in-law. But it is more than an addiction. So much more
than that.
Rosario, too, is no longer asleep. Every morning she wakes
to the darkness of the new day. It is a curse, an affliction she has suffered for years, this lying awake every morning with nothing to do, this me
asuring of the hours that her life has become, this
a f am i ly l 5
searching the room with eyes that are failing, this knowledge that you now inhabit a body that is shriveling and a mind that is ever alert, but a mind that lives now only in the past. She tries to think of something else, something kinder than this thing that is her life. Is this a life? But, today, she can think of nothing kind. Kindness has exiled itself from her world.
She is remembering the day her husband died, a perfect
morning, the garden bathed in honeysuckles. “I’m going to read the paper,” he said as he stepped into the backyard. “And then I’m going to take a nap. And then, who knows, I might just die.” He laughed and kissed her as if she were still a girl.
He did read the newspaper.
He did take a nap.
He did die.
It was she who found him. She sees herself trying to wake
him. She sees the smile on his face. Bastard, you left me here. I don’t forgive you. Oh, today let me die.
Xochil, the only daughter in the house, is twisting and turn-
ing in her bed. No rest or peace in her sleep. Like her father, what is left unresolved tracks her down like a wounded animal. She is arguing with herself. She wants this boy. She is yearning to let him love her. She utters his name—Jack—and just as the name
slips out of her mouth, she becomes still and quiet.
When she wakes, she will think of this boy, picture his face,
his lips, the look of want in his eyes, blue as the sea. She will picture his hands, larger than hers but trembling with the same want that is in her. She will shake her head. No, no, no, no, no. And then she will reach under the bed and take out the picture she keeps as a comfort.
She will stare at the picture. It is not an image of Jack, but a photograph of her and Gustavo and Charlie. They are safe, her
brothers, the harbor to which she’s tied her boat. She is smiling, Charlie is laughing, and Gustavo is gazing past the camera. She
6 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e always wonders what Gustavo is looking at. His eyes are staring at a future. That is what she will think to herself. The future. Let it be beautiful. Let it be as beautiful as you.
Gustavo and Charlie are sleeping in the room down the hall.
Gustavo, half asleep, half awake, wonders which he prefers,
the sleeping or the waking. He wonders, too, if today is the day the news will arrive. He has been waiting for the news for what seems an eternity. The waiting, the pacing in his mind, the pa-ralysis, the endless litany of cigarettes, the impossibility of escape, the inability to come up with a solution. The waiting is a limbo, the one he swore he did not believe in. Day after day, he hides the apprehension.
He is tired. He opens his eyes, then closes them. He slowly
falls back into a shallow sleep.
Charlie. A child at peace. Nothing disturbs him. He has a
mother and a father and a grandmother and an older brother and an older sister. He loves and he is loved. All he needs now is a dog. He is clutching a picture of a blond Labrador puppy from
a page he has torn out of an old Life magazine. This is the dog he wants. This is the dog he is going to ask his father to get for him. This is the thought he was holding just as he wandered off to sleep. This is the dog he is dreaming.
Four o’clock in the morning.
The windows are open, the breeze winding its way through
the rooms and hallways.
This is the family.
This is the house.
This is the day.
This is the season.
Summer has lasted and lasted. And lasted.
Let the breezes come, let the leaves turn and fall, let the trees stand naked. The crops in the field are clamoring for picking.
a b e
Four o’clock in the morning. Me and my new-found buddies
were just coming back from Juárez after a night of clubbing.
Clubbing, a nice word for getting drunk in Juárez dives. The
morning was cool and the breeze felt good on my face as the
cab drove us to the airport. For some reason I had this thing for rolling down windows when I was in a car. Never liked closed-in places. Sometimes I thought the jungle in Nam was gonna
choke me. Sometimes I thought I was gonna stop breathing. No,
I mean I didn’t like closed-in places. I needed lots of air.
Four o’clock in the fucking morning. God, I was tired. All
that drinking. Well, yeah, there’d been some whoring, too. Okay, there was a little bit of everything. We were eighteen. We wanted one last party. Why the hell not? We were leaving behind the old world. The familiar, dull, tired world. The world we’d lived in all our lives. Not that we knew the world we were stepping into.
The future was like the fucking desert sky. It just went on forever.
8 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e God, the world was more beautiful and bigger than we had ever
dreamed. Big. God, we wanted big. We were tired of small, tired of standing still, tired of being little men in a little world.
I’ll admit it, I was a scared. Okay. We all were. Not that we
talked about it. But mostly we were happy. God, we were happy
and proud as hell. Sure we were. Me and Ricardo and Jeff, we
were going into the Marines. That was a big fucking deal. Fi-
nally, we had a destination. We weren’t lost anymore. That’s how I’d always felt. Lost. And now, all of that was gone. It was like a fucking dream come true.
All we’d ever known was the desert and El Paso and high
school and good girls. Mostly good girls, anyway. So that last night, it was a way of saying good-bye to everything we knew.
Maybe that was a little bit sad. But we didn’t have the time for sadness. We were gonna be Marines. Halle-fuckin’-lujah.
So long El Paso, Texas.
Marines. God, we were happy.
We were in, baby! And on our way to San Diego, California.
Hell, yes, it was the promised land. You bet your ass.
But then it didn’t start off so good.
Of course not.
The fucking flight was canceled. Canceled. Sure it was. God,
we were disappointed. I swear I almost cried. And then we all
looked at one another. I mean, why just hang out at the airport for twelve hours? And hadn’t we already said our good-byes to
our friends, our families? Who wanted to do that again? So we
took a cab to the Santa Fe Bridge and when the clock struck
midnight, there we were, the three of us, lost in a crowd of Mexicans as the mayor yelled, “¡Viva Mexico!” from the balcony at city hall. I’d forgotten it was the sixteenth of September. Everyone in the whole world was yelling “¡Viva Mexico!” Yeah, well, we were yelling Viva Mexico, too. Ricardo said, “What the fuck, when in fucking Rome.” Ricardo, he was something. Short but strong as
a b e
9
hell. He looked just like the kind of guy you’d take with you if you were gonna fight a war. First time out in Nam, he got himself killed. Got blown to pieces. Jesus. Look, he died a Marine. He died for something he believed in. That counts for something.
Jesus. But on the sixteenth of September in 1967, he was alive and me and him and Jeff, we were having ourselves a party. It
didn’t matter to us that we were in a foreign country. I mean, going over to Juárez was normal for us. And one of the perks of living on the border was that their party became our party. So hey! ¡Viva Mexico!
I had me some tequila. Cuervo. Good shit. I’ve always loved
the way tequila feels when it goes down. It’s like pouring some sun down your throat.
I ran into some guy I knew from high school. He took one look
at me and wanted to start a fight. Sure he did. He started giving me the business about how he’d twisted his fucking ankle
the last time he played basketball and it was all because of me and he was in pain for a fucking month. Hell, that guy really carried a grudge.
He kept shoving me, and digging his finger into my chest. But I didn’t shove him back. Nope. I was maintaining. Absolutely in
control. But he wasn’t gonna stop—and just when I was about to pop him one, this other guy, Jack Evans, he steps in. You know, he was one of those true blue guys, Jack Evans. I mean, we all called him Jack Evans. We used both his names. I don’t know why. A
real straight arrow. Straighter than me, and back then, I was pretty straight. So we both backed off and Jack bought us a drink. I told him we were on our way to San Diego and that we were gonna
be fucking Marines. God, I was happy. And Jack, I mean, the guy kept saying, “Really? Really?” And then he said, “I’m gonna be right behind you, buddy. And we’re gonna make things right over there.” I got the feeling he’d already signed up.
“Yeah,” I said, “we’re gonna make things right.”
God, that guy, Jack Evans, he was even happier than me. Look,
10 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e I’ve always been a patriotic guy. You know, normal. But that Jack Evans, I swear he shit the American flag. So we sat there that night in Juárez over shots of tequila and drank to the Marines.
I don’t remember very much else about that night. The booze,
I guess. You know, looking back, I’m glad we got some shit out of our system.
I’m even glad about the whoring. I really don’t go in for that.
You know those girls, well, it didn’t seem right. They were poor.
Felt bad. Guess it didn’t stop me that night. The booze, I guess. I was raised to be a pretty clean-cut kid. But, you know, we were an inch away from being Marines and it was a long time before I had another woman. The next woman I slept with, I married.
So there we were at four o’clock in the morning, the three of
us headed back to the airport. Jeff and Ricardo, they slept in the backseat of the cab, but me, I was in the front seat, wide awake.
The breeze on my face was better than a cup of coffee.
The airport was really empty. Not that we cared. We just went
up to our gate and slept it off. Our plane left at 9:38 Mountain Standard Time.
We smoked all the way from El Paso to San Diego. Better to
smoke than to talk.
Smoked our hearts out.
We were scared. A little bit. But, God, we were happy.
It’s a funny thing, ever since that day in 1967, every time I
happen to be awake at four o’clock in the morning, I think of that day, when me and my buddies—me and Ricardo and Jeff—that
