The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya

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The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya 102four or five recruits would soon be showing up to help lug cases of ammunition from the train into astorage bunker a couple of hundred yards away. The recruits that came were always glad that they haddone so, because by its nature ammunition-lugging was a much better assignment than many others thatthey could have drawn. They were also glad because unlike many of the other corporals and sergeantsthat glared them down on a daily basis, the recruits invariably found that Jose treated them with respectand dignity.On Jose’s part the kind treatment of each weeks’ recruits occurred because it was simply hisnature to be kind. He was in fact still unaware at this time in his life of the kindness that was built intohis character, and actually had some concerns that the sergeant’s moustache he was growing andcarefully trimming to the corners of his mouth was making him somehow meaner. Kind or not, Josewas always grateful for the efforts of the recruits, because on cold mornings like this the scars on hisleg would glow an unearthly pink and the pain cause his limp to noticeably appreciate until he was ableto sit down to lunch in the noonday sun and let its healing heat restore him to full mobility.By seven a.m. on November 11 most of the ammunition had been stored away in the bunkerexcept for that allotted for the day’s training usage. Jose had made the recruits coffee after their detailwhile they waited for the rest of the company to march to the range to begin training for the day, whichwas another reason that he was well-regarded: It was a rare treat for men at this stage of their trainingto be allowed to sit idle and do nothing other than drink coffee and talk about the news and hearsayfrom Europe. The German navy had mutinied, and the German people were very nearly in open revolt.At just about the same moment that the discussion turned to Kaiser Wilhelm and his abdicationof two days prior, Ned Skelly appeared outside of the circle of men and motioned emphatically for Joseto come closer. Jose smiled, excused himself from the recruits, and stepped out the door onto thenarrow porch that fronted the range building. Ned Skelly reappeared there next to him, waving aghostly newspaper in front of Jose’s nose that had only one large, single-word headline emblazoned
The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya 103across its width: Armistice. Jose steadied himself against the porch railing. He had never had suchmomentous news of the physical world broken to him via spirit before, and he continued weighing thesignificance of that fact as he watched the company of recruits come marching up the dusty street fortheir training at the range.As it turned out they were of mixed emotions, the men of that company, because the captainthat commanded them had already told them in their morning formation about the armistice in Europe.It would not be officially announced to the American people by the government for several more hours,but nevertheless a fact was a fact. Some of the men were relieved that their lives had likely beenpreemptively spared by the end of fighting, and relieved that they would likely be allowed to go theirwhole lives without having to feel obligated to kill another man. A surprising number of others,however, were grumbling about that very same fact. A very few of those men, young enough and fluproof,would mark time in the army until the next chance at killing people came along twenty-someodd years later, when at last they would find happiness in the midst of so much sorrow.For Jose, however, who saw plenty of dead men on a daily basis and didn’t feel the need tocreate any more, the morally uplifting news of the armistice was tinted around the edges with colors ofa more practical concern. Since his first week in the army his career advancement had in one form oranother been driven by overt acts of people shooting other people, and the need for an army of so manysoldiers seemed suddenly questionable to Jose without that background and without the moralimperatives of vengeance – because despite the fact that vengeance might belong to bloody Jesus first,it was claimed and enacted more immediately by governments and revolutionaries.Jose’s reverie was short-lived, however. One of the camp motorcycle messengers, used byofficers and sergeants who either couldn’t bring themselves to trust the camp telephone system or whosimply liked the rumble of the machines, was roaring up the road on his Indian, dragging a tail of dustand pebbles behind him as he came. The motorcycle companies in the camp – of which the division
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The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya

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