The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya

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