The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya

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The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya 30For Jose, who was now allowed to keep El Flaco at his side at all times, every day was an endlessstream of trains bringing an endless stream of soldiers and equipment. They formed at the train stationand marched into camp, where their tents sprang up and devoured the desert like an ever-widening fieldof fairy-tale-sized mushrooms. Jose, who had already fought in a battle but who still had only been inthe army for a little over a week, was dumbfounded. The imagined armies of his boyhood had beendashing, swift-moving things, but in the week leading up to the raid he had been confronted with thetedious daily realities of army life, sometimes dull and often seemingly endless. Now, as he watchedthe feet stomp into camp and the tents blooming in the desert, he formulated a new conclusion: Timemoved more quickly on a large scale than it did in its minutiae.The ocean of men that surged at the train station and then flowed into rivers of soldiers wasamazing to Jose, but an even bigger amazement was still to come. Four days after the attack by theVillistas, Jose's platoon was sent with dozens of wagons to the train station. Once the sea of men hadparted and the wagons were up to the platform, they were quickly loaded with a strange collection ofwood, fabric, wheels, motors, and other strange machinery. Case after case was piled onto the wagons,all bearing the same legend: 1 st Aero Squadron. This excited Jose immensely, because it seemed toindicate that this unit had something to do with aeroplanes. Up to this point in his life he had only seenpictures of aeroplanes. The pictures delighted and fascinated him, and now here he was with all of thiswonderfully mysterious and extremely heavy equipment in crates marked 1 st Aero. Although he hadonly been in the army for a week and a half he was already familiar with the fact that the armysometimes twisted the meanings of words around, evidently without noticing, or even seemed to makeup strange new words or combinations for things that already had perfectly good names. Thus, by thetime all the crates had been moved from the rail platform into the wagons, Jose was still not certain thatthe 1 st Aero Squadron in fact had anything at all to do with actual aeroplanes.When the wagons were fully loaded they set out into the desert, stopping at a considerable
The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya 31distance from the endless rows of tents that the other soldiers had erected. The soldiers who hadtraveled together on the train with the equipment were following the wagons on foot. Since it wastaking them a while to catch up to where the wagons had stopped, Jose's lieutenant had his men unloadthe equipment from the wagons and lay it neatly out on the desert floor. Then the wagons were circledaround it all, and Jose and his fellow troopers settled down into guard duty. It was not a strenuouswatch, since the Villistas were long gone, but nonetheless the lieutenant sent out a few patrols onhorseback. Since Jose was neither trained nor practiced on fighting from horseback he was not sent onany of the mounted patrols, and had ample time to watch as the soldiers who were on foot arrived andbegan to unpack their equipment.Once again Jose was amazed. Some of the soldiers began pitching large tents while othersstarted to uncrate equipment. Their whole mass swirled and flowed, curling in and around each otherlike delicate strands of smoke. Hoists were pieced together and stabilized, large sections of metal liftedand swung and lowered and lifted again. The sun dropped away and night quickly overcame the desert.The men continued their intricate dance and from the desert floor grew strange shapes that rapidlybecame recognizable, as chassis, axles, wheels, frames, bodies and engines bloomed into trucks beforeJose's very eyes.Jose could not help but be mildly disappointed that “aero” to the army evidently meant “truck,”but trucks were still at least somewhat interesting in their own right, and as the engine on the first truckcame to life with a clash and a clatter the men all cheered. The driver took several gleeful laps aroundthe wagons, sending up great clouds of dust to drift across the desert before he pulled back in and cutthe motor. Jose's lieutenant immediately walked over to where the commander of the aero squadronwas directing the delicate dance of men and machinery, and the two conferred briefly before thelieutenant walked back over to Jose and three other troopers and ordered them to load up in the back ofthe truck. They were going to make a mounted patrol like proper cavalry troopers, but it would be on
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The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya

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