The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya

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The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya 66photographs of her that he could never have. The rose that she had left for him in the desert was aconstant miracle, never losing the bloom and never fading in either its color or its fragrance. Its scentwas in fact so intense that it would fill Jose's small room in the barracks, and had a narcotic effect thatmade him both drowsy and dreamy.In this state visions of her would fill his mind until the walls of his room faded away and hefound himself alone with her in the desert night. Sometimes the desert floor would become a ballroom,and she would dance for him or they would dance together, spinning across the landscape until thefloor became an endless bed into which they could collapse with the stars stretched out overhead like acanopy. Sometimes she would come with a flying carpet and take him up into the air, weaving in andout among the clouds, and Jose thought this was also a kind of dance, full of its own graceful turns andsailing movements as the lovers ascended and the ground receded away.Although these reveries seemed endless to Jose as he experienced them, eventually the walls ofhis room would fade back in and he would be alone again, clutching his memories and a rose thatwould not fade.Autumn of 1917 came, and with it came a change of seasons that Jose had never beforeexperienced. Everywhere were reds and yellows and oranges, a natural coat of many colors on whichNature would soon exact a terrible vengeance. Although Jose felt the chill in the air and had passingthoughts about how soon the snows would come, for the time being he was content to enjoy the colorsand to let himself be refreshed by the Fall air, not yet too cold but no longer stiflingly humid. It was onone such Saturday that Jose volunteered to help pick apples at a local orchard. He was not exactly surewhat the duty entailed, but he had no soldiers to train at the range on that day and he thought that itwould be nice to get out of the Camp and see some of the surroundings in their autumn finery.He arrived at the orchard in an open-bed truck with other soldiers who had volunteered,surprisingly unrattled by the trip; the roads in Ohio, it seemed, were a much better surface for riding on
The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya 67than the Chihuahuan desert. The trip took half an hour, and Jose spent it in a kind of reverie as the landunwound behind him. The truck pulled into a yard next to the two-story, white frame farmhouse thatcornered the orchard and kept it at bay and pulled alongside another Army truck already parked there.Climbing down off of the flatbed, Jose noticed a wave of excitement ripple through his fellow soldiers.It did not take him long to see why, and then the excitement washed over him, too: There were womenhere. Jose quickly picked up that, in his reveries and relative isolation at the rifle range, he hadsomehow missed something vitally important about the Camp: It was home to an Army nursingschool.The women of the group, all nursing students except for two more matronly chaperones, hadvolunteered in the same various fits of patriotism and boredom to pick apples as had the men that hadcome with Jose. Jose looked them over with amazement and delight. Some were plump and somewere slender, some were blonde and some were brunette, some had dark eyes and some light, but alllooked healthy and glowing. Standing at the edge of an orchard on a crisp Fall morning, they alsolooked ripe and delicious.This apparent fecundity was especially surprising to Jose, since in his mind American womenhad come to be equated with the collection of desiccated old prostitutes he had seen in New Mexico,dusty and infertile. Since that encounter, when he had ended up escorting the little witch La Brujitaback to the Mexican border, his mind and his eyes had been closed to American women; if he saw themat all, it was only because they were efficient at bouncing light. Now, however, he felt like a curtainhad been pulled back on some attraction that had previously been closed. The women from the nursingschool, who as a matter of moral policy were more or less kept apart from men as much as waspracticable, had much the same reaction upon seeing all the men. The eddies and whorls of sexualattraction, unnamed and unspoken, were suddenly everywhere, like the aftermath of some rogue wave.The farmer who owned the orchard and lived in the white frame house felt the tension and
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