Free Troika by Adam Pelzman Page A

old photograph of a man in a military uniform. It’s not the type that a general wears, with fancy medals and ribbons, but the kind a regular soldier wears, the uniform of a young man, a boy, who maybe has no idea why he’s fighting. Olive-green fatigues and a floppy hat and a hand-rolled cigarette. I look closer at the soldier’s face, and I can see that sure enough it’s Pepe when he’s young. The skin is shinier, the jaw stronger and the hair darker, but the shape of the face, rounded and thick, and the eyes, soft and sweet like he’s holding back tears, are the same. In a glass frame next to the photograph is a medal, gold-colored and round, dangling from a red-and-yellow silk ribbon.
    I sip my tea and look at the pictures of the pretty girls in their funny clothes and decide that I’m going to take some old dresses from my mom’s closet and play dress-up. Just then, Pepe steps out into the rain and picks up a metal mallet. He lifts it real high and hammers away at some rusted metal pipe sticking out of the ground.Bang, bang, bang. Now, I don’t have any reason
not
to trust Pepe, but I’m nervous anyway ’cause I’m a little girl alone in this house and I’m afraid my parents will be angry ’cause I lost my key.
    Between the rat-a-tat-tat of the rain on the tin roof and Pepe pounding away at the pipe, I’m struggling to listen for the sound of my dad’s car, loud and rough from a bad muffler. Finally, after what seems like an hour but is probably only ten minutes, I hear the car coughing in the driveway and my parents walking up the back path. They’re yelling at each other, not
bad
yelling but in that funny way that a man and a woman yell at each other when they know they’re not hurting any feelings.
    I jump right up and run outside and hand the magazine to Old Pepe and say thank you, sir, and he smiles and says anytime. I run across his yard and right up the steps, put my arms around my dad’s waist. Inside, he dries me off and doesn’t even get mad when I tell him I lost the key. And then I tell him about Pepe and how he brought me inside and gave me tea and a magazine. My dad and my mom look at each other and then at me and say is that all? And I’m confused. What else could there be, I want to know. My parents look relieved when I say that, and only when I’m older do I realize why, and not ’cause they had any concern about Pepe, but ’cause that’s a parent’s job. That’s how they’re wired.
    I tell my dad about the photo of Pepe dressed as a soldier and the medal in the glass frame, and my dad tells me the rumor is that the old Indian fought for the liberals in the Thousand Day War and that he was a fearless warrior but compassionate and loved by many. The Thousand Day War? I ask, ’cause that is one very long war. And my father says yes, three years or thereabouts, and when he says it like that it doesn’t seem so long. When I’m older, in my teens, I learn that this war ended in 1902. And that would make Pepe a hundredand twenty-five, maybe a hundred and thirty years old. Which just can’t be possible. But that’s the rumor, so who knows.
    My father didn’t have a college degree, didn’t even get past the eighth grade, but he was what they call a self-taught intellectual. Our house was filled with old books, magazines, newspapers, and they were stacked everywhere. There was tons of stuff on history and political science, economics too. My father was a
libertario
who believed in individual freedoms and just wanted the government to stay out of everyone’s business, let them achieve what God had planned for them without some bureaucrat screwing it all up. He also loved fiction and had an entire bookcase, floor to ceiling, with the great Spanish-language writers. Gabriel García Márquez, Federico García Lorca, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pablo Neruda. So I’ve been reading some of the best fiction in the whole world since I’m a little girl.
    When my father came to the States, I