The Shadow

Joshua Leon felt his body tense in his uniform as the plane jangled to the drop point, and the rest of his unit held onto their seats. The flurry of the aircraft carrier was behind them, and now they were concentrating for the mission, the blue waters of the Caribbean turning over below them. There were a few of them so hopped on drugs right before they left that they thought they were being sent to Vietnam, not the Dominican Republic, even though the United States wasn’t sending that many people to Vietnam yet. Joshua Leon did not bother correcting them. They were jumping onto an island that looked too much like their own. They’d be protecting American citizens, they’d been told. It was only to evacuate Americans while the countercoup tried to reinstate the democratically elected president, Juan Bosch. But there were strange whisperings around base. The Americans were on the side of the military junta, not the president, who was soft on commies, and they were told to be on the ready. Joshua knew what he couldn’t know yet, that they were going to war.

He was one of those people who could always see what his life could have been like but wasn’t, a shadow self following him even in his happiest moments. He sensed it even as a boy, his shadow looming large in his first memories. In the earliest one he could remember, his father and his uncle were going off to war, having been drafted into World War II. They were standing in the same square that had been the site of the Ponce massacre ten years before, although at the time he was too young to know that, and the music swelled loudly, the ballad called ‘‘La Despedida,’’ street musicians who had been hired for the job playing the song slow and mournful.

Joshua, then four years old, remembers only this: waving a tiny American flag, given to him by a soldier who was walking through the crowd handing them out to all the children, his father and uncle bathed with a golden light that slipped across their faces with the clouds. His mother was crying, and he was holding onto his wooden stick. The new Puerto Rican draftees saluted the family they were leaving behind, then turned to board the buses to Fort Brooke Base, where they would be given their assignments. His mother had pulled the flag out of his hand and thrown it on the floor as soon as his father turned away. When he looked down, he saw that his shadow was long on the square, and that the flag was drowned in his shadow. As his mother pulled him down the street, he felt chased like in his dreams, and every time he turned around, his shadow was there, longer than it should have been.

Afterward, when his father and his uncle had returned, changed, he would learn what had happened to them during those years. They were put in the 65th, the segregated all–Puerto Rican unit, and both shipped to guard the Panama Canal, where they would never see combat. When his mother got the letter, she praised God that they would be safe from the battles in Europe and in the Pacific. Really, the Americans didn’t trust Latinos, much less Puerto Ricans, to fight alongside them. His father and his father’s brother looked like many Puerto Ricans, a mix of native, black, and Spanish, and were racially ambiguous enough to pass as either mixed or white, but in those days, categorization was paramount, so the recruitment officers had split the difference, calling his father white, with his more Spanish nose, and the other brother colored, which would turn out to make all the difference. His father’s brother was selected as a test subject for mustard gas. His father came back unscathed from the war, but his uncle came back blind, scars on his face that made it look like the surface of the moon.

***

Finally they were nearing the drop zone. The jump leader waved them all up. They’d done this over and over in training, but this was their first combat jump. Joshua Leon strapped himself into the rig line with his unit. 40 OK, 39 OK, 38 OK, they yelled down the line until everyone was okay, and the hatch opened, brilliant green underneath them, their hearts in their throats one by one as the planes fell away above them. His stomach dropped only for the briefest of seconds and then stabilized; the plane had already been going at terminal velocity so his body was still moving at the same speed. The wind smashed him in the face. The people underneath him, could they see him, his body screaming through the air?

For a moment he felt ashamed. His mother had begged him not to join. His father had seemed proud but said nothing. His mother had started going to independista group meetings, and she came home full of Yanqui Get Out speeches, which his father shushed, but his uncle, who had come to live with them after having gone blind, only said, I’m surprised it took you this long. His mother said that his uncle should have been proof enough of what could happen to Joshua. But his mother had been too vocal an independista, waving the Puerto Rican flags and singing the anthems that had been outlawed until just after the Korean war. There had been black vans across the street from their house, as there had with other vocal independistas, and the telephone dial tone had a strange hum. Same as what was happening back on the mainland with the civil rights groups, black vans and suited agents just waiting for them to slip up to cart them away as terrorists or on some vague charge of sedition. No matter that there were two war veterans in his mother’s household. So he had enlisted, for her, to keep them off her back, to show that in that household, anyway, they supported the US military in wars off the island, if not their occupation of the island. That’s what he told himself afterward, but he hadn’t even meant to enlist. It was like his shadow had done it, marched up and signed his name to the enlistment papers. When he came to, he was looking at the closed wooden door of the recruitment office, the papers in his hand.

How could you know what side to pick, to stay American, to become independent? The Americans had taken over any farm or industry that had been turning a profit before their occupation. So many islanders were crippled economically, the wealth produced on the island being shipped back to the mainland. Now some of the only paychecks available were in the military or serving under American business owners. It was like you took away the food of a dog and made it eat only from your hands and only what you gave it. Of course there was loyalty. Of course there was fear of what would happen once the giving hand went away. How could you choose? It was like you had two selves. It was like every time you jumped, one of you was left on the ground. It was like everything you said came out of two mouths.

***

Their parachutes were yanked from their backs. The chutes bloomed around him, the air filled with them, two thousand troops hanging in the sky, all those men hoping they’d come back okay from the next few days, that nothing would have changed without them. He spun under the chute, kept his arms inside, spotted his eyes on the horizon. There was time now to breathe, to guide his chute slowly toward the landing spot. Somewhere far below, he could see his shadow, a dark stain moving over the treetops. That shadow, his dark self, the self that sometimes took his place, that sometimes showed him what he could have been if he were whole, would it abandon him now that he had left Puerto Rico, now that he had joined an army fighting other people’s battles? His shadow had protected him before. It could happen again.

When he was ten years old, he had been walking down a road outside Ponce, following a goat. He was walking away from the house where his mother visited a woman who used to be her childhood friend, back before the Americans had taken over both their farms and his mother’s family had moved into town. His uncle had insisted on coming, saying he hadn’t smelled the air of the fields in too long. His father was still at work at the immigration office, stamping papers. The goat was jingling its little bell, and Joshua had been hot in that stuffy living room, so he’d walked out to the yard and followed the goat down the road.

He came across the spot at which his mother always huffed when they drove past, the gate to the land that used to belong to her family. The goat bleated and walked through a gap in the wire fence. His shadow was on the opposite side of where it should have been, in front of him although the sun was also in front of him, making him squint. He went after the goat. He had a cube of sugar in his pocket he’d saved from his mother’s coffee that he wanted the goat to eat. To either side of him down the path were cane fields.

The old house, what was left of it, stood in front of him, the roof and the four pillars and the floor, which looked to be used as a dancing floor by the American owners. The new house stood next to that giant gazebo of a ruin. Servants bustled around the gazebo, putting tables and chairs to either side. The Americans were throwing a party. He sneaked underneath one of the white tablecloths with the tinkling of silverware above him. His hand was sticky from where the sugar cube was melting with his sweat. He felt above him for one of the napkins, but there was silverware on top of the napkin. He grabbed the first thing he felt, which was a knife. It was the most beautiful knife he had ever seen, a slanted sharp point made for cutting through steaks, the handle made of polished mother-of-pearl. A tiny silver flower joined the handle and the blade. He decided he better just wipe his hands on the underside of the tablecloth instead of using his manners. The goat jangled past again. He peeked out from under the tablecloth, knife in hand. The servants were on the other side of the great gazebo. He slipped out quietly, but he did not take the time to put the knife back in place. There was yelling; he had been spotted. He wasn’t sure what propelled him, but instead of dropping the knife and explaining himself, he just started running. He ran into the fields, the green cane stalks whipping past him in rows. Yelling in English pursued him.

Row after row of green, and then dark-skinned men and women, soaked with sweat, grunting, pulling up their machetes and slashing the rows, backs hunched, behind them the jungle earth stubbled with the bases of cane. He was scared; he knew this would be the most trouble he had ever been in. Finally he ran out of breath and hid in the rows that hadn’t been cut yet. The servants ran by him. He couldn’t understand why they passed right by without stopping. One did stop and looked right at him, or past him, eyes unfocused; then he kept going. He realized they just couldn’t see him. It was like he was made of shadow, a huge shadow on the dirt. He didn’t dare move. He stayed there for hours while they called that there was a thief in the fields, dangerous, with a knife.

As the sun dimmed, he saw his blind uncle walking through the field, his mute fingers clutching each stalk, feeling across the rows, his other hand trailing in the wind. Joshua stayed still. The shadow would cover him. But then he remembered the shadow was no use with his uncle’s blindness. His uncle felt his way straight for Joshua, like he knew exactly where he was. His uncle sat down next to him, keeping his finger across his lips for silence. The next time someone ran by, his uncle grabbed the edge of the shadow and threw it away from them in front of the running assailant. The shadow took the shape of a boy, running, a knife in his hands. Joshua heard the shouts, There he is!

Later, as his uncle led him back to the road, the knife tucked into the waistband of his pants, Joshua heard more shouts. We’ve got him! A negrito! Later that night, his shadow returned to him, silent and still, the soles of their feet seamed together.

His mother kept the pearl-handled knife. She hid it in her nightstand drawer, had been heard to whisper that it should have been hers. After that afternoon, she started going to the independista meetings, and she took the knife in her purse when she went. Was it his guilt over spurring her on that made his shadow enlist him years later? When Joshua asked afterward how his uncle had found him and what his shadow had done, his uncle held his hands over his eyes, fingering the valleys of scars, and said, Our darkest selves can take the place for us when we need to disappear.

***

Even now, now that he was occupying a country that spoke his language, the parachute dragging in the air, his shadow self traded places with him. One moment it was dusk and he was descending into a brilliant green, the next moment it was the dead of night and he was falling with night-vision goggles, the forms underneath him an electronic green the way the night vision electrified them, the valleys and hills like the moon, the treetops waving and blurred. He was in the night darkness of his shadow. In a few years, though he did not know it yet, he would be dropping into the nighttime of Tay Ninh Province, Vietnam. Was it protection, his shadow trading places with him, or a warning? What would they say to his mother if he died? That he died for his country?

But no, no, here was the daylight again, the emerald green of a disappearing future. The ground was close, and soon he would collapse his knees, drop and roll, gather up his chute with the other men hitting and deflating around him. Was it Vietnam, was it the Dominican Republic, was it the home of his childhood rising green to meet him?