Joe took from his pocket a buckskin strap and tied it to one end of the stick. When he was a kid, he and his friends used to hide along the Rio in the winter and trap juncos. The fat gray birds liked to flock on banks where the snow had melted. The boys tied horsehair nooses on willow branches above the river’s edge and caught two birds at a time, singed the feathers off in a fire and ate them hot. Delicately, Joe slid the buckskin noose over a brick of gelignite. The explosive would go to Santo Domingo, a pueblo south of Santa Fe; there were some veterans among the Domingos, some experts with explosives. The gelignite fell on its side. He shook the stick to draw the noose tight, gently lifted the brick clear of the shelf and brought it over the top of the cage to his free hand. It was cool as clay. The second brick slid loose as it came over the top and he caught it waisthigh.

The New Mexico National Guard had arrived in Manila in September of ’41. Supposedly they were chosen because New Mexicans were brown, spoke Spanish and would mix well with Filipinos. Rudy Peña had volunteered for the Guard because of his brother, Joe.

Joe hardly remembered Rudy. He was ten years younger, pudgy, quick to cry. His black hair stood up like rooster feathers. He was a wetter of the bed he shared with Joe, a longtime crawler, a late talker. During the worst winter, when the Army came through Santiago in trucks and threw off fifty-pound sacks of dry milk that were frozen hard as cement bags, Joe dragged a sack in each hand while his little brother clung to his leg and bawled, his face a mask of frozen snot. The harder Joe tried to kick him off, the tighter he held on.

By sixteen Joe had left the pueblo, and all he saw of Rudy was in photos from Dolores: Rudy and rabbits, Rudy on a horse, Rudy in a tie, the soft and surly face developing into a stranger with dark, nearly Arab looks. After the years of fighting and music in New York, it was a shock to hear that he’d meet his brother in the middle of the Pacific.