The Tattooed Soldier (11 page)

Finally he reached the front, where youngish men and women were pressed against the concrete stage, looking almost straight up at the speaker's thick eyebrows and flat peasant face. She was barely as tall as the podium. From his vantage point just to her left, Longoria could see her feet, white thongs standing on tiptoe so she could reach the microphone.

“¡ … Mientras haya pueblo, habrá revolución!”

A shout rose from the crowd behind him, the voices ascending and echoing against the bare arc of the band shell. It seemed strange to Longoria, incongruous, to see this small woman leading the mob, directing their energies like an evil conductor. It didn't seem right to him that there was no one to stop her from spitting forth her blasphemies. It would be so simple to silence her, to reach up and stuff his fist in her throat and muffle the words.

Turning away from the stage, Longoria looked at the audience, their eyes focused with intense hope on this small woman. Her amplified voice reached a climax, and a thousand brown-skinned fists rose simultaneously in the air, surrounding him like a forest of bare, knobby tree trunks.

 

5.
PROBABILITY

 

They were on their way back to Crown Hill after picking up a frozen chicken at the Unitarian food bank when José Juan spotted him, a dark, stubby man walking down Third Street with a bowlegged gait. A peasant without his straw hat, Antonio would think later. The sight of this man caused José Juan a moment of frantic distress. Like a fugitive who's just seen a police officer, he searched quickly for avenues of escape but found none.

“José Juan Grijalva!”

Seeing his friend's alarm, Antonio asked in a whisper, “What's wrong?”

Before José Juan could answer, the bowlegged man had run up to greet him with an exaggerated smile. “I don't believe it. It can't be you.”

José Juan feigned pleasant surprise to see someone from his hometown, a place called Anenecuilco. The man's name was Ramiro, and he was the cousin of José Juan's
compadre.
He reached up and gave José Juan a heartfelt embrace.

“How have you been?” Ramiro asked in a vaguely accusatory tone. “
¿Qué te has hecho?
The whole town is wondering what happened to you. Not a word for months and months. Your wife is so worried.”

José Juan had always been quick on his feet, but even so, Antonio had to marvel at the story he began spinning.

“I've been working in a machine shop,” he said with false humility. “I'm making so much money,
'mano
, it's embarrassing. I shouldn't tell you, but I know you'll get it out of me eventually. Fifteen dollars an hour! Can you believe it? I still can't. I'm in the union, though, so they take out a little chunk for that. Plus, the payments on the Chevy and the rent for my
condominio
aren't cheap either. You know how it is. You come to this country and you make lots of money, but somehow you end up spending it all.”

“So true,” Ramiro interjected.

“
Así es.
Here you work and work. There's no stopping. It's not like back home, is it? There's no rest here, no time to sit down for a
copita
every night with your friends. How does that one song go?
‘Una jaula de oro.'
Yeah, that's what it's like, a cage of gold.”

José Juan went on to explain that he had come downtown to help his friend Antonio move into a new apartment. If he hadn't written or called home, it was because he'd been waiting to surprise his wife with a call on their wedding anniversary.

To Antonio's amazement, Ramiro seemed to accept all this as true, his
campesino
eyes widening as the tale went on. “I had no idea things were going so well for you,” he said stupidly.

José Juan gave him a nonexistent phone number, and the two countrymen embraced, promising to meet again soon.

As Ramiro disappeared down Third Street, José Juan let out a low sigh. The effort of his lie had left him pale and shaken, like a man who's just stumbled away from a car accident. It was his worst fear, running into someone from his hometown. He didn't want anyone in his
pueblo
to know he was living on the streets, no better than the poorest man in Mexico. This was why José Juan never called his family. He was sure they would know the truth the moment they heard his voice. They would hear his shame on the telephone line and remember that he left home bragging about all the success that would come his way.

“Of all the people to meet on the street, it has to be that
pendejo
,” José Juan said with a nervous laugh. “What bad luck I have.”

It seemed like incredibly bad luck, to encounter a familiar face from your tiny village in a city of nine million people. José Juan had been betrayed by the laws of probability, but Antonio was not surprised. A few months earlier, while riding in the back of a gardener's pickup truck on the Hollywood Freeway, he had noticed a car in the fast lane, a rusting Datsun with four people packed into the back seat. The driver looked exactly like María Paredes, a schoolteacher who lived down the block from Antonio and Elena in San Cristóbal Acatapán. Antonio looked hard at this woman as she bounced along at fifty-five miles an hour, her long black hair tied in a thick braid. He told himself that he must be imagining things. Then, as the Datsun pulled away, Antonio saw the bumper sticker: “I
♥
San Cristóbal Acatapán.”

There were so many Latinos in Los Angeles now, thousands upon thousands of Mexicanos, Guatemaltecos, and Salvadoreños, more than he ever imagined. He had come to the States expecting to be surrounded by blond, blue-eyed gringos, not a Spanish-talking sea of brown faces. Even the Mayan Indians of his country, people who had lived in the same little
aldeas
in Guatemala since before the Spaniards came—even they were here. He remembered coming across a group of Indian women one day, not far from the vacant lots where he and José Juan now lived. They were wearing their traditional dress, embroidered
huipiles
and long rainbow-striped skirts. He watched them, these ancient people of the corn, as they walked through a canyon of brick tenements, their leather sandals scraping along the oil-stained sidewalk on Bixel Street. What were they doing here, in this place where not a single stalk of corn could grow? It saddened him to find so many of his countrymen transported, as if by some dark magic, to this freeway-covered plain, wandering about Los Angeles in an amnesiac daze, far from even the memory of the soil.

“You know what this means, don't you?” José Juan said, interrupting Antonio's thoughts. “Now Ramiro is going to tell everybody in my
pueblo
he saw me. Dressed in rags. He's a big
chismoso
, like everyone else in that town. He'll tell everybody.”

Dressed in rags. Antonio hadn't thought much lately about what they looked like. He had begun to forget the threads that dangled from the bottom of his pants, the little holes that had appeared in his shirt, the layer of sweat and grime that perpetually covered his skin. He caught a glimpse of himself in a store window, a cluttered
botánica
overflowing with votive candles. Moving closer to the glass, he could see that his hair was so matted it looked like he was wearing a small helmet. His khaki pants had turned stiff and gray with a smooth sheen of dirt. Lines of soot and dried sweat covered his face, the image of a caveman. Antonio was gradually leaving the company of men, slipping backward on the evolutionary tree.

What would Elena say if she saw him like this? Elena liked him to dress well. Elena was a little vain, she abhorred foul odors, she liked to shower after they made love and sometimes before. She would not make love to the grime-caked man Antonio had become.
If she saw me like this she would turn away in disgust.

Even here in Los Angeles, after Elena died, he had always showered every morning, wrapping his body in clean shirts and pants, a new, sanitized shell for each day. Now the scent from each day had seeped into fabric and skin: the long walks to the food bank, the tossing and turning at night, his body in bitter communion with the wind and soil. His fingernails were black, and the itching in his crotch was becoming unbearable. His scalp itched too. More than itched—it burned. “Stop scratching yourself,
cabrón
,” José Juan finally told him. “You look like a monkey.”

“We need to take a bath,” Antonio said. “More than a week already.
Ya es mucho.
”

From Frank and the Mayor, Antonio had learned that most of the camp dwellers took showers at one of the missions on Spring Street, although they considered it a last resort because the experience was especially degrading. One of the mission volunteers, a deputized homeless person, made you take off your clothes in a locker room and then hustled you and a dozen other naked men into the shower, where you stood shoulder to shoulder with whatever sample of Skid Row humanity happened to wander in that day.

The Mexicanos, on the other hand, always looked clean but never set foot in the missions. How did they do it?

“Where do you guys shower?” Antonio asked a man everyone called Chino because of his Eurasian eyes. “
¿Dónde se bañan?
”

“
En el río
,” Chino answered.

“The river? What river?”

“You know, the big one, the one that's past Los Angeles Street where all the factories are.”

Antonio couldn't hide an expression of disgust. The Los Angeles River was a giant concrete channel that cut a path through the center of the city. At the bottom of this huge chasm ran a brackish stream; except for a few weeds that poked their way through the cement, it contained no signs of natural life. During heavy rainstorms, the pathetic trickle became a raging torrent of fallen trees and trash bobbing in white water: tires, furniture, bottles, cans, newspapers, and bicycle frames from the suburbs upstream.

“That?” Antonio said. “That's not a river, that's a sewer.”

“No, it's not that bad,” Chino answered. “There's sewer pipes that come in with green water that has lots of chemicals and oil in it. We stay away from those. But if you go to the middle the water's cleaner. We don't go all the way in, we just splash ourselves. You can even wash your clothes and let them dry on the cement in the sun.
Te deja la ropa bien limpia.
”

Antonio didn't want to shower in the mission, and he was afraid of being poisoned if he went to the river. In Guatemala rivers were known to be carriers of disease. It seemed he would be condemned to more days of filth and grit, until José Juan came up with a solution: they could go back to their old apartment building and use the showers. On each floor there was a communal bathroom. Once Antonio and José Juan got past the front door, it would simply be a matter of climbing the stairs and sneaking into one of the bathrooms. They would have to trespass, but they would be clean.

An hour later they stepped out the back door of their erstwhile home into the sunlit, fetid air of the alley, feeling like new men.

Now I am closer to the man Elena knew. If she saw me, maybe she would kiss me.

*   *   *

When the sun rose the next morning, Antonio had no idea whether it was Monday or Wednesday or Saturday. Not knowing the day depressed him. It was another sign of his withdrawal from the world of normal people, from clocks and calendars, healthy meals and locked doors. So strange to live in a world where the days had no names. Maybe it was Saturday, Antonio guessed. He rose and crawled out of the shelter to see half a dozen girls in their best dresses—pink, blue, yellow chiffon—playfully skipping down Third Street. Their mothers, roundish women with black vinyl purses, shepherded the children briskly past Antonio and the other wretched people who lived in shacks and tents.

“
Andale, apúrale
,” the women called out. Hurry up! The rustling of the girls' shiny dresses and the click-clack of their mothers' high-heel shoes could mean only one thing: church day.

Antonio turned to José Juan, who was busy cleaning his toenails with a toothpick. “Hey,
moro
, it's Sunday,” he announced.

“So what,” José Juan said, eyes on his feet.

“Well, let's go do something.”

“Like what? What could we do? Go to church? Pray for money? No thank you.”

It seemed to Antonio that if it was Sunday he should be out somewhere doing what people did on Sunday. They got the family together and found a patch of lawn or beach to sit down on and gossip and take in the sun.

“Let's go to the park and walk around the lake like everyone else does.” The cheerful vision of the girls in the chiffon dresses had lifted Antonio's spirits.

After some gentle persuasion, José Juan agreed. They dusted themselves off and headed for MacArthur Park, where all the other Guatemaltecos and Salvadoreños and Mexicanos went, a little Parque Central almost like the ones back home.

A block away, people were already trying to sell them things. They were on Seventh Street, where commerce oozed from the concrete pores of the sidewalk: pirated cassette tapes, ersatz leather wallets, plastic toy battle tanks arranged in neat rows. Heavyset women in checkered aprons perched above the merchandise on folding chairs. They did not like to barter: “You're not in Mexico or El Salvador now. The price is set. I have children to feed.
No andas con esas babosadas.
” Farther on, across the street from the park, Antonio heard the restless voices of the black market, anxious packs of slick young men who paced the street corners in imitation Italian shoes. They looked everyone straight in the eye, the better to tell who was a policeman and who wasn't, who had money and who didn't, and offered one-word descriptions of their wares:
micas
, immigration documents;
seguros
, social security cards;
llamadas
, long-distance phone calls.