The Tattooed Soldier (33 page)

Longoria saw faces he recognized in the crowd, an assembly of troublemakers and malcontents, as far as he could tell. The middle-aged Salvadoran men who lived down the hall, the revolutionaries he had once seen carrying placards to a demonstration in MacArthur Park. The Guatemalteca who lived next door with her children—Longoria couldn't remember if she had three or four. And of course the cholos, leaning over the police tape, growing bolder as the crowd behind them grew larger, taunting the officers with lewd gestures, grabbing their crotches, pointing their middle fingers skyward.

The van drove off with the cadaver, and the street began to fill with noise again. “
¡Asesinos!
” someone shouted, with a little less vigor than before. The audience was getting restless, eager for a new diversion. Someone threw a chunk of concrete that sailed over the top of the crowd and landed beyond the police tape next to one of the officers, a woman. Incensed, she lifted the tape barrier over her head and waded into a group of cholos. Not a good move, Longoria thought. Stay in the perimeter. But no, she plowed on, elbows extended, the crowd parting before her, until she reached the cholo she was looking for. She was small but fit, with very broad shoulders and brown hair pinned up neatly under her cap. The cholo was at least a foot taller than she was, a lanky teenager with pockmarked skin and ears that protruded comically from his shaved head. Grabbing him by the arm as if she were his mother, she led him toward the police tape. The crowd whistled loudly, a collective jeer that seemed to be directed at the cholo as much as the officer. Longoria smiled; the cholo with the elephant ears was allowing himself to be humiliated by a woman.

Suddenly the cholo tried to jerk his arm away. The policewoman held tight, and people in the crowd began to pull at him and push at her. She fell to the ground, disappearing momentarily in a sea of legs, until another officer rushed to her aid with his baton raised like a saber. Longoria stood up, excited by the action, the sense that a battle was brewing for control of the street. Emboldened, the crowd surged forward and snapped the yellow tape barrier, trampling it into the asphalt.

Now more rocks were falling on the police perimeter and the officers were backing off, taking refuge behind their patrol cars, speaking into their radios, shouting words that Longoria could not hear.
Why don't they just take charge, these maricones? They draw their weapons, but they don't fire. Now they are retreating!
This was something to see. They were surrendering the field to an unarmed mob, scared off by a few rocks. Longoria was truly disgusted. The Los Angeles Police Department was not the fighting force he had imagined. In the rush to get away they had even left behind one of their squad cars, and now the cholos were climbing on top of it, pounding the hood, raising their arms in defiant celebration. One of them took a two-by-four and smashed the front windshield. What a disgrace!

Longoria scanned the crowd and tried to memorize the faces of the agitators who had ignited this disturbance. He might be able to pick them out later, turn them over to the authorities. But then he told himself that the police would never be able to catch them, that these hoodlums would melt into the city just as the guerrillas disappeared into the hills.

He was turning away from the window when he was startled by a flash of recognition.
There he is!
The man from MacArthur Park was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, four floors below. Longoria held the face for an instant, then lost it in the jostling of the crowd, the dancing shadows on the darkened street.
The son of a bitch who broke my arm. How does he know I live here?
Longoria tried desperately to find the man in the crowd again, but everyone was moving too quickly, every face was a blur.

Where is he? Where is he?
Rocks, bricks, and bottles began to jump from the crowd, arching high above the street and landing at the other end of the block, where the police were ducking meekly behind the surviving patrol cars, almost out of Longoria's view. All kinds of people were running back and forth, but none of them was the man with the pipe, Longoria's enemy.

He was there, I saw him.
Longoria wanted to run downstairs and confront the attacker, catch him by surprise. But no. His arm was in a sling; he couldn't fight the man with just one arm.
Was it really him?
He needed to calm down. He was losing control again, slipping into the irrational. Perhaps he hadn't seen the man at all.
I am being paranoid. I am imagining things.
Looking down at the crowd, studying the faces, he didn't see anyone who remotely resembled the tall man with the round glasses.

If the man with the pipe is out there, he could try to take advantage of the chaos on the street and kill me right now, when the police can't help me.
Longoria stepped away from the window and picked up the round disks of his weights, propping them against the door one by one. And then the lifting bench itself. No, this wouldn't be enough. Using his left shoulder, he pushed the dresser over to the barricade and sat down on the opposite side of the room, back against the wall, eyes fixed on the door.

The sounds of the crowd outside were behind him. Shouting, the patter of feet on asphalt and cement, the pop of glass bottles exploding as they hit the ground. A muffled voice on a loudspeaker, followed a minute or so later by the familiar whoosh and metal clank of tear gas canisters. Good, the police were fighting back. He rose to look out the window, and sure enough the cholos and their allies were retreating before a little plume of smoke, visible proof of what his instructors at Fort Bragg called “the outstanding effectiveness of tear gas in crowd dispersal.” But it was too soon to let his guard down, so he took up his position again, across from the door, grabbing the long steel bar from his weight set to use as a weapon.

Two hours later, when order had been restored on the street and the last of the insurgents had been taken away, Longoria began to dismantle the barricade.

Of course not. He hadn't seen the tall man after all.

 

15.
DEPARTMENT OF SANITATION

 

Antonio walked back to Crown Hill, crushed by his failure in the park. His shoes were untied, his belt loop was unfastened, his shirt was unbuttoned. Why did something always have to go wrong? Was he doomed to constant, pathetic failure?

The tattooed soldier is still alive, walking the streets of Los Angeles, breathing the air of this day and the next and the next.

But he had injured the man, that much was certain, perhaps broken his arm with that first blow. There was an unmistakable crack when Antonio brought the pipe down. Here was a victory, something to savor and admire, like a medal. He had accomplished something. The tattooed soldier now carried this pain, a throbbing, perhaps a pain deep to the marrow, like a hundred pins piercing the bone.

The first hesitation did me in. Next time I will be ruthless. Next time I will be an arrow, a compass locked on a steady bearing.

It was late afternoon, and the shadows were lengthening in the shallow valley of liquor-groceries and stubby tenements around him, edifices of brick and terra cotta with spidery fire escapes affixed to their walls, so strange and old, anachronisms in this young city. A few more blocks and the buildings began to disappear, thinning out into the familiar series of rubble-strewn lots. Finally he reached the open plateau of Crown Hill, the blank slate in the center of the city.

He looked at the shelters grouped in clusters, plastic and cardboard clinging to the muddy earth. He saw the makeshift structure José Juan had assembled from scraps, the tarpaulin roof fluttering in the breeze. It surprised him. He had forgotten where he was living. Like a traveler who returns home after a long journey to see everything in a new light, he took in the sight of this camp and suddenly understood many things.

I have been living this way, less than human, for longer than I can remember.

I have been wearing the helmet of mourning and self-pity too long.

I am living in the streets, under the starless sky.

Antonio considered this fact for a moment. It didn't seem so daunting anymore.
I am homeless.
The phrase had definitely lost its weight and stigma. He had been following the tattooed soldier, and this new mission had cleansed him of sorrow and guilt.
I am so much taller than the soldier, stronger than him.

He had a story to tell, and he was anxious to see his friends. He would give José Juan and Frank and the Mayor all the details: the color of the sky, the metallic taste of the air, the feel of the pipe in his hand, the sound of breaking bone. The inevitable failure and his dispassionate analysis of what went wrong. He was too rushed, he let the wave of emotion carry him forward, the surge of anger and vengeance, and didn't stop to weigh all the consequences. The parameters of the moment had escaped him, the correlation of forces on the field of battle.
I saw that police officer, and I should have known he would rescue the soldier. I should have waited, but I didn't plan.

José Juan and the others would say he was crazy and brave to try and kill a man with his bare hands.

*   *   *

“You can't kill a killer just like that, without thinking.”

Frank was upset with Antonio. Sitting next to the Mayor on their couch, on their mountain high above the panorama of the Harbor Freeway, he had listened as Antonio recounted his confrontation with the soldier in MacArthur Park. Now he frowned at his new friend with a sort of superior displeasure. He was annoyed because Antonio didn't consult him first.

“With a pipe?” he asked, incredulous, shaking his head. “You're crazy. Lucky you didn't get yourself killed.”

“He had a gun.”

“A gun? No way!”

“But it didn't fire.”

“Oh man! The drama thickens.”

“Maybe it wasn't loaded,” Antonio said.

“Naw, it was just one of those cheap black-market guns, I bet,” the Mayor interjected. “Gang bangers are dumping all kindsa shit on the streets.”

“And then the police showed up.”

“Police?”

“But they let me go. And the soldier, he ran away. He got away.”

“Unreal. You
are
lucky,” Frank said. “You're lucky the police didn't pull a Rodney King on you, beat you to a pulp like they beat that brother, a little shower of batons on your skull. You got some angel looking over you.”

*   *   *

The sun had set by the time Antonio returned to his own campsite to sit by the fire. José Juan was quiet and cautious, as he had been since Antonio first told him about the events in the park and saw José Juan open his eyes wide in shock, as if he was afraid Antonio might hurt him.
He thinks I'm mentally unbalanced, capable of anything.

José Juan's fear would pass. Antonio had not become a killer, nothing about him had changed. He had simply crossed paths with the tattooed soldier. The responsibility of bringing him to justice had fallen to him because there was no one else to do it. They lived in an interval of history without courts, without the passionless procedures of official justice, and so this act had fallen to him, a man living on his own in a strange city, a homeless man.
There is a balance between us. We are opposites balancing a scale, we are mathematics. I am tall, he is short. I live under the sky, he lives under a roof. He has a girlfriend, I am alone. He has a job, I do not. He is the killer, I am his victim.

José Juan coughed, pulling Antonio out of his daydream. The light of the campfire glowed orange on his curly head. José Juan had become adept at starting a good fire and finding wood scraps for fuel. In this city of asphalt and concrete it was surprising how much wood you could find lying around. The shelter had grown from a simple lean-to built against the remains of a brick wall into a cocoon of wool and cotton blankets shielded by pine boards José Juan had found or stolen.

Shooting Antonio a look, José Juan disappeared into the shelter, which seemed more cramped every day. He had lined the inner walls with shoe boxes that served as shelves, holding razors, pencils, spoons, cups, and a satin-gloss color print of his wife and family. Alone by the fire, Antonio concentrated on his next move. He had lost the element of surprise, and the soldier would recognize him now. He could no longer sneak up on his target. But the soldier didn't know that Antonio had followed him for days and stored his life patterns in memory. The gun was Antonio's biggest problem. This man was armed, and even if he had dropped the gun at the park, he could buy a new one. He was a soldier who could easily get a weapon and who knew how to use it.

Antonio hadn't realized there was such science and strategy to the act of killing someone. The body resists its own extinction, it is a fortress with walls and armaments more formidable than you might expect. Antonio was going to need some help. He was going to need Frank.

*   *   *

Antonio woke the next morning to the sound of engines and the warning song of big trucks going into reverse. He turned over on his mattress and reached out to pull back the towel that served as a door to the shelter.

In the next camp, a block away, he could see disheveled men shaken from sleep, holding blankets and bedrolls in their arms, scrambling to pick up shoes, boxes, sweatshirts, hats. Their mouths were open in protest, but Antonio couldn't hear what they were saying over the din of the engines. A dust cloud grew behind them, and they seemed to be retreating from its fury, dropping papers and clothes in their rush to get away before it swallowed them up and turned them to dust men.

“What's going on?” José Juan said, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

As the dust cloud began to thin, Antonio could see a bulldozer grinding forward, lowering its shovel behind the running men. It cut into the ground and lifted something into the air: a blue tent, trailing ropes and stakes, swept up intact and dropped into a large black cube. A trash dumpster. Then the dumpster itself rose in the air, propelled by the arms of a large garbage truck, which swallowed the contents into its roof.