The Tattooed Soldier (38 page)

Antonio and Frank stared at him and then at each other with identical expressions of astonishment. It was José Juan.

“He's clean,” Frank said, echoing Antonio's thoughts precisely. José Juan had the freshly showered look of a man who slept in a real bed.

“I got a job!” José Juan exclaimed in English, raising his arms in a triumphant V. He embraced Antonio, who felt an unexpected rush of nostalgia.
I didn't realize how much I missed him.

“
Moro
, look at you,” Antonio said, laughing and wiping at the corner of his eye. “You're a new man. What happened?”

“Look at those shoes,” Frank said with a low whistle. “Sharp.”

Antonio looked down at the tassels of José Juan's tapered cordovan shoes, now stained with the mud of the tunnel floor. His friend looked slimmer because he was no longer wrapped in the bundle of clothes they had to wear to stay warm, and he had gone to the barber for the first time in months. He could have been one of those smooth playboy types Antonio usually found so annoying.

“I'm living in Beverly Hills!” José Juan blurted.

“What?”

“Beverly Hills,” he repeated.

“No way,” Frank said. “How?”

He pulled out a milk crate and José Juan sat down to explain. Too excited to concentrate on English, he spoke in Spanish, with Antonio translating for Frank.

“No me lo van a creer.”

“You're not going to believe this,” Antonio said.

“Start from the very beginning,” Frank suggested.

“Okay.
Todo comenzó en la esquina. En la Main
.”

“It all started on the corner,” Antonio translated. “On Main Street.”

“Where the dayworkers are,” Frank interjected. “All the Mexicans looking for jobs.”

“Sí.”

In this fashion José Juan proceeded to tell his story. He had gone to Main Street to look for work, but when he got there he quickly lost hope. The place was more crowded than he had ever seen it, maybe three hundred men standing at the intersection, pushing and shoving toward the cars and trucks that stopped there, a dense pack of bodies forming around each prospective employer. José Juan wasn't strong enough to get to the front, and after a while he gave up and went off to sulk on a nearby side street.

Sitting on the curb with his head buried in his hands, he began to contemplate, for the first time, going back to his pueblo in Mexico and facing the ridicule that would surely be heaped upon him for his failure in Los Angeles. Just then a green Hyundai stopped inches from his feet, and the Korean driver called out, “You want work?” José Juan jumped into the car, not bothering with the matter of pay, and slammed the door just as a horde of men came running from Main Street and began to pound on the hood, holding up four and sometimes just three fingers. Miraculously the driver managed to escape that crush of humanity without running anyone over. A few minutes later they were in Koreatown.

The man owned a huge pink apartment building and wanted José Juan to hang up some signs. They were all in Korean, but José Juan assumed they said something like “For Rent: Koreans Welcome.” He had to use a ladder for the signs the boss wanted on the second floor and on various lampposts in the neighborhood, but no matter how slowly he worked, José Juan couldn't stretch the job out past three hours. He finished at about one o'clock, and the Korean man paid him nine dollars.

“
Nueve dólares cabales, ni un centavo más
,” José Juan said, shifting on the milk crate and leaning down to scrape mud flakes off his shoes.

“Nine dollars exactly,” Antonio translated. “Not a penny more.”

The pay was bad enough, but then the
coreano
didn't even give him a ride back to Main Street and he had to take the bus. That cost him $1.35.

“Those Koreans are jerks,” Frank commented. “But what about the Beverly Hills part?”

“A eso voy.”

“He's getting to that,” Antonio said.

José Juan made it back to Main Street about two o'clock. All the action on Main was in the morning, and if you were there after noon you knew you wouldn't get any work. Most of the men at the corner had gone home and the few who remained were already starting to get drunk, so when a big Ford truck pulled up, José Juan and a black Honduran guy named Roberto were the only ones to offer their services.

“I told myself, I can't believe I am so lucky,” José Juan said, switching momentarily to English. “Twice in one day I am lucky.”

The next thing he knew he was in Beverly Hills, of all places, in a house that looked like one of those haciendas in the Mexican soap operas, a big, beautiful white house with the prettiest red tile roof. The man who had hired him was the head gardener, a polite and friendly Asian who wanted José Juan to do some simple yard work. The pay was better this time, six dollars an hour instead of just three. He started out in back, cutting a huge lawn that surrounded the swimming pool. That's where he was an hour later when he spotted the maid.

“Una Mexicana guapísima.”

“A very pretty Mexican woman,” Antonio translated.

“Uh-oh,” Frank said mischievously. “I think I know where this is headed!”

When the Mexicana saw him looking at her, she disappeared into a cute little house in the back. José Juan thought he'd scared her off, but then she came out with a glass of cold water and said, in the sweetest voice, “You've been working so hard. Look at you, your clothes are so dirty from work. You should take a drink.” They talked for only a few minutes, but that was all it took for José Juan to find out that she was just like him: all alone and separated from her family. She had two little boys back home in Guanajuato, living with their grandmother.

“And the father?” Frank asked. “The father of her kids?”

José Juan shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
“¿Quién sabe?”

It was a long time since José Juan had talked to such a nice woman. When he finished work at about six o'clock and the polite gardener offered to drive him and Roberto back downtown, he lied and said he had a cousin in Santa Monica and that he'd take the bus. He walked two blocks down the street, saw the gardener driving away with Roberto, waved to them, and then circled back to the hacienda to talk to that very pretty, very lonely Mexicana.

Well, to make a long story short, he had been sleeping with Cristina in the little house behind the hacienda ever since.

“You dog!” Frank shouted with glee.

“But you're married,” Antonio said.

José Juan ignored this last remark and explained that Cristina's employers were away on a long trip and so nobody bothered them. This rich family worked in the movies, and they were in Europe at something called a “film festival.” And so it was just José Juan and Cristina alone in the little guest house, which was just like the main house only much smaller, with an identical red tile roof. Living with Cristina had been like paradise, but the best part was that she had a friend who got him a job at a garment factory on Washington Boulevard, just a few blocks, as a matter of fact, from the street corner where the whole adventure started. He had been working there for a week, making five dollars an hour. And even though he hadn't been paid yet, Cristina had loaned him some money so he could buy some new clothes, which was what he had done just before coming to the tunnel to see how his friend Antonio was doing.

“What a story!” Frank said.

“But there's more,” José Juan said in English.

“More?”

It turned out that Cristina had a brother in South-Central who was doing real well, with a good job in a factory that made water heaters. He had just bought a house out there in the black neighborhoods, by Fifty-third and Normandie. And even though this brother was going to share the house with his in-laws, they were still going to have trouble making the payments to the bank. To bring in a few extra centavos, they needed to rent out a small room in the back. The room had space for two people, and its own private bathroom.

“They say they'll rent us this room for just one fifty a month,” José Juan told Antonio. “And we don't need any deposit. When I get my first paycheck, next Friday, we can move in. You and me, Antonio. There's room for both of us.”

Antonio, who had been translating every word, stopped suddenly.

“What did he say?” Frank demanded.

There was a brief silence as Antonio wondered if it could be true.
I must not be such a bad person if this friend has come back to rescue me. José Juan knows I don't deserve to live in this tunnel.

“We're not going to be homeless anymore,” Antonio said finally. “He found a room for the two of us. Very cheap.”

He looked around at the mattresses and sleeping bags tossed on the floor near the tunnel entrance, at the pots and pans blackened by fire and the plastic bag that held all his belongings. He looked at his hands and saw the dirt under his fingernails, reached for his neck and felt the layer of grime.

“You're not going to be homeless,” Frank said.

*   *   *

José Juan gave him the money right away, two crisp twenties, just enough to buy a cheap gun on the black market. “You can pay me later,” he said. After a final embrace he left the camp to rejoin Cristina in Beverly Hills.

“She's going to make me dinner. Just two more days before the family gets back, so we have to enjoy it.”

The next morning Antonio and Frank rose early for the long walk to the Eastside, where Frank knew someone who would sell them a gun cheap. How did he know such people? Without Frank, Antonio would be completely lost, unable to solve this most basic of problems.

An hour later they arrived at their destination, a series of bluish gray apartment buildings just on the other side of the concrete ravine of the Los Angeles River. A large sign announced “Pico-Aliso Housing Project.” Frank led Antonio into a maze of buildings and grassy plazas, looking for an address.

They reached a doorway where a tough-looking teenager in baggy pants was cradling a baby boy in his arms, cooing at the infant as he kissed him on the stomach. As they headed for the next apartment over, the teen glanced up at them with mild suspicion, revealing a teardrop tattooed under his eye.

Frank knocked on the door. “Hey,” he said when a large Latina woman in a nightshirt appeared, hair shower-wet, the room behind her smelling of staleness, of closed windows, old carpets, and cigarettes. “I'm looking for my buddy John De la Torre. He around?”

At the mention of this name, the woman looked at Frank as if he had insulted her or spit at her feet. “John De la Torre! You know John De la Torre?”

“Uh, yeah,” Frank said tentatively. “I'm looking for him. He's my friend.”

“Your friend!” she yelled, and then laughed. “That's a good one. I didn't know he had any friends left!”

“Isn't this where John De la Torre lives?” Frank asked.

“Used to live,” the woman said. “Now we don't even let him in the fucking house, and when we hear he's in the neighborhood we double-lock the doors. Three times he's cleaned us out. A junkie is what he is. And a thief.” She paused, eyebrows raised in alarm. “Is he out now? Is that what you're telling me? They finally let my brother out of jail and didn't tell us? Son of a bitch!” She turned and shouted, “Hey, they let Johnny out of the big house and didn't tell us.”

“What?” came a voice from the apartment.

The woman turned back to Frank and pointed a menacing finger at his chest. “If you see that s.o.b., you tell him and tell him good. Tell him not to even think about showing his sorry-ass face round here till he gives me back my TV.”

“And my jewelry too!” the unseen voice added.

With that, the door slammed in Frank's face. “Looks like John ain't here,” he said to Antonio with a sardonic smile.

They were walking away from the door when they were approached by a boy on the brink of adolescence, a sheen of oil covering his pimply face. He was dressed in the T-shirt and stiff, oversized jeans that seemed to be a neighborhood uniform.

“You looking for John?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“What for?”

“To buy a gun,” Frank said without hesitation.

“Oh.” The boy looked at the ground, as if he were thinking about what to say next. “I know someone who's got a gun.”

Antonio's sense of surprise and horror quickly passed. Of course this acned cherub knew where to get a gun. It made perfect sense.

Frank contemplated the boy with a mixture of distrust and curiosity. “How much?” he said after a brief pause.

“Don't know. You gotta ask her.”

“Her?”

“Yeah. Monica, she's my cousin. It's only a twenty-two, but she wants to dump it.”

Frank and Antonio found themselves following the boy around the corner of the building. He walked with an easygoing shuffle, his pants legs rubbing together in a muted song. Antonio wished he were taking them to a playground or a sandbox, instead of to a woman selling a gun. Maybe it was all a game. The boy led them deeper into the labyrinth of apartment buildings, each the same bluish gray as the others. They walked for ten minutes, to a building that seemed no different from all the rest. The boy knocked on a door, and a thin girl appeared, perhaps sixteen years old, with cinnamon skin and hair dyed a brownish orange.

“Can you talk?” the boy asked.

“Yeah, what's up?” the girl said.

“These guys, they're friends of John De la Torre. They wanna buy the gun.”

Monica looked at Frank and Antonio with a frown, offended by their grungy appearance, perhaps, or by their association with the sullied name of John De la Torre.

“It's just a twenty-two,” she said.

Frank looked embarrassed now. They both felt like fools or worse, engaged in this repugnant commerce with children.