The Tattooed Soldier (37 page)

“Just shoot her, you stupid
indio
!”

Standing over his own prisoner, Longoria pulled the trigger. The first bullet pierced her stomach, and she looked straight at him in disbelief, wheezing as she gasped for air. Her arms floated up and she reached for him like the market women of his boyhood. “
Por favor
,” she said meekly.
“Por favor.”
She was passing over to the other side, and the quicker she passed, the sooner she would close her eyes and stop looking at him. He fired another round into her, but still her eyes did not close. Another round and another, his muscles tense against the weapon's recoil as the eyes rolled in circles, brown balls spinning in a creamy soup. Longoria kept shooting until his machine gun wouldn't fire anymore.

“Hey, look at Rat-Face!” Sergeant Medina called out. “He's a real killer, that one. Fierce! A killer rat!”

*   *   *

Longoria was racing down the stairwell of the Westlake Arms, uncharacteristically late for work after another night of fitful sleep, when he bumped into a cholo who was loping up the steps. They both fell in the crash of limbs.

“Hey, what the fuck!”

“¡Hijueputa!”
Longoria spat back.

“You fucking with me or what?”

It was the elephant-eared one. They stared at each other, facing off with identically clenched jaws and flexed muscles. Longoria could see “María” tattooed on the cholo's neck in a pretty swirl. Perhaps that was the name of the girl whose image adorned his biceps, the bounce of her curls reaching almost to his elbow.

Longoria had encountered this young man on the steps dozens of times but had never noticed the word on his neck because they had never stood this close before. The cholo had never stopped to look him in the eye this long, he had always looked away. The battle with the police had emboldened him. If I can fight a cop, his eyes seemed to say, I can fight you too, soldier.

Finally, with more bumping and jostling, they allowed each other to pass, Longoria's jaguar brushing against the homegirl on the cholo's arm.

 

17.
ADVENTURE IN BEVERLY HILLS

 

Not long after the bulldozers came to Crown Hill, José Juan Grijalva disappeared.

He got up one morning before everyone else, as usual, and bundled himself against the pre-dawn chill in a thrift store coat he wore over the sweater he had been sleeping in for the past three weeks.

“
Me voy a la Main y la Washington
,” he told Antonio, who was groggy but awake, lying on three layers of cardboard that were just enough to keep the wetness of the muddy tunnel from seeping through. “I'm going to look for work. Want to come?”

Antonio shook his head. He didn't feel like going to Main and Washington. He never did. He was surprised José Juan asked since he had told him many times that he considered it pathetic and undignified. You stood on the sidewalk, scanning the traffic like a prostitute in search of a john, pushing and shoving with a hundred other men so that you could be first in line when a pickup truck with building materials in the back finally slowed down and stopped. Then you held up the three or four fingers that indicated how little pay you would accept for an hour's work.

“
Como quieras
,” said José Juan, shrugging his shoulders as he walked away. Eight days later he had not returned.

Now Antonio missed his friend and wondered why he had left. Maybe it was the tunnel and its fetid air, even more dismal than the plastic and cardboard shacks on Crown Hill. Maybe he was scared off by all the talk of killing and vengeance that had begun to fill the conversations by the campfire. Maybe he thought Antonio would make him an accomplice to the murder of the tattooed soldier and they would end up in prison together, co-conspirators in a political assassination. José Juan had always been the cautious type. Breaking the law, resorting to violence, that was something he'd never do. He wanted a place in Montebello or East L.A., one of the nice Chicano suburbs, a house with a van parked in the driveway. If he played by the rules, maybe those things would come to him.

“Hey, what happened to your buddy, the curly-headed guy?” Frank asked one afternoon.

“
El moro?
I don't know. He's gone.”

“He was quiet, but he seemed like a nice guy.”

Maybe José Juan had simply decided to return to Mexico, defeated at last by the separation from his family. Maybe he was worried that his wife would take up with another man, someone who could provide for her—an understandable reaction for a woman left alone with four children. But at least he could have said goodbye. José Juan was always gracious and polite, and it seemed strange that he would leave like that, without a word to the friend who had suffered with him through so much.

Of course, it was also possible that he had been mugged or run over by a car or arrested by the immigration police. So many different tragedies could swallow a poor man in Los Angeles. Antonio was always reading in
La Opinión
about immigrants who died on the freeway or in factory accidents so far from home and family that there was no one to pay for their funerals.

Antonio could only hope and pray that nothing like that had happened to José Juan. He missed the companionship, missed talking to someone from his own culture, more or less, someone who at least spoke the same language. He remembered their last trip to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, to see Guatemala play Mexico, the game they ended up listening to on a radio just outside the stadium because the tickets cost more than they expected. It was a few weeks before the eviction, and they were broke. The radio announcer launched into a long “
¡Gooool!
” and the cheer of the crowd arrived a second or two later, forty thousand people taking in breath all at once and shouting, the extended roar peppered with horn blasts and firecrackers. José Juan shouted his own “
¡Gol!
” and jumped two feet in the air because Manolo Negrete had just put the Mexicans ahead of the hapless Guatemaltecos. Even though they couldn't see the action, Antonio knew his team would be shorter, frailer, and less skilled than the Mexicans. They always were.

When the game ended with the score 4-0, José Juan put a brotherly arm around Antonio's shoulder. “They'll do better the next time,
hombre.
They've got all those good new players, Paniagua, Castillo. They're young and fast. In a few years they'll be a lot better.”

“No they won't,” Antonio had said with a frown. “Guatemala always loses.”

A friend like that shouldn't just leave. He should tell you when he decides to go back to his country.

But the worst thing about José Juan's absence was that it made it impossible, for the time being, to move forward with the plan to kill the soldier. Everything hinged on being able to buy a gun. Frank said that was the only way to finish off a trained killer. You had to surprise him, plug him from behind, or you ran the risk of getting killed yourself. That was how Frank explained it. For this reason Antonio needed at least a small gun, something Frank called a .22, or preferably a bigger one, like a .38. Frank said there was a difference between a .38 and a .22—“a huge difference”—and he sounded like he knew what he was talking about. But even a .22 cost money, and Antonio was down to his last dime. He had planned to ask José Juan to lend him the forty or fifty dollars Frank said he would need.

Without José Juan, Antonio's plan to kill the tattooed soldier was in strategic limbo, but he could still work out the rest of the details, deciding when and where to stage his ambush. Frank suggested a “reconnaissance mission.”

“We have to know everything about the guy,” Frank said. “Where he sleeps, where he eats. Every detail.”

Antonio said he already knew these things. “I can take you to all the places. I can show you everywhere he goes, everything he does.”

The tour took a day. Antonio led the way, Frank following along with good humor and moderate curiosity, like a student on a field trip to the museum. It occurred to Antonio that he had never known a black man this intimately. There were only a few blacks in Guatemala City, and it was the nature of Los Angeles that the many races stayed separate, everyone on their own turf, Latinos with Latinos, blacks with blacks, whites with whites. It was only in the little camp in the tunnel that Antonio had seen the races mixing, all thrown together because they had no place else to go.

The only other black man Antonio knew as well as Frank was San Martín de Porres, the sixteenth-century Peruvian saint whose face adorned a palm-sized devotional card he carried in his pants pocket. He had bought the card for a quarter at one of the
botánicas
on Broadway, a few days after deciding to kill the tattooed soldier, in hopes that the image of the saint would remind him of Elena and inspire his quest for justice. But next to Frank, San Martín seemed mild and meek. He was saintly by definition, and not the fighter that Frank was, not the powerful and funny black man who was now helping him plan the murder of the soldier.

Walking toward the tattooed soldier's apartment on Bonnie Brae, they made slow progress because every half block or so Frank saw somebody he knew and stopped to talk. These acquaintances were an odd assortment, but they shared the same gray pallor, general emaciation, and slumped posture. “They're all hypes and hubba heads,” Frank said. “I used to be in that life, but not anymore.” They met a skinny white woman named Nancy who started to flirt with Frank, saying he had beautiful eyelashes. Antonio looked at Frank's eyes and saw that this was true. The lashes were long and curled at the ends, giving him a slightly feminine appearance that was offset by the stubble on his chin and the thickness of his neck. Nancy started to rub up against Frank but stopped abruptly when he said, “Hey, babe, I'm flat broke.”

A block later they reached the Westlake Arms. Antonio pointed out the window of the tattooed soldier's room.

“He lives up there on the fourth floor, right next to the little ladder. He's at work right now, so he won't see us.”

Frank craned his neck to examine the window. It was closed today, precluding any acrobatic break-ins from the fire escape. Antonio took off his glasses and cleaned them to get a better view. There was a white curtain that hadn't been there before. Maybe after their confrontation in the park the soldier had started to take precautions.

They walked around to the alley and the dumpster in back.

“He takes out his trash in the morning,” Antonio said. “Every day, I think.”

Frank seemed especially intrigued by the narrow corridor of the alley, his eyes lingering on the rear fire escapes that climbed up the building, the crisscrossing wires, the shacks of the homeless tucked against one wall.

“You say he comes here every day?”

“Yes. With a little red trash can.”

Frank chuckled. “You really got this guy down. You know everything about him. You know where he shits, you know where he sleeps. You really got him.”

Next they went to the bus stop where Antonio had seen the soldier standing with his girlfriend, the pretty Latina in the shiny shoes. Antonio began to describe her in detail, but Frank interrupted him.

“No, no, that's no good,” he said. “We have to leave the girlfriend out of it. She's got nothing to do with it.”

They walked two blocks to the park and the chess tables where Antonio had attempted to bludgeon his enemy, then another mile to Pico Boulevard and the storefront office of El Pulgarcito Express, branch number two. From across the street, keeping a safe distance, Antonio pointed at the plate-glass windows.

“He works at the front counter. See?”

Frank squinted and shook his head. The counter and a few bodies were visible through the glare of the glass, but little else. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I'll be right back.” He crossed the street and returned a few seconds later, barely aware of the traffic, grinning broadly.

“Holy shit! I saw him! He was right there. Tiny little motherfucker, just like you said! Ha! With the tattoo and everything.”

“Let's go, Frank. I don't want him to see me.”

“That sick s.o.b.” Frank clenched his fist as they walked away. “He looks like a killer. Looks like a Nazi with his buzz-cut hairdo. I seen him once, and I already wanna kill him. I wanna do him bad. I could see it in his face. I could see those kids you said he killed.”

*   *   *

“I think the alley is your best bet,” Frank said. They were sitting near the tunnel entrance in the afternoon sunshine, watching a group of graffiti artists add yet another layer of paint to the concrete walls. Pulling spray cans from canvas backpacks that hung languidly from their shoulders, they worked in elegant bursts, accompanied by the click-clack of little metal balls as they shook the cans to keep the paint flowing.

“No one'll see you there. You can hide in one of those boxes. Behind the dumpster. Whatever. Then, when he comes down, you take him out. Like this, pow!” He pantomimed firing a gun. “And then you make a run for it down the alley, blend into the crowd. Get on the first bus you see.”

It all made sense. The thing was not to get caught. To accomplish the act and go unpunished, to live afterward like a normal person, that itself was the real act of defiance against the crimes of the tattooed soldier. Antonio would kill him, and then walk and breathe in the open city as a free man. He would go back to work, find a woman to love, start a family again and grow into old age with them. While the soldier rotted underground, Antonio would stand in the sunlight and welcome the coming decades, the new generations. He would watch his children stand tall and prosper: they would go to school, do all the things Carlitos never could.

Antonio was lost in his thoughts, half listening to Frank, when he spotted a lone figure jumping the chain-link fence at the entrance to the lot, a swarthy Latin in a bleached white shirt and leather shoes ill suited to climbing. The man landed about fifty yards away, nearly slipping on the concrete, and the graffiti artists looked up from their work, wondering if he was a cop or maybe the owner of the property. The man ignored them and walked toward the tunnel. “Antonio!” he called out, waving his arms. “It's me!”