The Tattooed Soldier (41 page)

“I got my orders,” the driver yelled back. “This is as far as I go. Washington is the last stop. I'll be goddamned if I'm gonna take this bus into a riot zone. Take it up with the
RTD
if you don't like it.”

Antonio and José Juan stepped off the bus and stood on the sidewalk, trying to get their bearings. They were pedestrian castaways on the corner of Washington and Vermont, about thirty blocks from their point of departure and another thirty or so from their destination. Too much traffic at this intersection, a dozen cars in the blink of an eye. They decided to walk east to Hoover, to see if the buses were running there, but found only groups of stranded passengers cursing the signs that promised “Bus Stop.”

“We might as well walk. From here it's an hour, maybe more,” José Juan said. “Should we do it?”

“Why not? What else do we have to do?”

They headed south, toward the hazy silhouette of the University of Southern California, a brick tower jutting from the skyline not too far away. It was a sunny spring day, already pleasantly warm, the last traces of winter finally gone. Antonio didn't mind walking, especially with a good chance that he would be able to take a warm shower once they reached the new house.

They had been walking for twenty minutes when three fire trucks and two patrol cars zoomed past them, barreling south down Hoover toward the university. As the siren cry of the caravan faded, Antonio heard even more sirens in the distance. He stopped, fascinated by the sound. Unseen ambulances and fire trucks wailed into the city sky, calling out to their brethren, who answered back from all sides. A vast herd of emergency vehicles was assembling in the streets around them and migrating en masse to South-Central Los Angeles, where Antonio and José Juan hoped to live.

“Look,” José Juan called out. “I see a fire. Two fires! Three!”

Past the brick buildings of the university, black columns of smoke billowed into the air.

“I think we better go back,” Antonio said.

“Why?”

Antonio stared at his friend, incredulous. “There's a riot going on down there!”

They turned away from the pillars of smoke and walked north toward Washington Boulevard, at a brisker pace. Approaching the intersection, Antonio heard an alarm and saw a crowd of people descending upon two white buildings, a large structure and a smaller cube attached to the side: an auto parts store and its garage.

“Something's going on here.”

A few people were bolting from the white buildings now, running in funny waddles, deftly avoiding collisions with the people still trying to get in. A man in a hairnet came trotting down the middle of the street, oblivious to the cars around him, rolling a brand-new tire between the lanes of traffic. Other men followed, carrying car batteries, repair manuals, windshield wipers, cans of
STP
oil treatment, rearview mirrors, paper air filters.

“It's because of that
negro
who got beat up,” Antonio said, thinking out loud. “Because the police beat him up.”

“What
negro
? They're Latinos,” José Juan said. “They don't know any
negro.
They don't care about any
negro
.”

The waddling looters laughed and ran, eyes darting as they escaped the scene. They were scared and excited all at once, with a breathlessness in their expressions, a happy disbelief.
No one will catch us. No one will catch us because we are hundreds.
Antonio had never seen anything like it. It was the same impulse that made people push to get on the bus first or grab for the items on the sale table, a latent impulse set loose and multiplied, now a collective spirit. Another alarm sounded, and Antonio saw that a fire had started in the garage behind the main store. Employees in blue uniforms stumbled outside, soldiers of a vanquished army, some with torn shirts and scratch marks on their arms. Men and women, cashiers and clerks, they wept and comforted each other.
We tried to hold them off, but we couldn't. We've been attacked by the mob, but we survived.

“Maybe we should take something,” José Juan said.
“Aprovechar.”

“It's an auto parts store,” Antonio said sarcastically. “We don't have a car.”

“I guess you're right.”

A crowd had formed around Antonio and José Juan, taking in the spectacle from across the street. The number of onlookers seemed roughly equal to the number of looters. A tall Mexicano in a chef's uniform, white cylinder on his head, folded his arms across his chest and spat at the ground in disgust. On this side of the street, he seemed to be saying, we still respect the law. We are not people who loot, we respect the laws of this country even if we are not citizens. Antonio focused on a Filipino man who was running away with a red toolbox in his hand and the ecstatic smile of a lottery winner on his face. He stopped for a moment to look up at the sky, as if he half expected the great claw of law enforcement to descend upon him. Next to Antonio on the sidewalk, a young Latina woman in red heels and a black dress began to weep.

“Why are they doing this?” she said, stamping at the ground. “Why?”

Antonio did not share her sense of outrage. The whole thing was too much like a street fair, with alarm bells and shattering glass and crashing metal substituting for carnival music. People were breaking windows, cars were driving up to the intersection and smashing into each other. The flow of traffic, so thick and fast just an hour ago, had slowed to a crawl. Apparently word of the festival at Pep Boys had spread, because cars were stopping on the sidewalks or in the middle of the street to discharge their passengers into the store.

“I have to go,” José Juan said abruptly.

“What? Go where?”

“It's not far from here.”

“Now? Where? You have to go now?”

“It's just three blocks.”

José Juan turned away, but Antonio grabbed him by the arm. “Tell me where you're going.” He was afraid his friend was about to place himself in some sort of danger.

“I'm going to get my money from
el Armenio.
Or get even, at least. He owes me five hundred and sixty dollars.”

“You're crazy.”

“Or maybe I'll just set the office on fire. That seems to be popular today.” José Juan gave a wicked smile and touched his pockets. “Do you have any matches?”

“No!”

José Juan jerked his arm away and disappeared into the crowd of pedestrians who had taken over the northbound roadway on Hoover Street.

What does he think he's doing?
Getting even. Someone had declared this the municipal day of settling accounts, a day for all vendettas, private and public.

Now young men with rocks were roaming the streets. Where did the rocks come from? How did they get rocks in the middle of the city? Antonio looked closer and saw they were just chunks of concrete and brick, pieces of crumbling walls. There were plenty of crumbling walls in this neighborhood and thus no shortage of ammunition.

Antonio wandered around the intersection and watched as several smaller stores on the block began to surrender their merchandise. Hoover Hock and Pawn returned its goods to anyone with a rock or crowbar. The Washmont Mini-Grocery donated its inventory to the crowd. Women in tattered dresses pushed shopping carts filled with disposable diapers: diapers now, but maybe dresses later. Antonio was almost knocked down by a man with a huge samurai sword, pawn tag still attached. The samurai man fell to the sidewalk but quickly rose to his feet, sprinting away, cutting at the air with his sword to open a path through the crowd.

Housekeepers, garment workers, bus boys. Mexican, Honduran, Costa Rican, Nicaraguan. And of course his countrymen, the Guatemaltecos. It was a day without submissiveness, a day without coffee to pour or strangers' babies to feed or the whir of sewing machines in a factory. It was a day to liberate toolboxes and diapers from their glass cages. A day when all the pretty objects in the store windows would mock them no longer.

Antonio saw a boy of eleven running from a grocery store with a bag.

“Hey,” he called. “What did you get?”

The boy stopped, his face brightening with a catlike grin. He opened the bag for Antonio to see: lollipops and chocolate bars, jelly beans in clear packages. Red Hots. It reminded Antonio of that American holiday, the one where the kids dressed up in costumes and went from house to house. What was it called? He could not remember.

The boy disappeared into the smoky air on Washington Boulevard. There were many fires burning on this street now. The sunlight retreated, erasing the shadows of running people from the sidewalks. Flames from a burning warehouse ignited a palm tree and leapt up the trunk to the crown. Antonio wandered back to the auto parts store in time to see two more cars filled with looters collide in a metallic crunch.

A shoving match ensued. Two men began to wrestle, punches were thrown, a baseball bat was produced. And then, inevitably, a gun. A shot rang out and one of the combatants doubled over in pain as the people on the street scattered, instinctively ducking for cover. The shooter, a bulky middle-aged man, stood over his victim, a gaunt teenager, and then he got back in his car and drove away, a dangling rear fender scraping the asphalt. The teenager gripped his side and bled into the street.

“Where's the police?” a woman yelled.

Antonio touched his hand to the chunk of metal in his pocket.

There were no police. There was no authority or order of any kind. It was the municipal day of vendettas, and the police were staying home. There was nothing to stop José Juan from breaking into the office of his tightwad employer and setting the place on fire. He'd probably found some matches by now. There was nothing to stop a man from settling a dispute with a gunshot to the belly.

Antonio began to walk north along Hoover Street, toward Pico Boulevard and branch number two of El Pulgarcito Express.

 

19.
BELOW CROWN HILL

 

The insistent ringing of an alarm bell half a block away from El Pulgarcito Express announced the arrival of the mob. Sticking his head out the door, Longoria could see the twisted steel gate of the Payless shoe store, black bars bent so the looters could squirm in underneath. First they broke the windows with a pipe, then they used the pipe to jimmy the bars. Two men of about twenty-five, both looking vaguely Salvadoran, coordinated the action, displaying the desperate ingenuity that was characteristic of Centroamericanos everywhere. Two, three, four men followed. Collective action, another Central American trait. Longoria wanted to run over and bend the bars shut again, sealing the store and trapping the looters inside, but he realized this would be a foolhardy act. Trying to stop the looters now would be like running across the thick stream of traffic on the freeway: you were sure to be hit.

The fatal mistake of the Payless crew, Longoria decided, had been to close their doors in the first place, to pin their faith on locks and metal barriers. Running away and leaving the store unattended invited the crowd to attack. If every store owner on this block had held his ground, like the Cuban proprietor of the
discoteca
on the next block who stood on the roof with a shotgun, his mouth twisted in a canine snarl, they could have turned the mob back. But all it took was one weak link to break the chain.

For much of the morning Longoria had been monitoring the television, following the geographic progression of the riot, now in its second day. It spread northward from its cradle on faraway Florence Avenue, past the university, finally spilling over the bridges and through the underpasses of the Santa Monica Freeway. What surprised Longoria most was how quickly it had happened. Was some guerrilla cell masterminding the operation deep within the fabric of the city? Perhaps not. The real problem was the complete surrender of the Los Angeles Police Department, which lacked the resolve to take charge of a messy situation. They were unwilling even to fire their weapons, to do anything that might spill blood. Two good battalions of Jaguars, he calculated, could easily retake the city.

But no. He wasn't with his unit anymore. He was on his own, for all intents and purposes, inside El Pulgarcito Express. Yanira paced back and forth across the lobby, which had been deserted since ten, begging to be allowed to leave. Duarte and Carlos Avilés had left two hours ago for branch number three, six blocks south of the freeway on Normandie, hoping to defend what seemed at the time the most vulnerable outpost in El Pulgarcito's eight-branch empire. Longoria tried to call them, but all the lines were busy or dead. Duarte had taken the only gun in the office. The police were nowhere, unreachable by phone, radio, or scream.

As he looked out the plate-glass windows, which he noted were especially vulnerable, Longoria tried his best to summon his army stare, to fend off the looters with his rapacious eyes, the exotic scar of his jaguar tattoo. The stare and the tattoo had served him well in Los Angeles. They had helped Longoria establish himself as a man who couldn't be fucked with, as the gringos would say. But today, when he desperately needed their power, they were failing him. Something was wrong, and it wasn't just the fact that his arm still ached and throbbed from the attack in the park.

The old woman and the man with the pipe were to blame. Reginalda was to blame for leaving him when he needed her most. She had planted all this doubt in him. She had made him cry.

Across the street a lanky young man sat on the curb and stared at Longoria through El Pulgarcito's windows. He was in his teens or early twenties, Longoria's age when he was first promoted to sergeant. Skinny brown arms dangled at his sides, reaching now and then for two chunks of concrete at his feet in the gutter, next to the storm drain. He wore white shorts with blue stripes, and his knees knocked together nervously. He looked at once eager and apprehensive, like a girl waiting to be invited onto the dance floor.