The Tattooed Soldier (43 page)

Not that anyone would be paying much attention to him anyway. Everyone was caught up in the looting, too busy liberating merchandise or defending homes and businesses. A certain segment of the population was behind locked doors, waiting it out. Antonio could see them in the six-story grid of windows on the building across the street, worried eyes peeping from drawn curtains, immigrant mothers and fathers calculating the relative dangers and wondering at what point they would have to grab the children and make a run for it.

When the tattooed soldier finally showed up and Antonio shot him, he would draw the attention of these people, dozens of witnesses who would register his face and height and weight as they watched him run from the scene. They would see the body of the tattooed soldier bleeding into the black tar of the street. It would be something like a public execution.

Antonio began to draw energy from the thought, just as he had when he attacked the soldier with the pipe in MacArthur Park. The difference now was that he had a gun. With a gun it would be quick and clean.

There was a shot in the distance, the unmistakable pop and echo. Another pop, and then two more in quick succession. Somewhere a man was pointing and firing, his anger palpable in the sound of the bullet cutting through air.

My madness is everyone's madness.
The day of vendettas and bravado. A Zacapaneco took it seriously when you doubted his manhood. When he was a boy, Antonio's father told him stories about men who settled their differences with
machetazos.
Antonio didn't have a machete, but he had a gun.

The tattooed soldier turned the corner.

Ashen face, rodent features, shaved head, right arm hanging limply at his side. The man looked defeated already, he had no fight left in him. Antonio could sense this from behind the concrete steps. Something in the universe had shifted and rearranged everything in Antonio's favor. For a moment he felt like the neighborhood bully: this was like the time he picked on the weakest kid in his school and gave him a bloody nose in a fight over a bicycle. Not a fair fight. But the thought quickly passed as the soldier walked toward him. A man who is almost home, a tired man, imagining the feel of his bed, the creaking of the mattress as he lies down, a man who wants to rest. Walking home like any normal citizen. Antonio's fingers felt numb, and he squeezed them into a fist to bring the muscles to life.

He glanced at the building across the street and saw a woman draw back a curtain.
Seven years of Los Angeles and now this moment.
A skinny girl sold him the gun. Antonio closed his hand tighter around the grip, placed his finger on the trigger. The soldier had his eyes fixed on the sidewalk, and there was no one on the block but him. The street was empty, another miracle. Everything just right.

Antonio stepped out of the shadows with a light and silent stride. Four feet from the soldier he drew the gun and called out, “Hey, you!”

The soldier looked up, and at that instant Antonio fired. The bullet like a knife. Brass candy.

For Elena and Carlos and the blood on the tiled floor.

The soldier grunted and stumbled backward, clutching his stomach as he fell to the sidewalk.

Antonio heard the rattle of a window opening in the Westlake Arms. He turned and saw a white wino with grimy skin and a stubbly beard standing twenty paces away, looking him straight in the eye. Where had he come from? The wino turned and began to run, dropping his paper bag, the bottle inside popping when it hit the sidewalk.

“He shot my wife and son!” Antonio shouted at the wino's heels. He turned back to his prone victim and straddled him, pointing the gun at his head.

“
¿Quién?
” the soldier moaned. “Who are you?”

I am the avenger of a martyred wife and son.

The soldier was in pain, frightened and surprised, wheezing as he breathed through his mouth. He touched his wound, a red stain that was just beginning to show on his light blue sweatshirt. Antonio raised his eyes to the windows, where a dozen or so people were staring at him. On the third floor a woman held a hand over her mouth.

“Mató a mi hijo y mi esposa!”
Antonio shouted up at the building, but the words seemed unreal and hollow as soon as he said them. What were words next to the image of a man standing over his bleeding victim? No one would believe him.
They can't see what the soldier is.

Now the soldier was pushing himself up off the sidewalk with his one good arm. It seemed he was barely hurt. Antonio lowered the gun on the struggling body and aimed at the shaved skull.
This one is for the pictures in the envelope.

Antonio squeezed the trigger, and the soldier slumped back to the ground. A fresh bloodstain appeared on the upper chest, just below the curve where the shoulder meets the neck.

The city is burning all around us. The sirens are singing goodbye to the soldier.

“Hey, you! Get away from him!”

A big Latino man in a sleeveless T-shirt was standing at the top of the front steps, a gun in his hand, dark tattoos smudged on his forearm and neck. His gun was bigger than Antonio's.

“Leave him the fuck alone or I'll shoot your ass.”

He doesn't understand what I'm doing here. He thinks I'm just some psychopath, vomit spit up by the riot.

The Good Samaritan on the steps was raising his gun now and halfheartedly pointing it at Antonio. The bloodstain had spread across the blue field of the tattooed soldier's sweatshirt, a ruby dampness on his stomach and chest.

He is dying now. The wound in the stomach will kill him. My work is done.

Sneering at the man on the steps, Antonio turned on his heels and walked away.

*   *   *

His first thought:
I am bleeding.
And then:
I don't deserve this.
In years of battle he had never been wounded. First touching his stomach and seeing the blood on his fingers, and then the lingering gut pain. A chance to look at the man's gun as he yelled at the windows. It was a small gun, a .22, the smallest there was.
For this I am lucky.
Then the shot to the shoulder, just missing the neck and the jugular.
Twice lucky.
The soul of a Jaguar felt no pain. The animal stare of the jaguar.

I can still move my legs, so there is no damage to the spine.

The man from the park had come to attack him again: persistent, this man was, like a horror film monster, showing up at the most obvious yet least expected place, right here on his front steps.

The sound of the footsteps. Turning on his side, Longoria watched the killer calmly walking toward Wilshire. Who was he? Who were the wife and son?

He couldn't let this man get away. He would be persecuted by men with pipes and guns and old women with sharp teeth until he caught up with the shooter and found out who he was. Longoria rose to his feet slowly.

“Lie down,” his rescuer said protectively, descending the steps. Longoria had lived in this building for years, but he did not recognize the man in the T-shirt. “You're wounded. Don't get up.”

“Get away from me.”

“Call 911,” the man shouted at the upper floors.

“We're trying, but there's no answer,” a woman said from the sky.

Longoria felt as if the street were the floor of a helicopter or the deck of a ship at sea. Still, he took one step and then another, and soon he was walking uphill to Wilshire.

“Crazy-ass motherfucker,” the man said behind him. “Lie down. You'll bleed to death.”

Now Longoria remembered seeing the Good Samaritan in a blue security guard's uniform.
He thinks he's a policeman, and that's why he came to help me. Birds of a feather. Does he know I'm a soldier?

He was amazed to find himself bleeding and walking. The fingers over the wound in his stomach were glistening with blood.
My blood.
And yet he was walking. He could see the shooter's blue windbreaker two blocks away, headed toward Third Street.
He will not expect me to be following him. He will not expect such strength and resolve, such resilience.
To rise, as if from the dead, and catch up with the man who has left you to die on the sidewalk.

This is nothing. I am strong because I have been working since I was five years old.
His earliest childhood memory, stooped over the soil, his mother at his side, showing him how to drop seeds into little holes in the ground, making a game of it. Later, taking the hoe, too big for his soft child's hands, and hacking at the hard earth until his arms and back were so tired he wanted to cry. People had no idea what he had been through, and they were always underestimating him. They did not know who Longoria really was.

Before his arm was injured, he had bench-pressed two hundred pounds.

He stumbled on a square of concrete jutting from the sidewalk and fell to the ground. Lying there with his head resting on the sandpaper surface, he touched the wetness on his belly, a wound in his side, right over the kidneys.
I should be fainting just about now.
He hadn't fainted because he had been shot with a .22, a pinprick as far as the Jaguars were concerned. His vision was becoming hazy. If he lost any more blood, maybe he would soon be light enough to fly, maybe the wind would pick him up and carry him like a feather on the soot-laden breeze.

I have to get up.
Back on his feet, he looked around and saw the shooter turning onto Third Street. He was getting away. If Longoria could find this man, he could plot his revenge, exterminate the danger, live free of fear.

Crossing Union Avenue, two blocks from his apartment, another vision, dreamlike. Columns of soldiers standing in rows in front of the Vons supermarket, where he had come once with Reginalda to buy something feminine. Soldiers standing in rows, waiting for orders, waiting to fall out. What are soldiers doing in a supermarket parking lot? He must be imagining them. But no, they are as real as the dimming sunshine of late afternoon and the crowds of people gathered on the street as if it were a holiday and not just another Thursday in April. He can still remember today is Thursday, so his mind must still be sharp. It occurs to Longoria that if he simply wanders into the little army camp here in the parking lot, the soldiers will take care of him. The United States Army has the best military hospitals in the world. They will dress his wounds and fill him with plasma, and he will be just like new.

But the pull of the shooter is stronger than anything, and so Longoria follows along, ignoring the sanctuary of the troops bivouacked at Vons. Soon he finds himself stumbling into a barren area of the city, a place with fewer and fewer buildings, fenced-off fields of green. Longoria has the strange feeling that the missing buildings have floated up into the air like balloons, in the same way his head is floating now, bobbing somewhere above his body and leading him deep into this empty land. He cannot feel his feet touching the ground. The soles have no sensation left. Now, mercifully, he is walking downhill, and isn't this easier, to allow gravity to do the hard work. Longoria is coasting down the steep incline when his legs collapse underneath him. He cries out and he falls to the pavement, rolling down the hill and landing with a plop in the gutter.

The shooter turns around. Their eyes meet for an instant, just as Longoria's close and he slips into the quietest, sweetest darkness.

He dreams that he is being carried aloft by a breeze so strong it seems to have grown arms. He is floating, but still heavy somehow, like a zeppelin.

Opening his eyes, he finds himself slung over a man's shoulder. Good, Longoria thinks. I am saved again, rescued from my folly, from so much walking and bleeding. He is being carried down a hill and then over a fence that has been stepped on, flattened. So many walls and fences have fallen today. He would like to thank this man, but suddenly it has become nearly impossible to form any sound but a groan. Blood is trickling from his mouth. If he could speak, he would say that this is not the best way to be carried, because his stomach is pressed against the man's shoulder and each step brings the sharpest pain, the pain of metal in your gut.

And then it's as if the man has heard his thoughts, because he is lowering Longoria to the ground, taking him by the arms, dragging him along a cement floor. Longoria can see the sky again. He can see the face of the man who is dragging him, a brown face with round glasses.

Longoria feels warm wetness spreading over his legs. He has peed himself, his bowels have exploded in a sickening mess. Blood is dripping from his mouth, from the wound in his gut, from the wound in his shoulder. Liquid is seeping from him at every opening, he is being drained.

He can see the face of his killer against the sky. Perspiration drips down the killer's cheeks, his eyes dart back and forth, he is short of breath. They are at the foot of a green mountain, wild plants and shrubs all around them, forlorn palm trees and tall milkweed. Are they still in the city? Surely Longoria is hallucinating now. The sky disappears, replaced by a gray arch, and the concrete floor beneath him yields to mud.

It is getting darker, as if someone were shutting a coffin. Longoria is very scared. He opens his mouth to scream but can only make the weakest of sounds, a faint groan.
Don't do this. Don't take me here. I am afraid.
It is getting darker and darker, and Longoria can't tell if it's because he is getting weaker or because he's being taken from the sunlight. The roof is closing over him. The only escape is to pull his arms from the killer's grasp, but there is no muscle, no will left in them. Longoria slides deeper and deeper into the tunnel. The last light fades, the killer's features dissolve into black and disappear.

He is in total darkness.

Now there are only sounds. The labored breathing of the killer, the plop-plop of his footsteps. Without warning, Longoria's arms fall to the mud. Every sound is amplified now. He hears a rush of wind through the man's mouth, a grunt of exertion, then an object whistling through the air and landing in a pool of water.