The Tattooed Soldier (44 page)

“Guillermo,” the man says.

Longoria is startled by the sound of his given name, a relic from his childhood, lost long ago.

“That's your name, isn't it?”

How does the killer know?

“Do you remember Elena and Carlos? San Cristóbal?”

Longoria tries to speak, but the sounds that come from his throat make no sense. If he could speak he would say no, he doesn't remember. There were so many villages, so many people. They have slipped into the farthest reaches of his memory, years and months blurred into a single image: fire and ash. He cannot remember.

Footsteps on the muddy floor, fainter and fainter.

Ask me something else, talk to me. Don't leave me here.

Longoria tries to get up, but he is anchored to the ground. He is being swallowed by the muddy floor. The last liquid is seeping from his body, into the earth. He would like to cry, but he cannot. He can no longer feel his feet or his hands.

There is a burst of light. Glowing golden in the darkness of the tunnel is a cornfield. Stalks rise from the black mud and push against the cement walls, fleshy leaves shining, tiny husks bursting like green embryos. A dark woman stooped between the rows of plants. She cuts into the earth with a hoe, grunting in a quiet and familiar way, then turns to look at him. Stretching out her hand, she gestures for him to rise. Stand up, quickly, there is work to be done.

Guillermo forgot to bring back the soap because he went to the theater instead, but his mother is not angry at him. She wants him to stand and work, because the plants need human hands to help them grow.

With invisible strings she pulls him up, and now he is walking toward her through rows of corn. Leaves brush his face, cool and moist. Rainbow-colored trousers hang loosely from his waist, fabric she wove at the loom. On his feet are sandals, strips of old leather held together with wire and twine. He smiles at his dirty toes, mud caked in the nails. So strange and happy, after all these years, to be wearing his peasant clothes again.

And now words from his mother in a language he has nearly forgotten.

“
Balam
,” she says.

*   *   *

Antonio stepped into the sunlight and saw a note held down by a rock on one of the old chairs by the campfire. José Juan had come looking for him; they must have missed each other by minutes. “Meet me at the new place,” the note said. There were directions to an address on Fifty-third Street in South-Central. “The buses might not be running yet,” José Juan had written. “Walk if you have to. It's not that far.”

He slowly took in the surroundings and rubbed his shoulder, which was sore from the effort of dragging the soldier into the tunnel. The body was about three hundred yards inside, past the first curve. For a few frightening moments he had become disoriented, circling in the darkness, panicked by the sensation that he would be trapped in the tunnel forever, punished by God for taking a man's life.

Everyone in the camp was gone, as they always were during the day. There were no witnesses to the final act, no one who could step forward and enter the tunnel to save the soldier's life.

Antonio felt a sticky dampness. He looked down and saw that a blackish stain covered almost half of his brown sweater, the wool already turning stiff.
The soldier has soaked into my clothes. This wetness is him, his lifeblood.
He quickly took the sweater off, and the shirt underneath, gagging as he choked back the juices rising from his stomach.
Look at me, I am the clumsiest, sloppiest killer.

He took the tainted clothes and buried them in the mud of the tunnel floor, checking one last time to see if the soldier's blood had passed through the fabric to touch his skin. Diseases were transmitted through blood. Antonio inspected his shoulder but found nothing, though he thought he felt a drop under his chin, a spot he couldn't see without a mirror. He picked up some mud from the tunnel floor and wiped it on his neck, just to be sure.

Now he saw things that had escaped his attention when he dragged the soldier through the camp to the tunnel entrance: a brand-new clock radio next to the sooty coffee pot that had endured so many fires, a bleach white sweatshirt announcing “Sunset Strip” next to piles of dingy hand-me-downs.

His plan was to wait here until morning to make sure the soldier was dead. There was only one way out of the tunnel, through the arch under which Antonio was sitting. The Mayor said the other end of the tunnel was closed off when someone built an underground parking garage. If the soldier came back to life, he wouldn't be able to escape without going past Antonio.

Resurrection did not seem beyond the tattooed soldier.

With an injured arm and two of Antonio's brass candies in him, he had still managed to chase Antonio for almost a mile. What a shock, to turn around and see the man stumbling to the ground twenty minutes after shooting him. After making sure that no one was watching and that the soldier was quite helpless, Antonio had picked up the bleeding man and hidden him in the muddy crypt of the tunnel so that he would finally die.

Exhaustion had whittled Antonio's passion for revenge down to the simplest of desires: to be rid of the man.

That was just like him, to follow me.
A picture had formed in his mind of the soldier as proud and obstinate. Follow the man who shot you, show him he has not hurt you. Foolish, self-destructive pride. A man who would never change his ways, never repent his sins. Antonio went over in his mind what he knew about the soldier's life. There were no redeeming qualities. He collected pictures of his victims and kept them in his dresser, a set of barbells his only other furniture. The insignia of a murderous regime was imbedded in his skin. He played chess, which was not a bad thing, Antonio supposed, but his only sympathy was for the curly-haired girlfriend, who seemed like a nice enough person. She smiled at the soldier as if there were something to like, something she saw that no one else could. What would she think when the soldier stopped calling her? What would she think when she found out he had disappeared?

Enough. Forget him.

Frank and the Mayor arrived just as darkness began to fall, relieving him of the loneliness of his thoughts. “Oh man,” Frank said. “Oh man, oh man, oh man. What a day!”

“We seen some ugly shit out there. The ugliest.”

“The fun was gone after the fourth hour. Right, Mayor? The hoodlums took over. No spirit out there. Just me, me, me.”

Frank had a transistor radio he had taken from a Thrifty drugstore. The Mayor carried some white packages under his arm.

“You got something,” Antonio said, surprised.

“Underwear.” The Mayor looked slightly embarrassed. “What can I say? I got the bare essentials. The bare necessities.”

“We saw somebody get shot,” Frank said. “At the Thrifty, right after the Mayor got his shorts. Security guard opened up on the crowd. Asshole! Crowd scattered, then one of the gang bangers answered back. Probably the only gang banger in town who can shoot straight. Nailed the guard. The guy just fell, like this.” Frank placed his arms stiffly at his side, imitating a falling tree.

“There was blood everywhere,” the Mayor added. “And not a cop in sight. It was anarchy, fucking anarchy.”

Frank opened a package of batteries and loaded them into his radio. “The silence is broken,” he said. Switching from station to station, he found only news broadcasts.

“I'm tired of the fucking news. News is all there is.”

Finally he found a classical station that was playing what sounded like a funeral dirge. To the wailing of oboes and bassoons, Frank and the Mayor went to sleep, pulling their dirty blankets over their chins like children taking a nap, exhausted and satisfied by the excitement and wonder of the day.

Antonio spent the night awake, watching the light of the campfire flicker on the tunnel walls, half expecting the tattooed soldier to emerge from the black arch. Shortly after dawn he took Frank's flashlight and went back inside, stopping when the beam of light touched the outline of the body. The soldier's feet pointed toward the tunnel entrance, and the black well of his mouth opened to the ceiling, as if to gather the water that fell around him in steady drops. The eyes were locked in an empty stare.

Would he ever forget the horror of the eyes, the face of a man at the moment he reached for his last breath? The soldier with the peasant's voice. He would carry this memory next to the image of Carlos and Elena on the steps of their home in San Cristóbal. Twin images, emblazoned on the front and back of a book filled with his wanderings. The blood of Los Angeles was colorless in the black-and-white light of the tunnel. The blood of Guatemala was crimson under a tropical sun. The blood of Los Angeles might soon begin to fade. The blood of Guatemala was indelible.

A park in Guatemala and a park in Los Angeles.

If I hadn't seen him at the park, the soldier would still be alive now, playing chess, walking to the bus with his girlfriend, lifting weights in that barracks of a room.

*   *   *

Frank and the Mayor were still sleeping. Antonio gathered a few belongings from the Hefty bag, just one shirt and some underwear and socks. He left everything else behind except José Juan's hotplate. He was going to a new home now, and he wanted to start with new things. Everything clean. It would be easier to look for work when he was living under a real roof again.

He wanted to say goodbye to his friends, but with the tattooed soldier's corpse in the tunnel it was better to leave no connection to this place, no way to trace him from here. It would be safer that way. One day, perhaps, he would come back to thank the man who had helped him in his mission. “We'd be blood after this,” Frank had said. Antonio would not forget, he would find a way to return the favor. That would be the right thing to do.

Soon he was on Third Street, walking toward Vermont Avenue. He had decided to walk all the way to South-Central, fifty long city blocks, a trip that would take him all morning and part of the afternoon. Right away he noticed that the multitudes of running people were gone and no more columns of smoke blackened the sky. After two days the
quemazones
were over. A few people gathered around the hulks of mini-groceries and gas stations, like passersby drawn to a car wreck, fascinated by the twisted metal and the charcoal scent of burnt fuel. A syrupy smell assailed him as he passed a liquor store, all those bottles of cheap wine now a sugary ash.

He was halfway to South-Central when an army of people with brooms materialized. Where did they get so many brooms? They pushed at the streets with straw, harvesting mounds of pale green glass, teasing them into dust pans and shovels, lifting them into boxes and trash bins.

A woman on the sidewalk glared at him. Antonio was puzzled until he realized it was because of the hotplate. He was carrying this appliance under his arm, the cord dangling halfway to his feet. She thought he was a looter. All the Mexicanos and the Centroamericanos stared at him with contempt because he looked like a brazen thief and brazenness was something that belonged to yesterday. Today, their eyes said, we are a different people. We are the people we were before all this ugliness led us astray. We do not take things that don't belong to us.

Antonio laughed to himself. He was the last looter.

The incendiary mood of the night before had definitely passed. It had evaporated just like Antonio knew it would, a fleeting storm gone out to sea. Already he missed it. He was nostalgic for the running crowds, for the sense of power, for the world turned upside down and the supermarkets where everything was free. An insurrection had taken place on these streets, a beautiful disorder. It was the window he stepped through to kill the tattooed soldier. And now it was shut. The rebellious waitresses and nannies and bus boys had gone back to their overcrowded apartments. For the foreseeable future the revolutionaries had retired to the glow of their television sets and the variety shows beamed in from Mexico City.

Elena would have loved to see the throngs of nannies taking over the streets of an American city, like the garbage workers they had joined in Guatemala all those years ago. She had led him to the demonstration by the hand when they were lovers, to teach him something. In the same way she had shown him the slogan painted on the wall of the philosophy building at the Universidad de San Carlos, underneath the mural of a dashing Che Guevara.

The revolutionary is guided in all his actions by great feelings of love.

All the brooms on the streets now—they were definitely an act of love. The sweeping and the sweeping, strangers meeting to collect a treasure of shimmering shards. We are cleaning now. Here is the true brotherhood of the city. But the brooms could not do their work without the fields of broken glass, without the soggy ashes that covered the sidewalks. Antonio wondered if throwing a rock was an act of revolution and thus also an act of love. José Juan running off to set a fire, Antonio pulling the trigger. Ten thousand people taking things and breaking windows because they were angry. Smash, smash, smash. We are free.

Carlitos, my baby, he liked to destroy things too. He built little houses with his baby blocks and knocked them over with a slap of his hand. He laughed when the blocks came crashing down.

No, it was absurd to mistake rock throwing and looting for an act of love, but Antonio was willing to allow for the possibility. If only Elena were here, in Los Angeles. Elena would know, she would be able to give him a definite yes or no. After all, she had studied and thought about these questions of love and revolution and had given her life in search of the answers. If she were alive, Elena would put her arms around Antonio and kiss him on the cheek and say, “Of course you're confused, my love, you always were.”

If she were alive, Elena would put her arms around him and whisper all the answers in his ear.