The Tattooed Soldier (2 page)

Elvira Gonzales, the elderly Mexican-American widow who lived down the hall, and who was now toward the back of the crowd staring at Antonio with a sad and disapproving motherly frown, had repeated it too. “Well,
muchachos
, if they throw you out, I guess you'll have to sleep under the freeway. That's what everybody else does. I guess it's warmer there.”

Why did people persist in repeating this horrible little phrase? No matter which way Antonio turned the situation and looked at it, he knew he would still be out there in the open, with only a shrub or a piece of cardboard to protect him against the wind, the cold, and the junkies. And now this
chino
was saying it to him. Go sleep under the freeway. It was too much. Antonio wanted to grab Mr. Hwang's plaid shirt and shove him against the very walls within which he and José Juan were no longer welcome. At least that would be poetic justice.

Antonio lunged for Mr. Hwang, his fingers gripping the manager's collar. Seams ripped in his hands.

“You go sleep under the freeway! You!
¡A ver como te gusta!
”

“Mister Manager!” yelled a voice in the hall. “Do you want me to call the police?”

At this, Antonio surrendered to the arms that were pulling at him, separating him from Mr. Hwang.

The crowd completely filled the hallway now. People had come from the other floors to watch the spectacle. They probably expected the police to arrive at any moment. Car crashes and altercations always drew an audience. Antonio had seen this sort of thing before, had been part of the crowd himself on more than one occasion. The promise of real-life violence or chaos was just about the only thing that could entice the apartment dwellers to break the burglar-proof seals on their doors and venture into public space. Fires, gang shootings, marital slugfests that spilled out onto the street: friendships were made and love affairs ignited in these magical moments when people gathered in the hallway, on the sidewalk or the front steps, tugging at the yellow police tape, whispering under the pulsating blue and red lights of an ambulance or patrol car.

But there would be no police cars, no flashing lights today. A few minutes after Antonio ripped the manager's shirt, he and José Juan were ready to go. They left a collection of newspapers, letters, books, immigration forms, and check stubs on the floor. On a wall they left a life-sized poster of Hugo Sánchez, the mop-haired Mexican soccer star. José Juan and Antonio both loved soccer; it was how they became friends in the first place, talking about
fútbol
in the diner where Antonio had been a bus boy and José Juan a dishwasher. When they had steady work, they saved to see games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, El Salvador versus Guadalajara, Mexico versus Guatemala. Now they would leave their room to Hugo Sánchez. He seemed to be having a good time, anyway, with his foot on a soccer ball, a beer in one hand, and the other around the waist of a pretty brunette.

Goodbye, room.
Adiós, Hugo.

At 3:00 p.m. they picked up the black Hefty bag and walked down the corridor, which was now empty and quiet. The neighbors had returned to their apartments, but Antonio could hear the murmur of their voices passing through the closed doors, wooden rectangles that breathed words in a jumble of English and Spanish.

José Juan closed the black iron door of the lobby behind them, and the voices of the Bixel Garden Apartments grew silent. They stood on the bubble-gum- and oil-stained front steps, pondering their options. Go sleep under the freeway: it seemed as good a choice as any. They began walking the nine blocks from their apartment building to the overpasses of the Harbor Freeway.

Antonio and José Juan carried the Hefty bag downhill along Third Street, straining to keep it from scraping the ground. The bag was heavy because it contained everything they owned: clothes, shoe boxes filled with letters from Mexico and Guatemala, two blankets, a framed picture of José Juan's wife, and the four-burner hotplate.

“We should get rid of this stupid hotplate,” Antonio said.

“We're not going to be out here forever,” José Juan answered defensively. “When we get another apartment you'll be thankful. I'll be eating hot food and you'll be begging me to let you use it.
Ya vas a ver.
”

They walked through a neighborhood of tumbledown wood-frame houses with damp clothes draped over the porch railings, then a street of squat brick apartment buildings. Someone tossed a bucket of water from a third-story window behind them, bringing the merchants out of the first-floor storefronts to complain and hurl insults skyward. A mother pushing a stroller hurried past the scene. The sidewalks were thick with people, but no one seemed to pay any attention to Antonio and José Juan with their plastic bag. They passed a crowded bus stop, mostly women watching the traffic go by with weary, end-of-the-working-day stares. No one bothered to cast them a glance.

Antonio was living on the streets, carrying everything he owned in a plastic bag, and no one would look him in the eye. He was used to being unseen. There was the invisibility of being a bus boy, of walking between the tables unnoticed, a shadow rolling the cart, clearing the dishes. But this was another kind of invisibility. People now made a point of turning away from him, just as Antonio had turned away from the hopeless men he saw in this same condition. Those men pushed their belongings around in shopping carts. Now he could see how practical it was to have a shopping cart.

“I'm tired of this,” Antonio said suddenly, dropping his end of the Hefty bag. He felt disoriented, as if someone had spun him around in circles. He wanted to scream at José Juan, at the people on the sidewalk who would not look at him. There was a word the Americanos used when they were angry, a word Antonio liked because it sounded so harsh and mean and ugly.

“Fucking bag,” he said in English. “Fuck it.”

José Juan let out a sigh and looked up at the sky. The sun was low, but his face was covered in sweat. The freeway was within sight now, an overpass just down the hill, only two blocks away. Without a word, Antonio picked up his end of the bag, and they began walking again.

They reached the freeway and stood underneath it, dwarfed by the immensity of the structure. This overpass was higher than most, an underbelly of concrete covered with a fine network of leafless ivy branches that spread out like capillaries across the gray surface. Water oozed like blood from the cement, and the damp air around them smelled of feces and urine. Antonio could hear trucks passing overhead with hurried rattling sounds, hydrocarbon winds rushing by in their wake.

“Now what do we do?” José Juan asked.

Antonio decided that they should walk a little farther, to the spot where a series of overlapping concrete spans vaulted and curved in the air, the interchange of the Harbor, Hollywood, and Pasadena freeways: inside the shadows cast by all these overpasses and underpasses, on-ramps and off-ramps, there had to be, surely, a place to sleep.

They threw the bag over a cyclone fence and then jumped over themselves, following a trash-strewn path that cut through a slope of ivy landscaping. They walked a few hundred feet to a two-lane transition road where cars passed under a bridge and into a tunnel, the sound of their engines echoing into a fluttering roar. Across this narrow road, hidden in the concrete hollows at the center of the interchange, Antonio could see the makeshift shelters of human beings.

“
Ya llegamos
,” he said. “We're here.”

To reach the shelters they would have to cross the transition road, which was filled with rush-hour traffic, two lanes of cars snaking past them at about twenty miles an hour. Inside the cars, everyone seemed to be wearing sunglasses. Antonio stood and waited for a break in the stream of sedans, RVs, trucks, buses. Fifteen minutes later he shouted, “Now!” and they ran across the tarmac, dragging the Hefty bag and its hotplate cargo behind them, a blue sports car speeding by on their heels.

Antonio bent over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath, and began laughing as he hadn't laughed for days and days. José Juan smiled broadly. The absurdity of their situation was sinking in. Antonio felt silly, scampering across the freeway with this impossibly heavy plastic bag, like some Mexican comedy act, Cantinflas or Tin Tan.

They examined their surroundings. Now that they had stepped into the shadows, Antonio could see the shelters more clearly. He made out a sofa, a director's chair with the back missing, several mattresses tossed about. Maybe twenty or thirty people lived here. At the moment, however, the lone resident was a black man with a long beard who was sitting on a blanket on the dusty ground. He stood up and walked toward them.

“You must be visiting, right?” He examined the plastic bag at Antonio's feet and shook his head. “Because I know one thing. You sure as hell ain't staying. This spot right here is taken, it's our spot. There ain't no more room here. And we don't need any neighbors.
Comprende?
”

Antonio looked at José Juan. Silently they picked up the Hefty bag and turned around. They were outsiders here, and there was no use arguing with the man. A fresh wave of defeat now, a sense of pointlessness as they ran back across the lanes of traffic and followed the path through the ivy back to the street. Sleeping under the freeway wasn't so easy after all.

The shadows were lengthening as the short March day came to an end. They had been walking for at least an hour, maybe two. Antonio glanced at José Juan and saw that his friend was biting his lower lip, tears welling in his eyes. He is broken, this is too much for him, Antonio thought, the humiliation is too deep. Mexicanos. When they are little boys their fathers won't let them cry, ever, and so they fight it off as long as they can.

They walked back up Third Street, away from the freeway.
Away from that horrible freeway.
Antonio had not felt so lost and alone for many, many years. He wanted to weep too, but he held it in. He felt like a child out here on his own, a boy wandering about in his pajamas, separated from parents and home, pining for his pillow and his bed. They entered a stretch of downtown without pedestrians, passing a large white monolith with a blue sign announcing “Pacific Stock Exchange.” Here there were only cars and low, windowless office buildings sealed off with layers of stucco and iron. Electronic eyes scanned garage entrances, unused doorways. Everything was painted tan and gray, as if in imitation of the sky and earth.

A few blocks on, they reached a flat, empty space where even the squat buildings had disappeared. The scent of burning wood wafted through the air. In the growing darkness Antonio saw at least two fires going, the outlines of people. There were several shelters and tents, one resembling an igloo, wool blankets and a blue tarpaulin attached to a round skeleton of wire and wood planks. The shelters were spread across several vacant lots. There seemed to be plenty of room, and it might not be so bad to camp out in the open.

“I guess we can sleep here,” Antonio said. “This looks like a good place. I think we can rest here.”

The people standing around the tents and shelters seemed to ignore Antonio and José Juan as they set down their Hefty bag by an old palm tree. José Juan found some pieces of cardboard nearby and laid them on the ground. This was where they would sleep. They were on a small hill that rose over downtown, the muddy lot beneath them green with weeds grown thick from the recent rains. The leaves of the palm trees waved in the cool breeze. This place was some sort of geographic anomaly, a lush knoll of wild plants and grasses in the middle of the city.

Hours later Antonio was lying on a mattress of crushed boxes, adrift in a timeless night. José Juan was snoring, tossing and turning, resting finally. Above Antonio the Los Angeles sky stretched in a vast blackness empty of stars, constellations erased by the glowing lights of too much city around him. To his left he could see the skyscrapers on Olive and Grand, so close he could almost make out the faces of the janitors inside. He imagined Mexicanos emptying trash cans on the thirty-second floor, mopping, dusting, daydreaming, sitting in the executive's chair, talking on the phone, doing things they weren't supposed to do.

Sleepless hours passed as Antonio listened to the sounds hidden in the darkness around him, wondering if they would bring new calamities. Voices came from the igloo-shaped tent now, people speaking in Spanish and English, men with Central American accents, lilting voices that felt familiar and comforting.
There must be a hundred people living here, chapines and guanacos too, living here as if it were the most normal thing in the world, as if they'd been here for years and years.
He heard a woman, a gringa, her voice scratchy and insolent. The men called out her name. “Come here, Vicki.
Ven acá
, Vicki.” She responded with streetwise laughter. “
Conmigo
, Vicki. Next to me, Vicki.”

“You guys are so sick,” she said playfully. “That's why I like you so much. Because you're so fucking sick.”

It was strangely reassuring to hear their voices, to know that the people who camped here went about their lives like anybody else. He could easily have heard the same squalid dialogue in the building he had just been evicted from. Vicki and the men in the tent laughed together, a rich, human laughter. They sounded happy. But no. What a silly thing to say. How could they be
happy
? That was a word for birthdays and weddings.
The bride and groom looked happy when they left the church.

Antonio had spent a lifetime turning away from all that was ugly and unpredictable, and yet here he was right in the middle of it. He was sleeping on dirt, exposed to everything, protected by nothing. He was already beginning to feel nostalgic for the yellowing walls and rusty locks of the apartment he had left just a few hours ago. When he rolled over, trying to sleep, his lips touched the soil, grains of earth sticking to his tongue until he spat them out. The taste was not unpleasant. It reminded him of eating dirt, something he must have done when he was less than two, a memory older than words.