The Tattooed Soldier (27 page)

My mother who sent us to San Cristóbal Acatapán. My mother who said we would be safe there.

Antonio slipped the photograph into his shirt pocket and tore the letter into tiny pieces that fell around his feet. He would never make the mistake of reading one of his mother's letters again.

I didn't bury them properly. Even after they were dead I failed them.

The letter and the marble squares were proof of his impotence in the face of the tattooed soldier, his mother, and so many other things. If he had resisted his mother all those years ago, they wouldn't have ended up in San Cristóbal and Elena would still be alive instead of in a grave Antonio had never visited. “Of course you didn't remember to bury us, Antonio,” Elena would have said. “You always forgot everything.”

A light breeze carried the pieces of the letter across the vacant lot, white shreds of paper sticking in patches of weeds and fluttering into the mud. He could see his mother's blue handwriting on each bit of paper, snatches of her voice, giving unwanted advice, making judgments. Poor little Antonio, small man lost in an alien city, so pathetic he should see a psychologist. Pleading with him to come home so she could take care of him again. That was one thing he would not do. What was there to go back to? His mother and father? A country where the walls were covered with the names of the missing and the dead? A city of parks where Elena no longer laughed or walked or smiled?

If Antonio went back to Guatemala there would be no one to follow the tattooed soldier, no one to stand and say he was a killer. No one would know about the soldier's crimes, and he would live out his life like any other resident of Los Angeles, taking his girlfriend to restaurants and lifting weights in his room, growing old with pictures of his victims in an album in his dresser.

Antonio had seen all those pictures in the soldier's room, those anonymous cadavers. They had passed through his hands, all the peasants and students and revolutionaries and sons and daughters hacked and shot to death with no living witnesses. He knew these people only as photographs, but he could feel that they all died alone, like Elena and Carlos, in their homes and villages and fields, without anything or anyone to protect them. Now Antonio could act for them. He could act for the massacred who had been left without fathers, husbands, or brothers to avenge them.

I did not bury my wife and child, but I can stand and seek vengeance, for them and for the many, for the anonymous dead.

Now Antonio knew how Elena must have felt when she marched in the demonstrations. Now he could see why she was a revolutionary, he could understand what had been a mystery before.

This is how Elena felt, tall and strong. This is what she was trying to tell me, but I wouldn't listen. Elena knew that to march with the many was to stand tall. Elena loved me because she knew I could be a brave fighter.

Antonio felt as if he had been washed in the coldest, clearest mountain water, shocked into wakefulness. For the first time in weeks the gleam of the morning sun came into focus, the lines of the skyscrapers and bridges sharp in the distance. Antonio would stay in Los Angeles and track down the tattooed soldier and make him pay for his crimes. He would kill this man with his own hands.

It was not such a strange thing, to kill someone. Antonio could imagine himself doing it now, killing the soldier without remorse. In this city of vicious madness people did much worse things. That was what Frank and the Mayor said, and they were right. In Los Angeles people shot at the innocent, they fired randomly into weddings and funerals. If people could commit such horrible crimes for no good reason, then Antonio could bring himself to kill the soldier without feeling like an animal.

It was imperative to act immediately. It had already been seven years. Each moment the soldier lived was a crime against nature, against the laws that made planets spin and babies grow. The soldier's life, his living steps in Los Angeles, were a violation. They were a stain on the earth as indelible as the pigment etched into his skin, the jaguar on his forearm.

Antonio scoured Crown Hill for a piece of hard, heavy metal. Next to the ruins of a retaining wall he found a lead pipe, rusty at the edges, still gray and smooth in the middle, about two feet long. He tested it by striking it lightly against his open palm.
I really want to hit someone. Right now.
He started to pound on the wall, the metal clanging loudly with each blow, little bits of concrete flaking off.
Mr. Hwang, my mother, the tattooed soldier. So many people against me. I could turn this whole wall into a pile of pebbles.

The men in the surrounding lots lifted their heads, drawn by the rhythmic clanging of the pipe, like a church bell. Soon they turned away, bored. Someone pounding on a wall wasn't that unusual here, not in the camps, where people babbled to themselves and defecated in the open air. Antonio stopped, suddenly short of breath, his arm sore.

Frank was right. Antonio would follow the advice of the black angel sent to him by his wife. One good blow to the head would probably be enough to kill.
This pipe will leave little chips of rust and metal embedded in his skull.
Being beaten to death seemed as inelegant a way to die as any.
It must be very painful to feel your skull crack open.
He would beat the soldier with the pipe, preferably with people watching.
The soldier's name is Guillermo, but the name doesn't matter. I don't need his name to kill him.
His head would be a clean target because it was covered with only the thinnest layer of hair.

In broad daylight. That's the way Carlos and Elena were killed. On a sunny morning, their bodies left on the street for everyone to see.

Antonio left Crown Hill and walked briskly back to the shelter with his pipe. He tried to stick it in his back pocket, but it was too long and slipped out. He tried again, pulling his sweater over the protruding end. He looked awkward, a large bulge attached to his back, but the pipe stayed put.

It was Saturday, nearly a week since that first encounter in the park, and the soldier would almost certainly be there playing chess tomorrow morning.

 

12.
THE ARMY OF PAINTED CHILDREN

 

As soon as he talked to his friend, Longoria would forget about the old woman once and for all. What bothered him most was that she could get away with embarrassing him like that in public. In Guatemala, he would have been able to track her down and punish her. People like that were punished even if they were seventy or eighty years old, because you had to set an example. But here in Los Angeles she could just disappear into the ocean of the city, and there was no way to find her and teach her that you didn't talk to a Jaguar like that.

For almost a week now he had been carrying this lingering malaise, something resembling shame. He couldn't stop wondering whether he had actually killed this Demetrio. It bothered Longoria that the old woman had burdened him so. He hadn't felt this way when he was with the Jaguars. In Guatemala, when people looked at you with a hatred like the old woman's, or when they tried very hard not to look at you at all, it never stuck to you like this. These ugly thoughts must be lingering because he couldn't go back to the barracks and be with his brothers and forget.

In the barracks you knew you were good and honorable because you could feel the rightness of the cause in the strength of the men around you, lined up with their shimmering weapons, proud and ready for battle. Longoria couldn't be with his unit anymore because he was in California, but he could visit his friend Mauricio Lopez, the only other Jaguar he knew in Los Angeles. As soon as Longoria talked to his friend, the confusion of the past week would slip away. He would tell Lopez about the old woman and how his co-workers at El Pulgarcito had been treating him like a stranger since the day he slapped her, as if he were a different person from the man they had trusted and liked before. He would tell Lopez about the sidelong glances and the uncomfortable silences, even from Duarte, who had heard about the incident from the gossipy Carlos Avilés.

Together Lopez and Longoria had been to Fort Bragg and Panama, where they had endured the taunts of the smart-ass Salvadorans who treated them like simple backwoods cousins. Longoria hadn't been to see his friend in months, and he realized now that this was a mistake, that it was important to keep in touch with his brothers.

After work Longoria walked the four blocks from El Pulgarcito to Hoover and waited for the orange and white
RTD
bus that would take him on the forty-five-minute ride to Watts, where Lopez lived. One of the reasons he hadn't seen Lopez in so long was that he lived so far away, in a part of the city where, it was said, only bad things happened. Lopez's telephone had been disconnected, but it was Saturday and Longoria would just have to hope that he was there.

When the bus arrived, it was standing room only. The vehicle sagged like an overburdened draft animal, almost scraping the asphalt. Longoria squirmed through the packed bodies and found a place near the middle of the bus. An air conditioner whined overhead, unable to overcome all the human sweat and warmth. It was just like back home, like Guatemala City, the push of too many brown people heavy with exhaustion, except that on this bus no one was hanging from the back bumper or outside the front door, because that was something the gringo drivers didn't allow.

Fifteen minutes later, when half the passengers got off at Washington Boulevard, Longoria took a seat. The bus was sealed against the dry air of the streets by plastic windows shaded a smoky gray. A wild scramble of names and insults had been scratched into the panel in front of him, where the landscape of central Los Angeles was projected like a faint, fuzzy movie. Crowds of men and women massing at the intersections, nearly everyone carrying their possessions in plastic shopping bags. A revolving parade of storefronts. Imelda's Honduran Bakery. The Cheapest Flights to Mexico City! Cojutepeque Salvadoran Restaurant. The homeless, floating solo along the sidewalks, the throngs parting before them. More storefronts. El Chapín Guatemalan Grocery. Old brick buildings. Another branch of El Pulgarcito Express (number three). Here and there a shuttered window, a closed store. A huge auto parts place with tall window displays, one of the few modern buildings on this long street.

When the bus passed under the Santa Monica Freeway into South-Central Los Angeles, Longoria began counting the street numbers. He had boarded near 8th Street, now they were at 35th. His friend lived on 109th.

Longoria had been to South-Central more than once. It seemed like the rest of Los Angeles except that here the Latinos lived next door to blacks. He had never had any problems with the blacks. They kept to themselves. When you had to deal with them they were direct and unambiguous, like people he had known in the army. They didn't play games, and Longoria liked that. You could always tell what side they were on, where you stood with them.

South-Central Los Angeles looked a lot like Longoria's neighborhood, though there were fewer people on the streets. Entire blocks were empty of pedestrians. On other blocks all but a handful of the stores were shut down. Here and there he saw buildings that were only empty shells: four walls and no ceiling, painted announcements on the front almost erased by time. A few buildings seemed to have been burned out many, many years ago: scorched brick walls left standing alone, like part of a movie set, broken iron bars, twisted and rusting. Longoria looked at those buildings and thought that a war must have been fought here, though he had no idea when. A conquering army leaves this sort of mark on the landscape, the sooty signature of fire, the hand of random, celebratory destruction. The scattered ruins along Hoover Street looked familiar. Longoria wondered why this distant war had been fought.

He got off the bus at 109th Street and walked five blocks east to his friend's home. Lopez had done well for himself—he had a job as a car mechanic—and had made enough money to buy a little house for his family here in Watts. The last time Longoria talked to him, Lopez said that there were lots of Guatemaltecos living in Watts now.

Longoria went up the front steps past a lawn overgrown with dandelions and was greeted by a black steel door with an almost martial aspect. He knocked on the door and it rattled. After a minute or so of knocking and squinting through the pattern of pinholes in the steel screen, he saw a shadow moving.

The door swung open and Lopez appeared, looking so different from the man Longoria remembered that he wondered if he had come to the wrong house.

For years Lopez had kept his hair stubble-short, like Longoria, a habit carried over from their army days. Now it sprouted from his head in a tangled, asymmetrical mass of curls. Deep pillow wrinkles covered his face. Lopez had been asleep even though it was barely late afternoon. He was fully dressed, wearing a pale blue mechanic's shirt with “Mauricio” embroidered on a patch just above the left breast. Sweat soaked through the armpits, the back, the front. His green eyes had a faraway expression.

“Lopez? It's me, Longoria. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Longoria. What are you doing here?”

“I came to visit, I wanted to talk.”

*   *   *

They had first met on a basketball court, near the plaza of a little town in the mountains of Huehuetenango whose name he had long ago forgotten. It was before they both joined the Jaguars, when they were with one of the regular army units. They were lined up in haphazard rows, ready to march out on patrol, a new unit formed with conscripts from all over the country:
quetzaltecos, jutiapenses, capitalinos.
Next to Longoria stood a man with the name “Lopez” stitched crudely onto his shirt, a light-skinned
canche
with mischievous green eyes darting as they took in the scene, a big smile on his face. He was from the eastern provinces, where people were known as smart alecks and jokers. Days, weeks later, Lopez would still be smiling, though not quite as broadly as on that first morning on the basketball court. Months later, the smile would be gone completely.