The Tattooed Soldier (42 page)

When the first wave of looters arrived, the young man grabbed one of the chunks and stood up. When more and more people began to stream onto the street, when the baying of the alarm at the Payless had been joined by a hoot-hoot from the appliance store next door, the young man looked up and down the block. Longoria gave him a long stare, his meanest, but the young man just smiled at him. Taking a running start, he hurled the heavy chunk of concrete toward El Pulgarcito with athletic skill, throwing it sidearm, like a discus. Longoria barely had time to duck behind the counter next to Yanira before his ears filled with the sound of glass crashing around him. Yanira screamed. Another rock came sailing through what was left of the windows.

“Go out the back!” Longoria ordered. He was frantically looking for something to throw back when he saw the young man climbing into the lobby, his shoes crunching on the carpet of broken glass. Three other invaders of similar ages and builds followed, and for an instant it seemed that the young man had magically transformed himself into a platoon of looters.

Outnumbered, Longoria abandoned any notion of putting up a fight. Moments later he followed Yanira out the back door, surrendering El Pulgarcito Express, branch number two, to the mob.

*   *   *

Antonio saw the shattered windows and knew instantly he would not find the tattooed soldier here. The soldier was no longer at El Pulgarcito Express, because its windows and walls had been violated and he was not a man to tolerate such a thing. The soldier shot first and asked questions later. Antonio knew the man now. If a crowd was ransacking the place, then it followed that the tattooed soldier must be elsewhere.

He had walked fifteen blocks through Los Angeles ablaze, oblivious to the disorder around him because he was imagining what it would be like to confront the soldier again, this time with a gun. It seemed that there was nothing to stop him. Only once during his hour-long march to El Pulgarcito Express did he see the police, four officers in white helmets, three men and a woman, trying to keep a crowd from looting a bank on Venice Boulevard. Antonio stopped: he would be in serious trouble if the police searched him and found the gun in his pocket. He stood in the middle of the street as the officers chased a group of people from the bank's shattered front doors, inflicting truncheon blows on those they could catch up with. Seconds later many of these same people were across the street, invading a furniture store. The officers hesitated, then ran in a V formation toward the looters, only to watch them circle back to an electronics store. It seemed this bizarre dance might continue all afternoon. Realizing that the officers were fully occupied, Antonio had walked quickly past.

Two blocks from El Pulgarcito, his heart began to pound wildly. He stopped to compose himself, knowing that he would have to be clearheaded to do this act.
The gun is like a knife. Get close and stay calm.

And then he had reached the office and felt the adrenaline draining from his veins. The soldier was gone. There were only men and women and children carrying off typewriters and chairs and adding machines. A skinny young man in shorts with blue stripes was transforming the surviving panes of glass into crystal debris. The crowd had inflicted some revenge on the tattooed soldier's place of work, but the man himself had escaped.

Antonio joined a group of people gathered on the street as if for a block party or
quinceañera.
A thin grandmotherly woman watched a man step out of the office with another typewriter. She looked tough, like she might want to take something herself, and laughed as she shook her bony fist at the building.

“
¡Qué bueno!
Take everything. Take it all.
Gusanos sinvergüenzas.
They deserve it. Burn the place down.”

“They won't cheat us anymore,” said the man next to her, an old Mexicano with a puffy gray pompadour. “They can't cheat us now.”

“The packages never got there,” the grandmother said. “Or when they did half of what we sent was missing.”

A dark young man emerged with several posters in hand, portraits of El Salvador's right-wing presidential candidate, slogans declaring “
ORDER, PEACE, WORK
.” He'd ripped them off the walls, and now he made a show of tearing them in half, throwing the pieces to the ground, and stepping on them in a little jig. Another man joined him. The grandmother clapped.

“
¡Así!
” she shouted. “Get him,
muchachos
! Stomp him!”

Antonio moved on, searching his memory of the soldier's habits for clues as to where he might be. Above all it was important to act quickly. The chaos on the streets might soon evaporate, like the spring storm fronts that swept over the city and left a few drops of rain before dissolving into blue skies and sunshine. And then the tattooed soldier might live forever.

*   *   *

Longoria stood at the entrance to Reginalda's apartment building, unable to get inside because a man and his wife were trying to force their looted sofa through the narrow steel door. He had come here because he couldn't think of anyplace else to go, anyone else he wanted to see besides Reginalda. Perhaps she would have an explanation for her absence the night before. He wanted her to have an explanation.

All along this residential block people were shuffling back to their homes with shoe boxes, cassette players, and microwave ovens tucked under their arms. Everything was in its original packaging, nothing secondhand today. Two women drove up, left a stack of dresses and blouses on the porch of a neighboring building, got back in their car, and sped off.

The couple in front of him were especially ambitious looters. To run off with an entire sofa took a lot of nerve. The plastic cover and factory label were still attached. Just an hour ago he would have been outraged, but by now the couple's behavior seemed almost normal. Longoria could see part of the woman's dress riding up as she struggled with the far end of the sofa; she must be strong to hold it for up so long. It was a pretty sofa, yellow with a floral print, but probably much too big for their apartment.

Finally they made it inside and Longoria followed, taking the stairs two at a time. The door to Reginalda's apartment was open. He stepped in and froze. The living room floor was littered with boxes, a toaster and a curling iron peeking from plastic nests, two pairs of leather pumps spilling forth, clothes piled on the couch, the room thick with the cellophane aroma of new merchandise.

Reginalda was one of the looters. Longoria flushed, the disgust he felt for this day and this city gathering sourly on his tongue. Reginalda had betrayed him, she had joined the other side, she was with the enemy. He walked through the living room, down the hallway to her bedroom, and found her sitting on her bed talking into the telephone, her back to the doorway. The slender shoulders, the curly black hair Longoria had run his fingers through, everything about her so familiar. He was hovering over her, but she had not felt his presence and was laughing into the receiver. The sound enraged him even more, as if she were laughing at him, laughing with all the looters who mocked order and mocked Longoria.

He grabbed the telephone, and she turned and screamed. He threw the phone to the floor, closed his left fist, and punched her square in the mouth.
You spent the night somewhere else, and now I find you stealing.
Falling back on the bed, Reginalda raised her arms to shield herself, like a boxer pinned against the ropes. Then she held a hand to her mouth and laughed when she found no blood.

“Is that the best you can do? Is it? Get out of here,
maricón
!”

“Thief!” he yelled. “You were stealing.”

“What are you talking about? I didn't take anything. Those aren't…”

Longoria left without listening, venting his fury on the merchandise in the living room. He shattered a window with the brand-new toaster and threw the pumps at the wall, knocking down a framed poster of Luis Miguel. As he ran down the steps, he nearly collided with a girl hugging four pairs of jeans to her chest, a girl he vaguely recognized. Reginalda's roommate.

He stepped into the sunny madness of the streets. All around him people were running, but he walked at a deliberate pace, feeling the anger drain away. He shouldn't have hit Reginalda, even with his left arm. Would she ever speak to him again? Of course she wouldn't speak to him again.

He walked for almost thirty minutes, headed in no particular direction. His last contact with the world of women, and of people in general, had been broken. He had cut himself adrift in a city of flames. There was nothing to do but go back to the Westlake Arms, to his room with its scrubbed floors and the waste basket he emptied every day, a sanctuary of cleanliness. There were no fires, no crowds in his room.

He looked at a street sign to get his bearings: it was two miles to his apartment. On Vermont Avenue he saw black smoke spewing from the windows of a Thrifty drugstore. Firefighters perched on tall ladders poured braids of white water into the roof. They were trying to save the supermarket next door but did not seem to notice or care that a hundred looters had rushed in through the unguarded entrance, women mostly, Latino and white and black, running up and down the aisles, filling their arms with milk cartons and luncheon meats and cans of tomato sauce even as smoke and water cascaded through the ceiling.

The place was about to collapse on these people. They were going to kill themselves. And for what? For steak and chicken, oranges and fabric softener? He watched them through tall glass panes that had miraculously survived the assault, reaching for jars and cardboard packages, violating the neatly stacked shelves, knocking things over as they raced for the front doors. Hamburger Helper, cornflakes. On any other day Longoria would have yelled at them.
You call yourselves mothers? What would your children say?
On any other day he would have told them to obey the law, to respect the order of the shelves and aisles.
Wait your turn and pay!

Covering his face against the heat and the pungent smell of ash, Longoria followed the double yellow lines that ran down the center of Vermont, usually a pedestrian no-man's-land. A fire truck zoomed down a cross street, bumping over the uneven pavement, a police car in its screaming wake.

And then, at a distance, emerging on the smoky horizon as if from a dream, he saw what was instantly recognizable to him as an armored vehicle of the United States Army, a desert brown Humvee. At last! Longoria began to laugh. The U.S. Army had come to save him, one of their own, a soldier trapped behind enemy lines. With the police in retreat it would be left to the army to restore order. The army would not fail.

A minute or so later the Humvee rolled past him, a caravan of green trucks behind it, just like those armored boxes he had seen so many years ago at Fort Bragg in those parking lots of steel and rubber. Longoria raised his arm to wave but stopped when he heard jeers from the people on the sidewalk. He looked into the back of the first truck and saw two rows of seated soldiers tucked under oversized helmets, like big green mushrooms, staring out at the burning city and the crowds with teenage eyes of fear.

Longoria looked at their faces and saw himself in the moments after his forays in the villages, smoke and flame and chaos all around him. Soldiers rolling into battle, men setting fires. Longoria playing with his cigarette lighter, the Jaguars marching through the dance of ash in the hot wind. It seemed that the demons of his memory had taken flight and were loose on the streets of L.A. A trick of the mind, a hallucination. Everything spilling from his head onto the streets. Burning walls sagged and fell to the ground with a creak and a sigh. The Olympic Mini-Mall took a final bow. Tattooed cholos kicked at the glowing embers and ran from the orange rush of flames.

Longoria had expected Los Angeles to be like that beautiful military base at Fort Bragg, a city of tidy houses and well-behaved people. He had carried his cigarette lighter into the mountain villages so that Guatemala could start all over again, from scratch. The new Guatemala would be a place like Fort Bragg, like the United States. Instead the infection had followed him to Los Angeles. Even when you killed the children, the infection still spread. What would Lieutenant Colonel Villagrán and Lieutenant Sanchez of the Green Berets say if they saw this? Children were all around him now, their bodies painted like his, a guerrilla army of tattooed cholos assaulting the pawnshops and malls. How many more children would have to die before the infection went away? A sense of futility overwhelmed him, and then an inchoate feeling that he had been tricked in some way he didn't understand.

He was too tired to think anymore.
Just make it home.
The Westlake Arms was about a mile away. He would go to his room and sleep.

*   *   *

Antonio had been at the Westlake Arms for an hour, moving from hiding place to hiding place. He started off in the alley behind the building, then slipped into the lobby and sat in the stairwell on the second flight of steps. This seemed the ideal place to catch the soldier by surprise, until some tenants on their way upstairs glared at him as if they were trying to memorize his features for a future police lineup. He decided to wait outside.

The gun was in his pocket, loaded and ready to go.

Flakes of ash floated in the air like snow. Antonio had never seen snow, but he imagined it resembled ash, that it wobbled slowly to the ground, riding invisible currents. The burning smell was overpowering, a carbon taste on his tongue. In the weeks since the eviction, after all those scrap-wood campfires, smoke had seeped into Antonio's clothes, his hair, his skin. Today the smell was everywhere, carried aloft by hundreds of fires, a city of mini-malls and palm trees ablaze.

Hiding in the shadows behind the front steps, Antonio peered over the concrete staircase. He expected the tattooed soldier to come from the south. Everyone seemed to be running from south to north today. Waves of people drifted over the sidewalks and the street, so he didn't have to worry about looking too conspicuous. In a blue windbreaker and dirty jeans, hands in his pockets, feet shuffling nervously on the concrete, he looked a lot like a man waiting to meet a drug dealer, which on this block meant he blended in just fine.