The Tattooed Soldier (34 page)

“We have to go,” Antonio said. “They're making us leave.”

Three garbage collectors stood on the street corner, oversized lifting belts around their waists, two police officers next to them. One of the officers raised a bullhorn to his mouth.

“This is an illegal encampment. You are trespassing on private property. You are in violation of Penal Code Section Six-four-seven, a misdemeanor. This is an illegal encampment.”

The two policemen began walking across the barren lot, hands on the grips of their pistols, like gunfighters walking through the center of a hostile frontier town. They carefully opened the flap of the igloo-shaped tent built two nights ago by the camp's latest arrivals, a pair of Mexicanos. Finding no one inside, the officers went on. Suddenly their heads snapped to the left, toward the shouting figure of the Mayor, who was running across the lot.

“Fucking pigs! Pigs!” The Mayor raised a brown fist in their faces, and they both took a step backward. “You can't clear this camp. Where's your fucking warrant?”

“We don't need any warrant, asshole,” answered one, a white man who seemed too young to be talking to the Mayor that way, without proper respect. “All these shacks, it's a health hazard. Plus this is private property. You're trespassing.”

“Bullshit! We're squatters. We got squatters' rights.”

The officer looked temporarily perplexed. His partner, a middle-aged Latino with a five o'clock shadow and a thick mustache, took over.

“Listen, Mister
Mayor
,” he said slowly, allowing the irony to linger on his lips. “We've been over this before. There's no such thing as squatters' rights. Not in my city. Probably not anywhere in this state or this country. So why don't you just leave like a good citizen. For once.”

“Fuck you, Ramirez. This is my home. I ain't going! I ain't going!”

Ramirez sighed and threw up his arms in disgust. He mumbled something to his partner, and they walked away.

“It's the principle of the thing,” the Mayor shouted at the officers' backs. “The principle! We ain't gonna take it!”

The Mayor stormed back to his camp, stopping briefly to pick up a broken bottle and fling it halfheartedly at the policemen. It bounced on the ground, unnoticed, several feet behind them.

The bulldozer advanced across the lot and crushed the igloo hut, the huge shovel descending in a cacophony of shattered wood and snapping plastic. The Mexicanos who lived there were gone, off looking for work. The bulldozer scooped up their possessions and deposited them in the garbage truck, a remarkably clean vehicle with a fresh coat of pale green paint and the word “Sanitation” stenciled on its door.

“We've got to get our things together,” José Juan said, standing up in alarm.

For two furious minutes Antonio and José Juan stuffed everything they could into the Hefty bag, including the four-burner hotplate. They saved José Juan's twelve-cassette collection of BBC English tapes and the photograph of Elena and Carlos's grave, leaving little behind except some magazines recovered from the trash and the sports sections of
La Opinión.

They emerged from their shelter with the overloaded plastic bag to find the huge shovel of the bulldozer, a scratched yellow basin, waiting for them at the towel-covered opening they called their front door. Dragging their belongings to the sidewalk on Third Street, they watched from a safe distance as the bulldozer crushed the wood and cardboard home that had protected them from the rain and wind for more than three weeks.

In a matter of moments their shelter had been reduced to a tidy patch of dirt. After the police left, after he had listened to their final warning to “stay off this property,” Antonio went back to the lot and examined the ground, walking slowly in a growing spiral. There was nothing to be found but the bumpy soil beneath his feet, the crisscross of the bulldozer's long tracks, the wounds gouged by the shovel.

*   *   *

The refugees worked their way down the hillside in four different directions, fleeing the oily dust cloud raised by the bulldozers. They carried their possessions in shopping carts and milk crates, in blanket bundles balanced on their heads, in frayed garbage bags that trailed them like weighty corpses.

More than a hundred people joined the exodus. Antonio was startled to see a handful of women among them, walking behind male partners whose faces were familiar. It was the first time he could tell how many people lived here. The police officers had combed the entire mountain, uncovering every hiding place and niche. The bearded old man he had beaten a lifetime ago in the struggle over the hotplate stood by a cardboard shelter hidden behind a tangle of branches and took harmless swings at the air, yelling at the vanished policemen to leave him alone.

Grouped in dirty clusters, black men with black men, Latinos with Latinos, whites with whites, they assembled on Third Street, shivering in the rushing wind of morning traffic, a steady current of cars feeding into the orderly, pedestrian-free streets of the Financial District. They drew befuddled stares from the commuters accelerating and decelerating on Third, men in ties and women in suits who took in the spectacle of these refugees as if it were an image from a faded newsreel. This was something unusual, a break from the monotony of the morning drive.

Antonio saw Frank and the Mayor leading a small party of men down the steep drop of Bixel Street. He nudged José Juan and they followed. The Mayor and his friends walked like men who had been through this sort of thing before; they looked angry but not confused, and they appeared to be heading for a destination. Bringing up the rear of this procession of four blacks and two whites, Antonio and José Juan carried their Hefty bag in the fashion they had perfected after that first eviction, each man holding one end. José Juan still looked drowsy, as if he might fall back asleep at any moment. He's lucky he didn't sleep through the bulldozers, Antonio thought. He'd be in the back of a garbage truck right now.

The men descended two blocks and reached an open lot surrounded by a chain-link fence, a vast concrete floor, V-shaped, like a funnel, enclosed by two concrete walls that converged toward a tunnel entrance. Frank set down the black plastic bag he was carrying and scaled the fence, calling to the Mayor to throw the bag over. The rest of their party followed suit. The floor and the walls seemed to be vibrating, and Antonio instinctively raised his fingers to his temples to fight off an incipient headache. Narrowing his eyes, he saw that every inch of the place was covered with spray paint, a vast canvas shimmering like an acrylic rainbow sea. Color screamed from every direction, one layer of scribbles and cartoon drawings on top of another. In one corner of the lot a young man with a spray can was applying bursts of paint in broad strokes, the lone representative of the army of manic graffiti artists who had made this place their private gallery.

In single file, with Frank and the Mayor still leading the way, they marched toward the tunnel entrance across the sticky pigment on the floor. Another chain-link fence had once covered the opening from top to bottom, two stories high, but it had been systematically torn to pieces until only a few support poles and strands of fence remained. Standing under the huge gray arch, a semicircle of perfect blackness behind him, the Mayor turned to address his small band.

“This is where we make camp, at least for a couple of days,” he said. “Nobody is gonna bother us here. Not in this smelly place.”

“Don't go in too far,” Frank added as the men began to toss their belongings on the ground. “It's scary back there.”

Antonio and José Juan set their bag against one of the tunnel walls, a smooth curve of concrete covered with graffiti. The floor of the tunnel was muddy, and the air smelled green and dank. Peering into the darkness, Antonio could make out a mattress and the carcass of an automobile. The tunnel had not been used for years, at least not for its intended purpose. Like so much else in this corner of the city, it seemed to belong to another age. Just outside, baking in the orange sun, rose what looked like a concrete temple, a huge cement box with the words “Pacific Electric Rail Co.” etched across the top. Antonio stepped back from the tunnel entrance and looked up. A hundred feet or so above the gray arch he could see the crumbling staircases and ancient palm trees of Crown Hill.

*   *   *

He was about thirty, though his long eyelashes made him seem younger. His face was light brown, with a few freckles on the upper cheeks. His name was Darryl, and he was from Michigan. He was sitting in front of the tunnel in a lawn chair, talking to Antonio. They were the only men here, left to guard the group's meager possessions while everyone else wandered in search of food, money, and work. Darryl said he was once a steelworker by trade, until an accident ruined his life.

“A whole load of sheet metal fell on top of me. Blindsided me, just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

Everything in Darryl's life was fine before that fateful moment, nothing had been the same since. “I just haven't been able to get it together, you know? It just seems like nothing wants to go right. If it ain't one thing, it's another.” The accident sent him on a downward spiral that ended right here, the sewer line at the bottom of the drain.

“If it wasn't for that accident, I'd be a different man.”

By now Antonio knew that everyone in the vacant lots had a story like this, a quick, neat explanation for what went wrong in their lives: romantic betrayal, crippling accidents, jealous co-workers, abusive husbands, friends who turned out to be thieves, business partners who disappeared with all the money. They kept their stories uncomplicated, without nuance or ambiguity, as in a soap opera.

After talking at length about his back, Darryl revealed that he had a family in Michigan, including a teenage daughter he called collect every couple of months.

“Every time I talk to her she asks me, ‘Daddy, why don't you come home?' She just doesn't understand why I stay in Los Angeles. ‘Come home,' she says. Sometimes it's more than I can take. I gotta hang up the phone because I don't want her to hear me cry.”

“So why don't you go back?” Antonio asked naively. “They could take care of you until your back gets better.”

Up to this moment Darryl had been free with details of his plight. Now he answered curtly, “Don't want to go back. Can't. Don't see the point.”

He stared at the ground, then looked up at Antonio. His glance told part of the story: brown irises swimming in a buttermilk sea, the eyes of a lifelong alcoholic. Behind this gaze Antonio could sense a truth, painful and unspoken, an old memory stored away and hidden with great care. Some act of violence, repeated and repeated. This man a child and a witness.

This was something that had happened to Antonio with great frequency since the death of his wife and son. Alcoholics, the suicidal, battered wives, the perpetually lonely, witnesses to catastrophe, survivors of war: they all came into sharper focus. Antonio could almost spot them across a crowded room. They were like brothers or long-lost friends. They were different from the other people, the unscarred, those who had never seen or lived the randomness Darryl and Antonio knew too well. These other people walked about the city like well-fed children, bathed in a glow of innocence, the happy haze of unknowing. From the grave, Carlos and Elena had given Antonio the power to see these differences, another layer of truth near the surface but invisible to so many. It was a gift to be treasured, the exile's reward, this special vision.

Sitting here staring into those milky eyes, Antonio knew Darryl was very close to killing himself.

*   *   *

Antonio wanted to talk to Frank about the plan to kill the soldier, but the Mayor wouldn't stop rambling. The refugees from Crown Hill were all gathered around a single fire now. Some had drifted off into sleep. Everyone was there except Darryl, who wouldn't sleep in the tunnel itself and was lying on the ground just outside.

“A friend of ours from Kansas City showed us this place,” the Mayor was saying, though no one seemed to be listening. “About five years ago. Old wino, that guy was, part of a dying breed. I haven't seen him for years. Wonder what happened to him. We've been here eight times already and nobody bothers us. Except for that time with the gang bangers. That was bad. Remember, Frank? That was really bad. This tunnel belonged, I believe, to the people who ran the trolley cars. Years and years ago. The trolleys would take you all the way to San Bernardino if that's where you wanted to go. For some reason, you might want to go to San Bernardino. I never did. That's a long way. The trolleys would go right through this hole and into downtown. Fifth and Flower. I believe it was Flower, but I may be mistaken. I'm beginning to forget things. Farley, whose shirt is that? Is that my shirt? Listen to me. Pay attention. Did you take that from my pile?”

“No, Mayor,” answered Farley, a white man with a Southern accent. “It's my shirt. From the mission.”

“People are taking things now. You didn't see that before. Today is different. These are the last days, and so all the evil comes out. The Ottoman Empire. It was like that at the end. Constantinople. Everyone grabbing at everybody else. Grabbing and grabbing. Take your shirt, take your coins, take your pants. Living on the row, someone tried to take my pants off in the middle of the night. The row, the motherfucking, backstabbing row. They tried to steal the pants right off my legs. Motherfuckers. This ain't the row. This is my tunnel. It used to belong to the trolleys, but the trolleys are gone.”

The Mayor had been talking like this for almost an hour, drifting from point to point and circling back, his eyes fading into delusion, returning to sharpness, then fading again.

“Hey, Mayor, you taken your meds today?” Frank asked.

“I don't need 'em anymore. They cloud my mind.”