The Tattooed Soldier (35 page)

“Uh-oh. Did you hear that, everybody?” Frank called out, startling half the group to attention. “The Mayor is off his meds.”

“I knew it!” said Farley. “C'mon, Mayor, take the meds. You know how you get.”

“I'm too smart for that. I'm too smart for pills.”

“Bullshit.”

“I need to be alert!” the Mayor said. “Shit's happening. I can't be asleep with pills. Don't you understand that? Alert!”

This was an argument no one could counter. It was true. Everyone needed to be alert.

“This is like Julius Caesar,” the Mayor said, pulling his watch cap down over his eyebrows. “You know that, Frank? Farley, all you guys, turning on me and shit when I need to be alert. Julius Fucking Caesar.”

*   *   *

They were huddled in a corner of the tunnel, away from the others, having a conference, as Frank called it. Antonio spoke first, in a low whisper.

“You have to help me, Frank. Until I do this thing, as long as I know he's alive, I won't be able—how do you say?—to have peace.” He knew there was a better way to put this, words that would persuade Frank, but he was too nervous and his English suffered for it. “I need to have peace,” was all he could say. “Have peace inside.”

Frank listened to Antonio solemnly, hands clasped together, like a priest taking confession. When he finally spoke, it was not in whispers but in his normal booming voice, the words ricocheting off the round tunnel walls.

“Why should I help you? Why should I complicate my life? Complications are something I don't need.”

Antonio could think of no reply.

“He killed women and children?” Frank said.

It took Antonio a second to realize this was a question. “Yes. My wife and son. And others. Many, many others.”

“How many? How do you know? How can you know?”

“I've seen papers that say he was part of this unit. I saw pictures of the bodies. In his room.”

“You've been in his room?”

“Yes. This unit, they have massacred people. Villages. Thousands of people, buried in graves all over my country. They are like the Nazis. He is a Nazi. He is a real-life Nazi, living in our time.”

Frank's eyes lit up at this last phrase. A Nazi, living in our time. Maybe the idea of meting out justice, of fighting against the darkest evil, appealed to him. The conversation was moving to another plane. Yes. Now they were two men standing on the edge of history, like partisans camped in the hills. The crackle of the fire, the abandoned tunnel, even the layer of grime that covered their clothes bespoke heroic themes of vengeance and redemption.
Everything is against me, but right is on my side. I will prevail.
Antonio imagined himself deep in the plot of a wartime drama, Frank and the tunnel walls in flickering black-and-white.

“Okay, I'll help you. Don't ask me why, but I will.” Frank picked at his teeth with his long nails, then raised a finger in the air. “But this is murder we're talking about here. Conspiracy. This is more than a friendship thing. This is a blood thing. We'd be blood after this. It wouldn't be each man for himself anymore. We'd be brothers. Do you understand? Do you understand the responsibility? We'd be brothers just like me and the Mayor are brothers. I'd expect you to stand by me when something happens. You up to it?”

“Yes. I will be a rock. I will be a rock for you.”

“Deal.”

They shook hands. Antonio smiled broadly and felt the strangeness of it, the mouth opening in joy like this, the sensation spreading across his face like sunlight.

 

16.
JAGUAR

 

Four stories below, someone was sweeping the sidewalk. Even on this block, with all the graffiti and the alleys clogged with the settlements of the homeless, each morning brought the impulse to clean. A Mexicana wielded a broom, stopping to pick up the larger shards of glass and the yellow police tape, which she rolled up and stuck in her apron pocket. The Asian manager of the Westlake Arms worked alongside her, hosing down the bloodstains on the concrete.

Longoria had slept fitfully. The pain in his fractured arm was intense, and the events of the previous day wouldn't stop dancing like dust before his eyes: the attack in the park, street battles and tear gas, the blackened shell of the patrol car, set on fire before the police could retake the block. Inside his apartment the dresser and weightlifting bench were not flush against the wall like they usually were, and the weights themselves were scattered on the floor.

He didn't have the energy to straighten things up. His right arm hurt too much. But his left arm, the one with the tattoo, was fine, as if the jaguar were defending the skin and bone underneath.

The jaguar protected me during the last war. Now it will protect me in this Los Angeles war. It will protect me if the man with the pipe comes looking for me again.

The jaguar was almost ten years old now, but it was still strong.

*   *   *

He showed off the tattoo for the first time at the barracks in Huehuetenango. Just back from Fort Bragg, flush with the sunshine and rich diet of the southern United States, he felt taller and smarter. The skin was freshly healed, and the men in his unit noticed the tattoo immediately. It was an American tattoo, expertly administered by a man called Jake, in the course of an entire afternoon, in a place called Tattoo Fayetteville: a jaguar with a sleek yellow pelt and fierce eyes, sharp and resplendent, its mouth open, exposing a pink tongue rendered with such skill that you could almost see the saliva glistening. As soon as Longoria's fellow soldiers set eyes on it they all wanted one. A crowd formed around him, holding his arm as if it were a work of art, plying him for details about Jake, lamenting that there weren't any good tattoo artists in Guatemala.

“It looks so real.”

“The colors are so bright.”

“You're a Jaguar for life now.”

Two or three other men in the company had tattoos, none as fine as Longoria's. Next to his, theirs looked rough and amateurish, a child's effort. For several days, as they trained and prepared for a new campaign in El Quiché, Longoria found his barracks mates stealing envious glances at his tattoo. If they could figure out a way to take it from me, they would, Longoria thought. The tattoo was valuable, the prettiest and most expensive thing he'd ever owned. It cost him two months' salary, half of what he had saved since joining the army. It was his forever, it would be with him until he died. That's what Jake said back in North Carolina, that the colors might start to fade in a couple of years but the tattoo would still be recognizable when Longoria reached seventy, he should live so long. A professional soldier's life was a constant gamble, Jake said. He had tattooed hundreds of soldiers in his career, and a lot of them weren't with us any longer. Longoria had sat in Tattoo Fayetteville for hours while Jake etched his arm with that strange instrument, so he had a lot of time to listen and to absorb Jake's knowledge. Absorbing knowledge was what Longoria had done in the United States, and now he would do it in Guatemala, sharpening his perceptions, making himself a better soldier, because that was his profession now and he took pride in his work.

Jake said the skin was the largest organ in the body. Longoria did not know this. Jake said the skin was an organ and breathed, like a lung.

The tattoo announced the new species of man Longoria had become, the warrior who had been born within him. Longoria told Jake he wanted a jaguar because that was the name of his battalion. He felt good being able to explain to Jake about his unit. Jaguars were feared even way back in Guatemala's history, during the Mayan empire. The Mayans built temples to the jaguar god. Jaguars had spots that were like the camouflage uniforms the battalion wore. The jaguar stood for the new Guatemala the army wanted to build, a country of warriors and strong men, an empire like the one the Mayans had, except now they would carry submachine guns instead of spears.

Jake took out an old encyclopedia and found a color picture to use as a model. He said he knew some of the Green Berets who were training all those Latins over at the base and that they were “good guys, real he-men.” In a frame on the wall, among a dizzying variety of close-up photos of tattooed snakes, crucifixes, and bare-breasted women, a man opened his shirt to the camera to reveal the Green Beret shield tattooed just above the nipple: two arrows, a sword, and the words
De Oppresso Liber
, which Jake said was Latin for “Free us from the Commies.”

Even though he had been in only one battle, the tattoo of the jaguar made Longoria one with those Green Berets, a soldier who carried his loyalty in his skin. In the days after he returned to Guatemala he noticed that some of the younger soldiers seemed to take a step back when they were near him, while the civilians he encountered looked at him with a mixture of fear and carefully concealed disgust, as if the tattoo were a fungus on his arm. It was rare in Guatemala for a man to paint himself this way. He had broken some sort of taboo, crossed a boundary. Something about this snarling jaguar hinted at madness, unpredictability, bouts of rage. Even his commander looked at him strangely, this small
indio
who had grown stout at Fort Bragg and had returned with an animal on his arm, imitating the habits of the American soldiers every Guatemalan officer feared and respected.

Longoria was pleased to discover that his tattoo had these unexpected powers. From then on he always rolled up his sleeves to expose the tattoo to the Central American sky. It was born a North Carolina jaguar, but as it breathed in the tropical air it became a real Guatemalan jaguar.

*   *   *

A tow truck arrived in midmorning to carry away the remains of the police car. The driver was escorted by a squad of six patrolmen who formed a defensive perimeter around the hook of the truck, eyes trained on the gallery of windows above them. Using a winch and cable, he lifted the ashen chassis onto the flatbed as the officers watched solemnly, soldiers come to retrieve the body of a vanquished comrade. In thirty minutes the truck and the patrol car were gone, leaving only a rectangle of blackened pavement to mark the site of the fire.

Minutes later the cholos began gathering on the steps. Longoria could hear their chatter, the triumphant macho inflections as they celebrated their victory last night. There was no doubt the cholos had won, even though they retreated in the end. When the gangs fought each other it was conventional warfare, but last night, against the police, they were like guerrillas. The little battle was worthy of analysis. The cholos won because they employed the weapon of disorder, taking up stones against armed men, catching the officers by surprise. They understood that to win a war they had to be crazier than their opponents. Unpredictable. That was what Lieutenant Sanchez had taught Longoria back at Fort Bragg. Warriors who were prone to extremes tended to win more often than they lost.

Longoria knew that the Los Angeles Police Department could use extremes too, like what they did to that
negro
on the videotape. He had seen the tape months ago, on the television in the back room at El Pulgarcito, and had been impressed by the way the gringos handled themselves: the craziness of the baton blows, the exaggeration, so many against one kneeling man. He wondered if any of those officers had been trained at Fort Bragg, if they had studied Psyops, if they knew any of the Special Forces men. It was like the street strategies that García and the other chess players tried to teach him in MacArthur Park: attack, be reckless, forget what you read in the books. For some reason he could understand this principle when it came to real war, even though he had trouble applying it to the mind games of chess.

The burned-out patrol car was gone, but a sooty smell lingered over the street. The cholos had done a good job with their fire.

Longoria knew all about setting fires.

*   *   *

Their mission was to take the peasants by surprise. That's why the Jaguars had endured two days of marching instead of coming in by helicopter. But when Longoria's company reached the first houses, a tiny hamlet outside the main village, they found half the people who lived there waiting for them. A small man in a wrinkled black wool suit stood in the center of a dirt path with a Bible in his hand. Behind him a group of ten or so clapped and sang some evangelical hymn, raising their arms skyward in a gesture either of religious zealotry or of surrender, Longoria couldn't tell which. One woman seemed especially enraptured, her teeth gleaming in the sun, her head and long mane of black hair swaying to the rhythm of the tambourine in her hand.

“
¡Alabado sea Dios!
” the man with the Bible cried out.

Longoria watched as his lieutenant approached the singers. The lieutenant was a frog-eyed, mustachioed man of about thirty who usually looked composed and stoic under his red beret. Now his expression matched the snarl of the tiny jaguar on the beret's black patch.

“Hallelujah!” the pastor called.

“What are you doing?” the lieutenant demanded.

Longoria noticed for the first time that the pastor was an Indian man dressed in Western clothes. “
Gloria, gloria, es Jesús
,” the group sang behind him. Their voices trailed off when the lieutenant spoke.

“We came to greet you,” the pastor said timidly. “To show our support.”

“How did you know we were coming? Who gave you this intelligence? What is your source?”

Longoria was waiting for the pastor's answer when a sergeant grabbed him by the arm and ordered him to search the hamlet. It was Sergeant Medina, a fair-skinned
canche
from Puerto Barrios who hated Longoria because he had been to Fort Bragg and Medina had not. Propelled by an energetic shove, Longoria stumbled toward the cluster of adobe houses, pointing his Galil machine gun at the doorways like a child in an arcade. Once inside, he pointed it at empty chairs and collections of pots and pans. He found no people, only charcoal fires that were still burning, suggesting that the families who lived here had fled in haste.