A few steps away from Jawbone, Ben lifted a hand and opened his mouth to speak. But before Ben made a sound, Jawbone spun, pulled the dumpster’s lid open with one hand, and tossed the black backpack inside. Then he took off running.
Everything inside of Ben seemed to rear up, trying to force him to chase Jawbone down the alley. But by the time this physical intention resolved itself into a coherent thought, Jawbone was gone.
Go back to the house,
Ben told himself, even as he pried open the dumpster’s lid with both hands.
They weren’t fucking. Go back to the house now.
But a more reasonable-sounding voice in his head told him that Jawbone had simply robbed them, that the blood stains all over him had been old, probably the result of some accident, and who knew what stereo equipment or old watches were stuffed inside the bag he had been so eager to get rid of.
Ben pulled a trash can over to the side of the dumpster, lifted the lid with one arm, and reached down for the bag with the other. When his fingers finally grazed a strap, his center of gravity shifted and suddenly he was eating plastic, having landed face-first on the mess of trash bags inside. The lid slammed shut and he jumped to his feet, pushing it back open, and set the bag down on the trash can’s lid.
Once his feet were on the pavement again, he heard a rustling sound behind him. He turned. The bag was rolling toward the middle of the alley, each revolution slightly lopsided, leaving a trail of blood smears across the pavement.
As soon as it came to a stop, Ben crouched down over it and tugged the zipper open.
He was still kneading the matted hair inside, wondering if all hair felt the same once a person’s head had been removed from his body, when a harsh spotlight pierced the alleyway and fixed on him. For a few dazed seconds, he thought the sheriff’s cruiser would continue on, leaving him alone with his lover’s severed head. Then he heard the clipped, hollow-sounding voice of the deputy speaking into his radio, followed by the squeak of rubber boots heading toward him.
When the deputy was a few feet away, Ben peered up at the squat shadow standing in the spotlight’s unrelenting glare, his right hand resting gently against the holster he had just unsnapped. Ben heard himself say, “I need to go home now.”
B
efore they found the gun, they were running through the trenches at a construction site, throwing dirt clods at each other. But for their overgrown adolescent bodies, an adult standing nearby might have mistaken them for grade-school boys playing cowboys and Indians. They’d stand up in a trench, “fire” at the boy in the next trench over, and laugh and duck when the clod exploded on the other’s shirt, leaving a faint brown circle of clinging dirt crumbs. Throwing dirt clods was more fun than vandalizing the tractor and the backhoe, both of which were immune to much vandalism anyway, sitting there stoic and yellow-metalled at one corner of the construction site, impervious to dirt clods and rocks and globs of tar and even a splash of urine. It was Elliot who peed on the tractor treads, to little or no effect other than the stinking mist he sent into the air, and it was Elliot who found the gun a few minutes later, lying on the bottom of the trench.
Actually, Elliot stepped on the gun. Or, to be more accurate, he tripped over it. This is what he told Detective Sanabria. Elliot was an especially bright fourteen-year-old, and he sensed that telling the story to Detective Sanabria with all its details was going a long way toward exculpating him of any guilt, and that each little twist and turn he could remember was keeping him out of the squad car now parked at the edge of the construction site. The gun itself needed no describing, having been photographed by Detective Sanabria, and then catalogued and tagged and carried away in a plastic bag. Elliot said he thought it was a toy at first, and this was true, until he picked it up, at which point its mass gave away its identity instantly, as did its intricate assemblage—the tiny screws above the trigger, the patterned indentations in the handle, the mysterious metal latches and slides, and the letters stamped into the black metal:
CAUTION: capable of firing with magazine removed.
Detective Sanabria had grown up in this very East Hollywood neighborhood, gone to the very school across from the construction site, and could imagine the scene as if he had lived it himself. Danny, the victim, was the first bystander to run over, drawn by Elliot’s sudden stillness and silence before the object he was holding. Soon that same wordlessness had overtaken all the other boys, their shouts and laughter replaced by the identical frozen Os of their stunned adolescent mouths. Across the street, sinewy thirdand fourth-grade girls were running and playing tag and kickball on the school playground, without a clue about what these older kids were up to. Elliot slipped out of the momentary trance, smiled wickedly at the other boys, and raised the weapon and pointed it at the ponytailed girls. The girls didn’t notice, they just bounced a red ball rhythmically against a narrow wall that jutted like a sail from the playground’s asphalt blacktop, singing a song, while Elliot closed one eye and pretended to aim, looking down the stubby barrel.
Elliot laughed, and then passed the gun on to the victim, this boy they called Danny but who Detective Sanabria would soon identify as Daniel José Cruz Jr., age fourteen and a half, born in San Vicente, El Salvador, a resident of 5252 Harold Way, Hollywood, California, and just as American as fried chicken and potato salad. The victim had taken the gun, and like the little boy and the knucklehead he really was, he had turned the barrel toward himself to look inside.
Knucklehead
: It was not a word Detective Sanabria used growing up in this neighborhood, where Spanish and Armenian were starting to crowd out English, causing it to retreat from whole chunks of the day. Knucklehead was an appellation used at the station for bank robbers who got caught in the parking lot fiddling with the ignition in their getaway cars, shoplifters wearing pilfered sweaters with the price tags still attached, murderers who shot off their own fingers and their girlfriends with the same bullet.
If Danny had not been shipped away to intensive care at the Children’s Hospital (Detective Sanabria’s least favorite place to visit on earth), Detective Sanabria would have given him a good knucklehead slap at precisely the spot where the bullet entered his brain.
“¿Tienes miedo? No te agüites.”
Danny turned his wrist to look at the inside of the barrel, which was his way of answering Elliot’s taunt: No, he wasn’t afraid; he could stare into the most dangerous part of the gun, the part that could kill you. He wanted to show all the other boys his lack of fear. The circular cavity was coming into view when a light flashed and he heard a roar that somehow penetrated into the darkness that followed, the sustained thunder of a river tumbling over a cliff or a zoo of animals letting out a simultaneous roar, followed by the absolute silence of a dreamless sleep.
He opened his eyes to the soft glow of fluorescent lamps, and caught the sharp glint of light reflecting off stainless steel. He was on his back, suddenly, in a bed. His first fully formed thought was that it was not right that he could close his eyes and be transported from one place to the next, from the ditches and the dirt of the construction site to this strange room of glowing light with—what was this?—tubes taped to his arms. He fell asleep again, drifting in and out of wakefulness many times, and had the sensation that he was floating above the bed in a slow tumble. Finally, his eyes became fixed and steady and he could tell exactly where he was: a hospital. In a corner of the room, he saw a stocky and familiar figure, a woman in a blouse that fit too tight against her round belly, asleep in her chair, her open mouth facing the ceiling like the top of a snoring chimney.
“Mamá,”
he said.
His mother startled awake. She looked at him with a perplexed, confused gaze, and he quickly understood that being awake was not something expected of him, that sleeping was now his natural condition.
“¡Hijo!”
she shouted, so loud that the sound waves reverberated in his skull, which, he now realized, was covered with a helmet of gauze bandages. His mother brought her hands together and fell into prayer, closing her eyes, looking much as she had just a moment ago when she was snoring, words he could not hear drifting skyward from her lips like steam.
Danny soon forgot about her, raising his arms to inspect the tubes that fed a silky liquid into his wrists, lifting his fingers to touch the bandages, probing very gingerly for the place the bullet had entered. Inside his skull there was now an opening, a round path through his head, a cylinder as long and wide as the barrel of a gun.
* * *
“So you shot yourself,” Detective Sanabria said. “Good job, knucklehead. Do me a favor. Make that the last shot you ever fire from a gun.”
Children and guns were Detective Sanabria’s obsession, his off-hours hobby. The other detectives in Hollywood Division left copies of their reports on Sanabria’s desk whenever they handled cases in which children were shot, or in which children shot at other children. A ten-year-old shooting his sister in the shoulder with a .22; a two-year-old shot through the heart while in his playpen, the bullet crossing through three walls thanks to the penetrating power of an AK-47. Detective Sanabria could not explain why or when this obsession began, though his old partner Detective Nazarian knew perfectly well: He had been Sanabria’s friend since way back in the academy, and had been at the scene of Sanabria’s first homicide (it was also Nazarian’s first), which just happened to be four blocks from the elementary school they had both attended, an old brick edifice built in the early glory days of Hollywood, with the dusty pictures of silent film star alumni growing moldy behind a glass case in the office. Nazarian had seen the stunned look on then-probationary Officer Sanabria’s face when he looked down at that bleeding, dying eight-year-old whose walnut-shaped eyes and copper skin bore a striking resemblance to Detective Sanabria’s own.
In the case of Daniel “Danny” Cruz, Detective Sanabria’s investigation and the trace of the nine-millimeter gun that had placed Danny in this bed had been as fruitless as it usually was. Manufactured by the American Patriot Gun Co. of Waukegan, Illinois, the weapon had been sold to the Guns R Us Mart of Phoenix, Arizona, and then to a certain Andrew Palazzo, who, when contacted by Detective Sanabria by phone, said that he had sold the gun at a swap meet in Mesa, Arizona some six years ago.
“Untraceable,” Detective Nazarian had remarked when Sanabria told him the results of his two-hour investigation. “Unknowable.”
Detective Nazarian had seen enough cases of children and guns that he wanted to get out of police work, which was why he was going to graduate school and starting to toss around words like “unknowable,” which everyone in the Hollywood LAPD station found annoying, especially Detective Sanabria. But it was probably true: How and why some idiot had left a loaded gun in the construction site across the street from an elementary school was probably unknowable. So that left the victim Danny to talk to.
Detective Sanabria could not pretend he was here for any investigation. He was here for something else—to do something he did not know how to do, that he felt queasily uncomfortable doing, which was to make the speech and twist his face into the angry I’m-gonna-kick-your-ass-youngman stare that would keep Daniel “Danny” Cruz away from guns the rest of his life.
He stood staring at Danny with a lingering, pathetic, hopeless absence of words. “Now you know what a bullet can do to you,” was the best he could do. “Or maybe you don’t really know yet. Because you’re still alive, aren’t you? And you shouldn’t be.”
Only much later, days after Danny had taken his first, lightheaded steps away from the hospital bed, after the nurses had helped him walk through the ward, after listening to the doctor give his mother a much-too-long list of instructions for his care, when he was back in the familiar and messy nest of his room, did he realize exactly what had happened to him.
He had shot himself in the skull and survived.
He had been in a coma for two weeks, at one point nearly left for dead.
“You cheated death,” his mother said. “We even had a priest here.”
Danny remembered the first time he had understood what death was, in bed under his covers when he was still in elementary school. In the darkness of his room, hours after watching a movie filled with medieval battle scenes in which one of the protagonists had exited the world of the living with an especially poignant soliloquy, the abstraction of death had become real for the first time. It was perfect blackness, a sleep from which he would never awaken, forever tucked under the football helmets on his comforter, the bedroom lights permanently off.
Danny the hospital patient had a new appreciation for what death meant and, at the same time, could now see the possibility that he might “cheat” it. He could run away from death like those quick-footed boys in that game they used to play in gym, “War,” where you stood with your friends in a cluster of bodies and dodged the rubber balls your classmates threw at you, until only one boy was left—the winner. Danny had done something like that: A brass bullet spinning through the air, on fire, had taken aim at his brain and he had twisted away just enough to avoid being killed.
The more he thought about it, the more he saw his survival was an act of will, rather than a stroke of luck. Danny was not yet fifteen and unprepared to accept the idea that his life could end so stupidly. He noticed adults shook their heads when they looked at the scar under his eye socket, a pushed-in nub of darker, stringy flesh. He saw in this a gesture of admiration for his strength and courage. Elliot looked a little afraid of him, which made Danny feel happy and triumphant. “Jesus, man, you lived,” Elliot said. “I don’t know anybody who’s taken a bullet in the head and lived.”
Before he had been shot, the most daring thing Danny had ever done was back in his days at LeConte Junior High School when he broke into the campus after hours—with Elliot—walking through the empty hallways trying to crack open the odd locker or two. He had never been a good vandal because he always heard his mother’s voice when he tried to do those things. In the years since his father had left for El Salvador, never to return, Danny’s numerous Los Angeles relatives had reminded him that a boy should respect his mother, that he shouldn’t dishonor her: They were all alone, a working woman and her young son, and any bad thing he did would be a reflection on her. His mother, in turn, doted on him. She bought the blankets and curtains printed with the logos of football teams that decorated his bedroom, with their one-eyed pirates and stylized birds of prey. She had bought him the dragon poster that loomed over the bed on which he was now sitting. These things belonged to a boy, and he wasn’t a boy, not anymore. He was suddenly angry at his mother, for no other reason than he felt her protective presence everywhere in his room.
Danny stood up and walked out of his room, then through the living room and the smell of soup and cooked meat that always lived there, and out the front door. Reaching the sidewalk, he stopped for a long time to examine the other stucco bungalows on the block, the palm trees that all leaned toward the south, the cars and vans parked in the driveways, their dented bodies covered with white patches. It all looked familiar, and at the same time, completely different. The pinks and yellows and blues of the houses were faded and sun-bleached, the palm trees were sad and weary. For his entire life he had lived on this block, he had pushed toy trucks and ridden tricycles and bicycles up and down the sidewalks. Everyone on the block knew his name.
Beyond this quiet little neighborhood was the real Hollywood, the thoroughfares of liquor stores and hotels, motels and sex shops, which had always existed on the fringes of his boy consciousness as a forbidden, dangerous hinterland of gaudy marquees. Danny the boy used to ride the bus home from school and stay away from the freaks on Vermont and Western. Danny the wounded warrior decided it was time to take a walk, toward the thick metallic sound of traffic on the avenues and the rising cry of firetrucks and police patrols. In a few minutes he found himself facing the din and the carbontinged air of Hollywood Boulevard, its long parallel rows of street lamps just beginning to glow white in the twilight. He was standing near the bottom of a gentle slope several miles long, the boulevard a buckling line of asphalt rising into the distant hills toward a gleaming array of billboards and hotel towers that clung to the mountainside, far away but reachable.