Los Angeles Noir

by Denise Hamilton

  When he drifted back home and turned on the tiny television in his room, he saw the gun-holding couple from the poster in a commercial. “In the dark corridors of a violent city,” the voice-over intoned, “there is no time to lose.” Weapons, he noticed, were being drawn on about half of the channels on his cable system. There were soldiers carrying rifles, villains swinging machine guns from their hips, housewives cowering in closets with silver-plated .22s, ready to fend off intruders and rapists. Some of the scenes were filmed in squat palmlined residential neighborhoods that looked much like his own. People fired guns while crouched behind cement walls; they fired guns in kitchens; they fired guns while falling from airplanes; they fired guns and then jumped into lakes and rivers; they fired guns in warehouses, pinging bullets deflecting off iron beams.

  Danny had become a member of the fraternity of gunslingers, and, like the people on the television screen, he began to feel looked-at. When he finally returned to school at Hollywood High, he drew stares everywhere he went. One of the football players said hello and gave him a hearty, friendly punch on the shoulder. Girls touched his scar with soft fingers that brushed against his cheek. Sandra, the one with the flowing black curls, the girl he had stared at for months without saying a word, cornered him by surprise in a hallway. For the first time, he was close enough to take in the scent of her perfume, a basket of overripe peaches that had dissolved into the air around her. Like everyone else, she had heard about his accident.

  “Are you okay? I mean, that must have been awful, to be in a coma,” she said. “Are you totally, you know, like healed?”

  No other schoolmate had asked about his health. Only Sandra had been thoughtful enough, which to Danny immediately confirmed what he had always imagined: that she was as saintly as she was beautiful. Now he was speaking to her, his nerves steady because he was a wounded warrior, not a boy. They talked about his accident, about life and death, about the school and how stupid everyone was. Sandra wanted to know what it felt like to be dead: She was convinced that he had “passed over to the other side and come back.” He made up a story about seeing clouds and angels that brought tears to her eyes.

  Part of it was true; the old Danny had gone to sleep and died and this new Danny had taken his place, a Danny who wasn’t afraid to touch Sandra’s hand the third time they talked, a Danny who knew when to reach over and kiss her, how to wrap his arm around the arch of her back when they necked. A few days after they first spoke, they were under the bleachers at dusk, tugging awkwardly at each other’s clothes, scattered cups and hot dog wrappers at their feet. A week after that half-consummated encounter, they were in his room, fully naked on the bed with the football curtains and his baseball glove as witnesses.

  When they said their goodbyes and he watched her walk away down the sidewalk from the perch of his bedroom window, he knew for certain that the old Danny had died forever. He felt possessive of her in a hard, brittle way: Her blue jeans belonged to him, her lips, and the small scar on her chin. It was an unexpected thing to feel; tenderness and vulnerability at one moment, and then a kind of anger the next. The third time they were alone in his room, he pushed her arms forcefully against the floor. He was about to pull his hands away and apologize, but when he looked at her eyes he saw that roughness was what she expected from him all along. The boy who had been shot had to have a core of steel.

  Danny took to greeting everyone, all the time, with an angry gaze and found himself losing his patience for the routine and rhythms of the school day. By late morning, he was already squirming in his seat, daydreaming about fistfights, doodling pictures of fanciful weapons. On the bus home, he looked at the other passengers and wondered which one would challenge him, and how he would strike back with balled-up fists and kicks. He always won these imaginary fisticuffs, standing triumphantly over his bleeding adversaries. Finally, and without any good reason, he found his real-life self decking a tenth-grader named Pedro Carrillo in the cafeteria. The guy ran off, sobbing, and for the first time in his life Danny felt like a stupid bully.

  In the days that followed, Pedro walked around the school with one eye swimming in a purple cloud of cracked veins. The word on campus was that there would be a settling of accounts with Pedro’s older brothers, a portly senior and even more portly dropout who held court several hours each day in front of a tattoo parlor on Vine Street, next to the star on the Walk of Fame honoring Rin Tin Tin. It was said that one of the Carrillo brothers would jump Danny on the football field during PE, or ambush him in the cafeteria, or that the other would shoot him on Wilton Place after he stepped off the bus. Danny was one young man against three brothers. Asking Elliot for a gun to even the odds seemed like the logical thing to do. Elliot produced one two days later, a snub revolver that bore no resemblance to the sleek weapon Danny had shot himself with. “I got it from a guy on Western, a guy my brothers told me about.”

  Danny was headed home one Friday, walking past the elementary school, walking almost at a trot because he was going to pick up Sandra and take her to his room, when something cut past his ear. A half second later he heard the unmistakable report of a gun. Instinctively, he fell to the ground, looking up to see the largest of the Carrillo brothers walking toward him from across the street, a gun at his side, trying his best to assume the fierce and demented look of an actor shooting his way through an R-rated thriller. Danny stood up, quickly grabbed his own weapon from his backpack, and pointed it at Pedro’s brother, stopping him in his tracks. For a moment, the two gunslingers looked at each other with childlike befuddlement. Then Danny began firing, squinting his eyes against the explosions of his gun. Pedro’s brother started running, across the street and into the construction site, where he jumped into a ditch lined with metal rebar. From just a few paces away, Danny fired again, not squinting so much now and sure he would hit his target, but instead he felt a burning pain in his back. He fell, as stiff and heavy as a downed tree, and plopped down into a pile of earth, face first. A woman screamed from across the street. Pedro’s brother moaned from the ditch, calling out, “You shot me, you shot me,” in a pleading voice that seemed to belong to a five-year-old. Danny moved his head, an act of will against the currents of pain that ran up and down his spine, and looked into a deep hole carved into the soil. He saw chunks of mud floating about a pool of black water, and wanted to cry because he knew he would be buried soon, dressed forever in wet earth.

  The daylight around him dissolved quickly. He entered a self-conscious dream, lifting himself from the ground and beginning to run through a dark corridor, stumbling toward home and his room, to the bed his mother always made for him. If he could lose himself under the blankets, his mother would kiss him goodnight. The dream ended and he was vaguely aware of being on a bed that was not his own, of lights shining beyond the black universe inside his skull, of his limbs being lifted and prodded, of formless voices chattering about him. He wanted desperately to open his eyes; he tried lifting his arms and kicking his feet, but he had turned into something heavy and immovable After the longest of efforts, he succeeded in opening his eyes, seeing what had to be an apparition: a dark man standing at the center of an aura of yellow light, a glint of metal on his chest, his lips moving but the words unintelligible. Danny slipped back into his nothingness.

  “Danny. Danny. Danny.” It was a familiar voice, his mother speaking calmly, evenly. “Danny. Danny. Aquí estoy.”

  He opened his eyes easily, naturally, without much effort at all. “Mamá,” he said.

  She was standing over him, as was Sandra, the two women on opposite sides of the bed, each clutching one of his hands in theirs, rubbing his fingers and his palm with identical strokes. No one spoke. For the moment he merely looked at them—the familiar, round figure of his mother, and Sandra, who had changed in some way he could not put words to. Sandra stared at him with brown eyes swimming in a pool of tears, fixed on him with a strange and desperate intensity.

  “You look older,” he said. Danny sensed
that many days, weeks, maybe even months had passed while he was asleep. The skin of his arms and hands had turned soggy and the sunlight outside the hospital window belonged to a different, colder season than the one he remembered. The world had aged in his absence.

  “She’s having your baby,” his mother said.

  He lowered his chin to look at Sandra’s belly, which did, in fact, rise slightly with an unfamiliar roundness. She brought her hands to the roundness and cradled it.

  “Our baby,” she said.

  Danny felt the blood rushing to his skull, and let his head fall back on the pillow. Being awake was too complicated, so he closed his eyes and waited, in vain, to slip back into sleep.

  “Hijo, hijo, are you okay?”

  “I knew we shouldn’t have told him,” Sandra said.

  “What do you mean? You think he’s not going to notice you with your belly?”

  “We should have waited …”

  The two women argued, the words bouncing back and forth over his prone body, until he spoke again.

  “How long have I been asleep?” he asked with his eyes still closed.

  “Three months,” his mother said.

  “Almost four,” Sandra added. “The detective was here yesterday and he said he saw you open your eyes. So we came here to sit with you.”

  “And to pray,” his mother said.

  He fell asleep to the sound of the two women whispering Hail Marys in different languages, his mother’s “… y en la hora de nuestra muerte …” tangled up with Sandra’s “… pray for us sinners …”

  Detective Sanabria sat at the foot of the bed, the round and vaguely Olmec features of his face molded into a tense mask of irritation and befuddlement. “Paralyzed. Both you and the other knucklehead, Beto Carrillo. Poetic justice. That’s what my partner called it. You guys shot your legs out from under each other. Good work, pendejo. Me and the D.A. figure you’ve both been punished enough already so there will be no ADW charges. Your friend Elliot’s in juvie—he’s going to do time for you … Yeah, I found out he gave you the gun. Won’t tell me where he got it, the little brat.”

  Danny thought that he, too, would like to know where the gun came from. He thought of what the grip felt like in his hands, remembered wincing when he fired it, and wondered who else had touched it, what other damage it had done, which other children had played with it. On his back in this hospital bed, with his mother standing over him, Danny was starting to think of himself as a boy again. Somewhere there was a factory that churned out toy trucks and bullets for children, passing them on to toy stores, and to gun traffickers who operated in the alleyways of East Hollywood, selling them to boys like Elliot. The bullets in the gun Danny bought had cut the wires to another young man’s legs, just as the wires to his own legs had been cut, forever.

  Forever is a long time when you’re fourteen years old. None of the doctors who came to see him used that word, though it was clearly the word they meant to use every time they talked about his condition. The doctors were specialists in fields whose names were too complicated to remember. There were coma doctors, spinal cord doctors, doctors interested in his moods, and doctors who talked about rehabilitation. They shined lights in his eyes and wrote notes about what they saw; they poked and prodded his legs, attached sensors to his skull and watched his brain waves on a monitor. As a whole, the doctors were optimistic about his “recovery,” but fatalists when it came to his chances for walking again. After a few days, a burly hospital worker lifted him off the bed and onto a wheelchair with a cheerful, “Your new wheels, dude!”

  From now on, Danny would see things from four feet off the ground. Melancholia robbed him of speech, he could barely grunt a yes or a no when Sandra came to see him again, her belly rounder still. Every few days she seemed to get bigger. He was helpless before her stomach, the child growing underneath the hard shell of a belly she forced him to touch. “You’re going to walk again,” she said emphatically. “You are. I know it.”

  When he went back to school, he became, briefly, an object of curiosity. The girls took turns wheeling him around and putting their arms on his shoulders. One girl rubbed her fingers through his hair affectionately, but this only depressed him more because it reminded him of those parts of his body where he could no longer feel anything. For a week or so, the guys on the football team took turns pushing him around school, and for one game he sat in his chair next to the team bench, the helmeted players patting him on the cheek near the scar of his first bullet “for good luck.” Danny sat and sulked all game long. They didn’t invite him back.

  People began to avoid him, ducking into side passages when he wheeled down the hallways. No one asked to see the scar left by the second bullet, the angry red welt below his ribs, and the meandering scar in his back where the doctors had removed the metal. No one asked to hear stories about what it was like to be dead—a second time—and to come to life again. He became a ghostly, solitary figure, haunting the campus, pushing himself across the quad, inching forward with a stop-and-go roll. Sandra sometimes followed alongside him, until she became too big and round to go to class. Eventually he stopped going to school too, despite the pleas of his mother, who grew frustrated and irritable with him. “No seas mujer,” she snapped at him. Don’t be a woman. But even that insult couldn’t shake him from his leaden mood.

  Mostly, he watched television. In the movies, he noticed, people who got shot were never paralyzed. They bore their wounds with a grimace and rose to their feet, chasing after their enemies; or they died dignified deaths, giving long speeches before they closed their eyes forever. No gunslinger ever suffered the humiliation of sitting all day in a vinyl chair, trapped with the vinegar smell of his inert legs, forced to endure the protracted lamentations of his mother and his pregnant girlfriend, who both wondered how they would feed the baby, once it was born.

  After a week rooted like an angry weed to the floors of the bungalow, Danny finally got fed up and decided to wander the neighborhood in his wheelchair, joining the parallel universe of mumbling bottle collectors and lunatics who made their home on the sidewalks. He inched along slowly, deliberately, pushing hard to roll the wheelchair over the concrete squares where tree roots had raised the sidewalk, and up the steep ramps that were cut into the curb at each corner. It was during one of these excursions that, one afternoon, three blocks on from his house, he coasted down a slight slope, half hoping he would gain speed, lose control, and bounce into traffic. Instead, he came to a stop at the construction site across the street from his old elementary school. The dirt trenches were gone and the ground was covered with a vast table of concrete. Twice he had been shot here and left for dead. His manhood had arrived and slipped away from one moment to the next. A sense of injustice rose through his body, a muffled crimson scream. He stared directly into the yellow, fiery light of the sun, then turned away and cried, burying his hot face in his hands, weeping until his chest felt as weak and drained as his legs. Finally, he sat up, opening his eyes to the sight of girls running up and down the playground across the street, skipping with strong, healthy legs.

  Danny was headed back home, very slowly, because his arms were tired of pushing, when he found his path blocked by a pair of standing denim pants on the sidewalk. They belonged to a rather large and roundish teenage girl.

  “You prick,” she said.

  Danny looked up and gave her a quizzical, annoyed look. “Get out of my way,” he mumbled, without much conviction.

  “Who’s going to take care of Beto, you prick?” The girl reached into the backpack that dangled from her shoulder, a pink affair decorated with a pouting Betty Boop, and produced a small chrome gun, barely bigger than the palm of her hand. “Who’s going to take care of him, you prick?”

  Danny grabbed the rubber tires of his wheelchair and pushed backward, first calmly and then with panic, as the girl raised her toy-sized gun and pointed it at him. He looked at the tiny opening of the gun’s barrel and pushed harder, but cou
ldn’t get any distance between him and the girl, who kept marching toward him, mascara rivers racing down her cheeks. He tried to turn around, bouncing the chair and its wheels the way a therapist at the hospital had taught him, but he succeeded only in tipping the chair over, falling to the ground with a thud and a crash, his cheek crushed against the cement sidewalk.

  Without hearing the gunshots, he felt the impact of the bullets on his body, the first striking him near the waist, the second at the base of the neck, sending a starburst of blue light across his eyelids. His skull became a bell made of bone. All at once, everything turned mercifully quiet.

  He slipped into a dream in which he saw himself sprawled on the sidewalk, being lifted by men in black suits, the girl with the Betty Boop backpack standing against a nearby tree, sucking her thumb. Small chunks of silver and brass dripped from his back. He saw Pedro’s brother standing waist-high in a ditch, his arms raised in a plea: Help me. Elliot came to place a finger inside Danny’s first wound, the one in his cheek, wiggling the finger about like a worm. Danny shook his head and tried to push him away, and startled awake to see he was inside an ambulance, a paramedic’s latex gloves pulling back his eyelids. “Hey, Louie, we got him back!” the paramedic shouted. Danny passed out, tumbling into a warm dreamlessness, and then woke up again, alone, months later, in a room with green walls. For a few minutes he listened to the beep of a machine that echoed his own heartbeat until the steady, soft sound made him drowsy and he closed his eyes again.

  When Detective Sanabria came to the Children’s Hospital some time later, he spent a good two hours at the foot of Danny’s bed. He felt especially useless before the sight of this boy’s prone body. Sanabria was beginning to question his place in the world, the assumptions about goodness, strength, and perseverance that had informed his life up to now; the hours of study in community college, his struggles at Cal State L.A. in classes like Applied Psychology and Urban Criminology, his monklike devotion to the reading of prolix police manuals that had ended with his consecration as detective. Here on the bed before him was a boy who had managed to get himself shot not once, but three times, twice with Sanabria looking after him, as it were. The girl with the gun in her Betty Boop backpack was in juvie, learning to draw pictures of weeping girl-clowns from her fellow inmates, and as unwilling as the rest of the knuckleheads to give up the name of the person who had sold her the gun. The gun traffickers operated a machinery of violence that churned up the fertile ground in Detective Sanabria’s corner of East Hollywood. He saw them as blood merchants filling a charnel house with the bones of children, stacking femurs and punctured skulls harvested from the streets, lining their foul clothing with the quarters, the nickels, and the rolled-up dollar bills of children.