Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set (19 page)

But it was simple, stupid, anger, of the righteous type.

It was a bit on a local weekly television news show about a group called CANT-Citizens Against Neighborhood Tagging. They were mainly white, lower-middle class, male. El Cazador had re-created a grisly, fatal traffic accident on a brick wall near a treacherous intersection. The members of CANT busily blanketed the wall, regardless of the fact that the brick was red and their paint wasn’t. Gray rolled over the face of a woman, screaming above the body of a boy. Gray covered a car in which the chrome was so intricate you could imagine the owner polishing it on a Sunday afternoon. Gray overspread the vivid crimson splashes of El Cazador’s signature.

The spokesman for the group said it was “time citizens take a stand against vandalism in their own communities.” When asked, he admitted he didn’t live anywhere nearby; he did, however, own a real estate firm which held property in the area.

The worst, though, was Henry Colson. Henry was 32, unemployed, had joined CANT because it was “high time somebody stood up for the right to live in a clean, decent neighborhood free of scum.” Henry said he advocated “whatever methods necessary.” By the time he got to the part about “welfare children who can’t even speak the language of the country that’s supporting them,” he had gone on so long without pause that they had to cut away from him in mid-sentence.

El Cazador was possibly dangerous, but it was a danger that represented mystery, fire, heart, and soul. He wanted to decorate his world in shades of red, shades that disturbed, true, but that also provoked, inspired, enlivened. These others would protect their territories by pissing gray in all the corners.

I knew now I had to write this. I couldn’t let El Cazador be buried by the people who wanted us all to live in their soft shades of ash. I would have to find him. I would have to accept the risk of becoming the palette for his name.

###

Several weeks later, weeks of fruitless driving, unanswered or misunderstood questions, fearful encounters, shameful encounters....

...I found the unfinished one.

At first I didn’t know it for what it was. I knew only that it was different from the rest.

The area was an industrial nightmare, partly abandoned foundries, boarded-up warehouses, parking lots whose asphalt had long since cracked and sprouted ragged sage. I passed few cars and no pedestrians going in or out of the vicinity. The canvas was a concrete freeway support wall; fifty feet overhead traffic rushed, unaware of this rotten underworld. The scene was two half-human demons locked in hand-to-hand combat. Ichor gushed from wounds made by tooth and talon. I could virtually feel the pressure of locked muscles, straining backs, tearing hide. It was nearly thirty feet tall, still twenty-five feet below the freeway. How does he do it?, I wondered, not for the first time. The scarlet signature was there, but it trailed off strangely at the lower left corner.

I glanced around, saw I was alone, then got out the camera and started snapping. It was late in the day; the painting faced west and the low sun was golden. I was framing another angle when I noticed something through the viewfinder: A small white square on the street below the mural. It looked as if it was stuck there by tape or glue.

I lowered the camera and walked up to it. When I realized what it was, I felt a treasure-hunter’s thrill.

It was a rough sketch of the painting above. It had been taped to the wall for reference. It also clearly proved that the bigger work had been left incomplete, because in the lower corner a group of small boys watched the vicious combatants, their expressions both enrapt and afraid. Two of them had broken into their own fight, imitating the main event.

He hadn’t had time to finish here. What if it had been last night? What if he might be back tonight to finish it?

I returned to my car and moved it into an empty parking lot, partly-hidden by overgrown scrub brush. I moved the seat back for comfort, locked the doors, and settled in.

I would be here when he came.

###

It was after eleven when the lowrider car appeared, stopped where its headlights splayed out across the mural, three figures inside pounding armrests to the beat of gangsta rap.

For some reason, I’d never thought about the flesh El Cazador to match the blood. But if I had ever stopped to picture him, the boy who got out of the car and studied the unfinished tag would have been image come to life.

Lit by his car’s headlights he was no more than 18, but already tall, over 6 feet, well-built. He wore a sleeveless T revealing muscled, tattooed arms. Handsome, with deep-set eyes and thick, lustrous black hair curling to his neck.

The tattoos on his arms were miniaturized versions of all of El Cazador’s tags.

The tattoos, the way he studied the piece with such intensity... it had to be him.

I unlocked the car door, took the photographic album I’d compiled (the
catalogue raisonné
), and, holding the rough sketch before me like a truce flag, approached. He had turned at the sound of the car door opening and watched me, expressionless.

I stopped five feet away. “Is it you?,” I asked, nodding at the mural.

He glanced at the sketch, then back at me, smiling. “Maybe.”

Suddenly my heart was pounding, my fingers shaking as I held the album up, flipping through the pages for him to see. “I’ve been documenting your work. I want to write about you, so people can understand what you’re doing....”

“What do you think I’m doing?”

I looked into his black eyes and answered, “Putting your soul on display.”

He considered, then said, in that accent peculiar to this part of the Valley, “You wanna write ‘bout me, huh? So you can make a lotta money, right?”

“Well-sure, I mean we both can. But what I really care about is the work. The art. The citizens’ action groups think you’re nothing but a vandal. They want to whitewash your tags.”

“Whitewash, huh? I guess that’s somethin’ you’d know all about.” His eyes flicked behind me. “That your car?”

No, this was wrong. “My car....?”

“In this neighborhood, somebody could steal it.” He was advancing on me now, grinning. I started backing away.

Then he called out in Spanish past my shoulder. I jerked around and saw the other two in the car. They were getting out now, moving slow, enjoying this. One walked over and deliberately slouched himself against the driver-side door of my car. The third stopped a few feet from me. They both had bottles of bad malt liquor and moist blunts.

I faced the original boy, trying to keep my voice even. “You’re not him, are you?”

“Why not?”

“Because he works alone.”

He pretended to think that over, then laughed. “Guess you’re right,
chiquita
, ‘cause we always do everything together.”

The one closest to me, wiry, bad teeth, buzzcut, stepped up to my side. “Bet you never had any real Mexican food, huh, baby?”

“I’m just looking for El Cazador. If you know him, you can tell him for me-”

The first one slapped me. Not hard, but enough to leave my face stinging and bring tears to my eyes. “Why the fuck you think El Caz’d wanna talk to you?! He’s not yours, you dumb college bitch. He’s
ours
. You even know what his name means?”

Oh Christ. All these weeks and it had never even occurred to me that the name itself meant anything.

“Goddamn, you ain’t much of a writer, you didn’t even do your homework. El Cazador means ‘the hunter’. That’s us. That’s what we do, like him. We hunt.”

“Loco lobos,” Bad Teeth giggled.

“We protect our territory. And you strayed into it, little white rabbit-”

I made a break for my passenger door.

I didn’t make it. They got me, bent me back on the hood. Bad Teeth was clawing at my shirt while the others held me down, whooping and taunting in half-Spanish, half-English.

I can’t say for sure what happened next.

The gangstas over me were blown apart, like dead leaves in a sudden hurricane. I saw Bad Teeth grappling with someone, then he shouted a hoarse obscenity, a knife blade appeared through his back, and blood splattered my legs and the car. Oh God that thick metal smell...Tattoo had a gun out, the third one had his own knife. Whoever-whatever-had hit them went for the knifeholder first. The hand holding the stiletto was suddenly bent backward, little cracks sounding. The knife fell and its former possessor shrieked. The assailant shoved him away and stared at the boy with skin art and gun. “Go,
vato
! Now!”

Tattoo looked around frantically and realized he was alone now; his friends were either dead or fled. His fingers were shaking as the man with his back to me pointed at the tattoos and said softly, “I let you go ‘cause’a the art, man.”

Tattoo stowed the gun, got in his car, gunned the engine and peeled out.

I was crouched on the ground, huddled against the protective metal of a fender. Now the aggressor turned and I saw him by the dim light of overhead freeway traffic.

He was no man. He was young, more so than the others-16 at best. Small, skinny, acne-scarred face, stringy unwashed hair.

This couldn’t be him.

The Hunter.

“El Cazador....”

The boy with the teeth and the knife in his back moaned and scrabbled at the asphalt. His attacker turned away from me, walked idly over and pulled the knife out of him. Then El Cazador-because this was him-knelt beside the twitching boy, flipped him onto his back-

—and tore his throat out with his teeth.

This was not the polite seduction of a thousand midnight movies. The victim pinned beneath El Cazador was flailing wildly in his last seconds of life. He tore at his killer’s hair and clothes, uttered choked babbling cries, bucked his body, tried to dislodge the thing sucking him dry. Blood puddled beneath him and began to run.

I picked myself up and sidled to the passenger door. I’d forgotten it was locked. The keys were in my pocket. I got them out, wrapping my fist around them to stop the jangling noise. The click of the key in the lock, the creak of the door opening sounded like cannonfire to me, but El Cazador paid no attention, still embroiled in his grotesque feast. I slid in and locked both doors. My fingers were shaking as I got the keys into the ignition. I started the engine-

—and the driver-side window shattered in.

He had moved so impossibly fast there was no space to even react. His hand was through the glass, pulling up the lock, opening the door, dragging me out. Then he held me there against the car. His face was smeared with blood and two of his teeth were too long. Light flowed from his eyes.

I think I was screaming over and over, “Please let me go, please-let me go-”

He laughed and shook his head. “No way. You’re my dessert.”

I found a last reserve of determination, then, and answered, “Fine, but before you kill me look at the book on the ground behind you.”

It was where I had dropped the album. His eyes flicked around, saw the object. Then he threw me to the ground, hard, and turned to grab the album. I lay there, hurting, hoping, while he went through the pages of his book. His expression didn’t change, but he began to turn each page slower, taking longer to study the photos.

To appraise his work.

Finally he closed it, dropped it back in the car. “So?”

“So I want people to know about your tags.”