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.”
ONCE MORE, LAZARUSBY HECTOR TOBAR
Before 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:
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 Jose 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
