Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [56]
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.
Danny had walked just half a block when he stopped, frozen in place by an image glowing from the side of a bus shelter. It was an illuminated movie poster depicting a man in a charcoal