Flashback

Leonard had mixed feelings about all this. As an amateur historian as well as classicist, he knew the injustice of southwestern states being taken from Mexico in the 1840s. But he was also one of the few people he knew who were old enough to remember the 1992 L.A. riots after the police who’d beaten a man named Rodney King were acquitted. In less than a week of rioting, thousands of fires were set—many of the burned-out areas still had not been rebuilt, forty years later—and more than fifty people had died with a couple of thousand injured.

Leonard had thought of those riots that morning when he’d heard details of how an entire company of reconquista infantry in armored personnel carriers had been pulled from their vehicles and beaten and killed by a mob at the same place in South Central L.A.—the intersection of Florence and South Normandie avenues—where truck drivers and other innocents had been pulled from their vehicles and attacked in 1992. In this case, according to NPR, more than two hundred reconquista fighters were dead and the black rioters had moved into East L.A., burning everything they came across in the wake of the Nuevo Mexican forces’ retreat.

This upset Leonard. He wondered how his friend Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa and Emilio’s son Eduardo were. He wished them well. There was no doubt in George Leonard Fox’s mind that even though he’d demanded payment, Emilio had saved Val’s life—and perhaps Leonard’s as well—by getting them out of Los Angeles nine days ago.

Leonard noticed that Val had led them up a flight of steps out of the sunken Cherry Creek walkway and onto the street-level sidewalk that ran alongside Speer Boulevard. There were fewer bicyclists on the pathway below, Leonard saw, and many more homeless filling the path and riverside banks.

He’d just been thinking about the Alamo—he’d once proofread a friend’s essay about Texas’s Alamo and the fighting of February–March 1836, where Travis, Crockett, Bowie, and the others had died at the hands of General Santa Anna, the essay focusing on the failure in leadership of Sam Houston, Austin, and the other self-named Texians—so he was surprised to see the greensward of Denver’s Alamo Placita Park across the street to the north. On the south side of the boulevard was the smaller Hungarian Freedom Park.

There were hundreds of hovels and tattered tents in both parks, but especially in the Hungarian Freedom Park just to their right, and many more hundreds of the homeless, mostly men, milling around.

Val dropped back next to Leonard. “Stay close to me, Grandpa.”

A group of the lean, angry-looking men, perhaps twenty-five or so, crossed the busy street to the median sidewalk and began following them.

Speer Boulevard turned into East First Avenue here and ran due east and west. To their right now was a high fence shutting off access to what had once been the Denver Country Club with its extensive grounds. Cherry Creek disappeared into that forbidden area.

Across the street to the north was one of the oldest wealthy areas of Denver with shaded streets and what had once been multimillion-old-dollar homes, small estates, really, set back on deep lawns. Now those houses were in ruins, many burned down, others occupied by street people or turned into low-quality flashcaves.

The group of men behind them rushed to cross South Downing Street and catch up to them.

Val dropped Leonard’s duffel bag, turned around, and removed the Beretta pistol from his belt.

The group of men stopped about thirty feet away. They launched curses and one threw a small rock from the street, but—still cursing and flashing obscene gestures—they turned around and headed back toward the Hungarian Freedom Park.

Leonard found that he was having some trouble breathing as Val tucked the pistol back into his belt, picked up his grandfather’s duffel bag, and, gripping Leonard’s elbow firmly, moved him more quickly down the sidewalk outside the country club barriers.

“I’m surprised they didn’t have guns themselves,” managed Leonard when he could talk. He kept glancing back over his shoulder.

“If they had guns,” said Val, “they wouldn’t be homeless. And we’d be dead. Let’s keep moving.”

Passing the entrance to the country club, Leonard’s heart pounding from the exertion and adrenaline in his system, he looked into the grounds and saw blue tents pitched everywhere on what had been the tennis courts and an eighteen-hole golf course behind the large main buildings. In the few clear areas, those large swivel-wing planes the military called VTOLs or… what was it?… Ospreys were lined up, their engines and propellers aimed skyward.

“I wonder what…,” he began.

“Keep walking, Grandpa. We’re almost there.”