Do They Know I'm Running?

by David Corbett

  —There is no school for Shatha. Fatima is sick from the lack of food, the lack of sleep, the despondency. But the only alternative is to become a prostitute.

  —And that would kill you, wouldn’t it? Lupe spoke without lifting her head, holding the ice bag in one hand, wagging a knowing finger with the other.—To think your dear wife’s fucking other men, sucking their Arab cocks, so your daughter can eat.

  Samir shook his head with an almost boyish violence.—She understands honor.

  —She understands hunger.

  —And it is the Americans, the contractors, who use the prostitutes.

  —You use prostitutes. Admit it, Turco.

  His sunken eyes flared.—I have never—

  —Don’t worry, your wife understands. She understands her husband is far away and men are men. She’s on her own, like women everywhere.

  —I have never used prostitutes. Never. And Fatima is not alone! All of this, this struggle to reach America, it’s for her.

  —America? Lupe resettled her weight, nudging herself onto her back with an indulgent moan, as though self-pity was the only pleasure left.—We’re all prostitutes in America.

  —You are wrong! You are wrong. I realize these men you fell in with, they have made you a slave. Yes, you will have to degrade yourself, sell yourself to buy your way out of their grip. You will have to endure much and suffer greatly. But you can do it. You are young. You are not the only one facing such things.

  —Like your wife?

  —Someday you will get to America and there things change. I’m not stupid, I know dreams are for children. Yes, there is little hope in the world. But without America, there is none. Despite everything, you will have a chance.

  At last she leaned up a little, meeting his eyes.—What makes you think I’ll live long enough to have a chance?

  —You are too young to be so bitter.

  —And you’re too old not to realize your wife is fucking strangers to stay alive.

  —She’s not! She can’t. You don’t understand how it is. Her brothers would kill her.

  —She’ll tell them she’s out cleaning houses. Like Latinas do in the States. Like I said, in America—

  Samir refused to hear more. He shot to his feet and turned away.—I pity you. Despite all I and my family have endured, I have not despaired. I am a father, I can’t give up hope. You need to do the same. Otherwise, why not just surrender to death and the devil?

  —You don’t want me to die. I die, you don’t make it to America. Like it or not, all the hope in the world won’t save you without me.

  This last bit was said to Samir’s back, he’d already fled. She watched the empty doorway for a moment, then resettled herself, easing onto her side with another wincing moan, facing away from Roque.—God, I thought he’d never leave.

  It was the first thing he could recall her saying to him, even during their recording session back in La Chacra. He could think of nothing to say in return, preferring instead to study the hollow of her back where her blouse rode up. Wiping the lather of sweat off his face, he glanced up at the clock: half past ten. Tío Faustino and Samir would head off soon. Several feet below the clock, the lizard had yet to budge.

  —Stop looking at my ass.

  He flinched at the sound of her voice.—I’m not—

  The bag of ice sloshed.—Not what?

  —I’m not playing this game. You want to think all men are alike, we’re nothing but dogs—eat it, fuck it or piss on it. Be my guest. But my uncle’s not like that. I’m not like that.

  She huffed, glancing over her shoulder with her good eye.—What’s wrong with my ass?

  He heard an unfamiliar voice coming from outside.—Excuse me, he said, getting up from the floor to head out toward the sound, leaving Lupe and the lizard to themselves.

  The stranger looked nothing like Roque had imagined. He wore jeans, a rugby shirt, a denim jacket way too large, plus a Dodger’s cap, blue again, his only nod to MS-13. His name, Roque gathered from the conversation, was Humilde.

  Samir slung his bag at his hip, the shoulder strap crossing his chest. Tío Faustino prepared to head off with nothing but the clothes on his back. He wrapped his arms around Roque in a farewell embrace. “We’ll see each other tomorrow. Don’t worry.” Slapping Roque’s back, he waited for the others to drift out of earshot before adding in a whisper: “I cannot live with my conscience, knowing what that girl in there has facing her at the end of this trip.” He backed away, taking Roque’s face in his hands, a shocking gesture, overly tender, except the cast of his eye was calculating, not affectionate. “We have to think of something, you and I. The problem will be El Turco.”

  GODO WATCHED THE CLOCK, WAITING UNTIL TÍA LUCHA HAD been gone a full hour, meaning she’d be safely chained to the cash register, mid-shift, stuck till midnight, no likelihood she’d circle back home for anything. He pushed open her bedroom door, crossed to her dresser, sat on the edge of the bed. He wondered how lonely she was, not having slept with Tío Faustino for several weeks now. There was no way to know, of course. Not the kind of thing she’d discuss.

  Chancing the mirror, he suffered the usual jolt, his moonscape face. Speaking of lonesome beds, he thought. Maybe, someday, I’ll find myself a blind girl.

  Leaning down, he tugged open the bottom dresser drawer. Tía Lucha’s underwear trended toward the functional, boxy white panties, thick-foamed bras. He lifted the soft prim stacks one by one, moving them to the bedspread, then reached back in for the thing he wanted. Setting the worn manila envelope in his lap, he gingerly undid the clasp. Postcards and letters tumbled out, sent from El Salvador, people he’d never met writing about stuff he knew nothing about. It was the photos he wanted, the old ones, some brittle to the touch, some worn so smooth from handling they felt like cloth.

  The ritual was always the same but no less intimate for that. He liked to begin with the oldest, one particular favorite—here it was—picturing Lucha with her little sister Graciela, his mother, in their school uniforms. They stood outside the family home, a modest cinder-block house with a clay tile roof in the village of San Pedro Nonualco. A man in a harlequin costume was holding a macaw for the girls to pet, the two sisters so unalike, Lucha with her pinched face, her sour wince, pigtails so tightly braided they looked like they hurt, Graciela with her candy-red cheeks and plummy eyes, her gap-toothed smile, her wooly black tangles.

  In another picture they walked hand in hand in crisp white dresses down a meandering cobblestone street. Other girls and boys marched along with them, everyone dressed for First Communion, heading toward the colonial-era bell tower. Lucha dragged Graciela along, the older sister bulling ahead while the younger lagged behind, reaching out to touch the fierce red blossoms of a fire tree.

  He moved on to the teenage years, when his mother dropped her baby fat, though not all of it, slimming down here, filling out there. Was he to feel ashamed or proud that his mother’s image aroused him? Again, the contrast with her older sister practically reached out to slap you, Lucha with her twiggy shoulders and knobby wrists, the gaunt face, eyes dark and deep and sullen. But Graciela’s were shiny and full and wicked. Her smile was ripe, like an orange slice. She cocked her hip just so, suggesting the hunger of a born tease. Where were they? Godo liked to imagine it the doorway to a secret lair, a place where the teenagers hid away to talk in the dark about movies, smoke, touch each other, but it was probably just the neighborhood tienda, selling bread and sodas and aspirin.

  There was a gap then, seven years or so, no images with the savagery of the war for backdrop, nothing from the feverish trek to America. When his mother appeared again, she was holding her newborn son, Godofredo, swaddled in fleece, named for a maternal uncle. She looked weary, anemic, but strangely happy, or at least relieved. No pictures of the father.

  Now came the snapshots he lived for. He was just a kid in them, a wolf-eyed scrap clinging to his mother’s hand or nuzzled in her arms, their cheeks pressed close, her hair c
ascading down both their faces. He sometimes believed he could smell the floral tang of her shampoo, the talcum scent of her skin. Worry bags darkened both eyes, her smile wan, her skin pasty. She’d put on weight again. The lonesome grind of exile—one took comfort where one could, and in America food was easy, unlike love. Still, to Godo, she resembled perfection.

  Last, the pictures of her pregnant with Roque, the killer innocent, hijo del amor. Again, no snaps of a dad. She offered the camera a brave smile, hand poised on the swollen belly like a last regret. I would have saved you if I could, Godo thought, and as those words lingered in his mind Happy walked in, finding him on the bed, Tía Lucha’s underthings stacked beside him, a snapshot in his trembling hand.

  To his credit, Happy declined to express surprise or disgust. Godo was too lost in grief to feel ashamed. They regarded each other guardedly, almost kindly.

  Finally, Happy said, “I need to tell you something.”

  That seemed fair, Godo thought, wiping his face. One secret deserves another. He tucked the pictures back into the envelope, which he then returned to its spot at the bottom of the drawer. After carefully replacing the undergarments, he said, “Let’s not talk in here,” smoothing out the bedcover as he rose to leave.

  Happy chose a spot at the kitchenette table, Godo plopped down on the couch. Outside, the wind chimes gonged erratically in a brisk wind.

  Happy seemed tormented, running his hands through his hair. He’d let it grow back these past few weeks, to where it resembled short black fur. Godo waited him out, still in the backwash of memory, recalling the chicas in their starched white dresses, the chicos in their boxy suits, proceeding up the stone-paved street to their first holy sacrament, stepping smartly, little soldiers, all except the girl named Graciela, who got distracted, tempted by the fire tree.

  He was told by one of his squaddies, who’d also been wounded and medevaced to Landstuhl after the checkpoint blast, that he’d cried out for his mother as he lay there crippled and bloody, face in shreds, Gunny Benedict vaporized. But Godo remembered none of that. All he remembered was the little bird chopper hovering overhead, rotor wash scattering dust everywhere, the door gunners aiming not just at the gathering Iraqis but the dazed, bloody marines—he remembered it, even as he feared it wasn’t true.

  But don’t go there, he thought. Not now.

  “There’s something I should have told you,” Happy said. “About this thing, bringing Pops back, dealing with Vasco. Somebody else is coming along too, this guy I met in Iraq. He was our terp.”

  Godo was having trouble understanding. Happy’s eyes looked like they might melt from dread. “The guy’s a haji?”

  “He’s Palestinian, lived in Baghdad. His family’s in a refugee camp on the Syrian border.” He reached out for the sugar bowl with both hands, as though reassured by its shape and weight. “You can’t tell anyone about this.”

  “You sound scared.”

  “We’re bringing an Arab across the border. What the fuck do you think that means?”

  Godo blinked. An artery pulsed in his neck and he pictured it, the tall figure in woman’s clothing, marching forward, so calm, a martyr …

  “What if he’s not who I think he is? What if, say for instance, he worked for the Mukhabarat? What if everything he told me’s a lie, who he is, what he wants?”

  Godo caught something in Happy’s voice. He was holding something back. “What does he want?”

  “That’s the fucking point, I don’t know!” Happy gripped his head again. “He saved my life. At least, that’s what I thought. Maybe I got played.”

  Godo glanced at the clock. It was a little before nine, Tía Lucha wouldn’t be home for three more hours. The trailer felt empty without her. He wondered if he should tell her that, wondered if she would want to hear such a thing from him.

  “I can’t figure out what you’re trying to tell me, Hap. Saved your life how?”

  FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE HE’D BEEN DRIVING IN IRAQ, ALL THE TRUCKS were camouflaged.

  “This is wrong, very wrong.” Samir crumpled a can of Iraqi Pepsi as he followed Happy around the trailer, checking the tires and brake lines in the swirling grit. “They’ll think this is a military convoy. That doubles, triples the chances of an ambush. You should say something.”

  “I speak up,” Happy said, fingering tread to gauge its depth, “I’m fucked three times over. Lose my pay, get sacked, find myself back in El Salvador. That’s not an option, I told you.”

  The war increasingly resembled a massive game of bait and switch. Happy had come to focus solely on not getting killed. Sure, somebody was getting fleeced and somebody else was getting rich but he just kept telling himself: It’s not your problem. Besides, driving was the only relief from the boredom, which the heat made insufferable. Some of the contractors had built a driving range and a fishing pond to pass the time but those were off-limits to the Salvadorans and Filipinos who formed the truck pool. TCNs—third country nationals—were beasts of burden. Sometimes their trucks didn’t even have windshields.

  And yet they still dreamed of earning special status for a work visa to the U.S. It was a kind of group delusion. The company made no promises, nor did the embassy. Still, every man hoped, believing dedication and sacrifice could somehow manufacture luck.

  The warehouse complex had sixty-four squat, sand-brown buildings packed inside the double-blast walls, with Alaska barriers strung with razor wire stacked along the whole perimeter for extra protection against suicide attacks and VBIEDs—car bombs. Uniformed Kurds of vague employ and armed with AK-47s glowered from their posts in the guard towers, which were mounted with belt-fed Dushka machine guns.

  The drivers finished their prep, strapping down tarps on the flatbeds, tightening pineapple pins, slamming home bolts on trailer doors. They were bringing mattresses and baby incubators to the new hospital in Najaf, some desks for a rebuilt school, plus the usual drayage of rice and grain, bricks, bags of cement, drums of paint and acetone and asphalt sealant. There were sixteen guards in the convoy, four American vehicle commanders with 9mm Glocks and short-stocked Serbian Zastava M21s, the rest Colombians with Kalashnikovs. It was rumored the VCs made as much per month as a two-star general.

  After final load checks against the manifest, the Kurds in the towers aimed their Dushkas and AKs into the nearby streets as the gates opened and the convoy roared out in a storm of noisy dust toward Route 10. Two security SUVs led, followed by Happy and four other trucks, another SUV, then the final five trucks and a trailing security detail. It was always the slow in-town streets that posed the greatest danger but soon they hit the highway and were sailing along, miles of shimmering asphalt, the heat a mere ninety-six ungodly degrees.

  Every now and then a child ambling along the roadbed lurched off his feet and waved as the convoy rumbled past. Gestures of friendliness didn’t matter; the presence of every person and vehicle got radioed up and down the convoy. Happy kept his eyes alert, checking his sectors, while Samir, noting the prevalent variety of livestock clustered along the road, talked about the proper way to butcher a goat.

  They hit Baghdad at noon and rolled through the southwestern suburbs, long crowded boulevards lined with palms, the radio traffic constant up and down the line as guards and drivers called out possible threats: a haji with a gas can wandering into the street; a kid on a bicycle yammering into a cell phone; a clump of trash on the roadside, possible IED. One of the Colombian guards asked permission in clipped English to shoot a crane roosting in its nest atop a telephone pole. “Request denied, numbnuts,” one the American VCs drawled back. Happy’s throat felt like he’d swallowed pumice, stomach coiled like a fist, until they hooked up with Route 8. The road congestion cleared. He could breathe again.

  The squat mud-colored houses grew shabbier and more isolated the farther south they drove. Cowbirds and vultures veered low over the canebrake rimming fetid marshes while sheep and bellowing cows scavenged through reeking landfills for food. Happy told h
imself he hated this place, hated its scarred blankness, its punishing dust and soul-crushing sun. At the same time, he had no difficulty imagining why it was that, centuries ago, the nomads who wandered this landscape devised a god of judgment.

  The road split midway to Karbala, the convoy veered southeast onto Route 9. They crossed the Euphrates and were heading toward Karbala itself, charging through light traffic toward some nameless village, when Samir noticed the road suddenly empty. Traffic was no longer merely light, it was gone.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said. “Up ahead, something’s—”

  Fifty yards ahead of the lead SUV, a dump truck roared out from behind one of the crude white houses, pulling onto the highway in a blackish cloud. It stopped, blocking the road. As the lead SUV hit its brakes, preparing to challenge the driver, the red coiling tail of an RPG slithered from a wall of canebrake thirty yards off the road. The first rocket was followed quickly by two others, the last trailing in from the opposite side of the highway. That one hit. The lead SUV exploded in a savage plume of white flame, the pressure wave from the blast rocking the windshield of Happy’s rig, scattering it with gravel and shrapnel. Suddenly gunfire rained in from everywhere, not just from AKs but an RPK machine gun, the shells slamming and pinging against the trailer and cab.

  “Keep going, move!” Samir crouched down in his seat, slamming one hand against the dash, the other gesturing manically for Happy to pull forward.

  “There’s no place to go! The road—”

  “Around! Around! You can’t stay here.”

  Happy struggled to recall his ambush training: Continue forward if possible, low gear. Use your truck to push barriers aside, aiming for a corner of any vehicle in your path. He slipped the transmission into gear, prepared to ease off the clutch, but in front of him two bloodied survivors from the first SUV, one dragging the other, struggled toward him, screaming for help, while from the second SUV the Colombians and the American VC had already taken two casualties while trying to find targets, return fire. Help them, he thought. No, continue moving forward. He froze, unable to decide.