Do They Know I'm Running?

by David Corbett

  Salgado hadn’t been welcomed much, not like it was anyone’s fault. The loss of Mobley still pissed everybody off but it wasn’t just that. You knew the next guy could get lit the same way, so why bond? The buddy-up camaraderie of the invasion and the first flush of battle got countermanded by death. Goodbye only got harder if you bothered too much over hello, so everybody just gave a nod, figured the new guy knew his job. If not, he’d get told.

  Turned out Salgado—a true vato loco, Sycamore Street Mid-nighter from Huntington Beach—had some piss up his spine. He hadn’t enjoyed the color-blind unit cohesion Godo had so far. His previous platoon had included two die-hard haters and that’s all they needed, the one to back the other up when launching off on some phobic jag of anti-Latino bullshit. They were just as outrageous to the blacks but that wasn’t Salgado’s problem. He was still hot over the constant niggling wetback pepper-belly nacho-nigger bullshit. He told Godo not to be stupid.

  “These cats ain’t your friends,” he said one night over a cold MRE. “Don’t get your cholo ass in a bind and forget that.”

  Godo pretended to give that deep thought. He wasn’t sure what to make of Salgado. Kind of guy, he thought, who might pitch himself off a roof, convinced all he wanted was a better view. “Mobley fought his black ass off for me, I watched him die. Chavous is a fucking redneck but he never failed me once. Ditto Pimentel, who’s crazy but that comes in handy sometimes. And I’d lay down my life for Gunny Benedict.”

  Salgado bit open a gravy packet. “You’re a fool you think it’s gonna stay that way.”

  “Maybe you should wait, give this team its due.”

  Salgado licked a smear of brown gunk off his finger. “Say you’re right, cabrón. Don’t change the fact they be looking to deport your whole fucking family before you get home.”

  “Too late.” Godo chuckled acidly. “They already snatched my cousin.” It’s the reason I’m here, he thought, but why share that?

  Salgado fired up that crazed stare he was known for, like his focus was the only thing keeping the world from coming unglued. “Then you know. You fucking know. What you do over here don’t translate to shit. For real, man, ain’t no fucking brown heroes. You go home in a box they’ll kick the damn thing over into Mexico for burial.”

  “I’m not Mexican.”

  “You know what I’m saying.”

  It was the two of them manning the forward positions that morning at the checkpoint, Gunny Benedict staggered behind. Pimentel had their six. They stopped every vehicle and demanded access cards and weapon permits, especially the bongo trucks—cutaway VW vans, a favorite of the so-called desert foxes, generally friendly paramilitaries who wore chocolate chip cammies, flak vests, balaclavas. The unit’s BOLO list included not just the names of the Harmon Stern contractors but several dozen suspected insurgents, any of whom, if encountered at the checkpoint, were to get gagged and bagged and delivered to RCT-1 HQ.

  The night had been relatively quiet, though, only a couple cases of misunderstanding, taken care of when Godo or Salgado, having their shout-and-show ignored, moved to shoot: a warning round at the deck each time, one follow-up bullet to the grill of a Mercedes sedan that refused to slow down. The driver was an old man, confused—he jabbered and wept when they dragged him out of the car, threw him down in the dust for a search. The rest of the night they threw back Rip Its and tamped foot to foot, slapping their arms and bodies trying to stay warm, chipping away at the silence between them with practice of the little Arabic they knew: O-guf! Tera armeek for “Stop! Or I’ll shoot;” Interesiada for “Get out of the car;” Urfai edik for “Put your hands up;” Inshallah for “Allah be willing;” and their personal nonoperational favorites: kus (“pussy”), zip (“penis”), theiz (“ass”).

  Traffic started picking up about 0500 and got increasingly jammed as dawn leached across the sky. The family in the Cressida with the one working headlight reached the head of the line and Salgado stepped forward, asking the driver for documents. Godo eyed the rest of the queue, five vehicles deep, his weapon in condition one: a chambered round, bolt forward, ejection-port cover closed, safety on. He was ready to thumb down the safety at the merest hint of trouble and was in a bad mood regardless, the days on end without washing during the siege having created a case of cancer-level crotch rot, lingering for weeks now. He’d scratched himself bloody in his sleep, only making things worse, so now he was obsessively rousting himself awake at night, lurching up in his bedroll if he was lucky enough to drift off at all. He hadn’t slept more than twenty minutes at a stretch since he couldn’t remember when and in the semi-hallucinatory edginess that had come to characterize his state of mind, he often found himself revisiting Mobley’s death, the house they turned to smoke and ruin afterward. It wasn’t the fiery itch from his balls to his ass crack or the war in general or the idiot command or the ungrateful locals or even the pitiless creeps they called the enemy that kept Godo so pissed off lately. It wasn’t even the nagging dead or the skeletal dogs they seemed to inhabit. It was the fact that, after weeks of shabby sleep, he couldn’t feel the center of himself anymore. He had this daydream in which he was a kite that someone had let go of, God maybe, this little jet of bright paper and balsa wood bucking around in a cold wind, just a matter of time before it came crashing down.

  Back in the here and now, though, there was nothing especially screwy to get worked up about. The slender Iraqi in the coin-gray suit behind the wheel of the Cressida was merely slow, not suspicious, fumbling for his documents with his wife beside him, two kids in the back.

  It was that lack of zip, though, that upset the Chevy Blazer right behind. The driver started hammering his horn, five blasts, ten—it only upset the slowpoke father more, his wife in her hijāb headscarf craning around to squint into the headlight glare. Then the Blazer surged up and out, jockeying forward to squeeze past the Cressida, nudging the bumper and flattening Salgado against the driver-side door.

  Godo charged into the SUV’s path and shouldered his sixteen. Chavous fired off an air burst from the Humvee’s .50cal, tracers flaring into the ash-brown sky in a hypnotic arc, landing somewhere near the camel. Godo called out, “Whoa the fuck, asshole,” and the Blazer finally lurched to a stop, kicking up a shower of pebbled dust. Turning his face away, he saw the same emaciated dog, closer now, trembling beside the Hummer’s rear wheel. He resisted an impulse to reach down to his crotch and dig at his itch, at the same time feeling something unclick along his spine, a shimmer of pent-up rage shooting through him and he had to check the safety on his weapon, fearing he might fire out of pure gall. He hacked up an egg-size clot of crusty air, spat, checked again to be sure Chavous had him covered, then eased toward the Blazer’s driver-side door, shouting, “The fuck you thinking, shit dick?”

  The driver cranked down his window: older cat, maybe fifty, wire-gray hair, probably police back home, maybe a vet, eyes a bloodshot brown, mustache and sideburns straight out of Death Wish. “Got a convoy out at Akashat, they’re a squad short. Thing’s gotta move in an hour. Let us through.”

  “Akashat? You’re heading the wrong way.”

  “We got another man to pick up. Come on. Serious. We got exactly no time to waste.”

  Oh boo the fuck hoo, Godo thought, fighting a sudden twitch in his eye. Somewhere in the distance a chopper rotored over the city, invisible in the swirling dust and russet sky. Behind him the dog made a thin mewling sound. “Back the fuck up to where you were or you’ll spend the whole damn day here.”

  Salgado, jacked up from almost getting run over, blistered the Cressida’s driver with obscenities, like it was all his fault.

  The Blazer’s wheelman said to Godo, “Look—”

  “You jumped the goddamn line.”

  “You hear me? There’s a convoy, ready to move—”

  “Access cards and permits.” Godo shot out his hand, glancing past the driver at the others. The guy in the passenger seat looked half in the bag, sunglasses staring straight ahead
, weapon clenched between his knees. Behind him sat the rest of the team, three men abreast in the backseat, equally hungover from the general slump and cast of their eyes, every one of them dressed in the same contractor drag, like there was a store out there somewhere in the desert where they all got outfitted.

  Gunny Benedict duck-walked forward to calm Salgado down and provide a forward presence. A gust of keening wind sugared everything in grit.

  “Listen.” The Blazer driver leaned forward, like it was the distance between them causing the trouble. “Time window’s closing here.”

  In a moment of insomniac, rage-laced weirdness, Godo pictured the man growing a snout. “You with Harmon Stern?”

  The driver’s jaw tightened. The bloodshot eyes turned hard. “What’s your problem?”

  Good as a yes, Godo thought. “Access cards and permits.”

  “Look. You know who we are.”

  “Fuck I do. Access—”

  “We’re on the same side, damn it.”

  Godo glanced away, like the guy wasn’t worth eye contact, spotting that same dog edging ever closer, nosing the ground for garbage, then he coughed up another wad of dust-choked phlegm. For a second he thought he saw a flurry of black-winged bats veering in crazy arcs in the dawn-lit east. He blinked—nothing there. The dog, though, was real, he felt pretty sure of that. “Cards and weapon permits, every man in the vehicle. Now.”

  “You’re being an asshole.”

  Godo couldn’t help himself, he laughed. “Coming from you?”

  Salgado had the Cressida driver out of the car now, opening his trunk. Gunny Benedict spotted a pedestrian trekking forward from the hazy darkness, past the other vehicles in the queue, a strangely tall and awkward woman in a black abaya, her head and face wrapped in a white niqaab, only her eyes uncovered.

  The Blazer driver, trying to regroup, ventured a buddy-up smile. “Okay, you win. But there’s no need for this hassle, okay?” He nodded toward the front bumper. “How about you write down the plate number, we’ll be outta your hair.”

  It was galling, the crap they thought you’d swallow. “How about you shit backwards on this attitude you got and do like I told you.” The aggression was camouflage, he was trembling from adrenalin. Above and beyond the contractor’s bullshit there was something about the walk-up bothering him, putting him on edge—plus the wastrel dog. For just a second he caught Gunny Benedict’s dusty blue eyes as he glanced over his shoulder, first at Salgado, then Godo, checking his men, taking care.

  Do your job, Godo thought, another over-the-shoulder glance at Chavous then turning back to the Blazer. “My man there on the .50cal? He’ll send a few live ones through your windshield you try to move, so you’re going no place till you comply—we clear? Now cards and permits, I’m not asking again.”

  The driver cocked his head around, tracking Gunny Benedict advancing toward the odd-looking woman, ordering her to stop. Godo felt it stronger now, still not knowing why. His whole body felt like an antenna for the willies. He thought of shouting something but didn’t want to come off half-cocked. Gunny knew his business.

  The driver said, “That your team leader there?”

  Godo snapped back. “You don’t get to choose who you deal with, asshole.”

  The guy laughed, slapped the arm of the hunched man beside him. Back to Godo: “Touch a nerve there, did I, Poncho? Your sergeant know what a wound-up little girl you are?”

  “What my sergeant knows, Elmer, is I need to see your fucking access cards and—” In the corner of his eye, Godo saw the gawky woman slip past Benedict, reaching inside the black abaya one-handed. The slinking dog began to bark.

  “Know what?” The driver jammed the Blazer in gear. “I’m calling your bluff, hotshot.”

  At the sound of the engaged transmission Godo snapped. “That’s it, faggot. Out of the fucking vehicle.” He pulled open the Blazer’s door with the dog’s barking growing louder, fiercer, just as a man’s pitched cry broke from behind the woman’s veil: “Inshallah!”

  Two weeks later, the doctors in Landstuhl would tell him that simple thing—yanking back the door—probably saved his life. They’d also tell him that Gunnery Sergeant Raymond Benedict, among several others, marines and civilians both, didn’t make it. It was up to Godo to imagine the details. And he’d been doing that, while pretty much trying not to, ever since.

  GODO COULDN’T SAY IT WAS RELIEF HE FELT, OR IF IT WAS, RELIEF AT what exactly. Exorcising the demon, maybe, whatever the hell that meant. Relief he’d gotten through the story without sniveling like a bitch. He’d never said any of that out loud before, not that he could remember and he doubted he’d forget such a thing. Maybe in the ward at Landstuhl, when the morphine made him daffy. In the cold moonlight Happy’s face looked a little less grimly calculating, a little more accepting. Godo tried to tell himself that wasn’t pity. He wouldn’t take pity, not from Happy, not from anybody.

  “You blame yourself.”

  Godo shivered. “Minute I felt something wrong, you know? I shoulda lit that fucker up.”

  “You do that over there? Wax women?”

  “He wasn’t no woman, Hap, that’s the—”

  “You didn’t know that, is my point.”

  “No. No. Some level, I knew. It was wrong, you know?”

  “You guessed, Godo. You suspected. And you take out a woman on a bad guess, think of the shit you’da been in.”

  Godo shook his head helplessly, miserably. “You’re not getting it.”

  “You’re letting hindsight fuck with you. Time don’t work like that.”

  “Wow. That’s deep.”

  “Go ahead and mock, asshole. I’m trying to help you.”

  “I got locked in, you know? The crap between me and that damn driver.” Godo looked up into the night sky, the fat clouds, the spray of stars. “So fucking like me.”

  “No, what’s like you? Letting it eat at you like this. There’s nothing you coulda done. I know you wish there was but …” Happy let his voice trail off suggestively, the silence into which all wishes vanish. “Sure as shit no way you can change it now.”

  “Stop fucking telling me that.”

  “I’ll stop when you look me in the eye, convince me you’ve got this shit squared away. I told you, I’m gonna need you tomorrow. You’re the one I gotta rely on. Tell me I can do that.”

  Godo felt chilled to the bone. “There’s something else,” he murmured.

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not saying I can explain it, but more and more I picture this guy, this Snell, I see his face in that Blazer—backseat, passenger side. I swear to God it was him.”

  Happy didn’t say anything at first, just pulled his cigarettes from his back pocket, tapped one out, crouched over to light up, then glanced toward the house. The kerosene lantern Efraim had brought back flickered in the living room where everyone was gathered, its waxy light shuddering along the bare walls. “Don’t take this wrong, okay? But you been through what you been through, your mind is gonna fuck you up. It’s gonna want to explain what can’t get explained. Try to make sense of the crazy bullshit. All right? But it ain’t the guy. You’re making it up.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “I know this, okay? You go in there tomorrow thinking what we gotta get done has anything to do with what happened back there—I’m sorry man, I get it, this sergeant who bit it, he meant something to you, it’s totally fucked what happened—but you go in there with this on your mind, we’re all screwed. You can’t make it right. You sure as hell ain’t gonna make it right you walk in there tomorrow looking for payback. It’s a job. We gotta keep it clean. Somebody gets hurt, the whole thing spins outta control and we’re seriously fucked that happens. Keep it simple. We’re jacking an asshole, period. He’s smart, he hands everything up, everybody lives for another day, right? He’s stupid, we improvise. I’m betting he’s smart. And I’m betting he’s not your guy. Even if he was, he wasn’t the one driving, right, t
he prick who got in your face?”

  Godo was gnawing on his lip. “Maybe he was one of the guys on our BOLO list.”

  “So what if he was? Besides, that was true, you’d remember the name.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Godo winced, feeling lost. “I dunno …”

  Happy sucked on his cigarette, face turning red in the ash glow. “Sure you do. You’re just blocking it out because you want to get even.”

  “Listen, there were rumors of counterfeit access cards being used by some of the contractors, access levels jacked up to G-15, gave them the right to enter weapon storage. They’d get their hands on Russian and Iranian stuff, MAG-58s and AKMs, some German MP5s, sell it on the black market there. I wonder if this guy didn’t figure a way to get stuff like that shipped over. You hear what I’m saying?”

  “Godo—”

  “It makes sense. Admit it, it’s possible.”

  “Fuck, anything is possible. Look, put it to rest, man. It’s over, you’ve talked it out. It don’t have the power over you no more. It can’t. Am I right?”

  Godo knew what answer Happy was after, felt less sure he could give it to him. But he nodded assent, wanting not to talk about it anymore. Another rush of wind rocked the branches of the walnut trees, a chorus of whispers. Glancing toward the house, he thought he saw, beyond the rubbery lantern glow through the picture window, a small tumbling shadow flutter up and away from under the eaves. An exorcised demon, maybe. He couldn’t shake the feeling it was the wrong demon.

  THE NOONDAY SUN HAMMERED SHADOWS TO THE GROUND LIKE sheets of tin, while inside the musty room a slow trail of furry brown ants caravanned along the wall. Roque sat hunched at the window, squinting into the light, chin resting on his crossed arms, waiting for the Chamula woman to come along, the one who came down from her paraje in the hills every day to sell firewood or chickens or her specialty: popcorn. Las palomitas, she called it. Little doves.

  She was one of three distractions he’d found for himself in as many days, holed up in Arriaga at this so-called hotel. In truth, the place was a picadero, a cross between a flophouse and a shooting gallery, where his contact, a nod named Victor, hung out with his fellow salvatruchos and spike-jockeys all day.