Do They Know I'm Running

by David Corbett

  “¡Ellos te matarán!” They’ll kill you. Tía Lucha’s voice, all pity and terror, it froze the men where they stood. For a second-five? ten?-no one moved. Outside, the pursuers rustled their prey to his feet, thudding against the trailer wall once more, then crunching back along the gravel the way they’d come. The ensuing silence felt like a sign. Roque dared to hope that no one would die, common sense would win, everyone would step back from the lunatic edge and-what? Laugh? Shake hands? Exchange abrazos?

  Widow’s Peak spoke up for the first time. “I can place a slug through your brain, crater face, before you get off round one. Not to mention, you shoot, the woman gets hit. Who you think you’re fooling?”

  Godo, shotgun already trained that direction, tsked mockingly. “Perro bravo.” Mean dog.

  “Won’t say it twice.”

  “You’ve mistaken me for someone else, puto.” Godo tightened the coil of his finger around the shotgun’s trigger. “I’m a pill-crazed killer. And I don’t know who that woman is.”

  The trailer door flew back. All heads turned-except for Godo and Widow’s Peak, their eyes locked in mirrored stares, weapons up.

  Another agent peeked in at the doorway, shielding himself. Beyond him, Roque spotted more men, dozens of them, dogs too, flashlights crisscrossing the fog-shrouded maze of trailers. The one at the door had his pistol drawn, but after a quick glance first at Godo, then the glass shards on the floor, he made a show of setting his gun down just inside the doorway. Calmly, to the other two agents: “Holster your weapons.”

  Freckles rucked up his shoulders. “He’s got a shotgun-”

  “Holster your weapons!” Still using the doorway for shelter, he said to Godo, “It’s okay. Let’s all calm down.”

  Godo kept the Remington shouldered. “Who says I’m not calm?”

  “You’re back from OIF, am I right?”

  Godo cocked his head a little, to ease the stress in his neck. “Thundering Third.”

  The agent in the doorway nodded, eyes fixed on the shotgun barrel. “Okay, then. Excellent. I’m not saying this to yank your chain, okay? But I’ve got you beat by a decade or so. I deployed with the First Battalion, Third Marines during Desert Storm. Spent most of my tour in Kaneohe Bay, though.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “What say we all take a deep breath-”

  “Get the two cowboys the fuck outta my house.”

  Freckles: “We’ve come here for Pablo Orantes.”

  Godo, incredulous: “Happy?”

  “Pablo Orantes, where is he?”

  “He’s in fucking El Salvador. You should know-you’re the ones who deported him.” Godo gestured with the Remington. “Now get the fuck out of this trailer.”

  Widow’s Peak hadn’t budged. Freckles said, “Is Pablo Orantes on these premises?”

  The third agent, taking all this in, finally eased through the doorway into the trailer, eyes still fixed on Godo, a way to make sure there were no misunderstandings. His hair brushed the ceiling, even with a slight forward lean. He looked older than the other two, crow’s-feet, brush of gray at the temple, necktie beneath the raid jacket lending an odd formality. The jacket was blue, not black. Snapping his fingers to make sure he got the other two agents’ attention, he then gestured subtly for them to stand down. “I’ll handle this.”

  “We’re here for a fugitive alien named-”

  “I said I’ll handle it.”

  Only then did Roque notice how woozy he was; unconsciously, he’d been holding his breath. Sucking in a mouthful of air, he let his body slump heavily against the wall.

  Freckles, focusing on Roque for the first time: “Is that Pablo Orantes?”

  “I fucking told you, ass wipe, Happy’s in El Salvador.” Godo turned to the older agent. “Get them to leave.”

  “I’ll do that. Meanwhile, be wise to lower the shotgun, don’t you think?”

  “They leave first. I’m not getting queered by these two.”

  “Nobody’s doing anything to anybody. These two agents are going to step outside, right here in the carport. You and I will talk through what needs to be talked through. We square?”

  “They broke in.”

  “I hear what you’re saying.”

  “I was in my rights.”

  “We’ll discuss that.” He gestured for the two agents to pass in front of him, out the door. They did, unhappily-Freckles first, then Widow’s Peak, who exchanged one last eye fuck with Godo. The two agents perched at the foot of the doorstep, at which point the older one said, “Okay now. I’ve asked politely. Lower your weapon.”

  Slowly, Godo let the barrel of the shotgun drop, his shoulders unclenched. For the first time, Roque noticed the pungent stench of sweat, not just the others, himself too, then another odor, fouler still-infection. Godo’s dressing, still unchanged.

  On the sofa, Tía Lucha shuddered and put her face in her hands. The agent extended a gentling hand and said, “Everything’s okay, señora.”

  Godo, swaying a little, steadied himself with the wall, then raised himself up again with a shoulder roll, like a boxer manning his corner. Loud, so the pair outside could hear: “I grease those two shitbirds inside my own home? Not a jury in America would convict me.”

  “Let’s both be grateful you don’t have to test that theory.” The agent picked up his pistol from the floor and holstered it. “Shall we sit?”

  “I’m good where I am.”

  The older man’s glance tripped toward Roque, as though wondering if he weren’t, in fact, Pablo “Happy” Orantes. Tío Faustino’s son. Roque and Godo’s cousin, in a manner of speaking. Turning back to Godo, he again looked hard at the ruined face. “You’ve been stateside since when?”

  Godo wiped at some sweat and uttered a small, ugly, disbelieving laugh. “My turn to ask you something.” His pitted skin shimmered in the kitchen light. “Tonight, when you plant your ass on the couch, front of the TV, you and those two glorified rednecks outside-when you’re watching yourselves, watching all the people in these shitbag trailers get rounded up, ask yourself why. They do what you want. They do it cheap. But you watch all that. And when the next bit comes on, the one about the war, when the names of the dead scroll by: Rodriguez, Acevedo, Castellanos, Hernandez…” He counted them off, each name a finger. “Hear what I’m saying? Come on, look me in the eye, tell me honest, two jarheads, goddamn Thundering Third, right? Tell me to my face that doesn’t fuck with you.”

  Four

  PERCHED HIGH BEHIND THE WHEEL OF HIS FREIGHTLINER CAB, Faustino impatiently raided his lunch of cheese and beef tongue pasteles, prepared by Lucha, glancing up now and then through the wiper arc on his grime-caked windshield, watching the vast threadwork of lights grow dim along the crane booms and catwalks, daybreak sapping the dark from the sky. A San Cristóbal medallion hung from the rearview mirror, its pale blue ribbon entwined with a rosary.

  He was waiting in his queue at the Port of Oakland, the complex as vast as a city itself. At every berth, longshoremen in hard hats scurried beyond the fences like dug-up termites, forklifts growling to and fro and belching smoke amid cursing shouts and horn blasts and siren shrieks. Jumbo cranes hoisted freight containers from the cavernous holds of cargo ships, the vessels so huge they dwarfed the piers to which they were moored.

  Hundreds of truckers like Faustino-out of bed by three, down here by four-thirty to snag a place in line-sat idly in their rigs, waiting hours for a single load. And while they sat, they sweated the constant back and forth of cops and overeager port security flacks who hoped to pop them for a bum taillight, bare tread on a tire, excessive exhaust, anything. Most of the trucks were old-Faustino drove a ’94 day cab-and offers by the Port Commission to help finance new ones were laughable. Who could afford the monthlies, the interest, let alone the hike in insurance? Even the anti-exhaust systems they were hawking, ten to fourteen thousand a pop, were out of reach for most guys.

  It sounded like a lot to outsiders-hundred dollars a load fo
r just a drayage run, from the port over to the warehouse in Alameda, a matter of minutes-but the way they made you sit, wasting away the hours, you were lucky to get two runs a day.

  And the nickel-and-dime stuff ate you alive. Faustino did his own repairs, juggled his accident coverage with his registration payment month by month, part of the constant trade-off, shortchanging one thing to make good on another. Near impossible to meet costs, let alone get ahead. Desperation became a kind of genius, making you sharp and clever and tight with a dollar, but it was their hole card too. The shippers had you by the throat and they knew it.

  With his forefinger, he scooped up a smear of cheesy pastele filling from the crumpled tinfoil, unable to remember the last time he’d sat at the table and shared breakfast with Lucha or eaten one of her lunches without the stench of diesel souring the back of his throat.

  Meanwhile, outside his window: “Check this out-I’m moonlighting last weekend, hauling rock? Heavy load, incline. Boost gauge hovers around nine psi. Been a while since I drove a boost, but ain’t that high?”

  A circle of drivers, arms crossed, gathered on the pavement, biding time till the line budged. Risky, Faustino thought, gabbing away in the open like that. The shippers will say you’re organizing. Then watch your life turn to hell.

  “With a loaded trailer? Twelve psi, easy. Nine’s fine. What’s your speed?”

  “There’s the thing. I can barely break forty on an incline if I’m towing.”

  Faustino cocked an ear halfheartedly, like it was a game between teams he had no stake in. Even if he’d thought the coast was clear, he wouldn’t have climbed down, joined in. He didn’t feel much like camaraderie these days.

  What he felt was ashamed-losing the house, cheated out of it, all because the mortgage broker, a Mexican, all smiles and small talk, said he was dying to give them the Latino dream. They’d found the house, fourteen hundred square feet, three bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, nothing extravagant, and the broker had the loan, low interest going in, adjustable three years out. They signed the papers, wrote the check, moved in, no mean trick since Faustino was sin documentos. Two months later? Some guy they’ve never heard of shows up, demands an extra fifteen hundred a month, they’re already behind, says it’s to repay the short-term loan for the down payment. He had all the paperwork, Faustino’s and Lucha’s signatures right there, part of the ungodly stack the escrow officer had slid past them at the title company. That was bad enough but when the rate adjusted and the new monthly kicked in, it became too much. They’d trusted people. They’d trusted a Mexican. They’d been fools.

  They lived in that humiliating trailer now, trying to get their legs beneath them again, except Godo was back from the war, body in shreds, brain not right. And Roque, who should be working, helping out. He’s gifted, Faustino reminded himself. “That boy could be the next Carlos Santana”-he was ten when they started saying that. Teachers agonizing over him at school, saying he had the mind but not the will, reading novelas policíacas during class, tapping out rhythms with his pen or just lost in the clouds. Then he met old Antonio, the retired bandmaster who played boleros at parties. That was it, like the guitar descended from heaven and spoke. Roque learned classical and flamenco from the old man, pieces from Spain and Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, and it was magical, watching him turn calm and mindful, cradling the guitar. Then, boom, he’s a teenager and it’s pickup offers, garage bands, jam sessions, sometimes with real musicians, guys who got paid, which was how he met his latest teacher, Lalo, a professor at San Francisco State. He took Roque on as a special protégé, introducing him to jazz. Lucha bought him the electric so he could stand on his own among the others, prove himself. What else was there to do, let him turn out like Godo? Or worse-Pablo?

  Outside, the men continued: “Motor got rebuilt with a new pump maybe ten thousand miles ago, idles and runs like a champ, just weak on towing.” Faustino resisted a smile, not just at their rough-edged English, which to his ear, even after all this time in Gringolandia, could sound like rocks tumbling inside a bucket. The way norteños go on about their trucks, he thought, it was the same way they talked about family, sickness, politics. All you needed were the right tools, a good manual, everything would be fine. They listened to these people on the radio, Dr. Laura, Dr. Phil, hoping to fix their problems. They’re like children up here, Lucha said, they want to be told what to do, get punished but not too bad. Things are too easy, they get bored, which is why they spend so much time thinking about how to improve themselves. The divine, the invisible, death, it scares the living crap out of them, which is why they’re so noisy, so devoted to money and war and machines. Faustino knew what it meant to rely on his truck, he was no stranger to an obsession with its workings, but it was different. He knew there was no such thing as a diesel that could change his life.

  He wondered what the loads would be today. Hopefully not avocados. Or bottled beer or boxes of slate tile, especially if they were packed high inside a twenty-footer. The shippers were notorious for over-packing those, so the cans were too heavy. And they knew which were which, the vessel planner had to balance the weight onboard the ship, but that kind of info never got passed on to the terminal operators or the stevedores, let alone the drivers. You could get a tri-axle chassis from the yard if you knew you’d be heavy ahead of time, but that never happened. Instead you found out only after you got your load and who could afford to wait another few hours to change a chassis at that point?

  You took your chances.

  Tickets for weight could cost you ten grand. Worse, if the load wasn’t just heavy but stacked too high? Might not even clear the truck yard before the thing went over on you, spend the rest of the day dealing with cops and the port people, all that paperwork. Or worse.

  Trucker in Florida pulling a reefer load crushed a young model when his rig flipped, trying to dodge a wreck. Another guy right here in Oakland found out the chassis the yard crew gave him had shot brakes-same deal, swerved to miss a pileup, the thing went over on him, pancaked a Saturn wagon, whole family inside. And of course they always blamed the drivers, never the shippers. Everybody had a story like that or knew someone who did.

  Faustino’s involved a load of goats.

  He was carrying them to Guerneville where they were going to be used to clear brush-four hundred animals in all, stacked tight on tiered shelving in the trailer, to keep them from moving around, hurting themselves en route. None of them was more than two years old, babies almost. Faustino petted a few before closing up the back, heading out.

  Right outside Sonoma, he blew out a tire on a tight turn-the rig belonged to the company, not him, he’d pointed out the wear but they’d said it was fine, go, drive. The cab nosed down with the blowout, the load shifted, the trailer went with it. Some of the goats got crushed by the shelving. Others scrambled free through the back door that busted open in the crash, dozens of them, roaming around wine country, chewing up anything they could find.

  When the cops arrived they closed the trailer up again. Faustino tried to tell them no, don’t, the animals will suffocate, but they ignored him. The rest of the goats died, the ones on top smothering the ones below. Their screaming was terrible to hear.

  The woman who ran the company, called to the scene, watched animal rescue pulling out one carcass after the other, bodies twisted, bloody, limp. They were stacked five deep along the roadbed like cordwood. She came to the patrol car where Faustino sat in the backseat and just stared for a moment, then broke down, cursing him.

  Eight years ago that happened, Faustino thought. He still winced at the memory.

  Someone started banging on his driver-side door. Glancing down, Faustino recognized one of the men from the circle who’d been yabbering all this time. McBee, that was his name.

  “Better run, amigo.” He pointed back toward Maritime Street.

  Checking his rearview, Faustino saw the swirling lights, the unmarked sedans speeding forward. They’d blocked the end of the cul-de-sac as wel
l-there was no way out, except on foot.

  A low-rising green lay between him and the inlet, with sapling elms and small tussocks of beach grass lining the walkway, but it offered nothing like a hiding place. Could he swim across the channel to the next berth over? Would he be any safer if he did?

  The rosary and San Cristóbal medallion hung there from his mirror, helpless.

  “Forget the truck, Faustino. We’ll get it to you somehow. Leave the keys. Run!”

  Five

  GODO SAT ON THE SOFA BESIDE TÍA LUCHA, BEFOGGED BY a follow-up Percocet, a Lexapro for good measure, his leg wound clean and re-dressed, courtesy of Roque, who sat across the room, patting his hands together nervously. He was eyeing his guitars as though afraid they too might somehow get dragged off this morning. Such a punk, Godo thought, no particular ill will.

  The medication conjured a numb remove. Leaning forward to see past his aunt, he peered out the window, watching the muchachos line up outside the black ICE bus, surrounded by dogs and armed men. “Pobrecitos,” his aunt whispered. Poor things. Godo nodded to acknowledge the sentiment but found it hard to muster much feeling one way or the other. The meds, he thought, they drop you into this strange place, this room you know but don’t know. You get stuck.

  Meanwhile, just outside the trailer, the three agents were arguing among themselves. Listening in, Godo felt certain he heard one of them say, “They want to be taken prisoner,” but that was before, the invasion, the Kuwaiti terp talking about the deserters the regiment intercepted. Ragged silhouettes scuttling along the raised earthworks running west to Nasiriyah, lit from behind by distant oil fires, some in uniform, others wearing civilian clothes or traditional robes, choking on dust from the shamal winds, rags on their feet, gear discarded behind, littering the desert for miles. “They say if they go back the way they came, they’ll be killed by fedayeen.” Akbar, the terp’s name was. Everybody called him Snackbar. He had to tell the Iraqis they wouldn’t be taken prisoner, the Americans had barely enough water for themselves. The deserters shambled to their feet, a few crying out against the faithless marines, clutching handbills the Americans had dropped from drones promising humane treatment to prisoners. The rest just turned away, staggering east. You’re here to hunt, Godo thought, remembering what Gunny Benedict had told his squad the night before as they’d set out for battle. Think like a killer, not a friend. Be bold, trust no one, fear nothing. Act like you’re already dead-it just might save you.