Do They Know I'm Running

by David Corbett

  “Go back to the house,” he said.

  “I’m on it.” Puchi seemed to be trying to get his bearings back to the freeway.

  “No. Her house.” Happy nodded toward Lourdes. “We can’t leave her car back there.” He ignored Puchi’s stare and took out the wad of keys-it had a plastic piglet for a bob-and tossed them into Chato’s lap, thinking: Turd of honor. What the hell was that about? “Put the knife away, she gets you’re serious. Take her car, follow us out.”

  Chato’s eyes tightened but then Puchi hit the brakes and the van lurched to a stop. They were back at Lourdes’s house.

  “Go on,” Happy said, gentler now.

  Chato sulked his way out of the van, Lourdes staring at his back as the door slid shut, then Happy snapped his fingers to get her attention. “I apologize,” he said. “I mean it, we don’t want to harm you. We need you. I’ll explain as we drive.”

  GODO AND EFRAIM SPENT THE MORNING ALONE INSIDE THE ABANDONED farmhouse, breaking down the weapons, cleaning them, loading the magazines, every moment or so blowing into their hands for warmth. There was no electricity, no heat. Even the septic was fucked up, so they went out behind the barn to piss and, once apiece, take a windy dump. Now Efraim was gone, off to grab lunch for the crew-Happy and Puchi and Chato were due soon-while Godo stayed behind to wrap up.

  There was a time when the slow taking apart and piecing back together, the wiping and swabbing and brushing, the nutty smell of the oil, would have soothed him. All that crap about don’t get talked into anything, he thought. Now Happy says it has to get done, not just done, done like tomorrow.

  He knew about the ransom, knew Vasco stepped up to pay it and that gave him rights, the sly fuck. But he also felt guilty, wondering what might have been if he’d been the one down there, not Roque. Maybe he’d have gotten them out of whatever spot they’d blundered into. But that was fantasy. You’re damaged, he told himself. The damaged get left behind.

  He supposed he should count himself lucky he was able to chip in at all. He was the weapon wizard, the gun guru, maybe he should take pride in that. For a while there he’d felt reasonably in control, a lid on the monster, even the nightmares settled down some. Then came the run-in with Chuck. That’s when the hinges started working loose again.

  Strange, him being the target of this thing. Godo found some poetry in that. Serves him right, let him suffer, suffer for all the grief his kind caused, all the mayhem, all the blood. Suffer for Gunny Benedict. Because as the Chevy Blazer with the tinted windows bulled ahead of the rattletrap Cressida with its single headlight and the haji family huddled inside, Godo stepping forward, blocking the Blazer’s path, demanding docs, needing to check them against the names on his BOLO list, he’d spotted in the back, passenger side, one of the armed men, a face increasingly whole in his memory-this guy, this contractor, this Chuck-just as the searing white flash switched off the world and the explosion ripped it to shreds.

  So much for poetry, he thought, rising to his feet, the scent of the gun oil in his nostrils and the slickness on his hands. Looking out the window, he watched a sudden burst of wind thrash the walnut trees and for a second heard the chugging rotors of the little bird chopper hovering over the blast site amid the screams of the wounded, his included, felt in his mouth the grating dust from the rotor wash. Wiping his numb fingers with a rag, he thought: I can’t function like this, I’ll fuck this thing up and that’s not an option. Using his sleeve he mopped the sweat off his face-check it out, he thought, I’m sweating and it’s maybe fifty degrees, tops-then he bent down to the final M16, pushed the takedown pins into position, refitted the handguards into place, slammed home the magazine.

  The three sixteens would go to Puchi, Efraim and Happy; Godo would use the Kalashnikov. Chato would get the Mossberg.

  As he was bagging the brushes and rags and barrel rods he heard not Efraim’s pickup but another vehicle he didn’t recognize thunder up the drive, churning gravel. He edged toward the front window, peeking out at the white van pulling to a stop. Puchi sat behind the wheel, Happy beside him. As he stood there looking out, a flaring ghost of white light rippled across the backs of his eyes; his mouth went dry and he felt certain he wasn’t just imagining it, the taste of dust.

  Funny, he thought, how you hear people say: My body has a mind of its own. What am I supposed to do, he wondered, when it’s my mind that has a mind of its own?

  He wasn’t prepared for the woman. Happy dragged her forward from the van, not roughly but not kindly, either.

  “This is Lourdes,” he said once they were all inside. “She’s decided to help us out.”

  HAPPY PLOPPED DOWN WITH HER ON THE FLOOR IN ONE OF THE smaller rooms. He’d explained to her during the drive why she was so important, speaking to her in English, making her use it with him, practicing their back and forth, figuring if they reverted to Spanish during the robbery the family would suspect she was involved all along. “There’s no stopping what’s going to happen, Lourdes, one way or another, we’re going to do what we need to do. But you can change how it happens. Without you, people get hurt.” It had taken awhile, convincing her there was no escape, but the drive was long and he’d ultimately worn her down. There would be no way to beg or wish or talk her way out of it, except to tell him what he wanted.

  Strange, he thought, how things were lining up. There was reason to breathe easy. Sure, the thing was crazy but you heard stories all the time, snitches working both sides. And the government always looked the other way. They were greedy, like everybody else. They wanted what they wanted, wanted it big, wanted it yesterday.

  When it came time to take the stand, he’d tell the jury: I had to do it, they gave me no choice. It was all Vasco’s idea. Ladies and gentlemen, the only way to get my father back to the States was to go along with the plan, this stupid home invasion. My father was kidnapped, we needed the ransom, the government wouldn’t front the money. What was I supposed to do? But I was afraid that, if I told Mr. Lattimore what I was doing, the government would pull the plug, my father and cousin would get stranded. My father, he’s not a young man, he could die down there just waiting, while I’m scrambling around trying to scratch up the money all legit. It was a lot of money, more than my family could put together. And this was the only way to keep the case on track. We don’t bring my father and Samir to the States, the thing falls apart. I was doing the prosecution a favor.

  I did it for my family. I did it for the government. I did it for this country I love so much.

  Remember, he thought, you won’t be the one on trial. It will all work out, so long as nobody gets hurt.

  Efraim returned with tortas for lunch and Happy sent him right back out for paper and pens. They shared a sandwich and a soda, he and Lourdes, while the others ate in another room. The intimacy was intentional on his part and apparently welcome on hers, she seemed to hearten a little. Her nibbles turned to bites, she settled into her body.

  He asked about her life and in a voice that gradually lost some of its fearful whisper she explained she was from Santa Clara del Cobre in Michoacán, a village known for its copper artisans. Many in her family were in the trade but she had no such skill and so, when she was twenty-one, she traveled north to work. She’d been in California twenty years, wanted to improve her English but could never get to adult school regularly. Both her daughters were born here, their father left five years ago for another woman. He sent money sometimes. “He a weak man, not a bad man,” she said. “Señor Snell-he is weak and bad.”

  Happy sensed it, the turn. Don’t overplay it, he thought. “How you mean?”

  She corkscrewed her hips, trying to get comfortable. “This family I work for them three years now maybe. But him I talk no more five, six times, okay? He away at work when I there. But each time him, me talk, he treat me like I am stupid. Treat his wife, Veronica, like that too. Yell at her like she is a child. To myself, I think, how lucky for her if he die in Iraq. But he come back. And he is worse. Veronica, s
he cry sometimes, talk to me, tell me his business. I not supposed to see them, the guns-they all in the basement, I don’t go there-but she show me. She is very strange, Veronica, very lonely. She drink.” She picked at a bit of lettuce caught in her teeth. “She crazy a little too, I think.”

  Happy stopped chewing. “Crazy dangerous?”

  “No.” Her copper-colored ponytail wagged back and forth. “Crazy scared.”

  He took a sip of soda, passed the bottle to her. The house felt as cold as a cave. “You understand, Lourdes, those guns, the ones in the basement, it’s all against the law.”

  She nodded timidly, took a sip, handed the bottle back.

  “He won’t complain to the police. He knows he’ll have to lie about what we came for, about what we take. He won’t risk that. Better to lose the money, the guns, than risk that. They find out what he does, who he sells to, the taxes he doesn’t pay? He goes to prison.”

  Her eyes drilled his face. “He not need the police, a man like that. He come for me, my daughters. He come alone.”

  “When we tie up the family, Lourdes, we’ll tie you up too, make it look-”

  “He have this hate, this thing inside him-”

  “You’ll have to tell him you don’t know nothing. You’ll have to convince him.” A conspiratorial wink. “Don’t tell me you haven’t lied before.”

  “He will come, hurt me. Hurt my girls.”

  “You’re going to have to be an actress, Lourdes.” He felt a surge of impatience, fueled by guilt, pitying her, resenting her for it. “There’s no other way, I’m sorry.”

  Out in the front room, a sudden spate of goofy laughter: Puchi, Chato. Not Godo.

  “Why you do this?” Her hand drifted across the space to touch his hand. Her fingers were ice-cold. “You are different, not like them, out there, those pellejos, those chusmas.” Lowlifes. “I can tell you have family, you love somebody, somebody love you-”

  One of those chusmas is my cousin, he thought of telling her, though he imagined Godo’s face had made an impression that wouldn’t get undone with words. Then the front door opened and closed-Efraim, back from the store. Happy pulled his hand from under hers. “You’re right, I have family. You wonder why I’m doing this? For them.”

  Efraim appeared in the doorway but Happy realized something else needed saying. He asked for just another moment. Efraim, clutching the bag with Happy’s paper and pens inside, glanced curiously at the woman as though trying to determine if she was still their prisoner or something else now, then set the bag on the floor and shuffled down the hall, joining the others just as another spurt of idiot laughter erupted.

  Happy turned back to Lourdes. “Once this is done, Snell won’t harm you or your daughters. You have my word.”

  OVER THE NEXT TWO HOURS HE HAD HER DRAW OUT THE FLOOR PLAN for the house, upstairs, ground floor, basement. During the day, Snell worked as a claims adjuster out in the east county, an hour’s drive away most days, given traffic. Lourdes had only seen him at the house once since he’d come back from Iraq. She didn’t know what time he got home in the evening, didn’t know where any guns might be other than that one locked room in the cellar. She’d never come across any in the closets, under the bed; there were no display cases upstairs. Snell had a safe down in the basement as well but Veronica, the one time she’d shown the place to Lourdes, had admitted she didn’t know the combination.

  The couple had two children, but they’d be at school till four or so-a boy of thirteen named Samuel, a girl of nine named Samantha.

  “Two Sams.” It was Godo. They were all in the room together now, watching her chart out the house. “Weird.”

  “It is a strange family,” Lourdes replied.

  Twenty-Nine

  HAPPY TOLD LOURDES TO CALL HER DAUGHTERS AND SAY THAT one of her housecleaning clients had been in a bad wreck. The woman was in the hospital, she’d be there overnight; the husband was away, couldn’t get a flight back till tomorrow. The family needed Lourdes to stay with the kids. “They pay me,” Lourdes assured her oldest, whose name was Carla, “a lot.” Then the younger daughter, Angelica, got on the phone and Happy thought it would never end, back and forth: a kitten, the dentist, homework, a boy named Terrell. Finally he made a cutting gesture to his throat and Lourdes told her daughter she had to go.

  “Your daughter’s needy,” Happy said as she flipped closed her cell.

  Lourdes sank into herself. “She’s at that age.” It was decided she’d stay at the farmhouse, with Happy and Efraim trading shifts watching her. Efraim went off to fetch blankets and a kerosene lamp and one more meal. They’d do the takeover tomorrow, show up in the van, wearing coveralls from Vasco’s moving operation, get inside the house in the morning, tie up the wife and Lourdes, raid the secret room, then wait for first the kids to come home, then Snell, force him to open the safe. If they were patient, they’d be fine. Once Efraim was back, they ran through everybody’s role, rehearsing as best they could as it grew dark and even colder in the empty farmhouse: Chato watching the front door; Puchi clearing the ground-floor rooms then guarding the back; Godo and Efraim upstairs to clear the bedrooms; Happy in the living room with Lourdes, a pistol to her head.

  As they practiced their run-throughs, Godo seemed distracted, one minute almost incandescent in his focus, the next wrapped inside himself so tight he looked like he might lock up in a kind of trance. The problem wasn’t physical-the infection in his leg had settled down, he moved okay, looked strong. Happy drew him aside as he was doing a final weapon check, gestured toward the door. “Outside for a minute?”

  The night was damp, a rustling roar from the walnut trees whipping around in the wind. The clouds were plump in the moonless sky. Chafing their arms against the cold, they tested their way along the gravel to where the van and pickup were parked, out of earshot from the house.

  Happy lit up a smoke, needing two matches in the wind. He took one long drag, then said, “What’s wrong?”

  Godo was still rubbing his arms. “Who says anything’s wrong?”

  “Don’t fuck with me, not now. This is too important.”

  “I know how important it is.”

  “Then tell me the truth. What’s eating you?”

  Godo’s breathing became slightly labored, then he coughed. “Hard to talk about.”

  “That’s why it’s important to talk about it.”

  “Who are you now-Dr. Happy?”

  “This about Iraq?”

  “What isn’t? Fuck you, by the way.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I don’t-”

  “I told you my story. You think I was proud? I felt like a total chickenshit. But something’s got you by the nuts, it’s got some power over you. Tell me about it. It’ll lose some of that power, I promise.”

  A smile crept across Godo’s pitted face. “Where’d you learn that-Oprah?”

  “Listen to me. You’re the one I gotta lean on, Godo. You’re the one who gets it. I can’t have you going in and out. Every second, you gotta be there.”

  “I know what I gotta do.”

  “It ain’t a question of what you know. It’s a question of what’s gonna get in the way at exactly the wrong time if you don’t wrestle it to the fucking ground. Now talk to me about it.”

  HIS UNIT WAS NEARING THE END OF THEIR SHIFT ON FALLUJAH’S WEST ern outskirts, a flash checkpoint, no concertina wire, no sandbags, no glow sticks, just the Humvee with the engine running for the sake of the headlights, the diesel fumes increasingly noxious as the hours passed. Dawn smeared a thickening mustard haze across the east while overhead the night sky softened from black to a gritty shade of brown. The sand beneath their feet crunched with every step.

  The usual shabby low-slung houses bordered the road, while beyond them, emerging in murky silhouette, were palm and eucalyptus trees, elephant grass, a distant camel, a water buffalo. Soon the day’s first prayers would blast by loudspeaker, courtesy of the local muezzin, from the nearest m
inaret, same thing all across the city, mosques that during the battle served as secret armories, pillboxes, sniper hides.

  It was always a toss-up, which would start first, the morning prayers or the daybreak dog barking. Everybody’d come to hate the dogs, but shooting them for sport was a no go-the locals saw it as cruelty, not pest control-so Godo held his fire as he caught sight of a slinking form maybe twenty yards behind the Hummer, sniffing its way forward, a skeleton with a tail and a nose. The wind was brisk, the dust thick, the cold piercing; all this time in-country, he still hadn’t adjusted to the sixty-degree temperature swings on any given day.

  Among themselves, the marines sometimes joked that they’d made Fallujah the safest city in Iraq-by reducing it to a pile of rocks. On the plus side, there were fewer bats. As for the ruin, it wasn’t like they’d had much choice, given the way the mujahideen had prepped the battle space, the way they’d chosen to fight. Now, with the elections over, the new year in full swing, civilians were testing their way back into the city to sort through the wreckage and recover what remained of their lives.

  Military-age males-MAMs, they got called, another joke-were fingerprinted, given retina scans, issued special ID cards they had to display whenever confronted. Few vehicles were allowed inside the city limits and the ones that were got tossed inside out, nothing left to chance. It was drudgery, it was tense, it was the fucking pits. It was the shores of goddamn Tripoli.

  The problem was Ramadi. Thirty miles west, it hadn’t suffered the holocaust. A loose-knit bloc of insurgent gangs ruled the souk, the mosques, the winding alleyways where things got bartered for a favor down the line or sold outright for cash. Route 10, the open road between the cities, was the biggest but by no means only ratline connecting the two locales. Every way in and out of the city had to be tamped down tight.

  Meanwhile, the gradual influx of redevelopment money had brought a certain breed of carpetbagger to Al Anbar, negotiating deals on landfills and power plants and water-treatment facilities, few of which seemed to be getting built. The men with the bags of money and the big ideas had to get around, though, and they did, with their well-paid condottieri, dressed in cargo pants and flak jackets and Oakley shades, armed to the tits and charging around the country in their SUVs at ninety miles an hour, slowing for no one, running down dogs and sheep, old men and kids. Accidental deaths alone had caused untold grief for the marines. Intelligence dried up, resistance to the simplest request became routine, defying orders became a badge of honor, especially for MAMs.