Do They Know I'm Running

by David Corbett

  It got quiet.

  The hand, his right, felt like he’d boiled it, fingers clenched so tight, a claw. His ears kept humming, a keening pitch, punctuated by the strangled howls of the girl, almost inhuman now, muffled by the tape gag she’d half worked loose just by screaming.

  He blinked, tried to see but there was just a wincing blur, things shifting, outlines stripped apart and bleeding color. He waved his hand through the vaporous muck. In time he could make out Happy, upright, mostly so, leaning against the cabinet with its sawtooth glass, all broken, the girl in her pajamas huddled nearby. Happy’s sleeve was dark and that meant blood. His chest bellowed in and out as he tried to draw breath through the balaclava’s soggy black wool.

  No sign of the contractor. Had he run?

  He felt it first, the foot. He nudged it trying to stand, gathered his balance, saw the man finally, sprawled on the floor facedown, one side of his face a bloody knit of ripped flesh and jagged bone. Close-quarter impact from the Glock, Godo could put that together at least. One of the shotguns lay just beyond the dead man’s hand and Godo figured he’d pushed the girl up from his lap for distraction, shoved her into Happy, reached for the rack, pulled the weapon down.

  Godo heard himself say, “You all right?”

  Happy looked at his sleeve as though discovering for the first time he had an arm. “Cut it on the glass.” He pressed his hand to the bloody cloth. “You?”

  PERCHED IN THE VAN’S PASSENGER SEAT, CHATO COULDN’T HELP HIMSELF, lifting his hand to slap high fives, grinning like the luckiest guy alive. Puchi, behind the wheel, obliged him distractedly, offering him a raised palm. Godo and Happy, the wounded, sat in back with Efraim, who rummaged through the duffel bags filled with weapons they’d taken off the walls of the cellar room. They’d left the safe alone-why risk a second blast?-even passed on the desk and the display cabinet, anything with a door, not worth it, scrambling to grab what was there in plain view. But that was a haul. They’d come for weapons and needed something to show for their trouble. They’d left the girl and the two women tied hand and foot, made sure their gags were tight, gathered up all the cell phones and cut the cord on every landline they found.

  Happy, squeezing the cut on his arm, trying to stanch the blood, thought of Lourdes. Asking her to bear up with just a robbery in the picture was one thing, especially given who the target was, but they’d left a body behind and it wasn’t just Happy the law would come after. The whole crew was looking at felony homicide. That’d wipe the smile off Chato’s face, once he got his head around what it meant. And sure, Crockett was small-time, locals hadn’t seen this big a thing in who knew how long, but that just meant they’d call in the wise men. Word would reach Lattimore faster than rats up a rope. And they’d grind poor Lourdes down, no way she’d hold out. And that meant no immunity, no citizenship, no nothing. He’d gambled, a long shot, no point crying. But it meant going on the run. That’s how quick, he thought, the future dies. Not that he didn’t know that already.

  He glanced toward Godo. The burned hand was sickly red in places, charred in others, blisters bubbling up. He sat there flexing it, open, closed, wincing from the pain but not stopping, staring at the thing like he could heal it with his mind alone. That was Godo. Pity the ugly fucker, the guy was nothing if not stubborn. God knows he could take punishment and he had the instincts of a puma-who else could have stuck his arm in that hole and not lost the whole damn thing? Too bad it wouldn’t count for more.

  At the farmhouse they split up. Chato and Puchi kept the van, taking the weapons to Vasco with a report on why there wasn’t more. Efraim drove off in his own car. Godo and Happy lingered in the rusted Ford pickup with the Arizona plates.

  Neither spoke for what felt like an eternity, Happy sitting with his keys in his lap, Godo still working his hand like a prosthetic he couldn’t quite get the hang of. The sky remained leaden and the wind blew from the north but the rain had stopped. Blue jays cawed in the walnut trees. A splintering shaft of sunlight broke through a coral-hued, cuquita-shaped gash in the cloud cover, like something off a pornographic prayer card.

  “The guy back there,” Happy said finally, “the guy I killed-was that really the cat you thought he was? You know the one I mean. At the checkpoint.”

  Godo stopped messing with his hand for a moment, staring out the windshield. A blue jay buzzed something zigzagging through the tall grass, a ground squirrel probably, maybe a vole. He shrugged. “Won’t bring Gunny Benedict back if it was.”

  “That wasn’t really why I asked.”

  “The man deserved what he got. If that’s any comfort. And if not, it should be.”

  Happy watched a second jay join the first, dive-bombing their invisible prey. “I can’t stick around here,” he said.

  With his good hand Godo reached into the pocket of his coveralls, took out a bandanna, and wiped away some fluid leeching out of his blisters. “Take me with you.”

  “You need that hand looked after.”

  “The hand’s a fucking giveaway. Once the cops talk to the girl they’ll check every ER in the state, then move on to every state nearby.”

  “There’s clinics that’ll keep it quiet.”

  “Not once this thing hits the news.”

  Happy felt the usual boil of nausea churning in his gut. “I’m heading to Mexico.”

  “I can handle that.” Godo wrapped the bandanna around his charred and blistered hand, fashioned a knot using his good hand and his teeth. “We’ll get my guns and meds at the trailer.”

  “Your hand like that? What good are your guns?”

  “The hand’ll heal. Till then, you can shoot.” He smiled, remembering. “I couldn’t see much of what happened, but I saw the result. Brought the fucking heat, primo.”

  Happy shook his head. “I can’t go back to the trailer. Don’t wanna risk running into Tía Lucha. Don’t want to explain, don’t want any naggy fucking bullshit, I just-”

  With his good hand, Godo reached across the space between them, touched Happy’s wounded arm. The sleeve was crusty with dried blood. “She’s at work.”

  “I can’t look after you.”

  “I don’t expect you to.”

  Happy felt like he was swirling down a drain. “You can’t leave a note for Tía, neither. You leave a note, she’ll just go off, you know how she does. Better she doesn’t know.”

  Godo turned away, looking out at the barn pocked with bullet holes, the grassy hills beyond, the lurid downshaft of light. He began to whistle a gentle tune and after a second Happy recognized it, “Canción de Cuna,” a lullaby Roque had practiced damn near to death when he was first learning guitar. It used to drive Godo batshit. Funny, him thinking of it now.

  Godo said, “They tell you in basic that, first time you’re in combat, you’re gonna experience this thing called battle distortion. Time comes to a stop. Or you see things so clear it’s like they’re magnified or some shit. Maybe all of a sudden your memory goes blank. Some guys hallucinate, I fucking kid you not. Nothing like a squaddie with a SAW tearing up shit that isn’t there. But I had none of that. I had this weird disconnect between sight and sound, I could see okay but my hearing cut out, not entirely, but like I’d plugged up my ears real bad somehow. And in that, like, silence I heard the tune I was just whistling, the one Roque used to play. And you know what? It calmed me down. I told myself I wasn’t gonna die, I couldn’t die, I had to come home, tell Roque what’d happened. I had to come home for Tía and your dad. I didn’t feel so scared then.”

  Happy remembered the ambush on his convoy, the numbness he didn’t recognize as blind terror till after. He hadn’t thought of the family at all. That only came later, death and its lessons, wanting to make things up to the old man, wanting to do good by him, show him he understood now, the sacrifice, the love. “Why tell me this?”

  Godo turned, eyes like stones in the hamburger face. “I know you don’t want me along, Pablo. But you can’t leave me behind. Not with this.”
He presented the wrapped hand. “And no way I’m doing time, not on Vasco’s ticket. Bad enough these scars, the fucking leg. But I was the one who got you sent away the first time. I can’t face your old man again, tell him one more time, Hey Tío, your son’s fucked, guess who’s to blame.” He reached out again for his cousin’s arm, laid his hand gently near the wound. “We’ll meet up with your dad and Roque in some cantina before they cross the border, one last boys’ night out, all of us together. We’ll figure out if this haji friend of yours is for real. Right?”

  He withdrew the hand and slapped the old Ford’s dash, lifting a whisper of dust.

  “Come on, cabrón. Drive.”

  Thirty-Two

  THE FOUR OF THEM ARRIVED ON THE BUS A LITTLE AFTER SUN-DOWN, caked with road grime, wobbly from hunger and thirst but with fewer bug bites than the last crossing. They took turns in a bathroom upstairs, splashing water around, faces, torsos, armpits, while Beto made it clear they were stopping only momentarily. They needed to make Juchitán as soon as possible; from there he’d know which route they would take north through Oaxaca and beyond.

  Given Tío Faustino’s exhaustion, Roque again assumed driving duties, Beto taking the seat beside him, the other three in back. He suffered a vague wish to say goodbye to Julio but he realized the sudden vanishings of strangers from Arriaga would be nothing new.

  Checking his rearview, he saw the three of them-Samir, Lupe, Tío Faustino-in uneasy slumber, Lupe leaning against Tío Faustino’s shoulder, her head sliding vaguely toward his chest, while his uncle protectively circled an arm around her shoulder. Roque felt grateful the two of them had grown closer, at the same time secretly wishing it were him back there.

  They reached Juchitán a little before midnight and Roque was surprised by its sprawl. Beto gave him directions away from the old center of the city to a more industrial district near the bay, but before they veered too far afield of the nightlife they passed several bars where astonishingly large women, dressed elegantly in traditional traje, sat in chatty clusters at outside tables, fanning themselves in the lamplight. Taking stock of one particularly hefty mamacita wearing a ballooning green pleated skirt, a white huipil, even a mantilla, Beto chuckled. “You don’t know about this, I’ll bet. This town is famous for its homos. There’s like three thousand muxes-that’s the Zapotec word-who live here. It’s a matriarchal society, queer sons are considered good luck, as long as you only have one. Mothers like them because they don’t marry and go away. They’re usually good earners too. And because virgin girls are still prized down here as brides, a lot of guys pop their cherries on muxes.”

  He directed Roque into a nest of warehouses near the water and finally down a dark callejón to a nameless bar. Opening the passenger-side door, he said to keep the motor running, he wouldn’t be long. Roque switched off the headlights, threw the transmission into park and slid down in his seat, watching as Beto pulled back the bar’s narrow tin door and vanished inside.

  A weather-worn poster for Zayda Peña, a singer, was tacked up to the bar’s outside wall. Roque recognized the name from news reports. She was one of a dozen or so musicians on the grupero scene, Mexico’s version of country-western, who’d been murdered the past few years. Some of those killed had recorded narcocorridos, ballads touting the escapades of drug lords, a surefire way to piss off rivals. None of the murders had been solved. As though to drive that point home, somebody’d shredded the poster with the tip of a knife to where it looked as though a giant cat had come along to sharpen its claws on Zayda’s face.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he caught Lupe disentangling herself from Tío Faustino’s arm, stretching, yawning, finger-combing her hair. You’re such a sap, he thought, mesmerized. At the same time he realized he could be looking at the next Zayda Peña. You pay for the company you keep. And yet when somebody walks up, says he loves your act, tells you he wants to bankroll you, turn your dream into your future, knowing as you do how hard you’ve worked, how few musicians catch a break, how many give it up or lose their way, is it really such a sin to say yes? Is it really a sign of virtue to shrink away, turn down what, for all you know, is the last real chance you’ll get?

  The door to the bar opened again but it wasn’t Beto who emerged. A wiry man with a burdened slouch and artfully slicked-back hair stepped out into the street and rummaged a cigarette pack from his hip pocket. As his match flared, Roque got a glimpse of his features: less Mayan, more mestizo, with strangely bulging eyes like the clown Chimbombín.

  But that wasn’t the troubling part. This wasn’t California. The guy didn’t need to step outside to grab a smoke.

  Roque eased his hand toward the gearshift, ready to slam it into drive, leave Beto behind if need be, waiting for the bug-eyed stranger to make a sudden move.

  Beto strode out of the bar and past the other man without a glance. The passenger door opened, the overhead light flared on, the door slammed shut. He just sat there in the dashboard glow for a moment, his exotically handsome face a mask.

  Finally: “They’ve got checkpoints all over the inland roads. Strange. Usually they focus on one, the others are clear, switch it around every few days. We have to keep on the coastal route all the way through Oaxaca, past Puerto Escondido.”

  It took a second for the name to register. Roque said, “That’s where the boats run by El Chusquero-”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.” Beto leaned over, checked the gas gauge, then glanced up and finally noticed the bug-eyed man with the greaser hair. “What’s this turd want?”

  Finishing his cigarette, the stranger tossed down his butt, crushed it with his boot and shuffled back inside the bar.

  Tío Faustino edged forward. “You think that gangster-Captain Quintanilla, El Chusquero, whatever he’s calling himself today-you think he has something to do with closing down the inland roads? Maybe he’s paid somebody off. Maybe he has connections inside the military here, or the police. There could be somebody waiting for us up ahead.”

  Beto stared at the bar’s tin door. “No. Fucking coincidence, that’s all. Bad luck.” Reaching his arm out the window, he slapped the side of the door hard three times. “Come on. Let’s move it.”

  A FEW MILES OUTSIDE OF TOWN THEY ENCOUNTERED THE INFAMOUS wind, notorious for jackknifing trucks. The barrancas below were a graveyard, Beto said, not just the semis but the cars they dragged with them over the cliffs. Tío Faustino took the wheel. Despite a hairy sideways jolt now and then, he kept the Corolla on course, whistling under his breath to soothe his nerves, then asking Lupe to keep him awake with a song or two. Stirring herself from her inwardness, she resorted to the usual repertoire, “Es Demasiado Tarde,” It’s Too Late, coming first, sung sotto voce, almost a whisper, then “El Camino,” The Road:

  De lejos vengo yo a verte

  a conseguir lo que quiero

  Aunque la vida me cueste.

  I’ve come from far away to see you

  to get what I long for

  Even if it costs me my life

  They passed through Salina Cruz hours before dawn but the city was already stirring, the refineries bristling with light, bakery trucks roaming the streets. The road out of town followed the coastal hills for miles, the winds again rocking the car back and forth as Roque huddled against the door, trying to grab some sleep.

  As they passed a dirt lane a pair of headlights flashed on, then a pickup eased out onto the road behind them, followed by a second pickup trailing the first.

  Beto turned around in his seat, looking back through the rear window. “If you can pick up speed,” he told Tío Faustino, “it might be a good idea.”

  Samir wiped at his nose with the back of his hand, a fear reflex. Lupe glanced over her shoulder, her face both brightened and shadowed by the oncoming headlights. Following her eyes, Roque could make out the silhouettes of men standing in the first pickup’s truck bed, clutching the railing along the sides with one hand, weapons in the other.

  Tío Faustino ac
celerated, taking the switchbacks fast and tight, hoping to lose the pickups that way-they’d have to slow down at each sharp turn or risk losing the men holding on in back. But even with his best efforts, come every straightaway the two small trucks made up lost ground, though the second seemed to lag seriously behind the first. Finally the crack of gunfire, bullets whistling past.

  “You gotta outrun them to the next roadblock,” Beto told Tío Faustino.

  “How do I do that? How far-”

  “I don’t fucking know”-Beto pounding on the dash-“just go.”

  The highway dropped toward the beach and they passed into a sudden mass of fog. Tío Faustino braked, cranked down his window, leaned out to see the course of the pavement, guiding himself that way as he tried to maintain some speed. The road rose again suddenly, curving inland, the fog thinned and he hit the gas, hoping this was his chance finally to gain some real advantage. Then the road hairpinned back toward shore, he touched the brake as he entered the turn then accelerated, hugging the curve, only to see through the mist, once the road straightened, the outline of a something massive in the middle of the road. He got out the words “pinche putos” before everyone slammed forward from the impact and the cow barreled over the hood, shattering the windshield with the sound of an exploding bomb, continuing over the roof. The car fishtailed, careening off the road in a spin and nearly tumbling over as the wheels dropped into a rock-strewn culvert just beyond the asphalt, slamming hard to a stop. Every head snapped in recoil. Tío Faustino’s face came away from the steering wheel bloody.

  Beto brushed off shards of glass with one hand while the other slammed the door, “Go! Go! Go!” But Tío sat there dazed, blood streaming from his nose, a deep gash along his cheek.

  Gathering his wits, Roque said, “I’ll drive,” but he barely had his car door open before the first pickup cleared the bend. The cow’s carcass remained twisted across the road, the driver turned sharp to avoid it, almost tipped over, then overcorrected and this time sent the small truck tumbling, the men in back still aboard as the thing went over, crushed before they could jump free. The pickup rolled over and over, ending with its wheels in the air. An eerie stillness followed, just hissing steam, the wind rushing through the hillside grass, the surf below.