Do They Know I'm Running

by David Corbett

  “I figured you’d say that.”

  Lupe, sensing a wrong turn somewhere, looked to Roque for reassurance but he had none to give. Godo blocked the door.

  “This American, this man from Dallas.” Samir pointed, as though the city were only a short walk away. “He is CIA. You give me to him”-a finger snap-“I disappear.”

  “I don’t know that.”

  “They will hood me, torture me. I’ll end up in some secret prison. Worse, get handed over to someone else, the Egyptians, the Thais. Let them do the dirty work.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because they can.”

  Happy reached into his back pocket, withdrew a mangled pack of Marlboros, shook one free, lipped it. “Maybe all they want to do is talk.” The cigarette bobbing. “That be so terrible?”

  “And tell them what?”

  “Whatever.” Using a Zippo, Happy lit up, shrugged. “Everything.”

  “And if I have nothing to tell them, nothing they want to hear, what do you think happens? Think they believe me?”

  “Could be they want you to infiltrate a mosque, maybe a sleeper cell, maybe just a bunch of deadbeats hanging around some café, talking tough about jihad. You want asylum? Looks like you’ll have to earn it.”

  Samir turned one way, another, looking for a way out. “You don’t understand.”

  Happy exhaled a long plume of smoke. “You keep saying that.”

  A nervous laugh, disbelief. “What else can I say?”

  “No one understands. Not as far as you’re concerned.”

  “Why are you angry with me?”

  “I’m not-”

  “What have I done? Why betray me like this?”

  Happy took another long drag. “Who are you, really? Let’s start there.”

  Again, the hand across the heart. “I have never once lied-”

  “I have no idea who you are.”

  Roque glanced toward the door, wondering what if anything Godo felt about all this, but except for a vague impatience there was nothing in his expression to read. Sure the Arab was a pain in the ass but this was over the top. “Happy, what are you getting at?”

  “Butt out, Roque.”

  “No. You don’t tell me that, not after everything-”

  “This don’t concern-”

  “This isn’t necessary, okay? I told you, this guy in Naco-”

  “For fuck’s sake, you stupid? He’s a cop! I don’t care whose uncle he is. You gotta trust me on this, you go to this guy to get you across, you’ll never be heard from again. Okay? Especially with our friend here in tow.” He gestured toward Samir, then Lupe. “Same with her.”

  “Happy-”

  “The patrón wants a songbird, Roque. They all do down here. One of the perks of being el mero mero. He’ll make her a star. Life could be fucking worse.”

  “Now you’re the one who sounds stupid.”

  “Not like they’re gonna pimp her out, okay? Everybody’s being so fucking dramatic.”

  Again, Lupe looked to Roque for some reassurance. There was none to find. She turned to Happy, incensed, scared.-Tell me what is happening. Not him. Me.

  Before Happy could answer, a caravan of four SUVs turned off the road into the development, headlights raking the forward houses as the engines throttled down for the switch from pavement to gravel.

  Roque turned back to Happy, took a step toward him. “What have you done?”

  Happy didn’t move. A twinge of his eye, a blink. “I have no clue who that is.”

  Samir lunged toward one of the windows, hiking his leg over the sill, ducking down. He was halfway out when Godo sailed across the room, caught him, grabbing him by the shirttail first, then a crippling punch to the small of the back, like some instinct from the war had taken hold. Lupe, seeing the door unguarded, bolted, she was gone before Roque could stop her. He grabbed his knapsack, followed, glancing back from the doorway as Godo headlocked Samir, twisting him to the floor. Happy just stood there, tip of his cigarette a curl of ash as he stared in the general direction of the oncoming vehicles, looking as though to move would be an admission of something he still felt a need to keep private.

  THE DARKNESS ACROSS THE DESERT FLOOR FELT IMPENETRABLE, WORSE than inside the house, but once his eyes adjusted Roque caught Lupe’s silhouette vanishing past a snarl of cacti. He hurried after her just as the SUVs braked and men poured out. Over his shoulder, he recognized the huelepega from earlier, passing through the headlight glare, looking not quite so feeble now. They’d known, he thought. They had a lookout.

  He caught up with Lupe, snagged her arm. She fought back, throwing an elbow, a wild kick.-Let go!

  – Quiet! Get down.

  He dragged her behind a thicket of underbrush circling the base of a massive saguaro, its barbed arms snaking up and out in all directions. They both panted from exertion, trying to stifle the sound. The dogs from earlier had reappeared around the house and now skittered away as perhaps a dozen men surrounded it, all of them armed. Headlights lit up the house from two sides. From somewhere in the foothills a coyote howled, then one of the men called out, addressing Happy by his given name.

  – PABLO, STOP BEING SUCH A HOPELESS ASSHOLE. COME ON OUT.

  Happy, recognizing the voice, figured the Spanish was a play to the others, the men setting up the kill zone. Doesn’t matter what I say or don’t say, he thought, it’s all an act. This is what I get for mocking a snake.

  Godo gestured everyone down, out of the light streaming in through the windows, then belly-crawled to his duffel, shook it open and began pulling out the weapons, the shotgun, the Kalashnikov, the pistols. He flexed his gauze-wrapped hand, then slammed a magazine into the AK, the others already loaded. To Happy, he said, “I’m assuming you know who’s out there.”

  A burst of machine-gun fire ripped along the outer walls of the house, a few rounds pitching in through the window, tearing pieces of cinder block away like shrapnel and leaving clouds of chalky dust behind.

  Happy said, “The ones I told you about.”

  – Come on, Pablo. What, you think I wouldn’t figure this shit out, all that crap about wanting to do me a favor? You got the Arab and the girl in there. I understand, I do. Nothing terrible is going to happen to them. Nothing terrible will happen to you. Play it smart.

  “Where’s Roque?” Godo asked.

  “The girl ran out. He went after her.”

  “They think she’s in here.” Using his teeth, Godo began tearing the gauze away from his hand, peeling it off in shreds. Shortly, he broke into a smile. “They got away, her and Roque.”

  The lucky one, Happy thought. The magical one.

  “I won’t go with those men,” Samir said. He lay across the room, staring at the glassless, light-filled window. “A man cannot choose when he will die, only how.”

  Godo flexed his naked hand, still black and red from its burns. “That’s deep.” He wiped a smear of ointment onto his pant leg. “Kinda premature, though.”

  “Don’t hand me over to them. Kill me. Say it was self-defense.”

  “They’re going to kill us,” Happy said, talking to neither of them in particular. “He thinks I went behind his back. That can’t be forgiven. There’s nothing to say. I can’t make it right, not with them. And I’ve seen how they kill people.”

  Godo picked up the shotgun, chuckling miserably as he racked a load of nine-shot into the chamber. “Vamos rumbo a la chingada.” We’re on our way to join the fucked. He turned to Samir and hefted the Kalashnikov. “I hear you know how to use one of these.”

  The Arab began to crawl across the room, inching on hands and knees, butt high, head low, made it halfway across when another spray of machine-gun fire, this one longer, rocked the small house. He dove down, covering his head as bullets rang against the tin roof and tore away more of the wall. Once the firing stopped he scurried the rest of the way, joining Godo near the door as the dust swirled and drifted overhead.

  – I
’m not fucking around no more, Pablo. Hands on your head, you and everybody else, one by one through the door, or we gonna smoke you out.

  “That sounds like an MP5.” Godo edged closer toward the door, hoping for a peek. “They’ll have trouble with muzzle lift. Bitchin’ little gun, though.”

  “They’re off-duty cops, soldiers,” Happy said. “Maybe even special forces.”

  “The Bean Berets,” Godo said.

  Samir cradled the AK-47 with a kind of weary admiration. “I wish I had a bayonet.”

  Godo chuckled again, a little less miserably. “Good attitude.”

  “Give me the Glock,” Happy said. “It’s the one I know best.”

  Godo slid the pistol across the plywood floor. “Don’t plug yourself in the leg.”

  Happy leaned forward for it, dropped the magazine, made sure it was fully loaded, then slammed it home again. The chamber already held a round. Don’t plug yourself, he thought, Glock leg, they called it, the safety in the trigger, so touchy even cops shot themselves.

  Godo slid the Smith and Wesson.357 after, nodding for Happy to take it, then stuck the Beretta 9mm into his own waistband. Searching the duffel for an extra mag for the AK, he found it, banged it against the floor, then tossed it to Samir. “You’ll have more firepower than the two of us combined. Otherwise I’d offer you a pistol too.”

  “It’s okay,” Samir said, jamming the magazine into his trousers at the small of his back. “Pistols are for officers.”

  Godo smiled. “You left-handed or right?”

  Samir lifted his right hand, jiggled it.

  “Okay, I’ll go first. I’ll circle left, draw fire. You circle right, aim for the muzzle flashes. Happy? From the sound of things, I’d guess the guy who’s talking out there, El Recio, he’s almost a straight shot from the door, maybe twenty yards. You focus on him. Take him out, maybe the others will call it a day. If all goes well, we’ll meet back at the pickup.”

  “Godo-”

  “There is no plan B.”

  A canister tumbled in through the door, spinning once or twice as it spit a billowing plume of blue smoke. Godo rose into a crouch, bounced twice. “Everybody good?” He lifted the shotgun to his shoulder. “Honor, gentlemen. Think like a killer. Act like you’re already dead.”

  HE WAS HIT TWICE BEFORE HE WAS THROUGH THE DOOR BUT HE’D expected that. You measure a warrior by the damage he inflicts, yes, but also by what he withstands. Gunny Benedict taught him that, just as he taught him that pain is illusion, it’s only there to fool you, hold you back. One round caught him in the ribs, the other the thigh. Adrenalin kept him upright, moving to contact. He spotted for muzzle flash, fired, pumped, fired, trying to stay out of the headlights’ center but always moving, arcing left. He saw a man spin down, another cover his face and drop his weapon, silhouettes cowering by their SUVs. The battle distortion he’d known before returned, the disconnect between sight and sound, feeling like a promise, harkening back to Al Gharraf, Diwaniyah, Fallujah, and in the sudden stillness he heard the plucking of guitar strings, “Canción de Cuna,” Roque’s Cuban lullaby. It gave him heart, even as machine-gun fire raked his knees and he twisted down into powdery dirt and razor-sharp rocks, struggled to rise, caught another round in the neck and one more in his skull. Blinding, the last. He rolled onto his side, racked, fired, racked again, aiming into the silence until there were no more rounds in the magazine and he dragged the Beretta from his waistband, tried again to sight a target, taking fire like a pincushion and unable to feel the trigger against his finger or the hand at the end of his arm, unable to hold up his head while his throat filled with blood and the headlight glow swelled like an incoming wave. Once the wave crested he saw it, suspecting it had been there all along, suspended in the young girl’s hand. The bright red blossom of the fire tree.

  SAMIR DOVE OUT THE DOORWAY FIRING ON FULL AUTO, THE HEAVY AK rounds splintering glass, carving up metal. Targeting on muzzle flash in the drifting smoke, he spotted one gunman, fired, took him down, sighted on another, fired, resisting the upward pull of the barrel. Another kill. He caught them by surprise, all eyes focused on Godo. We’ll meet back at the pickup, he thought, daring to picture the off-campus cottage, brickwork and vines, the woman kneeling in her garden, the girl practicing clarinet inside, the library shelves lined with Don Quixote, Ulysses, Life on the Mississippi, Yo el Supremo, then a spray of bullets, like a sudden cloud of wasps, encircling, tightening, closing. He felt the slash of pain across his back even as he fired and took down one more gunman but the weakness came right after, legs jibbing, no strength. He fought to right himself and just that pause left him open. Another blistering stripe, this one up his chest and into his face, he spun backward. What he feared became what he knew-Fatima, Shatha, forgive me my lies, my weakness, my failure-even as he drew himself up, hefted the rifle above his head like an ax and charged the faceless invader before him.

  Inshallah…

  ***

  HAPPY GAGGED AS THE BLUE SMOKE THICKENED, REMINDING HIMSELF that all he’d wanted was to be a better son. Rising to his feet, he firmed his grip on the Glock in his right hand, then with his left drew the Smithy from under his belt. He felt a sudden terror that no one would remember him-mother, father, both dead-he would not be missed by any living thing. Roque, maybe. Run, he thought, run fucker, you and your woman, make it across and remember me.

  He dove out the door and headed as best he could tell straight for El Recio, guessing the spot where his voice had come from. Sure enough, there he stood, taking cover behind the door of one of the SUVs, watching Godo convulsing on the ground. Samir was off to the right somewhere. Was Osvaldo there? Kiki? Hilario? Were there ghosts to account for? Happy charged, firing two-handed, making half the distance before the gaunt bald asthmatic even knew he was there. I’ve never loved anything, he realized, as much as this fuckface loves his damn snake. The rest of the distance collapsed and he was pounding with the pistol butts, bashing the face, erasing that smile, crushing the throat, fighting off the hands of the other men trying to drag him off and remembering the song the bastard had sung that night, in the cop’s kitchen, as they forced the parents to watch their little boy get burned alive:

  Hoy es mi día

  Voy a alegrar toda el alma mía

  Today is my day

  I’m going to fill my soul with joy

  Forty-Four

  THEY FLAGGED DOWN A BUS ABOUT A MILE NORTH OF THE HOUSE. Lupe, sensing the opportunity in the gunfight, had slipped off during the worst of it, when Godo went down. Roque didn’t follow, not then, he couldn’t. Instead, jumping up idiotically, he’d called out or screamed, made some sort of sound, no memory now exactly of what; his throat still felt scorched. He might as well have stayed quiet for all the good it had done; no one heard him over the gunfire. At some point he turned, scrambled after Lupe, remembering none of that, either. But on the bus his memory revived, seeking its vengeance. Images clapped and hammered inside his brain, flashes of the bloodshed, his brother, his cousin, the maddening Arab, then wave after wave of shame and guilt, panic attacks, stabbing blame: You ran. You survived.

  They stepped off the bus at the turnoff to Naco, then thumbed a ride from a fat-bellied trucker in a Stetson who turned out to be an evangélico, witnessing them gustily during the drive then dropping them off at his storefront church. They stayed long enough to justify a fistful of cookies chased with scalding coffee, then muddled their way to the bus terminal, knowing they’d find phones there. Reading the number off the torn corner of a paper bag, Roque dialed Pingo’s uncle, the cop from Naco.

  His name was Melchior. At the invocation of his nephew’s name he agreed to meet at a taqueria near a small park three blocks from the port of entry but he couldn’t get free until late the next day.-I’m sorry, he said, I have work, my family. But tomorrow, yes, we’ll get together.

  The storefront church had closed up by the time they returned so they found a place to hide for the night in the alley around bac
k, Lupe’s head in Roque’s lap. Neither slept.

  Come dawn they bought coffee and pan dulce at a nearby panadería and breakfasted standing beneath the awning of a pawnshop catering to those needing cash to cross over. The store didn’t open until eight but already people were coming up alone or in groups, peering in through the ironwork.

  Once the church opened its doors they sat near the back in folding chairs, suffering the heated exhortations of the preacher from his lectern or indulging the quieter testimonials of the churchwomen, offering sweets, bestowing unsolicited advice, reading at length out loud from their Bibles. Finally, come four o’clock, they made their way to the taqueria and waited.

  He showed up with a gun on his hip and a badge on his belt, no uniform. Driving a rust-tagged Cutlass twenty years old, he took them east out of town toward the Mule Mountains, the peaks stitching north across the border, then pulled off the highway onto a rough dirt lane that trailed away among jagged rocks crowned with creosote bushes and paloverde, parking on a bluff in the middle of nowhere.

  He glanced left and right, ahead and behind.-I don’t know what Pingo promised. But everything has changed up here. You don’t have coyotes working the border solo like before, they’re either dead or they’ve signed on as guías with the cartels, who use the gangs as enforcers. A man I know, a cop like me, he and his family were tortured and killed the other night-what he did or didn’t do exactly I don’t know, but everyone in the corridor heard the news. There was a boy, seven years old, the stories of what they did to him… I have a family. I will not let that happen to them.

  – I’d never ask such a thing, Roque said. He glanced sidelong at Lupe sitting alone in the backseat. He doubted he had ever felt so tired.

  – Life means nothing to these fucks. If you’re lucky you just get used as decoys. The others, they take your money, make you a promise, then disappear, or take you into the desert and leave you there. Even the decent ones shake you down for more once they get you across.

  – But isn’t there some way, without dealing with this El Recio, that we could make the crossing?