Do They Know I'm Running

the cell at Mariona. “I can try to arrange a meet. Probably not with the warehouse guy, not until you’re in. But somebody.”

“If this thing is real, you can make it happen.”

“As for Godo-”

“You can make that happen too.”

“I need some time to think about it.”

Vasco lit another smoke with the end of his last. He was smiling. The smile said: Now who gets to ride, who gets ridden?

Happy said, “Problem is, we don’t have time.”

“Your problem. Not mine. Not yet, anyway.”

“If anything happens, to Godo I mean-”

“Like what?”

“He has a meltdown. He freaks out. He almost shot two agents during a raid at the trailer park.”

“I heard.” Vasco chuckled. “I like that, actually.”

“You weren’t there. Way it got told to me, it was fucking spooky.”

“Godo scares people. I don’t see the problem. Now what’s it going to be?”

“Like I said, I need time.”

Again, that smile. Stop worrying, it said. Thank your luck. “But, chero, you said it yourself. You don’t have time.”

Happy pictured it then, Vasco face flat on the concrete floor, held down by the others, a rag stuffed in his mouth as one by one they took him, shamed him, made him their punk. “If anything happens to Godo, I hold you to account.”

Vasco waved him off. He propped his boots on his desk, ankles crossed. “Since when are you two so close? Don’t remember you guys having one good thing to say about each other.”

Happy got up to go. Glancing back at the foul-smelling panda, he said, “Ever think of washing that thing? Can’t be good for the girl, way it is.”

Vasco looked at him like he’d just proposed the absurd. “What, you get your ass deported to El Salvador, you come back an expert on kids?”

Eleven

ROQUE HAD TO TELL HIMSELF: STOP STARING. IT WASN’T JUST the bruise-strange how, even with the plum-colored swelling and the gash across her cheek, the girl somehow remained stunning-or the fact that, from time to time, her uneasy eyes met his. She was a prisoner. Pity wouldn’t free her.

He’d been in El Salvador a total of four hours, arriving at the airport in Comalapa before dawn. He’d skated through customs, not so much as a glance inside his knapsack, then ventured out into the soft green heat of daybreak outside the terminal-the sidewalk jammed with well-wishers greeting friends and relatives back from Gringolandia, cabbies hawking fares to the capital, touts with bullhorns steering grenchos to the psychedelic chicken buses headed for the smaller provincial towns.

He stopped milling and chose a spot to wait against the terminal’s dark wall of glass. In time, a droop-lidded cholo, thin as a tomcat, edged his way through the crowd. He wore a T-shirt three sizes too large emblazoned with the Arizona Cardinals logo and the words “World Champions, Super Bowl XLIII.”

The cholo snagged Roque’s arm. “You’re the musician.” His lips curled in a slack smile, as though both offering a compliment and slapping down a challenge. “Call me Sisco.”

He led the way out to a parking lot shaded by eucalyptus trees where a battered Volkswagen Golf waited, tapping out a drumbeat against his thighs as he sang under his breath, “Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free.” The singing brought on a coughing jag and when he went to cover his mouth Roque noticed the gang tats on his hands, a sinewy art nouveau X on one, three simple dots the other, the telltale thirteen.

“Met your uncle, by the way,” he said once the cough was under control. “Nice old dude. Kinda quiet.”

As though in tribute, he said little himself all the way to San Salvador, preferring instead to play the radio, a weak-signal pirate station featuring radical tracks the mainstream outlets wouldn’t touch, hiking the volume when a favorite tune came on: Pescozada’s “Anarquia,” Mecate’s “El Directo,” a punk number by an outfit named Metamorffosis, a dark-wave track by a band called Wired.

Sprawling tracts of sugarcane and bananas vanished into the sunbaked distance. Here and there, women in long skirts and tight black braids pinned laundry up on the barbed wire surrounding their topple-down houses of wood and tin, packs of bone-thin children looking on. Dogs roamed freely, their road-kill quickly set upon by buzzards called zopilotes. Meanwhile, bilingual billboards touting everything from Nine West fashion to the inescapable Whopper popped up over and over along the highway, to the point Roque sometimes wondered if he’d really left Gringolandia at all.

Coming on noon, they arrived at a crabbed and decrepit barrio popular named La Chacra on the ass end of the capital. A grayish soup of dust and car exhaust fouled the air, along with the stench of fermenting trash. The Rio Acelhuate, which ran sluggishly through the barrio, was so thick with excrement and toxic waste its mud-brown surface had a purplish glaze.

Sisco slowed to pass a barefoot urchin toddling down the broken pavement, trailing a brood of chickens. A three-story monolith of cinder block rose up at the end of the street, slathered with garish paint, tagged with Mara Salvatrucha graffiti. Scraps of laundry hung limp from rope clotheslines strung along the walkways while salvatruchos clustered on every stair, leaning over the railings, smoking blunts or Marlboros and staring down with suspicion, curiosity, indifference, hate.

Roque tried to picture his mother living in a place like this. Maybe she had before fleeing the war, not that anything would be accomplished if he found out one way or the other. He felt an odd lack of curiosity, being in the land of her birth. No matter what, the absence would remain. There was no secret charm or trick that would cure him. Besides, life wasn’t something you cured. You lived it. Mariko taught him that much, before kicking him to the curb.

He grabbed his knapsack, shouldered it, patted his pockets for what seemed the thousandth time, checking to be sure he had his passport, then followed Sisco across the street to a squat tin-roof house. At the door Sisco knocked twice, waited until the plate at the judas hole slid back, then presented himself to the disembodied eye peering out. “C’mon, Slobnoxious, abierto.” A clatter of bolts and chains, then the door edged open, revealing a short broad shovel-nosed guanaco Roque’s age, maybe a year younger, wearing no shirt, baggy Dickies tugged down below his boxers, a Yankees cap kicked left atop his head.

The kid eyed Roque up and down, then stepped aside, gesturing them into a low-ceilinged room, empty except for two wood chairs and a haphazard array of car-seat cushions. A smell of stale grease and cheap weed lingered. A spray-paint roll call of the local clica, Los Putos Bravos, covered one whole wall: Bug, Chega, Lonely… Pepon, Snorky, Budu… Timo, Malote, Slick…

Suddenly Sisco’s eyes lit up. “Wait-your last name’s Montalvo, right?” He cast a quick glance at Roque, then the doorman’s Yankee’s cap. “Roque Montalvo.”

It sounded like a trick question. Roque nodded uneasily.

“Come on, you know what I’m talking about. Salvadoran dude. Same name. Plays center field for the Red Sox?”

He waited, checking Roque’s face, then the doorman’s, like the coincidence wasn’t just curious, it was meaningful-he expected the two strangers to square off, share a little heat, some New York-Boston bullshit. Then Roque realized it was the colors: blue, red. A gang thing. Seconds passed. Everybody gaped at everybody else.

Finally Sisco broke the spell, slapping Roque’s arm. “Just messing with you, homes. Ain’t no Roque Montalvo plays for the Red Sox.”

Turning away, he chested his thumbs, tenting his Cardinals T-shirt. “And the Steelers won the Super Bowl. Welcome to fucking El Salvador.”

AT THE END OF THE LONG HALL AN OPEN DOORWAY LED INTO WHAT appeared to be a makeshift recording