Do They Know I'm Running

earthquake, a furious shaking, and he felt the hand first and knew it was real and stirred himself, leaping back from the touch, terrified, forgetting where he left his weapons.

“Hey, it’s me. Godo, relax. It’s me.”

Godo placed the tone, reassuring and yet a little put out, before he recognized the voice. His eyes felt like someone had dripped syrup into them. Gradually, Happy took form, craning over the bed. He was dressed in a black work jacket, T-shirt, jeans, looking like a second-story man. Tia Lucha stood behind him in the doorway, her face stripped of the moon mask. She looked sad, human, like herself, not the person she became out there, in Gringolandia.

“You were making this sound, man.” Happy sat down on the edge of the bed, gestured to Tia Lucha that everything was okay. “Thought I needed to flip you over or something.”

Godo swept a damp palm across his face. Why was he sweating?

Tia Lucha whispered, “Buenas noches, amorcitos,” then withdrew into the hall, padding back to her room in her socks.

Happy said, “Things okay?”

He smelled of tobacco and pulque. Godo rolled over finally, nudged himself into a sitting position, tucked a pillow into the small of his back. “Why shouldn’t they be?”

Happy checked around the room, saw the duffel, glanced toward the hallway, cocking an ear for the click of Tia Lucha’s door. “The thing with Puchi and Chato, that’s what I meant.”

Godo wondered why Efraim didn’t earn mention. He was the only one worth talking about. “Went okay, I guess.”

“They didn’t say anything was coming up soon?”

Godo studied Happy’s face. It was gaunt, eyes sinking into the skull like a bedouin’s. Did the guy ever eat? “They mentioned nothing coming up no time.”

“That’s important. Put off anything they want you to do.”

Godo recalled the tedious dry fires and other lessons out at the farmhouse, the free-form shoot-out at the barn. “Too late.”

“I’m not talking target practice. I’m talking a job.”

A slash of pain rifled up Godo’s spine, igniting a shimmer inside his skull. He wouldn’t be falling back asleep anytime soon. Damn. He wanted a beer. “You’re talking to the wrong creature. I’m not in the loop there.”

“Money’s in the pipeline. Things are moving.” Happy worried his fingers into a knot. “Pops’ll be back in a week, two tops. We’re good. No rush. Don’t get talked into anything.”

“Those two fools? Couldn’t talk me into lunch.”

“Keep it that way.”

Incredible, Godo thought, the attitude. “And if Vasco says put me to work?”

“Put him off. Buy time.” Happy reached out, took Godo’s arm, a brotherly touch. “Two weeks, that’s all we need.”

Sixteen

THE CAR, A SIX-YEAR-OLD TOYOTA COROLLA, APPEARED IN THE morning, Sisco driving it, part of the arrangement with the salvatruchos for the trip back to the States. The money had finally come through. Roque guessed the car had been stolen up north and was making the return trip with a new VIN number and license plates, all part of Lonely’s little empire. Roque could only imagine what a relief it was to unload this cacharro on just the right bunch of suckers. He wondered what ridiculous price they’d been milked for but that was Happy’s end. He chose to believe Happy knew his business.

Tio Faustino worried over the thing throughout the day, replacing the serpentine belt, inserting new plugs, changing the oil and coolant. Test drives around San Pedro Lempa gradually increased his confidence level. Finally, late afternoon, came Roque’s turn.

He slid behind the wheel and adjusted the seat, Tio sitting beside him, wiping his hands on a rag.- She loses power a little going uphill, probably carbon in the cylinders. That’s most likely causing some of the knocking too. It’s not so bad with the new plugs. I haven’t seen smoke, so we’re not burning oil. He tapped out a merry taradiddle on the console, then reached over to squeeze Roque’s shoulder.-Love her, chamaco. She’s our ticket home.

Roque got the knack of the Corolla easily, a little loose in the wheel, a leftward drift in the front end, soft brakes. They barreled down a two-lane road lined with fields of sun-browned grass and scant trees. A man in an oxcart bearing plantains passed a small abandoned house bombed with gang graffiti. A woman with a bright red water jug atop her head led her daughter by the hand, the girl staring as the car sped past, the thing no less mysterious for being familiar.

As they drove, he listened to his uncle recount what Carmela and her friends had told him the past few nights. Street vendors were being driven underground, labeled terrorists for selling pirated CDs and DVDs-Hollywood was incredibly, strangely pissed about this, forcing the government to do something-plus the growing corruption in the national police, to where the FBI admitted they could find only twenty officers worthy of trust out of two thousand they’d polygraphed. Former guerrillas, desperate for jobs, now worked security for the very same men who, twenty years ago, wanted them dead. Whole farming communities had abandoned the land because they couldn’t compete with the low price of imported American corn. The spiraling cost of oil, swelling demand for meat and dairy in China and India, the use of cropland for biofuels, it was all driving up prices. Families couldn’t make ends meet. The number of people starving was larger than before the war.

– I have this terrible sense of deja vu, Faustino admitted.-I’m running away to save my boy. Except this time he’s saving me.

It was after nightfall by the time they returned to the house in San Pedro Lempa. As they entered the courtyard, a figure they hadn’t spotted at first rose from one of the chairs, unrecognizable in the darkness. Roque felt his heart bound into his throat but the man approached with an air of deference, clutching a small cloth bag to his chest. In an accent Roque couldn’t quite place, the man said to Tio Faustino, “I believe you are Happy’s father. My greetings to you.” He placed a hand over his heart, bowing respectfully. “My name is Samir.”

***

THEY SAT AROUND THE WOOD-PLANK TABLE BENEATH THE MANGO tree, the fragrance from Carmela’s exotic flowers mixing with the scent of candle wax.

“Let me tell you something, your son was a worker, very dedicated. But also very kind, very brave.” The Arab paused to take a sip of shuco, a hot corn sludge darkened with black-bean paste, thinned with scalding water and sweetened with raw sugar, something Carmela had worked up. “I owe him a great deal, your son. My being here tonight, not least of all.”

His face-long and vaguely hourglass shaped, indented at the temples-rippled with shadow in the guttering light, his features both delicate and stern, a beak of a nose but womanly lips, sunken eyes, closely shorn hair. His age was hard to pinpoint, late thirties, early fifties, anywhere between. Given the honey color of his skin and his textbook Spanish, he might just pass for a guanaco at the various checkpoints, Roque thought, if he says as little as possible. His accent seemed a bit starched, vaguely Castilian. As for his English, which he preferred to use with Tio Faustino and Roque for the sake of practice, it too was oddly accented, not just with the usual clipped Arab inflections but a kind of plodding cadence, as though he’d learned the language reciting clunky poems.

“I met Happy when the country was coming apart. The imams were in bed not just with the insurgency but with organized crime. Muqtada al Sadr and his thugs took over the hospitals. If a Sunni man came in with a gunshot wound, the Jaish al Mahdi would come, accuse him of being a terrorist, take him away. His body would get found a few days later, tossed in the street or a field somewhere.”

Tio Faustino hung on every word. Roque remained unconvinced. The man seemed too put together, like an actor still working into the skin of his role.