overgrown with elephant grass running parallel to the road. What if gunmen are hiding here, Happy thought, feeling now an odd indifference to the idea of dying-at least I won’t be scared. His body clawed ahead, unwilling to give up yet, prodded into the tall sharp grass by Samir. Several inches of thick brackish water, foul with excrement, sat in the bottom of the culvert, while a noxious cloud of stinging flies swarmed up from nowhere. The truck erupted then in a towering fireball, an ear-splitting blast, the shock wave knocking them onto their knees in the thick black water. Nothing cohered anymore, there were just the screams of the dying clouded by smoke, flickering silhouettes backlit by raging fire, helpless shouts of cruel insistent horror or triumph, the words in English and Spanish and, farther away, Arabic.
Samir grabbed the shoulder of Happy’s filthy shirt, dragging him up onto his feet. “I see something. Come.”
Happy let himself be pulled along, able to see no more than a few feet ahead, the rest of the world a riot of savage form. They ran crouching, far too long a ways it seemed, Happy with his head down, afraid to lift it for fear of one lucky shot, footfalls breaking the crusted, sunbaked sand, then the screech of rust-dry hinges, a wood gate slammed open, gravel underfoot. He smelled manure, the musk of wool, the char of a wood fire. Samir dragged him through a door, sat him down in a bed of straw. “We’ll wait,” he whispered, chest heaving. “Maybe somebody radioed ahead. Maybe a patrol from Karbala will come. LAVs, tanks.”
Happy blinked and blinked, feeling the fine sharp dust in his eyes finally milking away. Not glass, he thought, thank God for that, but he was still unable to focus. His breath rumbled inside his chest, he coughed up dust. Then Samir grew suddenly stiff, his breath stilled. His clothing rustled, the stench of shit unfurled off his clothes as he slowly rose to his feet. Happy looked up: a reed-thin silhouette in the doorway of the barn, flowing black dishdasha, a checkered keffiyeh wrapped around his head. A Kalashnikov in his hands.
Samir spoke quietly in Arabic to the man, an old farmer perhaps. Or one of the gunmen? In the time it took to say a rushed prayer, some bargain was made, exchanged in whispers. Happy would know only that the man withdrew. Samir sat back down. “I told him we wanted nothing, we would say nothing.” Happy chose to believe, sitting in silence until the churning roar of Hueys flying low echoed from the south, relief from Karbala. They left the barn behind and ran crouching back the way they’d come, through boiling smoke and the cries of the dying, waving their arms in the rotor wash and its choking storm of dust.
GODO LISTENED TO HIS COUSIN’S TALE, MARVELING AT HOW LANGUAGE told you nothing. It was the tremor in Happy’s voice, the haunting emptiness in some words, the sloppy quick clutter of others, that gave him away. You can’t make up that fear. And for the first time in a long while, he felt the two of them were truly kin.
“Seems to me,” he said finally, “you need to know more about what went on with this farmer, this gunman, whatever he was. You could call down, have Roque hand your guy the phone, put it to him.”
Happy glanced up from behind his hands. “If he lied to me back then, why not just keep lying?”
“Got a point.”
“He’s down there with Pops. With Roque.”
Godo’s eye strayed to the clock. A little past ten now, still two hours until Tia Lucha would be home. A migraine was ticking away behind his eyes. “Yeah.”
“What should I do?”
Good question, Godo thought, watching as the walls inched inward a little, then inched back. He decided not to mention it to Happy. “He wants to get to the States. He’s not gonna fuck up Tio Faustino or Roque, not while they’re his ticket.”
“What about once they’re across? When he doesn’t need them anymore?”
Godo kept an eye on the walls, checking for further insolence. “Seems to me you’re gonna have to catch them just south of the border, right before they cross. Deal with it then.”
Twenty
ROQUE SLEPT NEAR THE DOOR, LUPE ACROSS THE ROOM, BOTH curled up on the concrete floor, nothing but newspapers and flattened cartons for comfort, the air close and hot. At some point in the interminable night, the lizard finally chose his path and vanished from the wall.
Rafa had locked them in, saying he’d be back around daybreak. They’d arouse too much suspicion, he said, trying to cross in the middle of the night. He parked the Corolla in the service bay, so no one could hot-wire it, and come morning Roque and Lupe would drive it through the checkpoint, then continue on several miles to a roadside
He kept coming back to Tio and Lupe. Was she really the tragic cause his uncle made her out to be? All that talk about sucking Arab cock, she said it so breezily-and hadn’t Lonely called her a
Regardless, there was something broken inside her, something she’d tried to mend with fury. It made her a wild card. Maybe she’ll try to run, he thought, maybe she’ll want some sort of payback, a way to get even or maybe she’ll just turn the rage on herself, roll into a ball, settle in for her fate. There was no way to tell.
A kind of homesickness came over him, not for Rio Mirada or Tia Lucha but Mariko, and yet the dishonesty in that seemed clear soon enough. You just want to get laid, he thought, and the feeling gave way to something else, a kind of emptiness, as though his heart had become a grave and in the grave was buried what he’d once considered love. What is it we want, he thought, that we try to find in a woman? Especially a woman who isn’t fooled, who won’t buy into the usual bag of tricks. Secretly we want to be seen for who we are, the rest is just show. We want love, not praise. And yet that seemed a recipe for weakness, a shortcut to failure.
And, he reminded himself, failure’s not an option. Everyone is so proud of you.
He drifted off into fitful sleep and the dreams that came to him seemed slight, disjointed-except one, which echoed back to another dream, the one he’d had at Mariko’s house all those weeks ago. Again there was twilight, a gun blast, the snarling dog. And yet the sense he was carrying something priceless, something he’d have to fight to keep, had changed. He saw his mother standing a little ways ahead. Her hair, usually long and densely matted in her pictures, was cut short like a nun’s. She looked sickly and frail. The face, however, was unmistakable. He tried to call out but the sound caught in his throat and that was when his mother-or whoever, whatever she was-pointed to a dusty leather bag at his feet. A ridiculously large and agile tarantula pushed its way out from under the unbuckled flap, scuttering toward him.
He shot up blinking, felt the scaly presence on his neck, brushed the lizard off.
A throng
RAFA APPEARED WITHIN THE HOUR AND UNLOCKED THE DOORS. THE dream had left a residue, a sense of defeat, and Roque feared what he might do if trapped inside any longer. Lupe didn’t stir at first and only rose once Roque backed the Corolla out of the service bay, her hair mussed, her eyes piggish with sleep as she clutched the plastic bag of new clothes.
Rafa told them it would be best to cross the border early, before the guards working the day shift settled into their routine, but Roque got the feeling he just wanted them gone. Lupe dropped into the passenger seat, the better for appearances, he supposed, though he imagined she’d want to climb in back once the border was cleared, fall asleep again. He had a pretty good idea she’d be sleeping a lot in the coming days.
The clouds were a steely blue-gray and fat with rain, the air fresh but muggy. Twice in twenty minutes a quick thrumming shower fell, whipped by crosswinds, the downpour stopping as suddenly as it began. If that’s the worst of the weather, he thought, Tio and Samir shouldn’t have too bad a slog. Still, he wondered what shape and frame of mind they’d be in after trekking through pathless rough all night, rain or no rain.
The landscape was rolling windswept bluffs covered with tall brown grass, not unlike the foothills of Northern California, except there were more trees and he recognized none of them. He had no idea what bugs or other
