Do They Know I'm Running

muy maton, a real killer, a point he’d driven home with an anecdote from his days with the Kaibil corps, the Guatemalan special forces. They gave each recruit a puppy at the beginning of basic training, he’d said, and that puppy was your sole responsibility until the end, when you were commanded to slit its throat. Some recruits wept, others vomited. “But I,” El Chusquero intoned with exuberant pride, “I not shame me.”

He’d been studying Lupe’s face with unsettling fascination throughout the afternoon. Clearly he thought Roque was the culprit-and, judging from the tone of his winking insinuation, approved.

“Honestly, it wasn’t me,” Roque told him, trying to sound more humble than moral. He sat tuning the impossible guitar. They’d been serenading the man for hours now, ever since he’d learned they were musical.

The Commander sat back in his chair, rocking pensively, contemplating Roque’s disavowal. Sunlight drilled the window ledge. The putrid, sickeningly sweet stench of cascaras de cafe, the husks stripped away from coffee beans, thickened the stifling afternoon air, like a mix of rotting chocolate stirred with human shit.

Roque strummed the guitar to test the tuning, deciding it wouldn’t get better with more fussing. Distraction had become its own kind of focus as they’d run through song after song. Luckily the Commander’s tastes were unoriginal. He preferred many of the same ranchera ballads that Roque had played in San Pedro Lempa; what others he requested were easy enough to fake after hearing him or Lupe hum a bar or two. They tended to be about defiant pride in the face of feckless betrayal. Women came off badly in them-shrewish, cruel, duplicitous, needy-thus his fascination, Roque supposed, with Lupe’s face. Meanwhile she was growing hoarse from the nonstop performance and even with the additional requests the repertoire was tediously thin. Roque had played some songs a dozen times. But there was no thought of stopping.

“This is your woman, do not tell me no.” The Commander eyed Roque tauntingly. “I can see. I have eyes. More-I have ears. You play, she sings, like lovers.” It came out with a baiting smile, an insult wrapped in a dare.

Roque was aware that, while playing, he’d thoughtlessly stolen a glance now and then at Lupe as she’d lifted her face, eyes closed, concentrating on the lyrics and her pitch. Her voice, as always, kindled something inside him and perhaps that had come out in his playing, though he’d only tried to match what he’d heard as she sang, like any good accompanist. As time had passed and the repetitions multiplied he felt he’d become increasingly attuned to the nuances of her phrasing. Now all that seemed a hopeless mistake.

Lupe broke in.-Music is intimate by its nature, she said. Roque had learned over the past two hours that she had an awkwardly functional if limited command of English that permitted her to pluck out certain meaningful words-like “lovers.” She also had a knack for reading faces, gestures, tone of voice.- A song can make anyone seem amorous, even two strangers, if it is done properly.

El Chusquero squirmed. To keep from having to show Lupe any attention whatsoever and to continue hacking away at his English, he spoke to Roque: “Strangers? No. Not possible. You think I’m stupid-I no have eyes?”

For some reason, Lupe kept at it.-I can see you too are a romantic.

She was either daringly brilliant, Roque thought, or fiercely stupid. The Commander trained his gaze on her. The silence felt like a shroud.

– I think you’re being generous, she continued.-Too generous.

Seriously. We barely know each other. She flicked her hand back and forth, herself, Roque.-It’s the songs. The songs bring the feeling out of me, out of him. Out of you.

Rather than respond, El Chusquero turned his attention to the laptop resting on his desk among the weapons. He’d shown them a website earlier, explaining it to them, feeling it would prove instructive. He’d kept the screen averted since then but now he tapped the space bar so the screen saver melted away, revealing the background slide show, then glanced up at his two visitors with a truculent smile.

The website belonged to an incarcerated colonel named Otilio Ruben Villagran Pozuelos, under whom the Commander said he had served in Peten during the civil war. The reasons for Colonel Villagran’s imprisonment were left vague, though it was clear the dutiful El Chusquero considered them a travesty. That didn’t keep the colonel from living in relative opulence-in his earlier tutorial, the Commander had shown them pictures of his old superior’s prison quarters posted on the site: a spacious and freshly painted room with a refrigerator, an entertainment center with cable TV and a stereo, a brass bed, elegantly appointed bookshelves, rugs on the floor, even a few tasteful watercolors adorning the walls. But for the lack of natural light, it almost seemed more a condo than a cell.

The slide show now in progress, however, was horrific. The pictures had been taken with cell phones during a riot inside the prison: one group of cholos cowing another within one of the prison sectors, wielding machetes and dart guns called chimbas; a prisoner trying to escape through a hole in the wall; a cholo grabbing the would-be escapee by the hair, raising a machete to hack at his neck. In the background, torchlight reflected the glimmer of row after row of empty mayonnaise jars, and Roque remembered Happy’s letter, recalled his story of nightlong humiliation in La Esperanza, the Salvadoran prison. Roque’s imaginings of that night could not come close to what he was now obliged to watch. Lupe turned away; this was permitted since, after all, she was merely a woman.

El Chusquero, meaningfully turning to Spanish:-You see the fate of our enemies.

– I am not your enemy, she said.

– You see what happens to those who mock us.

– I would never-

– Don’t contradict me!

Lupe sagely dropped her glance to the floor. A tremor fluttered along the hollow of her throat.-I’m sorry, El Chusquero.

Responding to an impulse from God knew where, Roque began playing softly the opening refrain of “Cancion de Cuna”-Song of the Cradle-the Cuban lullaby he used to practice endlessly when he first began playing guitar. It drove Godo crazy, the constant repetition, but then gradually he always calmed down, often despite himself, succumbing to the insidious languor of the melody.

Eyes still trained on Lupe, El Chusquero reached down to a lower desk drawer and took out a small glass cage. At first Roque could not make out what lay inside, except for a quivering shudder of small black forms, two dozen or so, swarming across mounded beds of sand, in the midst of which lay a rubbery lump of hairy flesh, prey of some kind. Gradually he recognized the armored bodies, the glossy pincers, the uniquely coiled tails.

He stopped playing.

El Chusquero, employing Spanish again, so Lupe could not pretend to misunderstand:-Let us call this the lovers’ test. These, you may or may not know, are a particular kind of Guatemalan scorpion. They’re not as deadly as those one encounters farther north but the sting is still quite painful, especially if there is more than one. Right now they are feeding on a tarantula we found out in the firewood. But they can always be tempted to eat whatever we give them. He gingerly lifted the cage’s glass lid.-So here is the test: Which one of you is willing to put a hand inside? You cannot both refuse. He stared at her bruised face.- One must suffer so the other does not. Such is love, no?

For some reason, Roque suddenly became acutely aware of the groaning rumble of flatbed trucks loaded high with sugarcane laboring through the village’s modest zona urbana, that and the sulfurous smell of the cascaras de cafe. His tongue and throat had turned stone dry. Still, after a labored swallow:-Why are you doing this?

Before the man could answer, Lupe jumped to her feet, approached the desk and reached out with her left hand.-You are mistaken about us, El Chusquero. I don’t know why you won’t believe me. But if one of us must be the victim, let it be me. A guitarist must look after his hands, no? And we may well need to play and sing again as we make our way north, to earn a little money here and there.

Her face was a mask of stoic indifference. Roque realized she’d understood instinctively what he hadn’t, there was no way to negotiate out of this. He sat gazing at her, feeling unmanned. El Chusquero eyed her too, but with an almost merry suspicion, while the chittering mass of black bodies continued boiling over one another in their glassed-in world.

Suddenly the Commander reached out, snagged her wrist-not roughly, more like the father of a reticent bride.-And what else, for the sake of your lover’s hands, would you be willing to do for money?

For what felt like an eternity neither of them moved, eyes locked, her breathing feathery from terror, his smile