Do They Know I'm Running

hell ain’t gonna make it right you walk in there tomorrow looking for payback. It’s a job. We gotta keep it clean. Somebody gets hurt, the whole thing spins outta control and we’re seriously fucked that happens. Keep it simple. We’re jacking an asshole, period. He’s smart, he hands everything up, everybody lives for another day, right? He’s stupid, we improvise. I’m betting he’s smart. And I’m betting he’s not your guy. Even if he was, he wasn’t the one driving, right, the prick who got in your face?”

Godo was gnawing on his lip. “Maybe he was one of the guys on our BOLO list.”

“So what if he was? Besides, that was true, you’d remember the name.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Godo winced, feeling lost. “I dunno…”

Happy sucked on his cigarette, face turning red in the ash glow. “Sure you do. You’re just blocking it out because you want to get even.”

“Listen, there were rumors of counterfeit access cards being used by some of the contractors, access levels jacked up to G-15, gave them the right to enter weapon storage. They’d get their hands on Russian and Iranian stuff, MAG-58s and AKMs, some German MP5s, sell it on the black market there. I wonder if this guy didn’t figure a way to get stuff like that shipped over. You hear what I’m saying?”

“Godo-”

“It makes sense. Admit it, it’s possible.”

“Fuck, anything is possible. Look, put it to rest, man. It’s over, you’ve talked it out. It don’t have the power over you no more. It can’t. Am I right?”

Godo knew what answer Happy was after, felt less sure he could give it to him. But he nodded assent, wanting not to talk about it anymore. Another rush of wind rocked the branches of the walnut trees, a chorus of whispers. Glancing toward the house, he thought he saw, beyond the rubbery lantern glow through the picture window, a small tumbling shadow flutter up and away from under the eaves. An exorcised demon, maybe. He couldn’t shake the feeling it was the wrong demon.

Thirty

THE NOONDAY SUN HAMMERED SHADOWS TO THE GROUND LIKE sheets of tin, while inside the musty room a slow trail of furry brown ants caravanned along the wall. Roque sat hunched at the window, squinting into the light, chin resting on his crossed arms, waiting for the Chamula woman to come along, the one who came down from her paraje in the hills every day to sell firewood or chickens or her specialty: popcorn. Las palomitas, she called it. Little doves.

She was one of three distractions he’d found for himself in as many days, holed up in Arriaga at this so-called hotel. In truth, the place was a picadero, a cross between a flophouse and a shooting gallery, where his contact, a nod named Victor, hung out with his fellow salvatruchos and spike-jockeys all day.

It was a testament to the fear the mareros instilled in the locals, despite the druggy excesses, that Roque could park the Corolla on the street with no fear of its being messed with. Even the cops and vigilantes, not to mention the dozens of strangers straggling through town, knew enough to give it a wide berth. Still, he kept the distributor cap locked up in the trunk and watched the car whenever he could, fearing that the one time he let his guard down would be exactly when something happened.

The second distraction he’d afforded himself since arriving came courtesy of a dog-eared Peterson Field Guide, left behind in Julio’s taberna down the street by a birder trekking through the area. Roque paged through the color plates with bored devotion, mesmerized by the otherworldly names: loons, honeycreepers, limpkins and coots, jacanas and nightjars-also known as goatsuckers-bushtits and trogons and black chachalacas.

The mystery of the thing was this: The birds seemed to exist nowhere but inside the book. The only winged creatures he’d seen in town were vultures and blackbirds: grackles and cowbirds, if he’d identified them correctly, the latter being a brood parasite, explaining why it had driven off virtually every other species, pushing them up into the mountains.

Kill the young, he thought. The key to success.

He missed the guitar, its stubborn tuning, its thin sound. He remembered the clanging racket it made when Chepito’s sidekick smashed it against the roof, the Corolla barreling down the crowded street, horn blasting, scattering the fairgoers. It taught him something, that escape. The importance of idiot will. Refusing to give in. He felt a little larger in spirit now, a little bolder, a little more buxo, as Tia Lucha would put it-quick on his feet.

There was nothing quick here, just tedium. He’d asked Victor if he could buy a disposable cell phone somewhere to check in with Happy, maybe even talk with Tia Lucha, but the idea got nixed.-No such thing as wiretaps or warrants here, Victor had said, cops just listen in whenever they fucking feel like it. Forget a cell until you’re north of Oaxaca. Roque had wanted to respond: Right, and you guys communicate how? But it seemed best not to push it, the same way asking too many questions felt not just stupid but dangerous. Still, he missed everybody. It would be ten o’clock there, two hours behind. Tia would be at work. God only knew where Happy or Godo might be.

Again he glanced up and down the street, hoping to spot the Chamula woman. The first time he’d seen her, she’d been wearing a black-and-white poncho, typical of the women from San Juan Chamula, so he’d been told, and she’d carried a few chickens by their feet, a bundle of firewood on her back, an infant strapped to her chest with two more clinging to her skirt. The next time, yesterday, she’d been dressed in traditional Mayan traje, a boldly colored china poblana skirt, a lavishly embroidered overblouse called a huipil. That was when he’d seen her selling her little doves. He couldn’t say for sure why that had moved him so deeply but he’d gone down, bought several greasy bags of cold rubbery popcorn off her. It wasn’t peanut butter but it would do.

In the easterly distance a virginal sky topped the alpine highlands and cliff-scarred plateaus. Corn and sorghum fields checkered the lowlands all the way to the marigold fields nearer town. The yellow of their blossoms, he’d learned, was considered the shade of death. It looked so welcoming here. The flower fields yielded to the garbage dump on the town’s edge, which in turn gave way to the sprawling rail yard with its tumbledown station across the street, its adobe walls slathered with graffiti.

Glancing one last time up and down the empty sun-blasted street, Roque finally decided it was time to check in with Victor.

He was holding court in the spacious room on the ground floor that the picadero’s denizens grandly called the ballroom. The windows were covered with ragged sheets of tacked-up plastic, creating a stuffy gloom. The spikes were all male, half a dozen or so in all, varying in age from around twelve-kill the young, Roque reminded himself-to mid-thirties, sprawled on soiled mattresses or just bedsheets scattered across the floor, the muchachos bleary from smack or just there to watch TV, an old Sony with a built-in DVD player perched on cinder blocks in the corner. A few salvatruchos were hanging out as well, shirtless, their torsos black and red with tattoos, contenting themselves with beer or chicha, a fiery corn liquor sold everywhere.

Victor, tragically handsome, sculpted bone and nappy hair, sprawled sideways in the room’s only armchair, black-soled feet dangling over the arm and bobbing lazily as he dug beneath his nails with a hairpin. His eyelids hung at half-mast, jaw slack, a white plastic rosary draped around his neck. A pirated DVD of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto was playing on the TV, and as far as Roque could tell, the picadero gang watched little else, mesmerized by all that color-saturated sadism, the cool tattoos and wicked costumes, the spooky nihilism and debauched scarification and ooga-booga religiosity, as though it weren’t box-office bullshit but a kind of Mayan home movie.

Meanwhile, two salvatruchos near the doorway where Roque stood were going back and forth with the latest horror stories.

– Yesterday these five pollos got shaken down in broad daylight by some local cops, right? Out front of the church. Then guess what-those cops got jacked by state cops not five minutes later.