Do They Know I'm Running

door, he’d meet her in the street.

To his back, Julio said:-If she steals from you, don’t cry to me. The two field workers chimed in with a wheezy little spate of laughter.

From snatches of conversation he’d overheard at the picadero and the bar the past three days, Roque had gathered that the Chamulas were the largest, poorest, most hostile of the Tzotzil tribes in the area. He’d learned too that the name Tzotzil meant “people of the bat;” in their folklore there were ancient stories of black winged creatures who escaped from the mountain caves at night, kidnapping women, eating children, but the old folks said those creatures didn’t exist anymore. The last were seen forty years ago. This was all a grand joke to Julio and his pals. They considered the Indians layabouts, thieves, drunks, which seemed only too predictable, since they themselves were mixed blood.

As Roque reached into his pocket the woman’s eyes never left him, nor did her daughter’s. He could only guess at their respective ages; they seemed not so much mother and child as two reflections of the same idea. He pulled what coins he had and a few wrinkled pesos from his pocket, bought three bags of popcorn from the woman, who clearly wished he’d buy more. That was when the idea came to him.

“Venga conmigo,” he said-Come with me-pronouncing the words slowly, in case her comprehension of Spanish was as rough as her pronunciation.

He led her and her daughter inside the picadero, making a funny face so they wouldn’t be frightened. They entered the ballroom with Apocalypto at its midpoint, the parade of the bound slaves into the limestone city with its clouds of white dust, the bloodthirsty crowd in primitive exotica, the cynical priest in his towering headdress prancing atop the sacrificial ziggurat. Roque clapped his hands loud, shouting, “Oye, cholos.” Hey, guys.

Heads turned, Victor’s among them. People of the bat, Roque thought. He presented the tiny Chamula woman and her daughter.

– What’s a movie without popcorn?

He snatched bags from the woven baskets the woman and her daughter carried and tossed them around the room, gesturing with his finger and thumb that payment was due. As he waited for the money to materialize he suppressed an impulse to add: You clowns want to commune with your Mayan roots? Here she is.

Thirty-One

LOURDES LOCKED HER CAR, TRUDGED UP THE STEEP DRIVE TO THE front door, put her finger to the bell. She glanced once Happy’s direction, despite his having told her not to, not under any circumstances, but why get angry? He knew how scared she was.

They’d bonded, he and Lourdes, talking on and off throughout the night. She’d said he reminded her of a friend of her brother’s she’d known back in Santa Clara del Cobre, a young man who’d gone off to El Norte a short time before she had. She hadn’t seen him since but that was the way it was, you grow up with someone, learn to know them, perhaps come to love them, then they leave to make a better life but for you it’s a kind of death, because so often, almost always, they never come back. Happy had let her go on like that for hours, playing the sympathetic heavy, letting her wear herself out with talk, then watching her sleep balled up like a cat until it was Efraim’s turn to keep an eye on her.

A misty winter dampness filmed the ground, the asphalt, the parked cars. His bones felt like tin from the chill. Strange, he thought, how screwed up his inner barometer had become, all that time in Iraq. Maybe he’d head somewhere good and hot when all this was over.

The front door to the contractor’s house opened, Lourdes said something quick to whoever was there, then vanished inside. Happy racked the Glock’s slide to chamber a round, alerting the others sitting in back to get ready, grab the duffels with the guns. Stuffing the pistol under his belt, he zipped closed his coveralls and glanced at the cell phone on the seat beside him, waiting for it to trill.

“I NO KNOW WHAT I DO WITH IT, VERONICA. MY WATCH, I MEAN. I SO sorry, I feel stupid, I no want bother you.”

Lourdes stood there in the entry, same clothes as yesterday, unwashed hair. I’m a disaster, she thought, remembering the phrase from a movie she’d stayed up to watch a few nights back, the girls in bed so she couldn’t ask them what it meant. She glanced up to check how her script, such as she’d managed it, was playing, at the same time noticing the odd burned smell in the air. “I think I must leave it behind yesterday, when I come and clean. Maybe I look around, I no take time, I promise…”

The smell was smoke. Veronica said, “We had a teeny little accident at the stove this morning.” She was girlishly small and achingly thin, sunken eyes, an insomniac pallor, her head a frizzy eruption of sage-colored hair. The ghost of an angry girl, Lourdes thought, that is what she looks like, what she always looks like. “Samantha has some awful sort of flu, she can’t keep anything down. I was trying to scramble her some eggs.”

Lourdes detected a second smell, the familiar whiff of alcohol, Veronica’s breath, at the same time thinking: The girl is here, I need to tell them. She pointed toward the kitchen. “You need me help you clean?”

Veronica ignored the question, plucking idly at her frayed hair. She tried to chuckle but her voice caught. The self-pity in her eyes splintered. “Charlie’s going to kill me…”

What was she talking about? “Veronica-”

“Christ, he blames me for everything. What am I supposed to do? It was an accident. Okay? If you had any idea what a misery this is, how hard-”

“Veronica, I’m not understand-”

“And for what?” She waved listlessly then laughed so bitterly Lourdes shrank from the sound. “Go on, look around. I haven’t seen your stupid watch but maybe it’s here somewhere.”

Veronica turned toward the kitchen, staggering with her first step, recovering with the next. Then Lourdes’s cell phone rang. Waiting until Veronica was out of earshot, she flipped it open.

– What’s taking so long?

– The girl is here, not just the mother.

In the kitchen, Veronica kicked something metal-a pan, from the sound-across the linoleum floor.

– Where are they in the house?

– The girl is in her room, I think. I have not seen her yet. Veronica is in the kitchen.

– Find out where the girl is.

– The girl, she is sick.

– I understand that, but… What the hell…?

His voice rose sharply then fell away and she heard squealing tires-a car banged into the driveway, chattering brakes, a door slamming. Swallowing the knot in her throat, she drifted toward the picture window, peered past the curtains and saw the husband charging through the drizzle up the walk, hair and necktie flailing in the wind, his face flushed with rage.

Charlie’s going to kill me…

Into the phone, she said:-You see him, he is-

– Stick to your story. I’ll call you back.

The front door slammed open, the husband burst in, breathing through his mouth from the rushed climb up the drive, hair shaggy and damp, skin florid. Spotting Lourdes, he pulled up short. She still held her phone.

“What are you doing here?”

For the merest instant she considered confessing everything, the five vatos outside waiting to rob him, ready to kill him. But she could not trust him to understand. And her girls, what would happen?

“I think,” she announced, “I leave my watch here yesterday. I come back, look for it.”

He’d already abandoned his question, neck craning toward the stairs, the hallway. Veronica drifted out of the kitchen.

He said, “What the hell have you done?”

“I want you to listen,” she began.