David Corbett - Do They Know I'm Running

“Met your uncle, by the way,” he said once the cough was under control. “Nice old dude. Kinda quiet.”

As though in tribute, he said little himself all the way to San Salvador, preferring instead to play the radio, a weak-signal pirate station featuring radical tracks the mainstream outlets wouldn’t touch, hiking the volume when a favorite tune came on: Pescozada’s “Anarquía,” Mecate’s “El Directo,” a punk number by an outfit named Metamorffosis, a dark-wave track by a band called Wired.

Sprawling tracts of sugarcane and bananas vanished into the sunbaked distance. Here and there, women in long skirts and tight black braids pinned laundry up on the barbed wire surrounding their topple-down houses of wood and tin, packs of bone-thin children looking on. Dogs roamed freely, their road-kill quickly set upon by buzzards called zopilotes . Meanwhile, bilingual billboards touting everything from Nine West fashion to the inescapable Whopper popped up over and over along the highway, to the point Roque sometimes wondered if he’d really left Gringolandia at all.

Coming on noon, they arrived at a crabbed and decrepit barrio popular named La Chacra on the ass end of the capital. A grayish soup of dust and car exhaust fouled the air, along with the stench of fermenting trash. The Río Acelhuate, which ran sluggishly through the barrio, was so thick with excrement and toxic waste its mud-brown surface had a purplish glaze.

Sisco slowed to pass a barefoot urchin toddling down the broken pavement, trailing a brood of chickens. A three-story monolith of cinder block rose up at the end of the street, slathered with garish paint, tagged with Mara Salvatrucha graffiti. Scraps of laundry hung limp from rope clotheslines strung along the walkways while salvatruchos clustered on every stair, leaning over the railings, smoking blunts or Marlboros and staring down with suspicion, curiosity, indifference, hate.

Roque tried to picture his mother living in a place like this. Maybe she had before fleeing the war, not that anything would be accomplished if he found out one way or the other. He felt an odd lack of curiosity, being in the land of her birth. No matter what, the absence would remain. There was no secret charm or trick that would cure him. Besides, life wasn’t something you cured. You lived it. Mariko taught him that much, before kicking him to the curb.

He grabbed his knapsack, shouldered it, patted his pockets for what seemed the thousandth time, checking to be sure he had his passport, then followed Sisco across the street to a squat tin-roof house. At the door Sisco knocked twice, waited until the plate at the judas hole slid back, then presented himself to the disembodied eye peering out. “C’mon, Slobnoxious, abierto .” A clatter of bolts and chains, then the door edged open, revealing a short broad shovel-nosed guanaco Roque’s age, maybe a year younger, wearing no shirt, baggy Dickies tugged down below his boxers, a Yankees cap kicked left atop his head.

The kid eyed Roque up and down, then stepped aside, gesturing them into a low-ceilinged room, empty except for two wood chairs and a haphazard array of car-seat cushions. A smell of stale grease and cheap weed lingered. A spray-paint roll call of the local clica , Los Putos Bravos, covered one whole wall: Bug, Chega, Lonely… Pepón, Snorky, Budú… Timo, Malote, Slick…

Suddenly Sisco’s eyes lit up. “Wait-your last name’s Montalvo, right?” He cast a quick glance at Roque, then the doorman’s Yankee’s cap. “Roque Montalvo.”

It sounded like a trick question. Roque nodded uneasily.

“Come on, you know what I’m talking about. Salvadoran dude. Same name. Plays center field for the Red Sox?”

He waited, checking Roque’s face, then the doorman’s, like the coincidence wasn’t just curious, it was meaningful-he expected the two strangers to square off, share a little heat, some New York-Boston bullshit. Then Roque realized it was the colors: blue, red. A gang thing. Seconds passed. Everybody gaped at everybody else.

Finally Sisco broke the spell, slapping Roque’s arm. “Just messing with you, homes. Ain’t no Roque Montalvo plays for the Red Sox.”

Turning away, he chested his thumbs, tenting his Cardinals T-shirt. “And the Steelers won the Super Bowl. Welcome to fucking El Salvador.”

AT THE END OF THE LONG HALL AN OPEN DOORWAY LED INTO WHAT appeared to be a makeshift recording studio, the walls of the room stapled with cheap acoustic foam. That was when Roque saw her for the first time.

She was seated on a milk crate in the far corner, knees clenched tight, fists tucked beneath her arms. She had the slinky build of a dancer, a graceful neck, two dark moles dotting the hollow of her throat. Her lips were ripe and womanly but real, not plumped by a needle. She wore a white cotton top, jeans, sandals, her long black hair parted on one side and tied into a ponytail-a simple look, Roque thought, but this was no simple girl. She was a pichona , a stone beauty, and yet beneath the cocky edge he sensed damage, her face almost feral in its blankness, the mark of some thug’s backhand darkening her cheek.

Roque guessed the thug in question was one of the two sitting at the desk backed up against the wall, the pair of them watching a video track on a twenty-four-inch wide-screen iMac G5.

It wasn’t the only big-ticket toy in the room. He noticed as well a Sony camcorder, a Butterscotch Blonde Stratocaster with a Vibrolux Reverb amp, a Martin Marquis acoustic, a Korg Triton keyboard, a Digidesign 003 control surface, JBL monitors, Bluebird microphones. He realized now why so much had been made of his being musical. He was here to work.

Sisco caught a glance at what the other two were watching and drifted in behind, leaning toward the monitor. A snarling vocal track-just voices, the usual gassy blustering bullshit, half-assed hip-hop-droned from the JBLs. Roque let his knapsack slip from his shoulder and traded a quick glance with the girl, who regarded him with the same cold fear and barely disguised hate she directed toward the others. I’m not one of them, he wanted to tell her. Given what he’d come to El Salvador to do, though, and who he’d have to deal with to get it done, he wasn’t quite sure how true that was.

Finally, one of the two mareros at the table cocked his head around to take in Roque. He was somewhere in his twenties, wearing a pale blue polo shirt with tan slacks, as though on break from the sales floor at Circuit City. His face told another story, though: narrow, almost Jesuitical, a pampered goatee, intelligent eyes.

The other cat was huge, shaved head, weight-lifter pop to his muscles, shirtless like the doorman, all that skin ribboned with freak-show ink from his skull down to his waist. To his credit, it wasn’t the usual garish chaos. The designs seemed to cohere, with a theme involving dark towers, billowing flames, redemptive lilies.

Glancing at the monitor, Roque realized much of the video had been shot in the front room and featured the tattooed giant, with Sisco and the doorman and the Jesuit popping up here and there among nameless others, all of them vamping in poses of clichéd menace, posturing wildly, throwing placas -inverting the devil’s horn hand sign to form an M for Mara Salvatrucha-brandishing chrome.45s and ivory-handled nunchuks, a wicked collection of knives, a sawed-off pistol-grip shotgun, assault rifles, even a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. Roque glanced around the room for the weapons, saw none. He had no clue what to make of that.

As for the video, he’d seen dozens like it, the Web was crawling with them. Surprising, he thought, given what he knew of guys like this, that they hadn’t added a shot of the girl’s jacked-up face. Maybe they were saving that for a later take.