David Corbett - Do They Know I'm Running

Fucking place is an open-air gun mart, Godo thought, wondering if any of the players out there were ATF. “How long till your guy shows up?”

Puchi leaned down to his straw like he was snorting a rail. “Ask me when he gets here.”

Godo belched into his fist, looking off. The moon-faced girl was counting change into the palm of a washed-out, splay-footed woman whose body cascaded fat. Her stretch pants matched her hair curlers. Beside her, a bone-thin towheaded girl sucked on her fingers while bumping mindlessly against her mother’s slab of a thigh. It looked like some sort of gag, the two of them together, especially with the moon-faced girl in the head scarf standing just beyond them, that breathtaking smile, the cash register a kind of shield, protect her from the white trash. She reminded Godo of someone, the counter girl, the memory just out of reach at first. Finally, it crystallized: Mobley, Jam Slammer Mo, his squaddie with the hip-hop battle anthems, Outkast’s “Call the Law” the hands-down favorite, bellowing the words into the teeth of the shamal sandstorms from his perch at the Humvee’s turret:

Just grab my gun, and let’s go out Grab my gun, and let’s go out

Godo spotted the two grenades rolling toward them across the concrete floor and had time to shout out, everybody charging back at flash speed, diving for cover, but Mobley was dragging the SAW, those two-hundred-round ammo drums. The explosions tag-teamed, a sheering white one-two thunderclap followed by AK fire from somewhere near the back of the house, muzzle flashes crackling through the smoke and dust. Godo and Chavous answered with suppression fire, Gunny Benedict crawled forward toward Mobley’s screams. The blast had ripped his leg in two, just above the knee, the arteries torn like thread. He bled out so fast he was convulsing from shock by the time Gunny reached him. Calling for a corpsman was pointless. Mobley was dead before they could drag him into the courtyard, the severed half leg still inside the house.

Call the law, and hold the applause

“Hey dude, she asked you a question.”

It was Puchi. Godo glanced up, saw everyone grinning, not kindly. At the table’s edge, the moon-faced girl stood there waiting.

“I just axed if you’d like a refill on your soda,” she said.

Her voice was soft and more feminine than her size suggested. Gazing up into her face, framed by its veil, he searched for what it was that reminded him of Mobley, feeling vaguely ashamed, as though at some level his mind still believed they really did all look alike.

“Yes,” Godo said, a whisper. “Please. A refill would be nice.”

“It’s a dollar,” she said.

He dug into his pocket for the bill, thinking: ax. Who was it in the squad that used to tease Mobley about that? I axed you nicely. Don’t make me ax you again.

He handed her the money and watched her bobbing hips as she ambled away. Girl can work it till you jerk it, he thought, veil or no veil. He wondered if she felt disgusted by his face.

The night Mobley died, army psyops crews roamed the city in their Humvees, cranking out the deafening sounds of men and women screaming, cats fighting, Guns N’ Roses: “Welcome to the Jungle.” The favorite, though, was a gut-knotting laugh, the creature from Predator , played with amped-up bass at a hundred decibels, echoing off the pavement and the concrete walls of the pillbox houses and apartment buildings, like the voice of some cut-rate god.

“Hey hey hey.” Puchi nodded toward the parking lot, sucking loud on his straw, the dregs of his Pepsi. A gray windowless van had just pulled in. “Here comes business.”

Watching as the driver got out and crossed the parking lot, Godo took notice of how underwhelming the man was. Among the contractors he’d met in Iraq, a fair number had come from special forces backgrounds; they’d kept up with the PT, rock-hard bodies, switchblade minds. Cocky, sure, but sometimes you just had to grant that. There were plenty of others, though, who’d simply grabbed the back of the gravy train and refused to let go, slack habits, washed-out eyes, the mouthy swagger of small men: users, gasbags, phonies. They didn’t just lack fire discipline; they used their weapons like bug spray. Everything about them stank of self-delusion and the fear of weakness.

The man pulled a chair from another table and sat near Puchi, neither close enough to be part of the circle nor far enough away to seem too much a prick. He wore work boots and cargo pants, with a khaki T-shirt underneath a frayed cammie combat blouse, the name tape removed. That alone was enough to make Godo hate him. His eyes were smallish and filmy green while his skin had a raw red quality just short of a rash. He had a wisp of a mustache blurring his lip and a fistful of sag hiding his belt. His left eye drooped, suggesting some sort of nerve damage, and his left hand trembled till he jammed it in his pocket, which he did the instant he caught Godo’s stare.

Puchi did introductions. The man went by Chuck. He tugged a cigarette from a pack lodged in his shirt pocket and lit up right there, using a yellow Bic. No one behind the counter so much as frowned, let alone told him to put it out; they seemed to be ignoring him, actually. Christ, Godo thought, maybe he owns the place.

“We had a chance to float the boat a little,” Puchi said, slipping into some prearranged code. “I’d say everybody was happy.”

“Not quite,” Godo said, squaring himself in his seat. He’d been wondering how the guy got the weapons in. He’d heard tales of GIs sawing off the bottoms of oxygen tanks, slipping the AKs in, welding the bottoms back on, then loading them into shipping crates for transport back to their unit’s home base, all but impossible to track to a specific soldier. Maybe Chuck here had a guy in uniform working for him, easier that way, no customs. Godo felt certain that, if he asked, he’d only get a lie for his trouble.

Improvising, just to see where it went, he said, “You get the guns in Iraq, that’s one thing. If that’s where you get the ammo too, there’s a problem. Saddam’s factories got sloppy packing cartridges, it’s why they had so many misfires. So the weapons, fine.

Ammunition? Unless it’s Czech or Cuban, Yugoslav, anything but Iraqi, we’re not in the market.”

The guy named Chuck tapped ash onto the floor. His gaze was watery and a little off-center with the sagging left eye. He turned to Puchi. “What’s this guy talking about? You can buy a 7.62 round anywhere.”

“Not the quantity we want,” Godo said. “Not without red flags everywhere.”

Chuck turned to him, squinting against his cigarette smoke. “I don’t know you,” he said, half matter-of-fact, half insulting.

Godo mocked up a smile. “Sure you do. All the guys at Harmon Stern knew me.”

Chuck blinked, turning his cigarette in his fingers. His left hand still sat tucked away, safe in his pocket. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You guys came through my checkpoint four times a day.”

Chuck shot Puchi a glance. “What’s he going on about now?”

Puchi shrugged. “He worked over there. Like you.”

“So what?”

“Harmon Stern Associates.” Godo rocked back in his chair a little. “Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Chuck took a short tense drag on his smoke. “I didn’t work with that outfit.”

No doubt the guy’s lying, Godo thought. Too vague, too interior. “You sure about that?”

Chuck stood up, said to Puchi, “This is fucked up.”

“Don’t let him bug you, man.” Puchi waved toward Godo like that might make him go away. “He came back with kind of an attitude. Not like he’s the only one, am I right?”