David Corbett - Do They Know I'm Running

“I’m not fucking around. I don’t care where he’s been. Or what happened.” Chuck’s eyes flicked over to Godo’s face, jittered back. “He gets his shit in check or this is over.”

Godo basked in the power, the situation his to dictate. What did he care if Puchi and Chato scored another AK or two? Chuck looked like he might bolt for the door, Puchi seething in silence, Efraim just sitting there, arms crossed tight. Chato, in a world of his own, fiddled with his straw, making soft trumpet sounds with his lips.

“You think I’m just messing with you?” Godo laced his fingers behind his head. “We had trouble with Harmon Stern, not just once or twice. All the time. They were like a cancer in Al Anbar when I was there. This one time in particular, they shot two unarmed hajis for sport, the two guys just working on their pickup along the road to Ramadi. We dealt with the blowback for days. Had a fucking riot on our hands.”

“That’s got nothing to do with me,” Chuck said, a little stronger now.

“Convince me.”

“Convince you?”

“Yeah. And don’t be so touchy.”

Chuck dropped his butt on the floor, crushed it with his boot. “You think I’m touchy?” He leaned forward, fists on the tabletop. The inwardness had fled. “I get sick of Molly Mopes shitting on what we did. You were there? Then you know as well as I do there was damn near no way to tell a good haji from a muj. You could talk to a guy one day, he’s friendly as a foot massage, that night you catch him carrying gasoline out to the highway to soften the asphalt, bury an IED. You want to fault somebody for shooting two guys by the side of the road? Listen up-unless you were there at that instant, unless you knew what the intel was, unless you know what those two hajis did, how suddenly they moved, how they acted right before the trigger got pulled, unless and until you know all that, you don’t know dick. And guess what, I don’t care how bad things turned after. That means nothing. Those people used any excuse they could to bitch about what we were trying to do. Ungrateful shitbags most of them. But we had a job to do and we did it. We didn’t lose one package we were hired to protect. Not one. I owe nobody an apology, least of all you.”

Godo waited for a second, watching as, across the room, the towheaded girl and her walrus of a mother attacked their food. “My gunny got killed because of fuckups like you.”

“That’s it.” Chuck shoved the bad hand back in its pocket. “I don’t need this.” He turned toward the door and stormed out, Puchi watching his back as though waiting for that magic point when he’d stop, cool off, rethink it, come back in, if only to give Godo a ration of shit. But that didn’t happen. The guy who called himself Chuck, the man Godo felt almost certain he remembered now, if not him some guy just like him, climbed into his plain gray van and peeled out so fast his rear axle leapt almost a foot off the ground when it tagged a high-crested buckle in the blacktop. The other parking-lot shoppers stopped everything, staring after the van as it fishtailed away.

Puchi turned back to Godo, eyes glazed with fury. “Vasco’s gonna have your balls for that.”

EL CHUSQUERO, AS HIS HENCHLINGS CALLED HIM-THE COMMANDER-took great pride in his wooden English. “I ask only, you know, because it look so, yes? You…” He winked, flourishing his hand back and forth between Roque and Lupe. “And she…”

He had a meaty face with sleep-lidded eyes, an oft-broken nose that sloped back to a glistening forehead. His thinning black hair rustled in the downdraft from the ceiling fan. He wore a blue guayabera and khaki slacks, the crease as straight as a blade.

They were seated in his office, painted a stark white and located at the back of a traditional thick-walled house, his headquarters. The only furnishings in the room were his desk with its leather swivel chair, a huge Guatemalan flag hanging behind him on the wall and two wood chairs for Roque and Lupe.

He was the leader of the gunmen who’d come to their rescue out at the roadblock in the hills. Who he and those men were, exactly, remained somewhat foggy, though it seemed obvious by now they weren’t exactly Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

The desk was arrayed with a yard-long cord of rope with two close knots in it-the better to crush the windpipe of your victim, or so the Commander had explained during their leisurely afternoon together-plus a stretch of piano wire tied to two blocks of wood, a modest if chilling collection of knives, a bayonet honed to razor sharpness, a machete similarly seasoned, a set of nunchuks, even a length of chain he called a pirulo . An overreliance on firearms was the mark of an amateur, he’d remarked at one point, wanting to be thought of as muy matón , 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 cáscaras de café , 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 .