David Corbett - Do They Know I'm Running

Salgado bit open a gravy packet. “You’re a fool you think it’s gonna stay that way.”

“Maybe you should wait, give this team its due.”

Salgado licked a smear of brown gunk off his finger. “Say you’re right, cabrón . Don’t change the fact they be looking to deport your whole fucking family before you get home.”

“Too late.” Godo chuckled acidly. “They already snatched my cousin.” It’s the reason I’m here, he thought, but why share that?

Salgado fired up that crazed stare he was known for, like his focus was the only thing keeping the world from coming unglued. “Then you know. You fucking know. What you do over here don’t translate to shit. For real, man, ain’t no fucking brown heroes. You go home in a box they’ll kick the damn thing over into Mexico for burial.”

“I’m not Mexican.”

“You know what I’m saying.”

It was the two of them manning the forward positions that morning at the checkpoint, Gunny Benedict staggered behind. Pimentel had their six. They stopped every vehicle and demanded access cards and weapon permits, especially the bongo trucks-cutaway VW vans, a favorite of the so-called desert foxes, generally friendly paramilitaries who wore chocolate chip cammies, flak vests, balaclavas. The unit’s BOLO list included not just the names of the Harmon Stern contractors but several dozen suspected insurgents, any of whom, if encountered at the checkpoint, were to get gagged and bagged and delivered to RCT-1 HQ.

The night had been relatively quiet, though, only a couple cases of misunderstanding, taken care of when Godo or Salgado, having their shout-and-show ignored, moved to shoot: a warning round at the deck each time, one follow-up bullet to the grill of a Mercedes sedan that refused to slow down. The driver was an old man, confused-he jabbered and wept when they dragged him out of the car, threw him down in the dust for a search. The rest of the night they threw back Rip Its and tamped foot to foot, slapping their arms and bodies trying to stay warm, chipping away at the silence between them with practice of the little Arabic they knew: O-guf! Tera armeek for “Stop! Or I’ll shoot;” Interesiada for “Get out of the car;” Urfai edik for “Put your hands up;” Inshallah for “Allah be willing;” and their personal nonoperational favorites: kus (“pussy”), zip (“penis”), theiz (“ass”).

Traffic started picking up about 0500 and got increasingly jammed as dawn leached across the sky. The family in the Cressida with the one working headlight reached the head of the line and Salgado stepped forward, asking the driver for documents. Godo eyed the rest of the queue, five vehicles deep, his weapon in condition one: a chambered round, bolt forward, ejection-port cover closed, safety on. He was ready to thumb down the safety at the merest hint of trouble and was in a bad mood regardless, the days on end without washing during the siege having created a case of cancer-level crotch rot, lingering for weeks now. He’d scratched himself bloody in his sleep, only making things worse, so now he was obsessively rousting himself awake at night, lurching up in his bedroll if he was lucky enough to drift off at all. He hadn’t slept more than twenty minutes at a stretch since he couldn’t remember when and in the semi-hallucinatory edginess that had come to characterize his state of mind, he often found himself revisiting Mobley’s death, the house they turned to smoke and ruin afterward. It wasn’t the fiery itch from his balls to his ass crack or the war in general or the idiot command or the ungrateful locals or even the pitiless creeps they called the enemy that kept Godo so pissed off lately. It wasn’t even the nagging dead or the skeletal dogs they seemed to inhabit. It was the fact that, after weeks of shabby sleep, he couldn’t feel the center of himself anymore. He had this daydream in which he was a kite that someone had let go of, God maybe, this little jet of bright paper and balsa wood bucking around in a cold wind, just a matter of time before it came crashing down.

Back in the here and now, though, there was nothing especially screwy to get worked up about. The slender Iraqi in the coin-gray suit behind the wheel of the Cressida was merely slow, not suspicious, fumbling for his documents with his wife beside him, two kids in the back.

It was that lack of zip, though, that upset the Chevy Blazer right behind. The driver started hammering his horn, five blasts, ten-it only upset the slowpoke father more, his wife in her hijāb headscarf craning around to squint into the headlight glare. Then the Blazer surged up and out, jockeying forward to squeeze past the Cressida, nudging the bumper and flattening Salgado against the driver-side door.

Godo charged into the SUV’s path and shouldered his sixteen. Chavous fired off an air burst from the Humvee’s.50cal, tracers flaring into the ash-brown sky in a hypnotic arc, landing somewhere near the camel. Godo called out, “Whoa the fuck, asshole,” and the Blazer finally lurched to a stop, kicking up a shower of pebbled dust. Turning his face away, he saw the same emaciated dog, closer now, trembling beside the Hummer’s rear wheel. He resisted an impulse to reach down to his crotch and dig at his itch, at the same time feeling something unclick along his spine, a shimmer of pent-up rage shooting through him and he had to check the safety on his weapon, fearing he might fire out of pure gall. He hacked up an egg-size clot of crusty air, spat, checked again to be sure Chavous had him covered, then eased toward the Blazer’s driver-side door, shouting, “The fuck you thinking, shit dick?”

The driver cranked down his window: older cat, maybe fifty, wire-gray hair, probably police back home, maybe a vet, eyes a bloodshot brown, mustache and sideburns straight out of Death Wish . “Got a convoy out at Akashat, they’re a squad short. Thing’s gotta move in an hour. Let us through.”

“Akashat? You’re heading the wrong way.”

“We got another man to pick up. Come on. Serious. We got exactly no time to waste.”

Oh boo the fuck hoo, Godo thought, fighting a sudden twitch in his eye. Somewhere in the distance a chopper rotored over the city, invisible in the swirling dust and russet sky. Behind him the dog made a thin mewling sound. “Back the fuck up to where you were or you’ll spend the whole damn day here.”

Salgado, jacked up from almost getting run over, blistered the Cressida’s driver with obscenities, like it was all his fault.

The Blazer’s wheelman said to Godo, “Look-”

“You jumped the goddamn line.”

“You hear me? There’s a convoy, ready to move-”

“Access cards and permits.” Godo shot out his hand, glancing past the driver at the others. The guy in the passenger seat looked half in the bag, sunglasses staring straight ahead, weapon clenched between his knees. Behind him sat the rest of the team, three men abreast in the backseat, equally hungover from the general slump and cast of their eyes, every one of them dressed in the same contractor drag, like there was a store out there somewhere in the desert where they all got outfitted.

Gunny Benedict duck-walked forward to calm Salgado down and provide a forward presence. A gust of keening wind sugared everything in grit.

“Listen.” The Blazer driver leaned forward, like it was the distance between them causing the trouble. “Time window’s closing here.”

In a moment of insomniac, rage-laced weirdness, Godo pictured the man growing a snout. “You with Harmon Stern?”

The driver’s jaw tightened. The bloodshot eyes turned hard. “What’s your problem?”

Good as a yes, Godo thought. “Access cards and permits.”