David Corbett - Do They Know I'm Running

Happy looked at his sleeve as though discovering for the first time he had an arm. “Cut it on the glass.” He pressed his hand to the bloody cloth. “You?”

PERCHED IN THE VAN’S PASSENGER SEAT, CHATO COULDN’T HELP HIMSELF, lifting his hand to slap high fives, grinning like the luckiest guy alive. Puchi, behind the wheel, obliged him distractedly, offering him a raised palm. Godo and Happy, the wounded, sat in back with Efraim, who rummaged through the duffel bags filled with weapons they’d taken off the walls of the cellar room. They’d left the safe alone-why risk a second blast?-even passed on the desk and the display cabinet, anything with a door, not worth it, scrambling to grab what was there in plain view. But that was a haul. They’d come for weapons and needed something to show for their trouble. They’d left the girl and the two women tied hand and foot, made sure their gags were tight, gathered up all the cell phones and cut the cord on every landline they found.

Happy, squeezing the cut on his arm, trying to stanch the blood, thought of Lourdes. Asking her to bear up with just a robbery in the picture was one thing, especially given who the target was, but they’d left a body behind and it wasn’t just Happy the law would come after. The whole crew was looking at felony homicide. That’d wipe the smile off Chato’s face, once he got his head around what it meant. And sure, Crockett was small-time, locals hadn’t seen this big a thing in who knew how long, but that just meant they’d call in the wise men. Word would reach Lattimore faster than rats up a rope. And they’d grind poor Lourdes down, no way she’d hold out. And that meant no immunity, no citizenship, no nothing. He’d gambled, a long shot, no point crying. But it meant going on the run. That’s how quick, he thought, the future dies. Not that he didn’t know that already.

He glanced toward Godo. The burned hand was sickly red in places, charred in others, blisters bubbling up. He sat there flexing it, open, closed, wincing from the pain but not stopping, staring at the thing like he could heal it with his mind alone. That was Godo. Pity the ugly fucker, the guy was nothing if not stubborn. God knows he could take punishment and he had the instincts of a puma-who else could have stuck his arm in that hole and not lost the whole damn thing? Too bad it wouldn’t count for more.

At the farmhouse they split up. Chato and Puchi kept the van, taking the weapons to Vasco with a report on why there wasn’t more. Efraim drove off in his own car. Godo and Happy lingered in the rusted Ford pickup with the Arizona plates.

Neither spoke for what felt like an eternity, Happy sitting with his keys in his lap, Godo still working his hand like a prosthetic he couldn’t quite get the hang of. The sky remained leaden and the wind blew from the north but the rain had stopped. Blue jays cawed in the walnut trees. A splintering shaft of sunlight broke through a coral-hued, cuquita-shaped gash in the cloud cover, like something off a pornographic prayer card.

“The guy back there,” Happy said finally, “the guy I killed-was that really the cat you thought he was? You know the one I mean. At the checkpoint.”

Godo stopped messing with his hand for a moment, staring out the windshield. A blue jay buzzed something zigzagging through the tall grass, a ground squirrel probably, maybe a vole. He shrugged. “Won’t bring Gunny Benedict back if it was.”

“That wasn’t really why I asked.”

“The man deserved what he got. If that’s any comfort. And if not, it should be.”

Happy watched a second jay join the first, dive-bombing their invisible prey. “I can’t stick around here,” he said.

With his good hand Godo reached into the pocket of his coveralls, took out a bandanna, and wiped away some fluid leeching out of his blisters. “Take me with you.”

“You need that hand looked after.”

“The hand’s a fucking giveaway. Once the cops talk to the girl they’ll check every ER in the state, then move on to every state nearby.”

“There’s clinics that’ll keep it quiet.”

“Not once this thing hits the news.”

Happy felt the usual boil of nausea churning in his gut. “I’m heading to Mexico.”

“I can handle that.” Godo wrapped the bandanna around his charred and blistered hand, fashioned a knot using his good hand and his teeth. “We’ll get my guns and meds at the trailer.”

“Your hand like that? What good are your guns?”

“The hand’ll heal. Till then, you can shoot.” He smiled, remembering. “I couldn’t see much of what happened, but I saw the result. Brought the fucking heat, primo.”

Happy shook his head. “I can’t go back to the trailer. Don’t wanna risk running into Tía Lucha. Don’t want to explain, don’t want any naggy fucking bullshit, I just-”

With his good hand, Godo reached across the space between them, touched Happy’s wounded arm. The sleeve was crusty with dried blood. “She’s at work.”

“I can’t look after you.”

“I don’t expect you to.”

Happy felt like he was swirling down a drain. “You can’t leave a note for Tía, neither. You leave a note, she’ll just go off, you know how she does. Better she doesn’t know.”

Godo turned away, looking out at the barn pocked with bullet holes, the grassy hills beyond, the lurid downshaft of light. He began to whistle a gentle tune and after a second Happy recognized it, “Canción de Cuna,” a lullaby Roque had practiced damn near to death when he was first learning guitar. It used to drive Godo batshit. Funny, him thinking of it now.

Godo said, “They tell you in basic that, first time you’re in combat, you’re gonna experience this thing called battle distortion. Time comes to a stop. Or you see things so clear it’s like they’re magnified or some shit. Maybe all of a sudden your memory goes blank. Some guys hallucinate, I fucking kid you not. Nothing like a squaddie with a SAW tearing up shit that isn’t there. But I had none of that. I had this weird disconnect between sight and sound, I could see okay but my hearing cut out, not entirely, but like I’d plugged up my ears real bad somehow. And in that, like, silence I heard the tune I was just whistling, the one Roque used to play. And you know what? It calmed me down. I told myself I wasn’t gonna die, I couldn’t die, I had to come home, tell Roque what’d happened. I had to come home for Tía and your dad. I didn’t feel so scared then.”

Happy remembered the ambush on his convoy, the numbness he didn’t recognize as blind terror till after. He hadn’t thought of the family at all. That only came later, death and its lessons, wanting to make things up to the old man, wanting to do good by him, show him he understood now, the sacrifice, the love. “Why tell me this?”

Godo turned, eyes like stones in the hamburger face. “I know you don’t want me along, Pablo. But you can’t leave me behind. Not with this.” He presented the wrapped hand. “And no way I’m doing time, not on Vasco’s ticket. Bad enough these scars, the fucking leg. But I was the one who got you sent away the first time. I can’t face your old man again, tell him one more time, Hey Tío, your son’s fucked, guess who’s to blame.” He reached out again for his cousin’s arm, laid his hand gently near the wound. “We’ll meet up with your dad and Roque in some cantina before they cross the border, one last boys’ night out, all of us together. We’ll figure out if this haji friend of yours is for real. Right?”

He withdrew the hand and slapped the old Ford’s dash, lifting a whisper of dust.

“Come on, cabrón . Drive.”

THE FOUR OF THEM ARRIVED ON THE BUS A LITTLE AFTER SUN-DOWN, caked with road grime, wobbly from hunger and thirst but with fewer bug bites than the last crossing. They took turns in a bathroom upstairs, splashing water around, faces, torsos, armpits, while Beto made it clear they were stopping only momentarily. They needed to make Juchitán as soon as possible; from there he’d know which route they would take north through Oaxaca and beyond.