Do They Know I'm Running? (12 page)

“Vasco—”

“He can teach us things. Things we’ll need to know, in case the
norteños
don’t pack off to Sonoma all peaceful.”

“Vasco, listen. I mean it, Godo’s damaged, way more than you know. He can’t remember dick one moment to the next, his mind wanders, he makes shit up—”

“Okay,” Vasco cut in, leaning forward, his voice a whisper, “now it’s time you listen to me,
chero
. Godo comes in, gives the boys some weapons training, some tactics for protection, you hear where I’m going. Or be my guest, shop this can of worms around. Because you know and I know that anybody who bites is going to bitch you down to five points at best, or just push you aside altogether, maybe worse, when the thing is up and running. Here, you got a history. Nobody’s gonna turn you out. But there’s a price to that, right? Godo comes on board. This is not negotiable. I’m not so stupid I don’t know you brought this here first because this is where you wanna be. I don’t blame you. I’m grateful, matter of fact. And I’m not saying Godo steps up and pitches in somehow, helps us lean on anybody. Unless, of course, he’s okay with that. But the guys respect him, he knows things we don’t. So that’s the way it is, or yeah, I’m gonna pass. And I’m not handing thirty grand to nobody till I meet a real live human being, not just you, who can vouch that this isn’t a jar of smoke. The guy who owns this warehouse you talked about, maybe.”

Happy suddenly found himself wondering what Vasco’s stint in Folsom had been like, how many nights he’d suffered through the kind of thing the
mareros
had inflicted amid the mayonnaise jars in the cell at Mariona. “I can try to arrange a meet. Probably not with the warehouse guy, not until you’re in. But somebody.”

“If this thing is real, you can make it happen.”

“As for Godo—”

“You can make that happen too.”

“I need some time to think about it.”

Vasco lit another smoke with the end of his last. He was smiling. The smile said: Now who gets to ride, who gets ridden?

Happy said, “Problem is, we don’t
have
time.”

“Your problem. Not mine. Not yet, anyway.”

“If anything happens, to Godo I mean—”

“Like what?”

“He has a meltdown. He freaks out. He almost shot two agents during a raid at the trailer park.”

“I heard.” Vasco chuckled. “I like that, actually.”

“You weren’t there. Way it got told to me, it was fucking spooky.”

“Godo scares people. I don’t see the problem. Now what’s it going to be?”

“Like I said, I need time.”

Again, that smile. Stop worrying, it said. Thank your luck. “But,
chero
, you said it yourself. You don’t
have
time.”

Happy pictured it then, Vasco face flat on the concrete floor, held down by the others, a rag stuffed in his mouth as one by one they took him, shamed him, made him their punk. “If anything happens to Godo, I hold you to account.”

Vasco waved him off. He propped his boots on his desk, ankles crossed. “Since when are you two so close? Don’t remember you guys having one good thing to say about each other.”

Happy got up to go. Glancing back at the foul-smelling panda, he said, “Ever think of washing that thing? Can’t be good for the girl, way it is.”

Vasco looked at him like he’d just proposed the absurd. “What, you get your ass deported to El Salvador, you come back an expert on kids?”

ROQUE HAD TO TELL HIMSELF: STOP STARING. IT WASN’T JUST
the bruise—strange how, even with the plum-colored swelling and the gash across her cheek, the girl somehow remained stunning—or the fact that, from time to time, her uneasy eyes met his. She was a prisoner. Pity wouldn’t free her.

He’d been in El Salvador a total of four hours, arriving at the airport in Comalapa before dawn. He’d skated through customs, not so much as a glance inside his knapsack, then ventured out into the soft green heat of daybreak outside the terminal—the sidewalk jammed with well-wishers greeting friends and relatives back from
Gringolandia
, cabbies hawking fares to the capital, touts with bullhorns steering
grenchos
to the psychedelic chicken buses headed for the smaller provincial towns.

He stopped milling and chose a spot to wait against the terminal’s dark wall of glass. In time, a droop-lidded
cholo
, thin as a tomcat, edged his way through the crowd. He wore a T-shirt three sizes too large emblazoned with the Arizona Cardinals logo and the words “World Champions, Super Bowl XLIII.”

The
cholo
snagged Roque’s arm. “You’re the musician.” His lips curled in a slack smile, as though both offering a compliment and slapping down a challenge. “Call me Sisco.”

He led the way out to a parking lot shaded by eucalyptus trees where a battered Volkswagen Golf waited, tapping out a drumbeat against his thighs as he sang under his breath, “Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free.” The singing brought on a
coughing jag and when he went to cover his mouth Roque noticed the gang tats on his hands, a sinewy art nouveau X on one, three simple dots the other, the telltale thirteen.

“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.

The Jesuit offered a nod in greeting but did not extend a hand. “Ever hear of a guy named Piocha?” His English lacked accent, the voice raspy and deep.

“Yeah,” Roque said. Piocha was the stage name of Jorge Manuel, El Salvador’s most famous guitarist.