Do They Know I'm Running? (24 page)

Happy chose a spot at the kitchenette table, Godo plopped down on the couch. Outside, the wind chimes gonged erratically in a brisk wind.

Happy seemed tormented, running his hands through his hair. He’d let it grow back these past few weeks, to where it resembled short black fur. Godo waited him out, still in the backwash of memory, recalling the
chicas
in their starched white dresses, the
chicos
in their boxy suits, proceeding up the stone-paved
street to their first holy sacrament, stepping smartly, little soldiers, all except the girl named Graciela, who got distracted, tempted by the fire tree.

He was told by one of his squaddies, who’d also been wounded and medevaced to Landstuhl after the checkpoint blast, that he’d cried out for his mother as he lay there crippled and bloody, face in shreds, Gunny Benedict vaporized. But Godo remembered none of that. All he remembered was the little bird chopper hovering overhead, rotor wash scattering dust everywhere, the door gunners aiming not just at the gathering Iraqis but the dazed, bloody marines—he remembered it, even as he feared it wasn’t true.

But don’t go there, he thought. Not now.

“There’s something I should have told you,” Happy said. “About this thing, bringing Pops back, dealing with Vasco. Somebody else is coming along too, this guy I met in Iraq. He was our terp.”

Godo was having trouble understanding. Happy’s eyes looked like they might melt from dread. “The guy’s a
haji?”

“He’s Palestinian, lived in Baghdad. His family’s in a refugee camp on the Syrian border.” He reached out for the sugar bowl with both hands, as though reassured by its shape and weight. “You can’t tell anyone about this.”

“You sound scared.”

“We’re bringing an Arab across the border. What the fuck do you think that means?”

Godo blinked. An artery pulsed in his neck and he pictured it, the tall figure in woman’s clothing, marching forward, so calm, a martyr …

“What if he’s not who I think he is? What if, say for instance, he worked for the Mukhabarat? What if everything he told me’s a lie, who he is, what he wants?”

Godo caught something in Happy’s voice. He was holding something back. “What does he want?”

“That’s the fucking point, I don’t know!” Happy gripped his head again. “He saved my life. At least, that’s what I thought. Maybe I got played.”

Godo glanced at the clock. It was a little before nine, Tía Lucha wouldn’t be home for three more hours. The trailer felt empty without her. He wondered if he should tell her that, wondered if she would want to hear such a thing from him.

“I can’t figure out what you’re trying to tell me, Hap. Saved your life how?”

FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE HE’D BEEN DRIVING IN IRAQ, ALL THE TRUCKS
were camouflaged.

“This is wrong, very wrong.” Samir crumpled a can of Iraqi Pepsi as he followed Happy around the trailer, checking the tires and brake lines in the swirling grit. “They’ll think this is a military convoy. That doubles, triples the chances of an ambush. You should say something.”

“I speak up,” Happy said, fingering tread to gauge its depth, “I’m fucked three times over. Lose my pay, get sacked, find myself back in El Salvador. That’s not an option, I told you.”

The war increasingly resembled a massive game of bait and switch. Happy had come to focus solely on not getting killed. Sure, somebody was getting fleeced and somebody else was getting rich but he just kept telling himself: It’s not your problem. Besides, driving was the only relief from the boredom, which the heat made insufferable. Some of the contractors had built a driving range and a fishing pond to pass the time but those were off-limits to the Salvadorans and Filipinos who formed the truck pool. TCNs—third country nationals—were beasts of burden. Sometimes their trucks didn’t even have windshields.

And yet they still dreamed of earning special status for a work visa to the U.S. It was a kind of group delusion. The company made no promises, nor did the embassy. Still, every man hoped,
believing dedication and sacrifice could somehow manufacture luck.

The warehouse complex had sixty-four squat, sand-brown buildings packed inside the double-blast walls, with Alaska barriers strung with razor wire stacked along the whole perimeter for extra protection against suicide attacks and VBIEDs—car bombs. Uniformed Kurds of vague employ and armed with AK-47s glowered from their posts in the guard towers, which were mounted with belt-fed Dushka machine guns.

The drivers finished their prep, strapping down tarps on the flatbeds, tightening pineapple pins, slamming home bolts on trailer doors. They were bringing mattresses and baby incubators to the new hospital in Najaf, some desks for a rebuilt school, plus the usual drayage of rice and grain, bricks, bags of cement, drums of paint and acetone and asphalt sealant. There were sixteen guards in the convoy, four American vehicle commanders with 9mm Glocks and short-stocked Serbian Zastava M21s, the rest Colombians with Kalashnikovs. It was rumored the VCs made as much per month as a two-star general.

After final load checks against the manifest, the Kurds in the towers aimed their Dushkas and AKs into the nearby streets as the gates opened and the convoy roared out in a storm of noisy dust toward Route 10. Two security SUVs led, followed by Happy and four other trucks, another SUV, then the final five trucks and a trailing security detail. It was always the slow in-town streets that posed the greatest danger but soon they hit the highway and were sailing along, miles of shimmering asphalt, the heat a mere ninety-six ungodly degrees.

Every now and then a child ambling along the roadbed lurched off his feet and waved as the convoy rumbled past. Gestures of friendliness didn’t matter; the presence of every person and vehicle got radioed up and down the convoy. Happy kept his eyes alert, checking his sectors, while Samir, noting the prevalent
variety of livestock clustered along the road, talked about the proper way to butcher a goat.

They hit Baghdad at noon and rolled through the southwestern suburbs, long crowded boulevards lined with palms, the radio traffic constant up and down the line as guards and drivers called out possible threats: a
haji
with a gas can wandering into the street; a kid on a bicycle yammering into a cell phone; a clump of trash on the roadside, possible IED. One of the Colombian guards asked permission in clipped English to shoot a crane roosting in its nest atop a telephone pole. “Request denied, numbnuts,” one the American VCs drawled back. Happy’s throat felt like he’d swallowed pumice, stomach coiled like a fist, until they hooked up with Route 8. The road congestion cleared. He could breathe again.

The squat mud-colored houses grew shabbier and more isolated the farther south they drove. Cowbirds and vultures veered low over the canebrake rimming fetid marshes while sheep and bellowing cows scavenged through reeking landfills for food. Happy told himself he hated this place, hated its scarred blankness, its punishing dust and soul-crushing sun. At the same time, he had no difficulty imagining why it was that, centuries ago, the nomads who wandered this landscape devised a god of judgment.

The road split midway to Karbala, the convoy veered southeast onto Route 9. They crossed the Euphrates and were heading toward Karbala itself, charging through light traffic toward some nameless village, when Samir noticed the road suddenly empty. Traffic was no longer merely light, it was gone.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. “Up ahead, something’s—”

Fifty yards ahead of the lead SUV, a dump truck roared out from behind one of the crude white houses, pulling onto the highway in a blackish cloud. It stopped, blocking the road. As the lead SUV hit its brakes, preparing to challenge the driver, the red coiling tail of an RPG slithered from a wall of canebrake
thirty yards off the road. The first rocket was followed quickly by two others, the last trailing in from the opposite side of the highway. That one hit. The lead SUV exploded in a savage plume of white flame, the pressure wave from the blast rocking the windshield of Happy’s rig, scattering it with gravel and shrapnel. Suddenly gunfire rained in from everywhere, not just from AKs but an RPK machine gun, the shells slamming and pinging against the trailer and cab.

“Keep going, move!” Samir crouched down in his seat, slamming one hand against the dash, the other gesturing manically for Happy to pull forward.

“There’s no place to go! The road—”

“Around! Around! You can’t stay here.”

Happy struggled to recall his ambush training: Continue forward if possible, low gear. Use your truck to push barriers aside, aiming for a corner of any vehicle in your path. He slipped the transmission into gear, prepared to ease off the clutch, but in front of him two bloodied survivors from the first SUV, one dragging the other, struggled toward him, screaming for help, while from the second SUV the Colombians and the American VC had already taken two casualties while trying to find targets, return fire. Help them, he thought. No, continue moving forward. He froze, unable to decide.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a corkscrewing tail of red flame veer out of nowhere toward his tractor grill. Samir shouted, “Down!” and leaped across the seat, shielding Happy with his body as the RPG hit, rocking the entire cab off its tires, nudging it ten degrees right, shattering the windshield. Happy felt a knifing sting in both eyes, unsure what it was—tiny splinters of glass or metal or just brittle grit and dust shaken loose from the blast. Regardless, he couldn’t see. The engine stalled. Then he heard the crackle of flames.

“Out! Get out!”

Samir’s voice seemed swathed in cotton. Happy’s eyes still felt
raw, he couldn’t see. He was covered in jagged shards from the splintered windshield but he grabbed at the door handle, fumbled for the lever, lifted hard, felt the door give way. Tumbling out, he plummeted ten feet to the ground, almost breaking his wrist and shoulder in the fall. Samir dropped close beside him, nearly crushing his hand, then grabbed his sleeve. “Under the trailer! Stay down.”

Happy would remember the gut-coiling nausea of his terror, the stench of cordite and burning gasoline and finally blood, the continuing gunfire sending ricochets everywhere, off the asphalt, the tires, the truck’s underframe. He thought: Why are they shooting at me—what have I ever done to them? We’re transporting baby incubators for fuck’s sake, school desks, food. Some time afterward, he would learn that the Badr Brigade and the Sadr militia, the two main Shiite paramilitary forces, were vying for control of government patronage; the attack most likely resulted from the Sadr faction hoping to undermine the Badr organization’s role in funding development. But that would mean little to him later and nothing to him now.

How much time passed? Why could he still not see except through a shimmer of tears? The Colombians, Samir told him, were overwhelmed, too few gunmen, too many enemies, all invisible. Four of the other trucks, one by one, exploded in sheets of white flame, their crews dead or wounded or scattered. Then Happy smelled the trickle of diesel leaking from his fuel tank. It was a fuse. It was death waiting to happen.

He began scrambling out from under the trailer. Samir dragged him back.

“We have to get out!” Happy kicked at Samir’s hands. “The gas tank!”

Tangled together, two halves of some comic beast, they scuttled into the crossfire and ran for a culvert overgrown with elephant grass running parallel to the road. What if gunmen are hiding here, Happy thought, feeling now an odd indifference to
the idea of dying—at least I won’t be scared. His body clawed ahead, unwilling to give up yet, prodded into the tall sharp grass by Samir. Several inches of thick brackish water, foul with excrement, sat in the bottom of the culvert, while a noxious cloud of stinging flies swarmed up from nowhere. The truck erupted then in a towering fireball, an ear-splitting blast, the shock wave knocking them onto their knees in the thick black water. Nothing cohered anymore, there were just the screams of the dying clouded by smoke, flickering silhouettes backlit by raging fire, helpless shouts of cruel insistent horror or triumph, the words in English and Spanish and, farther away, Arabic.

Samir grabbed the shoulder of Happy’s filthy shirt, dragging him up onto his feet. “I see something. Come.”

Happy let himself be pulled along, able to see no more than a few feet ahead, the rest of the world a riot of savage form. They ran crouching, far too long a ways it seemed, Happy with his head down, afraid to lift it for fear of one lucky shot, footfalls breaking the crusted, sunbaked sand, then the screech of rust-dry hinges, a wood gate slammed open, gravel underfoot. He smelled manure, the musk of wool, the char of a wood fire. Samir dragged him through a door, sat him down in a bed of straw. “We’ll wait,” he whispered, chest heaving. “Maybe somebody radioed ahead. Maybe a patrol from Karbala will come. LAVs, tanks.”

Happy blinked and blinked, feeling the fine sharp dust in his eyes finally milking away. Not glass, he thought, thank God for that, but he was still unable to focus. His breath rumbled inside his chest, he coughed up dust. Then Samir grew suddenly stiff, his breath stilled. His clothing rustled, the stench of shit unfurled off his clothes as he slowly rose to his feet. Happy looked up: a reed-thin silhouette in the doorway of the barn, flowing black dishdasha, a checkered keffiyeh wrapped around his head. A Kalashnikov in his hands.

Samir spoke quietly in Arabic to the man, an old farmer perhaps. Or one of the gunmen? In the time it took to say a rushed prayer, some bargain was made, exchanged in whispers. Happy would know only that the man withdrew. Samir sat back down. “I told him we wanted nothing, we would say nothing.” Happy chose to believe, sitting in silence until the churning roar of Hueys flying low echoed from the south, relief from Karbala. They left the barn behind and ran crouching back the way they’d come, through boiling smoke and the cries of the dying, waving their arms in the rotor wash and its choking storm of dust.

GODO LISTENED TO HIS COUSIN’S TALE, MARVELING AT HOW LANGUAGE
told you nothing. It was the tremor in Happy’s voice, the haunting emptiness in some words, the sloppy quick clutter of others, that gave him away. You can’t make up that fear. And for the first time in a long while, he felt the two of them were truly kin.