Do They Know I'm Running?: A Novel Read online

  Across the side of a panel truck parked just inside the project perimeter, some tagger had written: Rio Mirada—Where your hopes come to die.

  “You heard about the big bad clusterfuck, huh?” It was Chato, following Godo’s eyes.

  Godo snapped to. “Some. Here and there. You know, the news.” He didn’t remember coming this way during his trek with McBee from the trailer. Were they driving back a different route? “I watch a lot of TV,” he added sheepishly.

  Puchi said, “We were hoping for work, man. Whole town was. Lay some brick, pound some nails, whatever. Then the buzzards showed up. Everybody gotta have their slice of the pie. And if they don’t? Nobody gets nothing.”

  “Nobody,” Chato chimed in solemnly.

  Godo, still staring out the window, said, “So what is it you two do? For work I mean.”

  Puchi said, “Happy didn’t tell you?”

  “Happy?”

  “You seen him, right?”

  “This morning, yeah. First time, actually. Why?”

  Puchi and Chato traded glances up front.

  Godo said, “What’s the big secret?”

  “We’re in the moving business,” Puchi said.

  Chato laughed, a snide little wheeze.

  “Great punch line.” Godo felt his temper inching toward red. “Guess I missed the joke.”

  “It’s a trip, man,” Chato said, unaware. “Check this out: We got no license, the trucking company, I mean. It’s so fucked up, it’s like, backwards, you know? Like permission to steal. Yuppies never see it coming.”

  “See what coming?”

  “Here we are, man.” Puchi slowed to a stop and dropped the tranny into park, the Impala’s 427 throbbing in neutral. They were out in front of the trailer park. How, Godo wondered, did we get here so quick?

  Puchi turned around in his seat. “Good to see you, my man. Maybe now, with Happy back, we’ll see a little more of you.”

  Chato added, “He talk to you about that?” He seemed eager, too much so. The kid was pasmado, all tics and quirks.

  Puchi cut him off with a glare. “Come on, let the man out. Got someplace I need to be.”

  Just as suddenly as he’d found himself inside the car, Godo now found himself standing on the gravel roadbed. A gust of wind off the river blew grit in his eyes. Chato cocked his hand into a pistol and winked. “Later, masturbator.”

  The black Impala rumbled off. Godo watched the six tail-lights recede, remembering another car, another time, another two vatos up front. Him and Happy.

  The car was Tía Lucha’s, the weed under the seat Godo’s. They were coming back from a house party in Vallejo, this girl he had a moon-howl crush on, name of Ramona Sánchez. A fly morena, long straight hair, heartbreaker eyes, smart but not stuck up, little cue-ball titties but an ass that said Step Right Up. Godo stood there in the kitchen, nursing the same beer for almost an hour, slick but not too, cracking jokes, teasing, asking about her people. If she was bored she hid it well, leaning back against the wall, smile to knock you over.

  Meanwhile, Happy sulked, too bashful to chat up a girl of his own, too angry to just hang, enjoy himself. He stood there chain-smoking, clutching the neck on a fifth of Jack, scaring the lipstick off the pigs, never mind any girl worth looking at. Finally he went out back to chill with Puchi and the boys. Godo checked in on him now and again, made sure he didn’t get into it with anybody he couldn’t handle.

  As the night idled away, Godo drifted in and out of the house, keeping track of Ramona, see if anyone else was hitting on her, not too obvious, slipping into the bathroom for a rail with Enrique, Cap’n Crank, catching a bump later on, just enough to keep the edge on his cool.

  When he caught her gathering her things off the couch, he strolled on up, helped her with her jacket, asked if he could walk her out. Her girlfriend was there but that was fine, Godo had a knack with chaperones. At the curb he asked for her number, wrote it on his palm with her eyebrow pencil. She shot him that knock-down smile as they drove away, and he told himself: Wait a couple days, then call her.

  No more romance on the agenda, he got tanked. Tequila shots, chased with beer, a few more bumps of crank. Sprawled on the couch, he rocked out to the music in hammered bliss: Zurdok, “Abre los Ojos.” Molotov, “Karmara.” Control Machete, “Sí Señor.” The music made him think of Roque, Tía Lucha’s precious, her favorite, the mother killer. Hand him his due, the kid had chops. But what a truly perfect day it would be, he mused, when that gifted little twerp woke up and had to look life in the eye: fuego, sonrisas, realidad y dolor.

  Fire, smiles, reality and pain.

  Sí señor …

  A little after midnight, Happy appeared. All he said was, “Gimme your keys, manudo.”

  Godo scored the pot on the way out, an ounce to mellow his drift, copped from Puchi, the crowd’s preferred mariguanero.

  That was what the Brown Town Locos were good for, crank and weed, that and stealing shit. Bumming papers off him too, Godo rolled a number, toking away as Happy drove. The night was cold and still. No moon. The bud turned him philosophical.

  He said, “You know, cabrón, way you act, women gonna think you’re a mariquita.” A faggot. “Gonna think you learned to fuck in jail.”

  Happy’s hand sailed across the car, snatching the doob away. “Who are you now, the prince of pussy?”

  Godo reached over to grab back his blunt. “Don’t be dissing my girl, cabrón.”

  Happy fended him off. “Zorra flaca.” Skinny slut.

  “I mean it, fuckface.”

  Godo tried again to snag back the joint, Happy dodged the grab. Godo persisted. A blur of hands, then Happy launched a crackback elbow, landing the blow square and hard. A clap of searing white, Godo reached for his nose. A dollop of blood stained his pants. His eyes watered from the pain.

  “Hijueputa…” Son of a whore.

  He threw a punch. Happy dodged the blow, pivoting away. The wheel went with him. The car veered across the double line, then whipped into a spin as Happy overcorrected. An oncoming pickup veered to miss them, screech of tires, angry honk. They stalled out straddling the center divide—lucky, for a few seconds anyway. A cop, lurking on a side street maybe three hundred yards down, saw the whole thing. Not that the two of them noticed. They were back at it, wild drunken haymakers landing once in every five tries but coming fast and hard regardless, only stopping when the cop hit his strobe.

  They froze. The red light swirled. Happy whispered, “Estoy chingado.” I’m screwed.

  He bolted, throwing open the door, leaping from the car, charging down the gravel roadside berm through weeds to the riverbank, hunting a way to cross. The cop spotted him, a voice calling through the squad car’s loudspeaker for him to stop and the headlights now square on Godo, sitting there, too stupid from liquor and weed to toss the ounce stashed under the seat.

  It would all play out like a tedious movie from there, the backup units blocking off the road, the chopper with its searchlight, the dogs. Godo would remember the back and forth at the window, the officer with his steel-gray crew cut, very professional, very polite.

  “I’d like to know if you’ll agree to a search of the vehicle.”

  By that point Godo was a fatalist. What would happen would happen.

  “I can get a warrant, just a matter of time. I detect a distinct odor of marijuana, your pupils are dilated, your companion fled the scene. You were observed driving erratically—”

  “I wasn’t driving.”

  “You have gang tattoos.”

  That made Godo laugh. He looked at the backs of his hands: a dragon, a bat. “These?”

  The cop leaned closer. “Let me explain something to you, son. Here’s how it will go: I’m a decorated officer with twelve years’ experience working this city, with expertise of particular relevance to the matter at hand, numerous multiagency task forces, narcotics unit, youth gang outreach. Am I getting through?” The two cops behind him grinned like jackals. “I sa
y those are gang tats. Think any judge in this county is going to second-guess me?”

  Godo’s eyes burned. Fearing he might cry, he bit his lip, telling himself, Don’t be a bitch. “I don’t care,” he whispered.

  The cop accepted this remark with an oddly warm smile. “Thank you. That’s consent. Please step outside the vehicle.”

  Godo watched as they tossed the car, thinking: sly motherfucker. They found the pot but nothing else worth bagging and tagging, no open containers, no crank, no weapons. Half an hour later the dogs cornered Happy out among the sloughs on the river’s far side, hiding in a patch of oleander. He and Godo were taken to lockup in separate cars. I’ll never see him again, Godo realized. The weed was a California misdemeanor, no more than a fine for him, his bigger problem would be public intoxication and even that was just another minor beef—a lecture from the bench, community service, counseling. But for Happy, the pot was an aggravated felony. No matter what any lawyer tried to do, no matter what Godo said under penalty of perjury—the pot was his, no one else’s, he’d paid for it, hidden it under the seat—none of it mattered. Happy wasn’t a citizen. His case was heard in immigration court and he drew a hanging judge. Not only did he get deported; he was barred from reentry for the rest of his life. Exile, for an ounce bag of Godo’s bud.

  It took only one time, looking into Tío Faustino’s eyes, for Godo to realize there was no other option. He had to go away, someplace strange and terrible. If he came back, he had to come back changed. And so he headed to the small featureless office downtown, where the man in the olive-green pants, the khaki shirt and tie, the famous high-and-tight buzz cut, sat behind his simple desk, Stars and Stripes on one side, Marine Corps colors on the other.

  “I just got popped on a weed charge,” Godo said. “That gonna be a problem?”

  THE DULL CHIME SOUNDED BEYOND THE THICK DOOR. ROQUE cupped his hands, a gust of breath, hoping for warmth. A ten count, longer, then she appeared, dressed in paint-stained sweats, wiping her clay-muddied hands with a towel. Her eyes looked scalded.

  “You’re working,” he said, remembering the debris from last night.

  She forced him to endure an unnerving silence.

  “I thought I’d check in on you. Make sure you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine.” Her voice barely a whisper.

  Something in her reticence suggested shame. Given his own, Roque found this encouraging. “I was hoping we could talk. I hated leaving this morning, the way things stood.”

  Her eyes seemed focused on a spot several feet beyond him. “And how,” she said, “would you say things stood?”

  A sudden wind sent a shudder through the chinaberry tree, rattling loose a few pale leaves. “Can I come in?”

  Her eyes blinked slowly, just once, like a cat’s. She stepped back and he followed her to the kitchen, grateful for the warmth.

  She poured them both tea in the breakfast nook. A wooden statuette of a bodhisattva named Jizo—typically portrayed as a child monk, she’d once explained, guardian of women and travelers, enemy of fear, champion of optimism—rested on a teak-wood platform at the center of the table. Steam frosted the windows looking out on her terraced backyard. In the sink, a drip from the faucet made a soft drumbeat against the blade of a carving knife perched across a bowl.

  “Something strange has come up,” he said. “I kinda wanted someone to talk to.”

  She sat with her elbows propped on the tabletop, cup lifted, as though to hide behind it. “I thought you wanted to discuss what happened between us.”

  “I do. Yes. I’m just saying …” The thumping drip from the sink unnerved him. “Last night, why couldn’t you stop crying?”

  She regarded him with sad disbelief, then chuckled. “What a treat it would have been to get asked that at the time.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I gathered that. Or I wouldn’t have let you in.” She brushed a stray lock of hair from her eyes. “What will it take to get you to pay attention to what I’m feeling, Roque?”

  “I thought I did pay attention.”

  A rueful snort. “We had sex.”

  He felt his stomach pitch. The woody scent of the tea didn’t help. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “I know it wasn’t. But it wasn’t all loving kindness, either.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop saying that, please. You’re being sorry isn’t much help, frankly.” She sat back, glancing out at her dormant garden. “I haven’t much wanted to get into this, but things haven’t been so great for me the past year or so. The drinking tells you that much. That’s new, trust me. I never used to drink, not like now, not till after my divorce.”

  She’d been married to an air force captain. “Your husband didn’t love you.”

  She made a face, like he’d missed the point entirely. “Yes, he did, Roque. Just badly.”

  “Talk like that, anything passes for love.”

  “Oh please, just once, try to realize that things are going to look very different to you in a few years, all right?”

  He blanched from the scolding. Gradually, anger brought his color back.

  She said, “I can tell you’re taking that the wrong way.”

  “There’s a right way?”

  “Yes, actually.” Beyond the steam-fogged window a crow rustled the branches of the tangerine tree. “I’m trying to make you understand what middle age is like.”

  He slumped in his chair. “That’s all you ever talk about.”

  “Please, listen. You get to where I am, see all the things you wanted that never showed up and realize, finally, they never will. This time of year just makes it worse. I’m feeling all bitter and Brahmsian and bored with myself.” She shivered. “God, that sounds like the line from a song. What I mean is, this thing, here, between you and me? It’s just an attempt to pretend I’m not really getting older. There. That simple, that stupid, that sad. As for you—”

  This part wasn’t new. “You think I’m needy.”

  “I think you need, yes, a kind of love I can’t promise or provide.”

  “And what about the love I can provide?”

  “I’m more concerned about what you can’t promise, actually.”

  “Which is?”

  “Please, stop being so angry, so—”

  “You think you know how I feel. So why do you get so scared when I try to tell you what I’m actually feeling?”

  “I was your age once, remember. I had passion and confidence and exuberance, all that lovely stuff. I envy you. But I can’t recover what I’ve lost through you.”

  Roque was floored. You think I don’t understand despair, he thought. You think I don’t know what it means to be lonely and desperate for something to justify the hassle of getting through the day. You think I don’t see what Tía Lucha and Tío Faustino and you and everybody else your age goes through, that I don’t get it, I don’t care.

  “I can give you back your hope.”

  She looked chastened. Then: “No, you can’t.”

  “I can make you happy.”

  “You do make me happy. You infuriate me and, I’m sorry, bore me sometimes, but yes, I’m mostly happy when we’re together. But—here again, the age factor comes in—happiness isn’t as important as I once thought. It’s a pretty slim commodity, actually.”

  “You’d rather be unhappy?”

  “Happiness comes and goes, is what I’m saying. A little sunlight on a gray day, poof, my spirits lift. A melody in my head. On the street, a dog wags its tail—”

  “That’s not happiness,” he said. In fact, what it sounded like was boredom.

  “Yes, it is. That’s the sneaky truth about happiness. It’s pretty ho-hum stuff. As for hope, it’s just a way to trick yourself into thinking the future can’t go wrong.”

  “What I mean by happiness is how we feel when we’re together.”

  “That will change.”

  “Yeah. It’ll get better.”

  “You can
’t know that. Trust me.”

  “If you really believe that, why live?”

  Her eyes met his. “The question I ask myself several times a day.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “‘Death is like the falling of a petal from a rose. No more. No less.’” She turned her cup in its saucer, as though it were a sort of compass. “In case you’re interested in the Zen view.”

  “You’re not seriously—”

  “I know, how thoroughly seppuku of me.”

  “Stop joking about it.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not contemplating suicide. But do I think about death more and more? Why yes I do. And you shouldn’t. It would be wrong and selfish and cowardly of me to inflict all that on you. Besides, there are worse things than loneliness. I let myself forget that.”

  “You’d rather be alone than with me.”

  “You make me want to drink, Roque. You make me want to drink and fuck and laugh and forget.”

  “And that’s so terrible?”

  “It’s cowardice. It’s unfair. To us both.” She said this with a sort of guilty kindness, fiddling with her cup. “You mentioned that something had come up, right? And you needed to talk about it.”

  “Yeah. My uncle. The one they arrested yesterday.”

  “He’s not really your uncle, though, if I remember.”

  “Close enough. I owe him. Big-time. His son, Happy, he’s come back. He got deported, couple years ago. Showed up out of the blue. I met with him this morning.”

  She looked at him askance. “What are you saying?”

  “Tía Lucha has to stay here to earn enough to look after Godo. Godo’s too messed up to travel anywhere, that’s not gonna change. Happy’s not supposed to be here in the first place, no way he can just come and go.”