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

  “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 Digi
design 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.

  “We got him slotted to do the music track for this video. But Sisco here, he talked to your uncle. He says you know your way around a studio.”

  Bullshit, Roque thought, Piocha wouldn’t come near these guys. “Not sure how my uncle would know that,” he said, not wanting to seem overly agreeable. He knew this sort, not so different from Godo or Happy, really. Avoid confrontation, they saw you as weak. “But yeah, I’ve spent some time at a board.”

  It wasn’t a total lie. He’d sat with Lalo during his recording sessions, paid decent enough attention. He could muddle his way through. The Jesuit invited him to sit and Roque called up the program, noticing a lack of manuals, at which point it dawned on him the stuff was stolen.

  It took him ten minutes to figure out their settings, plug everything into the right ports, check to be sure their version of Pro Tools and their Mac OS were compatible, test the Digi 003 for gremlins. Beyond that, without a MIDI to complicate things, it was basically just a digital tape deck.

  “Okay, before I start—I’m Roque, by the way?”

  The tattooed hulk and the Jesuit traded glances. “Chiqui,” the big one said. Short for Chiquitín, Roque guessed: Tiny. The Jesuit followed, “You call me Lonely,” said with a pinpoint stare. Roque remembered the name from the wall. Assuming it answered to the same reverse logic as Tiny, he figured it meant the guy was never at a loss for company, female company in particular, clarifying finally who the girl in the corner belonged to.

  “Okay,” he began again, “I guess I need some idea of what it is you guys are after.”

  Chiqui began to say something but Lonely cut him short. “How about you show us what you got, put something together for us to judge, then we’ll see who needs what.”

  Roque got that it wasn’t a suggestion. “Right.”

  He replayed the vocal track, got a feel for the beat, a standard rap rhythm, apparently kept with nothing but an inner metronome. The good news, they could hold a beat. That permitted him to lay down a click track for reference.

  “Okay,” he said to no one in particular, “I’m gonna add a drum bit on the Korg. See what you think.” He trolled through the samples on the keyboard, chose one heavy on the backbeat with a Bo Diddley shuffle, fashioned a four-minute loop and played it through the monitor. The wave patterns jagged hypnotically on the computer screen and the Digi dials self-adjusted like a ghost was working the panel. A little theater, he thought, amp my cred. With just the drum track the video instantly seemed bolder, more polished. He glanced around the room. “Sounds like money to me, what you guys think?” The answer was in their faces.

  Lonely pointed to the corner. “What about the zorra, man?”

  Up until that moment, Roque had no inkling the girl was anything but window dressing. “What about her?”

  “The bitch is here to sing.” Lonely gestured for her to get up, come over. “She knows it.”

  Roque hadn’t felt truly dirty until that moment. He reminded himself this was all for Tío Faustino. He had no choice who to rely on, who to deal with, but the girl’s eyes made no distinctions. She rose, arms crossed, and edged up to the pop filter on the microphone.

  Roque asked, “What, exactly, is she singing?”

  “You figure it out, culero. ‘Take Me Out to the Fucking Ball Game’ for all I care.”

  If these two are lovers, Roque thought, it was one of those fucked-up death-do-we-part situations, where you can’t tell the love from the hate, the pain you suffer—or inflict—only deepens what you feel. But the girl’s body told him different: no catty arched spine, no cocked hip, no pout. And the light in her eyes was cold with fright.

  “Let me get a few instrumental tracks down first,” he said, hoping to buy some time. “And I have to move a few things around, get situated.” He turned to her then. Hoping to sound kind but not arouse any jealousy, he said, “You can sit down for now.”

  “She don’t speak English,” Lonely said. Accusing. Mocking.

  Roque, trying again: “Puedes sentarte por ahora.”

  For the merest instant, her glance settled on him with something other than hate. Please, he thought, don’t. Almost instantly the fear returned and she pivoted around, walked back to the milk carton, sat.

  He tuned the Stratocaster and the Martin using the keyboard, adjusted the tone and volume dials for the cobalt pickups on the Strat, striving for the spooky hollowed-out bite the guitar was known for, then fiddled briefly with the Digi’s volume levels, making sure the waveforms were full and set as high as possible without peaking into distortion. He could feel his heart pounding and once or twice snuck a chance to wipe his damp palms on his jeans. He ran the video twice more to make sure the rhythm track was properly synched, then dubbed in a bass track, again using the Korg, choosing a fat round punchy tone. On top of that he laid down an organ effect, a churchy thrum, with a Hammond B-3 sample.

  As he worked, he felt the mood turn in the room. Everyone got quiet, calm, almost reverential. Then a boy appeared in the doorway.

  Roque pegged him at ten years old, but kids grow up small down here, he thought. The boy had a cloth bag in one hand, a bottle of Champán in the other, the local variety of cream soda. Lonely gestured him forward. The kid stole a glance at Roque first, then did as he was told.

  Lonely snatched the bag from him, peered inside. “¿Cuánto?” How much?

  The kid, tottering foot to foot, reached behind to scratch his back beneath his shirt. “Dos cientos, más o menos.” Two hundred, more or less.

  Lonely glanced up, met the boy’s eyes. “¿Más o menos?” He lashed out, slapp
ed the kid’s face, then launched into what felt like a full five minutes of insulting venom, accusing the boy of stealing, skimming off the protection take that had been collected by other mareros in shakedowns of the city’s bus drivers. The boy stood there and took it, valiant in his way, verging on tears but never giving in. Lonely made to slap him twice more, but settled for just watching him cringe. He asked three times, shouting finally, how much did he steal? The boy answered, “Goma,” nothing, his voice a little weaker, a little less convincing, each time.

  Finally, Lonely ended with: “Te gusta hacerte el suizo. Consigo mi dinero, lelito.” You like to play dumb. I get my money, you little fool.

  He waved the boy out with disgust. Once he was gone, Lonely turned back to Roque. “What the fuck you looking at?”

  Roque collected the Martin, switched to an open D tuning, adjusted the mike down to chair level. His hands were shaking. Get it together, he told himself as he recued the video. Figuring Lonely and his boys for secret sentimentalists, like most punks, he laid on the schmaltzy rubato as he strummed a flamenco-style rhythm track, complete with backhand flourishes and syncopated thumb slaps on the guitar’s spruce top. Gradually, the pulse in his neck stopped throbbing.

  He followed up with a muted arpeggio pattern on the Strat, echoing the bass line but elaborating on it too, giving it an edge, a little extra momentum. When it came time to solo he built it in Dorian mode like Santana in “Evil Ways,” the off-kilter minor jarring at first then jelling, almost medieval in its eerie drift, but full of bite and heat. After one particularly aching lick he could sense it, the gravitational turn, every eye and ear in the room drawn to him and him alone, and he finished with a series of slowly ascending arpeggios ending in a scream.

  Finally, he gestured the girl over again and readjusted the mike-stand height. He wanted to ask her name but knew better. Using the Strat, he played the vocal line he wanted her to follow, no words, just nonsense syllables or open vowels. The thing had enough verbiage as is. He let the girl know it would be okay if she improvised a little, even though he’d be echoing her on the guitar. Using the effects pedal, he bought himself a little distortion, a touch of phase delay, some sustain, then recued the track and said, “¿Listo?”