Do They Know I'm Running? (37 page)

The second distraction he’d afforded himself since arriving came courtesy of a dog-eared Peterson Field Guide, left behind in Julio’s
taberna
down the street by a birder trekking through the area. Roque paged through the color plates with bored devotion,
mesmerized by the otherworldly names: loons, honeycreepers, limpkins and coots, jacanas and nightjars—also known as goatsuckers—bushtits and trogons and black chachalacas.

The mystery of the thing was this: The birds seemed to exist nowhere but inside the book. The only winged creatures he’d seen in town were vultures and blackbirds: grackles and cowbirds, if he’d identified them correctly, the latter being a brood parasite, explaining why it had driven off virtually every other species, pushing them up into the mountains.

Kill the young, he thought. The key to success.

He missed the guitar, its stubborn tuning, its thin sound. He remembered the clanging racket it made when Chepito’s sidekick smashed it against the roof, the Corolla barreling down the crowded street, horn blasting, scattering the fairgoers. It taught him something, that escape. The importance of idiot will. Refusing to give in. He felt a little larger in spirit now, a little bolder, a little more
buxo
, as Tía Lucha would put it—quick on his feet.

There was nothing quick here, just tedium. He’d asked Victor if he could buy a disposable cell phone somewhere to check in with Happy, maybe even talk with Tía Lucha, but the idea got nixed.—
No such thing as wiretaps or warrants here
, Victor had said,
cops just listen in whenever they fucking feel like it. Forget a cell until you’re north of Oaxaca
. Roque had wanted to respond: Right, and you guys communicate how? But it seemed best not to push it, the same way asking too many questions felt not just stupid but dangerous. Still, he missed everybody. It would be ten o’clock there, two hours behind. Tía would be at work. God only knew where Happy or Godo might be.

Again he glanced up and down the street, hoping to spot the Chamula woman. The first time he’d seen her, she’d been wearing a black-and-white poncho, typical of the women from San Juan Chamula, so he’d been told, and she’d carried a few chickens by their feet, a bundle of firewood on her back, an infant strapped to her chest with two more clinging to her skirt. The
next time, yesterday, she’d been dressed in traditional Mayan
traje
, a boldly colored
china poblana
skirt, a lavishly embroidered overblouse called a
huipil
. That was when he’d seen her selling her little doves. He couldn’t say for sure why that had moved him so deeply but he’d gone down, bought several greasy bags of cold rubbery popcorn off her. It wasn’t peanut butter but it would do.

In the easterly distance a virginal sky topped the alpine highlands and cliff-scarred plateaus. Corn and sorghum fields checkered the lowlands all the way to the marigold fields nearer town. The yellow of their blossoms, he’d learned, was considered the shade of death. It looked so welcoming here. The flower fields yielded to the garbage dump on the town’s edge, which in turn gave way to the sprawling rail yard with its tumbledown station across the street, its adobe walls slathered with graffiti.

Glancing one last time up and down the empty sun-blasted street, Roque finally decided it was time to check in with Victor.

He was holding court in the spacious room on the ground floor that the
picadero’s
denizens grandly called the ballroom. The windows were covered with ragged sheets of tacked-up plastic, creating a stuffy gloom. The spikes were all male, half a dozen or so in all, varying in age from around twelve—kill the young, Roque reminded himself—to mid-thirties, sprawled on soiled mattresses or just bedsheets scattered across the floor, the
muchachos
bleary from smack or just there to watch TV, an old Sony with a built-in DVD player perched on cinder blocks in the corner. A few
salvatruchos
were hanging out as well, shirtless, their torsos black and red with tattoos, contenting themselves with beer or
chicha
, a fiery corn liquor sold everywhere.

Victor, tragically handsome, sculpted bone and nappy hair, sprawled sideways in the room’s only armchair, black-soled feet dangling over the arm and bobbing lazily as he dug beneath his nails with a hairpin. His eyelids hung at half-mast, jaw slack, a white plastic rosary draped around his neck. A pirated DVD of
Mel Gibson’s
Apocalypto
was playing on the TV, and as far as Roque could tell, the
picadero
gang watched little else, mesmerized by all that color-saturated sadism, the cool tattoos and wicked costumes, the spooky nihilism and debauched scarification and ooga-booga religiosity, as though it weren’t box-office bullshit but a kind of Mayan home movie.

Meanwhile, two
salvatruchos
near the doorway where Roque stood were going back and forth with the latest horror stories.

—
Yesterday these five
pollos
got shaken down in broad daylight by some local cops, right? Out front of the church. Then guess what—those cops got jacked by state cops not five minutes later
.

—
Cops are fucking thieves
.

—
Shit, man, I’m a thief. But I am what I am, I don’t pretend to be nothing else
.

—
Listen to this. Two nights ago, we were running the tops of the boxcars heading up from Tapachula, okay? Came across this pack of hicks from, I dunno, Nicaragua I think. Funny fucking accent, everything like twee twee twee. Anyway, we tell them, you ride the train, you pay the freight. They said they had no money. So we beat them stupid, stripped the fuckers naked. They had their money in their shorts, like we wouldn’t find it there. Then because they lied we tossed them off. So long, suckers
.

—
You hear about that guy who slipped trying to pull himself up into a boxcar out here the other night?

—
Guy who fell under the wheel?

—
Cut him in two. He’s lying there, watching the rest of the train roll over him, screaming. Fucker finally bled to death, but man …

—
You saw it?

—
I was chasing the cocksucker
.

—
No fucking way
.

—
What’s more important, your money or your life?

—
People, man. So fucking stupid
.

—
Reminds me. That Honduran girl?

—
The one got raped?

—
The one got gangbanged while they shot her boyfriend right in front of her
.

—
I heard that was cops
.

—
It was the fucking vigilantes, man
.

—
No, I heard cops
.

Roque listened to this last bit and tried not to think of Lupe. She and the others had been due in town yesterday, no word from Beto or anyone else about the delay. He knew how many stops the group would have to make: Get off the bus, trek around a checkpoint, maybe miles of detour. It was anybody’s guess how long they might have to wait, hiding in the fields, waiting until the time was right, dodging God only knew how many patrols, legal and illegal—local police, state police, private security thugs, vigilantes,
federales
, Grupo Beta, the army, the Mexican
migra;
the anti-immigrant backlash here made the Minute Man reaction along the California-Texas corridor look like Welcome Wagon—then heading back to the road, flagging down the next bus whenever it happened by.

Catching Victor’s gaze, he gestured that he was heading out. Victor responded with a swacked grin and a fiddly wave.

ROQUE CHECKED TO BE SURE THERE WERE NO COPS OR OTHER ARMED
men around, then headed up the block. A group of urchins materialized, begging. He’d learned the trick to saying no: nothing out loud, just a slow wagging of the finger back and forth, mysteriously effective. The kids made faces but retreated, scattering a handful of chickens pecking the dust.

He felt light-headed from sleeplessness. The
picadero
with its unholy stench, its meandering ant trails, its festering mattresses, it was the perfect spot for insomnia. In the long hours awake at night he’d found himself beset with increasingly shameless fantasies of Lupe, in which their lovemaking became tormented, ravenous, desperate. At times it had been difficult to know what
exactly he was picturing, sex or a smackdown. What was it about this place, he thought, that caused such tormented obsessions?

He headed toward Julio’s
taberna
, walking distance—more to the point, in visual range of the car. Julio’s was the third and last of Roque’s distractions.

After the blinding sunlight, the dimness felt welcome. Two field workers from one of the nearby plantations nursed beers at the end of the bar, their sweat-stained straw hats tipped back on their heads. A ceiling fan stirred the air around, unable to dispel the odors of leaky refrigeration and piss. What sunlight filtered in through the quarreled amber windows dissolved in the shadowy interior, surrendering its heat, a mystery Roque accepted gratefully.

Seeing him enter, Julio broke off feeding his parrot and dug out a can of 7UP from his ice chest, setting it atop the bar for Roque.

Julio cracked a smile.—
Still can’t find your way out of town?

—
I’m waiting for the bushtits and trogons to show up
. He popped open the icy wet can.—
How are things?

Julio shrugged.—
Why complain, the worst is yet to come
. Returning to his stool, he swept away the bits of seed husks littering the bar beneath the parrot perch.

Roque chugged back a mouthful of 7UP, ambling to the small corner stage where a guitar and a vihuela rested against the wall. He earned his drinks and a lunch of red beans and rice by playing for several hours each afternoon, sometimes teaming up with Julio for a duet, the barkeep on the vihuela, a smaller guitar used for mariachi ensembles, tuned high like a ukulele.

Julio, an able if not quite inspired musician himself, at one point had offered to give Roque the guitar as a gift.—
When you become famous, you can tell people about this place, how I saw your stardom ahead of you. And the only thing between you and fame, my young friend, is bad luck and the devil
.

Julio was bearish with a soup-catcher mustache and a wild
mop of curls. Mestizo by heritage—half-caste, Spanish speaking—he was courteous but wary, that instinctive
mejicano
reserve, at least until dusk stole the bite from the day’s heat, at which point he indulged in a few jolts of mescal chased with beer.

The night before, regaling his new talented friend from
Gringolandia
with the crazy
mixto
accent, he’d intoned:—
We
mejicanos
take great pride in losing. We don’t just have a capacity for suffering—everyone does—we enjoy it, like the Russians
. Then he’d broken into song, a ballad by the legendary mariachi Juan Gabriel, sung in a beery tenor.—
I just forgot again that you never loved me
.

Roque had to admit he felt tempted to take the man up on his offer, make off with the guitar, but it struck him as unseemly. Julio was lonely, bored, stuck here in Chiapas with nothing but daydreams and his parrot and a nightly drunk to amuse himself. And that would not change. Time was stuck. To that extent, Julio, like some creature from myth, seemed eternal, which meant it would be unwise to take a gift from him unless the consequences were clear up front.

Roque grabbed a chair and set the guitar in his lap, figuring he’d change things around a little today, rock out, jam on some Santana or Maná, maybe a little Aerosmith or even Steve Earle, whose tunes he’d learned from the edgier folkies at open mikes. Lalo had always told him, listen to everything, dismiss nothing; the key to creativity lies in two simple words:
Steal wisely
.

He got no further than tuning, though, before he sensed a sudden tension in the room. Glancing up, he saw Julio reaching beneath the bar for his
bastón
, a kind of billy club. Thinking that some immigrants were at the door, hoping for a handout, he glanced that direction, only to see the Chamula woman waiting there, one of her daughters by her side, the child a miniature of her mother, down to the
china poblana
skirt, the beautifully embroidered
huipil
. They both held woven baskets filled with bags of popcorn.

The mother called out:
“Las palomitas, señor,”
her Spanish brittle, heavily accented.

—
I told you
, Julio bellowed, slamming his hand on the bar, scaring the bird.—
Not in here. Out!

—
It’s okay
, Roque said, returning the guitar to its spot along the wall.—
I want to buy a couple bags off her
.

As though to prompt him, the woman said again, “
Las palomitas,”
her voice a kind of singsong, feigning innocence.

Julio, incredulous:—
Don’t encourage these people
. He reached up to stroke the parrot, soothe it.—
She’s probably drunk on pox
. He pronounced it “posh”—the local home brew.

—
I’ll take care of it
, Roque said. He gestured for the woman to back away from the door, he’d meet her in the street.

To his back, Julio said:—
If she steals from you, don’t cry to me
. The two field workers chimed in with a wheezy little spate of laughter.

From snatches of conversation he’d overheard at the
picadero
and the bar the past three days, Roque had gathered that the Chamulas were the largest, poorest, most hostile of the Tzotzil tribes in the area. He’d learned too that the name Tzotzil meant “people of the bat;” in their folklore there were ancient stories of black winged creatures who escaped from the mountain caves at night, kidnapping women, eating children, but the old folks said those creatures didn’t exist anymore. The last were seen forty years ago. This was all a grand joke to Julio and his pals. They considered the Indians layabouts, thieves, drunks, which seemed only too predictable, since they themselves were mixed blood.