Do They Know I'm Running? (9 page)

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.”

“Go where?”

“El Salvador.”

Her eyebrows arched. “Why—”

“I have to go down and make sure the money we send gets into the right hands, make sure Tío Faustino doesn’t get screwed by the
mareros.”

“The who?”

“Gang members. They’re the ones who can get him through Guatemala and Mexico. The borders have tightened up down there. It’s not as easy as it used to be to come north. Money’s not enough, you’ll just get ripped off. Or worse. And Tío Faustino’s no spring chicken.”

“And you’ll be doing what in all this?”

“We get close to the border, the
mareros
take Tío, hike him overland, I drive through the checkpoint. I’ve got an American passport, it’s like magic down there. I pick up Tío on the other side, some designated spot. Guatemala, then Mexico, then the U.S.”

“That’s insane. How can you trust these people?”

“Like we’ve got a choice? The drug cartels took over the smuggling routes. You can’t just go it alone, too easy to get killed or betrayed. Happy already has some angle worked, he hooked up with these people when he came across this last time. All we need’s the money.”

“I can’t believe you’re even thinking—”

“I can’t let the family down.”

“Your family shouldn’t ask you to do something so stupid.”

“Please, don’t talk about my family like that.”

“You’ve got too much promise.”

“It’s not about me.”

“You’re just trying to prove yourself. To this cousin.”

His hand ventured across the table, searching for hers. “It’s nice, by the way, to hear you say I’ve got promise.”

“I’ve always said that. When does all this happen?”

“Happy’s got a line on a job for me, some moving company, guys he knows.” He drew back the neglected hand. “Like I said, we need money, more so now. It’ll take anywhere from six weeks to six months for them to deport Tío Faustino. They’ve got laws on the books, from the civil war, making it harder to send Salvadorans back home. It creates a lot of red tape. But he’s got no case, no lawyer can help him, he’s screwed. So it’s just a matter of time.”

She rose from the table, walked to the sink, staring out past the muslin curtains. “I’m not going to save you from yourself, Roque, if that’s what you came here for.”

He felt stunned. “That’s what you think?”

She opened the spigot, ending finally the thudding drip, and
rinsed her cup. “I care about you. What you’re thinking of doing, I wish I could stop you, talk you out of it. But I also get the feeling that’s precisely what you want me to do. It feels manipulative. It feels wrong.”

“It is wrong. Everything you just said.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant.” He glanced again at the bodhisattva Jizo, guardian of travelers. What she meant was goodbye, she’d been saying it all along. Maybe it was time he listened.

“HAVE I TOLD YOU LATELY THAT I HATE THIS?”

Roque sat slumped back in his seat, watch cap and work gloves in his lap, as he studied the images in the mirror outside his window: Puchi and Chato standing at the back of the truck, shaking down the couple whose furniture the crew had just hauled to their new home in Pinole. The man taught high-school history. His wife, flamboyantly pregnant, worked for a florist.

Happy sat behind the wheel. He was smoking, waiting for the word: Unload or take off. In time, he said, “You got some better idea how to pay for Godo’s meds, cover the nut on getting my old man back here, I’m all ears.” Cocked head, reflective smile. “Into each life,
mi mosca muerta”
—my little innocent, literally my dead fly—“some fucking rain must fall.”

Roque turned his gaze toward the sky. The winter sun hovered beyond a filmy mass of noonday cloud. “Thanks for the update.”

“Life’s full of things you gotta do, not wanna do.”

“No shit? Try practicing scales six hours a day.”

Happy stubbed out his smoke. “Scales, yeah. I bet it’s a bitch.”

Let it go, Roque told himself. He regarded Happy differently now, admiration too lofty, respect too blasé, but that was the emotional territory.

He’d asked Roque’s help writing a letter to his father, asking forgiveness for being such a crap son, explaining what the last two years had been like since being deported. Roque could
hardly believe some of the things Happy told him to write down: the cops with dogs at the airport in Comalapa, who led him to a dank basement room, called him a faggot, told him to strip, just to check for gang tats; the hunchback priest who played harmonica and let him stay at his shelter for three days in the capital, then kicked him loose; old Tripudo the truck driver, a friend of the humpback priest, who took him on, teaching him how to handle a rig, only to betray him, turn him over to some rogue cops who handcuffed him, hooded him, drove him to the prison in Mariona, the one they call La Esperanza: Hope; the
marero
inmates who rat-packed him, beat him, raped him, almost drowned him in a cistern stewing with unspeakable filth, mocking him as he lay there on the floor, hands bound, gasping for breath, gazing up at the towers of mayonnaise jars in the disgusting cell—that was how they smuggled in cell phones, knives, drugs, inside jars of mayo; the plump balding warden who saw him the next morning, dressed in his pristine uniform, a parrot perched on his chair back, explaining how it would be: Happy was given a cellphone number, he’d be driven into San Salvador, he was to call the number, tell whoever answered he was sent by Falcón, then do as directed; the restaurant in San Salvador with more than a hundred restless men waiting in line outside, ex-soldiers, ex-guerrillas, answering an ad for contractors in Iraq; the call from a nearby phone booth to a raspy voice that told him to come around the back of the restaurant; the beefy
guanaco
at the table in the empty dining room, with his dyed hair and crisp white guayabera, brandishing an unlit cigar, telling Happy he’d been hired as a driver hauling freight between Abu Ghraib and Najaf—the coalition liked Salvadorans, the man said, they didn’t crap their pants when a bomb went off—for which he’d be paid $2,500 a week, all but $250 of which he’d kick back to a numbered account. That was the deal, go to Iraq and get shaken down or go back to that cell with the
mareros
and get punked to death, which was how Happy wound up in the same hell as
Godo, except fate denied them the privilege of knowing that or ever getting in touch.