Do They Know I'm Running? Read Online Free PDF Page A

cousin, in a manner of speaking. Turning back to Godo, he again looked hard at the ruined face. “You’ve been stateside since when?”
    Godo wiped at some sweat and uttered a small, ugly, disbelieving laugh. “My turn to ask you something.” His pitted skin shimmered in the kitchen light. “Tonight, when you plant your ass on the couch, front of the TV, you and those two glorified rednecks outside—when you’re watching yourselves, watching all the people in these shitbag trailers get rounded up, ask yourself why. They do what you want. They do it cheap. But you watch all that. And when the next bit comes on, the one about the war, when the names of the dead scroll by: Rodriguez, Acevedo, Castellanos, Hernandez …” He counted them off, each name a finger. “Hear what I’m saying? Come on, look me in the eye, tell me honest, two jarheads, goddamn Thundering Third, right? Tell me to my face that doesn’t fuck with you.”

PERCHED HIGH BEHIND THE WHEEL OF HIS FREIGHTLINER CAB , Faustino impatiently raided his lunch of cheese and beef tongue
pasteles
, prepared by Lucha, glancing up now and then through the wiper arc on his grime-caked windshield, watching the vast threadwork of lights grow dim along the crane booms and catwalks, daybreak sapping the dark from the sky. A San Cristóbal medallion hung from the rearview mirror, its pale blue ribbon entwined with a rosary.
    He was waiting in his queue at the Port of Oakland, the complex as vast as a city itself. At every berth, longshoremen in hard hats scurried beyond the fences like dug-up termites, forklifts growling to and fro and belching smoke amid cursing shouts and horn blasts and siren shrieks. Jumbo cranes hoisted freight containers from the cavernous holds of cargo ships, the vessels so huge they dwarfed the piers to which they were moored.
    Hundreds of truckers like Faustino—out of bed by three, down here by four-thirty to snag a place in line—sat idly in their rigs, waiting hours for a single load. And while they sat, they sweated the constant back and forth of cops and overeager port security flacks who hoped to pop them for a bum taillight, bare tread on a tire, excessive exhaust, anything. Most of the trucks were old—Faustino drove a ’94 day cab—and offers by the Port Commission to help finance new ones were laughable. Who could afford the monthlies, the interest, let alone the hike in insurance?Even the anti-exhaust systems they were hawking, ten to fourteen thousand a pop, were out of reach for most guys.
    It sounded like a lot to outsiders—hundred dollars a load for just a drayage run, from the port over to the warehouse in Alameda, a matter of minutes—but the way they made you sit, wasting away the hours, you were lucky to get two runs a day.
    And the nickel-and-dime stuff ate you alive. Faustino did his own repairs, juggled his accident coverage with his registration payment month by month, part of the constant trade-off, shortchanging one thing to make good on another. Near impossible to meet costs, let alone get ahead. Desperation became a kind of genius, making you sharp and clever and tight with a dollar, but it was their hole card too. The shippers had you by the throat and they knew it.
    With his forefinger, he scooped up a smear of cheesy
pastele
filling from the crumpled tinfoil, unable to remember the last time he’d sat at the table and shared breakfast with Lucha or eaten one of her lunches without the stench of diesel souring the back of his throat.
    Meanwhile, outside his window: “Check this out—I’m moonlighting last weekend, hauling rock? Heavy load, incline. Boost gauge hovers around nine psi. Been a while since I drove a boost, but ain’t that high?”
    A circle of drivers, arms crossed, gathered on the pavement, biding time till the line budged. Risky, Faustino thought, gabbing away in the open like that. The shippers will say you’re organizing. Then watch your life turn to hell.
    “With a loaded trailer?