Messenger from Mystery

by Deno Trakas

  After a final kick to the small of my back, the legs and shoes walked out the door, and I heard a car start. It was over, whatever it was. I tried to think clearly and to uncurl my body, but my brain blanked with a pain that felt like someone had stabbed an ice pick into the left side of my back. So I stayed in the fetal position awhile, nose filled with the smell of blood and dusty carpet, eyes imperfectly focused, seeing the shadowy dancing shapes of my furniture and bicycle.

  Saad? And others? But why? Nadia? Had he seen me go into her apartment or leave the next morning? Had he seen us together at other times? Was he spying on her or me or both of us? Was he going after her next? I tried to move again, and in spite of the pain and dizziness, I rolled over onto my knees, bending forward as if to touch my forehead to the floor in prayer. I stiff-armed myself up onto all fours, rested, pulled one foot under me, then the other, but I couldn’t stand up, so I crawled to the kitchen and pried open my body enough to reach the phone and pull it off the counter. My head spun and throbbed, but I called Nadia to warn her. She was fine, but angry and alarmed, said she was coming right over. I told her not to, he might be waiting for her, but she said she’d take a knife and stab him.

  In the time it took me to crawl to the couch and roll myself onto it, curled like a grub, Nadia arrived and burst in. “Oh Jay, oh Jay,” she said, “what they do? Those son-of-bitch boys, I kill them.” She kneeled beside me, stroked my temple, then got up and went to the bathroom, came back and kneeled before me again, patted my face and the back of my head with a wet washcloth. “What I can do? You want I take you to hospital?”

  “No, I’ll be okay,” I whispered. It seemed to hurt less if I whispered. “I might have a cracked rib, but I had one in high school, and all the doctor did was wrap it with an ace bandage and tell me to take aspirin and rest.”

  “Where you have aspirin?”

  “In the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.”

  She got up again and came back with the aspirin and a glass of water. “Why they do this? If they are angry at me, they can hurt me. But why they hurt you?”

  I lifted my head enough to swallow down the pills. “Hell if I know.”

  “Son-of-bitch boys.”

  “I guess they don’t like it that I . . . first Azi, now you.”

  “You are sure it was Saad?”

  “No. But the pants and shoes—I didn’t see any faces.”

  “I go to him. I tell him I call police.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. He’s dangerous.”

  “I buy gun.”

  I grinned. “No, you can’t buy a gun.’

  “Yes, I see gun at Kmart.”

  “Maybe I should buy one,” I said, only half joking.

  “Yes. Next time you shoot him.”

  “I’ll think about it. Maybe we’ll have the police keep an eye out for us, but meanwhile, I think we should stay together. And I should get a deadbolt, the way you did.”

  “Yes yes, lock and load, right? I stay here, take care for you, take you to doctor tomorrow.”

  “We’ll see.”

  After a long night, restless and uncomfortable with nightmares and pain, Nadia propped me up with pillows, brought me coffee and a bowl of cereal, left aspirin on the bedside table, and went to school. I called Richard to ask him to cancel my class, then spent the day in bed, reading when I wasn’t dizzy and worrying about the paper I should be writing. At least getting beat up was a good excuse for a late paper, better than any I’d ever gotten. Except one. A student once told me she couldn’t write her paper because she had to drive to Charleston to bail her mother out of jail—it was true, too.

  The following day I let Nadia take me to school, despite the lump on my head, my purple eye, aching ribs, and crimped posture. I told my 102 class that the Columbia mafia had beat me up because I refused to help them set up a drug ring in the English department. I told Dr. Sheldon it was Iranians. He responded with an I-don’t-think-that’s-funny look, but when I explained, he apologized and asked if there was anything he could do. Just let me have an extension on the paper, I said. Of course, he said.

  That afternoon Richard came by my office and found me hunched at my desk, trying to sit without touching my back to the chair.

  “Nicky, you look like you been hog tied and beat with a fence post.”

  “That’s about right.”

  He shook his head. “Damn, welcome to the new New South. We used to have black men getting lynched by white men. Now we have white men getting beaten by brown men. That’s progress, I guess. You gonna be okay? What can I do for you?”

  “I’ll feel better in a few days.”

  “These the same guys who did your tires?”

  “Probably.”

  “But I thought that was because of the Poppy Princess.”

  I smiled, thinking of Azi in a field of red poppies. “Now it must be Nadia.”

  Richard shook his head and said, “I’d say the message is clear, Mano: stay away from Muslim maidens.”

  “Nadia’s Christian.”

  “Well, maybe you should stick to white girls.”

  “Maybe so. But if that was the message, they could’ve called me.”

  He nodded. “Sure, but they’re terrorists, Mano—they aren’t your friends.”

  “I thought they used to be,” I said. “I know that sounds naïve—it is naïve—I’ve always wanted to be liked—I’ve never been hated like this.”

  “Yeah, well, I still like you, Nicky. But now you should call the cops and have the bastards thrown in jail. I mean, what are those guys going to do next if beating the shit out of you doesn’t work?”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I don’t know—I’ve never been through anything like this. Nadia wants me to buy a gun.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s how we settle our disputes in Texas, but I don’t recommend it. It’s why we have more people on death row than anywhere else in the country.”

  “Hmmm . . . I’ve got a couple of football players in my class, offensive linemen, I mean monsters—maybe they can help me persuade the boys to behave.”

  “I like it.”

  “But I’ll probably try the police first,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m sure they’d be happy to lock up a few Iranians. And lose the key.”

  “Saad, the meanest little shit in the group, is Saudi.”

  “Same difference. By the way, what’s the latest over there? I thought there was some big deal cooking with the U.N. and the Assahola.”

  “Yeah, there was—the best I can figure is that the Iranians are screwing around as always, playing with us: as soon as we get close to an agreement, they decide they aren’t ready to give up their leverage, so they add new conditions or something.”

  “So, the usual bullshit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, can you loan me fifty cents for coffee?”

  That afternoon, Nadia drove me to the police station, and I told my story to a detective, including a mention of the cutting of my tires. He nodded a lot, took notes, seemed mildly impressed with my bruises, said he’d file this as assault and battery, but since I didn’t see the perpetrator and didn’t have any concrete proof that it was Saad—he wrote “Sod”—he couldn’t make an arrest. I could file for a restraining order, but those, in his opinion, were worthless. The best he could do would be to haul Saad in and try to scare him, but that might backfire—when Saad saw that there was nothing the police could do, he might get even bolder. I didn’t want to give the little shit the satisfaction of sneering at all of us with impunity, so I said okay, I’d take care of it myself. He said, Don’t do anything stupid, son.

  Sometime the next day, Nadia reported, she confronted Saad, whose smirk was all the confession she needed. Evidently she yelled at him and was about to scratch his eyes out but Wahab interceded. So I went with Plan B.

  Saturday morning, I knocked on Saad’s apartment door. After a minute or so his roommate o
pened it, looking sleepy and disheveled, and I told him to get Saad. He said Saad was asleep. I pushed him, stepped inside, and told him again. When he turned to go, I picked up the aluminum tennis racket I’d set outside the door and followed him. I hadn’t expected an apartment out of Arabian Nights, with Persian carpets and baskets with cobras, but I didn’t expect the showroom of Radio Shack either. A huge Curtis Mathes console TV stood like a shrine in front of the main wall, with a video recorder on top. On both sides rose stereo speakers, like towers of Babel, and the stereo sat on a separate table.

  I stood around the corner of the opening to the hall, and when Saad stumbled out in his pajamas, I hit him as hard as I could on the back of the head with the frame of the racket. Taking a swing made my ribs feel, well, as if they’d been hit with a two-by-four, but it was worth it to see him fall face down on the shag carpet. His roommate came forward and started to complain loudly, but I raised the racket again and said, “Shut up and stay out of this.” He held up his hands and nodded.

  Saad lifted his bleeding head slowly, dazed, and looked up at me as if he couldn’t quite make me out. Continuing to hold the racket above him, I said, “Crawl to the front door.” He didn’t move so I repeated, “Crawl to the door, motherfucker.” I kicked his thigh hard, and he crawled to the open door.

  I pointed across the parking lot and said, “Watch this.” Richard and five University of South Carolina linemen stood beside Saad’s Pontiac—at my signal, they squatted, lifted the passenger side up and up until the car was resting on the driver side, and then pushed it over onto its top, which collapsed with a poignant crunch of metal and cracking of glass.

  Then the football players dusted their hands, sauntered over, and glared some good ole patriotic hatred of foreigners at the boy as I made my speech: “Stay away from me and Nadia. I have lots of friends like these guys, and we won’t put up with your shit. You understand?” He didn’t answer, so I kicked him again in the same spot as before. I bent over and leaned my puffy face toward his and looked into his deep-set eyes that looked like cold black coffee, searched for amusement or contempt or regret, but found no readable emotion. “You understand?” He gave a slight nod, as if he didn’t want to speak because his English would make him weak. I almost felt sorry for him, so puny in the face of all this American muscle.

  I turned on my heels and said to my students, “That’s it guys. Class dismissed.” We took a last satisfied look at the smashed, upside down car, then headed for the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet at Shoneys, which I had promised them as payment for their assistance, though I had to borrow the money from Rich. Laughing, proud and happy, the merry monsters ate the place down to its last biscuit and grit. I wished Saad could see this feeding frenzy, this massing of energy and attitude—he’d damn sure never mess with an American again.

  CHAPTER 6

  Mild weather returned in early March, greened the lawns and coaxed the daffodils. Nadia and I went about our lives cautiously, sporadically spending time together, being careful to avoid the boys. Nadia saw them at school as usual, but Saad steered clear, and since I no longer worked in their building, I almost never saw any of them. Nadia had my bike fixed, changed my front door lock, and made other amends because she liked to spend money on me, and her guilt over Saad provided a good excuse.

  I didn’t sleep well because of my sore ribs and because of a general uneasiness, marked by occasional nightmares, sometimes about Azi, but usually the grad school variety, like showing up for an exam and realizing I’d never gone to class or read the books. One night I dreamed I was shot in front of my duplex and lay dying until my father came over, smoking a cigar, and told me to get up and help him with the delivery.

  The U.N. commission went to Tehran and stayed for several days, but the militants refused to turn the hostages over to the government, and the plan that had supposedly been approved by the Ayatollah fell apart. In the early days of the crisis, I’d get stomping, cussing mad when our feathers of hope got plucked like that, but now I just shook my head. I felt sorry for Carter. For the first couple of months of the crisis, he’d been praised for his patience and restraint, but now his critics complained that he was weak, that the Iranians were toying with him . . . but when asked what they would do in his place, they never had a good answer. I heard a couple of military options proposed, such as a blockade in the Persian Gulf, or bombs, as in “BOMB TEHRAN,” but those were acts of war, and most sane people didn’t want us to send our troops, our boys, to the Middle East over the hostages. According to the Iranians, they weren’t hostages at all—they were guests of the Ayatollah.

  On the eve of spring break, I called my mother and invited myself home, then called Oman Lare again but still got no answer. When I arrived at the address for Lare that Sheldon had given me, the house was closed up and the grass obviously hadn’t been cut for months. Next door a goat and at least four kids, human, bucked around the back yard, so I went over to ask if they knew anything about Lare. They said he’d moved to Mexico and left his goat for them—Lare called her Goatee, but they’d named her Daisy. Then their mother came out and added that she thought he was in a town called Monterrey. Disappointed and worried that my chance for publication had fled the country, I got back in the car and headed across town.

  Our house sat on the flank of a cul-de-sac, at the end of which my dad had installed a long aluminum gate to keep drunk or careless drivers from running down the hill into the creek below. The city didn’t tell him to, he just did it because, he said, it’s important to build barriers in front of precipices because sometimes people don’t look where they’re going.

  I walked down to the creek, where my sister Barbara and I had caught salamanders and taught ourselves to smoke. The creek was a boundary separating our land from the trailer park, but a boundary in other ways too, and we liked to hang out there. In addition to the shade and cool water, we liked playing on the edge of the trailer park where the people were different and the rules were different from those up at the house where our strict father demanded, in Greek fashion, that we never, ever embarrass the family. And we didn’t—we were a good boy and girl, more or less, and when less, we were careful not to get caught. But at the creek we might see a skinny man staggering around without a shirt, cussing and taking swigs from a bottle of whiskey, or a fat woman hanging laundry, wearing a loose robe and nothing else, or a dirty boy walking around with a BB gun, shooting at rats. We didn’t envy those people, but we thought they were interesting, and we were a little afraid of them because they didn’t have much, so they didn’t have much to lose and were unpredictable. But now the trailer park was gone, being replaced by a sprawling, half-built apartment complex.

  I scooped up a sip of water—it tasted the same as always, tangy and somewhat metallic like rust—but there was more silt than before, and the new apartments were obviously to blame. I headed up to the house through the back yard where my father had terraced the lawn with stone walls. The house itself, built in 1906 by my immigrant grandfather, lost to the bank in 1931, repurchased in 1937, had no distinct style and looked modest and small—how was it possible that he and his nine brothers and sisters and two parents had lived there?

  I entered from the back, where the coal bin used to be, and called out. Mom came from the living room to greet me. Dressed in a pleated skirt and ruffled blouse, with earrings and necklace, her black hair styled in a soft wave as always, she looked like she’d been out shopping, but then, the only time she wore casual clothes was when she worked in the yard. “I was expecting you to come in the front,” she said. She started to hug me but stopped when she saw my fading bruises. “What happened, Jason?”

  “I got into a scuffle with some former students, Saudis and Iranians. I’ve been dating a Mideast woman, a friend of theirs, and they don’t like it.”

  “Iranians? Oh dear,” she said and gave me a delicate hug and kiss on the cheek. “Come in and sit and tell me about it.” She headed for the kitchen. I took off my coat, h
ung it on the rack, and followed.

  “I don’t remember the trailer park being sold,” I said.

  “You haven’t been here to notice.” I didn’t respond to her jab. She went to the refrigerator to pull out the salad fixings and the tea pitcher, which she handed to me. “So, tell me what happened.”

  I poured two glasses and sat at the table. “There’s not much to tell. At the end of the fall term, I went out with an Iranian woman, Azadeh, but she had to return to Iran. Then, in February, I started dating a Kuwaiti woman, Nadia, and some of my male students, one in particular, don’t like American men taking their women.”

  “Maybe you should stick to American girls.” Richard had said the same, but he’d been half joking—from Mom, the comment was more offensive, but I let it go. She said, “Do you want a beer? I bought some for you.”

  “I’m fine for now.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Just, well, we had a fight, I got banged up, but I think we’ve resolved it.”

  “Be careful Jason. Those Iranian students are dangerous.”

  Although I had said the exact thing about Saad, now I said, “These guys aren’t the same as the militants who stormed the embassy.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve taught them,” I said, “and I know them. One seems to be a radical, but the others aren’t.”

  “We should deport them all if you ask me,” she said, expressing the opinion of the vast majority of Americans.

  “You’re insulting me, Mom. I just said that I dated one of them. I”—I almost said I loved her—“I liked her a lot and still do. She’s as cultured, intelligent, pretty, and kind as any girl I’ve ever known.”

  “I’m sorry, Jason. I didn’t mean anything—I was just jabbering.”

  “No, you were probably repeating something you heard from some right wing politician. But it’s not just them, it’s everyone, all of us, we lump people and stereotype them. All Iranians aren’t terrorists any more than all Americans are rich and spoiled.”