“Is this your first?” Clyde said.
Fazoul broke eye contact and stared off into the forest. “Fifth.”
“Oh. Are the other four here today?”
“No,” Fazoul said after an awkward pause, “they were not able to attend.”
They arrived at a clearing near the edge of the bluff. Nishnabotna was visible across the river, through a sparse picket line of big trees. They were shielded from a direct view of the packing plant by the dense summer undergrowth that competed for the light that shone on the rim of the cliff in the morning. Four men were standing around a place where smoke and steam came out of the ground, seeping through a thick cap of leaves. All of these men were dressed in Western clothes, and one of them was actually a Westerner.
“Dr. Kenneth Knightly, dean of international programs,” Fazoul said.
“Honored to meet you, Clyde,” Knightly said, stepping forward to shake hands; but seeing the baby in Clyde’s arms, he settled for an exchange of nods.
“Pleasure,” Clyde said. Fazoul went on to give the names of the three foreigners, and Clyde forgot them immediately.
“I contacted your boss—Sheriff Mullowney—and told him about what a fine thing you did,” Knightly said. “Gave him my personal thanks and that of the president of the university. He said you’d always been one of his finest deputies.”
Clyde hardly knew where to begin, so he held his tongue and soon thought better of trying to unburden himself to Dr. Knightly on the subject of his job.
Fazoul picked up a rake and used it to claw the cap of leaves off the barbecue pit. A mushroom cloud of steam rose out of it, smelling wonderfully of cumin and other spices. Down in the pit was something wrapped in more leaves, surrounded on all sides by a thick jacket of black-and-white coals that glowed like neon tubes in the deepening prethunderstorm gloom. Fazoul and his three coreligionists commenced a serious but heated debate in whatever their language was.
“New High Altaic,” Knightly said, reading the curiosity on Clyde’s face. “New because it’s a modern dialect. High because it originally came from the high mountains of Central Asia.”
Knightly spoke with a Texas accent and wore actual cowboy boots—down-at-the-heel ones scraped round the edges and marked here and there with road tar. He was wearing a Gooch’s Best seed-corn cap to protect the large bald area on the top of his head, and he was smoking a straight Camel with the hunched, apologetic posture of a longtime smoker who has tried and failed to quit. Clyde felt that he could ask Knightly questions without being made to feel like an unlettered townie.
“How about Altaic?” he said.
Knightly grimaced, looked at Nishnabotna, and took a long drag on his cigarette. “Well, that gets us in deeper. Fazoul and his homeboys are Turks.”
“What part of Turkey they from?”
“Most Turks have never set foot inside the country called Turkey. I s’pose I could be old-fashioned and call them Turkomans just to make that distinction a little clearer. There’s a whole lot of different kind of Turkomans, Clyde. They start in Constantinople and go all the way to China. There’s Turks in Siberia and Turks in India.”
“Sounds like they really got around.”
“They did get around. The Turks are the biggest ass-kickers in history. They kicked everyone’s ass at one point or another. I mean really kicked their asses. You know who Genghis Khan was?”
“I guess.”
“Well, Genghis Khan was a Mongol, and he wouldn’t have been diddly except that he got the Turks on his side early. I could go on and on. Anyway, the point is that they’re all over the place, there are a lot of different subgroups. Fazoul and company are from a subgroup that started out in the Altai Mountains a long time ago and made a name for themselves—literally—in the Vakhan Corridor, which is where Afghanistan and China and Russia and Pakistan all come together. They are Vakhan Turks. But they have been a lot of other places since they got that name.”
“And now they’re in Forks County,” Clyde said.
Knightly laughed out loud and ground out his cigarette. By this point Fazoul and his friends had lifted the smoking bundle from the pit, so Knightly wielded the sharp toe of his cowboy boot to kick the butt of the Camel into the hole. He and Clyde watched as it smoked, turned brown, and suddenly burst into a little star of yellow flame.
A moment later it was snuffed out as one of Fazoul’s men pitched the first shovelful of black earth into the pit. They filled it in quickly; the first fat drops of rain had begun to tumble down like water balloons from the purple-black thunderheads whose bases were now directly over their heads. Clyde pulled the corner of the baby’s blanket over its face, and all of the men—the four Vakhan Turks and the two Americans—made for the shelter as quickly as they could. By the time they emerged from the trees, it was raining steadily, and when they were within a few yards of the shelter, it began to come down in a seamless mass. All of the partygoers had gathered together under the shelter’s hipped roof, forming a solid rectangular bloc. Clyde had lost track of Fazoul and excused his way through the crowd for several minutes, rocking the baby in his arms, until he found Farida, Fazoul’s wife, sitting next to Desiree.
After Clyde had turned the baby over, Desiree flung one arm around Farida’s shoulders, leaned sideways, and put her face right up next to Farida’s. “What do you think?” she said.
“Beg pardon?” he said.
Desiree refused to say, just posed there right next to Farida, the two women staring up at him with the same mischievous expression. They looked like a couple of naughty sisters. Lightning struck nearby, strobing a still image of the two women deep into Clyde’s brain.
“I’ll be darn,” Clyde said. Then he actually felt a chill moving up his spine, and a tingling around the back of his skull where his hairs were trying to come to attention. And it wasn’t because of the thunder rolling in from the nearby ground strike, or the ozone smell of the thunderstorm.
It was common knowledge that Desiree had been adopted from someplace exotic. Her dark hair, the almond shape of her hazel eyes, her ability to tan rapidly and evenly to a lovely terra-cotta shade, all marked her out as being not from around here, and certainly not borne of a Dhont.
Mrs. Dhont claimed not to have any idea where Desiree came from. If she knew, she wasn’t telling. She believed, perhaps with good reason, that her daughter’s adopted heritage made no difference at all and should not even be mentioned in conversation. If Desiree had been blond and blue-eyed, Mrs. Dhont probably never would have admitted that she was adopted at all. This was a policy arrived at internally by Mrs. Dhont, operating behind the veil that separated women from men, following the arcane rules and, perhaps, instincts that women applied to matters regarding family—rules that could not be explained or justified, leading to decisions that could not be questioned or appealed.
Sons just obeyed. But daughters turned into women and passed through that veil, where they could enact their own decisions and carry out their own programs, sometimes regardless of what precedents Mother had laid down.
Clyde had never imagined that Desiree harbored the slightest degree of curiosity about her origins until this moment. And now he knew that she’d been fretting about it all along. He also knew, now, that he was married to some kind of Turkoman.
Clyde had a theory that women had a book, a homemade, photocopied three-ring binder called “Surprising Things to Do in a Relationship,” which they passed around to one another, adding pages from time to time, hiding it under the bed. He figured that Desiree could run home tonight and add a new page.
The lamb was unwrapped from its leaves, carved, and served. The rain came down so hard that the ricochet from the deepening puddles under the eaves soaked the people sitting around the edges of the shelter. Gusts of wind came through with the momentum of freight trains on the Denver–Platte–Des Moines, inflating the raiment of certain partygoers like spinnakers and sending avalanches of plates and food down the lengths of the tables. Seve
ral of the foreign students were at work out on the grass, wearing raincoats improvised from garbage bags, struggling to erect a tent of wooden poles and skins.
He sought out Knightly, who was just winding up a conversation in Arabic, or something, with a man in a robe.
“I was just explaining to this gentleman,” Knightly said, “what those poor Vakhans are doing out in the rain. I suppose you want to know the same thing?”
“I figured that gentleman would already know,” Clyde said.
“That gentleman’s ancestors rode camels around on the desert of Arabia. Of course, now they’re oilmen. But Fazoul’s ancestors rode ponies on the grasslands beneath the snow-covered peaks of the Altai Mountains in Central Asia, a few thousand miles away. Different people, different customs. Fazoul’s people have been doing this for their newborn sons since, oh, a couple thousand years before Mohammed trod sand.”
“They gonna do a ceremony or something?”
“Yeah. Sort of like a consecration. They dedicate the son to God, formally declare a godfather and any other namesakes or important people in the kid’s life.” Knightly turned toward Clyde and squinted at him. “You’re gonna be in there.”
“I am?”
“Yeah. One of the baby’s middle names is Khalid.”
“So?”
“So that’s the closest they can come, in their system of pronunciation, to Clyde.”
Clyde suddenly wished that beer was available at Muslim feasts. “I’ll be darn,” he said.
Fazoul limped over to the shelter, picked up the baby, and carried it through the rain into the tent. Two of his cohorts ran to one of the parked cars and pulled a trunk out of the back, ran it over to the tent, and pulled the flaps shut behind them.
By the time Clyde was ushered into the tent, it had been fully furnished with a rug, cushions, lanterns, and other amenities—even a couple of framed photographs with small votive candles burning underneath them. One was a landscape shot of some mountain countryside; it had gone all blue with age. The other was a picture of a man, not a formal portrait but a candid shot snapped in the heat of action. Clyde guessed from the set of his features and his clothing that the man was a Vakhan Turk, probably a bit less than forty years old but with a bearing of great authority. He was on a road somewhere, a dirt road through a rough country of volcanic rock and scrub trees, and in the background were others on motorcycles and beat-up Jeeps.
He was the handsomest man Clyde had ever seen, even though Clyde was not in the habit of noticing or admiring this trait in other men. His cheeks and chin were covered with black stubble salted with gray,and the rest of his face was caked with dust and dried sweat. He was grinning broadly at something, as if he had just pulled something over on someone, and the way his skin wrinkled, or the way the photo was arranged, gave Clyde the impression that he didn’t smile very often. The photo was cropped to show only the man’s head, shoulders, and upper torso; but Clyde was startled finally to notice, in the bottom right corner, a dark, hard-edged shape: barely recognizable as the flash arrestor on the muzzle of a gun, which this man was apparently carrying under his left arm. It was evidently attached to a worn braided leather strap that ran over the man’s left shoulder.
Following the others’ cues, Clyde knelt on the rug. Besides Fazoul, two other Vakhan males were there. Fazoul’s son was laid out on the sheepskin cradle Clyde had noticed earlier. Fazoul called the meeting to order, wailing in a surprisingly high and reedy voice. Clyde recalled seeing a movie long ago in which a man was apparently being tortured up on a high tower in the middle of a Muslim neighborhood.
It was just like the first time Desiree had dragged him to Catholic Mass, and Clyde had been completely confused the whole time, surrounded by people who knew the whole program by heart and who ran through it as easily as Clyde tied his shoes in the morning. They didn’t speak Latin, but they might as well have done. Clyde had learned, on that and other forays into the papist universe, to adopt a solemn expression, sit very still, and do what other people did when called upon; and he found that it got him through this Vakhan ceremony, whatever it was, just as well as it got him through Mass. He heard the name of Khalid pronounced, and they looked in his direction, and he heard another name pronounced, something like Banov, and they looked at the photograph of the left-handed gunman. The rain battered the tent, making a roar like a hundred drums rolling at once during an especially grand halftime show; lightning flashed through the seams, ozone-scented air leaked in under the edge and made the lanterns flicker.
He was just settling in for a good hour of additional folderol when Fazoul suddenly relaxed and broke into English. “That’s it, then,” he said. He scooped up his son from the cradle and walked on his knees through the flaps. He clambered to his feet and held his son above his head, and Clyde winced, thinking of the danger posed by lightning. He could dimly hear a roar of approval from the crowd under the shelter.
By the time Clyde got out of the tent, almost all the people had fled to their cars. He helped Desiree carry Maggie and all the baby support systems to the station wagon, then walked back to the parking lot near the shelter and, stepping into his role as lawman, began directing traffic. The partygoers, so cheery and gentle on foot, had all gone crazy as soon as they had got behind the wheels of their cars, honking wildly at each other as they fought to escape the lot. Clyde took to whistling through his fingers and waving his arms dramatically, and when they recognized him, they stopped honking and accepted his authority.
After a few minutes Dr. Knightly strolled up, dressed in a slicker, which apparently concealed a generous store of Camels in some dry place. He hunched over and got one lit, then thoughtfully arranged himself downwind of Clyde. “I came early, so I’ll be the last one to get out,” he said. “I’d rather drive backward on a freeway at midnight with no lights than go bumper-to-bumper with these people.”
“You ever live in one of their countries?”
“Aw, shit, Clyde,” Knightly said, and shrugged. “Yeah, Turkey for a while. Did some time in China, too. Green Revolution stuff. Travel gets real old after a while.” He sucked deeply on his cigarette, as if the mere memory of these travels made him eager to hasten his own death from cancer. Or, Clyde thought, perhaps the memory of driving in those countries had made him fatalistic. Knightly took to worrying the toe of his boot into the ground. “I’m not much good at this,” he said by way of warning, “but I do want to thank you sincerely for what you did for Fazoul. It is not out of the question that you might have saved his life.”
Clyde chuckled. “Nishnabotna cops ain’t that bad.”
“I don’t mean to say they would have killed him, Clyde. I mean to say that if Fazoul had been provoked any more, he might have become irrational and done something that would have landed him in jail—then got him deported.”
“How’s that come to saving his life?”
Knightly was taken aback by this question and stared down at the coal of his cigarette for several moments. “It’s a tangled thing, Clyde,” he finally said. “I sometimes forget how tangled it must seem to someone like you, a lifelong Forks County boy. Let’s just say that the Vakhan Turks are one of those ethnic groups that don’t have a homeland of their own, so in order to come here and study, they have to carry passports from other countries in that area. If they get into a mess here and get themselves deported, they will be forcibly taken back to a country that may not want them. Which might have them on a list of people who, if they ever show up at a border, are to be taken straight to a windowless cell somewhere and never let out alive.”
Clyde had only a small number of oaths in his arsenal, of which “I’ll be darn” was about the strongest; and as it did not seem adequate here, he said nothing at all.
“That’s why these people have done you the very exceptional honor they did today,” Knightly said. “By the way, Khalid was perhaps the greatest warrior in the early history of the Muslim world—right up there with Saladin. They called him the Sword
of the Faith. So there’s also a play on words at work here. Just thought you ought to understand that.”
By the time the traffic jam had cleared out and Knightly had given Clyde a lift back to the station wagon, Maggie had crashed in her car seat, and Desiree was looking a bit drowsy herself—she was engaged in the practice of “resting her eyes,” which Clyde had never been able to distinguish from sleep. Clyde drove them home. Desiree was awakened by the sound of the garage door rumbling open and got Maggie tucked into the crib while Clyde changed out of his full-dress uniform and into a plain old deputy’s uniform.
“What happened in that tent?” she said, gliding into the dark bedroom smelling like milk.
“Ceremony. Like church, I guess,” Clyde said.
“So what did you think of the two picnics?” she said in a clearer voice, cocking her head in a mischievous way to let him know that this was very much a leading question.
“If I tell you all of what I think about the difference between Republicans and Muslims,” he said, “we’ll never get to sleep. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
twenty-two
KEVIN VANDEVENTER drove his new Camry from O’Hare back to EIU, a trip of two and a half hours, and spent most of the time talking to himself. Here he was, a newly minted Ph.D. who would never have to teach a gut biology course, wearing a new suit, driving a decent enough car back from a trip to D.C., where he had entrée to a number of embassies and was on a first-name basis with fairly significant personages at State, USIA, and Ag. But as the Vivaldi pounded away at him from the Camry’s fine stereo, he wondered why he felt that strange discomfort—something eating at him, as if he had done something really bad but couldn’t quite make out what it was.
Maybe it was becoming throwing-up drunk at his sister’s apartment, just when things were getting good with Margaret. He made a mental note to dry out. He was acquiring too much responsibility to risk doing something like that at a business lunch. Mother had always said that Dad’s side of the family was full of alcoholics. “One drink, one drunk. But you know, they were always sweet,” she would say, looking at Dad. But when Dad drank—generally after a late frost destroyed the emerging potato plants—everybody avoided him.
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