I prayed for my baba and abo, for my akai and athai, for all maamaas and khalas, and for my amas and my one dead kaakaa, Watek, and for all of my cousins, and I prayed for the health of the girl I might marry someday, and I prayed for the health of all the mothers on the earth but in Afghanistan especially, and I prayed for the men in the village who took care of their families and prayed all their prayers and watched over their neighbors and worked all day in the sun and never beat their wives and never sold their daughters and never snitched on their people and never joined the Americans and never hurt anyone they didn’t have to hurt, because I swear to God those sorts of men existed in Deh-Naw, in Logar, in the country. I swear to God.
A few villagers joined our line: farmers from their fields, laborers from their homes, and shepherds from their trails, until there were maybe thirty men or so praying behind Zia as he was wrapping up his final rakah.
I went on.
I prayed for all of my family and all of my friends and for all of the innocents and the martyrs, and I prayed for so many people and so many things that, wallah, just as Zia was turning his head to say salaam to the angel sitting on his right shoulder, Raqib, the recorder of good, I prayed one more time for Allah to bring us home, safely, so that I had no time left to pray for my enemies.
When Zia finished greeting Atid, the recorder of sins, and turned around to make his dua, he was only flustered for a second by the size of his congregation. He then recited a lovely little dua in what I assumed was perfect Arabic. Afterward, some of the men who had joined us in our prayer recognized Zia as Rahmutallah’s son, and they asked him what we were doing so far from home.
But before Zia could answer, Gul spoke up first, telling them that we were chasing after a dog, and a young shepherd stepped up and informed us that his flock had recently been attacked by something resembling a dog. He led us along a stream, the way we had come, to a clearing in a pasture where his flock was allowed to graze, and where he’d been briefly distracted by the erratic flight patterns of an American helicopter, and by the time he brought his attention back to his flock, his sheep were dripping red, and so, following one sheep after another, each of them getting more and more bloody, he came upon the source of the carnage: at first, he thought his poor little lamb had exploded from the inside out. That was until he saw the red paw prints leading away from the carcass.
We thanked the shepherd and promised to bring the dog to justice for the murder of his sheep. At which point, we started to follow the tracks, deeper and deeper into the valves of the country.
The Second Jirga
Budabash’s tracks disappeared just as we got to Watek’s marker.
So did his scent. Dawoud sniffed and sniffed as the sun dipped into the late afternoon but got nothing.
Watek’s flag didn’t look much different from any of the other flags littering the makeshift graveyards and the dirt roads all over Logar. It hung red and torn from a wooden rod. Stones gathered at the base of it. Ash too. It was the loneliest thing I had ever seen.
Near the flag there was a mulberry tree planted specifically in honor of Watek as a sadaqah. We gathered underneath it, catching our breath, rubbing our feet, and eating the toot from the branches, which belonged to Watek and so belonged to no one, or else, belonged to the whole village. We were so hungry and the toot was so sweet, we ate too much, too quickly, and our mouths got sticky from the juice. Gul said he was going to wash his face and he gestured for me to follow him. Past this hedge of chinar, we slid down a slope of clay into the bank of the canal.
“You know what happened here?” Gul asked me.
I told Gul I didn’t, which was true.
“You don’t know what happened to your Watek Kaakaa?”
Watek was Agha’s little brother. He was executed during the war by the Russians. He died really young, a kid practically. A shahid of the highest purity. That’s all I knew.
“This is where it happened,” Gul said, pointing to the earth beneath his feet as if that was the exact spot, as if we squatted right where he was standing when the Russians slit his throat or shot his face or filled his heart with lead.
The shade from the chinar fell slantwise against the bank of the water where we knelt.
He must have fallen in the water, I thought, it must have carried him.
“Shagha never told you that story?”
“Sometimes bits and pieces. But never the whole thing.”
“No one hears the whole thing.”
“Just bits?”
“Just pieces. Shagha’ll tell you the story piece by piece. And you’ll have to put it together yourself, and when you do, you have to come and tell me too. You understand?”
When we walked back out on the road, we found Zia and Dawoud whispering to each other. The two of them had created a secret pact in order to gather the strength to call for a second jirga, demanding that we, as a clan, a tribe, a nation, reinitiate our former council and vote on whether or not we should abort our prolonged mission.
“It’s getting dark,” Zia argued.
“I’m getting hungry,” Dawoud added.
Gul wasn’t buying it.
“Gul, you been saying a little farther, a little farther,” Zia said, “but you can’t force us unless we vote on it. Me and Dawoud want to head back. You’re the only one who wants to keep going.”
“Marwand wants to keep going.”
“Marwand wants to go back.”
“Well, what do you say, Marwand? You want to go home?” Zia asked.
“Or you want to go on?” Gul added.
The three of them looked to me for an answer and, wallah, I was trying to come up with one that might make everyone happy, but the toot juice in my belly wouldn’t let me think.
“What’s your vote?” Gul asked.
And just as my guts were about to give up and give in, I shouted, “Ghwul!” as loud as I could, and ran off through the chinar.
Hidden in between some bushes near the fields on the other side of the bank, I squatted and waited. Down the road the voice of a child called out the adhan from the speakerphone of a mosque’s citadel, and even with the static and the echo and the cracking of his pitch, it sounded so sweet in the fading light, with the fields darkening, and the crickets chirping their songs.
When the adhan finished, Zia stepped through the chinar and started to pray his Maghrib Salah near the stream. “Asalamalaykum Rahmutallah wa Barakatu,” Zia said to the angel sitting on his right shoulder, and just before Zia turned his head toward the angel on his left shoulder, to say his final salaam, I, too, peeked past my left shoulder, through Atid, God’s first snitch, and clenched my guts and watched the dark fields at my back, whose every single stalk of grain was trembling back and forth and side to side, while the whirlpool in my belly spun wildly into itself.
And all at once.
Zia finished his salaam.
I shat my flood.
Atid wrote this down.
The wind parted the wheat.
And a shadow leaped from the field, toppling me over, like a pile of rocks.
Night
Gul came bursting through the chinar, shouting half phrases in Farsi and Pakhto: “Zia, goddamn it, Zia, Budabash, Zia, fuck, Zia, Budabash, Zia, quit praying, Dawoud, sniff, get to sniffing, sniff the Budabash, Budabash, and where the fuck is Marwand?”
I was still hiding between the bushes and the fields, desperately trying to wipe the shit off my clothes. I worked quietly, without breathing, and as soon as Gul left with a curse and a huff, I hobbled over to the canal with its water cool and clean and pure, took a deep breath, and hopped in.
Gul must have heard the splashing.
“Marwand…,” he started saying before he spotted Zia a little ways up the canal, still facing toward the Kaaba, his han
ds before his face, his head bobbing to the tune of a song we couldn’t hear.
Standing in the stream, I looked to Gul as Gul looked to Zia as Zia looked to God and I could see that Gul was being torn at the moment between his uncle’s inclination to beat the shit out of Zia for ignoring him and his long-held, almost primordial, Afghan’s esteem for the act of worship, whether faked or not.
Gul ordered me to stay and wait for Zia, but it took such a long time, I remember, for him to finish his prayers. At first, I sat beside the stream, watching him, waiting for him to finish, trying to guess which head bob, which dua, which surah, would be his last, but he just went on and on until I got tired of it and went back toward the road and sat beneath Watek’s tree.
It was cold on the road by myself as wet as I was.
About two seconds later, Zia came crawling through the chinar, finally finished with his prayers, and sat right next to me. I gave him a suspicious look like, “I see you.” And he, in turn, gave me an expression of innocence as if to say, “God sees all,” which was true, you know, but, still. Probably, I could have pressured him, made him explain why he kept on praying his fake prayer when Gul needed him most, but part of me, I think, didn’t really want to know. Besides, Zia was all I had left, and I was all he had left, and so, even though I stank horribly of toot-shit and mud, Zia unfurled his patu and wrapped it around me and him both.
To pass the time, Zia asked me for a story.
The roads darkened. The crickets chirped. The donkeys brayed. And everywhere there was a smell of smoke and sadness. Me and Zia huddled underneath his patu, underneath the mulberry tree, underneath the sky.
We watched the flag of Watek’s marker and smelled the ash and listened for every footstep of every killer in Logar: the psychopathic white boys, the ravenous bandits, the Ts and the gunmen and the drug runners, the kidney kidnappers, the robots in the sky, the wolves from the mountains and the coyotes from the rivers, the witches in the cesspits, the djinn in the trees, the ghosts from the graveyards, and the monsters in the maze.
I whispered to Zia, “It’s so dark.”
“You scared?” he asked.
“It’s just that back in America it doesn’t get so dark because we have lights going on all night in the streets.”
“But who pays for the fuel?”
“I think taxes.”
“You miss it over there?”
“No,” I said, “fuck America. I rather be here.”
“Wallah?” he said. “Don’t lie in the night, Marwand. Snakes will hear.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe not right this moment. But in general.”
“So you are scared.”
“Maybe a little.”
“All right,” he said, and asked me to give him my right hand, which I did, and after carefully unwrapping the gauze still clinging to my skin, he traced for me—with a single finger—his evidence of God’s existence.
In some way or other, I knew we would be saved, either in the night or in the days to come, that it was only a matter of when, not if. At some point, we both fell asleep, and for the first time in a long time, Zia forgot to pray.
Mark Jude Poirier
How We Eat
THE THRIFT STORE Brenda drags us to today is on Kolb, far on the east side towards the Rincon Mountains, just past the Lucky Wishbone Chicken with the pulsating sunburst sign. Like every thrift store, it stinks of dust and mothballs and dirty diapers and bad breath and dead flowers. It smells like the floor of Brenda’s car.
My sister, Lizzie, and I search pockets, while Brenda scans other aisles for stuff to sell at the swap meet. It’s Thursday, late morning, and I’m nervous about missing another day of school. I’m in the sixth grade at Lulu Walker. I’m twelve, so it’s 1992. Lizzie is ten but she’s only in third grade because they held her back. For social reasons. She bit a kid and broke the skin. Lizzie is taller than me.
Brenda’s our mother but she forbids us from calling her “Mom.” We’re allowed to call her “Brenda” or “Bren,” though we never call her “Bren.” She says she looks too young to have kids as old as us. She has big eyes, and hair like hay because she uses Miss Clairol too often. The Natural Medium Golden Blonde has stripped our kitchen sink of its shine.
We started searching pockets a few years ago, and we’ve found a lot of different things, mainly in men’s clothes: money, condoms and condom wrappers, keys, sticks of gum, notes, credit cards, checks and check stubs, driver’s licenses, receipts. I once found the top of a set of dentures in a jacket. The most money I found was sixty-eight dollars in a pair of dirty jeans with a chew can ring worn into the back pocket under the plastic Wrangler patch. I gave eight dollars to Brenda and I kept the three twenties for myself. I rolled the bills tight and hid them deep in my underpants. Brenda always checks our pockets when we get to the car and sometimes she slides her finger around our waists to see if we’re holding out.
* * *
—
From the chest pocket of a pair of paint-splattered white overalls, I pull out a Polaroid, overexposed, but clear enough that I see its subject is a turd floating in a toilet. I feel like I shouldn’t have seen it. I shouldn’t have even touched it. Someone put it there so I would be freaked out, and I look around for the perpetrator, who I imagine to be a stringy-haired man planning on abducting me, torturing me, and sawing off my limbs, which he will put in four different dumpsters. Last week, the police found a woman’s arm in the dumpster behind Skate Country. I saw it on the news. They showed the gaudy, jeweled ring that was on the middle finger. Now I’m terrified, and I blame Brenda. If we don’t search the pockets, she tells us she’s doing her best, and why should she if we’re not, then she ignores us, sometimes for hours. The image from the photo is branded into my mind, and after I slide it back into the pocket and wipe my hands on my shorts, I can still see the bowed, feathery turd. I wish I were in school, even in math—though the teacher, Miss Burk, is a cruel woman who yelled at me when I first arrived in her class because I didn’t know how to divide fractions. Her left hairy ape wrist is cinched by an incongruently dainty women’s Timex that never fails to unsettle me.
* * *
—
Lizzie hasn’t found anything, and I can see the fear in her eyes. Brenda will be disappointed. Other than the Polaroid, I found only a flimsy, wrinkled one-dollar bill in a pair of shorts. We begin to look through sport coats when Brenda marches over, the high-heeled sneakers she stole from Value Village squeaking like dog toys on the glossy floor. In her cuffed denim shorts, her legs are too thin and her butt looks deflated. I wish she’d gain weight. Sometimes I worry she might collapse and crumple into nothing. “This place is picked over,” she says. “What did you find?”
“We can stay longer,” I offer.
“So you didn’t find anything,” Brenda says. Her shoulders drop as her face does.
I hand her the limp dollar bill.
* * *
—
In the parking lot, before we get in the car, Brenda crams her hands in Lizzie’s pockets, then mine. Her hands are like wild animals, quick and unpredictable, and when she feels around my waist, she nearly touches my dick. She smirks and says, “Still nothing,” referring to my lack of pubic hair, which is none of her business even if she is my mother.
There’s a pair of red, glittery shoes on the asphalt in a puddle of something gravy-like, and I imagine the lady who wore them: a hooker with a ratty wig and melted makeup, and she’s crying and hurrying to her car, which is junkier than Brenda’s silver 1979 Ford Fairmont sedan. She kicks off her uncomfortable shoes so she can walk faster. This woman just saw the photo of the ring from the severed arm in the dumpster. The ring belonged to her friend, another hooker. When we lived on Miracle Mile, Lizzie and I used to watch hookers through a cluster of desiccated palms from the safety of our apartment’s balcony.
Most of them were sunburned. They fought each other. They yelled a lot. Some didn’t wear wigs or much makeup; they looked normal, like Brenda—but not so skinny—or a teacher, or someone you’d see in the supermarket buying margarine. Lizzie could watch them for hours, her eyes wide and her mouth agape. She watched them like Brenda watched TV, and she knew their names: June, Daniella, Shannon, and two Cindys.
The backseat burns my legs so I shove my hands under my thighs. I don’t complain about the heat. What’s the point? The AC is broken and it costs, like, four hundred to fix it. The lighter still works, and Brenda smokes a Winston. The smell of her lighting it is pleasant, like chopped wood and white paper and birthday candles. But soon the cigarette stinks up the car, even with all four windows rolled down and the hot wind blowing in and swooping clumps of Lizzie’s pale hair.
Lizzie stares outside and picks at the last of the crusty impetigo on the side of her chin. I have it, too. It itches and hurts and cracks. Brenda says we wouldn’t have it if we’d just wash our faces more often, but we only have strawberry shampoo at the apartment right now, and it burns. I wash my face twice each day I’m at school. If there is any, the golden soap from the dispensers there stings, but not as bad as the strawberry shampoo.
Nirvana comes on the radio. I love them. I even looked up “mulatto” and “libido” in the dictionary. But Brenda changes the station and begins to hum-sing to the Eagles: ’Cause I’m al-ready gone, and I’m fee-ling strong…
My money stash is Ziplocked, the baggie taped to the inside of the toilet tank lid at the apartment. On a cop show that used to play in the afternoon when Lizzie and I got home from school, I saw drug addicts hide their heroin and needles in the same place. At this point, I have $126. I figure if the toilet’s running or clogged or something, Brenda won’t fix it; she’ll make me do it, so it’s safe.
* * *
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 Page 18