Khyber Run

by Amber Green

  He swallowed, rolling his eyes. One solid-white eye pointed off to the side, but his other eye was dark, probably still worked. He brushed his hands down the front of his vest as if to brush away his flinch. “Of course, of course. Are you well and hearty?"

  I nodded to the traditional greeting and ran a hand behind my back.

  Oscar mashed the lighter into my palm and slid around me toward the lamp. The old man backed away warily, but Oscar just held up both of his big hands to shield the wick from the wind. Once I'd caught the light, he too backed away and bowed from the neck.

  I gave the same bow to the old man. “Is there a hujra nearby, Uncle?"

  "Of course. However, because of the foreigners and the army, they cannot invite you to stay there. When the army can break through any gate and carry away one's guests by force, who then dares offer hospitality?"

  "Where then might strangers stay?"

  He looked piercingly at me, then at Oscar. “I am an old man, but I prize what little life is left to me. If you understand I cannot protect you, nor even shut the gate between you and what brigands may lurk in the night, then you are welcome to stay here, in the courtyard or in the gallery."

  I expressed my gratitude and followed him to the courtyard, where he bade us sit. He retired through a curtain and came back bent under a huge bundle of sheepskins.

  "This at least I can offer. Take what comfort you may."

  On his second trip, he brought a brazier and some charcoal to burn in it. The tea we were served was no more than hot water with mint and a touch of sugar, but a Pakhtun offers the best he has, so we drank it. The steaming cups did feel good. We blessed one another and one another's families.

  I broke out packets of heat-and-eat kashi. It wasn't polite for guests to feed themselves, but in hard times, practicalities change the rules. At my insistence, the old man tasted it hesitantly, then encouraged me and Oscar to eat our fill. The old man offered a drizzle of ghee, which was old enough to taste like the yellow oil on movie popcorn, but it definitely improved the kashi.

  I spilled a little ghee in my emptied teacup. If Oscar and I both lived long enough, I wanted something to anoint his brutally muscular ass with. Except that focusing on one another like that would shrink our chances of surviving. I regretfully set aside the thought. The ghee would be good with breakfast anyway.

  After we'd chewed all we could, the old man produced a week-old newspaper. I embarrassed myself by how little of it I could read, but he praised my efforts and helped with the letters I didn't recognize. He assured me the problem was with the newspaper's choice of something-something, using words I didn't recognize that probably meant font.

  If nothing else, this trip was improving my vocabulary.

  Oscar sipped his hot water and watched us from the other side of the fire. He'd picked, of course, a vantage point that allowed him to watch both the inner doorway and the outer one without turning his head. From my seat rather nearer the fire, I could look up from the paper to see the dark archway that led to the street. I hoped any movement from the gallery would also catch the corner of my eyes.

  Oscar's square face relaxed slowly. When the paper was folded, he stretched and yawned. I did too and helped the old man stand. He tottered away stiffly, leaving me and Oscar with the dusky red embers of the fire.

  The old man might not allow himself to bar the door, but he hadn't said we couldn't. While I shoved a wedge under the outer street door, Oscar strung a line at shin height across the inner archway, attaching the line to something blocky, which I assumed was a noisemaker. I high-stepped over it, and we treated the interior doorways the same. Then we moved a few thick fleeces from the heap by the embers and spread them in a completely dark alcove near the gallery stair.

  I realized Oscar was undressing. I slid a hand across his undershirt-clad back and over his shoulder and put my lips to his ear. “Do you really want to risk doing it tonight?"

  He caught my hand with his callus-hard one. “I don't want to risk dying tomorrow, knowing I could have done it and didn't."

  My heart beat harder, throbbing in my temples and in my belly. “Who gets bottom?"

  He turned, still holding my hand against his shoulder. “I pay my debts."

  That wasn't precisely the risk/benefit analysis I'd expected. I pulled back, but he held my hand. “If this is about squaring a debt, Oscar, never mind. I'm not twenty years old anymore. A night or two without isn't going to leave me all blue-balled."

  "Don't talk with your mouth full of shit."

  Which one of us is doing that? I didn't ask out loud, because he was enfolding my hand with both of his. I felt his pulse in my palm, my fingers.

  "What's it like to undress with the same man again and again, to learn what he likes and how to tell when something's wrong?"

  I sat on my ankles. “You don't know either, huh?"

  He hesitated. “I don't like people knowing too much about me."

  Those could have been my words. But I wanted to know about him.

  In the darkness I slid my free hand down his chest, tugged his undershirt free of his waistband. I rested my hand on his knotted abdomen, listening and feeling as his breathing grew heavier.

  My other hand came loose from his grip without resistance. I slid my hands around to his back, but that brought my face too intimately close to his face. I skimmed up the heated skin of his chest instead, his undershirt bunching against my wrists.

  His aroma, rich and male, rolled over me. I buried my face in his undershirt, then pulled the cloth free and dropped it. Would it mean I knew him if I could pick him out blindfolded in a crowd?

  His belt was unbuckled, his britches open. My hands slid down his flanks, under his waistline, and rested on the twin bulges of his warm, hard ass. “Is any part of you less than perfect?"

  He grunted and grasped my sleeves. “Get all this off, because if I have to take it off, it won't be wearable tomorrow."

  "Get the cup.” My voice was as deep and rasping as his. Testosterone. Yeah.

  I undressed while he fetched the cup, actually making noise that sounded as loud as an average mouse.

  I smelled the ghee then. Ghee always smells warm. He pressed the cup into my hand. “Don't use it all, Zu."

  My mouth went dry, but no. Another might never come for us, so I'd use as much as we needed. This needed to be right for him. I spread some on my cock, feeling for gritty particles and realizing I needed to wash in the ghee, since I hadn't washed in the tea. That's what clean bandannas are for, though. Wipe on, wipe off.

  Wipe more on. More than three strokes and you're playing with yourself, they say. They're right. So I turned my attention to playing with Oscar. My oiled fingers opened his body, eased the way.

  He pressed back against me. I took a cue from his methods and kept the fingering to a minimum. Some men like to chitchat before they dance, and some like their introduction at full tilt boogie.

  Full tilt boogie introductions can seriously damage a first-timer. So despite his silent urging I rubbed the ghee in until it absorbed, then applied more. Lots more.

  This, I figured, I could rub in with my cock. When I pulled his cheeks open and lined up, he stopped breathing.

  "Exhale,” I whispered. He did. When I felt his ribs expanding again, I pressed. He went rigid. I held position, waiting, knowing that getting the head in would be the worst of it. When he relaxed just that little bit, I pressed in more. The head popped in. Then he swallowed my shaft, as a hungry ass will.

  That ring of tight muscle slid down my shaft and throbbed at the base. He was so hot inside, so much softer than anyone would believe from the hard-ass exterior. I held him, just a moment. Then before he could get to wondering about that, I withdrew.

  The cold outside air made his ass even hotter now that that tight ring rested just below my head. I slid back in. Hot. Sweet. Pulled out. Relished the contrast of the cold air on my naked—

  I didn't have a rubber on. “Fuck!"

  "
What?"

  "Don't turn over and kill me. I just now figured out we're barebacking."

  He inhaled slowly. “When's the last time you did that?"

  "Never."

  He laughed, the feeling like a hand clenching about my cock. “Carry on then."

  What? But my dick was already in motion. I angled to rub across his prostate, and he bowed, gasping. Want more of that? I'll give you more of that!

  If we'd had anything better than ghee to work with, I could have jackhammered his hole, and I bet he'd like it. But tonight I just pistoned inside him, rising on my knees more on one part of the stroke and lowering on another, giving the pump and thrust its own rhythm, and nudging that gland of his with every single thrust.

  My balls swung between my thighs, accentuating every movement, brushing his warm skin every time my cock punched into his heated depths. This was the best part of being a man, feeling my balls swing and knowing what was in them. Feeling the swinging arc tighten as they drew close to my body for the shorter, harder strokes. Feeling the heat grow electric, almost painful. Knowing that I'd soon fly through paradise, even if I couldn't set foot and stay.

  I belatedly remembered the reach-around. His hand was already there and knocked my hand away. I grasped his hips again, those powerful hips, and yanked them hard against me. My head prodded his gland, nuzzled it a bit more, then pulled back and thrust one last time.

  Paradise! Rapid spurts jetted through me, the backblast of each igniting a pleasure so intense it burned me from the inside out. Oscar made a noise and convulsed. His ass pulled, squeezed, and wrung another set of spasms from my prostate.

  I fell forward across him, grabbing a mouthful of his short, thick hair and biting into it to keep from crying aloud.

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  Chapter Eighteen

  The next day's walk was long. A bit before sunset, we drew near a larger walled enclosure. I looked up at the gun slits just below the top of the hujra tower, set at height-staggered intervals I'd seen before. My great-grandfather had decreed their placement, some high and some so low that every man and boy who could hold a rifle could help defend the khel.

  I saw rifle barrels glinting now. Was I going to have to demand water? Had traditional Pakhtun hospitality deteriorated so much in one generation?

  A window in the door cracked. A man coughed, shut it, coughed several more times behind it, and opened it. “May you not be tired."

  I tried not to wilt with relief. From what I'd heard, that wasn't the open welcome it once had been. But it was something. “May you have peace, Uncle. I seek the hujra of he who is Hajji but before was called the Tiger."

  The door swung open. “Enter quickly with your friend. The radio says there are foreigners about."

  The men gathered in the hujra under a budding walnut tree hastily stood among the remnants of a skimpy-looking meal to shake hands. I recognized my grandfather, of course, and the old man sleeping gently by a sun-warmed wall was his father. My uncles had become gray-haired, hollow-cheeked, hawk-billed caricatures of themselves. My cousins were not the round-faced boys I remembered, but lean, hard men with what had been their father's faces. Some of those faces were bruised, and many of the hands were scraped and welted.

  More tea was rapidly brewed, more naan brought out. I smelled almond sweets baking.

  For an hour, we made agreeable, if sparse, conversation about the winter's end, the upcoming Now Ras festival, the condition of the flocks Oscar and I had observed on the way here, the way the Taliban meticulously counted each flock and took 10 percent.

  Their choice of which ten, a man my age muttered, and the others shifted weight as to distance their opinions from his. With Oscar behind me, they should know I was no killjoy of a Talib, but a man with a family couldn't be too careful.

  But no, they weren't looking at me. They instead threw sideways glances at my Uncle Abdallah. Who ignored them. Or pretended to.

  Halwah and almond cakes were served warm with spicy ginger marmalade and more tea. Then rice came out, with a smallish pile of meaty curry. Oscar and I were urged to eat our fill, though only my grandfather shared the curry with us. The other men and boys ate rice, explaining apologetically they had filled their bellies before our arrival. More likely, there wasn't enough to go around. Turning a bleating animal into edible food takes more than the hour or so one could expect a guest to cheerfully wait.

  My grandfather grunted that for all the years he had been granted to live, the students would be welcome to their 10 percent. He recalled for us the Shuravi, who had stolen a whole flock at a time—had indeed butchered any animal they didn't take and run trucks over the carcasses so that only dogs and evil birds might eat of them. The youngsters’ eyes shone as they drank in stories of the retaliatory raids.

  As mine doubtless had. Until the very end, I'd been too young to join in except to hold the horses in a safe place, out of sight. My legs had been too short to keep up as the men flowed from nook to cranny among the rocks toward the final target, my little-boy arms not strong enough or long enough to properly wield one of the precious rifles.

  By American standards, I'd been a little boy. Here, just too small and too inexperienced a warrior for such raids. Until that last one, the disaster.

  One of the uncles explained to the youngsters that Shuravi had meant friend, until it had come to be used for the Soviets. I wasn't sure about that, but the matter wasn't mine to dispute.

  Another cousin mentioned the neighbor's fond hopes the government would come fix the bridge on the highway so they could stop paying a cup of barley for every head of livestock driven over the bridge my uncles and cousins had built.

  I sipped a few drops of green tea from my cup. I didn't want to be the first one here to fill my bladder. I had to watch where someone else emptied it before I hit that level of need.

  The seeds I had brought were a paltry gift compared to the gifts I would need to accomplish my badal. Before I asked anything of these, my people, I had to establish bonds of a man with men, not of the shadow of a little boy who would, on a dare, climb anything that jutted toward the sky.

  One boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, held his mouth gracelessly open, displaying canines that had grown in crooked, just like my brother Omar's, and just like an uncle whose name I couldn't remember. He breathed harshly too, making me want to take a look at his adenoids. But not tonight.

  I took another six or eight molecules of tea and praised its scent. Now was the time I should tell them of myself and my family. My mouth opened—and closed with nothing said.

  I looked again at the bruised faces and the scraped, bruised hands and forearms. Either they'd been in a riot, or they'd recently played buzkashi. A few of my uncles had an unbounded passion for the sport. “So, who among you threw the boz into the circle of justice?"

  The openmouthed cousin sat up straight, his eyes glittering in the firelight. It had been a hard-fought game. The kind of epic game that starts one morning, restarts the following dawn, and ends just before evening prayer. Three of the boys elbowed one another and spilled bits of stories, fragments not yet patchworked together for the version that would enthrall generation after generation here in the hujra, as boys warmed their hands by the burning droppings of the many-times-removed grandkids of the goats whose droppings warmed us now.

  And maybe that's what home was. Speaking before their elders was forward of them, a fact their fathers would no doubt let them know about later. But for now they were vastly entertaining and were fondly tolerated.

  My great-grandfather yawned and stretched. Two of the cousins hurried over, handed him his teeth, and half carried him to the stool beside me, which an uncle hastily vacated. I stood, touched my heart, and shook his fragile, ancient hand. Oscar did the same.

  The hajji was given a cup with maybe an ounce of tea trembling in the bottom of it. Any more, and he would have spilled it.

  The conversation took up again. Someone mentioned my cousin Bad Shoes. I
tensed, abruptly remembering his sneer. Your mother left her father's home to find a husband.

  I sipped another half drop of tea, willing the cup to hold still in my hand.

  Bad Shoes had taught me a lot about fighting. When I'd gone to America, I'd used those lessons, busting noses and lips with wild abandon in my first schoolyard fight, taking out all my frustration and anger—and, yes, fear—on two other fourth-graders. They'd finally cowered against the fence, crying like little children, while I taunted them to stand up as if they had balls. When big hands grabbed me, I spun, fist cocked, and stopped dead. The old woman held me, the aide. I couldn't hit a woman.

  And putting such fear in an old woman's eyes was shameful to any Pakhtun with a mother.

  I dropped my fist and bowed, apologizing sincerely for having frightened her. Which is probably why, instead of being expelled, I got my first round of anger-management counseling and a full-time cultural transition aide.

  But I'd missed something in the conversation around me. I focused. Bad Shoes had sponsored the game, with attendant feasts for all comers, to celebrate the circumcision of his third son. The cost should have beggared him, yet he still had six fine horses and his sons attended school. No one actually said anything might be amiss, of course. It was all in the shift of eye and shoulder, the trailed-off sentences.

  I emptied my cup. My great-grandfather refilled it for me, splashing only a little on my wrist and knee. The scald was slight, and I saw it coming just far enough to dampen any reaction.

  But then I froze. His cup was still full enough to slosh way up the sides with his hand's palsy. Was I supposed to refill it anyway, or offer to?

  Doing nothing was an action, probably the wrong one, so I bowed to him over the fire. “My Baba surely taught me whether to refill the Hajji's cup, but after all these years, the memory becomes elusive. Please, advise a traveler correctly."

  He smiled kindly. “My cup is far from empty. Family is the root of all good things God the Compassionate has put on this earth, is it not?"