In the Kingdom of Men

by Kim Barnes

  By the time we stopped in Dhahran, other than a few tittering aftershocks, Yash and I had regained our composure. I walked past Maddy without a glance and stepped off, left Yash to bear the remaining miles to al-Khobar alone.

  I visored my eyes with the envelope, took in the hills, the flash of white houses, nicer than any in Abqaiq. Maybe we’ll live here someday, I thought to myself, and let the possibility find its gravity. Was that what I wanted? A house on the hill? I looked to the flat desert beyond, the unbroken sky, the shadow of the sea, and felt an undeniable yearning to be out in that open space.

  A note on Nestor’s door read, “Back in five,” so I waited, studying the photographs framed on his walls—a caravan of camels shadowed by cirrus clouds that unfolded like wings, the refinery at Ras Tanura, its black cylindrical stacks and squat steel tanks wreathed in vaporous light, the desert transformed into an ethereal kingdom. Prints of high-masted sailing ships along the coast, a stern-faced emir looking out from his palace in Hofuf, boyish princes already weighted with the trappings of wealth, their bare feet buried in sand—even in black-and-white, there was a softness to the scenes, a connection I could almost feel, as though the camera itself were possessed of emotion.

  What was it about those images that opened my eyes, made me see in a way I had never seen before? I can look back now and know it was at that moment when I felt something settle, the possibility of who I might yet be fall into place. I wanted to know how it happened, how you could take a hulking storage tank and turn it into a thing of beauty. I tilted my head, made out the photographer’s scrawl—Carlo Leoni—and felt something I hadn’t expected: envy. I wanted to know what he knew, how to do what he did.

  When Nestor returned with a steaming cup of coffee and a sandwich, the stink of egg salad fouling the air, I slid the envelope in front of him.

  “It’s about fun with fabrics,” I said.

  He eked out a smile. “I’ll take a look this afternoon,” he said, pushing a pencil across the lines of a legal pad.

  I nodded to the photos on the walls. “They’re beautiful,” I said.

  Nestor raised his eyes, settled back in his chair. “Leoni is one of the best. He loves whatever he sees, and whatever he sees loves him.”

  “Maybe I could take some pictures,” I said.

  He tapped the pencil against his lips, shrugged, opened a drawer, and pulled out a brand-new Nikon. “It’s yours,” he said. I tucked the camera close. I wasn’t about to tell him that I had no idea how to work it, but maybe he could have guessed. “Do you know how to run a darkroom?” he asked.

  “I can learn,” I said.

  “Just drop your film. We’ll get to it,” he said, and went back to his notes.

  I caught the return bus to Abqaiq, took in the shaded faces of the wives, the muted stream of traffic blurring by, focused, then lowered the lens, dissatisfied. What Carlo Leoni had that I didn’t was out there, where I couldn’t go—the open desert, that endless sea. How could I even begin to capture the people and landscape when I was closed up in a house inside a closed compound inside a society and a country that were closed to me in so many ways because I was a woman?

  I thought about Carlo’s photos, how it was that he could take in so much and all at once, as though his appetite were enormous, his eyes bigger than his head. I put the camera in my purse, looked out the sand-scoured window, and wondered what it would feel like to walk through the world with such ease and affection, if I must first be a man to know.

  The next evening, Mason due home from his tour, I remembered what Ruthie had said: food, sex, and sleep. I let Yash go early, put on a shorter skirt, styled my hair, dabbed a little lipstick, and cued up Ed Ames on the hi-fi. When the Land Cruiser pulled up out front, I met Mason at the door with the martini I had left to chill in the freezer. He took it with a smile, tipped a long swallow, and I tucked my face into his neck. He smelled like something I could almost taste—wet salt, a bitter green, like wind off the sea. When I looked over his shoulder, I saw Abdullah watching us. He met my eyes for a moment before letting out the clutch and driving away.

  Mason handed me his glass. “Why don’t you get me a refill while I take a shower,” he said.

  I came back with more booze and waited in the doorway of the bathroom until he turned off the water and stepped out, rubbing his head with a towel. He’d never been shy about his body, but it still seemed new to me. I sometimes studied him when he was sleeping: the notch of bone at this throat, the rise of each rib, the strange dark nipples, the swirl of hair like an arrow, the tender muscle that nested in the vee of his legs. He wrapped the towel at his waist, moved to the mirror, and raked a comb through his hair.

  “Gray,” he said, plucking at his temple. “I’m getting old.” He rested his hands on the vanity. “You know what I miss? Playing basketball, I mean really burning up the court.”

  I tucked my arms. “It’s my fault,” I said.

  “No,” he said, and peered at me in the mirror. “I knew what I was doing, and I’ve never been sorry.”

  I scrunched my shoulders, made self-conscious by his gaze. “What happened with Swede?” I asked.

  He hesitated. “How do you know about that?”

  “Ruthie told me,” I lied. “She hears everything.”

  Mason grunted, picked up the shaving cream. “Swede took a dislike to me from the get-go. Thinks the Arabs are good for one thing and one thing only, and that’s getting the oil out of the ground.” He lathered his face, wiped one finger across his lips. “They’re doing all the work, making ten cents an hour to my dollar, have no sense how much that oil is bringing in.” He stretched his neck, ran the razor along his jaw. “When Ross Fullerton called to get my side of the story, he told me that the day a man takes the helm is the day he no longer knows what’s going on with his own crew. He said that’s why he needs men like me.”

  “I saw Burt Cane,” I said, and leaned into his back, circled my arms at his waist. “He said to tell you that you did the right thing.”

  Mason patted his face with a towel, rinsed the sink, and turned to me. “Lucky wants to take us boating tomorrow. You can wear that new swimsuit. Sexy as hell.” He pulled me close, and I pointed my elbow at the bidet.

  “Do you know what that is for?”

  He laughed through his nose. “Yeah,” he said, “I do.” He ran his lips across my shoulder, then turned me to face the mirror, moved behind me.

  “Watch,” he said. I pressed back against him and lifted my gaze as he murmured his pleasure into my ear, but I couldn’t keep my eyes from that woman whose hair fringed her shoulders, her lips stained with color, and the man behind her, his head thrown back, his neck exposed, his body arching upward as though he were the one being taken.

  Chapter Seven

  The sun was beating down like a pile driver by the time we made Half Moon Bay the next morning. The Bayliner, a Confederate flag pegged to its bow, shouldered in against the wind slap, its outboard churning due east. It was the same red speedboat I had seen in the photo of the Bodeens—the Arabesque—maybe inherited, like Ruthie said, one more thing left behind. “Twin Mercs,” Lucky had boasted as we loaded in. “Fastest boat on the bay. One of these weekends, we’ll take her across the gulf to Bahrain, get the Brits to sell us some rum.”

  The wind’s direction shifted, the depleting gales blowing off the cool water toward land.

  “Executive weather,” Lucky hollered, meaning the kind you wanted when the company hotshots from California decided to pay their visits, but it made for rough seas. He stood bare-chested at the helm with the open stance of a linebacker, hair bristling from his scalp. I clutched my scarf and raised my face to the cottoned sky, the air like a poultice.

  “Right about here,” Lucky said, and brought the boat to anchor. “Break out the Kool-Aid, girls.”

  Ruthie poured the liquor while I unwrapped the picnic Yash had made for us: chapati, rice, cold chicken, chutney. When Ruthie stretched and stepped out of her ca
pris, exposing her racy black bikini, brass rings at her hips and between her breasts, I saw Lucky watching her like she was the sweetest thing he had ever seen. He caught my eye, winked, and I blushed, too shy to strip down in front of him.

  Mason helped rig the lines, and I watched the happiness with which he worked, his shirt undone, a red kerchief tied at his neck, the lean muscles of his legs bracing against the cast. Ever since we had launched the boat, he had been questioning Lucky about company politics, who answered to whom.

  “You got this triangle,” Lucky said, and touched his thumbs and two fingers together. “The House of Saud is up here at the top. Smart as hell and mean as sin. When old Ibn Saud decided he was going to rule the peninsula, first thing he did was get the Ikhwan fundamentalists on board, then sent them out to slaughter enough Bedu that the sheikhs finally surrendered.” He wrinkled his upper lip, and his voice dipped. “Then the Ikhwan decide the king’s being too soft, start making a fuss, so he has to turn around and beat the snot out of them too. Names them his very own militia to keep the peace, gives the real crazies of the group special duties, and that’s the mutaween.”

  “The Virtue Police,” I said, and looked at Ruthie, who held a finger to her lips and shook her head, but I had no intention of saying a word about our adventure in al-Khobar.

  “Now Ibn Saud’s got the desert Bedouins and the town Arabs and the religious nuts all where he wants them, and that’s the second point of the triangle. Only problem is, he’s got no way to develop his new kingdom. Million square miles of worthless real estate but no money in the coffers. He had nothing,” Lucky said, “until we came along.”

  Mason settled back with his drink. “Why us?” he asked. “We weren’t the only ones wanting in.”

  Lucky smugged his mouth. “A limey or two tried to stake some claim, but they kept to their cabanas, ate their biscuits and drank their tea, wouldn’t even take off their piss helmets. What Ibn Saud liked about us Americans is the way we went right to work, eating, drinking, wearing the ghutra just like the Bedu. Sun burned us the same color so that pretty soon, you couldn’t tell a white man from a darkie.” He leaned in, squinted at Mason. “The king had requirements that we had to agree to, expectations. He wanted nothing but business, no politics, and we said okay. We beat out the limeys and frogs and wops, just like we always do, and now Aramco is the third point of the triangle. Perfect balance of power, like a pyramid, see?” Lucky clicked his tongue. “Few years back, old Saud swung a sweet deal, gets fifty percent of all our profit, but the IRS gives Aramco an equal tax break, so it’s jake. Keeps the Saudis from nationalizing, which is good for the company”—he winked—“but what it means to you and me, well, that’s different.” He tapped out a cigarette. “Your drill hits petrol, you just might want to say you’ve found an underground spring, something we don’t have to pay for. Know what I mean?” He lowered his face to Mason’s lighter, looked up, gave a lopsided grin. “Oil into water. It’s a goddamn miracle is what it is.” He stabbed his hook into a minnow, threw a long cast, settled his cap lower on his forehead. “Heard you and Swede had a little go-’round.”

  Mason flipped his cigarette to the water, ticked one shoulder.

  Lucky thumbed his nostril. “You don’t waste much time, do you?”

  “Swede was the one wasting time.” Mason leaned back against the gunwale, crossed his arms. “No reason to treat a man that way because of his color.”

  Lucky sucked out an ice cube, let it slip back into the liquor, gave Mason a half smirk. “Bet you’re a college boy, ain’t you?” When Mason didn’t answer, Lucky chortled and shook his head. “Swede don’t care about color. It’s human beings he can’t stand. Bossed me just the same when I came up under him, hollering and knocking me around.”

  “Saleh Misar stands five-foot-nothing, weighs about the same as one of your legs,” Mason said.

  “I hear what you’re saying.” Lucky ran a finger across his teeth. “Thing is,” he said, “now we got no drilling superintendent, and that’s going to pinch everyone right down the line, including me and little Mr. Misar.” He squinted at Mason. “Swede’s been here since before the war, made his friends and made his enemies, but he knew where to slap the grease. That kind of education don’t come from no classroom.” He spat on his line. “Hell, we’re feeding the drillers red meat every day. You can stand back and watch them grow. Arabs never had it so good.”

  Mason turned his head to the side. “Not even close to how good we got it.”

  Lucky rolled his shoulders, leaned in. “That pretty little house of yours? Give it to a Bedouin, and he’ll trot in his goats, slaughter a few, roast them right there on that nice marble floor.” He settled back on his elbow. “When I first got here, you couldn’t get a full day’s labor out of the natives. Doc said they didn’t have an ounce of nutrition in them, shouldn’t even be alive. We came in, wiped out malaria, developed a vaccine that keeps them from going blind. Put them to work making real wages, showed them how to grow corn and raise chickens, built schools and taught them the alphabet. Turned the Saudi merchants into businessmen, and now we’re subsidizing their inventories, buy only from them. We’ve got houses the Saudi workers can buy on the payment plan. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.”

  Mason lifted the rod tip and settled it again.

  “Listen,” Lucky said, and hitched his leg. “I was born to the canals of the Barataria swamp. One-room shack on stilts, kept the turtles off our toes. Daddy was Acadian stock, right out of Nova Scotia, Mama a mean old German gal.” He circled his drink to take in the bay. “Kind of like here, people coming in from all over, doing what they was good at. Creoles grew sugarcane, Filipinos netted shrimp, Sicilians harvested oysters, Croats fished for anything they could catch. Irish, Africans, Yugos, Chinese, all mixed up together.” Lucky paused as though to remember. “Ten years old, got my first job skinning gators for a bohunk named Pohanko. You ever smell gator guts?” Mason shrugged. “Smells like pig shit, and I did too. That’s what my mama said.”

  Ruthie looked at me and raised her fist, mouthed the word pow.

  “Eleven of us kids.” Lucky continued. “Started getting a little crowded. Took off when I was fourteen. Doubt anyone ever missed me. Went right to the oil patch. They paid me ten cents an hour because that’s what they thought I was worth, and they was right. I worked my way up. No one ever handed me a goddamn thing.” He winced with quick pain, straightened his leg. “Just that fast”—Lucky snapped his fingers—“Saudis got it made.” He pinched one eye closed, gave a single nod. “I’ll tell you this. If they don’t like it, they can get on their camels and ride right back into that desert. All the prayers in the world won’t get that oil out of the ground.” He squinted a smile, jabbed his thumb down. “This here is our Mecca.”

  “Somebody needs a drink.” Ruthie moved across the deck like a figure skater, smooth and precise, and filled Lucky’s cup, her shoulders glistening with suntan oil. Lucky lifted his face, looked past her, and his eyes grew big. He reared back, bellowed, “There!” and I saw Mason’s rod bend nearly double. Mason grabbed the butt, arched against the weighted line, reeled in, arched again.

  “Bet you got a jack,” Lucky said. “Take her in a little. Keep the tip up.”

  Ruthie clapped her hands. “He’s hooked a good one,” she said, and poured a little more liquor. We cheered Mason on until he had the fish close enough to net, but what came up wasn’t a jack or a bonito but a three-foot shark, the cone of its nose edging over the gunwale, its teeth gnashing the line.

  “God damn!” Lucky grabbed the gaff, buried it deep in the shark’s gills, and hefted it over the rail. Ruthie pulled her feet beneath her and screamed, and I jumped to the stern, forgetting to take pictures as the shark thrashed and twisted. Lucky raised the gaff, brought it down again and again, the blood spraying from the hook in viscous arcs until the shark lay quivering only inches from Mason’s toes. I held out my spattered arms and legs, looked up at Ruthie, who let out a whoop
and lowered her feet.

  Mason wiped his face with his kerchief, flushed with excitement, his eyes as wide as a child’s. “Can you eat it?” he asked.

  “Can, maybe. Won’t, for sure.” Lucky dragged the shark to the fish cooler, leaving an oily red slick. “Might be able to trade it once we get back to the bay.” He leaned over the edge and rinsed his hands. “Some of them Bedouins will eat about anything.”

  Ruthie dipped her towel in the water, and I did the same, dabbing at the blood. She lifted her head, pointed east. “What’s that?” she asked.

  We all turned to see a column of smoke laddering the sky. Lucky rummaged in the cabin for binoculars.

  “Blowout?” Mason asked. Only weeks before we arrived, an offshore explosion had killed three Saudi drillers. The divers who searched had come up shaking their heads. A few days later, the bodies floated in on the landward current, charred skin brined white.

  “Think it’s just a waterspout, moving away.” Lucky glassed the horizon. “Got some dhows close by. Pearl divers.”

  Ruthie turned to me. “How about a pearl, Gin? You could make a nice necklace.”

  I looked to Mason, who looked at Lucky. “Can you buy them right off the boat?” Mason asked.

  “Nothing you can’t buy off the pearlers. They’re at the bottom of the barrel.” Lucky lowered the binoculars. “Might even trade for a shark.”

  I held tight to Mason as the Bayliner chopped across the waves to where the dhows, their sails roped tight, studded the water.

  “What about us?” I asked. Ruthie had wrapped herself in a beach towel, but her shoulders remained bare.

  “We’re on Aramco’s ticket,” Lucky said. “Rules are ours.” He reached for the gaff, jellied with blood. “We’ll keep this close, just in case someone says otherwise.”