by Mike Bond
Ahmad from Edeni, Jack realized. Warm happiness filled him. “Ahmad!”
The man turned. He jumped. “Jyek!”
She stepped back. “You know him?”
“Of course!” Ahmad laughed, dark eyes gleaming. ”Why are you here, Jyek, for Heaven’s sake? What’s happened to you?”
How could he lie? “Like I told her – I’m a journalist.”
“You said you were Saudi!” she snapped.
“If I’d said I was American they’d have killed me.”
Ahmad squeezed Jack’s hand. “Bloody palm to blood palm. Blood brothers.”
HE WOKE TO the hubbub of singing children, a woman’s voice repeating something, small feet running, a snatch of girlish laughter. Ahmad and the doctor were gone, dusk fading into night outside the empty windows.
He lay on a straw mattress, a horse blanket over him, in a sort of small storeroom, clay urns along one side, a bead curtain across the door. A young woman pushed aside the curtain and dipped a plastic bucket in an urn. “Oh!” She yanked her veil across her face when she saw he was awake. She backed out letting the curtain fall.
Ahmad came in and held Jack’s hand. “You’ve slept for a night and day.” He touched Jack’s forehead. “Your fever’s gone.”
“Is this a school?”
“An orphanage. The schools are all closed. I run it with Galaya, the girl you just saw.”
“Is she your wife?”
“Heavens no – don’t say such things.”
Jack sat up. “They find me they’ll shoot you.”
Ahmad smiled. “Why are you really here, Jyek?”
“To fight the Soviets... You know that.”
Ahmad nodded. “Wahid told me. I didn’t believe him.”
“I saw Edeni.”
“He said the Soviets did it?” Ahmad was silent, shook his head. “It was Hekmatyar, your American ally. Wahid knows that –”
Jack lay back, exhausted. “Got to get out of here.”
“Your friend Aktoub came today; he found where you were from the French doctor. And tomorrow he’s coming to take you over the hills to Pakistan.”
Jack raised up on his left arm. It didn’t seem possible that he might finally be going home. Or that he would make it. “The French doctor, what is her name?”
Ahmad looked surprised, hesitant. “Sophie Dassault.”
“When you see her please tell her thank you. And that I will save somebody else.”
“Who?”
“Just tell her. She’ll understand.”
DULLES WAS COLD and dank. Jack’s plane out of Rawalpindi had been delayed in Frankfurt and now it was after midnight DC time. In the airport’s hollow corridors he felt nervous, exposed. The air tasted disinfected. Bizarre signs advertised coffee, Time, bourbon and Winstons.
A white-haired black man pushed a broom along a hallway. A newspaper page, “New Hopes for Middle East Peace,” scuttled down the escalator. Somewhere a radio was playing a haunting melody about Sultans of Swing. I’ve never heard that, he thought. How long have I been gone?
He took the airport bus downtown and found a hotel on Eleventh Street. The desk clerk looked Pakistani but when Jack spoke to him in Pashto the man did not answer.
He slept with the Makarov under his pillow and awoke at noon nauseous, shoulder aching horribly. Traffic rattled the windows. The carpet stank of deodorizer and mildew. From a corner a television watched him. He yanked its cord and faced it to the wall but still it listened, waited.
The faucet water reeked of chemicals, the soap of artificial fragrance. The shower was intolerable, pelting his shoulder with tainted water, his soles sticking to the tiles.
The sidewalks were thronged with well-dressed people. Women wore sleek revealing clothes and stepped clear of him. In a store window he saw a skinny beardless man who gave him back the finger, then laughed the moment he did.
LANGLEY’S vast echoing spaces felt spooky. “Why the hell’d you come in commercial?” Timothy Cormac said. “We had a seat lined up –”
“Sit all night with my back against the wall? No thanks.”
“Hey I hear our doctors in Islamabad saved you, that you’ve made a great recovery.”
“It was my dog, the one you were afraid of, who saved me. And the French doctor in Kabul. Three times she saved my life. And that Afghanistani Aktoub and Owen McPhee getting me out of Afghanistan to Pakistan –”
“Speaking of Afghanistan,” Timothy watched him with dark-circled eyes, “we’re working with the Saudis. GID –”
Jack glanced round the vinyl-paneled room, wondering where the pickups were. “Who?”
“Saudi Intelligence. It’s run by this neat prince, Turki al-Faisal. Son of the former King. Hey, he’s a close friend of George Bush, and he went to Georgetown. He’s got this new guy, a rich Saudi with connections, going to help us in Afghanistan.”
“I thought they all spent their money on Parisian models and cocaine.”
“We’re going to put our money where our mouth is with this new guy. Osama bin Laden.” Timothy slid his tongue back and forth under his gums. “That’s his name.”
Sticky teeth, Jack remembered. “I think we should stop this war.”
Timothy chuckled. “What a strange idea. We want to send you back –”
“Afghanistan? You crazy? Everybody’s gunning for me – the Russians, Massoud. Even Hekmatyar’s got a ransom out on me.” Jack tried to settle into his seat but his shoulder wouldn’t take it. “This war is hideous.”
“It’s got momentum now, Jack. We’ve got them on the run.”
“Anyway I’m getting out of this game. Didn’t McPhee tell you?”
“We’ve sent Owen to El Salvador.” Timothy paused. “How’s your Arabic?”
“Why?”
“Ever been to Beirut?”
“A few times. In the good old days.”
Timothy eyed him brightly. “You want coffee?”
“My best friend’s in Beirut.”
“What, some raghead?” The yellow teeth again. “Just joking.”
“A Marine. Been friends since we were kids.”
“There’s a guy you should meet –”
“I’ve met lots of guys lately. Most of them wanted to kill me.”
“He’s one of us.” Timothy picked up an inside line and hit five numbers. “Bernie? Come on up. I want you to meet our new man in Beirut.”
Jack shook his head. “I didn’t say that.”
Balding and slope-shouldered, Bernie Rykoff had a soft wet handshake. “Bernie’s the new head of our Middle East desk,” Timothy said. “PhD from Stanford. In Middle East affairs.”
“Had a few of those myself.” Jack said in Arabic, turning to Rykoff. “How well do you speak the tongue?”
Bernie shrugged. “Never really had time to learn,” he said in English.
“Then how can you separate garbage from truth – how do you know anything?”
“You’re a field man, Jack,” Timothy said. “Bernie’s DI. You know the drill.”
“What counts is how you put it all together,” Bernie said.
“After Islamic Jihad bombed our Beirut Embassy in April,” Timothy said, “State wanted to pull out of Lebanon. We didn’t want to, Defense didn’t –”
“How do you know it was Islamic Jihad?” Jack asked.
“That’s why we need a presence there,” Bernie said.
“Hey Jack,” Timothy said, “what if you went into Beirut as a journalist, spent a few weeks? A chance to see your friend, relax, get to know the place?”
“My friend’s due home next month, wife’s going to have a baby. Anyway, don’t journalists there keep getting shot?”
“You’ll have cover. And backup. It’s just a few weeks.”
It no longer mattered, Jack reminded himself, how much he disliked Timothy. For his rotund flabbiness and portly pink smile, the way he said “Hey” to intro something he wanted you to buy. That he’d never heard a bullet fired in ha
tred but seemed more than ready to send others into danger.
The shoulder pain was intense. Hey buddy, he asked Bandit, tell me what you think.
Tell them get fucked, Bandit said.
“Get fucked,” Jack said.
“Now Jack don’t act like that.”
Bite him, Bandit said.
“I can’t,” Jack said.
“Why not?” Timothy said.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
Bernie looked around. “Then who...”
“I’m going home to Maine,” Jack said, “till this damn shoulder gets better.”
“Don’t take too long,” Timothy smiled. “We might find somebody else.”
“Please do.”
Timothy shook his head as if Jack had made a very stupid decision. “See the paymaster on the way out.”
The paymaster was downstairs in a windowless room. “You’ve earned twelve thousand seven hundred twenty-seven dollars,” she said. “After taxes, Social Security, that’s a nine thousand eight fifty and seventy-seven cents. You’ll get a check for that and a plane ticket home. But we have no liability for what happened to you.”
“Oh yeah?” Jack said. “But I do.”
On the flight from DC to Portland he drifted in and out of sleep, drank gin on the rocks and stared out the window at the strange, peaceful landscape unrolling below.
It didn’t seem possible, Afghanistan. Though every thud of pain from his shoulder proved it real. And every time he drifted off it was the face of the French doctor hovering over him, haloed in white light. Like an angel.
Cobbossee Woods
HE HITCHED FROM Portland Airport to Winthrop and called his mother from the pay phone at Mister Market. It rang and rang and he felt sharp disappointment. Then it was snatched up. “Yes?” his mother’s sharp voice. “Now who’s this?”
“It’s me.”
“You! Oh my goodness! Where are you?”
“In Winthrop. I’m on leave, wanted to call first, not give you a shock –”
He walked through rustling leaves down old familiar streets tangy with oak smoke to the white farmhouse on the shore of Lake Maranacook. “What, you ring the doorbell now?” she laughed, wrapping him in her arms.
“Jesus, Ma!” he yelled in pain.
“Oh my God – what’s happened to you?”
“Those old dislocations from football were getting worse. The Army docs fixed it.”
With his duffel over his good shoulder he stepped into the woodstove-warm kitchen with its checkered linoleum and the maple table and the four oak chairs his father had made. He dropped the duffle in a corner, the Makarov inside it clunking.
“All this time you can’t even write? To your poor old widowed mother? Who’s been pining away in your absence? What a terrible son you are!”
He laughed. “You know the drill, Mom –”
She held his face in both palms. “I was going to make soft-boiled eggs on toast and correct quizzes and do a lesson plan and read some dull book, and instead now I’ve got you!”
“I can stay a while? Or did you rent out my room?”
She laughed with joy. “There’s baked beans left over and I’ll make liver and onions, we’ll get some color back in your cheeks, you look like you just ate Mrs. Randolph’s cat.”
He sat at the maple table, weary, happy and alive. “So how’ve you been?”
“Fine!” She sat opposite him, elbows on the table. “Great, actually. It’s a good class this year, some super kids, no bad eggs... The car needed a new oil pump and Mr. Jansen did it but wouldn’t charge me. Johnnie Dillon’s doing the plowing this year –”
“How you feeling?”
“Fine,” she shrugged. “Tell me about this shoulder –”
“You had much snow?”
“Two storms so far. Leaves were magnificent.” She went to the sink, shook out a glass and took Canadian whiskey and sweet vermouth and bitters from the cupboard and Maraschino cherries from the refrigerator. “I’m going to have another Manhattan. I always have one before dinner but this is a celebration so I’m going to have two!”
“You’re a wild one –”
“Doctor Liscombe said I should. Marie, he said, you be sure you have your Manhattan every day –”
“He’s a good doctor.”
She took an ice tray from the freezer compartment and cracked five cubes into her glass. “Want one?”
He got a glass from the cupboard and dropped in some ice. “I’ll have it straight.”
They tapped glasses and he drank deep, luxuriating in the heat of whiskey in his throat. “You look like your father,” she said. “It’s like sitting across from him, the way we did, having a Manhattan or two before dinner.”
The years vanished, he was a boy coming into the kitchen for dinner shaking snow off his clothes, the smell of potatoes baking and hamburgers in the frying pan, radiators clanking, his dog leaving fat wet prints across the linoleum. “Sit on your bed, Thor,” his mother would say, and the dog stepped into his willow bed with the red cushion, turned round, flopped down and uttered a groan as if no dog in history had ever had to endure such a life.
“So,” his father reached out to squeeze his arm, “what’s new?”
“Up on Cobbossee ridge a hawk or owl got a rabbit, yesterday or last night. The deer have yarded up already in the hemlocks south of Upper Narrows...” Jack unlaced his boots and turned them upside down on the radiator. “What’s new?”
His mother young then, slender-faced, dark-haired – it’s the black Irish in me – “Your father’s got to go away a while.”
Now Jack glanced through the frosted windows at the October night. “Early winter.”
“Night of the first snow Toby Lemieux spun out his cruiser and hit a hydrant and there was water everywhere and then it froze. The boys at the fire station were real pleased.”
“Serves him right.”
“Chief Mullin’s going to take the repairs out of his pay.” She sloshed her ice cubes round to pull out the cherry by the stem and ate it. “Damn that was good.” She clasped his hands. “My God what joy to see you!”
He poured the beans into an iron frying pan and set it on to warm, cut two onions and simmered them in butter, drinking his whiskey and turning the onions as they talked, then laid the liver on the onions and turned up the heat on the beans. She cut some bread and put it in the pewter bread dish one of his father’s First Cav buddies had given him that said Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread. “Russian rye,” she said. “I put molasses in it and a little coffee. Makes it real dark.”
They ate dinner and drank more whiskey that in his weariness made his head spin. I’d forgotten, he realized, what it’s like to be loved.
When he went up to his boyhood room it seemed smaller, the bed under the pine-paneled dormer too short and narrow. He fell asleep but woke then couldn’t sleep, sat on the bed staring through the frost-etched window at the village in bare-branched dancing streetlight shadows under its pale sheet of snow, and it seemed unwise to trust this peace, the house made of wood that would never stop a bullet and the yards with no cover and open fields of fire everywhere. Finally he took his pillow and blankets and dozed in the bullet-proof safety of the cast iron bathtub, with the Makarov on safety across his chest.
Next morning he drove his old Camaro one-handed down the Monmouth road past the farm where once he’d picked apples for school money. He walked the ridge between Cobbossee and Upper Narrows in thin snow scattered with red maple leaves. There were raccoon and rabbit tracks and the wandering prints of deer. A great horned owl watched him sleepily from its hole in a dead spruce; he thought of all the little creatures it hunted, how they lived in constant fear. But I’m safe here.
Toby Lemieux stopped his cruiser on Main Street as Jack was crossing. “Shit,” he snickered, “we send you to West Point, and all you do is sit in Guam listening to the radio?” He spit disparagingly. “Christ when I do that here at least I’m catching speeder
s.”
“You didn’t send me to West Point, Toby. You sent me to jail.”
“You deserved it, too. Jerry can still barely walk.”
“He’s lucky he’s alive.” Jack turned away.
While his mother corrected geography exams he sat in the den watching the Patriots beat the Chargers. “Real men don’t watch sports,” he said as they sat down to pork chops and potatoes and cornmeal muffins. “Better if everyone was out playing sports than sitting in Barcaloungers watching TV.”
She laughed. “Most guys around here they’d get a myocardial infarction.”
“Because they’re out of shape.” He grinned thinking of a raggedy old Afghani mullah hitching up his pants to go deep for a long one.
“What’s this – you don’t say grace anymore?”
“Got out of the habit.”
“Even if you don’t believe in God, it’s good to be thankful for food when so many people don’t have any.”
He saw Afghanistan’s barebacked hills, the children in Ahmad’s orphanage, their thin faces under wispy hair. “Sometimes I forget.”
“By the way, I saw Susie Franklin this afternoon. That man left her with a baby and no child support – I told her what do you expect from somebody from Lewiston?”
“She made her bed. Let her lie in it.”
“She’s gone through a hard time. It’d be nice you called her.”
“I told her goodbye long ago.”
“So you only think for yourself now? The Army’s changed you.”
“Look what it did to Dad.” He winced at what he’d said, wanted to take it back.
“It’s okay,” her voice thick. “It’s true.”
He thought of her imprisoned by winter in this house. “You should’ve married again.”
“I never met another man I wanted to.”
For a while he said nothing, then pushed back from the table. “In the morning I’m going by Cole’s, see his folks.”
“Barb’s living with them now. She’s still taking vet classes full time though the baby’s due any day. Imagine him a Marine – just yesterday you two were throwing apples at each other in the orchard.”