by Dave Eggers
A burst of dust arose over a nearby hill. It was a truck, a small white pickup. It continued toward him, and stopped alongside him. A window came down. A man of about forty was driving, wearing a clean grey thobe. He looked a bit like Yousef, though taller and thinner.
—Salaam, he said.
—Salaam, Alan said.
—You need a ride?
—No thanks. Just taking a walk.
—Taking some pictures?
—Yeah, I guess. Beautiful morning.
—I was watching you from above, he said.
Alan looked around, trying to assess from what overhead perch the man could have been observing. The man smiled grimly.
—You’re taking a lot of pictures.
—I guess so, Alan said.
Something was happening but he couldn’t touch it. Then he knew.
—American? the man asked.
Ah. As always, Alan had the momentary inclination to lie.
—Yes, he said.
—All these pictures. You work for the CIA or something?
The man’s smile seemed more genuine now, and it must have loosened something within Alan.
—Just some freelance work, Alan joked. Nothing full-time.
The man’s head snapped back an inch, as if he’s smelled something disagreeable, something unnatural. Then he put the truck in gear and was off.
When Alan got back to the house, Yousef and Salem were awake and dressed, and Hamza had set out the tea set. Salem was on the deck, as he had been the night before, playing the guitar. Yousef saw Alan approach.
—Alan! We thought you’d been kidnapped.
Yousef and Salem were grinning.
—Just went for a walk. I woke up early. Beautiful here at dawn.
—It is, it is. We’ll have some breakfast outside. You approve?
Hamza set a wide white tablecloth on the deck and they sat down. He brought more tea and bread and dates. The air was cool but the sun was rising and Alan could taste the coming heat, the warmth of the rocks all around them. They stayed in the shade. Alan wanted to tell them about his encounter with the man in the pickup, because he knew he had botched it, and knew that trouble might soon arrive, even if just in the form of a phone call. But he held out hope that the man would forget it, that it had been inconsequential, that his terrible joke would be seen as that and nothing more.
When breakfast was finished Yousef jogged inside, inspired. He returned with a pair of the rifles he’d shown them the night before. Alan expected this to be another show-and-tell session until he saw Yousef shaking a box of bullets onto the tablecloth. They were .22s, and Yousef loaded one into the rifle’s chamber.
Among strangers or new friends, the loading of a gun always brings a moment of assessment. Alan had been around guns for many years, and he had a comfort level with them, and he had a comfort level with Yousef, and yet he had to pause, briefly, and think about his friend, and the gun, and their position, and any possible motives and outcomes. They were far from anyone who would care about Alan’s life. He trusted Yousef, considered him his friend, something of a son, but then there was a small part of him that said, You do not know any of these people very well.
Yousef left the gun on the tablecloth and went to the other side of the balcony, where the property backed up against the mountainside. He retrieved a can from the shrubbery and placed it atop the low wall. Then he jogged back.
—Let’s see if I’m still any good, he said.
Alan expected Yousef to lay on his stomach, or to stand, but instead he sat, with his knees out in front of him. He rested his elbows on his knees, the rifle nestled in his shoulder. Alan had never seen someone shoot this way, but it made a certain amount of sense.
Yousef aimed at the can — it was about twenty yards away — and shot. The sound wasn’t very loud, not as loud as a .45. These .22s were quiet, elegant, almost polite in their noises and demands.
The bullet disappeared into the thicket. He’d missed. He muttered in Arabic, emptied the chamber and loaded a new bullet. He aimed, fired, and this time, after a second of teetering, the can fell forward from the ledge to the driveway, like a movie cowboy falling off a roof.
—Very good, Alan said.
Hamza ran to set up the can again.
—Now you? Yousef handed him the gun.
Alan took the gun and loaded one of the small, gold-cased .22 bullets. The rifle was very light. He wanted to stand, or lay on his stomach, but felt that custom dictated that he follow Yousef’s way.
It was comfortable enough, mimicking the shape of a tripod. Alan found the can in the sights, exhaled, and squeezed the trigger. A small fist of dust rose just left of the can. Yousef and Hamza seemed mildly impressed, but also appeared satisfied that Alan was an inferior shot. What would it look like to them if Alan, middle-aged, heavy and wearing khaki pants, could sit down, pick up a gun and outdo them?
This was what Alan was determined to do.
—Can I have another? he asked.
Yousef shrugged and nodded toward the box of bullets. Alan loaded another into the chamber, and again took aim. He sighted, he breathed, he squeezed. This time the can took a bullet to its gut and fell from the wall.
Everyone, even Salem, murmured their approval. Alan handed the gun to Yousef, who was smiling broadly.
They continued this way, trading turns, replacing the can, filling it with holes, for about twenty minutes, until a truck barreled up the driveway. It was the white pickup that Alan had encountered earlier. As soon as the man emerged, looking agitated, Alan knew that he would soon be explaining himself. It did not help that when the man pulled up, Alan was holding a gun. As the man strode toward them, Alan placed it on the tablecloth, as close to Yousef as he could, but within his own reach. How could he know what was about to happen? He needed options.
First the man threw a barrage of Arabic at Yousef, pointing at Alan all the while. Then Yousef was standing, and Salem was standing, and all three men were yelling, and Hamza was unsure what to do. The man from the white pickup was surely someone whom Hamza saw every day, a man living in the town, and he couldn’t openly defy him, no more than he could blindly side with Yousef. Alan sat, trying to appear as harmless as possible.
Finally Yousef came to Alan.
—Did you tell this guy you were from the CIA?
Alan rolled his eyes. —He asked me if I was from the CIA, and I joked that I did some freelance work for them.
Yousef squinted at Alan. —Why did you say that?
—I was joking. It was a joke. He asked me. It was a ludicrous question.
—It’s not ludicrous to him. Now I have to convince him that you’re not from the CIA. How do I do this?
Alan wanted to be gone, up on the roof, anywhere. But an idea came to him. Tell him that if I was from the CIA, I wouldn’t go telling the first guy who asked me about it.
At this, Yousef laughed. Thank God, Alan thought. There had been a moment when the whole thing was getting away from him, from them all, and there would be all kinds of trouble for Yousef, for Yousef’s father, for Alan. By lunch he’d be in the next cab back to Jeddah. But Alan’s explanation had broken through, had reminded Yousef who he was, and who they both were. They were friends and there was trust.
Yousef turned to the man, put his arm around him, and walked him back to his truck. The man got in, sat behind the wheel for the next five minutes as Yousef talked to him through the window, calmly and with occasional emphatic gestures Alan’s way. Yousef tamped down the remaining embers of the man’s fury, and was soon finished.
—When the pickup was gone, Yousef returned, sat down, and exhaled theatrically. You shouldn’t have said that.
—I know.
—People don’t like jokes like that.
—I knew it as soon as I said it.
—It’s like joking about having a bomb when you’re in airport security.
—That was the analogy I had in mind, too.
—So we agr
ee.
—We always do.
—Most of the time.
—I’m sorry.
—Okay. Let’s shoot some more.
And they did, until Salem said he wanted to at least see some of the town or land. So they got in one of Yousef’s father’s trucks, Hamza driving, and descended into the flats of the valley and through the village. The truck ambled over the rough road so slowly that there seemed to be no point in all of them riding in a vehicle at all. Walking would have been faster and less ridiculous. They passed by the humblest dwellings and an array of well-made adobe homes and apartment buildings. The whole village couldn’t have been more than two hundred people, but there was a tidy school, a clinic, a mosque, even what Alan took to be a hotel.
After the main cluster of buildings, they drove up the dusty road to the other end of the valley, and after passing through a narrow passageway between two enormous stones, they were in another, smaller valley. They descended briefly, the next village in view, and Yousef stopped the truck.
—This is my grandparents’ home, Yousef said, indicating a small and ancient dwelling. It had been constructed of a few thousand flat stones, without mortar. It was probably no more than eighty years old, but would not have been out of place in an entirely different epoch.
They got out, and Alan followed Yousef through a window and into the shelter. The home was one small room. The roof was gone, but the round beams remained. Yousef took off his sunglasses and hung them on his thobe. He took a pull of water from his plastic bottle.
—I would have no idea how to live that way, he said. Can you imagine?
They got back into the truck.
They spent the next few hours driving lazily through the valleys, up and down the terrible roads. Along the way they passed a succession of improbable rock formations. Two-story stones that had been half hollowed, sitting like empty helmets. They drove to the upper ridge of the valley of Yousef’s father and looked down on the village. From their vantage point, it looked impossibly small and fragile, the kind of settlement that would be swept away in seconds by a flash flood, buried utterly by any kind of minor avalanche. It seemed a ludicrous place to live for a day or two, let alone for centuries. The people here would have been acutely vulnerable to drought, to the one road out being made even temporarily impassable by mud or falling rock. Looking over the valley, the work of humans so small next to the work of wind and water, Alan had the reaction he had had so often, which was People shouldn’t live here. People should not settle in a rocky terrain devoid of water or rain. But then where should they live? Nature tells man that she will kill him anywhere. In flat land, she will kill him with tornadoes. Live near a coast and she will send tsunamis to erase centuries of work. Earthquakes mock all engineering, all notions of permanence. Nature wants to kill, kill, kill, laugh at our work, wipe itself clean. But people lived wherever they wanted, and they lived here, too, in this impossible valley, and they thrived. Thrived? They lived. They survived, reproduced, sent their children to the cities to make money. Their children made money and came back to level hilltops and build castles in the same impossible valley. The work of man is done behind the back of the natural world. When nature notices, and can muster the energy, it wipes the slate clean again.
On the way back to the fortress, they passed a pair of men erecting a stone wall. The setup looked remarkably like the one Alan had used — a stack of rocks, a wheelbarrow full of mortar.
—Can we stop? Alan asked, before he had fully formed the reason why.
Hamza stopped. The two men looked up from their work and waved. Yousef greeted them from his window, making some joke in Arabic. The men laughed and came over.
—Ask them if they need help, Alan said.
—I’m not helping them! Yousef was momentarily puzzled. You mean you? You want to help?
—I do. I really do.
And after a few minutes of Yousef and Salem trying to reason with Alan, Yousef made the offer to the men, and the men accepted. They put Alan to work, and Hamza and Yousef and Salem drove off.
Alan’s job was to keep the mortar from hardening, stirring it, adding water periodically, and when that was taken care of, to help find the appropriate stones to place next on the wall. The work was slow, and the language barrier made it frustrating for both sides, but Alan felt good being outside, using his arms and legs, sweating through his shirt and khakis, and by the end of the day, they’d completed about eighteen feet of the wall. It was three feet high, it was solid, it was far better than the one he’d built in his own yard. They nodded to him, shook his hand, and he was done.
The sun was setting as he walked back to the castle. Getting lost was not a possibility: the fortress could be seen from every corner of the valley. In twenty minutes Alan reached it and Yousef and Salem were, as always, perched on the wall of the balcony, Salem strumming his guitar.
—Have fun? Yousef said.
—For a while I did. Then it was a fucking pain in the ass, he said.
Yousef and Salem both laughed. They were looking at a fool.
Yousef had a light in his eyes. —After dinner, I have a treat for you. You’ll love this.
Salem, in the know, raised his eyebrows, agreeing that Alan was about to be made very happy.
—What is it?
—You want to hunt some wolves?
—Why? Where?
—There are apparently some wolves killing sheep lately. They’re organizing a hunt. They need anyone who can shoot.
Alan hadn’t heard a more intriguing invitation in years.
—I do want that, he said.
—Told you, Yousef said to Salem.
—I didn’t deny it, Salem said. He picked up his guitar and composed a song, on the spot, about Alan and the hunt.
It was not half bad.
XXVIII.
AFTER DINNER, TWO PICKUP trucks pulled up to the house. Again Salem hurried to hide his guitar. Both trucks were white, but neither was driven by the man who suspected Alan of being a CIA operative. There were about four men in each, as old as Alan or older, with a few teenagers mixed in.
Alan was offered the front seat in the first pickup, but he wanted to be in the open air. It was a crisp and clear night and he wanted to see everything. Voices were raised among the men, but finally Yousef intervened and assured them that this was indeed what Alan wanted, that their hospitality was best expressed by granting him this wish. Normally he wouldn’t have forced the issue, but tonight he did, because after weeks of life in that sterile hotel, he wanted the night air, and the stars, and the bouncing around in the truck bed.
And so he crawled into the back with the two youngest cousins and an older man. All three had rifles. Yousef sat in the passenger seat.
—You coming? Alan asked Salem.
—You kidding? Salem said, see you later.
The pickup rumbled alive and began a slow amble down the driveway. The man across from Alan, about his own age and build, was smiling at him. Alan extended his hand. —Alan, he said.
The man shook it. —Atif.
A pothole sent them all into the air. When they landed, they all laughed. Atif, Alan hoped, had not been apprised of the possibility that Alan was CIA. He wanted the simplicity of being who he was: no one.
Atif raised his chin to Alan. —Did you hunt a wolf before, Mr. Alan?
Alan shook his head.
—But you have…
The man couldn’t find the word for shot so instead pretended to shoot his own gun. —You do this?
—Yes, many times, Alan said.
The man tilted his head, not quite adding it up.
—But no kill the animal?
—No, Alan said.
The man smiled. He was missing most of his teeth.
—Kill the man?
Alan laughed. —No.
—Eat the animal? the man asked.
—Yes, Alan answered.
The man seemed satisfied for a moment, then a shard of mischief appear
ed in his eyes. —Eat the man?
Alan chose to laugh. —No.
The man smiled. —Never once eat the man?
Alan chose to laugh again.
The man reached out and took Alan’s hand, shook it again.
—Good, he said.
The roads were a mess and got worse as they rose higher through the mountains. The truck whinnied and grunted, and Alan wondered aloud if any wolves would remain within miles of their loud convoy.
Finally, high atop the ridge, they stopped, and the cousins got out, helping Alan down. Yousef appeared from the other truck. He was loading his rifle.
—The farm below is where the sheep were taken last.
Alan sighted the pen, and guessed they were about seventy yards away.
—So the plan?
—Just to wait here, I guess.
—But won’t they smell us? Alan asked. No one answered, and he assumed the question was irrelevant.
—You and I will go over here, Yousef said.
They walked a hundred yards to a cluster of boulders, low and smooth, and Yousef draped himself over one. Alan followed suit, and they both pointed their rifles at the pen below. They had a clear shot. The owner had left a floodlight on — this had not deterred the wolves before, the men had said — and there was little wind, so it was a shot he could make if the wolf was moving slowly and predictably. Alan didn’t have much experience leading a target, but without any obstacles, in a spotlit open pen, he thought he could at least get a piece of the animal.
He watched as the rest of the hunting party spread itself out around the perimeter of the pen. He counted nine shooters, including the young cousins. Should a wolf penetrate the perimeter, there would be plenty of guns ready to put it down.
Alan did not want to kill any animal. He dreaded the moment when the wolf, hit by a bullet, would jerk, stagger about, and, immobilized, be filled with lead. He dreaded hearing its labored breathing as they stood around it, waiting for it to die. But it seemed unlikely that any animal, however stupid or desperate, would enter the pen under these circumstances, with so many people nearby, such bright light. Then again, Alan knew nothing about hunting, about wolf hunting, about wolf hunting in the mountains of central Saudi Arabia.