Milestones are important. They help us gauge where we've been and allow us the opportunity to estimate what we have left to do. Today is my 100th post, and I couldn't be more excited. Some of you have been with me the whole way, others are new to the gig. To everyone who saw that first post, on that first day, thanks for sticking by my side. To those who are just signing on, let me say thanks. You're part of what keeps me writing every day and I'm honored to have you along for the ride.
To celebrate my 100th post, here's a story for you all, fresh out of workshop. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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| enduringamerica.com |
The Most Depressed Spy
By Steven McLain
His name was not Mohammad Khalil, of
course. His mother had named him Roger Kendrickson and refused to
speak Dari at home, even though his father sometimes lapsed when they
fought. His grandmother, however, simply folded her arms and
continued speaking her tribal tongue. She called him Khalo, just to
make his mother scowl.
He sat cross-legged on the linoleum in
the kitchen, his long arms folded over bony knees. His face was the
color of paper just beginning to curl beneath a flame. He
contemplated the apple in his hands. The sticker said Gala. It was
his favorite food and he liked to hold it, smell it, imagine the
crisp of it on his teeth.
For hours and hours while his
grandmother rolled out bread and puttered around the kitchen she
rambled about her mother, her husband, and the little goat that had
wandered around their village in Afghanistan when she had been a
child. She said it had little black spots and wicked eyes. It stood
on the stones where the madrasa had been and glared at her.
Then his mother came in and rebuked
his grandmother. Flour hung in the air. Sunlight came in through
the window and while his mother and grandmother fought he watched
motes of flour drift toward the floor. On the counter, a stainless
steel pasta machine gleamed. His grandmother slapped the counter;
flour puffed into the air and a wooden turner—what he mistakenly
called a spatula—slipped off the peeling laminate and clattered at
his feet.
“This is my home,” his mother
said. “He is my son.”
“And my son,” his grandmother said
in Dari, “is your husband. He will decide.”
His mother took his hand and lifted
him to his feet. He squirmed. It hurt his shoulder. “We're going
shopping, Roger.”
As his mother tugged him behind her,
his grandmother called out to him in her sibilant language: “Be
good, Khalo. Your mother is a witch.”
҉
Rising early, even before the sun had
thought to breech the horizon, Khalil unrolled his mat and laid it
out facing west, toward Mecca. The mountains were darker places on
the horizon, where the stars didn't shine. Cold air from the north
settled over the plain and made his breath plume with every murmured
prayer. When he finished, he rolled up the mat, tucked it under the
rusting cot and slowly laced his shoes. He ached today. He thought
it was the cold, but perhaps it was the climb yesterday, and the
heavy pack he had borne.
In the darkness, he saw a slow,
blinking red light. He stared at it for a moment, certain that, like
a screaming infant, if he left it alone long enough it would simply
stop. After several minutes, he groaned to his feet.
“Five-seven-alpha,” he said into
the small radio handset.
“Please repeat your status,” a
voice crackled back in English.
He was alone in the room, but he
glanced toward the doorway and the wind-ruffled carpet dangling from
the threshold. The night leaked in around the edges. Switching to
English he said, “Five-seven-alpha.”
“Standby.”
Sighing seemed to be the natural
response. Yet, for all its release, he knew it was a useless sort of
reaction; a tantrum for those too dignified to throw tantrums, yet no
different in spirit. So he went to the corner where a small bookcase
waited to collapse. Most of the books on it were real, copies of
Western classics translated into Dari when such things were
permitted. Inside one of the books were copies of The Project for
Islamic Cooperation for a Peaceful Future in Afghanistan.
If anyone from the village discovered them he might be jailed or
beaten. But either option was better than if they discovered the
small niche beneath the bookshelf.
His thumbprint
opened the small lock box. Inside: several stacks of bills of
various currencies, three ounces of gold bars, and a laminated map of
the country. He took the map, closed the box and pushed the bookcase
back in place. The radio crackled on the desk.
After they
exchanged security pass phrases, the voice over the radio gave him
two names and a set of coordinates. He checked them against his map,
and, once he was satisfied, folded it into his tunic and turned off
the radio.
҉
For a time, all
they asked of Khalil was information. He came down from his shack a
few times a week, sat at a café and listened while old men and young
men gesticulated over little porcelain cups of vicious coffee.
Khalil never really acquired the taste for it, but he sipped
dutifully. The shop across the way traded gold and sold trinkets of
dubious antiquity. Sometimes Afghan soldiers came in clumps of two
or three and wandered through the market. Khalil was especially good
at seeming just interested enough that they would speak freely, but
not so interested that they became suspicious.
Then once a week
he spoke with the voice over the radio, and that was that.
҉
Two men, Khalo was
not sure who they were, came to their home and spoke with Khalo's
father. They seemed to be police, but wore black suits with gold
piping, epaulettes and a badge, so unlike the blue military cut he
was used to seeing in front of school. For a time there was silence
between the three men, but eventually they all stood and the men
left. Khalo's father sank into his seat and looked around the room,
though he seemed not to see anything.
Khalo went to the
foyer and pressed his face against the mottled glass beside the door.
He saw the men-like smudges through the window. He wasn't sure if
it was a police car or not. The spot where his mother normally
parked was empty.
He went back to
his father. “When will mother be home?”
҉
Khalo put his head
down and tried to ignore the three older boys walking up the aisle of
the bus. Older meant bigger, and he was small anyway. His father
told him it was better to be small; it meant that no one would notice
you. But children do not think the same way as fathers, and the
three boys stopped in front of his seat. Khalo was in the back of
the bus, on the long bench that stretched from side to side. He'd
already been waiting twenty minutes for the rest of the classes to
get out.
The three older
boys wore vinyl backpacks with Batman, Spiderman and Superman on
them, and the boy in front had on brand new Nike shoes. He crossed
his arms over his chest.
“Sixth-graders
sit in the front.”
Khalo looked over
his shoulder at Mrs. Calloway, the bus driver, hoping she would
intervene. She was bent over the wheel, stretched out to reach the
lever that opened the doors, and intent on everyone getting on the
bus. She didn't even glance back.
His
father said, It is better, being small, Khalo. When you
are small they tell you that you are to go to madrasa instead of
going to fight the invaders. They tell you that you should carry a
Quran instead of a gun. His
mother said, Don't call him Khalo. To
which his father replied, taking off his glasses to look his son in
the eyes, He is old enough to make certain decisions.
The
three boys were American, though. None of them cared about the
Quran, and there were no invaders to expel. None except for the
sixth grader sitting in the back of the bus.
҉
Khalil
saw the drone strike from perhaps two miles away, as he trudged back
to his shack. He never heard the drone, or the missile, but suddenly
the day became divided. There was now a before and
an after. The flash
was barely more than a twinkle in the corner of his eye, the kind
that sometimes occurred in the dark before sleep. A plume of smoke
drifted up from just beyond the village. Then he heard the
explosion. It was as loud as a man clapping beside him.
҉
For a moment,
Khalo considered getting up, but that felt like retreat to him. It
felt like running away. When she ranted in the kitchen, his
grandmother sometimes said that his father had run away, that he had
forsaken his family, his tribe. She called him a coward. Besides,
if he stood he would have to push through the three boys, and he knew
they would not let him go unchallenged. Whatever Americans knew of
honor demanded they punish this insolence.
Before the boy in
front could react, Khalo kicked him in the balls. The boy's eyes
bugged out, he let out a challenged gasp, then sank to his knees and
vomited on the other boy's shoes. Khalo leapt from the seat before
either of his friends could react. He slammed into one, driving him
to the ground. Khalo balled his fists and pounded the boy's face.
He thought the boy's face should feel like a melon, that semi-rigid
tension of a honeydew or cantaloupe. Instead, it was like a
volleyball pumped with too much air. Until the nose broke. Then it
was like pounding something nauseatingly giving.
He brought his
hands up and down in a frenzied rhythm that ended abruptly as he was
lifted and thrown back. It was the third boy, who hefted him off and
tossed him aside. Khalo hit a bench seat and flopped to the ground,
and struggled with the weight of his backpack. He launched himself
at the third boy, but something hard yanked him back.
Khalo screamed.
He thrashed but the grip was unrelenting. Mrs. Calloway had him by
the backpack, and her eyes were saucers and her mouth was perched
open in a round, scarlet-lipsticked O of astonishment. He spat out a
word in Dari that he never would have said in English, which he had
heard his mother call his grandmother before slapping her across the
face. It was a dirty, low word, she later told him, and he should
never call someone that. But Mrs. Calloway held him back, and that
made her low and dirty.
She dragged him
off the bus and deposited him in the school office.
His father came
and spoke with the principal while Khalo waited in the hallway in a
chair they had brought out from the kindergarten classroom. It was
too small and was sticky with residual Elmer's glue. Inside, Khalo
heard the stern words of the principal, and the meek words of his
father. When the door opened, his father looked small and sad.
Khalo scooped up his backpack and shuffled after his father.
҉
In Kabul, two days
after he had arrived in country, Khalil hunched over his coffee. A
boy stood in the market with a soccer ball that a Dutch soldier had
given him. The lettering had worn off, and most of the black
octagons were scratched away, but the boy had his arms wrapped around
it. The boy either wore long shorts or short trousers; in either
case, they were tattered and soiled. Even the boy looked tattered.
His hair might have been umber, but it was so matted with clayey dirt
that it had no particular color. Khalil and the boy looked at one
another from across the street, and Khalil was unsure why their gazes
had met, but when the boy looked at him Khalil smiled.
Khalil
heard the truck, something massive, with a shuddering growl that
echoed miles away. He could not say why, but the sound made him
think of inevitability. As though this was what glaciers and empires
and history sounded like. Someone once said that history was
the unfolding of Spirit in time. Across the street the boy suddenly
grinned. Khalil turned to see what had amused him.
The truck turned a corner. It was
dark and shiny and had tinted windows. Khalil tried to shout for the
boy to move. It struck and killed the boy and did not stop.
Khalil wondered, while the boy
struggled to right himself, though half his brain lay in the dirt,
what Spirit had unfolded in this time.
҉
Khalo and his
father drove home in silence until his father stopped at a red light.
The glare from the streetlamps filled out concentric circles on the
windshield where rain had fallen. Then the windshield wipers swatted
them away.
At last, when
Khalo began to fear that his father would never say anything to him
again, his father asked,
“Did those boys deserve what you have done
to them?”
“I don't know.”
Khalo's father hit
him. In the narrow confines of the car, the sound of the slap
resounded. The sting of it seemed to take an eternity to reverberate
through his cheek, up the side of his jaw, along the curve of his ear
and then into his brain.
“How can you say
to me you do not know? Do you know what you have done? They will
take my green card, they will say to me that we are not welcome here
anymore, that we must go. And they will say this because of you.”
A tear which he
was powerless to stop spilled onto his shirt front. His father
slapped him again. Then a third time. As the ringing turned to a
roar in his ear, the light turned green, and his father turned to put
both hands on the steering wheel.
“They have said
you must go to a new school. To do that, we must move. How can I
move and keep my job?”
“I'm sorry,
papa.”
Khalo's father
deflated and gripped the steering wheel harder. “Not yet you are
not.”
҉
Khalil packed what
he needed into an old Soviet rucksack that had been stitched with
goat hide and silk thread. Cyrillic letters on the bottom identified
the first owner of the bag, and a blood stain marked where the bullet
had gone through. Khalil had found it in the shack when he first
moved in. He told himself that he kept it as a reminder; when
Americans saw it they chuckled as thought it meant something ironic.
But as he stuffed it with canned beans, a box of grease-packed
Chinese cartridges, binoculars, rope, a roll of duct tape that had
been flattened into an oval, and his prayer mat, he decided that he
could not remember what it reminded him of. He thought, perhaps,
that all things changed hands in the end. That seemed like a
platitude, though, and he was not one for such things.
By the time the
sun had risen over the mountains, he had been on his way an hour.
The closest village was another half an hour, and the road was empty.
It had been paved once, when Soviet convoys fueled the drive into
the mountains. The scars of that war had been replaced by other
scars, but the road still felt foreign to him.
In school, he
learned about Roman roads. His teacher told him that Rome conquered
the world because of their roads. They allowed armies to move
quickly; but more importantly, they allowed money to flow all over
the empire. American roads reminded him of Roman roads. Arrow
straight from point A to point B. Soviet roads, however, felt like
the beaten paths of goats in the mountains. They meandered,
inexplicably, between hills, over rivers, clinging to the side of a
canyon, never seeming to go anywhere until they were suddenly
somewhere, a village or outpost or forgotten Mughal ruin.
After an hour of
walking, he got off the road and followed a path over a dusty
hummock. The sky felt close. Cold wind blew in from the north,
sweeping great eddies of dust and pebbles with it. Scrub clung in
checkered pockets where soil accumulated between stones or in the lee
of boulders. Goats wandered, a dog yelped in the distance, and two
men with faces as brown as the mountains leaned on crooks and
watched him go by.
He arrived at a
small building heaped from the earth, constructed on an old, stone
foundation. A Land Rover and black Expedition sat out front. The
English used the building as a trading outpost in the nineteenth
century; during the twentieth it had been used to store poppy. Now,
it had been re-purposed as a way station for Americans and British
nationals. Two men in dusty grunge watched him approach. Bulky with
ammunition, weapons, radios and other, more esoteric gear, they
looked ready to stop him at the door, then decided otherwise and
radioed ahead. Khalil thought he saw someone in the Land Rover, but
couldn't be sure.
҉
The
difference between murder and assassination is a matter of degrees.
You murder a man you hate; you assassinate a man you oppose. Khalil
neither hated, nor opposed, the two men bound and gagged in the back
of the battered pickup. Cold night air whistled through the
passenger window; it wouldn't close and the heater didn't work so
Khalil tried to make himself smaller in an old, wool sweater. Ahead,
the moon had just appeared over a hunchbacked mountain range.
In the
back, Gibran Khan knelt over the two men and kept them quiet with an
ominous look and the threat of the rifle resting on his knees. His
long, dark beard curled around his mouth, and he had pulled his scarf
across his nose and mouth so that only his eyes showed. They were
muddy and red-rimmed from poppy smoke. He seemed twice as big as
Khalil. Khalil knew nothing about him. But what he did know was
that Gibran Khan was not his name, either.
Khalil
knocked on the door to get Gibran Khan's attention. The much larger
man leaned into the cab, his scarf flapping like a banner behind him.
“Have
you ever seen From Russia With Love?”
Khalil shouted over the wind.
Gibran
Khan glared at him and withdrew back into the truck bed.
The
truck shifted uneasily on the rotted road, and they had to backtrack
to cross a bridge that had washed out. Twice, Khalil thought he saw
headlights in the distance, so they stopped to wait while the truck
croaked as it idled. Further up the hills, they passed a poppy field
and the low, mud buildings where children and bare-faced women slept.
Rocks slipped under the truck's tires as Khalil feathered the
accelerator and pounded at the gear shift. At last, they came to a
narrow outcropping that overlooked a dark canyon. The truck's lights
bored holes in the dark but revealed nothing.
Gibran
Khan took the men from the back of the truck and walked them to the
edge of the overlook. The men sagged in their bonds. Blood ran from
open wounds, pus from the burns which seared their hands, feet and
testicles. Khalil didn't envy them the relief that must have warred
in their hearts. He saw in their eyes a kind of battle between pain
and the hope that it might end. A woman who once caressed Khalil in
the dark said that torture was the unmaking of the world.
“These
men's worlds have been unmade,” Khalil said to Gibran Khan as the
night insects droned in the bitter air.
҉
With a last glance
at the Land Rover, Khalil ducked into the building and let his eyes
adjust to the gloom. Opium smoke curled along the mud-daubed
rafters. Two men in Afghan army uniforms eyed him from a table
across the room then went back to their cards. A small boy came to
offer pirated DVDs and condoms.
Khalil eyed the
crisp gold packaging doubtfully. “What are the condoms for?”
“Girls, man,
girls. I got three in the back. You want one only twenty dollars.
And she'll do anything.”
Before Khalil
could answer, an American in dusty khakis shoved past the boy and
took Khalil by the arm. His name was Edward Burke, and this was the
third time they had met. He dragged Khalil to the back of the room,
where the smoke wasn't as thick, and kicked out a chair for Khalil
before he took one for himself. Khalil slowly sat while the American
shouted for a drink.
The man was very
tall, even for an American, with the sort of butchered haircut and
motley beard Khalil had come to expect from special operatives.
Khalil suspected that they equated unkemptness with a kind of
prestige, or thought it would inspire some measure of solidarity from
the warlords to whom they pandered. He imagined they could not even
conceive of the secret contempt in which they were held, even as they
were feared as one fears a temperamental lion.
A younger boy
brought coffee on a tarnished platter and started to serve both men
until Burke shooed him away. The American nodded toward the older
boy peddling condoms to the Afghan soldiers. “The kid's a shit.”
He sipped from the small porcelain cup. “But I guess vices have
moved on here.”
Khalil glanced at
the man curled round his pipe. “Addictions are a singular thing.”
“Goddamn.
Sometimes I forget how good your English is.”
Khalil tried to
measure his response. “I was told I'd be meeting two people.”
He leaned into his
radio. “Mercer, you mind coming in here.”
They waited. The
American smiled. A bead of sweat ran down the small of Khalil's
back. When Mercer came in, Khalil felt a thrill of shock and
something else. Something both primal and electric between his legs.
He tried to cover his shame by looking away, but looking away would
be perceived as rude. So he rose to his feet and shook her hand when
Mercer offered it.
Her hand was soft.
“I'm Andrea Mercer. I've been given the details of your operation
and will brief you before your infiltration.”
They sat and
Khalil nodded slowly, unwilling to say anything that would reveal how
unsettled she made him. It had been years since he'd seen a woman so
exposed. He shifted in his seat.
Burke chuckled.
“Our boy's shy.”
Mercer tried to
console him with a smile, but it came across as condescending.
“Please forgive me, I'd been told you were acculturated to Western
norms. It's just been so hot I didn't want to wear it out here.”
She reached into her bag for a gossamer niqab.
“No, no,” he
said, reaching to stop her. “Please forgive me. It is good to be
reminded why I'm here.”
Burke harrumphed.
Mercer gave each man a brief nod, then reached into her bag for a
small packet wrapped in plastic wrap. Khalil took it and weighed it
in his hands. He cocked an eyebrow.
“I know,”
Mercer said. “We don't have as much on this one as we'd like.
That's why we're having you go in. You're to assess the situation on
the ground, determine the threat, and act appropriately.”
The packet
contained a map, and several aerial photographs taken by drone with
red arrows pinpointing locations.
“Even though we
don't have a lot,” Mercer continued, “what we have is pretty
solid. They've been gathering with known insurgents and have strong
ties to local warlords. Two weeks ago we spotted them moving with
rebel forces around Jalalabad. We think they're part of a network
moving weapons in from Pakistan. Including Russian Series Two
missiles.”
Burke pantomimed
an explosion. “Boom. Fucking drone-killers.”
Khalil flipped
through the photographs. “All right.” He stopped when he came
to the photographs of the men he might have to kill. “They're only
children.”
҉
Khalo stood
silently at the front of the church while old women and men he'd
never met streamed past him in a blur of Kleenex and black veils.
Waxy flowers surrounded the coffin and they stank like mold and
tropical diseases. A priest stood at the front with a crucifix and
offered comforting smiles to the viewers as they paraded in front of
the casket. There was a woman inside that they looked at and wept
over.
His father sat
beside him in a black suit that pinched across his chest. He stared
at his hands, clasped together in his lap, as though he was unsure
what they were for. Sometimes he drew in awkward gasps and let them
out in great heaves, but Khalo saw no tears in his eyes. Even his
grandmother was silent, but he saw her judging each person as they
walked by; they could not see her judgment, but Khalo saw how her
veil puffed out, how her head tilted down, how she sometimes
half-turned her head away from an approaching woman as though she
smelled something unpleasant.
A man Khalo's
father knew from mosque paid his respects with a silent prayer. When
their eyes met, Khalo's father seemed ashamed.
Khalo
heard them muttering behind the church, It was a civil
ceremony. She wouldn't convert.
When
they arrived home after the burial, the kitchen table had been
stacked with a casserole, two lasagnas, a spiral-cut ham, bunt cake
in a disposable tin, a relish tray, manicotti in a Pyrex dish, and
lamb chops. Cousins arrived and sprinted through the living room
into the kitchen, a grandmother Khalo had never met organized two
aunts and a fat uncle into house-cleaning details. Khalo wondered
where these people had been all his life.
Two days later
everyone had gone. The only evidence of their stay was the casserole
dish that no one claimed.
҉
Khalil took an
apple from his rucksack and held it out to the man sitting across
from him in the back of the old pickup. The truck swayed and bucked
with every rut in the road, but the engine sounded good. The man
driving had big hands and a quick smile; he had shown Khalil where
Afghan intelligence forces had attached electrical leads to his hands
and feet. The burns still wept.
The man across
from Khalil was wedged between his two brothers and smelled like
sweat and goat. His narrow eyes were crowded beneath mossy eyebrows,
and Khalil had never seen him smile. His brothers were both younger,
and one had a Chinese AK-47 balanced on his knees. Khalil had
labeled the two younger ones “skinny” and “short.” The older
brother in the middle was “morose.” But he took the apple and
split it three ways with his brothers. He bowed his head in thanks.
They arrived in a
village about twenty kilometers past the old British outpost where
Khalil had received his target dossier. At the outskirts of the
village, a pair of women stared at him behind their sky-blue burqas.
A pall of smoke hung in the air, and beneath it something sweet and
insidious. He covered his mouth and nose with his scarf.
They stopped in
front of a semi-collapsed building whose three remaining walls sagged
inward. The driver slapped the door three times. The three brothers
climbed out. Khalil watched them disappear into the building, then
he hopped down.
“Thank you,”
he told the driver.
“God be with
you,” the driver said.
“And with you.”
A quick plume of
blue exhaust and russet dust billowed behind him.
After the truck
had disappeared, two men came out from a building across the street.
Of the thirty or so buildings in the village, nearly half had
collapsed. Rubble lay strewn across the street, bone-white where
stones had cracked open. He saw blood stains throughout the debris.
The two men parted
a few steps from the building, but flanked him about twenty yards
apart. He thought he saw movement from the doorway and then the
outline of a rifle barrel.
One of the men
pointed toward the sky, then at the collapsed buildings. “If they
see more than three men gathering, they think we are plotting against
them. I would offer your welcome, but as you can see, there is none
to be had.”
He tried to ignore
the rifle. Since they hadn't already shot him he doubted they would.
But still. “My name is Khalil. I'm just trying to get to
Jalalabad.”
The two men eyed
one another, then glanced toward the building. “Lift up your
feet.”
Khalil lifted his
leg, showing him the fraying leather sandals.
“They think you
are an American spy,” the man said. “But Americans always wear
boots. Take some water from the well but please be gone when the
next bus arrives.”
“I thank you.”
҉
Khalo's
father's favorite movie was From Russia With Love.
In the kitchen, his father paused to look at the empty casserole
dish. Khalo watched him take a beer from the fridge, crack it open,
and drop into his armchair. He held the remote in his hand pointed
at the television, caught in the moment between turning the
television on or leaving it off. The moment in which the screen
remained dark lingered. Khalo's father's shoulders trembled, and the
television slowly bloomed with color and motion.
Khalo stood
outside in the hall, peeking around the corner. Sometimes his father
chuckled, but most of the time he remained silent. Khalo suspected
that his father knew he was there, but said nothing. Khalo's
grandmother was in the kitchen nattering to herself. Despite the
television and the distant muttering, the house was strangely silent.
Khalo listened to the soft groaning of the house, the distant sighs
and glacial murmurs. Wind blew outside and rain pattered against the
sliding-door. He could see the old oak in the back yard, and the
fence with the missing slat where the neighbor's rottweiler had tried
to force its way through. The dog was dead now, but the hole
remained.
He laid down in
the middle of the hall to watch the movie; the carpet was rough
against his cheek and smelled like the old clothes in the back of his
closet.
His grandmother
suddenly stood over him. Khalo hadn't heard her approach. She said
nothing, but picked him up and walked him to the kitchen. His father
glanced over the chair's shoulder but before he could follow she
shooed him away with a glance. She held out a chair for him and took
out a package of Oreo cookies from the cabinet, a treat his mother
had rarely allowed. She gave him three and sat across from him.
“Your mother was
a wicked woman, Khalo. That is why you have shamed your father; some
of her wickedness is now in you.”
Khalo held an Oreo
in both hands and sucked the chocolate cookie until it disintegrated
in his mouth. Not even his father interrupted his grandmother, but
he thought he ought to defend his mother somehow. But all he could
manage was the slow shake of his head.
“She was,” his
grandmother said. “I knew that she had bewitched your father when
he came to me with you in her whore's belly and told me they were to
be married.” His grandmother slowly sighed. She kneaded a swollen
knuckle with the ball of her thumb. He could see the serpentine
veins in her hand, behind paper-thin skin and soft flesh. “I said
no, but your mother had twisted his mind so much that he could not
hear the wisdom in what I said.”
Khalo's voice was
almost a whisper. “I don't want you to talk about my mother like
that.”
She nodded, as
though she had expected a response like that. “First, we will try
to beat it out of you.”
҉
On the road
leading into Jalalabad, Khalil met an old Pakistani woman and her
husband guiding a small wooden cart. The old man was nearly bent in
half over the reigns, clucking gently. He had no teeth, and his face
looked like it had imploded with nothing to support his lips. The
whites of his eyes had gone yellow, and his face was the color and
texture of used coffee grounds. His wife walked beside, hopping with
shuffled steps. Her burqa was a darker shade of blue than Khalil was
used to, and her eyes were as kohl-lined as a Saudi's.
A breeze ruffled
his hair; an anemic sun worked at the high clouds speckling the sky.
Khalil shuffled alongside them, keeping a pleasant distance so that
they could get used to his presence. From there, he could see inside
the cart; it was laden with DayGlo orange buckets and old MRE boxes
full of leafy produce, paper sachets twisted at the top and dusted
with paprika and cinnamon. The same spices over which five hundred
years ago empires had gone to war.
Eventually, the
old woman slapped her husband's knee and pointed back at Khalil. He
made himself small, harmless. The old man sighed and shouted.
Khalil's Pashto was broken, at best, but he tried his best to make
himself understood. Grunting, the old man switched through Mandarin,
Russian, and a language Khalil could not even guess at faster than
Khalil could keep up. Finally Khalil said, “English?” and the
old man nodded.
“You are
American?”
Khalil shook his
head.
“An American
saved our life once,” the old woman said, surprising Khalil.
Khalil looked up at the old man, expecting a rebuke, but he remained
bent over and said nothing. “But then the bombs came.” She
sighed.
Khalil told them
that he was on his way to visit cousins. He waved his hand generally
to indicate the lumpen mountains and the less distant scarlet stains
of poppy fields. The old man said nothing, but the woman stopped and
let the cart go a few paces before she started again. When she'd
caught up with them, she waved Khalil away. “Go, go.” Then she
lapsed into Pashto and waved a finger in his face.
Pausing in the
middle of the road, he let the cart pass him by, then looked into the
dominating bowl of sky and wondered where the terrifying speck was.
҉
When
Khalo came back to school, girls stayed away from him and the boys
dared him to approach. They crossed their arms and glared, but when
teachers saw the small clumps gathering in corners they steered the
young toughs back to their desks. Khalo walked alone through the
hallways and covered the narrow, inflamed bruises on his arms with a
maroon jacket.
Mr.
Reed was the school counselor. He wore jeans two inches too tight,
so that his gut dangled over the waistline. He stopped Khalo in the
hall and neither bent nor lowered himself to Khalo's height; what he
did was curl his back so that he seemed to be the personification of
a question mark. He asked if Khalo was all right. Of course, he
said, losing a parent would make anyone act out.
Khalo
considered. He remembered the moment when he had broken the boy's
nose, remembered the sour vomit on the ground and how the boy whose
testicles he'd crushed had made a sound like water draining out of a
tub. That instant was like an idea unfolding in his memory, but the
part of him that was him was absent. He doubted he had been upset
about his mother just then.
“I'd
rather have been left alone,” he told his counselor, who eyed him
for a moment.
Sure,
sure, Khalo. Sure, sure.
“I
think,” Khalo said. “I'd rather be called Roger from now on.”
***
As always, the work posted above is copyright Steven McLain 2012. Reproduction without written permission of the author is strictly prohibited.
