100th Post!

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.

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.