Chardy had the boy by the thick lapels of his raincoat and rammed him against the side of the van, feeling the head slap hard against the glass of the window.
“Hey,
The boy shook his head woozily and touched his throat. Fear showed in his wide eyes and trembling fingers, but the fear turned to rage.
“You
He slept poorly, thinking of helicopters.
The phone roused him early the next morning. He blinked awake in the gray light in a messy room. He had a headache and a sour taste in his mouth. He answered.
“Paul?”
“Yes?”
Her voice held promise of a question, but did not ask it. He gripped the phone so tight he thought he’d shatter the plastic.
She said, “I have to see you.”
“Why?”
“Paul, you son of a bitch. Why didn’t you stay in Chicago?”
He looked at his Rolex to discover it was 7:30.
“I haven’t slept,” she said. “I seem to be a little nuts. I did some speed a little while ago.”
“Take a nap, for Christ’s sakes. Then meet me someplace in the open. Outside.”
“By the river. By the boathouse. Off Boylston. Anyone can tell you where it is. At noon.”
“I’ll see you then.”
“Paul. Please come alone. Don’t bring any little men in overcoats.”
So Ulu Beg looked for black men. You could sit next to a black man for hours and he would say nothing. He would not see you. He would sit encased in his own furious silence, absorbed and bitter. Ulu Beg was somehow drawn to them. Were they America’s Kurds? For, like the Kurds, they were a manly and handsome people, intent upon preserving their own ways. They had a dignity, an Islamic stillness he could understand. And they were skeptical of the America around them, he could sense that too. Yet they had never retreated to the mountains to fight. He wondered why. He thought it might have to do with the music they always listened to, the huge radios they carried with them everywhere.
Beyond the glass of the bus window the state of Arkansas rolled past, flat and green.
The black man stirred. He was a large and silent man with small angry eyes in his huge face. He rattled the newspaper he was reading. Ulu Beg could see in black letters:...
“Sorry,” he said, drawing into his seat even farther.
The black man made an elaborate ceremony of turning the page, claiming for himself even larger amounts of space.
Ulu Beg looked past him, out the window again.
Arkansas. After Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee. Then Ohio. Then …
They were strange names and stranger places. He almost didn’t dare say them, even though the drilling had improved his English greatly; and he had memorized them, that curious, shambling route up through the middle of America, through dirty towns of no distinction that all looked the same. He’d been on the journey now for many days and would continue for many more.
“There is no hurry,” they had told him. “Caution is better than risk. Three certain steps back are better than one risky step forward.”
Little Rock upcoming. Memphis, then Bowling Green. By bus, by train, but never by airplane. Americans were crazy with fear about airplane hijackers, terrorists, killers, and so there was no more dangerous place for a man with a gun in America than an airport.
Lexington, Huntington. Always the same. Roll into a city bus station late at night, or, if arriving in the day, wait till nightfall. Then, with certainty, there will be a small hotel that caters to travelers without much money, without pasts and futures —
Ulu Beg was becoming something of an expert on such a life, and the places required by it. The hotels were full of old men with bleak eyes who spat and smelled of liquor, who would talk to anyone or no one. This was no America of wealth and might; it was a mean place, like the slums in any country, especially for lonesome men with problems: no money, no homes, no job. Much hate. These men without women lived on and fed off their hate. They hated the blacks — who hated them in turn — and they hated the “others” — that mysterious remainder of the world which they did not fathom but which somehow seemed to have the skill to live nicely. They hated children, who had futures; and they hated women, for not seeing them; they hated each other; they hated themselves.
Yet they did not seem to notice Ulu Beg, or if they did, because he fit into no category, they could not hate him. They ignored him....
Masters of this world? Rulers, emperors? Conquerors of the moon?
He’d never seen masters so sullen and wan. It is worse to suffer dishonor in this world than death, the Kurds say. Kurdistan or death, the Kurds say. Life passes, honor remains, the Kurds say.
No white American could say such things. They were like the corrupt old Ottomans — America a tottering Ottoman empire, as Byzantine, as greedy, as muscleless. American men sweated because they were so fat. They did not seem to own their own streets but merely to lease them at exorbitant rates. God willed nothing for them, because God could not see them.
Or maybe it was the weather, or maybe it was the city. Whatever, the air seemed blue in the cities he passed through — blue with rising smoke, with rising steam, blue with the nighttime hues of huge lamps, blue with hate. At any moment it would break apart and the groups would begin to hunt each other in the streets. Beirut, Baghdad, Tehran, Tabriz: it had happened a hundred times in his part of the world, all the hate swirling madly until one red day it burst, spilling across the pavement. And it would happen here. Surely that was the message in all this. He saw no Jardis.
America had lost her Jardis. Sent them away, pushed them, driven them, murdered them, blasphemed them, for whatever mad reason.
In his travel he saw no Jardi — not the posture which had seemed to him in the mountains the very essence of America, which had been perhaps only the very essence of Jardi. Jardi always pushed them on.
But Jardi had betrayed him.
Jardi, Jardi: Why?
His head ached. Jardi’s crime mocked him.
Jardi, you were my brother. Jardi, I loved you. You had honor, Jardi, you could not do such a thing.
Jardi, why? Who reached you, Jardi, who took you from us, who turned you against us? You would have died, Jardi, rather than betray us.
You once gave life, Jardi. You gave life to my son, Apo. Why would you then take it, my brother?
“Little Rock, folks. Municipal Station, ’bout ten minutes. Check the luggage rack overhead now.”
The passengers stirred.
Ulu Beg looked out the window: in a mean blue city again.
“’Bout motha-fuckin’
characters
Vernon Tell was a supervisor in the U.S. Border Patrol, Agent in Charge of the Nogales, Arizona, station, and he was trying to explain to Trewitt and Bill Speight, who were sitting in his office under the weak fiction of being investigators for the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms interested in an automatic-weapons violation, just how little there was to go on in the case of the death of his two officers, 11 March last. He wore gigantic yellow-tinted Bausch & Lomb shooting glasses and had the shortest crewcut Trewitt had ever seen. Trewitt blinked in the heat, trying to sort it all out. Evidently a climax in the conversation had been reached, for now the bulky old cop and Bill Speight rose. Trewitt felt the situation squirming out of control and wanted urgently to have it in his fingers again — if it had ever been so in the first place — but he felt himself rising too, drawn by Vernon Tell’s creaky magnetism, and by the desire to demonstrate to a creep like Speight that he wasn’t confused.
The old officer turned to him suddenly and said, “You in Vietnam, son?”
Trewitt, startled, felt he was being tested.
“No, sir,” he said.
“Well,” said Tell, whose forest-green uniform was crinkleless even though the air conditioning in his office was on the fritz and both Trewitt and Speight had wilted in their clothes, “reason I ask is most nights it’s like Vietnam out there.” He gestured to his window, through which, in blazing, cloudless radiance, could be seen a representative vista of the Southwest, miles and miles of scrub and desert and mountains and, incidentally, as Trewitt could see, a Dog ’n’ Suds. “They come with dope and guns and they come just plain illegal. They come in planes and in Jeeps and on foot. It can get pretty wild and woolly.”
“I’m sure it’s a tough job,” said Trewitt ineffectually.
“This-a-way,” said Tell.
He took them down a glossy hall under the gaze of various official portraits and through a double set of green doors. Beyond lay a gate, which the old cop swiftly unlocked. This led into another hall and into an atmosphere that rose in thickness and discomfort in direct proportion to their penetration of it. Cells, empty, flanked them, but there was still another destination: at the end of the hall two uniformed men sat in a prim little office.
“How’s our boy today?” Tell asked.
“’Bout the same, sir.”
“These gents come all the way from the East to see him.”
Another door opened, a room, half cell and half not, a private little chamber. In the cell a single Mexican boy lounged on the cot, slim and sullen.
“This is what we drug up,” said Tell. “His name is Hector Murillo. He’s sixteen, from a village called Haitzo about a hundred miles south of Mexico City. Any of you speak Spanish?”
Trewitt and Speight shook their heads.
“We think Hector came over that night. The others are dead in the desert, or back on their side of the border, or got clean away. But from the tracks on the site, we know at least seven men went across. One of them, the man who did the shooting, in boots. We’re still trying to track the make on the boots.”
“What’s his sorry story?” asked Bill Speight gruffly, mopping his face with a sodden handkerchief. Speight looked gray in the heat and his hair clung in lank strips to his forehead. Upstairs he’d been spry and folksy but the heat had finally gotten to him.
“Funny thing, he hasn’t got one. We just found him wandering half-dead from thirst and craziness in the mountains a week after the shootings. Says he can’t remember anything. Hector.
“They grow up fast on that side of the fence,” Tell said.
“Any help coming from the Mexican authorities?” Speight wanted to know.
“The usual. Flowers to the widows and excuses. They’ll kick down the doors of a few Nogales whorehouses.”
“Any idea of who ran them across?”
“Mr. Speight, there’s maybe two dozen coyote outfits in Mexican Nogales that move things — illegals or dope — into Los Estados. And there’s hundreds of free-lancers, one-timers, amateurs, part-timers. Ask Hector.”
But Hector would not look at them.
“In the old days, we’d have him talking. But that’s all changed now,” said Tell.
But Trewitt, studying the boy, who wore gym shoes, blue jeans, and a dirty T-shirt, did not think so. You could bang on that kid for a month and come up empty; a tough one; steel, the old cop had said. Trewitt shuddered at the hardness he sensed. He tried to imagine what made him so remote, tried to invent an image of childhood in some Mexican slum. But his imagination could not handle it beyond a few simpering visions of fat Mexican mamas and tortillas and everybody in white Mexican peasant suits. Yet he was moved by the boy.
“Well,” said Speight, “thanks for your trouble, Mr. Tell.” He probably wanted to head back to the motel bar for a rum-and-Coke. Trewitt had never seen a man drink so many rum-and-Cokes.
“Sooner or later Hector will decide to chat with us,” the supervisor promised. “I’ll give you a ring.”
“Do you think you could let me run through your file on the border runners, the coyotes?” Speight asked.
“Don’t see why not,” said Tell.
They turned and left, and Trewitt made as if to follow. But his sense of poignancy for the rough, brave boy alone in an American jail, facing bad times, stormed over him. He paused, turned back.
The boy had perked up and sat on his bunk, eyeing Trewitt. His dark brown eyes were clear of emotion. In the office Trewitt heard the two old men enmeshed in some folksy conversation about the old days, the way things used to be. But Trewitt, in the cell, felt overwhelmed by the present, by the nowness of it all. He yearned to help the boy, soothe him somehow.
You should have been a social worker, he thought with disgust. This tough little prick would cut your throat for your wristwatch if he had the chance.
But an image came to him: Hector and the others in some kind of truck or van, prowling through the night on the way to something they must have only vaguely perceived as better. They would have been locked in with the Kurd for hours, with a strange tall man. What would they have made of him?
The boy looked at him coldly, and must have seen another gringo policeman. Trewitt felt he’d blundered again. He knew he should leave; he didn’t belong in here. He felt vaguely unwholesome. He turned to leave — and then a terrific idea, from nowhere, detonated in his head.
“Hector,” he said.
The boy’s eyes stayed cold but came to focus on him. Speight’s words boomed loudly behind him someplace and the supervisor and the guard laughed. Had they noticed his absence? His heart pounded.
He could see before him a picture: it floated, tantalizing him. It was a picture of a high-cheekboned, tall, bright-eyed man with a strong nose and blondish hair. It was on a wall. It was the picture an artist had projected from the old photo of Ulu Beg.
Blond. And tall. And strange.
Trewitt said, in the Spanish he had so recently denied knowing, “I’m a friend of the tall
“You were betrayed,” Trewitt invented. “Sold for money by the man who took you to the border. The tall man seeks vengeance.” He hoped he had the right word for vengeance,
“The tall
“Tell him to kill the pig Ramirez who let my brother die in the desert.”
“It’s done,” said Trewitt, spinning to race out.
Ramirez!
He was so charged with ideas he was shaking. He couldn’t stop thinking about it.