"A lot of what?" Ahmad"s attention perhaps has wandered. They have come off the Turnpike at Bayway and are in some anonymous downtown with a lot of double parking that creates tight spots for Excellency to squeeze through.
"Poontang," Charlie says with exasperation, sucking in his breath as the orange truck sc.r.a.pes past a lumbering school bus loaded with staring little faces. "p.u.s.s.y," he clarifies. When Ahmad, blushing, offers no response, Charlie announces in a tone of quiet resolve, "We gotta get you laid."
The towns of northern New Jersey are enough alike- storefronts and sidewalks and parking meters and neon signs and quickly pa.s.sed patches of civic green s.p.a.ce-to create even in a moving vehicle a sensation of being stuck. The territories he and Charlie together drive dirough, with their summer scents of softened tar and spilled motor oil and of onions and cheese exhaled from small eateries out into the street, are much the same until they get south of South Amboy or the Sayreville exit on the Jersey Pike. Yet as one small city yields to the next Ahmad comes to see diat no two are identical, and each has social variety within it. In some neighborhoods large houses sprawl in the shade back from the roadway on lush rising lawns populated by squat trim shrubs like security guards. Excellency makes few deliveries to such homes, but pa.s.ses tliem on its way to inner-city rows where the front steps spring up straight from the sidewalk, without even the merest excuse for a front yard. Here those awaiting delivery tend to live: darker-skinned families with voices and televisions sounding from back rooms, out of sight, as if chamber after chamber of linked family members telescope out from the vestibule. Sometimes there are signs of Islamic practice-prayer mats, women in hijabs, framed images of the twelve imams including the Hidden Imam with his featureless face, identifying the household as Shia. These homes affect Ahmad with uneasiness, as do the city neighborhoods where shops advertise in mixed Arabic and English and mosques have been created by subst.i.tuting a crescent for the cross on a deconsecrated Protestant church. He does not like to linger and chat, as Charlie does, making his way in whatever dialect of Arabic is offered, with laughter and gestures to bridge gaps in comprehension. Ahmad feels his pride of isolation and willed ident.i.ty to be threatened by the ma.s.ses of ordinary, hard-pressed men and plain, practical women who are enrolled in Islam as a lazy matter of etlinic ident.i.ty. Though he was not the only Muslim believer at Central High, there were no others quite like him-of mixed parentage and still fervent in tlie faith, a faith chosen rather than merely inherited from a father present to reinforce fidelity. Ahmad was native-born, and in his travels dirough New Jersey he takes interest less in its pockets of a diluted Middle East than in die American reality all around, a sprawling ferment for which he feels the mild pity owed a failed experiment.
This fragile, misbegotten nation had a history scarcely expressed in the grandiose New Prospect City Hall and the lake of developers" rubble on whose opposite sh.o.r.es stand, with their caged windows, the high school and the sooty black church. Each town bears in its center relics of the nineteenth century, civic buildings of lumpy brown stones or soft red brick with jutting cornices and round arched entryways, ornate proud buildings outlasting the flimsier twentieth-century constructions. These older, ruddier buildings express a bygone industrial prosperity, a wealth of manufacture, machinery and railroads harnessed to the lives of a laboring nation, an era of internal consolidation and welcome to the world"s immigrants. Then there is an underlying earlier century, which made the succeeding ones possible. The orange truck rumbles past small iron signs and over-lookable monuments commemorating an insurgency that became a revolution; from Fort Lee to Red Bank, its battles had been fought, leaving thousands of boys asleep beneath the gra.s.s.
Charlie Chehab, a man of many disparate parts, knows a surprising amount about that ancient conflict: "New Jersey"s where the Revolution got turned around. Long Island had been a disaster; New York City was more of the same. Retreat, retreat. Disease and desertions. Just before the winter of "seventy-six-"seventy-seven, the British moved down from Fort Lee to Newark, then to Brunswick and Princeton and Trenton, easy as a knife through b.u.t.ter. Washington straggled across the Delaware with an army in rags. A lot of them, believe it or not, were barefoot. Barefoot, and winter coming on. We were toast. toast. In Philadelphia, everybody was trying to leave except the Tories, who sat around waiting for their buddies the redcoats to arrive. Up in New England, a British fleet took Newport and Rhode Island without a fight. It was In Philadelphia, everybody was trying to leave except the Tories, who sat around waiting for their buddies the redcoats to arrive. Up in New England, a British fleet took Newport and Rhode Island without a fight. It was over. over."
"Yes, and why wasn"t it?" Ahmad asks, wondering why Charlie is telling this patriotic tale with such enthusiasm.
"Well," he says, "several things. Some Some good things were happening. The Continental Congress woke up and stopped trying to run the war; they said, "O.K., let George do it."" good things were happening. The Continental Congress woke up and stopped trying to run the war; they said, "O.K., let George do it.""
"Is that where the phrase comes from?"
"Good question. I don"t think so. The other American general in charge, a silly p.r.i.c.k called Charles Lee-Fort Lee is named after him, thanks a bunch-let himself be captured in a tavern in Basking Ridge, leaving Washington in total charge. At this point Washington was lucky to have an army at all. After Long Island, see, the British had gone easy on us. They let die Continental Army retreat and get across the Delaware. That proved to be a mistake, for, as they must have taught you at school-what the f.u.c.k do do they teach you at school, Madman?-Washington and a plucky band of threadbare freedom fighters crossed the Delaware on Christmas Day and routed the Hessian troops garrisoned in Trenton, and took a whole bunch of prisoners. On top of that, when Cornwallis brought down a big force from New York and thought he had the Americans trapped south of Trenton, Washington snuck off through the woods, around the Barrens and the Great Bear Swamp, and marched north to Princeton! All this with soldiers in rags who hadn"t slept for days! People were tougher then. They weren"t afraid to die. When Washington ran into a British force south of Princeton, an American general named Mercer was captured, and they called him a d.a.m.n rebel and told him to beg for quarter, and he said he wasn"t a rebel and refused to beg, so they bayoneted him to death. They weren"t such nice guys, the British, as they teach you at school, Madman?-Washington and a plucky band of threadbare freedom fighters crossed the Delaware on Christmas Day and routed the Hessian troops garrisoned in Trenton, and took a whole bunch of prisoners. On top of that, when Cornwallis brought down a big force from New York and thought he had the Americans trapped south of Trenton, Washington snuck off through the woods, around the Barrens and the Great Bear Swamp, and marched north to Princeton! All this with soldiers in rags who hadn"t slept for days! People were tougher then. They weren"t afraid to die. When Washington ran into a British force south of Princeton, an American general named Mercer was captured, and they called him a d.a.m.n rebel and told him to beg for quarter, and he said he wasn"t a rebel and refused to beg, so they bayoneted him to death. They weren"t such nice guys, the British, as Masterpiece Theatre Masterpiece Theatre lets on. When things looked their worst at Princeton, Washington on a white horse-this is honest truth, on a truly white horse- lets on. When things looked their worst at Princeton, Washington on a white horse-this is honest truth, on a truly white horse- led his men into the heart of the British fire and turned the tide, and ran after the retreating redcoats shouting, "It"s a fine fox chase, my boys!" "
"He sounds cruel," Ahmad said.
Charlie made that negative American noise in his nose, aahnn, aahnn, signifying dismissal, and said, "Not really. War is cruel, but not the men who wage it necessarily. Washington was a gentleman. When the battle at Princeton was over, he stopped and complimented a wounded British soldier on what a gallant fight they had put up. In Philadelphia, he protected the Hessian prisoners from the p.i.s.sed-off crowds, who would have killed them. See, the Hessians, like most professional European soldiers, were trained to give quarter only in certain circ.u.mstances, and to take no prisoners otherwise-that"s what they did on Long Island, they butchered us-and they were so amazed at the humane treatment they got instead that a quarter of them stayed here when the war was over. They intermarried with the Pennsylvania Dutch. They became Americans." signifying dismissal, and said, "Not really. War is cruel, but not the men who wage it necessarily. Washington was a gentleman. When the battle at Princeton was over, he stopped and complimented a wounded British soldier on what a gallant fight they had put up. In Philadelphia, he protected the Hessian prisoners from the p.i.s.sed-off crowds, who would have killed them. See, the Hessians, like most professional European soldiers, were trained to give quarter only in certain circ.u.mstances, and to take no prisoners otherwise-that"s what they did on Long Island, they butchered us-and they were so amazed at the humane treatment they got instead that a quarter of them stayed here when the war was over. They intermarried with the Pennsylvania Dutch. They became Americans."
"You seem very enamored of George Washington."
"Well, why not?" Charlie considers, as if Ahmad has sprung a trap. "You have to be, if you care about New Jersey. Here"s where he earned his spurs. The great thing about him, he was a learner. He learned, for one thing, to get along with the New Englanders. From the standpoint of a Virginia planter, the New Englanders were a bunch of unkempt anarchists; they had blacks and red Indians in their ranks as if these guys were white men, just like they had them on their whaling ships. Washington himself, actually, for that matter, had a big black buck for a sidekick, also called Lee, no relation to Robert E. When the war was over, Washington freed him for his services to the Revolution. He had learned to think of slavery as a bad thing. He wound up encouraging black enlistment, after resisting the idea initially. You"ve heard the word "pragmatic"?"
"Of course."
"That was Georgie. He learned to take what came, to fight guerrilla-style: hit and hide, hit and hide. He retreated but he never gave up. He was the Ho Chi Minh of his day. We were like Hamas. We were Al-Qaida. The thing about New Jersey was," Charlie hurries to add, when Ahmad takes a breath as if he might interrupt, "the British wanted it to be a model of pacification-winning hearts and minds, you"ve heard of that. They saw what they did on Long Island was counterproductive, recruiting more resistance, and were trying to play nice here, to woo the colonists back to the mother country. At Trenton, what Washington was saying to the British was, "This is real. This is beyond nice." "
"Beyond nice," Ahmad repeats. "That could be the t.i.tle of a TV series for you to direct."
Charlie doesn"t acknowledge the playful idea. He is selling something. He goes on, "He showed the world what can be done against the odds, against a superpower. He showed- and this is where Vietnam and Iraq come in-that in a war between an imperialist occupier and the people who actually live there, the people will eventually prevail. They know the terrain. They have more at stake. They have nowhere else to go. It wasn"t just the Continental Army in New Jersey; it was the local militias, little sneaky bands of locals all across New Jersey, acting on their own, picking off British soldiers one by one and disappearing, back into the countryside-not playing fair, in other words, by the other guy"s rules. The attack on the Hessians was sneaky, too-in the middle of a blizzard, and on a holiday when not even soldiers ought to have to work. Washington was saying, "Hey, this is our our war." About Valley Forge: Valley Forge gets all the publicity, but the winters after that he camped out in New Jersey-in Middlebrook in the Watchung Mountains, and then in Mor-ristown. In Morristown, the first winter was the coldest in a century. They chopped down six hundred acres of oak and chestnut trees to make huts and have firewood. There was so much snow that winter the provisions couldn"t get through and they nearly starved." war." About Valley Forge: Valley Forge gets all the publicity, but the winters after that he camped out in New Jersey-in Middlebrook in the Watchung Mountains, and then in Mor-ristown. In Morristown, the first winter was the coldest in a century. They chopped down six hundred acres of oak and chestnut trees to make huts and have firewood. There was so much snow that winter the provisions couldn"t get through and they nearly starved."
"For the state of the world now," Ahmad offers, to get in step with Charlie, "it might have been better if they had. The United States might have become a kind of Canada, a peaceable and sensible country, though infidel."
Charlie"s surprised laugh becomes a snort in his nose. "Dream on, Madman. There"s too much energy here for peace and sensible. Contending energies-that"s what the Const.i.tution allows for. That"s what we get." He shifts in his seat and shakes out a Marlboro. Smoke envelops his face as he squints through the windshield and appears to reflect upon what he has told his young driver. "The next time we"re south on Route Nine we ought to swing over to Monmouth Battlefield. The Americans fell back, but stood up to the British well enough to show the French they were worth supporting. And the Spanish and Dutch. All of Europe was out to cut England down to size. Like the U.S. now. It was ironical: Louis Seize spent so much supporting us he taxed the French to the point where they revolted and cut off his head. One revolution led to another. That happens." Charlie exhales heavily and in a graver, surrept.i.tious voice p.r.o.nounces, as if not sure Ahmad should hear the words, "History isn"t something over and done, you know. It"s now, too. Revolution never stops. You cut off its head, it grows two."
"The Hydra," Ahmad says, to show he is not completely ignorant. The image recurs in Shaikh Rashid"s sermons, in ill.u.s.tration of the futility of America"s crusade against Islam, and was first encountered by Ahmad in watching children"s television, the cartoons on Sat.u.r.day mornings, while his mother slept late. Just he and the television in the living room-the electronic box so frantic and b.u.mptious with the hiccups and pops and crashes and excited high-pitched voices of cartoon adventure, and its audience, the watching child, utterly quiet and still, the sound turned down to let his mother sleep off her date last night. The Hydra was a comic creature, all its heads chattering with each other on their undulating necks.
"These old revolutions," Charlie continues confidentially, "have much to teach our jihad." Ahmad"s lack of a response leads tfie other to ask in a quick, testing voice, "You are with the jihad?"
"How could I not be? The Prophet urges it in the Book." Ahmad quotes: "Mohammed is Allah"s apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another. "Mohammed is Allah"s apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another."
Still, the jihad seems very distant. Delivering modern furniture and collecting furniture that had been modern to its dead owners, he and Charlie ride Excellency through a sweltering mora.s.s of pizzerias and nail salons, thrift outlets and gas stations, White Castles and Blimpies. Krispy Kreme Krispy Kreme and and Lovely Laundry, Rims and Tires Lovely Laundry, Rims and Tires and 877-TEETH-14, and 877-TEETH-14, Star-lite Motel Star-lite Motel and and Prime Office Suites, Bank of America Prime Office Suites, Bank of America and and Metro Information Shredding, Testigos de Jehovah Metro Information Shredding, Testigos de Jehovah and and New Christian Tabernacle: New Christian Tabernacle: signs in a dizzying mult.i.tude shout out their potential enhancements of all the lives crammed where once there had been pastures and water-powered factories. The thick-walled, eternity-minded structures of munic.i.p.al pur- signs in a dizzying mult.i.tude shout out their potential enhancements of all the lives crammed where once there had been pastures and water-powered factories. The thick-walled, eternity-minded structures of munic.i.p.al pur- pose still stood, preserved as museums or apartments or quarters for civic organizations. American flags flew everywhere, some so tattered and faded they had evidently been forgotten on their flagstaffs. The world"s hopes had centered here for a time, but the time was past. Ahmad sees through Excellency"s high windshield clots of males and females his age gathering in gabbling idleness, idleness with an edge of menace, the brown skins of the females bared by skimpy shorts and tight elastic halters, and the males arrayed in tank tops and grotesquely droopy shorts, earrings and wool skullcaps, clownish jokes they play on themselves.
A kind of terror at the burden of having a life to live hits Ahmad through the dusty windshield glare. These doomed animals gathered in the odor of mating and mischief yet have the comfort of their herded kindred, and each harbors some hope or plan of a future, a job, a destination, an aspiration if only to rise in the ranks of dope dealers or pimps. Whereas he, Ahmad, with abilities that Mr. Levy had told him were ample, has no plan: the G.o.d attached to him like an invisible twin, his other self, is a G.o.d not of enterprise but of submission. Though he endeavors to pray five times a day, if only in the truck body"s rectangular cave with its stacked blankets and packing pads, or in a patch of gravel behind a roadside eating place where he can spread his mat for a cleansing five minutes, the Merciful and Compa.s.sionate has illuminated no straight path into a vocation. It is as if in the delicious sleep of his devotion to Allah his future has been amputated. When, in the long lulls of devouring the miles, he confesses his disquiet to Charlie, the usually talkative and well-informed man seems evasive and discomfited.
"Well, in less than three years you"ll be getting the Cla.s.s A CDL and can drive any load-hazmat, trailer rigs-out of state. You"ll be making great money."
"But to what end? As you say, to consume consumer goods? To feed and clothe my body that will eventually become decrepit and worthless?"
"That"s a way to look at it. "Life sucks, and then you die." But doesn"t that leave out a lot?"
"What? "Wife and kids," as people say?"
"Well, with wife and kids on board, it"s true, a lot of these big, meaning-of-it-all existential questions take a back seat."
"You have the wife and kids, and yet you rarely speak of them to me."
"What"s to say? I love "em. And what about love, Madman? Don"t you feel it? Like I say, we got to get you laid."
"That is a kind wish on your part, but without marriage it would go against my beliefs."
"Oh, come on. The Prophet himself was no monk. He said a man could have four wives. The girl we"d get you wouldn"t be a good Muslim; she"d be a hooker. It wouldn"t matter to her and shouldn"t matter to you. She"d be a filthy infidel with or without whatever you did to her."
"I do not desire uncleanness."
"Well, what the h.e.l.l do you desire, Ahmad? Forget f.u.c.king, I"m sorry I brought it up. What about just being alive? Breathing the air, seeing the clouds? Doesn"t that beat being dead?"
A spatter of sudden summer rain from the sky-cloudless, an overall pewter gray shot through with smothered sunlight-speckles the windshield; at the touch of Ahmad"s hand the wipers begin their c.u.mbersome flapping. The one on the driver"s side leaves a rainbow arc of unswept moisture, a gap in its rubber blade: he makes a mental note to replace that faulty blade. "It depends," he tells Charlie. "Only the unbelievers fear death absolutely."
"What about daily pleasures? You love life, Madman, don"t deny it. Just die way you come to work early every morning, eager to see what"s on our schedule. We"ve had other kids on the truck who didn"t see a thing, didn"t give a d.a.m.n, they were dead behind the eyes. All they cared about was stopping at the junk-food chains to eat a ton and take a p.i.s.s and, when the day was over, going out and getting high with their buddies. You, you got potential."
"I have been told that. But if I love life, as you say, it is as a gift from G.o.d that He chose to give, and can choose to take away."
"O.K., then. As G.o.d wills. In die meantime, enjoy the ride."
"I am."
"Good boy."
One July day, on the way back to the store, Charlie directs him to swing into Jersey City, through a warehouse region rich in chain-link fences and glittering coils of razor wire and the rusting rails of abandoned freight-car spurs. They proceed past new gla.s.s-skinned tall apartment buildings being erected in place of old warehouses, to a park on a point from which the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan loom close. The two men-Ahmad in black jeans, Charlie in a loose olive-drab coverall and yellow work boots-attract suspicious glances from older, Christian tourists as they all stand out on a concrete viewing platform. Children who have just been in the domed Liberty Science Center dart in and out and jump on the low iron fence that guards the drop to the river. A breeze and swarms of sparkle like dazzling gnats come in off the Upper Bay. The world-famous statue, copper-green across the water, presents a rather diminished side view at this angle, but lower Manhattan thrusts forward like a magnificently bristling snout. "It"s nice," Charlie observes, "to see those towers gone." Ahmad is too busy absorbing the sight to respond; Charlie clarifies, "They were ugly-way out of proportion. They didn"t belong."
Ahmad says, "Even from New Prospect, from the hill above the falls, you could see them."
"Half of New Jersey could see the d.a.m.n things. A lot of the people killed in them lived in Jersey."
"I pitied them. Especially those that jumped. How terrible, to be so trapped by crushing heat that jumping to certain death is better. Think of the dizziness, looking down before you jump."
Charlie says hurriedly, as if reciting, "Those people worked in finance, furthering the interests of the American empire, the empire that sustains Israel and inflicts death every day on Palestinians and Chechnyans, Afghans and Iraqis. In war, pity has to be put on hold."
"Many were merely guards and waitresses."
"Serving the empire in their way."
"Some were Muslims."
"Ahmad, you must think of it as a war. War isn"t tidy. There is collateral damage. Those Hessians George Washington woke from their sleep and shot were no doubt good German boys, sending their pay home to Mother. An empire sucks the blood of subject peoples so cleverly they don"t know why they"re dying, why they have no strength. The enemies around us, the children and fat people in shorts giving us their dirty little looks-have you noticed?-do not see themselves as oppressors and killers. They see themselves as innocent, absorbed in their private lives. Everyone is innocent-they are innocent, the people jumping from the towers were innocent, George W Bush is innocent, a simple reformed drunk from Texas who loves his nice wife and naughty daughters. Yet, out of all this innocence, somehow evil emerges. The Western powers steal our oil, they take our land-"
"They take our G.o.d," Ahmad says eagerly, interrupting his mentor.
Charlie stares for a second, then agrees slowly, as if this had not occurred to him. "Yes. I guess so. They take from Muslims their traditions and a sense of themselves, the pride in themselves that all men are ent.i.tled to."
This is not quite what Ahmad said, and sounds a bit false, a bit forced and far removed from the concrete living G.o.d who stands beside Ahmad as close as the sunshine warming the skin of his neck. Charlie stands opposite him with knitted thick eyebrows and his flexible mouth clenched in a sort of pained stubbornness; he has a soldier stiffness to him, a cancellation of the genial road companion habitually lodged in the side of Ahmad"s vision. Seen frontally, Charlie, who neglected to shave this morning, and whose eyebrows meet above the creased bridge of his nose, fails to harmonize with the expansive loveliness of the day-the sky cloudless but for a puffy far scatter over Long Island, the ozone at the zenith so intense it seems a smooth-walled pit of blue fire, the acc.u.mulated towers of lower Manhattan a single gleaming ma.s.s, speedboats purring and sailboats tilting in the bay, the cries and conversation of the tourist crowd making a dapple of harmless sound around them. This beauty, This beauty, Ahmad thinks, Ahmad thinks, must mean something must mean something-a hint from Allah, a foreshadow of Paradise.
Charlie is asking him a question. "Would you fight them, then?"
Ahmad has missed what "them" refers to, but says "Yes" as if answering a roll call.
Charlie appears to repeat himself: "Would you fight with your life?"
"How do you mean?"
Charlie is insistent; his brows bear down. "Would you give give your life?" your life?"
The sun leans on Ahmad"s neck. "Of course," he says, trying to lighten the exchange with a flicking gesture of his right hand. "If G.o.d wills it."
The slightly false and menacing Charlie collapses, and is replaced by the good-natured motormouth, the ersatz older brother, who grins to put the exchange behind them, tucking it away. "Just what I thought," he says. "Madman, you"re a good brave kid."
At times, as the summer wears on, its August bringing later sunrises and earlier dusks, Ahmad is considered competent enough, enough a trustworthy member of the Excellency team, to handle on his own, with a dolly in the truck, a day of deliveries. He and two black minimum-wagers- "the muscle," Charlie calls them-have the truck loaded by ten, and Ahmad is off with a list of addresses, a sheaf of invoices, and his set of full-color Hagstrom maps from Suss.e.x County all the way down to Cape May. The deliveries one day include an old-fashioned item, a horsehair-stuffed leather ottoman, to a town on the Upper Sh.o.r.e, south of Asbury Park; it will be his longest drive of the day and his last destination. He takes the Garden State past Route 18, skirting the eastern edge of the U.S. Naval Ammunition Depot, and exits at 195 East, toward Camp Evans. By means of lesser roads, over misty low terrain, he works his truck toward the sea; the salty wild smell strengthens and there is even a sound-the precisely s.p.a.ced breathing of the surf.
The Sh.o.r.e is a region of architectural oddities, of buildings in the shape of elephants or cookie jars, windmills and plaster lighthouses. A long-settled state, it holds in its cemeteries, Charlie has more than once boasted, tombstones cut to imitate a giant shoe or a light bulb or one man"s beloved Mercedes; there are, in pine barrens and along mountain roads, a number of allegedly haunted mansions and insane asylums, which flit through Ahmad"s mind as daylight gradually fades. Excellency"s headlights pick out seaside cottages in tight rows, with scruffy front yards of lightly gra.s.sed sand. Motels and night spots name themselves with neon signs whose defective connections sizzle in the dusk. Ornately carpentered houses built as vacation homes for well-to-do large families with their numerous servants have been reduced to offering rooms and bed & breakfast and vacancy. Even in August this is not a bustling resort. Along what seems to be the main street one or two restaurants are plywooded shut, their oysters and clams and crabs and lobsters still advertised but no longer served up steaming.
From the bleached boardwalks tiiat do for sidewalks, cl.u.s.ters of people stare at his high square orange truck as if its appearance is an event; they look, in their medley of bathing suits and beach towels and tattered shorts and T-shirts imprinted witli hedonistic slogans and jibes, like refugees who were given no time to gather their effects before fleeing. Children among them wear towering hats of plastic foam, and those who might be their grandparents, having forsaken all thought of dignity, make themselves ridiculous in clinging outfits of many colors and patterns. Sunburned and overfed, some sport in complacent self-mockery the same foam carnival hats as tJieir grandchildren wear, tall and striped ones as in die books by Dr. Seuss or headgear shaped like open-mouthed sharks or lobsters extending a giant red mitt of a claw. Devils. Devils. The guts of the men sag hugely and the monstrous b.u.t.tocks of die women seesaw painfully as tiiey tread the boardwalk in swollen running shoes. A few steps from death, these American elders defy decorum and dress as toddlers. The guts of the men sag hugely and the monstrous b.u.t.tocks of die women seesaw painfully as tiiey tread the boardwalk in swollen running shoes. A few steps from death, these American elders defy decorum and dress as toddlers.
Searching for the address on die last invoice of the day, Ahmad steers the truck dirough a grid of streets back from the beach. There are no curbs or sidewalks. The macadam"s edges crumble into patches of sunbaked gra.s.s. The houses are shingled and small and close togetiier, widi an air of minimum upkeep and seasonal rental; about half of them display signs of life within-lights, a flickering television screen. Children"s bright beach toys litter some yards; surfboards and inflatable Nessies and SpongeBobs wait on screened porches for die next day"s oceanic romp.
Number 292, Wilson Way. The cottage shows no exterior signs of habitation, and the front windows are masked by drawn Venetian blinds, so Ahmad is startled when the front door pops open seconds after he presses die chiming doorbell. A tall man with a narrow head made to seem narrower still by his close-set eyes and tight-cropped black hair stands behind die screen door. Unlike die crowds near the beach, he is dressed in sun-repellent clotiies, in gray trousers and a long-sleeved shirt the indeterminate color of an oil stain, b.u.t.toned at his wrists and throat. His stare is not friendly. There is a wiry tension to his whole body; his stomach is admirably flat.
"Mr."-Ahmad consults his invoice-"Karini? I have a delivery from Excellency Home Furnishings in New Pros- pect." He consults the invoice again. "An ottoman in multicolored dyed leather."
"In New Prospect," the flat-stomached man repeats. "No Charlie?"
Ahmad is slow to understand. "Uh-I drive the truck now. Charlie is busy in the office, learning the business in the office. His father is sick with diabetes." Ahmad fears these superfluous sentences will not be understood, and he blushes, there in the dark.
The tall man turns and repeats the words "New Prospect" to the others in the room. There are three others, Ahmad sees-all men. One is short and heavyset and older than the other two, who are not much older than Ahmad. All are dressed not in resort clothes but as if for manual labor, sitting on the rented furniture as if waiting for the work to begin. They respond with mutters of approval in which Ahmad thinks he hears, buried among the inflections, the words fuliis fuliis and and kdfir; kdfir; the tall man observes him listening and asks him sharply, the tall man observes him listening and asks him sharply, "Enta btehki "arabi?" "Enta btehki "arabi?"
Ahmad blushes and tells him, "L"-ana aasif. Inglizi."
Satisfied, and a shade less tense, the man says, "Bring in, please. All day we wait."
Excellency Home Furnishings doesn"t sell many ottomans; they belong, like New Prospect"s City Hall, to a more ornate age. Wrapped in a thick transparent plastic to protect its delicate skin of tinted leather patches sewn together in an abstract six-sided pattern, the item, pre-owned but well preserved, is a stuffed cylinder solid enough to take a sitting man"s weight but soft enough to support pleasantly the slippered feet of one stretched at his ease in an armchair. It makes a lightweight armful, slightly rustling as Ahmad carries it from the truck across the crabgra.s.s to the front room, where the four men sit in the light of a single wan table lamp. None offer to take the burden from his arms.
"On floor is O.K.," he is told.
Ahmad sets the thing down. "It should go very nicely in here," he says, to break the silence in the room, and, standing up, "Would you please sign here, Mr. Karini?"
"Karini not here. I sign for Karini."
"None of you is Mr. Karini?" The three men smile the quick, hopeful smile of those who have not understood what has been asked.
"I sign for Karini," the leader of the group insists. "I am colleague of Karini." Without further resistance Ahmad lays the invoice on the end table with the dim lamp and indicates with the pen where to sign. The nameless lean man signs. The signature is thoroughly illegible, Ahmad observes, and he notices for the first time that one of the Chehabs, father or son, has scrawled "NC" on the invoice-no charge, significantly less than the hundred-dollar minimum for free delivery.
As he closes the screen door behind himself, more lights come on in the cottage"s front room, and as he walks across the sandy lawn to his truck he hears an excited gabble of Arabic, with some laughter. Ahmad climbs up into the driver"s seat of the truck and revs the engine to make sure they hear him depart. He moves down Wilson Way to the first intersection and turns right, parking in front of a cottage that looks unoccupied. Quickly, quietly, his breathing shallow in his chest, Ahmad walks back along a path worn in the gra.s.s in place of a sidewalk. No car or person is moving on the scruffy little street. He goes to the window at the side of 292"s front room, where a struggling hydrangea bush with parched lavender blooms offers some concealment, and carefully peeks in.
The ottoman has been disrobed of its plastic protection and set up on a tile-top coffee table in front of a worn plaid sofa. With a retractable touch-knife the size of a silver dollar, the leader has cut the st.i.tches on one of the triangular patches that form a six-sided star, a snowflake of red and green, in the circular leather top. When this triangle has become a big-enough loose flap, the leader"s lean hand can insert itself down the inside and extract, pinched between two long fingers, quant.i.ties of green American currency. Ahmad cannot read, through the dying hydrangea bush, the denominations, but, to judge from the reverence with which the men are counting and arranging the bills on the tile-top table, the denominations are high.
IV.
CHARLIE"S UNCLE and Habib Chehab"s brother, Maurice, rarely comes up from Florida, but the heat and humidity of Miami in July and August drive him north for those months. He stays off and on at Habib"s home in Pompton Lakes and shows up occasionally at Excellency Home Furnishings, where Ahmad sees him-a man much like his brother, only bigger and more formal, given to seersucker suits, white leather shoes, and shirts and neckties rather too obviously coordinated. He formally shakes Ahmad"s hand the first time they meet, and the boy has an unpleasant sensation of being sized up, by eyes more guarded than Habib"s, with even more gold in them, and less quick to break into a twinkle of amus.e.m.e.nt. He is the younger brother, it turns out, though he has the overweening manner of an older. Ahmad, an only child, is fascinated by brotherhood-its advantages and disadvantages, the quality it imparts of being in some sense duplicated. Had he been blessed with a brother, Ahmad would feel less alone, perhaps, and rely less on the G.o.d he carries with him, in his pulse and thoughts. Whenever he and Maurice see each other in the store, the portly, smooth man in his pale clothes gives Ahmad a slightly smiling nod that says, / know you, young man. I have your number. know you, young man. I have your number.
Ahmad"s glimpse of the dollars he delivered to the four men in the cottage on the Upper Sh.o.r.e stays with him as something partaking of the supernatural, that featureless vastness which yet deigns, by Its own unfathomable will, to reach into our lives. He wonders if he dares confess his discovery to Charlie. Was Charlie aware of the contents of the ottoman? How many others of the pieces of furniture they have delivered and collected were similarly loaded in their crevices and interior hollows? And to what purpose? The mystery savors of the events reported in the newspapers, the headlines he barely skims, of political violence abroad and domestic violence locally, and in the nightly newscasts that he clicks through while channel-surfing the stations on his mother"s obsolete Admiral.
He has taken to searching television for traces of G.o.d in this infidel society. He watches beauty pageants where luminous-skinned and white-toothed girls, along with one or two token entrants of color, compete in charming die master of ceremonies with their singing or dancing talents and their frequent if hasty expressions of grat.i.tude to the Lord for their blessings, which tJiey intend to devote, when their singing days in bathing suits are done, to their fellow-man in the form of such lofty vocations as doctor, educator, agronomist, or, holiest calling of all, homemaker. Ahmad discovers a specifically Christian channel featuring deep-voiced, middle-aged men in suits of unusual colors, with wide, reflective lapels, who leave off their impa.s.sioned rhetoric ("Are you ready for Jesus?" they ask, and "Have you received Jesus in your hearts?") to break suddenly into sly flirtation with the middle-aged female members of the audience, or else jump back, snapping their fingers, into song. Christian song interests Ahmad, above all gospel choruses in iridescent robes, the fat black women bouncing and rolling with an intensity that at times appears artificially induced but at others, as the choruses go on, appears to be genuinely kindled from within. The women hoist high their hands along with their voices and clap in a rocking, infectious manner that spreads even to the smattering of whites among them, this being one area of American experience, like sports and crime, where darker skins unquestionably prevail. Ahmad knows, from Shaikh Rashid"s dry, half-smiling allusions, of the Sufi enthusiasm and rapture that had anciently afflicted Islam, but finds not even a faint echo of it in the Islamic channels beamed from Manhattan and Jersey City- just the five calls to prayer broadcast over a still slide of the great mosque of Mohammed Ali in Saladin"s Citadel, and solemn panels of bespectacled professors and mullahs discussing the anti-Islamic fury that has perversely possessed the present-day West, and sermons delivered by a turbanned imam seated at a bare table, relayed by a static camera from a studio strictly devoid of images.
It is Charlie who broaches the subject. One day in the cab of the truck, as they pa.s.s through an unusually empty piece of northern New Jersey, between an extensive cemetery and a surviving piece of the Meadows-cattails and shiny-leaved reeds rooted in brackish water-he asks, "Something eating you, Madman? You seem quiet lately."
"I am generally quiet, no?"
"Yeah, but this is different. At first it was "Show me" quiet, now it"s more a "What"s up?" kind of quiet."
Ahmad does not have so many friends in the world that he can risk losing one. There is no going back from this juncture, he knows; he has little to go back to. He tells Charlie, "Some days ago, when I was doing deliveries alone, I saw a strange thing. I saw men removing wads of money from that ottoman I delivered to the Sh.o.r.e." "They opened it in front of you?"
"No. I left, and then crept back and looked in the window. Their manner made me suspicious, and curious." "You know what curiosity did to the cat, don"t you?" "It killed it. But ignorance can also kill. If I am to deliver, I should know what I am delivering."
"Why so, Ahmad?" Charlie says, almost tenderly. "I saw you as not wanting to know more than you can handle. In truth, ninety-nine percent of the time the furniture you are delivering is just that-furniture."
"But who are that fortunate one percent who win a bonus?" Ahmad feels a tense freedom, now that the juncture is behind them. It is like, he imagines, the release and responsibility a man and a woman feel when they first take off their clothes together. Charlie, too, seems to feel this; his voice sounds lighter, having shed a level of pretense. "The fortunate," he says, "are true believers." "They believe," Ahmad guesses, "in jihad?" "They believe," Charlie carefully restates, "in action. They believe that something can be done. That the Muslim peasant in Mindanao need not starve, that the Bangladeshi child need not drown, that the Egyptian villager need not go blind with schistosomiasis, that the Palestinians need not be strafed by Israeli helicopters, that the faithful need not eat the sand and camel dung of the world while the Great Satan grows fat on sugar and pork and underpriced petroleum. They believe that a billion followers of Islam need not have their eyes and ears and souls corrupted by the poisonous entertainments of Hollywood and a ruthless economic imperialism whose Christian-Jewish G.o.d is a decrepit idol, a mere mask concealing the despair of adieists."
"Where does the money come from?" Ahmad asks, when Charlie"s words-not so different, after all, from the world-picture that Shaikh Rashid more silkily paints-have run their course. "And what are the recipients to do with these funds?"
"The money comes," Charlie tells him, "from those who love Allah, both within the U.S. and abroad. Think of those four men as seeds placed within the soil, and the money as water to keep the soil moist, so that some day the seeds will split their sh.e.l.ls and bloom. Allahu akbar!" Allahu akbar!"
"Does the money," Ahmad persists, "come somehow through Uncle Maurice? His arrival here seems to make a difference, though he disdains the daily workings of the store. And your good father-how much is he part of all this?"
Charlie laughs, indulgently; he is a son who has grown beyond his father but continues to honor him, as Ahmad has done to his own. "Hey, who are you, the CIA? My father is an old-fashioned immigrant, loyal to the system that took him in and let him prosper. If he knew any of what you and I are discussing, he would report us to the FBI."
Ahmad in his new capacity tries a joke: "Who would swiftly mislay the report."
Charlie does not laugh. He says, "These are important secrets that you have extracted from me. They are life-and-death stuff, Madman. I"m wondering right now if I"ve made a mistake, telling you all this."
Ahmad seeks to minimize what has pa.s.sed between them.
He realizes that he has swallowed knowledge that cannot be coughed back up. Knowledge is freedom, Knowledge is freedom, it said on the front of Central High. Knowledge can also be a prison, with no way out once you"re in. "You"ve made no mistake. You"ve told me very little. It was not you who led me back to the window to see the money being counted. There could be many explanations for the money. You could have denied knowledge of it, and I would have believed you." it said on the front of Central High. Knowledge can also be a prison, with no way out once you"re in. "You"ve made no mistake. You"ve told me very little. It was not you who led me back to the window to see the money being counted. There could be many explanations for the money. You could have denied knowledge of it, and I would have believed you."
"I could have," Charlie concedes. "Perhaps I should have."
"No. It would have put falsity between us, where there has been trust."