Fives and Twenty-Fives (29 page)

“Thank you.
Shukran
. But that would not be possible.”

“Don’t want to see your father? Your brother?”

“I fear they do not want to see
me
.” Dodge smiled.

“I doubt that.”

“You should believe me,
Mulasim
.”

“All right, then. I’ll take your word for it.” I left it at that. I stood to leave. A good leader would let Dodge have the view. “Have a good night, then, Dodge.” I dusted off my trousers. “Good talk.”

“Eid meelad sa’eed.”

I turned and began plunge-stepping in the loose dirt, sliding down the berm.

“Go and telephone your parents,
Mulasim
,” Dodge called down to me.

“I hear that a lot.”

“You must. Or else they will be disappointed.” I saw him pull out his book.

I remember having a thought, just then. Something I wanted to share with Dodge on my birthday, but impossible at that distance.

It’s us, I thought.
We’ll
be disappointed. We’ll remember this war as the last time we were disappointed by our parents.

I kept it to myself, letting him read in the moonlight.

Dad—

Looks like I'll be staying up here for a little while longer. Mostly cause the New Orleans shop needs an extra hand through the holidays. Might be a good opportunity, you know? Show I could run the Houma shop by myself
someday. I'll be staying with Landry and looking for a temporary place here in the next few days. I'll drive home on Christmas Eve and stay through Christmas morning. Grab some clothes and things, but I got work again in New Orleans the day after. Promise I'll call you.

—Lester

Trouble in River City

Lizzy’s folding my clothes on her bed, separating work clothes from regular clothes. Not that there’s much difference. Three pairs of pants and six shirts. She hasn’t bothered with any of her own clothes. Just added them back to the piles on the floor.

I’m leaning back against her pillows, feeling plain worthless. “You don’t have to do that.”

“It’s no problem, dude.” Not even taking her eyes off the television, she asks me, “Are you following this stuff in Tunisia?”

I look over her shoulder at the news footage. Smoke and bombs, police killing innocent-looking people in some Middle Eastern town. Not something I’d take an interest in, given the choice. “Not really. What about it?”

“Well, last week, some guy burned himself alive in front of a police station to protest government oppression. And now, everyone’s out on the street. It seems like they might even get this dictator, Ali something, overthrown.”

“Wow. Crazy.”

“Totally. And what’s crazy is that they were live-tweeting it and shit until the government shut down their Internet.”

“Look at that,” I say, watching the television over her shoulder. It’s nighttime over there, and people in a traffic circle are setting up barricades. They’re waving flags, chanting, and carrying on.

“So. Iraq,” Lizzy says, easing softly into the question she’s been wanting to ask for a few days. “When were you there?”

“’Round oh-six.”

“And what you did over there, what you saw, does it affect the way you think about things? Like what’s going down in Tunisia?”

“The way I feel about what? Riots?”

“No, dude. Fucking freedom. People fighting for their freedom.”

I take a moment to try and think of something to say besides the truth, which is that I don’t think much on it either way, and blurt out, “Well, I hope everyone comes out okay.”

Lizzy smirks and goes back to the television for a second, with her forehead wrinkled all cute. She’s confused, which is understandable, I guess, since I don’t even know what I meant by that myself.

“You ‘hope everyone comes out okay’?” she asks finally, like I said something stupid and didn’t realize.

“Sure.” I shrug. “I hate to see people getting hurt.”

“Dude”—she laughs—“you were in a war.”

I fumble around for words. “Well, I suppose you could call it that.”

She laughs some more. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make fun, or anything. That’s just not something I thought a veteran would say about this. I was thinking you’d be all like, ‘Good for them. Fighting for their freedom. Rah, rah, rah!’”

Now I’m wishing I’d have said something better, more wise, because I’m stuck with this loser line about hoping no one gets hurt. I try to make myself believe it so the next thing I say might sound less stupid.

But Lizzy seems like she’s already moved on. She turns back to the news and says, “I wonder how they turn off the Internet to a whole country?”

“They did it in Iraq, on a smaller scale. Not the Iraqis. The Marines, I mean.”

Lizzy perks up. “Really?”

“Yeah. Whenever someone got hurt. They would turn off all the phones and all the Internet so no one could call or write home for a few days. They called it River City.”

“What for?”

“You mean why did they call it that?”

“No, I get why they called it River City. I mean, why did they turn off the phones and the Internet?”

“Oh.” I stop to think about the nicest way to say it. “Because they didn’t want the family finding out from the newspaper or the neighbors, I guess.”

“Finding out that someone got hurt? Would that make the news?”

I take a breath. “Yeah. Killed I mean. I didn’t want to say it like that, but it was mostly for when people got killed.”

“Oh. Sorry, Les. That sucks.”

“It’s fine. It happens.”

I’m pissed at myself, now. For bringing it up. We’re having a boring conversation, now. And she has to say boring stuff like, “That sucks.” I figure I can say about five boring things to this girl before my time is up, and I was hoping this might last a little longer.

But then a question occurs to me. “Wait. What do you mean, ‘I know why they called it River City’?”

“You don’t?”

I shake my head.

“
The Music Man
. You know? The Broadway musical? There’s a song called ‘There’s Trouble in River City.’” She folds the last of my laundry.

“You like Broadway musicals?”

“Tell any of my friends and I’ll kill you.” She throws a pair of underwear at my face, and I smile because despite everything Landry’s been telling me about her, this could last another week. Maybe all the way into the New Year.

I look over her shoulder, back at the news footage from Tunisia.

I think of Kateb. I bet he’d have something to teach me about this.

“Colonel Grangerford was a gentleman all over,” Huck reflects.
“And so was his family. He was well born, as the saying is, and that's worth as much in a man as it is in a horse, so the Widow Douglas said.”

Huck understands there is no honor in a lucky birth. But he can't resist the charms of
Colonel Grangerford, a well-born gentleman. The river drifts south, and while they are on the raft, Huck is happy to float. But when they go ashore, Huck craves strong leadership.

The Second Son of Abu Muhammad

Bullets crack over our heads and the pretty girl next to me grips my arm with the force of a wrench.

“Not to worry,” I shout to be heard above the din. “Those bullets? Just warnings. Merely to frighten us into going home.”

She nods and starts to cry.

“Here,” I shout. “Move against this wall.”

The panicked crowd rushes behind us. If I can just hold this girl and keep her from running, maybe we will not be crushed to death.

I see my flatmates across the square. They hide behind a statue in the center and appear from their faces not to have expected gunplay. It is too much for them, and now of course they want to go home. I had wanted to stay there for a reason. Fools.

The girl asks me why I am so calm.

“Iraq, cousin. This is normal for us there.”

I am thinking that in a moment there will be space to run away. The crowd will thin and we can escape back to the main avenue and move closer to our flat. But I see that after these first shots, no one is running. They are staying. And the police who fired these warning shots are growing confused. They had expected that we would flee. We have stayed through the tear gas. We have stayed through the warning shots. They have no options remaining, and I do not think they want to kill us.

The crowd begins to understand this and cheers the development.

Even this pretty girl. She jumps up and down while hugging me. “It will happen,” she cries. “It
is
happening! Here!”

The crowd begins to celebrate, singing “Tunisia Our Country.”
This pretty girl puts her arm around my waist as she sings along, and we sway with them.

“Why are you not singing?” she asks after several verses.

“Because Tunisia is not my country, cousin,” I say plainly. “I am just a visitor.”

She frowns and looks away. Back to her people. Back to her singing.

Hani would do better with this pretty girl. He would know how to kiss her and would have done so by now, I am sure of it.

My father enjoyed Hani and would often say that he and I should have been born brothers. I always took this to mean that my father would have preferred Hani as his second son.

Hani returned my father’s affection by apologizing on my behalf. We children of Saddam learned this trick very young. Supplication was love, and a confession wrapped inside a lie was flattery. When adventure kept us out late, when I missed dinner, or when we did not come home at all, Hani would show his love for my father by showering him with apologies, admissions, and lies disguised as plausible explanations.

“The respectful thing to do,” he would say. “Your father is old and tired. Be decent enough to lie.”

Late at night or early in the morning, he would come inside the dark house with me. There was never any point in sneaking, with the heavy front door and our footsteps echoing off the tile. My father would come out from his bedroom in his robe and slippers with his night hair carefully smoothed.

Hani would go to him and beg forgiveness, claiming difficulty with his studies and saying that I had volunteered to help.

My father understood these were lies, I am sure. He was never stupid, and he knew Hani as well as his own sons. But he valued my friendship with Hani. He valued Hani’s optimism. I think he was proud I could command such loyalty from a friend.

He would send Hani away with a pat on the cheek, saying, “Let me have a word with Kateb.”

But he never scolded me. He never struck me, even when I was a child and we were still mourning my mother. He would simply wander back to his room and ask softly where we had been. He would smile and gently tease me, worrying for my future. How, he would say, did I have such a lazy, mischievous son?

I never cared enough to apologize or to lie to my father, but Hani always sought to please. My father’s dignity compelled Hani. My father was one of Saddam’s old bureaucrats, upright and imperturbable. And we children raised with Saddam? Never quite free. Though our teenage years moved us to rebel, always the state brought us home again.

So, when my father and brother appeared at Tourist Town and stepped from the old Mercedes in slacks and fine shirts like nothing had changed, Hani followed his first instinct.

He went to the car and held my father’s hand to his forehead. “Abu Muhammad, in the name of God, accept my apology.”

My father smiled and cupped Hani’s cheek. “In the name of God, I forgive you. You are a good boy, Hani. Peace be upon you.”

Meanwhile, I stood in the farmhouse door, a guilty child afraid to approach.

“And look at Kateb! A grown man!”

My brother Muhammad stood behind Hani and grinned. The same grin from long ago, worn on days when our father had scolded me for sneaking treats. The satisfied grin of the firstborn, the oldest son from whom our father now derived his new wartime alias: the Father of Muhammad.

I remember, in that moment, wanting to show Muhammad that we were no longer children. That I was a man like him, not at all bothered by his satisfaction. Happy to invite my father and brother to drink tea around the fire pit. Happy to introduce them to my friends. I wanted all that gracious dignity.

Instead, when my father smiled and opened his arms for me, I went to him, wrapped my arms around him, and wept. I wept with happiness for seeing him alive and with regret for not having returned home from Professor Al-Rawi’s office, all those months before. For being afraid to fight. I wept with guilt for not trying harder to find him. I wept like an orphan.

We lingered for a moment, my father comforting me with declarations of love. When I pulled away, I went to Muhammad. My brother held me close, messed my hair, and laughed. “You look like a woman with hair so long.”

I reached over and tugged at his mustache. “And always a shopkeeper, you. Old so soon with this mustache?”