How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (9 page)

Conversation became almost impossible, which was kind of a relief. Alex met several people or, rather, nodded at several people, who, in turn, nodded at him. A Japanese woman shouted into his ear in what was probably several different languages and soon returned with a catalog of terrible paintings. He nodded as he thumbed through it, since apparently this was a gift. Far more welcome was an unlabeled bottle full of clear liquid that a man handed to him. He poured some into his glass. It tasted like moonshine.

Tasha towed him out to the dance floor, wrapping her arms around him and sucking his tongue into her mouth. Just when his tongue felt like it was going to be ripped from his mouth, she bit down on it, hard. Within moments he tasted blood. Perhaps this was what she wanted, for she continued to kiss him as she thrust her pelvis into his, still sucking hard on his tongue. He imagined himself being sucked whole into her mouth, and liked the idea. But without for a moment losing his focus on Tasha, he suddenly thought of Lydia and the girl before Lydia, and the girl after Lydia, the one he'd betrayed her with. How was it, he wondered, that desire for one woman always reawakened his desire for all the other women in his life?

“Let's get out of here,” he shouted, mad with lust. She nodded and pulled away, going into a little solipsistic dance a few feet away. Alex watched, trying to catch and follow her rhythm, until he gave up and took her in his arms. He forced his tongue between her teeth, surprised by the pain of his recent wound. Fortunately she didn't bite him this time; in fact, she pulled away. Suddenly she was weaving back up to the VIP area, where Frédéric seemed to be having an argument with the bartender. When he saw Tasha, he seized a bottle on the bar and threw it at the floor near her feet, where it shattered. Then he shouted something unintelligible before bolting up the stairs. Tasha started to follow.

“Don't go,” Alex shouted, holding her arm.

“I'm sorry,” she shouted, removing his hand from her arm. She kissed him gently on the lips.

“Say good-bye,” Alex said.

“Good-bye.”

“Say my name.”

She looked at him quizzically, and then, as if suddenly getting the joke, she smiled and laughed mirthlessly, pointing at him as if to say,
You almost got me
.

He watched her disappear up the steps, her long legs seeming to become even longer as they receded.

Alex had another glass of the clear liquor, but the place now struck him as tawdry and flat. It was a little past three. As he was leaving, the Japanese woman pressed several nightclub invitations into his hand.

Out on the sidewalk he paused to get his bearings, then started walking toward Saint-Germain. His mood lifted with the thought that it was only nine o'clock in New York. He would call Lydia. Suddenly he believed he knew what to say to her. As he picked up his pace, he noticed a beam of light moving slowly along the wall beside and above him; he turned to see Frédéric's bashed-in Renault cruising the street behind him.

“Get in,” said Tasha.

He shrugged. Whatever happened, it was better than walking.

“Frédéric wants to check out this after-hours place.”

“Maybe you could just drop me off at my hotel.”

“Don't be a drag.”

The look she gave him awoke in him the mad lust of the dance floor; he was tired of being jerked around, and yet his desire overwhelmed his pride. After all this, he felt he deserved his reward and understood he was willing to do almost anything to get it. He climbed in the backseat.

Frédéric gunned the engine and popped the clutch. Tasha looked back at Alex, shaping her lips into a kiss, then turned to Frédéric. Her tongue emerged from her lips and slowly disappeared into Frédéric's ear. When he stopped for a light, she moved around to kiss him full on the mouth. Alex realized that he was involved—part of the transaction between them. And suddenly he thought of Lydia, whom he'd told his betrayal had nothing to do with her, which was what you said. How could he explain to her that as he bucked atop another woman, it was she, Lydia, who filled his heart?

Tasha suddenly climbed over the backseat and started kissing him. Thrusting her busy tongue into his mouth, she ran her hand down to his crotch. “Oh,
yes
, where did that come from?” She took his earlobe between her teeth as she unzipped his fly.

Alex moaned as she reached into his shorts. He looked at Frédéric, who looked right back at him, adjusting the rearview mirror as he drove even faster. Tasha slid down his chest, feathering the hair of his belly with her tongue, his vague intuition of danger fading away in the wash of vivid sensation. She was squeezing his cock in her hand; then it was in her mouth, and he felt powerless to intervene. He didn't care what happened, so long as she didn't stop. At first he could barely feel the touch of her lips, the pleasure residing more in the anticipation of what was to follow. At last she raked him gently with her teeth. Alex moaned and squirmed lower in the seat as the car picked up speed. The pressure of her lips became more authoritative.

“Who am I?” he whispered. And, a minute later: “Tell me who you think I am.”

Her response, though unintelligible, forced a moan of pleasure from his own lips. Glancing at the rearview mirror, he saw that Frédéric was watching intensely, even as the car picked up speed. When he shifted abruptly into fourth, Alex inadvertently bit down on his own tongue as his head snapped forward, his teeth scissoring the fresh wound there.

On a sudden impulse he pulled out of Tasha's mouth just as Frédéric jammed on the brakes and sent them into a spin.

He had no idea how much time passed before he struggled out of the car. The crash had seemed almost leisurely, the car turning like a falling leaf until the illusion of weightlessness was shattered by the collision with a guardrail. He'd tried to remember it all as he sat folded like a contortionist in the backseat, taking inventory of his extremities. A peaceful Sunday silence prevailed. No one seemed to be moving. His cheek was sore and bleeding on the inside where he'd slammed it against the passenger seat's headrest. Just when he was beginning to suspect his hearing was gone, he heard Tasha moan. The serenity of survival was replaced by anger when he saw Frédéric's head moving on the dashboard and realized what could have happened.

Hobbling around to the other side of the car, he yanked the door open and hauled Frédéric roughly out to the pavement, where he lay blinking, a gash on his forehead.

“What was that about?” Alex said.

The Frenchman blinked and winced, inserting a finger in his mouth to check his teeth.

In a fury, Alex kicked him in the ribs. “Who the hell do you think I am?”

Frédéric smiled and looked up at him. “You're just a guy,” he said. “You're nobody.”

1999

In the North-West Frontier Province

“And where is your beautiful wife this fine day?” the Pathan asked, when Trey found him at his stall in the bazaar. The woman in question was not his wife, and by his lights it wasn't much of a day—no wind, the sun a degree higher in the sky and hotter than it had been this time the day before, and still no sign of Rudy. The Pathan's question had an ironic tone, as if the man understood all of this. But then, he always sounded that way to Trey, who replied that Michelle was back at the fort where she was relatively safe from lecherous Pathans. This was meant to be a joke, but the anxiety of waiting two weeks in a place where he didn't want to be put a sharper edge on the words than he'd intended.

The Pathan quit smiling.

Something bumped Trey's thigh. He looked down and saw a sheep nosing at his jeans. The animal then turned and waddled off down the bazaar, poking into stalls as if it were shopping.

He had insulted the Pathan, a stupid thing to do. Their sense of honor was extremely delicate, their sense of redress extreme. They killed each other over such matters. Here in the hills between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the code of tribal honor, blood relation and vendetta was the only law that was ever enforced. Pathan tribesmen with Enfield rifles strapped over their shoulders and bandoliers of ammunition wrapped around their baggy shirts strutted past the stall, and the man he was talking to had a revolver holstered on his hip.

“You have heard from your friend?” the Pathan said after a minute.

Trey shook his head, relieved that his indiscretion had been passed over.

“He was not Australian?”

“Scottish.”

“Ah.” The Pathan nodded. “There is an Australian passport for sale.”

It took a minute to sort this out, and to construe the warning. Trey thought he knew where the passport had come from. A few days before, he'd met an Australian in the bazaar who had mined opals in the Outback for two years. He had a dry, brick-red tan against which his green eyes and the gaudy opal pendant on his chest glistened. Over kebabs he told Trey, who hadn't asked, that he was in Landi Kotal to score hash oil. He was going to swallow it, in condoms, just before he flew out of Karachi and then shit out a small fortune when he got back to Sydney. That was his plan. When he finished talking, he beamed as if he were the first person to have penetrated the mystery of demand and supply. Trey felt obliged to tell him that it was an old trick and that people had died in the bargain; any residual alcohol that hadn't been boiled off in the processing of the oil would eat through the condoms, and once that happened it was permanent deep space. But the Australian smiled and rubbed the opal on his chest. “My lucky amulet,” he said. Trey had left him licking chili sauce from his cracked lips and yesterday had seen the opal pendant for sale at a stall in the bazaar. He felt awful then, thinking he might have been more sympathetic, more persistent.

It was an object lesson, he told himself. The Pathan was reminding him of what could happen.

“Excuse me,” Trey said. “My humor was crude.”

The man nodded. “Your wife. She is still sick?”

Trey nodded back. It was a convention of their transactions that Michelle was sick and that the junk was a temporary analgesic. This was, in fact, how Michelle viewed her habit.

“There is anything else I can do for you,” the man asked after they'd made the usual exchange.

“How about a fifth of scotch?”

“I am sorry. But you know I am a believer.”

Trey nodded once more.

“I hope your wife will be well soon,” the Pathan said. “A good woman is a pearl of great price.”

Trey had met him the day after they'd arrived in Landi Kotal. Rudy intended to leave for Kabul later that afternoon. The three of them spent the morning in the bazaar. It was Michelle's first time here and she wanted to look at everything. The close-packed stalls displayed bolts of Scottish tweed, Swiss watches, Indian ivories, sundries with the initials of Italian and French designers, Levi's jeans, Japanese cameras and radios, Buddhas in bronze and clay, vintage British cavalry swords and U.S. Army-issue Colt .45s. A hand towel embroidered with the legend
Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island, Michigan
was laid out beside a stack of Tibetan prayer rugs. Smuggling was the region's main industry. Much of the contraband was what it appeared to be, but it was safe to begin with the assumption that the Western-looking goods were Asian counterfeits and that the handcrafts and antiques were mass-produced.

At one of the stalls, Rudy and Trey examined some pale, crumbly hash. Rudy shook his head sadly. It was water-pressed, he explained, the dregs of last season's pressing. He was confirmed in his decision to cross the border and get the pick of the new crop in the mountain villages outside Kabul.

A small boy with a large knife sheathed in his belt stepped into their path waving his arms. “I got stone, man,” he announced. “Very hot stuff. Brand-new.” He reached into his pocket and drew out a cassette that he pressed into Trey's hand, the blocky roman letters on the inner lining reading EXCITE ON MAIN ST. BY ROLLING STONE. The boy wiggled his shoulders and hips vigorously, then took Trey's arm and coaxed them over to his rock-and-roll emporium. There were more bootleg cassettes, several Japanese cassette players and a Fender Stratocaster displayed in a gun rack at the back of the stall.

Michelle wanted to buy a cassette player. Rudy told her that even if it wasn't confiscated at the border when they went back to India, they'd still end up paying more duty than it was worth. Trey reminded her that their money was tight.

Michelle slammed down the tape she'd been looking at. “Always you and Rudy gang up on me,” she said, then turned and stalked off into the bazaar.

Rudy went after her while Trey bargained for the cassette player. Michelle had been clean for three weeks and he wanted to keep her happy. When he caught up with them, he saw they'd gathered a crowd. Michelle's red chamois shirt was on the ground and she was trying to tug her T-shirt up over her head, Rudy trying to restrain her as men and boys in turbans were closing around them.

Earlier in the morning they had counseled Michelle on keeping herself covered no matter how warm it got. She didn't like being told what to do. And she didn't like clothes. In Goa they'd spent the days nude on the beach. But Goa was not Muslim.

Trey pushed through the onlookers. Rudy had her arms pinned. Michelle had a mouthful of her own sleeve and was trying to rip the fabric with her teeth. When Trey grabbed her shoulder she kicked him in the shin.

“Bastards! Beat up on me!”

They each took an arm and pushed her through the crowd.

Michelle was laughing now.
“Fook
these dirty people,” she said. “They have never seen
teets
before?”

Trey was hoping no one could make out the English behind her French accent. The crowd followed them, their eyes already hostile. When Michelle tried to wrench herself away, Trey dropped the new cassette player, which had been pinned under his arm. The people behind them hissed and muttered. Trey looked back and saw a man pick up a stone from the side of the road. Others carried rifles. A boy darted forward to grab at the neck of Michelle's shirt; Trey turned and kicked him hard in the knee, provoking many indignant shouts.

“Don't look back,” Rudy said.

Michelle was no longer resisting. Her face was pale.

In front of them a man emerged from behind one of the stalls. Trey raised his fist.

“Please follow me,” the man said. “This way.” He guided them through a narrow passage between two stalls. “Here,” he said, holding back the flap of a tent. “They will not come here,” he told them, closing the flaps. He then lit an oil lamp and beckoned them to sit.

The first thing Trey noticed about him was that his eyes were blue and the sharply hooked nose seemed to be placed a little too high on his face. He wore a pale-blue turban and had a long, wispy beard that he stroked with his left hand. And the ring finger on his other hand was missing, nubbed below the first joint.

“An accident,” the man said, catching his glance. He introduced himself, but Trey missed the name. He said he was of the Afridi tribe of Pathans, and that it was the code of his people to offer shelter and protection to strangers.

Trey was stroking Michelle's hand, watching her.

“She is your woman,” the man asked him.

Trey shrugged.

“I am nobody's woman,” Michelle said. “Nobody cares about me.” She was pale and her hands trembled.

“She is beautiful,” the Pathan said.

Trey put his arm around Michelle and began to knead the muscles in her neck, but stopped suddenly when he saw how the Pathan was looking at her. It was a look he had seen on the faces in the bazaar.

Rudy touched his arm. “We should be pushing on, chum.”

They thanked the man, who assured them that he was always at their service. He was a merchant, a broker of commodities, and if they should require anything, anything at all, during their stay in Landi Kotal …

To Trey he offered the advice that you did not display a jewel in the bazaar unless you intended to sell it. Then he looked again at Michelle.

They saw Rudy off a few hours later. The taxi stand at the edge of the bazaar had a fleet of fifties Chevys, which rattled off over the Khyber Pass once a sufficient number of passengers had presented themselves. A taxi was nearly ready to leave when they arrived. The driver had seven fares in the cab itself and intended to put four more in the trunk. Four of the passengers were Caucasian. A woman with matted blond hair and dirt in the creases of her face was leaning out the rear window, moaning, the man beside her holding her hair back behind her neck. While Rudy dickered with the driver, she vomited. “That's the way,” the man said, “that's the way.” Someone else was telling a story about a guy from Ohio who had his balls cut off when the border guards found a ball of hash taped underneath his scrotum. A Pathan with an automatic rifle over his shoulder was securing a canvas bag to the pile of luggage on the roof.

“Well, that's it,” Rudy said after he'd paid the driver. “I've got a seat on the observation deck.” He indicated the trunk, then turned to Michelle and opened his arms. “How about a kiss for the soldier going off to the wars?”

She allowed herself to be embraced, and kissed him on the cheek.

Rudy hugged Trey and said, “You take care of that lady. That's your only job.”

Trey nodded and tried to smile. He was suddenly very nervous. He felt there was something they were forgetting. They'd been planning this for weeks, but now he didn't like the idea of splitting up. The blond girl leaning out of the cab heaved again, and Trey felt his own stomach shrink in on itself. “You'll be back in a few days?” he said.

“A few days, maybe a week. Just as soon as I can.”

Rudy had done this before. He liked to buy direct from the tribes in Afghanistan because it was cheaper and the hash was better than anything that came into Landi Kotal. He had a third of the money in his boot heel. Trey was holding the rest. Rudy would catch a bus from the border to Kabul, hire a guide into the hills, arrange the buy and make a down payment. He would come back through customs clean, and they would wait for the Afghanis, who did not believe in borders, to bring the stuff over the mountains. That was their plan.

The taxi driver told Rudy they were ready to go, and he climbed into the trunk and settled himself next to three old men in pink turbans. A cloud of smoke engulfed the rear of the car as the driver gunned the engine. When he popped the clutch, the car lurched violently and died.

More than an hour later, the driver still hadn't managed to get the car running again. Trey and Michelle had waited with Rudy as the sun dropped through the cloudless sky toward the jagged ridge of mountains to the west. He could feel the dry rasp of high-altitude sunlight on his face even as he was slapping his arms and chest for warmth, and Michelle claimed she was freezing to death. Rudy said they shouldn't bother to wait.

“I've been thinking,” Trey said. “Why don't you stick around another day, get a fresh start tomorrow.” It seemed to him that the signs were not auspicious—the near riot in the bazaar, the sick blond girl, the taxi breaking down. And he was not eager to see his friend leave.

Rudy went to talk to the driver, who had climbed in behind the wheel. When the engine turned over, sputtered and finally caught, Rudy jumped back into the trunk and waved as the car lurched forward. Trey put one arm around Michelle and waved with the other as the taxi disappeared into the dust.

They were staying in a fortified dwelling on the hillside just off the main road. This sort of earthen pillbox was characteristic of the region, designed for defense against bandits. Rudy had arranged for them to stay there, explaining that the family was on a pilgrimage to Mecca. The heavy wooden door on the ground floor opened into a dark space rank with smells, the quarters of the family sheep. A steep stairway led to the second level, where the small, vertical windows admitted little light. There was no escaping the residual aroma of the animals downstairs.
“Le château des pourceaux,”
Michelle said, holding her nose, when they first surveyed the place.