Jihadi (22 page)

As ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ yielded to ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, Mike Mazzoni shouted ‘Turn it up!’ strutted, took a pull from his Heineken and showed off to all and sundry a sharp new black pentagram on the back of his left hand, in the little well between the thumb and the forefinger. Around it ran the words UNITED WE FUCKING STAND.

The tat was calculated, Bobbler had observed before starting up the ink gun, to piss off their mother, a cradle Catholic. ‘No shit,’ Mike had answered.

Not about going home. About getting respect while you’re here. Which of course some people don’t get.

That star was too damn small. Mike Mazzoni had paid Bobbler the fifty bucks anyway – no discount for blood – and advised him that he would be doing a lot more business soon.

It was Mike Mazzoni’s experience that Captain X would grant certain enlisted men operating under his, Mazzoni’s, authority, significant personal discretion in timing their return to the barracks at night. The men knew this and appreciated it. They started shouting ‘Speech!’

Mike Mazzoni stepped onto the platform where the dogs had fought.

‘Where the hell’s my brother? I’ve got to keep my mom happy, guys. I promised her I would keep an eye on Bobbler. Where is that gap-toothed loser?’

No one answered, and the gathering was not much troubled by this. The meeting, fuelled by several cases of Heineken, progressed methodically through the items on its complex agenda, an agenda no human mind could have consigned to bullet points. The assembly ran louder and later than anticipated, and toward its conclusion the sun rose – which was, for a few of the attendees, a hilarious development in itself.

Mike Mazzoni strode to the centre of the crowded, noisy, odorous paradise over which he would still rule for another twenty minutes. He had saved the best for last. ‘Okay, there’s a rumour,’ Mike Mazzoni said, ‘that Allah sets the rules in this Republic, and we all know Allah has a problem with tequila. So if you guys don’t mind, we’ll just keep Allah out of the loop on this one.’ He produced a bottle, cracked the metallic top and took a long, vigorous pull. The Wreck Room sent up cheers that resonated for half a mile.

He wiped his mouth and recapped the illegal bottle. He held it aloft and informed all assembled that once they too had downed a swig, each of them was to consider himself born again in the Church of Cuervo. The bottle made the rounds, and each man converted.

It cost forty dollars to enter the Wreck Room, twenty of which went into a pool. Two hundred and forty bucks was now up for grabs. That money, and two bottles of Cuervo, would be awarded to the lucky, born-again bastards named Heroes of the Week.

‘Hey. Listen up, ladies. Listen up. Almost bedtime. Before we say goodnight, I bet you’re wondering: How do you become Hero of the Week?’

The obedient new converts shouted, ‘How, Mike? How?’

He held the black pentagram tattoo up for all to see.

‘Step one. If you’re serious about your team, tattoo yourself with
the logo you and your partner were assigned. My brother backed out, which makes me my own team. Fuck him. I’m the only team with one guy. The Starfuckers.’

The men howled and clapped to show their approval, presumably of the name. They were in a mood to approve of virtually anything.

‘Step two for being Hero of the Week,’ Mazzoni continued, waiting a couple of seconds for the various rebel yells to die down, ‘step two, boys, is to submit the best photograph of yourself next to a dead raghead. Ideally,’ and he had to say the word again louder to be heard over the whoop and roar, ‘ideally, an insurgent.’ This repeated qualifier produced raucous laughter, followed by more prolonged whooping.

‘All you raghead bitches, watch out!’ Mike Mazzoni screamed, his face red, his eyes set for distance like a hawk’s. ‘We’re eating this place alive!’

He raised his arms and gave the arena-rock, pagan salute: thumb, forefinger, and little finger extended.

The loudest cheer of the night, or rather of the day, shook the puny walls of the Wreck Room. A spidery little hillside occupant, perched behind a dark boulder less than a hundred yards away, heard that cheer.

He had been stationed on the hill for nearly an hour, nursing a plastic cup of Darjeeling tea, waiting for his shot. Indelible took a final sip of tea, capped the vacuum bottle, set it aside, and pulled out a carbine from a coarse cloth sack. He took aim at the man in the centre of the window.

This modest one-storey house, which they could not help calling ‘Wafa’s house’, commanded a full acre of overgrown and weedy land, untamed except for the patch Fatima had cleared out front. It boasted an old, sturdy tree that reminded Fatima of one of those great New England oaks, but wasn’t an oak. The chaotic secular community of insects, overgrown rodents, unnameable grassworms and various stray cats had apparently not bothered Wafa and her husband. A scattering of empty, filthy bowls within that jungle of a lawn: even daydreaming of untangling it all seemed too much for three longtime city dwellers.

Fatima’s mother avoided the green tangle, preferring to set up the kitchen. Noura attended to her room. That left Fatima to pull out the machete again from its green cloth casing. Within a day the immediate surroundings were freed of the tall grass and the most audacious of the vermin. Now she could face the neighbours.

She refused, at first, to feed the sunset- and dawn-coloured feral cats, then had a change of heart when they mewed in chorus. She opened a large tin of Wafa’s tuna, dumped it into a white ceramic bowl and set the bowl on the back porch. They wove and danced around her as though this were settled ritual. The four of them ate their fill. Unlike Wafa, she retrieved the bowl and cleaned it.

That wan, older woman next door spied on them from her window. Noura called her the Spy.

The Spy refused to converse, even after Fatima delivered a small homemade pastry and said ‘Salaams, how are you today?’

Wary, the grey-haired crone accepted the gift without thanks, through a crack in the doorway that closed a second later.

Fatima heard her mutter, from behind the door: ‘Not your business anyway.’

This exchange with the Spy should not have left Fatima feeling as low as it did. She knew all this by now. There were no neighbourhoods here. There were no communities. The Islamic Republic was
not a republic at all, not a nation rooted in a shared conversation and a shared consent. It was bits of stray foam on the cusp of a wave.

Giving thanks to a neighbour, Fatima should have known, was a dangerous thing. The fact that Fatima and the Spy lived next to one another, that they were both women left to their own devices in a world run by men, that they had, perhaps, both suffered losses – these were interesting coincidences, but such coincidences were best overlooked.

That afternoon, two disapproving aunts presented themselves, following an invitation Ummi had failed to mention. They questioned (as though Fatima were not sitting at the table with them) the wisdom of Fatima’s being driven into and out of the city by a man to whom she was not related, of her working with male colleagues, of her spending so much time in front of a computer screen. They reminded Ummi that this was not the first time this subject had been raised.

Did she really intend to permit her daughter to carry on in such a shameful manner? Was there no available suitor? Had she no sense of obligation to the family? Was the girl to become an old maid?

As he gave that three-fingered salute on the stage where the dogs had died, Mike Mazzoni screamed, ‘On the hunt for raghead pussy!’

In his back pocket at the moment he gave that salute was a wallet. In the wallet was a little plastic window where you were supposed to put your driver’s licence. Set behind that window was a tiny Sears photograph of Mike Mazzoni, age nine, seated in front of a fake forest background with his father. Each of them was trying to smile. They were dressed in identical hunting outfits.

The photo was taken a week or so before the older of the two hunters disappeared with that talkative Puerto Rican woman whose name could earn you a slap across the face if you said it out loud.

Mike Mazzoni never actually went hunting with his father, though. That was something Dad did with Dayton.

Noura took to wandering around in the brush. After the aunts left, she announced there was a swimming pool behind the house. Fatima laughed, but went out to confirm the report. A small pond, clear and apparently thigh-deep, lay at the outer edge of the wilderness.

Despite the rainforest one had to navigate to reach it, the pond was not as secluded as all that. An access road, not on the map, newly paved, ran near it. Fatima learned that night from an online ally, amiable and familiar with the area, but as anonymous as Fatima herself, that the Americans made steady use of that particular stretch of fresh grey asphalt, usually in the morning. They had built it recently to get supplies to their troops. For all Fatima knew, this online ally was the cold, grey woman who’d refused to thank her.

Noura, ordered to stay away from the pond, refused to comply.