The Place Will Comfort You (19 page)

How was it, then, that she beheld the beverage in its canned form, only four bus hours' distance from home? Of course. The Arab Nations had asked Pepsi to boycott the state of the Jews, this woman wasn't a Jew, so Pepsi decided, why should she suffer? She was a private distribution channel. Many more like her no doubt existed. Who knew? Uncle Chelomo went to the Arabs for his sausages and skewer meat; this was why Grandpa Daoud would not eat meat in Aunt Yvette's kitchen. Perhaps next time Shulee would go along with Uncle.

The plywood was laden with dented metal trays, as well. One was crammed with triangles of baklava speckled with radiant green pistachio dust. Another was laden with date-stuffed domes of maamul, and another with cubes of rahat, glowing dark amber through
a frost of sugar powder. All this put off the same smells as the same treats sold at Central Station. But Pepsi! Who would have guessed it? Pepsi-Cola.

She examined the cans again, a dozen of them. She reached for one and took it, the warm metal dimpling in her grip. The only other time she had held this, the can had been empty and the occasion upsetting. Tomer had brought it from a tour of duty in Lebanon. He had brought also Lebanese cherries, and a macabre aside, which he told those who gathered to enjoy the fruit on his parents' porch. She herself had still been fascinated with the smell of the can, planning to lift it to her nostrils again at the time when he said what he said. The scent had recalled that of the Sabbath wine cup, the silver sticky after the blessing and the meal.

So Shiko finds a Hezbollah jaw in a shoe. The shoe he leaves. I tell him, What's wrong with you, take it in the shoe. He says, Shoes we find all of the time. I say, Not with a jaw in them. He says, The jaw I got. I tell him, A jaw you'll find again, too. He says, Not in a shoe.

No response had come from the family and no commentary, even though to say this he had cut Grandpa off. Tomer had been strange in his demeanor and abrupt. And worse, when no one responded he looked to her. They were close in age, they had played together. That very stare had often goaded her towards feats of nerve, public accomplishment, once even to ring the doorbell of crazy Kokkinos down the street in the course of a game Tomer and she had refined to one rule, that the designated player inquire of an ominous third party whether he had lost a given object that couldn't possibly be his. The winner was the one to start an angry chase, then come back and tell all.

On that Shabbat afternoon, in the presence of their elders, she had found Tomer daring her again, but with much more vehemence than ever before, and much less persistence. For soon with a nauseous expression he had turned away and walked off, smacking the base of a new pack of cigarettes. She recalled the muscles jerking in
his back. He had brought back from Lebanon also the habit of smoking nearly constantly, one cigarette lighting the next.

The youngest of the adults could not bear responsibility for the group! It was not for her to have orchestrated a turning point as the tension hung, and Tomer shouldn't have expected it. He couldn't have. He wouldn't have required her to issue the response. Was there one?
The terrorists should all be crushed, Amen. Good going.
But it had seemed to her you should not keep the bones. Was she to have gasped at the manners of the battlefront from the safe center, a schoolgirl turn her nose up at a foot soldier? Maybe that was his point in the first place. What was the point? She couldn't even follow the plot in the dialogue. Did Shiko end up taking the jaw? Maybe not. Maybe the whole thing was soldier banter. Was Tomer's goal humor? Perhaps the only contestable issue was that he had brought up the matter with her little nieces playing Five Rocks in the corner with five brass cubes. Someone should have told him to watch his mouth. Could you tell a man defending you with his life to watch his mouth? They were right to have said nothing at all to him, but couldn't someone have explained it to her, later? Very soon no one had seemed bothered anymore.

About the Pepsi, Tomer had said it tasted different from any other cola, but it was difficult to say how.

The old Arab said something. Shulee nodded to indicate she was still making her decision. Did it cost the woman money to let her make her decision? It didn't appear that she was in a hurry to rise from her bucket.

“Just a minute,” Shulee said, but when she caught the vendor's eye she almost regretted sneaking off. In all her sixteen years and nine months she had never stood face-to-face with an Arab in order to interact. The woman peered with the gaze of steel rivets in a square-jawed handbag, more glint than character. Shulee set the can back in its place.

The old Arab spoke again, shrilly, and Shulee found she no
longer wanted the drink. If she was to skip lunch successfully she needed solid candy. A breeze lifted a mist of sugar powder off the rahat and carried the scent of rosewater to her nose. The old Arab tapped the tray and lifted three fingers. Just out of curiosity, Shulee pointed to the soda, as well.

The old woman raised all of the fingers of one hand, then folded them, and raised two. Outrageous! Pepsi was the finest soda in the world, or else the Arab was doing her part to impose the ban. Shulee pointed back to the candy and raised the finger to point up. One. The woman raised two. Shulee nodded. The old Arab reached down and tore a section from a stack of newspapers on the ground. A child emerged from behind her, stretched on the tips of her toes, picked out two cubes of rahat, took the paper and wrapped them. She turned the small packet over to the old woman, who looked at Shulee and waited. Shulee prodded at her jeans pocket, but found herself distracted and inept, staring at the child with all the fascination she didn't dare impose on the elder. The little one was beautiful! Like a kitten, miniaturized. Wearing a too-short tricot shirt, a small tan stomach exposed, tiny hip bones and a dainty knot of navel. On the fabric above, an image of the television muscleman, Mr. T, bulged shirtless.

“Mister T!” Shulee said. “Mister T, right? Good. I like, too!”

The child said nothing, but could it be that Shulee's efforts with her were softening the old face, or did the leathery jaw simply jut less than she had first perceived? And why not a softening? If a woman put up a table she wanted to sell, that was all. And here was a buyer. There was no malice. It was only natural that Shulee should have distrusted her at first, travel was dangerous. But had an old candy seller and her helper girl ever knifed a hiker in a waadi? Hijacked a bus and burned the passengers alive? Floated landward on inflatable rafts to massacre a hotel lobby full of tourists? Or taken high schoolers hostage on their Annual Trip, and shot twenty-one of them dead on their sleeping bags? Those had been eleventh-graders.
No. Buying candy was not what got them killed. They had been asleep. It wasn't a sought encounter. In a daytime engagement, entered willingly, it was up to you. You could pay attention, you could use your eyes. You could see what kind of Arab you were dealing with, a murderer or not a murderer. This Arab wanted only to sell. Shulee would buy. One very successful interaction for the record. Once she returned to her group, she will have done something here. If someone in the woman's village should say, The Jews are a dark spawn which must be liquidated, the old woman would answer, I met one and she was perfectly delightful. In turn, when Shulee boarded her bus with rosewater breath, she would say, Bought it at an Arab village, sure; my Uncle Chelomo purchases certain items from them, too, and afterwards sits there and drinks coffee.

True, how much more impressed the girls would be if she managed, in all this, also to thwart the boycott and show up with a cola they had never tasted. Not this time. It wasn't meant to be.

She twisted her canteen on its belt to better work her hand into the pocket. The old Arab observed, uttering her harsh sounds. Wind mussed the pines and exposed more of the village beyond. Shulee found her coins, yanked her hand out again, dropped everything she had into the Arab's waiting hand, disregarded the packet of sweets being held out in exchange, grabbed a can of Pepsi, and ran like the devil.

Goat droppings stuck to her soles and pine needles stuck to that. Through the leaning trunks she saw the roadside clearing where the group had stopped to eat. She saw no girls, but there was the hindmost bus, the exhaust pipe smoking.

The exhaust pipe moving, the bus rolling away. She could hear its companion, rumbling ahead. She came to a jolting stop and watched as the vehicles revved up around a bend and vanished. Running footfalls came from the direction of the trees behind her.
She whirled and collapsed on her haunches, fear draining the power from her limbs, the soda can dropping.

She closed her eyes to spare herself what she knew was coming: By the supernatural powers of hate the old woman had hauled up the sheet of plywood from her table, and with it dashed across the road, and through the trees, and back to the road in an arcing path, to crush the skull of her enemy's youth. Or the child had fetched the mob she had been sent for. Murderers! Bandits. She had given them everything in her pocket, even if it was short of the price they had named. The price was exorbitant.

“Can they do this?” someone said in Hebrew. Shulee opened her eyes. Yona Rodelheim gazed at the clearing, wonder-struck, her orange Pumas set widely apart on the bed of needles. She approached Shulee and squatted beside her. The weight of the backpack she was lugging nearly upended the girl. Her eyes acquired a sudden shine. “Can they leave us?”

“Don't you cry.” Shulee retrieved her soda from the dirt and stood up. “Crying we don't need.”

“I would think there are regulations. I would think by law—”

“Stop that,” Shulee said. “Slow yourself down.” She couldn't stand the girl's voice. When a sentence finally started coming, the words streamed out in too much of a rush, with too little variety in the inflection, the harried disclosure of a robot with a gun at his back. At her forehead, hadn't the girls said. “Why didn't they wait?” Shulee asked.

“How would I know?” Yona said. “I was with you.”

“You spied on me?”

“I thought that you were going to the toilet. I thought you'd want a lookout.”

“Did I ask for a lookout?” Yona seemed to consider this. “Did I go to the toilet?”

“No.”

“But you kept sneaking after me.”

“I was trying to catch up. If I shouted the teachers would hear.”

“Do you even know how to shout?” Yona had nothing to say to this. “Maybe today we'll find out, now you've got us stranded here. We'll have to see what happens to us now because of you.” Shulee reached for the girl's hand, pulled her to her feet, spun her away from the road, and herded her back towards the trees. There Shulee took the lead, walking among the trunks.

“Where are we going?” Yona said.

Shulee continued the retreat from the road. A songbird alighted on a low branch before them, but fluttered up in a frenzy just as suddenly. A crow shouted nearby. Yona's panting quickened. Shulee passed the soda can again from hand to hand.

“The Art History teacher has it in for me,” she said. “She can't stand my level of self-confidence. It bothers her, she has to be boss. She's trying to get back at me for having a mind of my own. She'll be showing up again, any minute now.” Her wrist was tired. “They drive a ways more, she's satisfied, she comes back to get me, here's what I tell her: The Bureau of Education is going to hear about this.”

Yona pulled a breath sharply through her nose.

“No crying.”

“I don't understand why we're running from the road,” Yona said. “If they come back they'll come by the road. We don't know our way here. I'm hungry.”

“And that guard,” Shulee said. “What's his problem? Oh, you have a gun, big man. You get to bore us senseless at gunpoint.”

“You're acting like we can't stop,” Yona said. If indeed the guard had held his gun to her she was doing a good job of hiding the trauma even at the mention of him. Her voice continued to stream over in the low, controlled rush. “Is there a reason we can't stop?”

“One human being has the balls to stand up to him, look what happens to her. I cannot tolerate that man. Can you tolerate him? That one also wants to teach me a lesson. They'll be the ones who learn. The school's going to be closed down, it deserves to be closed
down. The teachers are substandard. The principal is a rat face. You think this won't be on the evening news, you're crazy. There's going to be a scandal like there never was, a stain on the whole system. They're going to ask me and I'm going to tell.”

“We should stop,” Yona said. “You should stop. I think you should get ahold of yourself. You're very upset. You acted strange on the bus.”

“That was air drumming!” Shulee said. “It's only strange to know-nothings like you, idiots out of contact with the modern world.”

“But you should have seen your expressions.”

“How can you talk to me about
my
behavior?”

“Why was the Arab upset?” Yona asked.

“What Arab? What upset?”

“She was shouting at you. You ran from her.”

“I ran because I heard the buses. Goat shit again. Be careful.”

“But I saw—”

“I was counting on you to make sure the group wouldn't leave without me,” Shulee said. She kicked a pinecone out of her way. “If you'd have been able to stop yourself from spying on me, they wouldn't have taken off. Why couldn't you leave me alone?”

“For meals we're partners.”

“Maybe if you respected that. Maybe if you didn't act like that meant we had to walk together the whole Trip.”

The food pack was rustling, items inside knocking together. Shulee was hungry. She would feel better once she drank.

“You were trying to get away from me?” Yona said.

“Did I say that? Did I say that? Koos amak! Will you please shut up? Please?”