On the morning of Saturday, the twenty-second of December, Clyde and Maggie were in the TV room. Maggie was pulling herself up on things, clearly intending to be an early walker. Clyde was watching Iraqi schoolchildren running air-raid drills on CNN, and going through a week’s worth of mail. He found a cream-colored envelope made of nice heavy paper and opened it, expecting another wedding invitation from some shirttail Dhont six times removed. Instead it was an invitation from Fazoul to attend his graduation ceremony. As part of a package deal the Twister Bookstore had thrown in ten personalized invites to people renting robes and hoods from them, and Fazoul had been nice enough to put Clyde on his list.
It was a nice little bright spot in a bad month. And the business with the Iraqis was putting him through an emotional mangle. Part of the time he was anxious that he would never figure out where the Iraqis had built their facility. When he was chasing down a promising lead and began to convince himself that he had almost found them, he came face-to-face with the realization that he was very likely to die soon. He’d already made up his mind, in an abstract and theoretical way, that he would settle for that.
The notion of never seeing Maggie again was impossible to entertain when he was in the same room with her. When he was out in the station wagon by himself with a pump shotgun and a high-powered rifle resting on the seat under an old blanket, following a suspected Iraqi agent and beginning to think that he might be close, then the possibility seemed very real, and his heart pounded so hard, it almost knocked him over, and he wondered whether he would be any use when it came down to actually doing something.
In the midst of all this the notion of going to see Fazoul receive his international-business MBA lifted his spirit. Even that was bittersweet, for he knew that Fazoul’s visa ran out immediately after graduation, and that he would never see the family again after today unless they all lived through the next couple of months and then made a trip to wherever the Vakhan Turks were currently encamped.
He wrested the remote control from Maggie’s grasp, sending her into a tantrum, and switched over to the Weather Channel just in time for the Gulf weather report, which was his favorite part of the television coverage. It made him feel somehow closer to his wife. It was somehow reassuring to see the familiar high- and low-pressure symbols advancing across the Tigris-and-Euphrates region.
The phone rang, and he knew that it was Desiree. Her unit held a drawing to see who and in what order people would be able to make phone calls. “Hi, darling,” she said, and Clyde knew something was wrong. The voice had lost its snap, its confidence.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Better let me talk to my baby.”
“She’s sleeping on top of me here.”
“Let me hear her breathe.”
He put the mouthpiece as close to Maggie’s mouth as he could without waking her up. On the other end of the line he could hear Desiree beginning to come apart.
“Nice to hear from you, babe,” he said. He knew they had only three minutes.
“Honey,” her choked voice came through the ether. “Always remember, I love you.”
In the upper Midwest people generally didn’t say they loved each other unless one of them was on his or her deathbed. Television provided the bizarre, alien spectacle of actors kissing total strangers as they strode onto the sets of talk and award shows. People hugging while they extended the “peace of the Lord” to each other in church drew sharp frowns. People loved each other. That was enough; it wasn’t necessary to talk about it. Desiree loved Clyde; she knew it, he knew it. They didn’t talk about it. They lived it. Clyde knew something was terribly wrong, that Desiree had learned something. That she was scared to death.
He went to the kitchen, carrying the baby on his hip, mixed up some formula, and then went back to the recliner to feed the baby and watch CNN. He almost fell asleep again and was awakened by a grumpy noise from the baby when the bottle fell from her grasp. He felt too drained to go through the motions anymore. He changed her diaper, got her stuff together, and left for the graduation ceremony, leaving her with the Dhonts.
At one fifty-five he pulled into the vast, mostly empty parking lot of the Flanagan Multipurpose Arena, which they used to call the armory until they had put a new high-tech roof on it and painted over the cinder blocks. As he approached the entrance, he spotted Ken Knightly standing there, smoking his Camel in a most serious way.
“How’s it goin’, Dean?”
“Hey, Clyde. Big day. Our buddy Fazoul is heading back to Vakhan land. Hold this for me, would you?” He handed Clyde a half-smoked Camel while he reached in a backpack for his robes and hood, which had evidently been tightly wadded together and stored in a damp location since the spring ceremony. “Don’t want to immolate myself,” he explained, nodding at the cigarette. “These robes are made out of frozen gasoline, you know.” The robe was already zipped up, so he threw it on over his head like a T-shirt. Then he pulled out something floppy and violet: a gaudy, oversize beret. “Got this as a freebie with an honorary doctorate at the University of Dubai. Doesn’t blow off in the wind as easy as the goddamned mortarboard, which is an important consideration out here on the prairie. We’d better go in. Thanks.” He took the cigarette back, smoked it down to a butt in several long draws, and stamped it out at the threshold of the Flanagan’s main entrance.
The gym was about one-quarter full. Knightly led Clyde down onto the maple floor of the basketball court and pointed out some empty seats close to the dais where he and other university dignitaries would be seated. “If you would do me a little favor and sit there, Clyde. We’ve gotta talk after this is done.”
The Twisters’ pep band, dressed in their blazers and gray flannels, began to play “Pomp and Circumstance.”
Clyde was a softie for ceremonies—even the flag ceremonies at Cub Scout meetings. He looked around the half-filled gym and saw a few parents, but mostly wives and children, all dressed in their best. He saw one of the Iraqis he’d been following and wasn’t sure whether to be glad that the man was getting out of Dodge, or frustrated by his inability to catch the guy red-handed.
The degree candidates were led in by the president of the university, his administration, and then the faculty in their robes and hoods. Then came the students themselves with their different specialities represented by different series of colors on the hoods. By the time they were all in, the pep band played with a bit less flair. Then the “Star-Spangled Banner” was played, and then a suitably neutral prayer (“O Creator of the Universe”) was uttered by the local Unitarian pastor.
Clyde sat down and stood up on command, like a twelfth-century newly converted peasant at his first Mass, but his mind was elsewhere. He didn’t even realize the ceremony was over until he felt a gentle squeeze on his left arm, and there was Farida. “We’re so happy you could come.” She extended her baby son over to Clyde. “Could you hold him while we take pictures?”
The baby was sound asleep, an angelic, honey-skinned creature with astonishingly long and thick eyelashes. Clyde watched as Fazoul stood bedecked in his M.S. hood next to his adviser, Chung-Shin Kim, and then with Dean Knightly, who seemed blinded by all the mini-strobes and badly in need of a smoke. Then Fazoul motioned for Clyde to come up. Clyde was surprised when he was dragged in with the entire family.
“This is good-bye, my friend,” Fazoul said as he held Clyde’s hand in a long handshake. Then he hugged him. “Don’t forget me.”
Farida came up, tears in her eyes, and said, “Know that we are praying for your wife. We are all in the same struggle here.”
Fazoul said something sharply to her, and she responded in English, “We are together. That’s all.”
Knightly stepped in and said, “We’d better get you folks down to the train station. The Amtrak’s showing up in about forty-five minutes. I’ll give you a ride. You want to come along, Clyde?”
“Got space?”
“Got a Suburban.”
“Sure. My shift does
n’t start for a couple of hours.”
When they arrived at the station, it became clear that the next train to Chicago was going to be filled with newly minted Ph.D.’s and M.S. students going to Union Station, then catching the El to O’Hare for flights back to their various homes around the globe. It was an incredible multiethnic crowd in a decidedly mixed set of moods—many didn’t want to go back to their homelands, while others couldn’t wait to be free of what they saw as the cultural barbarism of America in general and the Midwest in particular. But all of them seemed to agree that Dean Knightly was the best thing about this place, and so Clyde enjoyed standing there, leaning back against the wall of the station, watching the graduates and their families line up to shake his hand, hug him, kiss him, press small gifts into his hands. By the time the train pulled into the station, tears were running freely down Knightly’s face.
Clyde and Knightly stood together as the train pulled away, and Knightly said, “You know, it rips me apart every time we send a bunch of them on. They have to go back. They can’t stay. It’s better that they go. But working with these people is the best job any man can have in this business.”
“You’ve got some bad ones, too.”
“Sure, but at least they’re smart and motivated bad ones. I hate to say this, but I have real contempt”—he caught himself—“I have a strong feeling of disappointment about most of our American kids. They don’t know why they’re here.” Knightly heaved a big sigh, stretched, then turned his back on the receding train, putting that particular batch of students out of his life. “Okay, Clyde. Let’s go get a beer.”
“Can’t do that. Got to go to work.”
“How about tonight, after you get off work?”
“Ken, I don’t get off until midnight.”
“That’s okay.”
“Then I have to go collect Maggie and get in bed.”
Knightly appeared not to hear any of this. “Come to my place, Clyde. Go ahead and bring that darn baby. My wife will look after her. We’ve got some talking to do.”
There was black ice on the roads that day, the shortest day of the year, and as soon as dusk fell, the cars started going into the ditches, and Clyde and the other deputies on duty began to litter the highways of rural Forks County with road flares and to jam the airwaves with requests for tow trucks. This was all good for Clyde, because he needed something to make the time go by faster. He had finally got it through his skull that Knightly had something important to say to him, and the end of his shift could not come soon enough. He watched the tow-truck drivers carefully, wondering just how a fellow went about getting a job like that, and what the pay was like. Certainly you could make a lot of money at it on a day like today.
Then he remembered his larger mission and reminded himself that he had other concerns for the time being.
He went back to the department and dropped his unit off for the second-to-last time; his next and last shift as a sheriff’s deputy would begin fifty-six hours from now, Christmas Day, from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon. He fired up the Murder Car and went out to Dick Dhont’s to pick up Maggie. By now he had perfected the trick of easing her from crib into car seat, and of spiriting her out into the station wagon, without waking her up. Dick Dhont handed off the baby-supply bag, and Clyde judged that it had sufficient provisions to keep Maggie alive for another few hours. He tossed it onto the passenger seat, on top of the blanket that concealed the two long guns, said good night to Dick, and then drove straight to Knightly’s house.
Ken Knightly did not seem to care for the company of professors or for the architecture of the yuppie/academic suburbs that had grown up to the north and west of Wapsipinicon. Rather, he lived in a part of Nishnabotna that many locals referred to simply as “Nigger Town” in recognition of the fact that something like twenty percent of the residents were black. Knightly had bought the mansion constructed by Reinhold Richter, the town’s first and last lumber king (he had cut down all the trees), back in the 1870s. He went in and ripped out all the stuff he didn’t like and all the wires and pipes that didn’t work anymore, then got it declared a historic-preservation site for the tax advantages, then put in state-of-the-art infrastructure. All told, there were nineteen rooms in the Richter mansion, and Knightly and his wife were going to fill all of them with the assembled evidence of their twenty years of living abroad.
The yard was still torn up from construction, a sea of churned black mud frozen into a hard and brittle moonscape. Clearly it didn’t matter where Clyde parked, so he parked close to the door and carried Maggie gingerly up the steps onto the veranda, which was wide enough to race horses four abreast. Clyde looked for the doorbell and couldn’t find it. But a hand-lettered sign had been tacked up where you might expect to find a doorbell, reading “Pull the Rope.” An arrow directed his attention upward to a brass handle projecting from the door frame. It required a hefty yank. Some eighteen inches of frayed nineteenth-century rope eventually came out. As soon as he let it go, an internal mechanism began to reel it slowly back in, and a box of chimes rang out “Sleepers Awake.” Maggie startled and began to shriek. The door opened, five feet wide and three inches thick, and there was Knightly.
“Got to muffle those goddamned chimes, Sonia,” Knightly barked. His wife shouted something equally strong back, Clyde thought, but not in English.
Sonia came down the giant stairway. She was brilliant and tiny, with olive skin and a lovely smile framed in perfectly applied red lipstick, as if it were not one o’clock in the morning. “Nice to meet you, Clyde. Ken has said good things about you.” She said this as if it were all that she demanded in the way of a character reference. Then she turned the full powers of her charm and energy on Maggie, who was anxious for a few moments, then fell silent, fascinated by the sounds and fragrances emanating from Sonia, and consented to be taken away somewhere and rocked back to sleep.
Clyde followed Knightly through the living room, the library, and finally to the back porch, where his host yanked a flashlight off a wall bracket and aimed its powerful halogen beam at his feet. “Watch your step,” Knightly instructed, “we haven’t fixed the stairs yet.” Indeed, they were rotten, buttressed by concrete blocks. He picked his way over the treacherous, ankle-breaking tire ruts frozen into the mud of the side yard and entered the garage, a three-car model with a high roof. Clyde knew better than to ask, and simply followed.
The garage was completely filled with dusty junk, except for a narrow winding passageway between sofas, filing cabinets, shipping crates, and old foreign motorcycles, which led to a crude ladder made of two-by-fours and nailed to a wall. It led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Knightly climbed up a few rungs and knocked on it with the butt of his big black cop flashlight—three longs and two shorts.
The trapdoor opened. Knightly shone the light up, piercing the square of blackness, and illuminated a ghastly face that would have sent Clyde running all the way to the Illinois border if he hadn’t recognized it.
“Fazoul!” Clyde said. “I’ll be darn.”
They clambered up the ladder and into the attic. Clyde was surprised to find a warm, well-furnished, windowless space. There was a desk, a wet bar, and the smell of Knightly’s Camels, a small but good home entertainment center, a urinal plumbed into one wall, a pool table, but no telephone.
“We’ve all got to have a hidey-hole,” Knightly said. “Someplace where nobody can find us and we can do what we want to do.”
“How many people know about this?” Clyde said.
“Sonia, Fazoul, and now you.”
Fazoul threw his good arm around Clyde’s shoulders and said, “We have to talk.”
Clyde said, “I figured you were halfway over the polar ice cap to wherever.”
“Ah that, that was easy. I have a brother who works at O’Hare. He has access to the international-departures area.”
Knightly turned to Clyde and drawled, “Ain’t that convenient? You would be surprised, Clyde, if you knew how oft
en convenient things happened to Fazoul and his thousands and thousands of brothers.”
“Well,” Fazoul admitted, “I am using the word ‘brother’ in an extended sense. He is a compatriot. When I went into the men’s room, he happened to be there, working on a defective air-drying machine. He is now over the ice cap somewhere with my wife and little Khalid.”
“How did you get back here?” Clyde asked.
“In his car. After I had fixed the drying machine.”
“I suppose I ought to check your driver’s license,” Clyde said, “but I have the feeling you got one that looks pretty good.”
“Anyone who can fix a drying machine,” Fazoul said, “can forge a driver’s license.”
“So,” Knightly said, “I’m going to get the coffee machine fired up, because if I break into the bourbon collection now, I’ll fall asleep, and Fazoul wouldn’t approve anyway. And you can help yourself to those.” He nodded at a Dunkin’ Donuts box on the top of the bar.
“Some coffee would be not bad at all,” Clyde said.
“I called this meeting because I’m getting tired of waiting for something to happen,” Knightly said. “I keep waiting for the C-130’s to descend on Forks full of SWAT teams in protective moon suits, and it never seems to happen, and I’m getting the idea that it never will.”
Clyde looked questioningly at Fazoul. Fazoul said, “Dr. Knightly knows quite a few things. We consider him one of us.”
“Sonia is half Kurd and a quarter Azerbaijani and a quarter Russian,” Knightly said, “and when she became the center of my life, well, my life got even more complicated than it was to begin with, which is really saying something. It’s a very, very long story, but suffice it to say that I’m on Fazoul’s side—whether or not I want to be. But I do want to be.”
The Cobweb Page 40
