A Good Country

by Laleh Khadivi

  The border patrol looked like a cop, his uniform green instead of khaki or black, and his face reminded Rez of the PE teacher they had in ninth grade with the thick mustache and almost-long hair.

  The patrol looked at Matthews and then in the car at each of their faces and the mess of water bottles and towels.

  Good surf?

  Yes, sir, Matthews said after the right amount of time. The swell was pretty incredible.

  That’s what I hear. I’ve been trying to get in as much as possible at the point over in Ensenada. Where are your boards?

  We borrowed some from some buddies we met down there. Didn’t want to risk it.

  Smart move, son.

  Kelly couldn’t help himself and leaned over Matthews, and Kelly’s voice rushed with ease and confidence and relaxation to talk to the patrol, to someone who was like him, familiar, safe.

  My uncle surfs that point. He says it’s great even when it’s just hip high.

  The patrol smiled.

  We are indeed blessed. Welcome home, boys. Enjoy those hot showers.

  The metal arm of the checkpoint rose up and the truck was through. When they were a few miles across the border, Kelly made Matthews pull off at a gas station and stop the fucking car so Kelly could get out and kiss the ground.

  Like the pope, Johnson said. Like the pope when he gets off a plane.

  Then they were in the stream again, on Highway 5 at night, the fast traffic and bright roads and smooth overpasses to take you from the clean shopping malls and their spotless parking lots to the enormous grocery stores and back home to the clean toilets and sterile kitchens, the network of invisible sewers gushing under everything and the fair laws over them all, good police who don’t fuck with you for no reason and the taxes to pay for some Mexican mother to send her six kids to day care or to help the shitty countries out when an earthquake or hurricane tears up their shitty cities, and laws to make sure that every man can carry a gun but that gun cannot be used against another man in an act of crime, and the honor in that, the honor in sending your kids to schools that make them pledge allegiance so that they can know where they are and who they are with, and when it is time, they can know what they must defend against jackasses from places with no law but fears and from the stupid old shit they believe that hasn’t changed in a thousand years when they used to kill each other for fun. They had long passed San Diego and were driving north along the black stretch of scrub desert before Rez realized the talk was not in his head, unspooling in a senseless mass, but coming from Kelly’s mouth. John sat in the front and said all of this in the slow, calm voice of a man giving a talk to his friend, like a man, grown and cool and knowing, like the man he turned into every night at the campfire. Rez closed his eyes on the dark America that passed outside and whistled in through his cracked window and tried to feel safe enough to fall asleep.

  7

  The gas ran out in San Clemente. They coasted down an exit ramp and into an Exxon station, where they pushed the car to a pump and Kelly turned to Rez and smiled.

  Close but no cigar. Time to call Daddy.

  Rez went to the pay phone and stared at it for a minute. He picked up the heavy receiver and pressed zero and a voice asked what he wanted. He did his best to explain that he wanted to call a number, but couldn’t pay.

  The voice, a woman, informed him, That is a collect call. I will put you through.

  The phone rang three and then four times and Rez waited and heard his mother answer and wanted to hang up. She said yes and then yes and then he heard his father’s voice.

  Where are you?

  In San Clemente. At the Exxon off Pico.

  What? The lake is north, why are you so far south …?

  Dad can you come pick us up?

  Who? Where are the chaperones?

  —

  Reza?

  Yes. Please just come get me.

  The line went dead and Rez walked back to the truck but didn’t get in. He leaned up against the bumper and waited and thought. There was no precedent. Never had he committed such disobedience. There was the unknown of his father’s reaction, the unknown of his punishment, the unknown of how to pay the money back, fix the truck, buy the boards, one hollow wrapped around another hollow around another and he tried not to panic and concentrated instead on the attitude that had helped him these last months as he came home stoned, with the smell of Sophia’s cunt on his fingers, or lied about studying with Matthews or going to soccer practice and going to the cove instead and getting high. Rez took a deep breath and leaned forward: Fuck it. He exhaled and inhaled and said it again. Again and again he cultivated the thought and it stopped his knees and hands from shaking, kept him upright and dry eyed. Rez watched the lights of cars stream south to San Diego or north to Los Angeles, and he thought about his father and who punished his father? Another father, his grandfather, an opium addict, military man, too distracted to put the full focus of love or hate on his twelve children, and who punished him? Another man Rez would never know, and on and on back to the first father and the first son and the first disobedience and defiance, and has a boy ever survived untouched? What is the worse he can do? He can’t kill me. Anything short of that, fine. But he can’t kill me. So fuck it.

  The luxury sedan pulled into the station and drove up beside Rez. The apostles hopped out and Kelly whistled.

  Nice to see you, Mr. Courdee. You sure did take your time.

  The window rolled down and Rez’s father, the long face, the glasses, and the mustache, the beard, made no response.

  Get in the car, Reza.

  No one moved and finally Rez found voice enough to explain they all needed rides. Or money for gas.

  Why is that your problem?

  His father, logical as ever. Rez looked at his flip-flops and thought, It will be boarding school, military academy. That is what it will be.

  But, Dad, our phones and wallets and they don’t …

  Get in the car. They can call their own parents collect. They still have their fingers, don’t they?

  Rez walked around and opened the passenger door and got in. He heard the sounds behind him, the No way; no fucking way and the You have to be kidding me and worse than that faded as his father rolled the window up.

  They drove in the opposite direction of their house. His father turned away from the highway that would have taken Rez to his mother, to his bed, to sleep, and turned instead east down Avenida Pico, where they drove for minutes and then an hour, and then longer, past strip malls lined with gyms and pet-grooming stores and frozen-yogurt shops. At the speed limit they drove away from the endless empty parking lots and gated entrances to neighborhoods with names like Vista Mar and Sunset Villas and Golden Valley, their fountains gaudy with colored lights and Italianate concrete god heads that spouted dirty water from their mouths. The rich ones had a guardhouse with a guard and a flickering television, but as they drove, the guardhouses gave way to simple code boxes and then cheap wooden signs that read DESERT FLOWER, ARROYO HEIGHTS. The stretches of desert were longer and longer now, and the golf courses disappeared and then there was only a single gas station and nothing else for a long time. Rez thought, He can’t kill me. He won’t. What father kills his own son? They drove on, the streetlamps fewer and fewer, the stars above them more and then many.

  In the dark nowhere his father slowed the car and turned right off the road onto the bumpy shoulder and then onto a dirt road. The headlights showed rocks, a few thorny plants, and crushed cans of beer. His father seemed to have a sense of the nowhere and drove easily until they reached an iron cattle gate that said NO TRESPASSING and turned the car off. With the lights of the dash gone, darkness was all around and Rez tried to concentrate on the skin of his hands and knees until his eyes adjusted and all the time he thought, He can’t kill me. My mother. The police. He cannot. He won’t. It will be bad, the worst, but he can’t go all the way. He won’t go all the way.

  Get out.

  His father opened
the door and stepped out and Rez did the same. And I can’t kill him. No. My mother. The police. Prison. If I had to …? He is taller, stronger. His hands heavier than mine. Bigger. Rez walked around to the front of the car where his father leaned up against the warm hood and stared out into the empty desert night. Whatever mountain the two had been scaling all these years, that hard rock of suspicious and fear and nerves, they now summited and Rez stood beside his father, faced the car, and tried to focus his eyes enough to catch sight of the road. When he finally saw it, or what he thought was it, he looked at his father, the profile of him in close-up now, an old man, but not completely old, not old in flesh or form, only in relation to Rez. Rez saw his shoulders broad and lean, his mustache and buzzed hair mostly black, his long straight torso thin from the collarbone to the belt. He was a well-made man, and even though his head hung down as if the rocks and scrub held some information, Rez saw now that he was not old, no, but tired, too tired, and a part of Rez stepped down from the summit and gave way. His father spoke.

  Is it something you enjoy?

  What?

  Lying to your father.

  No.

  And tell me this: Are you afraid of me?

  —

  Then why did you lie? Whose idea was it? The trip.

  Mine.

  And the theft, boards, the damage to the car …

  I said I’d pay for it.

  His father lifted his head.

  So you have taken your life into your own hands. Tried to trick me into thinking of you as my dutiful, honorable son, while you try to live in your own way. By your own rules.

  I thought if I asked you wouldn’t let me …

  Were there drugs?

  Yes.

  The truth came up from his mouth before he had a chance to catch it, to keep it and think it over and calculate the damage of it. It came out of Rez so quickly he had no moment to prepare for his father’s reaction, the head dropping again, and then the tears shook up and out from his convulsing chest and dripped down off his squeezed face onto the dry, dusty ground.

  I, a good man, good citizen, honest husband, and responsible father have such filth for a son? How is that possible?

  Rez took a step away from the car. He heard an escalation in the question, a change of tone from pitiful to angry, and knew it from the times before. He took a few more steps back and stopped when he thought he was far enough, when he realized there was nowhere to go. His father looked at him directly.

  You must apologize.

  I am sorry.

  No. You must recognize yourself. Admit to me who you have become. Say, I am an idiot. A filthy idiot who keeps the company of fools.

  —

  Say it and then it will be done. Say what you are and then I can let you back into the car, the house, the family, because you have named yourself and you will walk with that name for as long as I live beside you.

  —

  I am a filthy idiot. Say it and let’s be done.

  —

  Reza, my patience is only so long.

  No.

  And it came in a rush. From stillness to motion in less than a second. His father charged him and before he could move out of the way Rez felt the rocks of the desert digging into his back, into his side, and then into his face as his father’s hand pressed down the back of his head as if to drown him in the dirt. The bone behind his eyebrow began to sting and then the bridge of his nose burned too. His father pushed his face into the floor and grunted once for each time he smacked Rez in the back of the head. Tears came and they were not from the pain of the body, which was sharp and unusual and made in part of his father’s weight forced onto him, but some older pain, a pain he’d carried since he was four or five, the first pain he could remember and the words that followed then, that first time, followed now, resurrected, the same words in their same ageless plea.

  Baba, why are you hurting me? Baba! Why are you hurting me?

  8

  The fever lasted five days.

  He stayed in his room and sweat and slept and sweat again. His mother brought him watermelon and bowls of herb soup. Rez touched the bruises on his back and they felt small but deep and his whole head throbbed every time he smiled or winced or began to cry. Weary of expression, silent and locked away in his room, he stared at the ceiling, watched television, and avoided the mirror in the bathroom whenever he had to piss or shit. His mother came and went. If he was watching reruns of Seinfeld or The Simpsons, she would sit on the chair beside his bed and neither of them would laugh or say anything beyond Are you hungry? and No thanks and Yes and Maybe later.

  His phone died and his laptop battery drained and he made no efforts to connect to anything or anyone beyond the walls of his room. At night when he was too hot to sleep, he stared at those same walls, one and then the other, and saw pro surfers glide down faces of water so high he almost didn’t believe they existed. Kelly Slater. Laird Hamilton. Fiji and the North Shore. Tahiti. Injury and glory. Freedom without end. An ocean home. Some part of him believed it, lived in the dream of such possibility, and another part of him saw the photos the same way he saw images of Pluto or the rings of Saturn, awesome but beyond his reach. Beside those hung posters torn from European soccer magazines, players from his favorite teams. Barcelona and Manchester United, teams he adored in middle school when he and his father would shape a whole Sunday around watching the games during European prime time and American dawn. The players, soaked in sweat and in the moment either before or after a goal, moved with composure and full strength. In Rez’s time playing soccer he’d felt that once, maybe twice, and usually tried his best at the far distant defensive positions the coaches put him in. A few Japanimation sketches he’d made of characters from the graphic novels that obsessed him as a boy and a photo of him next to the HOLLYWOOD sign, not smiling. In the empty spaces between his mother had put up the many plaques and ribbons and certificates for chess matches won, math competitions won, science fairs won. The walls talked.

  Without sleep Rez looked again and again at the room around him and saw himself as the walls showed him: once a boy, Reza Courdee, with a family, a life of school and games, hobbies and achievements; and now, not yet a man, with dreams of worlds far from this room, this house, and the people who made him. Inside him now the boy began to diminish and he felt emerge the Rez of the apostles and the ocean and the search for pleasure at all cost, the liar and the desperate soul. Or at least that’s what he’d thought, these last months until a few days ago when the boy cried and begged into the desert night, Please please please stop. Please get off me. I was stupid. I am sorry.

  On Saturday morning the fever broke and he sat up in bed and drank orange juice and played backgammon with his mother, who, in her relief at his wellness, joyfully beat him every time. When they heard the footsteps come down the hall, he looked up at his mother’s face and she met his gaze but did not move. His father stood on the other side of the door, not knocking, not opening, just shouting.

  Reza, come. Let’s go for a walk. The morning is a nice one.

  The voice was normal and regular as if announcing Lunch is ready or I found my sunglasses. The footsteps went back down the hall and Rez’s mother nodded to him as if to say, Go, go on, nothing bad will happen. He stared at her for a second longer and then put on his shorts and a dirty T-shirt and went out to wait at the end of the driveway where he squinted at a sun he hadn’t seen in days.

  They walked around the neighborhood of manicured yards with bonsai gardens and boulders hauled in from faraway wild rivers now placed decoratively here and there. His father stood straight and walked quickly, keeping himself a step or two in front of Rez. They approached a woman with two small dogs on two thin rhinestone leashes. She wore cataract glasses and sensible shoes and opened her mouth slightly in a smile and perhaps a greeting, but by the time they passed she reconsidered and looked down at the pavement without even so much as a nod. Rez wondered what they must look like, he and his father,
on this morning walk.

  They climbed the quiet streets, higher and higher, to the cul-de-sac where the neighborhood ended and the scrub of the hillside began, and there his father stopped and wiped his brow with a kerchief he pulled from his pocket. He was not winded but the day was hot and it was the heat, not the pace, that made Rez feel an uneasiness slip in his gut, the hazy ends of the fever as it crept back into his skin and behind his eyes. Gathered, his father looked off to the horizon and began to speak in Farsi.

  The sound of the language had always aggravated Rez and he waited to feel the slight gag in his own throat at the guttural noises and the weird sounds. But today there was nothing. His body had no reaction but for the slightest twinge of pleasure in understanding the words, and the sudden intimacy the language caused between them.

  Ok.

  His father started up the trail that led to the ridge and Rez followed, the two of them in a line, past the artichoke cacti and sagebrush and the absence of house or man and after a few minutes Rez relaxed and the fever let go a bit and he felt the goodness of movement and breath and his body. Rez lifted and dropped his legs and his father did the same and then the neighborhood was far behind and some sort of uninhabitable dryness spread out in front of them and his father walked into it with direction and purpose. In Farsi his father spoke to the empty land before them.