Call Me Crazy (Janet Lomayestewa, Tracker)

by Bonds, Parris Afton

  Jack grunted, adjusting the sand goggles now perched atop his bandana. “I don’t think they take Visa, and I’m just about out of riyals.”

  But not out of machismo, Janet thought. The heroic image of him cradling the AK-47 and obliterating away her would-be rapist/killer rivaled any Indiana Jones film in her humble opinion. Jack was sheer carnal perfection.

  “We could threaten them,” Yasmin said with a grim smile and a nod toward Jack’s shouldered assault rifle.

  Janet sighed. “Let’s save the ammo.” Abandoning the startled two, she crossed the road to join the slender Arab, muttering to himself beneath the hood of the water truck. At her greeting of “Salaam,” his head swiveled like an owl’s, his eyes large at the sight of the shaven head woman.

  She nodded toward the battery. He was scraping away at the gook corroding it with his key. She doubted that was the problem. And she doubted he had jumper cables. “Heat got to it?” It happened enough in the desert Southwest.

  The teenager looked at her blankly.

  She took the key from the disconcerted teenager and called out to Sam. “Can you get these guys to push their truck?”

  She circled to the driver’s side and hauled herself up into the seat. Her bruised ribs and shoulder protested. And her jaw throbbed like a three-day-old toothache. A short exchange of words, and Sam had the two Arabs behind the truck, pushing. Once they had the truck rolling, she turned the key in the ignition, at the same time releasing the clutch into gear. Then she rammed the stick shift into second gear and gave it a lot of gas. The engine sputtered and caught with trailing puffs of smoke.

  After everyone caught up with the truck, she and the other three were downgraded to the back to squeeze between water drums. Sam didn’t give Yasmin a chance to climb onto the flatbed. He put his hands around her waist and hoisted her up. He was rewarded with a smack on one of his hands and a nuclear glare from the blue-green eyes.

  When Jack reached out a hand and began to haul her aboard the flatbed, Janet gasped and grabbed her shoulder. “You’re hurt?!”

  Finding a spot to sit, she managed a grin. “Not as badly as the three we took out back there.”

  His fingers came up to glaze the spot where her jaw must already be purpling. At the gentle gesture, she trembled and drew in a ragged breath. His own jaw tightened. “Then, here, this should help with the pain.” He pulled her billed cap from his back jeans pocket and tugged it onto her head. “Found it down the road a ways.” He adjusted the bill lower over her eyes.

  Looking up at him, she swallowed hard. Kind acts like that were always her undoing. Tender expressions had a way of getting through the barbed wire. And she couldn’t bare the pain of caring. That would completely incapacitate her.

  With everyone loaded aboard, the water truck struggled and puttered its way up and down the black lava cliffs and inched along craggy vertical walls. In the back, she, Jack, Yasmin and Sam were wedged between the drums and the flatbed’s flimsy slatted railing, which wasn’t reassuring when peering down a sheer drop into bottomless canyons. After a while, the asphalt road leveled out over a scrubland populated here and there with bee hives. On the horizon, the limitless expanse of sand grew closer. And the glaring sun grew hotter.

  At last, just beyond a small airport, used only by the military, the oasis of modern-day Marib was reached. Its outskirts consisted of Hunt’s oil-gathering plant and a scattering of squalid homes with roofs of cardboard, tires, or tarpaper. Curtains of sand raised by heavy trucks almost obscured the main street’s collection of petrol stations, shops, and government offices.

  What the sand didn’t obscure was the schoolyard basketball post minus hoop. From the cross poles was hanged a blindfolded, bearded, middle-aged man. His body, as thin as Christ’s might have been, was clad only in soiled black briefs. His hands were tied behind him, his ankles bound. She and the others stared in horrified fascination. From the rigidity of his body and the pooling of his blood in his legs, he had to have been suspended there a couple of days. She turned to Yasmin. “What does the sign above his head say?”

  Yasmin’s lips pressed into a horrified seam. “It says, ‘A traitor to al Qaeda.’”

  The teenage Arab driver paused to let the sobered four off on a corner in front on a chai shop with knobs of mangoes strung from its awning. While they waited, Sam questioned the kid about the area. Even in that remote town, modern trash eddied around their feet -- candy wrappers, plastic bags, and Pepsi cans.

  Ten minutes later, over the shop’s chai, Sam shared in a lowered voice what he had learned. “The only hotel, decent hotel, is the Bilquis, but checking in may not be such a good idea.”

  “Why?” Jack grumbled. “Because they won’t take my credit card?”

  Sam offered a wounded smile.

  “A bath would be wonderful,” Yasmin said. She sat next to Sam at the small Formica-topped table, and Janet noticed that Yasmin’s heated energy emission toward Sam had melted somewhat from open hostility to grudging toleration. Perhaps, the restaurant’s air conditioning helped.

  Sam’s mouth crimped apologetically. “Because no one is allowed to leave the hotel by himself. All visits in the area – the ancient dam, the ghost town of old Marib, the Queen’s temple – all are subject to a solidly armed military escort at a specific time along with as many groups as possible – and can be only viewed at a distance because the area has become a dangerous extremist outpost, what with all the recent unrest throughout the Middle East. Maybe we could grab a bath and some rest at a hostel or inn of some kind.”

  “No time for rest.” Janet took a sip of the chai. “He’s here.”

  “How do you know for sure?” Jack said, and she knew he didn’t have to ask ‘who.’

  “Saw his prints up there at the shooting range. They were made this morning.” She glanced at Yasmin. “And his calling card, a toothpick. He had already left. He can’t be too far ahead of us. Two or three hours, maybe.”

  Jack gulped his tea. “Enough time to claim the Ark and make his getaway.”

  “Not until five o’clock tomorrow,” Yasmin said. “Until then . . . ?

  “First, we need transportation out to Old Marib,” Jack said. “Now.”

  “We could call a cab,” she suggested.

  “Be better to call a camel,” Janet said. “Cab drivers talk.”

  “Didn’t Tex tell us if we made it to Marib to look up a friend of his?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “The owner of the Bilquis Restaurant. Everything’s ‘Bilquis’ here. Is Bilquis the Smith’s of Arabic surnames?”

  “The Queen of Sheba’s given name,” Yasmin said.

  “Then the Bilquis Restaurant it is,” Janet said.

  The restaurant was an outdoor brasserie with ceiling fans that must have been out of the Casablanca movie set. From somewhere a boom box played some kind of lively and dissonant chords of Arab music, overpowering the traffic noise coming from the other side of potted date palms and the roar of the kitchen oven behind. The sun-drenched courtyard and patio were latticed with desiccated grapevines.

  The tables, spread with red plastic sheeting, were bedeviled by flies. A serving boy, who looked no more than ten, slid buttered bread called ratib at the center of the table and took the order Sam placed for them. When he came around to Janet, he leaned his small head of curling black hair near hers and whispered, “Hello, heavenly. I want to fuck you.”

  Startled, she whirled in her chair. The boy was already headed for the kitchen.

  Beside her, Jack’s eyes narrowed. “What did he say to you?”

  Warm blood suffused her face. “He said . . . uhhh, that the lamb stew was heavenly and succulent.”

  Jack raised a mocking brow. “That kid said ‘succulent’?”

  “Probably taught to him by Western tourists,” Sam said cheerfully. “You have to get used to our people. They are attracted to Western women, especially.”

  She ignored the warm appraisal of Sam’s sparkling blac
k gaze. “Doubtlessly because we are more visible than Yemeni women are.”

  Jack shoved back his chair. “Let’s dance.”

  She looked up, up, up at him and found herself looking into a pair of smoldering eyes. He was so sure of himself. So sure of his possession of her. “You know I can’t dance,” she hissed beneath her breath.

  With an oath, he took her hand and pulled her to her feet. “You did with me a couple of months ago. Remember?”

  How could she forget? It was as if that starlit night she had finally been liberated of all old hurts and fears and damaging self images. It was that starlit night she had known quite suddenly that she loved this man. She had not cared if he was a white man. She had not cared what he was. Did not care if he was after the chip for his gain solely. He was the man she loved. She had fallen under his spell. She had been deliriously, insanely happy in his arms that night. But then the reality of the days that followed had intruded, crowding her happiness to a tiny, cramped corner of her heart.

  He led her to a small, cleared area of the patio. The boom box music had changed to a scratchy, slower melody, backed by a stringed oud and low, insistent drumming. His hand at the small of her back, he pulled her against his muscled length.

  A little sad smile curved her lips. “You had told me you couldn’t dance either,” she murmured against his chest. She could feel the strong thudding of his heart. Her own was dancing a jitterbug in her ribcage.

  He only shrugged. “I found a way that night, didn’t I?” he said somberly over her head.

  Her head tilted back to better see his face. Their gazes locked. At that moment, time and motion ceased and everything went silent. No one existed for one but the other. They both were silent, stuck in the quagmire of conflicting emotions. Yet, despite this and despite the ludicrous difference in their heights, they moved as one with the music as if they had been born to dance with each other only.

  For the few moments she let herself drift in the feeling of well-being and security in the shelter of his arms. The space around them was highly charged and magnetic. When the song ended, he released her and she turned to find Sam and Yasmin watching them with mouths open.

  Flustered, Janet returned to the chair Jack pulled out for her. She was barely aware of the food she ate nor the coffee served in filigree-cased cups. Everyone, was strangely silent. A peak at Jack’s impassive countenance confirmed her fear, that only in rare moments would he let down his guard and then only momentarily. She knew he wanted her. But he didn’t need her. He could get by on his own. As could she.

  Sam leaned forward. “Here comes Tex’s friend.”

  Faisyal as it turned out was Indonesian, dressed in the Arab futa skirt yet also wearing the Indonesian’s long jacket-style cotton shirt with mandarin collar and a pill-box hat. The plastic sandals had to be purely Wal-Mart. He bowed slightly. “I understand you need transportation adequate for desert travel?”

  “Transportation adequate for my credit card,” Jack qualified.

  “That is no problem, I assure you.” He spread his palms in a lavish gesture. “Allah will provide. In the shed behind has been stored a Hunt Oil seismograph truck. Nearly thirty years old, yet the Mack’s engine will still crank.”

  In the waning light of day, Jack stood at the shed’s double doors and gave a long, low whistle. “Will you look at that 4x4, sweetheart?! Two-inch rails guarding all the way around! She’ll plow us through tree branches, over rocks, up sand dunes. And get a load of those full-size tool boxes and side packs in its bed!”

  Jack’s male appreciation of the dilapidated transportation only barely surpassed Sam’s obvious pleasure that it had been he who had performed the miracle in providing it. Yasmin merely lifted an indifferent brow.

  Janet’s narrowed eyes traveled slowly over the old crew cab. Her lips, badly in need of her lip balm, firmed into an uncompromising line. Faisyal had said the truck had been stored in the shed. ‘Stored’ implied a passage of time.

  No cobwebs? No dust? No chance!

  * * * * *

  Yemen’s capital of Sana’a may have been one of the first sites of human settlement, yet Yemen’s dusty remote village of Hosun al-Jalai was barely inhabited. It lay trapped on one side by the flat shrub land expanse of the Marib desert and on the other by the great vastness of the Empty Quarter, its wind-swept sand dunes rising ever higher to seeming infinity. In between these two arid topographies several dozen square mud huts were far-flung, as though they had been pitched like dice by a roll of the hand. The box-like buildings housed perhaps a hundred or so Yemeni. The last half hour of twilight shafted through the open shuttered window of one mud-brick home.

  Leaving his shoes at the doorway, Craig dropped cross-legged on the sheepskin mat in the center of the sand-packed floor. His gaze scrutinized the small room. To one side of a zig-zagged patterned, blanket-draped doorway stood a dented metal table. On it, a satellite phone and a couple of computers looked as out of place as fish bowls. And from behind the blanketed doorway, peered a veiled woman wrapped in black like a mummy.

  Across from him sat Salam Farouk, his right knee propped up, his left knee dropped out to the side, as was customary. An intense young Bedouin, his left cheek was packed with qat. “You are not the first stranger to seek us out.” His slender coffee-colored fingers adjusted the dagger, cell phone, and beeper dangling from his colorful embroidered belt. “Tribal custom requires us to offer shelter – and protection,” he patted one of the two M16s that lay atop prayer mats either side of him, “to anyone, no questions asked.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Craig said, rolling the toothpick between weather-cracked lips, “but your M16’s are not.”

  Salam’s expression did not change, but his raisin-brown pupils expanded, if only minutely, with pleasure. “They frighten you?”

  The Arab’s careless lapse in exhibiting his feelings relayed to Craig that Salam was careless elsewhere. “The M16’s are not reassuring because they are not reliable. They jam under sandy conditions. Still, I am told that you are reliable. That you have the Gator ready for me, along with a 55-gallon drum of both gas and water – and, most importantly, the map?”

  The Arab’s mustache dipped in a disdainful curl. “Ahhh, yes, the directions to meet up with your droopy-eyed friend Tariq al-Madh.”

  “Apparently yours, as well. It is desert tribes like yours who harbor Al-Qaeda operatives.”

  Salam’s voice lowered to an almost gentle tone, yet again Craig glimpsed the careless contempt that flared in the eyes. “Our tribes are not harboring the operatives out of ideological reasons but rather financial ones. We want schools, clinics, work. Al-Qaeda is willing to pay. Which reminds me.” He pulled a set of car keys from his pocket and a folded sheet of paper and held them out in one palm. His other he extended open, anticipating payment.

  In that moment, Craig could have extinguished the careless and arrogant man’s life, yet a toddler chose to waddle through the room’s interior doorway. Craig froze.

  Clothed only in a dirty, sagging disposable diaper and thumb jammed in mouth, the brown child padded on plump feet toward Salam. “Baba!” he drooled and tumbled into Salam’s open arms.

  “Ahh, you escaped you mother, did you?” Salam said with an affectionate grin.

  “How old is your child?”

  “Amyn is eighteen months.”

  Too bad the man knew about the real location of Menelek’s tomb. Well, that would be one less. Craig couldn’t bring himself to ice him, not in front of the kid. But afterwards, there would be the child’s mother to whom to devote his attentions.

  The father’s slender, grime-embedded hands grasped the little boy’s chubby waist and tossed him a few inches above him before catching his son and burying his mustached mouth on the child’s drool-slickened belly-button. Salam made a tickling, growling sound that elicited something between a gurgle and a giggle from the toddler. Then, Salam sat the child on the dirt floor and swatted him on the bottom. “Go to your mother
,” he told his son affectionately in Arabic.

  When he turned, smiling, to face Craig again, a burst of gunfire from one of his own M-16’s extinguished that smile. Heavy, slimy, and sticky globs of blood from the back of the father’s head dribbled down the concrete walls onto a prayer mat.

  Craig whispered to the bullet-riddled corpse. “Seems I was wrong. Sometimes, M16’s are reliable.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  With the seismograph truck bed jammed with bolted tool boxes, only three people could cram into the crew cab. Jack was at the wheel and Janet wedged between him and the stick shift. That put Yasmin squashed on Sam’s lap.

  In the waning daylight, the aging oil field truck circumscribed the mud skyscrapers of Old Marib, the thousands year-old ghost town eroded by time and weather. As the 4x4 bounced along northeast of the Queen of Sheba’s temple, miles from sight and sound of its patrolling Yemeni soldiers, the dashboard’s array of gauges flashed alarmingly on and off. With each cresting and descending of undulating shrub land, wadis, and small dunes, Yasmin’s bottom would shoot up and slam back down atop Sam’s crotch. It was as if they were in the last urgent throes of intercourse. With each jounce, she could feel his crotch mounding thicker, higher, harder.

  She glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes. Although the evening was growing somewhat cooler, his temples and upper lip were beading with perspiration. In the concealment afforded by the crew cab, she had lowered her veil, and his breath stirred the unbound hair around the left side of her face. Sam’s breathing might be accelerated, yet her own was appalling. It was, quickening, keeping time with his. Surely, the perceptive Janet noticed.

  At one particular hard bounce, Yasmin’s hands latched onto one of his knees and the other thigh. He groaned. She gasped. A solid-muscled thigh. This she had not expected of the short and slender young man. A very handsome young man. Albeit, a very immature, superficial one.