In the Kingdom of Men

by Kim Barnes

  Lucky waited until we lost sight of Abdullah before reaching beneath his shirt and sliding the pistol onto the dash.

  “Took it along just in case,” he said. “Never know who you’re going to run into out here.”

  Mason looked at him like he had lost his mind. “And who did we run into?”

  “Abdullah.” Lucky nodded. “He’s all right, but you never know. Some of them’s good and some of them’s bad, just like all people is. One lays a finger on my wife, I’ll shoot him standing up. And that includes Abdullah.” He pinched shut one eye. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t do the same.”

  Mason glanced at me. “Guess it’s not something I plan to see happen.”

  “You’re in Arabia, partner,” Lucky said. “You’d better be armed and ready when that plan of yours breaks down.” He flicked his cigarette out the window. “You think you’ve got the world by the tail, but you’re forgetting one thing. This ain’t your world.” He let the words settle before snorting. “Listen,” he said. “If there’s one thing I’m aiming to teach you, it’s how to stop being so damn serious.” He pointed past the stand of acacia lit by our headlights. “If we can believe your buddy Abdullah, we got a straight shot right out of here.” He thumped the stick into low, loosened his shoulders, and crinkled his eyes. “Old Sahid, he saved our bacon, didn’t he? Him and his sorry-assed donkey.”

  When that rolling Cajun laugh came up from Lucky’s belly, Mason smiled in spite of himself, and I felt my own spirits lighten. Lucky broke into a chorus of “Camptown Races” and steered us toward the flattening horizon as we all joined in, following the road headed south, guided by the flares marking home.

  I was at the table the next day, dressed in a cool cotton housedress, my feet bare, typing an article on the Garden Club’s annual bulb sale, when Mason bent over my shoulder. “How about we catch a movie before I head back out?” He leaned in closer, put his mouth to my ear like he was whispering a secret. “Irma la Douce is playing. Adults only.”

  I shrugged him away. “I’m almost finished.”

  Mason touched the pile of photos I had spread out next to me, picked up a few of the clandestine shots I had taken from the bus. “These are really something,” he said.

  I ducked my head, pleased by his praise. “If Nestor won’t run them, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Maybe some other magazine,” Mason said. “Maybe National Geographic.”

  “Really?”

  “No reason not to try.” Mason gazed at the photographs a moment longer before moving his focus to the one I had taken of the hands hung from the post. He squinted and cocked his head just as I had: a skeletal tree at first, a few blackened leaves.

  “That’s outside the police station,” I said. “Ruthie told me it’s how they punish thieves.”

  “I’ve seen it.” Mason settled into his chair, fingered a cigarette from his pocket. “In Arabia, it’s all Old Testament, an eye for an eye. You kill someone, by accident or intent, they’ve got to even the score. What they have here that we don’t is plain old mercy. The person who is wronged can forgive, and everything is settled. Family, friends, even a stranger can pay blood money to spare a thief, which means it’s the poorest who bear the brunt of it. Kind of like everywhere else.” He tapped the photo. “My guess is those fingers belonged to someone who was hanging on by the skin of his teeth.”

  I thought of Baby Buckle, then looked at the article I had written—bulbs, for heaven’s sake. I sighed.

  “I tell you what,” Mason said. “I’ll set up a file drawer for you in the study. A career girl needs her own space.” He leaned back, crossed his fingers behind his head. “We should plan that road trip before it gets any hotter.”

  “Maybe Ruthie and Lucky can come with us,” I said.

  Mason thought for a moment. “I don’t expect Lucky to be happy about my being up for promotion,” he said, “but it seems like he’s got some other burr under his saddle. Can’t sit still during meetings, up and down, smoking like a chimney. Won’t even look at the reports, just pushes them on by.”

  “Ruthie told me,” I said, “he can’t read. She says that’s why he’ll never get promoted. He doesn’t want you to know.”

  “Huh,” Mason said. “Well, I’ll be damned.” I could see him thinking about it for a long second before he stretched, yawned expansively. “Guess I’ll kick back for a while,” he said.

  I found him a few minutes later, barefoot and shirtless, already napping on the couch, one of those people who can fall asleep anywhere, and I remembered Brother Fogarty, snoring beneath the pew. I studied Mason for a moment, one arm tucked behind his head, the other resting on his chest, all the care gone from his face, the scar at the corner of his mouth that never tanned. If not for the possibility of Yash walking in, I might have stretched out beside him like those first nights of our marriage spent on the single bed, just to feel that closeness.

  Instead, I changed into my work clothes and headed for the garden. I was on all fours, breaking over the onion greens to keep them round and sweet, when I heard someone behind me. I thought it might be Faris, come to shoo me away, but I looked to see Mason stretching, scratching his bare belly.

  “That’s a sight I like waking up to,” he said. “Don’t stop on account of me. I’ll just sit back and enjoy the view.”

  But now I was self-conscious about showing him my backside, even if some part of me liked having him watch. “Maybe I’ll dig some spuds,” I said. I rose and found the spade leaned against the wall where Faris had left it and cut it in behind one mound. When I levered the handle, half a peck of potatoes erupted, perfectly whole and unblemished. I knelt and dropped them into a basket. Mason lowered himself to the ground beside me, and I leaned into the light musk of his body, familiar and distracting. I loved to mouth the cap of each shoulder when he stood naked before me, test my teeth against the tensile strength of his skin, and I wanted to do that now, nip him a little too hard.

  “We’ve got enough spuds to feed Coxey’s Army,” he said.

  I rubbed the waxy jackets, remembering the caked red clay that clung to the tubers back home. “They come up so clean,” I said.

  He took out his pocketknife, pared me a crisp slice. “Just a little appetizer,” he whispered against my throat. He moved his mouth over mine, and I felt his hand work beneath my blouse and under my bra.

  “We’d better …” I tried, sure that Faris was watching.

  “Yeah”—Mason grinned—“we’d better.” He gathered the basket against his side and stood, pulled me up with him. “Do you remember that tune by Little Jimmy Dickens?” He broke into a chorus of “Take an Old Cold Tater and Wait,” and I laughed, remembering how it felt to live the truth of the song, communal Sunday dinners and not enough chicken to go around, being shuffled outside with the other children to wait for whatever remained, sometimes nothing more than the last hard scrapings of gravy, the neck and often the feet, fried crisp enough to gnaw on.

  “Do you think we’re done being hungry?” I quieted my voice. “I mean really hungry?”

  He touched the corner of my mouth and smiled. “Yeah,” he said, “I think we’re done.”

  We were turning for the house when a terrific explosion rocked the air, nearly knocking us to the ground. I gripped Mason’s arm and looked up to see the birds lift from the trees. At the south fence, where the flares flamed red, a cloud of black smoke boiled up, and then we heard the shrill alarm of the disaster whistle cut through the haze.

  “It’s the stabilization plant,” Mason said. He pulled me into the kitchen, where Yash stood wide-eyed and motionless over a pot of steaming rice. Mason yanked on a shirt. “You two stay here.”

  He was out the door and running for the gate, me right behind him, when another blast dropped me to my knees. A brilliant ball of fire rose into the sky, casting light and shadow across the faces of the people spilling from their houses to watch.

  “Mrs. Gin.” Yash was helping me to my feet, urging me b
ack to the house. “It is best if you stay inside,” he said. “There may be an evacuation.”

  I stood, saw the other men racing to the plant. A smaller explosion, and then another, the oily smoke spreading across the compound as the siren blared and the Volkswagen came ripping down the street. Lucky stopped just long enough to drop Ruthie before taking off again. She grabbed my hand, and we huddled together on the porch.

  “I should get my camera,” I said, but she shook her head.

  “Security would confiscate it,” she said. “This is nothing that anyone wants to see.”

  Yash urged us inside, but we stayed where we were for another hour, then two, keeping watch like sailors’ wives. We drank the sweet tea he brought us and smoked until the only light in the sky was the belt of flame that surged and retreated, bright as a prairie fire. Even after the call went out that the blaze was under control, the eruptions continued, each brewing another belch of oily smut that rode the searing breeze, greasing our skin.

  “There they are,” Ruthie said, and I saw the Volkswagen rounding the block. Mason got out, covered with soot, and groaned when I tucked in against his chest. Lucky held Ruthie in his arms, nodded at Mason.

  “That boy there,” he said, “he’s got some cojones.” He grinned, his teeth white against the smudge of his skin. “Wasn’t no one else willing to run in on that fire and cut that valve. If it wasn’t for him, this whole place might have gone up in smoke.”

  I looked up at Mason, but he shook his head. “Couldn’t have done it without your help.”

  “Hell,” Lucky crowed. “We was like Pancho and the Cisco Kid.”

  Mason ran his hand through his hair. “Think I’m ready for a shower,” he said.

  “Get yourself some rest, pard,” Lucky said. “The next round is on me.”

  “We’ll talk more tomorrow,” Ruthie said, and gave me a quick hug.

  Yash waited at the door with a highball, which Mason drank in one long draft.

  “Go on home, Yash,” Mason said, and handed him the empty glass. “It’s been a long day. We can take it from here.”

  I believed I wouldn’t be able to stand it until Mason told me, until I knew some part of what he knew, but I was learning the ways of men, their silence and refusal to speak of important things, things they believe too complicated for their women to hear. I waited, giving the liquor time to do its work. When he slumped to the sofa, laid back his head, I eased down beside him.

  “The pipe ruptured,” he said. “That first explosion trapped five Arabs.” His breath smelled smoky, like he had inhaled the gas flare’s fumes. “Burt Cane ran in first, tried to shut off the valve.” He blinked slowly. “They’re every one of them dead.”

  I remembered the joyous polka around the patio with Burt, the words he had offered me—I hope this place is good to you. They sounded wistful now, as though he already knew, as though he had been saying good-bye. I leaned into Mason, caught a whiff of burned hair—his eyebrows, his arm hairs singed to ash. He felt too hot to touch, as though the least scuff of friction might set him aflame.

  “But you did it,” I said quietly. “You shut it down. Cisco and Pancho, like Lucky said.”

  Mason held up one blistered hand. “More like Quixote and Sancho,” he said, “tilting at windmills.” He brought the cigarette to his mouth, held the smoke so long that I felt the ache in my own chest. He exhaled all at once, leaned forward, covered his face. “Goddamn it,” he said, then pushed himself up with such force that it rattled the ice in our glasses. I watched him disappear down the hallway, heard the door of his study bang shut.

  I sat for a moment, then went to the door, knocked lightly. “Mason?”

  “I’m okay,” he said, his voice muffled. “Why don’t you get the bed warmed up for me,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

  I wanted to find some way to comfort him, but I did what I was told and went to our bed, warming it against the chill of the air-conditioned room. The world felt emptier, my place in it less sure, as though gravity were letting loose its hold, and I held to Mason’s pillow as though it were my anchoring weight, breathed in, fighting against the grief I felt for Burt, the fear when I imagined Mason forcing his way through the flames. Maybe it was better not to know, I told myself, to go through my days like the other wives seemed able to do, calmly ignoring how dangerous the men’s work was—a miracle that they came home at all.

  They held Burt’s memorial in the Oil Exhibit building, standing room only, the remains of his body ready to be flown out even as the Arab dead were buried by their families in graves made of sand. As I sat between Mason and Ruthie and listened to one man after another offer his memories and his praise, I kept my eyes on Maddy, slumped in her folding chair.

  “They’ve got her drugged,” Ruthie whispered. “She’s not even blinking.”

  After the service, Mason stepped aside to speak quietly with Tiny Doty, whose eyes were rheumy with exhaustion, and I followed Ruthie to where Maddy was receiving the sympathies of a long line of women. We shuffled forward a step at a time until I stood before her. She looked up through her bifocals fogged with tears.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, then moved a few feet away to wait for Ruthie, who gathered Maddy’s hands, covered them with her own, and leaned her mouth to the older woman’s ear. They stayed that way for a long time, Ruthie bent and whispering, Maddy crying and clinging to Ruthie as though she might go down if she didn’t have someone to hold on to.

  Mason and Lucky waited for us, leaned against the back wall and smoking.

  “How about that drink I owe you?” Lucky asked Mason.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Mason said.

  Lucky tipped back his head. “You sick?”

  “Come on, Lucky.” Ruthie tugged at his arm. “We all need a break.”

  Even though it was still early, once we were home, there seemed nothing to do but go to bed. Mason stretched out beside me and rested his arm across his eyes.

  “Those pipes rotted through,” he said. “Tiny Doty told me. How could the company let that happen?”

  “The sand,” I said, “or maybe the rain.”

  He shook his head. “There’s no excuse,” he said. “None.”

  I felt every muscle in his body tense. I rose to my elbow, whispered, “Roll over,” and settled astride the small of his back, began working my thumbs at the base of his skull, beneath his shoulder blades, pushing into the springy softness between each rib, laddering my way down his spine. I hesitated when I felt him flinch, thinking I had hurt him, and rested my cheek in the nook of his neck, heard the hitch in his breath as though he might be crying. Even after I knew he was asleep, I lay there, inhaling the milky scent at the nape of his neck. When, finally, I slid to the side and tucked in against him, he moaned in his dream and rolled away, and I felt the air cool between us, heard the sharp ticking of the clock.

  A crystal ball, a shew stone, and I might have lingered next to him a little while longer, but I took up my book, the pages ahead like a promise that all could be made right again, and I wonder now—was it youth that allowed me to believe that my hours were lined out before me like coins I might pluck up and carry in my pocket to spend? There was always the morning after night, the lunch after breakfast, the muezzin’s call endlessly spilling out over the compound.

  Burt Cane’s death was a sadness, but he was an old man, wasn’t he? And Maddy Cane was nothing like me.

  Chapter Eleven

  Was it the next morning, or the next (so many of them the same—the room sulfured with light, the birdsong, the muezzin’s first call to prayer, Yash tinkering in the kitchen) that I woke to the sound of something strange yet familiar? I opened my eyes, saw Mason’s side of the bed empty, and tried to remember what day it was, whether he was on the platform or in the shower. Time is like this in the desert, the hours slow and weighted as though the sun passing over were a brilliant boulder lumbering across the sky. Mason’s absence had become more familiar to me than his presenc
e, and I was sometimes startled to find him there beside me and would lie very still, examining his face as though to memorize his features, as though there might come a time when I would no longer be able to recognize who he was.

  I rolled to my back and listened, trying to make out what I was hearing. When the door to the bedroom swung open, I jerked up the covers, thinking for a ridiculous moment that it was Yash, but then I saw Mason. Instead of the company-regulation khaki pants and button-down, he wore jeans and a white T-shirt, cigarettes rolled in the sleeve, like he was that farm boy again.

  He flicked his lighter, sly-eyed me through the smoke of his cigarette. “We seem to have us a regular rodeo outside,” he said. “Abdullah says someone put in a request for a ride.” And then I recognized the nickering and chuffing of horses.

  I didn’t even bother to shower, just rifled the drawers, pulled on a pair of Mason’s jeans and then my mother’s boots, arching my toes against their familiar crease and bend. I tied my hair in a blue scarf that I thought might match the sky, added film to my camera, and stepped out into the heat. Abdullah, dressed in the belted robe of a Bedouin, stood at the head of three glistening horses, their long tails swishing, Faris hovering close by, ready with a shovel to move their manure to the garden. Abdullah loosened the lead of the gray mare, brought her to me.

  “Badra,” he said quietly, his voice tender. “She will carry you well.”

  I held out my palm, let her snuffle and lick, then touched the silver velvet of her muzzle. When Abdullah nodded, I grabbed a hank of mane and swung myself up onto the thin cushion of leather that served as a saddle and adjusted my sitting bones to fit her back, which was narrower than Sonny’s had been, just right. Instead of reins, Abdullah handed me a single rope connected to the left of the bangled headstall so that the horse gave to that side like a goat kid trained to a post. A young black mare whose hide rippled in the heat stomped and settled as Mason pulled himself up. I saw Abdullah watching the mare’s ears flick back and knew he was judging her mood just as she was judging Mason’s.