Chapter 11

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Chapter 11

Before the sun rises she steals out of her hiding place. The fierce wind of a simoon whips up the stinging dust and dries her body and soul, so it seems her very bones will wither and crumble. On the horizon headlights stir, shake off sleep, and peer in her direction. She has been warned of white wolves, but she is desperate with thirst. Is being taken from this land of the dead prophets such a calamity? She has heard of the human rights they repeat like a prayer here. If the wolves pray this samr prayer, what else can they do except give water to her baby then send them back from where they came?

The wolves do not pounce yet. Instead, they sniff and harry her heels. All day she plods down the sand of the wadi, and all day she watches the wolves'' dust trails, keeping pace to the East, the direction of the holy city, as if taunting her to make a dash in that direction, daring her to seek help from her prophets of the black cloth Kaaba. Instead, she stays the course toward the new Mecca of New Jersey. To take her mind off thirst, she trys to imagine what this new place will be like. Will there be date palms hanging heavy with fruit? Is there water bubbling out of the ground, creating an oasis surrounded by silken tents and flocks feasting on soft grass? Are there the raucous sounds of strong, honorable men, racing their camels and sleek Arab chargers on the fringes of the camp? They tell her America is a mighty, wealthy country but so far this desert is more empty than her own. It supports neither camel, goat or sheep, she has seen no signs of these beasts. The people here must be miserably poor, because they do not offer the required hospitality. Perhaps New Jersey is different, perhaps New Jersey is a place where they venerate the holy prophets. Perhaps there the mercy of God makes the water run freely.

It is an unseasonably warm winter's day. Without her prohibited veil to cover her face, she feels as if she has ingested and digested a sand dune. Ridiculous rule, to ban something so useful in this climate, but she knows no other climate. The world is a continuous desert, and this place is proof. All of the dreamy stories she has heard about forests and jungles of infinite water are but myths.

The wolves keep pace in their trucks, but they do not approach. She thinks of a plan in case they finally come. Because of his Circassian father, the boy is as white as the wolves. If need be she will tell them she kidnapped the boy. They will have to be merciful to one of their own. As for herself, she is just a carcass, a withered skeleton. They can do with her as they please.

In the searing heat of midday she finds a sprawling tree in the bend of the wadi. Here she takes refuge from the heat, so exhausted and dessicated that she thinks she will just lie here and wait for the wolves. Scarcely has she settled into the shade when the rumbling of the wolves' engines grows closer. Incomprehensible threats are shouted in a vile tone through a bullhorn. As she tries to lie still through the growl of the bullhorn guns are fired. A whirlwind of dust explodes on the nearby wall of the wadi. She clutches the quiet boy and shields him with her body. In her own tongue she shouts "don't shoot!" then carries her boy back to the scorching brazier of the desert. As long as she keeps walking the wolves do not shoot.

Her reality is haunted by unreal visions borne on the madness of thirst. Ghosts from the past walk by and vanish. The voice of her mother scolds her for dropping a lamb down the well. Her husband stumbles down the wadi, carrying his head in his hands. The severed head speaks, asking if she is an angel. A train of camel-mounted Bedu appear at the top of the waadi. She runs towards them, begging to be taken along, but they pull back their keffiyehs to reveal the fanged, furry snouts of wolves. “No hospitality here!” they snarl, and ride on.

There is no quarter in this cruel desert, she realizes. The prophets of the book have no authority here. Perhaps they are dead.

The tower of the life-giving water teases her just ahead. She is close enough now to see the large plastic tanks at its base, filled with blessed liquid. She is meters away from salvation. Or is this just another vision that will crumble into dust?

In desperation she rushes down the dry wadi that has been her highway, stumbling along in the sand, her little boy clutching her fiercely. The tower with the blinking lights transmitting the irresistible temptation of water stands on a small rise that conceals the desert behind it. When she has scrambled to within a few yards of this low hill she hears motors, then two trucks equipped with enormous flood lights seem to rise out of the sand itself and stop on either side of the tower.

The woman drops to her knees in the sand. She doesn’'t know if she intends to beg or pray. What is the difference?

A tall, bulky man gets out of the passengers side of one of the trucks. He is wearing shorts, but has heavy boots on his feet. In different circumstances, the effect might be comical. On his head is an enormous hat, of the type worn in American John Wayne movies that even the humble Bedu love. The hat and his gleaming mirror sunglasses hide his eyes, or perhaps hide that he has no eyes. The eyes are the mirror of the soul, some say, so if you have no soul why do you need eyes?

Two other men get out of the trucks, also wearing glasses to cover the place where their eyes should be. They carry rifles, but perhaps worse they carry pitiless scowls. All three have the same red white and blue patch sewn on camouflage jackets.

When the woman sees the scowls she instinctively kneels lower, covering the boy with her body. The man with the enormous hat gives her a snakelike smile, licks his lips and says "Welcome to America!”

The woman begins to beseech him in her native tongue. She begs them to allow her to get to the water then to take her away, if they please.

The snake smile grows wider. Venom glistens upon the serpent's teeth. "Well if that ain't just the biggest head spinning earful of jibberish I ever heard! I don't claim to be no linguist, but that sure as hell don't sound like any Mexican I ever heard. Any of you fellas speak beaner?"

The men on either side nod negatively. "No, no, that ain't beaner” they concur.

"Where you from, honey?" the man in the hat asks.

She does not understand the man, but she hears the question in his voice, and she takes it as a cue to beseech him even more loudly and fervently than before. She sinks lower in her prayerful posture, her head touching the Earth, her body hiding her baby.

“Now look sweetie," the big man says, merrily kicking up a little cloud of dust with the tip of his boot. "If you were of the beaner tribe, I may not like it, but I would be forced by the laws of humanity to let you drink from our well. As dirty and scuzzy as they may be, the beaner tribe has certain core values that we hold near and dear."

She commits a thousand blasphemies, praying to this snake for the life of her child. Up on the tower, the dead lights clack in the wind.

"But you are of the Howeitat tribe, and the Howeitat may not drink from our well!" He kicks up a big clod of dirt and breaks out into raucous laughter. Then he looks up at his henchmen for approval, but sees only confused expressions.

Come on guys, that's a famous line from Lawrence of Arabia. Haven't you ever seen Lawrence of Arabia? Not even you, honey?" The man begins to hum the theme song, but she did not rise from her supplication. "Well, hell! What a waste of a wonderful monologue!”

"It's the Hazimi," one of the filthy goons holding the guns says.

"Beg pardon?" Says the man in the hat.

“The line is, the Hazimi may not drink from our well. He knew that."

“No, no, I'm pretty sure it was the Howeitat. I've seen the movie like 500 times. I've practically got it memorized."

“Boss, it is the Hazimi," a second goon with a gun disagrees. "The Howeitat were the tribe led by Auda Abu Tayi, portrayed by Anthony Quinn. He is the dude who said, I am a river to my people, after which everybody screeches out that ear piercing yodel.”

The man in the hat strokes his whiskered chin thoughtfully. “Well I could just poop.myself, I'm so embarrassed. Here I am trying to impress this pretty young lady with my knowledge of Ay-rab culture, and I completely fall flat on my face."

Prancing around in his shorts, boots, and cowboy hat, the man in the hat looks like one of the fabled Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, but 40 years past the prime. It is a rather uncomfortable caricature to behold. Even the two henchmen seem to avoid looking at him.

Failing to register any response to her repeated entreaties, the woman switches to French. The village near her tribe once had a school teacher who instructed her and the other children in many subjects, including French. This teacher is a cruel tyrant who punishes incorrect answers with a sharp ruler slap on the hand. One time he misses and the injured pupil, a sheik's daughter, goes home with an ugly red welt on her wrist. The sheik shoots the teacher. The tribe escapes to Jordan for a while. Her French lessons are stalled, but she still remembers a few words.

“Well hell," says the man in the hat. "I believe I heard a see voo play in there. Our little lady here speaks French too."

The man in the hat goes up to one of the henchmen, which just coincidentally rhymes with Frenchmen, and unceremoniously yanks the rifle from his arms. "That's where you effed up, little girl, just as I was starting to like you. If there's one thing I can't stand it's those effing frogs."

"I'm a good upstanding Christian, honey, well I'm a flippin ordained minister for crying out loud, what you would call a mulah who takes no moolah for it. But my sense of Christian charity gets drowned out by all of your frog talk. Ribbit, ribbit. When you were still speaking Ay-rab I thought for a minute we might be friends, but I'll have no truck with those whiny, faggy frogs. How can you condone the language of a people that, after we save their ass from the Nazis turn around and spit in our faces by not helping us bomb that Krud-dafi, may he rot in hell, sorry if he's one of your uncles, by the same she goat.”

The man in the hat cocks the rifle back hard. The woman tucks her baby's body further under her own.

“The Howei-, I mean the Hazimi may not drink from our well!" the man shouts. Then he turns and shoots holes in the two water tanks, stowed there in the shadow of the tower.

The life-giving blood sanctified by the heartbeat of the towers gushes forth from the broken jugs, to be greedily swallowed by the thirsty, parched sand. Muddy bubbling puddles form beneath the rivulets pouring from the bullet holes, but such is the greed of the desert that it swallows every drop. Not a molecule of muddy water is left, not even fit for a dog to lap from. Within seconds all that remains is a non-potable brown stain on the ground.

Just to be sure, the man in the hat picks up the ragged remains of the plastic containers and shakes them fiercely, to remove any lingering droplets. Then he throws the shattered tanks into the back of one of the trucks.

"See, sweetheart. I'm not a litterbug. I keep my desert clean.”

The alpha wolf crosses over to the henchman and hands back the rifle. "As you can see, I am not a violent individual. I am allowing you to continue forward into the bountiful generosity of this great land, to let events unfold as they may. Once again, I say welcome to America."

The three men get back into the pickups. As they board, the man in the hat can be heard to say "Make sure she doesn't make it to the highway." Then they drive off.

As with the sparkling Janat Eadn of New Jersey and all the other shining allures of mighty, glorious America even the lowly Bedu hear about, the tower is just another false promise. All hope is now dead. All gods are dead. She does not want to live in a world abandoned by God and his prophets. She would stay here and move no more, but she can't make that decision for her baby. Her baby boy has to live, somehow. For what other purpose has she lived? But she is powerless - What else can she do to affect the salvation of her baby, but to pray to the dead God’s? Can the gods of her people hear her from so far, across so many waters? Just in case, she prays to the god of Abraham to come back, she prays to the God of Jacob, she prays to the God of Yeshua, she prays to the God of Mohammed. Finally, she prays to the god of the hieroglyphs rock, to see if he will listen. It is blasphemy, but she must save her child. Only men quarrel and quibble over the fine points of theology. To protect her children, a mother will pray to any spirit that moves across the face of the desert.

Her head lifts from its supplicating posture as she feels, more than hears, a low humidity rumbling through the bare creosote flats. She pust see her head back down, smothering the boy again, who still will not complain or protest. Pressing her ear to the earth, she picks up a low drone that increases and decreases in frequency. It starts off like the frontal attack of an angry bee, then slowly recedes like the bellow of an elephant. Flashing back to what seems like the good old days of jolly old bombed out Aleppo, she recalls the same kind of sound made by Russian jets when they bomb or strafe the city. They come in with a high squeal, then fly off with a low snore. She doesn't have enough school to know anything about the Doppler effect, but when you live under constant battering in a war zone you learn these principles instinctively.

Looking up, she spies no planes in the endless, cloudless lid of blue above, but something is moving fast out there. It occurs to her that it must be cars and trucks. There has to be a highway close by!

Quickly she rises to her feet, silently thanking the god of the rocks, who must be the leading deity in this area, for the revelation. As she stands buzzing pain and a wave of dizziness envelop her head like a turban wrapped too tight. She wobbles and falls. Descending to the Earth she is careful to land on her back, being mindful not to crush the boy.

She passes out for a span that might be a moment, might be a millenium. In this semi-conscious state she is aware only of the constant whine of automobiles and the rumble of big trucks on that distant highway, amplified through her pillow of sand. She had to get to them, but she is powerless to move. Her body will not rise.

Then she feels the shadow of someone standing over her, someone she cannot see because she cannot open her eyes.

“Arise!" The voice commands and she does not disobey, for it is the voice of her mother. She springs into a sitting position, the baby asleep upon her breast, but sees no one. She longs to sink back down, to merge her weary bones with the dust of the Earth and sleep forever, but forces herself to stay up. There is a highway out there, and the highway is her only hope.

Pulling herself to her feet, she defies death one more time. By all rights she is dead already, but the mysterious force of the will pulls her from the tomb. Outraged demons haunt her steps. An earthenware jug laid in her path sweats cool liquid on the outside, but contains only dirt and scorpions. A precocious pack rat, gifted with the art of speech, invites her to rest upon a luxurious canopied bed beneath a Palo Verde tree. A wren on a high, dead stick whistles the theme song to Lawrence of Arabia. She ignores these distractions and keeps her feet moving in the direction of the highway, from where the noise of speeding automobiles grows louder. Or is this an illusion as well? She is not certain, but it is all she has to cling to.

The hieroglyph god of the rock is a cruel and capricious one who will not deliver her to the highway without further trials. Now her path is blocked by a steep ravine that can only be traversed by an eroded cut in the bank. The far side is less pronounced in grade, and past that the highway is so close she doesn't need to listen to the rumble in the earth anymore. But to reach it, she has to cross this one last wadi.

With no other recourse, the woman starts down the slice in the steep bank. Her head throbs with pain, her desiccated throat cries for mercy, her spinning head cannot issue the correct commands to her wobbly legs. Halfway down the cut, a loose rock comes out from under her foot and she slips and rolls the rest of the way into the wadi. The last act of her physical body is to toss the baby into the soft sand at the bottom. Then her foot catches in a crack in the rock and she feels something snap in her leg. Gravity forces her leg loose from the hole but she tumbles into the wadi with her wounded limb horribly distorted, bending forward instead of back. She is aware of it only as a curiosity. It doesn''t matter anymore.

The baby sits in the sand, his face puckered as if he wishes to cry, but does not know how.

“Go. Up," she commands, making a feeble gesture with one hand as she lays immobile. The boy does not move.

In the wild there is a biological imperative for organisms to reject their offspring when they no longer have the resources to care for them. In humans the instinct is rarely used but still exists, coming forward only in times of extreme duress. Both the mother's impulse to use it and the offspring's instinct to heed the call emerge at these times.

"GO! UP! WOLVES!" She shouts with her last strength, and her last breath.

The boy lingers yet a moment, looking across the waadi sand at the body of his mother. Then the biological imperative kicks in and he crawls for the other side of the ravine she indicated to him.. His skin scrapes the earth through the worn out knees of his trousers, but he accepts the departure of his mother and he accepts the urgency of her warning. It is definitely a liability that he never learned to walk, but there is no use beating himself up for that now. From now on, he will have to grow up fast.

The thick sand at the bottom of the wadi makes his pace sluggish. The slope beyond is packed more firmly, but covered with thorny brush. The words of his mother echo through his mind as he crawls upward, but he cannot visualize her word for wolf. He has never seen a wolf, only stray dogs prowling about the ruins of Aleppo. The thought of Aleppo makes him check the postcards hidden inside his shirt. They are his amulet, a magical transport to times before bombs and ruins. Maybe they will lead him back to his mother, someday. The mass of flesh lying lifeless in the wadi is no longer his mother. He knows that.

The boy crawls scraped and bleeding up the waadi wall. He hears the sound of motors racing down a road not far away, but he does not see it. In the bombed out city he can peek out the broken window to see trucks rolling through the rubble. Those trucks and the ones he hears now make the same sound. Is his mother sending him to the trucks? Or maybe he should find another bombed out building to hide in.

He crawls a little farther but it is very painful, so he stops in the shade of some high weeds. From there he sees a long building, and thinks that is the place where his mother wants him to hide. He waits in the weeds, but then the plants rustle and several dogs emerge through the tangle of plants. He thinks the wolves are coming, but they are only dogs.

The four beasts are led by a rather large Chihuahua, but the boy doesn’t know breeds, so he is not surprised by the dog's large size. Next there is a mongrel shaggy type, bigger but much meeker than the Chihuahua. Another is like a sausage on four legs. The final dog looks like a beagle, but the wrong color.

Had these dogs been just somebody's pets they might have let him off with a nip on the leg, but they are not. Being semi-feral they do not have the same respect for humans as pets do, and just now they are hungry. They intend to eat the boy. He is small, weak, incapable of flight, and smells of distress - easy prey. The human smell makes them hesitate, but their hunger is strong.

Snarling, the dogs form a wolf ring around the boy to block his escape. Big shaggy sneaks around the rear, while hot dog and semi-snoopy take up posts on the left and right. Chihuahua plants himself in front.

So now the refugee baby finds his salvation blocked by other kinds of wolves, not the kind his mother warns him of. Instinctively he gets back on his knees and tries to crawl away from the Chihuahua. Seeing the boy's back awakens the dog's predator instinct, and it lunges forward to nip him in the back of the foot, where fortunately its canines find only a tattered shoe. The attack awakens violence in the other pack members, and at once they all lunge in.

The feral dogs are obviously going to eat the boy. A pack with the killing urge, canine or human, will perform vile acts unthinkable to an individual. The human infant has survived bombings, crossed the pirate infested Red Sea, journeyed over two vast oceans and the bandit-plagued wastelands of Mexico, only to be consumed by flea-bitten mongrels while a few feet from freedom. Some call this irony, others just bad frickin' luck.

The little pack growls, barks and lunges, gradually gaining confidence to rush in for the kill.

Then a loud, angry yip comes from beyond a stand of creosote, and in a blur the Chihuahua seems to explode in a red cloud. Still another canine has emerged from the brush and is shaking the small dog fiercely in its jaws. The dogs bark and bellow in fake ferocity, but it is all bluster, for they know they are beaten. The Chihuahua constitutes the better part of the pack's valor. Before this attacker can make similar carnage of those left, they split up and run meekly toward the last points that had been home, a pack no more.

The coyote drops the limp Chihuahua carcass, finding it distasteful. Then it turns and faces the baby, who has no fear. The animal lowers itself down on its front legs in a sort of bow but raises its head to let off a triumphant series of barks, yips and howls.

The boy points at the coyote and waits for what is to come next. “Wolf!” he cries, in his mother's tongue. Mama is wrong. Wolves are nice.

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Photo courtesy of Sarah Studd, National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons