The Burgess Boys (8 page)

“Oh, they’re idiots, Susie.” Bob waved a hand. “Lawyers switch all the time. And he was already doing defense work at that Hartford firm. It’s all defense work. Defend the people or defend the accused. That case fell into his lap and he did a great job with it. Whether or not people think Wally was guilty.”

Susan said earnestly, “But I think most people who remember Jim still love him. They get a kick out of it when he shows up on TV. He never sounds like a Mr. Know-It-All, that’s what people say. And it’s true.”

“It is true. He hates showing up on TV, by the way. He does it because the firm tells him to. During the Packer trial I think he loved the publicity, but I don’t know that’s true anymore. Helen likes it. She always lets everyone know when he’s going to be on TV.”

“Well, Helen. Sure.”

It united them, their love for Jim. Bob took advantage of this to stand up and say he was going out to get some different food. “That spaghetti place still open?” he asked.

“It is, yeah.”

The streets were dark. He was always surprised how dark the night was outside the city. He drove to a small grocery store and bought two bottles of wine, which you could do in a grocery store in Maine. He bought the ones with screw tops. As he drove, not recognizing things the way he’d thought he would, he was careful not to go in the direction of his childhood home. Since his mother’s death (years ago, he had lost count of the years) he had not once gone past the house. He pulled up at a stop sign, turned right, and saw the old cemetery. On his left were wooden apartment buildings four stories high. He was nearing the center of town. He drove behind what had once been the main department store, Peck’s, before the mall was built across the river. When Bob was small, his clothes for school were bought in the boys’ department there. The memory was one of shame and excruciating self-consciousness: the salesman cuffing the bottom of his pants, once putting a tape measure right up the leg and to his crotch; red turtlenecks bought, also navy blue, his mother nodding. The building was empty now, its windows boarded up. He drove past where the bus station had been, where there had been coffee shops and magazine stores and bakeries. And suddenly a black man appeared, walking beneath a streetlamp. He was tall and graceful, his shirt loose-fitting, although perhaps there was a vest over it, Bob couldn’t tell. Wrapped around his shoulders was a scarf of black and white with tassels. “Hey, cool,” Bob said softly. “Another one.” And yet, Bob, who had lived for years in New York, Bob, who’d had a brief career there defending criminals of various colors and religions (until the stress of the courtroom forced him into appellate work), Bob, who believed in the magnificence of the Constitution and the rights of the people, all people, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Bob Burgess, after the tall man with the tasseled scarf turned down a side street of Shirley Falls—Bob thought,
ever so fleetingly
but he thought it: Just as long as there aren’t too many of them.

He drove further and there was the familiar Antonio’s, the spaghetti cafeteria, tucked back behind the gas station. Bob stopped the car in the parking lot. On the glass door of Antonio’s was a sign in orange letters. He looked at the clock on the dashboard. Nine o’clock on a Saturday night and Antonio’s was closed. He unscrewed the top off a bottle of wine. How could he describe what he felt? The unfurling of an ache so poignant it was almost erotic, this longing, the inner silent gasp as though in the face of something unutterably beautiful, the desire to put his head down on the big loose lap of this town, Shirley Falls.

He drove to a small grocery store, bought a package of frozen clam strips, and took them back to Susan’s.

Abdikarim Ahmed stepped off the sidewalk and walked in the street so as not to be close to doorways where a person might linger in the darkness. He approached the home of his cousin and saw how the lightbulb over the door was—again—not lit. “Uncle,” voices called out to him, and he entered the apartment and continued down the hall to his room, where the walls were covered with Persian rugs; Haweeya had hung them when he moved in months ago. The colors of the wall rugs seemed to move as Abdikarim pressed his fingers hard against his forehead. Bad enough that the man arrested today was unknown to the village. (It was assumed he would be one of the men who lived nearby, one of those who drank beer in the morning on the front steps, thick arms tattooed, driving loud trucks with bumper stickers reading WHITE IS MIGHT, THE REST GO HOME!) Yes, bad enough that this Zachary Olson had a job, lived in a good house with his mother, who also had a job. But what continued to frighten Abdikarim, what made his stomach sick and his head squeeze with pain, was what he had seen the night it happened: The two policemen, who arrived soon after the imam called, had stood in the mosque in their dark uniforms and belts of guns, had stood, glanced down at the pig’s head, and laughed. Then said, “Okay, folks.” Filled out forms, asked questions. Became serious. Took pictures. Not everyone had seen them laugh. But Abdikarim, standing close to them, moist beneath his prayer robe, had seen this. Tonight the elders asked him to describe for Rabbi Goldman what he had seen, and so he had acted it out: the grins, the talking into the hand radios, the exchange of glances between the two policemen, their quiet laughter. Rabbi Goldman shook his head in sorrow.

Haweeya was standing in his doorway rubbing her nose. “Are you hungry?” she asked, and Abdikarim said that he had eaten at the home of Ifo Noor. “Is there more trouble?” she asked softly. Her children ran down the hall to her, and she spread her long fingers over her son’s head.

“No, everything is the same.”

She nodded, her earrings swinging, and ushered her children back to the living room. Haweeya had kept them inside most of the day, having them memorize again their lineage, their great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and so on, far, far back; Americans seemed to have little concern for their past family. Somalis could recite back many generations, and Haweeya did not want her children to lose that. Still, keeping them inside all day had been hard. No one liked to go so long without seeing the sky. But when Omad arrived home—he was a translator at the hospital—he said they would go to the park. Omad and Haweeya had been in-country longer than others, they were not so quick to be afraid. They had survived the very bad parts of Atlanta, where people took drugs and robbed others right in their own buildings; Shirley Falls was safe and beautiful compared to that. So this afternoon, tired from the fast, and from the clear fall air that—Haweeya did not understand why—made her nose drip and eyes itch, she’d watched the children run after falling leaves. The sky was almost blue.

After she cleaned the kitchen and washed the floor, Haweeya returned to Abdikarim. She had great affection for this man, who had come to Shirley Falls a year ago only to find that his wife Asha—sent earlier, with the children—no longer wanted him. She had taken the children and moved to Minneapolis. This was a source of shame. Haweeya understood that; everyone did. It was America that Abdikarim blamed for teaching Asha such foolhardy independence, but Haweeya thought that Asha, years younger than her husband, was born to do what Asha wanted to do; some people were like that. An added sadness: Asha was the mother to Abdikarim’s one living son. Of other children born to other wives, only daughters remained. He had losses, as many people had.

He was seated on his bed now, his fists pressed into the mattress. Haweeya leaned against the doorjamb. “Margaret Estaver telephoned this evening. She told me not to be worried.”

“I know, I know.” Abdikarim raised a hand in a gesture of futility. “According to her he’s Wiil Waal: ‘Crazy Boy.’ ”

“Ayanna says she’s keeping her children home from school on Monday,” Haweeya whispered, and then sneezed. “Omad told her they’re as safe in school as anywhere, and she said, ‘Safe where they’re kicked and punched when the teacher looks away?’ ”

Abdikarim nodded. At Ifo Noor’s tonight there had been talk of the school and the teachers promising to be more vigilant now that the pig’s head had been rolled into the mosque. “Everyone promises,” Abdikarim said, as he stood. “Sleep with peace,” he added. “And get that lightbulb fixed.”

“Tomorrow I’ll buy a new one. I’m driving to Walmart.” She smiled at him playfully. “Hoping Wiil Waal has not returned to work there.” Her earrings moved as she walked away.

Abdikarim rubbed his forehead. At Ifo Noor’s tonight, Rabbi Goldman sat with the elders and asked them to practice the true peacefulness of Islam. This was insulting. Of course they would do that. Rabbi Goldman said that many townspeople supported their right to be here, and after Ramadan the town would show this with a demonstration. The elders did not want a demonstration. To gather people in a crowd was not good. But Rabbi Goldman of the wide heart said it would be healthy for the town. Healthy for the town! Each word was like a hit with a stick saying this was not their village, their town, their country.

Abdikarim, standing by his bed, squeezed his eyes in anger, because where were the Rabbi Goldmans of America when Abdikarim’s eldest daughter had first stepped off a plane in Nashville with her four children and no one to meet them, and the moving stairs called an
escalator
were so frightening they could only stare at them and get pushed aside by others who pointed and laughed? Where were the Rabbi Goldmans of America when a neighbor brought Aamuun a vacuum cleaner and Aamuun did not know what it was and never used it and the neighbor told people in town the Somalis were ungrateful? Where were the Rabbi Goldmans and the Minister Estavers when little Kalila thought the ketchup dispenser at Burger King was where she could wash her hands? And when Kalila’s mother saw the mess her daughter had made she slapped her, and a woman came up to them and said, In America we don’t beat our children. Where was the rabbi then? The rabbi could not know what it was like.

And of course the rabbi could not know, back in his own safe house now with his worried wife, that as Abdikarim sat down heavily on the bed, it was not fear that rose in him with most prominence but the uncurling of remembered shame from this evening, when he had put a piece of
mufa
in his mouth and experienced the feral, furtive pleasure of its taste. In the camps he had been hungry constantly, it was like a wife, the companionship of this ceaseless exhausting need. And now that he was here it was exquisitely painful to notice the animal craving he still felt for food; it debased him. The need to eat, excrete, sleep—these were the needs of nature. The luxury of their naturalness had long ago been taken away.

Fingering the tapestry of his bedcover, he murmured, “Astaghfirullah,”
I seek forgiveness
, because the violence in his homeland felt to him to be the fault of his people for not living the true life of Islam. As he closed his eyes, he recited his final Alhamdulilah of the day.
Thank you, Allah
. All good came from Allah. The bad from humans who allowed the sprig of evil in their hearts to blossom. But why this was so, the evil unchecked like malignancy—this was the question Abdikarim always walked into. And always the answer: He did not know.

That first night, Bob slept on the couch with all his clothes on, even his coat, it was that cold. It was not until the light began to come through the window blinds that he finally dozed, and he woke to hear Susan yelling, “Yes, you’re going to work. You’re the one who did this stupid, stupid thing! You damn well go earn that two hundred dollars I spent so you could be free.
Go
.” Bob heard Zach murmur briefly, heard the back door close, and in a few minutes a car drove away.

Susan appeared, hurled a newspaper across the room at him. It landed on the floor by the couch. “Nice job,” she said.

Bob looked down. On the front page was a large photo of Zach leaving the jail, grinning. The headline read NO JOKE.

“Oy,” Bob said, struggling to sit up.

“I’m going to work.” Susan called this to him from the kitchen. He heard cupboard doors slam. And then the back door slammed and he heard her drive off.