Part 7 (1/2)

”A lot of what?” Ahmad's attention perhaps has wandered. They have come off the Turnpike at Bayway and are in some anonymous downtown with a lot of double parking that creates tight spots for Excellency to squeeze through.

”Poontang,” Charlie says with exasperation, sucking in his breath as the orange truck sc.r.a.pes past a lumbering school bus loaded with staring little faces. ”p.u.s.s.y,” he clarifies. When Ahmad, blus.h.i.+ng, offers no response, Charlie announces in a tone of quiet resolve, ”We gotta get you laid.”

The towns of northern New Jersey are enough alike- storefronts and sidewalks and parking meters and neon signs and quickly pa.s.sed patches of civic green s.p.a.ce-to create even in a moving vehicle a sensation of being stuck. The territories he and Charlie together drive dirough, with their summer scents of softened tar and spilled motor oil and of onions and cheese exhaled from small eateries out into the street, are much the same until they get south of South Amboy or the Sayreville exit on the Jersey Pike. Yet as one small city yields to the next Ahmad comes to see diat no two are identical, and each has social variety within it. In some neighborhoods large houses sprawl in the shade back from the roadway on lush rising lawns populated by squat trim shrubs like security guards. Excellency makes few deliveries to such homes, but pa.s.ses tliem on its way to inner-city rows where the front steps spring up straight from the sidewalk, without even the merest excuse for a front yard. Here those awaiting delivery tend to live: darker-skinned families with voices and televisions sounding from back rooms, out of sight, as if chamber after chamber of linked family members telescope out from the vestibule. Sometimes there are signs of Islamic practice-prayer mats, women in hijabs, framed images of the twelve imams including the Hidden Imam with his featureless face, identifying the household as s.h.i.+a. These homes affect Ahmad with uneasiness, as do the city neighborhoods where shops advertise in mixed Arabic and English and mosques have been created by subst.i.tuting a crescent for the cross on a deconsecrated Protestant church. He does not like to linger and chat, as Charlie does, making his way in whatever dialect of Arabic is offered, with laughter and gestures to bridge gaps in comprehension. Ahmad feels his pride of isolation and willed ident.i.ty to be threatened by the ma.s.ses of ordinary, hard-pressed men and plain, practical women who are enrolled in Islam as a lazy matter of etlinic ident.i.ty. Though he was not the only Muslim believer at Central High, there were no others quite like him-of mixed parentage and still fervent in tlie faith, a faith chosen rather than merely inherited from a father present to reinforce fidelity. Ahmad was native-born, and in his travels dirough New Jersey he takes interest less in its pockets of a diluted Middle East than in die American reality all around, a sprawling ferment for which he feels the mild pity owed a failed experiment.

This fragile, misbegotten nation had a history scarcely expressed in the grandiose New Prospect City Hall and the lake of developers' rubble on whose opposite sh.o.r.es stand, with their caged windows, the high school and the sooty black church. Each town bears in its center relics of the nineteenth century, civic buildings of lumpy brown stones or soft red brick with jutting cornices and round arched entryways, ornate proud buildings outlasting the flimsier twentieth-century constructions. These older, ruddier buildings express a bygone industrial prosperity, a wealth of manufacture, machinery and railroads harnessed to the lives of a laboring nation, an era of internal consolidation and welcome to the world's immigrants. Then there is an underlying earlier century, which made the succeeding ones possible. The orange truck rumbles past small iron signs and over-lookable monuments commemorating an insurgency that became a revolution; from Fort Lee to Red Bank, its battles had been fought, leaving thousands of boys asleep beneath the gra.s.s.

Charlie Chehab, a man of many disparate parts, knows a surprising amount about that ancient conflict: ”New Jersey's where the Revolution got turned around. Long Island had been a disaster; New York City was more of the same. Retreat, retreat. Disease and desertions. Just before the winter of 'seventy-six-'seventy-seven, the British moved down from Fort Lee to Newark, then to Brunswick and Princeton and Trenton, easy as a knife through b.u.t.ter. Was.h.i.+ngton straggled across the Delaware with an army in rags. A lot of them, believe it or not, were barefoot. Barefoot, and winter coming on. We were toast. toast. In Philadelphia, everybody was trying to leave except the Tories, who sat around waiting for their buddies the redcoats to arrive. Up in New England, a British fleet took Newport and Rhode Island without a fight. It was In Philadelphia, everybody was trying to leave except the Tories, who sat around waiting for their buddies the redcoats to arrive. Up in New England, a British fleet took Newport and Rhode Island without a fight. It was over. over.”

”Yes, and why wasn't it?” Ahmad asks, wondering why Charlie is telling this patriotic tale with such enthusiasm.

”Well,” he says, ”several things. Some Some good things were happening. The Continental Congress woke up and stopped trying to run the war; they said, 'O.K., let George do it.'' good things were happening. The Continental Congress woke up and stopped trying to run the war; they said, 'O.K., let George do it.''

”Is that where the phrase comes from?”

”Good question. I don't think so. The other American general in charge, a silly p.r.i.c.k called Charles Lee-Fort Lee is named after him, thanks a bunch-let himself be captured in a tavern in Basking Ridge, leaving Was.h.i.+ngton in total charge. At this point Was.h.i.+ngton was lucky to have an army at all. After Long Island, see, the British had gone easy on us. They let die Continental Army retreat and get across the Delaware. That proved to be a mistake, for, as they must have taught you at school-what the f.u.c.k do do they teach you at school, Madman?-Was.h.i.+ngton and a plucky band of threadbare freedom fighters crossed the Delaware on Christmas Day and routed the Hessian troops garrisoned in Trenton, and took a whole bunch of prisoners. On top of that, when Cornwallis brought down a big force from New York and thought he had the Americans trapped south of Trenton, Was.h.i.+ngton snuck off through the woods, around the Barrens and the Great Bear Swamp, and marched north to Princeton! All this with soldiers in rags who hadn't slept for days! People were tougher then. They weren't afraid to die. When Was.h.i.+ngton ran into a British force south of Princeton, an American general named Mercer was captured, and they called him a d.a.m.n rebel and told him to beg for quarter, and he said he wasn't a rebel and refused to beg, so they bayoneted him to death. They weren't such nice guys, the British, as they teach you at school, Madman?-Was.h.i.+ngton and a plucky band of threadbare freedom fighters crossed the Delaware on Christmas Day and routed the Hessian troops garrisoned in Trenton, and took a whole bunch of prisoners. On top of that, when Cornwallis brought down a big force from New York and thought he had the Americans trapped south of Trenton, Was.h.i.+ngton snuck off through the woods, around the Barrens and the Great Bear Swamp, and marched north to Princeton! All this with soldiers in rags who hadn't slept for days! People were tougher then. They weren't afraid to die. When Was.h.i.+ngton ran into a British force south of Princeton, an American general named Mercer was captured, and they called him a d.a.m.n rebel and told him to beg for quarter, and he said he wasn't a rebel and refused to beg, so they bayoneted him to death. They weren't such nice guys, the British, as Masterpiece Theatre Masterpiece Theatre lets on. When things looked their worst at Princeton, Was.h.i.+ngton on a white horse-this is honest truth, on a truly white horse- lets on. When things looked their worst at Princeton, Was.h.i.+ngton on a white horse-this is honest truth, on a truly white horse- led his men into the heart of the British fire and turned the tide, and ran after the retreating redcoats shouting, 'It's a fine fox chase, my boys!' ”

”He sounds cruel,” Ahmad said.

Charlie made that negative American noise in his nose, aahnn, aahnn, signifying dismissal, and said, ”Not really. War is cruel, but not the men who wage it necessarily. Was.h.i.+ngton was a gentleman. When the battle at Princeton was over, he stopped and complimented a wounded British soldier on what a gallant fight they had put up. In Philadelphia, he protected the Hessian prisoners from the p.i.s.sed-off crowds, who would have killed them. See, the Hessians, like most professional European soldiers, were trained to give quarter only in certain circ.u.mstances, and to take no prisoners otherwise-that's what they did on Long Island, they butchered us-and they were so amazed at the humane treatment they got instead that a quarter of them stayed here when the war was over. They intermarried with the Pennsylvania Dutch. They became Americans.” signifying dismissal, and said, ”Not really. War is cruel, but not the men who wage it necessarily. Was.h.i.+ngton was a gentleman. When the battle at Princeton was over, he stopped and complimented a wounded British soldier on what a gallant fight they had put up. In Philadelphia, he protected the Hessian prisoners from the p.i.s.sed-off crowds, who would have killed them. See, the Hessians, like most professional European soldiers, were trained to give quarter only in certain circ.u.mstances, and to take no prisoners otherwise-that's what they did on Long Island, they butchered us-and they were so amazed at the humane treatment they got instead that a quarter of them stayed here when the war was over. They intermarried with the Pennsylvania Dutch. They became Americans.”

”You seem very enamored of George Was.h.i.+ngton.”

”Well, why not?” Charlie considers, as if Ahmad has sprung a trap. ”You have to be, if you care about New Jersey. Here's where he earned his spurs. The great thing about him, he was a learner. He learned, for one thing, to get along with the New Englanders. From the standpoint of a Virginia planter, the New Englanders were a bunch of unkempt anarchists; they had blacks and red Indians in their ranks as if these guys were white men, just like they had them on their whaling s.h.i.+ps. Was.h.i.+ngton himself, actually, for that matter, had a big black buck for a sidekick, also called Lee, no relation to Robert E. When the war was over, Was.h.i.+ngton freed him for his services to the Revolution. He had learned to think of slavery as a bad thing. He wound up encouraging black enlistment, after resisting the idea initially. You've heard the word 'pragmatic'?”

”Of course.”

”That was Georgie. He learned to take what came, to fight guerrilla-style: hit and hide, hit and hide. He retreated but he never gave up. He was the Ho Chi Minh of his day. We were like Hamas. We were Al-Qaida. The thing about New Jersey was,” Charlie hurries to add, when Ahmad takes a breath as if he might interrupt, ”the British wanted it to be a model of pacification-winning hearts and minds, you've heard of that. They saw what they did on Long Island was counterproductive, recruiting more resistance, and were trying to play nice here, to woo the colonists back to the mother country. At Trenton, what Was.h.i.+ngton was saying to the British was, 'This is real. This is beyond nice.' ”

”Beyond nice,” Ahmad repeats. ”That could be the t.i.tle of a TV series for you to direct.”

Charlie doesn't acknowledge the playful idea. He is selling something. He goes on, ”He showed the world what can be done against the odds, against a superpower. He showed- and this is where Vietnam and Iraq come in-that in a war between an imperialist occupier and the people who actually live there, the people will eventually prevail. They know the terrain. They have more at stake. They have nowhere else to go. It wasn't just the Continental Army in New Jersey; it was the local militias, little sneaky bands of locals all across New Jersey, acting on their own, picking off British soldiers one by one and disappearing, back into the countryside-not playing fair, in other words, by the other guy's rules. The attack on the Hessians was sneaky, too-in the middle of a blizzard, and on a holiday when not even soldiers ought to have to work. Was.h.i.+ngton was saying, 'Hey, this is our our war.' About Valley Forge: Valley Forge gets all the publicity, but the winters after that he camped out in New Jersey-in Middlebrook in the Watchung Mountains, and then in Mor-ristown. In Morristown, the first winter was the coldest in a century. They chopped down six hundred acres of oak and chestnut trees to make huts and have firewood. There was so much snow that winter the provisions couldn't get through and they nearly starved.” war.' About Valley Forge: Valley Forge gets all the publicity, but the winters after that he camped out in New Jersey-in Middlebrook in the Watchung Mountains, and then in Mor-ristown. In Morristown, the first winter was the coldest in a century. They chopped down six hundred acres of oak and chestnut trees to make huts and have firewood. There was so much snow that winter the provisions couldn't get through and they nearly starved.”

”For the state of the world now,” Ahmad offers, to get in step with Charlie, ”it might have been better if they had. The United States might have become a kind of Canada, a peaceable and sensible country, though infidel.”

Charlie's surprised laugh becomes a snort in his nose. ”Dream on, Madman. There's too much energy here for peace and sensible. Contending energies-that's what the Const.i.tution allows for. That's what we get.” He s.h.i.+fts in his seat and shakes out a Marlboro. Smoke envelops his face as he squints through the winds.h.i.+eld and appears to reflect upon what he has told his young driver. ”The next time we're south on Route Nine we ought to swing over to Monmouth Battlefield. The Americans fell back, but stood up to the British well enough to show the French they were worth supporting. And the Spanish and Dutch. All of Europe was out to cut England down to size. Like the U.S. now. It was ironical: Louis Seize spent so much supporting us he taxed the French to the point where they revolted and cut off his head. One revolution led to another. That happens.” Charlie exhales heavily and in a graver, surrept.i.tious voice p.r.o.nounces, as if not sure Ahmad should hear the words, ”History isn't something over and done, you know. It's now, too. Revolution never stops. You cut off its head, it grows two.”

”The Hydra,” Ahmad says, to show he is not completely ignorant. The image recurs in Shaikh Ras.h.i.+d's sermons, in ill.u.s.tration of the futility of America's crusade against Islam, and was first encountered by Ahmad in watching children's television, the cartoons on Sat.u.r.day mornings, while his mother slept late. Just he and the television in the living room-the electronic box so frantic and b.u.mptious with the hiccups and pops and crashes and excited high-pitched voices of cartoon adventure, and its audience, the watching child, utterly quiet and still, the sound turned down to let his mother sleep off her date last night. The Hydra was a comic creature, all its heads chattering with each other on their undulating necks.

”These old revolutions,” Charlie continues confidentially, ”have much to teach our jihad.” Ahmad's lack of a response leads tfie other to ask in a quick, testing voice, ”You are with the jihad?”

”How could I not be? The Prophet urges it in the Book.” Ahmad quotes: ”Mohammed is Allah's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another. ”Mohammed is Allah's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another.”

Still, the jihad seems very distant. Delivering modern furniture and collecting furniture that had been modern to its dead owners, he and Charlie ride Excellency through a sweltering mora.s.s of pizzerias and nail salons, thrift outlets and gas stations, White Castles and Blimpies. Krispy Kreme Krispy Kreme and and Lovely Laundry, Rims and Tires Lovely Laundry, Rims and Tires and 877-TEETH-14, and 877-TEETH-14, Star-lite Motel Star-lite Motel and and Prime Office Suites, Bank of America Prime Office Suites, Bank of America and and Metro Information Shredding, Testigos de Jehovah Metro Information Shredding, Testigos de Jehovah and and New Christian Tabernacle: New Christian Tabernacle: signs in a dizzying mult.i.tude shout out their potential enhancements of all the lives crammed where once there had been pastures and water-powered factories. The thick-walled, eternity-minded structures of munic.i.p.al pur- signs in a dizzying mult.i.tude shout out their potential enhancements of all the lives crammed where once there had been pastures and water-powered factories. The thick-walled, eternity-minded structures of munic.i.p.al pur- pose still stood, preserved as museums or apartments or quarters for civic organizations. American flags flew everywhere, some so tattered and faded they had evidently been forgotten on their flagstaffs. The world's hopes had centered here for a time, but the time was past. Ahmad sees through Excellency's high winds.h.i.+eld clots of males and females his age gathering in gabbling idleness, idleness with an edge of menace, the brown skins of the females bared by skimpy shorts and tight elastic halters, and the males arrayed in tank tops and grotesquely droopy shorts, earrings and wool skullcaps, clownish jokes they play on themselves.

A kind of terror at the burden of having a life to live hits Ahmad through the dusty winds.h.i.+eld glare. These doomed animals gathered in the odor of mating and mischief yet have the comfort of their herded kindred, and each harbors some hope or plan of a future, a job, a destination, an aspiration if only to rise in the ranks of dope dealers or pimps. Whereas he, Ahmad, with abilities that Mr. Levy had told him were ample, has no plan: the G.o.d attached to him like an invisible twin, his other self, is a G.o.d not of enterprise but of submission. Though he endeavors to pray five times a day, if only in the truck body's rectangular cave with its stacked blankets and packing pads, or in a patch of gravel behind a roadside eating place where he can spread his mat for a cleansing five minutes, the Merciful and Compa.s.sionate has illuminated no straight path into a vocation. It is as if in the delicious sleep of his devotion to Allah his future has been amputated. When, in the long lulls of devouring the miles, he confesses his disquiet to Charlie, the usually talkative and well-informed man seems evasive and discomfited.

”Well, in less than three years you'll be getting the Cla.s.s A CDL and can drive any load-hazmat, trailer rigs-out of state. You'll be making great money.”

”But to what end? As you say, to consume consumer goods? To feed and clothe my body that will eventually become decrepit and worthless?”

”That's a way to look at it. 'Life sucks, and then you die.' But doesn't that leave out a lot?”

”What? 'Wife and kids,' as people say?”

”Well, with wife and kids on board, it's true, a lot of these big, meaning-of-it-all existential questions take a back seat.”

”You have the wife and kids, and yet you rarely speak of them to me.”

”What's to say? I love 'em. And what about love, Madman? Don't you feel it? Like I say, we got to get you laid.”

”That is a kind wish on your part, but without marriage it would go against my beliefs.”

”Oh, come on. The Prophet himself was no monk. He said a man could have four wives. The girl we'd get you wouldn't be a good Muslim; she'd be a hooker. It wouldn't matter to her and shouldn't matter to you. She'd be a filthy infidel with or without whatever you did to her.”

”I do not desire uncleanness.”

”Well, what the h.e.l.l do you desire, Ahmad? Forget f.u.c.king, I'm sorry I brought it up. What about just being alive? Breathing the air, seeing the clouds? Doesn't that beat being dead?”

A spatter of sudden summer rain from the sky-cloudless, an overall pewter gray shot through with smothered sunlight-speckles the winds.h.i.+eld; at the touch of Ahmad's hand the wipers begin their c.u.mbersome flapping. The one on the driver's side leaves a rainbow arc of unswept moisture, a gap in its rubber blade: he makes a mental note to replace that faulty blade. ”It depends,” he tells Charlie. ”Only the unbelievers fear death absolutely.”

”What about daily pleasures? You love life, Madman, don't deny it. Just die way you come to work early every morning, eager to see what's on our schedule. We've had other kids on the truck who didn't see a thing, didn't give a d.a.m.n, they were dead behind the eyes. All they cared about was stopping at the junk-food chains to eat a ton and take a p.i.s.s and, when the day was over, going out and getting high with their buddies. You, you got potential.”

”I have been told that. But if I love life, as you say, it is as a gift from G.o.d that He chose to give, and can choose to take away.”

”O.K., then. As G.o.d wills. In die meantime, enjoy the ride.”

”I am.”

”Good boy.”

One July day, on the way back to the store, Charlie directs him to swing into Jersey City, through a warehouse region rich in chain-link fences and glittering coils of razor wire and the rusting rails of abandoned freight-car spurs. They proceed past new gla.s.s-skinned tall apartment buildings being erected in place of old warehouses, to a park on a point from which the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan loom close. The two men-Ahmad in black jeans, Charlie in a loose olive-drab coverall and yellow work boots-attract suspicious glances from older, Christian tourists as they all stand out on a concrete viewing platform. Children who have just been in the domed Liberty Science Center dart in and out and jump on the low iron fence that guards the drop to the river. A breeze and swarms of sparkle like dazzling gnats come in off the Upper Bay. The world-famous statue, copper-green across the water, presents a rather diminished side view at this angle, but lower Manhattan thrusts forward like a magnificently bristling snout. ”It's nice,” Charlie observes, ”to see those towers gone.” Ahmad is too busy absorbing the sight to respond; Charlie clarifies, ”They were ugly-way out of proportion. They didn't belong.”

Ahmad says, ”Even from New Prospect, from the hill above the falls, you could see them.”

”Half of New Jersey could see the d.a.m.n things. A lot of the people killed in them lived in Jersey.”

”I pitied them. Especially those that jumped. How terrible, to be so trapped by crus.h.i.+ng heat that jumping to certain death is better. Think of the dizziness, looking down before you jump.”

Charlie says hurriedly, as if reciting, ”Those people worked in finance, furthering the interests of the American empire, the empire that sustains Israel and inflicts death every day on Palestinians and Chechnyans, Afghans and Iraqis. In war, pity has to be put on hold.”

”Many were merely guards and waitresses.”

”Serving the empire in their way.”

”Some were Muslims.”

”Ahmad, you must think of it as a war. War isn't tidy. There is collateral damage. Those Hessians George Was.h.i.+ngton woke from their sleep and shot were no doubt good German boys, sending their pay home to Mother. An empire sucks the blood of subject peoples so cleverly they don't know why they're dying, why they have no strength. The enemies around us, the children and fat people in shorts giving us their dirty little looks-have you noticed?-do not see themselves as oppressors and killers. They see themselves as innocent, absorbed in their private lives. Everyone is innocent-they are innocent, the people jumping from the towers were innocent, George W Bush is innocent, a simple reformed drunk from Texas who loves his nice wife and naughty daughters. Yet, out of all this innocence, somehow evil emerges. The Western powers steal our oil, they take our land-”

”They take our G.o.d,” Ahmad says eagerly, interrupting his mentor.