Fiction
from "Fridays by the Pool in Khalidiyah"
Once, in the first year after she and Firaj moved to Abu Dhabi, to a compound in Al Mushrif, she'd heard screams coming from the villa next door, then an hour later an ambulance pulling into the shared drive. They had only a passing acquaintance with the neighbours, a couple from Belgium (a bit stuffy, but pleasant enough) and the two Filipinas who worked for them.
"I don't understand," she'd told Firaj. "What could they possibly need two maids for? They don't even have kids." And Firaj had explained that most likely one did the shopping and cooking, the other took care of the house. "Polishing the silver, who knows?" he'd said. "You'll never get this, will you? When money is no object, people don't have to do anything they don't feel inclined to do." His own mother in a suburb of Amman still employed a live-in maid, though she was a widow with no grandchildren.
Angie didn't know the maids' names, just raised her hand in greeting when she saw them. One had a sweet smile; the other only bobbed her head. The smiley maid seemed to be gone, Angie noticed about a week after the ambulance. She'd been the one who usually went out with the Belgian woman to help with the shopping. Now it was the other one who unloaded the plastic bags from the back of the SUV.
One afternoon when Angie was leaving to pick up their mail at the post office, she found the maid standing next to her car. "Please," she said, looking around. "Please." The woman looked so desperate, Angie coaxed her into the car.
"I need phone," said the woman. She wasn't especially young, Angie saw now. "I am Inez." The other maid was in the hospital, she said. The man had thrown her against a wall, then knocked her to the kitchen floor when she'd refused to give him a massage. There was blood. The man had finally called an ambulance. But now there were other problems, said Inez. The couple had taken away her mobile phone, afraid she might tell someone what had happened. Madame was yelling all the time and the man was now looking at her. "You know?" She kept turning around to look down the street as she spoke. Madame was due home any minute from a luncheon, she told Angie. "Today I wait for you. You always wave."
If the phone got traced back to Angie, she'd have to deal with the couple. There could be legalities, complications. She might get Firaj into trouble. Then she noticed Inez's hands, chapped, scabbed, scarlet. It hurt to look at them. She opened her purse, rummaged for her phone, handed it over. But the charger. She'd have to run inside for the charger. A bronze Land Rover appeared in the rearview mirror.
When the Belgian woman climbed down from her SUV a minute later, head bent into her mobile, she waved to Angie, who watched as Inez, standing on the curb as if she'd been waiting all this time for Madame to return, took the Paris Gallery bag she was handed. Inez did not look back, but Angie had seen her slip the phone into her uniform pocket as she sprang from the car.
For the next few days, Angie called her mobile. No one answered, no one returned the calls. She told Firaj, in minimal detail, what had happened. He wasn't impressed. "You've got to be more discreet. Who knows who these people are connected to? Remember that we are guests in this country. And even though we are the majority and Emiratis amount to...what? barely 15 percent of the population...it's their party."
01
Monday, August 23, 1993
Bernie Donatello held his breath and jiggled the accelerator pedal. The old truck coughed, jerked, and almost stalled. He yanked his foot off and jammed the clutch in, then tried it again, easing down on the pedal as he slipped the clutch out, praying mechanically, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, blessed is the fruit of thy womb …” His forehead was beaded with sweat, his jaw rigid. The muscles in his right leg were so tight they almost cramped. The truck lurched, coughed, then finally caught and jerked forward, easing out of the dark tunnel mouth of the bridge.
A cone of light flooded the doorway of the empty Customs shed as the truck inched past. Bernie caught a glimpse in the mirror of a uniformed man lurking in the shadows. The truck hiccuped again, faltered, then slid forward, finally slipping out of the bridge like a sick worm oozing out of a metal hole into the wet Canadian night. He hauled the steering wheel to the left, turning the rig toward Bridge Street, checking his mirrors again to make sure the trailer was okay. As the end of the rig cleared the bridge, he saw a shadow flit through the light and disappear into the shed.
Bernie started breathing again. He didn’t know what worried him more—the old rig breaking down, or getting jammed in the little bridge. He knew just how it would feel—he’d run it through his mind so many times—the screech of metal on metal as the rig suddenly jerked to a stop. He’d be trapped like a rat. It was bad enough worrying about the damned guard without having to worry about breaking down or getting stuck. What the hell would he do then? Jump out and run for it, he figured—hightail it back to America and leave the damn truck for Sal to worry about. It would serve the son of bitch right, too.
He breathed deeply, trying to slow down his racing heart. The headlights reflected off the puddles on the greasy black asphalt of Bridge Street. A sharp pain shot through his stomach, and he got that funny taste in his mouth. How much longer could he take this? Every time he came across, it was the same damn thing. It didn’t matter what Sal told him about it all being fixed. It didn’t even matter how many times he made the trip and nothing happened. A million things could go wrong. The truck could get jammed up. Or break down, more likely. They could change the Customs guy, put him on another shift at the last minute. Then what would happen? Bernie would eat it big time, that’s what. And Sal would be gone so fast, all you’d see was a little dust cloud, like in those cartoons.
He thought about being taken under the ground. He tried not to, but he couldn’t help it. Ever since that time he and Edie took the bus up to Toronto, he couldn’t get that picture out of his head. He hated going on the bus because he knew they’d get hassled, but she was worried about him drinking up there and she didn’t want to take the car. She’d put her foot down and that was that. He was right, though. They always stopped you when you were on the bus.
Excerpt from the Prologue
The summer before Will Edwards was kidnapped in Colombia, a medicine man told him he held the spirit of the butterfly. That was fine, but Will had participated in the healing ceremony in hopes of easing his inflamed knees, not because of an urge to fly.
Jake Across-the-Mountain was a reputable healer. People from Monarch Valley claimed that fire jumped from his hands. Jake told Will he didn’t know if he could erase the effects of thirty years of hard-rock diamond drilling, but he’d give it a go. Both men agreed this was not to be a sacred sweat—Will did not wish to offend Jake by pretending he was a blood brother in search of a miracle cure. It was simply a case of bad knees bringing friends together on a late August afternoon.
By mid-ceremony, Will’s concentration had crashed. With streaming eyes and a throat as dry as the sizzling juniper before him, he could no longer hear Jake moaning away in a language more akin to wind and tree than human speech. He thought only of escape, of getting outside and freeing himself from the smoke-filled tepee. When Jake revived the embers with a second handful of juniper, Will fell into a coughing fit that nearly rocked him off his fake-fur car seat cover. He began to wonder if this healing ceremony would kill him.
Will wished he could believe in the magic of the ceremony, but the ritual seemed sadly out of touch with the present day. When his mother was alive, the ancient ways held power. Her Cree medicines worked in harmony with the older, slower pace of life.
So when Jake opened his eyes and looked through his transition lenses set in their allergy-free, flexible titanium frame and asked Will to describe what he felt, Will stared back blankly. He didn’t want to admit that his legs were cramping and he couldn’t breathe. Jake waited. Will recalled a soft brush against his cheek, but he assumed that a sign of healing would be… well, bigger. His knees still hurt as he awkwardly hauled himself upright. He shook his head and grinned at Jake. No. Nothing.
Jake ducked out of the tepee and held the flap open for Will. Instantly revived by the flood of fresh air, Will greedily sucked buckets of air into his singed lungs. The summer sun soaked the men in gold as it slid behind the purple mountains beyond the river. They meandered along a path through Jake’s backyard—a tangle of tall grasses, timothy, and wildflowers. Giant yellow swallowtailed butterflies, copper, blue, white, grey, sulphurous yellow butterflies, tiny elfin butterflies, speckled, checkered, angle-winged, frayed, and ragged butterflies surrounded them. The dusty golden light shimmered with their collective wing movement.
Jake absorbed the sight. “So it is true,” he said.
Will looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
“You have the spirit of the butterfly.”
Within a week, the inflammation in Will’s knees subsided. He golfed a seventy-eight and got his first hole-in-one. A thousand golf swings later, Will Edwards accepted the foreman’s position from the owner of a small drilling company operating in Colombia.
