Khyber Run (21 page)
Authors: Amber Green
This, I figured, I could rub in with my cock. When I pulled his cheeks open and lined up, he stopped breathing.
"Exhale,” I whispered. He did. When I felt his ribs expanding again, I pressed. He went rigid. I held position, waiting, knowing that getting the head in would be the worst of it. When he relaxed just that little bit, I pressed in more. The head popped in. Then he swallowed my shaft, as a hungry ass will.
That ring of tight muscle slid down my shaft and throbbed at the base. He was so hot inside, so much softer than anyone would believe from the hard-ass exterior. I held him, just a moment. Then before he could get to wondering about that, I withdrew.
The cold outside air made his ass even hotter now that that tight ring rested just below my head. I slid back in. Hot. Sweet. Pulled out. Relished the contrast of the cold air on my naked—
I didn't have a rubber on. “Fuck!"
"What?"
"Don't turn over and kill me. I just now figured out we're barebacking."
He inhaled slowly. “When's the last time you did that?"
"Never."
He laughed, the feeling like a hand clenching about my cock. “Carry on then."
What? But my dick was already in motion. I angled to rub across his prostate, and he bowed, gasping.
Want more of that? I'll give you more of that!
If we'd had anything better than ghee to work with, I could have jackhammered his hole, and I bet he'd like it. But tonight I just pistoned inside him, rising on my knees more on one part of the stroke and lowering on another, giving the pump and thrust its own rhythm, and nudging that gland of his with every single thrust.
My balls swung between my thighs, accentuating every movement, brushing his warm skin every time my cock punched into his heated depths. This was the best part of being a man, feeling my balls swing and knowing what was in them. Feeling the swinging arc tighten as they drew close to my body for the shorter, harder strokes. Feeling the heat grow electric, almost painful. Knowing that I'd soon fly through paradise, even if I couldn't set foot and stay.
I belatedly remembered the reach-around. His hand was already there and knocked my hand away. I grasped his hips again, those powerful hips, and yanked them hard against me. My head prodded his gland, nuzzled it a bit more, then pulled back and thrust one last time.
Paradise
! Rapid spurts jetted through me, the backblast of each igniting a pleasure so intense it burned me from the inside out. Oscar made a noise and convulsed. His ass pulled, squeezed, and wrung another set of spasms from my prostate.
I fell forward across him, grabbing a mouthful of his short, thick hair and biting into it to keep from crying aloud.
The next day's walk was long. A bit before sunset, we drew near a larger walled enclosure. I looked up at the gun slits just below the top of the hujra tower, set at height-staggered intervals I'd seen before. My great-grandfather had decreed their placement, some high and some so low that every man and boy who could hold a rifle could help defend the khel.
I saw rifle barrels glinting now. Was I going to have to demand water? Had traditional Pakhtun hospitality deteriorated so much in one generation?
A window in the door cracked. A man coughed, shut it, coughed several more times behind it, and opened it. “May you not be tired."
I tried not to wilt with relief. From what I'd heard, that wasn't the open welcome it once had been. But it was something. “May you have peace, Uncle. I seek the hujra of he who is Hajji but before was called the Tiger."
The door swung open. “Enter quickly with your friend. The radio says there are foreigners about."
The men gathered in the hujra under a budding walnut tree hastily stood among the remnants of a skimpy-looking meal to shake hands. I recognized my grandfather, of course, and the old man sleeping gently by a sun-warmed wall was his father. My uncles had become gray-haired, hollow-cheeked, hawk-billed caricatures of themselves. My cousins were not the round-faced boys I remembered, but lean, hard men with what had been their father's faces. Some of those faces were bruised, and many of the hands were scraped and welted.
More tea was rapidly brewed, more naan brought out. I smelled almond sweets baking.
For an hour, we made agreeable, if sparse, conversation about the winter's end, the upcoming
Now Ras
festival, the condition of the flocks Oscar and I had observed on the way here, the way the Taliban meticulously counted each flock and took 10 percent.
Their choice of which ten, a man my age muttered, and the others shifted weight as to distance their opinions from his. With Oscar behind me, they should know I was no killjoy of a Talib, but a man with a family couldn't be too careful.
But no, they weren't looking at me. They instead threw sideways glances at my Uncle Abdallah. Who ignored them. Or pretended to.
Halwah and almond cakes were served warm with spicy ginger marmalade and more tea. Then rice came out, with a smallish pile of meaty curry. Oscar and I were urged to eat our fill, though only my grandfather shared the curry with us. The other men and boys ate rice, explaining apologetically they had filled their bellies before our arrival. More likely, there wasn't enough to go around. Turning a bleating animal into edible food takes more than the hour or so one could expect a guest to cheerfully wait.
My grandfather grunted that for all the years he had been granted to live, the students would be welcome to their 10 percent. He recalled for us the Shuravi, who had stolen a whole flock at a time—had indeed butchered any animal they didn't take and run trucks over the carcasses so that only dogs and evil birds might eat of them. The youngsters’ eyes shone as they drank in stories of the retaliatory raids.
As mine doubtless had. Until the very end, I'd been too young to join in except to hold the horses in a safe place, out of sight. My legs had been too short to keep up as the men flowed from nook to cranny among the rocks toward the final target, my little-boy arms not strong enough or long enough to properly wield one of the precious rifles.
By American standards, I'd been a little boy. Here, just too small and too inexperienced a warrior for such raids. Until that last one, the disaster.
One of the uncles explained to the youngsters that
Shuravi
had meant
friend
, until it had come to be used for the Soviets. I wasn't sure about that, but the matter wasn't mine to dispute.
Another cousin mentioned the neighbor's fond hopes the government would come fix the bridge on the highway so they could stop paying a cup of barley for every head of livestock driven over the bridge my uncles and cousins had built.
I sipped a few drops of green tea from my cup. I didn't want to be the first one here to fill my bladder. I had to watch where someone else emptied it before I hit that level of need.
The seeds I had brought were a paltry gift compared to the gifts I would need to accomplish my badal. Before I asked anything of these, my people, I had to establish bonds of a man with men, not of the shadow of a little boy who would, on a dare, climb anything that jutted toward the sky.
One boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, held his mouth gracelessly open, displaying canines that had grown in crooked, just like my brother Omar's, and just like an uncle whose name I couldn't remember. He breathed harshly too, making me want to take a look at his adenoids. But not tonight.
I took another six or eight molecules of tea and praised its scent. Now was the time I should tell them of myself and my family. My mouth opened—and closed with nothing said.
I looked again at the bruised faces and the scraped, bruised hands and forearms. Either they'd been in a riot, or they'd recently played buzkashi. A few of my uncles had an unbounded passion for the sport. “So, who among you threw the boz into the circle of justice?"
The openmouthed cousin sat up straight, his eyes glittering in the firelight. It had been a hard-fought game. The kind of epic game that starts one morning, restarts the following dawn, and ends just before evening prayer. Three of the boys elbowed one another and spilled bits of stories, fragments not yet patchworked together for the version that would enthrall generation after generation here in the hujra, as boys warmed their hands by the burning droppings of the many-times-removed grandkids of the goats whose droppings warmed us now.
And maybe that's what home was. Speaking before their elders was forward of them, a fact their fathers would no doubt let them know about later. But for now they were vastly entertaining and were fondly tolerated.
My great-grandfather yawned and stretched. Two of the cousins hurried over, handed him his teeth, and half carried him to the stool beside me, which an uncle hastily vacated. I stood, touched my heart, and shook his fragile, ancient hand. Oscar did the same.
The hajji was given a cup with maybe an ounce of tea trembling in the bottom of it. Any more, and he would have spilled it.
The conversation took up again. Someone mentioned my cousin Bad Shoes. I tensed, abruptly remembering his sneer.
Your mother left her father's home to find a husband.
I sipped another half drop of tea, willing the cup to hold still in my hand.
Bad Shoes had taught me a lot about fighting. When I'd gone to America, I'd used those lessons, busting noses and lips with wild abandon in my first schoolyard fight, taking out all my frustration and anger—and, yes, fear—on two other fourth-graders. They'd finally cowered against the fence, crying like little children, while I taunted them to stand up as if they had balls. When big hands grabbed me, I spun, fist cocked, and stopped dead. The old woman held me, the aide. I couldn't hit a woman.
And putting such fear in an old woman's eyes was shameful to any Pakhtun with a mother.
I dropped my fist and bowed, apologizing sincerely for having frightened her. Which is probably why, instead of being expelled, I got my first round of anger-management counseling and a full-time cultural transition aide.
But I'd missed something in the conversation around me. I focused. Bad Shoes had sponsored the game, with attendant feasts for all comers, to celebrate the circumcision of his third son. The cost should have beggared him, yet he still had six fine horses and his sons attended school. No one actually said anything might be amiss, of course. It was all in the shift of eye and shoulder, the trailed-off sentences.
I emptied my cup. My great-grandfather refilled it for me, splashing only a little on my wrist and knee. The scald was slight, and I saw it coming just far enough to dampen any reaction.
But then I froze. His cup was still full enough to slosh way up the sides with his hand's palsy. Was I supposed to refill it anyway, or offer to?
Doing nothing was an action, probably the wrong one, so I bowed to him over the fire. “My
Baba
surely taught me whether to refill the Hajji's cup, but after all these years, the memory becomes elusive. Please, advise a traveler correctly."
He smiled kindly. “My cup is far from empty. Family is the root of all good things God the Compassionate has put on this earth, is it not?"
"As the wise have said, so surely it must be. In the darkness of strange places, I often comforted myself and my brothers with the stories of our forefathers."
"Who are your brothers?” The crooked-toothed boy. Had he been so forward with only his uncles and forefathers present, he would've been promptly backhanded. But he'd asked what no man could be coarse enough to directly ask, and their relief was palpable.
I took a gulp of tea. The air went still. “My brothers were Hamid, Omar, Mohammed, and Sorrow."
"
Wezgorrey
!” A thin, heavy-bearded man tackled me, laughing in delight, knocking my head into Oscar's lap and kissing me right and left and right again, his beard scouring my wind-chapped lips. “It truly
is
you! You came home!"
I grasped his upper arms, felt the knob of an old break below his right shoulder. Recognition tightened my grip. “Kam Ali! You know me still?"
Amid shouts of
Mashallah
! he held me tight against him and suffered my hug in return. “We knew you would return, inshallah, wherever your destiny took you. From heart to heart, there are ways."
Another whooping cousin yanked me from his arms. I laughed helplessly, embarrassed as any American man, but let them sling me from one embrace to the next. Someone handed my great-grandfather a Kalashnikov; he emptied a deafening burst into the tree branches overhead, raining twigs and sticky green buds among us.
I caught a glimpse of Ali, still laughing wildly, jerking Oscar's face east and west for enthusiastic kisses.
The chant of thanksgiving rose with a shower of sparks. “
For he who was lost is found! He who was dead is returned to us! Mashallah, Wezgorrey is home! Mashallah
!"
Clapping started, and a handful of my cousins danced to the beat. My uncles joined, and the rest of the cousins. I held back, until my grandfather insistently waved me to join, and waved Oscar to join me.
We danced until I was breathless. Afterward, my uncles told me a “Ben” had come to them with a horse any man might kill for. He'd told stories of the family, and asked if they knew the family he sought. They'd been hospitable—of course, of course!—but Rund had no son named Ben, and the man had sounded oddly like a Nangrahari, like me. And his companion had smiled too much.
Ben's riding companion had come back alone days later, and had finally left without the bedraga to Pekhawar he'd demanded. No one of the khel knew or liked him well enough to grant him safe escort. Yes, he had returned with Ben's rifle. No, he did not return with Ben's beautiful mare.
But Bad Shoes had left an hour after him and had taken the family's only running truck and cargo trailer.
I showed them the printouts. They turned up the lamps and a crank-powered lantern. Yes, this was the Ben who had come to them, and yes, this was his companion. Alas that they had denied him! And yes, they would certainly finance badal against he who had murdered a son of Rund.
