The Dog (5 page)

“You have my blessing,” Omar said. He knew the boy would never go through with it, and that was fine because he wanted him nearby where he could keep an eye on him. He was a caged bird and he'd get eaten alive in Ürümqi.

Omar turned his attention back to the barrel of the pipe. The blade hitched against a lump of carbon fused to the shank. Eventually he gave up on the pipe and located a container of snuff. He scooped one long pinkie nail through the powder.

“Don't think I won't do it,” Anwher said.

“It would be the only thing you've ever managed on your own,” Omar said.

“I'll do it,” Anwher said.

“I'm sure you will,” Omar replied. He wrinkled his nose and brought another scoop of snuff to his nostril, inhaled, and waited for the blur to settle into his brain. With his free hand he felt around behind him for a pillow. “Off to see your boyfriends tonight?”

Anwher stood up, shaking his head and smiling crookedly, amazed as ever at the old man's capacity for provocation. “You truly know how to injure a man,” he said. “Good night, Grandfather. Blessings upon you.”

“Get a haircut,” Omar called after him. “You look like a girl.” The boy had always been a torment. He took a beating without a word, afterward never showing any sign of anger. Shot in the head, he'd rise up to commend his assassin. It had occurred to Omar that this trait was the mark of the divine—who else but a truly spiritual man could be so guileless?—but it was dangerous to be known as a forgiving man. Forgiveness had no place in this world. Omar wasn't going to be around forever. What would the boy do then?

He rummaged around for another pipe and smoked some hashish. Before long he was asleep, his hands tucked into his jacket in case a hungry rat picked up the smell of food on his fingers.

*   *   *

The restaurant across the street kept a little monkey. Most of the time it lazed on the warm brick by the pit oven eating Kishu oranges, occasionally rousing itself to harass a customer. It would steal parcels and toss them onto the hot coals where the naan baked.

When Anwher emerged from his grandfather's quarters, he saw the monkey preening the fur on its peach-size face, and he looked around for some trash to fling at it. The hunk of tire he found flew over the monkey's head and thudded against the restaurant's tin roof. The owner came out with fists raised, ready for anything.

“Why? Why?” said the poor man, mortally wounded for the thousandth time.

Anwher shrugged and started up the street.

“Worthless,” the restaurant owner shouted. “You're a piece of shit!” As always, Anwher pretended not to hear and disappeared into the crowd.

He wandered deep into the Chinese market, his hands stuffed in his pockets so no one could accuse him of anything, and he tried to walk proudly, meeting the eyes of any Chinese who looked him in the face. The market smelled of garlic and rotten cabbage and was lit by strands of lightbulbs drooping over the street. He caught sight of his barber working behind a cart stacked with chicken cages, and he abruptly turned on his heel and cut through the crowd.

The broad-faced Chinese man was moving gracefully around his customer, a mound of flesh who had established himself, like the cap of a mushroom, on a low wooden stool. From time to time the customer gave his newspaper a shake to clear the hair clippings. Otherwise he was still as a mountain. The barber combed and trimmed in silence, his hands gliding about the man's enormous head. Anwher waited quietly, in a strange communion with the barber, those conjurer's hands, the unmoving customer, until an old auntie pushed him out of the way.

“You're spooking the chickens. Go wait over there,” she said to Anwher, pointing at a stool with a folded bib atop it. “I'll get to you in a minute.”

He ignored her.

“You deaf?” the auntie said. She held her left hand, palsied and shaking violently, to her ear. Then she recognized Anwher and said, “For a little extra, I'll cut with the right.” She laughed like she was choking on a bone.

He knew the type. Like all Chinese, she was working an angle.

“There's only one thing you get paid extra for,” Anwher said, “and you're so old I'd probably fall in.”

The woman squinted slightly. “Get out of here. We don't serve your kind.”

“Sure you don't.”

“A haircut's not what you need. Maybe a hatchet between the eyes,” she said evenly. Anwher lifted an eyebrow and tried to stay cool. The barber and his patron both looked up slowly, as if they'd been disturbed from the mutual appreciation of a huge, tranquil painting.

“Everything okay, Ma?” the barber said.

“This Uyghur,” she said.

The barber limped over, his comb and scissors by his side. He hadn't received enough iron as a child and his legs were crooked. “It's no problem. I know this gentleman.” He craned his neck to see the sides of Anwher's head. “Little shaggy on the sides.”

“Yeah,” said Anwher.

The barber assessed him. “Don't tell me you've started picking fights with old ladies?”

Anwher coiled slightly. “How was I supposed to know she was your mother? Now I know.”

“Hey, don't take it so seriously. I'm just messing with you. We're okay, right?”

“It's fine,” Anwher answered.

“That's the spirit,” the barber said. Then he held up his comb and scissors and said, “We aim to please.”

“I don't go looking for fights,” Anwher said.

“Of course not. Have a seat over there and I'll be with you in a minute,” the barber said. He made a playful jab at Anwher's shoulder, and the young man juked like a prizefighter. The barber smiled and held out his hand for a shake. Anwher rolled his shoulders and tugged on his lapels. Among the Chinese he had no friends, but in this predictable monthly transaction there was a sort of comfort, one that relied on the rules of commerce to ensure that the razor the Chinese man put to his throat would never draw blood. There was, Anwher reasoned, no point in this Chinese doing him any harm. He tipped well and treated the barber like a valued servant. But the old woman had thrown the balance, and Anwher hated her for it.

“Come on,” the barber said. He limped over to a stool and snapped out the bib, shaking it playfully for the young bull. Anwher sidled over and the barber tied the bib around his neck. He went back to his other customer.

“It's the heat,” the barber said softly. “I saw two old ladies beating each other with their canes yesterday.” The fat man chuckled, his paper rattling as he heaved.

“I don't notice it,” Anwher said, but as soon as he'd spoken he wished he hadn't.

“Lucky man,” said the barber. “Always better to close one's eyes than curse the darkness.”

The barber's mother had been studying Anwher all this time. “I never forget a face,” she said, shaking a stubby finger at him.

“Take it easy, Ma,” the barber said around the comb clamped between his teeth.

Clearly the old woman was deranged, but Anwher couldn't catch the barber's eye to confirm it. The barber cut merrily along while his customer read the paper. The chickens scratched in their cages.

*   *   *

The old woman had spent a fair amount of time in Uyghurville. Those people didn't frighten her. And she knew exactly who this was in front of her. She had given herself to his grandfather in return for a lamb for her son's wedding. The other Chinese girls acted superior to the Uyghurs and complained about every little thing, but not her. She did what was asked, and she got repeat business.

That had been years ago. Sometimes she saw the old gangster in the street. She didn't step aside. A rich Uyghur was still worth less than a Chinese whore.

The boy's grandfather had been rough with her, but she hadn't complained. Afterward they had lain in his murky room, a place composed entirely of desperate corners light could not find, angled shadows where anguish had taken up residence. It made her skin crawl: everywhere the spirit of the dead wife.

After a while, the old man had called out and the boy silently appeared at their feet. He had a shadow of hair on his upper lip. She pulled the sheet over her breasts.

“Take a go at this?” the old man said.

The boy shook his head.

“Come on, I'll show you how. You put your little worm in the slit.” He tore away the sheet and grabbed her between the legs.

The boy shook his head, his eyes down.

“Faggot,” Omar said.

She set her jaw in case he decided to strike her. People were like that.

Instead he made a sudden lunge at the boy, but Anwher dashed out of the room before Omar's feet touched the floor.

The gangster shook his head. “This is the sort of crime that has been visited on me every day of my life. I should get it over with and buy him a man,” Omar said. He went on and on, talking, talking about the boy, the dead wife, business trouble.

As his semen dried to a crust on her thigh, it pulled tightly at the delicate hairs there. He had gone at her with everything he had. She hadn't complained.

From the other room came the sounds of the boy crying, and the old man had stopped talking. He sat up and told her to get dressed.

With only a blanket wrapped around his waist, he'd led her outside. At the restaurant across the street, the lamb carcass had been skinned, gutted, and strung up by its hind legs from the eave. The monkey was making a show of poking at the milky eyeballs, then leaping back to cower behind its owner's legs. In the heat the carcass had begun to sweat and a small crowd gathered as she'd struggled to get the slick body from the rusty hook and into the wooden cart. Without anyone's help she managed to wrestle the viscous thing down. Her clothes clung to her body like a caul. After she'd loaded up and gotten a little ways down the street, the gangster stepped through the crowd and called her name. “Tight Chinese hole,” he shouted after her, his fingers forming an O. The crowd laughed. She'd gripped the wooden cart handles and leaned toward the Chinese end of the market.

She knew all about this Uyghur in front of her.

*   *   *

From his stool Anwher catalogued the tools at her disposal. She had scissors. A razor lay on a corroded tray nearby. Rope lay coiled at the foot of the chicken cages, which were stacked in a bank high enough to conceal him from the crowd. Even if he cried out, no one would hear him over the noise. This was his usual means of entertainment. He imagined his own death and cultivated baroque fantasies involving a funeral march through the market. Everyone would be sorry, especially his grandfather, whose heart would break when he gazed upon the beautiful corpse.

After a while, the dim light and heat overpowered him and he dozed off and dreamed about a huge pillowed room filled with bodies twisting like lizards around each other. There were no faces and he lay with women and men alike and never needed to stop.

When he awoke, the barber was close to him, studying his face. Anwher smelled garlic on the man's breath. He glanced down to make sure his erection wasn't showing.

“You have a noble nose,” the barber said softly.

Anwher wiped his face with his hands. The barber stepped back and began to move his arm. The razor slapping against the strop sounded desperately final.

“Tilt,” the barber said, applying two fingers to Anwher's chin. A metal pot was steaming over a fire, and the barber plucked out a hot towel. He laid it over Anwher's mouth and went back to sharpening the blade.

“This makes some people nervous,” the barber said.

“Not me,” Anwher said into the towel.

The barber got down to business and neither one said a word until he was done.

Actually, it was the old woman who spoke first. “How fetching,” she said. “The boys at the Secret Garden will love it.” The barber's scissors snapped around Anwher's head, touching up the tight crop.

“She's bad for business,” Anwher said.

“Hm,” said the barber. He pressed a small plastic mirror into Anwher's hand. Anwher inspected the cut, then rose from the stool and worked at the bib's knot. He fumbled with it long enough to become aware that everyone was looking at him. “Allow me,” the barber said. It was off instantly.

Anwher held out a twenty, a generous sum. He wasn't sure why he'd offered more than usual. The barber bowed.

“If the old woman hadn't shot off her mouth it would have been forty,” Anwher said.

She looked up from her bowl of noodles. “Hey, young man, no hard feelings. It's on the house.”

“Very funny, Ma,” said the barber, flashing the banknote at her. For a moment something other than composed serenity flashed across his face. Then it was gone, replaced by the set line of his mouth.

“What? Speak up,” shouted his mother. “We're not so bad off we need dirty money.”

The barber winced. Grasping Anwher's hands in his own, he said, “Good night. Be well. See you soon.”

“Listen to me,” his mother said. “We don't need money from that piece of filth. Give it back. Don't make me embarrass you in front of these people.”

The barber tried to laugh, but it was a weak, nervous effort and hardly any sound came out at all. Gingerly he ventured a hand forth to pat Anwher on the shoulder, then thought better of it. “She's not well,” he whispered.

“No shit. Who is she, to be talking about filth?” Anwher said.

“Accept my apologies. She's like a naughty child. It happens. It's the heat. The heat does terrible things to an old mind.”

“They say the murder rate goes up when it's hot,” Anwher said in a tone meant to be menacing. As usual, it hadn't come out right.

“That's true. It's a fact,” said the barber. When Anwher didn't respond, the barber added, “It makes us all do things we don't mean.”

For reasons Anwher couldn't quite comprehend, the barber's obsequious behavior angered him. He was like a fat bottle fly buzzing over a plate of food, its mere presence ruining the entire meal. “She's no different in the dead of winter,” Anwher said. “I can tell these things about people. Bitter old bitch.”