Man of the Hour (2 page)

Back in the main room, Nasser took out his gun and pointed it at the woman reluctantly, tentatively, as if they both knew he had no intention of using it. He thought of saying something to reassure her, but decided against it—Youssef would be too angry. Instead, he stared at the little boy’s tinfoil badge, with its five points, wondering how long it had taken the woman to make it.

Then he heard the shot in the room behind the glass. A ferocious little sound like a balloon bursting. Part of him shriveled inside, hearing it. The room suddenly became warmer. The air closed in around his ears. The woman with the baby started to scream, knowing someone was dead. Nasser tried to say something to comfort her, but then the gun in the other room went off again.

He moved quickly into the doorway and saw the Rastaman splayed across the floor like a rag doll, arms and legs tossed around him, head turned, blood staining the front of his camouflage jacket and puddling on the floor next to him. Youssef was pulling the bills out of the cash drawer and stuffing them into the little blue laundry bag he’d had folded up in his back pocket. He didn’t see the bald black man in shirtsleeves rising up behind him, his face covered in blood, pulling out a small silver handgun.

Nasser saw his own hand rise with the .22, as if floating up through water. The impulse to squeeze the trigger came from somewhere besides his brain. The gun jumped and bucked in his hand and the noise bit into the air. A small part of the bald black man’s head flew off as he wobbled, fell against a stool, and slid down to the floor, still holding his gun. An angry black-red splatter remained on the wall panel behind him, with long spindly lines dripping down.

The woman in the other room scrambled, trying to get out the front door with the baby in the stroller. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this moment. Whereas everything had prepared Nasser. It was his destiny to be here and to do the things that would come afterward. So why did he still find himself paralyzed?

Youssef finished with the money, passed Nasser in the doorway, and came back into the main room. The woman turned away, not daring to face him. She understood that looking at either of them meant death. But it was too late. Youssef stepped up calmly and shot her in the side of the head.

She fell away from life, without even a chance to look back at her baby. And for a moment, this struck Nasser as unutterably sad, not at all part of the natural order. He knew these people were infidels and deserved to die, but he couldn’t help himself. When Youssef turned the gun toward the boy, who was screaming in his stroller, Nasser gently nudged him from behind.

“Come on, sheik, we have to go,” he said.

Two minutes later, as the car sped down Flatbush Avenue, Nasser still kept feeling the kick and burn of the gun in his hand. Slowly he tried to get back into the proper flow of time again. He fingered the key on the chain around his neck as headlights washed over the windshield and police sirens sounded in the distance.

“Don’t worry, my friend, they are not following us,” said Youssef, one hand on the wheel, the other fumbling for the little amber bottle of nitroglycerin pills in his shirt pocket. “We are going home.”

“What happened?”

“What do you mean ‘happened’? We were successful. I am so excited, I think I’m going to throw up. I don’t have a chance to count yet, but I’m sure we have enough to finance the next stage.”

Nasser realized he was still trembling from the force of events. “Sheik,” he said, using the word the way Americans called each other “sir.” “There’s something I have to ask you.”

“What?”

“Were you really going to shoot him? The little boy.”

“This is
jihad.
”
The Great Bear stared straight ahead into the oncoming traffic. “If it was God’s will, I would have.”

“But I was the one who pushed you out of there.” Nasser let go of the key and looked once over his shoulder, to make sure they weren’t being pursued.

Youssef shrugged. “Then that was God’s will too.”

2

A MORNING MIST WAS
burning off over the Atlantic and seagulls settled on the railings of the famous boardwalk along the southwestern rim of Brooklyn.

Nasser walked stiffly up the front steps of Coney Island High School, a salt-corroded, graffiti-insulted redbrick building on Surf Avenue. For the occasion he’d put on a black polyknit tie bought from an African street peddler in East Flatbush and a secondhand wool sports jacket that was much too warm for early October. He hadn’t been back in the four years since he left school, and now, as he walked into the lobby with a battered briefcase in hand and was confronted with the metal detector, he was not sure how to proceed.

“Please,” he said to the school security guard, “I have to see Mr. Fitzgerald.”

Come on. Keep them focused. Ten minutes before the buzzer.

Up in a fourth-floor classroom, David Fitzgerald angled his glasses and smoothed his beard as he read aloud from
The Red Badge of Courage.

“‘But here he was confronted with a thing of moment,’” he began, in a deep, chesty voice with a slight Long Island accent. “‘It had suddenly appeared to him that perhaps in a battle he might run. He was forced to admit that as far as war was concerned he knew nothing of himself.’”

He slammed the book shut with a dramatic pop, getting the attention of all thirty-six kids. They were jammed into the little dimly lit classroom with yellow walls, uneven wood-plank floors, and an old rotting hulk of a teacher’s desk at the front smelling vaguely of formaldehyde.

“All right, let’s throw this one out to our studio audience,” he said, keeping his voice up so he could be heard above the constant drilling upstairs. “We’re talking about this idea of being tested again. The whole notion of what a hero really is. So how many of you guys think you would run?”

The students turned on each other with incredulous snorts and fey high-pitched wisecracks. He was going at it too directly. These were Coney Island kids: you weren’t going to get them to own up to fear and vulnerability that easily.

“Come on, guys, don’t leave me hanging here.” He picked up the gnarled old Rawlings baseball glove he had lying on his desk from the discussion of
The Catcher in the Rye
earlier. “The point isn’t that I want you to memorize these books. The point is, I want you to find something of yourself in them. Or maybe to take something out of them that will become part of yourself.” He looked around, thinking he saw a few glimmers of light.

He slipped his left hand into the glove and pounded his right fist into it, savoring the loud
wop
bouncing off the classroom walls, feeling the performing juices start to flow.

“A-right, let me give you an example,” he said, wading in among them—all six feet two, two hundred and ten pounds of him—like a ship breaking through ice floes. “Back when I was a kid, I had a job being a lifeguard one summer at the Westbury Beach Club in Atlantic Beach. Can you imagine me in a bathing suit?”

He held up his arms and made a show of sucking in his ever-so-slack middle-aged gut, getting a round of giggles. “Yeah, right,” he said. “I looked like the ‘before’ picture in one of those muscle-builder ads on the subway. Anyway, my father was this big war hero with all these medals and I used to dream of doing something great to impress him. And everyone else. You know, common adolescent fantasy, right? You save the girl and she swoons in your arms.”

About three-quarters of the boys in the class smirked in recognition while the girls held back, waiting to be convinced.

“So one day, I’m up there on my lifeguard chair, waiting to be a hero, and I see this head bobbing up and down on the horizon. So I’m
on it.
Okay?” He moved toward the back of the class, hearing chair legs scraping on the linoleum floor as kids parted to get out of his way. “This is my dream girl, who I’m going to save. And I go running out there and I dive into the surf and I’m stroking against the current, man.” He mimed thrashing in the water, pulling back great handfuls of the Atlantic. “And then I get there, like two hundred yards out, and
it’s this big fat old lady in a bathing cap.
”

“Oh, snap!” yelled a boy called Ray-Za in the third row, who up until this minute had been staring mindlessly into his tiny Game Boy screen.

A few of the others cracked up too. It’s happening, David thought. After four weeks of school, they’re finally beginning to wake up after the long summer’s mental hibernation. Now was the time to grab them before they slipped back into indifference.

“So I’m trying to pull her out,” said David, doing the gasping-for-air bit. “And they tell you when you’re in lifeguard class, grab the hair—don’t grab an arm or a shoulder, because the person you’re trying to save may grab you and pull you down. So I grab for her bathing cap and it comes off and she’s like
bald
underneath.”

“Ho shit!” Merry Tyrone in the second row put a hand over her mouth.

“Oh yeah,” said David, heading back toward the blackboard. “She’s bald and she’s losing it
big-time.
She grabs me around the neck and starts trying to pull me down with her. This big bald lady is trying to drown me in the middle of the Atlantic. It was like some Freudian nightmare. Anyway, make a long story short, the skinny girl lifeguard I had a crush on from the club next door had to jump in and fish us both out.”

“Whhooo-aaa, Mr. Fitzgerald!”

The whole class went off, boys and girls equally. Well, that wasn’t exactly what happened, but who cared? They liked it when he told stories on himself. You were trying to spark them, engage them, break up the frozen sea in each of them.

“All right, so somebody else give me an example of character being tested,” he said, pounding his fist into the glove. “I’ll take anything from life or one of the books we’ve read.” He switched into his Coney Island sideshow barker’s voice. “Step right up. Make your case or get outta my face.
Think fast!
”

Without warning, he whipped off the glove and threw it to Elizabeth Hamdy in the first row. That bright and radiant girl who usually came to class wearing a white Arab head scarf and Rollerblades. He wanted her to set the tone for the others. She caught the glove and looked around, half embarrassed and half proud. No head scarf today.

“Um, what about Holden Caulfield?” she said quietly.

“Yeah, okay. What about him? Speak. You have The Glove.”

“Well, he has that dream near the end. About saving the kids falling off a cliff. That’s why it’s called
The Catcher in the Rye.”

“All right, but he only
thinks
about that.” David bowed to her. “He’s never really tested that directly. Can you give me a more concrete example?”

“Well, my father, when he crossed the river,” she said quickly and then lowered her eyes, hiding behind a smile.

“Yeah?” he said, not sure whether to push her. “What river was that?”

“The Jordan.”

“That’s in the Middle East, you guys.” David cocked an eyebrow at the rest of the class. You couldn’t make any assumptions about people’s knowledge of geography these days.

“Yeah, he’s Palestinian.” Elizabeth blushed a little.

“So why was crossing the Jordan such a big deal?”

“Because the Israelis shelled his family’s village,” she said shyly, not liking the attention but determined to answer the question diligently. “And his parents asked him to take his brother and sister across the river to Jordan. They thought everyone was going to get raped and killed by soldiers.”

“And so did he do it?” asked David. He hadn’t meant to delve so deeply, but the door was open now.

“Yes.” She swallowed and lowered her eyes. “One time, he said that when he crossed the river, it was like his childhood disappeared over his shoulder. But, you know, not everyone in my family was happy about it.” Her fingers curled up along the edge of the desk.

“Why not?”

“Some of them thought he should have stayed and resisted or something like that. But I thought it was more courageous, what he
did
do.”

“Which was what?” asked David, who remembered Mr. Hamdy only as a squat and exceedingly polite sixtyish grocery store owner he’d met on Parents’ Night last year.

“He survived,” she said, tightening her mouth a little. “He moved around a lot and eventually he saved enough money to come to this country and try to start a new life for his family. So it was like crossing another river.”

David sensed there was more to the story, but he decided not to push her on it. She’d said enough. In fact, if anyone else in the class had spoken that long, she would have been shouted down and called a loudmouth chickenhead. But with Elizabeth, the others hung back a little. They sensed she had a kind of glow about her, a special presence in the room. Look at her, thought David: she’s a star and she doesn’t even know it.

“Okay, thank you, Elizabeth.” He gave her a thumbs-up and saw her slump down a little in her seat, relieved she didn’t have to say any more.

“All right, somebody else!” he said, raising his voice so he could be heard above the construction racket upstairs. “Step right up. Make your case. All tales of guts and cowardice welcome.”

There was a pause, but he didn’t rush to fill it up. After fifteen years of teaching, he’d learned never to force the answers down their throats. Let them come to it, on their terms. That’s the only way they’d ever learn anything.

Eventually, Kevin Hardison in the back row half-raised his hand. He was a runty wannabe-gangsta with monogrammed gold caps over his front teeth, a Dollar Bill cap, and two sets of baggy clothes which he alternated day after day because likely that was all he could afford. Having been in fairly serious trouble himself when he was young, David always had a soft spot for the roughnecks and knuckleheads. He signaled for Elizabeth to throw Kevin the glove.

“I was gonna say something about how I moved last year,” the kid began with a soft lisp.

David started to stop him, saying he wanted to keep the discussion focused on heroism in literature. But then he remembered this was only the second time Kevin had spoken up in the first month of school. Better to let him go, to encourage him.