The Gulf (6 page)

But they'd miss his labor. And Ola wasn't any too good on the computer, keeping up with the payments and things.

He looked at the mountains for a long time. At last, he went inside the barn again, and a moment later water spattered anew on concrete, and on the hill the tails swung lazily, and in the sky the sun rose, and rose, and rose.

3

Karachi, Pakistan

THE parrot merchant hung on Phelan like a grinning tick, explaining how rare the birds were, how valuable, how easy they were to take care of. “He is perfect pet for ship,” he said over and over, washing him from inches away with breath like the garbage littering the alleys off Paradise Street.

Phelan evaded his eyes, hoping he'd give up. Passersby pushed past, women in dark clothes dangling enough gold to doom them in any American city, short men with glittering eyes that saw and understood everything instantly: American sailor, cornered by street merchant.

But then those eyes would freeze on his face.

The merchant reclaimed his attention by tugging on his arm. “Hey, I just don't want the fucking thing, man,” he said. His voice was so soft it was almost lost in the racket of unmuffled exhaust.

“But you want the women, yes? The women, they love birds. How beautiful he is. Look, just look at him.”

He found himself nose to beak with one of the parrots. He had to admit it'd give the guys on the Bitch a shit fit. Green and gold, its mascaraed eyes like inlaid disks of polished obsidian. But still it was just a bird in a cage. It smelled bad. The man had eight of them hanging over his back. A bicycle jostled him and they all screamed, a hoarse, terrible chorus of rage and vengeance that sliced through his Benadryl tranquillity like a honed straight razor.

“How much you askin'?” Phelan said in that same shy voice.

“Fifty dollars, U.S.”

“Forget it.” But at the mention of money his hand had gone to his back pocket, and the merchant's eyes had followed.

At last Bernard shook him off. He was fifteen minutes off
Long Beach
and had forty-eight hours of liberty ahead. He had things to do, places to be. And though he wasn't sure yet where they were, he didn't plan to look for them with a parrot on his back.

He'd looked forward to Karachi for weeks. Long weeks, out on the Be No Station. That was what they called it. Be No Booze, Be No Broads, Be No Liberty. Pakistan looked like a hellhole, but everyone said it was the best liberty in the Indian Ocean. The place was made for sailors. You could get anything there, they said in the gray passageways. Anything you wanted. Just make sure you took the bucks.

He slicked back sweat-wet hair and torched a Marlboro. The street was wide for the Middle East, lined with carpet shops and jewelers and Pakistanis selling shoes and leather and rugs. It reminded him of that place in New York City he'd gone once, couldn't remember the name, but it was crowded with street people like this. Lot of Paks there, too, Ethiopians, Russians, just about anything you could name.

Now that he thought about it, though, he'd never seen another American Indian the whole time he'd been in Manhattan. That was a kick. His people had kept their land. Thrown the Spanish out, killed the priests, then holed up on Sacred Mesa and dared the conquistadors to fuck with them. And made it stick, too.

Hospitalman Bernard Phelan, USN, hurried through the throng, and his reflection followed him in the storefronts: a lithe little man with a roll to his walk, broad cheekbones, a drooping mustache, and black eyes that never looked directly at anything. His bare shoulders were pale with old knife scars. His face was so smooth and expressionless no one could have guessed his age or his emotions. He had on Levis, Dingo boots, and a tooled leather belt with a hammered silver buckle. He'd had to wear a shirt across the quarterdeck, but now it was stuffed into the camera bag tossed over one shoulder. His sleeveless tank top said
I'M STUPID
.

For a moment, glancing back, he thought he saw a face looking his way. Then it turned away, looking into a window crammed with cameras. The lenses looked like birds' eyes. He stood rigid, anxiety struggling against the haze in his brain. Then he made himself relax. No problem, he reassured himself. They just never seen a Zuni before.

A few blocks on, he stopped before a curb full of cutlery. The vendor, a toothless old guy with something growing on his nose, immediately handed him a four-inch folding blade with a brass hilt decorated with rosewood. Bernard tried it on the sparse hair of his forearm. It was sharp, all right.

A little bargaining, meanwhile trying not to stare at the guy's nose, and he tucked the knife into his jeans with the money. Four hundred bucks. His paycheck, plus a nice chunk of change from coming in second in the anchor pool. He'd decided to plow it into the business.

He squatted back to the old man's level. The nose aimed left and right, then bent forward.

Phelan held out a five-dollar bill and asked him where he could buy some hash. The old man, grinning, told him to go to the sari market.

He figured it wouldn't be hard to find.

*   *   *

Phelan was Bernard Newekwe's second name. His
Melikan
name, his white name. He didn't care for it, but circumstances had forced him to use it for the Navy enlistment. He'd used his Zuni name the first time he'd joined up, at seventeen, in the Army.

From time to time, he wondered whether they were still looking for him.

Bernard was twenty-two now. He'd grown up in western New Mexico, one of six whose mother had been neither pretty nor sober enough to hold a man long enough for the formalities. At four, lousy and potbellied, he'd been taken away by white women in long dresses and placed with a family in Gallup. At seven, he'd been placed with a second family; at ten, a third. These people received money for taking care of children. There weren't enough of them and standards were low. He grew used to men's fists and women's tears. At thirteen, he'd gone to an aunt in Grants, then back to the pueblo with her when she'd lost her job making Indian fried bread for the tourists.

He learned from the older boys there how to fight, steal, and use a knife. Unemployment on the reservation was eighty percent, and he saw no point in wasting time in school. At sixteen, drunk, he'd tried to enlist at Fort Wingate, but they'd turned him down. At seventeen, he'd convinced his aunt to sign the papers for an underage admission.

For perhaps half an hour, waiting for the bus on Route 66, he'd thought his life was about to change.

At Fort Jackson he'd taken all the Basic shit, the Sitting Bull jokes and the pugil-stick poundings. Then on his first pass, he'd met a woman from Leesville who'd never screwed an Indian. She also needed help smoking ten ounces of prime grass. After nine days with her, it was gone and he decided he didn't feel like going to cooks' school—let alone the stockade time the Army would want first.

He'd hitchhiked home from South Carolina, making up a story about a medical discharge, and stayed there with his aunt and then two or three other women, Denise being the last. Till he'd carved a five-inch groove in Donicio Kawayoka's chest.

He couldn't remember now whether it'd been over money, jealousy, or an envelope of speed. Late that night, however, two of the elders from the Muhewa, his mother's clan, had come by to visit him. They'd pointed out in a friendly way that he wasn't really one of the Corn People. He'd taken no initiation, and no sacred animal had revealed itself to him. He didn't even speak the Shi Wi tongue. They admitted there wasn't much future in the pueblo for a young man like him. Perhaps life would offer him more somewhere else, far away.

Bernard took this advice seriously. The elders looked harmless and feeble, but people who ignored them tended to get run over by pickup trucks on dark nights. He'd headed for Santa Fe the next day. Far away? He decided to join the Navy.

*   *   *

His destination, when he found his way to it through the mazy streets, wasn't what he'd expected. It was surrounded by alleyways so narrow the light reached no inch of them directly—the typical souk layout. The air was crowded with spices, sweat, perfumes, and wailing Arab music. The last man he asked about the “sorry market” pointed to a huge concrete-block building.

He stood outside for a few minutes, peering in uncertainly. Was this it? The people going in and out the glass doors were all women.

The Benadryl he'd sneaked on the ship was wearing off and he stuck his hands in his jeans to stop their shaking. This was the part of town they told you not to go into without your buddies. But he had no buddies—or none he could take with him on this piece of work.

Twice in the half hour since he'd bought the knife, he'd thought he saw the face behind him. It was hard to tell. They all looked the same, short and dark with big mustaches. But this guy had on a pink shirt.

Now he couldn't decide whether to go in or not. The sense of doom increased till he could hardly breathe.

At last, he crossed the street, sweating and dizzy, and had a slow drink and a slower smoke, watching from a café. The guy didn't show again, so he paid and went out. He stood for a moment blinking and mumbling to himself in the sudden heat, waiting for a donkey cart to go by.

It was like bingo night on the reservation. The fluorescents were nearly all burned out once you got past the entrance, and the interior was thronged with about a million women, all of them yelling at the tops of their voices. He swallowed nausea as he looked down flickering blue corridors roofed with the spinning disks of electric fans. Each booth was lit with a bulb in the back, where the samples hung, more colors and embroidery than he'd ever seen in his life, and women sat in folding chairs drinking coffee out of doll-size cups and picking flies off sticky pastries.

This wasn't what he was looking for. He came to a smoky space of air and found himself at a cooked-meat stand. The smell made him suddenly ravenous. He bought a shish kebab. The flesh was unfamiliar, strong, but it was good and he ate it all. Then he rubbed his greasy fingers on his jeans and was back in it again, the noise, the heat, the flies, the musky perfume so thick he wanted to hawk it out like phlegm. On impulse, he asked the meat man, “Hey, you know where I can buy some drugs?”

The guy didn't speak English, and Phelan drifted off again.

Eventually he came to the back. This was lit even worse than the main area, and there were no women. Just stalls, most of them dark, and men sitting in the shadows, smoking or talking in low voices. Phelan saw a brass telescope in one of the stalls. There was other junk, too, old lamps, used radios, that kind of stuff.

He suddenly felt it again, very strong now, that irrational, doomed fear that grabbed him more and more often the last few months. He stood trembling in front of the stall, looking around again for the guy in the pink shirt, or for cops.

The light clicked on. Someone was in there. He unslung the camera bag and went in.

The bearded Pak bought the big Navy binoculars for thirty dollars. Phelan insisted on being paid in American money. The bills were grimy and faded, as if they'd been lying in the cash box since World War II, but they looked spendable.

Bernard asked him where he could buy drugs. The man examined him for a few seconds, his smile unaltered. Then turned to the shadows and called out.

The Paks with the dope were kids, fourteen or fifteen. There were two of them. They had drip, hashish, in several forms. They had it in paste, in what they called brown sugar, and in what looked like chewing tobacco. Phelan didn't like the looks of the tobacco. Or rather, it looked too much like tobacco. He'd been burned on buys before. The paste looked like shoe polish and tasted like marijuana. “You got anything else?” he said. “That rubbed Kashmir, or hash oil?”

“We have some opium,” said the one who spoke English. “Real qual-i-ty.”

“Let's see it.”

The opium came in plugs the size of his little finger. It was wrapped in aluminum foil. Phelan unwrapped one and sniffed. It smelled like it looked, dark brown, sweetish, burnt honey and incense. “How much of this is a hit?” he asked the kid.

“That's a hit.”

“What do you people do with it? Smoke it?”

“You can smoke it or eat it. Smoking it is better.”

“How much is it? For a hit?”

The kid wanted twenty dollars. Phelan thought that was high, but he wanted some. Now. He said, “You got more of this?”

“You want a brick,” said the Pak. “Do you want a brick? It's cheaper. Enough for a long time.”

The other kid showed him the brick. It was easily the size of three regular Hersheys. There had to be enough for a month at sea. Phelan wanted to try some right there. But at the same time he was afraid. Like he always was at a buy. The kids didn't seem worried, though, even when someone walked by. They must have their protection behind them. He let his fingers brush the knife.

“How much is the brick?” he asked the kid.

They only wanted three hundred for it. Phelan felt he'd stumbled onto good luck at last.

Once the money was in their hands, it seemed as if the transaction was over. They turned instantly and walked away. He decided to imitate them. He jammed the opium down into his jeans and went back very fast through the chattering women, under the drone of the fans. When he hit sunlight again, he felt safer. He grinned, anticipating the high he was going to feel in a few minutes. No more cough syrup stolen from the ship's pharmacy. No more Tylenol with codeine. Not for a long time.

Then he realized he was lost.

He'd come out a different exit and he didn't know which one. The souk was all around him. This seemed to be the shoe department. The stalls were filled with boots, sandals, sneakers. He started walking, his fingers clamped inside his pocket. What a deal. He'd chew some first. He'd heard you shouldn't do that; they rendered it with rat fat and you could get hepatitis. But just then, sweating and trembling, he didn't care.