Joseph McElroy: Night Soul and Other Stories

My wife turned a tidy profit dealing second-hand dual-pedal automobiles to driving schools. How could this be?

The times. A statement. We would go camping, my wife said. We? I said.

“I need a camera.” Two afternoons ago it was “want.” A clarity in the voice, a mission.

Where was the $3? Mom said, who’d given it to him on a morning forgetting that he had a student bus pass. She never forgets, so what is it? Her grown son Abbod hadn’t slept there last night. She had cooked special lamb with mint stalks that were Ali’s assignment.

What was my job?

The $3? Ali gave it away. To a poor person? she asked “a faquir ?” No, a friend in his class.

“What is your job? You don’t work in the afternoon?” Ali asked. “I am a poet,” I said. We’re in a large deli with a small haul of apples, orange, bananas in a basket, bag of SunChips. “You are a poet!” He is interested and we will meet again. “I write poems — sometimes,” I caution, appreciating his verdict on what I am. And I add, “Either you are one or you’re not.” “ I am one then,” he plucks a Balance Bar from a candy rack near the register and looks at it, as I weigh my sort-of lie. “I write advertising copy but I don’t have a job right now.” “My big brother — he has a job to do and he also does not have a job.” Showing a card at the checkout I address the girl by her tag, “Shakira,” adding, “You people have the greatest names.” “Debit or credit?” is the reply I deserve. “You ladies here at the register.”

I found the words to every thought I never had, but I wanted the person to speak them to. My wife half hears me, the other half knows me, she thinks.

What’s that name mean ? I ask Ali aside, thinking, What is my job? I’ll be clocking in somewhere soon, hearing a man at the back call her, “Hey Shak.”

Outside something hit the pavement from two or three stories up. I laughed. What was it? asked Ali. Two men race past the deli. Three others gather. “Something my wife said.” What ? said Ali, a dark flash of the eye. (News of another family?) “‘Pounding the pavements’ is what I said to her .” Ali pointed out the window, I shook my head. “No, looking for work is what it means.” “That’s what I told her I was doing today.” “Looking for work?”

“Yes, what she said was, when she left for work, ‘Try pavements that intersect. With the old, your father’s, with father neighborhood’—she’ll say anything — you have to listen, put it in context. ‘Coney Island,’ she said, but I thought Coney Island Avenue.” “Where you met me,” said the boy, delighted.

The rest I kept to myself, I could smell her, the jasmine and behind it some green tea and witch hazel message, “map your day, Mister Mo,” says my wife, “you ahead of someone else, someone there ahead of you.”

He knows percents. I will try him on decimals. He went to the store for his mother. He could “crunch the numbers” in his head, his pride, his old algebra.

I find in the leather-and-stacked-bath-towel-smelling closet one night the digital camera I’d been thinking about. I think that he should have it. I give it to him Monday. “This cost a whale of a lot of money,” he says, his face glowing darkly. “It’s yours.” Ali leafs through the little dog-eared pages, “In…structions in four languages.” My cell phone goes and I let it ring and Ali is cool with it. “Everything must go,” I say.

Kids didn’t invite Ali home.

I will save Ali, it comes to me. From what?

The game’s the thing, it’s another day, crossing against the red: Did he know the stories from his part of the world actually, like Noureddin and the beautiful Persian and the caliph who disguised himself as a fisherman, did he know Ali Baba and—“Forty Thieves,” Ali breaks in—“Ancient and interlocked—?” I went on but “Ah!” says the boy, a friend from some olden time. The two dreams of treasure? I said — and I’m explaining that the first dreamer follows his to Isfahan, is arrested among thieves by a man who dismisses the dream and tells his own, disbelieving it too, freeing the first dreamer, sending him back home to Cairo where amazingly he finds the second dreamer’s dream true — a treasure in your own backyard. The Arabian— ? I began, or did Ali know The Thousand and One— ?—looking over his shoulder at something behind us — tales broken off to be continued—“You bugging?” he interrupts — meaning Of course I know The Thousand and One Nights —that go on and on, always interrupted— Not always (Is the boy…? Had I gone too far?)…“They are not true,” said the boy. “Well they’re what could happen,” I said. “And bad things in them, I think,” Ali added. “Who said?”

Ali’s father. The imam, too, Ali thought. Your family, I said.

Not everyone. “Maybe not me ,” the boy says huskily. “My big brother, he says I got to pray but—” “For what?” “He don’t say his prayers all the time.” “But sometimes he does, Ali.”

Mom asked why had Ali walked home. Abbod had spotted him on the sidewalk halfway from school waving to someone. The game store, was the answer. He knew she looked in his backpack.

Pray for what? again I ask. “America,” Ali chuckles. (Can he be nine?)

Abbod seems to have a license. Got it pretty quick.

“If you’d never visited our game store…”—Ali heh-hehs (Is it my our ?)—“how come you were there?” “Oh I heard guys would be there that I knew.” “You heard?”

A tough young Arab never a day sick. My wife had a call, a guy wanting to know what driving schools she’d sold cars to but she thought quickly and answered she was only a middleman on the phone, and it was dual-control. Not quite true, she had a list.

That game store: the day we met was the first time, did he mean? Could it be true?

Ever been to the Brooklyn Bridge? “What do you take me for?” the boy replies, to say the words. “Ever walked across, I mean?”

When he saw Ali halfway home on the sidewalk, why didn’t big brother Abbod stop? Abbod was in a car. Questions came to me, like I’m being asked.

Seen it? Yeah. (You crossed the Manhattan . I think so, said Ali. Right onto Flatbush, I confirmed.) “Mister Mo? I like you like I like my uncle. He is tall. We go out for a run. Music helps you remember. You said that.” “I did?” We’re standing in front of the record store and, hearing a siren, turn to see a squad car racing north the wrong way. Ali’s life is not mine. “I hear a song, I remember where I listened to it,” I turn back to the window. “Or this store,” says the boy, “you hear Rap coming out of the speaker you recall Green Day bass, nothing like.” “Come here not knowing why, you could find a record you wanted,” I add. “I always know why,” I catch the child’s eye. Did he know Ska? Ska? The music…I will learn how he thinks.

What we might know between us. Our depth together.

He’s describing a game, a bus passes. Up the block another, the B8, crosses along Foster Avenue bound for Bay Ridge where I could gladly escape some intelligence that’s questioning mine, my city, my job (what is it?) — with a view there at the end of the bus line of the Narrows, the entrance to the harbor, a tanker, a huge, rusted hull at anchor, the winds across the water, the Verrazano Bridge, some responsibility to this boy at risk for whom I have begun to want what (?), some everything that he deserves, doesn’t care for the oranges here.

Ska? I explain — white California reggae, horns and a super drummer, well Jamaica to UK to Calif, the wife’s favorite sometimes. Ali is on his way. “White? I am late. I remember what you say.”