Joseph McElroy - Night Soul and Other Stories

The little brother Ali was little enough but you didn’t know what he would come up with, and they laughed when he told what his teacher had said, that we are all nomads.

His little sister laid the table, the mother from the kitchen calling Ali, the bread was waiting and the bowl of meat, and the very big brother Abbod tapped in a phone number, while Ali’s father and uncle, aware of Abbod because he’s only just unexpectedly blown in from Canada, to say nothing of sleeping on the couch, were plotting a new business venture, eased by aromas of lamb and onion, herbs and crusty, paper-thin lavash just out of the oven — so no one asked at first why the fourth-grade teacher at a Brooklyn public school had said what she did about nomad to Ali.

What is your job? I ask myself, on the move.

In the small shopping plaza above the B & Q train stop, they posted a news photo of a patrolman killed in line of duty. This not far from Ali’s family’s apartment, which in turn is a walk from his morning bus stop on the way to school with a walk at the other end.

Nomad? Nomad ? — just like that? What does she know? the uncle said at dinner.

In geography Ali had the answers and then some. Original was the only word for it. And when the teacher said a river takes us where we want to go and he put up his hand, the class became quiet. “Sometimes they take the river and they move the river ,” Ali said. Class quietly laughs at the nerd terrorist, yet waiting for teacher. But Ali proves his point. “Once they moved a river to try and win a war, I think.” In the yard later someone would trip him up and he would fall and skin his cheek on the hard, black rubber surface by the jungle gym, but fall lightly.

The family wanted to know a little more about it, this “nomad” point because…because Ali’s an original boy, in need even of monitoring, of serious questioning — for what could happen? Unafraid, called “terrorist” and “ A rab” by the boys in the school yard, what was he? A nine-year-old, a terrible asker of questions, small for his age.

Where is Mexico, where is Canada? asked the teacher, wondering at her own map hanging over the blackboard, where is California, the Arctic, the ice fields and polar bears, Brazil? Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea! What is the mouth of a river? Tigris River where they used to fish — no more. Where is Turkey? OK, where is Syria? See what country they have borders with. Borders? See the lines — one line is mostly river. “ Some times—” she begins, but one question can interrupt another, the teacher was so quick with a question she interrupted herself, a happy person (and to have this Muslim child in her class who picks up her turns of speech), she and her map routes, a river is a moving road, she said, and was off. Caves , said Ali, the bell rang, he raised his hand too late.

Nomad can wait, we know. Because he moves in season. He and his people. Everyone busy. Nomad knows his job. Children quite safe. He may return next fall to where he was, even when things fall apart.

One day the boy would have to make a living, he would have a job to do, said the father. A dreamer, Ali’s head was in the clouds, you didn’t know what he was thinking — and then he told you. Imam passing through had said that the boy had mouths all over his body.

All over ? she asked Ali (his teacher, one lunchtime, one-on-one, for she said he was better at math than even she…). Well, this imam was from Mosul, visited New York, got followed but not before he had trained his camera on the evil billboards and the great bridges, Ali told her. Did she know an entire bridge had been moved part by part from England to Arizona? His uncle had told him.

His uncle knew. His uncle got mad, not at him, stood up for him. (“Ali can crunch the numbers.”)

Who all were these nomads? We know roughly where they are. In olden times the Scythians would surprise the enemy, make some trouble and retreat. Let’s make a map of nomads, the teacher said. What is a map? she said. Anything that came into her mind, she would say it. The bald kid at the back who’d been sick but wasn’t anymore showed his notebook to the kid next to him.

Abbod wore a hunting jacket he’d picked up in Canada. He was bent on obtaining a New York driver’s license hopefully. What matter if it’s stamped third class not valid for U.S. government purposes? He’d always known, from birth, how to drive — what’s the problem? He had driven a white taxi from Beirut to Dimashq and when his uncle’s cousin had shown up to collect the fare at the post office by the train station, it was how things worked, which always came first. Didn’t he get paid? Ali asked. Post office next to a theater where you are too young to go, Abbod jigged his eyebrows.

Abbod knew how to take orders. It was how you learned to give them. Ali, age nine, thought if he didn’t ask for a camera he wouldn’t get one. But who could he ask?

What is my job? Ask no one but yourself, things falling apart some days like a song high above the street or in the distance.

Photos on the living room wall — a dark man, his eyes bugged at some awful thing about to happen. Next to it a picture of a gold-and-silver-threaded pharaonic tapestry with a band around it showing ducks flying and their wings like crowns, very pretty Islamic thing. And a tinted photo of, you’d guess, a rug and leaves growing all the way around it, and Ali would look at the leaves. Of what tree? A fruit tree, maybe existing someplace. Look, too, at their California calendar peeling the months up and back, with a hang glider or backpacking trail above each month of days, or high, bellying waves of surf, or a quake-proofed bridge.

Nomads, said Ali’s father, the way he said things. The big brother had left the table to make a phone call and Ali recounted only that teacher had a picture of a tent in the desert and had asked what a nomad was, and Ali had told about their sheepherder cousin. “Maybe a cousin, maybe not a cousin. A singer, we heard he was a singer,” said the father who had an attitude because big brother on the phone again or because Ali storytelling.

Forsythia, the surprise along Newkirk, its early yellow bearing in its very light a suspicion of green in a front yard next to Ali’s building. Late winter, early spring, seasons in question, a matter for the authorities.

And now big brother couldn’t drive legally without at least the third-class license Albany had promised if Governor would only stop changing his mind every other week on the three-tiered plan, what’s the matter with him? (Didn’t you get paid in Dimashq? said Ali remembering from two nights ago.) Cops see it, maybe they stop you maybe they don’t. Third category license was for driving, not I.D. except if you’re stopped with it you’re an immigrant in limbo, you could be on the BQE or Coney Island Avenue. Abbod had just arrived in New York Limbo? asked Ali. It means trouble, said Abbod. Did he fly from Canada in an airplane? How else you gonna fly? (Did Abbod answer Ali’s question?) Ali hopes he will stay. “What the dickens is the BQE?” “What’s the BQ E ?” laughs big brother. “The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, man — what did you say, Ali, what the what?”

Father and uncle were looking into a storefront at the lower, better end of Foster Avenue across from the NYPD security camera mounted above the street and nice older brick and wood houses, and seeking a private source of financial backing which would save their violating Sharia by applying to a bank in Greenpoint where they had once lived and had a dog.