AHMED’S WIFE by Scott Tucker
Diddie strangled himself accidentally, by a leash tied too long in the yard, and Ahmed had to butcher the body before the meat went bad. Hannah, the other goat, the female, lived on alone, eating whatever plants or grass grew within her reach. Once a week, Ahmed moved her stake to a new patch of lawn, in range of the blackberry vines and the red clover, and soon Hannah forgot about Diddie.
After a goat has given birth she continues to produce milk for the rest of her life. Hannah gave no milk yet. When Ahmed turned her loose to run in the yard, she galloped around in a goatly way but she didn’t venture into the greenbelt or the ravine or the neighboring yards. Ahmed’s yard had no fence and Hannah worried about the coyotes that lived in the ravine and the large dogs that lived in the neighborhood. The dogs were owned by tall, white-skinned American men with tattooed arms and dark, coyote eyes. They collected scrap metal in rusting bins on their front porches, and their cars leaned forward in a hungry way from side yards, parked for weeks at a time without going anywhere.
A small population of wild rabbits also had its run of the neighborhood, living in the underbrush and under houses, and Hannah watched them bound across the one-lane roads night and day, spirits of innocence, although every so often one turned up missing.
Behavioral economists. First, there is such an occupation. And second, they have proven, Ahmed’s wife taught me, that human beings feel the pain of loss more strongly than the pleasure of gain. “This explains almost everything you need to know about being human,” she told me. Then she sent me back outside to work, with a great deal of care in her eyes – always such care in her eyes.
She also told me, when things are not going the way I’d like them to go, I should repeat to myself, “All is well, and this is what it looks like.” That was her mantra. She was one of those rare people, I believe, who felt the pleasure of gain as much as the pain of loss. Although the rare ones feel more of both, I suppose, and the rule of the behavioral economists may still hold true.
Hannah the goat had gray hair, a mousy suede color that reminded Ahmed’s wife of a certain stylish jacket she had once seen worn by a mannequin in the window of a women’s department store downtown. Whenever she looked up from her work, and she saw Hannah eating in the yard, she thought of that coat in the window.
“I don’t understand your mantra,” I told her, after trying it outside. “If things aren’t going well in my line of work, I need to get my ass in gear and fix it.”
“Memory can travel in more than one direction,” she answered me. “And please, use nicer language.”
Ahmed’s wife was named Akilah, or one who reasons. Honoring her husband, and Islam, I will not describe her in more detail. Impure thoughts must be controlled, like traffic at an intersection. Ignored, like the rain in Seattle. You pretend you’re listening to a river instead. You live in the neighborhood of the river. You tell yourself – although her eyes – they are such a dark Egyptian blue – exactly the color of dawn in the desert.
One summer morning in the future, then, I walked with Akilah out to the slough near her house, across a vacant field between a cement plant and a trucking company. The grass grew tall and wild there with blue chicory flowers along the road and dark brown cattails along the water. Shorebirds and gulls picked through the mud beneath the cattails, finding long, fat sandworms to eat. A sheen of diesel oil floated on the water and gave the mud a phosphorescence, like a hummingbird’s throat twisting in the sunlight or a peacock’s feathers pulsing to impress a female. The blue in her eyes was the blue of peacock down.
A fire had swept through the area overnight, like a wild prairie fire, right here in the city. It left the trees and the buildings scorched but unharmed. The grass of the vacant field had turned to black stubble beneath our feet, still warm and reeking and wet from the fire department’s work. The ash will be good for the soil, I thought. The fire had cleared out the weeds along with the grass. Already, savannah sparrows and yellowthroats were foraging through the charred remains for plant seeds burnt to a flavor they liked.
“It’s all beautiful,” Ahmed’s wife reminded me. “The way the world works is beautiful.” She watched the birds at work finding roasted seeds and the big trucks at work unloading raw materials at the cement plant next door. The loading dock was painted now the color of smoke from the fire. The hard-packed earth and gravel beneath it was cleared of its weeds right up to the building. All is well. And this is what it looks like. The fire had been drawn to the wooden loading dock, but was unable to engulf it.
When the fire actually happened, in recent times, Akilah left me standing there by myself on a clear, cool morning in August, to think about it, to admit it – what she had been telling me all along was the truth.
* * *
I’ve known Ahmed and his wife now for more than a year, remembering them in two directions, as she would say. My company builds retaining walls, and Ahmed called me up one winter morning during the heaviest of the rains. He needed to hold his hillside back where it had started to collapse across his driveway and against his house. The job took long enough that we became friends. Most jobs, if you think about them, these days, the work doesn’t last long enough for you to get to know your customer. My job, you get to know them pretty well.
I’ve always liked what I do, especially in the winter. People call me up when their hillsides can’t possibly absorb another day of rain and the earth has started to move on them. Fir trees are tipping, hidden boulders are surfacing. They ask me for miracles. They’re afraid for their houses and sometimes their lives. With earth-moving equipment and concrete pours, sometimes I can deliver a miracle.
“What kind of dog never learns, it can’t catch a bird, ever?” Ahmed asked me one morning after I had completed his wall. “Our neighbor’s dog over there,” he pointed. “He’s tied up every day, but he expects to chase down the crows in the street and eat them.”
The dog, a rough German shepherd mix, an un-neutered male, sat in his front yard chained to a tree, and growled steadily in our direction, his eyes half-closed with hatred for no apparent reason. While we were watching, a crow landed on the paved road well out of reach and the dog charged it like a cougar until he ran out of chain. The force of the chain spun him around by the neck and knocked him to the ground. He scrambled to his feet and barked furiously at the crow, baring his long teeth as if he had cornered a bear in a ravine. The crow, used to the dog, hardly looked in his direction.
“What kind of dog never learns?” Ahmed asked me. “Even the trucks you bring in. He barks at them like he could kill one and eat it. I laughed at that dog once, and his owner came walking out, very angry with me for laughing at his dog.”
“This is the way men are sometimes,” Ahmed’s wife told me. “Their animals know them better than they know themselves.”
“Anything can lead to trouble these days,” she told us. “Ahmed has offered the dog’s owner fresh goat meat, to make peace with him. But the man looks at us like the meat is poisoned. Ahmed is careful now to encourage the dog from our side of the street. It’s a good game after all, chasing crows. I have told Ahmed, he was wrong to laugh.”
Ahmed was a slim, strong man with deep-set eyes of his own and a narrow jaw, slow to smile. His neighbors could imagine him as the leader of a Middle Eastern terrorist cell in North America. His small house had a new roof and new windows. He had recently bought a car. He might very well be hiding a large cache of weapons in the back bedroom, the one that looks out over the ravine. He might be hiding boxes of laundered money in his attic. Arab men visited him at odd hours of the day and night. They came in groups of six or seven, arriving at roughly the same time to attend meetings. Sometimes he drove his car into town alone for the day, moving wrapped bundles in and out of his trunk, as if something might detonate if he handled it too roughly.
In truth, he taught drumming. The clay darabuka, an instrument played in Egypt and Morocco. It stood half as tall as an African djembe. He could hold it in his lap. He gave private lessons and classes at his house, and he performed in the city. He transported the drums in his trunk, swaddled like infants. The best drumheads, he will tell you, are made of animal skin, but only in a desert climate. Here, where it rains the way it rains, humidity loosens the head and it falls out of tune easily. Here, aluminum drums with synthetic heads are better, especially for performing. The best aluminum drums are always made in Turkey, Ahmed will tell you.
One of his darabukas is covered on the sides with a mosaic inlay that tells a love story. The drumhead is made from sturgeon skin from the Nile River stretched tight enough to make a clear bell tone. When he plays it for me, I feel like I’m walking through the streets of Cairo with Akilah beside me.
He brought his wife to America because of the trouble she was getting into at the university in Cairo. “You reach a certain point in the Islamic world,” she told me, “as a woman, when it becomes simpler to leave.” That was as far as her explanation went.
Ahmed chose this particular tract of land to build a house because the noise from the drumming would not carry uphill or through the evergreens to bother his neighbors. When he drove into town, he performed with various groups at clubs and cultural events and schools. He also worked as a landscaper and a carpenter, when he could find the work. He made enough money that he didn’t need to turn to crime. He saved enough that he and his wife could start a family. The rest of the money he sent home to his mother in Cairo.
“This is all anyone wants from the world,” Akilah told me. A little sad, I thought she sounded. The trouble she was getting into at the university in Cairo had more to do with men, I learned from Ahmed, than with politics or religion. One man who fell in love with her killed himself. Another was already married at the time. Ahmed chose this ravine, in Seattle, to hold his wife in place as much as it was to hold the sound of drumming in place.
The bedroom at the back of the house, the one overlooking the ravine, was stacked to the ceiling with drums that Ahmed was repairing for others, or building for sale, or using when he gave lessons. Some were aluminum. Some were clay. Some he made with goatskin heads, when goatskin was available. Such as Diddie.
One day, as I waited for Ahmed to finish giving a lesson, so I could visit with him, and hopefully with Akilah, I stood outside their house and checked their hillside for any new movement. I walked the length of the wall I had built for them until I reached his neighbor’s property, the man with the vicious dog that wanted to kill and eat vehicles. The dog’s owner was working outside in his yard, digging post holes for a new chain-link fence along the street.
He straightened up to talk to me. He was a big man like I was. A military hair cut. Chest like a tank coming over a hill. Black eyes targeting, head swiveling on its turret. We shook hands. Calloused and mended fingers. His name was Bob Rainey, he said. “Like the weather.” He worked for a marine engine repair shop. He’d put a large Christian decal on the back window of his company truck and a National Rifle Association bumper sticker down next to the hitch.
“Why are you a friend a those two A-habs?” he asked me outright.
“I built them a wall,” I told him. I pointed at the retaining wall. I thought about it. “I like how they live on their own,” I said. “I like their drumming.”
“Izzat what he does? He’s a drummer?”
“You can’t hear him up here?”
He spit into his lawn, as if to say, it weren’t much of a job, playing a drum. Compared to fixing boat engines, or building retaining walls. I suppose it wasn’t.
“You’ve got a hillside there, ready to come down,” I told him. I walked him over to where I was pointing and we took a look at the hillside above his house. There are signs, if you know what to look for. Hills will tell you when they’ve had just about enough.
* * *
So I made a friend of Bob Rainey. Like most men, he had his good points. He didn’t talk overmuch. He didn’t smoke. He could fix any engine or plumbing problem you might bring to him. He told me his wife had been killed five years earlier by intruders in the house one afternoon while he was away at a job. Three men, who were never caught. He’s owned guard dogs ever since. He knows there were three men because his son witnessed the attack. His son was ten years old at the time and hiding in a closet where his mother had shoved him.
I made a friend of the son, too – Evan – a brooding 15-year-old boy as tall as his father but thin as a crow, with dark, unwashed hair hanging down into his eyes and bony shoulders rounded forward with the weight of that tragedy, or with the weight of adolescence like any boy.
I allowed both the father and the son to help me with the labor of building their new retaining wall, which lowered the cost for me and the price for them. We got around to talking about Ahmed’s goats and how Bob Rainey might rent Hannah for a week to mow his lawn, or he might buy a male goat and breed the two, there could be free hedge-trimming and grilled meat and drumheads for the whole neighborhood. This is how memory can travel in two directions at once.
But Evan stole Hannah first, late one August night with his friends, and they burned her alive down by the slough, starting the prairie fire in the vacant lot that blackened the earth and fed the sparrows and painted the loading dock the color of smoke. You never know how innocence will turn up missing every so often. They left Hannah lying in the ashes of the fire, unskinned and half-cooked, a gray fossil searching for its own bones. Her eyes had boiled away, and her stomach had burst open.
It was the kind of thing boys did. The kind of planning that went awry. They were 15, 16 years old, drinking their first case of beer and looking for something to steal, some way to leave their mark on the night. They were drinking around a campfire they’d built to stay warm down by the slough. By midnight, they came up with the idea to take the goat from the Arab’s yard downhill from Evan’s house and barbeque it. They were hungry by then and this made good sense. The oldest boy drove a pickup with a canopy on the back, and there was plenty of room for the goat in there. They walked into the Arab’s yard and cut Hannah’s leash with a pocketknife and led her out to the truck, quiet as a walk in the park. Hannah knew Evan from watching the neighborhood and she felt it was okay to go along with him. He’d never seemed like a threat to her.
They had no way to kill or cook a goat properly so they tied her by her short leash to a rebar stake they found in the ground and they lit a large fire underneath her and stabbed at her with the one pocketknife they had. She kicked in all directions and started the prairie fire going in the dry August grass, which drove the boys to run away from the flames and smoke and she died alone in the blaze, tied to her stake of rebar.
“I’ve gotten to the bottom of it,” Bob Rainey told Ahmed the next afternoon. “I’m real sorry about this, Ackmed. Real sorry. Evan an’ his friends’ll buy you another goat. Two or three goats, hell, we’ll make all kinds of new goats. I’m real sorry about Hannah, though.”
It was odd, being human.
“I don’t think I can forget this so easily,” Ahmed said. He looked up in Evan’s direction. The boy stood at the front door to his house, watching them talk, and Ahmed walked away in a dark mood.
“If you teach a boy anger, that’s what he’ll know,” Ahmed’s wife told her husband. “Teach him something better and he might grow up to be a good man yet.”
“Men only understand strength and weakness,” Ahmed said.
“Show him what to do. Weak people can’t do hard things. Only strong people can do hard things. Weak people do what feels easy.”
“In time, it will happen,” she told me. “There will be goats living in every yard.”
Ahmed called for a meeting with Evan, alone, outside. The boy came walking down cautiously from his house. His father and the guard dog watched from their yard, standing inside their new chain-link fence.
“I bought a goat that’s ready for market,” Ahmed told the boy. The goat was tied to a leash and staked in the yard. It was white and brown, with wet eyes and long, limp ears hanging down the way goat ears sometimes hang. Evan nodded tensely. He sunk his hands into his pockets. He glanced uphill at his father. There was no going back home until this meeting was done with.
“Let’s start by doing the part you did wrong,” Ahmed said. “Here is the right way to butcher a goat.” He handed Evan a long, sharp knife, bigger than any knife the boy had ever held, with a thin, jagged blade for dressing game. “I’ll talk, and you cut,” he told the boy. Their eyes met and locked for a hard moment. “Don’t worry about the blood, it will flow out into the grass here and disappear.”
The boy looked uphill again at his father. Holding the knife now in his right hand. Feeling his knees about to buckle.
Ahmed showed him where on the neck they would begin. “You’ll do a good job of this,” he said. “I can tell that much about you.”
From the kitchen window, Ahmed’s wife watched her husband and Evan working and she thought, I must make it clear to the man who builds retaining walls, I have no romantic feelings for him now. It would be unthinkable. Tomorrow I will tell him. I will take him down to the slough again where the fire was. Then she turned away and felt herself starting to cry, over all of it, over Hannah and pleasure and what she could remember of loss.
Scott Tucker’s recent work has appeared in Narrative, Main Street Rag, Portland Review, Floating Bridge Review, and Etude.