“I wouldn’t’ve anticipated this ten minutes ago, but that’s just about the most holy thing I’ve ever seen,” Nathan said, and coming from him that was high praise.
It occurred to us that since Andre and I had played here as boys, there was no reason to think the place any less irresistible to kids today, so we did need to insure Jamey’s privacy. We were well into morning by now, so Rachel and Mae and I left Nathan and Andre on guard while we drove to a hardware store. I used Visa to buy a screwdriver and the heaviest hasps and padlocks they carried, securing the slaughterhouse doors again after so many years, making sure we’d all jotted the combinations for whenever we got the urge.
We paid our respects one more time, and Mae kissed Jamey’s unspoiled cheek. After she began to cry a little I held her, and her so tiny against me, sniffling with her black black hair in her face, and on the way to our cars Rachel motioned me to fall back a few steps.
“If you want to go spend the rest of the day with her, that’s fine by me,” Rachel said, and I was about to say all right, maybe I should, but Nathan couldn’t give her a ride home because he had a job to hurry to, and Andre lived nowhere near her, so we decided to take her home with us since Mae didn’t want to be alone.
As we were about to leave the Lutheran car lot, Nathan turned his pleasant potato face to gaze in the direction we’d come from.
“You kno-ow,” he said, voice dropping and breaking the know into two syllables, in that analytical Nathan voice of his, “once you start safeguarding something that’s essentially worthless, and making it a group secret and spotting the odd miracle or two, what you’ve got is the basis of a new religion.” He shook his head. “I really should know better than this.”
*
When Jamey brought Mae Pak into the fold, it had only been in the past few years that I’d gained any real experience with anyone of different ethnicity than my own, which is to say extremely white, white nearly to the point of appearing blue from the veins beneath my Protestant-sired skin. Such daily homogeneity wouldn’t have been the case had I grown up in the city, but out in the ‘burbs there are enclaves where the majority clings to its status with tenacity so fierce you’d think the real estate consists of cotton plantations.
Still, I remember Jamaal.
We went to the same junior high and walked the same direction home each afternoon, and weeks went by before I’d first heard the sound of his voice. I remember now his smooth caramel skin and the shiny black curls of his hair, and how mysterious his brown eyes looked, not like anyone else’s. The word wouldn’t have occurred to me then, but now I would have to regard them as stoic.
Jamaal had the sort of build that American mothers describe to their friends as husky, and couldn’t run very fast, in every way a stark contrast to his brother Jameel. Jameel was older by a year, and taller, wiry as an Olympic sprinter. He never smiled and never spoke, suffering each day with a scowl terrifying in its maturity, and whenever he walked through crowded school hallways his passage was as clean as a razor’s. It was this image that dominated when my mother told me to watch myself around them, all of them, both boys and their older sister and their parents, and while my mother and her chatty friends weren’t sure which Middle Eastern country the parents had come from, it was an awful place.
“They hate us, every last one of them,” my mother would warn me. “For no better reason than because we’re American. They aren’t Christian there. They wish us dead.”
So I steered clear, the terrible Khashab brothers going their way, and I mine, until the afternoon I rounded a corner on the way home from school and saw Jamaal’s broad back, thirty feet ahead of me. I dropped my pace so I wouldn’t overtake him, giving him cause to cut my throat, and I was so careful that I stumbled and dropped the big armload of books I was carrying. They scattered across the sidewalk with an unnerving racket and papers burst free, strewn like fall leaves, and he turned around.
Jamaal turned around.
He said nothing, silent as his viciously mum brother, and as I stooped to retrieve everything he backtracked, so I kept my gaze low, the way you do with animals who might take eye contact as a challenge. His shoes came into view and they stopped, planted firm as pedestals, and I saw a knee, then the other knee, and then the rest of him as he knelt to help me pick up the mess.
When it was done, books dusted and papers salvaged, he looked at me with long-lashed brown eyes so shy, and some worse flavor, as though he’d guessed what I’d been thinking, and he said:
“You really should have a backpack.”
So we became friends, and as we were in seventh grade we were too old to play together, so instead we just hung, but never at my house and never at his, because I suppose each of us had things at home we wanted to shield the other from.
It was inevitable that I would show him the slaughterhouse, initiate him into its secrets and decline, and we would prowl its corridors as if searching their shadows for hints of our futures and how to reach them. Or we’d look for valuables left behind and sometimes even find them: the odd dirty magazine, select pages already brittle; warm beer, cached by older kids for later.
Sometimes we would just sit, ignoring the underlying residue of death as we trusted each other with the reasons why neither of us wanted to go home for dinner, me talking about my stepbrother and what a world-class stoolie he was, and Jamaal saying he could never study for all the yelling going on, his sister nineteen, with very definite ideas of what she wanted to do in a day and who she wanted to do it with, and their father not seeing it that way at all. He already had someone in mind he expected her to marry.
“Jameel sees what’s coming for him in a few years,” Jamaal told me. “He’s next. He coughed blood last week. The doctor says it’s an ulcer.”
And when, after the tragedy, no one knew where to look for Jamaal, I was the only one who thought to check the slaughterhouse the next day, but while he’d look at me, he refused to talk, or couldn’t. I could still smell smoke on him. He didn’t resist when, after an hour, I took him by the arm and steered him out of the slaughterhouse and past the thin young trees growing where once had been a drive, and brought him out to civilization and those who said they had his best interests at heart. I was afraid he might stay back in there until he starved.
Their father never denied locking Jamaal’s sister in her room after dousing her with gasoline and setting her ablaze, claiming that where he’d grown up a father had that right, when there was nothing left to be done with a rebellious, disrespectful daughter.
The area Shriners launched a fund drive to help with the skin grafts, but I never heard how she was doing because the rest of the family moved away to live with other relatives.
“Now do you see why I never wanted you exposed to people like that?” my mother said. “Their children are just cattle to them, is all they are. Not precious like you are to us.”
So I never knew what became of Jamaal, although years later, when I was in high school and needed some cash, I was going through my mother’s dresser drawers and beneath a jewelry box found three old letters, unopened, that he’d mailed to me, and only then did I realize I never had gotten around to asking him what country his parents were from.
*
After insuring Jamey’s eternal rest, nothing much else seemed right for the day, so back at our apartment Rachel called in sick to the current temping job she had, and Mae did the same at the music store, although it was late enough by now that both places should’ve already gotten the idea, so we made coffee and drank it, and then a little later on we went to bed.