A Nasty Piece of Work Read Free Page B

quote unquote facilities looking more delectable than a field of wild honeysuckle.
    “This is quite a mobile home, Lemuel. You live in the lap of luxury. All the inlaid mahogany, all the Italian tiles—where’d you find it?”
    “I bought it at a fire sale when one of those film studios in Hollywood went under. I suppose nobody wanted it because it was so big. They told me it was custom built in the thirties for Douglas Fairbanks Jr. when he was filming The Prisoner of Zenda on location. I think it was the first all-aluminum mobile home ever made, and a very fancy one at that. Which accounts, among other things, for what you call the facilities and I call the john.”
    “You like living in a mobile home?’
    “When you move into a suburb you’re surrounded by strangers. When you move into a mobile home park you’re living with family.”
    I accompanied Friday outside and down the walkway to the road. “What is it about walking barefoot?” I asked.
    “I love sand. I love earth. I love the earth. I’m frightened of leaving it. I’m superstitious about feeling the pull of gravity under my feet. It reminds me that I’m earthbound.”
    I searched her face. She wasn’t making a joke. “That’s an unusual superstition,” I remarked.
    “Oh, I have the usual ones, too. I’m superstitious about the number thirteen. I’m spooked by thirteen people eating at the same table, I won’t set foot on the thirteenth floor of a building even if it’s numbered fourteen, I won’t walk on a Thirteenth Avenue or drive on an interstate numbered thirteen or take a plane on the thirteenth day of the month.”
    With the kind of suppleness one associates with cats, Friday slipped the sandals onto her feet, then angled her head and stared at me for a moment. “So I think I enjoyed meeting you, Lemuel,” she said finally.
    “You’re not sure?”
    There was a quick little shake of the head, a petulant curling of the Scott Fitzgerald underlip. “I’m not sure, no.” Suddenly a cloud flitted across her features and she was swallowing emotions. She looked like one of those modern females wrestling with the eternal problem of how to give yourself generously and keep part of yourself back in case the giving doesn’t work out. “So you never know who someone is the first time you meet them, do you, Lemuel? You only know who they want you to think they are.”
    “That already tells you something important.” I cleared my throat. “I’ll call you.”
    “Yes.” She frowned. “Okay. Call me.” She ducked into the beat-up Ford van parked in the shadow of a stand of Mexican pinyons and waved once through the open window as she drove off. I watched the Ford until it turned onto the interstate and was lost in the swarm of traffic. Why did I feel as if something important had happened? I retrieved the rake leaning against the tree and, turning back toward the Once in a Blue Moon, followed the prints of her naked feet down the pathway, raking the sand behind me as I went. It was a trick I’d picked up from an Israeli colleague in Peshawar—the Israelis raked the sand around their camp every night and then inspected the track for footprints first thing at first light.

 
    Three
     
    “Yo, Gunn? It’s me, it’s your daughter, it’s your adopted progeny.”
    I kicked off my running shoes and settled my lean, mean six-foot carcass onto the yellow couch, the phone wedged between my right ear and the shrapnel scar on my right shoulder, my hands clasped behind my head, a moronic ear-to-ear grin plastered across my moronic face. “God damn, it’s good to hear your voice, Kubra.”
    “It’s good to hear yours, Gunn.”
    Since she’d gone off to junior college, my daughter’s phone calls had become a regular Sunday morning feature, which was when the long distance rates were bargain basement. Thanks to strings I’d been able to pull with a former American ambassador to Kabul, Kubra had been one of the three hundred or so Afghan