Terrorist Read Free Page A

village fellowship, the luxuriant mutual attention, of those with little to do and nowhere to go.
    After the Civil War, a conspicuous gaudiness entered New Prospect with the erection of an elaborate City Hall, a sprawling, turreted aggregation, Moorish in feeling, of rounded arches and rococo ironwork capped by a great tower in mansard style. Its sloped sides are covered in multicolored fish-scale shingles and contain four white clock faces the size, if they were to be brought down to Earth, of wading pools. The broad copper gutters and downspouts, monuments to the skilled metalworkers of their time, have turned mint-green witJi age. This civic pile, whose principal bureaucratic operations were long ago relegated to less lofty, more modern, less spectacular, but air-conditioned and easier-to-heat structures behind it, has been recendy awarded, after much lobbying, the status of a national architectural treasure. It stands within sight of Central High School, a block to the west, the school's once-generous grounds much nibbled by widened streets and real-estate encroachments permitted by bribed officials.
    On the eastern edge of the lake of rubble, where becalmed parking lots alternate with choppy waves of knocked-down brick, a thick-walled ironstone church supports a heavy steeple and advertises, on a cracked signboard, its award-winning gospel choir. The windows of this church, blasphemously assigning God a face, and gesturing hands, sandalled feet, and tinted robes—in short, a human body with all that is unclean and encumbering about it—are blackened by decades of industrial soot and made further indecipherable by their protective grids of wire. Religion's images now attract hatred, as in the wars of the Reformation. The
    church's decorous glory days of pious white burghers in the hierarchically assigned pews also belong to die past. Now African-American congregants bring their dishevelled, shouting religion, their award-winning choir dissolving their brains in a rhydimical rapture as illusory as (Shaikh Rashid sardonically puts forward the analogy) the shuffling, mumbling trance of Brazilian candomble. It is here that Joryleen sings.
    The day after she invited Ahmad to come hear her sing in the choir, her boyfriend, Tylenol Jones, comes up to Ahmad in the hall. His mother, having delivered a ten-pound infant, saw the name in a television commercial for painkiller and liked the sound of it. "Hey, Arab," he says. "Hear you been dissing Joryleen."
    Ahmad tries to talk the other's language. "No way, dissing. We talked a little. It was she come up to me."
    Reaching carefully, Tylenol takes the more slender boy's shoulder in his hand and digs his thumb into that sensitive place below the shoulder ball. "She say you disrespect her religion." His thumb works deeper, into nerves that have been asleep all of Ahmad's life. Tylenol has a square face the color of walnut furniture-stain while it's still sitting up wet on the wood. He is a tackle on the Central High football team and a gymnast on the rings in the winter, so his hands are iron-strong. His thumb is gouging wrinkles into Ahmad's crisp white shirt; the taller boy makes an impatient motion to shrug off the hostile grip.
    "Her religion is the wrong one," Ahmad informs Tylenol, "and anyway she said she had no use for it but to sing in that foolish choir." The iron thumb keeps digging, but with a surge of adrenaline Ahmad swats it away, the edge of his hand chopping at the thick branch of muscle.
    Tylenol's face darkens and comes closer with a jerk. "Don't you talk to me of foolish—you so foolish nobody give you shit, Arab."
    " 'Cept Joryleen," comes the quick response, riding the same adrenaline. Ahmad feels watery inside and suspects his face is shamefully stiff with fear, but there is a holy bliss in confronting even a superior enemy, allowing rage to increase your mass. He dares go on, "And I wouldn't exactly call it shit, what she gave me. It was simple friendliness