In the Kingdom of Men Read Online Free PDF

clipped him too close. “I look like a farm boy,” he had said, fingering the line where his tan met the pale stripe of skin. “That’s because you are,” I answered, and he had grown quiet, as though that were a part of himself he wanted to forget.
    I peered out the small window of the plane, saw the gray Gulf of Mexico falling away. Our layover in New York I remember only as a dim hotel room filled with the noise of the bar below, Aramco and Bechtel men laying in a last good drunk before hitting the dry desert. A short stop in Montreal, where we took on more passengers, and then the ocean crossing.
    It was like a dream, flying through that night. I remember Mason held in a white pool of light, studying his book of Arabic phrases, and then people leaving their seats, gathering in the aislesto smoke and drink until the plane took on the feel of a flying lounge, Johnny Rivers piping through the speakers. I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but I did. When Mason lifted the shade, we were landing in Amsterdam, the sun spreading across the horizon like paint spilled from a can. A stop in Athens to refuel, and then on to Beirut, where we left the jet and boarded a four-engine prop scoured shiny by sand.
    “From here, it’s the milk run to Dhahran,” Mason said. “Six countries in three days—not bad for a couple of Okies from Shawnee.” He still looked crisp in his new Arrow shirt, but I felt woozy, my cheeks flushed.
    We crossed into Arabia and followed the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, leapfrogging along, scattering herds of camels from the water wells Aramco had drilled, landing on oiled strips to unload geologists, small engines, and crates of eggs that were replaced by bundles of letters, trunks, and packages, grinning American golfers carrying their clubs, a single Arab in gold rings and flowing robes. When the plane abruptly banked, sending everything that wasn’t strapped or bolted to the lee of the fuselage, I screamed and grabbed for Mason’s arm. The Arab man smiled. “It is only the wind,” he said simply, as though it were the answer to any number of things, and I felt myself blush. I wanted to tell him what I knew of wind—the tornadoes tipping from the yellowing sky, hot gales that sapped the sweet from the corn. How my grandfather would strip an ear, scrape a few kernels with his teeth. “Could be worse,” he’d say. He remembered the powder-dry soil, the roof-high drifts, his own family’s house buried in the till of once-fertile fields. I looked out the window, saw the dunes undulating for miles. Like the sand, that dust was everywhere, sifted into the cavities and creases of everything living and dead, and I understood how it was that the Okies and Texans might find the desert familiar, the suffocating heat a manageable thing.
    The Tapline ran before us like an ink-dark tattoo, broken only by mounds of sand bridging the routes of nomadic migration. Inthe distance, a vast pool of light, the sun, and the sea that melded with the sky to a single canvas. And then I saw the flares. Mason had told me that even the astronauts could see them from space, giant flames burning off gas at the wellheads. The Dhahran Airport appeared like a white cathedral: pillars, arches like wings, control tower shaped like a minaret. All that light flowing in. We stepped off the plane, and it was like opening an oven. A furnace blast. A heat you had to lean into or be knocked down.
    I stood stunned by the hours we’d lost in flight until Mason took my arm and steered me across the tarmac. Inside, I watched the Arab official search through my clothes while a clutch of women cloaked in black silently waited to board. The Saudi man who accompanied them, dressed in a fine-cut suit and white head scarf, sat placidly, intent upon the activity my luggage elicited. The customs official took one look at the cover of my book—Scarlett and Rhett in an ardent embrace—handed it to an attendant, and clapped the suitcase closed