The Good Lieutenant Read Online Free PDF

the main house. His only means of communication, the only way he had to confirm his continued existence, was the cell phone his mother had left for him. It was a long, skinny silver Nokia that resembled one of his father’s shoehorns. It could text in Arabic but the phone’s system of having to push a button one, two, or three times just to summon up a letter of an alphabet made his own true desires, the things he really would have liked to say to his mother— I’m afraid or How long does it take a body to decompose? —seem even more impossible to communicate. However, he discovered that if he put it on speaker, he could hold the phone in his palm and feel her voice vibrating. Who knew what the hell she was saying? He’d walk the house, sit down at her dresser, stand in his father’s closet (the clothes were all still there, his city shoes nicked at the heels), pace out front on one of the no-electricity nights, feeling that great swallowing dark coming on, while her voice buzzed away there in his palm. He could get a fair amount of information from the vibrations: the quick prickling of worry, a buzzing jagged reverb of a rant, the longer, silkier passages when she cried. (Or at least he could imagine these things, which was probably better than understanding what his mother actually had to say.) Mostly, he understood that she was claiming him. They had never gotten along well, but now, at noon and again at six, she’d call and talk to him for a good ten or fifteen minutes that were always surprisingly emotional and satisfying for him. And then he’d lift the headset up and make his own barfing donkey noise into it (this was how Faisal had described his voice after Ayad had once written, Seriously, how do I sound? ), and that was the signal to hang up.
    When he woke, a pale blue-gray light was swimming around the walls, over the furniture. At first Ayad thought he was doing this by himself, beaming the image in out of the past, but he realized that some of the shadow bars that spun, flickered, and recycled over the bare walls were coming from outside. And when he went to the door, he saw the cars of the—what should he call them? insurgents? takfiri ?—curving around through the side yard, heading back out onto the road through the front gate, having solved his dog problem. And probably also mined the field.
    That morning, the dog returned—not to the field but to the old incinerator where he’d been dumping his trash. He noticed a flash of movement just outside the back gate. He walked down through the garden, peeked over the gate, saw the dog limping and whining over the trash, then returned to the kitchen, opened a can of chickpeas (there were fifty such cans, part of his mother’s supply stash, shipped in before the roads got bad), carried them back outside, and dumped them in the dirt—a large pile just at the spot where the spacing between the gate bottom and the foot-worn path was the largest. Then little dribs and drabs leading in. At the door to his father’s workshop, he left a second can, open but untouched, then returned to the house and the TV.
    *   *   *
    His mother’s family had owned the field. When he was twelve or thirteen, Ayad had been astonished to find this out. It was also his mother’s family who’d had the money, the land, the prestige that had allowed her to maintain the (in his view) illusory sense that such a thing as stability was to be expected in the first place. This traced clear back to pre–Ba’ath Party times—or to, as his mother insisted, dangerous-to-mention original Ba’ath Party times—a time that seemed to Ayad distant and historical, though he could tell from his mother’s ferociously maintained and guarded scrapbooks it was the Polaroid-engulfed, thickly emulsed 1950s. The friendship then had been with Hassan al-Bakr; that was the man whom he’d seen pictures of,