The Good Lieutenant Read Online Free PDF Page B

sitting in their side yard eating pickled cauliflower, surrounded by his mother’s (then his grandmother’s) roses and gardenias. And, if you wanted to look at the under-the-bed and inside-the-mattress albums, you could find a photo or two of good old Nuri al-Said.
    Whomever it belonged to, the dog had no interest in going back out into the field. He’d tried to lead it out the back gate a few times—this was after he’d gotten a collar on it and manufactured a leash out of some hammock chain—and the dog kept doing this insane, maddening thing of sitting down on its rear end and ducking its head.
    So, instead, he had to walk the dog down the fairly abandoned, half-paved, half-dusted-over road outside his house. A lonely line of two-strand phone poles echoed the road above their head. You want to talk about boring? Try taking this landscape seriously after you’ve spent half an hour watching a DVD of Beverly Hills Cop with your neighbor Faisal Amar. Or Independence Day . Or Sex and the City . No subtitles needed for that. In the past, Ayad had been big on backgrounds, big on the space and feel of other countries, had often walked this road without seeing it at all, head filled with nostalgia for places he’d never been. But now that same yearning pull applied to the road itself, or at least the road as he remembered it. For instance, the small grove of olive and eucalyptus trees just across from the doctor’s old place. His family had picnicked here. Horrible, boring, two-bit afternoons, as he’d seen them. A couple plastic chairs, dust-covered bowl of hummus, better replaced by Central Park, or the Vegas Strip. But now when he unfolded his imagination amid the polite churning dapple of its leaves, it was to reassemble the full complement of his family, all together, and bitching less than was strictly accurate. This particular afternoon, he’d been remembering a yellow ball he’d juggled here during a family outing, its surface the perfect combination of soft and sticky. He had caught the ball between a bare, upturned toe and his shin, and hopped on his left foot to show his father—he’d been so desperate for his father’s praise back then—and just as he made a ghost of this same turn, he saw the dog running toward him.
    The thing he hated, feared, despised, loathed about his deafness was his vulnerability. But in this case, the dog’s approach gave him enough time to crouch, catch a glimpse of the oncoming convoy, and then scuttle away into thicker brush so that when the American Humvees blasted by at a hundred kilometers per hour, pushing a hot, dry wind and filling the grove with its dust, he was safely hidden. The dog lay beside him, chin upon her doubled paws, a comically flat deadpan quality to her black-brown eyes as she followed the trucks and then swiveled over to look at him—no change in expression, no movement other than the eyes—as if to say, What the fuck? And then she was gone, bolting down the road after the convoy, which was not what he’d expected, quite honestly. He half ran, half walked after her, keeping to the tree line, since, if there was one thing you could say about the Americans, they had good signage:
    DANGER

    STAY BACK

    After about ten yards, he saw that the convoy had turned in at his front gate, and he retreated quickly back to the copse. What he wanted to do was warn them: Yes, the body is here. I don’t want it. But watch out—there might be something dangerous in the field. Against this was his awareness of how difficult, and possibly incriminating, this would be to explain, not to mention his fear of prison and arrest, the simple, unreasoning desire to remain free. After an hour, these contradictory impulses brought him to the canal on the west side of his house, at a point that, by dead reckoning, he figured was roughly perpendicular to the dry well that contained the body. He was crossing on a