Chapter III

Kara

Saturday and Sunday daytimes were always slow at Waiter on Wheels, and in the summers when everyone was at the beach, weekend mornings would be dead. Until tall, sandy-haired Theo took over the dispatch radio in the evening, we’d have only one order taker, usually Flora, the four or five drivers who didn’t mind working the slow shift, and the weekend morning dispatcher Big Bo with sleepy grey eyes and curly orange hair and beard.

Our office was the last ground floor apartment in a 100-yard long, two-floor strip office mall with a faux brown-brick façade. Between the wide parking lot ran a grassy median, and on it stood four large poplar trees. Under the trees, the weekend drivers would spread their cars.

Sixty-year old Vietnam vet Lew would work on the Washington Times crossword in his 1980 Dodge Aerostar with the windows rolled up, AC cranked up. He had a nice house in Olney and disability income, and he worked only to get away from his wife. Six-year old Sofie, who was car-schooled, and her stern little mom Beth, both with loose long blond hair swinging down to their hips and matching round-rimmed glasses, would sit in their van, windows down, engine turned off, and read. And sweat. Sofie would wave cheerfully to me, but Beth never would.

I had no AC, so I would roll both windows down and slide the window behind me all the way open and read Rumi on love of the divine or John Keats on loving death. The summer air was still and heavy, and sometimes a gnat would dance in front of my face as I read, and when there was a breeze it would shush-shush the leaves low over my truck and fan me with the sweetness of the moist earth and sometimes the fustiness of fresh dog poop. If the crickets lulled me to sleep I’d dream of my mountain. And every time we got a waft of wind I would feel the cool dry mountain air of my home, see the red dawn fire that spread in the cobalt blue stratosphere above snow-topped 25,000-foot Dumani rising straight into the sky, and under my feet, the clean back rocks in the clear water of the Bagrote. Sometimes I’d dream of Sundays, of my father’s best friend, Mehrban chacha, my Peer, walking down from his hamlet a few hundred meters above us on Dumani, to the gravel lot on the mountain side where my father and I worked on our Datsun Sunny.

And on the backs of sheets of orders of spare ribs, I would transcribe into Urdu Keats’ words to his dying brother. But I would not dare to translate them.

Can death be sleepy, when life is but a dream,

And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?

The transient pleasures as a vision seem,

And yet we think the greatest pain’s to die.

How strange it is that man on earth should roam,

And lead a life of woe, but not forsake

His rugged path; nor dare he view alone

His future doom which is but to awake.

In Nastaliq, I’d make pretty that love song. And incomprehensible to all around me.

An inside joke, on myself.

Sometimes my Russian concentration camp escapee friend Leo would open the driver’s side door and I’d fall out. Then laughing he would come around to the passenger side and move the delivery bag to the back of the truck. He would pull out my father’s cardboard bound Atlas of Karakoram from under the seat, and right foot stuck into the ledge of the half-open door, he would show me the places he had been. He had worked for a news organization in the USSR, delivering packages and messages, and he had traveled all over the Caucasus, even to the south Caucasus, just north of Hunza, on the north side of Dumani mountain from us. In Hunza district, Dumani was called Rakaposhi. And diving into the map his finger following green roads through mountain passes, he would  wrap me up in his wanderings. After Conor started at Wheels, sometimes he would come over, and then Leo would stay away. Leo didn’t trust almost anyone.

When an order came in, Flora would come out to wake me up. Sometimes two drivers would take an order together, and sometimes drivers would pass up an order to sleep. Except Beth, who was always careful to be the perfect mom for Sophie, who would take most orders that came her way. The first summer I was there in 1999, Conor’s sister Kara came back from Mount Saint Mary’s college, where she had just finished her freshman year, and got a job as an order taker on weeknights. A couple of slow Saturdays when she wasn’t doing anything she would come in and ride delivery with Conor. Once she went with me.

Kara had straight dark brown hair down to her shoulders, flashing dark eyes that were wide with questions, and a little, full bottom lip that sometimes dropped open when she was upset. And on the middle of her chest, four or five inches below her collar bone, she had a six-inch tattoo in a gothic font that I couldn’t fully read. She was shorter and lighter-skinned than Conor. Everyone knew the story of how on the first Monday of her summer break, she pony-tailed her shoulder-length hair and ran six miles from Conor’s apartment off Muddy Branch to 355 and then all the way to the office on Shady Grove. Cal got in at 10 a.m., just after she did.

Are you hiring? Arms behind her, hair pulled tight, face and shirt streaked with sweat.

Why are you sweaty?

The bus didn’t come. Conor told me to be on time, so I ran.

Ha. Did the bus ever show up?

It passed me on the way, but I couldn’t stop it.

He hired her, of course. For the first two months that summer I didn’t even talk to her. I was twenty and had been in the States two years, but I still didn’t know how to talk to American girls, especially pretty ones. I’d say hi when I saw her, and those flashing eyes would soften and her tight face would relax into a sweet smile that would confuse me so. And my chest and belly full and light, I would smile back with my misshapen teeth. A couple times, maybe three, Conor and I were standing outside the office, she came out for a break from work and I stepped away. If the girls were flirty or much older I’d learned to laugh at their jokes. But Kara was unspoiled like the snow fed water of the Bagrote, and her eyes were sharp like the big grey rocks on Dumani in the sunlight after a snowfall. She was so perfect I couldn’t talk to her and then it was August and she was going back to school.

One blindingly bright, cloudless, hot and dry Saturday morning, I wake up with a crick in my neck and can’t turn my head to the right. It’s Pakistan’s independence day, Ammi tells me, the first of the new millennium. I have been working so much, I’ve forgotten. It rained all Friday and now it is beautiful bright, not muggy like it has been for most of July. The rich families are at Rehoboth Beach and Bethany Beach, and the college kids are at Dewey Beach, and we work all summer except sometimes a driver or two goes to Ocean City for muscle car weekend.

When I get in at 11, Big Bo and Conor are sitting outside in the little strip parking lot on two grey and rust-brown metal folding chairs. I go in to see if there are any orders. In the large one-room office, the blinds are drawn tight, and it takes a bit for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. The dispatcher’s table, light, unfinished two-by-fours for legs and solid eight-foot rough wood planks screwed on top, is on my left and facing the outside window. In front there is another big table for overflow orders that has pen marks and drawings and writing all over and that’s where we sit when we check out. On my right, four order taker desks run against the wall. The mud-brown carpet turns black under the tables, in places by the door and under the order taker desks and is worn to the grease-blackened stone floor under the rolling torn green leather work chairs.

On Friday the long table is full with 30-40 slowly building piles of orders, stacked side by side, with the driver’s name handwritten on top of each order. By the end of the night, the bigger stacks will have 15, maybe 20 orders each. The faster drivers will make $80-100 in tips, plus the $2.50 we make for each run.

Right now, the table has only one sheet, a $210 order with a $20 tip from Bare Bones BBQ placed earlier in the week for delivery today, and it’s got Beth’s name scrawled on it in Cal’s pointy capital letters.

Finally I see Flora. She is the only person inside, on the last order taker desk all the way down the hallway on the right, sitting in the dark by the bathroom, head down and filing her nails. She looks up for a second, taps her head and grimaces headache. Flora is forever thirty eight, orange hair and elaborate lipstick and maybe a hundred and eighty pounds, and galant, mustached Mario who’s been here longer than most drivers loves her so, but she makes fun of him and flirts with all the young guys and hangs out with them on Fridays when her kids are with their dad. I smile and walk a little closer and ask if she wants water, and someone walks in behind me. I know it’s Kara, but still I turn around with my full body because my neck doesn’t turn. She’s come to see if maybe there is a paycheck for her. But Big Bo is outside, and as dispatcher only he would know, so I don’t know why she’s in here. She stands looking at Flora and me for maybe 30 seconds, blinking as her eyes adjust. Then she walks closer, stands to my right, not touching but so close I can feel her, smell her. Her little gold cross pendant glints in the dark in front of her loose dark blue t-shirt and her light pink cutoff shorts are so small my brain can’t process, and I go outside and sit, knees up to my chest on a six-inch high concrete bar by the building entrances made to stop cars from accidentally rolling into the building.

I’m about eight feet from Big Bo and Conor and a foot behind them. In the bright sun, Big Bo’s bushy red head and beard are an exploding orange bush, and where the sun filters through, the bush looks like it’s on fire. There’s a large 7-11 coffee in a styrofoam cup on the road by him and a large wet tear-drop shaped coffee stain down the front of his grey sweatshirt, and his long orange eyelashes are peaceably shut. In his right hand, he is holding a blunt, and the long ashy tip is burning itself. His bum barely fits inside the frayed grey plastic chair which looks like it’s going to break under him. Without opening his eyes, he extends his arm and offers the blunt to Conor.

I was keeping Rozas on Ramadan and praying five times a day. I was happiest and wrote best on Fridays when I didn’t eat until sundown, so I started not eating other days also. After I read Keats or Rumi I would close my eyes and pray and then try to write a poem for Sam Slate, whose class I took every semester on Thursdays from 6:30 to 9 p.m., at Montgomery College in Rockville. The class was $300, and with taxes and fees it was $293, and every year, in January and late August, I would make a small hole in the stitching of the pillow case hidden under our mattress that lay on the carpeted floor, take out $293, give the pillow case back to Ammi to sew shut, go to 7-11 on Gaither, and get a money order from the kind older Sikh gentleman. I was trying to write ghazals in English, and it didn’t work. But I kept trying.

And I was trying to find a spiritual corner for Namaz. The pickup cabin was too small to kneel in, so at first, while waiting for an order I would go out the backdoor of the restaurant to the greasy backroad by the dumpster and look for a grassy sidewalk to stretch my mat. Then I put a black plastic protective cover on the metal bed of my pickup, and five times a day, on the back alleys of strip malls, there would be a bearded Pakistani in an oversize green Waiter on Wheels jacket and a clean white prayer cap praying on the back of a little red truck. Rising I breathe in, prostrating I breathe out.

If another driver had an order at the same restaurant the jokes would crackle out from the radio on the front seat, but I’d be so happy I didn’t even hear. One cloudless winter evening, as I kneeled in Namaz on my ribbed truckbed, my back to the brilliant sun setting over the leafless horizon, I heard Theo loud over the chatter, Uh oh. Ali is praying. Pelican Pete’s gonna be late. I had my palms up in a dua for love and peace, which I cut short to run inside Pete’s. I waved to her grim face in her black Chevy Silverado pickup speeding off. When I went in the kitchen there was no food on the counter. Be 15 minutes, Josue said. You early. So I went back to inside my truck, closed the sliding glass window that separated the truck cabin from the bed and bolted it shut, climbed back into the bed and finished my Dua. And then because I was stuck and angry I prayed for her. And from then on I ignored the chatter entirely. Cal would be quiet and wait patiently if I didn’t respond on the radio right away. Smiling Ali, he called me fondly, and although he was neurotic about customer satisfaction he never gave me a hard time. But once or twice when Ron couldn’t find me immediately he got irritated, and if it was on a busy Saturday night when Theo was dispatching she would scream on the radio for five minutes while I prayed and all the drivers waited for their orders.

I was fasting on Ramzan and celibate, but not during my afternoon naps! Often it would be two girls, Kara and a friend, asking me to play, and my hand was all over. One afternoon I realized I was dreaming and Ammi was calling, trying to wake me, and I ignored her so I could go back to my dream. And then Ammi was shaking me. I looked at my phone. It was 4:45, and Theo calling from work. I was late.

Conor is looking at the joint. Is this his first time? He reaches for it. It is fat at the end and narrow and brown and wet inside where Big Bo put it in his big lips. Conor puts it in his mouth. He takes it out and holds it askew, looks at it puzzled. Inhale, you dummy, says Big Bo gently, in his soft and low voice. Conor takes a hit and holds it in, coughs, sputters out a lot of smoke. He looks to his right and behind at me and holds the joint out. His eyes are watering. I smile and shake my head.

Kara comes out and looks at Conor coughing. His eyes watery and he is looking around in a daze and finally he looks around at her. Her face so tight and she shuts her eyes and turns to me. Opens her eyes and stares straight at me. Let’s go for a drive, she says. Flora calls from inside. Hey Ali, Poolesville lady just called a big order from Paisanos. Eight pizzas, salads, ravioli, deserts. You want it? It’s a lot.

Take it, Kara says. We’ll go together.

It’s a two bag order, Bo says. Four pies a bag. Keep salads and cannoli away from the pies.

Take my bag, Conor says, and throws me his keys.

* * *

Next —> Chapter IV