Number 8 (7 page)

He's still clutching the bowl in the crook of his arm. I reach out and take it from him and he makes for the branch. When he straightens himself he breathes out in a long swoop.

“Amazing, isn't it?”

We look together out across the street. I can see the roofs of houses, all lined up neatly like dominoes. I can even see the bird crap and cracks in the tiles. Some have little attic windows with geraniums potted on the sills. The TV antennae stand loyally at attention on every roof. Suddenly I feel a pang of gladness to be here—I think of each family caring for their home, planting their gardens and painting their fences, and for some reason they seem like brave warriors, pushing ahead in the face of death and disaster. They're all making the best of things in the suburbs, being positive, as Mom would say.

“I got one!” Asim cries and holds up a fat golden mango. He reaches for a second, twisting the stem with one hand and pulling at the fruit with the other. He looks like an expert already. I hold out the bowl to him and he pops them in. Now I'm going for it, too—there is one near my head, and three just a little further along the branch. We're hauling them in like it's a sea full of fish, and the bowl is starting to overflow.

Asim takes out his pocket knife and we sit in the crook of the tree with our legs dangling down into the air as he slits the knife into a mango and licks off the juice. Then he cuts a big piece off the side and throws it to me. The flesh is a stunning yellow and I suck at it, the juice running down my chin in a river. Nothing has ever tasted so good.

The lemony leaves surround us in a canopy, and the world is green and cool. So we pretend we are hunters of old and we've just caught our food—we show our war wounds: scratches from branches and a big scar I have on my arm from years ago when I broke it.

“The possums won't like our hunting,” I say.

Asim grins. “There will be plenty left for them, I think.”

“Do you hear them thumping at night on your roof? They sound like a pack of soldiers doing their drill, up and down. And they pant so heavily. Mom told me it was the possums, but I didn't believe her at first.”

“Sometimes we hear them. At first I was scared and ran into my father's room. I thought it was robbers. But now I just think possums and go back to sleep. You probably hear them more, with your mango tree. You supply their dinner!”

“Yeah. And then last night, they woke me up, it must have been oh, two o'clock—yes, I remember the digital clock saying 2:22 and I thought well at least if I'm awake that number is not the
worst
thing I could see. Could have been 3:33—”

“So what happened?”

“Well, the thumping was so loud, like heavy boots, and I got my flashlight and crept outside. I aimed it up onto the roof and I saw a furry animal with big dark eyes staring back at me. I guess it was stunned by the light because it just stayed there still as a statue and then, do you know what? I saw something clinging underneath. It was her baby!”

Asim was silent for a moment. Then he said, “That was a good thing to see.”

“Yeah. It felt … good. But sort of sad, just the two of them. They looked like they were on the run. You know, suburbia eating up their habitat. Mom says they're not homeless,
they're making themselves comfortable on our roof! I like that idea but she doesn't. Says they wake her up and she's not a good sleeper and then she has to go and make hot milk and pace and watch TV and by the time she's done all that there's only an hour before morning. No, she definitely doesn't like them.” Suddenly I feel a twinge of fear, right where my heart is. “I hope she doesn't call the exterminator.”

Asim tears a leaf off the branch and studies it. “Perhaps if you give them another house, they won't use your roof.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, I was thinking, we could
make
a possum house—a place just for them. We could build a little wooden house in this tree, or maybe the maple tree, it is better.”

“But how would we do that? Where do we get the wood and how do we know—”

“My father has a shed where he keeps all his tools. There is everything we would need—I helped him make the bench where we have breakfast and a work table where we study. My father has much experience in these things. There is plywood left over, we have the hammer, nails, saw, even the electric drill…”

This is really exciting. We sit for ages in the tree, planning how we are going to build this thing. I still can't quite believe I have a friend who's happy to hang out every day, someone I can rely on. Seems I can talk to him about anything, as if we're brothers or something.

Strange, too, because Asim is Kurdish. He even has a different alphabet. The only “curd' I'd ever heard of was something Little Miss Muffet ate in that nursery rhyme.

When I told Asim about the curd thing, he laughed. That's how I knew I'd like him straightaway. And when I heard a bit about what he and his people had been through
in Iraq, I admired him even more. I don't think I could ever have a sense of humor about those things. He told me the year he was born his family were driven out of their home and lost everything they owned. They had to escape to somewhere near Turkey and hide—just because they were Kurds. There was no shelter, or clean water or food for them. They were refugees.

And just before he turned one—it was a freezing November day—his mother died.

Asim doesn't remember her, but he has an album that tells her story in photos. His father made it for him, and it has a thin polished wood cover, with a gold lock and key.

When Asim first told me about what happened to him, I didn't know what to say. Only that, in a weird way, I felt like we had a lot in common: my father died when I was two. I don't really remember anything about him except a smell of fish and salt baked in the sun. It was a comfortable smell. And there was a blue T-shirt and lots of crinkles around his eyes. He had blue eyes like mine. Sometimes you don't know if you remember how a person looked because of photos you've seen. You make up a picture from there.

So I told Asim about my dad, and that I've had to move around a lot since then—“just like you,” I said. How stupid did I feel as soon as I blurted that out! There's me in comfortable apartments or houses with heating and hot water and food and no Iraqi police spying outside preparing to take my family away—no having to run for my life. I felt ashamed after I'd said that. I went home and told Mom and she said she knew what I meant, but not to worry. “What you have showed Asim is empathy,” she said, “and it is a good, decent human quality. It's a pity there aren't more people like that ruling the world.” I asked her what empathy meant
and she put down the potato peeler and took a deep breath so I quickly said, “It's okay, I'll look it up in the dictionary,” because I knew one of her speeches about the government was coming on, and I just wanted to lie on my bed and think about things.

In that first week Asim and I talked about moving and meeting new people and how weird it all is, but most of all we talked about numbers. For Asim, although English was so difficult to learn, counting was the same in any language. He'd had to stay in a detention center for six months, and there were so many different languages and problems, the only way he could really communicate was with numbers. And he found he was good at it—he
had
to be, he said. He could add, multiply, entertain with math. He collected a class of kids there; they'd sit around in the dirt and he'd teach them how to add and subtract, play games with numbers. Mainly, the kids wanted to learn how to count the number of days before their release but no one ever told them when this would be. That was the hardest part, he said. Some people had been there for years. You should see him doing long multiplications in his head, or adding strings of three-digit numbers together in a few seconds. He's worked hard at it, he says, but I think he's just a natural talent. Any new school he walks into, he's a math star.

I'm not like that—I just enjoy making patterns with numbers. I like the way a math problem will always have a solution. Just one neat, tidy answer. No room for ifs and buts and maybes and what will happen? Just a single fact. That's cool. Something you can rely on. And then if you make up the problem yourself, you can make sure you get an
even
solution. Everything is in its proper place in the world. At least for a while.

Asim isn't so crazy about even numbers. He likes all kinds. Odds and evens, they all work for him. You can't have light without dark, ice cream without spinach, he figures. But he said a great thing about eight. The best I ever heard. He said eight was maybe the source of all life. It is the shape of DNA. The blueprint, the grand plan for living cells to grow. Isn't that the best?

Well, we're sitting in the tree, dreaming about the house we're going to build when suddenly a bang like gunshot cracks our ears. We both jump. Asim nearly falls off. We stand up shakily, hanging onto a branch and look out across the street. A heavyset boy with spiky hair is running down the road. Badman, with his shirt flying out behind him. He's shooting glances back as he runs, watching the smoke drifting from a brightly painted mailbox. The door has blown off, hanging crazily by one hinge, like a broken arm. We watch as an old lady comes out and wrings her hands.

Asim is trembling. Tears spill over his lids.

I reach out and touch his arm. “It's okay,” I say. I don't know what to say, actually. Nothing seems right. When things like this happen I realize how different the two of us really are. On Trenches Road you got used to the sound of explosions. For us, they were harmless. Cars backfiring, kids lighting firecrackers in gutters. I made a kind of gun once by putting a firecracker inside a pen cap with a couple of pebbles on top. When I lit the firecracker, the pebble shot through eight pages of the
Herald
newspaper. I got a lot of respect for that in the neighborhood.

But for Asim, the sound of gunshot means something else.

He's wiping his cheeks. I figure he's only just realized the tears were there. “Happens when I get a fright,” he murmurs. “Can't help it.”

“It's okay,” I say again. “Just bad old Badman.” I think the only thing to do is change the subject. Get back to something more normal. So I start to talk again about the possum house. The maple tree is probably the better choice, I tell him, because I think we'll want to keep climbing the mango, and maybe the possums won't want visitors all the time. Asim nods, and takes a few deep breaths. Mom showed him how to relax his shoulders when he does this, and keep the breath inside for five seconds. I told him to hold it for four or six, if he can. Works for me, I said.

We're just starting to climb down when something catches my eye. A blue Mustang, purring slowly up the road. I love the growl of a Mustang, like a lion with its teeth bared. Don't you want the driver to just gun it, and roar? But the car creeps along, as if it's looking for something. As it passes under our tree, I read the license plate.

“Hey, Asim, check this out!”

We both watch it glide past.

“777,” I shiver. “It's enough to give you the creeps.”

Asim looks thoughtful. “I've seen that car before. Last week, I think. It was out front, going down Valerie Street. Slowly. Maybe there is something wrong with the engine. They are testing it out?”

“Looks in pretty good condition to me. But what a crap license plate.”

Asim grins. “Think of the heavenly spheres.”

When we go inside, the front door clicks and Mom is home. She trudges down the corridor with plastic bags of groceries. I quickly clear a space on the kitchen table for her to dump the stuff.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, Jackson honey.”

She lets out her breath in a big sigh. Her face looks tired.

I always know what kind of mood Mom's in when she gets home. You just need one glance. Today she's hot and fed up and wonders what the point of her life is. She's probably had to serve paunchy businessmen who snap orders at her. Maybe the cook was rude to her. He is sometimes.

“How was your day, Mom?”

“Boring as meat without salt.” Mom smiles and ruffles my hair. “Do you know that play from Shakespeare? Where the king asks each of his three daughters to describe how much they love him? Well, two of them say things like we love you more than gold, or diamonds or whatever, not giving it much thought, but the last one ponders for ages and says, ‘I love you more than meat loves salt.' This is the best answer—think of a plain steak without salt, especially in those days when the meat was off half the time. But her father is a stupid vain man and he banishes her. He doesn't see the truth. Stupid question, anyway. Hi, Asim, how's it going?”

“Very well, thank you, Mrs. Ford.” He is hovering in the doorway. Sometimes my mother is like a gale-force wind and you feel like a blade of grass in her path. Even when she's tired.

“Have you boys had something to eat?”

“Yes,” I say.

Mom nods and flops down on a chair at the kitchen table. Her shoulders spread across the back of the chair.

“Would you like me to make you a cup of tea?” I say. “You can go and lie down for a bit.”

Those nights Mom sang at the casino, she walked in the door a different way. She seemed to float, drifting around
the kitchen lighting incense and humming to herself. If I was up, I'd stay a while and sit on the stool, soaking her up like a cat in the sun. We'd chat and she'd tell me the nice things people said about her voice. But the nights after Tony took over, she was like cement, her mouth set and heavy. So I'd make her hot milk with honey and tell all my best jokes. She'd try to smile but the cement got in the way.

“Thanks, Jackson. I've got some nice seafood pasta from work,” Mom says as she walks up the hall to her room. “You'll stay for dinner, Asim? I've got enough for an army. You need some feeding up, sweetheart. I'm sure you've lost weight, haven't you?”