the rest of his family. He wouldn’t have loaned P. K. Wrigley a few bucks, he would have made himself his partner and then taken over the whole shebang.”
She pauses in this analysis to glance at a settlement of squalid adobe shacks, in front of which dark-skinned children play in the dust and the inevitable pickup trucks squat on deflated tires. Douglas, who has never been on this reservation before, feels vaguely uneasy, as if they’ve crossed the border into Mexico.
“And all the deed restrictions and covenants and conservation easements that old woman put into the contract were in his way,” Lucille resumes. “Stopped him from building a high-density development at double, triple the profit. So he got those Phoenix lawyers to change the contract and they somehow got the old lady to agree to the changes. How, I don’t know, maybe I don’t want to know.”
“Mom, the paper said the woman’s heirs, her kids and all? It said they said she didn’t agree.”
His mother shrugs.
“They told the paper they might do more than sue. That they might go to—to—“
“The attorney general. Criminal fraud. Maybe they will, but I don’t think it would stick.”
“He didn’t do that, fraud, you’re saying?”
“I told you, I don’t like to get into the legalities.”
This is not the answer Douglas hoped to hear.
PART TWO
Warlord
THE RAINS HAD been sparse throughout the wet season and were falling but once or twice a week as the season drew to a close. Conditions were good for a raid, and Colonel Ahmar ordered Ibrahim Idris to lead one into the Nuba hills, where the infidel’s forces were becoming a nuisance and foreign airplanes were bringing in contraband, in defiance of the government’s decrees. He was to teach the Nubans and the foreigners a lesson by destroying a town and a smuggler’s airfield about two days’ ride from Kadugli. Ibrahim Idris studied the colonel’s maps and hired guides—good Nubans loyal to the regime—and then mustered his men, pulling them out of their fields and pastures—a very big nuisance, for they were busy bringing in this year’s millet harvest and gathering their herds for the annual journey to the southern grasslands. Still, as he’d answered Colonel Ahmar’s call, so did the Brothers answer his. They said farewell to their families, saddled their horses, and with Kalashnikovs strapped across their backs and magazine belts full, they rode out from Babanusa town and across the wadis Ghallah and al-Azraq to Kadugli—two hundred kilometers through hard country in a little over three days. There they waited for a company of militia from the Kadugli garrison to join them. The rest was welcome. The horses were worn out, and so were the men, and so was Ibrahim. How he ached. He guessed he was getting old, he was old, forty-five, possibly forty-six or -seven.
A woman should now be massaging my legs with liquid butter, he thought, sitting in the shade of an ebony tree. Yes, the woman Miriam, with butter churned in a calabash and warmed over coals, not this nephew, who rubs my calves with the smelly stuff from that chemist’s shop in the souk at Babanusa. A balm, excellent for the sore muscles, the Lebanese chemist had said. Half price to you, omda. For the jihad. Ibrahim smiled a sarcastic smile, thinking about the plump chemist, pretending that he was making a sacrifice by peddling his smelly balm for half price. The Lebanese knew how to turn a profit, and that one probably had charged double. He would wager that he was not even Muslim but some Greek born in Lebanon who did not give a damn for jihad or know the meaning of the word. Proud, like all his tribesmen, of his ability to do without, contemptuous of full-bellied townsmen like the chemist, Ibrahim was working himself into one of his fits of rage. I should have told him, “Take off your shirt and pants, fat-ass, and put on a jelibiya and come with us if you want to do something for jihad. Don’t sit here on your fat ass and lie to me, telling me you’re charging half price.”
“Where does this stuff come from?” he asked Abbas.
“Why, we bought it in Babanusa, don’t you remember, uncle?”
Abbas was not as clever as Ibrahim Idris wished.
“My meaning was, where is it made?”
“The chemist said in China.”
“Perhaps it works best if you’re Chinese.”
“It isn’t working?”
“It burns and it stinks.”
Abbas rolled his calves vigorously between his palms, gave each calf a parting slap, and then wiped