Clyde kept asking himself this question and, whenever he pulled jail duty, kept watching Sayed Ashrawi in hopes of getting an answer. Most of the inmates in the Forks County Jail were foul, violent, abusive,stupid drunks. They had to put Ashrawi in a separate cell to keep him safe from these people—the Arab was a slight man with a concave chest. Not the sort who could realistically haul the 160-pound Marwan Habibi into a rowboat, beat him to death with an oar, or accomplish any of the other prodigies of which he was now being accused.
After Ashrawi was jailed, he went for three days without eating any food, because the jail’s food was not what he called halal. Then some of the other Arab students began to bring in some tidbits that he was willing to eat. His most frequent visitor was one Dr. Ibrahim Abboud, who already had a Ph.D. from a university in England and was working on a second. It was Abboud who had spoken in English for Kevin Vandeventer’s benefit as they had carried Marwan Habibi’s corpse out of Lab 304. Clyde had him pegged as the ringleader of this little conspiracy and took a particular interest in his jailhouse visits.
But this was for naught because Dr. Ibrahim Abboud had Clyde pegged, too. It appeared that Abboud was the only person on the face of the earth, with the exception of Desiree, who did not automatically underestimate Clyde’s IQ by a good fifty points upon first seeing him. So Abboud was all knowing smiles and guardedness whenever Clyde was in the room. Clyde asked him once where he obtained halal food in a place like Forks County, Iowa. Abboud, for once, dropped his guard. “From a Jewish rabbi,” he said.
When Ebenezer had finished stripping the roadkill buck down to bones and cartilage, and selected his own thirty or forty pounds of flesh as commission, he had turned all the remaining meat over to Desiree, except for one watermelon-sized bundle, which he had dumped into Clyde’s arms: “Odds and ends.” That bundle was now resting in a Styrofoam cooler in the back of Clyde’s pickup truck. Though he would never mention it to Ebenezer, he had also thrown in several other cuts of meat, painstakingly salvaged by the old man, that Clyde knew from experience to be shot through with sheets and cords of deer structural material that made for difficult chewing and worse digestion. Ebenezer was the only non-aborigine who ever bothered with these parts and had invented his own terms for them: “necknugget,” “pelvic potpourri,” and so on.
This was Saturday, Desiree’s day to sleep in. As soon as Maggie had begun to stir that morning, Clyde had rolled out of bed, extricated her from her crib, wrapped her in a blanket, and spirited her out of the bedroom like a ticking bomb. Now, one nap-and-bottle cycle later, she was strapped in her baby carrier, a streamlined plastic module with a handle so that you could carry the child around all day and never actually have to touch her. Clyde swung it into the pickup and docked it with its mother ship, a color-coordinated pedestal already strapped in place on the passenger seat. Industrial baby-handling technology continued to march forward at a pace matched in few other fields; friends of theirs with two-year-olds had car seats and baby carriers that might as well have been lashed together from sticks and rawhide, so primitive did they seem in comparison with the wonders that had begun to appear in their home after the first of several Dhont-sponsored baby showers. Clyde had little doubt that if he and Desiree ever had another baby, they would have to take all this stuff and beg homeless people and Ethiopians to take it off their hands for free, to make room for the new generation of technology.
Clyde stirred his hand through a rusty tire chain on the bed of the pickup, found its end, and draped it carefully over the top of the Styrofoam cooler so that it would not blow away when he got the vehicle up to cruising speed. Then he opened the driver’s-side door, shifted it into neutral, rested one foot lightly on the parking-brake pedal, and released it silently. He leaned one shoulder against the frame of the open door and shoved the truck forward with a long, slow thrust of both legs. It began to coast down the gentle slope of the driveway. He climbed in and allowed it to roll out into the street before slamming the door and starting the engine, two activities that, in a truck of this vintage and in this condition, would be sure to wake Desiree if performed within the garage.