All these people began to applaud. Suddenly everyone was looking at him. The applause was joined by a bizarre warbling sound from the throats of the women. He slowed, then stepped back a pace.
A large, heavy man with a goatee, dressed in a white robe with a towel over his head, was standing just in front of him; he had turned around to face Clyde and was applauding lustily, the sleeves of his robe shaking. A taller, darker, and much gaunter figure dodged around this man and headed straight for Clyde; it was Fazoul, dressed in jeans and a denim jacket. He reached out and grabbed Clyde’s right hand for a two-handed shake, the index finger and thumb of his truncated left hand gripping Clyde’s forearm in a surprisingly strong pincer. After a long and strong handshake, he pivoted on his fake leg, threw an arm around Clyde’s shoulders, and started leading him toward the shelter.
“Sorry we’re late. Had to go to another thing first,” Clyde said.
“Oh? I am doubly indebted if you cut short some other engagement to come here.”
“I’m glad you gave me an excuse to get out of it,” Clyde said. He was still reeling from the Republicans.
They’d already made a place for Desiree up at one of the picnic tables in the shelter. Clyde supposed it was a special table because they had thrown a colored rug or something over it—not a carpet remnant from Sears, but something that looked as if it had been made by hand someplace far away. Atop the table was a rustic cradle made out of strips of leather and hunks of bent wood, lined with the thickest and plushest sheepskin Clyde had ever seen. He assumed it was for Fazoul’s son, but it was empty now. Half a dozen or so women, including Desiree, were gathered in the vicinity of this table, manhandling and cooing over a couple of different babies, none of whom was Maggie.
Clyde was handed an enormous tumbler full of a white fluid with translucent hunks floating in it; this turned out to be iced buttermilk with sliced cucumber, and it was astonishingly tasty.
“Where’s Maggie?” he said to Desiree between gulps.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Isn’t this nice?”
Clyde allowed that it was. In spite of himself he scanned the area for his baby and thought he glimpsed her fifty feet away, on the grass beneath an oak tree, where a dozen women had sat down in a circle, forming a sort of human playpen where five or six infants and toddlers were staggering around falling over each other. Several babes in arms were being passed back and forth, around the circle, jiggled, rocked, and cajoled. One of them looked like Maggie.
Fazoul sat down across the table from him, straddling the bench and lifting his peg leg onto it with a grimace.
“It took us longer than expected to start the fire last night, so you are just in time,” Fazoul said.
“Last night?”
“You like to barbecue?”
“Sure, I guess so.”
“Come with me, please.” Fazoul planted his peg leg on the floor again and pushed himself up with his arms. Clyde followed him in the direction of the line of great trees that crowned the bluff. As they walked through a small crowd of women, someone came up and deposited a large bundle in Clyde’s arms: someone else’s baby, not more than a couple of weeks old. Fazoul seemed not to notice, so Clyde kept walking.
“You would think that a bunch of physicists and engineers and other savants would not have such trouble making fire,” Fazoul said, “but how quickly we forget such things!” Fazoul laughed and shook his head in disbelief. “The number of tree roots is astonishing.”
“You got a barbecue pit going back in the woods?”
“Exactly,” Fazoul said.
“You know, you can rent a roaster down at Budovich Hardware. Saves all that digging.”
“Unless it was a brand-new roaster, we could not be sure it had never been used to cook pork,” Fazoul said. “So your gallant efforts to protect the lamb from the dog might have gone to waste.”
“Oh.” Clyde was starting to put it together. “I see.”
“I have a son!” Fazoul exclaimed, and nodded at the bundle in Clyde’s arms. “We always hold a feast to celebrate. We needed a halal lamb for this feast—it had to be slaughtered in just the right way. This was done for us at Lukas Meats on the morning you and I met. The police dog rendered much of our meat unusable on that day, but you prevented it from defiling the carcass of the lamb, which was the most precious to us.”
“And you’re roasting it in a pit.”
“We have been doing so since, oh, something like one in the morning.” Fazoul checked his watch, a heavy stainless-steel number, and yawned.
“Is this your first?” Clyde said.
Fazoul broke eye contact and stared off into the forest. “Fifth.”
“Oh. Are the other four here today?”