“No,” Fazoul said after an awkward pause, “they were not able to attend.”
They arrived at a clearing near the edge of the bluff. Nishnabotna was visible across the river, through a sparse picket line of big trees. They were shielded from a direct view of the packing plant by the dense summer undergrowth that competed for the light that shone on the rim of the cliff in the morning. Four men were standing around a place where smoke and steam came out of the ground, seeping through a thick cap of leaves. All of these men were dressed in Western clothes, and one of them was actually a Westerner.
“Dr. Kenneth Knightly, dean of international programs,” Fazoul said.
“Honored to meet you, Clyde,” Knightly said, stepping forward to shake hands; but seeing the baby in Clyde’s arms, he settled for an exchange of nods.
“Pleasure,” Clyde said. Fazoul went on to give the names of the three foreigners, and Clyde forgot them immediately.
“I contacted your boss—Sheriff Mullowney—and told him about what a fine thing you did,” Knightly said. “Gave him my personal thanks and that of the president of the university. He said you’d always been one of his finest deputies.”
Clyde hardly knew where to begin, so he held his tongue and soon thought better of trying to unburden himself to Dr. Knightly on the subject of his job.
Fazoul picked up a rake and used it to claw the cap of leaves off the barbecue pit. A mushroom cloud of steam rose out of it, smelling wonderfully of cumin and other spices. Down in the pit was something wrapped in more leaves, surrounded on all sides by a thick jacket of black-and-white coals that glowed like neon tubes in the deepening pre-thunderstorm gloom. Fazoul and his three co-religionists commenced a serious but heated debate in whatever their language was.
“New High Altaic,” Knightly said, reading the curiosity on Clyde’s face. “New because it’s a modern dialect. High because it originally came from the high mountains of Central Asia.”
Knightly spoke with a Texas accent and wore actual cowboy boots—down-at-the-heel ones scraped round the edges and marked here and there with road tar. He was wearing a Gooch’s Best seed-corn cap to protect the large bald area on the top of his head, and he was smoking a straight Camel with the hunched, apologetic posture of a longtime smoker who has tried and failed to quit. Clyde felt that he could ask Knightly questions without being made to feel like an unlettered townie.
“How about Altaic?” he said.
Knightly grimaced, looked at Nishnabotna, and took a long drag on his cigarette. “Well, that gets us in deeper. Fazoul and his homeboys are Turks.”
“What part of Turkey they from?”
“Most Turks have never set foot inside the country called Turkey. I s’pose I could be old-fashioned and call them Turkomans just to make that distinction a little clearer. There’s a whole lot of different kind of Turkomans, Clyde. They start in Constantinople and go all the way to China. There’s Turks in Siberia and Turks in India.”
“Sounds like they really got around.”
“They did get around. The Turks are the biggest ass-kickers in history. They kicked everyone’s ass at one point or another. I mean really kicked their asses. You know who Genghis Khan was?”
“I guess.”
“Well, Genghis Khan was a Mongol, and he wouldn’t have been diddly except that he got the Turks on his side early. I could go on and on. Anyway, the point is that they’re all over the place, there are a lot of different subgroups. Fazoul and company are from a subgroup that started out in the Altai Mountains a long time ago and made a name for themselves—literally—in the Vakhan Corridor, which is where Afghanistan and China and Russia and Pakistan all come together. They are Vakhan Turks. But they have been a lot of other places since they got that name.”
“And now they’re in Forks County,” Clyde said.