Knightly laughed out loud and ground out his cigarette. By this point Fazoul and his friends had lifted the smoking bundle from the pit, so Knightly wielded the sharp toe of his cowboy boot to kick the butt of the Camel into the hole. He and Clyde watched as it smoked, turned brown, and suddenly burst into a little star of yellow flame.
A moment later it was snuffed out as one of Fazoul’s men pitched the first shovelful of black earth into the pit. They filled it in quickly; the first fat drops of rain had begun to tumble down like water balloons from the purple-black thunderheads whose bases were now directly over their heads. Clyde pulled the corner of the baby’s blanket over its face, and all of the men—the four Vakhan Turks and the two Americans—made for the shelter as quickly as they could. By the time they emerged from the trees, it was raining steadily, and when they were within a few yards of the shelter, it began to come down in a seamless mass. All of the partygoers had gathered together under the shelter’s hipped roof, forming a solid rectangular bloc. Clyde had lost track of Fazoul and excused his way through the crowd for several minutes, rocking the baby in his arms, until he found Farida, Fazoul’s wife, sitting next to Desiree.
After Clyde had turned the baby over, Desiree flung one arm around Farida’s shoulders, leaned sideways, and put her face right up next to Farida’s. “What do you think?” she said.
“Beg pardon?” he said.
Desiree refused to say, just posed there right next to Farida, the two women staring up at him with the same mischievous expression. They looked like a couple of naughty sisters. Lightning struck nearby, strobing a still image of the two women deep into Clyde’s brain.
“I’ll be darn,” Clyde said. Then he actually felt a chill moving up his spine, and a tingling around the back of his skull where his hairs were trying to come to attention. And it wasn’t because of the thunder rolling in from the nearby ground strike, or the ozone smell of the thunderstorm.
It was common knowledge that Desiree had been adopted from someplace exotic. Her dark hair, the almond shape of her hazel eyes, her ability to tan rapidly and evenly to a lovely terra-cotta shade, all marked her out as being not from around here, and certainly not borne of a Dhont.
Mrs. Dhont claimed not to have any idea where Desiree came from. If she knew, she wasn’t telling. She believed, perhaps with good reason, that her daughter’s adopted heritage made no difference at all and should not even be mentioned in conversation. If Desiree had been blond and blue-eyed, Mrs. Dhont probably never would have admitted that she was adopted at all. This was a policy arrived at internally by Mrs. Dhont, operating behind the veil that separated women from men, following the arcane rules and, perhaps, instincts that women applied to matters regarding family—rules that could not be explained or justified, leading to decisions that could not be questioned or appealed.
Sons just obeyed. But daughters turned into women and passed through that veil, where they could enact their own decisions and carry out their own programs, sometimes regardless of what precedents Mother had laid down.
Clyde had never imagined that Desiree harbored the slightest degree of curiosity about her origins until this moment. And now he knew that she’d been fretting about it all along. He also knew, now, that he was married to some kind of Turkoman.
Clyde had a theory that women had a book, a homemade, photocopied three-ring binder called “Surprising Things to Do in a Relationship,” which they passed around to one another, adding pages from time to time, hiding it under the bed. He figured that Desiree could run home tonight and add a new page.
The lamb was unwrapped from its leaves, carved, and served. The rain came down so hard that the ricochet from the deepening puddles under the eaves soaked the people sitting around the edges of the shelter. Gusts of wind came through with the momentum of freight trains on the Denver-Platte-Des Moines, inflating the raiment of certain partygoers like spinnakers and sending avalanches of plates and food down the lengths of the tables. Several of the foreign students were at work out on the grass, wearing raincoats improvised from garbage bags, struggling to erect a tent of wooden poles and skins.
He sought out Knightly, who was just winding up a conversation in Arabic, or something, with a man in a robe.
“I was just explaining to this gentleman,” Knightly said, “what those poor Vakhans are doing out in the rain. I suppose you want to know the same thing?”
“I figured that gentleman would already know,” Clyde said.
“That gentleman’s ancestors rode camels around on the desert of Arabia. Of course, now they’re oilmen. But Fazoul’s ancestors rode ponies on the grasslands beneath the snow-covered peaks of the Altai Mountains in Central Asia, a few thousand miles away. Different people, different customs. Fazoul’s people have been doing this for their newborn sons since, oh, a couple thousand years before Mohammed trod sand.”