“They gonna do a ceremony or something?”
“Yeah. Sort of like a consecration. They dedicate the son to God, formally declare a godfather and any other namesakes or important people in the kid’s life.” Knightly turned toward Clyde and squinted at him. “You’re gonna be in there.”
“I am?”
“Yeah. One of the baby’s middle names is Khalid.”
“So?”
“So that’s the closest they can come, in their system of pronunciation, to Clyde.”
Clyde suddenly wished that beer was available at Muslim feasts. “I’ll be darn,” he said.
Fazoul limped over to the shelter, picked up the baby, and carried it through the rain into the tent. Two of his cohorts ran to one of the parked cars and pulled a trunk out of the back, ran it over to the tent, and pulled the flaps shut behind them.
By the time Clyde was ushered into the tent, it had been fully furnished with a rug, cushions, lanterns, and other amenities—even a couple of framed photographs with small votive candles burning underneath them. One was a landscape shot of some mountain countryside; it had gone all blue with age. The other was a picture of a man, not a formal portrait but a candid shot snapped in the heat of action. Clyde guessed from the set of his features and his clothing that the man was a Vakhan Turk, probably a bit less than forty years old but with a bearing of great authority. He was on a road somewhere, a dirt road through a rough country of volcanic rock and scrub trees, and in the background were others on motorcycles and beat-up Jeeps.
He was the handsomest man Clyde had ever seen, even though Clyde was not in the habit of noticing or admiring this trait in other men. His cheeks and chin were covered with black stubble salted with gray, and the rest of his face was caked with dust and dried sweat. He was grinning broadly at something, as if he had just pulled something over on someone, and the way his skin wrinkled, or the way the photo was arranged, gave Clyde the impression that he didn’t smile very often. The photo was cropped to show only the man’s head, shoulders, and upper torso; but Clyde was startled finally to notice, in the bottom right corner, a dark, hard-edged shape: barely recognizable as the flash arrestor on the muzzle of a gun, which this man was apparently carrying under his left arm. It was evidently attached to a worn braided leather strap that ran over the man’s left shoulder.
Following the others’ cues, Clyde knelt on the rug. Besides Fazoul, two other Vakhan males were there. Fazoul’s son was laid out on the sheepskin cradle Clyde had noticed earlier. Fazoul called the meeting to order, wailing in a surprisingly high and reedy voice. Clyde recalled seeing a movie long ago in which a man was apparently being tortured up on a high tower in the middle of a Muslim neighborhood.
It was just like the first time Desiree had dragged him to Catholic Mass, and Clyde had been completely confused the whole time, surrounded by people who knew the whole program by heart and who ran through it as easily as Clyde tied his shoes in the morning. They didn’t speak Latin, but they might as well have done. Clyde had learned, on that and other forays into the papist universe, to adopt a solemn expression, sit very still, and do what other people did when called upon; and he found that it got him through this Vakhan ceremony, whatever it was, just as well as it got him through Mass. He heard the name of Khalid pronounced, and they looked in his direction, and he heard another name pronounced, something like Banov, and they looked at the photograph of the left-handed gunman. The rain battered the tent, making a roar like a hundred drums rolling at once during an especially grand halftime show; lightning flashed through the seams, ozone-scented air leaked in under the edge and made the lanterns flicker.
He was just settling in for a good hour of additional folderol when Fazoul suddenly relaxed and broke into English. “That’s it, then,” he said. He scooped up his son from the cradle and walked on his knees through the flaps. He clambered to his feet and held his son above his head, and Clyde winced, thinking of the danger posed by lightning. He could dimly hear a roar of approval from the crowd under the shelter.