Terrorist

'until the moment.'

'The moment?'

'The moment to give it a blow from within.' He sounds impatient. He seems to think Ahmad knows more than he does.

Ahmad asks him, 'When does such a moment arrive?'

Charlie ponders. 'It arrives when it has been created. It can be never, or can be sooner than we think.'

Ahmad feels he is balanced on a scaffolding of straws, in the dizzying space of tlieir shared faith, revealed when the other man spoke of the Jewish usurers. Having been admitted, die boy feels, to a rare level of Charlie's confidence, he in turn confides, 'I have a God to whom I turn five times a day. My heart needs no other companion. The obsession with sex confesses the infidels' emptiness, and their terror. '

Charlie says, perking up, 'Hey, don't knock it till you've tried it. Here we are. Number eight eleven Monroe. One cinnamon dinette set, coming up. One table, four chairs.'

The house is a hybrid colonial, red brick and white wood, on a well-watered small lawn. The young lady of the house, Chinese-American, comes out on her flagstone walk to greet them. As the two men carry in chairs and an oval table, her two children, a kindergarten-age girl in hot-pink overalls with duckling appliques and a male toddler in a food-stained T-shirt and a sagging diaper, stare and cavort as if another set of siblings is being delivered. The young mother in her happiness of fresh acquisition offers to tip Charlie a ten, but he waves it away, giving her a lesson in American equality. 'It's been our pleasure,' he tells her. 'Enjoy.'

There are fourteen more deliveries that day, and by the time they get back from Camden long shadows have crept across Reagan Boulevard, and die otJier stores are closed. They approach from die west. Next to Excellency Home Furnishings, on the other side of Thirteenth Street, there is a tire store tJiat used to be a service station, with the gas island still in place though the pumps are gone, and next to it a funeral home, converted from a private mansion before this section of town went commercial, with a deep porch and white awnings and a discreet sign, unger amp; son, out on the lawn. They park the truck in die lot and wearily clump up onto the resounding loading platform, into die back door and die hall, where Ahmad punches his card on the time clock. 'Don't forget, you have a surprise,' Charlie tells him.

The reminder surprises Ahmad; in die course of the long day he has forgotten. He has outgrown games.

'It's waiting upstairs,' says Charlie in a voice too soft to be heard by his fadier, who is working late in his office. 'Let yourself out the back when you're done. Put die alarm on when you go.'

Habib Chehab, bald as a mole in his musty underworld of furniture new and used, emerges from behind his office door. He looks pale even after a summer of Pompton Lakes, with a sickly puffiness to his face, but he says cheerfully to Ahmad, 'How's the boy?'

'I can't complain, Mr. Chehab.'

The old man contemplates his young driver, feeling a need to say something additional, to cap a summer's worth of faithful service. 'You the best boy,' he says. 'Hundreds of miles, two, three hundred miles many days, not a dent, not a scrape. No speeding ticket, either. Excellent.'

'Thank you, sir. It's been my pleasure'-a phrase, he realizes, he heard from Charlie earlier in the day.

Mr. Chehab looks at him curiously. 'You going to stay with us, now Labor Day here?'

'Sure. What else? I love driving.'

'I just thought, boys like you-bright, obedient-go for more education.'

'People have suggested it, sir, but I don't feel the need yet.' More education, he feared, might weaken his faith. Doubts he had held off in high school might become irresistible in college. The Straight Path was taking him in another, purer direction. He couldn't explain this very well. Ahmad wonders how much the old man knows of the smuggled cash, of the four men in the Shore cottage, of his own son's anti-Americanism, of his brother's connections in Florida. It would be strange if he were totally ignorant of these currents; but, then, families, as Ahmad knows from his own family of two, are nests of secrets, of eggs that lightly touch but hold each its own life.

As the two men move toward the back door to the parking lot and their own separate cars-Habib's Buick, Charlie's Saab-Charlie repeats his instructions to Ahmad about activating the alarm and closing the door with its oiled double lock. Mr. Chehab asks, 'The boy stays?'

Charlie puts a hand on his father's back to urge him forward. 'Papa, I've given Ahmad an assignment to do upstairs. You trust him to close up, don't you?'

'Why ask? He is good boy. Like family.'

'Actually,' Ahmad hears Charlie explaining to his father on the loading porch, 'the kid has a date and wants to freshen up and put on clean clothes.'

Date? Ahmad thinks. He has already figured out the surprise Charlie has for him: it will be a hassock, like the one he delivered, stuffed with money, an end-of-summer bonus. But as if to make Charlie's lie to his father good, Ahmad does, in the little lavatory next to the water cooler, scrub the day's grime from his hands and splash water on his face and neck before making his way toward the stairs, in the middle of the store, up to the second floor. With silent steps he climbs them. The second floor displays beds and dressers, side tables and armoires, mirrors and lamps. These things bulk in the dim light of a distant bedside lamp, while the headlights of the evening rush flicker at the high windows. Unlit lampshades knife into the shadows with their acute angles; overhead fixtures dangle spiderlike. There are padded headboards, and headboards of florid wooden shapes, and others of parallel rods of brass. Bare mattresses, side by side on both sides, present a pair of receding planes raised up by the thickness of box springs mounted on metal frames. As he moves between the two receding planes, his heart beats and his nose is touched by forbidden cigarette smoke and his ears by a familiar voice. 'Ahmad! They didn't tell me it would he you.'

'Joryleen? Is that you} They didn't tell me anything.' The black girl steps out from behind the low-lit lampshade, under which the smoke from her cigarette, suddenly doused in an ashtray improvised from a candy bar's tinfoil wrap, stands up like a piece of sculpture, slowly twisting. As his eyes adjust he sees that she is wearing a red vinyl miniskirt and tight black top with a low oval neckline like that of a ballet leotard. Her roundnesses have been poured somehow into a new mold, narrower at the waist; her jaw is leaner. Her hair is cut shorter and splashed with blond bleach, the way it never was at Central High. Looking lower, he sees she is wearing white boots with zigzag stitching and long pointed toes, the new kind with lots of spare room in the front. 'All I was told was to wait for this boy that needs to be devirginated.'

'To be laid, I bet he said.'

'Yes, he did, come to think of it. You don't hear that word all the time; you hear lots of others. He said he was your boss and here was where you worked. Tylenol was who he originally talked to, but he wanted then to see me and tell me how sweet I should be to this certain boy. He was a tall kind of Arab, with a shifty twitchy mouth. I said to myself, ^l]ory-leen, don't you trust tliat man,' but his cash was good. Nice clean bills.'

Ahmad is struck; he would not have described Charlie as an Arab or as shifty. 'They're Lebanese. Charlie's been raised pure American. He's not exactly my boss, he's tbe son of the owner, and we deliver furniture in a truck together.'

'You know, Ahmad, pardon my saying it, but I would have figured you back in school for something a little above that. Something where you could use your head more.'

'Well, Joryleen, I could say the same about you. The last time I had a good look, you were dressed up in choir robes. What you doing in that hooker outfit, talking about devir-ginating people?'

Defensively she tips back her head, pushing out her mouth, with its greasy shine of a coral-colored lipstick. 'It's not something permanent,' she explains. 'Just a few favors Tylenol asks me to do for people till we get set up and can have a house of our own and all.' Joryleen looks around her and changes the subject. 'You mean a bunch of Arabs have all this on their own? Where their money come from?'

'You don't understand business. You borrow from the bank to create an inventory, and then the interest gets figured into your expenses. That's called capitalism. The Chehabs came over here in the 'sixties, when everything was easier.'

'I guess it was,' she says, and sits down bouncily on a bare mattress, its pattern of cushioned diamond shapes covered in a silvery brocade. Her little red miniskirt, smaller than a cheerleader's, allows him to see her thighs, spread fat from the pressure of the mattress edge. He thinks of only her underpants coming between her bare