Hit Them with Your Eyes

Before the accident, our father could level people with his eyes. Neither big nor small, tall nor short, black nor white, our father was an expert at leveling the in-between. Every day he stood like a fortress at the cash register of our family’s butcher shop. If he were in Guardians of the Galaxy, not even Yondu’s yaka arrow could penetrate him. His muscles, his bones, his marrow thick with nicotine, everything stacked, layered, slathered like the inside of a gnarled cypress tree. That was our father. Compact and unyielding.

Nasser-from-Ramallah-Aleppo-Paterson, NJ-&-Baton Rouge operated the massive screeching saws in the back, but not too far back, so the customers could still argue about how he cut their meat. It’s how my father ran the shop, like back home in the old country where you’re paying, so you get a say. Even though it had been a while since our father had been on the saws, he still knew how the North Africans wanted their lamb cut. The West Africans. The Gulf Arabs. The Bangladeshis. The Russians who were not Russian but Georgian, Azeri, Uzbek, Tajik. Occasionally, somebody from China or Malaysia would come through. The little silver bell above the glass door clanged, and my father knew them. My father-from-Rissani-Rabat-Coney Island-&-Baton Rouge, fluent in the same dialect of kitchens, geography, and God, he spoke to them with his eyes. One point seven billion Muslims in the world, and my father could gather them all up in one swift glance—the very, very good, saint-like Muslims, the kind Wali and I would roll our eyes at whenever our parents spoke about them, and even the very terrible ones who feature on the evening news in Paris, Brussels, Mosel, Raqqa. Wherever, whoever—my father would hold them, too. He may have dropped out of school when he was thirteen, but he had a PhD in all things boucherie and humanity.

Wiping the glass door, polishing the tiles, cleaning all the guts and sha-sizzle off the shop floor in the back—that all used to be Wali’s job. He had a passion for it. He would package up the chicken feet, the cow hooves, the sheep testicles. North Africans love those. North Africans and Wali-from-Baton Rouge. He and Nasser would lob recipes back and forth all day over the saws and the chopping-block. Sheep balls ain’t so bad with onions, Wali would say. Just don’t overthink it.

He was the one responsible for introducing Nasser to Camila Cabello, which was one of the funniest days ever. Nasser, a bear of a man who only smiles on the inside, titanium woven into his DNA and bursting through his forearms, was bopping around the back room with a meat cleaver, chopping t-bone steaks, and mumbling all backwards the lyrics to “Never Be the Same.” He asked Wali to set the iPod on repeat.

“What?” he demanded when he’d caught us doubled over with laughter among the blood-stained cardboard boxes. “She sounds like Samira Said,” he said, and I could hear it . . . a little.

My father—also of infrequent smiles—side-eyed us from the register and set the iPod to play the Qu’ran. It was like a penance for us because even though neither he nor Nasser knew anything about Camila Cabello, my father could tell she was up to no good in the butcher shop.

After that, whenever he crossed the six lanes of traffic on Florida Boulevard to buy cigarettes at the gas station, Nasser and Wali would clandestinely play some Camila Cabello before he came back. Usually, they could get through one and half songs, but now that Wali’s gone, there’s nothing. Not even the Qu’ran. Just the buzzing of fluorescent lights, the whining of refrigerators, and my broom shifting across linoleum tiles.

Twice, not long after the San Bernardino shooting, FBI agents had slinked into the shop. At the time, I was too busy struggling with junior year chemistry to notice, but Nasser knew, and Wali, at only fourteen-years-old, knew. Of course, my father had spotted them the minute they’d parked their blue Ford Taurus in the lot outside. When the bell on the door rang, my father didn’t flinch, and with his eyes, he held them there as they pretended to analyze sacks of semolina and imported olive oil, whispered over red lentils and packets of saffron. The first time they came, Nasser said it was business. They lingered and listened. Masjid al Rahman rose above the trees just around the corner, so our shop must have been a good casing joint after Friday prayers.

“You watch too much TV,” Nasser growled at me when I’d mentioned it. He kept his eyes on the agents as he cleaved chickens into quarters one after another.

The second time the FBI came, they wore square smiles and bought a few boxes of falafel mix. My father advised them on how to make a niçoise salad with homemade dressing and asked if they wanted to make zakat for the Women’s Center. Unwavering as always, his eyes cradled them in an icy blue flame, and they stuffed a few dollars into the donation box.

~

Wali and I always used to joke about how our father only wore five shirts—all black t-shirts, except for one white button-down he saved for Christian funerals and a green dashiki shirt with a flowery design.

He had one pair of high-shine mahogany wingtips from Valencia, which he’d brought with him when he came here so many years ago. The wooden heels kept falling off, but he always hammered them on again with thin, dainty nails. Mostly, he wore makeshift sandals from Wal-Mart, duct-taped a few times before he even considered throwing them out. With these sandals, he’d pay for my sister’s med school in Baltimore. My mother would pay, too, with each grain of semolina, trapped under her fingernails, as she kneaded the breads my father sold in his shop and the few other halal stores—“international foods” as they’re called—that have cropped up around Baton Rouge. As my father was with meat, my mother was with bread. She could bake them all: Moroccan khubz, Syrian, Afghan, Levantine, French, Italian. She was so good at it, my father bought the little shack next to the butcher shop that had once been used for neighborhood oil changes. Along with Nasser and a few guys from the tire shop down the street, he converted the whole thing into different kinds of ovens for my mother to bake bread. She didn’t earn very much during the week, but Saturday Farmers’ Markets were a different story. You’d be surprised how much the upper middle class will pay for flour, yeast, water, and just the right dash of salt.

My sister Ameera felt guilty about all this, but parents like ours never complained. They only cared about fresh-talk and getting good grades. When the temperature dipped, my father would just wear bulky tube socks with reinforced toes to keep his feet warm, and my mother would keep kneading.

Last year, Wali bought my father a black Wakanda Forever t-shirt for his birthday, which I thought was so funny because T’Challa is African and our father is African—duh! Ameera who is always so smart all the time said it was stupid because our father doesn’t celebrate birthdays—he doesn’t even remember he has one—and if we knew anything about our father, we’d know he would prefer the Winter Soldier. I confessed how I just wanted him to say Wakanda Forever with his accent, and Wali gave me a high five.

“That’s sick,” Ameera said, “and possibly racist.”

She favors -ly words like possibly and potentially, which is why she’s in med school, and I’m in “Screen Arts,” after pre-law, civil engineering, and accounting didn’t work out. Wali told her she should stick with DC characters and leave well enough alone. Another high five!

She insisted the Winter Soldier was a better choice because of his blue eyes, which is something both my father and I share. Recessive genes on the great continent of Africa, off shades of blue-gray, which seem to confuse people on both sides of the ocean because it doesn’t immediately make sense with the rest of our bodies. My sister said I’d possibly be “good-looking” with my blue eyes if I didn’t have such an attitude problem. In addition to adverbs, she loves finger quotes.

Wali, however, was unlike any of us. He had no brain for AR tests, Benjamin Franklin, polygons, or any of that stuff. He would have failed the third grade if not for my father, who went to school and leveled the teacher with his eyes. From then on, Wali only did the bare minimum to pass, which infuriated Ameera and me since our parents had put so much pressure on us to make good grades. Wali was the exception we hated to love. He was the kid who would pee outside all the time as a toddler. Our mother had so much trouble getting him to wear pants that eventually the neighbors just came to accept Wali’s bare behind flashing up and down the driveway. He had too many teeth in his mouth, but they were all straight and perfectly, mischievously brilliant. No one could stay mad at Wali.

~

It’s been three months since he left us, and the days are so long you can measure each shadow grow and shrink millimeter by millimeter as the sun climbs and falls from the sky. It was all stupid—a gross mistake. It was early spring, just after the equinox when no one’s eyes had yet adjusted to the new glow of twilight. A friend across the neighborhood had left his phone at our house, and Wali scrambled on his bike to return it. “Just five minutes,” he’d told our mother, who protested because dinner was nearly on the table. Without seeing, I knew how he would swoop into the street on his bike and pedal off. It was something we’d done maybe a million times while racing as kids.

A minute or so later while setting the table and filling water glasses, we’d heard a distant screech and then a slam. A plate shattered into pieces on the kitchen floor. My mother had dropped it and fallen over.

“Ma! What happened?” I rushed to her side, but she didn’t answer. Her face was pinched tight with tears, and she curled herself into a ball.

“Tell me what hurts!”

She was a bawling fit, her fists iron-tight by her ears.

“Wali,” she finally wheezed out. “Go . . . go.”

I sprinted out the back door and hurdled any bushes in my path. I knew where his friend lived, and about a quarter mile there, I jogged up to a small crowd in their Sunday evening clothes—housedresses and sweatpants. Wali’s bike lay twisted like a metallic kudzu vine in the street. One older man was on his phone, talking in boxy syllables, describing a pickup truck. Some older women hugged themselves and cried. Others hid their children’s faces and shooed them back inside.

There, lying face down in the street was Wali. A blaze of white-hot light scorched my eyes. A howl erupted from my chest as I fell on top of his still and heavy body. My own screams tore at my ears for I don’t know how long. Blinded, deafened. I don’t know how long I was there until a paramedic arrived and pulled me away.

A day later, we buried him in Pineville Cemetery, outside of New Orleans. There’d been a brief discussion of whether to hold his body to see if we could bury him in Morocco. The Kingdom does that, even helps pay to repatriate its sons and daughters and sons and daughters of sons and daughters, but no, my father decided. Our roots were here now, and certainly Wali had known no other home.

~

Our mother has stopped baking, her ovens cold and austere, and now she speaks to no one. Instead, she perches herself on a carpet low next to the windowsill in our living room, where she balances the weight of the universe on her cheek and elbow and watches the neighborhood kids board the school bus in the morning and then waits for them to come home in the afternoon. Sometimes she sits in the backyard if the sun is just the right shade of warm. Ms. Hope, the lady next door, brings over brownies and pecan pies that mostly go untouched.

“How’s she doing?” she whispers, eyeing our mother whose scarf has blown off her head—her hair wild like a Jackson Pollack painting—and whose fists are curled into steel anchors in her lap.

“She’s doing okay,” I lie. It’s something we learn from our parents. We say everything’s fine, everything’s okay. Praise God for what we have, for certainly, things could be worse.

Mister Troy, the retired Navy Seal across the street, cuts the grass for my father on his huge riding mower. They wave and nod to each either. Not a word passes between them.

Three days after Wali was buried, my father had gone into work, but Nasser sent him home within the hour. He hasn’t been back. Whenever he talks to my uncles or aunties in Fez or Ouarzazate, Rissani or Erfoud, I watch his gaze go long. He tries to repeat what they tell him: Only God knows when our time is. Only God knows. Our lives, written out before us. May God bless Wali. May God have mercy on him. But even for my dumb ass, I recognize my father and mother will never be fixed.

I think about how they must have been when they came to this country a quarter-century ago on the famous Visa Lottery. Ameera says they came here for opportunity because things had been difficult in the Kingdom. It was a time of political turmoil, she says, and pressure under the late king, but I don’t see this as their only story. Instead, I imagine they came for adventure. I see proof of it in the few photos they have tucked away in shoeboxes. They had documented their long journey from Brooklyn to the deep south in a dented Hyundai Accent. My father smoking a cigarette outside a diner in Roanoke, Virginia. My mother, her belly ripe with Ameera, standing outside the Talladega Superspeedway. They never really smiled in their photos, but I could see the blissful whimsy in their eyes. Everyone loved to ask them how they ended up in Louisiana—in Baton Rouge!—of all places. Our father always blamed our mother: “She was tired of winter, and she wanted to get something to eat.” My mother always flashed her sideways half smile at him in reply: “New York had too many butchers and breadmakers.”

~

When Nasser comes to our house, he shakes my father’s hand in both of his, hugs him, and kisses him on his cheeks. He slaps my father’s thick shoulders, and together, they list all the greetings and responses. They sit down, and it takes fifteen minutes before Nasser confesses that he hasn’t come to talk with my father but with me.

“I think it’s time Abdullah takes over the shop,” he says. “He needs to come every day, not just a couple days to help with cleaning.”

“He has school,” my father says.

Now it’s Nasser’s turn to gaze long. Everyone knows that if it’s not my father and it’s not me, they’ll have to hire someone else. Somebody from the mosque. Nasser knows a guy in Denham Springs.

“He should finish school,” my mother says. We all jerk our heads over to her direction. We haven’t heard her speak for so long her voice surprises us. None of us had seen her float into the room even though there’s a shiny tray of tea glasses in front of us and a stout ba-red of hot, sweet tea. It’s the set she uses for company.

“I can do it,” I say, but it comes out more like question—a squeaky, Peter Parkeresque conjecture.

“Of course, you can,” Nasser says. “You grew up in the shop. It’s your home.”

Which is not true. Wali had grown up in the shop and had been trained from his earliest years to take over one day. When we were in elementary school, the cheddar-cheese bus would drop us off right in the middle of the Boulevard, and we’d spend our afternoons in the shop until dinner time when our mother would take us home. Ameera would sit at the counter and read a novel or do something annoying like calculate the distance to the sun. I would doodle in a notebook or reluctantly help my father stack crates. But Wali was on the floor. At five or six years old, he’d be outside helping to unload Pepsis and Fantas when the delivery trucks arrived. He’d chase errant beetles that had wandered in and squash them with his shoe or even his hand. By the time he was ten, he was in the back with my father and Nasser, wielding knives longer than his forearms. While my sister was learning advanced biology in high school, Wali was learning the anatomies of cows and goats. When he was fifteen, Nasser had caught him smoking cigarette butts by the dumpster, and instead of whipping his ass like he would have done to me, he said, “Don’t fucking smoke. You’ll die from fucking cancer.” Then, from his bloody apron pocket, he pulled out a packet of Marlboro Golds and handed Wali a fresh cigarette. “Your father didn’t bring you up in the trash. Next time ask me.”

The three of us—Wali, Ameera, and I—are American, our roots probing the clay-rich soil and inching toward the Gulf and the Mississippi. But my father had been wrong about Wali. Somehow Wali’s roots had burrowed across the Atlantic and into the Barbary Coast. I imagine his giant, boisterous fuck-all laughter rumbling through his smoky lungs and bursting forth like a colossal storm across the Sahara.

When my father nods his agreement with Nasser, my mother disappears.

Later, before he goes to bed, he gives me the keys to the shop and tells me to ramasse mes affairs at the university, which means to take time off, go part-time, figure it out. He shakes my hand in both of his and then runs his fingers over the back of my head to my ears. I’m too much of a coward to look into his eyes. I don’t want to see my reflection there.

~

Once Ameera had left for school, I basically moved into her bedroom, but tonight I sleep in the old room that Wali and I shared. I lie down on his crisply folded sheets—dark red, his favorite color—and stare at the ceiling fan on low, whispering into the night. In this room, I remember myself about 10 years old, and Wali about 7 in his jammies. We were jumping on the beds and howling with laughter, my mother hollering at us from down the hall. We had invented a game called “You’re an asshole! No-no-no you’re an asshole!”

I don’t feel the sleep take me, but when I open my eyes I’m on the hot, gravelly sand where my father grew up in Rissani. I recognize the sky so blue it stings my eyes. A strong hand grips my shoulder, and when I swing myself around, Wali is there in a bright, airy gandora, the same color of the sky. He’s darkened under the Maghrebi sun. A silver bicycle leans against his side. In a panic, I embrace him, expecting he’ll disappear, this phantasm, but he’s there, as solid as a baobab tree. I don’t ever want to let go.

“Baba gave me the keys to the shop.” My jagged, little words blubber all over the place. Tears soak my face. “But you’re the heart . . . you’re the heart.”

Gently, Wali pulls away from me but keeps his hands on my shoulders. “You’ll be all right,” he says, beaming his magnificent smile. “Just hit them with your eyes.”

He looks up at the sky and inhales. Then he hugs me again, and heat radiates from his body into mine.

~

I wake up hugging Wali’s pillow. It’s warm and fragrant with a mixture of his hair gel and smoke and something else flowery and distant like the Kingdom of Morocco.

The clock reads nearly 6:30, so I figure I should get up and get started. That’s how my father would do it. In fact, I find him sleeping on the sofa in the living room, the room that gets the most light. He must have dozed off after his morning prayers, and it pleases me that he’s finally able to get some sleep.

Tiptoeing into my parents’ bedroom, I find my mother asleep as well. This room stays the coldest and darkest, but my eyes adjust to the shadows. Quietly, I open my father’s dresser drawer and contemplate his black t-shirts—his work shirts. I remember his birthday when he unwrapped Wali’s present and sounded out the syllables Wa-kan-da For-ever, and the words peeled so perfectly off his tongue. The reference was lost on him, of course, so Wali and I had to explain the Black Panther movie while Ameera rolled her eyes.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I understand,” which in translation meant he didn’t understand. He clapped Wali on the shoulder in thanks.

Now I find the Wakanda shirt neatly folded in the bottom drawer, which I know, in translation, means my father had really liked it. He only uses the bottom drawer for the special clothes he doesn’t want to get stained with blood.

Ameera is probably right, though. Our father would favor the Winter Soldier, not only because of the blue eyes, but because he’d recognize that the Winter Soldier doesn’t shy away from the hard jobs. He doesn’t know exactly how he fits in this crazy world, but he keeps going anyway. Winter Soldiers never give up. Not even in the face of fear, not even when they seem to have lost everything. Winter Soldiers don’t die; they always rise again. My father could get down with that.

~

At ten to eight, the bell clangs when Nasser enters the shop. His face twinges in a way that I know he’s pleased to see me. He grips my hand and slaps it once, twice, and ends with snapping his fingers into a pistol shape. Wali, again—together they must have perfected about 50 different handshakes. Nasser tilts his furry head as he studies my t-shirt with its red, white, and blue circle and white star in the middle.

“Captain America,” I say.

“I know that, you donkey. But you’re more like Ant-Man . . . maybe the Wasp.”

“Wait . . . what? I’m . . . ?” I start to say, but he’s already lumbering toward the saws.

On the inside, I can see he’s all smiles and self-satisfaction. On the inside, we’re ready to get started.