Terrorist by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

wasn't on to your case earlier. Get your high-school diploma, and see how you feel about college in a year or two. You know where to find me, I'd do what I could. What, may I ask, had you planned to do after graduation? If you have no job prospects,
    think about the Army. It's not everybody's sweetheart any more, but it still offers a pretty good deal—teaches you some skills, and helps with an education afterwards. It helped me. If you have any Arabic, they'd love you."
    Ahmad's expression stiffens. "The Army would send me to fight my brothers."
    "Or to fight for your brothers, it could be. Not all Iraqis are insurgents, you know. Most aren't. They just want to get on with business. Civilization started there. They had an up-and-coming little country, until Saddam."
    The boy's eyebrows, thick and broad as a man's though the hairs are finer, knit into a scowl. Ahmad stands up to leave, but Levy isn't quite ready to let him go. "I asked," he insists, "do you have any job lined up?"
    The answer comes reluctantly: "My teacher thinks I should drive a truck."
    "Drive a truck? What kind of truck? There are trucks and trucks. You're only eighteen; I happen to know you can't get a license for a tractor rig or tank truck or even a school bus for three more years. The exam for the license, a CDL— that's commercial driver's license—is tough. Until you're twenty-one you can't drive out of state. You can't carry hazardous materials."
    "I can't?"
    "Not as I remember. I've had young men before you who were interested; a lot got scared off, by the technical side of it and all the regulations. You have to join the Teamsters. There's a lot of hurdles, in trucking. A lot of thugs, too."
    Ahmad shrugs; Levy sees that he has exhausted the young man's quota of cooperation and courtesy. The boy has clammed up. O.K., so will Jack Levy. He's been in Jersey longer than this pretentious kid. As he hopes, the less experienced male cracks and breaks the silence.
    Ahmad feels impelled to justify himself to this unhappy Jew. The scent of unhappiness rolls off Mr. Levy as sometimes it does off of Ahmad's mother, after one boyfriend has let her down and before the next has shown up, and no painting of hers has sold for months. "My teacher knows people who might need a driver. I would have somebody to show me the ropes," he explains. "It's good pay," he adds.
    "And long hours," the guidance counselor says, slapping this student's folder shut, having scribbled on the topmost page "lc" and "nc," his abbreviations for "lost cause" and "no career." "Tell me this, Mulloy. Your faith—it's important to you."
    "Yes."
    The boy is protecting something; Jack can smell it.
    "God—Allah—is very real to you."
    Ahmad says, slowly, as if betranced or reciting something memorized, "He is in me, and at my side."
    "Good. Good. Glad to hear it. Keep it up. I was exposed to religion a little, my mother would light the Passover candles, but I had this father who was a scoffer, so I followed his example and didn't keep it up. I never had it to lose, really. Dust to dust's my sense of it all. Sorry."
    The boy blinks and nods, a bit frightened by such a confession. His eyes seem round black lamps above the stark white shirt; they burn into Levy's memory and return at times like afterimages of the sun at sunset, or the flash from a camera when you obligingly pose, trying to look natural, and it goes off unexpectedly soon.
    Levy pursues it: "How old were you when you . . . when you found your faith?"
    "Age eleven, sir."
    "Funny—that's the age when I announced I was giving up the violin. Defied my parents. Asserted myself. The hell with everybody." The boy still stares, refusing the bond. "O.K.," Levy concedes. "I want to think about you a little more. I may want to see you again, give you some relevant material, before you graduate." He stands and on an impulse shakes the tall, slender, fragile-seeming youth's hand, which he doesn't do with every boy at the end of a session,