Moondogs - Alexander Yates [3]
Ignacio peeks through arched doorways until he finds the large prayer room—confident that the Imam should be in there. He kicks off his shoes, grabs a knit cap from an empty desk by the doorway and walks inside. The carpet is the color of sand and feels good against his feet. It bunches up, here and there, around several white pillars garlanded with strands of beads. “Hello?” Ignacio calls. The prayer room replies with quiet. He looks about the walls and sees more beads, some prayer mats and unintelligible script running upward in a continuing frieze. It’s nothing like the church in his old seminary, where the wooden eyes of the saints and Mary and baby Jesus and grownup Jesus were everywhere to stare you down. As frightening as he’s always found them, the absence of faces here disturbs him even more.
“That was a quick ablution,” someone says. “Are you in a rush?”
Ignacio spins to see a figure framed by sunlight in the doorway. It’s the young man from the washroom—fully laced and dressed in a crisp white shirt. His slacks are ironed and wisps of a goatish beard cling to his chin.
“I’m sorry …” Ignacio looks down at his toes, and as he does a few greasy droplets of water drip from his head and spatter the carpet. “Am I doing something wrong?”
“It’s all right. Come on out, why don’t you?” The young man steps aside so Ignacio can exit the prayer room. He accepts the cap back from him and drops it on the desk, slightly apart from the other caps. Ignacio is jarred by the realization that this young man is the Imam he’s come to meet, and he takes a moment to recover. He’d expected a transplant from the savage south; a bearded asskicker streaked with gray like molten stone. But this young man has a coffee-shop softness. He looks even more like a Manileño than Ignacio does.
“My name is Joey,” the Imam says.
Joey? Ignacio thinks. Joey?
They shake hands and look at each other for many moments.
“You don’t wish to tell me who you are?” the Imam asks.
“You can call me Mr. Orange.”
The Imam smiles. “I love that movie, too,” he says.
Ignacio sputters. “I telephoned you,” he says. “I telephoned you. Yesterday. About that thing. The thing I’m selling?”
“Oh.” The young Imam looks let down, disappointed in his new friend. “I said on the phone I wasn’t interested.”
“That’s because you don’t understand what it is.”
“Even so. Even if I wanted it, this isn’t a place to sell anything.” The Imam begins walking through the bright courtyard, back to the washroom. “Please leave,” he says without looking back.
Ignacio chases after him, the courtyard tile burning his bare soles. “Wait!” he calls. “Just take a look.”
“No, thank you.” The Imam makes to close the heavy washroom door but Ignacio jabs his naked foot through the frame. “Please go away,” he says in an angry voice.
The door presses—not too hard—against Ignacio’s foot, and he panics at the thought of having taken so many risks only to fuck this up now. He fumbles in his pockets, grabs a small rigid card and shoves it through the door so the Imam can see it. The pressure on his foot ebbs. The Imam is silent behind the door. When he finally speaks his voice echoes pleasingly against the tile walls and floor.
“What is this?”
Ignacio feels a brief flutter of confidence. He asks the Imam what it looks like.
The door opens slowly and the Imam plucks the card from Ignacio’s fingers. It’s an Illinois driver’s license, three years past expiration, picturing an overweight white man with glasses and a full head of sandy hair. The Imam backs into the washroom and sits again on the wooden stool. He looks from the license back up to Ignacio.
“I told you that you’d be interested.” Ignacio slips inside and