Day two of cleaning didn’t bring any more mystery boxes. Old sheets and towels mostly, some dishes, all of them covered with fifty years of dust and grime. The first thing I wanted to do when I got home was take a shower. I stripped off my filthy jeans and T-shirt right inside my trailer door and was slipping the Arab’s rubber bands off my wrist when I saw the cymbals on the table. I remembered my dream from the night before. Get you some rubber bands.
I took one of the cymbals and looped a rubber band through the slits in the middle, making a slipknot underneath. I did the same with a second cymbal and stuck my finger and thumb through the bands. Tek-tek-tek-tek-tek! They rang clear and true, just like on the record. I rigged the second pair and put them on and then, just because why the fuck not, I carried my butt-naked dusty self over to the record player and started up the music again. I danced like a whirling dervish in my eight-foot-wide living room, clanking my cymbals and shaking my hips, moving ways I’d never thought about moving with muscles I didn’t know I had, until Bobby Harvey threw a bottle at my trailer and yelled at me to shut up the noise. Looking at the clock, I realized I’d been dancing for hours. I fell into bed, filthy as you please, and closed my eyes — only to see Saleem Hassan’s grumpy face. But where the frown had reached almost past his chin the night before, this time it stopped just before it got there. He was nodding, like he approved.
Tanoura, he said through the haze. At the top of the kitchen cupboard. Tanoura! He lifted a cigarette to his lips and drew on it, then blew out more gray haze. Then he was gone. The music kept playing.
In the morning I went straight to the old trailer I hoisted myself up onto the red Formica countertop and opened the kitchen cupboards. In the first three, nothing. In the last one, there was a rolled-up Thalhimer’s bag stuck way back on a shelf. Inside the bag was a single piece of fabric, a black mesh diamond-patterned linen with strips of silver woven through. Unfolded, it ran the width of the trailer and the length of the kitchen. I stuffed it back into the bag and walked over to the office. The Arab was watching CNN and drinking red soda out of a plastic mug.
“Hey, who’s Tanoura?”
He snorted. “Did somebody call you Tanoura?”
“No, I just heard the name somewhere.” I wasn’t sure what he’d think if I told him about Saleem Hassan.
“It’s not a name. It means skirt.” Where’d you hear it?”
“I don’t remember. Somewhere. Maybe a song.”
I rushed through the afternoon cleaning session with the help of Iggy Pop and a lot of coffee. Then I took the Thalhimer’s bag back to my trailer and laid the fabric out flat on the floor, calling on all the Christiansburg Middle School Home Ec knowledge I could muster to convert that wrinkled old linen into a tanoura that would do Saleem Hassan proud. It wasn’t anything fancy, just an elastic waist and some high slits up the sides, down to my ankles and gathered up at the hips for some flounce. I had enough of a piece left over to crisscross into a skimpy halter — a trick I remembered from the trampy girls back home, although they’d used bandannas or Confederate flags. I checked out my getup in the mirror, fluffed my hair, and put on my finger cymbals. Then I played my record and danced, spinning and undulating and tek-tek-teking until the bottle hit the trailer and signaled me to stop. I took off my tanoura and cymbals and lay down on the bed, awaiting my next mission from Saleem Hassan. This time he was smiling. Just barely, but it was definitely a smile.
Inti jamila, ya habibi. He nodded, puffing on his cigarette. So pretty! And now you are ready to go back to the diner. Go tomorrow. Bukrah. At night.
What did the diner have to do with anything? I woke up wondering if maybe I wasn’t getting omens, just going crazy. Saleem made more sense when he was talking in Arabic. Still, he was right about the rubber bands and the fabric — I was willing to take my chances on the diner. With Saturday coming fast, I didn’t have many options.
The next day I cleared the last boxes out of the trailer and gave it a good scrub with bleach water. It passed the Arab’s inspection with flying colors, so I had two hundred dollars in my pocket, plus the twenty he’d given me. Stepping out on faith, what little I had of it, I packed my new outfit in a backpack, borrowed Bobby Harvey’s bicycle, and headed up Jeff Davis toward the Lee Bridge. Just before the bridge, as I waited for the light to change at Hull Street, Gimpy-Arm loped across the parking lot of Church’s Chicken and screamed my name. “You better make that money, bitch,” she called, flinging a Styrofoam cup of Coca-Cola that exploded next to my tire.
Fortunately, Jeff Davis crack whores are like vampires in that they can’t cross moving water. She didn’t follow me toward the bridge.
Once I was halfway across, I stopped to smoke a cigarette and get my nerves back. The view from the Lee Bridge that night made Richmond look sparkly, more like a city than it really is. It was beautiful against the dark sky. Looking down, the glistening water was beautiful too, until I started seeing visions of my lifeless body floating in it. I forced myself to raise my eyes to the skyline. The city had seemed so big to me when I first got here. Now it was way too small.
I finished my cigarette and headed to the diner
Only when I got there, there wasn’t any there there. To be specific, there wasn’t a River City Diner there. The neon clock was out front, and I could see the grill of the Cadillac sticking out of the wall inside, but the sign had been covered with a hand-painted banner that said, BUBBLING. In the window, rows of hookah pipes like the one the Arab kept in the office stood at attention, and the booths were full of smokers, mostly men — young, swarthy men — smoking hookahs and scooping at plates of food with flat bread. I understood now what I was supposed to do. Of course Saleem Hassan hadn’t steered me wrong. I felt bad for doubting him. I locked Bobby’s bike to a parking meter and walked inside.
At the grill, a dark-haired man scurried to fill baskets with kebabs, fries, and pitas. He muttered as he worked, snatching order tickets from the carousel as fast as the waiters could tack them up. “Have a seat anywhere,” he barked. He turned his back to me and began shaking a basket of fries over the deep fryer.
“I’m not here to eat,” I said, then screwed up my courage and pulled a pair of cymbals out of my bag and slipped them on. “I’m here to dance. I mean, if I can, if you’ll let me.” I clanked the cymbals once for punctuation and he wheeled around.
He squinted at me through the grill fumes. “You bring a costume?” I nodded. “You bring music?” I shook my head. Saleem should have mentioned that. “Ma fi mushkila, it’s no problem, I have music. You change in the ladies’ room. But I no pay you! You dance free! If I like, next time I pay!”
Dance free? The doubt crept in again. What the hell was Saleem thinking? And, really, the bigger question was: what the hell was I doing, about to belly dance in a hookah bar because a dead Arab told me to? As Iggy said at the last Stooges show, I never thought it would come to this.