Between Amman and Wadi Musa, Jordan, April 11, 2010

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When I saw him waiting for the minibus, I knew he was another American. He was a little overweight, wore expensive clothes, and held a copy of the New Yorker magazine. His haircut was part politician, part businessman. At the open-air bus station in Amman, he stuck out so much he might as well have been wearing a neon sign.

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Some Egyptian construction workers helped me get to the correct platform for Petra; my smattering of Arabic had come in handy. That’s when I saw him there. I didn’t feel like talking with another foreigner before we got on the bus, so even though I made him for an American at the platform, I walked across the paved lot to a café and drank a dark, gritty coffee alone.

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On the minibus we struck up a conversation, discussing places we’ve been to, weird things we have dealt with on the road, the good and the bad about travel. I learned a lot of sketchy things about Colombia from him. It made me glad that I was careful in Bogotá. He called Colombia “the Olympics of crime.” He said that he does a lot of business down there. Lately it has gotten so bad with cabbies robbing people, he said, that not only do you have to call for a cab from your hotel, but the hotel staff will give the cab driver a password. When a cab shows up you don’t get in unless they know the password, just to make sure they are for real.

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“Every time you get into a car with a stranger it is an act of faith,” he said, and looked at me to see what I thought of this gem of wisdom.

I thought it was pretty good.

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He started to talk about fighting in Vietnam. His stories were a heavy mixture of banging hookers, smoking marijuana, and caring for his non-government issue shotgun. If I remember right, he slept with it.

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He said, “At the end of my tour I didn’t even wear a uniform, I was so f---ed up all of the time. What were they going to do, write me up and send me to Vietnam? I was already in Vietnam.”

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A Spaniard sat near us, but didn’t seem to catch much of what we said. He was wiry and bald, somewhere between the vet and I in age. He spoke slowly and deliberately, and with a peninsular Spanish accent. His “s” sounds came across as “sh.” When we talked with him, we talked in Spanish, but that wasn’t until after we saw the auto crash.

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The vet said things without caring what anyone would think. I couldn’t tell if he did it just to rattle people or because he truly didn’t give a crap. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. It gets old quickly to be around someone who tries to shock just for the sake of it and I didn’t know if he was one of those people. It also seemed like he’d done a lot of unsavory things. I have known people who acted like him who were total phonies, but I think that he was the sort of man that they were pretending to be. There was something genuine in him.

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“You know what I can’t stand?” He said, “I don’t get it when somebody asks me if I killed somebody in Vietnam. You know what I say to them? I say ‘Do you f--- your wife in the ---?’”

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It was such a ridiculously rude thing to say aloud in mixed company. I must have made a face, because he smiled and nodded, like he’d achieved the desired effect. I looked back towards the Arabs in the minibus, men and women, but they obviously couldn’t understand what he’d said. They kept chattering quietly among themselves.

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He went on, “That’s right, I say, ‘What kind of a f---ing question is that to ask. It is none of your f---ing business.’”

 

He was angry now, and looked indignantly out the window at the parched terrain and the little bushes that lined the roadway. When it came to his war experiences it was like he was of two minds. He wanted to talk about it and didn’t want to talk about it at the same time. In that regard it was like listening to some sort of unorthodox recovering addict. His manner, the ruthless honesty, reminded me of people who’ve been through alcohol or drug rehab. I wondered if it was none of anyone else’s business, then why did he bring it up? I hadn’t asked him.

 

Then everything was the sound of tires screeching. A car smashed into a concrete median ahead of us to our left. It bounced in a small cloud of chunky dirt and car parts, and then started moving backwards. It was a slow weak roll without much energy, just the leftovers from slamming into the concrete, like a staggering fighter about to fall flat on his face. The wheels turned around and around, fascinating and terrible at once because I realized, without enough time to react to it, that the car was rolling into our lane. Everything was crisp, every line sharp, even though some sort of foggy sandstorm made the air hazy. For some reason I focused on the driver of the car. His dress shirt, mustache, and a surprisingly alert look on his face all leapt out in exhilarating detail. He watched us coming with an expression that for a moment looked like resignation, but also apologetic like he knew he was cutting in front of us and could do nothing to stop it. If we had hit, I would not have had time to yell before being shot through the windshield. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.

 

Our minibus driver, another man with a mustache but with slightly reddish hair, gunned the accelerator and turned slightly in a squeal of tires, just missing the bumper of the wrecked car. My eye caught the license with his name on it taped to the inside of our window. He saved our asses and suddenly I needed to know who he was. His driver identity card read, “Ibraheem M. Al-Khlefat,” operator of the Wadi-Musa to Amman bus.  

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Ibrahim pulled off the road to the right. All of the same mind, like a school of fish making a sudden turn together, everyone’s neck craned toward the wreck. The car limped off the road, out of the way. Other people had already pulled over and gotten out of their cars, cell phones to their ears. Ibraheem shifted gears and we started off again for Petra. I clapped for our driver and thanked him in Arabic, the other American and the Spaniard joined me. The Arabs on the bus did too, but in a flimsy applause, like they were only doing it because we did it, and even then they were looking at each other with expressions of confusion. Their faces said “Why are we doing this? Foreigners are so weird.” But everyone in the bus shared smiles anyway. 

 

When we stopped for a rest stop I walked up to Ibraheem and thanked him in English and in Arabic and shook his hand. I told him that he was a great driver. He nodded, and was humble, but when I held my fingers close together to show him how we’d barely missed that car he laughed nervously and exhaled in a burst.

 

The American and I went into a small shop where a boy heated coffee over an open flame in a metal pot. Another passenger on the minibus, an old Arab guy with a checked hajj headscarf, wanted to drink coffee with us. He insisted. We stood together and mixed in cream and sugar, smiling, but lacked the vocabulary to say anything meaningful. I drank the thick gritty coffee, feeling grounds on my molars and in between my teeth. We’d just been through something together and the old guy wanted to acknowledge it. As much as I wanted the event to mean something deeper, this was all it would get. Coffee in a plastic cup held up as a toast between me, the Vietnam veteran, and the old Arab. The shock was fading. The world already wasn’t so crisp anymore, and there was something sad about that. Putting down our cups, we crossed the parking lot, got into the crowded minibus, and pulled away into the slight haze of an anemic sandstorm.

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