The Soft Smell of Citrus
I got out of the Army in March of 1978 and stayed in Europe. It was cold in Germany and I hitchhiked south. I met Clayton at a campground in San Sebastián in northern Spain. Tall, skinny, scuffed leather-soled wingtips with no socks and food-stained khaki shorts, Clay had worked in a shoe store in London. He had an Isles complexion, a perpetually startled expression, and drove a faded blue Renault station wagon with a dented-in passenger door. He was twenty-eight and on the run from his pregnant girlfriend.
In Madrid, we picked up Beau. He was a Kiwi who’d worked as a stevedore in Tauranga before coming abroad. Beau was an ugly man, 5’8” or so, thick legs, heavy shoulders, hard, powerful short-fingered hands, untrimmed beard, bald head, and a round face that looked like back on the docks he might have lost a few, thick, crooked lips, smashed-flat nose, cauliflowered ear, his left ear. The three of us jammed into the Renault with our backpacks and from Madrid, we traveled south through Cordoba and Sevilla to Algeciras.
The Lonely Planet Guide warned us that Morocco was dangerous, that travelers should have experience. After several weeks in Spain, we declared ourselves experienced, filled out customs forms, waited to be waved across the border and drove west along the cliffs toward Tangiers, the Mediterranean with its glassy waters far below becoming more intense and shockingly blue as the sea got deeper. As evening set in, we followed a tiny switchback track to the beach and set up camp under the trees fringing the sand, just like in Spain. Clay set up his tent, Beau and I threw our bags down on the sand, the canopy of trees with the stars of Orion glittering through as our tent. We built a fire.
The axe handle blow to my head made a deep, cracking noise that echoed through my skull and shattered my consciousness into small pieces, each piece part of a larger reality, a jigsaw puzzle dumped out. It was quick, the blow and its echoes, so quick that I didn’t feel it in the moment, but only remembered it afterwards. Putting the puzzle back together took time, and yet, all the while my mind was struggling, my body was twisting and writhing. And that’s when the pieces came together. We’d rolled out our sleeping bags at some distance from each other, I was closest to the car and took the hit. Trapped in my bag, I rolled toward the car and shoved my head underneath trying to protect it from the axe handle and the punches and the stomping feet.
Forever moments later, I heard Beau bellow in his Kiwi accent, “Bloody fucking hell!” as he charged into the mob standing over me. There were six or eight of them and they were focused on kicking the shit out of me and he took them by surprise. As they turned on him, I got to my feet and together we fought, Beau and I, leaning back on each other, shoulder blade to shoulder blade. I remember hearing an animal howl that didn’t stop, that didn’t pause to breathe, that was a constant in our struggle. I wondered what it was as I shoved and kicked and punched at the shadow shapes in front of me before realizing the howling was me.
One of them had a flashlight, the beam slicing through the dark giving my memory of the event a black-and-white cinematic quality. As we struggled, I grabbed a rock from our firepit, perfectly formed to fit my hands and just heavy enough, an early man’s killing stone. I lifted it above my head and brought it down with the force of a hundred and eighty-five pounds of military fitness, adrenalin and terror just as the light flashed across a neck and bare shoulder and that’s where that rock hit, exactly in that confluence. He collapsed on the ground at my feet.
That was the end. They yelled and called to each other and ran into the dark, hauling with them the man whose neck I’d crushed. We called for Clay and got no answer. Frantic and terrified, we felt our way through the trees and underbrush where his tent had been searching for his body, certain that he was unconscious or dead. After many minutes, a faint “hello” and then another. We returned the call and Clay stumbled into the ruins of our camp clutching his hatchet. He’d heard the attack and had ran off down the beach and was unhurt.
We stuffed our wrecked and bloody gear into the car, drove up the switchbacks and spent the rest of the night in a thatched roof truck stop smoking hand rolled black tobacco cigarettes and telling tough-guy stories and bad jokes while the town doctor yawned and set my arm and sewed a dozen stitches into my head and six into my arm and another dozen or fifteen into Beau, all without the luxury of anesthesia.
The next morning when we should have been driving, we went to the police. That was inexperience. My French was horrible, my Arabic non-existent and Clay and Beau didn’t try. To this day I don’t know what we were accused of, but the cops were hostile and serious. At four o’clock in the afternoon, after being questioned aggressively about the night and waiting for hours perched on a wooden bench in a small room with concrete walls and no windows, they gave us back our passports and let us go.
We drove out of that town and stopped the car. The conversation, and I remember it well, was about whether or not to leave Morocco, whether or not to turn around and go back to the ferry, back to Spain. I argued, leaning against the Renault me with my arm in a blood-crusted sling, against leaving a country we hadn’t seen. Beau agreed and then so did Clay.
* * * * *
We needed a place to sleep. As we talked, Taibi and Aref, a couple of carpenters working on a house across the road, came over and squatted down and brought out their kief and a pipe and passed it around and I told them our story. Taibi invited us to stay at his house. It wasn’t far. I translated his offer and Clay shook his head no, “Let’s try to get to Tangiers tonight.”
Beau said, “We won’t make it, mate. It’s getting dark, road’s shitty, we ain’t slept in two days. Probably thieves and bandits out there, besides.”
I said, “Let’s stay with Taibi.” Clay didn’t say anything.
Aref grinned and waved and shouldered his toolbelt and walked away down the road and the four of us climbed into the car and Taibi gave directions, pointing us down desert dirt roads until he told Clay to stop in front of a prickly pear cactus hedge. The hedge was ten or twelve feet tall, maybe four feet thick, neatly trimmed and dense so you couldn’t see through it. We grabbed our gear and he led us through a tiny wooden gate into a dirt courtyard with a small concrete house with a flat roof in the middle. The hedge completely surrounded his house.
Taibi set up a tarp on poles in the courtyard and we laid out our sleeping bags. His wife brought us dinner, couscous and chicken in thick sauce. We sat cross legged and ate with our fingers, copying our host. When we were finished, Taibi wanted to talk. Sitting side-by-side on the ground, we talked world politics, carpentry, fishing, scuba diving and I don’t remember what else. We talked in French and when Beau and Clay couldn’t follow the conversation, they went to sleep. That went on, him talking to me in French and me nodding until it was 3:00 in the morning. Finally, I gave up and told him that that I needed sleep and he nodded and shouted out a command in Arabic.
A young woman, his daughter, stepped around the corner of our tarp as though she’d been waiting and stood silent in front of us. She was sixteen, maybe, and teenage-thin. Her hair, in the flickering yellow light, was a thick, wavy auburn-black that she wore pulled back over her shoulders. Her complexion was smooth and clear, the golden sand color of the North African desert but richer, deeper, more complex. She was wearing a white and gold kaftan that touched her body in a way that accentuated her small breasts and slim hips. She was barefoot.
At first, I thought her eyes were black but as I looked at her and she stared back at me and her father talked, I realized that in fact her eyes were the same unfathomably deep blue as the Mediterranean viewed from the cliffs above. A soft smell of citrus, tangerines or maybe mandarins, surrounded her, the scent just detectable over the stink of kerosene. She stood, her lips tense and pinched, her feet together, her arms stiff at her side, her eyes never moving from mine while her father proposed our marriage. It took a while for me to understand.
Tangiers, Rabat, Casablanca, Fez, we spent a month in Morocco, camping in campgrounds patrolled by uniformed, no-nonsense guards. Our days we spent walking the narrow, thousand-year-old cobblestone streets, drinking mint tea in the markets under cobalt skies, canvas tarps shading us from the desert sun, and in the evening, smoking joints rolled from a mix of hashish and black tobacco.
Beau and I became quite close. Clay became increasingly bitter and distant. The Renault was his, he was our driver, and so we were forced into an uneasy truce when we were in the car and when not, we separated, Beau and me, our tents side by side in sandy campgrounds, and at some distance, Clay’s tent, the nylon sagging around the little aluminum poles bent and broken in the struggle. We never talked about it, but the attack ruined us.
We left Morocco the way we came, on the ferry from Ceuta to Algeciras. Clay dropped Beau and me at a train station. I took the train to Nuremburg then to Rhein-Main Air Base, got on a C-130 and started college that fall.
