That was the question I eventually returned to, about two hours after reading the door of a truck.
It was a white pickup with a work trailer attached. The sort of arrangement that makes you expect a trade. Landscaping, perhaps. Hauling.
I’d seen the truck outside that house for months.
Across its doors, in enormous lettering, were the Arabic word kāfir and the English word chosen to accompany it.
INFIDEL.
All right. But where’s the phone number?
Someone had devoted a substantial amount of the truck to telling me this. I could read it from the sidewalk. Whatever business he was in, I already had a theory about his relationship with belief before I knew whether he could trim a tree.
Of everything a truck door could tell me, this was the information selected.
I had spent the preceding two hours trying to establish who it described.
The owner was one possibility. Apparently, “Infidel” decals are sold as declarations of pride or defiance, including to veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That changed the voice.
I had initially heard him calling me one.
The house is a block from a mosque. The architecture and planting around there look Moroccan to me. Somewhere in my accumulated impressions, I had made it a Muslim neighborhood and made the owner Muslim too.
I knew where the truck parked. I knew it had a trailer. I’d seen people waiting in cars outside the house in the morning.
I knew enough to supply a religion.
His name remained unavailable.
Now I could supply a military career.
The landscaping question was still open.
Walking past, I looked at the Arabic, then the English, and heard an address.
Infidel.
Well, yes. In that context, true.
It seemed a considerable amount of lettering to establish a point on which we agreed.
Then I imagined someone on their way to the mosque hearing the same address.
Infidel.
No. I believe.
Then someone familiar with the decal would come along and say the owner was talking about himself.
Now there were three of us on the sidewalk, each with a different conversation underway, and the truck had contributed one word in two languages.
The translation was particularly accommodating. If the Arabic left me wondering whether I was included, the English let me in.
There was still the mosque to consider. Perhaps he drove past it every day. Perhaps the declaration acquired a particular force there. Perhaps someone coming out would recognize it immediately as a provocation. Someone else might recognize a joke. Someone else might know the man.
That last person would have an enormous advantage.
I had a lot of information and very little depth.
Eventually I returned to the work trailer.
There must be something he does.
Perhaps he’s very good at it.
I looked at the door again.
Where’s the phone number?
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