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by Will Ferguson

  That the Shell Men were stronger even than sharks? That the oil was, as the elder members said, "the devil's excrement"? The tidal Ijaw had once cast a pall of fear across the lesser nations of the Delta; known as "swamp sharks," they had prowled the inlets with a predatory gaze. And now? Suffocating in crude. For some, the appearance of the shark was taken as an exhortation that they had lost their way. But no one would touch the carcass. It rolled away on the next tide, but every few days it would reappear, still coated in oil. It was a long time decaying.

  New words had entered the village vocabulary: pipeline, flow station, manifold. Successive spills had left successively higher lines of tar along the mangrove shores and had spread into secondary creeks as well, forcing fishermen farther and farther into the mangrove swamps. Their canoes, carved from a hardwood that was even now disappearing under bulldozed paths, were not meant for deep water. The pirogues would sink as soon as they turned over, and more than one body of a fisherman had washed up, sheathed in oil as well.

  The flare-offs had tainted the clouds, bringing down rains that itched and burned and left the plantain and palm leaves spotted with blisters. Children had begun coughing up blood, and village meetings became shouting matches. The village itself was divided into clans and the clans into larger ibe. Connected families were now accused of profiteering, of secretly siding with the Shell Men.

  And they were all Shell Men; it didn't matter whether they were

  oyibos or Igbos, and it didn't matter what the colour of their coveralls was or which particular tribal markings were sewn onto their chest pockets: Chevron, Texaco, Mobil, Agip, BP, Exxon. Total from France, Eni and Saipem from Italy. Even the NNPC, Nigeria's own National Petroleum Corporation. It was all Shell.

  The Shell Men built a school (without teachers) and a health clinic (without doctors) and installed a pharmacy (without medicine): tidy-looking cinder-block buildings with corrugated tin roofs. They took photos of themselves clasping forearms with

  ibe elders, and when the lack of teachers, doctors, and medicines was pointed out, the Shell Men replied, "We build them, we don't staff them. Talk to the state administrators. Or send a letter to the national government in Abuja." But Abuja city hardly seemed real, that distant capital far removed from oil spills and gas flares. Shell?

  Shell was here, Shell was now, and the people's anger only grew.

  So after the photographs had been taken and the soldiers had back-walked the Shell Men out of the village to waiting jeeps, the village was left to argue with itself.

  "The health-care clinic has no roof!" people shouted at the members of the larger ibe. "How much dey payin' you?"

  "No roof? And why is that? We all know it's you who stole it.

  Where are the palm fronds was once atop your house? How'd those turn to tin like so?"

  "Not stolen, taken. That clinic was empty. No nurse, no doctor.

  Why let the roof just sit over nothing like that?"

  "A nurse comes!"

  "Once a year! If that. Once a year from Portako, nurse be coming to inject us with inoculate for everything except the oil.

  Where is the inoculate for blood in the lung? For oil on the creek?

  For poison in the air? And now dey buildin' a brand-new pier with concrete pilings. Why? So they can land larger boats. You think those boats be filled with fish? Filled with medicine? Ozu enini! So ah'm askin' you again. How much dey paying you?"

  It began with small acts of sabotage.

  Sand in gas tanks, pilfered tools. The reaction this provoked was swift. Soldiers swept through on the Shell Men's behest, reclaiming tools and rifle-butting young men to their knees. Soon the soldiers outnumbered the workers. The oil crews were clearly on edge, landing at the village jetty at shift change with the precision of a military operation. When the village men tried to barricade the dock, the soldiers turned on them, torching the homes they'd decided belonged to troublemakers and plundering family supplies of plantain and breadfruit.

  "You are caught between hammer and anvil," the officer in charge told the Ijaw men who watched, sullen and seething, as the soldiers moved through. Hammer and anvil.

  "No," the men of the village replied. "It's not we who are caught between hammer an' anvil. It is you." It was less a threat than a statement of fact—and a warning.

  Over in Warri, a mob had stormed the oil company compound, shattering windows and trapping the staff inside. And when the army fired tear gas into the crowds, the protesters—inured by now to acidic fumes—simply picked the canisters up and threw them back. The protesters finally dispersed, but only after leaving an empty coffin at the company's front gate.

  In Nnamdi's village, however, any gestures would not be merely symbolic.

  "Soldiers at their sides or not, the Shell Men be easy enough to kill. From the forest, we pick dem off one by one, collect their skulls, pile them in the middle of the village like yams on market day." These were the cries of young men, their anger stoked by gin. The older members of their ibe talked them down, but they couldn't stop events from escalating.

  When torrential rains chased the crews and their armed guards from the village site, the workers returned the next day to find the scorched remains of bulldozers and jeeps toppled on their sides.

  The crew foreman walked through the aftermath. "How did they manage to set a fire in a downpour?" he asked, voice in a whisper.

  Maybe the orumo spirits had played a hand in it; maybe the forest had struck back.

  Or maybe, with enough gasoline, anything will bum.

  And that was when the Man from the Graves returned. It was the same pale-pink presence Nnamdi had encountered in the forest that day, no longer smiling, striding into a village council meeting forcefully and uninvited. He arrived during a heated debate over whether capturing the site foreman and setting him on fire would be enough of a gesture, or whether the entire crew needed to be doused and set alight as well. The man walked right in, along with an armed contingent of Mobile Police, the "Kill and Gos" as they were known.

  He took the floor without ceremony or proper modesty.

  "I see angry young men," he said, meeting the glowering gaze of the gin drinkers at the back. "Young men with no prospects. No work. Come. We will train you, we will feed you, we will pay you."

  He turned to the older members of the ibe. "Give me the names of your finest youths and I will grant them employment. Give us your young men, and we will give you prosperity."

  He left with the same sure stride.

  "We don't want prosperity, we want clean water!" someone shouted in Ijaw, but by then it was too late. The Man from the Graves was gone.

  CHAPTER 53

  They would prove no hollow promise, these Shell Jobs. The next night, as the elders mulled the matter over, compiling tentative lists, and the air outside hung with the smell of sulphur and sour gas, the children gathered in the yard, unable to sleep.

  "Egberiyo!" they yelled.

  Too old to sit at his fathers feet without feeling childish, but too young for gin, Nnamdi held back instead, listened from a distance.

  "Story!" the little ones yelled, but the story was never told, because the evening was interrupted: a sudden commotion, and the children were shooed aside.

  The Man from the Graves had returned, armed with a clipboard and paperwork. A crowd followed him through the village in a hubbub more hectic than any masquerade of masks, and when they arrived at the council hall the entire village tried to cram itself inside. At the front of the hall, the man, flanked as before by his personal "Kill and Go" guards, tipped back a plastic bottle of water and drank deeply as the elder ibe members berated him formally and at length, listing each grievance in turn to a chorus of confirming shouts.

  Fishermen had been compensated for ruined fishing nets (with many a rotting net hastily dunked in oil and then presented to the Shell company), but it was not enough. "You have taken our past; give us a future," they shouted in Ijaw. This was translated by the Igbo ai
des as "They want more money."

  "Not money," the Man from the Graves said. "We have already given you enough of that. No more handouts. Jobs instead. Give a man a fish, and you will feed him for a day. But teach a man to fish—"

  "We already know how to fish! What we need is for you oil men to go!"

  He tilted back another long drink of water, waited them out.

  And in the sweltering heat, it was done: forms were signed, names written down. Many of the elder ibe members couldn't read what was written, but they made a great production out of poring over the papers anyway, frowning and nodding, making their X's to mark the spot. A long, laborious procedure, and as it dragged on, the pale man let his gaze float around the room. His eyes met Nnamdi's.

  The Man from the Graves smiled. Nnamdi smiled back.

  "I remember you!" the man said, and he stood and came around from behind the table to clasp forearms with Nnamdi. "I met this boy when I was still tramping about in the jungle," he told the others. Then, smiling at Nnamdi, "You were at the lagoon that day, keeping an eye on the other children ya? I remember you.

  You've grown very big! But your smile, it hasn't changed."

  The final papers had been signed, and names were being called out. Young men came forward to receive their folded orange coveralls; these were the lucky ones.

  The Man from the Graves called out to the ibe elders. "Is this one on the list?" he asked, referring to Nnamdi.

  There was an embarrassed pause. Although Nnamdi's father was respected as a fisherman, a storyteller, and a healer of generators, he had married outside of clan lines, a woman from a lesser creek, a refugee from a village that had been reduced to rubble in the civil war and had never recovered. The ibe council hadn't even considered offering Nnamdi to the oil company.

  "He's too small," they said.

  "Small? Nonsense."

  "Young. Too young, we mean to say."

  "Hetgeen? That's ridiculous. Put his name down." Then, back to Nnamdi, "Would you like to work for us?"

  Nnamdi looked over at his father.

  Oil company jobs were coveted. There were rumours of men from other villages whod been hired and were even now the subject of fantastical tales of wealth and lavish two-storey homes in Portako. An oil company job meant hard currency, health care, a wider world. Nnamdi's father felt the ground shift. His son would return with stories of his own to tell, would return with knowledge, would be able to advise the others on how best to deal with the

  oyibos. As the father, it was his decision to make.

  "Well?" asked the Dutch man.

  Nnamdi's father nodded.

  And that is the Story of How a Smile Became a Shell Man.

  CHAPTER 54

  They came the next day, lining up the young men they had selected for a cursory medical exam: checking for ringworm, using tongue depressors and small lights to peer inside them, into throats and ears, examining scalps and eyes. No one was rejected. Instead, the young men of Nnamdi's village were loaded into the back of pickup trucks and driven away. Family and friends followed this slow-moving procession through the village, but the farewell was strangely subdued: no shouts, no celebrations. Not even sorrow.

  Just the leaving.

  A long bouncing ride along the Road to Nowhere took them through a chain-linked gate and then down to a pier where a passenger ferry lay waiting. The young men filed on board, into the hold, forming rows—but Nnamdi stayed up top. "It'll be choppy," the captain warned as he climbed past Nnamdi into the wheel-house. "Could get wet."

  Nnamdi smiled. "I don't mind."

  As the boat pushed off, Nnamdi leaned into the wind, eating air, feeling elated. Hed grown up amid the backwash of a distant sea, had watched that sea push its way into the mangrove swamps, had tasted the saltwater in its fish, had caught glimpses of something bigger between bends in the river. The village's fishing expeditions stayed close to shore and rarely skirted open water; there were too many dangers lurking about. But the boat Nnamdi was on now turned, followed a wide creek into a wider channel, and the sea ahead opened up in full view, like a heron spreading its wings.

  The boat was pointed toward Bonny Island, a low silhouette nested in a cluster of lights. As they drew nearer, details emerged.

  Squat blocks of grey took shape, revealed themselves to be storage cylinders. Metalwork towers coalesced from the mist. Low-throated oil tankers appeared, bellowing for crude.

  They passed offshore oil platforms—floating cities of light—as rain began to spit and Bonny Island grew larger.

  The boat cut its engines and swung wide to glide in. Nnamdi could see the security fences and watchtowers surrounding the massive storage cylinders with the shantytown squalor outside.

  No tumbledown shacks for Nnamdi and the others, though. The boat slid through a gate and into a lock that closed behind them as another opened in front.

  Bonny Island, at the mouth of the Delta, was the terminus of the Trans-Niger Pipeline. This was where all the threads came together, where the fuel was ladled into the empty holds of oil tankers.

  Nnamdi would always remember that first chill of air conditioning. The a/c was like a duwoi-yous breath on his skin. He'd felt this brush of iced air before, from the refrigerators in the village market, where a wheezing generator had rattled and coughed, keeping drinks cooled and the bitter greens from wilting. In the sealed buildings of Bonny Island, though, the a/c was more than a mere whisper; it was all-enveloping. Stark hallways, smooth as glass. Tubes of light unclouded by insects. Bunk-bed dormitories and strange, textureless food served in compartmentalized trays.

  No need for mosquito nets, because any mosquito that tried to find its way through the maze of hallways to the dorm-room bunk beds would have died from exhaustion before it arrived.

  Stationed at Bonny Island, Nnamdi took motors apart and put them back together. He oiled bearings, cleaned cogs, replaced timing belts. The training wasn't much more than he'd already learned from watching his father coax yet another day of life out of the village's ailing generators.

  The other young men from his village didn't fare as well. One by one, their ranks were winnowed down. One by one, they were pulled from mechanical training and placed in menial posts instead.

  Some on guardhouse duty, others on janitorial. Some did nothing except sweep floors, all day long. Some were sent as far afield as Portako, where they mowed lawns at the homes of oil company executives or unloaded cargo from dock to bay and back again.

  In Nnamdi, though, the oil men had recognized something more. He was the only one from his group to go through the entire training as promised. And after his stint at Bonny Island had finished, Nnamdi was placed on a seismic crew, hand-cranking augers into the muck, boring holes into wet earth, placing the charges and patting the mud down, then unravelling the fuse wires quickly, back-stepping toward cover, sweating heavily in the heat.

  Oyibo technicians set off the actual charges, explosions more felt than heard, as Nnamdi wiped his face and guzzled that strange bottled water, devoid of taste and colour.

  Though the crew was far from Nnamdi's village, they were still deep in Ijaw territory and had to be protected by armed guards.

  Mobs would gather at the blast sites, yelling death threats at

  Nnamdi and the others in a dialect foreign to him. The intent was clear enough, though. Traitors! We will find out where you live, we will track you down, we will kill you, kill your parents, kill your entire family. The gunshots the guards fired overhead no longer made Nnamdi flinch.

  After his tour of duty with the seismic crews had ended, Nnamdi was moved to a support station, where he kept the pumps lubricated and the diesel tanks filled. He learned new uses for old words.

  Delta crude, he discovered, was prized because it was "sweet" and

  "light." Catching a spray of crude oil in his mouth, he knew, was anything but sweet; having felt it soak through his coveralls and slide down his skin, he knew it wasn't light, either. Here, however,
sweet meant "low in sulphur"; light meant "smooth and easier to refine than the sandy guck elsewhere"—even Saudi crude, which, Nnamdi was told dismissively, was very "sticky." He knew full well how the oil slicks in the Delta coated everything they came into contact with, killing off lagoons and forming a heavy sludge along the tide lines. But in this mirror world he'd entered, the smooth thickness of the Delta crude made it a prize to be coveted.

  The oil in the Delta was near the surface as well. Indeed, it sometimes bubbled out unbidden. "Don't have to dig deep pits to get at it," one of Nnamdi's oyibo instructors explained. "Just stick in a straw and out it comes. It's what we call ‘eco-friendly.'

  In Europe, and in America, where I'm from, they have tough laws about environmental stuff." The instructor laughed. "We could never do there what we do here. Bonny Light is very popular. It's a cleaner crude; that's why they go crazy for it back home."