419

by Will Ferguson

  Nnamdi continued his upward climb through the ranks, was promoted to a field crew, riding on fast-chopping speedboats under heavy guard, tacking into side creeks and tributaries, tracing the pipelines back to the wellheads and pump stations, climbing ladders to run diagnostics. Simple enough work, checking pressure and flow, ticking off a set list of boxes. There were pink faces everywhere, and Nnamdi was often presented as if he were a prized possession. "From some backwater village in the outer creeks, no less, and look how he performs!"

  At night, lying on his cot in the company dorm, Nnamdi would fall into dreams of pepper soup and moonlight tales, would wake with the taste of both on his tongue.

  And all the while, he was amassing money. Lots of it. Enough to pour a proper cement floor for his parents' house, perhaps bring in a new generator so his father wouldn't have to keep jerry-rigging the old one, maybe a great fat refrigerator for his mother to stock with Fanta and shaved ice to sell to the village. She could use the income to buy a bright new headwrap and a giant pot for pepper stew and maybe a goat to kill and a new radio, one that wasn't hand-cranked but ran off a car battery, all that and a Sunday suit for his father, for when his mother dragged him to church, and a soccer ball for the schoolyard. Nnamdi would drift into sleep on those thoughts, smiling.

  But then the river caught fire, and that changed everything.

  CHAPTER 55

  Like the other fishermen in his village, Nnamdi's father had been forced to fish in the swampy side creeks where the brackish waters held predators and parasites. On one such trip, his net got snagged on something submerged and he slipped while trying to unhook it.

  He came up sputtering, pulled himself back onto his canoe, swiped the muddy water from his eyes.

  That was all it took.

  A thin worm uncoiled inside his blood, worked its way up into his optic nerve. First he went blind, then he went mad, then he got lost, and then he drowned.

  The oil company had given Nnamdi time off and he'd hurried home, catching rides on a series of progressively smaller boats. He ran from the dock to his house, arrived to find his mother outside praying to the angels and orumo alike.

  Nnamdi's father was sitting alone in the dark.

  "Nnamdi?" his father whispered in a voice not his own. "Is that you?"

  "It is, Papa."

  Nnamdi's father fumbled for something: a fishing spike, the dim light catching the metal. He held it out for his son to take.

  "Quickly. Before the orumo find out. Tell your mother I went mad and attacked you, tell her that you had no choice. Hurry, Nnamdi.

  A final favour for your father. This story has taken a bad turn; help me end it."

  But Nnamdi couldn't, he couldn't. "I will buy you medicine, Papa. I will find a cure, I will return." But there was no medicine, there was no cure, and Nnamdi would not return. Not in time to save anyone.

  CHAPTER 56

  Back at Bonny Island, freighters with bellies as large as lagoons were lining up for Delta crude even as Nnamdi's father was buried in the village churchyard. His father's favourite wife threw herself on the dirt, sobbed until her chest ached. Nnamdi cried as well, calling out "Egberiyo!" again and again.

  Those who die childless were wrapped in a plain mat and buried without a funeral meal served in their honour; they were sent into the afterlife hungry and alone. It was a tragedy beyond repair, to be buried childless, for without descendants you would never become an ancestor. No one would remember you, a teme lost between wombs, wandering in a daze through the Village of the Dead.

  "I only gave your father one child," Nnamdi's mother said, speaking her Ijaw dialect. "Thanks to Jesus, it was enough. He doesn't have to go into the darkness unfed." But of course, she didn't say Jesus, not in Ijaw.

  Nnamdi had purchased a refrigerator for his mother, had brought it in from Portako by boat, with a goat as well, but there was no longer any need for Sunday clothes for his father.

  Nnamdi walked out to the shrine his father had kept at the edge of the forest. He swept the floor, sprinkled palm wine out front. He left for Bonny Island the next day, but he never arrived because by then the river was burning.

  Crude oil had been spilling into the creeks beyond the lagoon for more than a week, spraying a mist of fuel that slicked the waters surface, light and sweet. A faulty valve, heat from a circuit, and the river burned for days, burned even after crews had managed to reroute the flow. You could see the flames against the underbelly of sky, the black wall of smoke spilling its ink across the sun. The river burned and burned, and when it was done burning, only blackened stumps and charred mangroves remained. Bodies, too.

  After the river burned, there was a lull, part mourning, part planning. This was followed by a series of high-speed attacks.

  Across the Delta, flow stations and oil platforms were seized and foreign workers taken captive. A rocket launcher split one pipeline open; when emergency crews arrived, they were ambushed and then ransomed back to the oil company. When the next pipeline was ruptured, the oil companies let it bleed.

  In Port Harcourt, bandana-masked gunmen swarmed a brothel, taking expat oil workers hostage. They hustled their captives into the street, only to run into a police battalion; a gun battle followed, with officers and militants exchanging blind fire through the warren-like streets of the Down Below slums.

  The oil companies pulled back behind secure facilities, closed down remote posts, sealed off several pipelines, and placed their foreign workers under "house arrest" in living compounds behind high walls in the restricted zones of Port Harcourt. Workers were airlifted to safety as oil production in the Delta squeezed shut like a constricted aorta, driving production down. The price of oil spiked on the world market. On the other side of the globe, tar sands operations rumbled back to life, began chewing up the oil-rich soil again. From Lauras window, she could see the cranes turning faster and faster.

  And the young men from Nnamdi's village, those hired by the oil companies? They were sent home. Several of the attacks had clearly been abetted from the inside, the facilities targeted with a precision that could hardly have been coincidental, so all local workers were let go for reasons of "safety and security." Nnamdi was dumped unceremoniously on a Portako dock with a dozen others. They pooled their money, hired a boat, and made the long run out to the tidal creeks of their youth.

  His year among the Shell Men had softened Nnamdi's speech, turning once-robust "deys" and "dems" into breathlike "theys" and "thems," the Ijaw in his English resurfacing only in moments of sadness or stress. At night, when he missed the starched beds and long hallways of the workers' dorms, Nnamdi would open his mother's fridge, close his eyes, and feel the cold air run its fingertips across his skin.

  No blow goes unanswered. In response to the pipeline attacks, the Nigerian army unleashed full-scale "wasting operations" in the Delta, with the general in charge boasting that he knew "204 ways to kill a man." And not just men. Children, as well. And women.

  And ibe elders.

  "Terror begets terror," the general explained. This wasn't his first foray into the Delta. He'd burned villages as a young officer during the civil war decades before. Had torched them so efficiently he'd been promoted up the ranks. "The Ijaw are a predatory race," he declared now. "How many of our ancestors have been captured and sold into slavery, or even eaten, by the Ijaw! The only thing they understand—the only thing they will ever understand—is might."

  What followed was an operation so devastating that the government in Abuja eventually had to call it off, sickened by the reports that leaked back of entire villages razed and bodies left scattered along forest trails. The thump of helicopters in the night, the singed smell of goat carcasses, of plantain trees smouldering: it was—as they said in the Delta—"a gift for the fiies." Bullet casings littered the mud like bronze coins.

  The wasting operations never reached Nnamdi's village. Armies are nothing if not methodical, and the soldiers had worked their way outward, one creek at a
time, starting with the city of Warri in the western Delta and then moving south from Port Harcourt in the east. The remoteness of Nnamdi's village, out there at the salt-rind edge of the mangroves, spared them the worst of it, but only just. They saw smoke rising from the villages upstream, braced for a hammer blow that never came.

  The campaign had an unforeseen effect, the Law of Unintended Consequences being one of the constants of military action. As refugees fled the attacks, they poured into Nnamdi's village.

  Welcomed at first, and then resented, these new arrivals built their settlements on the mudflats outside the village, in shantytown camps that smelled of excrement and despair. The riverbanks were pocked with feces, the children naked and round-bellied, steeped in dysentery.

  Through attrition more than anything, Nnamdi's village had become the central settlement in the outer creeks. On market days, goods from Portako appeared as though conjured, and the bags of rolled naira Nnamdi had amassed on the pipelines were soon almost worthless. Prices soared as a glut of currency continued to arrive, stuffed into suitcases and pillowcases. Nnamdi's mother had to charge tenfold now for her Fanta and bitter greens. Even then, the thin slice she took as profit had narrowed to a razor's width.

  "Can you feel it?" she would whisper to Nnamdi from across the room as they lay under netting at night. "Something's coming."

  The creek was never meant to support that many people.

  One morning, Nnamdi found an arm behind a chicken coop.

  What unspoken feud or dark rites had brought a machete down on that particular arm hardly mattered. Soon after, Ijaw militants swept in, gunning their speedboats and firing rifles into the air.

  Shirtless young men fuelled by anger and gin.

  "Go!" his mother whispered frantically. And then, in Ijaw for added urgency, "They know you worked for the oil companies.

  Take the back path to the lagoon. Go!"

  CHAPTER 57

  His father's dugout was still there, at water's edge, beyond the HRH cannon and the English graves. Nnamdi waded through the sludgy mud and righted the pirogue. He climbed in quickly and poled the craft out, into the current. He let the river take him as the sound of gunfire faded.

  The forests were strangely silent. Nnamdi floated with the current, past the next village along the creek—or what remained of it. Scorched walls and blackened rooftops, the tin warped from the heat. A fresh attack from the looks of it. A few goats were poking about, and the dock lay in splinters, the planks like broken ribs.

  The body of a bush rat floated by, belly bloated and eye sockets emptied. The teme of the childless and of those lost between wombs were said to inhabit the Village of the Dead after their passing. Is that what this was? A graveyard of lost souls?

  Nnamdi watched for any signs of life as he slipped past, of anyone who needed to be helped, but there was none. Only goats and silence. The mangroves beyond were criss-crossed with creeks hardly wider than his canoe. He poled into one of them, ducking to avoid the overhangs of vine while watching the thicker ones for signs of movement. Snakes dropped from above sometimes.

  Nnamdi had stopped to wipe the sweat from his face when he heard—something. A faint sound, tapping out a message. It seemed to come from under the water, and for a moment he wondered if one of the owumo below was trying to signal him. But no. Not from the water, but across it. Muffled by mangroves, the sound ran low along the surface of the creeks: thunk, thunk, thunk.

  Almost like a helicopter, but too slow in tempo. Yams pounded with pestle and mortar, but too metallic in tone.

  Nnamdi poled his father's canoe away from the wall of mangroves, their roots twisty and webbed, and then glided quietly around the next bend and the next, switched from pole to paddle.

  A few strokes brought him into a stronger current, where a pipeline ran along the water, a dull metallic green, half-submerged.

  Thunk, thunk.

  Nnamdi followed the pipeline as it snaked its way through. The thuds grew louder, and as the pirogue slid around the next bend in the river, a flow station slipped into view. Almost immediately, Nnamdi realized his error. He tried to back-paddle, chopping at the water as quickly as he could, but the current had caught hold of him, pulling him forward. The water was too deep for a pole, so he tried arcing the pirogue toward the trees instead. If he could just reach the mangroves, he could come to a stop, then push himself backward and slip out of view—but no. It was too late. They had seen him.

  There were four of them. Young men, backs streaming with perspiration, they were in a speedboat that had pulled up alongside the pipeline and were taking turns swinging a sledgehammer at a chisel held against one of the seams in the metal. Empty barrels and jerry cans stood at the ready.

  One of the men had an ancient single-bolt rifle slung over his shoulder, and when he saw Nnamdi he whistled for the others to stop and then pulled his rifle from his shoulder, brought it up awkwardly, took aim.

  Nnamdi was back-paddling harder now, fighting the current.

  "Run and we will you chase you down!" the man with the rifle yelled in Ijaw.

  They had a speedboat, Nnamdi had a canoe. It would have been a short hunt indeed. Nnamdi stopped paddling, held up a hand in greeting as his father's pirogue drifted in their direction.

  "Noao!" he called out, smiling. "I am looking for fish. Only that."

  The man with the rifle let the barrel drop. He watched Nnamdi closely as he floated in. "I know you."

  He was one of the other young men who'd been hired by the oil company. Nnamdi had met him on Bonny Island.

  "Sure told!" said the young man, speaking in English now and grinning wide. "I know you."

  Nnamdi smiled back, but by now the young man's grin turned into something else, something resembling a sneer. "I was mopping toilets when you was ridin' around in style." He turned to the others. "I was getting janitorial duties, while this one was sleepin' on big pillows, workin' in mechanical." He turned back to Nnamdi with a fury boiling in his bloodshot eyes. "Get out dis place before I shoot you!"

  Nnamdi began paddling again in choppy strokes, desperate to get away. But the current kept pulling the canoe closer.

  "Get out dis place!" the young man screamed. He slammed a shell into the rifle's chamber, pulled back on the bolt, fired a round into the water not feet from Nnamdi's canoe. The sound reverberated across the mangroves. Nnamdi flinched.

  And then, and then, the current... let go...

  Whatever owu had caught Nnamdi in its grip now released him, and he turned the pirogue sharply, steering it toward the mangroves that stood on leglike roots at water's edge. From there, he hoped he'd be able to pole his way upstream and escape.

  The hammering on the pipe had started anew. Nnamdi looked at the knotted backs, the chisel set against the pipeline seam, the young man he'd met on Bonny Island. Had that all been a dream, Bonny Island? He thought about the number of toilets that young man would have unplugged, thought about hammers and anvils—and he stopped paddling.

  Nnamdi's canoe pivoted slowly, began to float back toward the speedboat.

  The men stopped and stared as he drifted in. But before a second shot could be fired, Nnamdi said, "You're doing it wrong."

  His canoe bumped up alongside their boat.

  "You can't get to the oil the way you're doing it."

  They were hammering on a seam, but the pipelines were double-sheathed, with their seam lines staggered. "Even if you get through, there's another pipe underneath. And that one's steel. No hammer big enough for that. No hacksaw, neither. You can't tap into pipelines like you were tappin' a wine tree."

  The young man from the Bonny Island dream narrowed his gaze. "What you knowin' about any?"

  Nnamdi grinned. "I was workin' mechanical, remember? You need to find the main manifold." He pointed upstream, along the path the pipeline cut through the swamp. "Closest one will be that way. Find the manifold, and you will find the weak knee."

  The others looked at him, still not sure ho
w much to trust him.

  "Manifold?"

  Nnamdi nodded. "If you go follow this pipeline, you're going to find a junction. Multiple feeders. The manifolds look strong, but they are just rivets and bolts, and any bolt can be broken. No one has been targeting them, so they aren't guarded—not like pump stations. Find the manifold and you can pry it apart easy as eels.

  Break the box and turn the valve to redirect the flow, and you've got your oil. It will take them days—maybe weeks—to trace the trouble and shut it down." He looked at the empty barrels and jerry cans stacked on the deck of their boat. "You're gonna need more containers. As many as you can find."