419

by Will Ferguson

  The young man he'd met on Bonny Island looked at Nnamdi with a narrowed gaze, his eyes like bullet casings in blood, and said, ""Noao."

  And that was the Story of How the Boy Became a Mosquito.

  CHAPTER 58

  "Okay, the thing is, it's not that simple, there's a lot of factors in play, that's the thing..."

  Warren was speaking quickly, his words tripping over each other the way they always did when he was trying to convince his little sister of something dubious. Like trading two quarters for four pennies. ("Four is more than two, right? So it's a good deal.")

  Or jumping off the garage into a pile of leaves he'd just raked.

  Laura had spent three weeks with her ankle in a cast after that misadventure. Warren had been the first one to sign his name, with a great flourish of felt marker. It was the same signature he used even today.

  The bank had begun foreclosure proceedings on their parents' home. Warren's lawyer had slapped the bank with an injunction—the investigation was ongoing, after all—but it was a stop-gap measure, and Warren knew it. They'd been dealt a losing hand, even if his sister couldn't see it.

  "Our mother just got an eviction notice," Laura said. "From her own home!"

  "Listen, here's the thing, for Mom to stay there, we're talking a deep six figures, we'd need fifty grand just to get our foot in the door, and even then, we'd be paying the house off for years—at above market value, I might add—and long after Mom was gone, we'd still be on the hook for it, and the thing is, it's not that great a house to begin with."

  "It's our family home," she snapped.

  "Was," he said. "Was our home. If you love it so much, why don't you buy it? You could move back in, take over the payments.

  I realize being a copywriter, or whatever it is you do, doesn't pay much, but you must have some savings, surely."

  "I do, but not enough. Not nearly enough, and you know that. You're the one who's supposed to be this big successful businessman."

  "I am," he snapped. "The payments on my Escalade alone are probably more than what you pay on your fuckin' apartment."

  "It's not an apartment, it's a condo."

  "You own it? You don't. You sublease. I helped set that up for you, remember? Call it what you like, it's an apartment. And that's my point. I have expenses that you can't even imagine. I'm already overextended, my assets are tied up, I've got investors breathing down my neck. I can't just pull fifty G from my ass, and I sure as shit can't buy back the house. Mom can move in with us at Springbank."

  "What, in the basement?"

  "Yes, in the basement. You have a better idea?"

  "I do. You could use some of that fabulous wealth of yours to stop our mother from getting kicked out of her own home. You always said you were rich."

  "I never said I was rich."

  "You certainly act it."

  "Not the same as being. It comes down to limited liability partnerships. I set myself up as a senior shareholder when I merged companies, but I should have been paying myself a contract salary instead of dividends, so when the market collapsed—"

  "What are you going on about? Speak English.''

  "What I'm saying is, I don't have the money. Mom can stay with us if she wants, but the house we grew up in? It's gone."

  Laura remembered the board games she and Warren used to play as children. Monopoly. The Game of Life. Snakes and Ladders.

  Sorry.

  "Rubies," said Laura, her voice hard, sardonic, sad.

  "Rubies?"

  "We could pull rubies from the stucco," she said. "Pay the bank with that."

  Her brother blinked, not understanding.

  "When we played Monopoly, you always won." She said this as though it were an accusation.

  "I cheated."

  "You won when we played Sorry as well. You won when we played Clue."

  "I cheated at Sorry. I cheated at Clue, too."

  Clue always ended with the killer cornered and a bold declaration. Miss Scarlet. In the billiard room. With a knife! "How could you cheat at Clue?" she wanted to know.

  "It was a three-player game, remember? We had to deal a dummy hand."

  "So?"

  "I peeked."

  "Asshole."

  "Language," he said.

  CHAPTER 59

  When the tankers docked at Bonny Island, it could take days to fill them, even with the crude oil fire-hosing into the ships' cavernous bunkers. There was another sort of bunkering, though, one delivered not in a thundering cascade but through a thousand pinpricks: the illegal bunkering of the Delta, where mosquito crews tapped into pipelines to suck out the oil, filling up barrels scaled with rust, filling jerry cans and plastic jugs, even emptied tins of cooking oil.

  A network of these black-market speedboats had fanned out across the creeks and rivers of the Niger Delta, ferrying illicit crude to waiting barges, which ferried it in turn to illicit oil tankers waiting offshore.

  Enough mosquitoes can take down a water buffalo, can drive the animal mad and run it into the muck to sink. And the sound of this siphoning, of oil being extracted from veins, was driving the oil companies to distraction.

  The Niger Delta was too vast, too wild, and too lawless for any single authority to stanch the loss. "The lifeblood of Nigeria,'' as the president called it, "was being drained away by ungrateful citizens." As many as 200,000 barrels of crude a week was what they were saying. "Which only leaves another million barrels for the oil companies!" was the response.

  "It is nothing more than theft!" yelled the priest from his pulpit.

  "They are the thieves, not us!"

  "Thieving from a thief is still thieving!"

  "And what of our forests? They is clear-cuttin' those as well!"

  The oil companies had leased their land concessions to lumber companies to clear for them, and the lumber companies had been stripping the hardwood forests bare and shipping the prized wood to Europe and America. "Where it's made into mahogany toilet seats!" someone shouted. "So that the oyibos can shit right through us!"

  "It is still theft!" shouted the priest. "Thou shalt not steal!"

  "Not theft, payment owed!"

  But it was theft.

  And payment owed.

  Nnamdi could see that clearly enough. Having scouted the flow stations and pipelines with the oil-soaked bunker boys, having shown them the cleanest way into a manifold and the cleanest way out, he no longer had to run away when the militants came roaring in. They greeted him as an ally now.

  AK-47s had replaced single-bolt rifles, and some of the more successful warlords had apartments in Portako, where they looked out at the gated compounds of the oyibos and plotted their own ascension into similar enclaves of luxury.

  Unlike the salary he'd drawn from the oil company, the kickbacks Nnamdi received from the bunker boys was adjusted for inflation, rolls of bills bigger than his fist could hold. He bought his mother another fridge, and another. She stocked it with bottles of beer and flats of Fanta, and she lorded it over the older market women who'd kept her in her place for so many years. But she worried about her son, the only remaining shred left of her husband. Nnamdi was now giving advice on pipelines and manifolds to bunkering crews. "Is a dangerous game, Nnamdi," she whispered at night from beneath her netting. "Take cautions. Don't fall head-first into de crude."

  "I won't," he promised.

  But pipelines have a way of exploding. And as the bunker boys grew more profitable, they also grew more impatient, and they began using torch-cutters to get through, something Nnamdi had advised against. One night an entire flow station went up in a blossom of orange-crusted flame that sent half a dozen charred bodies floating among the mangroves.

  The mix-and-match assortment of containers used to transport the bunkered fuel had given way to zeeps—square stackables made of plastic, easy to fill and easy to load. Speedboats soon sprouted second motors, and their drivers became increasingly reckless, weaving in and out, swamping those few canoes st
ill casting nets along the currents. In some creeks, dozens of empty zeeps floated on oily waters. When overloaded containers fell overboard, they'd sink to the bottom and slowly leak oil until some magic balance was reached, at which point they'd suddenly bob to the surface like deliveries made from the other side.

  It was palm gin and the weight of these zeeps that changed Nnamdi's fortunes. A particularly potent batch of gin had left men in a drunken stupor that lasted much longer than usual. With the zeeps too heavy to manhandle alone, the head of one of the bunkering crews had gone looking for Nnamdi instead.

  He found him at his father's shrine, laying out leaves and whispering chants for the half-forgotten oru within. Nnamdi took small objects from a pouch, let them fall on the ground. Stopped to study the message they gave.

  "Ya!" the foreman shouted, trying to sound brusque—but unnerved at the sight of Nnamdi caught in a trance, lost somewhere between teme and oje. "I need a strong back."

  When Nnamdi had returned to the world of the everyday, he smiled at the man. "Dile. I was dreaming."

  "Come away dis place. We are going to Mbiama."

  Mbiama was infamous.

  The national and state governments had launched a Joint Task Force aimed at hammering the bunker boys and black-market refineries into oblivion, and JTF boats now patrolled the main waterways. They fired with impunity and could not be bought off with bribes. Which is how Nnamdi ended up on a boat weighted to the water level with crude-heavy zeeps as it pushed its way through side creeks and unnamed channels, avoiding the main route, zigzagging toward the black-market boomtown of Mbiama.

  The man who'd hired Nnamdi was yelling above the sound of the motor. "We are meeting an Igbo, a man named Joseph. I have not met him, but ah'm told he knows of you. A good person to have on your side. He is always on de lookout for a good mechanic.

  His last mechanic? A drunkard, left him stranded in the desert, is what ah'm told." The boat slowed as a cluster of smoke and ragtag buildings came into view. "Welcome to Mbiama!" the foreman shouted. "This is where road reaches water." Twin rutted tracks running through the jungle. "Drivers run the crude in from here to Portako."

  Mbiama was painted with lights, strings of coloured bulbs that were draped from tavern to brothel. Girls in blue eye shadow and bruise-like rouge swished their skirts lazily at Nnamdi as he and the bunker crew foreman trudged up the dock, looking for a certain tavern. They found it, pushed open the screen door, went inside.

  A fan stirred the humidity. Reggae music trickled out of a tape deck somewhere. Bodies were huddled around a table, speaking low. The entire place was swimming with sweat and ambition.

  "I'm lookin' for Joe!" the foreman yelled. "Igbo Joe."

  The man at the table looked up at them with clouded eyes. Heavy lids. A thick neck and beefy face. "You found him, bruddah." Joe extended a heavy hand to them, but shook daintily, in city fashion. No clasped forearms, just a hanky-handshake all around.

  Igbo Joe was neither Igbo nor Joe. "I'm from up Onitsha way," he explained. "I'm Ibo, but no one out here can tell the difference.

  Joe and Nnamdi were down at the dock by this point, unloading the boat with the bunker crew foreman, wrestling heavy zeeps of bunkered oil onto a flatbed truck. "And my name is Joshua, not Joseph. Jericho, not de manger."

  "What do I call you, then?" Nnamdi asked.

  It was hard work, and they were sweating heavily. A zeep slipped from Joe's palms as he and Nnamdi hoisted it up, and it fell, slamming to the ground, almost rupturing.

  "Christ and piss!"

  Nnamdi grinned. "You want I call you by that? Or just be Piss for short?"

  Joe glowered. "You the mechanic? The one worked for the oil men at Bonny Island?"

  Nnamdi nodded.

  Stray dogs were nosing through garbage. Music was bleeding from barroom doors.

  "I'm driving this flatbed back to Portako," Joe said. "But after that, I'm takin' a tanker truck north, past Abuja. Fuel shortages up there, and I plan to cash in. I need a mechanic and a second driver.

  You could be both for a healthy slice. What do you say?"

  Rare, something like that dropped from a vine so readily.

  The bunker crew foreman handed Nnamdi a sweat-dampened fold of bills for his help, then headed to the closest bar for some

  "cool beer and warm women."

  Nnamdi considered Joe's proposition. "Where exactly north?"

  "Far," he said.

  "How far?"

  "The sharia states. In and out, very quick. I don't like to hang around up there. It's not—comfortable." He dug out a rag from his pocket, wiped his neck. "Ever been north?"

  "Never been past Portako."

  "Well, this is very far. Almost to the desert. The city we going to is named for crocodiles." He laughed, a broad, rolling timbre.

  "You from the Delta, you be used to crocodiles!"

  "Never seen a crocodile."

  "Oh, you seen plenty working with the oil company, I think."

  Joe looked at Nnamdi. "I have a buyer all lined up. You won't say this to any?"

  Nnamdi nodded.

  Joe smiled. "You want to know where we goin'?"

  "I do."

  "Kaduna."

  CHAPTER 60

  There had been other manifestos, other battle cries. But this one was thumbprinted with blood, like a royal seal. Elders of the larger

  ibe and the leaders of outlawed Ijaw militants, their bodies painted white to stop bullets, eyes wild with narcotics and gin, had joined together, had issued their own manifesto.

  It was nothing short of an Ijaw Declaration of Independence.

  The Curse of Oil is destroying the Niger Delta. Foreign companies grow fat, while we who live here cannot feed our children. Corrupt leaders drive about in BMWs, while we live in misery and starvation. By what right? This is Ijaw land, Ijaw oil. The blood money taken from the Delta pays for government mansions in Abuja and luxury hotel swimming pools in Lagos. Enough!

  There had been other manifestos, but this one was followed by explosions, a series of timed attacks on wellheads and flow stations that brought Delta operations to a stumbling standstill while emergency crews performed pipeline triage. The JTF called in more patrols in an attempt to bring order to the growing chaos.

  The Oil Men run pipelines above ground directly through our villages, they are flaring gas in the midst of human habitation, they are leaving oil spills to seep into the groundwater, are expropriating farmlands willy-nilly. Gas flares sour our air. The flood plains are ruined. Crops have been razed, and hardwood forests have been clear-cut with impunity.

  Poisoned seas and burning skies. ENOUGH!

  The militants of the Delta were nothing more than "gangsters and extortionists," the governors of the Delta states had warned.

  They were terrorists, and one does not negotiate with terrorists.

  Oil from the Delta benefits everyone but the Delta man.

  Where is our benefit? Where is our BMW? We are labelled thieves, but who is the real thief?

  "We cannot let the wealth of the nation be held hostage," said the army officer charged with bringing the militants under heel, his voice static-crackling over state radio. "We will set the Delta on fire if we have to. We will set it on fire, if only to smoke them out."

  Enough of the gas flares and oil spills, enough of the blowouts and bulldozers. Enough! All operations in the Delta must cease and the oil companies, together with their toady staff and Judas contractors, must withdraw henceforth from Ijaw territory or face the full brunt of our fury. You have been warned.

  It was a good time to leave.

  The ibe-backed militants had begun to branch out into other areas. Other endeavours. From gun-running and oil bunkering, they were now trading in narcotics and raiding the villages of rival ethnic groups. Towns farther inland had come under renewed attack—and not only from men in uniform. Caught between army and oil, between JTF and bunker gangs, entire creeks burned.

  Splinter g
roups appeared, calling themselves Vigilante Councils and Liberation Armies, and people turned on their own like a snake swallowing its tail. New factions formed as old ethnic feuds bubbled to the surface. Most of the fighting was to the west, around Warri, or up near Portako. Nnamdi's village, crowded, unkempt, but still remote, had been spared the worst of it. So far.