"Sleep with your eyes open? You?" Nnamdi laughed. "You don't even drive with your eyes open. And anyway, we don't eat Igbos. Not enough meat on their bones. Just gristle and old skin."
Then, realizing that Amina was becoming alarmed by this, Nnamdi turned to her, said, "Not to worry, child. No one will eat you."
"Not raw, anyway," muttered Joe. And then, to Nnamdi: "I can't believe you prefer to go back to that rancid swamp of yours rather than make money with me."
"We are kind to visitors," Nnamdi said to Amina. "Do not worry."
Outside, the gunfire was getting closer.
CHAPTER 76
Joe drove them to the pier at Dockyard Creek in a loaded-down taxi cab hed commandeered from the repair bay.
He insisted on helping Nnamdi load the supplies onto the
Himar. The boat had a fibreglass hull with outboard motors, and they filled it mid to rear with cases of Fanta. Square tins of cooking oil. Tins of condensed milk. Sheafs of bitter greens. Dried-cod stockfish. Garri powder for dumplings. Cement for patching walls.
Bottles filled with penicillin tablets. Hydrogen peroxide for cuts and petroleum jelly for burns, with ointments for the healing and gauze for the wrapping thereof. A box of flip-flops. Plastic bags filled with mosquito coils. New netting. A soccer ball for the school.
Sunglasses and colouring books.
By the time the last of the supplies had been loaded, the boat was sitting dangerously low in the water. Joe pulled a tarp across, helped Nnamdi fasten the sides under spitting skies, shook Nnamdi's hand, forearm to forearm.
"If you have a change of heart, you can still make the run to Cameroon with me. I'll be leaving next month, before the monsoons."
"Maybe," said Nnamdi, though he knew his heart would never change; the stones had been cast a long time ago. "Maybe."
Harbour waters, thick with oil. Rain, beading on the surface.
Joe, standing on the dock.
A cough and a stutter, and the motorboat sputtered to life. The Ogoni boy who was piloting the Himar backed it out of the berth, swung wide.
Nnamdi stood at the front of the boat, both hands raised in the air. "Goodbye, Igbo Joe!"
"I'm not Igbo!" he shouted. "And my name's not Joe!"
Long after his blood had turned to tar and the sores had spread, long after his immune system had collapsed and his body had grown weak, Joseph of Onitsha would remember the Kaduna run hed made with Nnamdi of the Niger Delta, would remember it fondly even as the lights went out, one by one.
Amina had never been on a boat before, and as it lurched below her, she gripped the sides fearfully. Nnamdi, however, stood straight-backed and strong, waving at the pier as Joe grew smaller and smaller.
"Noao!" Nnamdi shouted.
Joe was waving wide as well, back and forth with an open palm.
By way of farewell he shouted, "I'll sit on your face with my bare ass yet!"
Nnamdi laughed, the boat turned, and they were gone.
Joseph and Nnamdi would never see each other again.
CHAPTER 77
Language. Reveals as much as it conceals.
Laura had been thinking about compliments and complements. You're and your. Those distinct thumbprint misspellings and semantic blind spots that act as markers. Even as a copy editor, Laura had to stop and think whenever she came across
"different from" and "different than," just as the vestigial "r" in the middle of "February" continued to bedevil her. She knew it belonged there—of course it did—but it still seemed like a typo.
Were she ever asked to rewrite the dictionary, she would start with February.
"Complements of the season!" It was the sort of error a spellcheck program wouldn't catch. This wasn't a slip of the keyboard. This was something else. This was something you had to type in, every time.
Just a simple mistake? Or was it something more?
Perhaps it was a thread running through the air from Earth to emptiness, from satellite and back down again, across an ocean, over a continent, running along fibre optics before jumping through the air one last time, into a wireless router and then onto her father's hard drive. A thread running from here to there, from a bungalow in Briar Hill back to a distant locale Somewhere Else. Complements of the season.
CHAPTER 78
The pilot steered the Himar along the shores of Dockyard Creek toward the main channel, where he nosed the small boat into the shipping lanes of giants.
Oil tankers were flushing their reserves in preparation for refilling their holds, and the channel was coated with the residual runoff. Those that were finished moved past, pushing swells of wave before them like dough under a roller and dragging a spreading wake behind. Whenever these tankers passed, the small boat Nnamdi and the others were on would lift a moment later, rising, then falling.
The Ogoni pilot kept the throttle low. He angled across the crests as Nnamdi sat, face to the wind, and Amina clung to the sides.
Flat-bottomed pirogues, heavy with plantains and stacks of bundled firewood, were hugging the shore, their owners picking their way along with pole and oar, riding out the swells as best they could.
"My father," Nnamdi shouted back at Amina. "He had a boat such as that. I have it now."
They passed a derelict tanker, hollowed out and listing to one side, bleeding rust from its rivets. Flow-station platforms appeared as pipelines converged. Razor-wire outposts at water's edge, colours clearly marked: Chevron and Agip, Texaco and BP.
Nnamdi laughed. "Welcome to the Republic of Shell!" he shouted.
They passed a gas flare that vented its heat in the middle of a village. Vegetation on all sides had grown sickly and thin, but the women in the village were using the gas-fed flames regardless, laying out racks of cassava to dry and hanging their washing on the feeder lines, faces glistening from the heat. The pipelines carved paths through the forests, plunging in and out, across lesser creeks and larger ones, running along the surface like water snakes.
"Come rainy season, those pipes will disappear from sight,"
Nnamdi told Amina. Hed moved closer so he wouldn't have to shout.
She looked at the grey ceiling of cloud pressing down on them.
The spattering rain and dripping forests, the wet breath of mist. If this is not the rainy season ... She pulled her head scarf closer.
"You can crawl under," Nnamdi said, referring to the tarpaulin.
"If it rains."
If?
They had entered a steamy maze of waterways and tufted islands, and the Himar slowly began to pick up speed, its hull slapping the water as the rain pincushioned in, stinging skin like sand in a windstorm. What have I done? Fingers of water, everywhere. Endless passages. What have I done?
Nnamdi came back to sit beside her. "The water people, the
owumo, they live below the surface. They look up at us and think we are the reflections." He smiled. "Maybe they are right. Maybe the
owumo are real and we are the upside-down ones. The mothers, back in my village, they threaten children. ‘Behave yourself, or the owumo will come get you! If you are bad boys and girls, they will snatch you.' But my mother? She would only say, ‘Behave, Nnamdi, or iyei will come.' It means ‘something.' Only that. She would never say what. Just ‘something' is coming." He laughed. "That was always the worst, not knowing what—just something. Just iyei."
As the channel grew wider, the boat moved faster, cutting across the surface of that parallel world. On a lurch, Amina threw up into her mouth, spit the vomit over the side. Watched the waters blur past below.
CHAPTER 79
You didn't get the money? Preposterous! I sent it by Super Express Rapid Overnight Air Mail, and have already received confirmation that someone picked it up on your end and cashed it. What is going on over there? Do you think I'm some sort of chump?
Sort it out and get back to me.
Col. Mustard
CHAPTER 80
Bonny Island in the distance, glowing i
n a half-light of haze.
Beyond Bonny Island, open water.
It was the first time she had ever seen the sea, but she felt no sense of elation at this, because she knew what it meant. She had run out of Nigeria to cross. She had come to the end of all roads, could go no farther.
The wind was stronger now, and the waves were beginning to curl. Thin lines of whitecaps on the horizon. The weight of open ocean in the distance. Offshore oil platforms floating on a grey sea, towers of fire, flaring gas. It made her think again of trees burning on the open plains.
Nnamdi pointed out the clustered lights and distant cylinders of Bonny Island's natural gas liquefaction plant. "What isn't flared into the air ends up there. I used to live on Bonny." Many lifetimes ago. "It used to be a slave port," he said. "The point of no return, is what they called it. The slaves, they would be brought to Bonny, and from there, ships would take them away. There is a freshwater well on Bonny Island where the men and women and children would have a final drink before leaving Africa forever. Even now, they say the water from that well tastes like tears. Some people say it is just the sea seeping in. Salt water among fresh. I'm not so sure."
Details were emerging. Bonny Island, coming closer.
"Of course," Nnamdi said with a grin, "we Ijaw were most commonly the ones doing the selling. If I was meeting Igbo Joe at that time long past, I might have thrown a net over him and sold him to the oyibos. We Ijaw captured and sold a lot of Igbos over the years. They are still mad at us about that. The Igbo were yam farmers back then. Easy to catch." He laughed, but the message was clear: the Ijaw had never been subjugated, never been enslaved.
They had been the hunters, not the prey. The fishers, not the fish.
Hammer, not anvil.
When he saw a flash of fear in her eyes, he tried to soothe her.
"I am only making a jest. You will be safe with me." He looked out at Bonny Island. "You will like my village," he said. "We are kind to guests."
Naval gunships were on the prowl, riding low along the horizon.
"Looking for bunkering operations," Nnamdi told Amina.
"They will board any ship with oil unaccounted for, even a tanker, and they will not let it go until they are well provided for. But no one is looking for us." He pointed at the forest. "My village is that way. In the outer Delta. There are seven hundred people in my village, and I am related to eight hundred of them."
He said something to their pilot and the boat veered, heading straight for shore. Amina gasped, convinced they would crash into the wall of mangroves, only to see a gap open up at the last possible moment. A trail of water appeared.
"Shortcut," said Nnamdi.
Their young Ogoni pilot, chin down, white shirt billowing, looked tense as they left the main channel and entered Ijaw territory. The Ogoni people and the Ijaw might have formed a tentative alliance in the Down Below slums of Portako, but out here, in the spiderweb of the Delta creeks, loyalties were less fixed. If this Ijaw boy and his captive—Hausa from the looks of it—were to turn on him, where would he flee, what would he do? Was he steering the boat into an ambush? The Turk had assured him otherwise, but in a swamp, assurances were as uncertain as allies.
They were now wending their way into the waterlogged heart of the Delta. Tidal estuaries. Brackish inlets. The sheen of oil on water, iridescent and beautiful. Like an insect's wing, Amina thought.
The mangroves pushed in on either side; the trees themselves seemed to be wading through the water, roots twisting their way out of the mud below. Low-hanging branches dragged across the boat, thumping the tarp and forcing the pilot to duck.
"If you see a vine moving," Nnamdi told Amina, "it's best you do too."
Storks took flight, wings leaving perfect circles along the water.
On an overhead branch, a sudden shriek—and Amina scrambled backward.
Nnamdi said, "A monkey, nothing more." He could see the girl's shoulders shaking, thin and birdlike. "The monkeys out here have long tails, white throats. Always causing trouble. There is one monkey—a red one, with skinny arms, long hair. Very rare.
Professors from Lagos University have come here trying to catch it, and they have always failed. They even offered a reward! For a monkey! I have lived my life in this delta, and never have I seen such a monkey. But... maybe today is that day. So, child, keep your eyes wide. If you see such a creature, we must capture it at once. We will sell it to a zoo, then buy a big house and be rich."
She smiled, so faintly he almost missed it.
"Do you know how to catch a monkey?"
She shook her head.
"By being clever. If you put a pinch of salt between a monkey's eyes, he will go cross-eyed and not see you coming. A pinch of salt, between the eyes, and you will have him." Nnamdi imitated the cross-eyed fellow, staggering one way, then another. She had to hold a hand across her mouth and look away to keep from laughing.
Nnamdi passed her the canteen he'd filled back in Portako. "I think maybe you should smile more," he said. "It suits your face."
A rumble of thunder, and they made it through into the next channel. Thousands of dead fish were floating on the water, in among the mangrove roots, coated in oil. A charred forest.
Blackened trees, charcoal vines. Sabotage? A gas leak, ignited unawares? A bunkering operation gone wrong? "I don't know," said Nnamdi when the Ogoni pilot asked. Anything would burn if you use enough fuel, even rivers. Nnamdi knew this firsthand.
Dusk on the Delta. The pilot leaned on the throttle, hoping to make Nnamdi's village before nightfall. He would sleep on his boat, then return in the morning. That was the plan.
But then Nnamdi looked behind them. "Something's coming," he said.
Another boat had entered the channel, in from the rear, moving fast. A speedboat, crowded with men, rifles raised.
The Ogoni pilot leaned harder on the throttle, and the Himar began to chop across the waves, almost taking flight at times, even with the cargo weighing it down.
"Can we outrun them?" Nnamdi asked.
The pilot looked back at the speedboat that was even now cutting across their wake. "We have twin outboard motors!" he shouted. "Forty horsepower. And we are heavy with goods. They have seventy-five horsepower. Maybe more. Can we outrun them?
No, we cannot."
So the pilot spun hard, pointed the boat at one of the secondary creeks. "Perhaps we can lose them instead," he said. "Cat-and-mouse it among the creeks. Wait till nightfall, try to slip away."
"No," said Nnamdi. Running would only anger their pursuers.
"Cut the motor, come around. We will see what they want."
"We know what they want! Blood!"
"Cut the motor," said Nnamdi. "It's our only chance."
The pilot killed the motor, turned the boat to face his fate.
"Is good you didn't run!" called the man standing along the speedboat s prow. "We would have gone shot you out of de water, used ya skulls for soup bowls."
They were taut-torsoed men, shirtless for the most part and streaming with sweat. One of them wore an orange Shell jumpsuit, unzipped to the waist and stained with something resembling rust.
Three or four of them sported fresh scars across their chests, slits cut to insert protective potions under their skin. White tatters of cloth flew from their gun barrels. Egbesu boys, immune to bullets.
Vaccinated against death.
"Noao!" Nnamdi said.
"Noao," they replied, as their boat drifted up alongside. "We dey NDLA," shouted their leader. "What is your mission?"
"Going home, only that."
Their expressions reminded Nnamdi of the glazed stare of goat heads hanging in a butchers market.
Glassy eyes, rimmed with red: hashish and gin, perhaps a little heroin to leaven the mix. One of the Egbesu boys pushed his way to the front of the speedboat, laughed, full-throated and loud. "I know dis one!" he said, pointing at Nnamdi.
It was his old friend, the boy from Bonny Island, the one N
namdi had first taught how to break into a manifold. The young man had graduated from tapping pipelines, it would seem. An AK-47 rested in the crook of his arm and a leather belt of bullets was slung across his chest. A rocket-powered grenade launcher behind him leaned to one side. There was an oily sheen on everything: the men, the weapons, the boat. Nnamdi had seen such weapons on sale in the Down Below streets. A much improved arsenal, and a far cry from the single-bolt rifles of earlier days.
419 Page 26