Nevertheless, any moment, his guards would throw their bodies over him, several of them were already crouching and shooting into the crowd in the direction of Rosemary’s voice.
Then I threw my gun and was running with the rest of the people. Images of Bakasi on stage jumped in my head. We had to have hit him with over thirty bullets. He was dead on his feet before his men were able to throw their bodies over him. As I fled, I didn’t feel as I thought I would. Guilt, disgust with myself . . . I felt those but only a little. What I felt most strongly, however, was that we had opened the door . . . or was it that we had dug a pit?
Women were screaming, men were shouting, children were gasping, and I kept running. After that, I’m not sure exactly how it happened. People just went mad. Outside, violent fights broke out between groups of men and women and people began looting nearby shops and setting buildings on fire. The black Mercedes that weren’t driven off were kicked at and jumped on, their windows smashed and their insides set afire. There was a tint in the air, I recall. Something sour had spilled out from the auditorium to the streets. Bakasi was a Pandora’s Box, his hump housing all the vilest spirits and poison, and the bullets had opened him up.
We met in the place we said we would, in an old shack a half-mile from the auditorium. We had to get down low, for outside there was chaos. Agwes fighting Kodobas, Agwes fighting Agwes, Kodobas fighting Kodobas. It seemed few could tell who was who and simply took out their anger on whoever was close by. Children killed mothers. Mothers killed fathers, men beat women. Yes, we stayed down low.
“Where’s Rosemary?” I shouted. Someone’s body hit the window above us and it cracked.
Ralph, who had blood dribbling down his face, looked at me.
“You couldn’t see?” he said.
“I could,” Victor said. He wiped sweat from his brow.
“Oh Christ, oh Jesus, what have we done!” Effiong moaned, slapping at his forehead.
Outside someone screamed.
“You hear that?” I spat. “Do you think the mere killing of a man did this?”
“But we started it,” Effiong sobbed. “If we didn’t . . . ”
“We did not start this!” I shouted. “We did not start this! Bakasi did! It was there all this time. We’ve all known it! We had to cut off the head before it . . . ” I had to take a breath. “What . . . where is Rosemary?”
But I knew the answer. She was back at the auditorium. And she, like Bakasi, was riddled with bullets. Rosemary was dead.
At that moment something flaming flew through the window and we got to our feet and started running.
Killing and chaos in the streets for three days.
I fear for the life of my father and sister and myself, though no one has come for me or the others over our assassination of Bakasi. They couldn’t even find his body when all the smoke cleared. Many suspected that his hump had taken him back to the spirit world. But that day, forty-eight people were killed in the melee outside the auditorium, the newspapers reported. There was no mention of Rosemary. I guess they didn’t want to further humiliate Bakasi by saying his main killer was a woman. More have been killed since. The president will be sending troops today and Ndi State has been declared a state of emergency.
Yesterday, Bakasi’s body was left outside of the administration building. It reeked of decay and his hump had been cut off! This additional murder of Bakasi had nothing to do with us. I won’t be surprised if whoever did it turned it to ashes and is selling the ashes on the black market for millions and millions of naira. These are dark times . . . no matter what you do.
Report that in your American newspaper and tell me if your readers won’t shake their heads and think, “Even with all that sunshine, the place is still the Dark Continent.”
As if that is the soul of my story.
The Baboon War
My father and I thought my little sister was crazy.
We were at the kitchen table sipping hot tea and eating leftover jaloff rice when she came home. We were home because of the strange heavy rains. All the fishermen were. Fifteen minutes ago, a storm had rushed in out of nowhere. Thankfully, we hadn’t thrown our nets out yet. A weird morning, indeed. It was about to get weirder.
My little sister walked into the house. She looked like hell, soaked from head to toe. She was supposed to be at school. My first thought was that the odd storm had torn the roof off the school. But the entire school, roof and all, was made of concrete. She’d have been safer there than in the house.
Then my heart leapt as I noticed the bleeding cuts and scratches on her cheeks and arms. There was a deep gash in her left leg, the blood running down, staining her white wet socks red. Her uniform was torn in the front, back, and sides. She was spattered and smeared with mud. Her schoolbooks were so wet they were practically mush. But . . . she was smiling, smiling triumphantly. I wondered if she’d taken a blow to the head.
My father and I rushed to her.
“Emem, oh my God, what happened?” my father exclaimed. He took her face into his hands and touched a cut on her brow. I knelt down for a closer look at the gash on her leg. I shuddered. It looked more like a series of small puncture wounds. What the hell did that? I wondered.
“Come sit down,” my father said. He didn’t wait for an answer, pulling her to the dinner table and sitting her in one of the chairs. My sister giggled as she sat and my father and I gave each other a worried look. I quickly prepared a cup of tea for her.
“Put in two tea bags,” she insisted in her high voice.
I frowned. She liked her tea bitter, but too much caffeine stunts your growth. Granted, Emem was already tall for a ten-year-old but we certainly didn’t want to stop the process. A tall woman in our clan fetches a high bride price. And with such height, not even her husband will mind if she went to school past her teens. Emem was definitely made for school. Not only was she at the top of her class but she loved both reading books and the work and craft of fishing. I looked at my father. He nodded. “Just for today,” he said.
I set the dark tea in front of her. She didn’t move to take it immediately as she normally did. She loved tea. She always snatched at her cup of it, afraid that my father or I would change our minds and take it away.
Instead, she played with the bracelet around her wrist as she gazed at her tea. She’d made it months ago from three tiny bronze bells she found on the beach a few weeks ago, after a torrential storm. The night before, some fishermen said that they’d seen something like a falling star streak across the sky and land in the forest that borders the water. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. People are always seeing strange things in the forest. I myself have seen several tungwa floating amongst the trees as I’ve canoed my way home at night. I flashed my torch on one once. Tungwas really do look like floating skin balls. This had dark brown skin.
The little bells my sister had found looked harmless and common. Like something that might have fallen from a girl’s fancy dress or a child’s toy. Emem had strung them on some old rope and made a bracelet out of it.
Emem softly placed an object on the table. It pulsated and hummed every time those bells on her wrist tinkled.
“What is that?” my father asked, sitting across from and gazing at it. I preferred to stay a few steps away. Whenever I looked straight at it, my eyes dried out and my heart beat irregularly. I felt a squeezing in the back of my throat and tasted a metallic tang on my tongue. And in the back of my mind, I swear I saw clouds burst and waters rise. My little sister looked at me with the eyes of a girl who had conquered great things.
Then she started telling us a very bizarre tale.
As she spoke, my father and I realized we hadn’t been paying enough attention to Emem, so wrapped up we were in pulling fish from the waters. They’d been so plentiful, of late. How could you really blame us? As mama told me the day before she passed, “A family must survive.” I guess.
I sat down beside Emem. Despite the object on the table. I sat
protectively beside her and listened to every word she said.
The war started ten days ago.
Emem and her two closest friends, Nka and Asan, had been walking to school together since they were five years old. They considered each other sisters. Because they lived near the ocean, their walk was longer than most of the other girls’—about twenty-five minutes. They usually got to school with little time to spare.
Emem never complained. She’d always been one to analyze a situation and, if there was no way to improve it, accept and work with it. Of course, if there was a way to make it better, she’d move heaven and earth to do so.
Ten days ago, an opportunity to reach school earlier presented itself. Emem and her friends usually took the main road. But this day, as they walked, Nka noticed a bush beside the road. It was heavy with mbe mbe berries. Ripe ones, most of which were a sweet black or deep red. Nka had sharp and observant eyes when she was undistracted by conversation. Emem and Asan relied on Nka to spot groups of annoying boys from school, fast cars, and okada motor bikes careening up the road.
Nka giggled and ran to the berries, Emem and Asan following close behind. They’d eaten several handfuls when Nka noticed the break in the trees to her left. A narrow dirt path. Its entrance was marked by three wooden planks pressing down the foliage. The wood was warped and white with salt, as if it had been at the bottom of the ocean.
It was Asan’s idea to check out the path. She was the most curious, always wanting to know what was going on. Plus, because of their berry-eating, they were going to be late and this path looked as if it went straight to their school.
“Come on,” Asan said.
Asan and Nka looked at Emem. She was best able to swiftly consider all angles of a situation. She cocked her head. Then she grinned and nodded. “We better hurry!”
When they crossed the wooden plank, Eme noticed that their sandals made an odd wet trippity-trop-slap, trippity-trop-slap that seemed louder than normal. They walked for about ten minutes in apprehensive quiet, only Emem’s jingling bracelet breaking the silence. The path was squishy with mud and the air smelled swampy. Yet Emem saw no standing water or pond anywhere.
“Ssp!” something hissed softly from nearby.
“Hhaah,” something else whispered. Emem assumed the noise came from birds or some other small beast. The clicking sounds were probably insects. Emem heard bushes and grasses being brushed aside. Three times, large seeds fell from the trees, almost hitting Emem.
“Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to try the path,” Emem mumbled. A moment later, it started raining. All three of them cursed. It hadn’t looked like rain at all when they’d left home.
“Shh!” Asan suddenly said, whirling around.
“What?” Emem shouted over the sound of rain hitting leaves. “I didn’t . . . ”
“Quiet!” Asan snapped, wiping her wet face.
“Something’s watching us,” Nka whispered into Emem’s ear, squinting into the trees. “Some things. I can see . . . their eyes.” She gasped, huddling up to Emem. The rain stopped.
“Wait!” Emem whispered, trying not to push her off. “I can’t . . . ”
Asan huddled in, too.
“What do you see, Nka?” Emem moaned.
But Nka was too busy looking around to answer. Asan started whimpering, pressing closer. The trees and the humidly pressed close, too. Emem could feel her own sweat mixing with the rain, water further soaking her school uniform. She grasped her backpack of soggy books more tightly. The bells on her bracelet softly jingled. Immediately, the tree branches above and the bushes before them shook. Then, hollering a war cry, about ten baboons burst through the foliage, a whirlwind of fangs, claws and brown grey fur.
Emem, Asan and Nka, screamed but didn’t run. Instead they pressed into each other, a mass of brown bodies in navy blue and white uniforms. They burrowed their heads into each other’s shoulders, Nka into Emem’s, Emem into Asan’s, Asan into Nka’s. Emem felt one of the baboons yank hard at her bracelet. When the bracelet didn’t snap, the baboon gave up.
Baboons were crafty, violent, and meat-eating when the urge took them. Children were taught early in life never to play with, feed, or run from baboons. They moved in well-organized packs and had sharp fangs inches long. To flee invited attack. But the baboons lived deep in the forests, so there wasn’t much to worry about . . . unless you were young people in a forest and outnumbered.
None of the girls saw the baboons pull at their clothes or slap at their legs. Nor did they see the beasts finally open the girls’ backpacks and take their lunches of chin chin, fried plantain, and sandwiches. Emem and her friends realized this after the baboons ran off, shrieking in victory.
Emem, Asan, and Nka stood there, listening and looking at each other. They started walking. Emem felt like laughing, the result of a mixture of intense terror and realizing she was unhurt. They emerged on the far side of the school, stepping off the path into bright cloudless sunshine. Immediately, their clothes started drying.
The path was indeed a short cut. Emem smiled to herself. Completely worth it, she thought.
Even if it was a short cut, they should have been about fifteen minutes late. Instead, they were fifteen minutes early. How this was possible, none of the girls could guess. None of them cared. Emem looked at her friends and they grinned and slapped hands.
“Nothing good comes easy,” Emem said.
“That was crazy, though,” Nka said.
“Ah-ah, I thought we were going to be eaten alive, o,” Asan said.
They laughed. Emem plucked at her clothes. Nice, she thought, sarcastically. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder what it was all about. Baboons may be crazy, but there was usually a reason behind their madness. But then again, the baboons had stolen their lunches. But what of the rain? she thought. She shrugged. Near the ocean weather always did whatever it wanted and no one questioned it.
The next day they took the path again. They hadn’t planned to, but in a way they had. After finishing her homework, Emem had packed her lunch early, taking extra care to wrap her orange and biscuits with paper and a tight rubber band and placing it deep in her backpack. Her friends later told her that they, too, had secured their lunches.
However, none of this made a difference when they got halfway down the path. Again, the baboons attacked, scratching and slapping. One of the baboons ran at Emem, shrieked, bared its sharp fangs and turned up its upper lip. Emem almost wet herself as she stumbled back, raising her hands to shield herself against the insane creature. The jingle of her bracelet seemed to infuriate it even more but she didn’t know what to do. Again it started raining and again their lunches were stolen. Despite it all, once again, the girls made it to school impossibly early, with nothing more than a few scratches from running through bushes and shoving branches aside.
They did this nine days in a row.
Each time, the baboons attacked. But the attacks grew progressively worse, too. They’d snap at Emem and her friends. Lash out with their claws, inches from skin. Emem knew that sooner or later one of them would get seriously hurt.
Emem and Nka would buy little snacks like boiled eggs, cashews and peanuts to eat during lunchtime. They would share with Asan, who never had enough money to buy lunch. They told no one about their ongoing war with the baboons. It was an unspoken pact between them. But they were not going to let the baboons drive them off their chosen path. Not for anything. It just didn’t seem right. And none of them was raised to give up, especially to stupid baboons.
On the ninth day, Emem realized she was angry. They’d been attacked as usual, but this time, the baboons didn’t even care about their lunches. One of them jumped on Emem’s back and ricocheted off, pushing her up the path. Another ran up Nka’s back and tore at her short hair. Asan threw her lunch at one of the baboons. They merely stepped aside, hissing their warnings as the three girls ran up the path to school.
“Who do they think they are?” Emem suddenly shouted during
lunch as their stomachs grumbled. This day she didn’t have any money for snacks and neither did Nka. They’d spent the rest of their allowances on lunch the day before.
“Stronger than we are,” Asan said.
“I don’t care!” Emem said. “Every day, they attack us . . . ooh, sometimes I just want to tear their furry hides off!”
Nka rubbed her eyes. “They can bite . . . ”
“So can we!” Emem snapped, flinging her hands in the air. Her bracelet’s bells jingled angrily. “I’m sick of it! This can’t go on! And I’m not going to stop using the path. I’m not going to be driven off by some . . . some idiotic monkeys!”
Nka nodded rigorously. “That would mean they’d win. We shouldn’t let them win,” she said.
“Why don’t we just hide most of our food in our clothes?” Asan said. “And let them steal the stuff we keep outside our person?”
“That’s stupid,” Nka said, sucking her teeth. “You think the baboons won’t smell the food on us? How would you like a baboon tearing at your clothes to get to some chin chin?”
“They don’t care about the food!” Emem said. “And they were tearing at us today.”
“Maybe we should try paying them,” Nka said.
So the next day, when the baboons came running, the three of them held out packages full of orange, mangos, and udara fruit.
“This is our payment,” Emem shouted. But the beasts kept coming, howling their war cry. The three of them dropped their food and ran down the path to school.
“Shit!” Emem shouted, when they emerged at the school, impossibly early as usual. “Now what?”
At lunch, they sat nibbling from small bags of cashews, plotting. Within minutes they had a new plan. It didn’t involve running away or taking the long way to school. No, those days were over. Their plan wasn’t complicated, either.
The next day, as they walked down they path, Emem could feel her heart beating in her mouth. Her palms were sweaty. She opened her mouth to breath. The forest felt especially close today. Above, clouds gathered quickly. She held her bracelet silent.
Kabu Kabu Page 21