by Adam Johnson
When he is twenty-one, the war comes and while people are cheering in the streets and shouting “Biafra! Biafra!” he begins to stockpile goods. When goods become scarce, he makes his fortune. When food becomes scarce, he raids farms in the dead of night which is where he will meet his wife, and why Ezinma, fumbling the keys against the lock doesn’t see what came behind her: her mother at age twenty-two, not beautiful, but with the fresh look of a person who has never been hungry.
She is a brash girl who takes more than is offered. It’s 1966, months before everything changes and she is at a party hosted by friends of her parents and there is a man there, yellow-skinned like a mango and square-jawed and bodied like the statue of David, wealthy; the unmarried women strap on their weaponry (winsome smiles, robust cleavage, accommodating personalities) and go to war over him. When she comes out the victor, she takes it as her due.
Almost a year into their courting, the war comes. Her people are Biafra loyalists, his people think Ojukwu is a fool. On the night of their engagement party only her people attend. And when she goes by his house the next day she discovers he has left the country.
Her family is soon forced to flee the city, soon forced to barter what they have been able to carry, soon forced to near begging and for the first time in her life, food is so scarce she slips into farms at night and harvests tender tubes of half-grown corn in stealth and they boil so soft she eats the inner core and fibrous husk, too. One night, she finds a small farm tucked behind a hill and there she encounters a man stealing the new yams that would have been hers. There is no competition, he is well-fed and strong and even if she tries to raise an alarm out of spite, he could silence her. But he puts his finger to his lips and he gives her a yam. And being her, she gestures for two more. He gives her another one and she scurries away. The next night when she returns to the farm he is waiting for her. She sits by him and they listen to crickets and each other’s breathing. When he puts his arm around her she leans into him and cries for the first time since her engagement party many months ago. When he puts a yam in her lap, she laughs. And when he takes her hand, she thinks, I am worth three yams. She will have two daughters, the first she names Biafra out of spite, as though to say “look mother, pin your hopes onto another fragile thing” and the second is named after her mother, who has since died and doesn’t know that her daughter will forgive her for choosing the losing side and name her youngest child Ezinma, who fumbles the key against the lock and doesn’t see what came behind her: her sister whom everyone has taken to calling Bibi because what nonsense to name a child after a country that doesn’t exist.
Bibi, who is beautiful in a way her mother never was. Bibi, stubborn like her mother was always. They’ve fought since Bibi was in the womb, lying so heavy in her mother’s cervix a light jog could have jostled her out. Bedridden, Bibi’s mother grew to resent her and stewed so hot the child should have boiled in her belly. And three years later, Ezinma, pretty, yes, but in that manageable way that causes little offense. She is a ghost of Bibi, paler in tone and personality, but sweet in the way Bibi can be when Bibi wants something. Bibi loathes her. No, Ezinma can’t play with Bibi’s toys; no Ezinma can’t walk with Bibi and her friends to school; no Ezinma can’t have a pad, she’ll just have to wad up tissues and deal with it. Ezinma grows up yearning for her sister’s affection.
When Bibi is twenty-one and in the university and her parents are struggling to pay the school fees, Bibi meets Godwin, yellow-skinned and square-jawed, like his father, and falls in love. She falls harder when her mother warns her away. And when her mother presses, saying you don’t know what his people are like, I do, Bibi responds you’re just angry and bitter that I have a better man than you and her mother slaps her and that’s the end of that conversation. Ezinma serves as go-between, a role she’s been shanghaied into since her youth, and keeps Bibi apprised of all the family news, despite her mother’s demands to cut her off.
And Godwin is a better provider than Bibi’s father, now a modest trader. He rents her a flat. He lends her a car. He blinds her with a constellation of gifts, things she’s never had before, like spending money and orgasms. The one time she brings up marriage, he walks out and she can’t reach him for twelve days. Twelve days that put the contents of her bank account in stark relief; twelve days where she sits in the flat that’s in his name, drives the car also in his name and wonders what is so precious about this name he won’t give to her. And when he finally returns to see her packing and grabs her hair, pulling, screaming that even this is his, she is struck . . . by his fist, yes, but also by the realization that maybe her mother was right.
The reunion isn’t tender. Bibi’s right eye is almost swollen shut and her mother’s mouth is pressed shut and they neither look at or speak to each other. Her father, who could never bear the tension between the two women, the memories of his turbulent childhood brought back, squeezes Bibi’s shoulder then leaves and it is that gentle pressure that starts her tears. Soon she is sobbing and her mother is still stone-faced, but it’s a wet face that she turns away so no one can see. Ezinma takes Bibi to the bathroom, the one they have shared and fought over since they were old enough to speak. She sits her on the toilet lid and begins to clean around her bruises. When she is done, it still looks terrible. When Bibi stands to examine her face, they are both in the mirror. I still look terrible, Bibi says. Yes you do, Ezinma replies and they are soon laughing and in their reflection they notice for the first time that they have the exact same smile. How have they gone this long without seeing that? Neither knows. Bibi worries about her things that are still in the flat. Ezinma says not to worry that she will get them. Why are you still nice to me? Bibi wants to know. Habit, Ezinma says. Bibi thinks about it for a moment and says something she has never said to her sister. Thank you.
Which is why Ezinma, fumbling the keys against the lock doesn’t see what came behind her: Godwin, who grew up under his father’s corrosive indulgence. Godwin, so unused to hearing “no” it hit him like a wave of acid, dissolving the superficial decency that accompanies a person who always gets his way. Godwin, who broke his cello when he discovered his younger brother could play it better, which is why he came to be there, watching Ezinma, looking so much like her sister from behind, fumbling the unfamiliar keys against the lock of Bibi’s apartment so she doesn’t see who comes behind her: Godwin, with a gun he fires into her back.
PAUL CRENSHAW
Chainsaw Fingers
FROM Jelly Bucket
WHEN MILLS LOST HIS FOOT in Afghanistan, no one was able to help him find it. They had been traveling in convoy from Kabul when the IED went off and the lead Humvee flipped and the howling men appeared from among the rocks and began shooting. The windshield splintered. Then an RPG flew toward the Humvee and Mills went black. When he woke up his foot was missing, and his leg from the knee down. Fire rose white-hot all around him and he could hear Skeeter screaming and Johnson or Johnson moaning, though he couldn’t tell which Johnson it was.
When he was finally found, the doctors could not reattach his foot so they gave him a prosthetic limb. After the initial soreness went away and the stitches were pulled and all the swelling went down, he found himself walking lop-sided, never quite balanced. He tilted sideways in the wind and walked like a young child pretending to be an airplane.
When he came home from Afghanistan he stood in his house turning in circles. He did not recognize the room. Everything seemed to have been moved a few inches to one side or another: the leather chair with the knife rip in it, the ugly lamp that had been here when he moved in, sitting in the middle of the floor like a forgotten statue, the refrigerator that stayed warm enough to grow mold. He walked lop-sided down the hallway and decided it was his real foot that made him feel off-kilter, like the world was constantly spinning. He went around the house with his arms out but kept tilting into walls and chairs and hallway pictures that had been here when he moved in, gray-faced people he had never met. He went out in the yard and ran around the
house trying to get acclimated to the new leg but pitched into the bushes. When he came back in he sat staring at his legs, remembering rocket fire and black smoke, Skeeter crying out for his mother, Harris saying Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, Johnson or Johnson moaning. He opened the bottle of whisky he had saved for the day he returned and late at night he took out his gun and put the barrel against his shin bone and when he pulled the trigger the bone shattered. He took a long drink of whisky against the pain and shot his instep. When the red wave of blind pain wrapped itself around him, he covered his leg with a tablecloth and drove to the hospital.
At the hospital the doctor ran his hands over the leg and watched it through the X-ray machine. Then he brought out a saw and cut through the bone and sawed the leg off. He said, You are a lucky man, Mr. Mills, but Mills was unconscious.
With two prosthetic limbs he was no longer unbalanced, and he found he could run twice as fast. He could leap onto the house and stand there looking around the neighborhood. He raced cars up and down the street. The neighborhood kids came by all day every day. Jump on the house, they would say, then clap when Mills did it. Jump up in that tree. Catch that car. Catch that stray cat. Chase that wino until he throws up wine that looks like blood. Most of the time he enjoyed it. But sometimes he got angry standing on the roof. Jump down, the kids said. Now jump back up. Run to the far hills and back. Let us see your gun. Let us touch your fake legs. They shouted in unison like they were calling cadence or pledging allegiance and when they did this he wanted them to go away so he roared and threw pine cones and shingles and forgotten frisbees at them, but they only ran off a little ways and soon came back. Run a marathon, they said, standing in his yard. Do a backflip. Now do two.
To keep from staring at the walls all day, Mills started running. He ran up and down the street like a bullet with the neighborhood kids watching. His prosthetic legs flexed and bent with his body’s rhythm and he flew like an aircraft streaking toward Baghdad. He was disqualified from his first 5k. He ran it in just under ten minutes. That’s gotta be a New World Record! a man with a bullhorn said. The race was for charity. But they took the medal away because some people complained about Mills’s prosthetic legs.
He started running because a lot of his friends did: Skeeter and Harris and one of the Johnsons. They came back from the war with drinking problems. They passed out in the front yard at two in the afternoon. They got roaring drunk and climbed trees and howled at the moon. They got in bar fights and got thrown in jail and when they went before the judge the judge said, I appreciate your service, but you need to find a new hobby.
So they woke in the morning before dawn and splashed cold water on their faces and lit out the door before the world etched itself into shape. They ran in long lines like trains heading east, little reflectors on their clothing catching headlights of passing cars. Sometimes they mumbled cadences under their breath, though they never sang loud enough for anyone to hear.
When Mills ran with them the first time they tried to keep up with him, but none of them could. They ran until their eyes were bulging and their tongues had turned black and their hearts felt like rockets soaring skyward but they could not keep up.
Mills, old buddy, Skeeter said after Mills had been running with them for a few days. It was just dawn. The sun rose like a bomb. Mills, what Skeeter means is, Johnson said. What he means is. They stood in a circle with their hands on their knees, panting for air. Mills bounced lightly on his prosthetic legs.
Mills, you’re too goddamn fast, Harris said. We can’t keep up with you.
Mills stopped bouncing. What are you saying? His voice rose at the end.
So Mills started running by himself. He woke before dawn and lay in bed until he heard his old friends laboring past and then he ran out the front door and whizzed by them. Sometimes he circled them two or three times before running on. They waved to Mills and said Hey, old buddy, but secretly they cursed under their breath.
The neighborhood kids began following him on their bicycles. When they couldn’t keep up they got their mothers or fathers to wake before dawn and drive them, so that Mills often had a long line of cars with their parking lights on swinging through the neighborhood after him, fathers balancing cups of coffee on their knees as they drove with the window down. At first the fathers yawned sleepily into the headlights of coming cars and wondered aloud why they were up this early in the morning to watch a man run, even if he did have two fake legs. But after a while they leaned forward and peered at the speedometer and said Holy shit that’s thirty miles an hour! Thirty-four! Thirty-six! Forty!
There was a long line following him the morning the car hit him. He had forgotten to put on his little reflectors and the car came screaming around the corner and clipped him, knocking him backward, where one of the cars following him crushed all the bones in his right hand. He was still lying with the tire on top of his hand when his old friends from the Army came running by. At first he thought they were going to pretend not to see him. Like it was really dark. But he called to them, and they came, kneeling around him in a circle. They picked the car up off his hand. Skeeter had been a medic, and he had seen some nasty shit, some really nasty shit, he told Mills once, back when they were both drinking, you don’t even fucking want to know. Little kids with their guts ripped out. Dead dogs swollen and bloated in the streets, then dead dogs rupturing in the streets, the smell, Jesus fucking Christ, Mills, you can’t imagine. He didn’t vomit when he looked at Mills’s hand, though Mills could see him thinking about it really hard.
What do you think they will put on him now? one of the kids said.
At the hospital it was the same doctor. He said, You are a, but Mills cut in.
Please don’t tell me how lucky I am, he said.
We’re going to have to operate, the doctor said, clearing his throat.
Mills waved his good hand.
Is there anything, you, aah, want? the doctor said, clearing his throat. He made a point of looking at Mills’s prosthetic legs. Anything you, aah, need?
What can you do?
We’ve done guns, knives, billy clubs. A shotgun. A grenade launcher. A samurai sword.
I want a saw, Mills said.
A saw?
A saw.
The doctor cleared his throat. He was a champion at clearing his throat. Later in the night he would go home and take so many Vi-codin his heart would stutter and skip as he staggered around the house yelling the name of a woman he had once known. May I ask why? he said.
So when whatever happens next happens I won’t have to come back here. I can saw on my own body.
Well, I don’t know how well that would work, the doctor said, but we’ll see. He lowered the mask over Mills’s face. The anesthetic smelled like mouthwash. The lights dimmed. Mills tried to stay awake but the lights kept dimming. It was like driving through tunnels in the mountains, or when landmines went off too close to the vehicle you were driving and the ringing in your ears lasts for months.
When he woke the doctor was gone and a nurse sat in the chair next to his bed reading Soldier of Fortune magazine. She had huge breasts, Mills noticed right away, and her uniform was unbuttoned enough he could see her red bra, nipples poking through the satin. His mouth was dry and the world swam dizzily. He said, You’re a nurse? She had long blond hair and lips that reminded him of apples.
She said, I welcome patients back.
I went somewhere?
She held a glass of water to his lips. She smelled like apples too. You did indeed. How do you feel?
Mills held up his arm. His hand was gone, cut off a few inches above where his wrist used to be. A metal exoskeleton was attached to his flesh. His fingers were tiny little chainsaws. He said, How does this work?
She said, Pretend you are flexing your fingers.
He pretended he was flexing his fingers. The little chainsaws roared to life. They sounded like bees on his arm. The little chains spun and a pall of blue smoke came out of them. He straighten
ed his fingers and they shut off. Then he did them one at a time.
This is amazing, he said.
The nurse put a hand on his arm. I’m glad you like them.
Am I the first?
She thought for a moment. For the chainsaws, yes. But we’ve done shovel-hands for people who like to garden. And gun hands for hunters. You must like trees?
Not really, he said.
Then why the chainsaws?
He was still examining them and didn’t answer. The finger-saws came to life one by one, all he had to do was think about it. You guys can do anything, he said.
We’ve had lots of practice.
He slept with the nurse later in the afternoon. She straddled him on the hospital bed and lowered herself down. He watched the door, afraid someone would walk in.
Have you ever done this before? he said.
I am not a virgin, if that’s what you mean, she said.
That is not, he started to say, but then could not finish. He gritted his teeth. When he came the chainsaw fingers fired up accidentally and tore the sheet.
Afterward she lay on his chest, breathing. Her skin smelled like sunlight in winter. She punched her number into his cell phone. She said, Call me. Take me to dinner.
He said, You won’t be embarrassed of me?
No, she said. I am not embarrassed easily.
He stroked her nipples with his other hand. I have found one thing these are not very good for, he said, and she laughed into his chest.
When he got home the neighborhood kids were waiting on his front lawn.
Show us the chainsaws, they said.
Mills wondered how they already knew. He fired one of the chainsaws.
Do them all, they shouted.
He had to walk sideways to get through them. He said, Excuse me. He said, Move please.
Do them all, they shouted. Cut something down. Cut up that tree.