by E. C. Osondu
“Remember, the doctor said he was going to be a basketball player—see, the lines must have come from his curling himself up so tightly in that little space.”
“What are we going to do with that?” the husband said, pointing at the drooping bit of navel from the umbilical cord.
“Don’t worry, it will fall off in a couple of weeks.”
“I mean, where are we going to bury it when it falls off? Or do you mean you don’t know that back home you are buried wherever that bit of navel is buried?”
“Oh, yes, that—when it falls off, I will keep it at the bottom of my box where I keep my clothes and preserve it with camphor. We can take it back with us whenever we are going back home.”
The husband did not respond. His head fell back on the hospital chair, and his mind went back to his childhood.
He was sitting by his grandmother’s feet, and she was telling him a story; it was something that happened in the land of Idunoba. The inhabitants of Idunoba were dying of thirst. They woke up one morning and discovered that a black python had taken over the well that was the community’s only source of water. All the brave hunters who went to the well to kill the python ended up being strangled by it. Then a woman who had been pregnant for seven years began to feel birth pangs. The baby came into the world feetfirst. When he opened his mouth, he had a complete set of teeth, and he used this to bite off his umbilical cord. While everyone in Idunoba watched, he began to grow. His arms became stout, and his feet grew sturdy, and he stood at over seven feet. He began to speak and command the villagers to take him to the well. When he got to the well, he used his bare hands to drag out the python and choked it to death. Everyone was happy, including the king. He gave the boy his daughter to marry, and they had seven brave sons and lived happily ever after.
Now the wife was shaking the husband and asking him to wake up so he could go home. She had assumed he was sleeping. He rubbed his face, picked up his bag, and left.
When he got home, he assembled the new crib that he bought for the baby from Kmart and hung up a balloon on the doorway that said “Congratulations.”
The next morning he went to the hospital to bring the baby and mother back home. The wife had called him the previous night to tell him that the doctor had confirmed that all the tests were negative, and she was free to go home. The doctor told her to clean the baby’s teeth with cotton wool and warm water.
There was a bit of a situation when they were about to leave the hospital. The state law required all newborn babies to be transported in an infant car seat. They did not have a car, so they didn’t have a car seat. The hospital loaned them one, and they took a taxi back home.
The wife was happy on seeing the balloon when they entered their apartment, and thanked him. She was happy because he was becoming American in his ways. She put the baby in the crib, and he continued the sleep he had started at the hospital. The woman told him she was tired, went to bed, and dozed off. He read for a while and also fell asleep. The baby woke up twice in the night and was suckled by the wife.
The child continued to grow, and when he was a few months old, they bought him a toothbrush. Just because he had teeth, they gave him meat to chew on occasion, but he always spat it out.
The hospital sent a social worker to visit them to find out if they needed any assistance. The wife became friendly with the social worker, and it was the social worker that told her that here in America, people believed in something called the tooth fairy.
“You’ll see, when your son grows up and starts school, he will learn about the tooth fairy.”
The wife was happy to hear this little piece of news, and when the husband came back from school, she shared it with him.
“This means they are not so different from us,” the wife said.
“Yes, they are not so different,” the man agreed.
“I told my mother about it,” the wife said.
“I thought we agreed you were not going to tell her,” he said.
“I could not bear it anymore; I had to tell her.”
“And what did she say?”
“She said it is a sign of greatness—she said her grandson is going to be a great man.”
“For once I agree with your mother,” the husband said, and looked at the wife with mischief lurking at the corners of his mouth.
They both began to laugh. Their laughter woke up the baby, who was taking a nap, and he began to cry.
An Incident at Pat’s Bar
The bars favored by American oil workers in Port Har-court were named after girls—retired prostitutes called club girls. The names were short and memorable—Pat’s Bar, Stella’s Bar, Abby’s Bar, Christy’s Bar, and so on. The oldest of them was Pat’s Bar; it was also the one most visited by the older oil workers. You could tell the older oil workers by the color of their skin, a very dark brown like the color of anthills. You could spot the old-timers: they smoked Marlboro Reds, were usually potbellied like most of the prosperous locals, and had their shirts unbuttoned to the chest, revealing wiry gray chest hairs. They spoke a smattering of pidgin English, sprinkled with local expressions such as wahala, oga, ashewo, nyash, and na wah.
The girls had been given money to open the bars as gifts from departing boyfriends. Pat’s was a parting gift from a boyfriend who had returned to Texas. Over the years the place had grown into the favorite hangout of old expatriate oil workers. Pat openly cultivated these oil workers, making trips to the interior to bring young girls from Opobo and Nembe for her customers, who preferred them very young.
She would tell the other women so everyone could hear it, “All of us are club girls o, every girl who runs a bar in this Port Harcourt na ashewo, we be all prostitutes from A to Z, we know ourself o, make nobody deceive herself we all slept with oyibo to get money, so why I no permit young girls wey want to hustle and make money like me.” You could tell how prosperous she had grown from the folds on her neck. Her community had even conferred a chieftaincy title on her, Chirizua—“Uplifter of the Youths.”
Pat’s Bar was one of the few places where male prostitutes hung out to be picked up by expatriates. It also had a couple of decent rooms upstairs for “fresh fish,” the slang for newly arrived expatriate oil workers who had yet to find permanent accommodation. When these expatriates became well established in Port Harcourt, they never forgot the early days when they were still finding their feet, and Pat’s hospitality to them. The bar had cheeseburgers and fries, reminding its American patrons of home food. It also had several varieties of mustard and imported Heinz ketchup, not the tart-tasting locally made variety to be found at Christy’s Bar four blocks down the road. When you changed your money in the informal bureau de change at Pat’s Bar, you were sure you were getting genuine and clean naira notes, not the mutilated and sometimes counterfeit notes that were mixed with the real notes when you changed at Hotel Presidential.
Every year Pat adopted a local charity, and she kept a transparent plastic box for collecting donations on a stool in the bar. The first year she did this for St. Anne’s Motherless Babies’Home, she collected close to two hundred thousand naira when the money was converted into the local currency. The local cat-echist and his wife who ran the orphanage could not believe their eyes when they saw the money, and from that day on, they designated a special seat for her in the church. Different charities began to approach her to put a box for them in her bar. She would look at a soliciting pastor, shake her head, and smile.
“But you are the same people that criticize prostitutes in your church. Na una talk say na ashewo work we dey do for here, when una reach church on Sunday na to siddon for pulpit dey take mouth scatter us say na we dey corrupt this town of Port Harcourt.” The pastor would bow his head sheepishly as she carried on her tirade.
“Una don forget say even for Bible, sef, God say judge not so that nobody go judge you, even Rahab in the Bible was a prostitute.”
She would relent after her tirade, set up a box for the charity, and by
the end of the year would have a large sum of money. The expatriates were always happy to drop a couple of dollars to help motherless children, especially after a night of heavy drinking and with one of Pat’s girls hanging on their arm.
Her fish pepper soup was the best in town. She had two fishponds filled with live catfish; all a customer needed to do was point, and the fish was quickly brought out of the pond and killed.
There was no kind of drink that was not sold in the bar, from the local Gulder and Star lagers to Heineken, Budweiser, Miche-lob, and Guinness, and of course the house specialty, nicknamed Monkey Tail by the expatriates, a potent mixture of local rum, marijuana, and seven pieces of alligator pepper. It was rumored that when one of the American expatriates, Chet Williams, had first arrived in the country, he had taken more than the recommended one shot and ended up with a hangover that lasted for seven days. As he lay on the floor, writhing and yelling for ice water, he claimed that he saw snakes crawling all over the floor.
Pat got people out of all kinds of trouble, ranging from traffic infractions to separating them from local girls who had become too clingy. She had recently intervened when was one of her girls had become pregnant and refused to abort because she wanted to have a child with fair hair and blue eyes like engineer Rogers, her expatriate boyfriend.
It wasn’t that there were no other good places to drink, but Pat’s Bar, with its New York Yankees vest and cap in a glass frame, blown-up pictures of Madonna and Marilyn Monroe, and American quarters and cents glued to the bar, felt like home to most of the oil workers.
There were other places—the Shell Club, the Hotel Presidential Bar, and the Metropolitan Club 1938—that were frequented by British expatriates. These were places where you could drink your beer in peace, without a thin girl with pale skin and a false American accent brushing up against you and asking if she could share your seat or drink. Pat’s patrons considered these other places sterile and antiseptic.
Those who drank at Pat’s Bar knew what they were looking for, and there was plenty of that. Within the bar’s confines, you could talk about how the locals crossed the road like goats without looking left or right, and you need not look over your shoulder to see if someone was listening. You could throw up right there at the bar, and the unobtrusive barman would clean you up and take you upstairs to lie down for a bit to clear your head. The expatriates would point at the hand-lettered sign on the white fence outside that said DO NOT UNIRET HERE, OKADA NO PARKING DROP AND GO and laugh out loud. Pat had deliberately refused to correct the spelling errors when she discovered that her customers were fascinated by them. Yet the bar was never rowdy. The girls behaved themselves, and a few expatriates had been heard to remark that Pat ran a tight ship.
It was not that locals did not want to come there to drink, but somehow they could tell that they were not welcome. The beer cost almost ten times what it did in the local bars, and the girls would hiss at any local who called to them.
“Shuo why are you calling me, abi monkey no sabi him mate again, please ants move with ants and crickets move with crickets, abeg na oyibo I dey follow o I no dey follow you Port Harcourt men, fuck no pay thank you very much. Or you think because God gave me my thing free I should give it free to any man with a penis.”
Even the musician who played on Friday nights, who used to be known as Prince Shagasha, changed his name to Kenny Rogers Junior in order to please his clients and stopped singing African highlife, switching to country and western.
There were two categories of patrons at Pat’s Bar, those who lived in Port Harcourt and those who worked offshore. The latter category was more reckless, drank more, swore more, and picked up two or three girls at a time. They got into brawls more often.
IT WAS TO the offshore category that Chet Williams used to belong, but he’d had trouble and was living in one of the upstairs rooms at Pat’s Bar, accumulating a huge tab that even Pat was not sure he would ever be able to pay. Recalling that he had been one of her best customers when the going was good, she told her barman to keep giving him beer. She believed that Chet’s luck would turn. Some customers had been heard to describe Chet Williams as a disgrace to America, but the other Americans who came to the bar still bought him drinks and considered him merely unlucky. Chet had been like them; he worked for an oil company as a rig engineer and only came to Pat’s Bar when he was off duty. Generous and always laughing, he was thin and wiry, and three lines appeared at the corners of his eyes whenever he smiled. Some of the old-timers still recalled how he had once walked up to the stage when Kenny Rogers Junior was singing, taken his guitar and microphone, and belted out “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” to big applause. Pat called him “Engineer Double” because he would always leave the bar with two girls each night after drinking. It was never one girl, and he never went back to the same set of girls twice. The expatriate oil workers said that any problem that Pat could not solve was unsolvable. Pat had gotten Chet Williams out of trouble in the past. He had picked up a girl in a nightclub but did not know that the girl was a Mamiwata, a mermaid. He had such a great time with her and was so grateful the next morning that he gave her a hundred-dollar note, twice the usual amount. But the girl turned down the money and left. The side of the bed on which the girl had slept was wet, as if someone had poured a bucket of water on it. Probably sweat, he assumed, and left for the rig. When he got to the rig, he could not focus on the job he had to do; his mind kept going back to the girl he had slept with. He recalled her contortions and how she kept calling him “my husband, oh my husband.” He found himself with a huge erection,his face covered in sweat. He asked for compassionate leave and ran back to Port Harcourt to look for the lady. He went from one nightclub to another, distraught, his eyes wild, asking for Helen, the name she had given him. When he wandered into Pat’s Bar screaming her name, Pat could immediately tell what had happened.
“Mr. Chet don fuck Mamiwata be dat o, he no fit sleep again and na Mamiwata him dey see for dream every night wey him sleep.”
She took him to a native doctor in Diobu, a suburb in downtown Port Harcourt. The native doctor demanded five thousand naira, a white cock, and a bottle of Seaman’s Aromatic Schnapps. He spat some of the schnapps into Chet Williams’s eyes, and suddenly the man gripped Pat’s arm and, looking around, asked, “Where am I?” He felt as if he had been in a dream all that time, he said.
But Pat had declared Chet Williams’s recent troubles unsolv-able; in fact, she told some of the expatriates that his best bet was to return to America and start a new life. His recent troubles were caused by girls too. He had picked up two girls from another bar.
The girls claimed to be students at the University of Port Harcourt. Chet Williams had convinced them to do nude shots of themselves and him with his digital camera. When Chet woke up the next morning, the girls had disappeared with his money bag, his cell phone, his Rolex wristwatch, and his gold wrist chain, but had for some reason overlooked the digital camera. He cursed out loud, calling all Nigerian girls prostitutes and thieves. Pat assured him that she would help him catch the girls, but he was not interested. He posted the nude pictures of the girls in an expatriate Web site, Najamericans Online. When the girls heard that he had splashed their nude pictures on the Web, they told the local gossip magazines about Chet Williams and his weird sexual habits. They said they were no thieves; they had stolen his money because he refused to pay them for the nude shots. The newspapers had a field day with the story, splashing the girls’ naked pictures on their front page, mentioning Mr. Chet Williams by name, and calling on his employer, a major oil company, to sack him. The papers asked if he would have dared to take pictures of American call girls in his native country without paying them. The oil companies avoided anything that would draw the ire of their host communities; first Chet’s employers suspended him, then they fired him. Since then he had been hanging around, hoping to get another job and living at Pat’s Bar. But the oil companies operated according to some unwritten rules of c
ooperation.
The only case that came close to Chet’s involved a brash, cursing, beer-bellied Texan called Red Rick. He had gotten into an argument with one of the Nigerian engineers in the rig for not carrying out his instructions properly, and in a fit of rage had called the Nigerian engineer an “educated monkey.”
The Nigerian workers in the rig had thrown down their tools and attempted to throw Red Rick into the ocean, but were stopped by the Atlas guards on duty. The story had gotten into the newspapers, and the Nigerian Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers had stepped in and insisted that Rick must be sacked and deported. The newspapers had blown the whole thing out of proportion and actually insisted that there was a tradition of racism among foreign oil workers. No one listened to the argument that it was usual for the oil workers to refer to the Nigerian workers on the rig as monkeys, and for the local workers to refer to the white workers as “oyibo pepper,” referring both to the pale color of the white man’s skin and his inability to eat peppers. Red Rick hung around in Pat’s Bar for a long time while the case was being investigated. Finally, the oil company sacked him and asked him to leave.
ALL THESE WERE small issues compared to the abductions of expatriate oil workers that began to take place at the beginning of the new year in Port Harcourt. There had been abductions in other oil-producing towns with expatriate communities like Warri and Ughelli, but Port Harcourt, fondly called the Garden City, had seemed immune. When the news first filtered in that six foreign oil workers, including two Americans, had been abducted by a group known as the Niger Delta Force, fear gripped the expatriate community. They were used to threats and work stoppage from their host communities, but not armed abductions.
Pat moved from one drinking table to the next.
“No be serious matter at all, at all, the governor don step into the case, even the president, sef, and all the chiefs and royal fathers and soja don full everywhere, no wahala at all, everything is under control.”