“Stop it. Don’t you touch it,” Emeka bellowed.
She frowned at him.
“Your uncle has dropped his wallet.”
“Oh,” she said softly. After a moment, she smiled. “Can I have some money, Uncle?” She knelt and began to scoop the bills.
Again, Emeka yelled, “Remove your hands.”
“Take it,” Job said, a challenge in his tone.
“Leave it.” At her father’s words, her frown slipped away and was replaced by incredulity. Looking from one man to the other, her father and the man she must call Uncle, she refused to move.
“You spilled our drinks, clumsy girl,” Emeka said softly. “Go on, get us two more.” Both men watched the top of her head as she collected the snow-covered mugs in her shaky grasp and returned to the house.
After she was gone from their view, Emeka spun on Job. “What is the meaning of this?”
“Take the money and buy a snowblower,” Job said again.
“I don’t need a damn snowblower.” He ground his shovel into the snow.
“My boy likes the crib,” Job said casually. “So take it.”
Emeka’s face softened. Thoughtfully, he stared past the windows out into the distance. “She gave you the crib. I hoped it meant she would be happy, that this ‘boy’ nonsense would be done. We have all we need. We are a great success.” He sighed. “Nothing pleases her these days. Ah, this boy of yours has started it all over again.” Emeka threw back his shoulders in a shudder. His shudder turned into a chuckle, and before long, the chuckle morphed into a great laugh. “Women.”
At first Job couldn’t understand. Then he thought of that night, he and Emeka at the bar, faces upturned to strippers slippery with sweat. He remembered Emeka complaining about juju and native doctors, all commissioned in hopes of producing a son. Gladys again. Was it Gladys who sent Emeka to my house to put the crib together? Perhaps. Knowing this changed everything. This whole situation was nothing more than Emeka giving up and acknowledging that Job had bested him in the most significant manner, producing a son. He chuckled softly. “Why not take the money?”
He thought of Ifi at home, asleep on the bed next to their son in his crib. She had touched Job’s hand. We are a family, he thought to himself. Finally. The piece that had cemented their lives was the boy—with his beautiful, ugly, red, angry little face. “Buy your wife something nice, Emeka.”
“We both know that you need it more than me, my friend,” Emeka said.
His tone. His haughty tone. At that, Job pounced on Emeka. His movement was so sudden, so unrestrained, that for days afterwards, he struggled to pinpoint the place it came from within his body. What had he hoped to accomplish? Whites of his lab coat trailing on both sides, he was on Emeka, feeling his hard gut against his own, tasting Emeka’s powerful breath in his, soaked with the snow on his legs, hating Emeka with all his anger and might. “Take it!” he shouted into Emeka’s bewildered face. “Take the money!” He snatched a handful of bills and thrust them into Emeka’s face.
Emeka resisted. His jaw tightened, so Job bore down with his weight, pinning Emeka farther into the snow. He forgot about the street and the houses and the garages. In that moment, it was just the sounds of their breaths, the scent and taste of beer and crayfish from Emeka’s mouth. Surely Emeka would call him crazy. Perhaps I am crazy, Job thought. But he didn’t care.
Both men looked up at the sound of a creak. Balancing the same mugs glistening with melting snow, once again his daughter stood in the doorway. Silently, she regarded them, a look like her mother’s, a look too grown for her five-year-old legs, the rounded belly like her father’s, and the messy braids piled on top of her head. Stupid girl, Job thought. He was glad to have a son, a boy.
Like a drunken man, Emeka burst into laughter. Playfully, he jabbed at Job’s sides. Ah, he wants us to appear that way, Job realized, like two drunks wrestling in the snow. Like two rusty men who will be scolded by their wives for a late night and juvenile antics. Well, Job decided, I won’t have it that way. After all, he had come to make a point. “Stop it.” He shook Emeka. “Stop this laughing.”
But Emeka’s laughter only rose in pitch. Job took both sides of his shoulders and pressed him into the snow. “Stop this laughing! I am not fooling!” Emeka’s body flailed like a rag doll. He laughed and laughed and laughed.
His daughter descended the steps one more time, trying to decide if she should join the play or simply observe the two men. She settled for the latter and placed the drinks on the snow within their reach. In his distraction, Job loosened his grip on Emeka’s shoulders, and Emeka rolled free. He grasped one of the mugs and drank deeply, staining his mustache with foam. Exhausted, Job joined Emeka, draining his mug in one gulp, watching his life from outside of the ring, his hands red and dripping from the snow.
“Come and take this money your uncle has brought for you and your sisters,” Emeka said to the girl. Happily, she clambered down the stairs and claimed each of the twenty-dollar bills, folding them into the pockets of her jeans.
“Thank you, thank you, Uncle!” she said. She danced up the stairs, all two hundred dollars in her possession.
“That one will not share. She’ll spend it all on candy,” Emeka said proudly. “Three cavities the last time we saw her dentist. Three cavities, I tell you. But she’s stubborn. Like her mother.”
The thought of the five-year-old consuming streams of bubblegum and licorice with the money infuriated Job. “Do not enter my house ever again, you hear?”
Emeka glanced up, startled. “Your house. Heh?”
“Yes,” Job said evenly. “Spend the money on lollipops if you like, but never, under my dead body, never come into my home uninvited again.”
“What are you saying?” Emeka began a strange laugh.
“I mean this.”
“Is this why you have come to me here? You think I have broken into your house to steal your money? You think a man like me would need anything from you? Come now, you cannot be serious.”
“I am not silly.”
“You have lost your mind, my man.” Emeka stood and dusted off the rear of his pants. Snow rained around him and then rose again with the wind. He took a long, deep swallow from his mug.
Job felt cold. But his winter coat was sprawled somewhere in the distance, and his hands were too numb to search for it. Emeka didn’t seem bothered by the cold at all. His sneakers were still full of snow. Without his hat, now forgotten in the snow, the top of his balding head was revealed. How must Job appear now, shivering, his clothes scattered before him? He checked the houses up and down the street, so silent, so private. He was glad to be invisible.
Still, he couldn’t let it go. He mustn’t leave Emeka’s home without a single understanding between the two. “I am not crazy. I am no fool. This is simple,” Job said, leveling his eyes. “I am asking you to never enter my home again.”
Emeka stared back at Job. “I never entered your home.”
“You arranged the crib. In my own room.”
“My only hand was in giving it to your wife.”
When Emeka’s gaze didn’t waver, Job suggested, “Well, then your wife.”
“Gladys was here. With me.” With a wink, he added, “I should know.” After a moment, Emeka furrowed his brow and eyed Job. “Perhaps it is your wife who should worry you.”
Emeka’s words haunted Job throughout his shift at the hospital. What can I say to Ifi? he thought. How can I dignify such a claim? Yet at the same time, he was convinced that Emeka’s accusation was true. Even after many months together, Ifi still had strange ways that Job couldn’t comprehend. For the first time, he began to wonder what she did with her hours alone throughout the day. When he arrived home in the afternoons, the television was usually off, but he always noticed that the radio would be on. Usually he was the one to turn on the television. It helped him sleep. Now, he wondered, Which American stations does she listen to? Were the rhythms strange on her hips as she moved t
o the music?
Patients tousled awake as he made his rounds, emptying bedpans and rearranging sheets. During first rounds, Job found Captain sprawled across his sheets, staring at the mottled ceiling with unmoved eyes. Ishmael, a lanky Russian nurse with a thick accent, accompanied him. The two flipped and turned Captain over to change his soiled sheets. Over the past few weeks, the accidents had become more frequent. Each time, Captain shrank in humiliation as the folds of his skin were spread so he could be cleaned. When alone, Job cleaned as quickly as he could, knowing that Captain’s dignity was more precious than his cleanliness. But today Captain was perfectly still, staring up at the ceiling. Job followed his eyes and tried to think up a story to share with the old man, but Ishmael moved impatiently.
Just then, the old man’s eyes rolled to meet Job’s. His eyes were so vacant, so shameless, that it hurt to look into them. What is a man if he can have no dignity? Job thought in fury. Nothing more than a shrunken corpse, he allowed his flesh to slide one way and then the other without a care for how Job and Ishmael took him apart as they changed him. No longer did Captain walk with pride. All at once, Job was angry with Captain, Ifi, and the crib.
At break time, Job sat hunched over a bowl of dry cereal, his lids growing heavy. These days, between the hospital and the meatpacking plant, he was lucky to get four hours of sleep. Head resting lightly on his hands, he began to nod. Eventually, the humming refrigerator, buzzing fluorescent light, and creaking floors of the break room merged into one sound. Off in the distance, the intercom buzzed. An unanswered telephone rang. He drifted.
In his dreams, he was assaulted by a pack of faceless black American boys. They ran him down in his own car. They folded him against a wall. Headlights blinded his eyes. He woke just as the car was on him, finding, in its place, the bespectacled eyes of one of the nurses on his station. Mitzie was an older woman with a furrowed expression and dry, flaky skin. Her blue eyes were magnified behind the lenses, and her furious glare reared Job out of his seat.
He was up and out the back door, leaning against the brick back wall, breathing in the cold air, listening for the sounds of the night. Cars softly whirred on drying pavement. An owl hooted. All were so far away, yet everything was magnified in the dark, starless night. Four streetlights flooded the parking lot, and Job felt, even out here behind the large brick building, observed and scrutinized like he was on the line at the meatpacking plant. He had never forgotten the strange feeling of staring out over the floor from the large glass window, observing the bodies lined up like albino cockroaches in rows. How small that moment had made him feel, like he was merely a stain on glass.
Again, he reflected on Emeka’s face as he delivered his accusation about Ifi. Job’s cheeks burned in anguish. Overconfident, he thought of Emeka. Like Samuel. And Emeka’s crib—a rickety thing that could be broken in two with minimal might. That’s all it would take, and the nonsense would end. Perhaps Job would not even need to say a word to Ifi.
When the cold caught up with him, he breathed into his hands and tried to open the door. He was locked out. Job patted his hands together, blew in and out. He knocked wildly at the steel door. No one answered. He weaved in and out of the shrubbery guarding the door until he made it to the front entrance. A stern-faced security guard allowed him into the building. When he made it back to his station, everyone treated his absence as if it happened every night. No one wondered if he had locked himself out during a casual cigarette break, as had been the case with other employees in the past. No one worried if he went outside to vomit. Job breathed a sigh of relief.
Just as the early morning rays began their descent, his shift nearing its end, Job was asked to report to the main office. There, he was soundly reprimanded for his frequent negligent naps and undocumented absences. Further, the charge nurse reminded him that his constant appearances in inappropriate attire had not gone unnoticed. To Job’s consternation, she produced a document with a series of dates listed. Each offense was outlined in boldface letters. At the top of the list was a familiar date. He stared at the numbers on the page, remembering the night that he had been beaten, kicked, and spat on by boys young enough to be his sons. Boys he could have handled with a belt, had they been his own children.
Drawing her finger to the bottom of the page, she said, “Sign here.”
“Sign for what?” he asked. Why all of this fuss? He had been locked out; it happened to his coworkers all the time. In fact, he was usually the person to allow them in.
“Sign here, Job,” she said again. “It’s a formality.”
“But I have done nothing,” he said. “I was locked out.”
“Job, please,” she said, pursing her lips, smiling thinly. “Must you be difficult?”
“What am I signing for?”
“You are signing to acknowledge your compliance with the regulations of your workplace. That is what you are signing for.”
“Well, I don’t agree,” Job said.
“It’s not for you to agree. Just your acknowledgment. Any disagreement you have can be made through a formal petition.”
Job frowned.
She frowned back.
He stared through the woman’s white neck. The cords along her throat wiggled as she ground her teeth and swallowed. Slender ribbons of red mixed in with the muscles and tendons. His hands moved up. His hands gripped the cords of her neck. They squeezed. This is what he imagined of that neck.
“This is your second warning,” she said, finally, after he had signed. “Your next offense will warrant immediate suspension without pay and possible termination.”
By the time Job arrived at home that morning, his anger was a tight kernel in the pit of his stomach. His mind tumbled through a list of reasons for the assembled crib. If not Emeka, then Gladys. If not Gladys, then who? A curl of steam rose from a pot on the stove, an onion-smelling yam pottage. Instead of the scent calming him, it only infuriated him. Emeka and his haughtiness, the nurses on his station, and Captain, an old, imbecile man with nothing left.
Job flung the bedroom door open, finding Ifi curled on her side with a blanket wrapped around her swollen ankles. Dark lumps encircled her eyes. Her braids were clumped against the pillow in a frizzy halo. A ball at her side, the boy’s hands gripped the loose tails of her wrapper. Job turned away from the two, finding the domesticity of the scene a distraction from the immediacy of his anger. His eyes met the crib. An ugly, imposing wooden thing, balanced against his back wall, squeezed in the only bit of space available to them. Does the child even need a crib? he thought. I can purchase a bassinet, just as useful, a quarter of the size, at Wal-Mart. He could purchase a better contraption with his MasterCard.
Rigid lines scored into his forehead, Job nodded silently and stood squarely in front of the crib. An ugly thing! Examining the length of the wood, he ran his fingers over each smooth, shiny piece of the frame where the railing met two sturdy pillars along the side. An ugly thing, he thought once more. He scoffed at the word Emeka had used to describe it, antique. What a silly way of appraising a piece of junk they needed to rid themselves of. He jiggled the handles, pulled the lever, and the rail promptly lowered. A fit of rage overtook him. Then he kicked it in the middle, hard.
Ifi jolted from sleep, indentations from the braids along the sides of her face. She clutched their son to her body, wildness in her eyes. The boy threw his head back and let out a wail, the beginning sound of his furor. But Job wouldn’t be deterred. He kicked the crib again, as hard as he could. Ifi shrieked. The boy vomited. Job’s foot caught in the bars, but the shiny, dark wood remained unscathed. For a moment, Job dangled precariously at an angle before he untangled his leg and crashed to the floor, howling in rage and pain. At first Ifi gasped, watching Job bellow in rage. Then she laughed.
“Fucky, fuck that, fucker, motherfucker,” Job sputtered.
And she laughed harder. His features were a mixture of confusion, surprise, and pain. It seemed, for a second, that he might join in with h
er laughter. But once more rage surged through him. “Help me up! What are you laughing at? Stupid woman!”
Ifi tried, unsuccessfully, to bite back her laughter. She set the boy down on the bed and helped Job up. “Job, darling, what is the meaning of this?”
“You laugh, but I am the breadman in this household. Other men force their wives to work. Emeka forces his wife to work and kills their child, but me, I leave you here like a queen, and you treat me like a joke.”
Regret showed on her face.
“Any man would see what they had done to me and make it an excuse to stay home,” he said, pointing to the scars on his face, to the scar on his hand. “But night and day, I work. For you.” He turned away. “And him.”
“Ndo, I am sorry,” she said softly. “What happened? You are not at hospital.” Ifi rushed from the room and returned with a plastic bag of ice cubes and set it on Job’s thigh.
Avoiding her gaze, he looked out the window before grasping the bag and setting it against his throbbing kneecap. Finally, he turned back to her, speaking quietly and seriously. “Ifi, tell me now, who assembled this crib? It was not Emeka or Gladys as I thought. Who then? Tell me.”
At first, Ifi gazed at him strangely. Then relief spread across her face. “The boy,” she said, simply.
Anger clouded Job’s face. “You think I am an idiot.”
“Not our son. The criminal, Jamal. It was him.”
“That thief broke into our home? That gangster.”
“Job, what is this? The baby. You are waking the boy.”
The boy sputtered, spat, and flung his arms every which way. Ifi claimed him in her arms, but he wouldn’t relent, struggling to free himself from her grasp. She swung him this way and that until finally she angled her breast into his mouth.
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