Danny erupted into chuckles.
The girl’s eyes met his. She laughed with him. Their lidded eyes rested on Ifi.
“Whoa, man,” Danny said. “Whoa.”
The girl reached into the car and offered Ifi a hit on their joint. Ifi, still frazzled, took the joint in her trembling fingers. Never before had she even held a cigarette. She started to say no, but the hungry look in their eyes. She put the joint to her lips, sucked on the smoke hard. Her lungs caught on fire. She coughed. The couple laughed.
“You did that your first time,” the girl said to Danny.
“I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“Because I inhaled. You didn’t.”
“So?”
“Forget it.”
“Yeah, fuh-gedd-a-bout it.” They laughed at their joke.
“What you doing here?” the girl asked again.
For the first time, Ifi spoke. “My boy,” she said.
They looked around the junkyard at the shells of cars. “Won’t find him here.”
“No,” Ifi said back.
“Maybe,” the girl said, “hiding here somewhere.”
“What’s he look like?”
“He is a boy, a beautiful boy, my son.”
“What’s his name?”
“Victor.”
“I don’t know a single Victor.”
“How old is he? We’ll help you look.”
“Five.”
Danny crouched and called out in a low voice, “Victor, Victor, where are you?”
“What if we never find him? Oh, that would be terrible,” the girl said.
“Then we’ll break shit.” Danny still had the bar in his hands. He smashed it over the top of the car they had camped in. They all listened as the splintering glass ruptured the night air.
“Nice move,” she said sarcastically.
He smashed at another car.
Ifi collected her bar and attacked the silver coupe. They joined. In turn, the three demolished the vehicle, their silhouettes throbbing from their laughter.
Sirens wailed in the distance. By the time the police arrived, the car had stopped rocking. Only the scent of marijuana and alcohol lingered in the air. Into the blur of the highway the boy and girl had vanished, giddy and breathless with their raw defiance. Because of her bleeding thigh, Ifi made it only midway down the fence before a yellow light burned her eyes. A policewoman with a wide gait stepped into the light. But the glare was too intense for Ifi to make out her features. A staticky walkie-talkie merged into the sounds of the officer’s voice. Her questions were a disconnected stream of guttural syllables that Ifi had trouble understanding. Her blood was hot. Her throat was thick. Her eyelids were heavy.
Ifi’s bloodied hands were handcuffed. “Please,” she said to the officer, “I will not come back. I am sorry.”
“You have the right to remain silent,” the policewoman said. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”
A male officer ran her license on a computer.
Will they deport me? she wondered. I cannot go back to Nigeria, she decided. Not without my son.
At a hospital, Ifi’s wrists were bandaged. Asked not to return to the junkyard, she was suddenly released. Job waited for her with a white woman. The woman’s eyes were sleepy, her red hair in a tousled ponytail. Her high-waisted blue jeans tapered at the legs. She smelled of cigarettes and strawberries. There was an awkward introduction in which their eyes met and Ifi mumbled hello. She turned to go, but the woman spoke to her.
“Job and I, we’re friends from the old days,” the woman said in a rush. “Anyway, I took care of everything. The cops, they understand. They won’t press charges.” Then she looked at Job. “But she can’t ever come back, okay?”
Job nodded.
On the way home he said nothing, but the woman kept talking. She commented on everything: the still night, the full moon, the rattling of the car’s dash, the feel of the breeze. Ifi spread out on the backseat of the car, spent, unable to sleep.
They arrived at a corner apartment not far from where Ifi and Job lived. Just before they drove off, the woman glanced in the direction of the driver’s-side window. One soft look suddenly revealed to Ifi all that the years of late arrivals and early departures hadn’t. But she was too numb to react. Her tongue was too thick in her mouth to speak.
Job let the door to the house close before he finally spoke. “What is wrong with you?” he asked Ifi. “Are you trying to disgrace us, acting like onye ara?” a crazy woman.
She said nothing.
“They will deport you like the Mexicans,” he said. “I begged that woman to speak to them as an American.”
Ifi’s eyes sharpened at the woman’s mention. “I don’t care. They can take me. You can go back to your woman and tell her I said this.”
Job shook his head. “You must stop this. At once. I beg of you. Please, biko.” He took her bound hands in his. Tears were in his eyes. “Tomorrow, I am going to Nigeria alone to bury my only son, my only child. You have left me to do a father and a mother’s job as one. And now you must do this?”
“You do not have to go alone,” Ifi said. “Take your ‘friend from the old days.’”
Job emptied cans of pork and beans into a pot and heated them. After dishing for Ifi, he scraped away the burnt bottoms of the pots. Hot mugs of Ovaltine, sweet with evaporated milk, would finish the meal. Ifi did not eat. She did not drink. Is it because of Cheryl or Victor? he wondered.
For a moment, sitting across from one another at the table, Job’s mind returned to the image of Victor spread out on the concrete. When he had tried to explain that Victor had been moving when he first arrived, the doctors reasoned that Victor was already going into shock as his systems were beginning to shut down. His lungs had collapsed, his heart could barely pump blood through his body, his bones were broken under the surface of his skin, and his brain had already expired. They had said there wasn’t anything that Job could have done. But they hadn’t hung on to Victor in the last moment like he had. They hadn’t felt what it was to feel the last ripple of life escape through one’s fingertips.
Job gave Victor life. Why didn’t I save my boy? he thought. Sons were supposed to bury their fathers, not the other way around.
Ifi sat silently across from him, her face resting on her palm, her eyes vacantly gazing across the room. She had returned to work, but she hadn’t cried, she hadn’t wailed, not like him. He remembered the look on her face that night, how for just a moment, she had seen Job, the doctor, and known, believed with all her heart, that he could fix their son and fix their futures. Then how suddenly her face had gone from hope to dashed dreams as she watched Victor’s life slip from his father’s hands.
Job’s breath caught. He set down the salt shaker. He pushed thoughts of his son from his mind. In silence, he ate both of their portions; later, he strained over the toilet to push out the hardened stool.
Before Ifi’s arrival, the years before the arranged marriage, he had imagined that the indignity of these American meals would be no more. No more spaghetti from cans and frozen hot dogs. Now, his life had turned in on itself. Before flying to Nigeria to bury his boy the next morning, he promised himself that he would rise early and prepare a soup—despite what he already predicted: the soup would be runny, with okra sliced too thin, mushrooms too thick, blocks of beef too tough, and the fufu would be stiff and crumbling, overcooked on a too-high flame.
That night, Ifi’s eyes closed, feigning sleep. Job pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her back. Without comment, she neither balked nor relented. He took it as a sign that she had forgiven him, that without his having said so, she knew he had finished with Cheryl. Things had been over for some time anyway. He had only called on her help in releasing Ifi from jail. He pressed his face into her back and ran his fingers down the side of her dry face. She had never cried, not even once. Job suspected—in all honesty, hoped—that she at le
ast cried in his absence.
Daylight was just beginning, a fuzzy patch of clouds through the window screen. In an hour’s time, Job would be leaving for the airport to fly to Nigeria to bury his only child. For three weeks, he would sleep under mosquito nets at night, eat his mother’s stew, and listen to his brother rant about his latest ex-girlfriend. All of this would be pretense. Forget about the boy, they would say to him in their own silent ways. Move forward. Begin again. There is still time. Job dressed in his good pants, shirt, and tie. He had spent the morning ironing them. The phone rang.
“Who is calling at this time?” Ifi asked. She was hoarse; nonetheless, she looked more like herself.
“No one,” Job said. But when the calls didn’t stop, in exasperation, he finally answered.
Cheryl.
Before she could speak, he began. “Please, I beg you not to disturb my home.” He glanced back at Ifi. “My wife is not well.”
“Don’t shut me out, okay?”
Once again, he glanced back at Ifi, hovering in the bathroom doorway. “You hear me?”
“Job, don’t do this. Don’t be unfair.” Cheryl’s voice was flat and still, with the same gravel undertow he’d grown used to over the years. A smoker’s cadence. “I helped you.”
Ifi silently regarded him for a moment. Job forced a reassuring smile. After a moment, she retreated to the bathroom. She would sit on the toilet seat staring blankly at the walls surrounding her. He waited a moment for the sound of the water faucet. “You were not supposed to be there,” he said into the phone.
“You needed me. And I was there. Now I need you.”
“This is how it is,” he said softly. “My wife is not well. Not while she is like this.”
“Don’t be an asshole, Job. I get what we are. I never tried to make it anything else. I been married two times already, okay? I don’t need another one under my belt. Only thing is, what you’re doing, it ain’t fair.” Her voice was thick and churlish.
It softened him. He tried to understand where her ache came from. Hadn’t he been thinking the very same thought since that night? “What is this fair?” he asked. Truly, he wanted to know, because he couldn’t understand what the word meant anymore. What was fair about a boy losing his life just as it had begun? Was it fair the way things had turned out with Samuel, with his education in America, with Gladys, with Ifi?
“We can be there for each other, Job, like we’ve always been. I know things have cooled down lately. I could feel it. But it don’t have to be that way. Let’s go somewhere. A trip. Someplace brand new.”
“No, no brand new.”
“Why not? Why do we have to make ourselves miserable? We can help each other. Just for a weekend, okay? We go away and come back, and then everything’ll be calm.”
Water still ran at full blast. Job sighed. Ifi had left the water running again. “We can’t do this anymore,” he said. “I have tried . . .”
“We can.”
“No,” he said weakly.
In spite of his words, he felt the need to break away, escape from this empty house and Ifi’s dead eyes. What if I do it? he thought. What if I travel away and return with a renewed spirit? It would help him clear his head. It would help him understand. Because he could not understand it. What is all of this anyway? he asked himself. What is this marriage without the boy? What is this house without the boy? All that was left were objects. Objects were hollow inside. Like Ifi. “Where will we go?” he whispered.
“A cabin up north. My folks used to take me and Luther up when we were kids. Haven’t been back in years.”
Cheryl standing along a beach, her red hair swooped back by a breeze, her eyes lovingly set on him. He imagined it. Not like Ifi; her eyes were missing something, like a piece was gone, a piece that would never be retrieved.
“Okie,” he said. A weight lifted from his chest. He couldn’t believe he’d actually said it, and once he had, the arrangements began to take shape. He would make a cash withdrawal from his credit card, enough for a few days. He would ask for some extra leave time from work. They would understand. He would tell Ifi that there had been a delay, that he would be in Nigeria longer than expected. He would leave, with Cheryl. They would go away to this lake cabin. “I am going to my son’s funeral in Nigeria,” he said to Cheryl. “After I return.”
“Yes.” Cheryl let out a hoot. “This is so right,” she said. “Doesn’t it feel good already?”
“Yes, it does,” he admitted.
“This has been so hard for me, you know? I been fighting with everything inside.” She began to whimper. “God, I miss him so much.”
Job recoiled. He hated that sound, like snot trapped in her nose and wheezing its way through her lips.
“This trip will be so good for us, Job,” she said. “I just need to be with you. Then, you know, we can make it through this. And if we make it, we can make it through anything.”
“We are not miserable,” he said, glancing at the bathroom. Water still poured from the bathroom faucet. “We, my wife and I, are fine.”
“Job, I loved him too. You know that.”
Her voice softened, and the whimper turned into the crunch of tears, an ugly sound, a low, deep cry, the sound that he hoped day and night to hear from Ifi, a mother’s cry for her lost child. Not from Cheryl. She wants to cry for my son? I won’t have it. She is not the boy’s mother.
“No, you didn’t know him,” he said. He could handle her anger, her shouts, even her cigarettes, but not this. “You are nothing to him.”
“That’s not fair.” Like a child, a whining, foolish child, the harder she tried to protest, the more guttural and pathetic her cries. “Job, Luther’s gone. My folks are gone. You and Victor, you’re my family.”
Family? How had it all begun anyway? This thing with Cheryl. At first he couldn’t recall, then suddenly he remembered that day all those years ago, the derision in Gladys’s laughter. Right then. That’s where it began. Well, I was weak then, he thought. Cheryl took advantage. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the sickening scent of her strawberry shampoo and the cigarettes. Her whiny voice. She never let him be anymore, always calling, always with that hungry sound in her voice, a voice so hungry that it had almost consumed him.
He wouldn’t have even called her if it hadn’t been for Ifi’s accident. Only Cheryl could talk to the police and get Ifi out of trouble. Because she is white, he told himself. Because she is an American. And she knew this. He had been forced to call her. She used it to her advantage, he thought. A conniver, she is. But I will not fall to her again. Never again. “No,” he said with ferocity.
At once, Ifi stood in the doorway, her eyes on him. Water still blasted behind her. He smiled, threw up his hands in feigned exasperation. “Telemarketers,” he said to her. “I am hanging up,” he said to the invisible merchant. “Stop disturbing my family with your calls. Never ever call this number again.”
After he hung up, Job marched past Ifi into the bathroom and turned off the running water faucet. By the time he returned to the living room, he had collected himself.
With the morning news blaring, Job and Ifi ate runny soup together on the couch. He watched her slow swallows, the exhaustion in her eyes, and it occurred to him that she was quite beautiful. In a plain, unencumbered way, her imploring eyes had a way of reviewing the world with calm incredulity. It was magnificent. As he watched her, it was impossible not to make comparisons. Ifi and Cheryl. Ifi’s caramel to Cheryl’s crème. Ifi’s fluffy, dark hair, thinning around the hairline from tight braids, to Cheryl and her flyaway red hair, with slants of gray straining around her pinkish ears. Ifi’s hard, set look; the whiskers around Cheryl’s eyes. Ifi’s slim waist, her lumpy round rump in a towel or a wrapper, like now. Cheryl . . .
Ifi was beautiful and soft and hard all at once. Like his mother and his sisters and Gladys, and the first girl he fell for in secondary school, the girl with the gapped front teeth and crooked smile. She was a grown-up version of the Nig
erian girls he and his friends taunted as they marched by, their massive backsides rhythmically drumming with each step. She was a Nigerian, like him.
Now she was the mother of his son, his wife. She was beautiful. This must have been what he saw that first time so long ago, the photograph that stood apart from the others. He must have seen it in her, the ability to become a part of him. All these years, he had imagined it as a random shuffling of a deck of cards in a hand, that his eyes should land on hers; that his parents should agree with his choice for her skin color, her shape, and her family name. But it was more. Perhaps his eyes were destined to stop on her picture, to return a second and then a third time, before the decision was made.
Before leaving for the airport, he pulled Ifi to him by the waist. A rush of feelings enveloped him. Is this what it feels like to truly love someone, he thought, like in Hollywood? He kissed her tenderly along the side of her face and told her he loved her. “When I return,” he whispered, “we can start over. We will have other children. This will not be the end of it.”
In ten minutes’ time a cab would arrive.
All of a sudden she clawed at his thighs, his chest, his penis. It excited him. Her eyes were fierce and probing. She forced her tongue into his mouth. This is not her way, he thought. Normally, her kisses were dry, her movements soft. She hissed. He fought to keep up with her tongue’s movements just as he struggled to keep up with the movements of her hips.
A car horn began to honk outside. The cab. I will miss my flight, he thought in panic.
“Biko,” he said. “Not now.” Still he dared not push the bound hands away. “Biko,” he said again and again, suddenly realizing her plan. Holding her damaged hands gently, he pulled away. “You will cause me to miss my plane.” When he pulled his shirt back on, he found the skin of his back and chest shredded from her fingernails.
At last Ifi said, “You will not take my son away.”
“What are you talking about?” Job asked.
“We will bury him here. In America.”
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