The Turk smiled. "You and Joseph have made us all a great deal of money. You are to be congratulated. As for the girl," he gestured politely toward Amina, "she can stay here until the baby comes. We can clear a space for her in the storeroom, move some of the oil drums, let her sleep there. You would have to hire some sort of midwife, of course. But you have money enough for that, Nnamdi."
And after the baby came? What then?
Nnamdi had been thinking about this moment, had been thinking about it ever since he cast the stones in Lokoja.
"I have to get the supplies back to my village," he said. "My mother will be worried. And—you see," he turned to Amina, "in my village, I have an auntie who is a midwife."
Amina looked to the Turk, the Turk looked to Nnamdi. "I see," he said. "And you think the girl can make the journey? It's a treacherous trip, is it not?"
"If she can make the drive from Kaduna, I am sure she can manage a boat ride to the Delta. If she wishes."
CHAPTER 75
Nnamdi hired one of the Turk's boats, a small outboard vessel with the name
Himar
painted on the prow. "It means ‘donkey,'" the Turk said with a laugh. "Hopefully it will prove as stubborn, get you through."
He wished Amina and Nnamdi the best, but Igbo Joe was not quite so gracious.
"What!"
Joe had been tightening the lug nuts on the Dreams Abound wheels, standard maintenance after a long drive, and he now stood, wrench in hand, stunned, but not speechless. Never speechless.
"What manner of foolishness is this? What kind of
juju
has taken hold of you? Christ in a well, has she cast a spell on you? You are going to take her—
her
?—to your backwater village? The creeks are filled with gunmen and police patrols. You will never make it, and if you do, what then? You think she will be adopted by the Ijaw?
Eaten more likely."
"Joseph—"
"Come with me instead, Nnamdi. Give her some of your money, leave her be. You and I will reach new heights. Look. I am going to make another run, this time to Cameroon. To the border, anyway. Come with me, we will get rich together. And the women of Cameroon! Ah, the women. They make Nollywood beauty queens look like warthogs. The border is bathed in beauty. Come."
"I must get back to my village. I have been gone for too long a time."
Joe sighed, growled really. Turned to Amina instead. "And you? You want to go into that swamp? They're still cannibals, is what ah'm told. Several times, at night, when I heard this boy's stomach rumble, I caught him looking at me with a little bit of drool running down his chin. I slept with one eye open, I can tell you! Worried to wake and find him above me with a fork and some pepper."
"Sleep with your eyes open? You?" Nnamdi laughed. "You don't even drive with your eyes open. And anyway, we don't eat Igbos. Not enough meat on their bones. Just gristle and old skin."
Then, realizing that Amina was becoming alarmed by this, Nnamdi turned to her, said, "Not to worry, child. No one will eat you."
"Not raw, anyway," muttered Joe. And then, to Nnamdi: "I can't believe you prefer to go back to that rancid swamp of yours rather than make money with me."
"We are kind to visitors," Nnamdi said to Amina. "Do not worry."
Outside, the gunfire was getting closer.
CHAPTER 76
Joe drove them to the pier at Dockyard Creek in a loaded-down taxi cab hed commandeered from the repair bay.
He insisted on helping Nnamdi load the supplies onto the
Himar.
The boat had a fibreglass hull with outboard motors, and they filled it mid to rear with cases of Fanta. Square tins of cooking oil. Tins of condensed milk. Sheafs of bitter greens. Dried-cod stockfish.
Garri
powder for dumplings. Cement for patching walls.
Bottles filled with penicillin tablets. Hydrogen peroxide for cuts and petroleum jelly for burns, with ointments for the healing and gauze for the wrapping thereof. A box of flip-flops. Plastic bags filled with mosquito coils. New netting. A soccer ball for the school.
Sunglasses and colouring books.
By the time the last of the supplies had been loaded, the boat was sitting dangerously low in the water. Joe pulled a tarp across, helped Nnamdi fasten the sides under spitting skies, shook Nnamdi's hand, forearm to forearm.
"If you have a change of heart, you can still make the run to Cameroon with me. I'll be leaving next month, before the monsoons."
"Maybe," said Nnamdi, though he knew his heart would never change; the stones had been cast a long time ago. "Maybe."
Harbour waters, thick with oil. Rain, beading on the surface.
Joe, standing on the dock.
A cough and a stutter, and the motorboat sputtered to life. The Ogoni boy who was piloting the
Himar
backed it out of the berth, swung wide.
Nnamdi stood at the front of the boat, both hands raised in the air. "Goodbye, Igbo Joe!"
"I'm not Igbo!" he shouted. "And my name's not Joe!"
Long after his blood had turned to tar and the sores had spread, long after his immune system had collapsed and his body had grown weak, Joseph of Onitsha would remember the Kaduna run hed made with Nnamdi of the Niger Delta, would remember it fondly even as the lights went out, one by one.
Amina had never been on a boat before, and as it lurched below her, she gripped the sides fearfully. Nnamdi, however, stood straight-backed and strong, waving at the pier as Joe grew smaller and smaller.
"Noao!"
Nnamdi shouted.
Joe was waving wide as well, back and forth with an open palm.
By way of farewell he shouted, "I'll sit on your face with my bare ass yet!"
Nnamdi laughed, the boat turned, and they were gone.
Joseph and Nnamdi would never see each other again.
CHAPTER 77
Language. Reveals as much as it conceals.
Laura had been thinking about compliments and complements. You're and your. Those distinct thumbprint misspellings and semantic blind spots that act as markers. Even as a copy editor, Laura had to stop and think whenever she came across
"different from" and "different than," just as the vestigial "r" in the middle of "February" continued to bedevil her. She knew it belonged there—of course it did—but it still seemed like a typo.
Were she ever asked to rewrite the dictionary, she would start with February.
"Complements of the season!"
It was the sort of error a spellcheck program wouldn't catch. This wasn't a slip of the keyboard. This was something else. This was something you had to type in, every time.
Just a simple mistake? Or was it something more?
Perhaps it was a thread running through the air from Earth to emptiness, from satellite and back down again, across an ocean, over a continent, running along fibre optics before jumping through the air one last time, into a wireless router and then onto her father's hard drive. A thread running from here to there, from a bungalow in Briar Hill back to a distant locale Somewhere Else.
Complements of the season.
CHAPTER 78
The pilot steered the
Himar
along the shores of Dockyard Creek toward the main channel, where he nosed the small boat into the shipping lanes of giants.
Oil tankers were flushing their reserves in preparation for refilling their holds, and the channel was coated with the residual runoff. Those that were finished moved past, pushing swells of wave before them like dough under a roller and dragging a spreading wake behind. Whenever these tankers passed, the small boat Nnamdi and the others were on would lift a moment later, rising, then falling.
The Ogoni pilot kept the throttle low. He angled across the crests as Nnamdi sat, face to the wind, and Amina clung to the sides.
Flat-bottomed pirogues, heavy with plantains and stacks of bundled firewood, were hugging the shore, their owners picking their way along with pole and oar, riding out the swells as best they could.
"My father," Nnamdi shouted back at Amina. "He had a boat such as that. I have it now."
They passed a derelict tanker, hollowed out and listing to one side, bleeding rust from its rivets. Flow-station platforms appeared as pipelines converged. Razor-wire outposts at water's edge, colours clearly marked: Chevron and Agip, Texaco and BP.
Nnamdi laughed. "Welcome to the Republic of Shell!" he shouted.
They passed a gas flare that vented its heat in the middle of a village. Vegetation on all sides had grown sickly and thin, but the women in the village were using the gas-fed flames regardless, laying out racks of cassava to dry and hanging their washing on the feeder lines, faces glistening from the heat. The pipelines carved paths through the forests, plunging in and out, across lesser creeks and larger ones, running along the surface like water snakes.
"Come rainy season, those pipes will disappear from sight,"
Nnamdi told Amina. Hed moved closer so he wouldn't have to shout.
She looked at the grey ceiling of cloud pressing down on them.
The spattering rain and dripping forests, the wet breath of mist.
If this is not the rainy season ..
. She pulled her head scarf closer.
"You can crawl under," Nnamdi said, referring to the tarpaulin.
"If it rains."
If?
They had entered a steamy maze of waterways and tufted islands, and the
Himar
slowly began to pick up speed, its hull slapping the water as the rain pincushioned in, stinging skin like sand in a windstorm.
What have I done?
Fingers of water, everywhere. Endless passages.
What have I done?
Nnamdi came back to sit beside her. "The water people, the
owumo,
they live below the surface. They look up at us and think we are the reflections." He smiled. "Maybe they are right. Maybe the
owumo
are real and we are the upside-down ones. The mothers, back in my village, they threaten children. ‘Behave yourself, or the
owumo
will come get you! If you are bad boys and girls, they will snatch you.' But my mother? She would only say, ‘Behave, Nnamdi, or
iyei
will come.' It means ‘something.' Only that. She would never say what. Just ‘something' is coming." He laughed. "That was always the worst, not knowing what—just
something.
Just
iyei
."
As the channel grew wider, the boat moved faster, cutting across the surface of that parallel world. On a lurch, Amina threw up into her mouth, spit the vomit over the side. Watched the waters blur past below.
CHAPTER 79
You didn't get the money? Preposterous! I sent it by Super Express Rapid Overnight Air Mail, and have already received confirmation that someone picked it up on your end and cashed it. What is going on over there? Do you think I'm some sort of chump?
Sort it out and get back to me.
Col. Mustard
CHAPTER 80
Bonny Island in the distance, glowing in a half-light of haze.
Beyond Bonny Island, open water.
It was the first time she had ever seen the sea, but she felt no sense of elation at this, because she knew what it meant. She had run out of Nigeria to cross. She had come to the end of all roads, could go no farther.
The wind was stronger now, and the waves were beginning to curl. Thin lines of whitecaps on the horizon. The weight of open ocean in the distance. Offshore oil platforms floating on a grey sea, towers of fire, flaring gas. It made her think again of trees burning on the open plains.
Nnamdi pointed out the clustered lights and distant cylinders of Bonny Island's natural gas liquefaction plant. "What isn't flared into the air ends up there. I used to live on Bonny." Many lifetimes ago. "It used to be a slave port," he said. "The point of no return, is what they called it. The slaves, they would be brought to Bonny, and from there, ships would take them away. There is a freshwater well on Bonny Island where the men and women and children would have a final drink before leaving Africa forever. Even now, they say the water from that well tastes like tears. Some people say it is just the sea seeping in. Salt water among fresh. I'm not so sure."
Details were emerging. Bonny Island, coming closer.
"Of course," Nnamdi said with a grin, "we Ijaw were most commonly the ones doing the selling. If I was meeting Igbo Joe at that time long past, I might have thrown a net over him and sold him to the
oyibos.
We Ijaw captured and sold a lot of Igbos over the years. They are still mad at us about that. The Igbo were yam farmers back then. Easy to catch." He laughed, but the message was clear: the Ijaw had never been subjugated, never been enslaved.
They had been the hunters, not the prey. The fishers, not the fish.
Hammer, not anvil.
When he saw a flash of fear in her eyes, he tried to soothe her.
"I am only making a jest. You will be safe with me." He looked out at Bonny Island. "You will like my village," he said. "We are kind to guests."
Naval gunships were on the prowl, riding low along the horizon.
"Looking for bunkering operations," Nnamdi told Amina.
"They will board any ship with oil unaccounted for, even a tanker, and they will not let it go until they are well provided for. But no one is looking for us." He pointed at the forest. "My village is that way. In the outer Delta. There are seven hundred people in my village, and I am related to eight hundred of them."
