Still. It was a good time to go.
Nnamdi sent word back to his mother, telling her he'd be gone a week, maybe more. It would take much longer than that, though.
CHAPTER 61
Laura Curtis was looking through her reflection at the city below.
From her window, she could see the river and the descending curved arches of the Centre Street Bridge looking like the trajectory of a skipped stone as it leapt across into the city.
At either end of the bridge, flanking the approach, were the For King & Country stone lions, chess pieces of Empire, suitably sombre at their posts.
A half-edited manuscript was waiting on her desktop computer, silent, insistent.
Laura had once again been working her way through someone else's life, flagging it for inconsistences, clarifying key events, compiling a timeline and style sheet. The author in question, a bombastic Czech with a massive comb-over (to judge from his author photo), had a habit of employing contradictory adverb/ adjectival arrangements: "calmly excited," "frantically tranquil,"
"expansively small-minded." She dutifully queried each usage, but when she came upon the term "oppressively free," it gave her pause. Could you be oppressively free? Yes, she thought, you could.
Choices could paralyze you, overwhelm you. From that point on, she'd treated these phrasings as an authorial tic to be indulged, rather than an error to be fixed.
Her tea had gone cold in the cup.
She was staring through herself, was actively ignoring the manuscript that was squatting on the computer screen behind her.
In the city below, emergency lights were catching the polished glass and clean angles of the downtown core. And she thought, How beautiful it looks.
Sergeant Brisebois was standing inside the blue and red wash of those lights. He was within a perimeter of yellow tape in an alleyway, a police cruiser at either end. EMS was there as well.
Through the space between office buildings, Brisebois could just make out the apartment towers on the ridge of hill above.
Second building on the left. Third light, corner window. Shed shown up at the TRU office earlier that day, unannounced, asking to see the photographs of her father's accident scene.
"Are you sure?" he'd asked. "It's not pretty."
She hadn't flinched. Not at first. She'd studied them as though she were looking for something more than mere clues. One photo, then the next, until—
She'd looked up at Brisebois, smiling, eyes brimming. "Who knew?" she said.
"Sorry?"
"The sweater." She was referring to the knitted pattern visible in one of the shots. A geometric pattern. Not of deer. "Who knew my dad owned more than two sweaters?" The tears welled, but never fell.
"Ms. Curtis, we have a Victims Assistance Unit that can provide grief counselling if you need to—"
"Grief?" she said. "How about emptiness? Do you have emptiness counselling?
Regret counselling?
Things-you-forgot-to-say counselling?"
"Laura, if you need someone to talk to—"
"What I need is to be alone. Just for a moment. Please?"
"Sure. Care for a coffee?"
She did, but when he brought it in, creamers and sugar packet in one hand—"I wasn't sure how you take it"—she hadn't wanted it. She'd shoved the photographs back in their folder and hurried past him, trying not to sob.
He should have followed her. Should have caught up to her, should have asked, "Are you all right?"
But he hadn't.
She was up there now, standing by the corner window.
"Sergeant Brisebois? Homicide's here."
TRU had been called in. Reports of a vehicle on fire. It wasn't a vehicle that was burning, though; it was a man. A car had been spotted but it had sped away, leaving dark odours and a body behind. Not dead, but almost nearly. "Better call in homicide,"
Brisebois had said, even as EMS attended to the victim.
Brisebois looked at the smouldering garbage bags in the alleyway, the melted plastic and scorch marks, the reverse silhouette that had been burned onto the flattened cardboard of an alleyway bed: the blackened surface leaving the pale outline of where the body had been lying in a fetal position.
"Think he'll make it?" the homicide officer asked.
"It's unlikely. Third degree, most of the body. EMS said the skin had already started to separate."
Ambrose Littlechild. No fixed address. Originally a resident of Fort McMurray. Known to police. A panhandler, bottle picker.
These details would come out over the course of the evening.
Witnesses—-mad, rambling, and unreliable; street people like Ambrose—had said there were four, maybe forty, maybe a hundred.
Looked like college boys. "What does a college boy look like?"
Brisebois had asked.
"Like not us."
The assailants had purred down the alleyway in a sports car, in a van, on bicycles, had found Ambrose sleeping, had gotten out, giggling and snickering, had tied him down, had knocked him out, had shouted, had whispered, had doused Ambrose with gasoline, had set him on fire.
On that point everyone agreed. He'd been set on fire.
"We tried puttin' him out with our blankets, eh? But those caught fire too."
When EMS had loaded Ambrose onto the stretcher, he was gurgling to himself in a language long lost, telling stories no one would hear. He lost consciousness soon after, as though consciousness were a balloon that had been let go, the string slipping from between fingers, trailing away.
Brisebois had walked the crime scene twice by the time homicide arrived, had located the cigarette lighter and the discarded plastic bottle in among the garbage bags. The sides of the bottle were clouded and the top was open, and when he crouched down he caught the sour-sweet smell of gasoline. He marked the bottle and cigarette lighter with a numbered tent card and moved on.
"So we're done, then?" asked one of his TRU officers.
"Homicide's taking over?"
Brisebois nodded.
"You up for a drink?" The shift was almost over.
"No, you go. I have to swing by 7-Eleven, pick up some cat food. It's been a long day."
Red on blue, catching the tinted glass and clean angles of the downtown core. A corner light in the building above.
What was she doing up so late?
CHAPTER 62
It took longer to organize the Kaduna run than Igbo Joe had expected—"A lack of bona fides," as he put it—and Nnamdi found himself in the shaganappi streets of the Down Below, Portako's waterfront slums. He was put to work tuning motors, and though he'd never formally trained as a car mechanic, applied knowledge was something of a Delta specialty, and he learned quickly enough.
The garage took up a whole city block. It was a metal building that curved like a culvert over oil-stained cement. Who had hired
Nnamdi and who exactly owned the garage was never clear; these things were always a tangle-work of overlapping claims and competing guilds. But dented taxis and traffic-afflicted minivans kept cramming in nonetheless as the mechanics hammered fenders and spot-welded seams, metal on metal, the sparks waterfalling down like fireworks.
Nnamdi slept in a cot above the repair bay and ventured into the crowded alleyways of the Down Below at night. The streets echoed with voices and the air was saturated with smells: everything from open latrines to the wafting steam of garri dumplings at full boil. Portako was an Igbo city, but you wouldn't know it from the mash of dialects and languages he heard along the waterfront.
Nnamdi caught snatches of Ogoni and Ibibio, and a dozen variations of Ijaw, though none from the outer Delta.
Even if he never made the drive north, he could at least stay here, with roof and bed and work. One of the lucky ones. His fathers oru at work on his behalf, he was sure.
His long wait ended with the pull of a curtain.
The threadbare cloth pinned across the front of Nnamdi's cot was flung aside with an energy on
ly Igbo Joe could muster. "Get up, lazy man! Get up!" Joe sounded giddy. "Get up! She's here! And she is very much a beauty."
Nnamdi staggered awake, followed Joe down the stairs. A tanker truck now took up half the repair bay. It was a huge presence, with the taxis and minivans shoved against the wall to make space.
Sheep making room for the dominant ram.
The truck's cab was sharply angled so it would fit, its cylinder tank sitting atop rows of wheels. "Needs a tune-up," Joe said.
"That's for you to attend. Come, come. Look."
Joe was walking the length of the truck—it seemed to increase in size with every slather of praise he gave it. "Sixteen wheels! If one pops, you won't even feel it." The tire treads were bare, Nnamdi noted, but not yet bald.
"Sleeping quarters are behind the driver's seat, with space for food and baggage." Rusted hinges. A spiderweb of cracks across the windshield, and a cab painted in elaborate curlicues of green and gold, with a good-luck motto along the side: "Dreams Abound."
Nnamdi squeezed around to the other side, and there in purple and orange was another message: "This Too Shall Pass."
"Oh, it will pass," Joe said when he saw Nnamdi reading the motto. "Everything on the road!" He slapped a heavy hand against the side door. "She's filled to the brim with bunkered oil, refined right here at Portako. The JTF shut down the operation, but not before we got our fuel! We're always one step ahead! You can't catch a shadow even with the finest net. Is what we say in Onitsha. This truck holds thirty thousand litres of fuel. One trip, and we won't have to work again for a year. The girls in the Down Below bars will see most of your money, I am supposing! A young man like you!"
He laughed, grabbed Nnamdi by the shoulder, jostled him hard, taking his silence for concurrence.
A voice was calling out from the other side of the truck.
"Joseph, my friend!"
"Ah," said Joe. "He's here."
"Who?"
"The Turk." With hand on elbow, Joe steered Nnamdi around the front of the truck. And then, with lowered voice: "He's not a black man, but he is still Nigerian, so be kind."
"Why would I not be?"
But Joe had already swept ahead in full Joe mode. "My friend, you have delivered the stars in a pail!"
The Turk was not Turkish. He was a Lebanese businessman whose family could trace their history along these coasts for generations, and he ran several ongoing interests, illicit and otherwise, in the Down Below streets and warehouses of Port Harcourt.
The type of man who could grow fat in a famine, as they said. He had long given up on trying to shed his misplaced moniker.
"Turk!"
"Josephant!"
The Turk met Joe halfway. He was a squat knot of a man, and he gave Nnamdi a small bow of respect, palms held together.
"You must be the motor whiz magician Joseph has spoken of. On the last venture north, the vehicle we'd arranged broke down in a sandstorm, and the driver walked for days to the nearest telephone, only to be stripped clean of everything by the time we came to collect—both the driver and the truck! Joseph tells me you can mend an aeroplane in mid-flight, a bus whilst it plummets—can get it running before it hits the ground. He says you were the King of Bonny Island, back in happier days, before these... troublesome times."
Nnamdi felt his heart race. Igbo Joe was given to embellishment, but—"Yes," he said. "Most moto, I can fix." He'd never worked on a vehicle this size. Before the cars, it had mainly been motorboats and the occasional tweak at oil company flow stations.
The Turk turned to the tanker truck with a father's pride.
"Dreams Abound will get you there—and back, Insha Allah."
On a handshake, the deal was done. Joe and Nnamdi would make the run north to Kaduna city with the fuel the Turk had purchased, and would split the fee he was offering sixty-forty.
Selling oil in Nigeria seemed a little strange to Nnamdi, though, like shipping salt to Mali, diamonds to the Congo, or salt water to the sea.
"What do they need with Portako fuel? They have a refinery in Kaduna," he said. He'd worked on some of the pipelines that branched northward. The Kaduna Line. One of the lines that had been bombed, in fact. Bombed, but not destroyed, as far as he knew.
"True enough, Nigeria is floatin' on oil," said Igbo Joe. "The problem is not fuel, but delivery of fuel." He stretched the word out, making it sound more like fool. "There is no shortage of oil, bruddah. Only of cunning."
"They've got lineups across the north," said the Turk. "Those refineries have suffered neglect for years, have been struggling just to meet minimum capacity. So Abuja is now playing catch-up, shutting down whole segments for maintenance upgrades. It's causing... complications. Shortages, rioting, black-market profiteering. A terrible hindrance to the people. But I say to you, in life there is no such thing as a hindrance, only an opportunity.
Trade is movement," said the Turk. "Sea salt moves north. Rock salt moves south. All of it salt, but what is important is that it moves."
"When do we leave?" asked Nnamdi.
"Now," said Joe. "Right now. The dry season. Best time for it.
Can't risk the rains. The lands in the north are so bone dry, they don't know what to do with water when it does come. In rains, you have flash floods, roads that run like rivers. The earth becomes sticky clay, bogs down tires. No," he insisted, "I'll take heat and dust over floods and mud every time."
The Turk said his goodbyes with a flurry of handshakes and good-health salutations, and Joe stood, fists on hips, like a general surveying the battlefield. "We leave as soon as you're ready!" he said to Nnamdi. "We'll take turns—driving and sleeping, sleeping and driving."
This was, perhaps, the time for Nnamdi to mention a certain minor detail. "I'm not sure if this is a matter of concern," he said.
"But I have not operated a motorized vehicle before. Motorboats, of course. Certainly. But not trucks."
Joe looked at him. "You don't know how to drive?"
Nnamdi shook his head. "No. I understood it was more a mechanic you were after."
"A mechanic and a driver. Two in one. I can't drive all the way gone to Kaduna on my own. It is too far. Look. You know what a clutch is, what it does?"
"Of course."
"So. You gear up, gear down, keep your foot on the accelerator and the truck pointed down the middle of the road—we are big enough that others will get out of our way. Avoid the brakes, those will only slow you down. And if you can't find a gear, make one.
That is all you need to know. I will get us out of the city, you take over once we are clear."
And that was that.
"I'll leave you to tune up the vehicle," said Joe. "I have to gather my belongings for the drive. It's a long road, but one with great riches at the end!"
It took Nnamdi half an hour just to figure out how to release the bonnet, and when he did he was startled to find that the entire front of the truck opened up, backward, from windshield to grille.
Since arriving in Portako, the largest vehicle he'd worked on was a minivan taxi. He peered into the tanker's engine as though looking into a human chest cavity. He recognized the fan belt and not much else. After a few moments he quietly closed it up. "It looks fine," he said to Joe, whom he found upstairs stuffing a Ghana-Must-Go bag with loose clothes and mason jars of murky home brew.
"Good! Let's go!"
CHAPTER 63
Nnamdi swung his own Ghana-Must-Go into the truck's cab.
Grabbed hold and then launched himself up and into the passenger seat, the seat springs bouncing under him.
He was wearing Ijaw yellow, with billowing trousers and a loose-hanging smock. Joe frowned. "Will be cold wearing such as that."
"Cold?" They were heading north to the edge of the Sahara.
"You'll see." Joe wedged a final mason jar into the seat between them. "This will keep us warm. Paraga," he said. "A Yoruba concoction. Herbs and spirits, mixed together with tonics and such. I put some ogogoro in there a
s well for extra kick. Will keep you awake with eyes bug-open. Warms you from the inside out. If it doesn't kill you first!"
Joe started the engine and nudged the tanker truck out of the garage in fits and starts, cranking the wheel and squeezing it onto a side street scarcely wider than the vehicle itself. It was like poling a pirogue through the smaller creeks of the Delta. But with more traffic. They clipped a roadside vendor's stall, sending a pyramid of lumpy yams tumbling downward, and batted a parked bicycle to one side as pedestrians hurried out of the way in their flip-flop gait.