Too slowly for Joe, who cleared a path with his air horn. He then forced his way into a go-slow, all but shoving the other vehicles aside.
"This lane is too crowded," he complained after struggling to keep the motor from stalling. So he pulled out, into oncoming traffic, to overtake a line of vehicles before veering back in. Once they got past the go-slow, they began to pick up speed, flying by shantytowns wreathed in smoke, and oil company compounds gated like luxury jails. Endless rows of roadside stalls crowded the street under great overhangs of trees. City and forest. Port Harcourt. Portako.
Every kilometre was a kilometre farther north than Nnamdi had ever been. This is the farthest, and this and this. And this.
"I saw you," said Joe, "last night, casting your stones, reading twigs and feathers." A small crucifix hung from the mirror; Joe had placed it there for luck. "You should attend church instead. Stop stirring up spirits that are better left alone. It's just folklore." The crucifix dangled between them, bobbed and leapt like a fish on a hook as Igbo Joe forced the truck into ever higher gear.
The owumo could be petitioned anywhere, and Nnamdi had brought several small items from the Delta to help him. "Was asking for safety on our journey," he said. "Only that."
"Well," said Joe. "Let's hope it worked. Soldiers, up ahead."
On the outskirts of the city, men in olive-green uniforms had blockaded the road, and vehicles were filing through for inspection. Joe had stashed a thick roll of naira in the glove compartment. "Peel off a few," he said to Nnamdi. After they'd paid the required "inspection fee," they were allowed to rumble forward.
Not minutes down the road, and the police had set up a roadblock of their own.
Once they got past that, Joe steered them onto an exit ramp as the city fell away. The windows were down, and a soup of exhaust and muggy air swirled through.
"No a/c," Joe yelled. "But we have music."
He shoved a cassette into the truck's deck and Highlife filled the cab, swirling around them like an extra current of wind. Trumpets and trombones, metal drums and hand-clapping tempos. Highlife melted into juju, and juju into Afrobeat, with jazz and calypso, samba and gospel folded in for good measure, women's voices singing the chorus and the rich lather of male vocals out front.
"Fela Kuti," Joe shouted. "I saw him on stage in Lagos, years ago. Before, well, you know..." Kuti had been injected with the
AIDS virus by government operatives jealous of his music. That was the rumoured truth, anyway.
The music rolled over them, joyous, felicitous, angry, alive.
"Yoruba music?" Nnamdi said, teasing Joe.
"Not Yoruba," said Joe. "African. True music, not the ooga-booga you have in the Delta."
Nnamdi laughed. "The drums of the Delta are the heartbeat of the gods! Show some respect."
"If that's the music of the gods, the gods need to take music lessons. A little more melody and a little less ooga-booga." Joe twisted the volume louder, and they were propelled across the landscape on Highlife and Afrobeat, in a quicksilver coffin labelled
"Dreams Abound," eating air and grinning all the while.
They'd left the main highway and were bearing north through humid forests. Derelict vehicles littered the shoulders and the asphalt was pocked with potholes. It threw them back in their seats, then bounced them forward, Nnamdi clinging to the dash.
"It gets worse," Joe warned.
Nnamdi had counted a dozen wrecked vehicles in that first stretch alone. The tanker truck pushed on.
CHAPTER 64
"So who got murdered anyway?" Laura asked.
A rainy day afternoon from long ago. Her big brother dealing out Clue cards.
"It doesn't matter who," he said. "Same guy every time. He doesn't have a name. Just roll the dice, okay?"
CHAPTER 65
Paced out as regularly as accident scenes: roadblocks. Some were staffed by men in crisp black uniforms, others by sad-sack souls in tattered khaki. Some were in jungle camouflage. Others scarcely seemed like officers at all, looking more like forgotten sentries left to fend for themselves, wielding mangrove branches and brandishing snub-nosed pistols—the barrel of a gun being, as always, the final confirmation of authority.
A roadblock might be a simple pulley; it might be rubber tires stacked up with a plank across or a lone officer with an arm raised and an assault rifle on his hip. It wasn't the barrier that mattered, but the men behind it. And the guns.
Nnamdi peeled off another twenty-naira bill, passed it through the window.
"It's the least we can do," said Joe. "They are out there every day, standing in the heat, protecting our roads from rascals. The least we can do is buy them a canned Coke."
Nnamdi had already perfected what Igbo Joe called the
"ten-kilometre-an-hour handshake," with Joe slowing down just enough for Nnamdi to lean out the window as a police officer stepped up on the running board to collect his fee.
"Always better not to come to a complete stop if you can help it," Joe explained. "They might start to dream up infractions to squawk about and tickets to write. Better just to shake hands as you go."
Army checkpoints were fewer, but scarier. The men at these sported AK-47s and flak jackets, and the senior officers were rarely assuaged with a handshake. They demanded to see Nnamdi and Joe's paperwork, forged letters from the Governor Himself that were duly handed over, duly mulled over, and duly returned. At army checkpoints, you always came to a stop.
Every town, no matter how dusty or down-heel, boasted at least one motor park where vehicles converged. Chaos, compacted.
Danfo minivans, riding low on broken shock absorbers, and Peugeot taxis, overloaded and well-battered, wrestled for position.
Ticket men argued over prices, dragging baggage onto bus roofs, dragging baggage off bus roofs. Passengers pushed forward—and were pushed back in turn by the ebb and flow of sudden surges.
Long-haul coaches and ailing transport trucks wormed their way through the crowds, and in among them, a tanker truck from Portako filled with highly flammable, highly illegal, imperfectly refined fuel.
"We hunker here for the night," Joe would say. "Anywhere else isn't safe."
They would lock up their cab and climb down, ignoring the shrieks of taxi drivers who'd been blockaded by their rig, to head off in search of chophouse fare.
The food stalls in the motor parks were wedged in among the vehicles, with diners crowding along benches at tables bathed with exhaust. Women and young girls threaded through the mobs, enamel trays and tubs of food balanced on heads, calling out their wares in a singsong chant. Ragged beggars and lepers moved through—the crowds opening before them as they held up bandaged stumps, trying to scare people into flinging coins to avoid contact. When the lepers came, Nnamdi handed his kobo over, palm to palm, in proper human fashion, said, "God bless."
By then, Joe had staked out a spot for them at a suya stand.
A shoe-repair tailor, calling himself Saviour of Soles, mended Nnamdi's sandals with a hand-cranked sewing machine while they ate. A tinker laid a handkerchief on the bench, carefully took Igbo Joe's watch apart, replaced a broken pin, and reassembled the timepiece in now-working condition.
"That," said Joe, "is the genius of Nigeria."
There was a rhythm to the road. After suya and beer, Joe and Nnamdi would return to their cab. Joe would challenge Nnamdi to a game of checkers. Nnamdi would accept, Joe would lose. So theyd play another round, and Joe would lose again. At which point he would pull out an ayo board instead. Thick wood with holes bored in. Joe would count out twenty-four seeds for himself and Nnamdi.
Nnamdi hadn't played ayo before, and Joe explained it with the same succinctness he'd shown in teaching Nnamdi how to drive:
"You capture pieces by moving from hole to hole." A complicated game, in fact. But Nnamdi won nonetheless.
"Are you sure this is an Igbo game, Joseph?"
"I'm not Igbo, I'm Ibo. And my name is Joshua, not Joseph.
And you—you are cheating. I don't know how, but you are."
Another round of ayo, and Joe would declare, "Let's go back to checkers." They did, with predictable results.
Joe would then drink himself into a stupor, and eventually to sleep, as Nnamdi lay awake on the front seat, listening to Joe snore and watching the moon refract across the cracks in the windshield.
And then he, too, would drift toward slumber under a splintered sky.
"One does not drive after dark." This was one of the paramount Rules Almighty for driving in the north. "People live on the roads up here," Joe explained. "They treat it in the manner of a public hallway, with their huts like separate rooms. No street lamps, goats everywhere. Robbers, too."
When the police roadblocks closed down for the night, roving thieves took over. And no twenty-naira, ten-kilometre-an-hour handshake would save you from them. The police were at least civil, would drag a driver from a vehicle and beat him only if he deserved it, or if the officer was in a bad mood. But the night thieves, they would beat a fellow even if hed handed over his wallet and watch.
Which was why a wrong turn on the wrong road could prove fatal.
Igbo Joe had made just such a turn. Hed exited the main highway too soon and hadn't realized it, taking what looked like a connector route into a low valley, only to find that the road soon narrowed into gravel and ruts. "A disgrace!" he said, still not realizing they were on the wrong track. "This is needing an upgrade. Some blacktop at least."
As night seeped in, headlights began flickering on. Or should have. Most of the vehicles around them seemed to be missing at least one light, often both. And with the road growing more pocked with holes, oncoming vehicles often veered toward them to avoid craters. The tension inside the cab rose. "Where is this exit?"
Joe demanded.
"Perhaps we missed it?"
"Nonsense."
Joe hunched over the wheel, watching for potholes. Nnamdi watched for traffic farther afield like a sailor on a crow's nest, yelling
"One-eyed!" for vehicles lacking a headlight and looking dangerously like motorbikes, or "blind man" if a vehicle was lacking both.
In the next town they found an exit. But it was the wrong one, curving west, not north.
"Love and piss!" Joe yelled, slowing down violently. "We take that and we'll end up back on the coast, in Lagos. Has our luck turned to vinegar? All we need now is to run into a Kill-and-Go patrol."
Nnamdi looked at the flattened scoop of the valley ahead of them. In the Delta, you might escape a mobile police assault by hiding in the jungle till the MOPOL unit passed. You could dodge the Coast Guard and JTF as well, losing yourself in the labyrinth of creeks and inlets. But here, under this open sky? On these open plains? Where would you hide? Where could you hide? A single body cast a long presence out here. Hunters could track you simply by the shadow you trailed, even in moonlight. You would have to run very far to escape.
Lost in the night, they needed to turn around, and soon. But where? The streets were too narrow for turning, so they rumbled on, looking for a gap. They found it in a schoolyard soccer field, where Joe made a sharp U-turn, leaning hard on the wheel, trying to avoid both the walls of the school and the jackknifing of the vehicle.
Checkpoints weren't always police or military; freelancers calling themselves "tax men" would sometimes shake down drivers for a "transportation fee." A toll, as it were. Indeed, any group might muster enough members to man a blockade. Border police
(even deep inland), immigration officials (ditto). Agricultural and veterinary inspectors might also set up roadblocks to check for unlicensed vegetables and improperly secured livestock.
As Joe slowly brought the tanker truck back onto the road they'd just come down, a figure came running out ahead to throw a spiked roll of rubber across their tracks. Igbo Joe geared down, braking with both feet, barely stopping in time.
"Christ and vinegar!" he yelled.
A sinewy man in a thin undershirt called up to Joe. "I pray chop your hand-oh! Transport tax dis village. Where dis papers-oh?"
But Igbo Joe was in a foul mood, and he yelled down at the man,
"What is the meaning of this! We are on official government business.
A MOPOL patrol cornin' soon behind us, arrest you quick."
"No Kill and Go out here. You is gone lost, I think, and dere is a fee for passing dis way. Village improvement tax."
Nnamdi looked around. The village could certainly use it.
"A tax?" Joe sputtered. "For using the road? Where is your gun?" he demanded. "I don't pay anyone till they go'an show me their gun. Where is your credentials?"
As Igbo Joe and the tax collector shouted at each other, Nnamdi slipped out the passenger side and, crouching low, ran up front and pulled the spiked roll of rubber aside. Joe had seen him do it, and when Nnamdi leapt back inside, Joe barrelled through, gears grinding.
The man in the undershirt was screaming at them in their side-view mirror, growing smaller, disappearing.
"We are free!" Joe roared.
Like shadows through a net.
It was late at night when they finally rumbled into the next motor park, their headlights scattering moonlit beggars picking through the rubbish. Joe and Nnamdi found a chophouse that was still open, pushed through the beaded curtains, sat on wooden benches, ate on oilcloth. Skewers of lamb and a savoury soup.
Boiled yams and bony fish.
"Enjoy this last taste of the sea," said Joe, picking a hair-thin bone from his teeth. "Once we cross the Middle Belt, even dried fish like this will be hard to find. Just goat meat and millet after that. Even their beer is made from millet." He shook his head at the tragedy of it.
"I like goat."
"Not like this you don't. These are northern goats, raised on twigs and pointy grass. Just gristle and hide." A pause. "Will be good to be back south again."
There was a chill at night here as the heat of day gave way and temperatures fell from near-boiling to near-freezing. Nnamdi would be dressing in layers from this point on.
Igbo Joe finished off his broth, opened up his checkerboard on the chophouse table. "One more before bed."
Nnamdi sighed. "You never win."
"The only reason I never win," Joe said, "is because you never lose. That's the only reason. Now, let's play."
CHAPTER 66
The next morning, Joe said, "You will drive from here."
They were having an early breakfast at a tea-bread-and-eggs stand. Pale grey omelettes and a fist of bread ripped from the heart of the loaf, served with tea that was boiled in sugar-milk and served in plastic mugs. "Waking up on sweetness." This is what Nnamdi's mother would say when she fed him nuggets of cane sugar in the morning. The Delta had never been so close. Or so far away.
"We'll bless the vehicle first, to be safe. You know, wash it in the blood of Christ before we go."
Joe tracked down a motor-park preacher to perform the service.
A grey-stubbled man with a booming voice, he climbed onto the running board and, holding a Bible first to his forehead and then to his chest, intoned, "As you enter the north, may Our Holy Lord and Saviour Jesus bless this vehicle. Bless its cargo, O Jesus! Bless its alternator and its transmission! Bless its wheels that they may turn, bless its brakes that they may not fail, bless the fan belt and gears, O Lord, and see these men out safely again. Amen." He then walked around the vehicle, sprinkling water.
Nnamdi had cast his own prayers earlier, had clapped his hands to catch the attention of the now-distant orumo, had asked for benediction from the village ancestors that he might not crash the vehicle or become lost along the way. That he might escape, shadow intact.
The road continued to deteriorate.
Crumbling villages came and went, and the tanker truck splashed through rivers of raw sewage, then bounced across dry creek beds.
"Come rainy season, impassable," Joe said. "Becomes a muddy stew.
Nnamdi was gripping the whee
l, eyes on the road, barely blinking, barely breathing. His first time driving.
"Speed up," said Joe. "A baby crawls faster."
Nnamdi swallowed down his nervousness, pushed a little harder on the accelerator.