Nnamdi slid down onto the seat beside her, the three of them now lined up like schoolchildren on a bench.
"You've met?" said Nnamdi.
Joe mumbled something about foolishness and trouble.
"Joseph, this is Amina. Amina, here is Joe. Igbo Joe."
"My name's Joshua, not Joseph. And I'm Ibo, not Igbo."
Nnamdi smiled, said to Amina, "Even scientists with the most advanced of technological equipment cannot tell the difference between Ibo and Igbo."
"You," said Joe. "Can eat the peanuts from my shit."
"We have a lady among us," Nnamdi reminded him.
Igbo Joe shot a look across the bow, didn't even bother addressing Amina. "What does she want?"
"Transport. Only that." He looked at her. "The next city?"
She nodded, and Joe slammed the keys hard into the ignition, made a noise low in his throat, somewhere between a growl and a sigh. She was going to be trouble, he knew it. "Abuja," he said.
"Abuja city and no further." Then, with a wave toward the latrine ditch at the motor park's edge, "Easy yourself both before we go.
We don't stop for toilets till we get to the capital. She can ride in the bunk, out of view. It will be our good deed for this trip.
Nothing more."
Joe's edict banning Amina to the back bunk didn't last. Once they hit open road, he allowed her down, on the condition that she would scamper back up at the first sign of a roadblock. There were none. The police and the army had been called in to Kaduna, where the petrol riots had taken on a tribal taint. Neighbourhoods were burning, and the violence had spread to other cities, to the Jos Plateau and beyond.
But Dreams Abound had slipped free of the crocodile's jaws and the tanker truck was bouncing now, unburdened and barely tethered to the earth; had it come undone, it might have floated away like a mylar balloon, the kind they sold at street festivals and naming ceremonies.
"We couldn't have left her there," Nnamdi had said to Joe as they drove. "Not after I'd shared food with her and given shelter."
"I know," said Joe. I know.
Amina was relieved to creep down into the seat. The bunk had been tossing her about, and she was worried about the baby.
Nnamdi passed her a bottle of Maltina, the drink so popular in Portako—"A meal in itself," the ads said—and she felt it drain almost immediately into her child, felt the flicker of strength grow inside her even as she watched the flattened savannah roll by. Slowly, the savannah gave way to rocky outcrops and strange landforms. And birds. Hornbills with black wings and ivory beaks taking flight.
Nnamdi watched her. "Have you been here before?"
She shook her head. Every kilometre south was the farthest south she'd ever been. Only then did she realize she'd left her only possession behind: the battered jerry can of water hidden in a culvert near the motor park.
Nnamdi and Amina talked while Joe ignored them—loudly.
Granite hills began to appear, pushing themselves out of the earth, and the road began to twist. Joe was leaning hard into the wheel on every corner.
"Zuma Rock," he said. "Up ahead."
A great stone loaf, Zuma Rock was a significant landmark; it denoted not only the traditional geographical centre of Nigeria—the "navel of the nation" as it was known—but also the border between the sha'ria states of the north and the Christian states of the south. Zuma rose up, rounded and sudden, on striated cliffs etched by a thousand years of rainfall and erosion. The ridges carved down its sides were the sort of lines that might be left by acid or tears.
"Finally!" said Joe. "We can drink beer and enjoy ourselves again."
"You were drinking beer before."
"But now we can do it openly."
"You were drinking openly."
"Yes, but I couldn't relax."
"You weren't relaxed? You seemed very relaxed."
Joe grumbled an insult in Nnamdi's general direction and said nothing more on the matter.
As they neared Abuja city, Amina climbed back up into the bunk. The white gates of Abuja soon appeared and they crossed through, into the nation's dreamlike capital. Open boulevards and shimmering hotels. Expressways that flowed without go-slows or entanglements. A government town, a showpiece where oyibos and British queens might be feted and fooled, Abuja was laid out like a blueprint, in a precise and orderly fashion; even the traffic signals worked.
"I don't trust any city where the traffic lights work," Joe said.
"Do you know how much that slows drivers down?" He hated touching the brake pedal. "They don't even allow okadas in the downtown. What kind of city doesn't allow okadas!"
"But you hate okadas," Nnamdi said. The motorbike taxis, carrying whole families on their backs at times, were forever darting in and out of traffic in daredevil feats of boyish bravado, cutting off larger vehicles and snarling up traffic that needed no further snarling.
"I do," said Joe. "They are the curse of every truck driver. But that is not the point. No. Abuja is not Nigeria. Abuja fell from the sky. It is an invention."
The wide streets reminded Nnamdi of the air-conditioned hallways of Bonny Island. The city was basting in the heat, yet still looked cool to the touch.
"Did you know," Joe said, "when slums appear in Abuja, the government bulldozes them down to keep things pretty? An honest man does not have a fighting chance here."
Minarets and a church steeple appeared: the National Mosque and the National Church, squaring off from each other across Independence Avenue. Joe laughed. "They measured them down to the very inch, is what I heard, to make sure no side was favoured."
As the golden dome and minarets slid by on one side, the stained glass and cross on the other, Joe gestured with his jaw. "National Stadium ahead." The one shrine that united all: home of the Super Eagles. Igbo Joe watched it pass with unabashed reverence.
Abuja was oversized, its perspective skewed, from hotels to mosque, from church to football stadium. A person left behind in Abuja without friends or family would feel very small indeed, Nnamdi thought.
It needed to be asked. "Joseph," he said. "What will we do about the girl?"
"What we goin' to do? I tell you what we goin' to do. We are going to leave her. We'll drop her at the Jabi motor park, past the junction."
"We can't."
"Can't? We got her out of Kaduna. That is enough."
"She wants to work at a market. She told me this on the drive in. Abuja city, it's too controlled, you said this yourself. She won't make it here. They'll bulldoze her down."
"The Old Wuse Market. The New Wuse Market. Friday markets at the mosque. She can find work."
"She wanted to go far away. This isn't far away."
"They catch us with her in the truck, and what's gonna happen?
They will search the vehicle, top to bottom. Everywhere. Is that what you want?"
"Exactly so," said Nnamdi. "It is too dangerous, my friend.
Police and army everywhere. It's very risky, dropping her off in Abuja. Very risky for us."
Joe looked at him. "Are you playing me for a mugu?"
"Lokoja. We'll take her as far as Lokoja, fine, yes? The markets there are not ripe with police officers. Easier to disappear in Lokoja."
"Fine. You drive." Joe geared down, brought Dreams Abound to a halt at a roadside rest stop. "I'm hungry anyway."
Nnamdi turned toward the bunk to get Amina, but Joe said,
"No. She stays inside. We're not taking her with us for chop. You can bring her back some food-is-ready. But she doesn't leave the truck."
They ate at the Mammy Market, in a courtyard where wandering musicians played flutes and lambs roasted above a central grill. Halfway through their meal, Joe realized they had left the girl alone in the truck with the money. "Finish your beer," he said, hurrying. "We have to go."
She was sleeping when they got back, and Joe felt vaguely silly at having panicked. He watched her sleep while Nnamdi went back to the food-is-ready stalls, returning wi
th blackened goat cooked in mango. She woke to the smell of it.
As Nnamdi steered the truck back onto the highway, heading south, Igbo Joe and Amina changed places, with Joe stretching out in the bunk to sleep and the girl up front, eating. It was a hunger that grew with the feeding.
CHAPTER 69
My Dear Good Fellow!
Colonel Mustard here. I understand you are looking for someone to invest money in your 100 percent riskfree Nigerian export business. Shame about the dead relative, though. He was a diplomat you say? Pip pip. I was once a member of the British Royal Commission myself, working in such far-flung spots as Upper Rubber Boot, Saskatchewan, and Nepal. I've got my chequebook open, pen in hand. How much do you want? Or should I just send you a blank note and let you fill in the amount?
With snooty good wishes,
Yours sincerely,
The Colonel
CHAPTER 70
Stone markers counted down the kilometres to the next town, and the next. Small scenes flitted past: mud-and-wattle homes, children running, women queuing at a well.
The grasslands had slowly transformed into forest and the road had begun to rise, twisting upward in series of hairpin turns, touching the underside of clouds. The girl in indigo had never felt the effect of altitude on her ears before, had never seen such rolling landscapes. The air was cooler and thinner up here, and she felt light-headed and faint.
They had entered the Middle Belt, and on a sharp bend in the road, farmlands opened up below, with pastures and patchwork fields and clustered villages.
"Tiv," said Nnamdi to the girl. "They hop when they dance."
Dreams Abound hit a pothole, and the truck almost bucked itself off the road. When Nnamdi looked over to see if she was all right, he saw her cupping her belly, as though protecting a basket of eggs.
The Middle Belt rolled on and on, in sleepy turns and misted heights. Amina nodded off, leaning first to one side, hands still cupping her stomach, then to the other. The air had cooled, but as Nnamdi brought Dreams Abound down into the flatlands above the Benue River, the heat returned, as belligerent and insistent as ever.
She was still sleeping when they arrived in Lokoja. So was Joseph.
Nnamdi slowed down for a ten-kilometre-an-hour handshake at a police blockade, feeling nervous. But the officer who hopped up on the running board took the naira without a flicker of interest in Amina. Still, just to be safe, Nnamdi pulled the blanket over her before the next roadblock.
The mangled metal of past accidents marked the countdown to Lokoja. Nnamdi nudged the tanker truck into a motor park, killed the engine. He slipped out, closing the door quietly so as not to wake the other two. Cricked his neck, shook the stiffness from his legs, took a piss beside the truck. Across from the motor park, children were playing an indiscriminate game of football—the rules and rosters seemed to change on a whim—and their laughter and angry exhortations, their shouts of triumph and woeful cries of defeat rang out. Had he ever been that young? His mother had always said, "You were born an old soul."
Nearby, a few piecemeal food stalls constructed from leftover scraps of sheet metal were selling warm beer and dry suya. The main market was down by the river—hed spotted it on the way in—and he walked toward it now along a path that took him through Lokoja's European cemetery. The area had once been a key crossing of the River Niger, and as such had inspired all sorts of imperial bombast. No cannons in Lokoja's boneyard, but lots of headstones leaning as though into a wind. Missionaries and mercenaries, soldiers and Royal Niger officers, lost among the weeds and rubbish.
The rubbish wasn't limited to the graveyard. It spilled out down the embankment to the riverbank below—the amount of rubbish, like the number of car wrecks, testament to a town's economic health. Wealth produced garbage as surely as food produced feces.
Nnamdi came at last to a grassy crest, and there it was, in front of him: the confluence of the Benue and Niger rivers. They'd driven through Lokoja at dusk on the way up, and he'd missed the full sweep of it, the two rivers sliding slowly toward each other with only a sandbar dividing them and then—not even that.
Two different shades of clay combining, the muddy green of the Niger and the milky blue of the Benue. Not a collision but a soft blending, the Benue folding itself into the Niger. Hard to imagine that this was the same Niger that later splayed out into the vast and distant delta to the south. Had Nnamdi floated downstream from here into the labyrinth, he might have eventually reached his own village.
Cattle, rib-thin and looking for water, were being herded along the riverside, goaded by the swish of switches and the click of tongues. On the Benue, a lone fisherman poled a flat-bottomed pirogue through shallow waters. The river had shrunk back from its shores in the parched heat of the dry season; it looked low enough to wade across. What might it look like after a heavy rain? The two rivers must churn into each other with something approaching passion. Nnamdi wondered if he was still thinking about rivers.
His father had told him tales of the Ghost King and his Igbo ferryman, Asasaba, who carried souls across a river of death to be reborn as shadows on the far shore. "It's why you must never tread on someone else's shadow," his father explained. "You never know whose soul it might contain."
Nnamdi followed the shoreline down to Lokoja's River Market, where aromas both pleasant and pungent mixed, and where voices shouted out above each other. Boats were lined up, with trade going on right at waters edge, the goods being ferried directly from bargemen to market women. Mounds of yams, knotted like driftwood and with the earth still clinging to them, were shovelled into burlap sacks. Other piles of them floated above the crowds, in basins and buckets balanced on heads.
Have we arrived at far away? This was a question that needed answering.
He retraced his steps to arrive back at the shaded graveyard.
On the flat surface of a fallen headstone, he prepared to contact the
orumo. He brushed dead leaves aside and removed a small pouch that hung around his neck, emptied it onto the granite slab. Rolled clay pellets, embedded with fragments of shell. A shard of bone, a feather tied with a strip of hide. He picked them up, held them in his palms, let them fall as they may. The reading wasn't clear, so he threw them again. And again. The trick with the orumo was to keep asking until you got the right answer. They were only ever guiding you from within, after all, and it was always your own heart you were reading.
Nnamdi thought again about the pale blue of the Benue, the dark green of the Niger; he thought about shadows and souls and stories left untold. And when he got back to the motor park, he started the truck and drove out of Lokoja without waking the others. Joseph continued to mutter and snore, and when Amina murmured in her dreams, Nnamdi shhh-shh-sh'ed her back to sleep.
CHAPTER 71
At Onitsha, everything exploded.
Igbo Joe was seething. He'd woken while they were crossing the bridge over the Niger River, a soaring structure that jarred him from sleep by its very lack of bumps and thumps. By that point they were already past Lokoja, and he knew it. He crawled down, raining curses upon Nnamdi's ancestors and on those generations as yet unborn.
"Turn us around!" he yelled. "You son of Judas."
"Please, Joseph. I didn't want to waken you," said Nnamdi.
"Get over, I'm driving." They switched without stopping, Joe sliding across and Nnamdi scrambling under. They could see a roadblock coming up, and Joe snapped at Amina, "In the back.
And stay there."
They rolled through with a ten-kilometre-an-hour, twenty-naira handshake; Joe knew that making a U-turn would only raise suspicions, invite a search. So he took his frustration out on Dreams Abounds throttle instead, pushing the truck to higher and higher speeds, overtaking traffic, forcing oncoming vehicles into the ditch.
Nnamdi stayed quiet. The forests were growing thicker, the air heavier. But at the Onitsha motor park on the cluttered outskirts of the city, Joe cleared a path with his truck, brought Dre
ams Abound to a shuddering halt.
He yelled back at Amina. "Out! Now! This is the end of the road for you. Off you go."
She crawled down, looked to Nnamdi.
"Can't we at least drive her in?" he asked.
"Drive? Into Onitsha? Are you feverish? The city is a goat's bladder. Go-slows and thievery, all of it. We drive into Onitsha, and we will come out the other side naked and on tire rims. In Onitsha, they will steal your eyeball from out of your head, and you won't even see them do it!"
"I thought you were from Onitsha."