Cautiously, the driver stepped closer. “Do you trust me?”
Let’s see now, she thought. I got in your cab under the pretense that you would have me at O’Hare airport in half an hour. Instead, I shared the passenger seat with a thieving vampire, a shedding masquerade, some kind of bloody-man butcher, was driven through the traffic of Hell or the Highway Styx or whatever. And now here I am. Alive. Alive, and more or less well.
“Holy shit, I’m in Nigeria,” she said wonderingly.
He held the door open for her as she slowly slid into the back seat. Smiling as he did so, of course. She looked at her watch. The hands pointed to the same time it had been when she left, give or take a half hour. “That can’t be right,” she mumbled.
Somehow she was not surprised to learn that they were only a short distance from her village. Shouts of joy and wide grins of happiness from three of her aunties greeted her when she stepped out. As the driver unloaded her big suitcase she saw that other guests were also disembarking from cabs similar in appearance to the one that had brought her to the site of her sister’s wedding.
Seeing the shock and jubilation on her younger sister’s face was worth everything Ngozi had gone through to make it home. Almost. Excusing herself, Ngozi paid the driver.
“Just for the equivalent of the trip to the airport,” he told her. “A flat fee. I give you ten percent discount for when I carried other passengers. No charge for the . . . time travel.” He smiled that enigmatic smile. “I don’t have a meter anyway. No point in putting one in a cab like mine, is there?”
Then other relatives noticed her, and she found herself swarmed with questions, concerns, and love. When she looked back, the cab was gone.
Something on the ground caught her eye. Bending, she picked it up, and grinned. It was a tiny bright red bead. One of the thousands that had decorated the interior of the cab. She doubted the driver would miss it. He seemed to have a good business, and would be otherwise occupied.
“We thought you’d call before you travelled. We were worried about you,” her cousin Emeka said as he took her suitcase and carry-on and escorted her to the compound’s main house.
“Sorry,” she told him. “I got up late and forgot to call before leaving. Then, well, I took some weird Nigerian unlicensed cab, it got kind of crazy.”
“Ah, a Naijameican-style kabu kabu.” He nodded knowingly. “I hear those can be bad business.”
They stopped in the shade of the house. “Emeka, this might sound like a stupid question . . . but am I too late? For the wedding? My watch says . . . well, I don’t know how long I was really in that, ah, kabu kabu.”
Emeka looked at her oddly. “Too late? No, no. The wedding isn’t until tomorrow. You are a day early, Ngozi.”
She stared at him, then looked down at her watch. So it wasn’t broken. That driver. That crazy smiling fucking driver. He was busy, all right. He really had lost track of the time.
The House of Deformities
Ngozi scowled and clapped her hands over her ears. But she couldn’t do it for long because she needed to hang on to the van door. She tried to relax as the orange van rattled loudly down the speed-limitless road but the faster the van went, the more it shook. Ngozi didn’t know how everyone else could stand it. In the front of the van, her parents and the driver were all laughing and blabbing about just about everything.
“Chey, I can’t remember the last time I had cassava! It’s almost impossible to find in the United States,” her mother was saying.
“Yes, well, you have six more days to enjoy it,” the driver said.
Ngozi scrunched her face. She hated cassava. The smell prevented her from getting it even close to her mouth. Sharp and pungent in taste, cassava was worse than eating celery and she absolutely hated celery. Ngozi’s twelve-year-old little sister, Adoabi, loved it and ate it with the fervor that she normally reserved for plums. But at the moment, Adoabi probably wasn’t thinking about cassava.
Adoabi sat beside Ngozi, absorbed in another one of her scary books. This one was by Stephen King, The Talisman. Ngozi bit her lip as she watched her sister read. How does she do it? she wondered. She should be carsick as hell. But you probably have to be aware of your surroundings to get carsick. When her sister got into a book, she might as well have physically flown to a different world.
Adoabi had been reading the book since they had boarded the plane back home in Chicago. She read through the entire flight to London and continued reading through the flight from London to Port Harcourt, Nigeria. She kept reading through the ride to the village and for plenty of nights by candlelight in the village.
The Talisman gave Adoabi sweet nightmares every night but still she read on, craving every page. For Adoabi, the book had spiced up the world. She walked around with wide eyes that often annoyed Ngozi.
“Why don’t you calm down or something?” Ngozi told her sister once when she saw Adoabi staring at the forest behind the village. “You look stupid and stuff.”
Adoabi had grinned.
“You just don’t get it,” Adoabi said. “It’s like everything around us is alive. Look at all the trees!”
Ngozi had only rolled her eyes at her dreamy sister. It was better to just ignore Adoabi’s strangeness.
One night, they were sitting on the balcony. The generator had run out of gas and everyone simply decided to turn in early for the night instead of wasting energy trying to stay cool. Ngozi had tried to sleep but it was too hot. Adoabi was sitting cross-legged on the concrete balcony floor reading by candlelight.
Though it was a sweltering night, a strong breeze waved the trees back and forth, making a shhhhhhhh sound. Ngozi froze, a shiver running up her spine despite the heat. She glanced at Adoabi, who had stopped reading and was looking out into the moonlit forest that was a sea of rippling leaves.
“There have to be monsters in there,” Adoabi said. “Yeah, big looming monsters with huge blue bug eyes and white jagged claws that could easily rake up skin.”
“Oh, bullcrap,” Ngozi said, rolling her eyes. “Those books are like drugs and they are giving you hallucinations.”
“I can’t help it, though,” Adoabi said with a giggle. “I’m addicted.”
“Whatever,” Ngozi said, going back inside. She sucked her teeth in irritation, the way she heard her cousins do it and quickly went inside. She’d rather sweat indoors than be with whatever was out there.
“Man, whatever yourself,” Adoabi said. “You never listen to me.”
“Weirdoes aren’t meant to be heard,” Ngozi said
“You’re the weirdo,” Adoabi grumbled, going to back to her book. “Your head’s, like, all dried up and stuff.”
Now in the rickety van on their way back to the airport, Ngozi saw Adoabi’s shoulders shiver and she felt more annoyed. Though Adoabi was only two years younger than she was, she could be so babyish. It was always Ngozi’s bed that Adoabi crawled into when she got scared at night. And Adoabi snored like a sleeping dragon. Whatever, Ngozi thought, I think she likes being scared or something. There’s no other reason why she’d keep reading that stuff.
The wind whipped a braid into her face. She glanced at it and pushed it back. When she and Adoabi first stepped off the airplane into the heat of Nigeria, their braids were black. But now they had a reddish tint from the dust that swirled around. Ngozi wondered if either of them would be able to wash it out when they got home. Adoabi didn’t really care.
“Dust is natural,” Adoabi said.
“Man, whatever, dirt lady,” Ngozi said.
Ngozi and her sister teamed up with their cousins, Grace and Rose, throughout most of the two-week visit to their father’s village. Rose and Adoabi were the same age and Grace and Ngozi were also the same age.
The four girls, looking like four sisters, were inseparable. Adoabi and Rose had a special love for wildlife. They spent hours and hours mucking around in the bushes and red dirt. The day they smuggled in the robust green stick bug under the dinner
table still made Ngozi’s skin crawl. The vile thing had somehow ended up on the table next to the bowl of jollof rice. Ngozi remembered that insect was cleaning itself. Neither of their mothers had been happy.
In Ngozi’s opinion, she and Grace were much more mature than Adoabi and Rose. Adventure was what they were interested in, not creepy insects and slimy lizards. Ngozi giggled at how scared Adoabi got when the four of them snuck out to an old oracle one moonlit night deep in the forest behind the village. It was Ngozi’s idea.
Adoabi refused to go unless Ngozi made a grand promise to her. “I hereby promise to buy you the new Clive Barker book, hardcover, the minute it comes out in return for you risking your life visiting a haunted scary place at my request,” Ngozi had to recite before Adoabi and her cousins. It turned out to be a worthwhile exchange, for a haunted scary place was exactly what it was, at least in Adoabi’s opinion.
With flashlights, they’d trudged into the tall palm trees and thorny bushes, following what their cousin Grace called a path but was really no more than gaps between the trees. Adoabi clung to Ngozi the entire time, jumping at every hoot and screech. Adoabi said she was sure there were lumbering monsters and hungry headhunters watching them, waiting for the right moment to strike.
“Maybe if you didn’t constantly scare yourself with those stupid books,” Ngozi snapped. “It’s just an old place, that’s all.” The temple, made of thick slabs of grey stone, was covered with flowering vines, dark green lizards scampering up the sides. Rose said it hadn’t been used in decades.
“Yeah, since the missionaries invaded and made people believe that a blue-eyed blonde Jesus was their savior,” Rose spat. She grumbled something in Igbo and then said, “You should see my mother! She is truly brainwashed, o!”
Rose had stood behind the stone altar and recited spells she’d heard a year ago when she had snooped around the local medicine man’s hut. Her older sister, Grace, superstitiously crossed herself.
“Stop playing around!” she snapped. “You are so stupid!”
Rose only laughed.
“Do you think all that Christian stuff is going to help against the old religion? You are confused, girl,” Rose giggled.
At that moment, Adoabi stumbled across a pile of old chicken bones and gasped, leaping over to her sister and burying her head on Ngozi’s shoulder.
“Those are only the bones of chickens, silly,” said Rose, picking one up. “Their necks were rung as sacrifice to the gods.”
“You know,” Grace said, “in the paper the other day, there was a story about how these men are practicing black magic. They had been kidnapping children and cutting off their heads and using their brains and grinding up their skulls for powerful potions.”
Adoabi gasped, glancing around into the shadows.
“What?” Ngozi said, holding her sister’s hand.
“No, you’re making that up!” Rose said. “I can read, too, you know. There was nothing about ‘black magic,’ that’s just a word these white people like to use to make us afraid of our own power! Don’t make me tell you off!”
“You are such a little barbarian, Rose,” Grace said. “You are too childish to tell me off!”
Rose sucked her teeth, scowling at her sister. Then she turned to her American cousins.
“It just said that there have been children disappearing lately,” she said. “Rumor has it that before the child disappears there’s a man wearing a black hat hanging around.”
“He probably hangs around places like this for stupid girls like you who believe this nonsense,” Grace spat.
“I don’t believe it,” Rose said. “I just don’t . . . ”
That was when the breeze picked up. It was a cool night but the breeze was warm. Later on, Adoabi said, “It was the breath of whatever ruled the forest.” Ngozi didn’t know what it was. All she wanted to do was forget that burst of hot air and that smelled like wet soil and mulch after it rained.
All four of the girls had frozen, staring at each other with huge eyes barely lit by the half moon above. Then they all took off, swallowing their screams. They were out at an hour that would get them beaten by their mothers, and even in their horror, they knew to remain quiet. Adoabi didn’t stop shaking until they had climbed back into their room through the window and she was under her covers.
Now here she is subjecting herself to more of that, Ngozi thought.
“Whatever,” she grumbled, staring out one of the open windows, letting the air blow her face. They passed markets where women sold cocoa yam, dried fish, oranges, tomatoes, and egusi. Goats were tied to the trunks of trees and chickens lay on the ground unable to walk because their legs were tied. She tried to take in as much of southeastern Nigeria as she could. There was only a week before it was time to go. Back to the United States. The thought made her heart drop. Man, who knows when we’ll be back.
The trip from their father’s village to the Sheridan Hotel in Lagos would be about six hours long, the driver said. Of course this didn’t include the traffic and potholes and haughty military men who liked to make travelers unpack everything in their vehicle until the travelers decided to just pay them off.
“If they actually caught anyone carrying drugs or anything else that was supposedly ‘illegal,’ I’ll bet they’d let the people go if they gave them some of the stuff,” Ngozi had angrily said as they pulled away from some military men an hour ago.
Ngozi had eyed her sister as the man with dark smooth skin wearing the green beret and carrying the very big gun walked around the van.
“I swear, man,” she said right after, “when he came to my side, I swear, I saw his fingers on the trigger, and his nails were long like the nails of . . . a sloth. And did you see his eyes? They were wild, man. Like he was just waiting for a reason to shoot.”
“Adoabi, one of these days you’re gonna have a heart attack,” Ngozi said. She actually thought the military man was quite good-looking. And she certainly didn’t find men with nails long as a sloth very attractive.
They were stopping again and Ngozi looked out the window. Adoabi looked up from her book.
“What are we stopping here for?”
Outside was what Ngozi thought was a restaurant. People sat at wobbly tables drinking Fanta and Star and Heineken beer and dishing up Fu Fu with their hands and dipping it in spicy okra or egusi soup. The front of the “restaurant” was open. Adoabi wondered what they did when it rained. She could see two women cooking in a kitchen-like area at the back. She couldn’t see but she imagined that they were sweating and probably very tired.
“We’re stopping here for some drinks, so if you have to go to the bathroom, Ike says it’s around the back,” their father said, stretching his long arms. Their parents had become a lot more relaxed over the last three weeks. They were thousands of miles away from their busy lawyer lives. Ngozi was glad to see them without their beepers and having such a great time. They hadn’t been back to Nigeria since before she was born, which Ngozi thought was way too long.
Ngozi looked at the decrepit building with a rusting red tin gate. The air smelled of burnt marshmallows and Highlife was playing from a radio somewhere inside. There was smoke billowing from the back and behind the whole building was lush forest.
“Come on, Adoabi,” Ngozi said, grabbing her arm, “I have to go to the bathroom and I’m not going behind there by myself,”
“Ngozi, I really do not like this place,” Adoabi said, trying not to sound as scared as she was. “I don’t know if I even want to drink anything from here. Something’s not right.”
“Ah man, come on,” Ngozi said rolling her eyes.
“It’s like stumbling across a circle of mushrooms, knowing not to step into it but not knowing why,” Adoabi desperately said.
“Whatever,” her sister said dismissively, pulling off the elastic band that held her foot long braids in a ponytail. She let them cascade into her face. “The driver said he stops here all the time and if the place wasn’t safe, we
wouldn’t be here.”
The driver seemed to have been everywhere. He knew every twist and turn, every pothole, how to get around almost all traffic jams (or at least how to lose the least amount of time in one). And he was the most skilled driver Ngozi and Adoabi had ever seen. They had watched him maneuver the van through amazingly tight squeezes. He wove through a traffic jam with such ease, people around him got irritated when they couldn’t follow him. One man had even spit on the van as it passed. The saliva globule had dried on the car door.
“Oh, fine. God!” Adoabi said snatching her arm from Ngozi’s long-nailed grasp. As she walked toward the building, Ngozi could hear Adoabi dragging her white sandals in the red dirt. Ngozi frowned but she did not look back at her sister. The closer she got to the building the more she felt a sense of doom but she’d never admit such a silly thing. I’m not going to let Adoabi’s stupidity rub off on me, she thought. She looked up at the looming shack and quickly looked down at her feet and the dirt. There was a dim red haze that radiated from the building like heat.
“Come on, man!” Ngozi said. “Walk faster. I’ve gotta go bad!”
“I’m coming! Cool it!” Adoabi said. “It’s not my fault you didn’t go at the last stop.”
“I’m sick of going in the damn bushes!” Ngozi snapped, opening the white gate to the back. “You’re lucky you didn’t get bitten on the ass by a snake or something.”
“Whatever,” Adoabi said, following Ngozi through the gate. As soon as she stepped in, she ran into her sister.
“What are . . . ”
She heard the yipping before she saw them and when she saw them, her jaw dropped. It was a bizarre procession that looked as if it had come right out of Adoabi’s head. Coming toward Ngozi and her sister was a herd of puppies, yipping and tumbling over one another. Their fur was a soft sandy brown, their tiny paws white. Bulldogs.
“What the . . . ”
Then she noticed something else, some of the puppies were . . . limping. And they were limping because they had no choice. They each only had three legs! In place of where the fourth leg should have been were smooth furry stumps. Ngozi stared until her eyes got dry. She’d seen a story on the news once about a three-legged dog but she’d never seen one in real life. How the heck were they able to move so fast?
Kabu Kabu Page 4
