They plopped down in a spot close to the shoreline. Nigel spread out his long legs, leaning back on his arms. Angie did the same. She watched the froth rise up off the ocean, curdling like a giant foaming mouth before it tumbled backward, only to rise again.
She slipped off her sandals, crossed her legs at the ankle. “This is nice.”
Nigel nodded, eyes distant. He looked unmoored, as though he were drifting away with the tide. She wanted to bring him back. “I could see why you and Ella wanted to come here, to Nigeria I mean.”
Nigel’s neck muscles jumped. “We didn’t really choose Nigeria,” he said. “Not at first, anyway. This is where FESTAC took place, so this is where we came.”
“Tell me about the festival,” she said. “Of course, Ella told us about it when she got back, and I read a little bit about it too, but—” Angie paused, told the truth. “I just want to hear you talk about it.”
He smiled. “It was amazing. Just to think, celebrations went on for twenty-nine days! We were only here for about ten of them, but we did a lot. You really couldn’t choose between the films and art exhibits and the music and the theater performances. It was insane! We’d be out all day, then return to FESTAC village and party all night.” He laughed. “You have never seen so many platform shoes in your life.” Nigel said the best part for him was the Colloquium. “Every day, the leading black scholars from all over the world got together and read papers, then got into hot debates over a range of shit—religion, literature, history. That was my kind of scene. I loved it.”
“And for the closing ceremonies, you guys saw Miriam Makeba perform, right?”
He nodded vigorously. “Yeah, I’m so glad we got to see her. That woman’s voice is crazy powerful and just, hmph, gives you chills.” He shook his head. “We almost missed it too, because by day four or five, we decided to break off from all the official shit on the agenda, get away from that fake village, and just go off on our own.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Everyone was talking about the country’s most popular musician, Fela, how he was boycotting FESTAC, refused to be part of a corrupt government-sponsored festival, right? Turns out, he was having his own counter-festival at his club. Ella was like ‘I want to go there!’ She kept saying it, ‘I want to go there.’ Seeing how determined she was to check out Fela turned me on, I ain’t gonna lie. Other folks in our little group, they were scared to travel on their own. You know, dangerous roads and all that. But she was game! Got me to climb into one of those danfos—I remember the damn thing rode on two wheels all the way there.”
“I rode in one of those things!” Angie interjected. “Crazy.”
“Yeah?” He paused. “Well, somehow we found the Shrine. Ah man! It was the shit! You have never seen anything like it. We went back every night.”
Angie thought of Fela’s frenetic, hypnotic music racing out at her as she drove around in her car. “I saw him perform you know.”
Nigel turned to her. “Where? In Detroit?”
“Yep.” She was so proud of herself. “At the Fox. Last November. He was amazing!”
Nigel whistled. “A lot has changed in Detroit, I guess.”
“Not really,” said Angie. She wished she hadn’t interrupted. “Go on, tell me more about the Shrine.”
“Well, it was a cool scene. We got to meet Fela, in between all the celebrities and dignitaries who came through. On that last night we were there, damned if Stevie Wonder didn’t show up! And Sun Ra! They were in Lagos for the official festival but they wanted to check out Fela too, man. Everybody did.” Nigel threw his head back. “Shit was mind blowing.”
Angie tried to picture the scene. Instead, her mind landed on a memory of herself, her mother, and Denise hanging onto every word as Ella gave them a blow-by-blow account of her trip, the dining room radiator hissing in the background.
“I want to go to the Shrine,” she announced.
“That old one is gone,” said Nigel. “It was in a hotel courtyard but—”
“I know. I heard. But Fela built a new one, right?”
His shoulders rose and fell in a sigh. “Yeah, he had to. Government burned down the first one. And not only that, a week after FESTAC, soldiers raided his compound and raped the women, destroyed his master recordings, and threw his mother out a window. His mother died from her injuries.”
“My God,” whispered Angie.
“Yeah. And it was clearly retaliation because he refused to perform at their festival. They say that really changed Fela. I’ve been to the new Shrine many times, and the vibe is different now believe me. Not like back in ’77.”
Angie uncrossed her legs, sat up. “So, I missed that great moment too?”
“What great moment?”
She threw her arms out. “All of it. The festival, Fela’s original Shrine, Stokely. I mean Kwame Ture . . .” She dropped her arms. “I feel like I was born too late.”
“Everyone feels that way,” offered Nigel. “When I sat there listening to Brother Kwame, hearing about the intensity of the sixties, I felt like I was born too late. But then again, look at Kwame. He’s dying.”
“What?”
“Prostate cancer. And he’ll tell you straight up—living through the movement, always up against the Man, all that stress, fearing for his life, forced to live in exile? He says that’s what put disease in his body.”
“But he got to do what he believed in,” said Angie.
“But was it worth the price?”
“Maybe it was.”
“I don’t think he feels that way.”
“Anyway, I never even got to make that decision.”
Nigel’s voice was kind. “This is a cliché, but it’s true: you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”
“I just wish I’d been at that festival,” she said, wistful. “All those black people from all those different countries, from the diaspora,” she sang the word—“all in one place. For the first time! I just wish I’d seen it.”
“It was great. But it was also a mess,” he said. “People died at the festival’s opening ceremonies.”
“I never read that.” Angie was skeptical.
Nigel nodded, lips pressed together. “Yup. Nigeria built this massive arts theatre just for the festival. I’m sure you’ve passed it on the bridge coming from the mainland. Shaped like a big military hat?”
She did remember, the sombrero building.
“Well, it could only seat sixty thousand people. More than one hundred thousand tried to get in. Folks got stampeded to death. You can believe that choice fact didn’t make it into all those gushing news stories.”
She could see what he was trying to do, refused to allow him. “That was an unfortunate accident, but that doesn’t mean—”
“That was poor planning, pure and simple.”
She wasn’t going to let him ruin it for her. “And still, admit it. Being at the festival changed your life.”
He thought about it. “It opened up my world.”
“Then it changed your life.”
He chuckled. “Good point.”
“I remember that time so clearly,” said Angie, triumphant. “When you guys got back, you two were inseparable. You were so in love.”
He kept his eyes on the water. “We were. Young and in love.”
“Meeting like that at the festival, that had to be romantic in itself.”
“Oh that’s not how we met. I had a class with her.”
“Really? I never knew that.”
“Yeah.”
She waited, but Nigel didn’t go on.
“So, tell me!” she insisted.
“I had an anthro class with her,” he began. “I’d noticed her before then at a couple student protests, but she was so quiet, shy even, that I hadn’t really paid her much attention.” On the day of the
midterm in anthro, he’d come rushing up to the building, late, and saw her standing outside smoking. With no coat on. And he thought that was the oddest sight, because it was one of those windy-cold October days in Ann Arbor. She was just casually puffing away, yet shivering, and he had this sudden urge to take off his leather jacket and give it to her. He asked her why she wasn’t inside taking the exam.
“I want to see if I can do the test in the last twenty minutes,” she said.
That blew him away. As he went inside to take the test himself, he kept anticipating her coming through the door. Sure enough, twenty minutes left, she entered. After he finished his exam, he waited, and when she turned hers in, he followed her out. She walked fast but he caught up and asked her how she thought she did on the midterm.
Ella shrugged. “I finished it,” she said, like that was the important thing.
“Hey, would she like to go for a drive?” Ella shrugged, said “OK.” They walked to his car and left campus, cruising along the cutesy shops on the town’s main street. She smoked and so did he. With the heat blasting and the windows up, the car turned into a warm, foggy capsule. “This place bores me,” she announced.
He asked her where she wanted to go. She said to the racetrack. He wasn’t expecting that and he laughed. She cut her eyes at him, asked what was so funny? He said it was just that he never had a girl tell him she wanted to go bet on horses. And she said she didn’t bet on the racehorses; she rode them. And Nigel said, “You?” She asked him what was so hard to believe about that? And he said that well for one thing jockeys are men aren’t they? And aren’t they like, small?
“Are you suggesting I’m too big to be a jockey?” she asked.
No, no he insisted. He didn’t mean anything by it.
But she told him, “I’ll prove it. Take me to Hazel Park Raceway right now.”
All the way in Detroit? He asked her. She said yes. So he decided what the hell? He drove the forty-five miles and when they got there, the front-gate guard actually knew Ella, said how good it was to see her again. He let them in even though the track was closed and she walked him along the barns. The air smelled like Vicks VapoRub. She turned, walked down a row of stalls, stopped in front of one, and said, “This is where my father dropped dead.”
She told him how she and her father had been prepping Baby’s Breath, his prize horse and how hopeful he was that the horse would win, how he had a heart attack after she’d stepped away for a while, how she found him there, dead, when she returned.
Angie felt a chill from the ocean’s breeze. She kept quiet.
When he heard that story, he wanted to get out of there, felt that was not a good place for them to be, but Ella suddenly asked if he wanted to ride one of the horses. He said ‘Can you do that?” and the look on her face was so tragic that he quickly said sure, let’s do it, even though he’d never been on a horse in his life. He watched her go up to one, a dark horse, pet his nose.
“You’re a good boy, I can tell,” she said.
She led the horse out of the stall, saddled him, and slowly guided him out of the barn. Nigel followed as she walked the horse to the large, silent racetrack. The sight both awed and frightened Nigel. It was so quiet and, with the overhead lights off, eerily dark. She stuck her foot in the stirrup, hopped up, swung her other leg around, and mounted the horse. She held her hand out to him and even though Nigel was terrified—how could the horse see a damn thing?—he got on behind her. The animal stumbled, perhaps from all the weight and he envisioned the worst: the horse would break a leg, they’d be stuck out here, the police would find them, arrest them for stealing and hell, worse, causing the death of the damn thing. Plus, it was cold! But Ella crouched low and kept talking to the horse and before he knew it, they were gliding around the track. He held her around the waist and felt the air rushing past him, the exhilaration of the animal’s muscles moving beneath his thighs. They went around halfway, not too fast. And then she sped up the horse and they galloped around the rest of the track. It felt liberating.
Ella led the horse back to the barn, where they dismounted and she quietly returned him to his stall. She gave the horse water to drink and a few oats and kissed him between his ears.
“Thank you, whatever your name is,” she said.
And right there, Nigel moved in and kissed her. She kissed him back and everything about her, about this moment, excited him. They fell back in the hay and kissed some more. Finally, he took her hand and pulled her up. “Should we go back to campus?” he asked as they walked to his car.
“Not tonight,” she said.
He asked if she wanted to go home and she said absolutely not.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“Get a room.”
She told him how to drive to Woodward Avenue at Six Mile, and they checked into a motel, returned to Ann Arbor the next morning.
Waves made their way lazily up to the shore. “So you were already together when you went to the festival,” Angie said quietly. She was hurt that Ella hadn’t ever told her that story—especially the part about being on a horse again. “She never even mentioned you until she got back from her trip.”
“We liked being a secret,” explained Nigel. “I had a girlfriend at the time, and there was a little overlap there for a minute; I admit that. But once we went on the trip, hell, it was clear to me this was the woman I wanted to be with.” He paused, smiling. “And we had a nice run there, me and Ella. For about a year or so, it was good. It was damn good.”
She wished the story stopped there; but she pushed herself to probe, to get him to tell the ugly part. “So what happened with you two?”
“I think you know what happened.”
“What?” she insisted.
Nigel stared at the ocean. “Drugs happened.”
“You got her into all that, didn’t you?”
He turned to her. “Is that what you think?”
“Didn’t you?”
He turned his attention back to the shore, its groggy waves. “We got each other into all that.”
“Then you dumped her and that was when it all got worse,” insisted Angie. “I remember. That was when she overdosed.”
“I didn’t dump her.”
Angie studied Nigel as he sat up, pushed his hand into the sand, let it pour through his fingers. “I think you did,” she said.
“Believe what you want, but I’m telling you that’s not what happened.”
“Then what did happen?”
Nigel shook his head. “We were fine until we stared snorting smack up our noses. Suddenly we had to feed our habit and shit got crazy. We got wilder with the shoplifting and all kinds of illegal shit—busting scripts, forging checks, boosting.”
Angie remembered that back room in Nigel and Ella’s apartment, all those supple leather purses piled on the bed, price tags still attached.
“It all got to be too much,” continued Nigel. “I made her go home. We lost our place, anyway. I think we both were trying not to drown, you know?” He hesitated. “We didn’t talk to each other for a couple months. I figured she was still snorting. When I heard she’d overdosed, I couldn’t believe it. We never shot up, that was our rule, so I was really shocked. I called just to check on her, you know? We decided to hook up, see each other again, go from there.”
“I remember that,” said Angie. “She wore my mother’s blue leather coat on a so-called date with you.”
He winced. “I helped her pawn that coat.”
“My mother said that’s what happened.”
The sun had pushed through the clouds, now shone across Nigel’s face. “That was when I learned that yeah, she was shooting up. And she made it sound incredible. I’ll be honest. We did it together that night.” He squinted against the sun. Or the memory. “It was a bad scene though. She got sick, I got sick. I think we had some bad shi
t. The next day, I begged her to go to Herman Kiefer, see a doctor. She wouldn’t. But that was it for me. It scared my ass. I grew up around junkies. I quickly lost all romantic notions about shooting up. I stopped everything after that. Cold turkey. No more snorting shit. But Ella, she loved getting high. She told me, ‘I’d rather die than stop.’ That really fucked with me.” He shook his head. “She was so greedy for it.”
“You make her sound pathetic.”
He shielded his eyes with his hand as he turned to her. “Come on, you know how she was.”
“I just know that she spent the next three years hooked on heroin,” said Angie. “And you didn’t, apparently. But how would we know? Because you never even bothered to come back around.”
Nigel kept his gaze on her, hand over his eyes like a salute. “What do you want me to say?”
Sweat tingled Angie’s armpits. “I want you to say, ‘I’m sorry I was able to kick the habit and she wasn’t.’ I want you to say, ‘I’m sorry I got to go on with my life and she didn’t.’”
He dropped his hand, squinted. “I can say I’m sorry, and believe me I am, but it’s not gonna bring her back.”
“That’s mean.” Angie suddenly rose, stalked up the beach; but her angry strides were hard to maintain in the sinking sand. The clouds had disappeared and the day’s dose of sun bore down on her. She could feel the few beachgoers staring as she passed by. Wet beads rolled down her sides. She didn’t know whether Nigel was behind her or not. She refused to turn around and look, kept going, sand hot and hard against her feet.
Nigel caught up with her, held her elbow. “Come on Angie, let’s go back. It’s getting too hot out here.”
Into the Go Slow Page 23
