by Jowhor Ile
“Let’s go home, don’t mind her,” Paul said, “she is a very stupid girl.”
“No wonder her brothers hate her,” Bibi added, but Ajie couldn’t help feeling the heaviness that somehow he had ruined everything.
—
Bibi wrote a letter that night, under candlelight. She made several drafts and threw the old ones in the bin, crumpled up in a ball. She covered up the letter when anyone got close, as if shielding class exercises from a seatmate. “State secret,” Ma said, and clicked her tongue. “Mind your eyes, Bibi, that letter can wait till daybreak.”
Bibi bent over it, perfecting all four pages of the final draft in her most careful handwriting.
She had no reason to suspect that anyone would salvage her discarded pages from the bin.
I think Paul has a girlfriend in school, she wrote. I suspect it. I don’t even know if she’s fine since I haven’t seen a picture, and my younger brother, Ajie, is being stingy with details. All I know is that she’s a Hausa girl.
You know our neighbor I wrote to you about in my last letter? Wendy. Hmm. Story is beginning to come out. She really liked Paul. I think they went to the abandoned trailer park not too far from the house to hang out and they kissed. I’m not too sure, but it’s very likely.
Now, here is the gist. Paul took Ajie with him the next time he was supposed to meet her. I think he was feeling guilty because he kissed someone else when he has a girlfriend. Not sure…but you know me, my instincts are always right. I overheard something! I think Paul wanted Ajie to learn how to kiss from Wendy. My brothers are so weird. Anyway, the whole thing backfired. The girl got so upset she wouldn’t let Ajie anywhere near her bicycle. She was just enduring Paul and me for half of one afternoon, and then she couldn’t take it any longer and she exploded like a grenade.
What’s happening with that Obinna boy? Is he still begging you?
My father and mother are going to America in two months’ time. We are going to stay with Uncle Tam, who is not really our uncle but that is what we call him.
CHAPTER TEN
Ajie followed Paul into the yard. Abandoned tractors were afield, overgrown by elephant grass and shrubs of awolowo. Two or three earth tillers gathered rust, their flattened tires sinking into the loam. A woman with a child braced on her hip came out of a house on the far corner of the compound and emptied a basin of wash water in front before disappearing into the darkened passage. The windows of the unplastered house were boarded up with planks.
“Ajie.” Paul beckoned, stepping aside on the tiny path so his brother could walk ahead as they made their way toward the fence. Paul began to whistle. Everything was yellowy under the November sun. The chill of the coming harmattan was already in the breeze. Ajie looked at his feet and felt that he had applied too much of the pomade. Grains of sand were stuck on his feet, between his toes, and on his calves, courtesy of his flapping oversize slippers.
“Can you jump?” Paul asked.
“Mhm.” Ajie nodded confidently.
“Oh, look,” Paul said, and walked off the path again and onto the grass. “There is a hole in the fence. I didn’t see that last time. Let’s squeeze through instead.”
“Okay,” Ajie said, disappointed. He had wanted to scale the fence ever since Paul had suggested it was a nice shortcut from the street behind their house to the barber. They didn’t have to walk on the road past Ikom Street all the way down to Sangana. They had gained ten minutes now, as the sound of traffic reached them from the road up ahead. Ajie followed his brother’s blue T-shirt while they weaved through the bush, dwarfed by the tall grass. Startled dragonflies buzzed and darted.
They came out of the bush and walked toward a row of newly built shops. The first was a restaurant. A glass showcase arrayed with fried fish and skewered peppered beef was stationed right in front. A little board leaned on the legs of the showcase with a sign written in white chalk: Better Isiewu inside. The strong smell of the spiced goat meat came through the beaded curtain as they walked past. A dry goods store was next, with empty beer crates piled high on the veranda, nearly touching the ceiling. The third was a barbershop. Loud bumpy music came from inside.
Paul slid open the glass door and walked in like someone who was quite used to coming there. The posters on the wall were of American rappers and R&B stars in baggy jeans and shirts accessorized with big shoes, long neck chains, silver crosses, rings, and tall hair: Kriss Kross, Naughty by Nature, Boys II Men, Poison, MC Hammer, Bobby Brown, Da Brat.
The barber nodded at them as they took a seat. He was putting finishing touches on a customer’s hair. “Two of you?” he asked.
“Yes,” Paul said, “my brother will go first.”
Ajie sat down. “Which number?” the barber asked him, motioning toward the picture catalog of numbered hairstyles stuck to the mirror. The barber wrapped tissue paper around Ajie’s neck, then threw a blue cloth over him and clipped it at the back of his head with a plastic peg.
“Number eighteen.” Ajie pointed at a box on the catalog. The man in the picture had the sides of his hair cropped in a fading pattern that came together in a medium rise toward the center, and then on the left side, a slight part.
“Mandela.” The barber nodded, approving. “Nice choice.”
Ajie sat upright and grinned into the mirror. “You know the side part?” he asked, looking at the barber. “Can you do it on both sides?”
“What?” Paul stood up to look. “No. Ajie, you know Ma will be angry.” Then to the barber, “Only one side part, please.”
From the mirror behind, Ajie could see what the barber was doing to the back of his head. He watched as Paul bopped his head to the music and then the barber’s hand covered his eyes so he couldn’t see anymore. When the barber was done, he used his talc brush all over Ajie’s neck and face, and afterward Ajie looked in the mirror, turning his head this way and that, squinting and at the same time gauging Paul’s face for signs of approval. Paul gave him a thumbs-up and made to take his seat. Nothing, Ajie thought, would ever make him return to that other barber that Ma took him to at Mile 3 market, with his manual clippers that left faint zigzag lines on your head.
Ajie sat back on the padded bench as the barber began to work on Paul’s hair. Paul explained to the barber carefully and in detail how he wanted his hair. Ajie heard Paul’s voice without taking in the words. Paul touched the back of his head as he spoke, then the sides, brushing his temples in a way that might have meant something, and then looked up at the barber, who nodded as he sprayed the blade with a sterilizer, picked up the vial of blade oil, and applied it to the edge of the buzzing clipper, as if to say he already understood everything (I know I know I know) and that Paul needn’t explain any further. He tested the sharpness of the blade on the back of his hand, then put the clippers to Paul’s hair. The clipper hummed and crackled, and Paul’s hair rolled off like a carpet.
—
A pair of brown leather shoes was set by the door when they got home. Application Master, who was half stretched on the sofa, was woken up by their entrance, and he exclaimed “Swoy! Look at these children.” He looked them up and down the way grown-ups do when they think a child has grown way taller than they ever foresaw. “Come come come.” He opened his arms to the both of them. His teeth were stained brown, his smile wide and childish. His feni tunic smelled of camphor. For Ajie, the smell of camphor was always linked to trunks, dark places, cockroaches, and death. Because it was the smell of people who came to visit from the village, it was also the smell of old people, and it was about old people that news often came.
Bibi and Ma came out of the kitchen. “Look at your hair!” Bibi exclaimed at her brothers. She turned, her eyes wide in consternation, toward Ma, hoping she would comment on the stylish haircuts. Ma paused for a moment to take in their new looks, and Ajie wasn’t sure if it was displeasure on her face; if she approved, that didn’t show, either, she just moved her lips in a way that said this could wait till later. “Application Mas
ter, do you want your drink now?” Ma asked. “Bibi.” Ma gestured for her to go and get the drinks.
When Bendic returned, he changed from his work clothes and came out to the parlor to sit with Application Master. Bendic asked Paul to get him a glass of water, and Paul soon emerged from the kitchen with Bendic’s beer mug filled and dripping with water. Bendic motioned for him to keep it on the side stool to his right. The wrapper on his waist was rolled up in a loose bunch in front so that the waistband of his Y-front briefs was visible.
Ma called Bibi to help with dinner and asked Paul to get the guest room ready. She wanted him to change the sheets and open the window to air the room.
Later that night, after dinner, they all sat outside because there had been a power outage and the air in the parlor had become warm and stifling. Bendic asked Ismaila to check how much diesel was left. “Maybe you can turn on the generator for an hour so we can watch the nine o’clock news.”
“The buses all charged double fare today,” Application Master said. “From Ogibah to Ahoada, and from Ahoada to Port Harcourt, they charged double the usual fare. As if what we used to pay was not already high enough.”
“It is so o,” Ma said. “We were lucky to be able to fill our tanks with petrol, but we couldn’t find diesel for the generator.”
There was speculation that tanker drivers were planning to embark on a strike the following week, so people flooded the gas stations, panic-buying and causing a shortage even before the speculated strike.
Bendic explained this to Application Master while the children waited, hoping to catch a hint of the matter that had brought Application Master from Ogibah. Ajie sat on a kitchen stool in the rough circle, certain the news would trickle out soon enough. Paul took off his shirt and fanned himself with it. Bibi had spread out a mat on the ground and was lying on it.
“It is unheard of,” Ma said soon after, and Ajie saw the outline of her shoulders shrug in the moonlight. “Why should he send the police to arrest you?”
“Ogbuku has always been a bit stupid. And his father, Nwokwe, sits back as his son misbehaves like this?” Bendic said. “Someone has to stop him before he goes completely mad. All that Company money he is eating has gone to his head. The fact that a fellow citizen can send the police to arrest another person is a different matter altogether.”
“They call Ogbuku ‘Chop-I-Chop’ these days,” Application Master said. During the campaign for the local government chairman position, his message to the Youth was that whatever he got once he was in office would not be for his pockets alone, that he was not the greedy type, whatever he could collect would surely go around. “You chop, I chop” would be his modus operandi. Not like the old-timers, who he said wanted to keep everyone away from the pot.
“I still don’t see how that gives him the right to eat the money meant for renovation of the only school we have.”
“It takes a certain originality to call that pitiful job he did an upgrade,” Ma chortled. “Ultramodern, indeed.”
“This petition I wrote that is running him crazy, he has no idea I can do worse than that. If I sit down properly and write a petition against him…eh?” Application Master sighed. “These young ones think that they can do as they like.” He touched his breast pocket, but the pens that he always had clipped on weren’t there.
—
A band of policemen had come into the village one morning and arrested four boys. Four boys they found sitting by the road near the empty market stalls. They shot them with Taser guns first to encourage their cooperation. Then they hit them with batons to make sure. By the time people arrived at the scene just after they had taken the boys away, they saw bloodstains in the sand.
Two weeks earlier, Application Master had written a petition against Chop-I-Chop, who was the current councillor for the ward and had his eyes set on becoming the next local government chairman. A contract had been awarded for new classroom blocks for the secondary school in Ogibah. Chop-I-Chop’s company won the contract. The project was billed as an ultramodern learning center. In other words, it was six classroom blocks, complete with laboratories, staff room, library, and gatehouse. Many months passed before work began on the school site. The “ultramodern” project manifested as a three-classroom block with rough unplastered walls and floors, no ceiling, no staff room, no library, no laboratories. Once the roofing was done, pupils began to take lessons in the classrooms because the old block was overfull.
People grumbled: Chop-I-Chop could have followed the blueprint and built decent classroom blocks and still have made a killing from the contract. They summoned Chop-I-Chop to answer for himself at a youth meeting; he didn’t bother to show up. He said the project had been inspected and the execution approved and commended by representatives from Company (who had awarded the contract as a community development project to soothe tempers frayed by the ongoing construction of the new pipeline). Why were they all going mental, Chop-I-Chop asked, about money that did not even come from their own pockets? He dismissed the elders’ talks as the prattle of yesterday’s men.
Application Master then wrote a petition against him to the local government chairman; copies of the petition were sent to the general manager of Company, to the manager of the department in charge of the inspection of the project, and finally, to the office of His Excellency, the governor of Rivers State.
When Chop-I-Chop got wind of the petition, he decided to go shake up Application Master a bit and make him withdraw his submission. Things could be kept quiet at this stage, so he went to the police station in Ahoada and had a little talk with the DPO. Two policemen in plainclothes were dispatched to do the job.
They enter the courtyard of the house and demand to see “Mark Alari, the owner of the house.”
Application Master’s sister in-law, who is in the out-kitchen frying garri, simply hollers over the hiss of the pan, “Who is asking? Who wants to see the man of the house?”
The two men march to the shed and speak to her tersely in English and order her to go find her brother-in-law.
She pulls wood out of the fire. “Just a minute,” she says to them, “please, sit here and wait,” and then hurries out. In no time, word goes around. Strange men called at Mark Alari’s house, demanding to see him, they wouldn’t say who they are. Mark is on his way back from Aduche’s house when the message gets to him. He is told to keep a low profile until they find out who these men are. What do they want? The young men who have gathered wonder among themselves. People from out of town come here, demand to see a man without stating their mission? Oh, back in those days when Ogibah was Ogibah, such madness would not last a second.
Ogibah youth gather at once and march toward Mark’s house. They find the plainclothes policemen sitting on a bench by the kitchen shed and begin to question them: “Who are you? What do you want?” But the men will not say. So they order the men out of the courtyard. They should detain these men. Who knows what they have come for. They look suspicious. They may be hired killers, but even hired killers should know better than to come into Ogibah like that.
A boy pushes one of the policemen. The man pushes back and tells all of them to back off. “We are police,” the man declares. The crowd reels. Police? But the excitement in the air isn’t about to cool off yet. “Show us your ID,” they demand. “Why did you not say this? In fact, we do not believe you. Your ID cards may be fake. Okay, okay, tell us, policemen, what have you come for? What is your mission?”
They have come for Mark Alari, they say. They have come to take him to the station for questioning.
“Questioning for what? What has he done? Who sent you? Show us your arrest warrant. Don’t think you can intimidate us. You must think we are uneducated. To arrest a man from his house, you need a warrant. Is that not what the law says? If you are real policemen, you must know that much, at least!”
“You are obstructing the course of justice,” the policemen say. “You are standing in the way of the law.”
“We
will obstruct any obstructable,” a boy shouts back at the policemen. It is getting dark now. Someone from the crowd makes a sudden lurch toward one of the men. The policeman turns around and grabs the nearest person by the neck. “Did I touch you?” the man asks him. “Take your stinking hands off me. You think police work is work?” The policeman’s grip weakens. The man begins to slap the hand off; the crowd cheers. The policeman reasserts himself, tightens his grasp. His colleague has come to his aid, and the crowd closes in. Application Master watches from behind the crowd in a position that allows him a good view of what is going on.
Now enters Agility. He could be anything from seventeen to twenty-four years old. He is an up-and-coming stalwart of Ogibah Youth Front, a mover and an agitator. He gave himself the nickname Agility and bears it with great confidence because, as he said, he looked up the word in the dictionary and was quite proud of the meaning. This boy breaks through the crowd and strides toward the policeman, who is still holding the man by the collar. Agility looks the policeman straight in the face and says in a firm voice, “Leave him.” The policeman ignores him. Slap, slap, pull. Slap, slap, pull. A struggle ensues, and pretty soon everyone joins in.
Application Master raises his voice from where he stands. “Calm down, steady, steady, young men.” He is going toward Agility to calm him when he catches a glimpse of something going up in the air. It is the form of a man: One of the police has been lifted bodily, flung up into the night air, and abandoned, like a sacrifice, and the crowd parts to allow him to land without impediment. He meets the ground with a clumsy thud. Everything goes quiet. There is something quirky about his heavy fall, the sound of corporal damage. He lies there, leg drawn up at the knee. “Maybe he has broken something,” someone says, “a leg, his waist, his neck, his back.” They move closer to the man and do not notice when the other policeman relieves himself of their company. Voices of caution rise from the crowd. “We warned you boys to let them go; whatever comes out of this, you will carry it on your own heads.” “But who knows their mission,” other voices counter. Someone goes close to the fallen man and prods him with a finger. He doesn’t respond. A firmer prodding. Then all of a sudden the man leaps from the ground, grazes a finger on the ground, and disappears into the night.
