"When do we leave?" asked Nnamdi.
"Now," said Joe. "Right now. The dry season. Best time for it.
Can't risk the rains. The lands in the north are so bone dry, they don't know what to do with water when it does come. In rains, you have flash floods, roads that run like rivers. The earth becomes sticky clay, bogs down tires. No," he insisted, "I'll take heat and dust over floods and mud every time."
The Turk said his goodbyes with a flurry of handshakes and good-health salutations, and Joe stood, fists on hips, like a general surveying the battlefield. "We leave as soon as you're ready!" he said to Nnamdi. "We'll take turns—driving and sleeping, sleeping and driving."
This was, perhaps, the time for Nnamdi to mention a certain minor detail. "I'm not sure if this is a matter of concern," he said.
"But I have not operated a motorized vehicle before. Motorboats, of course. Certainly. But not trucks."
Joe looked at him. "You don't know how to drive?"
Nnamdi shook his head. "No. I understood it was more a mechanic you were after."
"A mechanic
and
a driver. Two in one. I can't drive all the way gone to Kaduna on my own. It is too far. Look. You know what a clutch is, what it does?"
"Of course."
"So. You gear up, gear down, keep your foot on the accelerator and the truck pointed down the middle of the road—we are big enough that others will get out of our way. Avoid the brakes, those will only slow you down. And if you can't find a gear, make one.
That is all you need to know. I will get us out of the city, you take over once we are clear."
And that was that.
"I'll leave you to tune up the vehicle," said Joe. "I have to gather my belongings for the drive. It's a long road, but one with great riches at the end!"
It took Nnamdi half an hour just to figure out how to release the bonnet, and when he did he was startled to find that the entire front of the truck opened up, backward, from windshield to grille.
Since arriving in Portako, the largest vehicle he'd worked on was a minivan taxi. He peered into the tanker's engine as though looking into a human chest cavity. He recognized the fan belt and not much else. After a few moments he quietly closed it up. "It looks fine," he said to Joe, whom he found upstairs stuffing a Ghana-Must-Go bag with loose clothes and mason jars of murky home brew.
"Good! Let's go!"
CHAPTER 63
Nnamdi swung his own Ghana-Must-Go into the truck's cab.
Grabbed hold and then launched himself up and into the passenger seat, the seat springs bouncing under him.
He was wearing Ijaw yellow, with billowing trousers and a loose-hanging smock. Joe frowned. "Will be cold wearing such as that."
"Cold?" They were heading north to the edge of the Sahara.
"You'll see." Joe wedged a final mason jar into the seat between them. "This will keep us warm.
Paraga
," he said. "A Yoruba concoction. Herbs and spirits, mixed together with tonics and such. I put some
ogogoro
in there as well for extra kick. Will keep you awake with eyes bug-open. Warms you from the inside out. If it doesn't kill you first!"
Joe started the engine and nudged the tanker truck out of the garage in fits and starts, cranking the wheel and squeezing it onto a side street scarcely wider than the vehicle itself. It was like poling a pirogue through the smaller creeks of the Delta. But with more traffic. They clipped a roadside vendor's stall, sending a pyramid of lumpy yams tumbling downward, and batted a parked bicycle to one side as pedestrians hurried out of the way in their flip-flop gait.
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?"
