Joe demanded.
"Perhaps we missed it?"
"Nonsense."
Joe hunched over the wheel, watching for potholes. Nnamdi watched for traffic farther afield like a sailor on a crow's nest, yelling
"One-eyed!" for vehicles lacking a headlight and looking dangerously like motorbikes, or "blind man" if a vehicle was lacking both.
In the next town they found an exit. But it was the wrong one, curving west, not north.
"Love and piss!" Joe yelled, slowing down violently. "We take that and we'll end up back on the coast, in Lagos. Has our luck turned to vinegar? All we need now is to run into a Kill-and-Go patrol."
Nnamdi looked at the flattened scoop of the valley ahead of them. In the Delta, you might escape a mobile police assault by hiding in the jungle till the MOPOL unit passed. You could dodge the Coast Guard and JTF as well, losing yourself in the labyrinth of creeks and inlets. But here, under this open sky? On these open plains? Where would you hide? Where
could
you hide? A single body cast a long presence out here. Hunters could track you simply by the shadow you trailed, even in moonlight. You would have to run very far to escape.
Lost in the night, they needed to turn around, and soon. But where? The streets were too narrow for turning, so they rumbled on, looking for a gap. They found it in a schoolyard soccer field, where Joe made a sharp U-turn, leaning hard on the wheel, trying to avoid both the walls of the school and the jackknifing of the vehicle.
Checkpoints weren't always police or military; freelancers calling themselves "tax men" would sometimes shake down drivers for a "transportation fee." A toll, as it were. Indeed, any group might muster enough members to man a blockade. Border police
(even deep inland), immigration officials (ditto). Agricultural and veterinary inspectors might also set up roadblocks to check for unlicensed vegetables and improperly secured livestock.
As Joe slowly brought the tanker truck back onto the road they'd just come down, a figure came running out ahead to throw a spiked roll of rubber across their tracks. Igbo Joe geared down, braking with both feet, barely stopping in time.
"Christ and vinegar!" he yelled.
A sinewy man in a thin undershirt called up to Joe. "I pray chop your hand-oh! Transport tax dis village. Where dis papers-oh?"
But Igbo Joe was in a foul mood, and he yelled down at the man,
"What is the meaning of this! We are on official government business.
A MOPOL patrol cornin' soon behind us, arrest you quick."
"No Kill and Go out here. You is gone lost, I think, and dere is a fee for passing dis way. Village improvement tax."
Nnamdi looked around. The village could certainly use it.
"A tax?" Joe sputtered. "For using the road? Where is your gun?" he demanded. "I don't pay anyone till they go'an show me their gun. Where is your credentials?"
As Igbo Joe and the tax collector shouted at each other, Nnamdi slipped out the passenger side and, crouching low, ran up front and pulled the spiked roll of rubber aside. Joe had seen him do it, and when Nnamdi leapt back inside, Joe barrelled through, gears grinding.
The man in the undershirt was screaming at them in their side-view mirror, growing smaller, disappearing.
"We are free!" Joe roared.
Like shadows through a net.
It was late at night when they finally rumbled into the next motor park, their headlights scattering moonlit beggars picking through the rubbish. Joe and Nnamdi found a chophouse that was still open, pushed through the beaded curtains, sat on wooden benches, ate on oilcloth. Skewers of lamb and a savoury soup.
Boiled yams and bony fish.
"Enjoy this last taste of the sea," said Joe, picking a hair-thin bone from his teeth. "Once we cross the Middle Belt, even dried fish like this will be hard to find. Just goat meat and millet after that. Even their beer is made from millet." He shook his head at the tragedy of it.
"I like goat."
"Not like this you don't. These are northern goats, raised on twigs and pointy grass. Just gristle and hide." A pause. "Will be good to be back south again."
There was a chill at night here as the heat of day gave way and temperatures fell from near-boiling to near-freezing. Nnamdi would be dressing in layers from this point on.
Igbo Joe finished off his broth, opened up his checkerboard on the chophouse table. "One more before bed."
Nnamdi sighed. "You never win."
"The only reason I never win," Joe said, "is because you never lose. That's the only reason. Now, let's play."
CHAPTER 66
The next morning, Joe said, "You will drive from here."
They were having an early breakfast at a tea-bread-and-eggs stand. Pale grey omelettes and a fist of bread ripped from the heart of the loaf, served with tea that was boiled in sugar-milk and served in plastic mugs. "Waking up on sweetness." This is what Nnamdi's mother would say when she fed him nuggets of cane sugar in the morning. The Delta had never been so close. Or so far away.
"We'll bless the vehicle first, to be safe. You know, wash it in the blood of Christ before we go."
Joe tracked down a motor-park preacher to perform the service.
A grey-stubbled man with a booming voice, he climbed onto the running board and, holding a Bible first to his forehead and then to his chest, intoned, "As you enter the north, may Our Holy Lord and Saviour Jesus bless this vehicle. Bless its cargo, O Jesus! Bless its alternator and its transmission! Bless its wheels that they may turn, bless its brakes that they may not fail, bless the fan belt and gears, O Lord, and see these men out safely again. Amen." He then walked around the vehicle, sprinkling water.
Nnamdi had cast his own prayers earlier, had clapped his hands to catch the attention of the now-distant
orumo,
had asked for benediction from the village ancestors that he might not crash the vehicle or become lost along the way. That he might escape, shadow intact.
The road continued to deteriorate.
Crumbling villages came and went, and the tanker truck splashed through rivers of raw sewage, then bounced across dry creek beds.
"Come rainy season, impassable," Joe said. "Becomes a muddy stew.
Nnamdi was gripping the wheel, eyes on the road, barely blinking, barely breathing. His first time driving.
"Speed up," said Joe. "A baby crawls faster."
Nnamdi swallowed down his nervousness, pushed a little harder on the accelerator.
"And don't swerve for goats like that," Joe said. "Go through them. It's the only way. We can hose off the grille later, but if we tip this rig on a swerve, all is lost."
The road began to undulate, rising and falling over hill and gulley, unspooling upward across the plateaued heights of the Middle Belt. With the altitude, the air grew cooler, and Nnamdi's ears popped. Then popped again.
"Tiv country," said Joe, pointing out the crops and slow movement of cattle below. "Farmers. They hop when they dance."
Nnamdi waited for something more, but that was it. That was Joe's full summation of Tiv culture.
"I'm going to sleep," said Joe, and he crawled up into the bunk, pulled the curtain across.
Trails of smoke were rising from the Tiv settlements. "Are they peaceful people?" Nnamdi shouted back at Joe as he wrestled the wheel around a slow bend.
"The Tiv? I suppose," Joe replied. "Too busy hopping." He stretched out and was soon asleep.
From the thin air of the Middle Belt, Dreams Abound began its slow descent. Nnamdi could feel the immense weight of the fuel behind him, pushing the cab forward, and he fought against it, riding the brake pads, gearing down.
Joe was awakened by the strain of the truck fighting its own momentum.
"Don't use the brakes," he said, crawling back out of the bunk.
"I told you, they'll only slow you down."
The outer savannah opened up, with rocky outcrops and a terrible emptiness stretching out in front of them. On the far horizon, a cloud the colour of dried blood had darkened the sky.
"Harmattan," said Joe. "We better find cover."
It was a race against the weather—and it was a race they lost, as the sands swept in, bringing the Sahel with it, turning day into dusk, dusk into night. They cranked up the windows and turned on the wipers, but the water that sprayed across only smeared the grit, didn't clean it off.
"Paraga
and
ogogoro,"
said Joe as he unscrewed a mason jar, rolled down his window and hung out, into the storm, sand stinging his eyes as he reached to splash a chug of his mixture across Nnamdi's driver-side windshield. The dust slid away, left clear streaks in its path. "More than one use!" Joe cried with a laugh as he swung himself back inside. "Would'a been worse come rainy season. Dust is still better than mud.''
Nnamdi wasn't so sure. The motor was gumming up; he could feel it growing sluggish. Harmattans and motor oil didn't mix well.
They entered Abuja city in the grip of a dust storm, headlights on, wipers flailing. Nigeria's national capital was clouded in a red haze, the government buildings outlined in rust. Nnamdi pulled over. "I can't do this. I'm driving blind."
Joe crawled across, took Nnamdi's place. The truck rolled down a wide boulevard strafed with grit till Joe found a motor park. It looked like a Bedouin camp, with vehicles shuttered and food stands closed tight.
"We'll wait out the storm here," said Joe. "And make Kaduna city tomorrow morning." His voice was strangely flat. Any elation he might have felt over their impending payday was lost in a sea of foreboding. "In and out," he said. "We don't linger. There's no drinking in the sharia states, you know. No taking of harlots or gambling."
Nnamdi said, "I wasn't planning on taking harlots. Or gambling. And I can go a night without drinking."
Joe grinned. "Well, I'm not one for gambling." He finished off the last of the
paraga.
"And just because it's not permitted doesn't mean it's not allowed. It's just—you have to skulk about so, like a common criminal in among the riff-raff and ruffians of the Sabon Gari."
"The Sabon Gari?"
"The Christian quarter. Every city in the north has one."
"Sabon
means Christian?"
"Sabon
means stranger."
The cab was rocking on the wind, sand hissing across the glass.
Another round of checkers, another round of
ayo
—
"We should have been playing for money," said Nnamdi. "I would be a rich man by now."
Joe climbed up into the bunk.
"You're cheating. I don't know how, but you are."
"It is not cheating. It is cleverness."
"Cleverness is just another form of cheating. And anyway, if we played for money, that would be gambling, and gambling is forbidden up here." Joe rolled himself over and into sleep.
Tomorrow Nnamdi would clean the worst of the gunk from the motor. They would deliver their cargo of fuel, and then beat a hasty retreat, cash in hand. Nnamdi felt as though he had crossed an ocean, had reached the edge of the map, had climbed the tallest oil palm in the Delta.
As the storm outside thinned, he watched a red moon burn its way through the dust. And he smiled.
CHAPTER 67
Fires were burning on the road to Kaduna. Vehicles, set alight. The fuel riots had spread, and mobs were smashing storefront windows and being truncheoned into submission. Broken glass formed diamond-dust patterns on the sidewalks, and a haze of smoke and harmattan dust hung over the city. The few filling stations still open were backlogged with cars, horns blaring their anger and frustration. Another riot seemed imminent.
"Let's hope they don't storm our truck, drain the tank," Joe said as they rolled down the debris-strewn boulevard. He tried to laugh, but it came out as a nervous giggle.
"They probably think it's empty," said Nnamdi.
"Let's hope."
Even in crisis, there was opportunity. Young boys moved through the angry mobs selling plastic baggies of water and packets of kola nuts. Black-market stands offered cloudy gasoline of dubious quality in plastic jugs and two-litre bottles. "Just enough to get to the next stand," Joe joked. "We are not selling ours on the black market, though. We are selling it right back to the government."
He turned the rig onto a wide side street, aimed it toward a fuelling depot ringed with razor wire and towering chain-link fences. "Illegal fuel to a legal depot." This was the brilliance of the Turk's scheme.
And it worked.
They handed over their paperwork, joined a queue of tanker trucks inching forward until it was, at last, their turn. Workers climbed up, opened the hatch and pushed a metal pole deep inside, drew out a sample to make sure they hadn't arrived with kerosene floating on top of well water. When their cargo had been filtered and confirmed, the coveralled workers threaded in a drainage hose, started up the pump. The sides of Dreams Abound rattled and banged as the fuel inside was emptied into underground reservoirs.
Escaping fumes created a wavering mirage above the tanker trucks.
"We are rich," Joe whispered to Nnamdi.
They counted their money twice, couldn't stop grinning. By this point, dusk was settling over the city. "We don't want to be on the highway with this payroll," said Joe. He peeled off some bills for the night ahead, then wrapped the rest in a plastic bag and pushed it under the floor mat, in the space where the emergency brake had once been. "I had them remove it before I picked up the truck," he explained. "It was just taking up space." He slid the floor mat back in place. "Perfect!"
