Indigo (28 page)

“What does Beany really care about the people?” Jerry suddenly asked. “What real evidence is there that he cares about anyone other than himself?”

The Power 99 man laughed softly. “Das a very ignorant question,” he said. “Dat question mean I got to start from de beginning.”

The Power 99 man's face was a small moon lighting up the area that the real moon didn't hit. He looked at Jerry and sighed, but soon he said, “Beany de pied piper for village folk; when he play 'is flute dey follow 'im aroun'.”

Now it was Jerry's turn to sigh. He wanted hard talk, not parables. In the morning, or whenever the bus was fixed, he'd be on his way back into everything, and he wanted to know what the man who'd been instrumental in dismantling his life was about.

Jerry leaned forward and tried again. “Tell me something that Beany has actually done,” he said. “Has he built a road or has he arranged for student scholarships—what has he done for people?”

The Power 99 man laughed again. “Oh no,” he said, “de road aroun' here need work right now, an' de student got to fin' 'is own school fee. Beany don' do work like that. Beany ain' on de practical side. School fee for de chil' of annoder ain' Beany's forte at all.”

“Well then, what is his forte?” Jerry asked. “I've been trying to discover that for two weeks and no one can tell me. So far as I can tell he doesn't have a forte.”

“Course he does,” said the Power 99 man. “He is a man of de people. His forte be exac'ly dat.”

The conversation was a joke and Jerry laughed. It was three A.
M
., he was sitting with a weird albino salesman under a mango tree far out in an African field, and he was trying to discover the essence of a man whom he didn't know or like at all. He tried, however, one last time. “What people?” he asked. “If Beany is a man of the people, what people is Beany a man of?”

“All of 'em,” said the Power 99 man. “Dat's de point.”

“He's a man of all the people?”

“Yes, you see, wit Beany it ain' tribal. He's a man of all de people, a pied piper for 'em. Even in de nort' you can fin' 'is likeness on de wall o some man home, jus' like in my very own. Even in de eas', even de Ibo tink to follow Beany widout mistrust. An de Yoruba tink so too, das de big surprise. Beany de I-don'-mistrust-'im man for de Yoruba too. Dat wha' importan' 'bout Beany.”

Jerry remembered his visit to Beany's mother. She had told him he had the I-don't-believe-it disease, and now he was confronted with the I-don't-mistrust-him man. These were hyphenated lessons he was learning but he pursued them anyway. “Just tell me one thing that Beany has done, one thing that he tells people, even, that they can believe.”

“OK,” said the Power 99 man. “Beany tell 'em 'bout discipline, just like it say on de new bottle, 'bout gettin' de senses in order to see tings right.”

That, too, had a familiar ring to it. Someone had recently told Jerry that he should begin disciplining his eyes and ears, training them as to what to see and hear.

“I'm not unfamiliar with discipline,” Jerry said, “but I think it has to do with habits, with working hard and fulfilling one's duties well. Isn't that a better definition of discipline than telling people to get their senses in order, to retrain their eyes?”

“Yes, das a good one all right, I know it too. When I go for selling I got jus' dat kin' o discipline in my own min'. Workin' hard is my ethics an' I do it even when I don' feel like doin' it, so I know what you mean.”

“Well then,” Jerry said, “how can that kind of discipline take a backseat to the kind of stuff Beany tries to pull? If he were supporting a work ethic like yours and mine I could understand it a lot better, couldn't you?”

Jerry hoped he didn't sound patronizing, but the Power 99 man simply said, “No, my discipline an' your discipline is fine but Beany got de better one. Beany discipline ain' got no tribalism in it; we trainin' our eyes to see pas' de tribalism, trainin' our ears too, not to hear de soun' o lbo or Hausa, but jus' to hear what de words say. Beany de one-Nigeria-man, he say les take Nigeria de way de British cut 'er up and make sometin' good out of 'er anyway.”

Jerry stopped trying to argue. Beany was the one-Nigeria-man and the I-don't-mistrust-him man, while he was stuck with I-don't-believe-it. It was true, of course, that he did not believe it, but just then, and just for an instant, he'd had a sense that maybe he was wrong. What was tribalism, after all, and what did he know about it? He wanted to ask the Power 99 man what tribe he came from and also to which tribe Beany belonged, but in the face of what he'd just heard such a question seemed a violation.

“I always thought it was a question of religion,” Jerry said. “I mean, I read in the papers that Nigerian politics revolves around a Christian-Muslim thing more than it does around tribes.”

“Oh, yes,” the Power 99 man said, “you can tell sometin' 'bout Nigeria from dem papers. But Beany say we can' jus' have our discipline 'bout tribes. We got to have it 'bout religion too. I was jus' usin' dem tribes as my example. If a man listen to Beany too long it get complicated.”

Jerry was sure that was true, but he nevertheless felt strangely satisfied by what he had heard. That Beany was a man of the people didn't sound so absurd to him now. Jerry stood up from the bench and leaned against the trunk of the mango tree, closing his eyes. He then reached up and removed Beany's mother's cap from his head. He had been wearing the cap for four days now and making himself comfortable with the idea that nobody he ran across could truly see him because of it. He opened his eyes again and found the Power 99 man stretched out on the ground. He leaned away from the tree, trying to get a little under the moon's waning light, then he ran his fingers through his hair, scratching and rubbing the place where the cap had been. It felt good but as he rubbed he began to smell the awful odor of his body, which he hadn't noticed since he'd washed it in the creek, but which was suddenly so terrible and overpowering that he nearly retched. When he looked at the Power 99 man he could see that he too had watering eyes. It was a rancid, horrible smell, and on impulse, as if he were corking a bottle, Jerry put his cap back on. Almost immediately the smell went away.

Jerry looked quickly at the Power 99 man, who hadn't moved from his place on the ground. Surely the smell had come from the nearby field, brought to them by a coincidental breeze, just at the moment he'd removed his cap. “What was that?” he asked, but the Power 99 man was breathing steadily again and he did not respond.

Jerry closed his eyes then, sliding down the trunk of the tree until his back was on the ground, his cap pressed firmly to his head. He felt freer than he had in a long while, and certainly more at ease. Perhaps hearing something good about Beany made him feel that way, but whatever the reason, sleep came before he could think about it too much. And he did not move again until a dozen field-workers found him in the late morning, awakening him with irritating claims that only Agbor people could sleep under this tree, and that at the very least he owed a small and proper fee.

The Yoruba woman was wrong to believe that the driver had only pretended his bus had broken down so that he could spend the night in Agbor, but the fact of the matter was that the driver had slept at home that night while the passengers were restless in the uncomfortable bus. When Jerry and the Power 99 man returned from the field they could still see them there, necks crooked at odd angles, mouths wide.

Back at the Power 99 man's house the women were awake and the door was open. Sondra had placed Jerry's bottle of Power 99, her pillow from the night before, inside his bundle of art, and the room had been swept clean, an activity that made it seem larger in the morning air. Though the women hadn't slept much longer than the men, they were cheerful and hungry, and since the Andrews Sisters knew that they would not have to sell Power 99 again until the first of the week, until the new year, they decided that they'd all go on the bus with Sondra and Jerry, at least as far as Benin City, where they had family.

“It will provide us with good cover,” Sondra told Jerry. “If we pretend we are selling something everyone will naturally want to stay away.”

Since Sondra was the only one among them with money, they all hung back, waiting for her to decide what it was she wanted to do about breakfast. The Power 99 man had food in his back room, but the Andrews Sisters wanted to go out to eat. There were good restaurants in Agbor, and the idea of air-conditioning and a proper washroom made Jerry tell Sondra that he wanted to go too.

“How 'bout de Loaves and Fishes Hotel?” the Power 99 man said. “De place be new but I hear is fine.”

By the time they left the room again it was after ten, the day was getting hot, and Jerry felt, once more, like he hadn't slept or bathed in weeks. He could see readily enough that his clothing was filthy, but the idea that his body odor was bad hadn't occurred to him until that moment in the field. When he looked at his companions, however, he was amazed to see that they appeared fresh and comfortable as they walked along. Sondra's indigo gown still seemed clean, and the Andrews Sisters, though they always wore black, looked as if they were on their way to church. Even the Power 99 man seemed to have affected a way of looking comfortable in the same old clothes that he wore.

At first sight the Loaves and Fishes was a disappointment. It was low-built where Jerry expected something high, and it did not look new. Inside, however, the place was cool and quiet, there were seven or eight tables with white cloths on them, and, though there were no other customers, there were about fifteen waiters. The restaurant was closed off from the rest of the hotel by a single heavy door, and once that door was shut even the street noise seemed to die away. They sat at a table in the room's center. The linen was starched and the waiters were wearing uniforms that were starched too. Even the walls of the place looked as if they had been washed the previous day. It was more than Jerry could take and as soon as they were settled he excused himself and went into the washroom.

Here, a little surprisingly, he could see the outside world again; through a little window he could see the normal activity of the Agbor streets. The bus was there, though the driver was not, and he could hear the voice of the Yoruba woman from the night before.

There was soap in the washroom and there were paper towels, but though there was also a white porcelain sink, no water came from its tap, so Jerry had to decide whether or not to use the water that sat in a bucket at the sink's side. He could see the bottom of the bucket through the water, but he had no idea whether or not it was clean. There was a stopper on a chain wound around one of the unworking faucets, so Jerry plugged the sink with it and poured some of the water in. It was clear and odorless stuff, and the sink's white bottom called him, so he pushed his face into the water until he could feel its wetness under his chin and into his hairline at the base of his cap. He opened his eyes and saw the white sink's bottom and pushed his face farther in until the water entered his ears, casting away, once again, the outside city's sound.

Jerry hadn't taken a breath before putting his face in the water but he felt no need to breathe while he was there. It was like one of those dreams he used to have and it was an encapsulation, for what the water seemed to do, as if it had been waiting in that washroom bucket just to do it, was to wash from the channels of his ears and the outside circumference of his eyes the last remnants of all the expectation, all the assumption that his lifelong view of the world had placed there. Jerry closed his eyes and opened them again, but the bottom of the sink was still white and breathing was still impossible, with water filling his nose and running into his now open mouth the way it was.

This was a moment that Jerry would forever after be unsure of, but when he finally pulled his face from the water it seemed to him that a great deal of time had passed and that things had irreversibly changed, though everything, of course, was absolutely the same. He picked up the soap arid washed the dirt from his hands and arms and watched as the water, this time, took on the dark color of the dirt that ran off him, clouding the bottom of the sink and making it seem far away.

As he dried himself Jerry unplugged the sink and let the dirty water leave, though it went down the drain too slowly, reminding him of a flat and muddy tide moving out of its basin over the course of an entire day.

Did all of this, the reordering of his senses with their predispositions washed away, have anything to do with Beany? If it did, then though the war that Beany wished to wage was surely an impossible one, for every man's eyes were as clouded as Jerry's had been, it really was the kind of thing that men should follow. It could give them hope, Jerry could see that easily now.

When the last of the water was gone Jerry poured the remaining clean water into the sink, so that even the sheen of his previous disposition was gone, and then he stepped into the restaurant again. The room was still quiet, his companions still the only eaters. He had no idea how long he had been gone, but though they had ordered in his absence, no one seemed to think that he'd been gone too long. When he took his seat, the waiters placed a plate in front of him and on the plate were any number of little fish, smelt or herring or river fish of some kind. The others had fish too, and in the middle of the table were round loaves of bread, which his companions were pulling apart and on which they were placing pieces of the fish.

Jerry laughed then—the menu at the Loaves and Fishes was the same as its name—and he said, “Perhaps the age of miracles is upon us again, maybe that's what this is all about.”

Sondra smiled at him. “You know,” she mildly said, “no one like Beany has ever before risen so high. Among Nigeria's animists only Beany has been able to stretch so far.”