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  DAWN CRACKED OVER THE forest. The sun rose slowly, an orange yolk floating into an albumen sky. He was hungry. Beside him, Yẹmi was starting to doze when the young man with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder walked into view and began to urinate, his back turned to them. Chike left Yẹmi and crept up to the man, who had squatted to defecate.

  “I am officer of the Nigerian Army. You are under arrest. Hand over your gun. Do not turn. I said do not turn. Throw your gun on the ground and stand up with your hands behind your head.”

  “How do I know you have a gun?”

  “I should shoot?”

  “My people are close.”

  “So are mine.”

  “Chike.” The man stiffened at the sound of Yẹmi’s voice and dropped his gun on the ground.

  “Stand up. Slowly.”

  “Can I pull up my trousers?”

  There was a foreign tang to his speech, something in his diction striving to be American.

  “He fit take us to the road,” Yẹmi said.

  “We’re trying to get to the main road.”

  “I wanna see you first.”

  “You can turn. Slowly.”

  It was a boy, not a man, just leaving his teenage years. His eyes were deeply planted in his face, giving him a starved look, but the rest of his features were regular. A furrow ran along the middle of his forehead, a crevice that deepened when he looked beyond and saw no signs of a Nigerian army.

  “If I refuse?”

  “We go shoot you. You think say we be soldier for nothing?”

  To the best of Chike’s knowledge, Yẹmi had never shot a living thing, but his bravura was convincing.

  “If you lead us into a trap, we will still kill you before your friends get to us,” Chike said, adding his own threat.

  “No, no. I was going to the road myself anyway.”

  “Your name?” Chike asked as the militant led them into the undergrowth, his gun a few inches from the boy’s spine.

  “Fineboy.”

  “Na which kind name be that?”

  “Na my mama give me,” Fineboy said, for the first time dropping his accent and sliding into pidgin.

  4

  CHIKE HAD GROWN ACCUSTOMED to the back of their hostage’s head, his thin neck, the pulpy scar behind his ear, the scattering of razor bumps on his otherwise smooth hairline, clipped within the last few days, in a militant camp no less. Perhaps, as well as a barber, the militants had cinemas and shopping malls.

  The militants said they were fighting for compensation for the millions of gallons of crude that had gushed out of the ground since the 1950s, when a Shell-BP drill struck oil in “commercial quantities,” the magic phrase that would draw the French, the Dutch, the Chinese to this small corner of Nigeria, destroying the land and water from which the Niger Deltans gained their livelihood. The government called the militants criminals who spent their days hacking into pipelines and causing oil spills, kidnapping petroleum engineers, and smoking insensible amounts of weed.

  If he were a civilian, Chike would have had sympathies, would have tried to puzzle out the rights and wrongs of each side, but his military training disposed him to neutrality. It was for politicians to decide who they fought and why, which causes were just and which were not. Soldiers dealt in orders alone, and it was because the colonel’s orders were illegal that he and Yẹmi were wandering through the bush now, following this young man who might or might not be leading them into an ambush. He was thirsty, almost deliriously so. The sun was now high in the sky and still no sign of the road.

  “Halt,” Chike said. “In which direction is the road? North, south, east.”

  “I don’t know. I just know how to get there.”

  “We’ll kill you if you’re leading us into a trap. I swear it. Your water. Please.”

  He had just noticed the plastic bottle tucked into the rebel’s belt.

  “Please? When you’re pointing a gun in my face?”

  Chike took four sips, letting the water sit in his mouth before swallowing. It was warm with a back taste of petrol. The oil seeped into everything in this place. His first urge was to spit it out. He passed the bottle to Yẹmi.

  “Don’t finish it. Do you have anything to eat?” Chike asked their hostage. The boy put his hand to his pocket and Chike followed the movement with his gun.

  “What the hell? You asked me for food and I’m getting it.”

  The boy drew out a black polyethylene bag and then a newspaper-wrapped bundle from within it.

  “Smoked fish. Maybe the last fish in the Niger Delta.”

  Chike saw the longing in Yẹmi’s face.

  “We’ll take a short break.”

  They sat on the ground and the boy placed the fish between them. They all three stared at the white flesh, charred and blackened on the outside.

  “You think it’s poisoned.” The boy smiled, showing even teeth. He took fish in his fingers and shoved it in his mouth. “More for me.”

  The fish was dry but flavorsome. Beside him, Chike could hear the workings of Yẹmi’s jaw as he ate the flesh and then the slivers of silvery bone.

  “So what are you two running away from?”

  “Na who say we dey run?” Yẹmi asked.

  “Soldier man wey lost for bush, no dey find fellow soldier. Dey look road. Looks like desertion to me.”

  “We want a change,” Chike said. “What about you? You’re young to be a militant.”

  “My juniors are back at camp. Don’t look at me as a small boy.”

  “Explain something,” Chike said. “How will kidnapping oil workers bring roads to the Delta?”

  “How will soldiers here bring peace? Money from our oil has built every infrastructure you see in Nigeria and yet we, the owner of the oil, don’t have hospital, schools, roads. When I was a child, you dip your hand in the water and you pluck out fish. Now everything is destroyed from oil spill. We didn’t start with violence but no one wants to hear the way of peace so the people have chosen war.”

  They were borrowed words, the manifestos of others delivered with a conviction that would have been catching if Chike had been a journalist or a person passing briefly through the Delta. But he had seen the villagers harassed by militants and soldiers alike, just wanting to be left alone.

  “The people have chosen?”

  “Of course. We could not keep up the struggle without them. They feed us, their sons join us, they even send their women. You should see how many of these girls want our babies. Just yesterday, one came out of a tree and opened her legs.”

  There was a loud rustling above them. It startled the soldiers to their feet and they took aim with their guns.

  5

  WHENEVER CHIKE DESCRIBED WHAT happened next, he began by saying it was mythical. Not like the silvery European myths of winged men and wood sprites but like the denser African myths of living trees that devoured human sacrifice.

  He saw a girl appearing as if from the tree itself, her legs sprouting from the bole, her arms from the branches, her hair a compost of twigs and leaves. He heard Yẹmi release the safety on his rifle.

  “Hold fire!”

  She was running, upon them and past them, straight into Fineboy, plowing him to the ground. She struck him, with her elbows, with her hands, straddling him like a wrestler, her trousers fitted to slim legs, too thin surely to keep a man pinned under her weight. Fineboy cried out in a tangled stream that was rising in pitch. It would not do for them to be discovered.

  “Cover me,” he said to Yẹmi.

  Chike dropped his rifle by the private. Then he approached and took the girl by the elbow, dragging her halfway to her feet. Fineboy lunged, catching her on the right side of her face, and in a grotesque reversal, she fell to the ground. Chike held him back but it was too late. The strange girl had fainted.

  “SHE DON WAKE O,” Yẹmi said. “Oya make we dey go.”

  They had lost time waiting for the girl to come around. Even now she was conscious, sh
e seemed too weak to stand. Chike stood over her, looking down on her face. She was very dark, black as crude. Her lips were dry, whitened strips of skin standing out on them.

  “Are you all right? Bring the bottle,” he said to Yẹmi.

  “Don’t give my water to that bitch.”

  She flinched at the rebel’s voice.

  “That’s enough from you.”

  The girl took the bottle from Yẹmi and poured the water down her throat without pause for breath, slurping until the empty bottle contracted from the pressure. Chike was standing over her, he realized, in a way that she might find threatening, a gun slung over his shoulder, his hand resting on the stock. He stepped back.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Isoken.”

  “Where’s your home?”

  “I’m lost.”

  “But your village. Where are you from?”

  “I came from Lagos with my parents. To my mother’s village. It’s somewhere in this bush.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “I don’t know. There was fighting near our village. We ran but my mum was too slow. She’s ill. That’s why she came back home. For the local medicine.”

  “Is that how you got separated? When you were running?”

  “I left them. My dad said I should go. That he would stay with my mum. My dad is a hairdresser. He does his work in Lagos but none of the women in the village would let him do their hair. They said they can’t put their head between a man’s laps. He taught me how to do hair. Any style you want.”

  “How long ago was—”

  “While you’re asking twenty-one questions,” the rebel said, “find out why she attacked me.”

  “You.” She gathered saliva in her mouth and spat in a clean arc. “If I hadn’t been wearing jeans.”

  “If you hadn’t been wearing jeans what?”

  “You would have raped me.”

  The revelation slipped easily from her mouth.

  “Are you crazy? Do I look like somebody that needs to rape girls? Me. Fineboy.”

  “Hold him back,” Chike said to Yẹmi.

  “I was in a tree yesterday evening,” the girl said, turning to him. “I had been walking the whole day, trying to get back to the village, but I was tired. I dozed off. When I fell, I hurt my back and I couldn’t move. There was a group and he was in the group. They attacked me. They beat me, see my face, but they couldn’t get what they wanted because of my trousers. He said I offered myself to them. It’s a lie. I’m still a virgin.”

  The rebel was stepping forward again despite Yẹmi’s gun aimed at his chest.

  “Who dash you virgin? See this prostitute.”

  “Your mother is a prostitute.”

  The boy charged past Yẹmi. Chike fired in the air, a single clear shot that resounded in the bush.

  “You. Stand back and put your hands behind your head. That’s how you’re walking from now on. Hands behind your head, I said. Yẹmi, if he lowers them, shoot him. Isoken,” he said, turning to her last, “we must go. We just waited to see that you’re all right.”

  “You have to arrest him. Are you not a soldier?”

  “Soldiers don’t arrest people. That’s for the police. We must be leaving. Anyone could have heard that shot.”

  “They’ll find me, then. Let me come with you. Where are you going?”

  “Yenagoa.”

  “I have an uncle in Yenagoa.”

  “She go slow us down,” Yẹmi said.

  Chike gave Isoken his hand and helped her to her feet. “You’ll walk between me and Private Ọkẹ.”

  6

  “THANK YOU,” CHIKE SAID to Fineboy when they got to the road. It was narrow, barely wide enough for two cars, but it would take them to Yenagoa.

  He flagged down the first bus he saw. It listed to one side from the weight of yams strapped to its roof. The other passengers were thin and hard-looking, their clothes threadbare and ill-fitting. There was a smell of toil in the bus, of sweat and labor in fields whose yields had decreased since the oil companies arrived. A woman with withered lips stared at Yẹmi’s camouflage trousers. She looked away when she caught Chike’s eye.

  The four of them squeezed into a backseat designed for two, Fineboy suddenly deciding that he wanted to see his mother in Yenagoa.

  “Don’t let him sit next to me,” Isoken said when the militant started to climb in after her. Chike placed himself between the two of them. Isoken’s body was warm, almost febrile in its heat. Chike could feel her knee against his thigh. Once he shifted in his seat and his hand brushed her arm. She shrank, her elbows contracting onto her stomach, and there they remained until they reached Bayelsa’s capital. Yenagoa was more town than city, a settlement of dwarf houses, roofs level with the raised road. Billboards were particularly effective in this stunted landscape, malaria drugs, Alomo Bitters, Coca-Cola, Durex, Indomie, Winners School, and churches, plenty of them. Evangelists, pastors, apostles, prophets, and bishops beamed down, inviting Chike to Amazing Grace Ministry, Fire Fall Down Tabernacle, Jehovah Always on Time Assembly. The air above Yenagoa must be thick with prayer, petitions flying and colliding on their way to heaven.

  At the bus park Isoken stood blinking in the sun. She was just about a woman. It would not have been long since she was asking “Mother, may I?” in a backyard. There was still something of the child about her cheeks and the way she balled her fists into her eyes when Chike asked, “Can you get to your uncle’s house from here?”

  “I only know the address. Plot Sixteen, Dongaro Road. We went just once. We stopped there on the way to the village.”

  “Please tell her how to get there,” Chike said to Fineboy.

  “Or what? You’ll shoot me?”

  They had abandoned their guns in the bush, taking out the cartridges.

  “I can have you arrested for your time spent in the creeks.”

  “I’ll deny it.”

  “The word of a Nigerian officer against yours.”

  He expected the boy to see through him. Two soldiers deserting were in no position to threaten arrest. Instead, he kicked his foot in the soil.

  “The place is not far,” Fineboy said in words shorn of every trace of an accent.

  THE BUILDINGS ON DONGARO Road had not seen fresh paint in years. The road was worn in many places, the thin asphalt stripped to the red earth beneath.

  “This is the place. His flat is on the ground floor,” Isoken said, in front of a house streaked brown with rain tracks.

  “Should we come with you?” Chike asked.

  “Please.”

  THERE WERE CHICKENS IN the yard, a mother hen with a troop of grey chicks marching in line behind her. A car stood rotting in the sun, propped on four cement blocks, its tires, mirrors, and fenders long gone to a younger model. The uncle was sitting outside on a bench, fat with adolescent breasts that showed through his worn singlet, a raffia fan idle in his hand.

  “Isoken, is that you?”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “What are you doing with these soldiers? Have you brought trouble to my house?”

  “No, Uncle.”

  Briefly Isoken told what had happened to her hometown, saying nothing of the attempted rape. Hers could not be the village Colonel Benatari had torched. That had been in the evening.

  “Wonders shall never cease,” the uncle kept saying, as if his niece had come from the bush to thrill him with anecdotes.

  “Come and sit next to me.”

  She sat at the end of the bench, but the uncle moved towards her and put an arm around her, his hand resting on her stomach where her shirt stopped and her jeans began.

  “Officers, how can I thank you for bringing back my daughter to me?”

  Isoken remained rigid in his embrace.

  “No thanks are necessary,” Chike said. “We’re just doing our job.”

  “At least tell me your names so that I can remember you in my prayers.”

  “Chike.”


  “Yẹmi.”

  “And you?” Isoken’s uncle said, looking at the militant. Why had Fineboy come into the compound? He had seen this kind of fatuous curiosity in the lower ranks. Before the boy could give his absurd name, a man appeared in the door of the flat, addressing the uncle in a language Chike did not understand, the words locking into each other without space, like pieces in a jigsaw. Their exchange was short. It seemed heated until the uncle laughed and the man returned into the flat. “Officers, don’t mind my business partner. Will you take something to drink?”

  “No, we must be on our way,” Chike said.

  “Goodbye, Brother Chike,” Isoken said to him. “Thank you.”

  Chike had never had a sibling and the filial title pleased him. Outside the gate, he noticed the smirk on the rebel’s face.

  “What are you smiling at?”

  “From frying pan to fire.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something her uncle said.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure. He was speaking Kalabari.”

  “Tell me what you heard.”

  “He said she was ripe.”

  “For what?”

  “I think sex.”

  THE UNCLE’S HAND STILL rested on Isoken’s stomach when they returned to the compound. Chike swung his arms stiffly as he walked towards them, a reminder of his military status. The chickens scattered at their second entrance, darting behind the old car in a streak of clucking feathers.

  “Please, sir, will you allow your niece to escort us to the end of the road?”

  They could take the girl by force but he preferred to try a ruse first. He did not know how many “business partners” this uncle might have.

  “Officer, my niece is tired.”

  “Please, Uncle, my parents would want me to see off these people that helped me.”

  “It would only be to the end of the road,” Chike added.

  “OK. But don’t be too long. You need to rest.”