You've grown very big! But your smile, it hasn't changed."
The final papers had been signed, and names were being called out. Young men came forward to receive their folded orange coveralls; these were the lucky ones.
The Man from the Graves called out to the
ibe
elders. "Is this one on the list?" he asked, referring to Nnamdi.
There was an embarrassed pause. Although Nnamdi's father was respected as a fisherman, a storyteller, and a healer of generators, he had married outside of clan lines, a woman from a lesser creek, a refugee from a village that had been reduced to rubble in the civil war and had never recovered. The
ibe
council hadn't even considered offering Nnamdi to the oil company.
"He's too small," they said.
"Small? Nonsense."
"Young. Too young, we mean to say."
"Hetgeen?
That's ridiculous. Put his name down." Then, back to Nnamdi, "Would you like to work for us?"
Nnamdi looked over at his father.
Oil company jobs were coveted. There were rumours of men from other villages whod been hired and were even now the subject of fantastical tales of wealth and lavish two-storey homes in Portako. An oil company job meant hard currency, health care, a wider world. Nnamdi's father felt the ground shift. His son would return with stories of his own to tell, would return with knowledge, would be able to advise the others on how best to deal with the
oyibos.
As the father, it was his decision to make.
"Well?" asked the Dutch man.
Nnamdi's father nodded.
And that is the Story of How a Smile Became a Shell Man.
CHAPTER 54
They came the next day, lining up the young men they had selected for a cursory medical exam: checking for ringworm, using tongue depressors and small lights to peer inside them, into throats and ears, examining scalps and eyes. No one was rejected. Instead, the young men of Nnamdi's village were loaded into the back of pickup trucks and driven away. Family and friends followed this slow-moving procession through the village, but the farewell was strangely subdued: no shouts, no celebrations. Not even sorrow.
Just the leaving.
A long bouncing ride along the Road to Nowhere took them through a chain-linked gate and then down to a pier where a passenger ferry lay waiting. The young men filed on board, into the hold, forming rows—but Nnamdi stayed up top. "It'll be choppy," the captain warned as he climbed past Nnamdi into the wheel-house. "Could get wet."
Nnamdi smiled. "I don't mind."
As the boat pushed off, Nnamdi leaned into the wind, eating air, feeling elated. Hed grown up amid the backwash of a distant sea, had watched that sea push its way into the mangrove swamps, had tasted the saltwater in its fish, had caught glimpses of something bigger between bends in the river. The village's fishing expeditions stayed close to shore and rarely skirted open water; there were too many dangers lurking about. But the boat Nnamdi was on now turned, followed a wide creek into a wider channel, and the sea ahead opened up in full view, like a heron spreading its wings.
The boat was pointed toward Bonny Island, a low silhouette nested in a cluster of lights. As they drew nearer, details emerged.
Squat blocks of grey took shape, revealed themselves to be storage cylinders. Metalwork towers coalesced from the mist. Low-throated oil tankers appeared, bellowing for crude.
They passed offshore oil platforms—floating cities of light—as rain began to spit and Bonny Island grew larger.
The boat cut its engines and swung wide to glide in. Nnamdi could see the security fences and watchtowers surrounding the massive storage cylinders with the shantytown squalor outside.
No tumbledown shacks for Nnamdi and the others, though. The boat slid through a gate and into a lock that closed behind them as another opened in front.
Bonny Island, at the mouth of the Delta, was the terminus of the Trans-Niger Pipeline. This was where all the threads came together, where the fuel was ladled into the empty holds of oil tankers.
Nnamdi would always remember that first chill of air conditioning. The a/c was like a
duwoi-yous
breath on his skin. He'd felt this brush of iced air before, from the refrigerators in the village market, where a wheezing generator had rattled and coughed, keeping drinks cooled and the bitter greens from wilting. In the sealed buildings of Bonny Island, though, the a/c was more than a mere whisper; it was all-enveloping. Stark hallways, smooth as glass. Tubes of light unclouded by insects. Bunk-bed dormitories and strange, textureless food served in compartmentalized trays.
No need for mosquito nets, because any mosquito that tried to find its way through the maze of hallways to the dorm-room bunk beds would have died from exhaustion before it arrived.
Stationed at Bonny Island, Nnamdi took motors apart and put them back together. He oiled bearings, cleaned cogs, replaced timing belts. The training wasn't much more than he'd already learned from watching his father coax yet another day of life out of the village's ailing generators.
The other young men from his village didn't fare as well. One by one, their ranks were winnowed down. One by one, they were pulled from mechanical training and placed in menial posts instead.
Some on guardhouse duty, others on janitorial. Some did nothing except sweep floors, all day long. Some were sent as far afield as Portako, where they mowed lawns at the homes of oil company executives or unloaded cargo from dock to bay and back again.
In Nnamdi, though, the oil men had recognized something more. He was the only one from his group to go through the entire training as promised. And after his stint at Bonny Island had finished, Nnamdi was placed on a seismic crew, hand-cranking augers into the muck, boring holes into wet earth, placing the charges and patting the mud down, then unravelling the fuse wires quickly, back-stepping toward cover, sweating heavily in the heat.
Oyibo
technicians set off the actual charges, explosions more felt than heard, as Nnamdi wiped his face and guzzled that strange bottled water, devoid of taste and colour.
Though the crew was far from Nnamdi's village, they were still deep in Ijaw territory and had to be protected by armed guards.
Mobs would gather at the blast sites, yelling death threats at
Nnamdi and the others in a dialect foreign to him. The intent was clear enough, though.
Traitors! We will find out where you live, we will track you down, we will kill you, kill your parents, kill your entire family.
The gunshots the guards fired overhead no longer made Nnamdi flinch.
After his tour of duty with the seismic crews had ended, Nnamdi was moved to a support station, where he kept the pumps lubricated and the diesel tanks filled. He learned new uses for old words.
Delta crude, he discovered, was prized because it was "sweet" and
"light." Catching a spray of crude oil in his mouth, he knew, was anything but sweet; having felt it soak through his coveralls and slide down his skin, he knew it wasn't light, either. Here, however,
sweet
meant "low in sulphur";
light
meant "smooth and easier to refine than the sandy guck elsewhere"—even Saudi crude, which, Nnamdi was told dismissively, was very "sticky." He knew full well how the oil slicks in the Delta coated everything they came into contact with, killing off lagoons and forming a heavy sludge along the tide lines. But in this mirror world he'd entered, the smooth thickness of the Delta crude made it a prize to be coveted.
The oil in the Delta was near the surface as well. Indeed, it sometimes bubbled out unbidden. "Don't have to dig deep pits to get at it," one of Nnamdi's
oyibo
instructors explained. "Just stick in a straw and out it comes. It's what we call ‘eco-friendly.'
In Europe, and in America, where I'm from, they have tough laws about environmental stuff." The instructor laughed. "We could never do there what we do here. Bonny Light is very popular. It's a cleaner crude; that's why they go crazy for it back home."
Nnamdi continued his upward climb through the ranks, was promoted to a field crew, riding on fast-chopping speedboats under heavy guard, tacking into side creeks and tributaries, tracing the pipelines back to the wellheads and pump stations, climbing ladders to run diagnostics. Simple enough work, checking pressure and flow, ticking off a set list of boxes. There were pink faces everywhere, and Nnamdi was often presented as if he were a prized possession. "From some backwater village in the outer creeks, no less, and look how he performs!"
At night, lying on his cot in the company dorm, Nnamdi would fall into dreams of pepper soup and moonlight tales, would wake with the taste of both on his tongue.
And all the while, he was amassing money. Lots of it. Enough to pour a proper cement floor for his parents' house, perhaps bring in a new generator so his father wouldn't have to keep jerry-rigging the old one, maybe a great fat refrigerator for his mother to stock with Fanta and shaved ice to sell to the village. She could use the income to buy a bright new headwrap and a giant pot for pepper stew and maybe a goat to kill and a new radio, one that wasn't hand-cranked but ran off a car battery, all that and a Sunday suit for his father, for when his mother dragged him to church, and a soccer ball for the schoolyard. Nnamdi would drift into sleep on those thoughts, smiling.
But then the river caught fire, and that changed everything.
CHAPTER 55
Like the other fishermen in his village, Nnamdi's father had been forced to fish in the swampy side creeks where the brackish waters held predators and parasites. On one such trip, his net got snagged on something submerged and he slipped while trying to unhook it.
He came up sputtering, pulled himself back onto his canoe, swiped the muddy water from his eyes.
That was all it took.
A thin worm uncoiled inside his blood, worked its way up into his optic nerve. First he went blind, then he went mad, then he got lost, and then he drowned.
The oil company had given Nnamdi time off and he'd hurried home, catching rides on a series of progressively smaller boats. He ran from the dock to his house, arrived to find his mother outside praying to the angels and
orumo
alike.
Nnamdi's father was sitting alone in the dark.
"Nnamdi?" his father whispered in a voice not his own. "Is that you?"
"It is, Papa."
Nnamdi's father fumbled for something: a fishing spike, the dim light catching the metal. He held it out for his son to take.
"Quickly. Before the
orumo
find out. Tell your mother I went mad and attacked you, tell her that you had no choice. Hurry, Nnamdi.
A final favour for your father. This story has taken a bad turn; help me end it."
But Nnamdi couldn't, he couldn't. "I will buy you medicine, Papa. I will find a cure, I will return." But there was no medicine, there was no cure, and Nnamdi would not return. Not in time to save anyone.
CHAPTER 56
Back at Bonny Island, freighters with bellies as large as lagoons were lining up for Delta crude even as Nnamdi's father was buried in the village churchyard. His father's favourite wife threw herself on the dirt, sobbed until her chest ached. Nnamdi cried as well, calling out
"Egberiyo!"
again and again.
Those who die childless were wrapped in a plain mat and buried without a funeral meal served in their honour; they were sent into the afterlife hungry and alone. It was a tragedy beyond repair, to be buried childless, for without descendants you would never become an ancestor. No one would remember you, a
teme
lost between wombs, wandering in a daze through the Village of the Dead.
"I only gave your father one child," Nnamdi's mother said, speaking her Ijaw dialect. "Thanks to Jesus, it was enough. He doesn't have to go into the darkness unfed." But of course, she didn't say Jesus, not in Ijaw.
Nnamdi had purchased a refrigerator for his mother, had brought it in from Portako by boat, with a goat as well, but there was no longer any need for Sunday clothes for his father.
Nnamdi walked out to the shrine his father had kept at the edge of the forest. He swept the floor, sprinkled palm wine out front. He left for Bonny Island the next day, but he never arrived because by then the river was burning.
Crude oil had been spilling into the creeks beyond the lagoon for more than a week, spraying a mist of fuel that slicked the waters surface, light and sweet. A faulty valve, heat from a circuit, and the river burned for days, burned even after crews had managed to reroute the flow. You could see the flames against the underbelly of sky, the black wall of smoke spilling its ink across the sun. The river burned and burned, and when it was done burning, only blackened stumps and charred mangroves remained. Bodies, too.
After the river burned, there was a lull, part mourning, part planning. This was followed by a series of high-speed attacks.
Across the Delta, flow stations and oil platforms were seized and foreign workers taken captive. A rocket launcher split one pipeline open; when emergency crews arrived, they were ambushed and then ransomed back to the oil company. When the next pipeline was ruptured, the oil companies let it bleed.
In Port Harcourt, bandana-masked gunmen swarmed a brothel, taking expat oil workers hostage. They hustled their captives into the street, only to run into a police battalion; a gun battle followed, with officers and militants exchanging blind fire through the warren-like streets of the Down Below slums.
The oil companies pulled back behind secure facilities, closed down remote posts, sealed off several pipelines, and placed their foreign workers under "house arrest" in living compounds behind high walls in the restricted zones of Port Harcourt. Workers were airlifted to safety as oil production in the Delta squeezed shut like a constricted aorta, driving production down. The price of oil spiked on the world market. On the other side of the globe, tar sands operations rumbled back to life, began chewing up the oil-rich soil again. From Lauras window, she could see the cranes turning faster and faster.
