Indigo (19 page)

Now that the man's shirt was clean he seemed not to want to wrap his arms around the log again, and the log was too heavy for him to hold at arm's length. There was a screen door too, and though the main back door stayed open, the screen door wanted to swing shut on its spring. Jerry couldn't remember having seen a screen door in Africa before, but the way it had banged shut when the man came out had startled him, taking him all the way back to summers in Oregon, where screen doors banged all the time.

Pamela said, “Let's give him a hand,” and when they walked over to the man, she held the screen door while Jerry and Bramwell helped him bully the log through the door and into his workshop. They put the log up on a long table, letting it roll into a worn groove.

Though the man had seemed large before, he now looked thin and muscular, like the laborers and janitors at the school. He was bald, like LeRoY BaLoGuN, but where LeRoY had a smile that changed him completely, this man's mouth fell naturally down. His room was smaller than LeRoY's, but it was as busy. Wood sculptures stood along the floor and hanging on the walls were several chain saws, gas operated and rusty as the outside gate.

Pamela spoke with a scolding tone in her voice. “This is it, isn't it, Ben?” she said. She pointed to the log they had just carried in. “It was today you were supposed to finish but it is today that you are going to begin.”

Pamela turned to Jerry. “There it is,” she said. “Inside that log somewhere is your Christmas gift.”

Though Pamela was upset, Jerry felt pleased. There really was a Christmas gift; she hadn't lied. He wondered when she had arranged the gift, and he worried that perhaps she truly hadn't done it on her own, but he said, “I don't mind waiting, either here or in Lagos if it takes too long.”

Jerry took a closer look at the finished sculptures that stood at the edges of the room. Some were like totem poles, some trees of life, while others looked like traffic accidents in the Lagos night, abstract tragedies that made something inside him ache. They were all quite fine and he wanted one of his own.

The artist watched him as he looked, finally saying, “I like to split my wood roughly so that the early cuts are accidental. Like the Europeans did when chopping up Africa. I like to echo that in my work.”

This was political art, and as Jerry looked at it he imagined a chain saw making its cuts, pieces falling out, chips flying away. Most of the finished work was highly abstract. Some of it looked vaguely human, but the one he was most drawn to resembled the roots of a tree, as if the roots were in the log and the artist's job was only to expose them, to cut away the surrounding wood until the roots were visible again.

Jerry looked at the uncut log on the table. “When will mine be done?” he asked, but before the man could answer LeRoY stuck his head into the room.

“It's time for dinner,” he said. Pamela and Bramwell left the room quickly then, but Jerry stayed a while with Ben. He wanted to examine the log, but he was also disturbed by the fact that when LeRoY had spoken, he had thought, for an instant, that it was Jules. And his first impulse had been to scold, to say that dinner could wait and that Jules could wait too, standing by the dining table in the other room.

It was time for dinner all right, but it wasn't served as Jules would have served it. Since the whole house was given over to artists' workshops, there was no proper kitchen, so they all followed LeRoY out the front gate and onto the country road again.

By this time it had grown utterly dark. There wasn't a Christmas moon, and once the gate was closed there were no lights coming from the compound. They could hear a chain saw, though, starting out loud and then lowering its voice as it burped into the uncut wood.

“Eating here is haphazard under any circumstances,” LeRoY said, “but this is an occasion. When we have guests we try to do it well.”

LeRoY was walking fast, and Pamela took Jerry's sleeve, pulling him into the darkness in front of Bramwell, who took up the rear. “I forgot my torch,” LeRoY said, but in a minute they saw candlelight coming from the side of the road, the wider glow of a camp lantern at the bottom of a gentle hill. There was a building there too, with an awning and a few tables in front of it. Off to the side was the firefly flicker of a neighborhood, small lights here and there, like tears in the black blanket of a sky.

“This is the People's Canteen,” said LeRoY, “and there, behind it, is Beany's own home village, the one he came out of to put things right.”

By the time they had descended to the People's Canteen, they could see quite well. And though it had been quiet on the road, music was now easy to hear, a poorly recorded kind of Afro-pop coming from the single speaker of a tape player.

Beneath the People's Canteen awning, next to a scarred old chalkboard with the menu written on it, a couple of tables had been pushed together. Two men and two women sat at the tables, and three more women, employees of the People's Canteen, were swaying around, sashaying in a kind of embarrassed greeting, in time to the music that they heard. There were other customers too, peering in from tables difficult to see, dotting the dirt at the edges of the awning and off into the dark.

“It was either here or the Club One,” LeRoY said. “They are eating fish at the Club One tonight.”

At the People's Canteen they were eating chicken-and-pepper soup, and those waiting at their table had already ordered for everybody. Three of the other artists from the house were there as well as an ancient-looking woman from the nearby town.

Once they were seated LeRoY ordered beer, calling out the names of Nigerian beers as if he were bidding on something at an auction. “Gulder, Star, Harp, Gold.” Pamela ordered a shandy for herself and for Bramwell a Coke. The old woman held a glass of palm wine in her hand.

When the drinks came the waitress opened everyone's beer, then placed the caps back on the bottles to guard against flies getting in, and as she did so Jerry looked at those sitting around him at the table. One man was a painter and another worked with bronze, he had been told that much. The only woman among them was a fabric dyer, a worker in batiks, who was dressed wonderfully well, her beautiful face smiling out from under a headwrap of indigos and blue. But what else? Were these the country's leading artists sitting here, and were they somehow attached to Beany and his plan? And what was there about this strange Christmas Day that continued to keep Jerry at odds with his own plan to pick up his Christmas gift and then get away?

Jerry was seated next to the old woman, whom no one had introduced, but who nevertheless sat easily among them, her hands wrapped around that palm wine glass. Pamela and the fabric dyer were sitting on her other side. They were both beautiful women, both young and well poised. Jerry was terribly drawn to Pamela, but he liked the look of this fabric dyer too. The old woman, however, was a visual roadblock between them, and seeing her made him think about the passage of time. He was fifty-seven, Charlotte was long dead, and these young women would become like this old one in the bat of an eye.

Jerry wondered if the old woman had once been beautiful. Her eyes were wide and clear even now, but her skin, though smooth about her forehead and nose, was so wrinkled around her cheeks and chin that she looked like two women stuck together, an old one and a younger one mixed, age creeping up from below. Also her hair seemed planted backward, black at its roots but white where the strands all met to form a frosty forest at the top.

“I've never tried palm wine,” Jerry said. He had leaned over and was trying to speak to the old woman. “I've seen men tapping the trees but I've never tasted the stuff myself.”

When he spoke the woman let her eyes rest on him in an incurious way. “Are you my brother?” she asked.

Pamela, who was closest on the woman's other side, put a hand on her arm. “No, dear,” she said, “this man is white. Your brothers are all black.”

LeRoY, who was on his left, touched Jerry's arm the way Pamela had the woman's. “She likes to sit quietly,” he said, “it is best to let her do it.”

“But who is she?” Jerry asked, and though the fabric dyer was three seats away, it was she who answered his question. “This is the great man's mother,” she said, “Bramwell's grandmom. Nurudeen's too.”

LeRoY had wanted the meal to be an occasion, but the old woman's presence was making everything tentative. It was she who owned the house in which they all worked, but she didn't live there and she rarely came to the People's Canteen, so they didn't see her often. She had another house in the village and she liked to stay there better, to hold a kind of crazy court in front of the house, to receive her son there whenever he came to call.

“I have a son who will lead Nigeria one day,” the woman told Jerry. “Do you know him?”

Jerry said that he did, but just then the food came and soon thereafter the music got louder, so it was difficult to talk. When the beer was finished LeRoY ordered more, and when Jerry's food was only about half gone the fabric dyer surprised him greatly by coming around behind him and asking him to dance. He had a mouth full of chicken but he looked around. “I don't see any place to dance,” he said.

The fabric dyer pointed to a space over by the People's Canteen's main door. Someone had placed a piece of linoleum down on the dirt there, an American-style kitchen floor. “With music like this I can't sit still,” she said.

Jerry had been enjoying his food and didn't want to let it get cold, but he nevertheless soon found himself standing and actually walking away with this girl, who was swaying like the waitresses, the indigo bunch of her skirt already rhythmic as she walked.

Had Jerry been asked to do so, he would have called the music they were dancing to “reggae,” but in truth it was not. The specific tune was called the “Lagos Jump,” and it probably belonged under the general musical heading of High Life. It was an up-tempo, cheerful tune, and at the chorus, which was “Lagos, Lagos jump!” Jerry found himself following the fabric dyer up into the air in a kind of hop. Soon the bronze man was on his feet with Pamela, Lagos-jumping his way over to the kitchen floor, and soon after that other Lagos-jumpers came out of the shadows, men and women from the village, perhaps, or from Onitsha, which was only a few miles away.

Jerry was amazed at himself but quickly came to believe that dancing made his troubles, the real difficulty of his life, seem distant, and he understood that as much as anything he needed a psychological break, a hiatus from the constant worry of his recent days. Just as quickly, however, he began to tire and to jump badly, a gangly kind of North American jump. And as he got worse, the fabric dyer got better. He could see her body moving under her dress like a tongue inside a cheek, her round parts coming out and then receding, showing themselves and then falling back again.

The old woman came onto the dance floor by herself. She wasn't jumping, but began coasting among the dancers, her clear eyes and smooth forehead bobbing up and down. Perhaps Jerry was affected by the fabric dyer's body beneath her dress or by constantly dwelling on Pamela, but the sagging portion of the old woman's face, her sloshing jowls and chin, soon began coming up over the smooth parts, and he was reminded of the head of a penis, covered and uncovered by the folds of its foreskin. Even her hair, dark at its roots the way it was, seemed in favor of it, accepting her head in a pubic sort of way and making Jerry turn away in wild embarrassment.

Mercifully, the song ended then. The fabric dyer fell briefly against Jerry's chest, then pushed herself away. “You are a good Lagos-jumper,” she said. “When I asked you I was certain that you would refuse.”

Jerry wanted to speak to her pleasantly, but the old woman was quickly next to them, surprising them both by placing a hand over the fabric dyer's where it rested on Jerry's arm. She pulled herself up and blew a steady stream of air onto Jerry's face and neck. Her eyes were contorted when she blew, and the fabric dyer jumped back out of the way of the older woman's wind.

Jerry was suddenly so sure that this old woman knew the thoughts he'd had about the look of her face and head that he began to apologize, though the image was so bizarre that he could barely acknowledge having had it himself. But just then another song started, this time real reggae, and the old woman suddenly floated off again. As soon as she was gone the fabric dyer—Sondra was her name—reclaimed Jerry's arm. She smiled up at him nervously and said, “I think she was trying to make you disappear.”

Pamela and the bronze man had already resumed dancing. This time, since the tune was slow, the dancers touched, and as Jerry watched the bronze man put his arm around Pamela, he felt the fabric dyer, he felt Sondra, put her arms around him. “Perhaps I will make you a shirt,” she said. She then leaned into him and they were quiet for the remaining three or four minutes of the song.

Back at the table the pepper soup was cold, but the chicken was still tasty, so Jerry continued eating while the others listened to the old woman talk in a language he couldn't understand.

Jerry felt a little proprietary about Pamela. The bronze man had changed chairs after the dance, was now sitting next to Pamela where Sondra had previously been. LeRoY was in Jerry's old chair, presumably so that he could listen to the old woman, and Jerry was in LeRoY's chair, with Sondra now on his other side. It was complicated, but since Sondra was thè only Nigerian too far away from the conversation to join in, Jerry tried to talk to her. He nodded toward the old woman. “If she's Beany's mother why is she living here?” he asked. “Why isn't she living in Lagos with her son?”

Sondra gave him a look that said, “Who would want to live in Lagos if they could live here?” but what she finally did say was a good deal more interesting than that. “This is her home,” she said, “and she lives here like a queen. She is the juju mistress of the entire region—everyone comes to her with their problems.”