Talk to A. Igoni Barrett on the Fictionville blog
On a night so dark that rats breastfed their litter out in the open, two friends, Kozi and Saamekpe, decided to execute a plan that had been in the offing for two years. They met at the appointed hour in Saamekpe’s house, and, after downing a dram apiece from the bottle of gin that Saamekpe’s father only approached when the ancestors were to be summoned, they set off. It was a short distance from Saamekpe’s house to their destination. The streets were deserted.
Darkness hung like a pall over the city. A citywide blackout had been in effect for the past three days, this partly a consequence of the five-week long fuel shortage that the nation was reeling under. As the friends crept through the resounding silence of empty streets, the silhouettes of abandoned cars and the sleeping houses lunged at them like fugitives from the netherworld of imagination. They hurried through the blackness, their shoes scuffing the road, their hands brushing now and again in the darkness, as if by mistake. They made no effort to break the silence that hung about them like a chaperon. It was a cold night.
It was Saamekpe who first recognized the looming signpost. In daytime the sign read ‘RIVOIL PETROLEUM’— but on this night it just hung umbra-like against the skyline. Saamekpe, however, had no trouble identifying it: it was his father’s filling station.
The friends approached the low railing that ran round the perimeter. Saamekpe, with a confidence born of the knowledge that the night guard was contracted to resume duties only as from midnight, leaped lightly over the barrier. Kozi, who was heavier of build, and also had a polio-stricken, foreshortened leg, clambered after him.
‘Let’s make some money,’ Saamekpe said, rubbing his hands. Then he set off at a trot for the bushes that bordered one end of the filling station. Kozi followed in his wake, all the while throwing backward glances that never advanced beyond his nose.
The friends forged into the thick bushes, stamping their feet to alert any vermin lurking in their path. They wrestled out the empty oil drum that Saamekpe had hidden there earlier in the day. Then, with Saamekpe leading the way, they headed for the metal trapdoor that secured the mouth of a subterranean tank. Although there were several such reservoirs situated in different corners of the filling station, Saamekpe was one of the three people who were privy to the knowledge that it was only this reservoir he chose whose store of petrol hadn’t been expended.
They set down the drum beside the trapdoor. Saamekpe reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a bunch of keys. Squatting down, he unlocked the trapdoor and threw it open. The smell of petrol rushed out at him like a blast from a lion’s maw. Saamekpe rubbed his hands with glee.
Peering into the drum, Kozi asked, ‘Where is the doro?’
‘What doro?’ Saamekpe replied, entranced by the cavern that yawned beneath him.
‘The doro we’ll use to fetch the stuff...’
‘Shit!’ Saamekpe burst out, punching his palm.
‘You forgot?’
‘Yes... Aw shit!’
‘Lower your voice,’ Kozi cautioned, then began to pace around the empty drum.
The plan, which the two friends had drawn up when Saamekpe’s father first opened the filling station two years ago, had been honed to perfection by time. But no urgency attended its execution until the fuel shortage, appearing with the suddenness of a natural disaster, struck the country a paralyzing blow. Pouncing on the opportunity presented by this catastrophe, the petroleum retailers began to hoard their supplies. Within a few days of this wholesale chicanery coming into effect, the prize of petrol on the black market sextupled.
As petrol had overnight become a more valuable resource than gold and foreign exchange, the black market tsars, reacting like all capitalists to the pull of market forces, withdrew their goons from the street-corner soliciting and dispatched them to the four corners of a petro-famished country to buy, beg or steal every drop of the precious commodity. As a consequence, the highways soon gained a reputation akin to the Bermuda Triangle’s: whole tanker-loads of petrol began to vanish off the face of the earth. Soon, not even the most intrepid drivers would venture onto the highways except in veritable armadas. This made for an epileptic delivery of a commodity whose supply was already inadequate, and further exacerbated a bad situation. Abandoned vehicles lined the roadsides of cities like flotsam after an oil slick.
But back to the two friends: one slip had turned the perfect crime into a perfect debacle.
‘For want of a nail the barrel is lost,’ sighed Saamekpe, rising from his crouch beside the open reservoir.
‘Shut up, you bloody fool!’ hissed Kozi as he stomped past for the umpteenth time in his circuit of the drum. His limp had grown more noticeable with the rise of a seething rage. There was nothing for it: their induction into the criminal fraternity had to be postponed by another day.
‘No use remaining here,’ said Kozi, grinding to a halt beside Saamekpe. He threw a regretful glance at the open tank. ‘You better lock that up. Let’s leave before the guard comes.’
‘Ok,’ said Saamekpe, jumping to it. As he bent over to draw the trapdoor shut there was a clink of metal, and then, after a long, long silence, a distant splash. He straightened up, a dazed slowness to his movements.
‘The keys have fallen in the tank,’ he said.
‘They what?’ exclaimed Kozi, raising his voice in spite of himself. ‘The whole bunch? Oh you...’
Saamekpe raised his hands in self-defense as Kozi flung himself at him; or he thought he did, until he opened his eyes and found Kozi flat on the ground at his feet.
‘Get down!’ Kozi hissed at him, tugging at his trouser cuffs. ‘Get down – police!’
Saamekpe dropped like a pole-axed mule. The police patrol van, its headlights dimmed, approached the filling station at a crawl. It purred past without stopping. Kozi only raised his head from the ground when the sound of the car’s engine had faded into the nothingness of the night. Saamekpe, however, was still whispering prayers into the dust.
‘Are they gone?’ he asked when Kozi tapped him on the shoulder. ‘They didn’t see us, I think?’ he said as he scrambled to his feet.
Ignoring his questions, Kozi said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ He headed for the drum.
‘What about the tank?’ Saamekpe asked. ‘They’ll know it’s me when they miss the keys in the morning. My father, that man – he’ll kill me. I’m in real trouble this time.’
‘What do you want me to say? The keys are gone, they’re gone.’ Kozi grasped the drum by the rim and tilted it. ‘Grab the other end,’ he ordered, ‘let’s get this out of sight.’
They lifted the drum and headed for the bushes. Their footsteps echoed in the silence of the night. Their breathing grew ragged. Then Saamekpe had a brainwave.
‘What if we look round for a rope,’ he said, his voice vibrant with a desperate hope, ‘and you tie it to my leg and lower me into the tank. I think I can find the key. What do you think?’
‘Lower you into a tank full of petrol? You have a death wish or you’re just stupid?’
‘Don’t call me stupid again, Kozi.’
‘You don’t turn this into a fight...’
‘I’m not fighting but don’t call me stupid again.’
They glared at each other over the distance that the drum imposed between them. Then Kozi expelled his breath, loudly. ‘Look, let’s get rid of this drum...’ he began - but he didn’t finish the sentence as at that moment a burst of light ripped through the fabric of the night, and transfixed the pair in its glare.
‘Hold it!’ a voice ordered from somewhere beyond the light. ‘Don’t move or we shoot!’
The friends stood as if turned to pillars of salt. The drum felt as heavy as a dead body.
‘What do we do now, Kozi?’ Saamekpe ventriloquised as they heard the thud of disembarking boots. The policemen slowly advanced on them, their guns held at the ready. They moved in like experienced toad hunters, keeping to the periphery of the light beam with which their prey had been blinded.
‘Tell them it’s your father’s filling station,’ Kozi whispered back. ‘It’s our only chance.’
‘You two, oya, enter de motor! No drop dat drum o... Move!’ The policemen herded the captives with prods from their rifle barrels.
Saamekpe, a gun-barrel jammed in the crack of his arse, blurted out: ‘It’s my father’s filling station! I swear – I am the owner’s son!’
The inquisitive muzzle was immediately extracted, and, as Saamekpe heaved a sigh of relief, the gun returned, this time with the butt to his face. As his brain exploded into searing fragments of agony, Saamekpe gave a scream and stumbled, his body relaxing for the fall – but he was jerked back to attention by the return of the barrel to his posterior.
'If you drop that drum!’ came a warning, followed by a slap to the back of the neck that set Saamekpe’s teeth chattering. ‘Who told you to talk, eh? Who gave you permission to open mouth?’ And then a kick to the small of the back that instantly turned his kneecaps to jelly, and would have surely sent him sprawling but for the brace of the drum. Saamekpe hunched his shoulders and stumbled after Kozi, feeling as if he was under attack from the night itself.
The two friends were bundled into the back of the waiting van, and the drum was thrown in after them. Then the policemen clambered in. The engine was turned on, and, with the headlights again dimmed to a moribund gleam, the car began to inch forward.
The inside of the van was so dark that the friends thought if they wedged themselves in the corner there was a chance their presence would be forgotten. The van stank of urine, stale cigarette smoke, and fear.
The rasp of a match showed for an instant the cupped hand and lips of one of their captors. Then it went out. In its place appeared the burning tip of a reefer, the relaxing fumes at variance with the dead-seriousness of the scene. Then the firefly glow began slowly to travel, flitting from hand to hand to lip to hand, until it had done the rounds of the van and returned to the hand of the owner. Suddenly this evil eye dipped towards Kozi. An invisible cloud of fragrant smoke washed over his face.
‘You,’ said the smoker, brandishing the reefer in time to his words, ‘take a drag.’ The angry glow came to a sudden stop a finger-length away from Kozi’s eyeball.
Kozi reached for it without thinking, but halfway there his hand froze. His mind began to spin possibilities. Is this a trap, he thought. Do they want to charge us with drug dealing? Take us in with the smell of marijuana still on our breath? It will be our word against theirs. And if I don’t, what stops him from forcing me if I don’t? And if I do, is that not proof enough that I have done it before? Is that a crime? But what if he’s just trying to be friendly? Can I afford to say no? What do I do? If only I could see his face I would know... These thoughts strobed through Kozi’s mind, subverting logic.
The voice behind the offer lost patience. ‘You dey take am abi you no dey take am?’ it snapped, and Kozi, startled, started forward. The burning tip of the reefer came against the skin of his cheek with an audible hiss. Louder than this however, was the silence with which Kozi bore the pain. The reefer was extinguished. Chuckles rolled in the darkness. The smell of burnt flesh hung in the air.
The van crept for several meters down a road that even houses had deserted. Then it turned off unto a rutted dirt track, and picked up speed. The bushes that lined this goat-path whipped the van’s sides as it bounced past. It swerved round a corner, causing the drum to roll with a loud clatter: the bushes parted to reveal a road that was as wide and asphalt-smooth as a runway. The van climbed unto the tarmac and moved a short distance. Then it pulled to a stop. The engine was turned off.
‘Wetin dey happen?’ several anxious voices enquired, as a door opened and footsteps approached the back of the van. The two friends cringed in their corners, their hearts banging about in their chests like broken radiators.
‘Anybody notice movement at that junction we just pass?’ asked the policeman who had disembarked. He was replied with a chorus of ‘Nos’. ‘But I see something,’ he said. ‘I see something move. We will go back and check it.’
As his footsteps moved away, one of the voices in the back of the van grumbled: ‘Oga sef e like wahala too much. This two wey we don catch do to make report. Abeg, sleep dey catch me o.’
The voice swallowed the rest of its complaints as the van shook under the weight of ‘oga’. The engine was switched on, and the van put into reverse. With the headlights turned off, the van began to nose its way through the darkness, retracing its route.
The drum rolled again, its hollow metal scraping against the grooved metal floor of the van. It banged against the side of the van. Without warning, the night was shattered by a burst of gunfire, whose rata-ta-tat zinged off the van’s panels and the road, and streaked the night with flashes of light. The policemen, screaming muddled orders at each other, tumbled out of the van and began to return fire.
As the firefight raged on, Kozi and Saamekpe threw themselves flat on the floor of the van and maneuvered the drum into position as a barricade. They cowered behind it, their knees drawn into their bellies, their heads cradled in their arms. Then something smashed into the drum and began to bang about its insides, trying to get at the friends. The drum shuddered under the attack. Another bullet hit the drum, and another: it began to feel to the two friends as if all the guns had stopped making war with each other and were turned on them.
The foot of Kozi’s bad leg had been jammed against some unknown part of his friend’s body for some time. Now, with the clarity of approaching death, he felt a violent tremor shoot through Saamekpe’s body, and travel to his own through the foot. ‘Saamekpe?’ Kozi called across to his friend in a stage whisper. ‘Saamekpe? Are you alright?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Saamekpe replied, with a preternatural calm. Though his face couldn’t have been more than a whisker-length away, his voice floated back to Kozi as if from great depth.
A flurry of bullets slammed into the drum, making it jump. Then Kozi felt something hot pass over his neck, chilling him to the bones.
‘Saamekpe!’ he shrieked, desperate now. ‘What do we do? We’re sitting ducks here. Me I want to run o – should we go?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Saamekpe said again.
‘Don’t worry, don’t worry – what do you mean by don’t worry?’ Kozi yelled over the din of barking guns. ‘Bullets are flying over our heads for chrissakes!’
‘Kozi,’ Saamekpe said, his voice resonant with self-assurance, ‘I said don’t worry.’
But Kozi, feeling death breathing down his neck, was worried. And he couldn’t understand why Saamekpe, who had proved himself many times to be a thoroughly boneless fellow, was not. Here bullets were raining on the drum like they had someone’s name engraved on them, and there Saamekpe was acting like he knew it wasn’t his. For want of a better alternative, Kozi decided to tap from the source of his friend’s newfound confidence. He slithered across the floor to where Saamekpe lay. Then (as at that moment the unknown assailants’ car screeched off in reverse, its headlights wildly swinging) Kozi saw things clearly for the first time that night. Saamekpe, curled up like a bottled foetus, and with the look of a cornered titmouse in his eyes, was bathed from head to foot in a cold sweat. His hands were clasped before his chest, in prayer.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, his lips curling in a smile of terror. He shut his eyes. His cheeks trembled.
#
Several minutes after the gun battle had ended: the policemen were still combing the scene. From the sounds and fragmented talk that floated into the van it was clear to their prisoners that they were gathering up their expended shells. They seemed not to be in any hurry. Then, as if to controvert this impression, two pairs of boots approached the van at a quick march. The click-clack of cocking rifles was earsplitting in the confined space.
‘You two - get down.’
Saamekpe and Kozi climbed down from the van. They were marshaled towards a spot in the road where they could vaguely discern the heads of the gathered men.
‘Stop here.’
Their herders crossed over to their colleagues and joined in the whispered conference that was ongoing. Kozi, straining his ears, heard a single word that right away completed the puzzle for him.
‘Saamekpe,’ he hissed, inching closer to his friend, ‘they’re going to shoot us.’
‘No,’ Saamekpe said. ‘They can’t.’
‘They are. That’s what they are talking about now.’
‘Oh my God,’ Saamekpe exhaled. ‘Oh. My. God.’
The policemen began to move in a body towards the two friends. Kozi shot a glance around. The nearest cover was more than twenty paces away. With his bad leg, he wouldn’t go three steps before he would be mowed down. He was trapped. He began to tremble, uncontrollably. Then he felt Saamekpe grasp hold of his shirt and wring it. He smelt the rusted-metal stink of fear on his breath. He heard the beginnings of a wail welling in his chest.
As the policemen approached, Kozi cleared his throat and spoke. His voice was confident, his tone matter-of-fact. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, addressing the wall of silent shadows. ‘I know you are going to shoot us.
‘Makes our job easier that you know,’ a voice responded, and the man lifted his gun. This was the signal: they all lifted their guns.
‘Wait! Please wait - in the name of God!’ Kozi wailed, dropping down to his knees with his arms raised in the air. Saamekpe immediately followed suit.
The policeman lowered his gun, and signaled the others to do the same.
‘Wait for what?’ he asked, but waited nonetheless. (Kozi, his brain working at for-the-last-time speed, interpreting, associating, extrapolating the influx of information and memory that the terror of ultimate nothingness had dredged from the recesses of his mind, now recognized the voice as that of ‘oga’.)
‘Please sir, just tell us why you want to shoot us?’ Kozi asked, his voice pleading. ‘We didn’t have anything to do with the armed robbers. That filling station where you caught us, true, it is this my friend’s father’s own.’
Here Saamekpe piped in: ‘Yes, it is my father’s own.’
‘Are those your last words?’ the policeman asked.
‘Aaahh,’ Saamekpe groaned, as if from a body blow, and, his knees crumbling, he collapsed to the ground.
Kozi opened his mouth to protest this fate that ill luck had meted on him, but the jury was already decided. None of the reasons he could put forward for a stay of execution could have convinced snake venom, talk less of this implacable lot. He bowed his head in defeat and awaited the gavel sound of his death sentence.
But Saamekpe, writhing in the dust like a discarded gecko tail, blurted out: ‘I have money! I can give you money! Please let me live!’
There was an immediate and perceptible transformation in the atmosphere – this was demonstrated by the murmurs that began to rise from the gathered men. Without any instruction, they lowered their guns.
‘Where is the money?’ the voice of ‘oga’ demanded.
‘It is in my house,’ Saamekpe replied, rising to his knees, his tear-streaked face holding just the faintest glimmer of hope.
‘How much?’ another voice enquired.
‘I don’t know...it is plenty. I’ll give you everything I have - everything. Please, just let us go.’
The policemen fell silent again, considering the offer. Saamekpe, unable to control himself, let a sob escape. Time hung over the friends like a collapsing roof. They waited, unable to draw breath while their fate, like a flipped coin spinning on its side, held them at bay. Dawn had tinted the sky on the horizon with the first hint of her bloody rising.
‘Oga’ reached a decision on behalf of his colleagues. ‘We’ll spare you,’ he said, his tone as emotionless as the ring of metal on metal. ‘But if you don’t do us well...’ He let the threat hang.
The two friends were ordered to their feet and jostled into the van. It was with relief that they took up their former positions. The policemen clambered in, and, after the directions to Saamekpe’s house had been taken, the van drove off.
#
Dawn was ripping at the night sky with scrabbling fingers as the van pulled to a stop before Saamekpe’s house. There was a general stir, as the policemen stretched and yawned themselves awake. ‘Oga’ disembarked and approached the back of the van. ‘Okay – go and bring the money,’ he said.
Kozi and Saamekpe climbed down from the van, they hoped for the last time. They headed for the safety of the house, their hearts galloping in their chests with every step that they took. Their hearts jumped into their throats when ‘oga’ said: ‘You, the one with bad leg – stop.’ Saamekpe walked on without looking back.
Kozi’s bad leg began to shake as the door shut behind Saamekpe. The footsteps that approached from behind him beat in his head like a tom-tom. His body stiffened as ‘oga’ drew alongside him.
‘We’re letting you go today but next time we won’t be at all forgiving,’ the policeman said, as if striking up a conversation.
Kozi remained silent. The sounds of a waking city floated over their heads.
‘Your friend is taking time,’ the policeman said.
Kozi turned to look at the policeman. Their eyes met, but the policeman looked away. The policeman’s face was genial, if slightly puffy from lack of sleep. The need to know was suddenly stark in Kozi’s mind.
‘Were you really going to shoot us?’ Kozi asked, watching the policeman from the corner of his eye.
‘Yes, of course,’ came the surprised reply.
‘But...why?’
‘Oga’ thought for a moment. ‘Why?’ he finally answered, raising a finger to pick his nose. ‘The reasons, they are many.’ He turned round to face Kozi. His eyebrows were raised, and his mouth was twisted in a smile that asked for understanding. ‘One, because if I no produce the body at the station that we use the bullets for, it is me and my boys who will pay for it. Two, because you are thieves. Three, because it is my job to kill thieves...’ He sucked in a thick ball of mucus from his sinuses, and spat it at Kozi’s feet.
Saamekpe emerged from the house at that moment, clutching a parcel in his arms. He hurried over to where the two men stood waiting, and handed the parcel to the policeman. The man opened it and looked inside, counting the money with greedy eyes. Then he nodded, satisfied, and stuck the parcel under his arm.
‘Congratulations, you’re free,’ he declared, giving a mock salute. He turned on his heels and marched off.
Kozi and Saamekpe followed the van with their eyes as it headed up the street. In the weak light of dawn they could see emblazoned on its side the motto, ‘To Serve and Protect with Integrity’. At the junction, where the morning crowds were already collecting for the few buses that the fuel scarcity had left on the roads, the van suddenly came to a stop.
Saamekpe turned as if to run, but checked himself when he saw that his friend had held his ground. The empty drum was tossed out. It fell to the road with a crash. Then, as the van turned the corner, the drum began a slow, stately roll all the way to the feet of the only two men who could tell why it had more holes in it than heads on the Hydra.
FINIS