When We Were Ghouls Read online

  I didn’t know it yet, but my family of five, all lined up in the middle seats of the 747 jumbo jet, would slowly disperse. Maybe I had a sense of their pending disappearance because I kept that Naughahyde carry-on, Barbie’s tomb filled with all her belongings and companions, tight against my chest for the entire trip.

  My father’s new contract was with an Italian oil company, Agip Oil. In order to absorb the time and fear of flying in a 747 for the first time in our lives, the first time for us even to be on a plane, my mother decided we would learn Italian, and so she bought a phrase book. I learned one phrase on the last leg from Milan to Lagos: non lo desídero. I do not want it. To this day, it is all the Italian I remember. The first time I used it was after my mother pounded on the airplane bathroom door.

  “Amy, what’s taking you so long?” I could hear her panicked voice through the flimsy door.

  “I’m doing Barbie’s laundry,” I replied. That miniature sink, the tiny faucets, the whole room Barbie-sized, I couldn’t resist. Barbie sat spread eagle on the small, stainless steel counter watching me rinse out her ball gown.

  “Amy!” my mom said. She tried the knob. I had failed to lock it. Her head popped in, and her eyes nearly popped out when she saw the damp Barbie clothes spread out around the room. “There’s a line out here! You have to come back to your seat.”

  “I’m busy,” I told her. I still had a couple of pantsuits to wash. The flight was terribly boring. Shouldn’t Mom be glad I’d found something to do?

  “Amy,” she said first in panic and then from between gritted teeth, “the line is down the aisle. You need to come out now.” She snatched up my carefully arranged, damp laundry and naked Barbie, then grabbed my wrist.

  “Non lo desídero!” I told her as she pulled me from Barbie’s Laundromat.

  That was, more or less, how we ended up living in Lagos in 1971. My father says it was where, as Southerners, we had our eyes opened. But Mom says redneck eyes take forever to open, if they ever do. For me, there’s a sliver of time when my eyes wouldn’t close, even to blink, but not out of any kind of search for understanding. I wasn’t that aware. More out of fear, of being afraid that if I blinked, one more person would disappear.

  To this day, I can’t smell diesel and not be reminded of the drive from the Lagos International airport on Lagos Island to our house on Ikoyi Island inside a compound that consisted of two large two-story houses for oil company families, the Griffins’ and ours. In the back of the compound, behind a tall wall sat the servants’ quarters. The Quarters, we called them. Our previous houses certainly had never had The Quarters, but instead were rundown rentals lucky to have a yard. Like the one-story, three-bedroom, one-bath house in Nevada, the greatest luxury being the new linoleum installed in the bathroom when the pipes burst one winter. To brighten up a dingy room, my mother made a lampshade from a coffee can spray-painted white and decorated with plastic daisies.

  But here in Lagos, Portuguese for “lakes,” we were on the western Africa coastline, made up of islands in the Bay of Guinea in the Southern Atlantic Ocean: Victoria, Ikoyi, and Lagos Islands. Our house was a two-story glass-sided contemporary complete with a gateman, a night watchman, a steward, a gardener who mowed the lawn with a machete, and a nanny. The latter just for me. Built-in babysitter. Non lo desídero. “It’s not necessary,” my mother told the oil company escort. “We’re used to doing things on our own. We don’t need help.” By “help,” she meant assistance, not servants. But they came with the house. We were no longer the beans-and-cornbread-for-supper Wallens.

  My first nanny was our steward, Phillip’s wife, Okinaya. She was so shy, she would hide in the servants’ quarters and not come out, so I didn’t really have a nanny at all. Then Mom hired Martha, who finally had to be fired because she drank all of Dad’s whiskey, which was hard to come by. He bought bootleg from the slick Nigerian man who drove his long, black Chrysler New Yorker into the compound.

  Standing in the hot, Nigerian sun, my father and our compound neighbor, Mr. Griffin, and other men gathered around the long trunk of the Chrysler and picked out cases to stock their supply of booze and cigarettes. I stood off to the side, peering into the trunk from afar, watching the clandestine act. Intoxicated by the nicotine from the cigs they’d lit up and the wafting aroma of whiskey as the J&B Black Label was tested, I watched my dad joke with his buddies, negotiate for an extra box of cigarettes or bottle of booze, and surreptitiously hand over rolls of quid. To my young eyes, something sneaky was going on. Where there’s an American will for liquor in a Muslim country, there’s a way to buy it. We had a new way of life, and it didn’t include the Piggly Wiggly anymore.

  My next and last nanny was Alice. I loved Alice, her bosom so deep, I would fall inside when she clutched me tight, and her bottom so big it jutted out like a table behind her. Alice could make me laugh even when there was nothing to laugh about.

  It was Alice who looked after me. Here we’d landed in the land of perpetual summer, and I was not allowed to go barefoot. I was given a pair of flip-flops, and Mom told me never to leave the house without them on my feet or I would get hookworm. And a spanking. The hookworms, my dad explained, make their way from the soles of your feet, through your blood stream to your heart. Then they travel to your intestines, where they dine for years. Even under the threat of a spanking and little, yellow hookworms burrowing through the pink soles of my feet, I tried to get away with going barefoot. So, whenever I left the house sans shoes, Alice chased after me waggling the rubber thongs in the air. She would make certain those worms did not drill into my heart.

  My Baptism

  There’s always a light at the end of the sewer.

  —Tudy Wolfe

  The oil companies paid tuition for their transplanted employees’ kids at the American International School Lagos, but the grades went only as high as eighth grade. My brother and sister were starting the eleventh and twelfth grades, respectively, so they were to attend The American School in Switzerland, a boarding school thousands of miles away from me. Non lo desídero.

  This is when the disappearances started.

  My siblings leaving for school was more than just something I didn’t want. Their absence resembled a tearing in two of my world: a world I remembered in the States and a new world from which something very essential had gone missing. The world I would now live in had no ties, except my mother, to the old life. The life I’d had with my brother and sister at home, or coming home any minute now, was over. I would now become an only child. With a more-or-less single mother.

  Losing my grip on my family felt temporary at first, time that had been stretched not to my liking. My dad had always traveled for work, so “gone to the bush” most weeks wasn’t much different from “off on hot shot” in Louisiana. But my siblings away at boarding school, albeit speckled with holidays home in Lagos, confused me. No more coming home from school and sharing peanut butter sandwiches. A time warp of sorts had occurred. Like they’d gone to school, only it took so much longer for them to come home. Months. They’d gone to school halfway around the world. It seemed as though I was perpetually waiting. The days appeared tilted in the wrong direction. I didn’t understand distance like “halfway around the world” yet. Time, when you’re seven, is in increments of play vs. boredom.

  “Come on, Amy, let’s go.” I heard my favorite words from my brother. I followed Marty everywhere. Any moment spent with him was pure mirth. It was the day before their first departure. Marty and I left the compound with its red hibiscus bushes growing taller than the bamboo fences, umbrella trees shading the grass, and big, fat bumble bees buzzing around the elephant ear bushes. We entered Omo Osagie Street, which swam with people, Nigerians on their way to market, tradesmen going house to house, sandals slapping the soles of pink-bottomed feet, bicycle bells dinging. Nigerian women balletically towered along the side of the asphalt, wearing brightly colored lappas, yards of fabric wrapped around and around their bodies, and baskets filled wit
h you-name-its balanced perfectly on their heads. In contrast, the open sewer on either side of the road teemed with all of humankind’s detritus, both fecal and random household trash. Debris piled high against the concrete walls of the surrounding compounds. Even here in the most exclusive part of Lagos, Ikoyi Island, with the green, yellow, and orange tropical birds fluttering, the palm trees fanning overhead, the ocean air just a few blocks over, nothing could escape the jungle heat, making the sewer’s smell swell in the oxygen we inhaled.

  We headed toward the marina, walked around the curve at the end of Omo Osagie Street, and turned right onto Awolowo Road. We walked along the marina’s wide sidewalk, bordered on one side by lapping bay water and a busy city street, cars honking, on the other. The water slapped against the short concrete barrier on the other side. In the distance, greasy and unkempt oil tankers sat side-by-side with a few cargo ships stained black with soot from their smokestacks and the seeping oil buried deep in their bellies. All that separated Marty and me from the water was a short but thick concrete wall. The wall was so short even I could lean over and dangle my hand, if I wanted to, that is. In the water, thick bunches of paper and rags and old plastic cartons, all wrapped in seaweed, bumped up against the edge of the marina wall. The refuse’s rank smell was outdone only by the Awolowo Road’s diesel and tire rubber wafting in the heat.

  As we looked over the edge of the wall at the trash, Marty said he was going to throw me in. I knew he wouldn’t do it, but the idea of it scared me, and I loved being scared. I liked for my stomach to flip-flop, like when we watched scary movies together. It meant I was daring like my brother. My older brother crush was so big I would have swum ten miles in that polluted water for him. His eyes, dark brown like mine, lit up when he smiled. His smile revealed a front tooth broken in half at a diagonal. He said that when he was older he was going to have a gold cap made for that tooth. I knew that would make him only more handsome. Alas, he became an English literature professor rather than the gold-toothed rock star he perhaps longed to be.

  Marty leaned farther over the edge of the seawall. “Look,” he said, pointing toward a big clump of wet dreck. I thought he was just trying to draw me closer, so he could pretend to throw me in. I was on to his shenanigans. It wasn’t that I thought he would really do it, I was more afraid of the prospect that he could make a mistake, and I would fall in by accident. By accident, the possibility of this was what scared me most.

  “I don’t see anything,” I said. I didn’t want to lean too far over, still worried it was a trick, and he would try to push me. I had to be at the ready for anything he might try, yet I was giddy with excitement. I wanted my brother to know how much I loved him.

  “You’re not leaning over far enough,” he told me. “You can’t see it from there.”

  I leaned just a little farther. “What is it?”

  “A body,” he said.

  Then I saw it. The body of a Nigerian man bumped against the side of the wall, same as the water slapping the rest of the offal. Mixed with trash, gray and brown and bloated with yellowed edges, his whole body appeared to be heaving.

  We didn’t speak.

  Marty leaned a little closer, and so did I. I knew he wouldn’t throw me in. My hands clutched the gritty concrete, and the odors slid up my nasal passages, colliding with the part of my brain that holds memory, my ears overloaded with traffic roars and honks, while my eyes burned with stain.

  I looked up at the horizon. Past the ships, past the long bridges between the islands, and out of sight were my school and the execution amphitheater.

  “Day before yesterday Daddy said a man was executed by the Nigerian army. Do you think this is the guy who was executed?” I pictured a firing squad and wondered whether the man was a criminal. Was this moment menacing or ghoulish? A kind of shame in not knowing the right thing to say about a dead man moved around in me. I wanted Marty to see me in the best light. I scooted an inch or two closer to him.

  He didn’t move when my forearm rested against his. “No, this guy’s too swollen,” he said.

  I looked at my brother for what to do, how we did this. We weren’t supposed to stare, but he was staring. So I stared.

  Once we’d come across a tiny bird on the sidewalk. I squatted next to it. A baby bird. But not a little bird. It appeared naked to me without feathers. Its skin so translucent I could almost see the bones.

  When I reached my finger out to touch it, Marty said, “Don’t. It’s dead.” Like with the man in the marina, I wanted to understand what had happened to the bird. “How did he die?” I asked. “He fell.” We both looked up to the sky to the tree overhead for a nest.

  The marine layer had rolled into the bay. Gray clouds would dump tropical rain in an hour. I knew this man did not fall from the sky. But so many similarities existed between him and the bird. The twisted and limp neck. And while this man didn’t have the same bright yellow beak, his lips were white and stood out against his gray skin. The bird’s skin had glowed translucent and rubbery. No feathers except the tiniest inkling on the wing: minuscule, wet, and black, they were the size of my smallest hair clips. The only color had been the bright yellow beak and the black wings. A crow, my brother had said. He knew. He was smart. Was that my first encounter with something dead? An embryonic raven?

  Throughout my life I had come across dead animals. My friends would squeal and avert their eyes or walk briskly away. Not me. I’d poke it with a stick. This is what I did. It was dead, after all. What was I to be afraid of? Was I attracted to death? Did I attract death? Dead bodies.

  I had never watched anything die, just come across things already dead. If I found something dying, like my friend who found the sick baby squirrel, took it home, and nursed it with a bottle, would I do that? Or would I poke it with a stick?

  The floating man’s legs were long and naked, knobby-kneed like the bird’s. Trash wrapped around his feet. Newspapers, etc. The body fascinated and grossed me out. Like the bird, I didn’t want him to be dead. But he was. Did I know what dead was at that age? Did I understand the stillness was so much different? Was it in my DNA? When I think back, when I’m counting the dead bodies in my head now, I am aware I could not have known the difference between sleeping and dead. I would have poked either one with a stick. I hated it when my mom took a nap. I’d stare at her the same way. I’d poke her to see if she’d wake up.

  But it wasn’t just the bodies. It was the Biafran war, the stories about death that I listened to like other kids might hear princess stories. I couldn’t care less about being a princess with long, golden hair fit for tossing out a window for a prince.

  The waves flipped the body over and a piece of The Sun newspaper wrapped around the dead man’s neck.

  “He’s been here awhile,” Marty said.

  Then the corpse was heaved under by a wave. When he bobbed to the surface again, the straps of half a rubber sandal adorned his wrist.

  I didn’t look at his eyes. I knew they would be turned inside out, the white parts tinged orange. I was glad that Marty wanted to stare, because I wanted to stare too.

  Even this wasn’t my first dead human. I had stepped over them in the street when Mom and I walked to the market. The concept of a person being dead, gone forever, hadn’t fully formed in my consciousness yet. How was I to make sense of a state of being, or not being—a human being like any other lying prone on the sidewalk, up against the curb maybe, or curled up against a concrete wall? My mother’s way of dealing with it was to barrel through, to not look down, to yank on my hand signaling me to hurry it up. My way was to look at everything, to figure out as much as I could, as fast as I could, before I was told to stop.

  “Mommy, what’s wrong with him?” I asked as we stepped over the legs of a man appearing to lounge against the wall.

  “Don’t stare,” she said. “He might just be sleeping.” But I knew you didn’t sleep with your tongue hanging out and your eyes rolled.

  So many things to stare at in N
igeria, and I was so rarely allowed to stare. But if I couldn’t look, I couldn’t understand.

  “Are they really dead?” I asked as we traipsed through Bhojson’s grocery store parking lot, me holding her hand tighter, she squeezing so hard my knuckles crunched together. When I remember the pressure on my knuckles, I suspect she was more afraid than I was. How could she have had any idea where she would end up with this move from Nevada to Nigeria? Her seven-year-old charge not letting her ignore the setting.

  “They probably just fell asleep and didn’t wake up,” Mom said.

  It wasn’t just corpses. It was also the beggars, the poor and starving, who ran between cars with their hands outstretched. “Madam, madam,” they said. “A shilling, madam.” She scooted her handbag up onto her shoulder more securely. I pulled my long braid around to the front of my neck, afraid a hand would yank it from the back.

  Their eyes could be sunken, or even missing, and yet they smiled at me. The boys with festering wounds on their arms and legs still shoved and played with their fellow beggars. Sometimes they could be so physically grotesque with limbs so infected that, despite my curiosity, my eyes would divert themselves.

  “Please, madam, please, just one shilling.”

  The beggars on little wooden carts zoomed between the lanes of cars and sidled up beside me with only the slick click, click, click of the ball-bearing wheels on the asphalt. I’d heard at my folks’ dinner parties that they rode on carts because their legs had been chopped off. Their parents or they themselves axed off limbs for more sympathy, for more shillings. What kind of parent did that, I remembered thinking? The toughened, callused pads that had grown over where their knees should have been were black with grime and grit, but it crossed my mind how much more fun it would be to be a beggar on a little cart with wheels. I mean, if one had to be a beggar.