When We Were Ghouls Page 5

  The beggars stuck an infected arm in my face, grabbed at me—their way of getting more sympathy from Mom, of trying to shock for money. If they had no hands, they reached with their callused foot, which felt hard and crusty on my skin, and I cringed. Mom yanked me away, whispering in my ear, with what sounded like anger. “Don’t let them touch you.”

  “Mommy, can’t we give a shilling to this one?” I’d pull on her arm, fully engaged with the urchins.

  She crunched my fingers together tighter, focused on getting to the front doors of the air-conditioned grocery store. “No, Amy, we can’t give any shillings. They’ll just swarm.”

  I sucked in my breath. To hinder the odor of staph, yes, but the held breath was like a pause button—it kept their world from entering my world. To be dead was one thing, but to have to live and suffer was another. Of the beggars, I was most afraid. Not afraid of them doing anything to me. Afraid I could catch what they had, could so easily become one of them. And if I became one, I would die a horrible death. Weren’t they the hideous people with their boil-covered skin?

  I hurried in the air-conditioned Bhojson’s with Mom.

  I stared at the dead man in the marina, my arm against Marty’s. I didn’t think about how the man could have died. I looked at how his black skin was turning a powdery gray, how his lips were gone, how the little fish nibbled at the thin threads of algae on his elbow.

  “I’d rather die in my sleep than be executed,” I told Marty, trying to sound smart. “They execute you if you do anything wrong here.” My parents never worried whether I was in the room when they talked with their friends.

  Marty looked at me with a question on his face. I wanted him to know that I knew about these things. Looking back, I know I didn’t know, but I thought I sounded as if I did. “Not like Saudi Arabia where they just cut your hand off.” I’d heard that at one of my folks’ parties too, so I repeated it.

  A small smile crossed his mouth, then he nodded. He’d do that, if I said something a little absurd. He’d take it in and then seemed to understand it. Understand me. He didn’t rush me away; he didn’t squeeze my knuckles till they hurt. He had a familiar expression, a brief glance, as though he were just checking in, checking to see if I was okay. Because of this expression, this look, I sensed he kept an eye on me when it seemed no one else did. Like somehow he knew me.

  I smiled back. He poked me in the side, which never failed to tickle me, as all anyone had to do was to come at me with wiggly fingers, and I’d fall on the floor. My brother and my father, for that matter, always resorted to making everything funny, to trying to make me laugh when scary or sad presented itself. Nothing is a better cover-up for fear and sadness. I was being taught not to be afraid when I looked and to laugh when I turned away. Mine was a different kind of callus. Humor provides a certain salve, if only for a moment.

  “ReeRee!” Marty said. ReeRee was our code word for riotous laughter. We headed back in the direction of home.

  “ReeRee!” I said back. Now maybe we could go back to having a carnival of a good time before he had to leave. “ReeRee!”

  “ReeRee,” he said. We held hands as we continued on Awolowo Road’s sidewalk, closer to the cars now instead of the water.

  When we got back to Omo Osagie Street and approached the gate to our compound, I pointed up to the Andrews’s house in the compound next door. “They have a pet monkey,” I whispered.

  “Really?” he said. “Are you going to get one?”

  “ReeRee!” I said. That was silly. I didn’t want a pet monkey. I wanted the shaggy, inbred poodle, Boudreaux, that we had had to leave with another family when we left Nevada.

  In front of our gate, Marty let go of my hand, and with one big leap he jumped across the green, slimy, open sewer. When midair, his legs spanned the width of the trench. He landed on the small strip of grass along the compound concrete wall. Not more than a few feet away, a Nigerian in flip-flops had unzipped his fly and peed into our compound’s slimy moat. A woman in her orange and brown geometrically patterned lappa squatted with her skirt pulled up around her thighs. The sewer was really just a big public toilet.

  “Come on,” Marty said from across the gully. “Jump!” He waved his arm and smiled his crooked tooth grin. If he said I could do it, then I knew I could. He wasn’t teasing.

  I was good at squat jumps in PE, so why not a leap across a five-foot green and slimy gulch? I tried to ignore the stench. As I crouched into my leapfrog position, Marty hollered, “You can do it.” I never wanted to disappoint him. I pushed off the edge, looking not down at the oozing muck, but up at Marty, his arms wide.

  Halfway across, midair, I could tell jumping wasn’t a good idea. In fact, it was a very bad idea.

  I missed the other edge by inches. As I slid down into the slime, I heard him say, “Grab my hand! Quick.” But all I could grab were the long, slippery strands of silky, green algae that rained down the concrete side of the sewer wall.

  Marty yanked me from the thick sewer water. I tried stifling the cry bubbling out of my throat, not just because I didn’t want to cry in front of Marty, but I was afraid to open my mouth.

  James, our gateman, and the neighbor’s steward, Winston, came running through the gates. “So sorry, Small Sister!” they hollered. “So sorry, so sorry,” they repeated as they wiped down my slippery, little arms.

  So sorry. I knew the phrase from when I fell off my bike and anyone passing by would say, “So sorry.” I got it. “So sorry” wasn’t an apology, but a compassionate and empathetic cry for me, for my plight. So sorry I was for the beggars. So sorry for the dead man in the marina. So sorry for the plight of all the poor people of Lagos, as I entered the white gates of our well-kempt and guarded compound. So sorry.

  My mother stood in the doorway to our house. She must have heard the commotion.

  “Go straight to the bathtub,” she said.

  As I went up the marble stairs of our house, I tried not to touch anything. If I got green slime on the banister, Mom would be “madder than Old Billie Hell,” as she would say in her Texas accent. Marty had disappeared, probably hoping to avoid the wrath of Mom when she saw her green daughter.

  While Mom gathered cleaning supplies from the kitchen, I undressed. I piled my red shorts and T-shirt along with my Keds, now gunked with sewer crud, in the corner. I knew better than to get the goopy mess on any of the pretty pink bath rugs Mom had decorated with. As I stood naked in the bathtub waiting, I winced at the wet, sticky long hair plastered on my skin.

  “The water’s going to be hot,” Mom said, as she arrived with a bucket full of supplies. I spied a scruffy pad, the brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and the giant green bottle of Phisohex antibacterial soap. Today Phisohex is sold only by prescription, and the FDA recommends it be used only on occasion to flush out severe infections. It has a tendency to cause convulsions. People with the severest forms of acne and boils use it, but otherwise it’s avoided as a cleanser. We bathed prophylactically with it every day in Nigeria. It stung like the dickens under normal circumstances. The shower hose attachment in hand, Mom rinsed me off from top to bottom like a dog, and then lathered me up. Rinse, then repeat. In addition to the scruffy pad she’d brought from the kitchen, she kept turning the water up hotter. Now with the steel wool, scalding water, and Mom’s scrubbing me all over like an iron griddle, I had to hold my breath to keep from succumbing to the sting. I didn’t cry until she poured the hydrogen peroxide onto my raw, pink skin.

  “You’re scrubbing too hard!” I screamed. I hoped to keep at least one layer of skin after this bath.

  “We have to make sure we get it off you,” said Mom, her face pinched. “Hold still!” She hosed me off again. She didn’t want a daughter who came from the sewer. She liked a nice, clean, sweet daughter. I must stay clean, not grow necrotic like the beggars.

  My body felt like one giant sunburn, like when we went home to Padre Island, Texas, for summer vacation. Mom would soothe my sunburn sting with
cool Noxzema all over my back and shoulders.

  Just when I thought she was done sloughing off the sewer sludge, she drained the water from the tub and started over again. When she finally finished, she told me to close my eyes and mouth tight, then poured rubbing alcohol all over me. She poked around inside my ears, underarms, and between my toes, checking for green slime.

  This bath, I remember it as if it were yesterday—Mom doing all she could to keep the gruesome outside world from seeping into my pores. But try as she might, I know she failed to get all of Nigeria out of me. I would never be the clean little girl I was before. What I’d seen, what I touched, tasted, smelled, and heard, that would never come off.

  Marty left for boarding school. Poof! He was gone. A few weeks later a letter arrived in a red-and-blue airmail envelope addressed to me. Return address: TASIS Switzerland in his tall, slanting handwriting. I ran up to my room, closed the door, and lay on my yellow bedspread, scooting right up next to the air-conditioning unit. While the refreshing cold air blew on my face, I pulled the thin onion skin paper from the envelope. The onion skin cost less to mail overseas and was so light and so thin, like sheer gossamer, if held up to the light it was translucent. The entire single page contained only this typewritten message: “ReeeeReeeeReeeeReeeeeREEEEEEE!” Over and over. I faced the wall, the cold air conditioner blowing on my face. Falling into hysterical laughter, I read every last ReeRee on the page, while the ghostlike paper fluttered in my hands. Then I hugged the thin page to my chest and let the air conditioner turn my tears sticky.

  All of this is true. All of it happened. Although the part with my brother along the marina with the dead body, that part has holes in it. The fall in the sewer, no doubt it happened that way. I can still feel the slime. All the other dead bodies, they are true, exactly as I remember them. But the memory of Marty and me at the marina with the dead body, I will not call home to confirm it. Unlike the memory of Marty being at the graveyard with the skull, this memory cannot be taken from me. Unlike the skull, this memory was given to me. This memory is mine to hold onto.

  That I relish these memories, does that make me a ghoul? I suppose it does. There is no one to call and ask because they are all ghouls too. I am not obsessed with death—okay, maybe I am a little—but I am obsessed by something else.

  I am afraid of the consequences.

  Under the Dogonyaro Tree

  How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has a put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

  —Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

  The American International School was concrete block buildings, Quonset huts, and a dirt field surrounded by coiled, barbed wire–topped chain-link. This was no Exeter. No ivy-covered walls. Just razor wire above chain-link fence. Next door to AIS sat more Quonset huts of the Nigerian army base. Just beyond the huts, green and white painted oil drums, the colors of the Nigerian flag, stacked two and three high, created the backdrop for firing squad executions. Only the tall chain-link fence separated our school property from the military base where public executions took place. Zoning laws weren’t prevalent in Nigeria. I have to assume the Americans who built the school in this location thought the semblance of military security took precedence over bloody executions. In fact, we got Execution Days just as we had Snow Days in Nevada, although not all executions took place at the firing squad arena.

  The particular day in my memory was a Wednesday. I remember the day because Mom got her hair done on Wednesdays, and when she came downstairs with her limp, unwashed hair, she startled me. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m going to the beauty shop in an hour.”

  Dad had left for the bush that morning, so it was just the two of us. And the staff. I ran out the front door, happy to hear the toot toot of the little VW school bus come to pick me up.

  On the road to school, I stared out the window at the thick, caramel-colored air. The Harmattan winds off the Sahara blew hot and sandy, making the sky dense as cornmeal.

  About midway through our day, we had Nigerian culture class. Mrs. Nwoko, the Nigerian culture teacher, always dressed in a Sears polyester jumper and wore her hair well coiffed in a smooth, turned-under, Western style. Many Nigerian women opted for Western-style dress instead of the traditional wrap-around iro skirt and the gele wrapped like a wonton on the head. Mrs. Nwoko laughed a lot and looked around as though wondering if she were in the right place. I empathized with her. Her job was to come to class each week and teach us how to cook Nigerian foods or construct other arts and crafts representing the Yoruba, Igbo, or Hausa. I liked Nigerian culture class because it usually involved eating food or using glue, two things I was good at.

  On this day we worked on our calabash painting project. The large, pumpkin-shaped gourds were dried and halved for us to make masks, wall hangings, or ornaments. I had chosen one the size of a split basketball. In the midst of painting what I considered to be a unique design that I’d seen embroidered on Suzanne’s hip-hugger blue jeans back pocket—a red, white, and blue peace sign, Miss Abby stepped into our room.

  The air conditioning had gone out. Wiping sweat from her neck, she told Mrs. Nwoko to take us outside.

  “I will teach them the Igbo dance,” Mrs. Nwoko said.

  That’s how we ended up on the playing field under the forsaken dogonyaro tree. The middle of the field lay barren but for that tree and a few dried-up patches of grass, which right then during the dry season were the same color as the dirt.

  Sometimes at recess we’d see and hear the Nigerian soldiers dressed in green fatigues marching in formation on the other side of the chain-link. But today only our class had come outside, and it was quiet stillness.

  The dance started off like ring-around-the-rosy. We held hands and skipped in a circle around the dogonyaro tree. I held onto the French girl’s hand. Mrs. Nwoko held the other sweaty hand of the French girl as we hopped one way in the circle, then the other. Twice around the tree. Mrs. Nwoko demonstrated the next hop. “My people, they skip with a bow,” she said, pulling her hand free and placing it at her waist. As she bent forward, the tip of a branch snagged the top of her hair, while we all shuffled a few steps along.

  Her wig dangled from the branch until she realized what had happened. She must have felt the warm breeze on her head, the titillation of her skin in the electric Harmattan air, and the tittering of the kids as we saw her scalp bared. She screamed and crouched with her hands covering the tiny pigtails braided all over her head. She cowered as though ashamed. With her tiny braids, she looked young like a girl and more Nigerian than her American TV–inspired look from Room 222. But she crouched in humiliation and embarrassment when her real self was revealed. I wonder, did she think the Western clothing and wig made her beautiful? Did she think she was ugly otherwise? The Western world, the desire for anything American, was creeping into third world nations.

  She snatched her wig off the branch and gave a quick, stern look at any gigglers as she replaced her false head of hair and readjusted her snug dress. “My people,” she said with a stern voice, “dance with a bounce.” And she gave a kick and another tuck at the waist. We followed. A kick and a tuck. I spied Mrs. Nwoko checking with one hand to make sure her wig was in place. Kick and tuck. A kick and tuck. Around the dogonyaro tree we go.

  “My people,” she said, “dance with their hearts.” Her voice was lifted by the wind and drifted off. Only the sounds of our soft, dusty kicks padding on the dirt touched our ears.

  Maybe it was the ferociously dry air from the Harmattan wind that day, or maybe we were all busy concentrating, but the playground got deathly quiet as we bent at the waist and touched the ground. When we reached for the sky with our little white hands as Mrs. Nwoko demonstrated with her dark brown ones, the Ha
rmattan howled. Our tiny ears perked up. The circle tightened around the dogonyaro tree as we grasped hands again. Then a long shriek pierced the thick air over our heads.

  The circle froze.

  My skin prickled; the wail sounded close enough to brush my bare shoulders. The troubled ululation had come from the lunch hut near the front doors of the school. Then it came again. Another long moan, just as the janitor jutted out from the hut, and right behind him the cook.

  In the hot, African sun, I saw a glint flash off a long, silvery knife, more than likely a machete. The janitor didn’t wear a shirt. He never did, the African heat too hot for American tees. Small rivers of red trickled in the dust at his feet. On the playground, we scuttled around Mrs. Nwoko’s polyester hem as the janitor screamed again. He ran past the teeter-totters and dodge ball court, still howling, now at the cornmeal sky. The cafeteria cook sprinted right behind him, red blood turned purple against the dark skin of his arm. It clashed with the faded Orange Fanta T-shirt he wore. The knife in his hand, then in the back of the janitor, waggled between them. As they returned along the chain-link fence, I saw the gash in the janitor’s back between his shoulder blades. The dark blood turned bright as it hit the cook’s white apron. The cook was the most hysterical, acting as though he had been stabbed in the back, his life stolen from him. The janitor screamed again, and the cook spewed curses in Yoruba or Hausa, I didn’t know which.

  Not one of us let go of our handhold, and we pulled in closer to the center of the circle, as the possessed men rushed and stumbled onto the field. Mrs. Nwoko kept whispering, “get down, get down,” like she was afraid they’d notice us if she were too loud. So we all squatted as they passed us and left a trail like tar in the dust.

  More teachers came pouring out of the school building. In my opinion they were too late. They shooed us inside, keeping us in queue while looking over their shoulders shouting whispers. Mrs. Nwoko’s eyes were wide, wig askew, her hands too busy holding ours to check her coif. She seemed especially frightened, dressed in her smart Western wear, her jumper from Sears. Instead Miss Abby, the principal in her maxi skirt like a giant quilt around her legs, marched up and down in front, steering us inside. “But we hadn’t finished learning the dance yet,” Scott Curtis shouted. Miss Abby leaned over the rush of kids and shushed him. The little French girl, who had been holding my hand for the Igbo dance and never let go, buried her face in the skirt of Miss Abby’s quilted maxi.