Thumps rattled the door. Ike bolted up, then realized he had dreamed through a downpour. Its rage spent, the storm now fell in feeble sleets on the zinc roof.
Slowly he opened his eyes. A sharp ache throbbed within his skull. He rubbed at his eyes as he clambered to sit up.
The door shook with another round of knocks.
He winced. “Who is it?” he asked in a sour tone.
“Alice, sah.”
“What do you want?”
“Somebody wants to see you, sah” his niece said. “She’s been waiting.”
“She? Who is that?”
She whispered: “I don’t know, sah. She’s a mother.”
“A mother? How do you know?”
“She’s here with her children,” she said in a hushed voice.
Ike hissed. It was not as if he didn’t expect that a stream of relatives would come to “greet” him—greeting being, in this case, an excuse to lay their woes at his feet and then request some money. It was a game marked by conceits, highly interesting if you were merely an observer of it. But if you were cast in the role of inexhaustible benefactor, it could be a trying experience.
“I’ll be out in five minutes,” he said.
He leaned back in bed, propped on his elbows. Peering out the window at the red, soggy earth, he pressed on both sides of his head to crush the pounding pain. He felt mildly peeved at the unknown intruder who’d come to claim a first place in the game of “greeting” and “receiving.”
He mentally rehearsed the game’s all-too-familiar ritual. It invariably began with an eager smile, a hug, or a firm handshake. Then followed a superfluity: “Did they say you came back?”
You nodded.
“I was just at the market to buy a few things to make soup—the price of things these days!—and then I overheard somebody say you’d come home. Great happiness swept me away. I didn’t know when I broke into dancing—such was my delight! Every day, I’ve been praying to God to keep you safe in the land of white people. Every day, I say to God, I’m a sooty destitute, I have nothing, but please bless Ikechukwu with health and riches. Bless Ikechukwu for me, because I know that when he has, he won’t see me hungry and throw his eyes in the bush. Poverty is not bad; what’s bad is to be poor in people, to have nobody. Our people say that when I lack and the person who would help me lacks, too, then death has entered and occupied a seat. That’s why I’ve been begging God to forget me but never to forget you. To look at you—see your cheeks, surfing with sheen, your skin aglow—God has been hearing my prayers! Just to see you, happiness has filled my stomach to the brim.
Into the ear flows a catalog of privations and a litany of needs. Then silence, a deep, expectant silence.
He drew a deep breath, filling his lungs with the doughy scent of wet earth. Suddenly a radiant sun broke out. It imbued the fizzling ropes of rain with a silvery brilliance. He could not tell what day it was. Had he slept and woken up on the same day, or had he fallen into a sopor, slept through a night, and woken up the next day?
He’d taken much longer than five minutes. Cupping both hands in front of his face, he blew breath, sniffed—and recoiled. There was no time to brush now; he lobbed two cubes of peppermint in his mouth. Then, with instinctive wariness, he set out to meet his guests.
The visitors sat on a wooden stool out in the veranda, a woman flanked by five children, two daughters and three sons. They sprang to their feet as he made his way, warily, to them. He did not immediately recognize them. He squinted, looking. The odor of squalor wafted into his nostrils.
“Good evening, sir,” said the woman. She had a placid look and wore a blouse of faded blue over a skirt that had come apart at the hems. Her feet were shod in a pair of thread-bare slippers.
“Good evening, sir,” chimed her brood, shyly averting their eyes, their faces impassive.
“Good evening,” Ike said, peering.
“You don’t remember,” she said, her tone half guilty, half recriminatory. “Regina. Don’t you remember Regina?”
“Regina?” he said doubtfully. He was about to ask which Regina, but—jolted by recognition—held back. His mouth flew open with shock. The frumpy, reeking apparition before him was his first love, once the object of his anguished infatuation.
“You don’t remember me?” she inquired in an apologetic tenor. Her voice, now familiar—the sole survivor of her ravaged body—snapped him awake from his doldrums. “I know I’ve changed. Life has been hard.”
She’d hurt him years ago. She had dumped him for Emeka Egoigwe, a tall, mustachioed man of ostentatious habits. Egoigwe had made a vulgar display of his fortune, acquired—so it was widely whispered—by unscrupulous means. He owned more cars than anybody cared to count and had a fetish for matching the color of his clothes and wristwatch with the color of each car he drove. He—again, it was whispered—used bleaching creams to lighten his skin.
Two of Ike’s friends had warned him that Emeka Egoigwe—who was called Merciless for the way he picked up, used, and dropped women—appeared to have designs on Regina, but Ike had dismissed their report. “Egoigwe is not Regina’s type,” Ike had told his friends. “He’s an uneducated oaf. Regina doesn’t care for money. She loves me because of my brains. Do you know she cries whenever I write her a poem? Does Egoigwe know how to read, much less how to spark a woman’s heart with a love poem?”
“Remember that woman does not live by a poem alone,” cautioned one of his friends.
“And that some women love the poetry of fresh-minted cash,” said the other.
“Not my Regina!” Ike boasted, his finger slicing the air for emphasis.
A few days later, Regina broke up with him via a blithe, terse letter, written in a lackadaisical tone that lanced him. He still remembered the lines that most savaged him: Don’t think that I no longer care for you. I enjoyed your poems and stories and our visits to Uvunu. But it’s time for me to graduate from childish love. It’s time to grow up.
It was as if somebody had used a sharp, serrated knife to slice his heart. It grated to read Regina consign what they had to childish distraction, to be discarded in order to graduate into a mature, cash-driven love. No, he could not recognize Regina in the words! Egoigwe, the rogue opportunist, must have offered her the sentiment even if not the language.
Ike might have skulked off to a corner to lick his wounds. Instead, he was too obsessed to let go. He had enlisted his two friends in an amateurish plot to frighten off her suitor. They composed a letter that they clipped under Egoigwe’s windshield: We, the undersigned, having constituted ourselves into a vanguard and committee in the defense and cause of genuine love, hereby give you, Mr. Emeka Egoigwe, hereinafter to be known as the putative usurper, an ultimatum to forthwith cease and desist from any form of amorous contact or advances to Regina.
The next day, an uncle of one of the boys called the vanguard to his home. He informed them that Regina’s new lover had blazed with rage over the letter. “You three boys are lucky that I talked the man out of visiting you individually at home to personally deliver his response to your letter. Are you boys mad? Is Regina the only woman in this world that you would risk provoking a man as callous as Egoigwe? Do you even know anything about the man?”
The three boys stared in silence.
“He’s a killer,” said the man. “He’s like our police: he can kill and go.”
On learning that Egoigwe’s fortune came from a career as a ruthless drug pusher, Ike and his friends had decided to give him—and Regina—a wide berth.
From afar, Ike had monitored Regina’s relationship with the wealthy drug pusher. He had tracked their numerous breakups and reconciliations. He knew of all the times the man took Regina on a shopping spree in Rome or London, of the black-and-blue beatings he gave her anytime he suspected that her eye had strayed in another man’s direction, or whenever she dared ask questions about his escapades with other women. Through all the time he monitored the vicissitudes of their relationship, Ike’s one dream was that she’d return to him one day, a teary penitent. That she’d throw herself on his mercy so that he would have the opportunity to withhold any forgiveness or mercy.
Shortly after Ike got a scholarship from the Rotary Club International to study at Amherst College, he heard that Egoigwe, after a breakup that lasted more than a year, had returned to marry Regina. From time to time, he’d draw her into his mind, his remembrances fueled by malice. He wished her marital woe. He hoped that he would abandon her for another woman. Sometimes he caught himself and recoiled, shocked that the passage of time had done little to curb the bitterness he felt toward her.
A year ago, without an effort on his part to conjure her, she had popped into his mind. In the next e-mail to his sister, Nkiru, he had inquired after her. Nkiru’s reply had startled him. Emeka Egoigwe had died shortly after Regina’s birth of their fifth child. Nkiru offered no further details; apparently, the accounts of the man’s death were too sketchy.
Now, as Regina stood before him, Ike realized that his heart had softened, even if it still incubated a measure of resentment toward her.
“I heard you came home,” she said, her voice breaking. “I brought my kids to come and greet you. It has been a long time. A lot has happened.”
His ears registered the sound of her voice, but her words glided past, left no emotional print on his mind. She seemed to register his inattentiveness. She fidgeted and fell mute. He waved her and her children to a long stool on the veranda. She slouched down, then her children crowded about her, nervous. Her children wore desolation on their bodies, their eyes sunken. One of the boys, the youngest child, scratched persistently at his skin. Ike looked at the child, then flinched at his pocks of rashes.
Ike and Regina exchanged looks. There was a plaintive note to her expression, as if she trusted her eyes to plead her case. Shame, loathing, shock, seized him all at once. Her eyes—unbelievably dead! Their deadness deepened her pallor, completing her slovenly, frowzy appearance. Those eyes! How they once sparkled with life. He used to gawk at them, enraptured by their seductive power, amazed at their flirtatious glaze that drew him effortlessly into obsession. How those eyes once complemented her chiseled face that was adept at transmitting infectious joy. Her pulchritude gone, her face—marred and joyless—was a macabre advertisement of angular jutting bones.
His eyes fell to her breasts. He could remember when they were supple and firm. Now they hung flat, lifeless as rubber. He looked away with the quickness of a guilt-ridden voyeur.
The woman in front of him was woebegone, the portrait of a hag. Time and hardship had laid their merciless hand on her.
He made mighty mental efforts to recall the pristine body that had awakened his youthful desire, but the devastated body in front of him was unyielding, blocking him from the reach of that beatific memory. He tried to recall their trysts of long ago, how they would repair to their favorite hideout—a copse that was past the shallow, clayey Uvunu, off the beaten track. He worked his mind to recall how his fingers would find and knead her breasts, her lips smack against his, both of them trembling, pouring perspiration. The body before him would not cooperate. It stubbornly transposed itself in place of that former vivacious body.
“Things have been hard for me, very hard,” she said. She swept both hands to indicate her children. “Feeding them is often impossible. They stay up at night, crying from hunger. When I heard you’d come home, I said let me take the children to go and see you. You have a good heart. I know you will help.”
Her certitude irked. Why, he thought, drag another man’s children to me to feed? He wished to be curt and dismissive, but the children’s eyes gawked at him, their own voiceless pleas even more harrowing.
Suddenly, his thought zipped to Queen Bee. One day, perhaps, Queen Bee would come to him, her skin disheveled, body as ravaged as Regina’s, to plead for succor. A sinister gush of compassion rushed inside him.
“I understand your husband—”
“He died four years ago,” she interjected. She patted her youngest child on the head. “He died a week after Tochi was born.” The rash-infested child squirmed.
“But he had money—your husband.” Only after the words had tumbled out did he realize that an accusatory accent, unbidden, had crept into his voice.
She emitted a grunt and rolled her eyes.
“No, he was known to have money,” he persisted. “What happened to it?”
Tears welled up in her eyes, and she turned her face away, gazing vacantly. He watched her struggle to hold tears at bay. He saw her composure weaken. A single tear streaked down her cheeks, but she wiped it before it could drop to the floor. She quickly turned to face Ike. Her two youngest children stood in front of her, staring, as if her distress were a rare form of entertainment. The three oldest clung to her side, like protectors offering an armor of comfort. They cast sneaky, accusing glances at Ike.
“Go outside with your brothers and sisters,” she instructed her oldest daughter. “Take them outside and play.”
“In the rain?” asked her daughter, frowning.
“The rain has stopped. Take everybody outside.”
Her youngest son balked at going outside with the rest. She glared at him. Picking at his rashes, he ran to join his siblings.
“Have you heard how my husband died?” Regina asked in a dry voice.
Ike shook his head from side to side.
“In London, right at Heathrow—that’s where it happened.”
“At Heathrow? From what cause?”
“Just listen,” she said, a sad smile parting her lips. “He’d arrived from Thailand, carrying things in his tummy.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m telling the story. Just listen,” she admonished. “His stomach bulged with packets of heroin he’d put in condoms and swallowed. He was standing in a queue to go through customs. Then he suddenly became sick. One eyewitness said he hugged his stomach, then began to shout like a woman in labor. After a while he fell to the ground and began to roll around, still shouting.”
“Did they get him medical help?”
“Medical help?” she echoed exasperatedly. “From what I was told, British officers surrounded him and began questioning him—”
“Even as he rolled on the ground?” Ike interjected.
“Am I speaking with water in my mouth? Yes, they questioned him as he rolled all over the ground, grabbing his stomach.”
“That’s murder!” he said heatedly.
Calmly, she said, “They were questioning him until he began to foam at the mouth. That’s when they called for an ambulance. He was already a quarter to dead. Before they could get him into an ambulance, he’d become a corpse.”
“You should sue,” he said, his voice rising with excitement. “That’s murder! They had no right to deny him medical attention. Even the worst criminal has a right to medical attention. Sue Heathrow … Maybe it’s British immigration you should sue. Or customs. Just find a good British lawyer. It’s called wrongful death.”
“Wrongful death?” she sneered. “Do you write poetry with death? Is death ever wrong?”
“Yes, the British authorities were negligent. You can get money. A lot of money.”
She regarded him inquisitively. “You see me in this condition and you’re telling me to go to London and sue? Who’ll allow a rag like me into Britain? And even if they allowed me, then what? You want me to walk into a court in England and tell them, ‘You people killed my husband. Yes, my husband swallowed things a man should never put in his stomach, but it’s you who killed him.’ That’s what you ask me to do?”
“But you, you knew he was in that line of business. Why did you marry him?”
Silent, she cast him a reproachful eye.
“No, you knew,” he persisted. “Everybody knew, so you must have known.”
She spoke in a tone of despair. “I pleaded with him to stop. Many times, I did. He’d made a lot of money. I begged him to start a clean business.”
“You did—so?”
“The first time I suggested it, he beat me black and blue. He threatened to divorce me.”
“And you backed off, scared?”
“Me?” she said with a sneer. “Have you forgotten about my stubbornness? I kept telling him, despite the beatings. One day, instead of beating me, he asked me to sit down. He wanted to talk.”
“About his drug deals?”
“Yes. He asked why I wanted him to stop. I told him I was afraid for our young kids—we had two then. What if something happened to their father, how was I to raise them alone? I told him I didn’t want to be widowed at a young age—or to have a husband in jail, which is the same thing.”
“And what did he say?”
“He laughed for a long time. Then, beating his chest, he said, ‘Me, dead? Me, go to jail? Have no fear; I’m like wind and water. Is the wind ever caught in a trap? Does the basket hold water?’ He told me that he’d secured himself spiritually. I think his words were: ‘I’m protected by three spiritual insurance policies.’ ”
“What did he mean?”
“I asked the same question. He explained that, before each trip, he first would go to see a pastor, a malam, and a dibia. He paid the pastor to fast and say powerful prayers for him. Then he paid the malam to chant Koranic verses for his success. From the malam, too, he got a protective amulet.”
“A protective amulet?”
“It was supposed to confuse the eyes of anybody in uniform, customs or police.”
Ike let out a chortle but quickly collected himself.
“Finally,” she continued, “he told me that his dibia gave him the charm called oti n’anya afu uzo.”
“What’s that?”
“You know what it is,” she said, turning slightly away, a tinge of impatience in her tone. “Have you stopped speaking Igbo? Oti n’anya afu uzo. The charm does what its name says: ‘look all you want, you can’t see a thing.’ ”
“It was meant to make him invisible?”
“Yes,” she said with emphasis. She turned, glancing up at him, her eyes dulled with sorrow. “He trusted in these three men. He boasted that they gave him full spiritual protection. He assured me he would never be caught.”
“And you fell for that?”
“I cried. I told him that others like him had been caught in America and sent to jail. Or in Indonesia—and beheaded. There was this friend of his—they called him Khaki No Be Leather. An only son, he was caught in Indonesia and beheaded. His old mother went and hanged herself. I reminded my husband of Khaki. ‘Are you wishing me dead?’ he fumed. ‘You want me beheaded so you can carry my money and run to your boyfriend, eh?’ Before I could speak, he slapped thunder into my eyes. Twice. Twap! Twap! Then he shouted, ‘If you’re a witch and you’re planning to kill me, I’ll kill you first.’ I’d never seen him more mad with rage—and more scared.”
“He did all this and you stayed with him,” Ike said.
“You speak as if you’re not from these parts, as if you don’t know how difficult it is for a woman to get up and leave her husband. The scandal. The evil eyes cast at you by your own family and others. The rumors that the man must have sent you home because he caught you with a lover. I had to stay.”
“And you must have stopped haranguing him about drug pushing, I bet.”
“The day after he slapped me, he brought Pastor Uka to our house.”
“Uka? Did you say Uka?”
“Yes, Pastor Uka. He was my husband’s prayer warrior. He now owns a church here in Utonki.”
“Go on,” Ike prodded. “What happened?”
“My husband brought Pastor Uka home. Then Uka said God had told him I was possessed.”
“Possessed?”
“By the marine spirit. That’s what the pastor said; that I was bonded to the water mermaid. He said God also revealed to him that I would bring bad luck to my husband—unless I was delivered. I saw hell that evening. I was forced to kneel in front of the pastor while he danced all around me and barked sounds that had no meaning. Occasionally, he grabbed my head and pressed hard until I cried out in pain. Whenever I cried, he shouted that it was the marine spirit fleeing out of me. This lasted for three hours.”
An ache seared his skull, a pain born the moment she mentioned Pastor Uka. A ropy pain, it stretched from his forehead to the nape of his neck. It pulled and tugged at the tense, taut line. He leaned against the wall, eyes shut.
“So you know all about Pastor Uka.”
“My husband said the man was next to God. You won’t believe the kind of money Uka made from my husband. And from other drug smugglers.”
“They just threw money his way?”
“They believed his prayers could save them from arrest. My husband certainly did.”
“The first moment I met Uka, I knew he was a bloody charlatan. Your husband must have been—pardon my bluntness—a fool.”
For a moment, her eyes blazed with belligerence. She folded her arms across her chest. Twice, she opened her mouth but seemed unable to coax words.
“I didn’t mean to insult him,” he said. “But I don’t know why—forget it.”
“People believe what they believe,” she said resignedly.
“But you should have put your foot down. You should have told your husband to quit trafficking drugs or else.”
“Who told you I didn’t? In fact, despite the beatings, I harassed him so much that he lied to me. He told me he’d stopped anything to do with drugs. For a long time, he didn’t travel abroad. Life became sweet for me again; I stopped waking up at night with terrible dreams about being a widow. Then I had Tochi, my last child. A few days after Tochi’s birth, my husband told me he had to travel to London. He said since Tochi was going to be our last child, we needed to throw a big party. He wanted to buy a few things in London for the big bash. He never mentioned he was first going to Thailand, for then I would have known. I would have known.”
Ike felt that the story had come full circle.
“You have to sue,” he said, nodding to drive home the point.
“Make those British officials pay for their negligence.”
Silent, she cast a vacant gaze.
He asked, “How about the man’s assets in Nigeria? He must have left quite a ton of money.”
“A ton, you say?” She sighed bemusedly. “I don’t know about a ton. Drug dealers make a lot of money, but they throw a lot of it away. It’s the nature of their business. One Christmas, my husband gave five cars—expensive, brand-new cars—as gifts to his hangers-on. He was impulsive in that way. He had lots of girlfriends—here and in other parts of the world. He paid rent for them. Money passed through his hands and went quickly to other hands. I don’t know how much he left in the bank, but I know he owned three buildings.”
“Uh-uh. Are they not rented?”
“They are—but his brothers collect the rent and keep all of it. My children and I don’t see a kobo of the money.”
“Why is that?”
“When my husband died, even before his corpse was flown home, his brothers came to the house and accused me of being a witch. They said Pastor Uka told them I had used witchcraft to cause the heroin to burst in my husband’s belly. They said both the malam and the dibia had confirmed it. I was confused, didn’t know what to say. To have a newborn baby on my arm and to be dealing with this sort of thing just after my husband’s death—I was just confused. I told them they were talking nonsense. They gave me dirty slaps, worse than any beating I had ever received from my husband. If I denied it, they said, I should go and swear at a deity’s shrine in Okija. If I was a witch, I’d die within seven days. If I lived, it meant I was innocent.”
“Preposterous! Did you go?”
“Am I mad? I knew that the priests at the shrine give oath takers a concoction to drink. It’s meant to test your innocence, but it’s a well-known scam. Somebody who wants to get you just offers a bribe to the priests. The priests then sprinkle a slow-acting poison in your drink. Within seven days, you’re dead. That’s what my brothers-in-law planned for me.”
“What was their reaction when you refused to go?”
“Oh,” she gasped, “merciless beating. Right in front of my crying children. It was as if they meant to kill me with blows if I wasn’t going to drink poison. They left bruises all over my body. Then they gave me thirty minutes—only minutes—to take the children and run from our home in Enugu. I was not permitted to take anything, only the dress on my body. Everything else, they took, including a Toyota Camry my husband had given me three months before his death. My children and I were homeless. That’s why we left Enugu and returned to the village.”
“How did you feed the children?”
“How else? I turned a professional beggar. Father Nduka at Saint Matthew’s helps us with food and a little money here and there. He pleaded with some women to give me their used clothes.” She shrugged sadly. “If anybody had told me that I, Regina, would one day be wearing secondhand clothing, I would have said, ‘Never!’ But such is life.” She shrugged again.
Ike seethed. “That can’t be done!”
“It’s done,” she said in an even, resigned voice. “There are many women like me in this country. A man is not supposed to die before his wife. Often, when a man dies first, his relatives accuse his widow of witchcraft. Then they drive her away and inherit everything the man owned.”
“Why didn’t you get a lawyer? You ought to fight these bastards in court.”
She gave him a quizzical look. Then she said, “Ike, this is Nigeria.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Here is not America.”
“I still don’t get your point.”
She looked away, gazing into vacancy. It was as if something about him—his innocence? his naïveté?—could no longer be stomached. After a moment, she slowly steered her eyes back to him.
“If you can help us with something, try,” she said. “God will bless you. The kids can’t sleep at night because their bellies are empty. When they fall asleep, they soon wake up crying for food. But what can I do? Should I cook myself for them?”
IKE SAT ON THE stool long after Regina had left with her children. His mood was wistful. The rope of ache that split his skull in half had grown, leaving raw nodes of pain all over his head. He placed thumb and two other fingers on the tautest spot. He pressed, then released, pressed and released. He kneaded his neck, varied the pressure, his fingers calming the searing sensation. When he thought his fingers had dissolved the pain, a sudden spasm jabbed at him. It reminded him that the pain’s roots lay in the soul.
He thought about the paltry sum he’d given Regina. Two thousand naira—less than twenty dollars. It was all he could afford. He still had five days left to his stay in Utonki, and each day was sure to present claims on his wallet. There would be a steady retinue of “greeters.” Each would be armed with rending tales and expect some monetary gift.
Regina’s eyes had brightened when he’d handed her the money—plus three cheap T-shirts. As he gave her the gifts, her eyes had regained a hint of their once-accustomed sparkle. Her gratitude had gushed in a babble of words. And then, in a flush of euphoria, she’d jumped from the stool and flung herself at him. He’d stiffened at her approach, his body still as a statue as she rounded him in an embrace. Her body lay flat against his, a fleshless, quivering medley of bones. She wafted a sufferer’s stink, an unwashed, sweaty smell. It swelled in his nose. He held his breath, repulsed.
Jealous of his livelier memory of her, he shut his eyes. He was desperate to expunge her present image from his mind. He wanted to imagine the days when this same body boasted softness and a welcoming fragrance. He tried all he could, but the apparition blocked all paths to a vivacious past. He was relieved when she let go. He began breathing again.
She had summoned the children and ordered them to take turns saying “Thanks, sir” to him.
Moments after her departure, he still stood on the spot, his hands folded across his chest, his thoughts entangled and grim. Then he sat down, on the same spot where she’d sat, the stool still warm with her heat.
His rage poured forth in different directions, unsure of its target. A rogue stream of self-loathing bile flowed toward himself. Why hadn’t he stopped Egoigwe from stealing his girlfriend? And why was he still a struggling man after all these years of living in America? If he’d made a fortune, he would have been able to offer Regina substantive help, not the miserly gift he put in her palm—enough, by the most optimistic calculations, for four meals at the most.
There—there was a leap in his mind—was another justification to snag Ngene.
“Do you want to eat now, sah?”
He turned to Alice. “Not yet,” he said. “Where’s Mama?”
“She went for evening service at the church.”
He pictured his mother’s grimaced face as Pastor Uka related his version of their encounter earlier that day. Strangely the image did not move him in any way. Regina’s visit still occupied his thoughts. He wished to take a walk in search of solitude. He needed the right space to begin untangling the clutter that filled his mind.
He decided to walk to the grove of Uvunu. There was a tinge of nostalgia to the decision, for it was at that shallow stream that Regina and he had had their first trysts.
“I’m taking a walk,” he told Alice.
“You didn’t eat lunch, sah,” the girl said in a voice strangely inflected with maternal concern.
“When I come back.”
“Then dinner will be cooked. Will you eat your lunch and dinner together?”
He quickened his steps, ignoring her.
A sand-colored grasshopper leapt from his path and landed to his right, disappearing in the underbrush. He scuffed his feet at the spot where the grasshopper had taken cover. The insect hopped. With a swift swipe of the hand, he caught it in midair. Slowly unclenching his hand, he stared at the grasshopper’s dark secretion. It brought to mind one of the pastimes of his teenage years. He and his friends would spend afternoons scouring the grass and gathering a variety of grasshoppers. They’d pause as the sun began to sink, then each person would bring his harvest. The result was a great miscellany of insects in different shapes, sizes, and colors. They’d begin their games, pairing different hoppers in a macabre simulation of love and feuding. Afterward, seized by a paroxysm of violence, they’d decapitate the grasshoppers and cast their bodies in open places where chickens would peck at them.
Accompanied by memories of his grasshopper-hunting days, he arrived at the stream. To his delight, there was nobody in sight. He hoisted himself on a ledge slick from the recent rain. The wetness licked his pants, touching his bottom with a gentle titillation. Shutting his eyes, he breathed deep. He exhaled, opening his eyes, taking in the tangled shrubs, willowy trees that danced to the wind, and the unhurried pool of water.
A toad jumped frantically from underneath the brush. It jumped and then jumped again, in desperate haste. A slim green snake slithered past, giving chase. But toads made perilous dinner. Ike once saw the carcass of a green snake, its body gashed open just beneath its mouth where a swallowed toad had flexed and swelled itself. A green snake was no match for a toad’s genius for self-inflation. It was a lesson little green snakes learned only too late.
Uvunu was a sliver of a stream. Its serpentine course ran along a track of soft, clayey bed. Ike watched birds as they glided in the openness overhead. Sometimes two birds would swoop to a collision, belly to belly, their contact enacted with breathtaking harmoniousness. From the surrounding thicket other birds twittered and chirped, as if in encouragement of their commingling, amorous siblings. Crickets chirred, perhaps enacting their own love rituals.
Ike was entranced by birdsong. He sat up and removed his shoes. Unshod, he walked toward the stream, relishing the way his feet sank in the soft, wet earth. For a moment he stood at the edge of the stream and gazed at its liquid sparkle. He admired the tiny silvery fish that darted about with dexterous ease.
Gingerly, he stepped in with one foot, then the other. A strange weight seeped out of his feet and disappeared in the lazily flowing stream. A calm washed over him. His body became open, hungry.
He knew it was time to walk home.