Buried At Sea Read online

  He looked up into the nearest face and, before the kid's eyes slid away, said, "Hey, how you doing?"

  "Five dollar."

  "What?"

  "You hear. Five dollar?'

  The Sailing Directions said that English was the official language, but that in the Delta there were many tribal dialects. He spoke slowly and loudly. "I don't follow what you're saying. Where is everybody?"

  The answers came back fast and loud. Through the accents, he realized that they were speaking the pidgin English that Will had told him was the lingua franca. He heard a word that sounded like "money." And another that sounded like "chop."

  "We take arm and chop!"

  Any comparisons he might have entertained to making buddies with locker-room attendants were instantly dispelled and Jim fumbled the painter loose to get the hell out of there. Before he could, he got the phrase they were repeating over and over.

  "Landing fee?"

  "Are you stupid?" shouted one. "Money." Then Jim realized that what had sounded like

  "We take arm and chop," actually meant "Pay us money so we can go shop."

  "Pay," yelled another, sticking out his free hand, and his friends started chanting, "Pay.

  Pay. Pay."

  Jim shot a glance across the lagoon, where Hustle laid her upside-down reflection on the oily green water. Will, who was following Margaret down the companionway, waved as he disappeared below. The canoe that had delivered her was headed down the creek in the direction of the main channel, trailing thin Vs of ripples.

  "Pay. Pay. Pay."

  I'm getting mugged, Jim thought, his temper rising. All want is a ride out of here and I'm getting mugged. He jumped without warning, using his arms to pull himself up and bound onto the dock in a single swift motion. The two in front backed up, bumping into those behind them and nervously fingering their weapons. They were taller than he but emaciated, their skeletal chests barely as broad as his arms, and he saw fear in their eyes as he prepared to kick the head off the first one who pulled his machete.

  Then he stumbled. The dock felt as if it were rolling under his feet. He struggled to catch himself. But after six weeks on the moving boat, his slow-to-adjust inner ear, which had made him prey to seasickness, was betraying his sense of balance on land. It felt like an earthquake and he stood reeling visibly, which cost him the initiative as quickly as he had gained it.

  They moved closer. "Landing fee. Pay."

  He'd have a better chance duking it out drunk. The one who had yet to speak gave him a hard stoned-on-something grin and demanded in a loud British accent, "You pay for landing your boat a five-dollar landing fee. It is the custom."

  "Five dollar."

  Four against one. They had machetes. Don't get killed for nothing. Besides, they were dressed in rags. What the hell was five dollars? He kept his roll in his pocket as he peeled off one of the bills.

  Out shot another hand. "Five dollar."

  "I just paid you."

  "Five dollar." Louder.

  "I paid you. Get out of my way."

  They drew their machetes and pointed them at the rubber dinghy.

  Jim stared hard at the stoned kid, who explained with the dull, uncaring, but certain logic of a clerk in a bank, "You pay five dollar. We protect your boat."

  He produced another five. Then he walked through them, toward the village.

  The entire place seemed to be nothing more than twenty shacks on stilts. But he noticed two exceptions. One was a concrete structure with unglazed windows and the faded sign community CLINIC over the gaping door; goats had moved in and it stank of their dung.

  The other structure that stood out was a larger house made of three attached huts. The chief's? Jim wondered. It too was empty.

  Maybe the main village was farther inland. There was a dirt road of sorts, twin tracks beaten in the sand and mud that indicated some vehicles had been through here at some point. The land was still rolling under him, and his feet kept slipping as the road seemed to fall away. At the next step they would scuff the dirt as it seemed to rise like a wave.

  He was still wobbly when the road forked. He followed it right. It narrowed, wandered into the mangroves, and petered out at the edge of another swampy creek.

  Mangrove trees towered from the water up to a gloomy canopy. The treetops blocked the sun and it dawned on him that he had already walked through the village thinking that the wooden huts with tin roofs were the outskirts.

  He walked slowly back. The left fork looked no more promising than the right, and he almost passed it by. Then he thought he heard music. A far-off pulse in the thick, hot at-mosphere. So he took the left fork and followed it into the mangroves, still groping for balance, pausing occasionally to cock his ear to the music.

  He walked for fifteen minutes, slapping at the bugs that hovered just beyond the aura of his insect repellent. The land began to rise. The stagnant pools disappeared, replaced by thick bushes, and the mangroves gave way to more ordinary-looking trees without the spidery roots. When he stopped again to hear the music, he heard people calling out and laughing. The main village: a bigger one on a main road.

  Now he smelled food cooking in the still air. Climbing a steep rise, he found himself on a ridge. But instead of a bigger village, all he saw below was a shallow ravine where scores of people were digging with picks and shovels. The cooking smells came from an open fire above the excavation, where three women dressed in bright red blouses and long skirts were roasting sweet potatoes on sticks. There was no village in sight, no huts or buildings of any sort, just a raw earth gouge in the land, which looked like it had been dug that morning.

  They had exposed a buried pipe. A long, narrow break in the trees, overgrown with bushes, marked the pipe's track. More people were streaming down the slopes carrying buckets, jerricans, and plastic pails.

  Jim was still trying to figure out what they were doing when suddenly a cheer went up.

  People started pushing and shoving to get to the center, waving their buckets and pails.

  More people came streaming out of the woods and a sharp smell, much stronger than the roasted sweet potatoes, rose from the crowded pit—the nostril-pricking stink of gasoline.

  A man in a ragged shirt burst from the crowd carrying a brimming bucket in each hand.

  He climbed the slope nearby, his face beaming. Jim backed away quickly and bumped into someone. An old man had come up behind him.

  "Excuse me, sir."

  "Sorry," said Jim. "My fault. You speak English?"

  "Yes, of course." He had an accent like Will's friend Margaret's.

  His hair was white. He wore a rope for a belt and a Shell Oil cap with a missing bill. His running shoes had been re-sewn by hand and his red plaid shirt was patched with green cloth.

  "What are they doing?"

  "Scooping," said the old man. "The white man's pipe runs under the land. They've made a little puncture to scoop some petrol."

  "Petrol? That's a gasoline pipeline? They'll get killed if it blows up."

  "They know the danger of explosion. But they're poor. People have to survive."

  "What do they use it for? I haven't seen any cars." "There are no cars, sir. They mix it with oil to run a generator, or sell it to someone who owns an outboard motor." That explained where everyone had gone. The adventure

  seemed to have emptied every village for miles around. "Is there a way I could get to an airport?"

  "There is no airport."

  "A boat, maybe? To Lagos or Port Harcourt."

  "Far away."

  "How about Calabar?"

  "You might find someone with a motor canoe. Go to the lagoon."

  "I just came from there. No one's there."

  "When this is done, they'll come back. I wonder, sir, if you would have a dollar?"

  Jim was reaching into his pocket when suddenly the eager shouts and laughter turned to cries of alarm. The mob scattered. People clawed their way up the slopes, trampling one another. J
im saw fire jump skyward. Bright flame leapt from a puddle of gasoline onto a man's shirt and he ran, screaming, while the fiery puddle spilled toward the pipe.

  The burning man slipped and fell facedown in the mud. Men pounced on him, pummeling at the flames, beating them out with bare hands.

  Others kicked mud and dirt on the flames. There was a moment of utter silence, then nervous laughter rippled through the crowd. Shouting, laughing, people pounded one another on the back, shook hands, pulled the fallen man to his feet, and began picking up their buckets.

  A big cheer greeted a pair of fat middle-aged women who marched out of the woods with cases of beer balanced on their heads.

  "We live," the old man said, "by the mercy of God."

  Jim turned away. Anyone who would risk burning to death to steal gasoline was stuck in the Niger Delta worse than he was. The old man was still glued to his side. Jim pressed one of his five-dollar bills into his hand.

  "God bless you, sir. God bless you and yours:'

  Jim hurried back toward the dock, sweating in the heat, slapping at the bugs that grew bolder as his perspiration washed away the repellent. One of the machete gang had climbed into the dinghy.

  The kid with the best English said, "What do you want?" "I need a ride upriver to Calabar."

  "How much you pay?"

  Will had told him that the daily income in the Delta averaged thirty cents. Based on the ten-dollar bribe to come ashore with a promise of finding his boat on his return, and the blessings from the old man for five, Jim guessed a ferry price of twenty dollars.

  The kid hooted. "You crazy, man. Twenty dollar. No way. Never happen. What's twenty dollars to a big man like you? Your family rich."

  "No"

  "They live in a big house?"

  "I live in a little apartment."

  "They drive big cars. SUV cars."

  "I drive a goddamned Honda," said Jim.

  All three started shouting at once.

  "You burn our oil."

  "You take our oil. You pay us with pollution?'

  "You kill our fish."

  What in hell had Will gotten him into here, a dead-end village with no way out? There was an American embassy in Lagos. But it might as well be on Mars for all the good it would do him on the Calabar River.

  "Wait a minute. I'm not the oil company. I'm just trying to go home."

  "Does your family miss you?"

  The innocuous-sounding question seemed a welcome shift from blaming him for wrecking the environment; but they were suddenly extra-alert, all four intent on his answer.

  Was he paranoid? Or did they sound like kidnappers assessing his ransom value? He glanced again at Hustle—perched upon her upside-down reflection as white as an egret—and realized with a sinking heart that driving a cheap car didn't make him any less of a jackpot to kids in bare feet. The rich white man's yacht had delivered a miracle: their winning lottery ticket dressed in a Gap shirt, Levi's, and New Balance 1220 running shoes whose cost could put food on their tables for a year.

  A horn blast whipped their heads around. Jim tried to look in every direction at once.

  Some ways down the shoreline something large was emerging from a creek mouth overhung by mangrove trees. Salvation, he thought. Salvation in the form of an ungainly workboat like the offshore rig tenders he and Will had dodged as they motored through the oil fields.

  The teens watched intently as the big boxy vessel lumbered into the lagoon. But when it swung toward the village, three of them backed hurriedly off the dock, calling to the fourth, who climbed out of Jim's dinghy but stayed defiantly on the dock. On the workboat's square bow stood a soldier in uniform cradling a rifle.

  When it was a hundred yards away, a loud-hailer boomed, "Hey, bud, you wanna move your dinghy ' fore we squash it?"

  Jim jumped down, fumbled his painter from the piling, and inched into the shallows. The workboat, with Nellie H on her smoke-stained stern, rotated on her twin screws. Engines thundering, she frothed the water into muddy soup and backed into the dock, which leaned and trembled from the strain.-

  Jim scanned Nellie H for a friendly face.

  But no one appeared on deck, as if waiting for the Nigerian soldier to swagger back from the bow and take up station on the stern. The kid who had stayed on the dock—the most stoned one—jumped aboard and demanded, "Landing fee."

  The soldier motioned him off with his rifle. The kid stood his ground. The gun butt whipped up and caught the kid full in the face, with an audible crunch. He fell backward into

  the water, splashed feebly toward the shore, and dragged himself onto the muddy beach.

  A handful of black men trooped off the boat, looked around as if surprised to find the village empty, and wandered toward the huts. A heavily bulked-up white guy slid down the ladder from the wheelhouse and called after them, "Okay, boys, we'll be back for you in three days. Don't do anything I wouldn't."

  "Three days," shouted one, without breaking stride. "Don't be late," yelled another, plodding toward the village. "Hey, what's happening?" said Jim.

  "What the hell are you doing here?"

  "Came in on that sailboat," said Jim, extending his hand. "Jim Leighton."

  "Frank Perry." He looked Jim over. "You a lifter, Jim?" "A little," said Jim. "Not like you."

  "Shit, man, I'm a mess. Haven't worked out in three months."

  "Same thing on the boat. I've got a spinning bike and some free weights, but it's no gym."

  "When I get home, it's going to take me six months to shape up for a pageant."

  Jim nodded in sympathy. Competing in a body builders' pageant required the classic Mr.

  Olympia dimensions, which meant that Frank had to bum forty pounds of fat into ten pounds of muscle to match his arms and calves to his twenty-inch neck.

  "Cast off?" boomed the loud-hailer.

  "Gotta go. You take care, dude."

  "Where are you heading?"

  "Port Harcourt:'

  "Could I catch a rider'

  "Up to the old man," the roustabout said dubiously.

  "I'm trying to get home. I'd be really grateful for a ride. Who's the old man? The captain?"

  "I gotta warn you, he is one pissed-off skipper. Come on, I'll take you up to him." Jim jumped onto the boat and hurried forward with Frank Perry.

  "Why's he pissed off?"

  "We blew two cylinder heads 'cause the chief got drunk and the company said we had to drop these boys in the middle of their fucking-nowhere home village for community service and the tide's going out and there's a tornado coming in—not our kind of tornado, but a hell of a squall, buckets of rain, sixty-knot wind."

  "Let me talk to him."

  The "old man" was about Jim's age. He was slumped at the steering wheel, staring at the southern sky where huge cumulonimbus clouds looked ready to develop the solid tops Will had warned him to watch out for. Bloodshot eyes and a veiny red nose suggested that the "chief' had not been drinking alone.

  "No rides. Company policy?'

  "I'll pay."

  "You can't pay me enough to get fired."

  "I'm really stuck, Captain."

  "This ain't a goddamned ferry, just 'cause I gotta give the goddamned natives rides."

  "Hey, Cap," said Perry. "Give the man a break. How'd you like to be a 'merican stuck in this shit hole?"

  "Perry, get out of my face. You come in on that fancy sailboat?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Where from?"

  "We sailed from Barbados?'

  "So now you're bored and you want to go home?"

  "No, sir. I was supposed to crew to Rio, but the owner changed his mind."

  "Rio in Brazil? I'll say he's changed his mind. What do you mean, 'crew'? You work for him?"

  Jim decided that the workboat captain would not regard a personal trainer as a fellow working stiff. "It's a job." "What's he paying you?"

  Jim lied. "Fifty bucks a day and a ticket home. From Brazil."

  "Jeeez-su
s ... Okay. Okay. Give Perry a hand casting off." "Thank you, Captain. Thanks a lot—can I get my stuff?" "What?"

  "His gear, Cap," Perry interjected. "His clothes and stuff." "It'll just take a minute."

  "We're outta here in ten minutes. No way I'm crossing that bar at low tide."

  "I'll be right back."

  "Ten minutes."

  Jim scrambled down the wheelhouse ladder, off the workboat, jumped into the rubber dinghy, and rowed as fast as he could across the lagoon. Streaming sweat, his heart pounding, his head swimming from the heat, he pulled himself onto Hustle, hurriedly tied on the dinghy, and leaped down the companionway.

  Margaret lay on the cabin floor.

  Jim was stunned again by her raw beauty. Her dress had hitched up her thighs. For a crazy instant he wondered if she had changed her clothes. Changed from the tight white dress into a combination white skirt and red blouse. But he was dreaming. Wishing. The red was her blood. So much blood that she had to be dead.

  WILL?"

  The only sound he could hear was the distant rumble of the Nellie H's engines. Her captain was revving them, chafing to get under way.

  The woman's mouth was wide open as if to scream and yell or shriek with surprise. Her front teeth were as straight and white as a model's. But she was missing several deeper in her mouth.

  "Will?"

  What had the old man done? "my „

  "In here, kid" came the answer from Will's stateroom in the back of the boat.

  Jim backed fearfully from the dead girl, past the nav station and the galley, where he noticed belatedly that the teakettle was whistling, and down the narrow corridor to Will's door. He glanced in and quickly stepped back.

  Will was lying on his bunk, pointing a short-barreled gun at the door. Where, Jim wondered, had Will gotten the weapon? A sawed-off shotgun, he realized, as a crazy thought careened through his mind: Who would murder a beautiful young girl with a shotgun?