“That is what the hand of God can do!” the pastor said, and this charged the congregation. “He is the I Am that I Am, the unchangeable changer. He has spoken in his word that the sun shall not smite thee by day nor the moon by night.”
“Amen!” the hall reverberated. The pastor was silent for a while and then started cooing into the microphone in his deep dulcet tone: “Amen, and amen, we bless the Lord. Amen and amen.” And slowly, quiet was restored for the delivering of the Word.
A male usher in a black suit, white shirt, and red tie hurried to the stage with a fat Bible and a notebook, which he placed on the lectern, performing a slight bow to the pastor before hurrying down the stage.
Back at home after the service, the Utus had jollof rice and chicken for lunch and soft drinks. Bendic asked Paul to tune the JVC to Radio Rivers 2, where Chinemerem Nwoga was presenting her usual Sunday classical music program. Today’s edition was about the eighteenth-century pianist Chopin. The presenter played her personal favorites from his work and talked about the pianist’s struggle with ill health and the devastating love affairs that might have inspired his music.
Ajie sat on the floor beside the couch. The cold Sprite burned the back of his throat as he gulped. The bottle made a sucking sound, then fizzled and bubbled as he set it down. “I know it was the price for our redemption and all, but if, according to the memory verse quoted in church today, for our sake, it ‘pleased God to bruise His own son, Jesus,’ does that not then make God a sadist?”
“What did you say?” Ma’s eyes narrowed. Bendic was sitting in his chair and didn’t lower his newspaper. Ajie’s toes played with the velvet buttons on the side of the couch.
“I said, eh, does it make God a sadist then, since it pleased Him to bruise His son?”
Ma’s slippers whizzed across the parlor but missed Ajie’s head by a wide mark. Ajie sprang up. Ma followed, caught him by the arm, and gave him three clean slaps on the back, tai! tai! tai! They stood there before each other, stunned. Ma could have given more slaps had she wanted: Ajie’s feet were glued to the floor like those of an animal dazed before the full beam of a car. He did not know how to run from the hands of his parents. They had never hit any of the children before.
“What’s going on?” Ajie could hear only Bendic’s voice. He heard Paul open the door to their room and come out. The slaps had carried through the house. Ajie didn’t feel any pain — like everyone else, he heard only the sound of the slaps; still his eyes clouded, and the solid edges of the tall room divider became wobbly. He sat down behind the sofa so nobody would see.
“We need to instill the fear of God into these children,” Ma strained at the top of her voice. Ajie didn’t hear Bendic say anything back.
The next day Bibi dropped one of the dinner plates and stepped right onto a sharp edge that cut through her foot. Later that week, Ma saw Paul with a James Hadley Chase novel and made it clear that she disapproved of the blonde on the cover whose back was turned, showing part of her buttocks, with a holstered gun stuck in her pink lacy panty hose. Paul tried, but Ma closed her face to his explanation that it was just a detective story.
That weekend Bendic called them together and said, “Your mother and I are traveling to America for a few weeks. We don’t know if your uncle Gabby will be off work so he can stay with you, but we have spoken to Tam and his wife, and they are happy for you to stay with them while we are away.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I ran into a pothole,” Uncle Gabby said as he walked into the house, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief and thumping his boots on the raffia foot mat by the door. “I ran into a pothole near Timber, and my car nearly fell down around me.”
The children crowded the door to welcome him. “Just one pothole?” Ma was standing behind the children, smiling and looking Gabby up and down.
“You should have seen the depth of the thing.”
“Your car is not made for our roads,” Ma replied. “And you are not looking bad at all, Gabby. Money is beginning to touch your hands!” She let her hand drop from his shoulder. “What were you looking for near Timber, anyway?” she continued.
Gabby paused for a moment, frowned, and then said with vague inconsequence, “One girl like that,” and Ma thumped his back with her clenched hand, and he ducked a little too late.
“Come and sit down, I beg,” Ma said, then moved toward the empty seat right opposite Gabby’s. “So you went to see a girl before coming to see us, eh, Gabby? How many months since you last came into town, and a girl — near Timber of all places — matters more?” Ma rumpled her face in mock rancor.
Paul put his hand in Gabby’s breast pocket and took out the car keys. “Don’t try any rough play,” Ma shouted after Paul. “You know you can’t drive.”
“I know,” Paul said. “I just want to check out the inside.”
Bibi still held on to Gabby. Paul went to his room to get his bag of mix tapes. He jiggled the car keys at Ajie. To Gabby, he said, “I’m sure your sound system is powerful.”
“Paul!” Ma turned to Gabby. “It’s like you want them to spoil something in your car.”
“Let him go.” Gabby laughed. “I’ll go out to check what he’s doing.”
Paul jiggled the keys again at his brother. “Ajie,” Paul said with mock impatience, “follow.” They hurried out to the driveway, and there was the blip from Gabby’s car unlocking. Bibi joined Paul and Ajie in the car but soon heard Ma calling her name, so she went back into the house.
This was a year before the afternoon when everything changed. Before normal life, like a scammer, stooped, touched a finger on the sand, and vanished, and it was hard to imagine it had been there in the first place. The absence of Paul would come to project itself, harsh and relentless, like a whistle at midnight. It would be the question mark hovering above the sentence of their lives, never knowing where to settle.
“So when am I going to see this Timber girl?” Ma asked. “Or is she so ugly that you have to hide her from us?”
“It’s nothing serious yet. When I’m off work next, I will come with her,” Gabby said.
Outside, Paul and Ajie listened to track after track from the mix tape. They knew every word of Salt-N-Pepa’s “Shoop,” and they sang and rapped along as it played. “All That She Want” by Ace of Base, coming through Gabby’s speakers, made Ajie shut his eyes and sway his head. Paul was sitting nearly sideways in the car with his elbows turned out, as he rapped later to Coolio’s “Fantastic Voyage.”
Night fell, and they turned on the interior light to read the labels on the cassettes. They reclined the seats as far as they would go when the slow tunes began, and looked like two middle-aged laborers, taking a rest after a full day of carrying blocks on a building site.
“Water Falls” by TLC was playing when Bendic drove in, and they took a break to greet him and take his briefcase and newspapers inside. He asked what they were doing in Gabby’s car. They replied, “Nothing,” and went back outside to sit in the car.
Bibi came out again to join them. “Gabby can’t take time off work, so we are going to stay in Uncle Tam’s house for the rest of the holiday,” she told the boys.