Voice of America (20 page)

It wasn’t that there were no other good places to drink, but Pat’s Bar, with its New York Yankees vest and cap in a glass frame, blown-up pictures of Madonna and Marilyn Monroe, and American quarters and cents glued to the bar, felt like home to most of the oil workers.

There were other places—the Shell Club, the Hotel Presidential Bar, and the Metropolitan Club 1938—that were frequented by British expatriates. These were places where you could drink your beer in peace, without a thin girl with pale skin and a false American accent brushing up against you and asking if she could share your seat or drink. Pat’s patrons considered these other places sterile and antiseptic.

Those who drank at Pat’s Bar knew what they were looking for, and there was plenty of that. Within the bar’s confines, you could talk about how the locals crossed the road like goats without looking left or right, and you need not look over your shoulder to see if someone was listening. You could throw up right there at the bar, and the unobtrusive barman would clean you up and take you upstairs to lie down for a bit to clear your head. The expatriates would point at the hand-lettered sign on
the white fence outside that said
DO NOT UNIRET HERE, OKADA NO PARKING DROP AND GO
and laugh out loud. Pat had deliberately refused to correct the spelling errors when she discovered that her customers were fascinated by them. Yet the bar was never rowdy. The girls behaved themselves, and a few expatriates had been heard to remark that Pat ran a tight ship.

It was not that locals did not want to come there to drink, but somehow they could tell that they were not welcome. The beer cost almost ten times what it did in the local bars, and the girls would hiss at any local who called to them.

“Shuo why are you calling me, abi monkey no sabi him mate again, please ants move with ants and crickets move with crickets, abeg na oyibo I dey follow o I no dey follow you Port Harcourt men, fuck no pay thank you very much. Or you think because God gave me my thing free I should give it free to any man with a penis.”

Even the musician who played on Friday nights, who used to be known as Prince Shagasha, changed his name to Kenny Rogers Junior in order to please his clients and stopped singing African highlife, switching to country and western.

There were two categories of patrons at Pat’s Bar, those who lived in Port Harcourt and those who worked offshore. The latter category was more reckless, drank more, swore more, and picked up two or three girls at a time. They got into brawls more often.

I
T WAS TO
the offshore category that Chet Williams used to belong, but he’d had trouble and was living in one of the upstairs rooms at Pat’s Bar, accumulating a huge tab that even Pat was
not sure he would ever be able to pay. Recalling that he had been one of her best customers when the going was good, she told her barman to keep giving him beer. She believed that Chet’s luck would turn. Some customers had been heard to describe Chet Williams as a disgrace to America, but the other Americans who came to the bar still bought him drinks and considered him merely unlucky. Chet had been like them; he worked for an oil company as a rig engineer and only came to Pat’s Bar when he was off duty. Generous and always laughing, he was thin and wiry, and three lines appeared at the corners of his eyes whenever he smiled. Some of the old-timers still recalled how he had once walked up to the stage when Kenny Rogers Junior was singing, taken his guitar and microphone, and belted out “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” to big applause. Pat called him “Engineer Double” because he would always leave the bar with two girls each night after drinking. It was never one girl, and he never went back to the same set of girls twice. The expatriate oil workers said that any problem that Pat could not solve was unsolvable. Pat had gotten Chet Williams out of trouble in the past. He had picked up a girl in a nightclub but did not know that the girl was a Mamiwata, a mermaid. He had such a great time with her and was so grateful the next morning that he gave her a hundred-dollar note, twice the usual amount. But the girl turned down the money and left. The side of the bed on which the girl had slept was wet, as if someone had poured a bucket of water on it. Probably sweat, he assumed, and left for the rig. When he got to the rig, he could not focus on the job he had to do; his mind kept going back to the girl he had slept with. He recalled her contortions and how she kept calling him “my husband, oh my husband.” He found himself with a huge erection,
his face covered in sweat. He asked for compassionate leave and ran back to Port Harcourt to look for the lady. He went from one nightclub to another, distraught, his eyes wild, asking for Helen, the name she had given him. When he wandered into Pat’s Bar screaming her name, Pat could immediately tell what had happened.

“Mr. Chet don fuck Mamiwata be dat o, he no fit sleep again and na Mamiwata him dey see for dream every night wey him sleep.”

She took him to a native doctor in Diobu, a suburb in downtown Port Harcourt. The native doctor demanded five thousand naira, a white cock, and a bottle of Seaman’s Aromatic Schnapps. He spat some of the schnapps into Chet Williams’s eyes, and suddenly the man gripped Pat’s arm and, looking around, asked, “Where am I?” He felt as if he had been in a dream all that time, he said.

But Pat had declared Chet Williams’s recent troubles unsolv-able; in fact, she told some of the expatriates that his best bet was to return to America and start a new life. His recent troubles were caused by girls too. He had picked up two girls from another bar.

The girls claimed to be students at the University of Port Harcourt. Chet Williams had convinced them to do nude shots of themselves and him with his digital camera. When Chet woke up the next morning, the girls had disappeared with his money bag, his cell phone, his Rolex wristwatch, and his gold wrist chain, but had for some reason overlooked the digital camera. He cursed out loud, calling all Nigerian girls prostitutes and thieves. Pat assured him that she would help him catch the girls, but he was not interested. He posted the nude pictures of the
girls in an expatriate Web site, Najamericans Online. When the girls heard that he had splashed their nude pictures on the Web, they told the local gossip magazines about Chet Williams and his weird sexual habits. They said they were no thieves; they had stolen his money because he refused to pay them for the nude shots. The newspapers had a field day with the story, splashing the girls’ naked pictures on their front page, mentioning Mr. Chet Williams by name, and calling on his employer, a major oil company, to sack him. The papers asked if he would have dared to take pictures of American call girls in his native country without paying them. The oil companies avoided anything that would draw the ire of their host communities; first Chet’s employers suspended him, then they fired him. Since then he had been hanging around, hoping to get another job and living at Pat’s Bar. But the oil companies operated according to some unwritten rules of cooperation.

The only case that came close to Chet’s involved a brash, cursing, beer-bellied Texan called Red Rick. He had gotten into an argument with one of the Nigerian engineers in the rig for not carrying out his instructions properly, and in a fit of rage had called the Nigerian engineer an “educated monkey.”

The Nigerian workers in the rig had thrown down their tools and attempted to throw Red Rick into the ocean, but were stopped by the Atlas guards on duty. The story had gotten into the newspapers, and the Nigerian Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers had stepped in and insisted that Rick must be sacked and deported. The newspapers had blown the whole thing out of proportion and actually insisted that there was a tradition of racism among foreign oil workers. No one listened to the argument that it was usual for the oil workers to refer to
the Nigerian workers on the rig as monkeys, and for the local workers to refer to the white workers as “oyibo pepper,” referring both to the pale color of the white man’s skin and his inability to eat peppers. Red Rick hung around in Pat’s Bar for a long time while the case was being investigated. Finally, the oil company sacked him and asked him to leave.

A
LL THESE WERE
small issues compared to the abductions of expatriate oil workers that began to take place at the beginning of the new year in Port Harcourt. There had been abductions in other oil-producing towns with expatriate communities like Warri and Ughelli, but Port Harcourt, fondly called the Garden City, had seemed immune. When the news first filtered in that six foreign oil workers, including two Americans, had been abducted by a group known as the Niger Delta Force, fear gripped the expatriate community. They were used to threats and work stoppage from their host communities, but not armed abductions.

Pat moved from one drinking table to the next.

“No be serious matter at all, at all, the governor don step into the case, even the president, sef, and all the chiefs and royal fathers and soja don full everywhere, no wahala at all, everything is under control.”

“What do they want, is it money?”

“Are they connected to any Muslim group? They say their leader has a Muslim name.”

“Are Americans their target, or are they after every white person living in Port Harcourt?”

The first of the hostages were set free after a week. They
had only good words for their captors; they said they were very polite young men and were only asking for representation and development for their people. But that first abduction opened a floodgate in the Niger Delta. The news leaked out that the first kidnappers had been paid off handsomely—in foreign currency too—by the oil companies, who had established a ransom fund. This was all the news the unemployed young men in the Niger Delta needed.

The abductors drove up to Pat’s Bar in a navy blue Nissan bus in a cloud of dust. They shot sporadically into the air. One of them leaned out of the front passenger seat; he had a red bandanna around his head and military fatigues.

“Lie down, everybody—if you move we shoot you, if you talk we shoot you dead, bring out your cell phones and keep them on the table, if you move, we waste you.”

The rest of the abductors jumped out of the bus; they too were dressed in military fatigues and carried AK-47 rifles. They were all barking out orders at the same time. There was dust, smoke, and confusion in the small bar. Some of the expatriates were hiding under the tables. The girls were lying on top of them, shielding them with their bodies.

Pat came out from the kitchen, where she had been supervising one of the cooks who was preparing steak for a customer and began to scream, “What police station are you people from, and who sent you? Don’t you know that this is a decent place where oyibo people come to relax, oya, oya, who is your leader, come and see me quick.” She had mistaken the abductors for idle soldiers on an extortion raid. Soldiers from the Tombra barracks would occasionally raid bars to extort money whenever they were broke, but they rarely came to Pat’s Bar.

One of the gunmen shot at her, but their leader pushed his gun to the side, and the bullet ricocheted off a table. Pat screamed and lay down, calling on Amanyanabo, the god of her forefathers, to save her.

“We want the white men,
oya
come out all of you, one by one, and start marching into the vehicle, quick, quick, march into the bus and let’s move, we are not wasting time, anybody that disobey we waste the person one time.”

It was then Pat realized that these were no soldiers raiding expatriate bars for small extortion money, but abductors who had come on more serious business. The lights in the bar were very dim, powered by the standby generator that had been running all day due to an outage. Pat crawled to where three of her white customers were sitting and shielded them with her body. The only two people who walked into the waiting bus were an American who worked for Chevron named Pete and Chet Williams. Chet had been sitting alone before the abductors came, nursing a beer and waiting for an opportune moment to ask the barman to bring him three shots of Monkey Tail. He had been playing his favorite mind game to amuse himself, which he called “Why This Country Is Fucked Up.”

As long as they continue to have only one kind of doughnut, this country will remain fucked up.

As long as they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, this country will remain fucked up.

As long as they call every kind of pasta macaroni, this country will remain fucked up.

As long as Happy Cow cheese remains the only brand to be found in the country, and even that is hawked in the hot sun, this country will remain fucked up.

As long as they continue to throw tires round the necks of armed robbers, douse them with petrol, and set them ablaze instead of trying them in courts of law, this country will remain fucked up….

He was still enjoying his game when a gun was pointed at his head and he was led away.

The girls knew Chet Williams’s story; they knew he had no money, and they stayed away from him. The other American who was abducted, Pete, was a fat, unhappy fellow. He usually wore Levi’s and a New York Yankees baseball cap, preferred young boys, and always looked sullen, which made the girls stay away from him as well.

As the bus pulled away, the abductors shot into the air and shouted, “You will hear from us.” People began to stand up from the floor; two of the expatriates had urinated on themselves, and they pointed at each other and laughed nervously. They emptied their wallets, giving all the money in them to the girls who had shielded them, fled into their cars, and sped off.

The news soon spread that two Americans had been abducted from Pat’s Bar, and the story made the local newspapers. The governor of the state invited Pat and whoever had been at the bar to come forward and debrief the security operatives. He called on the oil companies not to pay ransom money to anybody.

T
HE ABDUCTORS CALLED
themselves names like Rambo, 007, Chuck Norris, and Hulk Hogan. They were all very dark-complexioned and were visibly excited, like fishermen celebrating a big catch. As they drove the bus at high speed through the
streets of Port Harcourt, Chet prayed that they would run into a police checkpoint. Pete was crying, big tears running down his face and snot down his nose; he looked too scared to wipe off the snot. Surprisingly, there were no police checkpoints on the road that night. Ordinarily, every quarter mile featured a point where the policemen would ask for bribes. If they noticed that the car was carrying a white person, their manner immediately turned servile. “Oga oyibo your boys are here working for you, abeg find your boys something to do the weekend, as you can see we are here protecting you, nothing is too small, any small thing is appreciated even if na dollar or pound sterling.” Tonight the policemen were nowhere to be found.