The Bag

The Warden's boys had been giving Danger and Benny odd jobs for about a year, and every job came with the same rule: don't ask.

The Warden himself never gave them anything. Chief Lazarus Ekanem, whom everybody on June 12 Street calls the Warden, spent thirty-one years at Kirikiri prison across the road and then bought the house at No. 1145 and lit it purple and called it Prizm. He does not talk to area boys. He has boys of his own for that: young men in black T-shirts with earpieces that may or may not be connected to anything.

The jobs were never much. Carry crates of drinks in through Prizm's back gate on a party night. Move the big generator when it needed moving. Danger had fixed that generator twice; the Warden called him "my engineer" and paid him for the first repair only, because "a man must not be greedy, my son." Danger had looked at him for a long time when he said it, and the Warden had laughed and looked somewhere else first. Stand at the corner and tell a boy in black when a certain car came in. Carry a cooler to a car at the gate. The money was fair and it came fast, and they did not ask. In Benny's notebook there was a page headed PRIZM with dates and amounts on it and not one other word.

On Thursday afternoon the tall one with the earpiece found them at the gate and handed Danger a bag.

It was a black sports bag, the kind footballers carry, with the zip closed and a little brass padlock through the pull. It was heavier than it looked. It did not slosh, it did not clink, and it did not rattle.

"Keep it tonight," said the tall one. "Tomorrow, quarter to midnight, take it out to the port road past the waiting area. A white car. You hand it over. You don't open it. You don't ask."

Then he named the price. ₦50,000, for the two of them.

Benny had been in business for fifteen years, and he had one rule older than the notebook: when the price is too good, the thing is not the thing. Nobody had ever paid them ₦50,000 to carry anything. Danger had pushed a fuel tanker for less.

The tall one was already turning away. Then he turned back, as if he had just remembered something, which Benny could tell he had not.

"Your neighbor. The London one, in Room 3." He said it lightly. "What does he like? Who does he owe?"

Benny opened his mouth. He could sell anything to anyone. He had sold umbrellas to a man holding an umbrella. He had once sold a woman her own chair. And standing there at the gate with the bag at Danger's feet, for the first time in his life, Benny had nothing to sell.

"Rice," said Benny. "He likes rice."

The tall one looked at him for a moment, then at Danger. Danger had not moved. He was simply looking back, the way he had looked through the window of a certain taxi, and the benches around them had gone quiet in the way they did. The tall one laughed, a little too quickly, and went back up the street toward the purple sign.

Room 8

They put the bag on the mattress in Room 8, on the fan side, because neither of them wanted to sleep next to it.

"It's not clothes," said Danger. He picked it up and weighed it in one hand, then the other. "Clothes don't sit like that."

"Put it down."

"You're the one who always says, know your stock."

"It's not our stock," said Benny. "That's the point. Everything we sell, I know what it is. Chargers, credit, fuel, water. Even the thing Tara hates, I know what it is, and I know what it costs a man if they catch him with it." He looked at the padlock. "This one, I don't know what it costs."

Danger set the bag down. He did not raise his voice. He never does, and that is the part that frightens people. "Then why did you take it?"

Benny said nothing for a moment. Then, quietly: "Fifty thousand."

"Fifty thousand." Danger said it back slowly, as if he were weighing that too. "I carry rice for the market women. I carry Mama Ronke's water when her back is bad. I pushed a tanker down the port road for two thousand and a cold drink. I carry for anybody who asks me straight." He touched the little padlock with one finger. "I don't carry for a man who won't tell me what I'm carrying. I am nobody's donkey, Benny. Not the Warden's. Not his boys'."

"And the other thing," said Benny.

"I heard him." Danger's face had gone cold, the way it had at the taxi window. "What does the London one like. Who does he owe. That boy came out of a cell two weeks ago with no laces in his shoes. They are not putting him in their mouths. Nobody uses him. Not for fifty, not for five million. Not while I'm on this street."

"And when you're not on this street?"

Danger laughed, the big laugh, the one you can hear from the gate. "Benny. Look at me. You think I'm going to be an old man on that veranda, complaining to Mr. Akin about the bathroom? Men like me don't get grey hair in Ajegunle. The street spends us young. I knew that before I could spell it. So I'm not spending what's left of me carrying a bag for the Warden."

"Stop it."

"I'm only saying it."

"Saying it is how it starts." Benny's voice cracked, which it never did, not even at eleven, kneeling in a heap of crushed groundnuts. "Every time you say that, I want to write it in the notebook just so I can cross it out."

Danger looked at him for a long moment. Then the cold went out of his face, and he sat down on the floor with his back against the wall, on the mosquito side, and rubbed his face with both hands.

There was a knock. Not on the wall. On the door.

Tara stood in the corridor with a wide-tooth comb in her hand and a half-braided wig over one arm, because she brought her work home on Thursdays. She looked at them. Then she looked past them, at the bag on the mattress.

"What's in it?"

"We don't know," said Benny.

"That is the worst answer you have ever given me," said Tara, "and I have heard you explain the fan rota."

"The Warden's boys," said Danger. "They cut their hair with you. You hear things."

"What the mirror hears, the mirror keeps." She said it the way she always did. Then she was quiet for a moment, which she almost never was. "I will tell you what I know without telling you anything. That tall boy talks too much in my chair and never says anything at all. And nobody in this city pays fifty thousand naira for a walk."

"How do you know it's fifty?"

"Because you took it at the gate, in front of my salon, and my apprentice Blessing has ears like a satellite dish." She pointed the comb at the bag. "Not in this house, Benny. You hear me? Not that thing, and not anything you can't name."

The yard

So they took it out to the back yard of Iloro House, and when the light went at eight they were still there, sitting on two upturned paint buckets with the bag on the ground between them, like two men waiting for it to say something.

Over the rooftops, Kirikiri's watchtower lights were burning. Benny had looked at those lights every night for years and never once thought about them. Tonight he could not stop. Danger had thought about them plenty. Without looking up, he said a verse he had written their first week in Room 8, low, the way he said all of them.

NEPA takes our light at eight on the dot.

Over the east wall, the prison keeps what it's got.

All night the towers burn, white and wide,

like the wall is calling: it's brighter inside.

Benny did not say anything. It was one of the ones he liked, which tonight was worse.

The back door creaked. AJ came out in the dark with a cup of water, saw them, and stopped.

"What's in the bag?"

"We don't ask," said Danger and Benny together.

"That's not what I asked," said AJ.

Nobody answered that. AJ sat down on the back step. After a while Benny said, without looking at him, "The tall one asked about you today. The Warden's boy. What you like. Who you owe."

AJ was quiet. "What did you tell him?"

"Rice."

AJ laughed, once.

"Whatever they want from you," said Danger, "the answer is no. You hear me, London? Even if it's rice."

AJ stopped laughing. He finished his water, said goodnight, and said thank you, to Danger, as though somebody had given him something. Then he went in.

When the back door had shut, Danger looked up at the towers. "That man thinks this whole estate is still his prison," he said. "Thirty-one years of keys. He hasn't got one for me."

Benny took the rubber band off the notebook and opened it to the page headed PRIZM. Dates. Amounts. Not one word about what. For a year that had seemed like the cleverest page in the book. Now it looked like a list of doors he had walked through with his eyes shut.

"Danger."

"Mm."

"When did we start not asking?"

Danger thought about it for a long time. "When they started paying," he said.

"And when do we stop?"

Danger did not answer. Neither did Benny. The generators sang up and down the street. Somewhere a dog barked at nothing, and somewhere else a radio was playing, and the little brass padlock on the bag caught the light from the prison wall and held it.

It was a very small padlock. Danger could have opened it with a fingernail, and they both knew it. Tomorrow at a quarter to midnight, a white car would be waiting on the port road.

They sat there until the generators began to go quiet, one by one, looking at the bag, and neither of them said out loud what they were both thinking. What if we look?

And then the other question, the worse one, the one that kept them on those buckets until morning.

What if we don't?