What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky(3)

“When I was your age, my lieutenant—”

“You were in the army when you were twelve?” I interjected, knowing my father’s penchant for exaggeration. Emmanuel used to take him to task for it, interrupting my father with laughter and calls for “Truth! Truth!” With Emmanuel gone, the assignment fell to me, but my father didn’t crack a smile.

“Lieutenant Ezejiaku was a hard man. I feel bad for him now because he was surrounded by boys and fools and charged with creating an army of men. He would wake us at three in the morning and make us run around the compound with our gear. When we complained, he would shout, ‘Do you think the enemy will let you fetch a wheelbarrow to carry your things?’ Sometimes he would wake two of us at random in the middle of the night to run drills. We would always fight to sleep in the spots we thought he wouldn’t pick.”

“Is this about the time he took your gun?”

The tale, intended to impart some inscrutable lesson, was a stale one my father had trotted out at various infractions over my short life. I heard it when I stole lipstick from my aunt’s dresser. I heard it when my mother discovered me gathering ants in a plastic bag to put in a schoolmate’s hair. I heard it after I got into a fight with the children who said my father was strange, and again when I wanted to know why Emmanuel couldn’t come to our house anymore, and later, why he’d done what he’d done. My father never shared stories from before or after the war, as though he’d been born in the barracks and died the night of the final volley.

“Yes, it’s about the time he took my gun, and it was entirely my fault. Lieutenant stressed to us time and time again the importance of keeping our weapons within reach and sight at all times. One night, I was eating around the fire and placed my gun behind me. That was when the lieutenant must have taken it. I panicked when I couldn’t find my gun, but it never occurred to me that he had it. My friends and I took turns rotating so that when one unit was resting, I would have a weapon. This lasted for three days, until the lieutenant mobilized all the units at once for inspections. When he came to me, he looked me in the eye and handed me my gun. I never sweated so hard in my life.”

My father laughed harsh and loud, then quieted, staring at the chessboard. He was still for so long I wasn’t sure if he was contemplating his next move or if this was the genesis of one of the thick skins of silence my mother would spend days peeling off. Just as I was about to go and get her, he moved his queen to check my king and continued.

“I was flogged so hard my back looked like pureed tomatoes. Then they buried me in sand for three days. After that, I never took my eyes off my gun. Checkmate.”

—

I arrived at school the next day a hero. Fellow students patted my back and I was soon surrounded by the girls who hadn’t made Anita’s club and a few who had but wanted to curry favor with the new regime. By exposing Anita and cutting the head off the beast, I’d inherited my very own Girl Army.

During vocabulary class Ms. Uche asked us to select a word from the dictionary to use in a sentence. The person with the best word would get to lead the class to assembly tomorrow.

“I feel luminous,” I said, heady with power.

“Stop being obnoxious.” This from Femi Fashakin, a thick-waisted girl with a plague of pimples. She’d been part of the Girl Club and wasn’t ready to relinquish her membership. Ms. Uche, already bored with the exercise, intervened.

“Why don’t we query the class? Class, which word is better, luminous or obnoxious?”

My army responded like a rehearsed choir.

“Luminous!” And Femi Fashakin was put in her place.

Anita Okechukwu fared worse. She hadn’t been popular before the supposed bra acquisition, her only claim to fame being that her baby brother was albino, and she couldn’t take much credit for that. But she’d tried, and her incessant conversations about a three-year-old earned her a reputation as an odd one. She’d fallen even further now, with girls pointing and laughing at her, which was only to be expected. What I hadn’t expected were the boys who ran behind her during recess and lifted up her skirt, as though my actions had given them permission, as though because they had seen her bare breast they were entitled to the rest. It was a boyish expectation most would not outgrow even after they became men.

At first Anita yelled and pulled her skirt down and chased the offenders, but soon something cracked and though she cried, she no longer tried to stop them. This earned her the reputation of being easy, which would haunt her long past girlhood.

I resisted the urge to walk over to Anita and went instead to the cluster of girls who awaited my command. We sat in a circle looking at each other. I was seated on a crate that had once held soft drinks. Damaris Ndibe, who had installed herself as my second in command, dragged a smaller girl forward and stood her in front of me.

“She lied about the job her older brother got.” It took me a minute to realize that I was supposed to set this right somehow. The incident with Anita made me the purveyor of vigilante schoolyard justice, but I’d lost my taste for truth.

I stalled for time.

“What’s your brother’s name?”

“Emmanuel,” she whispered, and though it wasn’t my Emmanuel, something about the way she said his name, a trigger in her inflection, brought it rushing back. Emmanuel’s vigorous laughter, the way he ruffled my hair and pulled up my braids in a bid to make me taller. The way he bartered stories and wit with my father. His growing moroseness, his angry outbursts, the crying that followed. My mother would pull me away from where I eavesdropped and put me to bed. After Emmanuel left, I’d hear them argue, my mother’s raised voice saying, “It isn’t right, Azike, he isn’t right. I don’t want him here.” But the next week he’d be there again and sometimes he’d be okay and sometimes he wouldn’t, and sometimes he’d pull my braids and sometimes he wouldn’t, but he was always there. Until he wasn’t.