Free Blood Is Dirt by Robert Wilson

price, sat in full robes and started making elaborate gestures at each other so that we could see their Rolexes. Sam let us buy him a beer and some chop. The food was
eba,
a ball of steamed gari, cassava flour, which you could build a brick wall with if the cement works went out of production. It came with a red-hot sauce and two pieces of meat which looked like knee cartilage but turned out to be school rubbers. I ate the
eba
and sauce and left the rubbers for Sam and Bagado. The petrol barons were drinking Nigerian Guinness, which, at eight per cent alcohol, can creep up on you. Their mouths widened and their tongues flopped out. Occasionally they sat back from each other, stunned, as if they’d inadvertently called each other sons of whores.
    The chop-bar owner was playing draughts with himself using beer-bottle tops on a board scored into the counter. He was roughly half the size of his wife, who appeared from the kitchen behind him and looked over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t cheating. Bagado asked him about Akata village. He left the bar without a word and roared at the old man outside who stumbled in behind him, fresh from some pilgrimage of the mind. The barman gave us a bottle of
ogogoro,
distilled palm wine, which could get you nowhere quicker than a sandbag across the back of the neck. That was how they got the name for it, it was the noise a man made as he went down.
    The bar owner suggested that we get our questions in between the first and third shot of
ogogoro
which proved to be good advice. After the first shot the old man looked around him as if his cataracts had demisted. Bagado spoke to him in Yoruba, sounding solicitous, respecting his elders, and made notes in his little book. Once Bagado had it straight on paper he gave the old man his third shot. Something short-circuited and the wavering twelve-volt lamps behind the white discs of the old man’s eyes went out.
    Sam gave us a treasured business card and we left him in the chop bar with the sleeping petrol barons. The bar owner walked the old man outside, where he sat down and fell asleep with his head balanced on the end of his stick. He’d given Bagado directions on how to get into Akata from the north where there should be fewer patrols. It involved crossing a river twice. We hoped it would be dry. I bought some tinned corned beef and some old bread, which they’d coloured pink, and we set off into the bush in the mid-afternoon.
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    By 5.30 p.m. we’d crossed the river for the second time and abandoned the car, which we hid in the thick bush. I took the camera and a couple of empty water bottles for samples and we walked up to the top of a ridge and down a dry tributary to the river which the old man had said would take us close to Akata village.
    A team of buzzards had found something and we watched them spiralling down in ones and twos into the trees. I was sweating cobs and not just from the heat—the gout didn’t like the shabby treatment it was getting from walking over rough ground and it seemed to have set up some kind of carpentry class in the joint of my big toe. The insects remembered there was a feast to attend and started rubbing their hands at the prospect. A type of fly which had a proboscis geared for getting through cow hide had just found that human skin was as buttery as the finest beef fillet. Bagado strode ahead with his hands clasped behind his back.
    The light was failing rapidly as we broke out of the trees and on to a rough but graded track. This didn’t sound right from the instructions the old man had given us. Maybe that
ogogoro
had burnt more out of his brain than the bar owner thought. From the dusk came a deep, farting noise of a diesel engine—a tractor or an old truck. We walked towards it. As we drew closer the gearing of the engine changed, manoeuvring with more urgency. There were voices around it. We dropped off the graded road into a ditch and worked our way forward