Last Night In Asaba Chike Frankie Edozien (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 140] I knew that I shouldn't have picked up the call. I feel the chills that come when Baba is in one of his moods. Those little puddles on my arms—goosebumps, Alhaji calls them—are sprouting up. I'm sitting in the cramped back seat of a rickety Volkswagen kombi bus that is past the halfway point on the Niger Bridge, heading into Onitsha. Minutes after dropping the phone, I'm still shaking. The passengers are gawking at me. Why did I have to answer? Baba never calls unless something is terribly wrong. I could have stayed on the bus and gotten off at the club and had a fantastic night dancing. Tomorrow, I would have just said my battery died. Or that I misplaced my phone. This one Friday night that I need to let off steam, I took the call, and now, I have to get off, catch another bus, and head back to Asaba. No dancing. No flirting. No Star beer. I answered and what did I get? "WHERE ARE YOU?" Baba's voice was so loud that the market woman sitting next to me squirmed. It seemed like everyone onboard heard. "Get back here now! If I don't see you in five minutes you will see what will happen." I have been very good this whole year. I have stayed out of his way and out of the [End Page 141] way of all the Aladura Prayer Warriors Baba has over every other day for Bible study. I always tell the white garment shoeless brothers who are my father's latest obsession, that work is keeping me away from the meetings. But truly, what work is there really to do when you're a youth corper? The National Youth Service Corps mandate is that we spend the year after university working somewhere in Nigeria where we are not indigenes. Somehow, they posted me to Okpanam. Of all places. I've had to move back to Papa's home in Asaba and go to work from there. It could have been worse; they could have sent me to Yola, or someplace in the Northeast where I could have been ravaged by Boko Haram sympathizers. They must have thought we still lived in Lagos. But Baba is retired and the Lagos home is no more. And with retirement, he is around all the time. We all know not to cross Baba when he is in one of his moods. I still remember when I was finishing High School. That term, of the three hundred people in S. S. 2, at Ogbomosho Grammar School, I was number two when the results were compiled. Even in the deadly boring Health Science, I was on top. But during that first mathematics midterm, I had been sick. So, missing the test got me a zero score. No mercy for being at the Sick Bay that day with stomach cramps. There was no way to get an "A" in that one. So it was all "As" except for the "F." On the cramped bus ride back to Lagos that day, I kept smiling. If not for the stomach issues, I might have ended up in first position, but second was fine too. I was happy walking into the house for my holiday with my report card. Even with that missing test, I had still been placed second. But Baba was already in a bad mood when I arrived in Lagos. I didn't know what the problem was. But there he was, frowning, with visitors. One of them was kneeling. I'm not sure what they were there for, but I recognized some of them as Ilesha people. Baba's last wife is from Ilesha and these were her kin. She had been gone for some time, since I'd left for the boarding school two years before. It seemed like I was always an inconvenience to her. And Baba did everything to make her happy. Even sending me to board in Ogbomosho was her idea. Sending her to England, too, was her...