“Come, pretty boy boy, how you get it up? How I goin’ know which one you like when you wearing some grandmother death shroud?” she said as men lit wall torches behind her.
Still tall as the doorway, still fat from crocodile meat and ugali porridge. Still wearing a long wrap around her waist to squeeze her breasts to almost pop out, but showing her meaty shoulders and back. Still leaving her head bald and bare, a thing not liked by the Kongori. Still smelling like expensive incense because “Us girls must have one thing out of the reach of other girls,” she said every time I told her she smelled like she just bathed in a goddess’s river.
“I can just tell you who I want, Miss Wadada.”
“Oh. No, boy boy boy. Prefer the other way when your big Tracker just stiff up and point up to the one he like. I don’t know why you in that curtain. I feeling all the offense you should be feeling for yourself.”
Miss Wadada’s House of Pleasurable Goods and Services was not for people who were not themselves. Illusion was for who smoked opium. She let a shape-shifter fuck one of her girls as a lion once, until he swatted her in a fit of ecstasy and snapped her neck. I left my curtain on the floor and went upstairs with the one she said came from the land of the eastern light, which means an emissary raped a girl and left her with child to go back to his wife and concubines. The girl left the child with Miss Wadada, who looked at his skin and bathed him every quartermoon in cream and sheep butter. She forbade him to do any work so that his muscles would stay thin, his cheeks high and hips much wider than his waist. Miss Wadada made him the most exquisite of all creatures, who had all the best stories of all the worst people, but preferred that you fucked each tale out and paid him a fee on top of Miss Wadada’s for being the best information hound in all Kongor.
“Look, it is the wolf eye,” he said. “No man has made a woman of me since you.”
His room smelled like the room I just left. I never asked if saying “him” brought offense since I only called him Ekoiye or “you.”
“I can’t tell if you live with a civet or have its musk all over you.”
Ekoiye rolled his eyes and laughed. “We must have nice things, man-wolf. Besides, what man wants to enter a room where he can smell the man who just left?”
He laughed again. I liked that he only needed himself to laugh at his jokes. I saw it in people who had to endure other people. With Ekoiye it mattered not if you were a fine or a foul lover, or if you were a man of much or little sport. He took pleasure for himself first. Whether you shared in it was your business. He crowded his little room with terra-cotta statues, even more than I remember last. And this, a cage with a black pigeon I mistook for a crow.
“I change every man into one before he leaves this room,” he said, and pulled a comb from his hair. Curly hair fell down like little snakes.
“Indeed. Your shows deserve an audience. Or at least a griot.”
“Man-wolf, don’t you know the verses about me?”
He pointed to a stool with a back like a throne. A birthing chair, I remembered.
“Where is your friend? What name did they give him, Nayko?”
“Nyka.”
“I miss him. He was a man of great light and noise.”
“Noise?”
“He made the greatest noise, something like a loud cat’s purr, or the coo of a rameron pigeon, when I put him in my mouth.”
His hand grabbed me as he said that.
“You little liar. Nyka was never one for the company of boys.”
“Good wolf, you know I can be whatever you want me, even the girl you’ve never had … under certain wine and in a certain light.”
His robes fell down all around him, and he stepped out of the pile on the floor. He straddled me and winced as he lowered himself and I rose up inside him. This is how he always played. Sinking down on me until his ass sat on my thighs, then, without climbing off, turning around so that his back was to me. I told him once that only men who tell lies to their wives need to fuck from behind; he still did it this way. He asked what he always asked: Do you want me to fuck you? And I said what I always said: Yes. Miss Wadada always asked if he’d injured me when I left.
“Fuck the gods,” I said in a hiss, and curled my toes so tight they cracked like knuckles.
I pushed him down on the floor and jumped on top. After, with me out of him, but him straddled on top of me, he said, “You follow the eastern light now?”
“No.”
“Ghost walkers of the West?”
“Ekoiye, the questions you ask.”
“Because, Tracker, all men under the sky, men who love to think they are different from each other, perhaps to make sense of when they war, are all the same. They think whatever troubles them here”—he pointed to his head—“they can fuck it out into me. This is foreign thinking, that I did not expect from a man from these lands. Maybe you wander too much. You’ll be praying to only one god next.”
“I have nothing in my head to fuck out.”
“Then what does the Tracker want?”
“Who needs more after this?” I said, and slapped his ass. The move felt hollow and we both knew so. He laughed, then leaned until his back was on my chest. I wrapped my arms around him. I dripped sweat. Ekoiye was ever dry.
“Tracker, I lied. Men from the eastern light never fuck anything out. They always want to get sticked in the ass. So again, what does the Tracker want?”
“I seek old news.”
“How old?”
“Three years and many moons.”
“Three years, three moons, three blinks are all flat to me.”
“I ask about one of Kwash Dara’s elders. Basu Fumanguru is his name.”
Ekoiye rolled away from me, stood up, and went to the birthing chair. He stared at me.
“Everyone knows of Basu Fumanguru.”
“What does everyone say?”
“Nothing. I said they knew, not that they would talk. They should have burned that house down, to kill the plague, but none will step near it. It is a—”
“You think the house fell to disease.”
“Or a curse from a river demon.”
“I see. How powerful is he, the man who pays you to say such?”
He laughed. “You paid Miss Wadada to fuck.”
“And I pay you far above your sum to talk. You saw my pouch and you know what is in it. Now talk.”
He stared at me again, then. He looked around, as if more were in the room, then wrapped himself in a sheet. “Come with me.”
He pushed away a pile of chests and opened a hatch door no higher than my thigh.
“You will not be coming back to this room,” he said.
He crawled in first. Dark and hot, crumbly with dust, then hard from wood, then harder from mud and plaster, always too black to see. Hear much I did. From every room came men shouting and fucking in all ways and manners, but girls and boys who all moaned the same, saying fuck me with your big, your hard, your Ninki Nanka battering ram, and on and on. Training from Miss Wadada. Twice the idea ran through me that this was a trap, Ekoiye coming out first being a sign to kill the man who crawls out after. There might have been a man with a ngulu sword waiting for my neck, though Ekoiye did not hesitate. For we crawled even longer, long enough to make me wonder who built this, who traveled this long for Ekoiye’s bed. Ahead of him, the dark twinkled with stars.
“Where are you taking us?” I asked.
“To your executioner,” he said, then laughed. We came to a flight of steps, which led to the roof of a place I did not know. No smell of civet, no smell of Miss Wadada, no scent or stench of the whorehouse.
“No, there is no smell of Miss Wadada,” he said.
“Are you hearing my words unsaid?”
“If you think them so loud, Tracker.”
“Is this how you know the secrets of men?”
“What I hear is no secret. All the girls can hear them too.”
Laughter burst out of me. Who else would be expert at reading the minds of men?
“You are on the roof of a gold merchant from the Nyembe quarter.”
“I smell Miss Wadada’s perfume south of us.”
Ekoiye nodded. “Some say it was murder, some say it was monsters.”
“Who? What do you speak of now?”
“What happened to your friend, Basu Fumanguru. Have you seen the men who gather now, in our city?”
“The Seven Wings.”
“Yes, that is what they are called. Men in black. The woman who lives beside Fumanguru said that she saw many men in black in Fumanguru’s house. Through the window she saw them.”
“Seven Wings are mercenaries, not assassins. Not like them to kill just one man and his family. Not even in war.”
“I didn’t call them Seven Wings, she did. Maybe they were demons.”
“Omoluzu.”
“Who?”
“Omoluzu.”
“I do not know him.”
He went over to the edge of the roof and I followed him. We were three floors up. A man rolled in the road, palm wine smell coming of his skin. Other than him, the street was empty.
“Such a swarm of men, who want this man dead. Some say Seven Wings, some say demons, some say the chieftain army.”