Kevin owned a fashion shop he managed with his little brother. He was five-feet-ten-inches tall so he was not someone you could describe as a tall man. But he had arms that were each half the size of his waist. The arms hung on his sides permanently suspended at angles of thirty degrees to his body. When people met Kevin for the first time, they keep expecting him to bring down the arms and walk like every other person but they soon learned that it would be easier to increase the angles between those arms and Kevin’s body than to reduce it. The position of Kevin’s arms relative to his body was due to more than a decade of building his upper chest and triceps in the gym, making him walk as if he was always trying to occupy more space than he needed.
It was perhaps this posture that made the police arrest him when they raided a neighbouring marijuana bunker. The use (or more appropriately) smoking and sale of pot were still illegal in Bansar district and the whole of the country for that matter. But, scattered all over the city were places you could buy the good stuff and smoke it if you wanted. Most people liked to smoke in these bunkers because as they said, it provided more entertainment and better scope for the imagination. Rumour had it that one young guy, after smoking in the bunker, he could not leave. Having stayed there for over an hour just sitting there and drooling saliva all over him, Man-pass, the bunker owner had to ask him to leave to allow more space for new customers.
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"Pally, I think you better leave now," Man-pass whose real name, Amanze was changed to Man-pass because of his favourite saying, Man pass man, told you young fellow. The young man did not move. When other customers intervened, the young man protested.
“Please pardon me,” he said. “I came here with two legs, but I can’t find one. Someone must have left with it. Now I don’t know how to walk with one leg.”
Some of his fellow customers on the same level of highness thought about it and nodded that, yes, one should not be expected to talk away with one leg, especially considering that you came with two.
Kevin did not smoke and he had never seen the inside of the bunker. His greatest crime was having his shop beside the bunker so when the police raided the place, the real culprits woke up from their pipe dreams fast enough to have jumped fences, including those with only one leg. Kevin heard the noise and came out of his shop to know what all the noise was about when the police saw him and decided quite logically that a man built like a nightclub bouncer must have been smoking dope too.
The police would not hear anything Kevin said to prove himself innocent.
“Don’t worry,” one of the policemen said, with his rifle trained on Kevin. "You must get to the station first and write what happened on a police statement. Then you can go. Kevin knew the drill with these policemen so he did not want to go to the station. All his explanation of how he was not in the bunker fell on deaf ears. So, he had to go.
By the time he was standing in front of the police corporal across the counter waiting to be processed out of that nightmare, he kept hearing a loud voice from across the wall behind the counter
“Hol’ your cell show!” the voice said as if the owner was on the brink of choking from his own saliva. Behind that wall was an enclosure with a high wall and no roof. Beyond that to the right was a doorless room that served as the police cell. The stench of human waste inside the doorless room was so palpable, you could sit on it and it would carry your weight. But Kevin did know these. All he could heard was that voice. He heard the voice again. This time it sounded gruff like the voice he often heard from people leaving the bunker late in the night sometimes.
“Hol’ your cell show!”
Kevin turned to another man sitting behind the counter. He looked like someone in the police custody.
“Please, what’s that noise coming from behind that wall?” he asked
“Oh, na the cell presido, Oh it is the cell president,” he replied in an off-hand matter.
Kevin felt uncomfortable but the corporal did not pay him any attention as he continued writing on a piece of paper he had been writing in since Kevin arrived. He presently looked at Kevin and asked, “So, you were just in front of your shop when the policemen arrested you, right?”
“Yes sir,” Kevin said.
The man scribbled a little more on the paper and looked up again. He turned the paper he had been writing on so that Kevin could read what he had written. Kevin was surprised to find that the man had been making a police entry on his behalf all that time. The man’s narration basically covered what had happened in front of Kevin’s shop during the raid. Kevin was relieved because he thought the nightmare was over as he signed the statement.
“Please remove your watch, belt and any other jewellery and call any person that can bail you out,” the desk corporal said casually. Kevin was confused and the corporal sensed it.
“I don’t have any space behind the counter, so you have to go into the cell until you are bailed out,” he explained.
Kevin called his younger brother and handed over his wallet, watch, belt and cell phone and followed the corporal. The voice from across the wall kept on, “Hol’ your cell show!”
As the corporal unlocked the small wrought iron gate that led to the opening where the cell inmates were seated on the floor, it occurred to him to ask what the voice was howling about.
“Excuse me, sir. What does it mean?” Kevin asked, referring to the voice.
“Oh, it means that you should have something to appease the cell president,” the corporal answered as he led Kevin through the gate.
It was too late. Kevin had walked into the cell without something with which to appease the cell president. As he walked in, the enclosure became very quiet. The presido stopped howling. He was a lanky man of about twenty-eight years with reddish, tired eyes and a scraggly body that looked like it had not been bathed forever. He had a moustache and a goatee that made him look a little like a West African dwarf billy goat. He wore only trousers as did most of the inmates. Kevin wondered what had become of their clothes. He stood at the entrance and surveyed the room, then finally locked eyes with the presido. He was the only one standing, everyone else was seated or curled up in a fetal position. Kevin and the presido looked at each other for a minute, then the presido smiled and spoke.
“Bouncer!” he shouted, “Na wetin carry you come here, What brings you here?”
It took Kevin a moment to realize that the guy was talking to him. He had never met the guy before and he had never gone by the name Bouncer and he had never worked as one, but the guy seemed to like it and he guessed that his physical stature may have suggested that he was a bouncer so he played along.
“Nothing oh. Na mistake, they just carry me together with people wey dey smoke igbo, Nothing. I was mistakenly arrested with people smoking dope,” Kevin replied.
"Your own better. Me, na foolishness oh. I say make I just rob one small shop collect wine drink after they don close. Na him dey nap me since two weeks ago. The wine sef, I never drink, Yours is easy. Mine is foolishness. I decided to rob a closed shop of wine that I could drink and I was caught, since two weeks ago. I did not even have the opportunity to drink the wine," presido said.
As he just finished speaking, another suspect was led in by the corporal. He was a twenty-year-old. Kevin looked at him and was surprised to see he was carrying garri tied in a black polythene bag in one hand and water on the other hand. From the look of him, Kevin could guess that it was his first time. He later learned that the boy was a student who was hungry and had gone to buy garri with which to eat the soup he had in the hostel when the cell phone of the shop owner got lost and everyone that was at the shop was arrested. The boy shivered from head to toe as presido looked at the garri and water the boy came in with and then he looked at Kevin
“Bouncer, how you reason am Bouncer, what do you think?” he asked, his eyes focused on the garri.
Kevin thought about it briefly. He realised that the presido did not pose any threat to him, perhaps because of his physique, instead, he seemed to want his opinion or approval on how to run his cell.
“Just free am nah. Nothing dey there. Free am, Just let him be. He hasn’t got anything you need, anyway,” Kevin responded.
The presido got angry very quickly, “What do you mean, ‘free him’? I am the president of this cell and I have not had anything to eat today,” he said and he seemed to get angrier as he spoke. Suddenly he pounced on the boy, hitting him hard on the chest with both hands and the boy dropped his goods on the floor. The presido picked both the garri bag and water and retired to one corner. Kevin tried, but he could not imagine how Presido was planning to make a meal out of the two items but he was relieved that the presido was satisfied with his loot enough to leave the boy alone. Kevin was sure the boy had soiled his pants.
The corporal opened the small gate and announced that Kevin had been bailed by his brother. He walked out and swore that nothing would ever make him see the insides of a prison cell again. He thought about the student in that cell and felt pity for him. He asked about what brought him there and learned that the boy was just a victim of circumstance like himself. Bail was supposed to be free but when he asked what it would take to bail the boy, the corporal told him “Ten thousand”. He figured that the boy would pay a million to get out of there now if he could afford it. Maybe someday he would. Kevin paid and got the boy processed out of the cell, without his garri, of course.
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