Don't Order Dog_ 1(22)

“Sure, whatever bro,” his tattooed friend declared, handing both of them an ice-cold shot glass filled to the brim. “So what happened to your uncle?”

“Bad shit man. Drove his car into a tree,” ponytail replied, a pensive frown clouding his expression.

“Fuck… no shit?”

“No shit. Kinda saw it coming though. The guy was a total alcoholic. Always drunk at the holidays and making passes at my other uncle’s wife. The cops that pulled his body out of the wreck said his BAC was like four percent or something.”

“Is that even possible?” pasty-face asked.

“Of course it is, if you’re a fucking alcoholic. Anyway...” He shrugged and nodded dismissively.

“Well, here’s to him,” his tattooed friend muttered, raising his shot glass.

“To crazy motherfucking reporters,” pasty-face chimed.

“Cheers to that,” ponytail added.

The three young men nodded and touched glasses. They threw back the shots and looked at each other in the weak light of the bar, shuddering and wincing with the wide-eyed grins of children.





13.




The atrium lobby of the Garden Landmark hotel bustled with the noise and activity of mid-morning check-ins and check-outs as the concierge made her rounds. Gliding across the mirror-polished granite with a confident, seductive sway, her tall dark frame cast an exotic reflection over the black stone as she moved. She stopped briefly at one of the tables to adjust the stargazer lilies and cymbidium orchids in one of the massive flower arrangements on display; their sweet, cinnamon fragrances mixing with those of expensive European perfumes in the cool conditioned air. A guest approached her and she smiled instinctively, nodding at his question before tapping her phone and making a call. By 8am she had already made more calls for the hotel’s elite guests than she could remember. Everything from cab rides and flight confirmations for the departing to spa sessions and dinner reservations for new guests had been quickly and deftly handled. Now, seeing that the girls at the registration desk were becoming overwhelmed, she moved quickly to intercept new arrivals strolling through the massive glass entry doors.

She smiled with flawless grace, tilting her head with a welcoming expression as a group of men in tailored suits and polished Italian shoes stepped into the lobby with several bellhops in tow. “Good morning gentlemen, and welcome to the Garden Landmark. May I assist you in checking in?” she asked. The men nodded as they collected around her. One of the men barraged her with questions while the others stood and stared conspicuously at the curves of her body beneath her tight blue uniform. She recognized several of them. In her four years at the hotel, she’d come to know a good many of the hotel’s clientele on practically a first name basis. The majority were regular guests like these – executives from large petrochemical companies with operations in the country’s oil-rich Niger delta. They were middle-aged, mostly European and American, with graying hair and soft bellies and the curt politeness of men used to getting what they asked for. But despite their egos, she admired and envied these men– or at least their wealth and power. They were refined and well-mannered, a stark contrast to the hotel’s other oil-feeding clientele – the large, bawdy, loud-talking roughnecks from Texas or Russia who dressed in outdated Tommy Bahama outfits and spent long hours drinking at the bar, killing time and money until their rig contracts were renewed.

She found these men to be both humorous and dangerous, especially at night. It was then that they would come stumbling collectively from the bar to the lobby, red-eyed and volatile, prowling for the seedier offerings of the city that sprang up like mushrooms in the night. They would collect on anything in their path that they fancied, including her or any of her female co-workers, and on more than one occasion she’d had to apologetically but firmly remove the arm of a roughneck from around her waist. If personalities had a sound, she imagined that of the roughneck being the tick, tick, tick of a timed explosive.

Last in the social hierarchy of the hotel was the media; a disheveled, sleep-deprived fraternity of international reporters who had settled on the town like an irascible swarm of tsetse flies two years ago when the conflict between the large multinational oil companies and the local paramilitary resistance groups turned particularly bloody. Like the roughnecks, the reporters also hovered near the bar, though the two groups rarely mixed, and she’d quickly come to recognize the mutual disdain both groups held towards the other. From her own tribal roots she understood this paradoxical nature of men all too well; the animosity that was born from similarity. Both were tight-knit groups of badly-dressed, egotistic, womanizing alcoholics. Both hated their assignments in Port Harcourt almost as much as they hated the oil industry’s executive elite. And perhaps most ironic of all, both groups ultimately earned a living from the very same source– the oil industry itself.