Dipita Kwa
CHAPTER TWO
Usually Musango sat for hours on a bench behind the ticket counter at Gare Routier Bonaberi praying for one more passenger to come. At times he slept. After feeling sufficiently bored he joined the loaders to scream destinations at prospective travelers. Most often after the tickets sold out showed that his bus was full, and he could at last make a trip, he still had to comb the off-licenses to drag out those passengers already trapped in bottles of beer, apparently oblivious of their pending journey. And such passengers plucked off bottles are usually the real noisy ones who ceased the least chance to spring up a quarrel and insult anyone who hadn’t a sober mind. They would talk and shout and even threaten to trade blows all the way to their drop-off points. When these types decided they didn’t like the driver’s face, Musango turned to his CD player for help. He increased the volume to drown the noise. This, however, worked only when the trouble-monger was sitting far behind in his fumes of alcohol.
This evening he was lucky. He had waited only forty minutes for his bus to be loaded. And most of the passengers were tired market woman returning from selling mangoes in Marche Central. There was just one fair lady with two gold rings on her nose whose cell phone rang almost every four minutes. Apart from her numerous merry calls, the ride was relatively quiet. And most importantly, the tire leak was mercifully gradual. Musango started feeling it on the wheels at the Bekoko Roundabout under the flyover to the Western and Northwest Regions. By the time they got to Miondo Bar, the tire was flat and scrapping against the paved road like a sack of stones.
The police at the control post didn’t waste their breath in whistling him down as they glanced without interest at the bus wobbling off the road. He swerved the bus to a stop at the curb.
‘Na wetin Driver?’ a passenger ask from the last seat behind.
‘Flat tire,’ someone answered.
Thank you, Musango thought and killed the engine.
A few more voices grunted their irritation.
‘Please, get down everyone,’ Musango said, undid his seatbelt and jumped out, not waiting to hear their complaints.
A few meters from where he parked was a blockade the police had mounted with tires and old drums and thick logs of wood. There was one policeman holding an L-shaped iron bar with long spikes on the lower section. He was smoking a cigarette and keenly watching down the road towards Tiko with a deep frown on his face. There was no way any car passed this point without the driver bleeding something. Unless, of course, the policemen chose to let them go. There seemed to have been a mutual understanding that no transport vehicle was regular. If all the car documents were in order, the time wasted by the driver to get them to the policeman sitting in a shade several meters from the road was sufficient motive to impound his vehicle for hours. So it was useless counting on the regularity of one’s car papers. Just place a five hundred or a thousand francs note between the pages of the car document folder and pass it on and you will do your trips in peace. Well, you were okay until the guys were replaced with another fresh and hungry gang. As for passengers without their National ID cards, they only had to inform the driver of their status beforehand and hand him a thousand francs to “settle” control when the time came.
While Musango struggled with the old door that refused to lock, he counted four buses, two trucks loaded with eru and two Toyota Corollas lined on either side of the road. The drivers of these vehicles were inside the small shade roofed with thatch bargaining with the police boss. The eru trucks, by virtue of their transporting export cargo, had a special fee to pay that ranged from fifteen to twenty thousands. The amount was actually arrived at after a hearty bargain. There were several instances when the driver and the police arrived at an equilibrium price and the policeman who did the negotiation had to consult his treasurer after receiving a five or ten thousand note to get change to reimburse the driver. This was a well established and generally recognized marketplace without properly defined merchandise. Both parties seemed to be at ease.
Musango watched the passengers file out of his bus to the roadside, some stretching and two men took a few steps into the low bush nearby and pulled down their trouser zips. Peeing was indeed contagious, Musango thought as he saw a woman scurry behind a house, raising her skirt as she went.
‘You never get new tires,’ the lady with the ringed nose said. Musango turned and couldn’t help staring. She was tightly clad in blue jean trousers that accentuated her beefy hips. She wore long raster plaits that fell on her bare shoulders. Her blouse was a flimsy piece of yellow cloth held in place by one stripe hooked on her left shoulder. Musango marveled at how she got that gold ring in her navel. At least the two in her nose were okay. He had seen pictures of pigs with them.
‘I am in a hurry,’ the woman said, twisting her lips in what should be a bitter protesting grimace. ‘Now I have to stand under this sun . . .’
Musango looked at the sky. The sun was now orange as it retreated slowly to rest. The cloud was grey in most parts with patches of faint blue. He could describe the weather as mild with prospects of rain before tomorrow dawn.
He heard the lady’s cell phone ring again somewhere in the bulging handbag clasped under her arm, this time a soft Christmas carol ringtone. It took her quite some time to rummage down to where the small black phone lay.
Musango shrugged her away from his sight and mind as he removed the spare tire from the back boot, pulled out his jack and spanners and got to his knees.
‘Can I help?’ A young man in a brown T-shirt with the caption VOICE FROM BEYOND written in bold pink letters asked as Musango fitted the jack.
‘Thanks,’ Musango said. ‘Get me some stones and wedge the two front tires. You know where to fit them . . .’
‘I am a taximan Grand, a mechanic,’ the young man said and moved closer. ‘My patron took back his taxi last week. I want to go and rest for a while.’
Musango nodded. He understood. He knew the hardship you faced living in Douala
‘You get the wedge,’ the young man said, ‘I will do the tire.’
Musango thankfully backed away. Most of the passengers had dispersed. He saw one across the road, pointing at the bundles of miondo sitting on a piece of plank placed on the mouth of an old rusty drum. The man was talking to a child dressed in navy-blue khaki shorts and nothing else on top. Musango wondered what other means of living apart from selling miondo was available to the inhabitants of this tiny roadside village and made a mental note to buy two bundles after replacing the tire. A bundle of twenty was sold at two hundred and fifty and he could see just four bundles on that plank. The state of their houses somehow reflected their inadequacies. This house in particular, the one in front of which the miondo was displayed, had stones and cocoanut branches on the roof to hold broken aluminum sheets from being blown off by the wind. The rotten planks on the wall had been replaced in places or reinforced with black plastic papers and thatch. A dirty piece of clothe, possibly a part of a deceased woman’s discarded dress was draped over the window facing the road to wade off burglars. From the open door, one could see a chair with a broken leg leaning on the wall under a broad wall calendar that Musango could bet was hiding a huge hole on the wall separating the parlour from the bedroom.
Men live by hope – the sure fuel that keeps them going. Hope that tomorrow will solidify today’s plans and dreams of a better life. But in most villages around the sub-division that Musango had traveled to, he had never stopped wondering what it was that the populace placed their hope for tomorrow on? In the morning they got up from sleep looking tired, sad and hungry to face a fierce day. In the evening, especially on the eve of a market day, you see them, malnourished shapes of dirt and fatigue, dragging themselves along farm roads like zombies with mighty bags of coco yams or cassava or huge bunches of plantains or a neck-breaking combination of all on their heads or strapped on their backs. The older ones held walking staffs to keep them on their feet. Most often there were the younger ones of tender ages, trudging along with deep furrows of tears running down their cheeks to their bare chest and mucous bobbing back and forth in their sniffing noses. The lucky farmers had two-wheeled trucks in front of them against which they applied the last fibers of their frail muscles to move their harvest home. They generally got home shortly before nightfall to cook and bathe and sleep and dream of another tomorrow. The only tomorrow that gave some rest to their bodies was market day. At least then they had a short distance to cover to convey their products to a market where the tax-collectors, a refined version of those in the biblical days, awaited with tickets for every meager good that entered the muddy or dusty enclosure for sale. The people paid with a few inaudible bleats like sheep whose lambs are taking away by the shepherd for sale. Whatever proceeds left were completely spent in buying smoked crayfish, salt, rice and a few other items that might hopefully keep them alive to the next market day.
Musango shuddered. That was how the world had been programmed: a huge lot must labour for the comfort of a few.
The lady with the ring on the navel had crossed the road and was now standing with one of the policemen laughing and tossing her hair about teasingly. The early tricks of enticement were at her service for flaunting as she wished. Musango saw the policeman bring out his cell phone and begin punching the keys and looking up at the lady every now and then with a look in his face like a dog eyeing meat on a butcher’s table. He was certainly taking down her number – happily hooked to her perfume and rings and the eclectic scenes his free-roaming mind must be conjuring up in an undisciplined heart.
For this the sheep can only bleat inaudibly as it gives birth year-in-year-out for our tables.
‘Vultures! It is for them that we toil from sunrise to nightfall.’ The young taximan said bitterly from his kneeling position beside the bus and spat. ‘All they collect from us goes to these girls, mimbo and jambo,’ he added. ‘They retire without a house and after bullying their way from one apartment to another carrying along house rents on them like ticks on a dog’s ears.’
Musango ignored him and rummaged beyond the curb where he found two stones. He fitted them behind the two front tires to prevent the bus from rolling backward. He wiped his hands on his dirty jeans and listened to the taximan grumbling about the organized robbery by the forces of law and order in the pretext of controls.
‘A bunch of very skinny or pot-bellied morons with no moral scruples,’ the taximan said. ‘One thing is indisputable: police and routiers in this country have their consciences stuffed with sleeping pills or the accumulated smoke of marijuana.’
Musango had been listening to this kind of angry talk ever since he was a boy traveling with his father. As a man, fate offered him as a willing sacrifice at the alter of the forces of Loot and Murder as his father labeled them, by making him a bus driver. He knew every routier and policeman, old and new, by name, yet most of the time they pretended not to know him. It was a strategy adopted against supplication. The routires and police received an average of seven thousand francs from him every day. Had he been dropping all the money he gave away into an empty twenty-liters paint bucket instead, he would have filled about five of such buckets over the last three years – saving enough to buy two second-hand buses. He was certain that this disgraceful highway robbery would go on with verve and silent applause even after his death and his grandchildren would take up the song of complaint, paying their dues in silent tears so long as nobody thought it his duty to do something positive about it.
‘It’s fine now,’ the taximan-mechanic said and kicked the newly fitted tire. ‘Picked a nail. That is why I prefer tubeless. Slightly more expensive but secure.’
Musango nodded, picked up the jack and replaced it under the seat, dumped the wrecked tire in and locked the boot. He coughed and spat the phlegm in the bush to his left and began crossing the road towards the drum of miondo. At that very instance, a wave of multiple aggressive whistling froze him to a standstill. There was a red Carina cruising towards the police post, towards him as well. From that distance, Musango identified the clandestine transport car. It was owned by one Lieutenant Colonel in Limbe and driven by his younger brother fondly called Squick who always placed one of the colonel’s deep-green berets on the dashboard close to the windscreen. The beret was his laissez-passer through all controls as he ferried passengers from Limbe to Douala
‘PRRRRRRRRR!’ the whistles blasted.
Two anxious policemen quickly positioned themselves in the middle of the road, each of them had one hand raised and the other holding the shrilling whistle in his mouth. Squick stubbornly nosed on like a deaf bull. Seeing the determination on the twisted front bumper that headed straight for them, both policemen dove away, one to the left and the other to the right. The one holding the L-shaped spiked iron bar a few meters from the blockade immediately dropped his cigarette and tossed his bar into the road.
All these took not more five heartbeats.
Musango plunged across the road and miraculously landed safely on his side in the bush on the other side. He lay flat on his belly, folded his hands over his head and squeezed his face against the shrubs with his eyes firmly closed. What followed was a series of deafening collisions followed by one loud mind-wrecking explosion. There was a short moment of silence during which those still alive like Musango, shook the initial coating of shock and dared to look around. The clandestine cab was sitting on its side with the roof leaning against the wheels of Musango’s upturned bus. The cabs three remaining tires spun like the kicking legs of a dying animal. There were tiny fingers of black smoke wafting from the engine into the clear sky. The road was lithered with fragments of shattered glass. On its mad race, the cab had brushed a coming double-cabin Hilux, lost whatever balance it had left before diving on to Musango’s bus for support. The Hilux too had received the caress with no grace at all as it swerved a complete circle and crashed into a gutter, knocking down two bystanders before dozing off.
When the screams came, they came in one long blast, loud and thundering chorus, quickly followed by heavy foot-falls as people emerged from every backyard and ran past Musango still crushed on the ground, dashed into the road without watching out for any coming car. Musango stood up at last and dusted himself without moving a pace. His feet seemed rooted to the spot as he gawked at the crowd converging towards the blockade. At first he saw people heading towards the cab and then suddenly there was a change of course and a vibrant scramble in the middle of the road. He saw the young taximan who had been standing beside him only a while ago stick out his foot and topple a man wearing a Dina Dell hat. The older man fell flat on his belly but went on grabbling with both hands and sweeping the floor towards his breast. They were all grubbing for something on the floor. Musango saw the taximan shove his hands into his pocket without standing completely upright and then dash forward again. A few silvery items fell from his pocket and bounced off the road. About four hands quickly went after it. The topless child, the miondo vendor, was on his knees salvaging what he could between the feet of the older people.
Money!
That was it. The police treasurer must have lost his treasure as he fled from the car.
Musango looked out for the policemen. It appeared a silent command had somehow been passed around. He caught the faint glimpse of the back of two uniforms disappearing behind an Indian bamboo enclosure, the type that served as a roadside liquor parlour. That was smart. No one would be able to identify the culprits, except the police boss who sent them out, of course.
‘Petrol!’
Musango jumped. It was the miondo vendor. The child must have abandoned the hostile ground of the paved road to continue his search in the pockets of the occupants of the tumbled cars. He was now hanging on one of the tires that had stopped spinning. From where he stood, Musango could see a clear liquid dripping from the mesh of metals on the upturned bottom of the dead cab.
Fire!
His brain registered and plucked his adrenaline pipe back in its rightful place.
His vehicle! Oh God, no!’
He sprung across the road and was peeping into the cab through one of the broken windows. Inside was silent. He saw at least three heads, surely with broken necks, lying in awkward angles from twisted bodies. Apart from the three bloody heads, he could tell there were other bodies beneath from the many hands sticking out in various places. The window was already smashed. He held the doorframe and heaved. Nothing. He reached in, gingerly avoiding the pointing edges of broken glass, gripped a wrist with both hands and pulled. The arm came free, the force of his pull flinging him backward. He fell on his back on the tarmac and the amputated bloody female arm with several bangles dropped on his chest.
Musango’s shock finally took a voice. He screamed and pushed the arm away. His scream seemed to revise the priority of the looters or their booty was now safely filed away so they could turn their attention to lifesaving. He saw heads turn his way and then running steps and voices barking orders and wailing and praying.
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