by Frank Achebe
—What do I mean by that?
Well, there are people, and there are places. You just don’t sell sugar on the open market.
—Sugar?
Yeah, sugar. Drugs. Coke. Skunk. Et cetera.
Their shitty job involved making ‘arrests’. The arrests, in the real sense of it is like escorting the drugs to their destination. At the station, reports are filed and then the arrested persons are released with their wares after haven had their wares ‘examined’ and found them ‘clean’. Meanwhile, the false arrests as they were made was to keep those who would have made the real arrest. The examination, for what it actually was, was where the settlement was made.
Some other times, those involved made sure the drugs reached their destination by changing the cops on checkpoint duty and patrols to include those who…you sure do get what I’m hitting at so let’s leave it at that. When under watch, they made the pass by extending the time in-between shifts to keep the roads and the posts free.
It was a national criminal web and most of the top cops were caught in it like flies in a spider’s web—including Mr Shergie’s chief. The bigger towns which in turn had bigger drug markets were the prize cake that the hungry and greedy police chiefs scrambled for. Those men were part of the drug trade. Whom they favoured, they kept in the game and the ones that messed up bad, they put out of it. And they did put some people off the game once in a while when they began to grow tails.
That was how they braved the tough times that followed the War. Even though such jobs were once-in-a-while intakes, anytime it came, it came with a big-bang for everybody. More than just braving the times, it was the chance at living a high life. And they sure did live the high life.
Mr Shergie was one of the cops who were part of what was up though not in a grand way. He mostly did the paperwork.
At the time when his bucket was tipping over its edge, his wife left him to be with another man. It was about the sex. She said it wasn’t good enough. Said he was naïve about such things. She said he had a small organ. Those sort of things. She was really loved but there was no way Mr Shergie could change that and she could not accept it either. She walked away and Mr Shergie’s peace with her. It drove the man nuts. He drank and gambled. He began to make a scene.
When the story came out, he could not stand his fellow men, not even the women. The children too. He talked too much then. It was almost as if he went about talking about his circumstance in self-pity. His colleagues thought it was best to let the cat out of the bag, as he had become surplus to requirements. A lot of news was made out of it.
There was the sound of reforms in the police department. The north were coming to terms with the reality that they had lost the War. A new chief was sent to the town. A lot was done to stop him from coming but he came nonetheless and to satisfy eyes, they fingered him when he rattled their cage. They made an example of him. But they had actually done it as a favour to him and to themselves and hard feelings were far from it. If they had allowed him to go on, he would have wrecked himself and them. He had to understand and he did. The promise was that life was going to be made easy for him while in jail. They did not particularly keep their promise but then they needn’t.
—What happened in jail?
The most of it all was that jail helped him to reflect upon his life the more closely. He come to terms with a lot of things, part of which was that he was in no way a man because of his small penis. It had transformed him into a child.
—What about now?
A year in the open world after more than a decade and half behind stonewalls, he felt he belonged more to the world behind those walls. He was more useful in that other world than he was outside. To God, to others and to himself. He didn’t think he could stand the world as it is now but he had been managing anyway but then thought of going back was still there.
In this world, he was reminded that he less than a man because of his organ.
This story was told on the drive. It was not in the same chatter but in more collected words and tone. But a large chunk of the time following was in silence as each men clutched at their hearts in reflection of what they’d heard.
# # #
There was something about the picture of the grandfather with the girl coming into the tavern that lingered in the mind of the older man. As you see it, Mr Shergie Peters was still obsessed about the hair. He had tried to explore this obsession against his better judgement.
Seeing a man like Zach whose concern for others made him do more than just talk about them, but want help in practical ways was the relief he had never had as an adult that was regressing into the child that he once was.
However, he didn’t have to, there was something cleansing about that drive and the day as a whole. He needn’t tell him that there was an eleven-year old neighbour’s daughter that he was buying gifts for almost every day with one thing in mind—to invite her over, slid his hand up her skirt and check whether there was hair or not and to go for a free trial to taste and see for himself. He could not stand older women emotionally, not after his wife had left him. He still wanted to explore in more devious ways.
It was ‘playful’ but that was too much of a ‘play’.
Talking with Zach reminded him of his own past. He was an idiot but he was not one that was entirely useless for anything even if he was for sex. He was of those type of men that helped other people at their own risks. Most of the money he had made ‘moving’ evidences had been used on his younger ones. The woman did not lack much of anything except sex in the way her other lovers were giving it to her.
He had rediscovered that man while in jail but coming out and meeting another world had hurt that man. Seeing Zach and hearing him spoke loads to him more than anything which Zach had said. He could not let the world destroy the only virtue that he recognized in himself. He would have to find a way and be that person again.
# # #
As for Zach, it was in that silent moment that it rushed upon him – for all his naivety – that sex to most people was unlike it was to him—it was air to some people, and water to others. People lived for sex, died for sex, married for sex, divorced for sex, made legislations for sex, built toys and equipment for sex, made movies for sex, ruined their lives and other people’s lives for sex, went to war for sex, paid for sex, betrayed themselves and others for sex… It was a pitiful thing but then it was also reality, hard reality. It was unfortunate that it took him a rather long time to realize that unlike the most of us who were born into the other side of the world.
If he had paid attention to life on college, he would have realized this earlier than he did for in college, Good morning was as good as ‘Who did you sleep with last night?’ And that the campus churches and the youth groups served as dating centres for those who could not afford to lose both their souls and the world. The realization made him shudder.
It was not hard to tell a novice what to expect in the New Millennium, which was on its tail. In the more advanced nations of the world, the sex revolution was already completed. It had taken a long time in coming to us.
# # #
The cab stopped just where he could walk into a train station. There was no train in sight. By their time, it was almost one when they pulled in.
Zach stopped and wanting to indulge the man for a moment longer on the question of hair asked: ‘What about the hair?’
The man’s face shrunk. ‘Forget it.’
The man looked at him with childlike attention. In that moment, the act as he had planned to do it to the little girl flickered in his eyes. ‘Does it make any difference?’
‘Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it does. I love my wife, that’s all.’
He did not need to say more than that as Mr Shergie understood.
‘Maybe you really don’t need go back. There may be some place for you here.’
Mr Shergie nodded and started out of the cab. Zach followed him.
‘So what are you going to do about the boy?’
>
‘I’m not sure yet. When we get to that river, we’ll cross it. I can’t think of that now.’
By then, they were heading to the tickets.
They stopped at the queue that lead up to the ticket counters and Zach entered the line.
The movement up the line progressed. In a moment, Zach remembered that he hadn’t paid his fare. ‘A minute,’ he said to the lady behind him and headed out of the line in search of the other man.
He searched for what was considerably a long time. But he did not find either Mr Shergie or his cab.
Chapter Six: Nānti
A train arrived about an hour later as it approached two o’clock that afternoon which for a typical August afternoon was both wet and sunny.
In between the time that passed his arrival and that of the train, Zach had spare time to reflect upon his own marriage in light of the epiphany as he had had it. Had he taken the times he shared sexual intimacy with his wife for granted all this while? What about it? What did he have to say about it, about the hair — about her?
The thought of all that made him shudder. But he would not dismiss it all instantly.
Actually, he was not the typical Victorian prude (he had his own moments) – it is hard to find prudes in our world. But whatever he did with his woman was done from innocent and ‘righteous’ self-surrender. It happened in sparse instants that he had very little control over. He could not stand the idea of his woman being to him a sexual object, at least not in the way that he was now seeing it through the eyes of others. Sex was one part of their lives. It was not their lives. It had its own place which was certainly not the centre. That was what sex meant for him and even though he could not articulate it as I have, it was evidently that. He could not remember any of those things as he had heard them occur to him in his sexual relationship with his wife. He found that he had no clear definition of things and just then, the train’s horn blasted into the station.
His thoughts turned to Nānti as the train blasted off after a few minutes.
He had bought a first-class ticket this time apparently afraid of running into some other market women with gossips. The journey was shorter this time and thankfully too as he had heard enough.
There was something in that time that came close to despair. It was not something he was familiar with anyway. But one thing was certain to him by the time the train pulled into the third and penultimate station of his journey. It was his realization of what people like us who have been more observant have always known and despairingly accepted, namely, that there was something desperately ill with the world, an illness which threatened him in his vision of himself as it threatened us all.
In this fear, lay hidden a presentiment of something dreadful, something that would defeat his fearless spirit—something that would make him like them, or reveal him to be one of them. Being a man whose sensibilities were still largely underdeveloped, he could still not make anything of it.
He had reasons to dread the world.
Chapter Seven: The Gentleman
An hour past six that evening, he was in a very old bus with other people heading to a small port. The overloaded bus, which creaked all the way as it bounced off the bumpy and untarred road was stuffy with an array of smells as they oozed from the bodies of market women, labourers, farmers etc. who were returning home after the day’s businesses.
The seats were arranged so that they faced each other and Zach tried to keep his eyes on the sun that was setting outside the bus over the mountain. Occasionally, he would steal a quick glance at the face of the women as if he was searching for something in there.
He did see something that he was familiar with anyway, the same wantonness as he’d seen in Noiā, except that this time, it was not pleasure that stolen their wantonness, but survival. It was all over their worn, mean, sweaty and exhausted faces. There were hardly any smiles on them. They had food for the next day but hardly enough to make it worth the stress of striving so desperately to eat, sleep and then die.
The feeling was one of pity tempered with concern.
It was evident that they sought a place for themselves in their society, one which burdened them to take responsibility for their own lives. They needed someone to whom they could abandon themselves. It was evident that religion meant that for them, especially in a society that would take no responsibility for them.
The journey lasted a rather short while when the bus pulled up at a small port. It was then that Zach realized how much he hated travelling. He had thoroughly enjoyed the journey as he was rediscovering himself in it. But the idea of travelling in a boat made his shudder. He hated large bodies of water.
However, left with no other options, he followed the people as they crossed the road and headed to the port that was lined with old canoes, boats and shrimpers. It was a lot busy at that time than normal and as a result, the boats were overloaded as the boatmen made the most money in those late hours than during the whole day. The sight of those boats reminded Zach of Biyar and his people and a smile creased across his face in the dark that was already pitching its way into the horizon.
Sure of where he was going but unsure of any other route, he boarded one of the more costly boats, which was a speedboat, and kept his mind off the muddy waters and on the naked boatmen relishing the way they went about their work with much dexterity as if they had been rowing boats since the day they were born. But thankfully, the journey took less than fifteen minutes.
The next and final phase of the journey was a short walk through what was a broadway through what was a rubber plantation. Small stalls where people stopped to make quick pick-ups of fruits or snacks flanked the road on both sides.
Zach took in the sights. He did not seem to be in a hurry though by the time he was on the Nānti Boulevard, which opened, at its far end, into what was the townhouse and a market, it was already dark.
He did not know which way to turn. The town bustled at its centre. There were hawkers, flashes of car lights, dizzy neon lights coming from the shops of the newly rich, music from a row of grocery stores, a betting shop, a row of taverns that had boards with ‘Menu’ on top and ‘Food is Ready’ below them…
Zach was more worn than he was hungry. He felt some soup would solve his problem for the mean time. Finding his way through the bustle of the small town, he made his way into what was a tavern among a few other taverns. The name on top of door read ‘Truth Is Life Eating Centre’. He did not know what it was that made him chose ‘Truth Is Life’ above others, but in no while, he was walking into it.
The tavern was low-head and Zach, for his six-feet one, kept his shoulders bent in as he made his way into the tavern. The curtain at the door was dirtier than the one he had seen at Silas’ havening watched dirtier hands. The tables were low and he could feel his weight on him as he sat in. He waited apparently, expecting a waiter to ask for his order. But seeing that the customers took their orders at a counter that separated them from the tavern owners with a net with a hand- and plate-hole through it, he went and stood behind a man who was drooling with the smell of alcohol. The man seemed to have a lot to say to the lady whose sweaty-face glistened in the low incandescent light.
Zach stood behind the man and listened in embarrassment as the man went off… ‘She beat me again today… Maureen, I am not going home tonight. Maureen, I know that I am a scoundrel but a whipping in front of my children…. It’s injustice. I married a witch. Maureen, have mercy on me. Just a plate of soup for the night. I will pay you back when I find a job.’
There was laughter behind him. Zach turned to see two young men huddled in a corner. They hadn’t taken notice of him. They seemed to be having fun on the drunken man at the counter. They seemed to know him very well. It was also evident that they were used to such things.
Catching his breath, the younger of the two boys said: ‘Othí, if I were your wife, I would have long drowned you in the Nānti River.’
The two of them laughed aloud.
; It was then that Zach got his reprieve for the man turned from the counter to meet his detractors. ‘What do you know? You don’t know how much I have suffered. Okay, that is why I drink a lot. I have suffered. And I know I’m a drunkard. But if you suffer what I have suffered and if you don’t end up a drunkard…I’m a cursed man. I am an unfortunate man. Do you know I could have gone to college? I could have been a doctor. But I am a cursed man. God has cursed me.’
The two boys exploded in more laughter in between mouthfuls. Zach almost forgot himself that it took the lady at the counter some prodding to gain his attention. ‘Oh, sorry, just a plate of soup. Thanks.’
As she went about fixing the order, Zach took another glance at the drunkard who was still haggling with his two detractors. (Now, he was begging them to ‘remain some food for him’.) He was moved with compassion that he heard himself sputter to the lady in a tone that was loud enough for the other three to hear him. ‘And a plate of soup for our nice gentleman here.’
# # #
It dropped on them like a bomb. For what could be described as an hour compressed into a second, they all starred at him. He was embarrassed by all that when Othí burst out in a dramatic display of ecstatic excitement: ‘Did you just hear that? Did he just call me a gentleman? Maureen, so I’m a gentleman after all. I am a gentleman!’
With that, he abandoned even the plate of soup that had being pushed through the plate-hole towards Zach and ran out of the tavern screaming: ‘He called me a gentleman. I am a gentleman.’ They say he went home that night and kept screaming from outside the door to his home in a voice loud enough for his wife to hear: ‘He called me a gentleman. Finally, someone gets it! I am a gentleman.’ Anyone that knew him would swear that it was his usual drunken bouts. But it was deeper than that. It was the purest ecstasy of a man who, for the first time in his life, had been assessed in a positive light. His mother who had raised him, his wife who was having a rough time keeping him away from home had always described him as a ‘good for nothing’, an idiot, a buffoon and a swine. He could not remember anyone ever telling him that he was anything other than an idiot and a drunkard.