about accommodation in the city; he slept under the truck on his mat, even when in town. More importantly, he was a de facto apprentice driver, most truckers starting as moto-boys, learning the trade, and making the contacts.
Henri passed his weeks and months in the hot cab of the Mercedes truck, the howling of the engine completely drowning out the hum in his mind. He would change the flats and change the oil. He would clean the cab and the windscreen. He would seek men, looking for a few francs, to help him load and unload the cargo ranging from coffee and cement to cattle and telephone poles.
The vagabond lifestyle excluded his establishing close friendships and even his finding a candidate for a wife. His main social distractions came at truck-stops where he would move about with the other moto-boys his age, spending a few francs for roasted meat or plantains, having some cups of arki, the cheap locally distilled high-octane alcohol, or an occasional beer. As he grew older and his hormones began to take more control, he began also to include a stop at any of the many bordellos for a “quickie” with an older hooker; all a poor moto-boy could afford.
Henri’s life had now taken a new routine, distant and removed from the village and its bucolic life. He rarely went home. It was not that he felt it beneath him, far from it. However, when someone went back to the village from the city, they had to go back with gifts and offerings for the family; and the extended family in the village was large. The pittance paid a moto-boy would not allow him to return home often with the largess he felt he needed to compensate for those youthful years growing up which had been truly joyous.
He managed to get home for either Christmas or Easter, and would generally find himself there for at least one additional visit a year, for the important wedding or funeral; the later becoming more and more frequent as the years passed.
His life now was concentrated in the hot, shaking cab of the truck with the perfume of sweat mixed with diesel. The newness of this wore off as the rigors took their toll. Constant noise and vibration combined with sleeping on the cold, often wet ground, added to poor diet began to accelerate the aging process and at thirty-five, as he was now looking for a new job as a driver, he looked nearly twice his age.
Fortunately, his smile had not aged with his body and he had been able to make some very promising contacts that seemed highly likely to lead to a driver position with the corresponding increase in salary; nearly a ten-fold gain to be anticipated. Only the final discussions remained, and it seemed likely he would soon be behind the wheel of his own rig, with his own moto-boy to boss about.
As the details were being sorted out, he continued to suffer in what he now saw as a beat-up carcass of a lorry compared to what he hoped would be his new charge. He begrudgingly spread his mat under the chassis every night, thinking of the day in the not too distant future when he might be able to get a room of his own with a real bed and maybe even running water and electricity, if he were very, very lucky.
He sullenly unloaded the sacks and bails, regretting the continuous pain in his lower back and longing to feel the gearshift of a big rig in his hand, instead of the wheelbarrow handle to which he was harnessed to unload a mountain of sand. He was a short-timer now and he felt it.
When all the arrangements had been made and he had given his current boss his notice, the day came when he was ready to make his last run as a moto-boy. This final venture involved going to the port city to pick up a load of soap from the factory. On the outward leg, they would pick up vegetables along the road to sell in the port and then return the next day with boxes and boxes of block soap.
All went as planned and they slowly climbed the hills from the coastal plain to the highland savannah when it happened. The brakes went out on a down-hill-bound truck loaded with beer from the nearby brewery. The beer truck teetered to the left and to the right before it careened head-on into the cab of Henri’s truck. The momentum from the final impact shifted the beer crates to the front, crashing through the wall separating the bed and the cab, mincing the brewery truck’s driver and moto-boy in a flurry of broken glass. This same impact threw Henri’s boss through the windscreen and on to the pulp that had been the inhabitants of the beer truck’s cab. Henri was saved from this same fate by the fact that his leg was wedged between the seat and the door, preventing him from becoming air-born at the time of the concussion.
Henri awoke, immediately aware of the sting of antiseptic in his eyes and nose and the ring of crying in his ears. As luck would have it, if one could even use the term in the context of such a grotesque accident, the lorries had collided not ten kilometers from a mission hospital.
The main road to the port was well-travelled and the accident itself was witnessed by many people in many vehicles; passenger cars, taxis, buses, trucks. The taxi that had been immediately behind Henri’s truck as it climbed the hill, narrowly missed smashing into the back of the truck as the driver hit the brakes.
The taxi driver was a big man with great strength, both physical and emotional. He first pulled his vehicle well away from the trucks for fear of fire and then offloaded all his passengers as he went to inspect the terrible wreckage. As the first on the scene, he saw Henri hanging out of the space where the windscreen had once been. When he opened the passenger door he saw Henri’s horribly mangled leg, the leg that had prevented him from being immediately killed, but which was now a twisted stick of sinew and macerated flesh. The leg was, in fact, so loosely connected to the rest of the body that the taxi driver could quite easily turn the booted foot to dislodge it and carefully remove Henri’s body from the dash.
He carried the limp form to his taxi and spread it out on the back seat before dashing at top speed to the mission hospital. He slid to a stop at the hospital entrance, gently lifting Henri into his arms and carrying him to the reception as he screamed for a doctor and urgent help.
His screams were met with supreme indifference as the matron averted her eyes from the mutilated limb and asked the taxi-man for the patient’s hospital card. There was, of course, no card and there was also no running to help; no gurney, no doctor, not even a nurse, only the stoic matron. The taxi-man called her a nincompoop in six languages and yelled for help at the top of his lungs. When there was still no reaction, he charged into the interior of the hospital, Henri in his arms, barging into each room until he finally found someone in a white coat and stethoscope, someone at whom he too yelled to come and save this poor man’s life. The grit in the driver’s voice seemed to stir the stethoscope man to life; his eyes became less glazed and he actually took in the full gravity of the circumstances. Like someone coming out of a dream, he half led, half pushed the driver into a sordid operating room, whereupon he shoved the driver out as he too began yelling for nurses, instruments, and medications.
Henri was aware of none of this and the taxi-man had long since gone back to his passengers. Henri had practically no memory of anything. In the deep recesses of his mind, where the cicada had stayed, he seemed to recall a man in a white coat saying, “I hope you are a hero”. And then, there was blackness.
The blackness was now replaced by fuzzy grey as Henri looked about. He was in a metal bed, apparently with springs and a mattress underneath him, almost like the bed he had dreamed of getting once he had his own truck. The grubby sheets were covered with a grey, frayed blanket that matched the gun-metal grey walls, painted with oil paint that could be scrubbed from all the afflictions that lived in the ward. The ceiling had apparently been white but was now fly-specked, dusty, and grey. The beds in the ward next to his were occupied by people who looked grey. His world was grey.
With great difficulty he raised his head slightly, quickly noting only one hump under his blanket. Although he could clearly feel his right foot, when he painfully moved his hand to where his right thigh should be, there was nothing. He had lost his leg.
The drugs, the shock, and the fatigue blissfully took him away from the grayness into the cloudless skies of his mind where the cicadas were silent and the air smelt of fresh fallen rain.
When he awoke again he found his Mother sleeping on a mat next to his bed; next to her a worn vinyl bag and some chipped enamel pots. As was typical of that place and time, hospitals provided medical care, such as it was, and, if possible, a roof over the patient’s head. All else was up to the malade (the sufferer) and the family. Families fed, bathed, and sometimes