TheOne In A Hardware Shop In Longonot Pt2

“Her name was Alexis and she was fine,” I announce again and drain my glass. In that uncanny way that only she has mastered, Mueni appears at my elbow, a fresh Pilsner in hand. It’s steaming cold and my previously watered mouth suddenly goes dry. I take a greedy gulp and swallow. The cold brew burns a frosty track down my throat.

Across the table from me, Nick narrows his eyes suspiciously. “Remington,” he says and plants one of his ominous pauses after my name. “How is it that you can’t remember where you placed your phone before sleeping yet you can remember names of all these women you been with?” he says “all these” as if the words taste bad in his mouth and he has to spit them.

“It’s the small things that matter Nick. Women like it when you remember their name. it places them on a small pedestal in your hall of importance.”

“Stop interrupting Nick,” Jack growls. He’s getting tipsy. The veins on his temples are beginning to pop out. Soon they’ll resemble a thick spider web woven by a drunken Black Widow. “Let’s hear about Alexis. You said she was religious.”

Or so I thought from her headscarf. The moment I noticed it I was ready to bolt. Religious women come from a whole other planet. First of all they listen. In case you don’t know, that’s a very good thing but these Jesus Chics can turn that into one horrendous experience. After you are done with your spiel, they will do one of two things; attempt to preach the devil out of you or take a chance and cling onto you all the way to momma. And if you are lucky enough to come across the one who just dreamed that the next man she talks to is the one assigned to her by God, and you happen to be that person… well you can fill that blank.

So there I was in a hardware talking to one of the prettiest faces in Longonot and she just happened to be in the Big Bus bound for heaven. She must have noticed my sudden change of demeanor as she handed me my nails.

“What’s wrong,” she said. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

I flash a weak smile. “More like the Holy Ghost.”

“Hallelujah!”  she said and laughed softly.

I took my package and fled. Just outside the door, I bumped into the earlier customer who had bought chicken feed as he hurried back into the shop. I guessed his chickens must have asked for something extra. Maybe a drink to go with their cereal.

“Watch it buddy!” he said in a voice struggling to climb down from teenage octaves and join the low ranks of men his age. So far the man only managed to sound like a strangled sixteen-year-old boy. I raised my hands. No offense here buddy. You actually bumped into me. I stepped aside and almost fell on a bad of cement displayed outside. At the last moment I twisted my body and sat on the bag. If the man-boy noticed he didn’t show it. He stormed right into the shop like a bull in heat which I later learned he actually was.

“Who was that?” I heard him growl inside the shop.

“Just a customer,” the shopkeeper said. “Why, are you jealous?”

I’ve never been known to run from a good challenge. You should have seen the smile on my face when I heard those words. Maybe Miss Headdress in there was not such a Jesus Freak after all. No stretch of my imagination could fathom the chicken guy as a pastor. I wouldn’t even believe he was one if he wore a black robe and collar and literally shit Holy Communion bread. Chicken man was Common Joe like me and Shop was ripe pickings. I stood up, dusted cement off my pants and walked right back into the shop.

“That’s my boy!” Jack bellows and slaps his thigh. “I swear if you’d said you tucked tail and took off I’d have disowned you and banished you from Jack’s Pub.”

There is all round laughter at the table. Even Sibuor, who had managed to fall asleep somewhere along my narrative, wakes up. Looking around groggily Sibuor says, “Drive slowly. You are shaking my intestines.” Don’t ask. We never do.

So I was now back in the hardware shop. Chicken Man’s eyes were two smoldering pits of fire and I was certain any time now he’d aim two flaming balls at me and reduce me to cinders. But Shop Girl smiled. I was not sure if I was seeing things or it was just my horny self justifying what I was to do next, but I could read desperation in the girl’s eyes. On behalf of her entire self, they were crying for rescue. Even her blinking appeared to me like Morse code for SOS.

“Yes customer,” she said. “Did you need something else?”

“Yes,” I said. I crammed all the sincerity I could muster into my voice. “I did forget something. You.”

“I beg your pardon?” This came from Chicken Man.

“I am not talking to you,” I inform Chicken Man, my eyes not once leaving the girl’s. “Alexis, I don’t know you from Eve and I swear upon all the saints you believe in that when I entered this shop I only wanted some nails. Then I saw you and something inside me shifted but I was ready to let it go. Ready to leave this one street town and only remember, albeit on rare occasions, a beautiful girl who weighed nails for me. Then I ran into your boyfriend here.”

Alexis interjected quickly, “He’s not my boyfriend.”

“What are you saying Alexis?” There is so much pain in the man’s voice that was I not thinking with my smaller head I would have pitied him.

“Oh he thinks he is alright,” I tell Alexis. “But he is not in it to like you. He wants to own you. To him you will be no more than that chicken feed he carried out of here.”

“And how do you know that Mr. Mwamba?” asked Alexis.

 “Yeah. How do you know that?” Chicken Man echoed.

“Because I am a man. Something he is yet to become. A man who knows you deserve more than a backwaters hillbilly who includes you among his assets.”

“A what?” they chorused.

I put the nails on the counter. “I am going to lay my cards on the table. There’s one jail I’ll never sentence myself to, Alexis. And that’s the ‘What If’ jail. I could walk out of here and go take out my heat on those wooden planks I got the nails for and you and your Chicken Man here can duke it out and decide who collects tithe at first mass on Sunday but come Monday and you'll remember me and ask yourself what if you had had that dinner with me.”

“What dinner?” Again the two said in unison.

“Shut up Peter!” Alexis commanded but her eyes stayed on mine. Oh my, oh my. “What dinner?”

“The one I am going to cook for you.” (The game is afoot Watson). “And I am a good cook. In fact if I ever cook one of your Chicken Man’s chickens for you, I suggest you ask to see the feathers before you eat it coz you might just find yourself relishing something only considered a delicacy in the Philippines.”

Horror splashed allover Alexis’ face. “You can cook a dog?”

“Do you eat dog?”

“Of course not.”

“Chicken then it is. I’ll pick you up at eight.” I turned and walked out of the shop.

“But I didn’t say I’ll come,” she shouted after me.

“But you didn’t say you won’t either.”

“Man, that’s terrible,” Jack retorts.

“What?” I gawk. “I don’t really eat dog. Come on.”

“I mean what you did to that poor guy.”

I take a long sip of my beer. “I didn’t do anything to him he wouldn’t have done to me if he had half my balls.”

“So you mean if he had one of your balls,” Sibuor says. We all turn and gaze at him as if he is a dead man risen. “You know, since you have two, half would mean one. But wouldn’t that leave you with only one also?”

We burst out laughing until my phone rings and cuts us short. A quick glance at my cell phone. It’s a strange number. I answer it.

“Hey Remington,” a female voice says. “It’s Patricia. I am now in Nairobi and it’s about to get on fire.” My balls shrink into my stomach.

The One In A Hardware Store In Longonot

“So tell us about Longonot.”

That’s how it always starts. A simple question and the floodgates open. Of course it helps that by now the soon-to-be-offending throat has been thoroughly lubricated by the froths in Jack's Pub served up by a gorgeous petite Kamba girl called Mueni and words flow out with the smoothness and ease of a tempered orator. The instigator is Nick, a tall potbellied character who now looks absolutely nothing like the boy I went to high school with. Nick is married with two children, boy and a girl, and he goes home to a brat and a baby girl. Those are his exact words. Seated next to him, ear cocked for the start of a sumptuous tale is Jack, another former inmate of our high school institution. We are at his place, the aptly named Jack’s Pub in Kariobangi South. Jack is on his second marriage and this one too seems poised to follow gravity downhill. Of course being the manly men we are we try to keep our observations to ourselves but only until the oils of Jack's Pub sleek the avenues of reason and suddenly everything and everyone is fair game. The third fella at our table is Sibuor. We call him that but nobody really knows his real name. Come to think of it, no one knows much about Sibuor.

One day he arrived at our customary table and pulling up a seat he said, “So what are you guys talking about? If it’s interesting enough it might keep me from killing myself.” It’s been years and we still don’t know if he had been joking. If he wasn’t, I guess we—meaning mostly I—have been entertaining him enough. “What’s your name?” Jack had asked him and as if on cue, the man had collapsed drank on the table. “He looks like a Sibuor,” Nick had said, patting the poor man on his back. “We’ll call him Sibuor.” And so he remains.

I take a sip of my beer and look around the pub for Mueni. I am stalling.

Sibuor calls me out. “Come on Remington. You were gone three weeks. By now your shenanigans could fill a novel.”

I look down pensively. “Actually the one in Longonot almost slipped away,” I say.

 “I find that impossible to believe,” Jack chips in.

Oh, but true it is. You see, as you all well know I had gone to Longonot to oversee a client’s structural repairs. On the second day we ran out of nails at about the same time we ran out of water and since we were waiting for donkeys to deliver the water, I decided to go for the nails myself. Stretch my legs and all that healthy stuff. Now, Longonot is a two-hardware town, see? So I went to the one nearest to me. Like most hardware shops this one was also burglar-proofed enough to quell any klepto temptations.

I look through the bars and there is the shopkeeper dressed in a blue dustcoat and bent over facing away from me. Even through the dustcoat I could tell there was one hell of an ass in there. I mean, that was Jennifer Lopez bent over some spilled roofing nails and if she would have turned around and started singing “Jenny from the Block” I would not have been the least bit surprised.

“Wait a minute,” Nick says. “But she was facing away from you in a dustcoat. How did you know it was a woman?”

Oh, that thought crossed my mind, I continue. Actually it hit me so hard I promised to look for the highest bridge in Longonot and jump if the keeper turned around and ended up being a man. I mean it’s me, Remington Mwamba, Don Juan Extraordinaire, admiring another man’s tush? Unheard of. But for a moment there I didn’t really care. I was looking at a Jaylo butt and that was all that mattered.

When she finally did turn around I managed to breathe. I had not realized how long I had held air in my lungs. I exhaled so loudly she smiled and cocked her head at me. She flashed a brilliant smile that exposed the most perfect set of pearly whites you’ve ever seen. I mean, this girl’s dentist was one proud bastard.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You sound out of breath. Were you running?”

“Not really,” I managed through a throat that had suddenly gone too dry to speak. “I think it’s my father’s curse," I added, regaining a bit of my former self.

“A curse?”

“You see, he always said that I was so forgetful that one day I would forget to breathe and die.”

Her smile widened and she broke into little girl giggles that rocked her body so delicately I yearned to reach through the bars and touch her right there and then. Damn the consequences. Another customer came in and asked for chicken feed and as she served him I now got to really see her. She was pretty in an unfinished sort of way; like she could use just a little extra something to bring her full grace to the surface. The peach lip-gloss on her lips gave them playful volume and made her appear as if she was perpetually ready to kiss. Her skin was a dark chocolate tending towards light ebony and quite smooth, with the occasional spot here and there as if to remind me she was real and that I was not looking at a newsstand glossy. She wore photo chromatic prescription glasses that hid her eyes and I couldn’t wait for that time when I would take them off and gaze into their depth. Yes, I was gonna go for it.

The customer got his wares and cut me a look full of something I could only interpret as hatred before leaving the shop. The girl turned her attention back to me.

“That’s so funny. You can’t forget to breathe,” she said and broke my reverie. I had sunk into the all-too-familiar zombie zone I slip into every time I encounter a really beautiful woman. It happens often and should probably be a notation on my driver’s license. “The holder should not be allowed behind the wheel in the presence of a pretty member of the opposite sex.”

“Oh yes you can if you are me.” I stuck a hand through the bars. “Mwamba, Remington Mwamba.” (Thanks Bond, James Bond). She shook my hand. Hers was surprisingly soft. I guess working at a hardware store I had expected her hands to be coarse and unwelcoming.

“Alexis.”

“You have very soft hands,” I blurted my thoughts out.

She smiled. “Most women do Mr. Mwamba. It’s kinda like the law of nature.”

Beauty and a brain, I mused to myself as I smiled at her sense of humor.

This time I gave her my you-are-so-funny chuckle and made a small dismissal gesture with my hand. “You obviously haven’t shaken hands with half the women in Longonot. I think the same chemical that eats their teeth does a number on their dermis. And talking of teeth, you are not from around here, are you?”

“Born and raised. Why do you say that?” “You have very white teeth while everybody else here blames the fluoride in the water for their golden grins.”

“You couldn’t get away with that with a mother like mine. ‘God demands two things,’ she would say. ‘Brush your teeth three times a day and go to church once a week.’ She is funny like that.” Alexis chuckled again and this time something like electric current cascaded down my spine. My feelings were beginning to bubble up.

Then I noticed the headdress she had on. It was not just any headdress. It was a blue religious turban. I felt as if some invisible hand had slapped me smack across the face. Guilt descended upon me like a cold burst of water.

“Nails. I want some nails,” I shouted hoarsely. “Three kilos each of three inches and two inches.”

“What?” Jack asks presently and starts so badly he nearly topples his seat over. “That’s it? Since when did religion stop the great Casanova?

To be continued…