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…
