by Dilman Dila
“Yes, yes,” the waiter said, as he gave the door of the fridge a tug. It did not open. It had a fastener and a padlock. “Ah sorry. Last week someone stole a beer so I put this on when I’m in the kitchen. A minute. I’ll get the key.”
The doctor cursed. He glowered at the waiter, who disappeared through the back door and ran across the backyard to a grass-thatched hut, which served as the kitchen.
An engine ignited. The doctor frowned.
His pick-up had been the only vehicle in Wemo, until six days ago when a mzungu appeared with a bigger truck, a double-cab, that had the blue logo of the United Nations. But the foreigner’s car was parked behind the kitchen. Dr. Okot could see its bumper. The sound of the engine came from the street. It had to be his pick-up igniting.
A carjacker?
He parted the curtains and peered out of the window. The driver’s seat was empty, yet the engine revved, and then the car sped away in a whirlwind of dust.
The doctor ran into the street, just in time to see a little girl crossing the road. The split second in which it happened stretched for an eternity. She turned her head to the car in surprise. Her mouth opened to scream, but no sound came out. A cloud of dust rose, obscuring his view. He heard the vehicle slamming into her little body.
The pick-up then reversed, broke out of the dust cloud, and screeched to a halt at the same spot that he had parked it. The dust faded away, revealing a yellow bundle spread in the middle of the road. He had not noticed the color of her dress before, and now he hoped that yellow thing was not the girl.
“What happened?” a voice asked.
It took him several seconds to recognize it as the waiter. Now, he became aware of the people stepping out of the shops. He could hear feet running from the backstreets. He could feel anger stirring in the street when they saw the yellow bundle on the road. He wanted to feel that anger too, but his insides felt hollow. His stomach was just a bag of frightened air.
He staggered to the girl. Her eyes and mouth were wide open, the scream crystallized on her face forever. Brain seeped out of her smashed skull. Blood soaked her uniform. He checked her pulse. Nothing.
“Mangulata’s daughter,” the waiter said.
The doctor knew her too, though he could not recall her name. He had treated her of malaria just a week before. He could still remember her smile, which shone even as the fever burned through her body. He sat down beside her, and watched her blood flow away in rivulets, like earthworms wriggling away from a danger only they could perceive.
He sensed the mob gathering around him, in silence, hardly casting any shadows. Their eyes burned his flesh with accusation. Vengeance flowed out of their pores, and dripped onto him like molten plastic.
I did not kill her, he tried to say. The words stuck in his throat, a rusty pipe clogged with muck, chocking him.
He looked over his shoulder, at the car. There were several men behind him. He saw the car through their legs. It was out of focus. Their pants and shoes were sharp in focus. Beside one leg, a club dangled. Beside another leg, a machete gleamed.
They would clobber him to death.
A woman started to wail. Her voice pierced the air like a whistle.
He staggered to his feet. There were about a dozen people around him, each had a weapon. The unspoken rule on roads was that if you knocked down a pedestrian, you do not stop, for a mob will lynch you in vengeance. Instead, speed away to the nearest police station and report your crime, or simply vanish. This mob had not yet descended on him because they knew him. He had stayed when other doctors had fled, after the hospital project had failed, and that had made them see him as a part of the community. That was the only reason they had not already clobbered him to death.
But now they thought he had killed the girl, they would forget the good he had done for them. They would forget the sacrifice he had made by staying to keep the hospital alive. They would want his blood in vengeance.
Tears clouded his vision as he staggered away from them, toward his truck. Why he was going to it he did not know. They gave him way, but he knew they were behind him, following with their weapons raised. They were only waiting for a spark, for someone to strike the first blow…
The car drove itself, he wanted to tell them. He could only gasp.
No one else had seen it. No one would believe him. He went down on his knees, bowed his head, closed his eyes, and waited for the first blow to strike him. To break his skull open just as the car had broken open the girl’s skull. He hoped to pass out with the first blow.
“Don’t kill him!” a voice shouted in English, in a strange accent. “He didn’t do it!”
Dr Okot looked up, to see a white man’s head poking out of a window on the first floor of the hotel. Their eyes met, and he thought he saw a flare in the mzungu’s eyes, like sunlight bouncing off a metallic surface. They had first met the previous day at the hospital. His name was Grant. He said he was in town researching local opinion about a project the UN planned to implement in the area. Another project bound to fail, Dr. Okot had thought when he had heard Grant’s pre-conceived ideas of what the locals wanted.
“I saw everything!” Grant shouted. “Don’t kill him!”
Most people in the mob did not understand English. One man did. He was the only law enforcement officer in Wemo, an elected official who thought of himself as the president of the town. Dr. Okot had forgotten his name because people just called him Chairman. He had been at the helm of the village council for over fifteen years.
“Wait,” Chairman said.
The doctor wanted to turn around, to get a good look of what was happening behind him, but he remained on his knees, waiting. The mzungu vanished from the window. Seconds later, he came running from around the building, panting.
“It was not him,” he said. “I saw it.”
He had braided his beard, three locks dangled on his chin. His hair was the color of sand. The sun had burnt his skin red. His eyes had a green tint that unnerved Dr. Okot, who could not imagine a human being with green eyes.
“You did?” Chairman said.
Dr. Okot felt a headache coming.
“Yeah. I was on my window. I happened to be looking out. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. I thought it was a trick of the sun, but it was real. I saw the doctor stop, and he got out of the car, he went into the restaurant. There was no one in the car. But when the girl appeared on the road, the car drove itself and hit her.”
Several seconds passed. There would have been total silence if it were not for the woman wailing. Her melodrama drove a knife into the doctor’s gut.
“Was he in the restaurant?” Chairman asked the waiter.
“Yes,” the waiter replied, after a moment of consideration. “I left him there to get the fridge keys from the kitchen. I was gone for only a few seconds. I did not see what happened, but I left him sitting in the restaurant. When I came out to the street, he was standing by the road, not inside the car.” He paused for another few seconds before adding, “Maybe the mzungu is right.”
Dr. Okot felt the immediate danger ebbing away. The mob would not pounce on him just yet. He had two witnesses on his side, but no one could explain the strange behavior of the truck. Everyone present thought of something, but no one said it aloud.
Juju.
#
The doctor abandoned the car on the street. He could not bring himself to even touch it. He would leave it there until the police came. The station was over thirty miles of bad roads away. They could not possibly come that day.
He took the rest of the day off. He longed to talk to Amito, his wife, but she was still at the primary school, where she taught English and Mathematics. He wanted her to hear it from him before she heard it from anyone else. He tried calling her, but he could not get through because of the bad phone network. He thought about walking the five miles to see her in person, but the heat sapped all his energy. And the news would travel faster than he could walk.
H
e collapsed onto a rocking chair under a mango tree in his backyard, brooding, drinking beer to calm his nerves. When he heard an engine, he stiffened, anticipating the sound of metal slamming into flesh. He closed his eyes, trying to dislodge the image of the yellow pile on the road from his mind. The car stopped in front of his house.
It then came to him that it must be the mzungu, who owned the only other car in the village. Dr. Okot did not want to talk to anybody. He wanted to be left alone. But before he could instruct the maid to turn away the visitor, she showed Grant to the backyard.
“That is not a good idea,” the mzungu said, looking at the beer bottle.
Okot smiled politely. The urge to yell about how wazungu always thought they knew what was best for Africans nearly overcame him. He wanted to rave about the failed hospital project, to tell Grant that it was a grand example of how ‘stupid white men with a superiority-save-Africa complex’ try to force their views on other people. He wanted to say a lot of nasty things, but the words did not come. He took a sip from his bottle, and looked away, out of the chain link fence, at a herd of cattle grazing in the fields.
“It’s a ghost,” Grant said. “And I can help.”
Okot turned to him, “Ghost?”
Grant shrugged. “Well, you people call it ghost, but it is something that can be explained scientifically. There are metaphysical forces –” He pulled a DVD and a neatly folded sheet of paper out of his pocket. “Look, I have a friend. He is a ghostbuster. He can help you.”
Dr. Okot did not touch the things the mzungu held out to him, but he saw that the paper was a flyer for an investigator of paranormal activity.
“On this DVD, you’ll see him at work. He can get rid of the ghost that has taken control of your car.”
Okot did not respond. His eyes clouded as he stared at the flyer. It had stripes of yellow. There had been only one yellow stripe on the road.
“Here is my Ugandan number,” Grant said as he scribbled a number on the paper. He then placed the flyer and the DVD on Dr. Okot’s lap. “Call me if you don’t want your car to kill more little girls.”
The mzungu walking away.
#
That night, Dr. Okot and Amito lay sleepless in bed. Heat smothered the room. They kept the windows open, and the fan running, but that did not stop sweat from seeping out of his pores. The sheets clung to his skin. He got out of bed, took a cold beer from the fridge, and staggered out of the house. He sat on the doorsteps and watched clouds dashing around the moon.
Amito joined him a few minutes later. She had a cold bottle of water. They did not talk for a long time. An owl hooted. A soft breeze blew, cooling them down, and Okot wondered why it had not blown into the room through the window.
“Why do we live here?” Amito broke the silence.
The question had troubled Okot since he saw the yellow bundle on the road. When he first came to Wemo Hospital, shortly after it had opened with a lot of fanfare, the money had lured him. He earned four times above the government rates. Then the project failed, because patients did not turn up. The hospital had to retrench most of its staff. He was the only doctor left. The idea had seemed a good one, setting up a hospital in a region that did not have functional health centers, but it ignored the culture and history of the locals. He knew that they preferred traditional medicine, which he and the Western donors had been quick to dismiss as primitive and backward, until he witnessed a herbalist curing a boy of cancer. He had then questioned everything he had learnt at school, everything he had been socialized to believe. He had thought of a radical project, in which the hospital would embrace traditional medicine, as well as the cultures and sciences of the place, rather than impose an expensive and foreign health system. His employers had not yet bought into the idea. Now, he wondered if it was worth it. The locals were happy with their medicine men. They did not need him, or the hospital.
“Let’s get away,” she said. “I hate teaching in that school. I want to teach pupils who are interested in learning, not pupils who only think of taking cattle to drink water.” He wanted to retort a reminder that learning to take cattle to drink was probably better than learning about Cinderella, but he only took a swig of his beer. “I don’t want our children to grow up here.”
He placed a hand on her shoulders. She buried her face in his chest.
#
A little after sunrise the next morning, the maid awoke Okot. He stepped out in nothing but a bathrobe, to find visitors waiting in his living room. He knew Chairman, who sat between two elderly men. He recognized one, from the costume of bark cloth, as a mganga.
“How is your morning?” Chairman said.
“Fine,” he replied.
“This is her grandfather,” Chairman said, nodding at the second old man. “This mganga told him it’s her father’s spirit. You see, her mother has been sleeping with her uncle, who isn’t the heir. That made her husband’s spirit very angry. So the mganga wants to prevent the ghost from using your car again.”
Why my car? Dr. Okot wanted to ask, but he only swallowed saliva to wet his throat.
“It’s still in the street,” he said. “I’ll never drive it again.”
Chairman nodded. Without another word, the three men rose, shook his hand, and walked out. At the doorway, the girl’s grandfather paused.
“We shall bury her today,” he said. “We have to do it quickly because of the manner in which she died. Please be there so you can ask for her forgiveness.”
#
The funeral started at three. A large crowd gathered at the bereaved homestead, which housed six families and had a dozen grass-thatched huts with mud walls. The family necropolis lay in a garden behind the homestead. Banana plants soared above the graves like phantom guardians, blocking out the heat of the sun. The mganga stood beside the priest, whose sermon accentuated the sorrow and the oppressive heat. Dr. Okot and Amito stood at the mouth of the grave, along with the girl’s mother.
Just as the priest started to say a prayer, a scream chilled the afternoon.
“The car!”
Okot turned to see a woman running up the road toward the homestead. In the distance behind her, a plume of dust whirled toward the mourners. He could hear the whine of an engine. His pick-up.
The burial turned into pandemonium. People ran in all directions, screaming. Within a minute, only a handful of the mourners remained, waiting in resignation as the car sped toward the homestead. Amito held Okot’s hand in desperation. Her fingers dug into his flesh. A breeze rose, making the banana leaves rustle, like wings of demons, accentuating the silence that gripped the graveyard.
The car stopped about twenty meters away. It was empty.
“I was wrong,” the mganga said. “It wasn’t the girl’s father.” He turned to Dr. Okot, and pointed a scrawny finger. “You must have knocked someone else dead, and now the ghost is haunting your car.”
Dr. Okot’s knees went weak. His tongue went dry, his lips cracked. He became aware of eyes glaring at him. Sweat broke out of his skin. A drop ran down his face, tickling him like the finger of a witch.
“I’ve never knocked anyone,” he said.
“Then why is a ghost driving your car?” Chairman said.
Amito started to cry. Her fingers dug deeper into Okot’s flesh, until he was not sure whether it was sweat or blood trickling down his palm.
“You must have sinned somewhere,” Chairman continued. “You must be running away from bad things you did somewhere. All your friends left when the hospital failed, why did you stay? Why do you choose to live in such a village? Why don’t you return to the city? That’s where all educated young men want to live, not here.”
Amito’s crying went up a notch. Okot hugged her, to comfort her, hoping she would not feel the fear that gripped him. He could not be sure anymore if he had never killed a person. Over the years he had run over many animals, sometimes in the night when he could not tell exactly what it was he had knocked over. Maybe one was a human.
“Confess your crimes,” the priest said. “Turn to God, and he will vanquish the evil haunting you.”
The breeze turned into a strong wind. The leaves screamed. A dust devil danced in the distance, as though to confirm the presence of a ghost.
It was his car. He had to do something, to stop it from killing more children.
He looked deep into his wife’s eyes, an apology struggling to come up his throat. He could not say anything. He wriggled his hand out of her grip. She let him go. His knees wobbled as he walked out of the banana plantation. The wind threatened to knock him over. Blackjacks clung to his pants as he cut through the high grass. He ripped off his coat and tie, and threw them into the bush. Amito stopped crying.
Fire. A thought blazed in his skull. Destroy the car to destroy the ghost.
He staggered into the homestead, into the nearest kitchen. He picked an axe off the wall, and a burning piece of wood from the stove. Then he stepped onto the road, and faced the car. Chicken blood from the mganga’s ritual streaked it red. There were pig-bone necklaces and other fetishes that the mganga had hung on its bonnet and roof. The headlights blinked. The indicators flashed continuously, like multiple eyes winking at him. Mocking him. He could hear the sound of the lights. It made him think of the ticking of a clock. He bit his lips, bracing for the fight with the supernatural.
He felt the weight of the axe, felt the heat from the wood. His palms were slick with sweat. He felt his energy drain, and wondered if he would be able to burst open the fuel tank.
“You can’t burn it here,” Chairman shouted.
Dr. Okot turned to see him standing a safe distance away, cowering behind a hut, clutching something in his hands. Even from the distance, the doctor recognized the sheep-tail whisk, a talisman to keep away ghosts and evil things.
“Take it away,” Chairman said. “Burn it where there are no people. Not here.”
Dr. Okot had heard of a Christian pastor who had convinced a shaman to stop practicing magic. He set the shrine on fire, but the moment it started to burn, human-like creatures the size of small rats jumped out of the flames, killed them both, and ran amok in the village, razing several homes before vanishing into a forest. Something similar might happen if he torched the car in the village. He had to take the vehicle away.
