Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Terez Rose
No Home for the Holidays
It doesn’t take long for Kate to decide the Gabonese driver
of the beer truck delivering her to Lambaréné is a madman. He races
the lumbering vehicle down the narrow, unpaved African roads,
swerving wildly to avoid crater-sized potholes that punctuate the
washboard ruts. Chickens flutter and goats scatter in panic as the
driver thunders through villages. Ascending hills, the weight of the
truck slows to a crawl. The driver makes up time on the descent,
giving the term “break-neck speed” new significance. He glances over
at Kate after an hour. “The last white woman who traveled with me
begged to be let out,” he comments in French. She unclenches her jaw
long enough to tell him she can handle it. Visiting Carmen, a fellow
American, is as close to home for the holidays as she is going to get
this year. Not a chance she’ll back out now. “Peace Corpse?” he asks
in English. When she tells him yes, he nods as if that explains it all.
They crest one particularly steep hill and begin rocketing downward.
She glances sidelong at the driver’s face. He is grinning, his expression
filled with the kind of rapt glee you find on the faces of ten-year old boys
playing arcade games, the type with steering wheels and virtual roads
displayed on the screen. The difference, of course, is that with the game,
when you make a bad turn and your vehicle rolls and explodes into a
churning inferno, you simply shrug and put in a few more quarters.
But the constraints of the real world and the laws of physics don’t seem
to deter the driver. Nor any other driver, judging from the trucks that
come barreling toward them from the other direction, veering off only
at the last moment to avoid head-on collisions.
The life expectancy for the average Gabonese man is fifty-one
years. One in every ten Gabonese children will die before their first
birthday. That’s how it is here. But statistics don’t concern this man. He
only knows that the sooner he gets to Lambaréné, the sooner he will
return home to family. He lives for the moment, like most Africans do.
It’s a safer bet. And besides, Mom—American and not Gabonese—was
only fifty-one.
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 127