By Roy Duffield.
and what is a queue for the pumps—flashy, pattern motos with missing handle-grips, side-panels scratched, in colors that don’t match, loose exhausts bobbing and ticking in the heat—clogs the gas station and spills out down the road—more pothole than road—of plastic bottles crushed into black mud, hard-packed under more plastic, more mud, more plastic, more mud, more plastic—autumn leaves on a forest floor, only autumn never comes down this far: it’s every rainfall, every flash flood—the fresh forest soil long ago swept away, this is the pungency of stagnant sewage-infused black mud on which women sell coal, closed bananas, breadfruit, kowosol, watermelon and lettuce leaves as the loose dust of the sewage-infused black mud, drying in the tropical heat, takes to the wind and is scratched from the corners of the eyes of passersby with unwashed fingernails and comes to rest on the lettuce leaves, and between Optimiste Auto Parts and Patience Bank hand-painted on bright green breeze-block walls in red and white letters large enough to be read from the road, between the omnipresent Dieux and Lotto, a woman in an orange dress every minute or so remembers where she is, snaps her wrists, and scoops at the sludge-grey water that has flooded her home, the sludge-grey water that slops at her shins—scooping at it with a five-litre commercial plastic bucket—the kind in which popular New York restaurants receive their Hollandaise and tartar sauces, and she pours the five sludge-grey liters into the open drain separated from the road and from her home by a low concrete wall, and again lets her thoughts run loose as she waits for the opaque, grey water in the drain to fall lower than the opaque, grey water in her home still slopping at her shins, and she gazes across the honking traffic of taptaps, tuktuks and the queue of flashy, pattern, Chinese motos spilling from the gas station through which Guito is edging an old truck overloaded with apparel bound for the port and for the United States, the truck revving high, splashing its slow passage through the potholes, Guito observing without envy as he’s overtaken on both sides by unhurried crowds on foot, worrying only about the rattle and crunch of the clutch as he treads it to the floor again before it even has a chance to catch the bite. The woman in the orange dress gazes through all this, all this traffic, across to the beach—a beach not of sand nor of pebbles but of trash—to the men fishing with improvised basket nets, waist-deep in waves that, as they crash on the plastic shore, roll to reveal themselves brown before taking some of the floating debris away in exchange for the pieces freshly delivered—waves eerily beautiful as the sun sets through the storm clouds on the horizon, as the petrol truck, the first in three weeks to make it through the Port-au-Prince gangs that control the fuel routes, swerves suddenly to avoid a mototaxi and its fallen helmetless passenger—another screech lost against the horns as the truck overturns and the moto riders and all the passersby snatch up plastic bottles and plastic bags, coconut casks, watermelon husks, polystyrene boxes and rush into the gurgling fuel, the lucky ones managing to get away with a week’s, a month’s worth of gas and there’s Majori in her orange dress wading out of her home with her bucket—held from beneath, its handle long broken—wading into the fuel, pushing and twisting her way to the centre of the crowd. Favoured by God, it is her bucket right beneath the very source of the spill as other bottles and vessels jostle excitedly against it, knocking it this way and that, but Majori holds her ground as the sun sets through the storm clouds, as the sparks from the fallen moto ignite the fuel in which hundreds of people stand, in which hundreds of people are soaked.
From the other side of the bay, Guito contemplates the glow of the blaze through cracked glass, as he rumbles along in his truck overloaded with apparel bound for the port and the USA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roy Duffield wrote you Bacchus Against the Wall (Anxiety, 2023). He loves to talk to strangers: https://linktr.ee/royduffield.
