Benon Otema was a good man and proud, so when the village drunkard offered to tell him how a man in Kicheri became wealthy in an instant, Benon wasn’t sure he should listen.  It was beneath him to be seen even talking with Joseph Mkala, although everyone knew the man was one of Benon’s best customers.  In the end, Benon gave in and listened to the tale—even giving Joseph a free glass of banana gin to lubricate his tongue—but afterwards he regretted it.

Benon’s trouble started a few days after the conversation, when four screws turned up missing at a particularly inopportune time.  Benon had opened the twist of paper that should contain six wood screws but found it now held only two.  He groaned when he saw the ragged tear where the others had rubbed their way through the paper packet while his son was carrying them home.  The screws were lost forever, Benon knew, dribbled out along the three-hour walk from Bugota, where he had purchased the metal door the screws were meant to mount, to Rwenkagi, the tiny community where Benon was proudly building his newest house.  He had trundled the heavy metal door over the rutted dirt road lashed securely to his bicycle while his son Dennis straggled along behind carrying a banana leaf wrapped around a fistful of nsimi for their lunch and the scrap of newspaper containing the six precious screws.  Benon felt a flush of anger, then a deeper stab of self reproach at his own foolishness in expecting the four-year-old to complete the simple but important task. 

Dennis was a darling toddler with a chubby belly and a quick mischievous grin that never failed to bring a chuckle from Benon, who often marveled that the boy was unlike his other children.  They loved and respected him too, of course, but they never tagged after him like Dennis did, singing a nonsense ditty to himself as if he didn’t have a care in the world, kicking up the dust with his toes and stopping now and then to pick up a pebble or a twig that caught his eye.  When he was with his father, he was as happy as a little boy could be.  It made Benon happy to have the tiny fellow by his side. 

            Now, though, the boy had let him down.  Without the screws, Benon could not put the new door in its frame.  His house would be incomplete and the raw admiration of his neighbors would be tempered. 

This was Benon’s third house.  Even without the new door, it was unquestionably the finest in the village, made of fire-hardened brick rather than the cheaper sun-dried ones Benon had used to built his second house. That one had been admired by his neighbors, too, because its rough, soft brick walls were a big step up from their own mud-and-wattle huts which were just like Benon’s first house.  Also, the second house had been roofed with corrugated tin scraps Benon had salvaged from the abandoned soldiers’ quarters across the river, a marked improvement over the thatch above everyone else’s heads. 

That sun-dried brick house with the tin roof had been the first of its kind built in the village, something that gave Benon great satisfaction.  He started it with bricks he made himself and finished it later with more bricks bought with the earnings from his work as a porter for the tourists in the mountain gorilla reserve.  It was hard to both work his farm, build his house, and carry the tourist backpacks up the steep trails through the misty mountains, but Benon had done so for several years.  Felicity, his wife, did much of the field work that put food on the table while Benon worked for cash that bought the bricks, course by course, and the mortar, load by load, until the second house was built.  Timber for the roof joists Benon cut himself in the forest, waiting until he knew the rangers were elsewhere.  If they caught him, he would have to pay either a heavy fine or a bribe; either way, it would be expensive.

The only complaint about the second house came from Felicity, who objected to its location near the dirt road that ran through town.  Every vehicle that passed raised a cloud of dust, she said, and much of it drifted into the new house.  It was farther away from the fields, too, so that she had a longer walk to and from work every day. 

Felicity stopped complaining when, not long after the house was done, Benon’s neighbors elected him to the village council in recognition that a man of his seriousness and accomplishments would be likely to give good advice to the headman. The appointment fueled Benon’s ambitions, although he was careful to keep any trace of swagger out of his walk and to remain deferential to his seniors on the council.  He also worked hard to keep both his houses in good repair.  Soon, several others in the village started building sun-dried brick homes of their own. 

His neighbors also followed Benon’s footsteps to the tourist camp, swelling the rota of available porters and reducing the number of treks Benon could work each week.  Benon was resourceful, however, and turned the oversupply of labor to his advantage by mounting a double seat on the back of his bicycle so that he could earn a few shillings taxiing his weary fellow porters back and forth between the village and the tourist lodge.  He could have earned more on any given day as a porter, but there was no assurance that he would work each day.  The bicycle taxi business, though, had customers every day, so his total earnings were greater.  Besides, while the porters were tromping up and down the mountainsides, Benon could attend to his other affairs, returning only at the end of the day to pick them up again.  A motor scooter would have been even better, but Benon couldn’t possibly save enough money to buy one. Unlike a new house, which you can buy a brick at a time if you need to, the entire purchase price of a motor scooter was expected at once. 

When the first neighbor completed a sun-dried brick house just like his, Benon decided it was necessary to start building a grander home.  Fortunately, Felicity had provided the means, albeit unwittingly, by bearing two sons in two years, then two daughters before she had Dennis.  The two boys were now old enough to not only work the field, allowing Benon to run the bicycle taxi service full time, but they could be trusted to tend a still Benon built to make banana gin near his old mud-and-wattle house where the boys now slept.  He had put it there so the smoke from the constantly-burning wood fire under the drum of slow-boiling banana wine would blow away from the new house.  It was also close enough for the boys to keep an eye on the simmering still but far enough so that if it exploded, Benon’s new house would not be destroyed. 

            Felicity also gave him two daughters. The younger of them had a twisted leg but she got around fairly well.  Now she was old enough to sell tomatoes and yams at a table by the side of the road.  She also sold the banana wine and gin made by her brothers. 

Felicity lost a baby after the girls were born and Benon assumed his family was complete.  But, three years after the birth of the girl with the twisted leg, Dennis came along, a big surprise to everyone.  His mother treated him like found treasure; his sisters like a doll.  Even Benon, ambitious and busy as he was, often found time to scoop him up and nuzzle his bare belly, which always sent the baby into gales of squeals and giggles.  Dennis was now sturdy enough to be helpful around the house like the other children, although the loss of the screws had shown Benon the little boy wasn’t good for much yet.

The older girl was the real prize.  She was a beauty even at fourteen, with long, lithe legs, wide hips that promised easy childbearing, and a perky upturned nose above full lips that spoke of sweet nuzzlings in the night for her lucky husband.  Her face made the newest house possible when a wealthy man in a neighboring village paid a spectacular bride price for her—sixteen cows! 

Benon bartered the cows for enough fire-hardened—not sun-dried—bricks to build his newest house.  He should have kept at least some of the cows so his sons would be able to buy brides when their time came, but Benon figured they could fend for themselves as he had done.  He had received no help from his own father, why should they?  It would be good for them to show their mettle by earning their own brides just as Benon had done.  Besides, he needed every shilling from the cows to buy enough bricks to build a house.  Those bricks were much better than the sun-dried ones he had used in the house by the road.  They were harder so they would last much longer and more uniformly shaped so they could be set in neater, more compact lines with less mortar making a stronger bond.  Above all, they spoke of richness, of accomplishment that put the owner of such a house apart from his fellow villagers.  Benon set the newest house back from the road on a little hillock that raised it above the surrounding fields and made it clearly visible from nearly everywhere in Rwenkagi.  When the new house was completed, the older one would become a store or perhaps a tavern by the road.

The missing screws were delaying the whole project, though. Benon carefully folded the two remaining screws into the paper and tucked it into his shirt pocket.  He contemplated the sturdy door with its sheet metal panels welded to two rails and three stiles and crisscrossed by steel bars for extra stiffness.  He had already painted the outside a brilliant cobalt blue and the inside gunmetal gray using left-over sign paint he had found in the dump near the gorilla camp.  The hinges were riveted to the door ready to be screwed to the wooden frame around the opening in the brick wall.  Now, that step would have to wait until Benon had the hardware to complete the job.

The door wasn’t to be the ultimate glory of the new house.  Benon hadn’t told anyone yet, but he intended to roof his newest home with kiln-fired clay tiles like those atop the headman’s mansion in Bugota.  Such a roof would be wildly expensive, but that would also make it utterly out of the reach of any potential rivals.  Benon thought it might be just the touch he needed to cement his own selection as headman of Rwenkagi, a position that would be open once the current village leader died without an heir.  As the most prosperous man in the village, Benon would be the logical choice.  A roof of kiln-fired tiles atop walls of fire-hardened bricks and a shiny cobalt blue metal door would surely ensure his selection.

Benon told Felicity he would be home late because he had to return to Bugota to replace the screws.  As he mounted his bicycle, she meekly suggested that one of their neighbors might have a few screws on hand that he could buy, but he dismissed her and pedaled away.  What did a woman know?  To beg hardware from his neighbors would be revealing to them a weakness.  What would they think?

He pedaled past the shops selling carved gorillas and small baskets woven from tough-stemmed grass, the tea shed where his least-capable neighbors brought their bags of freshly-picked tea leaves to be sold to the company buyer for a pittance despite the painstaking hours spent gathering them, past the houses where entrepreneurial neighbors operated beauty parlors, vegetable stands, and even a pool hall with one moth-eaten table, two warped cues, and sixteen nicked and beaten balls.  On Sundays, Benon took a few bottles of gin to the pool hall to sell.

As Benon coasted to the bottom of the hill past the pool hall, he was nearly knocked over by a truck full of tourists rounding the curve from below.  Benon jumped off his bike just in time to drag it safely into a ditch, but the call was a close one.  The truck didn’t slow as the driver wove furiously back and forth across the dirt road to avoid the worst of the ruts and washouts.  Pedestrians—and bicyclists—weren’t visible to him, although a white woman with an expression of horror on her face looked out the side window to see if Benon was all right.  As Benon caught his breath from the close call, he remembered the story Joseph Mkala had told in the pool hall after a glass of Benon’s banana gin.

“Did you hear of the good bad fortune that a man in Kicheri had last month?” Joseph asked, his words only slightly slurred by the gin.

“What man?” Benon had replied. 

“I do not know his name, but everyone there knows him.  He became very wealthy in an unfortunate way.  That’s why I said he had good bad fortune.”

At the mention of wealth, Joseph had Benon’s full attention.  “What did he do?” Benon asked.

“He did nothing himself,” the storyteller answered.  “His child—I do not know if it was a boy or a girl—brought him a fortune by running across the road.”  Sensing Benon’s interest, Joseph fell silent.

“What?  I don’t understand,” Benon said.

“I said I do not know if it was a boy or a girl, but there was money involved.”  Joseph glanced nonchalantly at his empty glass, but did not touch it.  Benon took the bait and filled it anyway, then leaned forward.

“What happened?”

“A truck carrying a rich tourist and his wife to a game drive in the Lake Virunda circuit ran over the child.  It was killed instantly right before its father’s eyes.”

           Benon sat back in his chair, horrified at the thought, while Joseph drained the glass.  Benon could imagine his own despair at seeing the mangled flesh of a child, blood seeping from the eyes as he had seen in a goat struck by a speeding truck one time.  His stomach wrenched as he imagined Dennis suffering such a painful death. 

Joseph Mkala cleared his throat as he put his glass on the plank serving as a bar.  “It was very sad,” he said, “but also very fortunate.”  When puzzlement replaced shock on Benon’s face, Joseph pushed the empty glass toward him.  Benon regarded it, weighed the price of the rest of the story, then reluctantly gave in and dribbled out a few drops more.

The old man sipped again before he continued.  “A policeman was summoned, of course, but the driver claimed the child ran in front of him so fast he could not stop.  The people of Kicheri raised an uproar, however, and the policeman ordered the driver to surrender his license.  It was then that the rich tourist took the policeman aside and spoke quietly to him.  They stepped behind the truck for a moment, then the policeman came out and summoned the man whose child had been killed.  The policeman talked to him behind the truck with the rich tourist.  When they came back, the man carried away his dead child without a word and the policeman told everyone to go home.  The matter was settled.  The next week, the man bought a motorbike and everyone knew what had happened.  It is a common thing.  I thought everyone knew of it.”

When Joseph Mkala said it that way, Benon dismissed the story as an unreliable rumor on its way to becoming a legend, embellished in the telling, repeated with just enough detail to sound true but not enough to verify.  He regretted the two glasses of gin the story had cost him.  It was probably no more true than the tale he had heard the rangers tell the tourists many times on the gorilla trek to scare them into following the rules.  In the rangers’ fable, a visitor just the week before violated the rules and slipped away from his tour group to get a better photo of the silverback.  The poor fool fired his camera’s flash in the massive male’s face, the rangers always said, and lost not only the camera but his arm, which the gorilla ripped right out of its socket.  The story wasn’t true, but it excited the tourists while helping to keep them in line during the trek.

          Now, Benon tasted the dust from the truck as he got back on his bicycle and continued toward Bugota.  He tried to shake off Joseph’s story, to bury it again deep in his mind where it had lain festering since he first heard it.  What a horrible thing for a man to do, accept money for the death of his child.  Such a thing was as bad as the stories Benon had heard of people who sold their children into servitude.  At least the man in Joseph’s story didn’t purposefully push his child in front of the tourists’ vehicle—or did he?  Benon wondered.

He also wondered whether it was a boy or a girl child who was killed.  Each would have different value.  A boy would work for his father until he became a man and set off on his own.  You had to feed him and clothe him, of course, and there was the cost of his education, which was now mandated by the government, but a male child was generally a money-making proposition.  A girl, though, couldn’t do as much work.  She still had to be clothed and fed, too, although school was optional.  A girl became prohibitively expensive if she didn’t bring a large bride price, which was much more common than not.  Benon knew he had been very, very fortunate to receive the high price he got for his older girl.  The young one might well not ever marry, which meant she would be a burden for the rest of her life.  Unlike a boy, you couldn’t just push a girl out into the world to fend for herself when the time came. 

The man at the building supply lot where Benon had bought his door that morning was getting ready to leave when Benon pedaled into his lot.  He paused, his hand on the padlock already threaded through the hasp on his shop door.

“What can I do for you?” the man asked.

“I need some screws,” Benon answered as he stepped off his bicycle.  “Like these you sold me this morning.”  He pulled the twist of paper out of his pocket and unwrapped it to show the screws to the man.  “I need four more.”

“I remember you,” the man said.  “You gave the screws to the little boy, didn’t you?  Did he lose them?” Benon nodded sheepishly.  The man didn’t say anything else, just pulled the padlock out of the hasp and went inside. As Benon started to follow, he came back out with four screws in his palm.  “You were lucky I hadn’t left yet. Anything else?”

Benon started to shake his head as he twisted the screws into the paper and put them in his pocket, then thought of something.  “How much do you charge for kiln-fired clay tiles?  Like the ones on the headman’s house?” 

The man didn’t answer right away, and Benon thought he was sizing him up to see if he could afford such extravagance.  Finally, the man named a price that was higher than Benon had imagined.  He did some quick calculation and realized the roof tiles would cost more than the rest of the house. The only way he would be able to afford them would be though another windfall, although he didn’t say that to the merchant.

Benon kept his expression neutral as if he shopped for such luxuries all the time.  “I’ll figure out how many I need and get back to you,” he said.

“Of course,” the merchant said.  Benon felt the man’s gaze on the back of his neck as he pedaled away.  At least he doesn’t live in Rwenkagi, Benon thought. With luck, no one from the village would come into the shop before the man forgot how Dennis had lost the screws. 

Anger at the boy again bubbled up as Benon pedaled down the rutted road.  He pulled over to let pass a truck loaded with plantains.  It wasn’t a close call, but the sound of the huge tires crunching on the road was scary.  He imagined what they would feel like rolling over a leg stretched on the ground.  How they would grind it into a mangled mess.

Benon’s younger daughter was in no pain from her twisted leg, although it slowed her considerably. Unlike her older sister, the girl would never marry, of course, and Benon frequently complained to Felicity that the girl was likely to become a burden. She retorted that at least he didn’t have to pay for an education for her like he did for the boys. What’s more, she reminded him, the girl would be around to care for the two of them when they became old, so he should be grateful to have her.  And he was, most of the time.  Still, it would be nice to get a bride price for her or some other ready cash.

About half way home, Benon had to swerve around a stalk of plantains that had fallen from the truck.  He started to stop, but realized the edible ones had already been stripped from the stalk. As he passed, he remembered Dennis tagging along behind him in the banana grove behind their old house. Like he always did, the boy was imitating his father’s every action: as Benon stacked the spent banana stalks to dry so they could be burned, Dennis made his own little pile of dry fronds; when Benon stopped working to wipe the sweat from his face, Dennis rubbed his grubby hand over his own forehead.  Benon bent over to yank a particularly stubborn stalk from the ground but didn’t get it on the first pull.  As he straightened to gather his breath for another try, Dennis darted over and wrapped his stubby arms around the thick trunk.  He pulled up with all his tiny might and the stalk, looser than Benon thought, popped free.  Dennis toppled backward rolling head over heels.  The thought of it made Benon laugh.

It was almost dark when Benon pedaled past the pool hall.  Joseph Mkala was leaning in the doorway.  His head turned to follow Benon  but his eyes weren’t focused so Benon figured he probably didn’t recognize him.  What a disgusting waste of a man, Benon thought.  What a horrible story he had told, a lie no doubt. 

Benon chained his bicycle to a porch railing on his sun-dried brick home.  Tomorrow is Saturday, he remembered.  It is market day in the village and a new wave of tourists would be arriving as others depart, clogging the road with their vehicles.  He thought it would be a good day to set up a stand by the side of the road where his daughter with the twisted leg could sell yams and bananas and perhaps a few bottles of gin.  Dennis could help her; he was big enough now.  The perfect spot would be at the bend in the road where the tourist trucks slowed to make the blind curve.