Climber of electric poles
I heard a speaking challenge to pounce on the subject of unauthorized restoration of electric power to neighborhoods by seemingly helpless but actually reckless disconnected subscribers to the power. The present story might just turn out to be a disturbing one without me having purposely made it so. I see the comfortless chance of the narrative rudely driving home the point that in Nigeria man-made light, not God’s, clinches the bigger celebration for permanence and-need I really bother to add it?-man is inclined to feel greater disappointment with a long or short interruption of his Dynamo-Powered Light, not with that of Jehovah’s Greater and Lesser liger of his firmament.
It was the last week of a November of a year and a Monday…
Monday! To all Government offices a special twenty-four hours; we should accept, too, to all the private ones all over the world to electric power consumers in the third world. It is the most painful day to lawfully disconnect their defaulting lines following a non-prompt payment of their power bills. Outrageously, the Plaque Electricity Authority had just stormed a Robert’s avenue with three of her blood-red vans for the purpose of severing defaulting subscribers’ electric wires and disappearing with their awkward left-over in her punitive vans. The raid proved to be a heavy weight boxers on the affected persons for their having begun to operate this-and-that gadgets in their shops, kiosks, salons, restaurants, laundromats minimart, supermarkets and regular apartment. Some of them had rushed out their post at the very moment of the outage for a last-minute appeal to their invaders for empathy as fellow members of the human race. But business-like the electric wire-slashing Plaque Squad had continued their heart-breaking labor, except when it pleased them to lend pretending ears to the eleventh hour fervent promises by their defaulter subscribers to offset their bills in less than a half hour!
Meanwhile, one unaffected subscriber was making the most scene of his gratitude to The Squad for skipping his guiltless wire in the vengeful exercise - A Billy Inyang. Inyang did not see anything out of place proudly displaying on the scene in that tense moment his up-to-date endorsed payment slips for consumed electricity. For the perfectly angering drama, an affected Bassey could not help freeing from his lips “Medusa blast your soul!” Billy Inyang’s drama had simply confirmed his solidarity for the darkness intentions of the Wire-Slashing Plaque Squad.
Almost as soon, the squad comprised of five men and two women began to shake hands with Billy and three others for their exemplary subscription to their light service while about forty faces with hate-filled eyes endured the hurting compliment.
“I… I just hope Inyang and Gang already understand that they’ve started a war they’d better they finished or died trying…”
Bassey Duke was sure that, if by Satan’s Accident he shoe meet Billy Inang in a wilderness or simpler forest, he would not fail to keep the tightest grip on his thirty-year-old neck for as long as a life-finishing quarter-hour!
The Plaque Darkness Squad was not long in rounding off its job, whereupon it left Creeks Roberts Avenue but also left behind an awkward silence within her perimeters. The still milling round men and women of the hit avenue had on their faces confused looks as real as Satan’s Hell Thirty-three-year-old Bassey kept his restless eyeballs for just one man: An Elijah Coleman. More by choice that by real training an electrician. Elijah, thirty one or thirty two, had either despised formal apprenticeship to a practicing one or he could not assemble the Fifty or Sixty Thousand Naira for it. In the end, he finally landed on his electrician’s occupation from the aircraft of his craving for safest knowledge of electricity and voltage for the end of safest utilization.
So far so good! shaggy-haired Elijah had since been sustaining self with his electrician’s self-acquired know-how, now and again neatly wiring new buildings and old ones and, whenever special luck shone, delving into the Field of Electronic Repairs.
“But where’s our Fearless Electrician,” sought Bassey in an impatient voice that fitted his mood.
“Or can he have been shocked by a 220KVA?”
For giving this morbid thought a fleeting vent Bassey tried to laugh but postponed the act. Mood-wise, he was rather slightly better-off than he was when he was, just like that, dumped by a fiancée he had singularly trained in a polytechnic for A Higher National Diploma in Microbiology. Bassey, by Astrology a Leo had had to give Tina a lion’s fight but success recorded in only repossessing property of hers she had acquired through him.
At a time, Bassey Duke was getting ready to rashly ask God what good a deserved darkness would do for him after 7:00pm, his memory kindly brought back to him an incident one could rely on to wager that Elijah would not in the end show up. In his last light Reconnection Business, Elijah had traded the bitterest abuses with a Just-Returned from American’s Philadelphia. On the electric pole, Elijah had perched, he had for some three minutes been juggling its wires as a result convulsing a steady light. How The Returned from Philadelphia was able to sense that the then fitful current had something to do with tampered wires outside would remain some sort of big puzzle. Quickly producing himself on his balcony and sighting work-engrossed Elijah, he hastily demanded that he disclose who the monkey he was.
“Monkey! What? Monkey?”
Anderson’s question to Elijah he had fired in American English that could have been faultless but for his Efik mother tongue’s slight interference. Elijah’s eventual reaction to the hateful interrogation was not an indignant one of the upset but he was to find the full courage to reply with “A Monkey exactly like you!”
Lord! Have Mercy!
From George Anderson Elijah Coleman had expected America’s Son-of-a-bitch! capped with a speedy move to reach The Ignorant Plaque Electricity Authority through wired calls. Instead from U.S Green card-carrying Anderson, Elijah collected a malevolent Nigerian curse whose Anderson source meant every letter. But for Elijah’s preparedness to complete what he had started he would not have retained a watchful eye on the naked light he was swapping its wires!
To Elijah, his illegal light Reconnection Business for The Disconnected was as good as over, saves if he should want to gamble away his Elijah Coleman’s life! No member of their religious family, he not excluded, had ever pooh-poohed a pronounced curse from the truly aggrieved from unjust treatment. Bassey Duke, then on the scene, did not find the episode funny either “Accordingly, he had to counsel Elijah on ‘A start-distancing electric poles for light reconnection.’ Bassy too, was a non-challenger of messages from Sermons on Curses. Not once, not twice he had walked into a church and meet a sermon whose salient message is the Unpleasantness of Curses and their great powers, though preachers did not forget to subsume their said great powers under Christ’s .
But-Alas!-Elijah Coleman had lately begun to find it pretty difficult placing a sizable meal on his dining table, following fewer invitations for the lawful electrician’s jobs. Now, more than five months he had bid farewell to the climbing of Plaque Electric Poles like a monkey for activities that never failed to fetch him big ripe bananas!
Cursed by Anderson or not and whether curses are potent or impotent really time to reason out other truths. The truth of half starvation and poor feeding! The half-starving poor feeder has all that it takes to change the shameful story.
Elijah Coleman had to wonder how a glove-wearing electrician atop an electric pole could shake hands with a high voltage or recklessly permit its close brush against his body, when he had not left for the business from a pub but rather from his whisky-free apartment.
Some admirers of Elijah had thought with full conviction that even from two kilometers, his ears could pick the sounds of the giant pliers of the Plaque Electricity Darkness Squad shredding the guilty wires of her indebted subscribers, that at such moments Elijah would bide his time, leave the victims of the raid to their ordeal and when the Plaque Squad with its vans had quitted the scene surface for the purpose of drying their tears with his own as giant pliers for light reconnection. But for those who had observed that the Plaque Electricity Darkness Squad often struck her defaulters on the last Monday of a month, their ox-blood vans swishing past the busy roads and quiet streets of the creek on such Mondays should be enough pointer to a scheming electrician within the perimeter that The Squad was then in control of things. Indeed, the patrolling vans of The Plaque Electricity Darkness Squad were on all last Monday of months his major feeder of the information of a carried-out strike by the squad and rarely the tires of the vans failed to roll over the asphalt of Dynasty Road that served as a major link between her base and all the parts of Creek!
Is there really any other precaution an electrician already at work on top of an electric pole should take for safety sake apart from concentrating on the thing with completely sealed lips: no holding of needless conversation with waiting anticipatory subscribers at the base of the pole?
Elijah Coleman did not know when he had risen to his full length for a ten-minute taxi ride to Roberts Avenue from their Dynasty Road. As he was alighting from the cab, Elijah broke into whisper-low song reminder song about the need to shun the cracking jokes and exchange of pleasantries from an ascended electric pole, until he is through with the task: Not unexpectedly Bassey’s eyes turned out the first pair to pick out the six feet-four frame of ever shaggy-haired polo-shirt spotting Elijah. Bassey discarding or forgetting a habituated self-restraint, rushed at Elijah like, a recovered treasure encircling his Bassey’s arms round his waist.
“Now, I can see, you’re only slightly better than Judas Iscariot with his betrayers kiss.”
“Oh Christ! You’ll never get tired of your unhealthy jokes,” returned a mirthful Bassey, for the first time bright-faced, since The Plaque Darkness Squad violated his electric wire and with that tampered with a part of him that must not even by neared.
“So, how much are you grabbing from us for your job… Just for my pre-information?”
Elijah for response put on the right menacing look for commencement and completion of what his lips would release “Five grand and not a naira less…
But, easily, Elijah remembered for cracking as joke that he had intended to plunge the whole Five Grand into his serious marriage moves for a Serious Eunice.
Bassey Duke found the remark delicious and had a satisfied consumers smile to show for it. Still, he gave Elijah to understand that in his last invitation for the same job he had mentioned a Clara as his fiancée: A Clara Esom he could not account for because he had not seen her nor eventually did so.
“Yet, we were all to glad to drop a cool four thousand naira light reconnection fee on your suitor’s palm!”
A quick interrupting ‘sorry’ from Elijah. Eunice had divinely turned out to be actual rib he had missed!
“Then, five grand is your last word, Coleman?”
“I’m afraid ‘yes.’ For the fine job I’ll make of reconnecting your abused wires.”
“And for the sake, too, of getting your Eunice successfully betrothed to you… why are you forgetting that?”
Both men united by their electricity headache laughed. Two men: sort of still safe bachelors for being in their early thirties. Once again, Bassey Duke in admiration embraced Elijah Coleman, who once again felt that he had done so like a homosexual, for rejection of the act disfiguring his face. Elijah Coleman five thousand naira after a victorious collection from consenting plaque defaulters through Bassey Duke was as victoriously pocketed by him. Thereupon, he fished out his pliers of the same giant size as The Plaque Darkness Squad’s for a long avoided fast money job.
Fatefully, the job was to be Elijah Coleman’s last, frightfully coinciding with the week he breathed his last: some two days later in a not-far-off hospital. Elijah’s death revealed not George Anderson’s high voltage electrocution curse; rather the handiwork of a bullet obeying the pressed trigger of a pistol belonging to a man whom Elijah’s last light reconnection job had irreversibly damaged his Plasma TV. The bullet as wished by the shooter had hit Elijah’s pliers-clutching right palm except that Elijah on falling down, had hit his occiput on a jutting metal at the base of the mounted electric pole… So expertly fired was the shot that it just kissed the targeted meddlesome hand! It was not like a shooting job by a Nigerian Civilian who had lived all his life in Nigeria. No, much like one by one who had set foot in the United States and had lived in, for example, Philadelphia.
Comments