Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [16]
“Sorry to disturb you, but if it’s not too much trouble, would you mind terribly putting the truck into gear and, at my say-so, giving it a bit of gas?”
Sylvia chuckled. “No, I wouldn’t mind at all.”
I positioned myself behind the truck, slapped a few flies and mosquitoes off my face, and fervently hoped that in a few short minutes I too would be allowed inside the truck, task accomplished. I sought some leverage by placing a foot against a rock, leaned into the truck, and said, “Okay. Now!”
Sylvia floored it. The wheels spun wildly, and if we had happened to be on a paved road, we would have undoubtedly been moving at well over one hundred miles per hour. But since we were not on a paved road but on a berm of mud, I saw, to my consternation, that the truck was in fact sliding ever farther backward. I heaved with all my might. The palm fronds splintered into nothingness. The spinning wheels dug through layers of mud, spraying a brown mist deep into the bush. I took my foot off the rock, and then my flip-flops lost all traction. “BRAKE! BRAKE! BRAKE!” I yelled as a ton of steel pushed at me with incontestable momentum.
A moment later I was in the passenger seat, panting from the exertion. I turned the air conditioner to its highest setting. “So, how long have we been in Vanuatu now?”
“A little less than twenty-four hours,” Sylvia answered.
We looked at each other, noted the streaming sweat, the mottled hair, the strata of grime, and the innumerable mosquito welts, and agreed that maybe we should have spent the day at a hotel pool, lounging and imbibing froufrou drinks.
“What do we do now?” Sylvia asked.
“Well,” I said, looking a little more closely at our map, “I think we’re about ten kilometers from the next village. We have, what, three, four hours left before darkness? We should probably start walking. We’ll at least be able to find some water and food there. And we’ll probably have to spend the night. There might be a guesthouse.”
Before setting out, we crossed the road—or the big pile of sopping mud that was euphemistically called a road—and wandered toward the nearby ocean. There was, alas, no beach, just cragged ridges of rock absorbing the hard impact of a heaving ocean. It was much too rough for swimming, and we stumbled about in search of a tidal pool, hoping to cleanse ourselves of our filth. We found one and, mindful of the crabs and urchins, we swabbed ourselves clean, ignoring the sting of salt water flushing our mosquito bites.
“I hear something,” Sylvia said, cocking her ear toward the road.
“What?”
“A car…no, a truck.”
It was unmistakable, the muddled grind of a large diesel engine straining in the mire. We dashed across the rock, throwing prudence to the wind, and as we reached the road we saw the aged dump truck coming from the opposite direction from whence we came. Here was something that could salvage us from our predicament. Sylvia stood in the middle of the road and proceeded to do what appeared to be very spirited jumping jacks, complete with flopping ponytail.
“I think he sees you,” I said.
“Just making sure.”
The truck grinded to a stop. In the back hold there were several dozen people dressed for church. The men had shirts on, and the women wore prim Mother Hubbards, one-piece frocks that were highly recommended by nineteenth-century missionaries. They smiled warmly at us. The driver, a stout, bearded fellow with an opaque expression, emerged from the cab and proceeded to say something. I had no idea what he was saying but recognized the language as Bislama. I recalled what I had learned during my first trip to Vanuatu and, using every word I had gleaned back then, said, “Me no tok-tok Bislama…uh…truck…uh, problemo…bugger up…Do you speak English?”
“Non,” he said. “Je parle français.