Vengeance Is Not Mine (2)

By CLIFFORD OLUOCH

It was while waiting for his car to be washed that Dr. Kioko called.
“Give me ten minutes and I will be there?” Felix told the doctor who wanted Felix to be there when the news was being broken.

Felix decided to walk to the Doctor’s plaza. He gave the car wash man shs.500 and told him to keep an eye on the car. In less than ten minutes he was in the doctor’s office. The receptionist, who knew Felix quite well, quickly ushered him in. The moment he walked in, his mother knew.

“Tell me it is not true,” she started, her breathing becoming raspier and more uneven. Her distorted face, courtesy of a severe stroke she suffered during the 2007 election violence, looked more horrific as the mouth tried hard enough to stay straight. There was little success. Felix’s dad, on the contrary, remained seated in total disbelief. The grief was too much for Felix who broke down in wails that he had suppressed for the last three hours or so.

It is the doctor who noticed the stiffening old man. He quickly called for ambulance services and by the time the vehicle came from Nairobi Hospital, both old man and woman had collapsed, relegating a frantic doctor to a first aider. Felix could not believe his eyes. The paramedics were quite fast but came with only one stretcher thus forcing the doctor and Felix to use the clinic’s stretcher to transport the old man who looked gone.

“Please don’t go,” Felix kept on shouting at the old man as the paramedics rushed the old couple to the ICU room. Felix made to follow but he was stopped by the guards. He tried fighting but he was not match for the three guards.

“Please don’t go,” he kept on repeating as he sat down against the corridor doors, both his hands placed on his bowed head which was resting on his knees. He does not know how long he stayed there but the moment Doctor Kioko came out, Felix knew it.

“Tell me the truth doctor,” Felix whispered standing up, the energy suddenly coming back to his legs.
“We lost both of them,” the doctor said as he put his hands on Felix’s shoulders. This time Felix did not cry because the same coldness that had hit him when he received news of Wicky’s death, spread throughout his whole body, leaving every part of his body numb. And at that moment, something in Felix died, the piercing pain in his heart almost proving unbearable.

“They will pay for this,” Felix said as he demanded to go and see his parents for the last time. This time the guards allowed him and Dr. Kioko accompanied him.

They looked too peaceful to be dead. Felix moved to the dad he had known for the last twenty years. Felix knotted his fingers into his father’s cold hand and did the same with his left hand to his mom’s hand. He stayed like that for almost five minutes before Dr. Kioko told him that it was time to let go. The coldness in his heart seemed permanent. He swallowed hard and moved out of the room without looking back.

It was a frantic week for Felix as he rushed up and down organizing the burial of the only family he had ever known. Chepchumba and Omari played a major role in offering the emotional and logistical support that funerals demanded. Wicky’s numerous friends also played a big role. Within that week, Felix came to know of the policeman who had gunned down Wicky, apparently over a disagreement on delivery of drug consignment money. Felix marked him. He would pay.

The burial and grave side service of the three was held on a Saturday afternoon at Langata Cemetery, exactly a week after their death. It was an emotional send off but Felix, dressed in a black suit with a white shirt and a black and red checked tie, did not break down. He kept his head high and when it came to the eulogy, Felix made it clear that family was all about who you grew up with and not who gave birth to you. He talked about his parents who came from a different tribe but found no problem taking care of two orphans from another part of the country.

The cop was there, maybe to make sure that Wicky was really dead and buried. Felix already had some background information on him and his family.

At the end of the ceremony when almost everyone had left, Felix remained behind to supervise the cementing of the graves. Chepchumba was in the car waiting for him. It was while arranging the last bits of flowers that the cop came to talk to Felix.

“Do you know me?” he asked Felix.

Felix looked at him expressionlessly. “No,” he simply said.

“I am the one who shot your brother and I will also shoot you too if you cross my path,” he whispered.

“Or vice versa,” Felix told him without any trace of fear and without lifting his eyes to look up.

“Watch your back,” he said as he was leaving.

“I am not gay,” Felix shouted without losing a beat. “I shoot from the front!” This time he turned and looked at the gigantic figure of the cop disappearing towards the gate. Felix spat.

That evening when all was quiet, and the gravity of being left alone was slowly sinking, Felix went to Wicky’s inner room. It was a very neat room, his bed not slept on for more than a week on one corner of the room. Felix knew where to check – under the bed. He moved the bed and found a trap door whose padlock he had to break. Felix found an assorted catchment suitcases that housed guns and had no problem choosing the black suitcase that had the handy AK-47. He remembered the rudimentary tutorials that Wicky had given him during the 2007 elections chaos. “You never know when you will be called upon to use fire arms,” Wicky had told him. The time was now.

As Felix was returning the other guns, something else caught his attention. Beneath the case that housed the guns were some canvases. Felix pulled them out. Some were dusty.

Felix unrolled the canvases. The first painting that Felix saw simply swept him off his feet. He knew that Wicky was an artist. What he did not know was where Wicky found the time to paint that well. Suddenly he understood the reasons Wicky used to retreat into his room and stay for long, or the late nights and early mornings where the lights in his room would remain on the whole night.

The first painting was a family portrait of two boys, two girls and their parents, especially their Father who had passed on before the land clashes. His father resembled Wicky. It was a portrait of happiness, the girls’ smile bringing some tears in Felix’s eyes. So this is how his late sisters looked like. They were cute. The signature also grabbed Felix’s attention: FUCK POLITICIANS (FP) was engraved in dripping red paint to bring out a bleeding effect!

The next painting was horrific. Two machete wielding men were hacking at the mother, the girls trying to stop him. The boys were under the bed peeping. A closer look revealed the older boys hand on the younger boy’s eyes. Horrific! Again the same signature tune: FP.

Felix spent the next hour poring through the paintings that gave him a journey through his early life, their road trips, night outs, rain drenched shanties, turf wars with other victims, hunger, pain, death of friends, and worst of all, rejection and lack of acceptance from the main perpetrators – the politicians. After ten such detailed pictures, Felix was drained emotionally. He had to do something.

He called Nijo. “I need the cop’s house number now!”

Nijo was more admonishing. “Don’t be foolish Felix. You won’t make it out alive.”

“I died last week Nijo. Only my burial remains. Are you giving me the house number or not?” the coldness in Felix’s voice told it all. Nijo obliged and gave the cop’s house number and location but not without having the final parting words.

“Wicky thought highly of you. Please don’t let him down by following his path!” Felix was beyond caring. The paintings had shown him another side of his life that he did not know existed. He had nothing to live for.
It was 7.40pm when Felix made his way to the police residential place at the Kasuku Police Station. It was dark and completely devoid of street lights.

Felix, dressed in a combat jacket and heavy boots, parked his car outside the police canteen, went and bought cellphone credit, loaded it into his phone and took to the stairs of the first block on his left. Block G. He knocked gently. Nijo had told him that the cop was never home on Friday and Saturday evenings, the two major days for goods deliveries.

The old wooden brown door was opened by a middle aged woman who smiled warmly. She was dressed in a green apron. The smell of chapatti wafted to Felix’s nose. Felix forced his way in. The four children, two boys and two girls were watching Spelling Safari. They did not turn to look at the intruder. The room was cramped with old furniture. The walls were adorned with small portraits of all the past presidents of Kenya and one big portrait of the current president.

“Switch off the TV,” Felix coldly gave the order. The oldest girl, who must have been fourteen, used the remote to switch off the TV. She was dressed in black jeans and a red top. Felix saw fear in her eyes.
It is then that all the other kids turned to check who the visitor was.

“Who are you?” asked the youngest boy, who must have been three years old. He looked at Felix and was about to move towards him but his older brother held him back.

Felix ignored him. “Move there all of you,” he motioned to the three seater maroon sofa that was adjacent the TV set. They now knew that something was seriously wrong.

Felix looked at the five of them. The mother and the girls were terrified and literally shaking. The older boy, who looked about eight years old, was composed, studying Felix intently. The youngest one did not seem to understand the gravity of the situation.

Felix removed the gun from the inside of his jacket and then started his lecture. “My name is Felix. Your father killed my older brother last week. As a result both my parents passed away due to shock. I buried them today. And today I will also kill all of you!” Felix spoke through clenched teeth while circling them like an eagle ready to swoop on its prey. It was now time for action.

“Say your last prayers,” Felix ordered as he looked at the gun, looking for ways to trigger off what he considered the last holocaust. It was a rhetorical question but the youngest boy seemed to have taken it literally. He knelt down and put his hands together for prayer.

“Good God, please do not let this man Felix kill us before we have eaten chapatti. Amen!” His angelic voice seemed to boom in the room that was totally engulfed in silence and tension. The boy then went back to his place.

It is a prayer that hit Felix right in his solar plexus. Suddenly he saw the Wicky collection of paintings afresh. Something pierced his heart as he saw the older boy, blocking the younger brother’s mouth from continuing to talk. Felix swallowed hard.

Felix looked at the small boy and saw himself. He looked at the boy’s older brother and he saw Wicky. He looked at the two sisters and he saw the two sisters that he never got to know. He looked at the policeman’s wife and he saw the two mothers who had been by his side all along – the one whose face he could not remember and the other whose face he could not forget.

Felix put the gun on the table. “Someone has to stop this madness,” Felix had told Wicky during the 2007 general elections when virtually the whole of Kibera, and Kenya, went up in flames and Kenyans were consumed in demonic fires of fermented hatred and unimaginable animosity of self destruction that defied, and still continues to defy, all manners of human logic.

“You will be the one to stop it,” Wicky had said ignoring his brother’s pleas of ceasefire during the tribal confrontations.

“Human beings are at the bottom of the animal kingdom,” one of Felix’s friends had mentioned during one of their heated debates about political parties and tribal affiliations. The words ‘FUCK POLITICIANS’ kept on flashing through his mind, the bleeding effect in the writing growing more and more ominous. Felix knew that something had to be done.

The time to start stopping was now. Felix looked at the five pairs of eyes that were fixed on him. He gently placed the gun on the dining table and then walked towards the door. At the door, he turned, removed his black cap, placed it against his chest and faced the still shell shocked family. “God is good,” he croaked as he opened the door to leave. Instinctively they all chorused. “All the time.”

(c) 2009 Clifford Oluoch. oluochcliff@yahoo.co.uk