Ordeal By Truck

By Ray P. Davis

ALL we wanted to do was get home.

We were in Papeete and we live in Paea, which is about 19 kilometers as the Old Crow flies. We had had a nice luncheon at the American Consu late, and nice cocktails, and we had our nice white suit on, and we felt glowy and wonderful, and all we wanted to do was get home.

The Coconut Radio —that infamous instrument that should have its dials twisted off and tossed into a cuspidor had reported that a truck might leave Papeete for Paea, and all points south, at about 2 o’clock that afternoon.. It was then only a little after three, so we knew we had plenty of time.

We decided, while we waited, to sit on one of those soft stone benches in Papeete’s Trafalgar Square, and do a bit of solitary tropical cogitation. We hadn’t been sitting more than an hour or so, trying to think and at the same time sit first on one side until it got rested, and then on the other (it was like going on a hay-ride with a load of pineapples), when this truck we had been warned about crashed into sight.

We strolled out and held long converse with its driver, explained that all we wanted to do was get home, and did the driver or any of his relatives have a suggestion.

Well, he was going to Paea, yes—if!

And, so help us, this was the if: It depended upon one thing. You see, he wanted to keep his truck running regu larly, back and forth, back and forth.

Didn’t want to miss a single trip. His tyres were getting frazzly, like our patience. Now a ship from America was due, he said, in a week or so. If that ship brought some new tyres for his truck, he would make the trip this after noon !

WE have looked at the above, and looked, and tried to change it so it would make sense. But there is no way. It stands exactly as he said it, glibly defying evolution. What he said sounded crazy and reads crazy, but after two years in Tahiti we knew at once what the fellow meant.

Some other people had understood, too, for about 200 of them, of more or less variegated parentage, were piled high in the track’s 40 seats.

At first, we just sat on top of a pile of natives, not even worrying about our white suit. Pretty soon, then, we noticed a much smaller pile in another seat. The pile was neater, too, with its most prominent member a small native woman who looked like she was a com bination of Tahitian, French, and Ameri can, although she no doubt had some Spanish blood. Her name, we discovered later, was Teutonic. She had a man hanging onto the pile, with her, a brute of a fellow, a human ox. probably half Mongol and half mongrel.

"Would you,” we asked her politely, ‘‘mind holding your husband on your lap, if we could arrange all these people so you could have a lap?”

Now, that was exactly the way to say it. Tahitians, or whatever is left of them, are stubborn. What you do when you want them to do something is to ask them to do the opposite. So, sure enough, in about an hour the man took his wife on his lap.

At this sudden shift of weight, most of the pile went on the floor. When they were down there, among the pigs and sacks of flour and pareu bundles and baskets, it gave us an excellent chance

to breathe some of that luxurious tropi cal air we had heard about. But when we looked out to see which way the extra air was coming, and how near we were to being home, we discovered we hadn’t moved yet. It was all just a scheme, a foul scheme, to save tyres.

Nothing happened for a while, except that three Tahitians, drinking red wine at the very top of our pile, missed oftener than they hit, and so slowly made our nice white suit look like something in Pagliacci’s laundry bag. Meanwhile, this stack of humanity surged in on us from six sides, making us feel that we were Robert Taylor and they were autograph hunters.

SUDDENLY, there was a terrific crash ing of metal and grinding of gears, a horrible sound like the Panzer

Division smashing against Joe Stalin.

Then the truck leaped forward, and we were off.

But we went only about 300 feet.

The back of the truck gave a little curtsey, the front of the truck leaped an imaginary hurdle, the engine made a sound like it had phlegm in its throat, and died.

An auxiliary mechanic crawled from under a board and ran around and started cranking as though he got paid by the piece. It didn’t have the least effect. He might as well have been paid by the month, with room and board. So four or five dozen Tahitians, and a few Chinese, and some half-and-half child ren, unravelled themselves and jumped out and began pushing. And, first thing we knew, we were off again.

But we went only another 300 feet.

We were now in front of Tahiti’s brew ery—a Tahitian driver’s idea of front, that is—and so we started loading a lot of cases of beer and sacks of ice, for the sultry white trade of Punaauia.

That was when everybody thought we were ready to start home, for Paea and all points south. But we started for the hills, instead. Up one hill and down the other. Back and forth.

We haven’t the slightest idea where we went. We went everywhere, doubling back over the same spot twenty times.

Anyway, we picked up pigs with their feet tied, sometimes, and a few ducks on a string, and some bunches of bananas,, and four or five bundles of laundry, and three or four bicycles, and some crates and boxes, and all of this went on top of the truck. We could tell where it went without peeking, because every time we hit a bump the truck’s top would sag and pop and grunt, as though it were tired of being on top and wanted to come down and be a passenger.

Then, finally, we came down out of the hill country, and everybody thought “Now!”

BUT it wasn’t to be. What we did was go back into Papeete and stop at exactly the spot we had left two hours before! Everybody piled out and bought ice cream cones, and disappeared around buildings, and two Tahitians went into Quinn’s to try and drown their stalemate.

By this time we didn’t know what to do. Should we get out and spend the night in a honky-tonk hotel, or stick to

it? Did the Japs know, when they took the Dutch East Indies, that this would happen in Tahiti?

Some of the horde under us began to reshuffle and squirm, and pretty soon a head popped out, and of all people it was the Tahitian who lives next door to us. We hadn’t seen him for weeks. So we had a good chat, mostly about how his hogs came over and ate our hibiscus Slowly, now, the sun crept over Moorea. Some of the passengers drifted back to the truck and began packing themselves in. Soon everyone was there, and we were at last ready to start.

Everyone was there, that is, except the driver. Well, we waited a while, and then a native went to look for him. The native didn’t come back, so another native went after them. They were in a restaurant having coffee and bread.

But we are holding the story up. We are arresting the action for the sake of details. What we started to tell was about going from Papeete to Paea by truck . , .

So we finally left Papeete and had progressed several hundred feet in the right direction, maybe two kilometres, when it happened. Everyone had been waiting for it, silently and fearsome, and it happened. A tyre blew out.

SO all the piles of passengers unpiled.

We guess this was to lighten the load, so somebody could put a jack under the wheel and try to fix the tired tyre—a tyre that looked like a doughnut wearing canvas underwear. We had of course, no spare.

Everybody was out milling around the road, most of the men watching the driver fool with that ragged hunk of rubber, when it began to rain. And it was not a Denver drizzle, but a Tahiti torrent. We ran for the truck and began piling ourselves in again.

And there we sat. Packed in tighter than the dead Japs on Guadalcanal, we were hot and sweaty and wet, and we smelled like the back end of a Chinese livery stable.

A native produced a guitar. We don’t know where they come from, these gui

tars, but whenever you run up against a real emergency in Polynesia, some native reaches into his pareu and pulls out a guitar. Do you suppose they can do it with rabbits, too?

He started strumming away while the rain poured. “Lovely hula hands, like the ocean waves abo —ve you ..." (“Honeysuckle rose, goodness only knows, I lo—ve you . . . ”) It was dark now. There was no moon, and the stars seemed very, very far away. We began to get a headache. We wondered about our dinner guests wait ing for us at home—in faraway Paea.

And there was the dinner on top of the truck, rainsoaked. The guitar played on.

THE rain had slackened, and we got out of that mass of humanity and began walking toward home. Home!

Even the word sounded beyond achieve ment! We stumbled along the black road, kicking our weary feet against the limbs of trees and stray coconuts. Our head swam. Our once-white suit was stained with red wine, wet with rain, wrinkled worse than Ghandi’s stomach . .

It must have been an hour later when the truck came creeping along, its one dim headlight making a sickly glow on the wet road. The natural assumption was that the driver saw us, and would stop and let us continue our journey by truck—although that was no privilege.

But there are no natural assumptions in Tahiti. The driver didn’t see us. The truck didn’t stop. It continued on, went about 500 feet. Then, all of a sudden, a big noise like a POOF! came out of the hood, and the truck stopped dead!

When we arrived at the scene of the truck’s latest disaster, a few minutes later, the first face we saw sticking out of the pile of people was the native who lives next door to us. He had a bottle of red wine in one hand.

“Aita peapea! Bouvez! Drink!” he said, mixing three languages like a drunken chairman at the League of Nations.

We tilted the bottle to our lips. “I’ll bet you don’t know,” we said, “how to say ‘whoa to a Swiss horse!”

A long draught of sickly red wine gur gled down our gullet. For a full minute nothing happened. Suddenly, then, we thought we’d swallowed a depth charge.

Beads of perspiration stood out on our brow, ran down our nose and around the of our collar. The truck seeemed to be coming at us in reverse.

“You go Paea?” asked our neighbour.

We were trying to go to Paea, we told him. We had guests coming for din ner at six o’clock, and it was now seven or eight, or nine. And the dinner was up on top of the truck with the hogs.

“You want go Paea?” he asked.

Now that was utterly redundant. We thought everybody in French Oceania knew, by now, that we were just trying to go from Papeete to Paea, and that we just wanted to get home.

He pointed to the top of the truck.

“Me,” he said, “ bicycle.”

Was he going to take me on his bicycle? Did he want me to know that he had a bicycle? Did he mean that he usually went by bicycle—from Papeete to Paea?

The mystery was easily undone. Almost at once, half a dozen natives scrambled to the top of the truck, and we could hear a terrific untangling going on. Pigs grunted and beer bottles rattled, and bicycles knocked together. Someone threw some coconuts over the side. Sud denly we were worrying about whether those sacks of ice we had loaded at the brewery were now sacks of water. Then

a shiny red bicycle came down the truck’s side.

So, to make a short trip longer and a long story shorter, we finished our ordeal by bicycle. * * * If you want a moral, just remember this: Since Tojo, the shortest distance between two points is a strait-jacket!

Another ship, the submarine “Curie,” built in Great Britain for the Fighting French Navy, was presented recently to its crew in a British yard. It is the first time in history that naval % craft have been specially constructed for’the French Navy in British naval yards.